My brother Dave is ex-Army, an orthopedic hand surgeon, and a Christian. But recently he had to give up his practice because he had an aggressive and malignant tumor removed from the occipital lobe of his brain. The damage that the tumor and the treatment did to his eyesight cost him his career.
After operating on 120 patients a month who needed repairs to shattered bones and severed blood vessels, one common-place Tuesday afternoon, he took the results of his MRI, went in to see the chief of surgery, and explained, “I can’t operate anymore and you can’t afford to have me operate.” Now he is trying to sort out what he can do with his life in a world made smaller by damaged eyesight.
But he doesn’t go to church anymore in order to find help with that struggle. Why? Well, as he explains it, there are at least three reasons and I think that they help to explain why an increasing number of people think of themselves as spiritual but not religious.
One is that the church won’t stop talking to him about money. Oh, he understands the need for stewardship. He gets the expenses involved in real mission. What he doesn’t understand is the way in which the church so often lets the appeals for money take precedence over nearly everything else. Rightly, he notes, “Jesus risked everything to save others. The church risks anything and everything to save itself.”
Second, the churches he has attended won’t talk to him in a way that speaks to his life. He’s listened to clergy talk over and around life’s challenges without ever saying anything real about them. The preachers he has heard either string together a series of twenty-five dollar words they learned in seminary, or soft-ball life’s hard realities. One way or another there is little or nothing with which he can connect.
Third, on the rare occasion when the church does speak to him about the challenges he faces, as he puts it, the preacher usually “blows sunshine up my ass and tells me that everything will be alright.” It’s hard, he points out, when you’ve been told that you have a brain tumor to hear people tell you that God has a plan, that the best is yet to come, or that you are living a blessing in disguise. Saying that to someone with a tumor that claims the lives of all but three per cent who have them is worse than useless. “It’s horse shit, not just false hope, to argue that at age 52 I can do more good without my surgical skills, than I did with them.”
The third reason he gave, of course, is the real reason he doesn’t go to church.
It’s no surprise that the two friends he has that speak most readily and directly to him about the spiritual demands of life are no-nonsense, plain-spoken, recovering alcoholics. They may lack the theological vocabulary of a priest or pastor, and they may not have the time to dedicate their lives to a study of Scripture, but they have sharpened what they believe and they have refined the way that they live by bringing their faith to bear upon the hard realities of life. “The institutional crap doesn’t mean anything to them. Living their lives does,” my brother observes.
The conversation has led me to begin applying what I call “The Dave Test” to what I write and the causes to which I give my energy. Am I writing for real people who live and work in the real world? Am I writing for people who think that their faith in God ought to make a difference?
“The institutional crap” is probably not the thing that distracts you from living fully in the presence of God. Some people even use the resentment they feel toward the church to distance themselves from God. Just because you aren’t seduced by the church in all its churchiness, doesn’t mean that you aren’t hiding from God and from life. We can all be seduced by something that keeps us from living vulnerably, openly, and with energy in the presence of God — including pride in the notion that we are living vulnerably, openly, and with energy before God.
We all need to apply the Dave Test.
Dave’s “real reason” for not going to church, Reason #3, is a good one. So many preachers have positioned Christianity as a sort of magical system, to wit: “believe this, and God will do that.” Some of their teachings have less sophistication than an African shaman (I’m thinking of Joel Osteen).
Long ago I grew weary of the moral sleight of hand some of these pastors introduced in their sermons. It went like this: “Yes, bad things happen to good people . . . But God allows them to happen for a reason. And that reason actually makes the bad thing a good thing.” Really? Like Dave’s tumor? I don’t think so.
No, I think people would do well to cease their practice of religious co-dependence and stop acting as if they can control God. Who or whatever God is cannot be manipulated by the intentions of even well meaning people.
The medieval thinkers may have gotten it right after all: life is a veil of tears and what our religious or spiritual practice offers us is comfort. Not magic. Not manipulation of the divine. And definitely not sunshine blown up up our collective ass.
As usual, very well said! It reminds me of Heather’s comment about wanting to hear something that she can hold onto during the week when she wants to kill her kids (a sentiment that most parents can readily identify with!).
In other words, no tricks, no lies, no quiet stabbings. Or as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” Humbling, isn’t it?
I’m glad that Dave has found two good friends who can speak some deep sense to his situation. What answer is there? I can only speak from my own experience with the ups and downs of life. For me, it’s been keeping Holy Week, especially the Great Three Days, every year. A wise priest once said about Holy Week, “This is ultimate reality, and we can’t ever understand ultimate reality. All we can do is participate in it.”
Maybe this is what Dave’s friends are able to convey to him: it’s bad stuff, but we’re with you, and we’re not going to saddle you with nonsense on top of everything else you have to put up with. We’re with you.”
Prayers for Dave, and thanksgiving for his friends, who have the integrity to “tell the truth and shame the devil.”
Prayers will ascend for Dave. His story is a humbling one…