Down in the River to Pray

I can't shake Flannery O'Connor's short story The River. It is accessible yet unattainable, clear yet veiled. What to make of it!

A woman takes a four year old boy named Harry/Bevel from his dysfunctional house for the day to the river where a preacher baptizes and heals. The woman presents him to the preacher to be baptized. Before the preacher submerges him, he tells him that his baptism will enable him "to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You'll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you'll go by the deep river of life." After he administers the sacrament, he tells the boy, "You count now...you didn't even count before."

In his family, the boy did not count. His mother was an alcoholic and his father was incapable of meeting the four year old's need. When the boy woke up the next morning, his parents were knocked out and would be out of commission until the afternoon. He had to fend for himself.

He beautiful naivete longed for some form of extrinsic value that the preacher seemingly bestowed him through the river.  He wanted to go to the Kingdom of Christ. His home certainly failed to embody it...but the river, yes, the river, must house it. He would do whatever it takes to wash away his suffering and to find rest in the Kingdom -- to really count.

So he leaves. With no intention of coming back. He follows the path that leads to the river that washes away suffering. He didn't need a preacher to baptize, he could do it himself. Purposefully, "he put his head under the water at once and pushed forward." Straining, reaching, hoping, he tried with all his might to literally reside in this Kingdom. Initially, he failed, but as evil tried to hold him back from the loving embrace of Christ, "the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down."

The little boy suffered no more. That day, he resided with Christ in his Kingdom.

"For the disciple of Jesus, 'becoming like a little child' means the willingness to accept oneself as being of little account and to be regarded as unimportant...God's grace falls on them because they are negligible creatures, not because of their good qualities." -- Brennan Manning

The boy realized he was nothing. But for those who are nothing, Christ died for them to make them into something. In his fervent desire, the boy's discipleship led to his earthly demise. But more so than his earthly pleasure and gain, the boy wanted to participate in the Kingdom, no matter the cost. For once in his life, he counted!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the grace the boy received like this:

"Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him...It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life."

The boy's actions seem absurd, to literally die for the sake of Christ and to give up your life for the truth of Grace. But the call of discipleship is to leave their old lives and conjoin to their new ones. We see this as the disciples drop their nets and leave their booths as their rabbi calls them.

O'Connor is not calling us, in her grotesque ways, to physically destroy ourselves in order for our souls to be stripped from its vessels and placed in God's presence. Instead, as a mouthpiece of the Gospels, she calls us to strip our body and soul from its old life and rest in the new life of God's grace in the temporal Kingdom Jesus established through his bodily death -- no matter the perceived or actual cost.

I pray I began to have the child-like faith to embrace the costly grace of Christ.

Longing for the Green

"We are like birds on a branch. We don't know if we are going to stay or go." paraphrase
"No, we are the birds and you are the branch. If you leave, we lose our footing." paraphrase

"We are like flowers. We don't uproot and place ourselves in sun but we wait where we are and grow in spite of the light or dark." paraphrase

Of Gods and Men tells the story of French monks living and serving the people of Algeria who have to decide whether to stay in or leave their monastery because of the radical Islamic's murderous actions. As they speak to the faithful Muslim leaders about their possible departure, their thoughts stun and still them. A Muslim woman, from around the corner, articulates the gravity in which their dismissal would bring to their people: "If you leave, we lose our footing."

At another point in the movie, when all the monks are of the same mind to stay and serve their people despite the risk, Cristian, the leader, relates their situation to the flowers of the field: "we wait where we are and grow in spite of the light or dark."

As I watched this movie, I longed to be like these monks. I yearned for a similar community and resolve. I desired to serve Christ in such a tangible, purposeful way. I started to feel as if my service and my calling paled in comparison to the monks' service.

Quickly, I tried to pound those fleshly thoughts out of my mind. For me, and I think it might be the same way with a lot of others like me, the easiest and most comfortable thing I could do as a Christian would be to move somewhere across the world and meet the needs of the poverty stricken. If that was my current calling, I don't think I would wrestle with it or fight it. I would embrace such a noble and overtly Christ-like vocation.

But, you want to know what, God planted my seed elsewhere. He planted my seed at TCA and at Starbucks. Might I be elsewhere in six months? Possibly. The winds of change always pick up and blow the seeds of fruit unexpectedly. But at this very moment, I need to celebrate the fact that my roots firmly planted itself here. Praise God! I don't know how or if or when I will be used by God, but that is ok. If I am a rake, He might choose the hoe. All to his glory.

I am a bow on your hands, Lord.
Draw me, lest I rot.
Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break.
Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break.
-Nikos Kazantzakis

No matter if I believe at the moment, if my faithfulness is waning, if I want to uproot and plant myself directly in the sun wherever it shines -- "who cares" -- his Grace is sufficient.

To the Languished --

The church raised
With relationships fazed
The family razed

With soul crazed and unamazed

"I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ...God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord...we have the mind of Christ [!]

"for you are still fleshly. For since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and are you not walking like mere men?...[yet] you belong to Christ; and Christ belongs to God [!]" (I Corinthians 1-3).

Paul's rhetorical style amazes me. Every time I stumble upon his opening words in I Corinthians, I recollect the grace of God when I desperately need to. Paul establishes and reveals to the Corinthian church their identity from the very beginning -- ones filled with the grace of God through Christ. He then proceeds to point out certain aspects of their body that fail to represent the fundamental truth. While he admonishes harshly at times, he repeatedly reminds them how the cross transformed (past tense, it has already happened) their previous vivid dream-like state into this new mysterious reality predicated on the foolishness of man. I can just see Paul writing this letter feverishly, urging the Father, with his fist raised somewhat indignantly in the air, to grant the Corinthian's the grace to truly see themselves gifted with the mind of Christ.

Oh how I wish I would believe and trust that God has given me (us) the mind of Christ!

Each blessing given to us can be coerced into a curse and each curse can be morphed into a blessing. Growing up as I did, in a Christian family that enrolled me into a Christian school and drug me into a church on Sunday mornings, I was inundated with various forms of the Gospel. Most of them probably, at some time or the other, reflected the risen Christ (Can you hear it now? You know, the testimony of the Christian who has always been a Christian? Oh, come on, you know, he/she walks down the isle, says the sinners prayer, and all is good with their eternal prognosis? Yeah, let's not go there).

In the spiritual whirlwind of childhood, the concept of grace always struggled to find the soil in which to root itself. Sometimes, the thorns would choke the seed out while other times, the birds would swoop down and snatch it. I was talking to a friend today about a novel he read called Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. In the story, there is a character named Jack who struggles with his faith while the rest of his family embraces it easily and fully. Since he was raised in a faithful family, he understood the premises of many Christian doctrines. But the seeds could not, for whatever reason, take root in the lush, fertile soil. His basic knowledge of predestination and his inability to grasp the faith in the way he thought was necessary caused him to wonder if he is one of the un-elect, condemned to hell. He was helpless, hopeless. In the same way, I am sure the Corinthian church felt similar to Jack when they realized this long, fifteen chapter letter (yes, I know Paul didn't put the chapters in there) came from their spiritual foundation builder. Who writes an encouraging letter of that length?

But Paul, by way of his style, emphatically points out to the Gentiles, whose new faith in Christ is so foreign compared to their previous beliefs (driven by the wisdom of man -- I Cor. 1), that the grace of God gave them the mind of Christ -- they belong to Him by the indwelling of the Spirit! They might feel like Jack, who believes he is one of the un-elect, but in reality, the power of God infused into them the third person of the Trinity.

"...our response to the love of Jesus demands trust. Do we rely on our resume or the gospel of grace? How do we cope with failure? 'Grace tells us that we are accepted just as we are. We may not be the kind of people we want to be, we may be a long way from our goals, we may have more failures than achievements, we may not be wealthy or powerful or spiritual, we may not even be happy, but we are nonetheless accepted by God, held in his hands. Such is his promise to us in Jesus Christ, a promise we can trust'" (The Ragamuffin Gospel).

I pray I begin to see myself as a man with the mind of Christ. I pray that in my failures, the grace God showed to me through his son moves to the forefront of my consciousness so I realize I have been forgiven. Fill my soul with your Spirit.