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T h e pat h to C h r i s t is the path I wanted to travel from the very beginning. I wanted to understand Scripture, but to put it more humbly, I wanted to know it. And knowing it involved intense rereading of the Gospels and the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, and continuous exploration of the Old Testament as well.
I expected to travel this path. I began with so little knowledge of Scripture that it was embarrassing. The Gospels were inert to me. I couldn’t tell the voice of one Evangelist from that of another. I didn’t know which incidents occurred in Mark, as opposed to Luke; or what was unique to Matthew; or what was so stunningly unique about the Gospel of John. Also because I’d heard every word of Scripture from the pulpit, it was hard not to skip over the familiar passages as I read, denying myself an experience of the fluid and living Gospel. 2 1 9
Reverend Rick Warren mentions this very problem in The Purpose Driven Life. “We think we know what a verse says because we have read it or heard it so many times,” says Reverend Rick. “Then when we find it quoted in a book, we skim over it and miss the full meaning.”
Well, in the first months of 2002, as I began my research, I was skimming the entire Gospel. I had to make myself stop this. I had to read and reread the entire book until I stopped anticipating and jumping, until the flow of the work became as familiar as the individual words.
Scholars played a special role in this, and none more for me than John A. T. Robinson with his book The Priority of John.
Reading Robinson feels like sitting by the fire with a brilliant professor and having him discuss with you the things that happen in John’s Gospel as real events. Slowly, you come to realize that for Robinson, this is almost like detective work, figuring out what Our Lord chose to do at a specific juncture, or how He responded to something that occurred. Faith in the text is essential to recovering the vibrancy of it. And suddenly, as I was reading Robinson, the Gospel stopped being a passel of quotations, and became a living account. I crossed some barrier in my studies. I stopped hearing chapter and verse and got caught up in the story, eager to discover what was going to happen next. Taken again and again to the Old Testament backdrop for the Gospels, I was soon reading the Old Testament books with equal curiosity and vigor, astonished by the distinct voices of the characters, and the wondrously surprising twists C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s and turns of the various accounts. I fell in love with 1 and 2 Samuel, and the exploits of King David. I became entranced with the Book of Jonah, and the Book of Tobit. I began to see everywhere the explosive creativity of the documents I was reading. I began to feel their pulse. The writings of N. T. Wright brought alive for me the accounts of the Resurrection, and helped me to see them as the record of men and women struggling desperately to describe something for which they had no experience and no words. Christ had risen from the dead.
It wasn’t too long at all before I came to see the distinct personality of each Gospel writer, and to reach the inevitable conclusion—in contradiction to much sophisticated scholarship—that the Gospels were indeed first-person witness, and that they contained our earliest and most accurate knowledge of Christ Himself. The novelist in me responded to the internal and effortless unity of each Gospel, the kind of unity that emerges in any heartfelt written account. I’m certainly not alone in this conclusion. Much worthy scholarship supports the same view.
However, an entire generation of New Testament scholars and clergymen has obviously come of age believing the Gospels to be “late date documents,” compiled by “communities” of people, who somehow lived in isolation from one another, and apparently made up words for Jesus according to what these communities thought should be made up. Sophisticated explanations are given for this by skeptical critics, but it always comes down to the same thing: they think the Gospels are fictional documents. They think they are col-2 2 1 laborative documents. They think they have been heavily edited. They think they must be “edited” again by the modern student as to what is more or less likely to be “historical,”
if anything in the Gospel is historical at all. It is sad that the influence of these skeptic critics is so widespread.
Not only do I find no evidence for isolated Gospel communities making up documents for their little groups, but I see no evidence of collaborative writing in the Gospels at all. Collaborative documents would never contain so much that is contradictory and surprising and difficult to explain. On the contrary, the Gospels, once I plunged into them and let them really talk to me, came across as distinct and fascinating original works. Nowhere does one see the “smoothing” of an editor or a group of collaborators. Too many mysteries are woven into the fabric of the work. Also something else has happened to me in the study of these documents. I find them inexhaustible in a rather mysterious way. I’m at a loss to explain the manner in which every new examination of the text produces some fresh insight, some new cascade of connections, some astonishing link to another part of the canon, or to the Old Testament backdrop which enfolds the whole.
The interplay of simplicity and complexity seems at times to be beyond human control.
Picking up the Gospel on any given morning is picking up a brand-new book.
There is something so explosive about this body of work C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s that it not only dwarfs the fragile assumptions of the skeptics, it dissolves them into nothingness.
And at times I have the feeling that I will die, with my face down in one of these books, on the verge of some new and momentous question or insight. In sum, there’s no visible bottom to this well of meaning. It’s unlike my experience with any other written text.
Frequently, so frequently as to be disconcerting and humbling, I feel myself on the verge of some response to the words that will carry me beyond where reason has led. To say the words are evocative doesn’t cover it. The words push one to the brink of mystical realizations. The words never stop inspiring responses that are beyond the words. Of course I continue to read scholars at every turn, especially those like Raymond E. Brown and C. S. Keener who devote attention to every line of Scripture. The theologian Cardinal Kasper offers powerful illumination. The early Church Fathers often provide keys to the most difficult questions. The whole enterprise is immeasurably huge and thrilling.
And this path, this deliberate path, has led me to affirm the core doctrines of Christianity that were worked out by the Church Fathers in the Nicene Creed and before. In sum, I am a conservative when it comes to doctrine because this is what I see! This is what I have found in the texts. This is what makes sense to my mind. The novelist in me has found this complex web of truth and meaning in these books when, frankly, I did not expect to find anything so powerful at all.
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Now for the behavioral aspect of this path. It is not enough to read Scripture. It is not enough to go over and over the beautiful words and phrases and events of Our Lord’s life. What does it mean to be a child of this Christ of Scripture? What does it mean to be a believer in Him? As I moved through the writing of Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, I became so wrapped up in the story that I didn’t think much about my own personal behavior, about my own attitudes and how they ought to be affected by what I was studying and writing. Of course I prayed, I studied, I cried. I went to church and I prayed before, during, and after Mass. I talked aloud to Our Lord. I asked for His guidance. My writing could only take me close to Him. There was no other possibility. But it wasn’t until sometime in 2005 that the obvious leapt out at me. The Lord of whom I was writing, the Lord of whom I was reading, was demanding a complete transformation in Him. And that transformation revolved around love. It is painful to admit that this realization came to me during a television interview at the time that the first novel was published. I was being interviewed by an intelligent man who obviously took my novel very seriously, and he asked, simply enough: “How has returning to Christ actually influenced your life?”
I found myself thinking about this and then answer
ing:
“It demands of me that I love people.”
This was a turning point, this simple acknowledgment. Because I began then to realize what the message of Christ was for me: to love my friends and to love my enemies. And C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s the mystery was that loving my friends was sometimes harder than loving my enemies. And that if one loved both, completely and sincerely, and if one could convince others to do this as well, one could, theoretically, bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.
In the months that followed, I thought a great deal about this commitment to love. I found myself reading the Gospel of Matthew more than the other Gospels. I found myself entranced with the Sermon on the Mount.
And something came clear to me that had never been clear before. Loving our neighbors and our enemies is perhaps the very hardest thing that Christ demands. It’s almost impossible to love one’s neighbors and enemies. It’s almost impossible to feel that degree of total giving to other human beings. To practice the daily love of neighbor and enemy calls into question one’s smallest and greatest competitive feelings, one’s common angry reactions to slights both great and small. In sum, the will to love all human beings must pervade every thought, word, and deed. One has to love the rude salesclerk, and the foreign enemy of one’s country; one has to love those who are “patently wrong” in their judgments of us. One has to love those who despise us openly and write and tell us so by e-mail. One has to love the employee who steals from you, and the murderer excoriated on national television.
My thoughts on this have been slow and continuous. And the more I read the Gospel of Matthew, the more I do see this Gospel as laying out a blueprint for the Kingdom of God on earth.
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These meditations have also caused me to evaluate my reflections on my Christian brothers and sisters. Time and again, I’ve heard people denounce this or that famous minister saying that he preaches “feel-good Christianity,” when, in fact, that minister is obviously preaching this earthshaking commitment to love. That minister is trying to show us that this requirement—to love—can bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.
I am a baby Christian when it comes to loving. I am just learning. So far were my daily thoughts from loving people that I have a lifelong vocation now before me in learning how to find Christ in every single person whom I meet. Again and again, I fail because of temper and pride. I fail because it is so easy to judge someone else rather than love that person. And I fail because I cannot execute the simplest operations—
answering an angry e-mail, for instance—in pure love. Another thing which has become obvious to me is that we Christians who believe in organized Christianity—whether it’s the Catholic Church or the Lutheran Church, or the community of the Amish in Pennsylvania—we Christians of the churches are faced with a near immediate temptation upon conversion to judge other Christians as deficient and missing the point.
We can’t give in to this. Yet this temptation will always be there.
The Gospel of Matthew is explicit on our not judging. The Gospel of Matthew tells us how to love. The parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke tells us how to love. Jesus at the Last Supper in the Gospel of John tells us C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s again and again how to love. St. Paul in his magnificent 1 Corinthians tells us how to love.
And yet the temptation to judge never leaves us alone. Our Christian brothers and sisters question us as to the integrity of our conversion. They often condemn our approach to the Lord. They go so far as to tell us we are “not really saved” because we have not spoken the words they want to hear us speak. They suggest that our church is perhaps not Christian or is even demonic. They sometimes accost us on the basis of our political choices. We have to accept these condemnations. We have to accept them without complaint. If we do not accept them, we are lost almost at once in a miserable negotiation with the Lord’s commandments which can swallow the loving heart completely in what appears to be a Christian vocation but which is anything but.
The more I study the New Testament, the more I see the contradictions enshrined within it. But I see something else there too. We have been a quarreling religion from the beginning, born out of an earlier quarreling religion—
Judaism—and in a sense the New Testament enshrines us as such very clearly, with no easy solution as to how we handle our quarrels or the contradictory passages except that we must love! The voice of Christ speaks so loudly in the Sermon on the Mount that surely it drowns out those passages that urge us to condemn or to shun. But how is one to say so for sure?
To accept the canon means to accept all of the canon. And that means there will be no easy resolution ever, and that learning to live with this tension, in love, is what we must do. 2 2 7
This may come across as simplistic. It is not simplistic. It is life changing and endlessly difficult, and the steadfast determination to love is threatened at every moment. We walk a tightrope over a pit of grasping demons when we insist upon love. And sometimes we walk alone.
The truth is, we are never alone, but we are tempted to think we are alone.
The more I study this, the more I listen to people around me talk about their experience with Jesus Christ and with religion, the more I realize as well that what drives people away from Christ is the Christian who does not know how to love. A string of cruel words from a Christian can destroy another Christian.
Over and over again people write to me to explain why they left a church in bitterness and hurt, because of the mercilessness of Christians who made them feel unwelcome, or even told them to go away.
I’m convinced that it takes immense courage to remain in a church where one is surrounded by hostile voices; and yet we must remain in our churches and we must answer hostility with meekness, with gentleness, or simply not answer it at all!
Reverend Rick Warren writes with shining eloquence of this in The Purpose Driven Life, this need to love. But many a venerable Catholic theologian has written of the same imperative. The message of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, of Karl Rahner, of Walter Kasper, of St. Augustine, of St. Paul is—to love. The message of St. Francis of Assisi was love. We have the famous prayer of St. Francis which spells it out beautifully and poetically:
C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Lord, make me an instrument of
Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow
Love.
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled,
As to console;
To be understood, as to understand; To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we
receive—
It is in pardoning that we are
pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are
born to eternal life.
We kid ourselves if we think this is “feel-good Christianity.” This is Christianity! If it isn’t Christianity, then what can Christianity possibly be? It’s the toughest way to live that there is.
Again I see in the Christmas tableaux of the Holy Family the perfect iconography of this love. I see the love of God in the presence of the Christ Child; but I also see in the Virgin Mother, the embodiment of the truth that the conception of 2 2 9
the Child Jesus did not involve violence or a proprietary claim on the part of any human being. The Virginity of Mary is not a rejection of sexuality; it is a rejection of violence, a rejection of ownership, a rejection of the social system of the first century in which even a Jewish woman became to some extent the chattel of her husband. The Virgin Mary is a woman who belongs to no man, and only to God. And we, whether we are male or female, like Mary, belong only to God.
Joseph is the perfect guardian and the perfect witness. He
is the man who assumes the responsibilities of fatherhood. But these are seen in their deepest essence, divorced from any claim established by conjugal dominance. They are freely given, these gifts of fatherhood, and therefore they illuminate all fatherhood for all of us—men or women—as they become a parental ideal. In the Christmas picture of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the family transcends the age-old cycle of fertility and death. Each figure is there voluntarily, and therefore symbolically, and allegorically. Each figure speaks of the pure relationship to the Father in Heaven. This is the Family of Love. No wonder the hymns celebrate this so fiercely through the centuries. “God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay. Remember, Christ Our Savior was born on Christmas day.”
Yet the Christ Child will die. He will grow up to die, and to rise again.
From the moment we come to Christ we start negotiating with all this. And to move out of that negotiation and back to C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s the heart of Christ is the hardest thing, I think, for a Christian to do. Did St. Francis of Assisi know this when he put the babe in the Christmas Crèche at Greccio? Was he not one of the greatest of the Christmas Christians? Did he not give us the Christmas Crèche?
And yet Francis received the shocking and dreadful wounds of the Stigmata. Francis knelt in awe of The Atonement. But Francis was a Christmas Christian first and foremost, perhaps as he reached out his arms to all God’s creatures, and all God’s creation, and to Christ Himself. My path leads me deeper and deeper into these mysteries. The powerful inversion of God, the Creator, become human in the body of a babe enthralls me. The complexity of simply loving leaves me stunned.
This path to Christ, this attempt to grasp the multiple meanings of His life and death on earth, had led me to other truths too. It had led me to unspeakable happiness and a sense of belonging for the first time in my life. But unfortunately, I traveled another path from 2002 to the present and I think it necessary to describe it in brief. Before I describe that Other Path, I feel I have to say something specific here about sin. I have talked about the Sermon on the Mount, about the great challenge to love, but I have not talked about my own sin.