I started thinking through a blog post in the shower yesterday morning. It was a furthering of my statement on dissonance in Tuesday’s blog.

As I wrote it out, I wasn't satisfied with how it was coming out. I agreed with what I was writing, but I felt like my tone wasn't love.
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Dissonance is something I am deeply familiar with; it has been a feeling I've had for many years of my life, particularly in the areas of spirituality and Christianity. For a long time, I felt like I was being told I had to fit into a box, which is tragic because so much of what Jesus spoke and the impact of his actions & words was freedom. Time and time again, the stories say that people left Jesus as new people. They were healed. They were free. They were refreshed or reinvigorated. They were inspired. They were human again.

Unfortunately, most of my response to the box of religion has been rebellion, just throwing the whole thing off. Rebellion is easy. Though I still revert to my insurgent ways, more and more I desire to find ways to be faithful to the triune God, to Scripture, to historical orthodox Christianity, somehow living in the precarious balance of not submitting to the rules, regulations & expectations of a sub-culture while also not getting pissed about its propensity to tack on a bunch of extra requirements. It's a difficult road to walk.

For awhile, I've said that I want to be a faithful follower of Jesus, but I'm just trying to figure out how to do that without having to be a Christian.
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I read the Eugene Peterson article in Image quarterly. The interview is led by the poet Luci Shaw, and it is nothing short of beautiful. What I found especially refreshing about Eugene's words was his abundance of grace in the midst of critique. He certainly had some strong and pointed things to say, but the apparent humility in his words was striking and attractive. It encouraged me that there is a third way to living discipleship. Faithful to Jesus. Outside of the sub-culture.
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One of the topics that I intended to touch on in my blog about dissonance was the almost singular focus on doctrine and theology within evangelical Christianity, and at the same time our almost absolute ignoring of mystery. My question was whether a focus on the revelation of God's character (doctrine and theology) was actually indicative of a relationship with GOD, who, as it is so beautiful stated, is the one who is conceived as inconceivable.

This isn't to disregard doctrine, theology or revelation, but is to bring balance and a reminder that as much as we know of God, there is a far greater amount that we do not. And therefore we live in the humility that our pursuits are always lacking, our doctrine ever incomplete, and our theology always full of holes.
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A couple weeks ago, a member of my house church, a painter, told me that though she was committed to Jesus and had been for much of her life, she never felt comfortable in the church. For her there was always a tension between being an artist & what she was told it was to be a follower of Jesus. I later asked her what the church needed to do make itself safe for artists and she simply replied, "embrace mystery."

I intended to rant and rave, and probably bitch a little in my blog about the lack of mystery in the church, but I doubt that would be very useful. Ironically, Eugene Peterson spoke beautifully of it in his interview. Beautifully and graciously. May his wise words guide us and maybe expand our imaginations a little bit:

Image: Where does this desire always to analyze and critique come from? This desire to figure out how things work and make them work better? Is abstraction a normal part of the human experience?

EP: We all do it. The way we do it is sin. Sin is an abstraction. Sin is a fragmentation. The old temptation of the garden, to be like the gods, is rooted in knowing good and evil. We want to know, and we can't. Humility is a prerequisite for the accurate use of language. We live in a world made by God, but we refuse to live in mystery. We're always trying to figure it out. Now mystery doesn't mean obscurity. It doesn't mean ignorance. Mystery means living in a trusting presence to what we cannot control or explain. All our big words - redemption, salvation, grace - when Christians try to pin that all down so that they can create a police state in the church and get rid of all the
evil, the bad thinking and bad behavior, we destroy the church. If you ask any pastor who knows his congregation, you'll hear that congregations are a mess. God does not seem to scruple over who he's going to bring in for us to rub shoulders with. Unless we're ready to live in mystery, we're not ready to live in what we're given by the grace of God.