Order, Disorder and Re-order

Photo from Box City

This morning I was listening to a super interesting dialog between Richard Rohr and Rob Bell on the Alternate Orthodoxy.  There was just so much there that has got me thinking......I'm going to just pick one thing that I want to ponder on and write my way through right now.  Not that I'll totally grasp and apply the concepts in one sitting, but I just want to think on them some more.

 In life we're working our way through 3 "boxes". The 1st one is order, the 2nd one is disorder, the 3rd one is re-order.  Conservatives get stuck in the first box;  their need for order is high.  They use good, right order that's founded in reality and helpful for life and child rearing.  But then they also construct artificial order that isn't true, but they stick to it at all costs due to their extreme need for order. Liberals, progressives and academics get stuck in the second box of disorder. They just keep deconstructing everything.  This has caused so many problems for the children who are teens today because they grew up in this constant deconstructing; it's a difficult way to grow up. There's no rules or reality and nothing to hang on to. Richard Rohr emphasized that there's no "non stop flight from the first box to the third box".  People want that; they want to just get there.  He emphasized how it's only when we face disorder in ourselves, our culture, our church and experience; when we go through the falling apart of what Thomas Merton called "our salvation project",  that we can work through the process of re-order.

I'm in the process of going into that third box.  I've been a life time in getting there.


I started out in the order box.  I grew up in a fundamentalist, evangelical home. Yet I can  remember as young as 10 or 11 knowing in the depth of my heart, that some things weren't right.  The 1st thing I remember was knowing that this giving your heart to Jesus at one specific time, and being saved, wasn't really like that.  In my church you walked down the isle, gave your heart to Jesus, and became saved.  Later on when I was involved in a high school campus ministry I even learned to give a 3 minute testimony about the before and after of this experience.  The problem was, I knew at 11 - I'd never disbelieved.  As much as I knew and understood, I always loved God and Jesus and reached out for him.  I distinctly remember walking down that isle when I was in the 5th grade to make my church happy - I knew that I wasn't "unsaved" before. I'd had the extreme blessing of growing up in a house that went to church and so I got to learn about God, the Bible, and Jesus from the time I was born.  I'm extremely grateful for that.  There was so much truth there.  But there was also what Rohr refers to as a culture that needed order and attached to orderly ideas that don't have Biblical or really even experiential reality to back them up - that don't make sense. This idea that "salvation" is a one point in time event just doesn't add up for me; it never has.

I can also remember that growing up in this fundamentalist group there is a sense of those who are "in" and "out". For example, Catholics aren't considered really "saved".  I mean God forbid that you'd meet and marry one - then you'd be "yoked to an unbeliever"!  I can remember several times in high school and onward where that felt all wrong. I can specifically remember once, I think I was in high school at the time, wishing something along the lines of I wish Catholics were saved too - I really like those Catholics and want to be together with them too. I think that my heart knew what my head didn't yet; I'd experienced the love of God.  When I was in middle school and living through that angst that is specially known to the adolescent, going time and time again tot he book of Psalms.  I'd found a paraphrase of the Bible called "The Living Bible" that I could actually understand.  The intensity and heightened emotion within many Psalms drew me in and the Holy Spirit ministered love to me when I needed it most. The result of love is to want everyone to get to be part of it.

Another result of that In and Out group thinking is that I always felt apart from the people around me.  As a Christian I never felt like I was one of the kids at my school or out in the community.  I was only one of the church people.  That made there always be a touch of sadness inside me. 

When I was pregnant with my first son (who BTW is now 31 years old) I read a book that opened up a whole new world for me: Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster.  Through that I began an acquaintance with Christian writers through the ages.  I realized that there was a big world out there of real Christians who'd come before and who didn't think identically to my church.  I caught a glimpse of the wide stream of orthodox Christianity. Writers like Thomas a Kempis, Brother Lawrence, Meister Eckhart, and many others.  I was drawn to the Christian Mystics.  I found it amusing that so many of these authors were Catholic.

Several years later I read The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning.  That book helped me see, and experience, the grace of God as I'd never done before.  It helped open doors in my mind that made me able to see things in a different way.  It was interesting because I have a wonderful Christian friend, a true woman of God, that I know from my local, fundamentalist church.  I'd talked about how wonderful that book was and given her a copy as a gift.  She and I both adore reading and studying alone and in groups. When she finished reading the book she said something to me about where was the accountability, the recognition of sin?  She missed it!  She missed that God's love and grace are so great, and the more we experience it, the less we want sin any more.  It's right there in Romans 2:4 that it's the love of God that brings us to repentance.  True repentance is turning away from our sin.  It's love that draws us there, not condemnation or fear of hell.

A couple of years after that I remember being at the library and seeing a book title: "What if everyone gets saved?"  I will never forget what happened in that instant - something leaped for joy within my spirit! I checked out the book and it ended up not being what I'd wanted; it took away from what Jesus had done and that hurt more than even thinking some people might not be saved.  But that experience, that connection to the idea of everyone being saved, stuck with me.

Then about 5 years ago I read Rob Bell's famous book Love Wins.  My heart exploded and I've never been the same again.  All around me everyone called it heresy.  But for me, I'd finally found the path where I could experience resonance. There was finally a thought process on which I could embark that allowed me to love everyone like my soul desired.  There didn't have to be outsiders and insiders anymore - Paul's words from Galatians 3:28 about there no longer being Jews, Gentile, slave, free, male, female - us all being one in Christ - they made sense now!

I am still a sojourner in the life of faith-still trying to figure it out while accepting and embracing that there truly is a mystery of faith.  But through these past few years I've been able to connect with "unbelievers" in ways I never could previously.  I've held more genuine conversations about God, His love, and the impact it can have on the individual than I ever had before. It seems like I'm having more of a positive impact than before.  I feel more comfortable with myself and other people - I can allow them to be whomever they are.  I'm more open about my own faith.