Blue and Grace

I haven’t posted in a week, so you’ll have to excuse the length of this post. When I last posted, my wife and I, as well as my father-in-law, were at Iron Sharpens Iron. On the last day of the conference, I sat through a plenary session and a seminar demonizing both Rob Bell and Don Miller for questions in their theology. While I see the problem points in the books, I think a charitable reading allows us to learn a lot from these books.

I read Blue Like Jazz, and I enjoyed it. I felt like the presenter, Ben Mathew, may have been overly critical on this particular book. Perhaps he’s read more of Miller, and pulls his criticism from that, but I can’t help but think it’s more of a knee jerk reaction to the emergent movement, rather than an honest appraisal of this particular book. In any case, there were two things I really gleaned from the book. First, we cannot live the Christian life by ourselves, it has to happen in community. Second, Christians, for the most part, to a bad job of reflecting Christ.

From ISI, we drove straight down to Mountain Home, Arkansas, where my wife’s grandmother was dying. We actually didn’t expect to see her alive, but she hung in there for two days, everyone had ample time to say their goodbyes, although she was pretty strung out on morphine. It was really hard to sit in that hospital for a thousand reasons, but the biggest reason was that the community wasn’t working. One would think that the death of a grandmother would draw the children and grandchildren together, but it seemed like everyone was highly critical of everyone else. In the waiting room, I read A Hidden Wholeness and parts of de Barry’s Theological Reflection, both of which give a lot of weight to becoming whole and engaging in theology in community. It was a tremendous contrast, between the picture painted in the books and the reality before me.

After Grandma passed, there was a lull in the community thing, the daughters went with Grandpa for funeral arrangements, the rest of us did our own thing. The visitation that evening and the next day was better. Everyone was supportive of everyone else, and we all talked about Grandma’s life, and what a crazy lady she was (in a good way) and how tough she had been. The last full day, the funeral, was back to the same fractured mess. People criticizing one another over who’s kids did what, who took which flowers, all very stupid, but sooo important.

I’m not demonizing this family. I know they all love each other, and are trying to do what’s right. Their problems are my problems too. When I need community the most is when I’m most likely to lash out at people. When people support me I respond by cutting them down. It’s almost habit. I am beginning to see a huge gap between the broken communities that we have and the healing communities we need. We can never fully reach the perfect community, but as we grow closer to reflecting Christ, we can encourage other individuals to do the same. Ultimately, this will draw our communities closer together, and closer to God.