Paradise Lost – Innocence Shattered (Part II)

Spiritual…but not Religious

We have been placed during a time in which our present society finds increasing tension between themselves and ‘the church’, where one third of our nation is ‘spiritual’ but not ‘religious’, where these so-called Christian buildings are places more associated with fear, judgement and conflict than love, community and healing.  Is it really such a surprise that both those inside and outside the body of Christ feel so cut-off and distant?

Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest says this of what we’re deeming ‘Paradise Lost’, “The first half of life is about light (order, meaning clarity, explanation). The second half of life is where God leads us into ‘darkness’ which is actually a much greater teacher than what seemed like light. Now we learn through waiting, trusting, praying and ‘through a glass darkly’”

It seems as though what we’re dealing with in this whole innocent vs. naked community, is an identity crisis of sorts.  We have a people, both Christian and non-Christian who can’t really come to grips with which half of life their dealing with.  We have Christian adults who desire to return to the first half of lighted life; and then we have Christian adults who have no idea as to what to do with this darkened second half of life they find themselves in.

Primarily, because what is so often pushed as ‘Christian living’ is this return to innocence.  Yet redemption has nothing to do with a return ‘to the way things were’, which I’ve written about before in ‘Redemptiphobia’.  The Christ of the scriptures is one who crashes fully into the darkness, so as to provide an exodus to an entirely different reality; not to return to the innocence that existed before darkness.

An identity crisis…this tension and confusion begs the question as to which half of life, we’re meant to live in as so-called Christians. Things then seem to become further complicated, as the darkness is most definitely dark, and we often doubt that our God and our faith can venture in and out of this darkness in one piece.

Bumper stickers and Biblical identity

In the end…whether you’d call yourself part of the ‘innocent’ or the ‘shattered’, we’d all like to return to the proverbial Eden…Which is what makes God’s promise of exodus that much more difficult to trust. In the end, we’d like to opt for an alternative escape route. Nonetheless, God’s got his own plan.

If you’re still reading at this point and haven’t gone for a smoke-break, I have a proposition…Sometime in the next week, ask one of your non-Christian friends (if you don’t have any friends, then try and get out more) what’s the first thing that pops into their head when they hear the word, ‘Christian’…then ask them the same question, but with the word, ‘Christ’, instead…I’m willing to bet a Chicago-priced pack of cigarettes (that’s how you know I’m serious) that the answers are contrastingly different from one another.

And so here’s where the rubber meets the road, or the contemporary inspiration, if you will.  With regards to our mid-life crisis as the body of Christ, we struggle with not only being Christ to the ‘world’, but even within our own communities in the bride of Christ.

Allow me some liberty for the moment, as I speak to the idea of ‘leading someone to Christ’.  For when it comes to this illusion of those ‘on the in and on the out’, the central issue is, “Are you leading people to Christ? Or are you actually just leading them to Christianity?” …or Christian culture more or less…

What concerns me most about Christianity, is that we have come to equate the ideas of Christ and the culture that is created by Christianity, so much so…that we no longer see a difference between the two.

Yet in reality, the Christ that is spoken of in Hebrews 5 is seemingly different than the Christianity that is pushed in the present time.  One rushes into the so-called ‘darkness’ with hope, trust and spleen-bursting compassion; the other with pseudo-innocence and bewilderment.

So where do we go from here?

Well, by now we’ve come to the end of this chaotic thought-train that’s bound for an off-the-rails disaster…

The funny thing is, I don’t really have a conclusion of sorts.  Instead, I invite you to wrestle with these tensions that seem to plague us in these days. As I’ve said before, the greatest danger of ‘Christian culture’ is that we expect people to conform to this identity of innocence…whereas if you’ve known the darkness, it’s a pretty complicated idea to just up and return to child-like innocence.  In fact, the return to innocence has nothing to do with Christ; it’s a denial of what Christ has already done.

Perhaps more to the point…

What kinds of people do you feel just ‘don’t get it’ the way you seem to? Is there tension here? How should we see each other?

How are we bridging a gap between the kingdom and the world? Can people see Christ? Or do they just see culture?

What kind of intentional community are we making time for within our own Christ-communities? Is it possible that some members of the ‘family’ are drifting off?

So may you continue to wrestle with this Christ who comes to bring redemption to those who have lost their innocence, may you also grow in compassion for the bride of Christ…even amidst an identity crisis…and at the end of the day, may we not grow weary in pointing to Christ, again and again…laying beside our own stories, so as to not further complicate our reality in him.

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