by Christie Purifoy | Nov 4, 2011 | Jesus, Scripture, Uncategorized
How’s that for a title? Did it draw you in? Turn you off?
To be honest, I’m trying not to care whether or not His name is an effective lure for a blog post. I’m trying not to care because I’ve realized something important: it’s all about Him, but I make it about so many other things.
I’ve tended to think that this is a problem for “those other” Christians (and, I promise you, there will always be “others” in this gorgeously diverse body of Christ).
I point my finger at an earlier generation of believers and say, “Thanks to you, too many people in this country think Christianity is about right-wing politics, pseudo-science, celebrity preachers, and churches that look like clones of corporate America.” I may be the quiet, introverted type, but I’m quite good at pointing fingers, even if only in my own mind.
However, I’ve been convicted (a heavy, old-fashioned word, right? Yet, I think it’s the only one to use). I, too, have made this believing life to be about so many other things: social justice, creation care, orphan care, free-trade coffee … well, you get the idea.
Surely those are good things? Justice for the poor, caring for widows and orphans: aren’t these necessary components of a religion that pleases our maker?
Yes, I’m quite sure that they are. I’m not about to buy chocolate harvested by trafficked African children, and the grief I personally feel over abortion and capital punishment can’t be untangled from my Christian spirituality.
And yet … I’m beginning to see how a commitment to good things (to causes, to ideals) is not exactly the same thing as a commitment to Him. To Jesus. One certainly flows from the other, but they are not interchangeable.
If someone asks, “What is Christianity all about? What does it have to offer?” the right answer is “Jesus,” not “feeding the hungry” (though that doesn’t, for one minute, let me off the hook for feeding the hungry).
I pray that my life speaks on behalf of justice for the least of these. I must do (and keep on doing) some serious self-reflection about the size of my house, and the overflowing state of my children’s toyboxes (not to mention my own closet). In my view, following Jesus demands these responses. Yet, I can no longer live as if this is the heart of the Good News that Jesus came to preach.
The treasure we’ve been given, the treasure we should be proclaiming, the treasure we should always be giving away … is Jesus himself. Emmanuel. God with us.
I have hardly begun to see how this Jesus-centered faith will reveal itself in my life. Is it only semantics? What, really, needs to change?
I can point to small things. Reading the Bible with my kids, I try not to reduce the story of Noah and the ark to a moral lesson about obedience or trust. Jesus told us that Scripture was all about Him, and I want to take that seriously. I want my kids to see Noah and his ark, not in isolation, but as a part of one beautiful, world-changing Jesus story (thank you, The Jesus Storybook Bible!). I’m also grateful to attend a church where the Eucharist (Communion, Lord’s Supper) is not an afterthought but the highlight of our weekly gathering. The sharing of this Jesus-meal is the purest, most compelling sermon we can preach. It communicates perfectly to seeker and believer, child and adult.
I sense that there’s more … much more. What a relief to know that this is not merely one more theological knot to untangle. This is not one more item to check off of some spiritual to-do list.
This is far more personal because it’s all about a person; it was, is, and always will be about the One who sits enthroned. Jesus.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 2, 2011 | Family, motherhood, Stories
Fairies flying in my sister's yard.
Monday night witnessed our first visit from the Candy Fairy. For parents of highly allergic and/or cavity prone children (and I have one of each), she is a Very Good Thing. After the trick-or-treating, after the just-one-more-piece before bedtime binging, she empties the still-brimming candy buckets and drops a small toy into the plastic orange void.
For the firstborn: rosebud earrings and a Pippi Longstocking book. For the middle child: a Lego alien “blaster” (The language of a five-year-old boy is amazingly onomatopoeic). For the baby: a red Thomas the Train engine with an unpronounceable name stamped on his side.
This largesse came fast on the heels of another nighttime visitor: the Pacifier Fairy. When Jonathan noticed the baby’s teeth looking more than a little misshapen we took quick action (assuming, rightly I think, that delay would be deadly for our resolve). The baby was sweet-talked into stuffing the mailbox with much-loved pacis, and the Pacifier Fairy soon whisked them away, leaving a blue Thomas the Train engine behind.
Add in Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and Easter Bunny, and our home is a busy intersection in the fairy/magical creature highway.
Since she was first old enough to string words into sentences, my daughter has asked me, “Mom, do you believe in fairies?” And I always say the same thing, “Well, I’ve never seen one, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” (And for the rational-minded among you, shuddering at my deceit, all I can say is how often have scientists discovered bizarre new species in ocean trenches or volcano tops, creatures more surprising than any fairy?)
I tend to think that belief (in anything unseen) is a subtle orientation towards the world. It’s a just slightly off-kilter way of looking around oneself. A way of seeing that goes beyond the physical perception of your eyes. To believe, is to be always ready to say, “Perhaps, there’s more (rather than less) than meets the eye.”
And so, I’ve introduced my children to more. Fairy rings and tomtens. Santa Clause and mermaids.
I don’t share this under the category “advice for parents.” Perhaps, you’ve heard me mention before that I believe in the sharing of stories but not the sharing of advice?
I’m sure any number of you could put together a highly convincing, highly reasonable argument for why I am wrong. Honestly, I’m already half-convinced, and we will probably be telling the firstborn the truth about Santa Clause this year (the truth: Santa Clause is a magical story that you now get to help tell for your little brothers).
But here is what I cannot do: I cannot give my children lists of beings worthy of belief (Jesus, the angels) without demonstrating for them a capacity for belief. I want them to see in me a willingness to be surprised, to be proved wrong. I want them to know that the world God made is always more beautiful, more startling, more good than what we previously knew.
This world is full of magic. It’s evident in science textbooks and in fairytales.
I believe that the great magician behind it all has revealed himself to us in the figure of a man. This man walked the same solid ground that we do. In him, story and history intersect. Magic and flesh-and-blood-reality are joined.
He is the good news, too good to be true.
And he lives.
by Christie Purifoy | Oct 31, 2011 | Books, Chicago, Poetry
I didn’t discover the poetry of George Herbert until graduate school (my undergraduate education in literature had more than a few gaps, I’m afraid. This due, mostly, to my own indiosyncratic course selection criteria: what time is the class and who is the professor?).
Thankfully, I did find Herbert, and I still remember my shock that we could actually discuss such Christ-centered poetry around a University of Chicago seminar table. Who says there’s no Jesus in higher education? Though, to be honest, there’s a lot more of Freud in my dissertation than Jesus. A lot more. I blame Virginia Woolf for leading me astray.
However, with the job market in the humanities being what it is, I have a good deal of time for Herbert these days. And, my love for the modernists notwithstanding, that’s a very good thing.
Without further ado, a poem on rest (one I’ve recently been feeling the truth of deep in my bones):
The Pulley
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us” (said He) “pour on him all we can;
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.”
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flow’d, then wisdom, honor, pleasure;
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.
“For if I should” (said He)
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in nature, not the God of nature:
So both should losers be.
“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”
– George Herbert
by Christie Purifoy | Oct 28, 2011 | Chicago, Community, Faith, Florida, Seasons, Stories, Uncategorized
I believe in stories more than advice. In other words, I believe that a light is shined on our way forward, not when we finally hear the exact, right piece of advice, but when someone shares their story with us.
True stories contain all of the messy, untranslateable details of a life. Somehow, they also point us toward the maker of life.
I wish I could tell you how to live without the kind of community I described earlier this week. I wish I could tell you how to get it back. I even wish I could tell you that developing that kind of community in your own setting is the most important use of your time. But I can’t tell you these things.
If this whole Jesus-following-way-of-life is truly a relationship (as I’ve been hearing all my life) then we need to stop comparing our circumstances with everyone else’s. My marriage to Jonathan is fifteen-years-old (or fifteen-years-good), and it makes no sense for me to look at those still-awkward newlyweds and wonder why our lives are so different. Other than the fruits of the spirit, I’m not sure there are many things we can point to in order to say “that is a good Christian life” and “that is not.” At times Jesus walks us through joy and other times he walks us through trouble, but we can be confident in both that he has not and will not abandon us.
I lived in community for ten years, and it was good and it was painful, and I hope I haven’t said goodbye to that way of life forever. I could beat my head against my Bible wondering why my life no longer looks like that and how to get it back, or I can accept that when God empties our lives he also fills them up again. Not with the things we are missing, necessarily, but with himself.
In this world, we are wanderers. And that is not always a bad thing, not always a sin thing. We can wander quite a distance pursuing the good things of God’s kingdom on earth. Still, there’s little rest in wandering, and God knows we need rest. But where to find it?
God’s people “wandered over mountain and hill and forgot their own resting place” (Jeremiah 50:6).
Sometimes we need silence and emptiness, loneliness and barrenness in order to remember. We need winter.
The four walls of my suburban existence can feel like a prison, but they have been just the thing for feeling the heavy, holy pressure of God’s hand on me.
“You hem me in – behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
Psalm 139: 5-6
by Christie Purifoy | Oct 25, 2011 | Chicago, Community, Seasons
Taken by Yours Truly at Chicago's Art Institute. This painting, with its people like stone columns, always reminds me that living in a crowd is not the same thing as living in community.
Our airplane tilts away over city rooftops, and I feel as if I am leaving home in order to return to a house. It is not an altogether blue feeling (it is a house inhabited by my favorite people, after all), but it is disorienting. An emotional confusion to match a physical one; as the plane banks, I can no longer tell if I am pointed toward ground or sky.
I’ve spent four days trying to understand what I left behind when I moved away from Chicago. It seems important to do this, because I do not yet know if my life is a straight line heading always away from it or a curve that will one day return. I think the only word for what has been lost is community, but that word seems beyond inadequate.
In Florida, when my husband leaves for a business trip, I lie awake wondering who I would call if one of the children had an accident or became suddenly ill. I know that there are people in our neighborhood and people in our church who would graciously, even eagerly, help out, but it would involve some tracking down of phone numbers and many apologies for having “bothered” them in the middle of the night.
Living in community meant that there were no apologies.
We frequently woke to midnight phone calls, whispered midnight prayers for friends in crisis, made beds on the floor for small children whose parents were racing to hospitals. I have rushed behind a curtain in the emergency room to find a friend sitting at my son’s bedside: the friend who held him down for the epi-pen, the friend who drove him to the hospital.
But community is so much more than a safety net.
It is a web of interdependence that is often uncomfortable, even painful. It is the downstairs neighbor who calls (again) because my children are pounding on her ceiling (again). It is the woman pushing the stroller down my street who asks me (again) for bus money. Walking near my old building this week, I saw her, remembered her, and was not at all surprised when she stopped me to ask for money. I passed her again on my last evening in Chicago, and she asked (again) for money. I hand over my bus pass knowing that she will always need, and I hope, for Jesus’ sake, that someone will always be there to give.
Community is trying to keep the kids quiet in the kitchen in order that the group of church ministry leaders meeting in the living room won’t be disturbed. Community is making the bed in the spare room for friends of friends. Community is waking up early to make them breakfast, too.
Community is being inconvenienced.
It is straightening up the living room in order to host a weekly gathering for a church small group when all you want to do is climb into bed. Community is when the unmarried, male graduate student from that same small group surprises you with home-cooked Indian food two weeks after your baby is born.
Community is life in abundance.
This is the gift of the one who made us (the one who said it is not good to be alone): to be poured out again and again in order to be filled again and again. Of course, I am not talking about martyring oneself so that bitterness and resentment destroy all hope of relationship. But I have seen that when I open my hands to give until it hurts I receive … oh, I receive so much in return.
On Sunday, I sat once again in my former church. I was joined by a friend, and we both had tears in our eyes just for the joy of sitting next to one another. She turned to me and whispered, “This is our life,” and I knew just what she meant.
This is our life: it is real, it is now, it is beautiful and difficult, and, above all else, it is shared.
