Sins of the father.

{ October 26, 2008 @ 12:26 am } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
{ Tags: anger, anxiety, burning, chapel, comfort, Eucharist, God, Ikon, lamentation, love, sacrament, seminary, silence, sin }

All day, I’ve been dreading writing – perhaps it was the neon red “priority” highlight on this item of my to-do list, or the fact that I’ve already spent more than 8 hours on the computer today.  Maybe it’s the fact that the weather was gorgeous and my heart felt a bit raw from too much reflection and busy-life-stuff.  Maybe it was chapel Thursday.  I think that was probably it.  A few friends and I hosted the last worship service of the week at school on Thursday.  The service we offered was based on one designed by Peter Rollins, an emergent church theologian at Ikon Community in Belfast, Ireland.  It was titled, “Sins of the Father,” and offered worshipers the opportunity to, simply, be angry with God.  It asked these questions: Is our faith radical enough, is it passionate enough, to embrace and acknowledge our anger at God? Must our relationship with God always be friendly and comforting or can we dare to confront, demand  and shake our fists at God? Could, perhaps, a violent reaction against God signal a close and authentic experience of God’s presence?  I won’t bore you with details, but it was stunningly beautiful to see how visual media, old-church ritual (most of it turned on its head), and music could come together to create a space where it was not only safe to be horrified at God, to expose our deep wounds that find their source in our inability to understand how God can be good and also allow, well, what is allowed… but expected to do so. 

The centerpiece of the service was the opportunity for each person present to write on a slip of paper (or 2, or 5) the ways in which God had offended against them, the ways they were shaking their fist in God’s face.  I could sum them up as saying, “HOW COULD YOU?”  Each paper, unless marked with an X, was read anonymously but out loud and then burnt, offered like a sacrifice in the Temple, the smoke curling up toward the chapel ceiling.  As I faced my peers, professors, and friends, reading their pain outloud, there settled over my shoulders a deep sense of quietude and holiness.  The pile was large. I found myself slowing down after about a dozen slips because my heart simply didn’t want to read the next complaint, knowing that there would be no sweetness, nothing to break the monotony of brokenness, fear, and anxiety.  But as I read things like, “my mom’s health,” “AIDS, world war, destruction, global warming,” “child abuse,” “debt,” and “your silence is deafening,” held them to that candle flame and watched them burn down to my finger tips, it was obvious that this was the most priestly act I had ever done.  I am a lover of the Eucharist.  The open table, the banquet of the Kingdom open and ready for any to share, is a central feature of my understanding of God and God’s reality.  There is a bounteous generosity, a provision of abundance, openness, and inclusion that cannot be diminished by any human act.  The bread and cup are evidence of the brokenness of the world, but also of its hope for reconciliation.  But that smoke, those terrible words on those tiny, fragile slips of paper… they were a Eucharist, too.  So, as I continue to think about this experience, the holiness of it, the weight of it, I know that God can carry its heaviness, but I wonder if we can continue to sit in the discomfort and tension of the question… Can we stay in love with God and feel this devastation? 

The final word offered during the service was not a neat answer, but I think it is one of comfort.  “For now, all we can comfort ourselves with is the possibility that the God we accuse is a God our our own creation… our own creation which subsequently makes demands on us.”  This is not to imply that the service ends with the sense that God does not exist, but rather, the God we with whom we are angry is not really God.  The God of Creation, not of our creation, is far more mysterious, complex, wonderful, and (likely) more difficult.  In some way, this scares me.  In another, it absolutely must be true in order for me to be faithful, since I confess that the God with whom I am angry is one who is not worthy even to hear my lamentation.  And so I will hope, and I will pray for each one of the angry, sad, and broken accusations offered on Thursday.  I will pray that God will hear them and will do something magnificently generous to heal them.