About last night...
It is probably one of the most unusual and awkward moments – the moment when you realize that in a room full of friends you are a stranger. This was a common moment of disorientation in college return trips back home – not so much because any one person had changed, but because there was this barrier of uncertainty. We had lost touch and had not had time to catch up.
I felt this way when I went to a recent meeting with a number of the young people from our church. I am still not exactly sure why I went – mostly to hear where folks were at. What I heard at the start was silence.
If I can cut to the chase, there is silence that is beautiful and silence that is awkward. One is ripe with expectation, while the other is the ‘no words are necessary’ kind of silence. Last night was definitely in the awkward category.
Since I know these notes get pulled into facebook, perhaps folks who read my notes in there will be able to evaluate just what I am talking about – because that place is anything but silent for most college students. All sorts of things make their way into the public sphere.
As unpopular as it may seem, I don’t take the whole Chef party line (no pun intended) that says, “There is a time and place for everything, and that’s college.” What I was getting at in my brief statement last night was that during a person’s life they spend a lot of time getting comfortable in their own skin. They learn more about what they like and dislike – what they want to pursue – what they can and cannot expect from others.
While God should be at the core of this experience, for a lot of college students the core tends to be a blur. It’s one thing to question the core – and quite another to forge one. I knew a lot of friends who tossed their Christian roots aside in college. It was more than just the partying… I mean it is fun to have fun, but that wasn’t always it.
We have Christ as a part of our lives for a reason – he is design to be a living part of our problem solving process. Our whole religious tradition is based on sustaining a body of good advice. It goes beyond ethics and morals – it is supposed to be a life-giving enterprise.
God should ultimately be our refuge and our strength, not reliance on our friends or people who dress and think the way we do – not people we vent with about how crappy such and such a teacher is. And yet there are a lot of folks who hit the bottle, or substances, or use people sexually in order to medicate their wounds and their personal needs. Sometimes they learned this from their parents, and sometimes this comes from peers and the media – but ultimately every single person out there feels pain.
I can’t think of any times in my life that were more painful than what I experienced in college. We spend a lot of time isolated from parents and family. Friends are there but they are like fellow prisoners – everyone is planning a jailbreak every other day just to get out. On some level, it is trading one form of control for another.
This was my point when I mentioned boundaries, and how college is a place where your boundaries are allowed breathing room to expand. I think the biggest challenge in college is trying to maintain autonomy over your boundaries – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual – your entire person is undergoing significant development, while also being pushed around by bullies who attempt to impose their own boundaries, dreams, and visions onto you.
This alone is not a bad thing – there are definitely rules to the game of life, and college is a place where you start working through the manuals and figuring out which rules are real and which ones are not. Unless of course you are too afraid to deal with this and have enough ‘book money’ to blitz every other night.
To be honest, that is personally my own concern for the college folks who I know. It’s not a morality play – it’s a question of coming to know who you are and being ready for the outside world. College is marketed as a party zone by a lot of popular media outlets, because the last thing they need is someone who has become a true solid individual who is not easily sold on the next big thing or quick fix… The consumer world needs all of us to be weak, needful and willing to use their product to make ourselves feel important, healthy, strong, attractive, etc.
It’s not the party that is at fault. It’s not the substances or the people. At the end of the day, the only person who is going to develop your personality – its strength and viable limitations – its uniqueness – is you. You may not be able to change the rules, but you can change up the game that you play in order to succeed.
This is what the Judeo-Christian wisdom tradition has always been about. Legalism was never really the intention of the law-making process. Wisdom goes beyond knowledge – it is knowledge applied to circumstances that produce power and vitality.
You don’t have to be poor to experience God’s power, but it helps. When we have nothing else to rely on or medicate our hurt, that is when many of us look to our knowledge, faith and beliefs and try to make a positive change. This is where the bible gets the image of the Word of God as a fountain bubbling up inside of us. Knowledge provides us with the keys we need to unlock many trials in life. Wisdom is that application of that knowledge – an untried belief is worthless.
If you know the gospel back to front and never test that knowledge, it’s like carrying around an enormous toolchest that is forever locked. The longer you wait to open it, the more burdensome life will become, because God is interactively seeking you. He wants you to open the chest – to try things out. He wants you to make plain vanilla faith into your own.
My personal recommendation to students – and many do this already in the privacy of their own life – is to experiment with faith. Ask yourself the tough questions and do not settle for easy answers. An easy answer is one that just pops into your head without any sort of testing or practical application. It’s like putting 2 + 2 together… it can make perfect sense but have no practical application.
A classic example of this was discussed last night:
“Always preach the gospel, and where necessary, use words.”
I can’t tell you how many times someone dusts off this old chestnut and plays off verbal evangelism and witnessing as ‘passe.’
The fact of the matter is that is never has been an either/or. In fact, according to scriptural records of prophecy, a person needs both. For example – how many times did Jesus heal a person and not reveal who he was in words? How many times does Jesus tell them what healed them, or who it was that healed them?
What if the Annunciation had not occurred? Seems like words were important then.
What if there was no voice come down from heaven during Christ’s baptism? Again, words are powerful.
What about the fact that Christ told the apostles that their words could bind and loose sins? That’s powerful too.
If God’s spirit acts and no one declares that it is God’s work, then no one would ever believe in God! They’d just assume nice things happen sometimes. There is no love guiding this universe – things are just impersonal and ‘good.’ By the same token, if people said God was loving and he wasn’t – the world would end!
It is the prophet’s sole purpose to speak the truth! The prophet doesn’t actually do much of anything else – he declares that God is active and working in the world.
So when we are talking about street preaching, there are several classes:
1) “Are you saved?” – this is, honestly, a ridiculous question to ask without context. What if the answer is no? On the flip side, being saved in the classic sense is precisely the experience that Fr. Jerry related regarding the priest who was put in prison. When a person reaches rock bottom – when their externals are taken away and they have nothing but their heart and God to turn to – that is when they truly discover who God is and how important Christ is and THAT saves them. God becomes the source of life for that person from that point forward. That is what it traditionally meant to be ‘saved’ – ‘I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.’ And to be honest, people who have been ‘saved’ don’t take long to detect others who have been.
2) “Do you know about Jesus?” – this is a valid question, but only when asked in the context of knowing someone well enough to see and empathize with their pain. A person who is at rock-bottom and who has nowhere else to turn may benefit from hearing about Jesus and understanding the love that God has for them. You can show them this love personally, but that can lead to abusive situations. This question makes a person look beyond the earthly realm for aid – perhaps they will have an experience of God working in their lives. Maybe they already did, but because they didn’t know about God they were unable to recognize it. Asking this question and sharing your faith can sometimes bring a person to see themselves and their situation in a new way.
3) “The world is going to end. Repent” – this is the classic prophetic cry and is probably the most ‘harmless.’ It was what many apostles agreed to at the time of writing – it is something that we laugh at and mock as if the world will never end. “The world can’t end when people are making so much money!” But the sad thing is that they are right. We believe in death and final judgment. We all need to repent, confess our sins and walk with God as much as we can.
Each of these folks only operate within a certain context – unfortunately, many young zealots go through the process of entering the arena of ministry without understanding that true love is about the people, and about forging real relationships that are supportive and life-changing for both people involved. These are not relationships that are common, but they are very important – worth the time, money and energy spent to keep them up.
You don’t get that from showing up to a meeting every two months and having a priest ask you personal questions about how you are doing in front of everyone. This is sometimes done to save time, but it is no replacement for a close relationship with a spiritual friend. Ultimately, the relationship between a spiritual father and child is this kind of special friendship, just as much as it should be between child and parent… but these relationships are not always available.
So I guess my reponse to the whole conversation regarding ‘witness’ is that it is never a one-way street when done properly. It is done within a context. Like even now, as I am writing this I am thinking of the people who were at the meeting last night, but also the people who weren’t – some of whom take up a lot of bragging rights on parties and popularity and a lot of other things that tend to burn people out and leave them high and dry, wondering who the hell they are at the end of the day. It’s not ‘bad’ – it just doesn’t help anything.
It reminds me of a monologue from Henry Rollins where he was talking about popularity and about being on stage and how at the end of a show he would always get hit with this deep feeling of emptiness, hollowness and depression – he’d seen 50,000 people who were shouting his name and rocking out to the band and now he faced this empty vaccuum where that short-lived euphoria disappeared. It’s hard to believe you have any friends in the world when you go through that night after night.
As an alternative, learning about the faith and about how God sees you gives you a very different perspective on your life. You are a valuable part of the universe and there are things on this earth that only you will be able to accomplish – there are opportunities that will only be given once, and only to you – and while you are in college, the best thing that you can do is make sure that when those moments happen, you will be ready. Because either way, you are going to be the sole person responsible for the outcome of your life. You will have to make choices at those moments of opportunity and you will determine your own destiny based on how well you face the challenges that God offers you. While you are in college the decisions you make may not have serious impact – and it is a bit of a testing ground, but even in college – as in all stages of life – God is there presenting you with choices, questions and challenging situations… so make your best use of this time – try to stay connected to the faith through OCF but also take time to make a personal investment in your own spiritual lifestyle while at school. There are rewards that come with it that you may not expect.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny