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the great reversal

By Graham Kervin

For the past 2 years I have not been much of a fan of Scripture. Truth be told, I have only been reading my Bible sporadically, and most of those scattered times were because I needed to for whatever reason.  It just didn’t communicate as a source of life but rather like a closed and indexed collection of sometimes-engaging tales that belonged more in a gallery than in my hands.  I couldn’t muster the interest, let alone desire, to approach the God of a fossilized testament. In many ways, I simply stopped caring.

And then in February it all changed. With the help of a fellow seeker I was reintroduced to the texture and the previously unfelt energy of the Bible. That’s not to say that all of a sudden my brain switched to ‘proper Christian’ mode or miraculously snapped out of some coma but that, instead, and with a little help, my heart has finally begun to beat again.

I think as Christians we are confronted by an endless parade of models and ideals for what the exemplary Christian looks like. We hear in sermons, read in literature, and swim in a great stream of pop spiritual media the great machines at work, all working valiantly to project out in front of us the kinds of people we should be and the kinds of lives we ought to be leading according to the paradigm of the day. And in compiling this great depiction of the exemplary believer, the ideals manage to miss out on the real person living in real situations, who tries to meet that usually unreal expectation, but seldom comes anywhere close to the mark. And so we shrink back in disappointment, still struggling to compare ourselves with one another, making sure that we at least look like THIS percentage of the ideal or that we practice spirituality at least better than THAT person, but in playing these games of futility, it seems like more often we end up only scrambling for the scraps of spirituality because the real meal is just so unattainable. We resign ourselves to seeing through a glass darkly, never truly expecting that we will ever become much more that exhausted shadows of poster-worthy Christians. And in a skewed way, I think the Bible was doing that to me even with Jesus, painting Jesus as the ideal for what my life is supposed to look like. And since my actions and thoughts paled in comparison to his, the life of working my soul to the bone to become Jesus was poisoning me and cutting me off from the very source of life himself.

And then I was shown the passage that changed it all, John 21:20-21. As written in The Message:

Turning his head, Peter noticed the disciple Jesus loved following right behind. When Peter noticed him, he asked Jesus, “Master, what’s going to happen to him?”

Jesus said, “If I want him to live until I come again, what’s that to you? You - follow me.”

For me, this split the heavens wide open. I read this and I began seeing the posters ripped from the walls, cardboard cut-outs stomped to the ground, and straw men torn to shreds. This, for me, was the Great Reversal. I had for so long been shoving Jesus aside in order to pattern myself after his images on church billboards that I had lost the point of religion and spirituality and a concern for God. In so doing I had lost that thing that was supposed to be foundational and had given up on its meaningfulness and relevance… and I had given up on myself as being anything but a rag doll blown around in the vacuum of what’s left behind when faith evaporates.

But I had it all reversed. God doesn’t want me to PROVE how like Jesus I am. He doesn’t want me to commit myself to works righteousness in order to become that gleaming image of the perfect Christian. he wants me to follow him, in as basic a sense as I can convey that. Not predict where I think he’s going and hook up with him later. Not bury myself in Christian knowledge and cliches so that I have an answer to every little thing. Just follow. Literally watch where he puts his feet and try to keep mine within the same trail of footsteps as I walk along behind him. I don’t have to know where he’s going, and really, I don’t need to know. And, as the passage above seems to imply, that means that I matter. Me, Graham, for all of my great strengths and crippling weaknesses. Jesus had other trails for John to follow, other plans he had in mind for Peter, and that personalization of faith, of asking his followers to trust him, brought Jesus from the edge of a distant oblivion to a nearness that the hairs on my skin could feel. I’ll try to flesh this out later, but for the time being, the burden has lifted and I can forget about all that other stuff, all that doing I hold as so important to my exercise of faith, and just follow, knowing that I am accepted, that I am loved, and that I am being led. Me.

differentiation

By Graham Kervin

In the past couple of months a great change has taken place in my imagination of God. The monolithic idea of ‘GOD’ in its de facto outranking of Jesus and the Holy Spirit has begun to recede a bit, and in its place now exists a more robust idea of the Trinity. I realize, of course, that the doctrine of the Trinity is nothing new and has been a permanent fixture in Christian theology for a good long time, but knowing about something and believing something are, as I have come to really appreciate, two very different things.

Now this isn’t to say that I don’t still regard God with the utmost respect and reverence, but I have found something so much richer and more theologically and personally significant in allowing the combined persons of the Godhead to differentiate themselves a bit. In this differentiating, the exalted and transcendent monumentality of ‘GOD’ finds the fuller and more representative expressions of the Trinity that we find in the Bible, namely a son, Jesus, that wore flesh and walked among us, and a Spirit, which serves countless roles of Counselor, Guide, and Spokesman. Both of these figures, then, while still both God, or rather aspects of God, can give ‘GOD’ a little more breathing space in bearing the titles of Creator and Father. In other words, I see it like this. You can take water, steam, and ice, and you understand them as three very different things, each with its own properties, which you experience in different ways. But at the end of the day they’re all the same thing: H20. They are just expressed differently given different conditions. And this I see taking place in the model of the Trinity, a same basic, core essence, but one that simply works itself out according to the conditions or conditions it needs to meet.

This plain theological metaphor has made a great difference for me in my spiritual walk. By treating God, Jesus, and Spirit as basically the Siamese twins of an overarching ‘GOD’, my faith and conception of these biblical persons became very distant and remote. I couldn’t connect with a singular Being that, despite my best efforts, just wasn’t able to be brought down to the plane of my life, my daily footsteps, my decision-making process, or even my moral consciousness. I had become quite deistic in the way I perceived God, and it wreaked incredible havoc in my life and in the relationships around me.

I’m sure this might alarm a few of you, but my prayers and my conversations with God have absorbed this differentiation. I have begun addressing ‘the Three’ in private prayers, and communicate to each in specific, nature-honoring ways, while still praying in the presence of all of them. What I mean by this might need a brief explanation! When I say ‘nature-honoring’, I enter my prayers as though I’m standing or sitting or kneeling in the midst of three dear friends. Though each is all part of the same basic ‘GOD’ unity, we find in Scripture very real and very unique characteristics bestowed to each personage. God is the original Creator, but he is also the great Leader, the Protector, the Warrior, and more recently, the loving Father. If I could possibly contain all of this in a word, God is the Preeminent One. In Jesus we see a different side of God - not different in essence, but different in state or phase. He is who God is as a human being, as something materially bound to and limited by the borders of organic life. And so in Jesus we find God’s Praxis, the character of God and his love revealed in flesh and bone, and one that shows us how to live as God himself would live among his creation: loving others more than self and loving God with all of heart, mind, body, and soul. the Spirit, then, becomes the Great Animation. We, as but simple members of a mortal existence, have little naturally to equip us for the work of God: to heal the diseases and sins of this world, to be the peace and strength that others need, let alone to have the endurance and power to successfully overcome the selfishness in our own lives. As physical bodies we lack the language and the spiritual fiber of God to resolutely prevail over the temptations and hardships of this life, but through the Spirit, the great animating presence of God, we find the abilities and determination, compassion and fortitude, to become what we need to be.

And so I pray to the Trinity. I pray to them in their distinctiveness while still praying to them in their inseparable unity, much like the unity we find Jesus speaking about in his prayer for his disciples. I can appreciate the unorthodox-ness of this, sure, but to me it makes the daily spiritual life something incredibly more intimate. By merely imagining the nearness of the Trinity as a three-ness walking alongside me I can appeal to the comforts and righteousness of the Father, the awareness and humanity of Jesus, and the encouragement and guidance of the Spirit, all while walking to the grocery store or playing Frisbee in the park or leading a conversation group about spiritual things.

And to me this is overwhelmingly valuable and has radically re-visioned the sort of person I am and can be in this life.

hear ye, hear ye

By Graham Kervin

I realized something tonight: I miss writing. I like writing, and I miss it. I think that, on my good days, I’m pretty adept at it, and now, after sailing right on through the anniversary mark of this blog’s complete and utter atrophy, I have been reminded that I miss it.

For those of you who may still pass this way from time to time, I make no apoogies for my long delay in writing. I have come to understand that the writing that appeared on this blog in the past was nothing more than a digital ego-trip, a mere typing to hear myself, well, write. Though what I wrote may have sounded nice, and even made a justifiable point here or there, mostly (I can see now) it was an exercise in seeing how eloquently and suavely I could write about something, whether or not the thought behind it was as carefully worked out as my sentence structure. It was just the syntax of pride, the arrogance of using a talent for self-gratifying vanity. And even beyond the high degree of spit-shine I lacquered over each entry, the content itself was largely fraudulent. I wrote about spiritual topics as though I had actual experence or wisdom regarding those topics, and I daresay I overstepped the bounds of credulity a time or two in writing about things I knew little about, either empirically or academically.

And I just wanted to get that off my chest. Because I like writing, and I miss it. However often I will begin repopulating the pages of this blog, I want to establish a more concrete and hemmed-in vision for what will hopefully transpire. I can look back at some of these older posts and I just start to gag a little bit at the sheer amount of hubris I tried to pack into each little entry, using words and language that even I can’t fully follow anymore. I’m surprised that you out there tolerated such ballyhoo. And so what I would like to do is simply write for the love of writing. I honestly don’t know what I’ll write about. The spiritual life has been heavy on my mind lately, but I profess even now a quivering uncertainty toward many aspects of it that I ought to understand more fully, and though I will try to write much more from experience than theoretical postulation, I am going to avoid making sweeping comprehensive statements that ought to be implemented in others’ lives because, frankly, I’m not wise enough to make such assertions. I can only speak from what I know as beneficial or harmful from my own life and my own unfolding experiences and adventures in faith, in Scripture, and in life. I’m tired of pretending to have some unaccounted for corner on the religious market, and I would really hate to further subject you to its falseness.

So I’m coming clean. I’m playing all my cards right now so that I can have something to hold myself accountable to down the road when I need a gentle reminder of what I’m doing or saying. So thanks for sticking it out here for this long, and hopefully the future around here will be a little bit brighter.