I said something to the effect that I think one of the biggest challenges (because I don’t think there is one biggest challenge) is how we as the church will, and should, engage the web. As more of life moves into digital spaces, there will be areas we need to challenge and offer alternatives to, and there will also be areas where the web, and its effects on us, can improve our theology and spirituality. This will happen in ways at least as profound as it did in the aftermath of the printing press.

Now, I don’t know if you’re like me, but whenever I say something that might be heard by a number of folks, whether it is teaching a group of people, or calling into a podcast hotline, I tend to go over what I said later. For a little while after, I think about the words that I used, how they might be taken, how they might be mistaken, and what I could have said differently.

With this, I thought about it for a little while, but then a couple of days later I started to think about it again when I saw a completely unrelated tweet about how the web is “seeping into other places.”¹ That took my mind back a bit further to a quote from Jeffrey Veen, one of the web’s masterminds, who was speaking at a conference:

quotable @veen: “The web is spilling out into the real world… so let’s not fuck it up.”

Quoted by @davemcclure

This is one of those statements that won’t leave my mind, even though the tweet that quotes it was posted in March, far longer than the lifespan of most tweets. So in light of that, I want to continue my thoughts on how the web is one of the biggest challenges facing us.

The web is spilling into religion at least as much as religion is spilling onto the web, and we have barely begun the theological, spiritual, and overall cultural reflection that is necessary to understand those implications.² I want us to think about what this means, when we need to respond (because certainly we don’t always need to say something) and what our response should be when we do.

Specific issues for examination

From my perspective, there are a number of specific issues we can think about – and there will continue to be more – but I want to mention some of these.

Theological work

The leading folks in web and user experience design are working on many of the ways the web is spilling out into the real world. Some of them are now designing the experiences of physical spaces as often as they are the experiences of web spaces. Others are working to design web experiences that reach into physical space to make it better, or to help us retrieve valuable cultural modes we have lost in the modern age that again are viable for us.

Still others are working to design web experiences that bring physical things onto the web, or that blur the boundaries so that the web is more an extension than it is a distraction. These things, as far as I can tell, are some of the things Mr. Veen was thinking about. We can do these things well, or we can do them badly.

Theology itself can be affected by, and can affect, the web in these same ways. It will be a beautiful thing to start to see how this works, and I’m hoping to be one of the folks involved in this. It will give us new ways to think about God, and I don’t think we’ve even begun to see how much. But again, we could do it well or we could do it badly. We will probably do both in different areas, and we will need to be aware of which is happening.

More dramatically, maybe, are the ways the web will affect the church and the ways we think theologically about it. We’ve seen people start to observe these shifts in small ways, I think, but too often these observations look specifically at Facebook, for example, (I don’t fault the church or theologians for this, as the business world is the same way) instead of looking at a broader perspective of what the internet actually means.³ The ways we create new faith communities are already being affected by the web, and the more we observe and think critically about this, the more this will be able to happen in positive ways.

We’ll be able to (as we were before) create faith communities where we can avoid nuance, as this often happens on the web. But this is not the nature of the web, and we don’t have to design things that way. We can instead learn from the real, beautiful networks that are created as we design communities.

Life in the Spirit

I’m also increasingly convinced that the very ways we interact with the Spirit of God will be affected by the web, in good and bad ways.

The web is a place of “maybe.” There are few ideas that, if they can exist online, have no chance of success. In a negative sense, this is why it becomes easy for folks to put online communities on pedestals they don’t deserve, but in a positive sense it gives us unique ways to learn, connect, and exercise hope. This is always a good thing, but on a deeper level I think it can give us metaphors for thinking about the possibilities of God’s activity in the world and our relation to it. Not perfect metaphors, but valuable metaphors.

Justice work

Maybe the hardest thing for us to think about is how the web will affect the poor and oppressed among us, and what the church needs to know and do about this. The reason it’s so hard is because when we’re online, doing this kind of thinking, at this point the poor and oppressed are often not with us.

One beautiful exception to this is the relationships that are being built with the LGBT brothers and sisters that are among us, and taking part in our conversations online. They are helping us understand their struggles and advocate for them when we can, and this is powerful. To an extent, there are also exceptions as we can hear the voices of people of color, whether they are discussing racism in America or freedom in Egypt, and this is an equally powerful thing.

But as a rule, those who are poor and oppressed too often do not have access to our conversations and our relationships online because they are not online. Internet access is still prohibitive in many parts of America, and in many parts of the world.

Make no mistake – this is changing at a rapid rate, and it will continue to change. As it does, I’m hopeful that we will build the same kind of powerful relationships with these brothers and sisters, and that we will walk together toward our mutual liberation.

But this is also a place where the web could spill out in bad ways. It brings to mind yet another old tweet that I saved:

Today we treat being online as a sign of wealth. One day we will consider the freedom to be offline the same way.

@fernandogros

It’s somewhat possible that the web will become integrated into our lives enough, economically especially, without reaching into the real world in the positive ways that we can hope for. If it does, it may be that we’ll be spending our leisure time looking for ways to disconnect. Pilgrimages to offline places, and times of re-integrating with the physical world.

If that happens, it will again be the poor and oppressed who are affected most by this, as they will be the ones without the resources to make that disconnection happen.

This will be a space where the church must respond. We must provide space for people that, regardless of whether our optimistic dreams for the web’s engagement with the physical world come to pass and regardless of whether they have the luxuries to sequester themselves in the physical world from time to time, allow them to meet the embodied God, and live in embodied, mutual liberation.

What’s next?

This is only an initial set of thoughts, sparked by a question on a podcast and a tweet from a conference that I didn’t attend, and another tweet from a man across the world. But I hope you can see the importance of this conversation. The web is spilling out into the real world, and I think we in Emergent, specifically, have a lot of opportunities to shape the way we do things in light of this. I’m hopeful that we can be led to do it well.

1. The article it referenced is about how the web is expanding beyond the browser into mobile apps, tablets, and dedicated reading services like Readability, among other things.
2. Too many folks are running around telling us about how Google Makes Us Stupid, on one side, or The Internet Is My Religion on another side, and there isn’t much nuance. It is important to note that John Dyer, a web developer in Dallas, is releasing a book called From the Garden to the City that, to me, shows promise for doing that. I also think The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture from Shane Hipps, released in 2006, was a good effort as well. But again, we have barely begun.
3. A great start, I thought, was Thy Kingdom Connected from Dwight Friesen. From my own perspective, I recently reflected on user experience design and ecclesiology, as I think this is a fascinating place where we can learn a lot of things.

Rachel’s book is structured around her own story. She was raised in the strongest of evangelical apologetics, ready to defeat a host of arguments without listening to them and treat threatening views as dangerous views, and her own views as unquestionable. This part is called “Habitat.” But eventually, her critiques and questions of the views of others are turned on her own, and this part is called “Challenge.” Finally, she learns that her faith can change, and indeed must change. This, of course, is called “Change.”

In the first part, there are powerful stories of Dayton, Tennesee and the world of conservative evangelicalism, and of herself and other folks that Rachel has known. There are stories that will make you cringe, either because you remember the same experiences in your own life or because you can’t imagine such experiences really happening. There are stories that give glimpses into its cracks and dangers, stories that give glimpses into what it taught her, and stories that just make it look old in a world that no longer needs it.

One example is this:

With this assurance [that reality would always support their "biblical worldview"], we studied common challenges in Christianity, such as the problem of evil and the destiny of the unevangelized. These were treated as issues that atheists and agnostics might raise to try to undermine Christianity, not issues that believers generally struggled with themselves, so I had to be careful how I phrased my questions in class.

In the second part, the questions of skeptics become Rachel’s questions. She deals honestly with issues of hell, pluralism, the fact that the time and place in which we were born is the most likely factor to decide the religion we will practice, the guilt that can plague us when we begin to honestly look at the suffering of people in the world, and other questions that people with these frameworks really don’t like to think about.

This is a profound section, partly because it is willing to give us a glimpse into a deep wrestling with questions that have been equated with a faithful theology for Rachel’s entire life up to this point, and partly because it gives us a glimpse into how deeply we can encounter the love and grace of Jesus within these questions regardless of whether or not there are satisfying answers to them.

In the end, the same question that frightened and intimidated me as a child provided the clearest way out: What if I’m wrong? It was a question loaded with uncertainty, possibility, and hope, and it was a question to which I often would return. To be wrong about God is the condition of humanity, for better or worse. Sometimes it lures us into questioning God; sometimes it summons us to give him another chance. After I’d thought for so many years that good Christians are always ready with an answer, it was a question that eventually drew me back to belief.

So following this, the final section tells us how Rachel has learned that her faith can be flexible, that God is full of grace, and that it’s okay not to know things. One last quote to illustrate this:

And slowly I am learning to live the questions, to follow the teachings of a radical rabbi, to live in an upside-down kingdom in which kings are humbled and servants exalted, to look for God in the eyes of the orphan and the widow, the homeless and the imprisoned, the poor and the sick.

I hope I’ve expressed a bit of the profound theological and spiritual story that is in this book, and the freedom and beauty that is in its message. It doesn’t tell us that real faith is easy and lets us float above the hard parts, or that we can settle for a lifeless faith that offers nothing that can change us and nothing that can change the world. It offers us hope through the stories of folks Rachel has met and shares with us, through the parts of her own journey that she shares with us, and the ways that we can turn an honest look on our own journeys and know that Jesus is in them.

I’d love to encourage you to get this one. You can buy it on Amazon, or get more info on Rachel’s site.

I’ve been a fan of Sojourners and Jim Wallis for almost ten years, but I’d never met or seen him in person, so this was a great experience for me. We listened to his talk, and then we almost accidentally bumped into him when everyone was heading into the lobby. We bought his new book, and got to shake his hand and thank him for coming, and he asked us a couple of questions, and then we left.

When we first came in, he was talking about the excessive bonuses that bankers from the biggest Wall Street firms recently received. He spoke of all of the things that the hundreds of millions of dollars could have done instead, and also of the folks who have been foreclosed upon because of their unjust practices (people who had enough money for a house loan but were tricked into dangerous loans, for example). He compared the story of these bankers to the parable of the unjust servant that Jesus told. The bankers were given extraordinary grace, in that sense, when we bailed them out; but they have refused to extend that same grace to folks who have been affected by their own choices.

Moving on from the specific example of the bankers and their bonuses, he spoke profoundly about the condition of which the bankers are a symptom. Our need to have everything, focus on ourselves, and only worry about the present has led us into the present economic crisis, and we can either (gradually) go back to the way we were, and at some point find ourselves in another crisis, or we can be truly affected by where these things have brought us, and move somewhere else. We can realize that “enough is enough,” “we are all in this together”, and think about “the seventh generation out,” as he reminded us.

He spoke of the winds of change that are occurring, speaking of his experiences at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he had conversations about values and morality in our economic system with folks ranging from Eric Schmidt to Barney Frank. He spoke of his own travels around the country, speaking with folks who have the two great hungers he sees – spirituality and social justice – and the desire for something to bring them together.

He constantly reminded us that religion does not have a monopoly on morality, but that faith traditions offer practices and perspectives and histories to achieve these kind of changes. He reminded us of the need for a hopeful populism. If you know of Jim Wallis, you know that he is not a Tea Partier, and he recognizes that they have affected our perception of the word populism, and reframed it differently than the focuses that they have into something that is much more concerned with justice, the poor, and hope.

After talking for an hour or so about these kind of things, he answered several questions and then went into the lobby to hang out with folks. Not having read the book yet, I’m not sure how much of his talk was from it and how much was just informed by its concepts, but either way I’d encourage you to see the tour if it comes near you, and pick up the book. I disagree with him from time to time, as I often lean more toward the Anabaptist way of looking at culture, but he is an important voice for those of us who want to see spirituality and justice come close.

The pictures there now are haunting. Often they are beautiful. Sometimes beautiful and haunting, as they have been during the uprisings in Iran over the last year. The utter horror that they depict now, though, has made me consider the depth to which we are capable of processing what we are seeing, since we are not on the inside of it. I want to look at these issues, as they are different for us than they have been for any other generation in the history of humanity.

We know that there is more information, of all kinds, available to us today than there ever has been. More stories, more conversation, more news, more useless crap. Just more of everything. In times like these, though, many of us find that we cannot process all of the suffering that is in front of us. This is one of (many) reasons that I don’t watch news, aside from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Many of us are simply numb, and we can’t handle another video of another person trapped and dying under rocks that, in any other country in our hemisphere, someone could move.

And yet. When I got to hear Bill Clinton speak earlier this month, he spoke about the challenge of “our interdependence and interconnectedness” that he believes is the challenge of the 21st century.

But what does that mean, when we think of suffering?

It means that there is no suffering from which we are disconnected.

Jesus told us to love our neighbor, and told radical stories about what defines a neighbor. He expanded its definition to the limit of what was geographically available to the people of his day.

What does that mean when everyone is geographically available to us? When no story is unavailable to us? I don’t believe it means that we can watch every sad video, or look at every sad photo, or hear every sad soundbyte. We would never do anything else, for one thing, but it is still true that we simply are not mentally or emotionally capable of processing all of it.

But what it does mean is that we cannot ignore any story. We must process what we can, and enter into these stories. We must, as one of my favorite professors was fond of saying, “Take on the pain of the world each day.”

This same professor is a deep practitioner of contemplative and charismatic practices. He reads and prays deeply. He visits monasteries. He is a Pentecostal mystic, in a beautiful way.

This is essential, if we are to enter into these stories. We must, yes, go to the people and places the heart of God demands that we go. But we must also take those people and places to the heart of God. Remember this, in this suffering and all other sufferings.

I’ve always found it easy to reject that civil religion, but didn’t really embrace that there was an alternative so I tended to throw out the whole of Advent. In recent years, though, this has changed a great deal for me. I have come to have a deep, life-altering appreciation for what the Incarnation itself means – for God to engage us to such a radical extent.

This new appreciation has come about through any number of experiences. They started with an emerging house church I was a part of during 2006, and have continued in various Emergent communities in Atlanta in the last couple of years. They have continued with various blog posts on a variety of thoughts, and have reached into so many areas of life for me – design, church, activism, politics, spirituality, and theology. It’s a fascinating thing.

This year, I have tried to focus on these things in various ways, from a local emphasis on deliverance from human sex trafficking, to buying things that matter, seeking ways to create things that matter, while trying to contemplate again what it means for God to put aside otherness from us to “scream alongside us.”

All of this, as you can probably tell, swirls around in my mind and each thing reaches into other things. But they all finally rest upon the concept of waiting. Waiting for God to come. We live in a time in which God has come to us, but at the same time we wait for God to come to us.

Even in my own life, I know that God has come to me. And yet still, I wait for God to come. I wait to join God in his dreams for the world, in the places that seem abandoned, and in my own dryness. This year, I have been shaken by exhortations to live epic stories, to find suffering in the world and do something about it, and to varying degrees I wait for these things. I’m seeking to embrace this waiting during this Advent, and be shaped by it.

1. Ironically, those who are angry about this are almost never angry about the consumerism that we buy into when we celebrate Christmas, and I have never seen them angry about the slave labor that makes the products sold by these retailers.

So when I went to see him, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and it was a great conversation. The event lasted for an hour and a half or so, and was (very) roughly divided like this: Socratic questioning, prophetic critique, and question/answer time. All of these things related in one way or another to race, but much more broadly applied and dealing with humanity, as that “which is born between urine and feces.”

During his thoughts on Socratic questioning, Dr. West spoke profoundly to our unwillingness to critically examine and question ourselves, both individually and as a culture. He spoke of Plato’s statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and led into another of Plato’s statements, that “philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death.”

Through this, we were led into transformation, both as individuals and as a society, because in Plato’s mind (and, in West’s view, the mind of Paul), transformation doesn’t happen without death. We must learn how to die to things. Further, for West, we must learn how love relates to all this, because in love we die as isolated selves and are reborn as selves that are entangled with another self.

It is fascinating and beautiful how all this speaks to the story of God, and yet clearly does it in a way that sidesteps the traps of overt religion, which still allows him to bring in his thoughts on Jesus, thoughts on the cross, thoughts on the spiritual traditions that were birthed in slavery and empire, and how all of these things are preserved in churches, art, and music.

So from this, he spoke to us about the Hebrew prophetic tradition, that which lived and suffered under empire – both its own, as Brueggemann tells us in The Prophetic Imagination, and under the empires that surrounded and oppressed it. He spoke of Isaiah, weeping over injustice, Amos asking for justice to roll down, and of Jeremiah. Here, he reminded us that he wasn’t speaking of Jeremiah Wright, though he does feel that they were doing some of the same things.¹

That these were empires that forgot their humanity, forgot the poor and oppressed, and forgot to examine themselves, as we have done. He talked at great length about these aspects of justice, and again reminded us to “Understand that justice is what love looks like in public.” He spoke of the ways in which this has been lived out in nonviolence through the black tradition, and how it has led to the creation of arts of compassion – Negro spirituals, blues, jazz, and so on that were birthed out of suffering.

Dr. West looked back on the creation of our experiment in democracy that didn’t address slavery in the Constitution, not because it was below the ideal but because it didn’t examine itself. He reminded us that the birds came home to roost during the Civil War, and that Abraham Lincoln had supported a Constitutional amendment that would have made slavery permanent until the abolitionist movement caused him to be great. The people who sought justice rose up, and he listed many of these names, and caused Lincoln to become a great president.

In light of this, Dr. West reflected upon the end of the Reagan era in American politics, and expressed great hope that we will stop caring for the rich and strong, which he sees as a marker of that time,² but care for the poor and weak. Not to be against the rich, but to be for the poor, and to have that place from which to look at things – that place of Matthew 25.

Finally, he spoke of Barack Obama’s election, and the fact that he has not yet shown that he will care for the weak and poor, but has continued to care for the rich and powerful. From a race perspective, he reminded us that this election is not the end of racism or beginning of a post-racial era, but a marker that white America is less racist. This is a wonderful thing we can all rejoice in, but that is all it is. Blacks, he reminded us, have looked past the color of a candidate’s skin for decades, and no one has asked if they were post-racial.

Dr. West offers a critical support to Obama and seeks to be a prophetic voice in that space, as he has since before the Iowa vote last year, and recognizes that Obama is the leader of the biggest empire in the world, and has a different calling than Dr. West does, which reminds me of Martin Luther King’s statement that the church must be the conscience of the state. As he did in his video remarks a few weeks ago, Dr. West said it will be hard to be a war president with a peace prize.

The official event ended along these lines, reminding us to bring Obama, and culture in general, to greatness and push him to care for the poor and weak. There were some questions from the audience, including one that I especially appreciated on the Israel/Palestine issue. Dr. West responded at length, reminding us that the Israelis were victimized in the heart of Europe, and still think of this even as they are victimizing Arabs. We in the United States are afraid to even have a conversation about what they are doing. The hope in this, for Dr. West, is that the Jews will begin to have love and compassion for the Arabs, and that it will be seen as a tragedy for anyone to be victimized.

So all in all, this was a profound, challenging event that taught me a great deal and filled me with any number of emotions and thoughts. Dr. West is currently on a book tour that you should see, if you can.

1. In light of that, though Dr. West didn’t go into it, I want to look at that similarity, as I think it was profoundly missed during the discussions of Rev. Wright last year. Though there are many places where the two Jeremiahs meet, it is the most controversial that I want to look at:
   

   …wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme.

   Jeremiah doesn’t specifically use the words, “God damn America,” though many prophets have this essential message for oppression, but what I specifically see is that the statement, “God bless America,” is a statement of civil religion that Jeremiah Wright has turned upside down. Jeremiah the prophet does an identical thing, standing in the temple in Jerusalem:

   Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!” If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever.

   Jeremiah has taken the saying of civil religion, “this is the temple of the LORD,” and turned it against oppression. Civil religion didn’t like it, and it doesn’t like it anymore today than it did then.

2. Though there is great disagreement with Reagan, Dr. West still rejoiced in the times when Reagan did care for the poor and oppressed, such as those in Eastern Europe under the empire of the Soviet Union.

The last post looked at the stories of activism and art, engaging suffering in powerful ways. A good bit of the event was like this, and I cannot overemphasize how meaningful it was for me. So far it has stuck out more, possibly because I keep retelling it. But much of the rest of the evening was about what to do about our own suffering.

So yes. What to do about our own suffering. This deliberately goes away from the question of “Why?” – not because it is unimportant, but because there is no satisfying answer. Many of us want nothing to do with the hyper-Calvinist theology that is out there providing answers to this question that don’t line up with the nature of the God we’ve met in the Cross, and also want nothing to do with the hyper-faith theology that is out there telling us that we just don’t have enough faith to stop whatever suffering we see.

There are great alternatives to both of these extremes, from the work of Jürgen Moltmann to the work of Greg Boyd, and Rob recognized this, but the point of the event was different than those things.

When we suffer, then, at some point we want to know what to do. What to do after that phone call, or that sudden disturbance, or that thing that happens to us. We are given several answers, ranging from the new worlds that are created for us when our boxes are broken, to the beauty that artists find in their failures to the community that we share with others who suffer with us, to a culmination in the God who comes to earth and hangs on a cross, “screaming alongside us.”

There are powerful statements in these thoughts, and powerful paradoxes and images. Many of us have resonated with the agony expressed in the painting The Scream, and to think of God doing that alongside us is a deep thing that is hard for us to understand or accept, but immediately it hits me as true.

And that is the essence of what this response to suffering was for me. When things happen to us, there is a deep beauty that is present and available to us, not because these things become good events or because there will ever be a resolution to them, but because there is art in the mind of God, and art can always come out of darkness.

I have already shared some of my thoughts on Don Miller’s new book, and it is fascinating to me how much is in common between the two. Mentally and emotionally, at least, I have been shaken by what is being said through them, and my hope is that this will flow through and shake the rest of my life.

I want to write a few posts about this, as there are some distinct areas in which the event has said things to me. One of these was derived from an image. Rob Bell speaks of a time when he was watching people in a certain part of his town, when he saw a teenager driving his mom’s SUV through a shopping district, listening to rap music from a context entirely alien to him. Of course, if he had driven a couple of miles from were he was, he would have been in the kind of context where such music is created, and would quickly have run or driven elsewhere.

He takes this image to remind us that there is a spectrum of death with which humans have to deal. There is a death on one end, a violent or painful or suffering death, which is the subject of part of the event. On the other end, there is a death from boredom, and this is probably what the SUV driving young man is trying to flee, though he doesn’t know how.

Death from boredom

This image struck me to the core, especially in light of the thinking I’ve been doing in light of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I have some of the pieces of a good story – maybe even an epic story. There is potential for me to move into that kind of story with my life. But in just as many pieces, I’m living a bad story, or even a stupid story, or waiting to see what kind of story my next moves will lead me into.

The example that the tour uses is the founder of charity: water, one of the most beautiful organizations working in the world today. The founder, apparently, was living that kind of bored life – had everything people are supposed to want, but was dying inside. Searching for meaning, he went on a medical trip to Africa, where he learned that “80% of all disease is caused by unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation.” Coming home to New York, he did something about it, asking his wealthy friends to pay administrative fees so that all donations from the rest of us go directly to direct project costs, funding sustainable water solutions.

We were told a number of wonderful stories along these lines. Stories of art and activism engaging suffering. The point here was, in essence, “If we don’t find some suffering and do something about it, we’ll die.”

What the book says

During the stories that this book tells, Don Miller is in the process of writing the screenplay for the Blue Like Jazz Movie, and it is fascinating to see how he learns about the power of story as he creates the story for the movie, and in the process his own life and story are completely revolutionized.

He spends time talking about what makes a good story, and how characters in the stories we love are shaped by their stories – by pain, conflict, tension – and how we are shaped by these things as well. As he does this, he shares his own stories from the last few years, telling us about the bad story he was living – even while making a living as a creative person who told good stories – and how he learned to live in a better story. Things like the Ride:Well Tour, The Mentoring Project, and a movie that sounds fantastic come out of this time in his life. He refers to all this as, “an epic story of my own.”

What the book says to me

First off, I want to highly recommend this book. I loved it, though at times I hated it. I have been shaken by it, and the things that it has shown me about my own story. In a lot of ways, I’m living a bad story, and in some ways I’m living a stupid story.

I want an epic story like he has found. I can see elements of it in my life, but there is a frustrating extent to which I feel like I can’t get there. Don says, at one point:

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward.

This is right where I am. He also reminds us, “the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.” The epics we want to live are bigger than we are. Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings realize that they are part of a bigger story, and they are at peace because of it. Our peace comes, then, from finding out what it means to be a tree in the story of the forest.

It’s been a while since I read anything from Don Miller, aside from his blog and his Twitter (both of which are wonderful), but this one is very possibly my favorite. It is profound. In this brief aside on his current happenings, know that he is on a book tour in support of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Go see it, if you can.

So in essence, this life and story is a deep presentation, alongside a deep written example, of the power of story, and is the best combination of the two that I’ve ever experienced. It reaches into the areas that Tolkien and L’Engle wrote about, and brings them out in a fresh way, incarnated in a life that is living them at the same time that he is learning them.

I think this is an incredibly important book, because the entire focus is on that mixture. The other books that Shane has written, for example, do mention this, and the fact that it is so common for one to be missing among people who emphasize the other, but this one does stand on its own because it seeks to show how spirituality and activism can, and must, go together.

The book looks deeply at various biblical prayers, telling of experiences in joining them with activism, or what they have to say to justice. It spends a lot of time with the Lord’s Prayer, which I think is incredibly fitting. Clearly, it is a radical prayer in any sense, but especially in light of justice for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized it is utterly shaking, from its utter disregard for nationalism in its call for the kingdom of God to its remembrance of Jubilee economics. Just before reading the book, I had read an intense post on the 24-7 Prayer blog along these lines, and together these things have taken me to entirely new ways of looking at the way Jesus taught his people to pray.

The book continues and spends time with several other prayers, looking at the community Jesus desires for his people, the ways in which we should be sent into the world, and the ways in which we can experience the Spirit’s power in seeking for justice.

This last part, based on Paul’s prayer that we would know the Spirit’s power, is a gleam of hope for me that people who seek to live in the nonviolence of Jesus can reclaim the real, tangible power of the Spirit. It effortlessly moves from the desert fathers of the fourth century, seeking to become fire¹; to the historic black church, desperately crying out to God in spiritual songs and working to seek freedom; to the Pentecostal church, entering into the presence of Jesus and arising from poor and marginalized folks; and the miracles that have followed the people of Jesus when they don’t already have everything they need.

I want to strongly recommend this book. I still think there is much to be said about these issues, including the links I mention between nonviolence and charismatic experience, for example, but this is such a wonderful start that it outpaced my expectations, which were already high.

1. A story is recounted in which a young monk asks of an older monk what he can do after having done everything he knows to know God. The older monk, with the tips of his fingers flaming like ten candles, responds, “If you will, you can become all flame.” In light of this, I cannot encourage you enough to listen to this utterly unique song from mewithoutYou, The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate, and ponder these words.