My Faith Tree

         The stillness of the church sanctuary on a Sunday morning is a great opportunity to open oneself to inspiration, conviction, creativity, and other whisperings of the Spirit. Or, it’s a chance to let your mind wander. Sometimes those wanderings go in nonconstructive directions: What’s coming up at work tomorrow? Did I pay that bill? I wish I hadn’t said/done that. What’s going to happen on the next episode of Game of Thrones? If you’ve ever been in church, you get the picture.

          Last Sunday, however, for some reason I reflected on my faith heritage. This weekend I will get my third (and final...maybe) tattoo, a design I created myself. It will be a Celtic cross with a triquetra knot in the middle, representing both my faith and my ethnic heritages. As a creative type, I love imagery. Maybe that’s why I have no problem perceiving the Bible’s symbols and metaphors as representations of the sometimes mysterious truths of God and the Truth that is God.

          So I reflected on my own faith history, and the imagery that came to mind was of a tree. I was raised in the Free Will Baptist church, a conservative evangelical denomination founded on Arminian principles of free will and God’s free grace, and also highly influenced by Wesleyan theology. In practice they are much like most other Baptists, but in theology they are more similar to Methodists. That church is the taproot of my tree, fed by soil composed of Wesleyan and Arminian elements.

          As I grew and became more independent, I leaned toward the Southern Baptist church. Many of my high school friends were Southern Baptists, and I got my undergraduate degree at a Southern Baptist-affiliated university. Anyone living in the central Texas area cannot help but be influenced to some degree by Southern Baptists, I suppose. So the Southern Baptist church represents the trunk of my faith tree. I was beginning to think for myself and form my own ideas about faith, and that Southern Baptist evangelicalism bolstered my maturation.

          But as I grew older and experienced more of the world, encountering people of other Christian backgrounds and non-Christian faith traditions, my mind broadened and I began to think more critically about what it meant to be a follower of Jesus and to be Christ to the world. Issues of social justice and environmental sustainability surfaced as the primary concerns for me, replacing those evangelical notions of witnessing and “winning souls for the Lord,” which in my opinion were more concerned with sheer numbers and the afterlife than with sincerely being concerned about another person’s welfare in the here-and-now. I began to look at Jesus’s life as my primary example of how to live in this world, and not the lives of Paul or Peter or any of the other disciples. Honestly, I believe some evangelicals are dangerously close to making idols out of the Bible itself and of characters in it, rather than looking to Jesus alone as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. As my spiritual explorations continued, I came to realize that much of what I had arrived at on my own in my faith journey had already actually been defined by others before me as Progressive Christianity. My faith tree was beginning to branch out from the trunk, spreading its limbs to accommodate ideals of social justice, environmental responsibility, hospitality, and intellectual knowledge balanced with more intuitive and emotional ways of knowing. And in the same way that a tree provides shade, food, and protection for other creatures, so our faith should not be simply self-serving, but rather a faith that gives to others—physical, emotional, and spiritual nourishment and protection; a place of refuge and rest; a cool respite from oppression, and a dry haven from life’s storms.

          That’s not to say that I’ve reached some sort of Christian nirvana state. I still struggle to love the unlovable…although those whom I perceive to be “unlovable” have changed through the years. Showing hospitality unconditionally is sometimes a challenge for me. I don’t always make the most environmentally friendly consumer choices. And those fruits of the Spirit that the New Testament lists? You know: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? They sometimes rot on the limbs of my faith tree because I fail to nourish them properly through communion with the Master Gardener a.k.a. God.

          But at least I do have limbs that branch out and reach up, however feebly. Reaching toward the light that comes from God’s grace and love, those limbs know that they need to grow and spread and thrive, drawing their life not just from the roots below the trunk, but especially from the sun and rain that comes from above. My faith tree may never be a mighty oak or a towering pine, but it has withstood life’s storms and droughts for over fifty years now. Even the tiny bonsai thrives with the Master Gardener’s loving attention and tender care. So, whether I am a mighty oak or a little bonsai, may I continue to grow and thrive wherever I am planted.

The Town that Time [Almost] Forgot

          It is simultaneously comforting and disturbing to know that there is a community on this earth that changes little over time. I’m talking about my hometown, a small town of little more than 4,000 people located literally deep in the heart of Texas (and yes, the stars at night really are big and bright). I lived with my parents until the end of my sophomore year in college, and since then the only time I’ve really lived there was when I took a semester off during graduate school. Otherwise the visits have been as brief as a few days and as long as a couple of months during summer vacations. And each time I go there, I am struck at how very little the place and its people have changed.

          With the exception, that is, of the young people. Cable TV there was relatively new when I was a teenager. It did a lot to bring the world a bit closer to our little town. Those who could afford cable TV (unlike my family) had greater access to world events and popular culture. Shortly afterward came satellite TV, then in the 80’s the Internet appeared on the scene. Dial-up was slow and awkward; downloading graphics could literally take hours. Still, more information became available to those who were open to it (unfortunately, that also meant misinformation became more readily available, and to an un- or under-educated population, that can be dangerous). But when high-speed Internet became an option, the entire world was available at one’s fingertips. Many of my generation and older embraced the new technologies, and now, with smartphones, folks even in that little town in the middle of Texas carry the Information Age in the palms of their hands.

          One indicator of the changes that have occurred because of these new technologies is people’s accents. When I was young, almost everyone had that Texas drawl (you might think of the actors on the 70’s TV series Dallas, but don’t; their accents were so fake it was painful). Now I notice that most young people speak with a more general American dialect, which I believe is a result of their having more access to media through TV, Internet, and smartphones. This will help them in the future, most likely, for people with strong Southern dialects are often not taken as seriously as those with slight or no accents.

          The older generation, though, for the most part does not participate to a great deal in the Digital Age. My father, a World War II veteran, only got satellite TV a few years ago, and only has a cell phone because I bought him one to carry in the car with him in case of an emergency. He’s never used a computer or a tablet (the electronic kind, not the paper one). He’s never sent an email in his life, and the concepts of Facetime or Skype are like something from Buck Rogers or the Jetsons.

          People of his generation were defined by World War II. He was only nineteen when his number came up and he was gone with the draft. Even then, he was already a married man. But this young guy from small-town central Texas, who had never travelled out of the state (maybe even never outside of the county!) was shipped across the Pacific to New Guinea, Australia, and the Philippines. Thankfully he didn’t have to serve in direct combat, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t experience danger and hardship. He contracted dengue fever while there, and the tropical climate interfered with his sinuses in ravaging ways. And he was separated from his young wife and his elderly father for two years.

          One advantage of his service, though, was the opportunity to meet people from other places. He told often the story of the New Guinea native who scrambled up a coconut palm with machete in hand and harvested a fresh coconut for the two of them to drink. He spoke fondly of a Filipino friend he made in Manila who welcomed him into his family’s home. And he never spoke ill of the Japanese individually. He understood that those men were serving their country in the same way he was serving his, and that their militaristic government, and not the Japanese soldiers themselves, were responsible for the atrocities enacted on the people of Japanese-conquered nations and on prisoners of war. To him, the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the horrific end to a horrific war, and nothing to celebrate or feel proud about.

          Another story he told less often was more emotional to him. When my father was young, there were no African-American people in the community. In fact, the first African-Americans moved into the town only in recent years. The area has the reputation for not being a very welcoming place for diversity, and in the years before World War II, little progress had been made in civil rights for African-Americans (or anybody who wasn’t a white male, for that matter). So needless to say, my dad had had little or no contact with African-Americans before the War. He mentions that the white personnel treated the African-American soldiers poorly, and he tells about driving along a road in Australia one night and picking up an African-American soldier who had apparently been tormented to the point of great fear by the white American soldiers. My dad stopped his truck and gave the young man a ride to the safety of his camp. When he tells how grateful the man was, he nearly comes to tears. I wonder if that’s his way of expressing sorrow for the long, painful history our European ancestors have inflicted on those of African descent, especially in Texas and other places in the South. He and others of his generation still use certain words to refer to African-Americans, despite my repeated attempts to correct and educate him. They are products of their times, as are we all. Still, my father rose above his upbringing to show compassion and mercy to someone who needed it. That was most certainly a risky thing to do for a young man from a small town in central Texas where that sort of compassion and mercy was not the fashion.

          My father’s story makes me wonder what it is that emboldens a person to step courageously outside his or her comfort zone and take the risk to be kind. Perhaps some do so out of a sense of religious or moral duty (i.e. God says we have to). Perhaps others express kindness in order to earn a reward, either in this life or the next (i.e. we work our way to heaven). But many, it seems, are kind to others simply because they understand that it is simply the right thing to do. They express what they desire to receive; you know, the whole “do unto others” command. Progressive Christians like me might say that it is the spirit of Christ in us serving the spirit of Christ in others. Similarly Hindus say Namaste in greeting, which, loosely interpreted, means “the spirit in me honors the spirit in you.” A person who has known suffering, either directly or indirectly, recognizes suffering in another and feels empathy for the suffering individual. While my father had never been a victim of racial bigotry in his life, he understood what that young African-American man was experiencing at the hands of racist bullies, and he did what he could to help in that moment: he offered the victim a safe passage to a safe place.

And years later, when he had children of his own, he modeled compassion and mercy to his three children in that small town in central Texas. He wasn’t a perfect model; like I said earlier, his vocabulary needs some adjusting. And he can still express some fear-based assumptions about certain people that are not necessarily true. But he never, ever advocated bullying or oppression towards others for any reason (even toward Republicans; he has some pretty strong opinions about them and their beliefs and policies, but he would never physically hurt one).

And so, as change occurs slowly—painfully slowly—in that small town deep in the heart of Texas, the comfort lies in knowing that people like my father have consistently, if not perfectly, showed kindness to others. It is a hospitality enacted in small, daily increments that accrue toward a universal community of humanity bound together by common decency and compassion. Maybe that’s why the place doesn’t change all that much through the years, because God knows we need places like my hometown to remind us both of how to be consistently nice to each other, and how much we need to keep growing and changing and not get stuck in a rut.