So, I was a little surprised when my last blog entry got 3 times more hits than all of the previous blog entries I’ve ever written combined. I’m grateful that something I wrote could have such an impact on so many people, and if you are reading this blog because of that particular entry, well, hi there! I mostly write about spirituality/religion from a not-terribly-orthodox Lutheran perspective, my own life and foibles, how much I like using words like foibles, films, books, et cetera. I never write about politics and I don’t really see the point in debating for debates’ sake, although I’m happy to hear what others say and try to better articulate my own perspective when necessary.
So this video with the guy who loves Jesus but hates religion that everyone is posting on Facebook.
Sigh.
It mostly reminds me of Tony Jones' Writing a Book About How RADICAL Jesus Is? Please Stop Boring Me.
There have been some good responses written by others, so I’ll just link to them… one by Becca Clark, who I’ve never heard of, but she does a good job teasing out the pros and cons, and one by Nadia Bolz-Weber that was apparently written at the request of the ELCA. She is pretty much the closest thing the ELCA has to a rock-star pastor right now, and one of the people that always draws me back to the beauty of the church when I start getting too annoyed with the ugliness.
It’s not that I hate the video… I don’t. But I don’t really love it, either. There are parts of it that are really beautiful and parts that make me go “huh?” and parts where I want to say, “Well, wait, actually…”
For one thing, I’m so desperately tired of the “spirituality vs. religion” or “relationship vs. religion” thing. There was a time I said, frequently, “religion is for people who are afraid of hell, spirituality is for people who have already been there.” How arrogant. As if all people throughout all time, religious or not, don’t go through hell in some way, and as if the only possible reason a person would feel drawn into a community gathered around certain ideas about God would be fear of hell.
For me, at least for the last 6 or 7 years, it’s spirituality and religion, like the two contact lenses I put on my eyeballs each morning (and isn’t that a weird thing to think about, if you really think about it) that allow me to see clearly. If I leave one of my contacts out, everything looks weird. If I leave them both out, I’m blind as a bat. But with both in place, things look right. So yes. Both-and. That’s the only thing that works for me. Your mileage may vary.
But more than that, I think, was that as soon as I saw the video for the first time, I knew it would be reposted. A lot. And I knew that the inevitable “backlash” blog responses would come, and so on, and so much of what I see online lately feels to me like so much preaching to the choir and I’m just really bored with it.
It might be time for one of those Facebook breaks people talk about, I’m thinking. Just for a little bit.
And what perfect timing to do it, since I need every spare minute because I’m reading The Lord of the Rings again! The first time I read it was 12 years ago, when I took a Fantasy & Science Fiction class at NDSU. I took that class because I had enrolled for a Women’s Lit course and realized I’d already read all of the books for it, some twice, and I really didn’t want to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening *again.* I saw that a Fantasy/Sci-Fi course was offered and thought, “Isn’t that stuff pretty much romance novels for boys?” And I took the class and found out I was so wrong, so wonderfully wrong.
The first time I read LOTR, it was in the last years of my drinking, which really took off and took over after I moved to Fargo, even though I somehow managed to stay in school and even do some darn good work while I was there. I can’t say I was particularly spiritual or religious then, and so a good deal of the beauty of LOTR was lost on me. I liked the story enough, and I really love the movies, but the richness of Tolkien’s writing and the depth of it were mostly lost on me.
But it’s so beautiful now. He treats the problem of temptation and sin and the human condition with such real consequence, while at the same time always treating his characters with such grace and mercy. Gollum is maybe the ugliest and most beautiful thing in the world, and ever since I saw this scene from The Two Towers early in my sobriety, I feel a special kinship with him:
Aww. It still makes me tear up. The inner conflict and the giddy tense nervousness near the end when he’s finally free… it just, like, nails it.
I also see in the Smeagol/Deagol story echoes of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the whole thing really just has so much depth and weight and grace and beauty to it, more than most books I read. It’s the end of the week and I’m not about to write an in-depth theological study of it just yet (mainly because I’m only 1/3 through the first book), but suffice to say, it is filling my soul with good things, and that’s always necessary.
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