Christianity as the Rough Life Religion

My ambitions to post more regularly are being challenged by a generally rough patch in my life currently. But then, I suppose ambitions to strengthen or re-establish disciplines--mental, physical, and spiritual--often do face early challenges by life's general roughness.

I think it's often forgotten that one of Christianity's longstanding strengths is its willingness to openly and often acknowledge life's rough spots. I suppose the over-exposure of word-and-faith, prosperity gospels that cast Christianity as a naive set of beliefs about how good life is (or should be) if only you trust in Jesus. At best, such pie-in-the-sky Christianity seems willfully blind, creating churches full of dupes all to eager to dump "seed" money into the pockets of hungry charlatans. Religion becomes, in the eyes of skeptics, a "stupidity tax"--like lotteries--catering to the gullible.

The darker side of this image, of course, is the Pat Robertson-esque (or Fred Phelps-esque) drive to explain natural disasters, ill health, poverty, or personal tragedy as some directly God-ordained punishment for individual or communal sin. Ugly Christianity has few nastier faces than the well-ya-shouldn't-have-sinned rationale.

In my experience, though, few Christians, be they mainline, liberal, Catholic, or evangelical, actually espouse such balderdash. Sure, the idea of a fallen world (whether literally or figuratively due to to the Edenic Fall) gets a lot of play, but--and this is a fine nuance often lost in communication--invoking the Fallen World is of a different order of explanation than the Robertsonish cause-and-effect narratives used to, for example, blame AIDS on homosexuals. The fallen world--or as I like to think of it the broken world--doesn't assign direct blame; it's not a juridical rationale. It's a way of describing the sick, sad, fact that s--t happens.

I find that assessment of life, frankly, throughout the gospels. "It rains on the just and the unjust," Christ tells us. Or (in Luke--and I paraphrase), "Don't go thinking that those people Pilate had killed or those folk who died when that tower collapsed were any more or less righteous or guilty than you were." Yes, you should repent of your sins, Jesus insists; but your repentance or lack thereof doesn't cause disasters to happen. Mortal life is full of suffering and disease. Paul has a thorn in the flesh that doesn't leave no matter what his prayers. Sometimes healing happens. Sometimes it doesn't. That's just life.

Heck, we have (from our Jewish cousins-in-faith) the book of Job, where God's puzzling, frustrating answer to Job's all-too-human question of why, God? is basically, "you're better off not asking."

Much of the skepticism I hear directed at religion, and Christianity especially, castigates it for its inability to deal with the reality of pain and suffering--the fact that life sucks sometimes. But (and this echoes a rebuttal voiced by critics like Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton) Christianity itself has a rich history of reflecting on how life does in fact suck, asking why it must suck ("why have you forsaken me?" our own Lord demands of God), and--most of all--demanding that we attend to each other as neighbors, as sisters and brothers, in the midst of the suffering.

I would never want to be seen as asserting that pain occurs simply to remind us of our own shared mortality; that'd be like saying that tornadoes happen to remind us of the need for storm shelters. I don't think most pain comes to us with lessons hidden within it, bundled away for us to unpack. To affirm the world is fallen or broken isn't to ameliorate the frustration that it is so. But, sometimes, we can create of pain an occasion do what we can to make the world less broken.

Judaism has a great phrase, tikkun olam--"repairing the world." Generally, as it was introduced to me, the phrase describes how certain good or ethical acts should be done not because of their direct or indirect benefit to the doer but because, in general, they contribute to the betterment of the world at large.

I am drawn to the idea of "repairing the world" as a way to describe our joint endeavor with Christ in this broken, fallen world where bad things happen. It is because the world is broken that we can (and should) decide to act in ways that repair it, in ways that make the suffering of life less for our neighbors.

Lord, help me, in this rough spot of this rough, broken life to remember to do your work of repair and to receive with grace the repairs you may grant to me.

More later,

JF