The Rev. Craig D. Townsend

Please pardon the delay - more entries will come soon, promise - it's a New Year's resolution that's starting a bit late...

A Different Take

It's so much easier to say what something is not than to say what it is. My Christianity is not about answers, it's not about rules, it's not about certainty, it's not about figuring out who's in and who's out – it's not about a lot of things, so what is it about?

There is no simple nor systematic way to state the elements of a faith. This blog will attempt to explore the elements of Christianity that I think are most essential and therefore also most controversial. But right now, a shot at a summary that might intrigue you sufficiently that you'll read on.

I'm advocating a contrast to clarity and certainty, so what I have to offer is ambiguity and paradox. These point to a mystery, and that is the key to it all. At the heart of existence is the mystery of why: the meaning and purpose of existence. Not how did we come into being, not debates about the Big Bang or the theory of evolution – but why do we exist? Why does the world exist? Why does the universe exist? What is its purpose and meaning?

No scientific theory will ever answer that question. And no human being can answer that question, as it lies beyond our abilities of comprehension. Humans have always recognized this – not the limits of what we know, but the limits of what we can know. We are finite, we cannot comprehend the infinite. We are mortal, we cannot comprehend that which has no beginning or ending. So what are we to do with the uncomfortable fact that we cannot answer a question that we cannot stop asking?

For as long as humans have existed, they have struggled with the concept of faith. We like to think that we have somehow “evolved” into more rational beings, but perhaps we just have yet to recognize as myths the myths that sustain us. Faith is the assertion that something is true without any possibility of proving its truth (Thomas Aquinas' twelve proofs for the existence of God notwithstanding). Faith says that we can talk about what cannot be captured in words, that we can claim meaning and purpose without knowing what they are, that the rational human mind while extraordinary is also extraordinarily limited, that there is more out there than our experience and our science can say. Faith argues that the most exciting things about life are the very things that scare us the most: risk and change and mystery. Faith turns the tables on the fears that can stunt our lives and hopes and uses them instead to push us in new directions.

I will focus on Christianity in this blog, because I'm a Christian and I want to offer a new view of that faith. I will discuss ways to think about other faiths from a Christian perspective – and Christianity from the perspectives of other faiths – in later chapters, however, for faith of any kind is important. But I'm a Christian because the language and imagery and stories of the Christian faith work for me, they point in directions I've found useful – and I think that is not only the best we can hope for, it is the best thing to hope for.

What Went Wrong

How did faith get hijacked? These days it seems that fundamentalist versions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism dominate the public perceptions of religion – and I'm sick of it. So let's look at what's gone wrong here, and then I can spend more time trying to point out what faith actually gets right.

I'd like to just bash the media here and say it's all their fault: conflict creates drama and sensational conflict creates sensational drama and that sells newspapers and magazines and TV broadcasts and internet blogs. So the media, in this scenario, naturally focus on the most conflict-oriented versions of the faith because they're always doing or saying something that is sufficiently dramatic to sell the news. I'd like to say it's that simple, because the dynamic is real – but the media can't be blamed for the existence of fundamentalism just because they like to report on it. Oh well.

Fundamentalism arises when people of faith become afraid that their faith is being co-opted by the dominant culture. If I can't see a difference between what I believe and what the culture around me seems to believe, then how does being a person of faith matter? And how am I to explain what my faith is if it has blurred into a cultural norm? Can you hear the insecurity behind these questions? I believe that insecurity – which exists in all of us regarding the issue of faith – drives many people, not unreasonably, to demand clarity about faith. They would like their faith defined, delimited, with clear rules that establish who is a person of faith and who is not.

This is, again, not an unreasonable demand – but the fundamentalist response to it is both tempting and dangerous. You want clarity? I'll give you clarity – I'll show you a list of commandments, a nice set of quotes, from Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or the person who can assert most loudly and boldly that he or she knows what God really means. Because that's what the clarity issue is really about: it's about our desire to know what God wants of us, and the desire of too many clergy to tell us that they know what God wants. You want to know whether you're in or out? Just take on my list of rules and you're in – and you can easily spot the rest of the folks who are out, because they're ignoring our rules. This is so tempting and so gratifying! And I will succumb to it on many occasions in this blog, I'm sure.

It's tempting because the alternative sounds so lame and unsatisfying. The alternative is to offer uncertainty as a benefit, and that's a tough sell. The alternative is to admit that we can't ever know what God wants because we don't know for certain whether God exists – and if God does exist we can't know what God thinks because we're not God – and therefore we don't actually know whether we're in or out because only God knows, and we can't say for certain what the rules are or how one ought to behave because we don't know what God wants. But we believe – we're not certain but we believe – that God loves us. And this uncertainty has one very important benefit: it keeps us humble. We can't very well push people around if we're too busy admitting that we don't actually know anything.

Do you see how lame that sounds? The best I can offer is a vision of becoming humble – whereas the purveyors of clarity and certainty offer a vision of being in God's inner circle, in some version of paradise that the rest of the world will wish they were part of. To be a fundamentalist is to get to say, This is what God wants, and I do it! I'm in!

The danger comes when we then decide that those who are not in are less worthy in God's eyes than those of us who are in. They are not as worthy in God's eyes, and therefore they are not as worthy in ours – and then it is easy to think that they are a threat to us. Then we can marginalize them or mistreat them or persecute them or even drive them away or find more appalling ways to get rid of them. Think about it: history is full of people, mostly people of faith, whose certainty that they knew what God wanted led to terrible things. Hitler is one obvious example – he was so certain that Jews were an evil cancer on the world that he needed to wipe them out. Today it's Islamist terrorists – perverters of the faith of Islam who have decided that all who do not ascribe not only to their faith but to their version of the faith are worthy only of death. Or it's the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, whose primary agenda is to promote their assertion that “God hates fags” (see their website of that name). These are just modern versions: the Spanish Inquisition ranks as one of the all-time worst, and it was run by the institutional Christian Church to root out the threat of those who did not believe what the Church wanted them to believe. The desire for clarity too often leads to a claim of certainty, and that always leads to some sort of tragedy.

But we forget this. We forget it over and over and day after day. We forget because we think this time we've got it, this time we're going in the right direction and God will smile upon us. We forget because we find it too hard to go in the other direction – too hard for the church or the temple or the mosque to admit that they do not have answers but only questions to pursue together, too hard to grapple with uncertainty and recognize that grappling as the essence of faith itself.

I have found by my own experience that when faced with a choice, I should always push myself to choose the harder thing. My faith, the Christian faith, has been hijacked by the desire for an easier way to go. All of the world's great faiths have been hijacked by this same desire – and all of us will succumb to it quite regularly as well. But let's try the harder way, and see whether it might not lead us in a better direction. Let's try to catch ourselves succumbing to the desire for clarity, and let's try again and again to push ourselves to the harder way of faith.

This is what I mean by “engaging life with faith.” Our narrator's crisis of confidence about her faith actually gets her to look at her life, decide what matters to her, and then act on that decision. She does not become a saint, she does not conform immediately or maybe ever to some standard visible set of behaviors, but she agonizes over her faith and what it should be and how it should shape her life, and that agonizing alone is a powerful act of faith. We don't worry about what isn't important to us – our narrator would not be worked up about her Christianity if it didn't matter to her, if she'd decided to be indifferent to it. Thus engaging herself in the conversation is itself a sign of her faith. And oddly enough, the same turns out to be true for the guy: our narrator finds it ironic that Alan turns into a “holy roller” some years later, but that doesn't surprise me at all. No one bothers to argue about faith, or expend the energy even to be contemptuous of faith (let alone rant about how dangerous or destructive faith is), if they don't find it in some way to be important. This guy has been thinking about people of faith, he's been wondering how they could accept such a childish thought system – he's been taking it seriously, and in the long run that turns out to matter more than he was, at the time, aware.

But aren't behaviors important? Doesn't it matter whether people go to church? Shouldn't a good Christian go to church and believe what the church tells them to believe and not complicate things? These questions are important, because they never go away – I never stop wondering if I'm doing any of the things a real person of faith ought to be doing, I never stop thinking other people are better at this than I am. Other people pray more and believe more deeply and don't get tangled up in paradoxes and ambiguities, why can't I? This deep-seated insecurity about faith is, itself, important – not because we need to get rid of it, but because it pushes us to ask ourselves all the right questions, it pushes us to ask whether our faith is engaging our lives. The problem is that there is no once-and-for-all answer to these questions, so too often we assuage our insecurity by avoiding it, by pretending it isn't there. We settle for the certainties offered by others as versions of faith: just believe what I tell you, I have the answers to your questions. Sometimes the offer is just that obvious, sometimes it's much more subtle, but the desire for it is the same: I don't know myself whether I'm a good believer, so you tell me. We avoid the insecurity by reducing faith to certainty, which isn't faith at all, and then we wrap ourselves in those certainties as if they were bubble-wrap that can protect us from all the ways life scares us and makes us insecure. And then we do look childish to the people around us, we look like we've let our fear turn off our brains and run our lives – and we have. And it happens to all of us, all of the time. The only question then is whether we stay in that bubble-wrap and call it faith – call it fundamentalism or Biblical literalism or whatever system it is that we think has removed the difficulties from our lives – or whether our insecurity about faith jolts us into questioning the certainties, rejecting the bubble-wrap, and engaging with life once again. I think the conversation narrated in this story has done just that to both of these people.

OK, you're saying, you've just read an awful lot into a pretty simple story. Well, sure. Because I have these kinds of conversations all the time, so I'm pretty confident that I can interpret things this way. Plus I know the author! But still: it's not important whether my interpretation of the story is exactly right or not, because no one can actually know the perfectly correct interpretation of any story, even its author. What is important is whether my interpretation is plausible, whether it gives us a useful way of looking at the questions the story itself raises. In the business of interpretation of stories, the answers are seldom as important as the questions.

And this story raises, for me, the most important question of all, the question of how to find and use one's faith during the rest of the week so that we engage our lives in ways that give us meaning and purpose, or at least a sense that maybe we're doing something positive now and then. That's the goal. Not getting into heaven, or being in the right church, or making God happy, or finding out what Jesus would do – none of those goals matter to me in the slightest, because they are beyond our knowing and I don't think they're even the right goals. The goal is to find meaning and purpose, even if we can't say what that meaning and purpose actually are. The goal is to have moments, five- or ten-second moments, where we feel ourselves to be engaged with life in such a way that it seems we're headed where life itself is headed. The goal is to be who God has made us to be. I don't claim to have a way to achieve this goal – in fact, I don't think this goal is achievable beyond those five-to-ten-second moments, which are vague and mystic and who knows whether they are actually anything at all. My hope, with this blog, is to offer a version of faith that points toward that goal, that calls us to work together toward that goal, that says that life itself is the pursuit of that goal that cannot be attained but without which we feel no meaning or purpose at all. In my case, in the case of this blog, this is a Christian faith – and it is available not only on Sundays, but also during the rest of the week.

Here's a story written by one of my parishioners, a young woman, for a class I taught:


November, sophomore year in college. Alan and I had been dating for about a month, though dating is probably too strong a term. We didn’t have classes together or friends in common, but we had by chance discovered a mutual fondness for tequila one Friday night. And as he was pretty cute even without the alcohol, making out ensued.

We had been drinking and making out for about a month when he announced, apropos of something I cannot recall, that he had always felt some contempt for Christians. I asked why, and added - because it seemed unfair to withhold - that I “considered myself a Christian.” He looked surprised and assured me that he had meant no offense. I can’t recall his reasoning exactly, but the gist was that he found Christianity too illogical a belief-system for any but the uneducated, ignorant masses, and thus couldn’t help but feel some...disdain (scrambling for something softer than contempt)...for thinking people who deliberately cast off reason for childhood sentiment. However, he hastened to add, he realized - even as he spoke the words - how narrow-minded they were; surely, he would have to rethink his position. For now, though, he very much wanted to drop the conversation. So did I.

But I couldn’t forget about it. It upset me - not that Alan could think those things, but that he could say them to me, never suspecting that it might put a damper on the evening. True, I wasn’t seen running to chapel on Sunday mornings (the campus Protestant group was too hell-happy for me), and my attempts to find an off-campus church had been somewhat lackluster. And Alan and I hadn’t exchanged many (any) soul-revealing confidences such that he should have known about my beliefs - and he could hardly be expected to guess them from what he did know of me. I understood that. Still, no one had ever just assumed that I wasn’t a Christian. And the assumption stung.

I can’t say the incident produced any immediate change in my behavior. I still spent most weekends ducking sobriety. Sunday mornings I shrugged off my hangover and visited my father (and did my laundry). I did, however, dump Alan the next weekend. A few years ago a friend of mine, who ran into him at a class reunion, said he’d become a “Holy Roller.”


I love this story. I love this story for lots of reasons, but especially because what gets the narrator's goat is not that Alan doesn't think much of Christians, it's that he doesn't think she's Christian. The story captures the ways that both believers and non-believers alike have standard images of what a faithful life looks like, and they either don't like it or don't think they measure up to it. The guy plays the all-Christians-are-scared-to-face-life card, while the narrator plays the good-Christians-go-to-church-and-don't-drink-and-make-out card, and both manage to trump any effort at getting at what it actually might mean to be Christian.

I want to make an attempt to get at what it might mean to be a Christian who engages with life without thinking he (in my case) has all the answers, just some interesting approaches to the questions. For example: in this story, I think both the narrator and her friend have images of Christian faith that are much too limited and narrow. First, Alan thinks the only way to have faith is to leave logic, or reasonableness, or rational thought, behind – which means that he has no idea just how much intellectual energy has been expended in exploring and explaining the minutest nuances of every major world religion over the past three or more millennia. How someone can simply dismiss people like Augustine, Maimonides, Dogen, Lao Tzu, Milarepa, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King as purveyors of “childhood sentiment” who have “cast off reason” is beyond me. Faith in its myriad forms and venues has engaged the greatest minds of every age – yet this is an extremely common assumption among non-believers, as it gives them the comforting illusion that they are taking on the real world while believers are lost in a naïve mist. Second, our narrator seems to think that good Christians are visible by their behavior, and they look like people other than herself. This too is an extremely common assumption – one held to greater and lesser degrees by every person of faith I know, including myself. We all think that other people lead better lives of faith than we do, and that it is always obvious what that life looks like and therefore who those people are.

What I want to suggest in this blog is that it is possible to be thoughtful and intellectual and rational and still accept an irrational faith – and that it is possible to be a person of deep commitment to faith and not have that be obvious to everyone around you. We Christians (or Jews or Hindus or whatever, for that matter) do not need to shut off our brains or wear our faith like some giant “I'm with stupid” t-shirt. We can instead learn to pay attention to the ways we use our faith to engage with the world – something that I'm convinced we all do more often and more thoughtfully than we ourselves are ever fully aware. For example: in this story, our narrator does not jump out of bed on Sunday mornings to go to church, she drinks to excess on occasion, and she has never had a heartfelt conversation about her faith with the guy she's ostensibly seeing – so she worries that she doesn't “look” Christian. She does, however, come to a profoundly faithful realization as a result of this difficult conversation: she dumps the guy. Not because of what he said, but – it seems to me, and it is certainly possible that I could be wrong – because people of faith don't have casual relationships with people they don't respect and who don't respect them. Our narrator asserts that the conversation did not change her behavior, but it seems to have led directly to the end of a relationship that on every level was pretty meaningless to both of them – and Christians, I would argue, take their fellow human beings too seriously to continue in such a relationship once they've realized that's what it is. I love this story, because I think both people are wrong about what it means to be Christian, and yet I think our narrator acts in a deeply Christian manner.

I hate being asked what I do by an airplane seatmate. I often lie and say I'm a teacher. I have actually been a teacher on a few occasions, so I can get away with it, I can make it sound plausible. It seems rude to tell a lie, but I know what will happen if I tell the truth. The conversation will go about like this:

“Well, I’m an Episcopal priest.”

“Really? Huh.” Seatmate squirms uncomfortably; I wince as seatmate continues: “I haven’t been to church [in five years] [since I was a child] [for longer than I can remember] [ever], and [I’ve been thinking I should go....] [I used to ...] [I just never liked...]” and then it's a long tale of when and why church became less important or unnecessary or just inconvenient. The thing is, I don't really want to hear a confession, I just want to sit quietly and read my detective novel. But then comes the real kicker. At some point the confession winds down, and then I get the question, the one that has always made me crazy:

“So, I know what you do on Sundays, but what do you do during the rest of the week?”

Several sarcastic answers generally spring to mind, but I try to resist the urge to say them – sarcasm is not a priest’s best mode. The problem is that many people really do think I only work one day a week, and it's very hard to explain what fills the six-days-a-week that every clergyperson I know works - the hospital visits, the midweek services, the committee meetings, the planning sessions, the newsletter writing, the premarital counseling, the postmarital counseling, the Thursday morning Bible studies, the preparation for Sunday services, the, the....

The other problem is that I get very uncomfortable with what I imagine my seatmate is already assuming about me. “A priest, huh?” I bet he's thinking. “Oh jeez, he's one of those Christians who think they're going to heaven and everyone else isn't – probably doesn't drink or smoke or listen to anything but Bach and chanting monks, hates homosexuals and abortion, votes right-wing Republican and thinks God is on his side in every argument... what am I going to talk to him about? He probably already thinks I'm a bad person....” We Christians have developed a public image that is just awful – and it's particularly appalling to me personally because none of those assumptions are true. I don't think God spends an awful lot of time worrying about our political system or our sexuality, I think most of our contemporary world is full of issues that are about fear and love is supposed to drive out fear, I drink and used to smoke and listen mostly to rock and blues and anything my boys think I should give a listen, and I believe everyone's going to heaven. Stop putting me into a box - I don't think the purpose of being faithful is to make other people feel bad.

I'm trying to become a better fellow airplane traveler. This blog is my effort, then, to answer that question, seriously and with some humor, some reverence and some irreverence. Because here's the real answer. What do I do during the rest of the week? I try to live out my Christian faith. I try to connect my faith with my day-to-day encounters and events. This sounds simple, but it's frustratingly and neverendingly hard. I believe that faith – actually, any faith – is the primary tool we have for engaging with life, with its sorrows and joys, sufferings and triumphs. But I also believe that it takes constant energy and constant desire to use faith in this way, because life is scary and hard and it's easier to run away and hide than take it on. So for all my rest of the weeks for the rest of my life I will keep trying to get myself to use my faith to take life on – and to help others do the same.

So here's the thing: if you are a fundamentalist Christian, a Biblical-literalist Christian, a God-hates-fags Christian, a Darwin-is-the-devil Christian, a good-people-like-me-are-saved-and-Jesus-will-leave-the-rest-behind Christian, then you should read no further – what I have to say is just going to make you think I'm not really Christian, by your standards, at all. But if you hear me say I'm Christian and you think you already know what that means, if you assume that I must not be that bright and I'm probably afraid of science and the modern world and need to hide out in miracle stories and worldviews of another era, then I wish you would read on because I'm sick of people thinking that's what a Christian is.

What I want to offer here is another version of Christianity. My version of Christianity is about paradoxes and ambiguities rather than blanket assertions or truth claims, it's about struggling to make sense of the world rather than thinking we've found the right set of rules, it's about acknowledging at the start how much we don't know and can't know about the meaning and purpose of the world we live in and then asserting there is meaning and purpose nonetheless. And this version of Christianity is not actually mine at all – it's a version that has always existed but that is infinitely harder to sell. Too much of the time we prefer answers to questions, rules to ambiguities, certainties to paradoxes. I think that's because deep down we know that there are no certainties or simple answers, but we find the resulting awareness of our constantly-shifting ground uncomfortable and so we latch on to the rules and certainties that other people claim to have found. Christianity has sold itself that way far too often in its history, and it does so much too successfully in this country today, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to be Christian – or even the best way. Ambiguity and uncertainty may be uncomfortable, but they open up possibilities.