Bono, who Mark Driscoll refers to as “the coolest guy on our team” preached the best sermon I’ve honestly ever heard on the subjects of justice, equality and charity at The National Prayer Breakfast on February 2nd in Washington, DC.
Most relieving for me was his opening assertion that because we are religious we may at times find ourselves critical of the religious:
“Yes, it’s odd, having a rock star here—but maybe it’s odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was… well, a little blurry, and hard to see.
I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.
For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God’s second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…
I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.
Even though I was a believer.
Perhaps because I was a believer.
I was cynical… not about God, but about God’s politics.”
Most spankalicious was his reminder that there is a higher law than man’s which lawmakers must live by:
“I’d like to talk about the laws of man, here in this city where those laws are written. And I’d like to talk about higher laws. It would be great to assume that the one serves the other; that the laws of man serve these higher laws… but of course, they don’t always.”
And most unarguably scriptural and decisively Christian is his insight on the difference between charity and justice - and which is the higher ideal:
“...you’re good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can’t afford it.
But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.
6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality...”
There’s a little, maybe a lot, of debating and pontificating about whether Bono is a Christian by our definition these days. Is he too ecumenical? Is he too Catholic? Too ambiguous? Paul said belief crosses us over from death to life - not language or piety. And John tells us the evidence of this crossing over is our love for people. He said if we claim to love God but don’t love people we’re liars. Jesus said if we love the Most High we’ll be about loving the least. Bono seems to know Jesus, though it’s not my job to judge either way, and, more importantly, Bono seems to know where He hangs out:
“I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”
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Our goals, or “BIG IDEAS”, can be simplified to three major objectives:
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I’ve done my best to reduce my arduous mysterious plunge from faith and stability into doubt and debilitating depression - and the climb out - into posts here. But in doing so I’m sure I’ve led you to believe I have a grip on exactly what happened, why and how. I don’t. My story is full of holes only the words “I don’t know” seem to fill. And that uncertainty is beautiful. It happened - I died and came back again - and that’s all I know for sure. It happened.
Like the man basted by his skeptical inquisitors, the one who walked away from Jesus gushing about the color green and laughing at the glitzy shimmer of the lake, all I can say is “All I know for sure is I was blind and now I can see.”
I can see.
And whereas I was blinded by the fools and foibles bearing the name “Christian” before, today, while I know we’re a dysfunctional religious family, I’m seeing the wonder and worth in us. I wanted us to be the proof. i NEEDED us to be the proof. I prayed we would be. And maybe - I don’t know - but maybe my soul squinted so hard, I stared so intently, I searched so hopefully for the proof in us that my eyes got stronger. It’s everywhere. The proof. As tripped up as we Christians are at times we’re still somehow leaving a trail of bread crumbs through the forests we stumble through, a trail leading to God.
I first caught the trail two weeks ago today. Friday in Indiana. After my emotional and spiritual baggage was rifled through and disposed of I packed a suitcase and picked Brian up for the long drive to Indiana. I was playing atTaylor University as part of the World Vision sponsored AIDS summit for members of the college based organization Acting On AIDS.
The glorified coffeehouse that held the crowd was humming with heroism. Here, culled from the generation that birthed and blessed the celebrity of Paris Hilton and is said to be collectively slumping for apathetic hour after hour in front of reality TV and X-Boxes, sat 400 bread crumbs to the Jesus who came to restore sight to the blind, free prisoners and release the oppressed. Proof.
They gave up a weekend and untallied hours year round to feed the poor, medicate the sick, pray with the hopeless. I played for them, in tribute to them and the God they proved to be real. It is not natural for humans, college aged humans perhaps especially, to be drawn outside themselves, their own daily dramas and aspirations, to sacrifice for the good of strangers on the other side of the world. This was proof.
And the next day a classroom across campus filled up to hear me talk about what Jesus meant by “kingdom of heaven” and what their allegiance to it required of them. They listened intently and took notes, asked tremendously insightful and inspiring questions and shared their stories and solutions with each other and me. And all this on a Saturday morning. College students in a classroom learning how to bring heaven to earth on a Saturday morning.
Proof. Beautiful bread crumbs of proof.
I see it now.
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Awake in the bottom bunk. An oscillating fan perched on a stool next to the bed purred back and forth across my face, circulating the Texas heat.
At it’s center, embossed on it’s cage of a body, a logo in a shiny silver circle. My eyes traced the shape. A circle. A circle never ends. The preacher that morning said life never ends. It goes on forever. I felt trapped. I didn’t want to live forever. What could I ever do for forever? I didn’t want to die either. Not existing scared me as much as always existing. I cried out for my mother. She sat with me, told me to imagine the best things ever. Heaven is even better, she said. But I still didn’t want to go there. I was scared. I was five.
“That was the first time I remember doubting the goodness of God,” I answered. “And then again in the sixth grade, and in tenth, and a few months in college. And every time it brought depression. Never depression without doubt… Hmm. I never realized that.”
It was this first question and first answer that made me trust Spooky Friend enough to stay and talk some more. And she asked many more questions. And we asked God a few too. Each one led to the next, unearthing a long trail of half truths and lies I’d believed for a long time. Wrong priorities, incorrect assessments of others and myself, imbalanced theologies, outright lies about God I’d swallowed so long ago that I’d never spat them back up and looked them over to see if they were edible in the first place.
My guess - and it’s only a guess - is that the process we went through was very much like what takes place in any therapist’s office. Question and answer. Going back over the past. Tracing current “issues” to their roots. Unearthing skeletons and other embarrassing and brutal details crawling beneath the foundations of a life that’s begun to tilt off axis. I have many friends who’ve gone through this process in a therapist’s office. None of them are well. All of them are medicated. One of them is dead. Most of them are self-absorbed and fearful.
Their therapists dug up the skeletons and the lanky clanging bones of the undead eventually marched them to a pharmacist, and when that drug stopped working they went to another, and another. And the skeletons took a seat, took naps, took vacations, sometimes long ones, but never died. They were always over the shoulder, behind a parent, hiding in a stressful situation or temptation, lurking in a new uncomfortable situation. Never dead. That’s my friends. Maybe not yours.
And on their way to the pharmacist most of them had some eggs to throw at parents and teachers and mentors and brothers and sisters and religion and society at large. So when Spooky Friend asked me about my father I stopped playing along. I stopped trusting. For a minute.
“My father isn’t perfect. I’m not a perfect father either. And I’m not interested in blaming him for anything that’s gone wrong in my life. Adam and Eve had a perfect Father and they still messed up. He loved me.”
And she smiled an affirmation and passed me a tissue. She’d hit something. And I knew it.
We unearthed it and other skeletons of my own making - I made them by perceiving the world as children do, slightly different than it is, through idealistic expectations that are inevitably unmet. We dug up a small army of lies two weeks ago Wednesday, not all them ancient, most of them from the last five years. We didn’t medicate them or treat them with a process of many weeks or years. We crucified them, replaced them, destroyed them.
We started by giving them names as they were discovered:
Arrogance & Pride. There’s something I get from doubt, something that makes me hold onto it. It’s the same thing that makes me judge other Christians or ways of doing this faith thing and church. If I doubt and everyone around me does not then it means I must know or understand something you all don’t. Which means I’m much smarter than you.
Certainty & Independence. I don’t do well not knowing. The more I know the more I control and the less stress and hurt I’ll have in life.
Shame & Regret. I had sex before I was married. I don’t teach on abstinence. I don’t play True Love Waits conferences and the like. I don’t do these things because I feel unqualified to. And I fear that if anyone knew the truth they’d feel I’m unqualified too. And I work to pay my wife back for that mistake, as if I have to earn her forgiveness or God’s. I’m not sure which.
Anger. I’ve always been angry. I don’t know why. I don’t hurt others physically when I’m angry and most people wouldn’t suspect me to be an angry person, but I am.
Fear. I’m afraid mostly of what other people think of me. I always have been. I figure most of us are. Bust most of us, I hope, don’t have to hear the words “good job” to keep going. That’s why comments are turned off for now. I wanted to be honest in these posts. I wanted to tell the story as it happened not as the comments wanted it to be. Writing blind has been a good discipline to defeat my fear of you.
And many more.
Then every named skeleton of untruth was replaced by a truth. We confessed each untruth and wrong belief to God, claimed forgiveness that is mine because Jesus died to give it to me, we thanked God for that and asked God for a word or ideal with which to replace my old way of thinking, something true and alive to replace the skeleton:
Arrogance and Pride were replaced by Humility and Grace alone.
Certainty and Independence were replaced by Belief and Dependence.
Shame and Regret were replaced by Forgiveness and Love from God - my Father.
Anger was replaced by Peace.
Fear was replaced by Acceptance and the verse that sooths Gabriella in her darkness, “God is my helper. I will not be afraid.”
As each lie was exposed, named and replaced I repeated words like these after her out loud, eyes open, looking each other in the face:
“Shame and Regret, you are not welcome in me any longer. By the authority of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, by the power of his blood, and with the sword of the Holy Spirit I sever the unholy soul tie between you and me. Thank you, Jesus for making me your possession, your child, and for forgiving me of my sins on the cross. Thank you for forgetting them, Father. Thank you for loving me as I am today, right now.”
Therapy has the power to dredge the lake for bodies, to search the past for wounds and gather an army of skeletons. And drugs have the ability to mask the stench of those decaying bones inside us, to hide the smell of the Fall. But what I wrestled two weeks ago put off such a foul odor of doubt and sadness that lighting Paxil candles wouldn’t make the air palatable again. I had to realize that. Admit that. See the situation for what it was, a spiritual one. And then the bones had to be destroyed. But even as I was experiencing belief and relief from this kind of battling I still wanted a long process instead. I just didn’t believe this was it, this was the solution for my despair. Too easy. It had to take more time than this.
At one point Spooky Friend asked me if we’d destroyed them all by asking, “Are you free and clear?” “I think this’ll be a process,” I told her. “I’m just too tired and it’s just too late for us to do all this today.” She led me in a prayer against fatigue and asked what in me was asking for “a process.” “This is ending today,” she demanded. And we dug and destroyed some more.
I wasn’t battling doubt. Doubt was the last one to the party. It was the boisterous one drawing my attention and energy but it wasn’t the root or the strongest enemy of mine. There were many there before him setting up chairs and blowing up balloons and setting the table and unlocking the doors and windows to my mind, making the preparations so he’d feel most welcomed in me when he finally arrived. I was weakened before he came by the lack of intimacy in my marriage due to busyness, and a lack of peace in my business relationships, and sickness, and Guilt and Shame and Envy and all the rest of the party going skeletons and obstacles in life. I felt great for having made it through so much. I celebrated with a dinner on a Friday night. But I didn’t realize how weak victory had left me. That weakness was made more sever by my lack of time praying and being with God recently - not studying Him and teaching about Him - but being intimate with Him, with no agenda. I was busy doing much good, knowing much, teaching much, but being strengthened by and in love with God very little. I was ripe for overthrowing. And when doubt came in, my own impotent life became the proof he used to convince me Christ was a fable. The perfect package, like she said. Package made of and carried to me on lies.
And pills don’t kill lies. Truth does. The truth set me free two weeks ago. The truth is simple. I’m God’s boy. He loves me and always has. He put on skin and was executed to pay for all the law breaking that kept me behind bars and far away from Him, from loving Him. He unlocked my cell when He walked out of his tomb on the third day. I believe this story is true so Paul says I’ve crossed over from death to life, I’m approved of by God, forever. More than that, I’m better than acceptable, I’m his boy. Me. All I’ve done. He doesn’t see it. He sees His blood, His offspring, His child.
And because I am His there’s a family resemblance. Like a boy becoming more like his Dad the older He gets, over time I’m looking more and more like Him to people outside our family. People will notice this someday. I am proof of His goodness, the proof of invisible God. And the Author of Lies can’t have that. He can’t have proof walking around unconfronted. He wants to mar my complexion, distort me in a way that I don’t look like Dad any more. He wants me in bed, curled up and scared. He wants me blaming someone else. He wants me powerless. He wants me to forget the truth of who I am, how God sees me, why I’m here. He wants me to ignore the spiritual reality behind the physical world we live in. He wants me to laugh at words like “spiritual warfare” and “blood” and “sin” and even “Jesus.” He wants me critical and cynical and apathetic. He wants me busy and religious. He wants me to believe that those times Jesus fought Satan and worked miracles were just stories that never really happen today. He wants me in therapy the rest of my life. He wants me dead.
But I am not defenseless. He doesn’t have to have things his way. I am the possession of God and so I cannot be possessed by anything else. I can only grant permission for lies and sin to squat on me, God’s property, for a time. But those permission slips can be revoked. Those lease agreements can be torn up or severed by the power that comes from my Father. It’s the power that raised Jesus from the dead and sent demons into pigs and resisted temptation in the desert. It’s the power every Christian has, the ability to “hold every thought captive” and “resist the devil” and “flee evil” and wield the “sword of the Spirit.” We have the name of Jesus, the property owner, our Dad the landlord in our arsenal and at His name “every knee will bow.” And, theologically speaking, every untruth will have it’s butt kicked. And with the power of the Name we can ask ourselves the toughest questions, delve into the deepest darkest parts of the past and present and bring truth there where the lies growl in he corner. We can close the distance between us and God - God can close that distance for us through us. It’s a beautiful mysterious miraculous truth that sets us free. He’s always there fighting for us in the unseen battle, ready to fight through us, undetected by the senses.
But not always. Not always undetected. Sometimes He reaches out - and I don’t know why - and touches us.
“Shaun, you felt a tiny hand on your back and it woke you from terrible nightmares,” she recounted at the end of the tiring battle two weeks ago Wednesday. “And you you turned to that touch, thought it was your child. It was a touch that made you think of someone you love. There was no fear was there?”
“No,” I said.
“I believe you really felt a touch. I believe it was real. Whose hand was that waking you?”
“God’s hand,” I smiled.
I smiled. And I still am.
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TWO WEEKS AGO TODAY: WEDNESDAY Pt.2
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3:30
I slumped on Spooky Friend’s couch and vomitted up the story of the great dinner on Friday night, the paragraph, the nightmares, the inability to feel anything morphing into a feeling of total despair. I told her I knew confessing all this to her probably meant I would not be a pastor at our church anymore. I told her I didn’t think I should be. I told her almost all of me, almost all the time, didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah the Jews had waited for or that his resulting religion called Christianity was true. I was not convinced that Christianity was completely derived from other pagan religions or manufactured by a secret society but I also could find no quality thorough data to the contrary and so I asked her to please prove these accusations wrong with facts so the depression would lift and life could resume - even if it was life no longer involved in pastoring and teaching others. I drew a line two weeks ago today: Prove Christianity is true and heal me of this despair or I’m out.
The room was silent. She put down the pen and pad she’d been taking notes with.
She bowed her head and sat still for a minute. Then she prayed for herself. Then for me. Then against Doubt and Depression, whom she spoke to as if they were people. My eyes stayed open.
“Amen.”
And then it got weird.
So much of what happened over the next four hours should stay back in that room two weeks ago and will, but what transpired convinced me of a war we don’t see - one I don’t talk about because I’m embarrassed, I don’t fully understand it, it’s not logical, and I’ve been unconvinced until two weeks ago today that it even existed.
But two weeks ago today I realized I was in it. And we all are.
I’ve read Paul’s words to the Ephesian church hundreds of times, where he tells them they aren’t really fighting against what can be seen but against forces and entities who cannot be seen. The mental image that appears when I read his warning is of me and the rest of the human race down here near sea level driving to and from work and soccer practices and piano lessons, eating at our kitchen tables, sleeping in our beds, sitting in our pews and somewhere else, somewhere far away, maybe in the sky somewhere, on another playing field, these unseen things - demons and angels - are pummeling each other. And occasionally that battle gets out of bounds for a minute and spills over into a madman with nuclear weapons or a serial killer whose dog tells him to assassinate the president for Jodie Foster or keep a collection of penises in his fridge, but the rest of the bad stuff in the world - the regret, depression, loneliness, apathy, greed, envy, sickness and doubt - is just us humans making bonehead decisions or making due with the gene pool and bodies and chemistry and life we were given. The battle is something I defend against by doing my best to be good and think happy thoughts but I’m not in the battle. I can get biffed by it’s shrapnel perhaps, and people do, but I’m not a target or a soldier in it. So I thought before two weeks ago today.
I’ve had a stomach ache - which is really trivializing the degree of inconvenience and pain - every day since kindergarten. It has a name. It’s in medical books. It shows up in tests. It is a physical ailment. I’ve taken medication for it since high school when my symptoms became so severe that I was no longer able to function - to go to school or, some days, stand up straight. I’ve coped with it not only by taking medicine, which helped immensely, but by meditating and relaxing, doing yoga essentially, praying, cutting out caffeine and red meat, not panicking in stressful situations but being more logical than emotional and more proactive than reactive. This managed the pain and made me able to climb on airplanes and tour buses and do my job. But I never ate until I was full. I spent hours some days in a bathroom. I did not take certain opportunities because I feared being sick and/or stressed because of them. And I never had a day without pain. And three months ago it stopped.
I got angry at the limitations this illness placed on my life, on my ability to go anywhere and do anything God wanted me to do. At how it took me away from family and friends, embarrassed me and hurt me. I prayed as I always had but I got proactive, realizing that Western medicine only treated the symptom and couldn’t stop the cause. I saw a naturalist - the type of person I would have called a quack before I got ready to try anything. One hour later I walked out with a list foods I could and could not eat and a bottle of the nastiest tasting goop I’ve ever swallowed. And I’ve been well ever since. No pain.
My career has caused me tremendous stress. My second and third records didn’t do well compared to the first. My third album was declared “dead” several weeks ago by my label - no more time or money would be spent on it. It was only six months old. I grieved. It was like, but not as severe obviously, twelve of my kids had been in a school bus accident and never got to grow up and make friends and families and have kids of their own. I owed my label a fourth album and wanted to keep my promise to do so but I became increasingly blaming and angry at radio stations, my label, the industry, myself for my apparent failure as a recording artist things I’d felt before in growing amounts but things which now overwhelmed me with angst. I was crippled by this anger. I’d stopped thinking creatively and writing songs, immobilized by the quandary of what to write and who to write for and whether anyone would hear the resulting music in such a busted system ruled by two radio station program directors, narrow play lists, upbeat and positive criteria, worship music remakes and familiar sounding production.
I got tired of being angry and sat down with my label’s president for a very honest retracing of our steps over the last five years to discover what went wrong, who was to blame - even if it was me - and what would be different in the future. I confessed my hostility towards everyone - including myself - and asked if he thought it made sense to make music together any more if we both believed we’d done our best at our jobs and the last two records still didn’t sell. He and the label had been asking the same questions for about the same amount of time it turns out. With me not able to tour more, and definitely unable to do 200 shows every year, because of commitment to family and church, and with radio - my label’s main marketing tool - not warm to what I do any more, and with budgets for marketing and touring being cut on all records across the board, could they afford to lose money on me again? Was making another costly record together, no matter how much we liked each other, a fair or productive thing for either of us?
We agreed it wasn’t. We agreed to think about some other kind of fourth record - something live perhaps - that we could put out eventually, but decided together that my contract with Rocketown Records would now end. We sat together and mourned a little. We like each other after all, under our frustrations that is. And with those gone there was peace and the liking part of our relationship was all there was. We laughed. We hugged. We talked about the plans the label has for other kinds of artists and other ways of doing business that I think will work far better than what I do is working today. I talked about the things I’d like to do now as well. We felt like we were getting one of those strange divorces in which the couple says they’ll still be friends and buy houses next door to each other and even set one another up with single friends of theirs. It was odd. It was freeing. There was peace and relief and so much real estate in my mind was empty again. No anger. No blame. Just understanding and friendship and freedom. Our relationship now is clean, everything out on the table, no fear and stress or guilt for letting each other down. Turns out we’d both worn a lot of guilt for not doing better work.
My marriage during the move was weakened by my traveling, the work load of fixing and painting, having a small baby that required so much time. We barely saw each other and when we did it was to talk about what was next on the to do list. We were co-workers and not friends. No angst, just two people sharing a bed thinking we’d hang out eventually when the baby’s older and my schedule thins out and the house looks good.
I got tired of that and so did Becky. We resumed our weekly date nights we’d replaced with painting and grocery store shopping. We got back to dating each other at Brian’s suggestion honestly, I wanted intimacy but I didn’t want to give up anything to get it. And Brian said he’d baby sit the kids if we’d baby sit for him and he and Amy go out once a week too. And so, accidentally, out marriage was revived back to health.
Spooky Friend knew some of this. And she took these pieces and put them together to form a picture for me of a battle so much larger than doubt and depression, so much more heinous and frightening than seratonin levels and accusatory paragraphs. And hard to believe.
She said to me something like this, “Here’s what I think has happened and is happening. And you ask God as I’m speaking this to you if what I’m saying is true. Don’t accept anything I’m telling you today without asking if it’s true first. There is a battle and we’re all in it. We don’t think we are but everyone is. Satan is fighting to convince us all that God is not good. He is trying to immobilize us, especially those who expose his lies and convince people God is good. Isn’t funny how this window was opened in you and doubt and depression and all the rest of it came in as you said when everything was going great. When you were meeting with book publishers and exploring new possibilities. When you got rid of debt and sold your house and showed that you were willing to sacrifice to be obedient to God and love people. You’ve been sick your whole life and now you’re not. You were in debt and now you’re not. Your marriage was weakened and now it’s strong. And you had peace and possibilities all around you. You were free of everything that had kept you bound and ineffective. No more anger, stress, bad relationships, stomach pain. It was gone. And you were desperately looking for what God would have you do to next in your life and your career. And you were making progress in that. And Satan decided to do something about it. And you went to a bookstore and read some words on whatever and he handed you a package.”
She handed me a pen and I took it thinking she would ask me to write something down - she does that sometimes. “Why did you take that?” she asked. “Because you handed it to me,” I answered.
“And that’s what you did that night. You took it. You didn’t even think about it, and why would you? You didn’t know it was the perfect package for you. Nothing else worked so he used something that always works to shut you down didn’t he? Your intellect. Doubt. He knew you were weak and he knew you would take it. You are in the battle...I want you to ask God if what I’m saying is true.”
“God, is this true?” I asked out loud, feeling ridiculous.
I sat silent for a few minutes. I shifted in my seat. I was thinking what many of you, I imagine, are thinking right now. What a bunch of crap. What a convenient way out for Christians. If you doubt their faith they claim it’s because you’re being attacked by Satan and they won’t address or refute your doubts with hard facts, with real evidence. I felt myself getting angry. I wanted to leave. My face was hot, and my jaw clenched. What a waste of time. I’m not going to be getting over this today, I thought.
“Look at me,” she said. “Doubt, is that you? How long have you been here? God, show Shaun when Doubt first came to him.”
To be continued…
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Bono, who Mark Driscoll refers to as “the coolest guy on our team” preached the best sermon I’ve honestly ever heard on the subjects of justice, equality and charity at The National Prayer Breakfast on February 2nd in Washington, DC.
