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I have addressed this blog to seekers…people who are looking for something, often without quite knowing what they are seeking.
What do seekers seek? Why do people go from church to church, and from churches to ashrams, from temples to yoga studios, from Presbyterianism to Scientology? Why do Christians convert to Islam? Why do black Baptists become Black Muslims? Why do Catholics stay home and Lutherans consult tarot cards? Why do people join cults? Why do people flock to evangelical megachurches? Why do they replace the Bible with “The Course In Miracles?” Why do seekers put their hopes in “The Secret” and purported revelations from channeled entities? What are people seeking to find with all of this coming and going?
Is it Truth? I don’t think so. I suspect that few of us are motivated by a deep desire to clarify abstract philosophical concepts. I think the real quest is for something other than “the Truth.” Beneath our quests, our strivings, and our seekings, there is a deep and abiding longing to find a better story.
Each of us is a product of our stories. Stories define us, shape us, tug at us. It’s not so much the experiences that shape us, as the stories about those experiences. If you take away our stories, we are left with skin and bones, and not much else. Why? Because stories tell us who we are. They tell us why we are alive. They tell us what it’s all about. They answer the deepest questions: “Do I matter?” “Does anyone care if I live or die?”
Broadly speaking, there are two types of stories in this world. There are stories that expand us and stories that shrink us.
My book, Going Broke With Jesus, is about Jesus and money stories. My premise is that the real stories about Jesus and money are heroic stories, but these heroic stories about money become constricted when they become Bible stories to teach about money. They stop being heroic stories and turn into morality tales. In other words, instead of teaching us to be heroic about money, they teach us to shrink.
And so I suspect that the real reason we join churches and leave churches comes down to the stories. Every religious group is a story machine with the implicit claim: ”Become a member of our church, and along with free coffee on Sunday after church, you get to be part of our story.”
But this leads to the problem. But what if I don’t like the story? What if I cannot live with the story? What if I cannot find a home in this story? This is when seekers leave, to seek out a new place with a new story.
No one personifies this dilemma more than Barack Obama. Barack Obama has captured attention, both good and bad, because he has a story unlike any other story we have heard before from presidential candidates. It’s not his politics that are relevant here, but his quest to find a place where he can find the story he can live with.
The story of Obama’s religious journey is a uniquely American tale. It’s one of a seeker, an intellectually curious young man trying to cobble together a religious identity out of myriad influences. Always drawn to life’s Big Questions, Obama embarked on a spiritual quest in which he tried to reconcile his rational side with his yearning for transcendence. He found Christ–but that hasn’t stopped him from asking questions. “I’m on my own faith journey and I’m searching,” he says. “I leave open the possibility that I’m entirely wrong.”
”Finding His Faith.”
Barack Obama, as much as any of us, has been on a quest to find the story that will allow him to be most authentically himself. Consider his challenges. Half black and half white, so stories about black or white cannot contain him.
Barack’s mother was named “Stanley” (because her parents wanted a boy) and so she lived out of their story until she decided that that she was through with being Stanley. Meanwhile Barack was reared by his white mother and grandparents, which means his lived story is not black enough, because his immigrant father from Africa abandoned him and did not provide the African part of the story. And so he sought to claim his black side by seeking out a black church with its own stories of white injustice, but he cannot deny that he is half white and the beneficiary of white privilege.
Barack Obama’s story is more dramatic than most stories, but the challenge is the same for all of us. What do we do when our stories are too small? Where do we find stories that will give us room to grow?
Although I am not Jewish, I spent years deeply immersed in the study of Hebrew and Hebrew scriptures, and even taught Hebrew to theological seminary students. Along the way, I grasped several insights from the “Old Testament” that are much richer, much deeper, and much more liberating than anything I ever learned in Sunday school or church.
One of these liberating insights is the essential difference between Christian education and Hebrew education.
Often, Christians who approach the Hebrew Scriptures do it with the idea that the Jews have the old stuff. They have the “Old” Testament. But Christians have the new stuff. Christians have the “New” Testament. If you have experienced any form of Christian education, you have heard this. The Jews have law. Christians have grace. Or to put it another way, Christians have the answers. Jews have missed the boat.
Even though I am oversimplifying and overgeneralizing, the difference between Christian and Jewish education comes down to this difference: Christians learn catechism. Jews learn midrash.
Basically, a catechism teaches doctrine in the form of questions and answers. Catechism provides both the questions and the answers, with the expectation that the answers will be memorized. Even if your Christian education didn’t involve a formal catechism (there was no catechism class in the First Congregational Church of Harwich) the tendency is endemic in most Christian education. “This is what you are to believe.”
If you challenge the received answers, Christian history teaches you that you run the risk of excommunication, burning at the stake, shunning, or simply being hounded by Christians who are sure you are wrong. (As exhibit A, see the young man pounding his fist on the table as he declared without the slightest trace of doubt: “God does not call women.”)
Compare the process of catechism with midrash. The verbal root of midrash is “to seek.” With all of its variations, midrash encourages seeking of personal insights into scripture. This simple difference is the difference between learning received answers to a specific set of questions and being encouraged to ask questions to find your own answers.
Clearly, this is an over-simplification of a complex topic, but the core insight is this. Christians are told to learn the answers, because asking questions is a sign of disobedience to God’s authority. Jews are taught to ask new questions, as part of their obedience to God’s authority.
I suspect this single difference is the reason that so many Jews are such innovators in medicine, law, business, science, and the arts. They learned to ask new questions while Sunday school and catechism taught Christians to learn the old answers by rote.
So, this is the choice facing each of us.
- We live with the old stories, attempting to shrink ourselves to fit into them.
- Or we ask new questions to find the stories that give us room enough to grow.
And at the bottom of all of our seeking, the deepest insight of all is that we do not find our stories. We must create them.
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
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