Lydford Parish and Community Magazine
and Northmoor News editorial
February 2013
We ministers get used to being laughed at. It goes with the territory which we gingerly tread, as representatives of a religion which seems a nonsense to many today. One of the reasons that people don’t take Christianity seriously might be that Christianity doesn’t seem to take them seriously. Perhaps some of those who feel drawn to the arguments of the so-called ‘new atheists’ would believe in a God if they felt that God believed in them; but the faith they are presented with, is a quietist faith in a God who (if addressed directly at all) is addressed politely and always positively, in a way which barely connects with the realities of people’s deep struggles.
If this is a true reading of contemporary Christianity, then it demonstrates that our faith unerringly reflects our wider culture. For society at large is generally in denial of the difficulties and harsh realities of our lives. We don’t have a language to express the deepest struggles of our souls, our conversations are reduced to the most functional, to tweet-and txt-level. The more Facebook friends we gain, the less of ourselves we can articulate to them.
The theologian Walter Brueggemann writes*, ‘As children of the Enlightenment, we have censored and selected around the voice of darkness and disorientation, seeking to go from strength to strength, from victory to victory.’ We shun negativity. We deny the failure of our attempts to control. And consequently, ‘much Christian piety is romantic and unreal in its positiveness’.
I suspect that many people regard today’s version of Christianity as irrelevant to them, not so much because they think its theology doesn’t match the insights of modern science, but more because they feel it has forgotten how to help them make a deep connection with a God who can meet them in their darkness and disorientation, a God who surely must have the power to treat the infections of today’s toxic mental environment.
But note the words of Rabbit in John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich: ‘Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need, the ones the dead have spoken.’ In particular, I suggest, they have the words of the Psalms. And the Psalms are not dry theological treatises, they are intense conversations, dialogues between faithful but sometimes struggling people, and the God who listens, bends, makes amends. The Psalms (writes Brueggemann), ‘articulate the entire gamut of Israel’s speech to God, from profound praise to the utterance of unspeakable anger and doubt.’ They are direct language, songs of questioning, songs of pleading, to a God who may seem to have disappeared for a time but who can be found; their verses of disorientation end in reorientation; they are poems which attest to the reality that in our faith tradition, ‘deep loss and amazing gift are held together in a powerful tension’.
Open the book of Psalms this Lent and rediscover the powerful language within. If you thought that you had nothing to say to God then you might just find the words there - for your questions, for your anger, for your praise; if you thought that God had nothing to say to you then you might just find the words there - of assurance, of direction, of hope.
The Psalms are ‘the words of the dead, ... words that linger with power and authority after their speakers have gone’ (Brueggemann).
This Lent, I encourage to spend some time with the Psalms, and to join in their conversation.
*Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, Augsburg, 1984
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.