I just started a book called Peace like a River. It talks a bout faith a lot. I have been talking about it a lot. And considering the title, I wasn’t too surprised to be asked if the book was written by a Christian. My answer is that I think so, but I’m not sure. The narrator affirms his belief in miracles, but I am not sure yet that the author himself believes in them. You can’t tell if a book is Christian until you see how it ends. Only three endings are possible, really. Hope, false hope, or despair. Christians end with hope, Lifetime movies end with false hope, and everyone else must either accept despair or uncertainty. Because of this, Christians write the greatest epics, for every epic must end with the triumph of good over evil. And it is the weight of the author’s belief in triumph that inspires joy in the reader.

Two years ago I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It is meant to be the anti-Narnia, the interpretation of Paradise Lost in which Satan is heroic and God unfair. But in order to be consistent with his belief system, Pullman cannot simply reverse the old polarities. Everyone must be both good and evil. So in the end, there is nothing to triumph over. God is weak, not bad. Satan is indifferent. The large battle at the end diffuses rather anticlimactically. This may make sense in the logic of an absurdist play, but it does not make sense in a fantasy epic. And it is certainly not inspiring. Pullman tries to showcase some transcendent aesthetic of atheism, but it does not work as fiction. It is falsely transcendent. It is admittedly flat, confined to a one dimensional self-defining universe. And any plot which veers into false hope is never very convincing.

Despair is, by definition, not good, so I won’t bother to say why we don’t like it.

Anyhow, every story brings its characters either closer to hope or closer to despair, and in this sense, every story reflects the greater metanarrative. So then how do we think of our own stories? Faith is faith that the end is triumphant. And we have to interpret the intervening events accordingly. But in life, as in stories, we often discover information or experience something that causes us to reinterpret everything that came before it. I’ve told my life story to groups twice before, once in high school and once in college. And as I prepare to tell it yet again, I realize how differently I perceive the same events. Although I still pinpoint the same events as pivotal, every few years their meaning and significance changes. And so it will continue. God is a good Aristotelian and gives every story several reversals. We must have faith that the final reversal will reveal everything, and that everything will be good.

But it is difficult to have faith that the ending is good, when dark things come out of secret passages, and the clue in the diary leads to broken relationships rather than to clarifying mysteries. How do we live in light of the end, without spending all of our moments anticipating it? How do we interpret God’s will in the midst of the story? I must believe that all of God’s actions are good, whether or not they appear to conform to the standard of morality. Because if I do not, I cannot have faith that the end will be good. Of course, I cannot conceive what the end will look like. Perhaps, as I exist now, it would appear frightening. But I must trust that the light of eternity will not burn, but will heal and clarify and allow me to truly see for the first time.

During Matins one morning, someone prayed that God would “rush through our house like a wind” and that his spirit would bring unity to our group. I thought about that twice. How would that actually appear? I’ve heard the terminology of the “spirit rushing through like a wind” many times. My entire Pentecostal heritage is based on the story of the upper room, a wind, tongues of fire and speaking in tongues. And so my idea of God being fully present always meant that everyone would be singing worship songs and praying and speaking in tongues 24/7. But this is obviously wrong. We must sleep sometime. If we spoke in tongues for even 16 hours a day, our voices would go hoarse. Pity the fingers of the guitar-playing worship leader!

Christ may be the Bread of Life and the Living Water. He satisfies our eternal hunger and thirst. But this must be distinguished from our temporal hunger and thirst. Failure to distinguish the two can be fatal. A few keen medieval women took the metaphor literally, attempting to subsist on the Eucharist alone. They starved to death.*

In Greek, two sorts of time are specified. Kairos is God’s time, the eternal, divine moment. Kronos is the time that we humans struggle through. And as we are moving in Kronos, no matter what our spiritual state, we still become hungry and thirsty. Food must be produced and water must be purified and clothes must be worn. For while our eternal responsibility is to God, because we commit to acknowledging Kairos, acknowledging the time in which he chooses to work, Kronos is imbued with meaning. And that gives us the weight of other responsibilities, responsibility to and for our families and communities.
Sunday is the day of rest. It is the time in which we recognize the existence of eternal rest. It is the period in which Kronos and Kairos intersect. But not every day can be Sunday. There is a reason God specified that it happened only once every seven days. An old fable is told about a lazy man who wished for a week of Sundays. The first Sunday was routine. The second Sunday was still nice. He attended church and the sermon was of passing interest. His wife gave him leftovers from the previous day. He quite enjoyed his leisure time. But by the third day his wife had nothing left to serve but broth, because all of the shops were closed and food could not be purchased. The priest’s message wasn’t very meaningful, because he had spent all of his energy writing sermons for the previous two days. The man had so much leisure that he became sick of his extra time. As the week progressed, matters only worsened. When the week came to an end, the man realized he now desired work.

God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it (Gen 3:15). It was only after the Fall that his work became unpleasant. But it is not constantly unpleasant. We still have ways in which our work satisfies some spiritual need. When I am pursuing knowledge, I often experience the joy of discovery. Each bit of knowledge illuminates the created world. And every sort of work can illuminate the created world. For creation, even in its brokenness, reflects its creator. While creation cannot give us the full picture – that is why direct revelation is necessary – it is still a source of divine understanding.

Once we fully participate in Kairos, we may eternally cry “holy, holy, holy” with our voices. But we are still in Kronos and if our worship is to be constant, it must also flow through our work. Thus, if the Spirit of God were to flow through our house, it would not only manifest itself through musical worship or prayer. It would look like increased understanding in class, joy gained in work at the Lodge, and most excitingly (for me at least) the gifts of every individual would be used to glorify God. So my academic work would communicate the joy of creation, and I would be joyful in the process. Whatever you were created to do, you would take joy in completing. And both the process and product would participate in the coming of the Kingdom of God.



* Sometimes, when we ought to be speaking of Kronos, we give answers that really apply to Kairos, and this can be extremely detrimental to one’s own faith as well as the faith of others, (which is, perhaps, even more unfortunate than the starvation of well-intentioned ascetics). Jesus himself is often unclear about which he is speaking, such as when he tells the woman at the well that she will thirst no more, when clearly, she will come to that well again. But Jesus was Jesus, and he knew when people needed overstatement. He knew when people needed to be told to gauge out their eyes to avoid lust. But we need to be careful with how we communicate the same precepts. Too often answers such as “God will provide” are given, when God may not choose to provide in the temporal realm. Sometimes he does, and we can petition in prayer. But sometimes he doesn’t. He has promised to work all things together for good, but this is an eternal good, not an earthly good. We live in the light of eternity. We anticipate it. It is almost but not yet. And we need to acknowledge the uncomfortable ‘almost.’

The problem of pain is that it is a problem. Gravity is not a problem and it can be explained in much the same way. It is an inexplicable force that brings both good and ill effects. Pain is an effect with an equally murky, equally unavoidable cause. But unlike gravity, it is incredibly difficult to discuss pain; any attempt to reason out suffering sounds vapid. When confronted with distress, words deliquesce into meaninglessness. If we could simply accept suffering as a natural effect, there would be no problem. But we cannot accept it. And although I can accept a certain theological explanation involving free will, there are moments when I would renounce free will if it meant renouncing pain. Free will is a foreign currency whose value I do not fully understand.

Words dissolve before pain, and I cannot use words to describe another’s suffering. Give me a metaphysical argument and I will use language, but give me a face and I will respond with expression. I could work out my thoughts on pre-destination for years, but it would not get me any closer to salvation. I can discuss the problem of pain and reconcile it with God’s nature in the most erudite expressions, but it would bring me no nearer to comprehending suffering.

If the cost of free will is pain, what is the consequence of saying that I do not want free will? But I have already given it up. For the Christian must renounce their own will. If freedom in Christ means submitting our will to his, we are, in effect, giving up our knowledge of good and evil. We are abandoning the law – morality – in favor of God’s will. But in return, he does not allay the effects of the Fall. We are made perfect but our circumstances are not.