A Few Shattered Narratives

Life is mysterious.

In November 2004, Frank Warren printed 3,000 postcards. On each postcard was an invitation to
decorate and mail in a secret, something nobody else knows, something true. He handed these
postcards out on subways, put them in library books, and left them in art galleries. Secrets began to
trickle in. After a few weeks Frank stopped handing out the postcards, but the secrets kept coming.
Some secrets are meticulous works of art, decorated as sacred objects. Others are hastily scrawled on
the back of shopping lists and pieces of old cardboard. To date, Frank has collected nearly half a billion
secrets. This is the story of Postsecret, an ongoing, global collaborative art project began by a man
never intending to be an artist, but finding himself the caretaker of something with a life of its own and
wondering occasionally if he is worthy of it. I am grateful that Postsecret happened to someone like
Frank who cares, because I love Postsecret. Let me tell you why.

Each postcard is a story, and there are stories from every human place, from every stage of life, from
the whole breadth of human experience. Some of them are hilarious, some are sad. Some bizarre or
grotesque and others are ordinary. Many are beautiful. They remind me of how extraordinarily different
we all are, and yet how the same and connected we are. In the words of another Postsecret fan, “The
things that make us feel so abnormal are actually the things that make us all the same.”

I wonder why this is so hard for me to remember. Why is it so difficult to remember how textured
humanity is? Why is my own mental model of how other people think and feel so wrong? Why does it
continue to be wrong despite what I know about myself and what I've seen and read about what people
are really like? I should know better, but I don't. Why? How can I assume that everyone else's
experiences of loneliness, sexuality, God, and belonging are completely different from my own? Why
shouldn't I assume people experience the world in a similar way to me?

And why should it be so easy for me to malign those who come to different conclusions from me about
life, society, and the universe even though I know that my own conclusions have often been hard won
through toil and tragedy, or else were handed to me through fantastic privilege and good luck?

That's why I like PostSecret. Because it is an antidote to my ignorant self-involved view of other
people. It rubs up against my preconceptions about the world. Getting to know other people can do the
same thing. As I have said before, there are two great surprises one enjoys from growing close to
another person: first, that someone else could be so similar, can have some of the same intimate, secret
thoughts and hopes and fears that you do. Second, that someone could be so different and foreign. Of
course, PostSecret and growing close to other people are just two ways of probably many that have this
effect of teaching one about the texture of humanity and inducing a more compassionate view of other
people. Another one for me is reading the Bible. When I read the Bible for what it actually says, or at
least when I try to, what I read quite frequently rubs up against my preconceptions about the world. It
frequently challenges me and what I believe, and my beliefs about what human beings are like are not
immune to its challenges. One of the great features of the Bible is that it is unafraid to show the whole
spectrum of human experience.

Poignancy
Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts.
 Psalms 74:19 (New International Version)

Will You cause a driven leaf to tremble? Or will You pursue the dry chaff?
Job 13:25 (New American Standard Bible)

Humor
One possible translation of 1 Samuel 5:11-12

For death had filled the city with panic; God's hand was very heavy upon it. Those who did not
die were afflicted with hemorrhoids, and the outcry of the city went up to heaven.

Despondency

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to
restore my spirit.
Lamentations 1:16 (New International Version)

Happiness

Sing praises to the LORD who reigns in Jerusalem. Tell the world about his unforgettable deeds.
Psalms 9:11 (New Living Translation)

These are just simple examples off the top of my head. The real meat of these paradigm-shifting
experiences of reading the Bible tend to be intensely personal, at least for me, so much so that I hesitate
to share an example.

I think we can perpetuate mistaken notions of what it means to be human by building mistaken notions
into our institutions, especially our church.

The Bible tells me not to lie because it knows that I am a liar. The Bible tells me to love my brother
because God knows my capacity for hate. It tells me to give to the poor and to my church not because
my church and the poor need to be taken care of, but because God knows that even though I perceive
the needs of the poor and the church with clarity, my greed and self-interest will win out against my
charity and selflessness every time. I think this has profound implications for our church culture. In our
culture we have a set of sins that are safe to confess publicly, which we acknowledge as universal
tendencies, which we understand are spoken against in the Bible precisely because God knows that we
struggle with them and God knows that there is a better way to live. It's quite common in our church for
someone to confess in a sabbath school class that they overeat, or that they speed too much or watch
too much tv. We will listen to them and perhaps smile and laugh and say, amen brother! But it's very
easy to confess those sins. It's easy to say, “I can't stop eating Oreos.” It's hard to say, “I'm addicted to
gay pornography.” It's easy to say, “I never wear my seat belt even though it's against the law.” I pray
for the day when one of us can sit in our sabbath school and say, “I don't believe in God but I tell
people that I do.” These confessions are hard partly because we do not understand them as universal
temptations. We understand them as the vices of the others, those people we are blessed to be separate
from. The saints of the church couldn't possibly wrestle with those kinds of problems. But here's my
question, church. If God has commanded us to tell the truth because he knows that we will be tempted
to lie, if God has commanded us to give to the poor because he knows that we will be tempted to
neglect them, then why has God commanded us not to have homosexual sex? Why has God
commanded us not to hit our wives?

Sexual perversion, or racism, or misogyny, or physical abusiveness aren't sins and temptations of the
others. They are our sins and temptations, too. You can never know what the person sitting next to you
in church is dealing with. The truth is that we're dealing with everything—we're dealing with stuff that
we don't even know is wrong.

We are a broken people, even the best of us. Even the most righteous among us. We should know this
from first hand experience, but the Bible also tells us so. Doesn't Isaiah 64:6 tell us that “all our
righteousnesses are like filthy rags”? I like how the New Living Translation renders this verse.

Isaiah 64:6 (New Living Translation)

6 We are all infected and impure with sin.

This is the perfect time for us to read Matthew 23, the whole chapter. This is the perfect time for us to
discuss it together, because I think it speaks directly to what I'm talking about here, about observance
and religious culture. But I don't have time, and so I've assigned it to you all as homework. Matthew
23.

I'd like to share a quote from an interview I heard with the Quaker sociologist Parker Palmer, in the
midst of which he quotes lyric's from a Leonard Cohen song called “Anthem”. Palmer says,

The truth of the matter is that underneath the patina of self-sufficiency there has always been
profound need. That's why we sell so many antidepressants and tranquilizers in this society.
There is huge need underneath that illusion of self-sufficiency.

Ring the bells that still can ring

It's in those cracks that we connect with each other, it's in brokenness that we connect with each
other. And that we generate very mysteriously the abundance called hope that actually can make
us move our feet and move our hands and move our minds towards something better in very
practical terms.

This quote speaks to the truth that our shared fragility and brokenness are exactly the things that
empower our faith community. And yet I experience my church culture as smearing out the texture of
humanity and covering over the magnitude of fragility and brokenness—especially in our most
righteous members. Thomas Merton speaks to this problem in No Man Is an Island:
 Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. And there is a
far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right
questions—because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we
communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an
unsufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask. (p. 116)

I don't want a religion that presents to me a list of certainties about being human in this universe. I want
a religion that appreciates the mystery of how human beings actually are. Can I make a church like
that? I don't know. What kinds of unanswered questions do I have? Which am I afraid to ask? Is my
religion big enough to speak to my sexuality? Can it speak to the sexuality of my friends? What healing
wisdom can it offer to the abused and broken? Can it nurture the poor? Can it nurture the wealthy?
How does it negotiate tumultuous political waters? Does it have the power to make a community—a
real, honest-to-goodness faith community, out of peoples very different in culture and color? How does
it embrace those who feel marginalized, isolated, and rejected? That question is worth repeating: Does
my religion have to be presented as a religion of rejection and exclusion?

I hope I'm not being too vague and confusing. Let me try again in different words to identify the
problem I perceive. It is precisely the rigidity of my church's narrative, its commitment to the historical,
canonized answers to the traditional, orthodox questions that cripple its ability to hear either my needs
or my contributions, and keep it from being relevant to me. With all of our dogma, with such a
complete, just-so narrative of the Great Controversy, is there room to even begin to address—to even
acknowledge what is in the language of author Krista Tippet the “enduring mystery of the beginning of
life, the inevitability of death, our ordinary and persistent struggles for meaning in between”? What if
your spiritual problem isn't about what condiments to avoid in order to keep from upsetting your
stomach, but about the morality of factory farming and about your role in the economy of suffering?
What if your spiritual struggle isn't about merely honoring your father and mother, but about how to be
a good son in the face of familial tragedy? Can my tradition teach me how to love an evil person,
appreciate beauty everywhere it hides, care for the sick and spiritually wounded without judgment, and
nurture relationships of meaning, compassion, and understanding with all of humanity, even those
committed to different religious traditions? Can I say, “Yes,” to all of these questions without being
motivated by a blind cheer leading for the denomination I am married to? Can I say, “No,” to any of
these questions without reacting with automatic cynicism to all the ways the church has been hurtful
and failed me through the years?

Ok, so let me summarize what I've tried to say so far. I have tried to remind you about what people are
really like instead of what our mental models say people are like by sharing with you some postcards
from Postsecret. I tried to convince you that the spectrum of human experience is wide and textured,
and I've observed that it's really hard to remember this fact. I've made a claim that one of the roots of
our faith community's problems is that it teaches a view of humanity that is too simplistic, which
forgets the texture of human experience, but I've observed that the Bible does in fact acknowledge the
rich texture of human experience. To finish, I want to offer a remedy to the problem.

To begin, I want to share a story from author Andrew Solomon who was speaking on the contrast
between a faith community that oppresses and rejects versus a faith community that accepts and
embraces. He told a story of someone who left the church in a dramatic and painful identity struggle
and passed through life experiences which many faith communities heinously villainize. He eventually
returned to his home church, and in a touching gesture of acceptance his church invited him to speak.
He spoke to the theme of the Prodigal son. Andrew Solomon continues the story in the words of the
man,
 “...This is ordinarily a story really that's told from the father's perspective, what it was like for
him to welcome the prodigal son home. I will speak to it as the prodigal who has returned and I
will say that the miracle of love is a love which is abiding which is true that has me here in the
same church that I grew up in and which is able to accept even that which remains
incomprehensible to it, even what happened in a far off land that is never to be known and never
to be understood.”

I think that the solution to the problem I am describing is a different way of thinking about people. We
should cultivate an approach to sinful people like the approach Jesus took with Peter who denied Him
three times, with the woman caught in adultery, with the woman at the well, with the Roman centurion.
We can acknowledge sin and call it sin, and simultaneously embrace and accept people; we can show
compassion and charity to them as individuals instead of reacting automatically to them as a member of
a group with which we are in opposition.

And we can avoid questions that serve to distract from this way of receiving people.
Instead of asking whether or not gay people choose to be gay, we can ask how to relate to the broken
and marginalized homosexual.
Instead of wondering whether or not atheists choose to disbelieve to justify their lecherous lifestyle,
wonder rather how you can share with nonbelievers how your relationship with God has been
transformative and how you've discovered a better way to live.
Instead of pitting science and religion against each other and then demanding they fight to the death,
ask how you can nurture the spirituality of the intellectual and be a balm to their difficult questions.
Instead of accusations of twisting scripture, or overt suggestions that those don't practice like me do so
out of laziness, egotism, selfishness, greed, or self-serving hedonism, seek to find common ground and
better ways of explaining that draw people closer to God.

It's a different way of living out a theology of love and compassion. You can phrase this theology in
terms of demands, yes, of course. You can phrase this theology in terms of lists of divine imperatives.
That is very easy to do. It is far harder to phrase this very same theology, and then to live out this
theology as an invitation, as a seeking to understand and connect. A nun once told me that you see the
world in a completely different way when you see the light of Jesus shining out of the face of every
single person you meet and bouncing off the walls.

Two different approaches:

By now it should be obvious to you that the problem I've described is a problem with both us as
individuals and us as a whole community. And the solution is a solution for us as individuals and as a
community.

We all have a story that we tell ourselves about who we think we are, our own narrative. Part of the
narrative is about who we think we are as individuals, and part of our narrative is about the kind of
church we are, who we are collectively. These narratives, these stories include little lies about who we
are. We magnify our abilities, our intelligence and talents. We tell ourselves we are more beautiful than
we know ourselves to be, and more righteous than we know ourselves to be. When we are at our most
creative, either purposely or without realizing it we daydream about how we would react in various
situations, about how we would be able to give a defense from the Bible for our beliefs, about how we
would be impervious to the criticism of others, about how we would be accepting, or about how
charitable we would be. When we meet someone with more personality we console ourselves with the
lie of our intellectual superiority and depth, and when we meet someone who out-strips us intellectually
we find comfort in the fact that they are socially inept and lack the ability to "connect with people"
which is the most important thing after all, isn't it? And through our web of comfortable fiction we are
always able to believe ourselves to be the special person in the room, no matter the room. And we are
always able to believe our denomination to be superior to all others. We do this nearly every waking
moment.

Sometimes it takes something external and dramatic to break the charade. Sexual assault, infidelity,
verbal humiliation, some great moral failure, a gay son or daughter.... it can happen in the blink of an
eye, with a single phone call. We lose our identity. Our ego is shattered. We have to somehow integrate
the new facts--cowardice, weakness, inadequacy, victimhood--into a new narrative. We have to recreate
ourselves.

Some of these narrative shattering episodes are horrible and should never happen to anyone in this
world.

Some brokenness heals back stronger, and some brokenness lingers. We all have stories like these.
We've all lived through things that haunt us for years. We all have moments of great shame that we will
never be able to undo. We all have experiences of gratuitous hurt. It's our burden to struggle to make
sense of nonsense. This impossible task forces us to balance humility with confidence, purpose with
frivolity, certainty with wonder and curiosity and frustrating ignorance all at once.

But if we can remember what it is like to have our narrative shattered, then maybe we can remember
how fragile human beings really are. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. That's
how we can find the strength to be compassionate even when we feel so strongly, so certain about the
world. That's how we can find the strength to see everyone as our neighbor and to love our neighbor.

I guess this is what I mean when I say that life is mysterious. And this introspection and the task of
rewriting is I think mostly what I mean when I say that I struggle to understand myself, the world, and
my place in it. But even here I am unsure. And even in these last sentences I wonder if I've ruined a few
good quotes with ridiculous sermonizing. But that's what the hard things in life do: they make you
second guess and reevaluate and question and re-prioritize. Let us forgive each other for these silly
inadequacies. Let us smile and nod and say, yes, I know what you mean, and touch hand to hand in
sympathy, forgetting our precious narrative in spite of ourselves.