whatever you do.

“The God we affirm is then, at its best, inspired by the incoming of God and born there, but it is never to be confused with God.” – Peter Rollins

You know those times when your thoughts are building and changing so quickly that you barely have time to reflect on each of them and give them the brain time they deserve? Those times when all you can do is pound your hand on the table or attempt to suppress a squeal of excitement? Yes. Those times.

You know those times when thoughts start to crawl beneath your skin and into your eyeballs amidst the most queasy of itchiness? When you find yourself only able to think about how you need to stop thinking about these concepts because they are burning worse images in your head than those Faces of Death videos from grade seven? Yea…

Admittedly, three years ago the ratio of the first to the second would have been entirely reversed, but still, Pete’s latest book had me in both regions of anxiety. When reading The Fidelity of Betrayal the table pounding squeals far outweighed the eyeball squirms, but they were still there.

Pete takes us through three (four) aspects of our experience of God that we possibly need to be ready to betray in order to avoid mistaking these objectified realities for the creator God we worship. These being the Word, the Name, and the Act of God – the fourth being Truth itself (himself).

My biggest pauses came when I heard myself saying things like, “Aw that snake wasn’t such a bad guy,” Even though my beliefs about the story of the fall have changed drastically in the last while, I was still believing that the person-hood of God was contained in the words written about the encounter between God, Eve, Adam, and the Serpent (poor snake). Pete’s intent is not to pull us into a sympathy for the devil but to pull us from a loyalty to our words about God as contained in the Bible. We need to search out a deeper devotion to our creator born out of that betrayal. So while I’m not ready to run off to join some serpent cult, I am more ready to embrace the ambiguity of God’s nature within the Biblical narrative and try to see past my simplified ideas about a knowable personality of God.

Skipping ahead to the end of the book, Pete prompts us to consider a betrayal of our secured church boundaries in favor of a communal encounter with a God that we find in a religion without religion. A religion founded on the movement of God in miracles of love and reflected on through sacraments and then third and least made knowable through a set beliefs and creeds. I’m still to find a church institution that doesn’t try to downplay 1 John 4 in some way – to attempt to house the “of Gods” first within a church structure, system, or belief net.

So, I finished this book angrily and over-joyed. I’m angry because I feel alone. I feel alone among a sea of churches and Christians. I feel an insecurity in my beliefs that somehow fills me with a wonderful desire to fill the absence with love. I’m angry that I believed for so long that doubt and insecurity would be my enemy in life – that I needed to make sure I built my house on a church-rock. The problem being that the church-rock lately has felt much more like quicksand. Quicksand that pulls down anyone that doesn’t fit in order to make room to stabilize those who would do well in that system. And the thing is, I have a vision of Jesus jumping right off that church-rock too. Not to pull people back up on top, but to be present with those who have been sucked down.

It seems scary, and right now I feel alone, but I am going to try to stop squirming and go down too. I’m thinking that’s where I’ll find God. It seems that’s where heaven is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Christianity, Church, Kingdom, Reading, Religion, Spirituality, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.