Crazy Talk
Essay Posted Oct 10, 2006 by James E. Nelson
I recently heard an advertisement for an interview program featuring a Christian singer who is about my age. She made it big in the recording industry while I was in college and went on to a rocky personal life and even rockier singing career. Once again her star is rising, so she’s currently on the publicity circuit.
I would never recommend getting your Christian teaching or theology from Christian entertainers. They are entertainers, after all. Evangelicalism has always been entertainment oriented but has always been uncomfortable with this orientation. Evangelicals therefore euphemistically call its entertainers and entertainments, “ministers” and “ministries,” and the mega-corporations of the Christian entertainment industry (money-making machines that make the secular publishing and music industry green with envy), “parachurch organizations.”
This language spin often confuses us and we come to accept that our Christian entertainers are well trained to inform us about the faith handed down from the Apostles. In truth, what we typically hear is our cultural values repackaged into religious sounding ideas and presented as if they were Christian. Sometimes it's just crazy talk.
When the musician in question, therefore, speaks about her need to “find herself” (a disturbingly non-Christian idea) at age 45, she is describing, not the state of Christianity at the turn of the millennium, but rather the narcissism of our society. The need to embark on the task of finding oneself points to a profound restlessness of soul. But our musician friend is looking for the wrong person. As Augustine of Hippo said, back in the fourth century, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee, O God.” The need to find oneself also indicates an emptiness, for the self is always there, and if we are unable to discover ourselves within our being, the emptiness must be overwhelming.
The comments of the Christian musician struck a chord because I was returning from a pilgrimage when I heard her comments. There was a speaker at the retreat (a priest and theologian, by the way; I have no idea if he can sing, dance, or play an instrument) whose theme was “living the saintly life.” He began with the biblical premise that saintliness and sainthood is not extraordinary, but rather the normal condition of the Christian life. He also pointed out that the fallen world is not “normal,” but sinful and broken. As a result we are sub-normal, and achieving normalcy (much less maturity) is very often the life-long task of the Christian.
The priest’s lectures could be summarized with two ideas: The balanced life and losing oneself. Our “selves” (and specifically, our sinful selves) are flighty creatures driven here and there by our desires for everything we see, smell, or realize our neighbors have. With our inner beings bouncing here and there and back again, and never settling down, achieving balance is a near impossibility. Achieving balance is therefore the task of the relatively mature. The immature must seek to lose themselves in order to find the silence and quietude in which balance is possible.
This, of course, is utterly at odds with our society. We are adrift from God. In this state if we were to lose ourselves we would have absolutely nothing left. It is an unthinkable state of being for beings who have no memory of God’s real presence. Likewise, for Christians who are busy flitting through life (and this is most of us, although I have in mind our middle aged musician currently in search of herself), the idea that God’s presence is preferable to my own presence is an oddity. The idea that the only solution to our sadness is increased mourning (Mat. 5:4) is stranger still.
An argument can be made that John the Baptist is the proper saint of this generation. Christ “must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30) he said to his fans after they stated their concerns that Jesus was becoming more popular than John. A short time later John would be beheaded by a society seeking itself and offended that John would criticize its activities. Evidently John never had any concern over his own well-being, only whether he correctly identified the Messiah.
I put all this into the context of the Christian entertainer, not to pick on her or her religious tradition, but rather to put it all in context. I assume she’s a sensible person. She may not have been at 25 when her life spun out of control for a time, but at 45 she’s got her act together. But then again, society is mostly sensible. Or at least it’s madness seems perfectly sensible to us because we live within the society; its air is the same air we breathe.
The Christian singer, who is busy trying to find herself, is sensible. John the Baptist, condemning the king, rotting in prison, and ultimately losing is his head, is the mad one.
Or so it would seem.
But that’s the problem with losing oneself to a saintly life. One must pass through seeming madness to enter into the bliss of the kingdom. Faith is crazy before it becomes sublime. Of course, this is not because faith is, in and of itself, crazy, it is rather because we view it from the madness of sin, gazing upon the Kingdom of Heaven through the bars of the asylum of sin that our existence too often becomes. But when all our friends are on the inside with us, it’s hard to figure out who the sane ones are.
Fortunately, I had just spent two and a half days in the presence of the saints, praying with the saints, considering the strange sanity of a saintly life. Fortunately I had gained some needed perspective. So when the Christian entertainer said her current task in life was to find herself, it was obvious to me that she was crazy . . . Not in a John the Baptist, prophet of doom sort of way, but in the ordinary and unobtrusive way that infects us all.
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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