Submission to the Church?

“If you never get married, you don’t have to submit to anyone but God.”  

This was the surreptitious wisdom I received as a teenager growing up Southern Baptist. These words--whispered to me during a sermon on women submitting to their husbands--calmed my adolescent angst about the New Testament household codes, but left me with little sense of how “submission” is to be part of my Christian walk, whether single or married.  In much more than gender matters, “submission” is not a word many Baptists know how to use well.  My religious heritage is both a treasure and a warning: I come from a branch of Christianity that is both known for its dedication to religious liberty, and plagued by congregational splits and angry divisions.  

This month, however, I have been thinking about what “submission” means, particularly in the context of “the Church.” Since Advent, I have been using Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals to guide my morning prayers, and at the beginning of each month, the compilers include a short reflection on one of the twelve “marks of New Monasticism.”* In April’s reflection, the writers of Common Prayer called readers to remain in the church, submitting to Christ’s body by remaining among other Christians, even when the histories, priorities, and actions of Christian churches are a mess, or worse.  In other words, these writers claim that “submission to Christ’s Body, the Church,” is an essential part of the Christian life. Do you agree?

This question is more than intellectual.  Since college, I have been broken-hearted and baffled to see so many of my peers and my friends “shopping” for churches with the impatience of any American consumer, or drifting out of communal religious life entirely.  

But what does it mean to submit to the Church? How are we to find ourselves “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5. 20-21). Below is my very tentative list, drawn from observations, conversations, and hopes.

• Remaining in a congregation you have committed to even when it fails to meet your needs, or the needs of your children
• Serving in the church nursery 
• Studying church history
• Speaking against a sermon, purchase, or decision that compromises a congregation’s ability to bear witness to the gospel
• Refusing to gossip
• Resisting cynicism in all its clever forms
• Honoring the authority of Christian traditions that come from times, places, and cultures different from your own

I’m not really happy with this list. It sounds very school-marmy.  Shouldn’t it sound joyful?  I’m sure that deep down in the core of this idea, there’s a lovely paradox waiting: exquisite liberty that can be experienced only through submission.  But I’m not to that core yet.  Help me.  

What are your reactions to the phrase “submission to the church”?  What does submission to the Church look like in action? How does your religion teach (or fail to teach) about this sort of submission?

 *New Monasticism is a movement that has intrigued me since college, and while I don’t know if I will ever live in a community such as The Simple Way, Rutba House, Koinonia Farm, or the Little Portion, I admire this movement’s attempt to counter the poverty of individualistic adulthood.

Life Undivided: A Place We Are Free

"I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed - or worse, expelled.”  (Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and the Sorcorer’s Stone) 

Like Hermione, I have always I have always been a rule-follower.  The impulse to push against the boundaries established by parents, teachers, or others never made much sense to me. As a shy child, happy to slip through a day without notice, I could never understand why so many of my peers seemed determined to make trouble for themselves and everyone around.  Even as an adult, I sometimes catch myself raising my hand when I want to speak among a  group of friends. No one who knows me will be much surprised at this pledge of my rule-following, but perhaps they should be.  Could we go back in time and ask a five, ten, or even fifteen-year-old Bethany, “What are the rules in your house?” that younger-me would have been baffled.   

For most of my childhood, I can only remember being given a few explicit rules.  On the first day of kindergarten, for example, my mother made it very clear that I was not to let anyone call me “Beth.”  Years later, when I was in high school, she delivered a rather vague prohibition against “weird” clothing at church, but only if I were singing in the choir, where a tie-dyed cape or black veil (yes, veil) might distract people in the congregation.  Aside from these rather particular mandates, my childhood and teen years were shaped by an extraordinary experience of freedom.  I can never remember being told to do my homework--indeed, I can never remember my parents asking much about my homework. As a teenager, I never had a curfew, and often stayed out until the wee hours of the morning, so long as I had told my parents beforehand when to expect me home.  My time was my own from a very early age, and when I would accompany my parents to the conferences and retreats they led, I would spend entire weekends roaming a campground or conference center while my parents and their students attended the official programs. My teachers treated me in much the same way, allowing me to direct much of my own studies even in elementary school. 

Of course, my parents could afford to have few rules because, for the most part, I did the things I was supposed to do.  If instead of rules I think about the habits and practices of my childhood home, I can make a long list: we prayed before meals; we did not work or shop on Sundays; we kept rooms clean and tidy; we did not watch rated-R movies; we avoided any waste of food, electricity, or water. While these practices might look like rules to outsiders, for me they seemed intuitive. They felt like freedom. 

When I grew old enough to realize that this absence of rules was unusual, at least among the households of my friends and relatives, I began to ask questions that have been haunting nearly every realm of my life and attention lately:

What does it mean to be free? How do people come to use their freedom well?

I am posing this question on my blog because I believe that home should be a place we are free.  I’m still pondering precisely what this means: perhaps that home is a place we do not need rules because we desire good things. Or a place where we are trusted, where we have authority because we work for the sustenance of the whole household. As I have studied history and literature, as I have learned to be a teacher, as I have watched my friends begin to parent children, as I have worshipped in a “free church” tradition, as I have watched this spring’s uprisings and revolutions  in the Arab world, the question of becoming free has felt increasingly urgent this year.  

From my own experience, I can see that I learned to be free by having freedom, and that from the examples of many wise adults and peers, I saw that love for God and others, not mere deference to authority, should be the force that governs my will and choices.  At the same time, there have been seasons as an adult when I felt my freedom to be an extraordinary burden, and I had to learn that living a life of freedom requires courage as well as love.  

However, as my friends constantly remind me, I am not normal, nor can I generalize answers to such important questions from my experience alone. I have encountered many ideas on this subject -- passages from Scripture, ideas from various philosophers, poets, and patriots, aphorisms and cliches -- but to synthesize all that would be a dissertation-length project, and I have one dissertation to write, already. Thus, I’m hoping you will offer some of your ideas and experiences on the subject of freedom. In future posts, I hope to return to this topic, perhaps dealing with some of the specific ways freedom is linked to vocation, life as single or married adults, and church, but for now I am risking some big questions: 

 What does it mean to be free? Are the ideas of “home” and “freedom” linked in your experience or philosophy? If you are a parent, how are you teaching your children to handle freedom? What are some ways in which freedom can be difficult? 

Making it Home: To Build a Home

March has been a busy month in and around my little Texas home.  I have several new posts in progress, but until I make time to finish and post them, please enjoy another musical meditation on the ideas and complexities of building a home: "To Build a Home," by The Cinematic Orchestra.

Abundant Lives: Come, Thou Fount (Part 1)

Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; 

streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. 

Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. 

Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, mount of thy redeeming love. 

I began singingly almost facetiously, wondering if we were ever going to find the water we had driven so far to see. Technically, it was a mountain spring, not a “fount” that had inspired our trip, but as Rachel, Keith and I wandered through a graveyard in the Tennessee mountains, a hymn seemed the most appropriate mode for deciding which way to go next.  

One week earlier, my friends and I had attended a reading by the poet Jeff Daniel Marion at our college’s Appalachian Center.  First-semester freshmen, we were eager to attend any campus event, and our English Professor, Dr. Ernest Lee, had arranged the reading.   Mr. Marion shared several selections from his most recent book, Ebbing and Flowing Springs, and spoke about the actual Ebbing and Flowing Spring, near Rogersville, Tennessee, which had inspired the title poem.  I had loved poetry since I learned to read, but in all my adolescent sighing over “Tintern Abbey,” it had never occurred to me that poems could be connected to, or rooted in, actual places. I had always valued poems because they took me away from the uninteresting landscape of Terre Haute, Indiana, but here was a poet who drew his words from the land around him.  Rachel and Keith seemed struck by this, as well, and we decided that at our first chance, we would drive to Ebbing and Flowing Spring ourselves. 

We set out on a dark and misty day in late November, headed towards Rogersville, but we soon learned that poets, whatever their other verbal skills, cannot be counted upon for precise driving instructions.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed the drive; I was still very new to Tennessee and was fascinated by the winding roads, the twang of the voices at the gas station, and the way my companions, one from further east in the state, and one from the mountains of North Carolina, responded to the landscape.  As we drove further and further from our college town, whose foothills still seemed Alpine to me, Keith and Rachel would say, “Now we’re coming near the real mountains. Now I feel safe again.” 

  By the time we reached the gravel road and clearing where we were supposed to find the spring, twilight had passed into proper night.  The area was encircled in trees, but in the darkness we could not tell how large the clearing was. We peered through the windows of an old church, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones surrounding it, but we saw no sign of the spring house. For a time we stood apart, silently, each hearing the sound of rushing water, but unsure of its direction or source.  When a light rain began to fall, we linked arms and I began humming “Come Thou Fount.”  To my surprise, voices on either side of me began to sing along, each harmonizing with my melody.  

Aside from a few peers in my tiny home church, I had rarely met people my own age who knew hymns, yet here were two other teenagers who not only joined, but enriched, the songs that were most precious to me. All my ideas about what it meant to know a place or a person shifted: I was standing in the dark, on an unfamiliar mountain, with people I had known hardly three months, and yet I knew I was home. 

That night is my emblem for the home I found in college, a home I treasure not from nostalgia, but for the life it trained me to love, a life that challenges the isolation and petty ambitions of mainstream adulthood. In coming entries, I will write more about how my time at Carson-Newman challenged and deepened my understanding of home, relationships, community, and church. Tonight, however, I am content to dwell in this memory, and to invite you to join me there. 

We never did find the spring that night, but I think we might have stumbled upon the Fount.

Making it Home: To Be Still

I often feel that I'm spending my days building a life, a home, and waiting for others to come join me.  This song, by Alela Diane, is the song I play when I feel this way. I open the window wide, sing along, and hope all the friends and strangers outside can hear.  

Have you been wearing holes in your boots out there?

Have you been kicking bones in the desert sand?

There's a wolf inside the cave and another in the clouds.

I've seen them chewing on, on the shadows in your eyes.

And it's here at home I wait for your wanders to be still.

Oh it's here at home I wait for your wanders to be still.

from "To Be Still" by Alela Diana

Life Undivided: We Are Made for Love

“We are made for love -- and in vain we strive to pour forth the streams of our affection by the narrow channels which the world can give -- and well is it if, stagnated in our hearts, they turn not to bitterness. The religion of Jesus Christ is intended to bring us back to our real natural condition: for all the world is in an unnatural state”

-George MacDonald 

While reading for my dissertation, I found this quote in one of George MacDonald’s letters.  MacDonald’s lines resonated with a difficulty I’ve pondered since leaving college, if not before, and I decided that it would make an excellent--and hopefully provocative--motto for this year’s Valentine’s greetings to friends and family. In one of my first entries, I discussed one of contemporary Christianity’s “failures of the imagination”--the failure to celebrate and bless stages of life that don’t fall into tidy “marriage, missions, or babies” categories. I also gave thanks for all the new relationships and “fridge worthy” moments life in spiritual community has given me.  With this entry, I risk repeating myself because I am convinced that the very idea of the “Church” -- individuals participating as members of Christ’s body--challenges our world’s very narrow ideas of whom and how we should love. 

I once thought that not being loved by someone would be the saddest condition for a human life. As I grow older, I realize that lacking others to love can strike just as deeply at our roots.  Single adults often feel this lack most keenly because the channels the world provides are, as MacDonald realized in 1848, painfully narrow.  Here is an example of what I mean. A few days ago, while browsing through a really cool data visualization site, Information is Beautiful, I found this visual presentation of “The Varieties of Intimate Relationship.” The graphic, with its careful symmetries and graceful lines, is nearly beautiful.  However, the more I studied it, the more I realized that  I was reading a very pretty map of the world’s very narrow channels for our love.  First, while the chart purports to present “The Varieties of Intimate Relationship,” what it actually shows are varieties of sexual behaviors. (Admittedly, most readers would probably guess this before looking at the chart; but I have what my mother calls “the spiritual gift of oblivion,” and I expected a much broader array).  The use of “intimate” as a synonym for “sexual” is in itself enough to annoy me; not only does its function as a euphemism suggest a strange uneasiness in a culture increasingly open to discussions about sex, but the reduction of “intimacy” to a physical action is downright dangerous. 

The content of the chart reinforces how narrow the world’s channels for love are.  No mention of familial relations, though surely the bond between a parent and child, among others is intimate. No mention of relationships that are not, in some way, contingent upon eroticized understandings of self and other. Although “celibacy” is included, comparing its gentle pink orbs to the “monogamy” and “non-monogamy” groups reveals something even more troubling than the intimacy/sexual synonymy of the title: the monogamy and non-monogamy options name (for better or for worse), varieties of relationships (e.g. “marriage,” polyamory,” “co-dependent” and so on).  The celibacy bubbles, however, only name various reasons and modes of celibacy: “ascetic,” “involuntary (for physical and emotional reasons),” “spiritual,” and a few others. Vows “to God” do make the list, but in all other cases, the modes of celibacy have only to do with the celibate person -- not with anyone else. 

Does anyone else see the problem with this? 

Based on “The Varieties of Intimate Relationship” chart, it appears that monogamous and non-monogamous people are involved with other people, however dysfunctionally, while the “intimate relationships” celibate people have are either with God or with themselves, singly. Sexual behavior aside, the potential for emotional and even spiritual self-involvement is very real for many single adults. 

Now, I could rant for a long time about how frustrating I find this chart, but what really breaks my heart is that Christians spend so little time thinking deeply about wider, richer, divine channels for our affections and energy.  These channels do exist--I have seen them, been swept into them--while mopping floors with other summer missionaries, while eating a meal with a church lifegroup, while worshipping with believers whose language I don’t even know, while teaching classes--but I have yet to hear a sermon on friendship, and most “relationships” sessions at Christian conferences are only about dating and marriage.  The world’s chart has names for all kinds of unnecessary romantic configurations--why do we have so few names for the far more important ways in which we love each other?  

 Some people, including many Christians, may have the luxury of considering this question secondary to the love they owe spouses, children, parents, boyfriends or girlfriends.  As an adult who is not married, I no longer have an excuse for claiming such a luxury, though in the past I did. I have always been rather narrow in my love; as a child and college student, I would select a few worthy people (usually my parents plus a few intimate friends) and lavish my time, affection, patience, energy, prayer, money, and skill on them.  Since leaving college, that kind of focus has been impossible. This is not to say I have not made good friends; on the contrary, I have been humbled and loved and given love in a thousand beautiful ways.  But not by one person. Or by two. Or even by a consistent group.  

This state of love-limbo strains me.  I dislike the weekly crisis of deciding where to sit each week in church, even though I know I would be welcome in any pew I chose. I dislike the constant uncertainties about how much attention is too much, too little.  My life would be much easier if I could pour out all my love on one person within some sort of clearly defined relationship.  Narrow channels, you see, are much easier to navigate. 

My weariness of having such a wide web of people to love (rather than a tiny, manageable few) is largely a matter of temperament, and perhaps the more important danger is that if we do not have persons to love (persons, not “causes” or even ideals), it is so easy to spill our affection in less worthy places--not necessarily wicked channels (though that is possible), but things such as pets, hobbies, school or work.  

I’m trying to take courage and to challenge my imagination, but the wide channels of God’s love can be frightening and can, ironically, feel very lonely. If churches want young adults to feel at home within their congregations, we need to talk about how one develops depth, intimacy, accountability, and joy into relationships that are bound by no vows. We need to name, study, excavate, and plunge into deeper and wider channels for our love.  Not work-for-the-abstract-good-of-humanity channels, not tide-you-over-until-you-are-married channels, not anything-goes channels, but varieties of communion and kinship so strange and beautiful that the worldlings join us, abandoning their pitiful polyamory and their empty fidelities. 

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; 

These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. Psalm 107:23-24, KJV

What are some of the ways in which we (as individuals and churches) do, can, or should pour out our love when the world’s channels are too narrow? What names do we have (or should we have) for these wider channels, these un-charted intimacies? 

Life Undivided: Walking Home

What do these things have in common?

• a man sitting in the grass, playing his guitar and singing to a seven or eight children
• a sign reading “Warning: High Drug Trafficking Area. Do Not Loiter”
• fragments of all kinds: pieces of vinyl albums, newspapers, and once, a gun
• a pony
• magnolia, crepe myrtle, live oak, and pecan trees
• men and women gathering pecans into plastic grocery bags
• goats 

Answer: Each item appears on my “Seen While Walking to Church in Waco” list. 

During my first two years in Texas, I lived about a mile and a half from my church, and during those years, I only drove to Sunday worship four or five times. Every other Sunday, I walked.  While this record may seem quirky or counter-cultural, for me it was intuitive.  Growing up, my family lived barely three blocks from our church, and in college, I attended the church that was across the street from my dorm room.  I did not own a car until I moved to Texas for graduate school, and so while I could have driven to any number of churches, I first visited congregations within walking distance (I had several good choices; this is Texas, after all). My trek to Calvary Baptist was longer than either my childhood or college walks, but I came to treasure those Sunday mornings.  Though very thankful for a reliable car, I have never enjoyed driving, and Sunday became a day I could rest from the rush and worry of controlling an automobile (or automobeast, as I used to call them). 

My view of Colcord Avenue on a typical Sunday morning. The blue is the underside of my parasol--a necessity for walking on a summer day in Texas. 

I mention these walks, and the strange list they helped me compile, because as I continue to ruminate on what makes a place home, I have realized that home is a place I walk. For most of my life, it has also been a place from whence I walk to church. When I moved to my current apartment, I was much closer to campus, the river, the city park, and many other good things, but I could no longer continue my Sunday ambles (Rising at five am to walk across town doesn’t make me feel very reverent). Losing those walks, however, made me realize how important they were to making this city home.

The benefits of walking through the this city for so long makes that curious inventory precious to me. Week after week, I walked the same route: from Maple Avenue to Colcord, from Colcord through a little web of back streets that brought me to the church building. From a car, this route is hardly lovely: a few blocks of stately houses soon gives way to shabbier buildings, unkempt yards, overgrown lots, and at least one intersection with a bad reputation. There are few reasons to linger if you are simply passing from one side of town to another. 

By walking, however, I had the time to see and know this place.  The broken things I saw, whether weapons or windows, frightened me, but gave me prayers for my neighborhood. The trees and the people and the goats became familiar and beautiful.  Eventually, the women on their porches or the guys working on their cars would say hello, asking me, “You goin’ to church?”

I never did learn the story behind the pony. 

Walking used to be my primary mode of transportation--not only to church, but to school, the grocery store, or any other place I needed to be. In college, my church was on a hill, and I would let myself wander for miles in any direction, knowing I could find my way back once I caught sight of the steeple. Both in Indiana and Tennessee, I often walked to the places where I worked, studied, and shopped. While dating both my high school and college boyfriends, we spent most of our time together rambling through neighborhoods around our houses.  These walks always lasted for hours, and even now I somehow expect to see those bright boys whenever I return to one of those Indiana streets. 

But there is something particularly beautiful about walking from house to church, knowing that with every step I am treading both to and from home.  I used to joke that living alone took all the fun out of being an introvert, but my Sunday walks invariably restored the joy of solitude, blessing me with the tension between walking alone and worshipping together.

Perhaps I can put this all another way: home is a place I reach with weary feet, a place I rest and realize that my hair smells like a February wind. Home is a place I leave in order to arrive. Home is a place I am content in solitude and in community. Home is a place I know what is ugly and notice what is beautiful. 

Home is a place it takes a long time to reach, a place I can see and name long before I arrive.