Ever had a cup of tepid tea? Bleh. It's good for nothing, similar to salt that has lost its saltiness (Mt 5:13). Too cool to be hot tea, and too warm to be iced tea. It has no identity. It is a no-thing. It would be an insult to serve it to your guests.
If there was ever an indictment to be found in New Testament, an admonishment from the Lord of how we are to be, it can be found in the Book of Revelation:
"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm--neither hot nor cold--I am about to spit you out of my mouth." (Rev 3: 15-16)
Spit you out of my mouth. It evokes an image of divine disgust, offensive to God. It helps me to imagine this from the perspective of a father, sick to his stomach in the face of such apathy: My son DIED for you. He was tortured for you. He shed his blood to give you LIFE. It was a free gift. I sent Him to take your place, as a ransom. And you shrug.
Like many converts who came into the Church, I had trouble understanding the complacency I experienced from other Catholics. I had a personal encounter with the Lord on my own road to Damascus. I recognized, with quite a bit of pain and gratefulness, what I had been ransomed from. The disciplines of the faith only made sense and had purpose in the context of an ardent faith--otherwise, it just seemed miserable to be religious; being a Catholic was embarrassing enough in the eyes of the world, but to be a Catholic with no real faith, devotion, or praxis, a Catholic in name only...well, it seemed the worst of all worlds. Thomas A Kempis, in his classic The Imitation of Christ, notes this as well, when he writes to lukewarm monks:
"A religious person who is negligent and slothful has trouble upon trouble and suffers great anguish and pain on every side, for he lacks true inward comfort, and is prohibited to seek outward comfort."(71)
For most of my life of faith, though, I have tried to live in two worlds. I think a lot of convert struggle with this--reconciling their prior lives to their new lives in Christ. Christian friends are not a given, though hopefully they are acquired. You don't really want to leave your former friends, because you have an authentic history with them.
I was at a bachelor party over the summer which wasn't completely off the chain, no arrests or anything, but was just dark in its hedonism. I have done my share of partying, and like to have a good time with good people, so it was not a foreign scene for me. But something was different this time. It wasn't a matter of being better than anyone else, or holier than thou. I just realized I didn't belong here anymore.
But I was kind of trapped, as it was. As the party was raging into the morning, I went into my room and with a feeling of despair, opened the small Gideon bible I brought with me. I opened randomly to Colossians, chapter 3, and read:
"Put to death, therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.
You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourself of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips." (Col 3:5-8)
I wanted the best of both worlds--I wanted to live in the world and experience all it had to offer without having to say no to anything or let anything go; to continue my pre-conversion life but in my Christian suit. I realized that night, though, that I was fooling myself. Not choosing, not standing apart, was itself a choice, for as the Lord says, "If the love of the world is in you, the love of the Father is not." (1 Jn 2-15). There is no middle ground, and if there is, it is like tepid tea--offensive and insulting to one's character as a new creation in Christ, good for nothing. There is pain in detachment, but only because we have allowed ourselves to become inordinately attached to that which, ultimately, enslaves us.
The more the world loves, accepts, and affirms us, the more we should be cued in that we are perhaps not on the path that leads to Life, but living a kind of spiritual inauthenticity, for "if you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you." (Jn 15:18-19). When we are slandered and accused as Christians for speaking truth, we should rejoice, for we are living the beatitudes: "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Mt 5:11-12).
No comments:
Post a Comment