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.