CruciformMe

In the movie Joe Versus the Volcano, Joe Banks has a miserable life. He’s a hypochondriac working a dehumanizing and dead-end job managing the catalogs at a company that proudly produces sexual prosthetics. Joe is having an even worse week. He is diagnosed with a terminal yet symptomless condition called a brain cloud. Then he is hired by a billionaire Samuel Harvey Graynamore to jump into a volcano to appease some islanders from whom Graynamore wants to buy a mineral needed for his super-conductors, the upside of this being that Joe receives an all-expenses-paid cruise to this island on a private yacht before he dies. To round out this week from hell, the yacht goes down in a terrible storm. He and Graynamore’s unconscious daughter, Patricia. are the only survivors.

One night, Joe is in the middle of the ocean after several days of floating aimlessly with the comatose Patricia, effectively alone on a makeshift raft created from his waterproof luggage. He looks at the full moon, which appears to be much larger than usual, reaches towards it and quietly says:

Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG…. thank you. Thank you for my life.

He does not know the correct religion, who God is or even which god to pray to, but he realizes that there is something or someone that is in control of gracing him with the gift of his “miserable” life.

The third step is:

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

The “as we understood him” part of AA and other recovery groups has fascinated me for awhile, mostly because it causes so much controversy. For some, the Twelve Steps just aren’t Christian enough, leading to spin-offs such as the eight steps of Celebrate Recovery. For these people, this kind of openness towards all belief systems is a weakness that cannot be overlooked and sometimes downright heretical.

The problem with programs (or churches …or people) that have a very defined picture of God is that there is little room for God to get any bigger. It’s safer because God can’t take over something in which we don’t let him be involved. Since we think we know who God is already, he will not grow and neither will we. Most of us change only when absolutely forced to by the circumstances of our lives. “As we understood him” grants us the freedom to not be stuck with one immovable picture of God our whole lives. In fact, the it assumes that our understanding now will be different from what we once “understood.”

I got to go to a twelve-step recovery meeting a few nights ago, in order to see one of my kids from Freedom pick up his 30-day chip (these are given at many intervals: 30 days, 90 days, 1 year; represents X days clean from drugs/alcohol/whatever). As each person received their chip, they were instructed to say who they were and how they did it. “A lot of help from my sponsor,” said one. “A whole lotta prayer,” said another. And one, who was re-establishing (starting his count over with a desire chip after a slip), said, “I just have to let God have every part of me.”

He knew that he would continue to flail around like what he had been doing so far unless something changed. What he’d been doing so far had not been working. Just to survive, he needed to grow in his relationship with his higher power. This is important because if he had turned his will to same God he had used before, nothing would change.

I don’t think it is a mistake that the step that involves turning our will to God also involves understanding that we cannot fully know that God. My knowledge is so minute compared to how large the universe is, let alone alone compared to the God who created it. As he helps me grow, however, my picture of him grows, too, until I finally realize that he is bigger than I will ever know, which is the best understanding for which I can ever hope.

In this way, our faith is sometimes like stumbling in a dark room until we realize it is not the lack of light but our own blindness that keeps us from being able to see. In this world, this concept is not the beginning of the path towards wisdom, it seems, but the destination. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

What should the church look like as a result of this realization? Not very “Christian.”

It looks like people who aren’t so caught up in being right. Self-righteousness in the knowledge of the mind of God doesn’t exist because we know that we are no better off than those who are not as far along as we are. We know that the faithful life has its share of “Blessed Assurance,” but also its share of when “‘Tis Midnight and on Olive’s Brow,” when even those who know the most have trouble dealing with the way things play out. Knowing all of this, we go forward in the hope that perhaps in all of this unknowing we will find peace. Together, we seek truth without the belief that we can ever have a monopoly on it.

But first there are demons we need to deal with - step four.