Jesus Brand Spirituality (pt 4)

Part One: Active Dimension
Ch 4: Healing Along the Way

Wilson begins the chapter with something I’ve felt for quite a while:

My father had a favorite word: bass-ackwards.  Sometimes I wonder if those of us who promote the religion of Jesus have gotten something bass-ackwards.  Have we front-loaded people with so many matters of belief that we are, in effect, asking them to swallow the whole package as a prerequisite for meaningful engagement with Jesus?

He talks about the fact that we can’t crawl into another person’s soul; we can’t know where they are, where they are coming from, etc.  But we hand them a package of belief and expect them to swallow the entire thing whole, all at once, before they can begin to engage God or have any sort of meaningful experience of spirituality.  We’ve forgotten that the Christian doctrinal system has been in development for over two thousand years, rooted in traditions that are even older.  He then speaks to four different aspects of “healing along the way”:

BELIEVING
Our belief isn’t a black/white thing — you can’t explain or experience it in binary.  For many people it occurs over time, through various experiences and thoughts and days and nights of wrestling with things.  For some it seems to come easier than others.

We’re drawn to Jesus.  We respond.  And things happen along teh way to confirm, or expand, or cause us to ask other questions or face other dilemmas, and we see if we’re drawn and we see if we respond.  I realize I cannot formulate this into a doctrine that can be taught in seminary, but it’s how I think it really works.  The only stuff that happens, happens along the way.

HEART MENDING
Wilson talks about the changes and healing that takes place within us, in our hearts…but continues to emphasize that they happen along the way, building upon one another.  One of my particularly favorite passages from this section is:

As you take a step closer to knowing the Jesus who is repairing the world, it’s helpful to understand that this is part of an ongoing story that involves you.  Among other things, it’s a mending story.  He’s about repairing the world, and he invites you to help him get the job done.  And while that’s under way, things are meant to happen that mend you.

I’m trying to stay far away from that debate about whether the world as a whole needs to be fixed before we as individuals are, or whether we need to be fixed one at a time before the world can improve.  That’s one of those old meaningless debates like, ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’  We are part of an enormously complex system of connections, a network in which the slightest changes at any one part may have a cascading effect that touches the whole.  We change, and the network changes.  The network changes, and we change along with it.  Repairing the world, and the mending of each of us in it, is all of a piece with the work of God involving us.

This was so refreshing to hear as I have been around people who want to dry lines between the spiritual gospel and social gospel…and I think, were we to ask God which one he prefers, he would simply answer: “Yes.” 

BODY MENDING
The author then speaks to healing of physical bodies.  He mentions that Jesus is “compassion driven.”

His message doesn’t seem to be about him as much as about the sick people getting better.  Jesus never told stories about how he healed people in the previous town in order to rev people up in the next town about his message.

This was refreshing to read as well, and Wilson’s words are thick with mystery and unsuredness, speaking of ‘healings’ in tangible and real-world ways, including modern medicine and technology.  But along with all of these attempts is bound to come doubt and frustration.  And I think he speaks to this well:

There are plenty of reasons not to try, but I think we should try.  Because sick peopel who don’t have other options need us to try.  We should do what we can, not what we can’t, and we should also be open to doing things we think we can’t, because maybe we can.

SOUL MENDING
We live in a world deeply influenced by dualistic thinking, and this has crept into “Jesus brand spirituality” as well.  We tend to think of the soul as some disembodies, ghostly spirit hovering within its prisonous shell of a physical human body.  But Wilson speaks to this immediately:

We often think of the soul as something apart from the body, but the tradition that informed Jesus didn’t see it that way.  In his tradition, the Hebrew tradition, the soul is more like an expression of the person in his or her wholeness.  As the creation story in Genesis 2 tells us, God breathed into Adam, and Adam became a living soul.  Another way to say it is that we are enfleshed spirits and inspirited flesh.  We are soul.

He goes on to talk about how mending the soul is a holistic effort, that the two are intertwined and connected, influencing and affecting one another.  He specifically looks at addiction and the origins of AA, how spirituality is a key component in the recovery of addiction (which is often deemed as a solely physiological ailment).  But it’s not that simple — there are countless factors and influences and ways to experience mending and healing of the soul, and the church would do well to not only recognize that, but acknowledge it.

I think this is a lesson for the church: we shouldn’t just look for God to show up inside our camp; we should look for him to show up outside our camp as well.  Jesus, after all, went outside the camp to do his most important work.