From milk to solid spiritual food

What does the next level of my faith walk look like?

I’m jiving myself and you if I still call myself a neophyte Christian. It’s been nearly ten years since I started regularly attending church.

To recap, I spent nearly a year going to Catholic Mass. Then I switched to a little country Methodist Church, principally because the minister was a friend. He’d been a student in my rock & roll history class at our local community college. A deep, thoughtful guy with some experiential scars that had put him on the path of seriously embracing God.

I was welcomed into their midst. During this time, I also did the Emmaus Walk and helped with some jail ministry. Seeing the genuine transformation in some of the most raw, indeed, feral, specimens of humanity greatly deepened my understanding of Holy Spirit.

Alas, he was moved to a church in an urban area in the far north of our state. The next two pastors there were short-lived, and the congregation steadily skewed older as families with kids left. That means events such as vacation Bible school and chili suppers disappeared.

I drifted away, and began shopping around, a process I recounted in a piece for Ordinary Times.

A friend of mine read it and invited me to try her church. After a few weeks, it felt like home to me. There is a wide age range, there are families with kids, and the doctrine taught and preached is sound. A major factor in drawing me in was that most of the congregants I’ve come to know are smart, funny people. That’s certainly the case in the after-service class I’m in. The preacher has those traits. There’s a lot of witty, good-natured repartee. These people also care deeply about each other. The weekly prayers list is of huge importance to them.

I should add here that I’m on this walk alone. My wife of thirty-two years is, shall we say, spiritual but not religious. I was in the same space for many years. I had no use for concepts like sin and redemption.

What changed for me was the realization that I’d never really grappled with the essence of the Christian message in a grown-up, serious way. That mainly happened because theologians and thinkers whom I’d started reading for other reasons increasingly impressed me as having real depth and integrity, the kind I, in my own feeble way, aspired to.

I came to terms with God’s absolutist nature. His insistence that we be pure to enter his presence came to make more sense. On the other hand, I took great comfort in the teaching that he takes each of us where we are, that we don’t have to be all cleaned up to turn to him. What closes that gap? It has to be that blood-drenched cross.

I realize that I need to set an example for my agnostic wife, give her a picture of true Christian witness. I’m pretty bad at it. My shortcomings are on display daily. But I must be making progress. She sometimes expresses genuine curiosity about how the church service was when I return home noon-ish on Sundays.

And now, this matter - steadying and deepening my faith walk - finds its confluence with another of my preoccupations: how the span of my individual life fits into the arc of history.

In June, I posted an essay here at Precipice entitled “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift.” I did what I could to make my point, and not come across as so self-absorbed that I didn’t understand that billions off human beings throughout history have existed in times arguably far more harsh or bizarre than the span of my life thus far.

But I’m scared. What is unique about what the above-mentioned tectonic shift has wrought is nothing less than an obliteration of the basic architecture of this universe, particularly human identity. It’s put us in uncharted waters. There are no assumptions to hold on to.

A writer and thinker I read regularly and greatly admire, Andrew T. Walker, puts it thusly in a World piece entitled “Why Is America Coming Apart?”

What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. Drag Queens dancing in front of children is as recreational as baseball in some parts of the country, or so it seems. Mainstream medical guilds now suggest that confused children and teens mutilate their bodies to tranquilize the mind. Public schools when I grew up might have been secular, but they weren’t morally insane or propagandizing students in cultural self-hatred like I routinely hear about now. Major media outlets are entirely compromised by a groveling deference to wokism and identity politics. The left once called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but the move to de-stigmatize abortion and gloat about it has moved the needle in a ghoulish direction.

The surrealism of our simmering unrest is explainable, I think, in the near total collapse of Christianity as America’s underlying public ethic. At least for the moment, put away questions about Christian Nationalism. What I’m observing is the final stripping away over the last few years of the last thin layer of Christian veneer. No secularist will say this out loud, of course. Because that would mean restoring virtues that figures like former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy believe are incompatible with liberty. Such virtues can only be grounded in a transcendent account of the universe.

The kind of Christian the present time calls for is one who comports himself or herself like a serious grown-up, who is sufficiently grounded in knowledge of what he of she professes to be able to stand firm, who is equipped to walk through a world such as ours.

St. Paul, in his letter to the Hebrews, admonishes them for backsliding on the maturation process they’d pursued:

For truly, by this time you ought to be teachers, but instead you need to have someone teach you again what are the beginning principles of the oracles of God, and have become those in need of milk, and not of solid food.

He lobs the same charge at the Corinthians in his first letter to them:

Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans?

I find myself guilty as charged. If I am at all able to handle the truth correctly, it is fleetingly so.

It is so hard to escape the milieu I was formed in, the one I describe in the tectonic-shift piece linked above. We live in the world set in motion by that time.

So my question is, what is involved in getting stronger, in maintaining greater clarity?

Maybe it simply starts with prayer.

Lord, make me the kind of agent of your grace these times call for. Make me an effective instrument of your kingdom. Give me important work to do.

In Jesus’s name I pray.

Amen.