For the last few years I've done different sorts of things on Fridays. This year, every Friday I wrote about what happened each week out at the prison during the Monday night Bible study I lead from 6:30 to 8:30 for about fifty inmates, whom we affectionately call "the Men in White."

I did "Prison Diary" this year because a lot of people wanted to hear more about my experiences out at the prison. So for this, our final entry, let me return to the reflection with which I started the year.

Prison ministry isn't all that exciting. Maybe you noticed that as the year went on, getting bored to the point of skipping these Friday installments.

I get that. But there is magic in the boredom. As I said at the start of the year, prison ministry is about fidelity, showing up week after week, month after month, year after year. There is nothing particularly sexy or heroic about just showing up. Heart-wrenching and amazing stories aren't happening every Monday night.

Trouble is, though, we get addicted to those heroic stories. And the Christian publishing and speaking industry keeps us addicted to these heroic stories.

But I'm not a hero. And the Men in White aren't heroes. And what we experience on a typical Monday night isn't going to show up in a story for a book or the speaking circuit.

We're just small, broken people looking for grace in a sad, lonely, and very mean world. And from time to time, we find it with each other. Mostly in the smiles and hugs we share when we are reunited again each week. Grace, I think, always feels like coming home.

That is the story I've tried to tell you each Friday. Nothing spectacular or heroic.

We simply show up, and make ourselves available to this boring thing we call grace.

A lot of damage has been done in citing Proverbs 22.6 to parents:

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Parents whose kids don't turn out as hoped tend to blame themselves because of an uncritical use of Proverbs 22.6. There's something deterministic about the text, like dominoes falling and a clear chain of cause and effect. If we had trained up our child properly, we think, they would have turned out okay. So we must have done something wrong.

But the Bible is never so clear about such things. There are countervailing witnesses and testimonies. Against Proverbs 22.6, consider the witness of Ezekiel 18:20:

The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

Your virtue is your own, says Ezekiel 18:20. Parents will not share in the guilt of their children. Nor will children share in the guilt of their parents.

All that to say, the Bible presents a complicated picture regarding the relationship between parenting and moral development. Yes, we do have the obligation to train up children in the way they should go. But at the end of the day, a righteous parent will not share in the guilt of an unrighteous child.

And from time to time, it's good to remind parents of that fact.

One of the complaints about penal substitutionary atonement is how it makes the ministry of Jesus soteriologically irrelevant. Jesus was "born to die," so his life and ministry was just a prelude to the real action: dying on the cross for our sins. There is little connection in this view between Jesus' ministry and what he does on the cross.

But as I point out in Reviving Old Scratch, Christus Victor atonement sees the life and ministry of Jesus as an important and critical part of salvation. Again, in Christus Victor atonement Jesus sets us free from the power of the devil. And while this emancipation reaches its climax on the cross (Col. 2.15), freeing people from the power of the devil characterized the whole of Jesus' ministry. Jesus' confrontation with Satan is the narrative glue that holds the gospels together.

Here's how Jesus described what he was doing:

Matthew 12.22-29
Then they brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see.

All the people were astonished and said, “Could this be the Son of David?”

But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.”

Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house."

Jesus describes his ministry as robbery.

For the legally minded, burglary is "breaking in" and stealing, but there is no victim involved. What Jesus describes is worse, it's not burglary but robbery, using force to steal from a person. Jesus breaks into the house of a "strong man," ties him up, and then robs him, carrying off his possessions. This is Christus Victor salvation.

People are held in bondage to Satan--human beings are "possessions" in the devil's house--and Jesus breaks in to tie him up and set his hostages free. This emancipation didn't wait for the cross but began at the very start of Jesus' ministry. As Peter concisely summarized in Acts 10:

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil.

Scholars of the gospels might shake their head about this, me missing a point that should have occurred to me sooner, but I've recently had a sort of breakthrough about how I read Jesus' parables.

I owe Gerhard Lohfink for this change, his book Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was.

Because of years and years of Sunday School classes (as a child and adult) and decades of sermons, I've been trapped in and unable to shake a moralizing approach to the parables. Specifically, I would read a parable to find it's little moral lesson about how to live. Be like the good soil. Watch like the prepared virgins. Go to the banquet when you're invited. And so on.

I don't want to deny that any of these moral exhortations aren't in the parables, that the parables never offer guidance for virtue and holiness. I simply want to note that if you exclusively use this moralizing approach you'll find some of Jesus' parables disturbing and ill-fitting. Some of Jesus' parables end rather harshly. And some of the characters in Jesus' parables aren't very moral or nice. Some parables have no obvious moral lesson at all.

Consequently, lots and lots of Jesus' parables get ignored.

Plus, the Gospels often suggest that the parables were used to keep some people in the dark.

So how are we to read the parables?

As simple and as obvious as this is, the framework I'm now using is that Jesus' parables are just metaphors for the kingdom. Seems simple, but seeing a parable as a metaphor lifts it out of the moralizing frame. The metaphor might be shocking or strange, immoral or amoral, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not trying to squeeze virtue or moral advice out the parable. Jesus is trying to bring some aspect of the kingdom to my attention. And like any good story-teller, Jesus likes to violate our expectations, even our moral expectations, to bring a point home.

And the gain here is clear. Once you adopt this approach you stop avoiding the weird or uncomfortable parables and come to embrace them all. And when you do this, a bright clarity begins to illuminate the whole and Jesus' worldview begins to open up before you.  

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
upon them the light has dawned.

You have increased their joy and given them great gladness;
they rejoiced before you as with joy at the harvest.
For you have shattered the yoke that burdened them;
the collar that lay heavy on their shoulders.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,
and the government will be upon his shoulders.
And his name will be called:

Wonderful Counselor;
the Mighty God;
the Everlasting Father;
the Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end,
Upon the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish and uphold it with justice and righteousness.
From this time forth and for evermore;
the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

--Isaiah 9.2,3b,4a,6,7

"Nativity"

The smell of dung
and the hot close air,
heavy of animal heat
and sweaty straw.
The baby is slick with fluid and blood,
the father fumbling to cut the chord with a knife.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
will suckle naked at his mother's breast.
Her hand caressing his cheek.
And in the smallness of this night,
all that has been tangled,
will slowly begin
to be unwound.
And the fever of the world
will begin to break.

Say a prayer for the incarcerated this Christmas season.

I like to use this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer:

Lord Jesus, for our sake you were condemned as a criminal: Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment. Remember all prisoners, and bring the guilty to repentance and amendment of life according to your will, and give them hope for their future. When any are held unjustly, bring them release; forgive us, and teach us to improve our justice. Remember those who work in these institutions; keep them humane and compassionate; and save them from becoming brutal or callous. And since what we do for those in prison, O Lord, we do for you, constrain us to improve their lot. All this we ask for your mercy's sake. Amen.

Something Joe said to me one Monday night haunts me. They call the various cellblocks on the unit "houses." We have guys in our study from "houses" 3, 4, 18, and 19.

So I asked Joe one night, "What house are you in?"

"It's not a house," Joe replied. "I never call it a house. It's a cell."

I'll be praying for those without houses this Christmas season.

I'm a low-church Protestant so I don't typically pray to angels. Especially not to St. Raphael, whose only mention is in the Apocrypha, a part of the Bible I didn't grow up with.

That said, I came across a prayer to St. Raphael which I found to be poetic and beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful guardian angel prayer I've come across.

Raphael is the angelic guide of Tobias in the Apocryphal book Tobit, found in Catholic and Orthodox bibles. Thus the petition for "happy meetings." In church tradition Raphael is also the angel associated with stirring the pool of Bethesda in John 5. Along with Michael and Gabriel, Raphael is also an archangel.

The prayer:

O Raphael, lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand towards those we are looking for. May all our movements, all their movements, be guided by your Light and transfigured by your Joy.

Angel Guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Him on whose unveiled Face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of earth, we feel the need of calling to you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the Province of Joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country.

Remember the weak, you who are strong--you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene, and bright with the resplendent glory of God. Amen.

Regular readers know I'm a Johnny Cash fan. In fact, my next book with Fortress is tentatively titled The Gospel According to Johnny Cash.

But my most recently published book is Stranger God: Meeting Jesus in Disguise.

So here's a Christmas, Stranger God, Johnny Cash connection.

The big story of Stranger God is how God comes to us when we show hospitality to strangers. Jesus comes to us incognito and in disguise.

Jesus coming to us in disguise is a huge Christmas theme. Christmas tales and legends abound about Jesus coming to people in the guise of beggars and the needy during the Christmas season. A person shares a meal or a warm place to stay only to find that the person they welcomed was Jesus in disguise.

In 1980 Johnny Cash penned his own version of this story, a poem entitled "The Christmas Guest":

It happened one day at December's end,
Some neighbors called on an old time friend.
And they found his shop so meager and lean
Made gay with a thousand bows of green
And old Conrad was sitting with face a-shine
When he suddenly stopped as he stitched a twine
And he said "My friends, at dawn today,
When the cock was crowing the night away
The Lord appeared in a dream to me
And said 'I'm coming your guest to be.'
So I've been busy with feet astir
Strewing my shop with branches of fir.
The table is spread and the kettle is shined.
And over the rafters the holly is twined.
Now I'll await for my Lord to appear
And listen closely so I will hear
His steps as He nears my humble place.
And I'll open the door and look on His face."

Then his friends went home and left Conrad alone
For this was the happiest day he had known,
For long since, his family had passed away
And Conrad had spent many a sad Christmas Day.
But he knew with the Lord as his Christmas Guest
This Christmas would be the dearest and best.

So he listened with only joy in his heart
And with every sound he would rise with a start
And look for the Lord to be at his door.
Like the vision that he had had a few hours before.

So he ran to the window after hearing a sound
But all he could see on the snow covered ground
Was a shabby beggar whose shoes were torn
And all of his clothes were ragged and worn.
But old Conrad was touched and he went to the door
And he said, "You know, your feet must be cold and sore.
I have some shoes in my shop for you
And a coat that will keep you warmer too."
So with grateful heart the man went away
But Conrad noticed the time of day
And wondered what made the dear Lord so late
And how much longer he'd have to wait.

Then he heard a knock, he ran to the door
But it was only a stranger once more.
A bent old lady with a shawl of black
And a bundle of kindling piled on her back.
She asked for only a place to rest
A place that was reserved for Conrad's Great Guest.
But her voice seemed to plead "Don't send me away,
Let me rest for awhile, it's Christmas Day."
So Conrad brewed her a steaming cup
And told her to sit at the table and sup.
But after she left he was filled with dismay
For he saw that the hours were slipping away
And the Lord had not come as he said he would.
Then Conrad felt sure he had misunderstood.
When out of the stillness he heard a cry
"Please help me and tell me where am I?"
So again he opened his friendly door
And stood disappointed as twice before.
It was only a child who'd wandered away
And was lost from her family on Christmas Day.
Again Conrad's heart was heavy and sad
But he knew he could make the little girl glad.
So he called her in and he wiped her tears
And quieted all her childish fears.
Then he led her back to her home once more
But as he entered his own darkened door
He knew the Lord was not coming today.
For the hours of Christmas had all passed away.

So he went to his room and knelt down to pray
And he said "Dear Lord, why did you delay?
What kept you from coming to call on me?
I wanted so much your face to see."
Then softly in the silence a voice he heard.
"Lift up your head, I have kept my word.
Three times my shadow crossed your floor
And three times I came to your lowly door.
I was the beggar with bruised, cold feet
I was the woman you gave something to eat.
I was the child on the homeless street.
Three times I knocked, three times I came in.
And each time I found the warmth of a friend.
Of all the gifts, love is the best.
And I was honored to be your Christmas Guest."

You can hear Cash recite the poem here.

There has been some Internet chatter this holiday season arguing that the Christmas TV classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is "problematic."

You hear this criticism of Rudolph a lot, and I think it's high time to put this criticism to rest.

The knock against Rudolph generally goes like this. Santa and all the others only accept Rudolph because he is useful to them, because his red nose can help cut through the fog. This, it is argued, undermines the message of tolerance that the story is trying to convey. Difference should be accepted no matter what, not just when it is useful to us.

Now, if that was the message in Rudolph I'd agree that the critics have a good point.

But that is not the message of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Perhaps the most popular blog post I've ever written is Everything I Learned About Christmas I Learned from TV, where I take a tour through three Christmas classics: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. So I know this material really well.

So here's the truth about Rudolph.

Santa, Rudolph's family, and the entire Christmastown community reconcile and come to accept Rudolph before Santa's realization that Rudolph's nose could help cut through the fog.

Santa doesn't accept Rudolph because he finds a use for him. Santa's discovery happens after the acceptance, as a happy accident of their reconciliation.

All that to say, the critics are simply wrong about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I know, because Everything I Learned About Christmas I Learned from TV.

As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and so fled from God after disobeying his word, Mary in her turn was given the good news by the word of an angel, and bore God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobedience to God, so Mary was persuaded into obedience to God; thus the Virgin Mary became the advocate of the virgin Eve.

Christ gathered all things into one, by gathering them into himself. He declared war against our enemy, crushed him who at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, and trampled on his head, in accordance with God’s words to the serpent in Genesis: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall lie in wait for your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel...

The one lying in wait for the serpent’s head is the one who was born in the likeness of Adam from the woman...

 --St. Irenaeus

"Magi"

The sway of the camel's back
ebbs and flows like water
against the steady light-pricked sky.
And the grit of the sand
is in the spittle and hair.
Seers, starcharts, and prophecy
scrapped from scrolls and faded parchments.
These guide us
over the ripples of dunes.
We seek the hinge, the crack,
the abyss,
the apocalypse where this world ends
and a new one is being born.
Deep beneath blankets
we carry gifts.

Every year a few of the churches in town work together to put together and deliver "Christmas sacks" for every inmate in the French-Robertson facility.

The sacks contain things like food, socks and toiletries. Often the sacks are decorated by children. On a night a few weeks before Christmas, about 30 or so volunteers will go out to the unit to deliver the sacks. There's over 2,000 inmates, so there are a lot of sacks.

Escorted by guards and a group inmates who have been picked to help us, we cart the sacks from cell block to cell block. Each cell houses two inmates. You go cell to cell with sacks in hand. The guard opens the cell and you hand out the sacks with a hearty "Merry Christmas!" It's a very unique opportunity to play Santa's elf.

Brenden, my oldest son, got to come again with me this year. It's a great way for him to meet the guys in the Monday night Bible study.

Over the years, I've gotten less interested in handing out the sacks than visiting the guys in the study. There are plenty of volunteers to hand out the sacks. So when we get to a cell block I mainly look for my guys. From their cell they'll see me walk in and call out. I'll make the rounds, cell to cell, chatting through the bars while we wait for the door to open. It's the one chance I have to see where they live, and meet their cellmate who has been told all about me: "You're Dr. Beck!"

The visit makes them feel very special. That is unheard of, to have a friend visit your cell. The Christmas sacks make it happen.

And it warms a father's heart that Brenden gets to come along. A new Christmas tradition at the Beck house.

Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going "the second mile." turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully--while living the rest of our lives just as everyone around us does....

We cannot behave "on the spot" as [Jesus] did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everyone else does. The "on the spot" episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and so ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world. We've all seen this happen.

--Dallas Willard, from The Spirit of the Disciplines

Walter Brueggemann has said that the plea-to-praise movement in the Psalms is one of the most jarring and shocking of transitions in the bible. This move from lamentation into praise, seemingly from out of nowhere, is a hallmark of the lament psalms and other laments in the Old Testament.

For my part, one of the best examples of the plea-to-praise movement is in Lamentations 3.

When I was in college we used to sing a devotional song that came from Lamentations 3. The words:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is Your faithfulness.
"The Lord is my portion," says my soul,
"therefore I will hope in Him."

Those are beautiful words of praise and trust. But do you know what precedes this hymn of praise? One of the most searing and gut-wrenching songs of lament and sorrow. Accusation after accusation is hurtled at God. It's very uncomfortable to read. And then, out of nowhere, a hymn of trust and praise. It's really one of the most startling juxtapositions in all of Scripture.

I am the man who has seen affliction
under the rod of his wrath;

he has driven and brought me
into darkness without any light;

surely against me he turns his hand
again and again the whole day long.

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away;
he has broken my bones;

he has besieged and enveloped me
with bitterness and tribulation;

he has made me dwell in darkness
like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;
he has made my chains heavy;

though I call and cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer;

he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones;
he has made my paths crooked.

He is a bear lying in wait for me,
a lion in hiding;

he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces;
he has made me desolate;

he bent his bow and set me
as a target for his arrow.

He drove into my kidneys
the arrows of his quiver;

I have become the laughingstock of all peoples,
the object of their taunts all day long.

He has filled me with bitterness;
he has sated me with wormwood.

He has made my teeth grind on gravel,
and made me cower in ashes;

my soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is;

so I say, “My endurance has perished;
so has my hope from the Lord.”

Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!

My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.

But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”

If you've heard me talk over the last two years you might have heard me talk about how the kingdom of God is perceptual rather than moral.

Specifically, the kingdom of God isn't a matter of becoming a good person. The kingdom of God is a matter of seeing. If you see clearly then the goodness--right action--follows as naturally as breathing.

An example of this is Thomas Merton's street corner revelation.

On March 18, 1958 Thomas Merton was in Louisville, KY for an appointment. Merton had been a cloistered monk for seventeen years. He had entered the monastery seeking an escape from the world so that he might draw closer to God. But on this day, standing on a street corner and watching the hustle and bustle of people, Merton had an experience of God that played an influential role in tuning him outward toward the world in the 60s.

Merton recounting his experience (from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander):

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

A plaque marking the spot of this revelation (pictured above) can be found the corner Fourth and Walnut in Louisville.

Merton's revelation illustrates the point I'm making. Merton comes to see people with the eyes of God. We are all walking around shining like the sun. And upon seeing this, the illusion of separateness disappears and Merton's heart explodes: "I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers."

My observation here is that Merton doesn't, in this moment, need to try, through an act of will, to "be a good person." Instead, having come to see clearly, right action is easy and spontaneous.

The kingdom of God is learning to see what Merton saw that day on the corner of Fourth and Walnut.

Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.

--the Elder Zosima, from The Brothers Karamazov

"Shepherds"

The old ewe limps on the edge,
where moonlight bleeds into firelight,
bleating into the blackness.
Lost, forlorn and unanswered.
A sign
of our frayed, fragile hope.
Too stretched for memory.
Legends now
and barely believed.
And then,
within the quick catch of breath,
this cataclysm of light.
The interruption of decaying days
of a world we no longer recognize.
All burned away.
By angels with a song.

Over the years I've written a couple of reflections about Advent out at the prison. The two most popular posts have been Advent: A Prison Story and Piss Christ in Prison: An Unlikely Advent Meditation.

But the most popular Advent post I've written is Christmas Carols as Resistance Literature. And that's especially true during Advent out at the prison.

I've had to educate the men in the Bible study about Advent. They've been liturgically impoverished. So we've started to sing Advent hymns and Christmas carols during the weeks of Advent. Our singing this time of year, given the Advent theme of waiting for the end of captivity and exile, is particularly poignant and profound. Christmas is a hard time for lots of people. You can imagine how hard it is for the incarcerated.

And so we are singing Advent hymns on Monday nights, songs of resistance to fend off despair and chase away the darkness.

O come, O come, Emmanuel 
And ransom captive Israel 
That mourns in lonely exile here

In the last three posts of this series I've made two points.

First, faith needs religious experience. We need to bump into God from time to time or faith reduces to ethics and politics.

Second, on first blush it might seem that religious experience is increasingly rare in our secular age, but that's actually not the case, as William James has pointed out. We are surrounded by religious experiences, if we know what we are looking for and are intentional to be on the lookout.

In short, religious experience requires attention and intentionality.

All this made me think of the series of posts I did about James Smith's description of "the pentecostal worldview" in his book Thinking in Tongues.

According to Smith, the genius of the (small-p) pentecostal experience is a radical openness to God, especially God doing something different or new.

This openness is, writes Smith, "a deep sense of expectation and an openness to surprise." Charismatic and pentecostal worship "makes room for the unexpected" where "the surprising comes as no surprise."

Importantly for this series, what is key here is a posture of receptivity. As James says, "pentecostal spirituality is shaped by a fundamental mode of reception." This posture of receptivity creates the potential for surprise.

When I say cultivating religious experience is a matter of attention and intentionality, these are the things I'm talking about. Cultivating...

...a posture of receptivity.

...a deep sense of expectation.

...a capacity for surprise.

...radical openness to God.

Faith, I've been arguing, is sustained by religious experience, bumping into God from time to time.

But isn't that the very thing we struggle with in a secular, disenchanted age? It's not that we are dismissing the value and importance of these experiences, it's that we just aren't having these experiences in the first place. So facing that void, we're left to create other foundations for faith, things like ethics and politics.

In light of that possible response I'd like to use this post to argue that most of us are awash in religious experiences. These experiences really aren't all that rare if you know what you're looking for.

To illustrate this I'd like to go back to William James, his chapter on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Mystical experiences are the quintessential examples of religious experience. And in his wide-ranging survey of these experiences James argues that there are four characteristic marks of mystical experiences:

1. Ineffability
Mystical experiences are difficult to capture and describe with words.

2. Noetic Quality
The definition of "noetic" is "relating to the intellect," from the Greek "to perceive." Mystical experiences are experienced as experiences of insight, revelation, and knowledge. A change in perception occurs. Scales fall from our eyes. We are enlightened and woke.

3. Transiency
Mystical experiences are fleeting and short-lived.

4. Passivity
Mystical experience happen to us. They act on us. We receive or surrender to them. They interrupt us. We feel, in the words of James, "grasped and held by a superior power."

Having set out these four marks of mystical experiences, James goes on to show how common these experiences are. He starts by reflecting upon those moments in our lives where we struck by an deep insight. We say to ourselves, "Now I understand what people have been talking about when they say..." We've been illuminated. We see things more clearly or deeply. We're interrupted by profundity. Often these insights occur through art, literature and music.

If you ponder the four characteristics above I bet you've had lots of mystical experiences in your life, large and small.

My point here is that mystical, religious experiences are more common than we think. If you know what you're looking for.

That we need to bump into God from time to time, that religious experience vitalizes faith, came home to me this semester as I taught William James to my students in my Psychology of Religion class.

Religious experience is the focus of James' magisterial The Varieties of Religious Experience. James describes religious experience as our "direct personal communion with the divine." Bumping into God.

James goes on to make religious experience central to his definition of religion: Religion is "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they many consider the divine."

What is "the divine"? James' response is that the divine is that which we approach and respond to "solemnly and gravely." The divine is associated with experiences of wonder, reverence and awe. 

Teaching The Varieties of Religious Experience to my students this semester reminded me just how important religious experience is to faith. For James, religious experience--bumping into God--is primary. All our God talk, all our debates about theology and doctrine, are secondary to religious experience. This is important because, for many of us, we spend a lot of time and effort engaging in, monitoring and improving God talk. Faith reduces to theology. But theology without religious experience, God talk without "direct personal communion with the divine," eventually becomes an empty intellectual exercise, a chess game we play with other theological hobbyists.

In a related way, James is also keen to point out how religious experience is different from morality. This is important for Christians who reduce faith to activism and ethics. There are many who identify as "Christian" because they follow Jesus as a moral, humanistic exemplar. Christianity reduces to "following Jesus" as a moral guide, a model for how to live as a human being.

Let me be clear here, I'm not being judgmental about this. For many people, belief is hard and "following Jesus" is the only thing keeping them tethered to the faith and identifying themselves as a "Christian."

But the point William James makes in The Varieties of Religious Experience is that religious experience--bumping into God--is different from following a moral exemplar like Jesus, as praiseworthy as that may be. This is what I meant in the last post about how many Christians, in reducing their faith to "following Jesus," have cut themselves off vitalizing sources of faith.

For James, religious experiences are fundamentally emotional. Religious experiences stun, stop and interrupt us. Religious experiences inspire wonder, awe and reverence. Religious experiences fire our passions and imaginations. Religious experiences fill us up with joy and peace. Religious experiences make us fearless and courageous.

Bumping into God from time to time vivifies and vitalizes faith.

If William James is right, and I think he is, when we don't have direct, personal experiences with the sacred and divine--experiences that move, stun and shake us--faith becomes unsustainable. We come to lean on secondary structures--God talk and morality--that eventually collapse without the foundation of religious experience.

Last summer I had a wonderful conversation with Brian Smith while visiting our dear friends the Bywaters in St. Albans. During that conversation Brian said something that really struck and has stuck with me.

Among many of the things we talked about, Brian and I were discussing faith in a secular age, church-going in particular. An increasing amount of people, younger adults in especially, just don't find going to church very compelling. Brian's observation was that unless one is encountering God at church--having a religious experience of the sacred and divine--then church isn't going to be very attractive to people.

That might seem to be a fairly obvious observation, but I think Brian put his finger on something very important. That is why his comment has stayed with me.

Yes, it seems obvious that we'd go to church to encounter God, but that's not happening for many of us. And while some of this is a problem with the church--so feel free to pile on--a lot of the problem, as I'll argue in these posts, has to do with how we have closed ourselves off to having religious experiences. And if you cut yourself off from religious experiences, you cut yourself off from what makes faith vital, energized and passionate.

For many Christians--and especially post-evangelicals going through a season of deconstruction--faith is being increasingly reduced to political activism and ethics. And while politics and ethics are really important things, we need to bump into God from time to time if we want to sustain faith across the long haul.

A poem I shared last year...

"Exile"

The faces of the old men
glow orange in the brazier's light,
seeing through time
with white milky cataract eyes.
The camels snort somewhere in the dark.
Huddled against the desert cold
they tell us the stories.
One Story, really.
Of a hope, now tenuous and dim,
rendered more fragile with the tellings,
like the glowing cinders rising
and taken by the wind
into the dark beyond seeing.
Of a king
who would come.
Of a God
who had not forgotten us.

My son Brenden is a sophomore in college. When he left his bedroom here at home his freshmen year, he didn't quite get it all cleaned out. And last summer, when he moved back home, it filled up some more. So over Thanksgiving one of the things I helped him do was to get the room fully and finally cleaned out. We took everything out of the room and he sorted through it all making two piles. Keep and Throw Away.

As he sorted we came across letters the men in the prison had written him.

During his Senior year of High School Brenden was baptized. The men in the study relish news about my life. They don't get to have ordinary days and rhythms of life--family, job, church. They don't get to see movies or go out to eat. But they see all these things on TV. So they live vicariously through us. Have we tried that new burger at Whataburger? Are you going to the Star Wars movie?

So when Brenden was baptized I shared the event with them and wanted them to be a part of it. I asked them, as men who have been on this journey with Jesus for many years, to write a letter to Brenden, congratulating him on his baptism and sharing some encouragement and wisdom.

Then men responded, and as a part of his baptism Brenden got a stack of letters from the men in the study. And last Christmas Brenden got to meet a lot of the guys when we handed out Christmas Sacks. Christmas Sacks is a ministry of local churches where we give a gift sack--mainly food, socks and necessities--to every man out at the prison. Volunteers hand deliver the sacks to the inmates. Last year Brenden came along with me and got to talk and shake hands with many of the guys in our study as we handed out sacks.

Anyway, we came across those baptism letters while cleaning out his room.

He put them in the Keep pile.