This I Have Against You...

Losing Love in all the Right Places

About eight years ago I quit reading.

Actually I quit reading books. Instead I read mostly Facebook posts by friends and random blog posts and an occasional linked article. Specifically, I stopped reading books about Orthodoxy, the spiritual life and theology. It wasn’t that I had “arrived”, it was that I hadn’t.

I’d been a bookaholic and obsessive reader for decades. When we sold our old house to buy another one to move my parents in with us I sold most of my library. I donated all my Orthodox books to my parish to set up a lending library. I admit it was partly because I didn’t want to box, haul, unbox, build bookshelves again and re-organize 80 boxes of books. When I sold it I told the buyer “I’m not lifting a finger or supplying a box… you have to move it ALL, and it’s in a basement.” They brought three trucks, six people, and dozens of boxes and I watched… then cashed the check. But, I’d come to the decision to stop reading before the move so it made it easy to sell the books because I knew I was done with them.

One wall of books….

I realized that I had read about the Christian life for decades and I knew more about it than I was being. I made a conscious decision to stop reading about how to be a better Christian and start just BEING one according to the knowledge I had.

I don’t know what exactly triggered the decision. I’d been Orthodox and on the Ortho-net for at least fifteen years, a podcaster, blogger, Facebook presence and ubiquitous commenter in lots of groups all over the spectrum of online Orthodoxy. I guess I could say I grew weary. Weary of the agitation. Weary of the contentiousness. Weary of the insults. Weary of the hostility. Weary of the joylessness. Weary of the crusades. Weary of the havoc. All in the name of and service to “truth”.

I wondered how I got “here”. I wondered how this became “normative” in my spiritual landscape. I wondered if any good purpose was being accomplished either within me or anyone else participating in all this.

In my ruminations about the trajectory of my spiritual life I recalled my “conscious conversion” in high school in the Jesus Movement forty years before.

I was already sacramentally a Christian and had attended Catholic schools for seven years, been an altar boy, and was fairly devout, spiritual, and planning on becoming a priest. But all that was pretty “unconscious”. It just what “was”. Rote, auto-pilot, meeting expectations but not exceeding any.

I started hanging out with some Jesus People and I realized something was missing. I bought a Bible in “modern English” (NASV if you must know), and I read the Bible, specifically the Gospels for the first time. Although I probably “heard the Gospel” at Mass in the readings and was probably taught something of them in seven years of parochial school, I couldn’t have told you a single parable, story, or miracle. I read about Jesus and, I can’t explain it rationally, I fell in love with Him. Jesus was what was missing. I knew then that He was who I wanted, He was what I needed to be. I had no “dogma” about Him, just the stories of Him being God on earth and among sinners. I recall consciously deciding to “be Jesus” to every person I encountered. I was 17.

But, like all loves, even love for Jesus, our egos, our baggage, the influences of the world, who we hang out with, the community we attach to, our preconceptions, and our mentors shape what we define as “love” and what love looks like in practice. And eventually… sometimes, it doesn’t look like love anymore.

In late 1969, through a friend in my English class and some very wonderful people who welcomed this long haired hippie Jesus Freak into their congregation when I visited, I became attached to a community of faith, The Eastside church of Christ (non-instrumental, kitchen, and cooperative, if you know, you know). It was a Campbell-Stone Restoration tradition that focused on exactness and correctness of adherence to Scripture only: “We have no creed but the Bible”. “We speak where the Bible speaks, and we are silent where it is silent.” Except, as I went through my BA in Bible College, I eventually figured out that “we have no creed” IS a creed, and where the Bible was silent we managed to fill in that silence with some of our own traditions, extrapolations and interpretations of “where it speaks” and make that a silent dogmatic necessity.

Our tradition focused heavily on St. Paul’s epistles. The Gospels were almost secondary documents and Jesus’ actions, ministry, and “witness to the Father” were interpreted through the lens of a tight systematic Pauline theological structure. Anything that didn’t fit that structure was either “under the Old Covenant because Jesus had not yet been crucified and resurrected, therefore not applicable to the post- Acts 2 New Covenant”, or an exception to the rule and form of “the faith once for all delivered” by the Apostles, and Jesus could do that stuff because, welll… He was God and could do a “one off” forgiveness, miracle, salvific act if He pleased, but it was not to be understood as “normative” within the structure of the Christian faith as St. Paul explicated it. The system was elegant and tightly woven, and if there was any loose thread it was snipped off with the scissors of “better safe than sorry”. I began to learn to love the safety of correctness.

All that to say, we (and I) took the warnings of St. Paul to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 quite seriously.

“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock;  and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert…”

I lived in a state of constant alertness to false teaching and twisted doctrines for the next few decades. Which led me eventually into Orthodoxy and where I have paid careful attention for the last twenty five years.

But my growing weariness in the Ortho-net said something was wrong. Missing. No amount of books and reading and theology filled the void. They were a distraction from looking into the growing unsettling thing deep in the darkness.

I knew St. Paul’s admonition in Acts and his Epistle to the Ephesians was not the end of their story.

Thirty years after St. Paul knelt and prayed with the Ephesian elders, St. John delivers a message from Christ to them: “I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars; and you have persevered and have patience, and have labored for My name’s sake and have not become weary. Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place—unless you repent.” (Rev. 2:2-5)

Hard workers, involved in ministries. Not bearing evil, morally pure. Testing the teachers, dogmatically correct. Perseverance in doing good in the name of Christ.

You think you have fulfilled Paul’s last prayer with you. You think you have preserved the faith, instructed the ignorant, been a light to those in darkness, attained spiritual maturity and understand the mysteries….

But… no, you have fallen. Grievously and far.

Repent. Or I will come quickly and remove your lampstand. Repent!

I had to ask myself, “What did I fall FROM into a life of good works, calling out heresies, faithful service, right dogma, and moral purity?”

I fell from the reckless passion and giddy abandon that only new lovers know, where all things are lightness and joy, all things are beautiful, and nothing is a burden if it is for the sake of the good pleasure of the beloved. I fell from longing in the middle of the night for the eternal embrace of my Love above all loves. I fell from the peace of knowing I’m loved beyond my comprehension. I fell from loving my neighbor as I knew I was loved.

I fell from Jesus.

My Beloved Jesus Christ, Son of God, take me back.