The Fullness of Time: Reconciliation in Ancestral Memory

Heaven in 2017.

As the shards of my consciousness reform after the inevitable energy drain received in the aftermath of an intense five-day urban program (and the final project for my ministry with InterVarsity), the depth of my awareness for the wounds of young people returns. When the reactive depression recedes like a strong tide, and the wind stings my face beside a salty shore, and the connective tissue in my thoughts, emotions, and passions resume their normal furious pull -- there is another, deeper crisis in miniature, the point where my courage falters, a split-second where the absurdity overwhelms and paralyzes.

In a talk I gave at the end of Day Three of the program, I described the work of French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, who evolved from the same colonial European milieu that produced Derrida and dialogued with the great existentialists (whom he never enjoyed being lumped in with). He is famous for giving flesh to the concept of the Absurd, which in brief is the experience of an overwhelming, usually objective desire, which is not met and thus prompts a crisis. His parable of Sisyphus invites us to reimagine the Greek myth of an arrogant king who was punished by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill, and then watch it roll back down to repeat the whole process for eternity. The process of rolling the boulder up the hill, for Camus, represents the absurd struggle of humanity in its desire to find meaning in the circumstances of its existence. Of course, he argues, humanity has discovered that there is no meaning in its circumstances (remember Camus lived during two World Wars that nearly annihilated his culture), and in the rejection of the two most obvious choices of "rebellion," suicide and religion (which he calls "philosophical suicide"), we must create our own meaning and choose to find happiness within the depth of our circumstances. Should we choose to do so, we will not remain slaves to a fruitless effort seeking purpose and meaning externally, but rebel against these circumstances and discover the fullness of human flourishing within (which the Post-Structuralist Peter Rollins describes as the true definition of the Sacred).

A careless reader of Camus could read the contemporary technology-obsessed, neurotic, consumeristic, pleasure-driven society as one manifestation of such a rebellion, where the "boulder" is the task of accumulating more wealth, status, or power, and the "meaning" we create is found in our hedonistic addiction to superficiality. I'm almost certain Camus would quickly point out that the social media, technology, and rising suicide rates (in middle class America) point to a society that still does not acknowledge its own fruitless chase after a nonexistent Pleasure-God. To make things worse, the vast majority of religion follow the cues of the broader culture to provide parishioners and congregants with an emotionally cathartic and thus "meaningful" existence, even though such an endeavor is dependent upon crafty rhetoric, music, and other stimulants. Divorce rates and domestic abuse point to a deep misunderstanding of the nature of commitment, and ultimately, an alienation from Love itself. According to North American religion, the chief end of our existence is the ultimate in escape-from-our-conditional-existence: the pursuit of "heaven".

To be sure, I lean into the vision presented by the Bible and recognize the church's call to "look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." Revelation, though coded in dream-language and circulated to give hope to a suffering Church, speaks truth about the journey, about the truth of the narrative: there is an End. Yet curiously the Bible, both in Hebrew prophecy (Ezekiel and Daniel) and Greek (through John) present the End not merely as a time, but as an Event, a Place. As a younger man I edified my frustration with "heaven-talk" by reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope and listening to Gungor sing "I don't know what you've been told but heaven is coming down to the world..." Still, my frustration remained. I work (at least for another 2 weeks) for an evangelical organization and at one point was trained to give "calls to faith" in order to raise chapter attendance and report on our success (I admit my cynicism clouds my evaluation, but my gut tells me the only people who care about the numbers are conservative donors). This came in the midst of a massive crisis that ostracized many of my close friends and colleagues from our organization, and stigmatized InterVarsity as little more than "playing woke" by appeasing millennials to mask a facade of fundamentalism. I felt that my integrity had been compromised without any action on my part: in short, this was no longer the organization that I joined as a student, where love was shown unconditionally, least of all for the finer points of theology. Yet I wanted to continue doing the work that I wished to do, that I felt was important, that provided a distraction from the crumbling hypocrisy which drives so many away from the Christian faith. I was not strong, and the work, the Christian ministry, became my own boulder, became the thing that I thought would save me from the absurdity of a work based on a lie. It cost me two horrific mental health breakdowns, but the subsequent disillusionment saved me from my ego-religion more satisfied with the savior in the mirror and less with a rejected Galilean bastard from Nazareth.

The Lie, endemic to evangelicalism and largely present in my own Catholic church, is that our religion offers a convenient "out" for our suffering, and provides the ultimate in human desires: eternal life. You may bristle at the thought. Listen to that.

But wait, didn't Jesus talk about eternal life all the time? Well, we read that language in John a lot, to be sure. Haven't we all memorized John 3:16 as children, and isn't "heaven" the fullest expression of God's love for humanity? Lest we only believe?

Biblical exegesis forces us to reexamine John's words a bit. God loves the world, which is the Greek kosmos, thus reflecting the literally cosmic nature of God's concerns. God sends his only-begotten Son, the substantial participant in Divine glory, to borrow language from the Eastern Church. Whoever believes, or puts their trust in Him, shall not perish but have eternal life. The Greek apollyon describes total annihilation, and is another name for the Angel of Death found in Revelation (9:11). Another way this phrase could be read is "who puts trust in Him will not be given over to utter annihilation, but will live in that Life which has always been and will always be. Remembering the amazing prologue John wrote to describe the Word, who in the beginning was with God and was God (Jn 1:1), we are surely connecting the dots to realize that Jesus, as partaking in the Divine Nature, opens for us the Way out of destruction, meaninglessness, and annihilation into the Life-outside-of-time.

For me, my imagination cannot begin to grasp this "new reality" and I can only talk indirectly based on the way God interpenetrates all of reality with his goodness. Thus all of us are invited into the Depth of existence that Jesus proclaimed: the poor! The meek! Those persecuted! They are citizens in the Kingdom of Heaven! This Kingdom, as any freshman student of Mark's gospel in InterVarsity will tell you, is not some abstract reality separate from our existence, but poking through, behind, within, every step of the road. In Jesus' words, the Kingdom is at hand.

And yet what if I take courage and examine the fear that rises when I think about the "Fullness of Time" that Paul uses to describe Christ (interestingly, when he writes of his incarnate birth of the Virgin Mary [cf Gal 4:4]) and peer into the Hope that comes with the Divine plan? I face the resistance born not only of my own limitations, biases, and suspicions, but the overwhelming burden of the past upon my conscience. On both sides of my family the legacy of missionary "calling" has left in its wake poverty, mental illness, infidelity, adultery, divorce, spousal and child abuse, and little in the way of any semblance of acknowledgment/repentance/apology. Yet I continue to hope and listen to the hope within, that there is a greater power hidden in radical love that can undo the corruption of our human frailty. At some point I have to admit that there is no way I can carry these burdens, but it is foolish to pretend that they don't affect my life at all. Is there faith within me to hope for Christ's restoration, redemption, his reconciliation to touch all these broken stories? As I look within, not only do I say "Yes!" but it is one of the deepest and overwhelming desires that I have, and perhaps is at the core of my own suffering, if I am emotionally honest.

To invite the generations of my family to genuine relationship unhindered by age, paternalism, or the failure to adequately speak to each other is a wonder to imagine. I never knew my grandfather, who died before I was born, but his PTSD born in the flak-riddled skies above Berlin in 1944 meant that there was never a moment of my father's life that was untouched by horrific, unspeakable trauma. To allow us, the Gurney/Górny men of California-New Mexico-Pennsylvania-Poland to speak beyond the ache of an immigrant's terror, the soot of coal mines, frostbite of Siberia, or death in the mud under Russian tank treads is a hope that I continue to carry, a hope that I give into the careful hands of Christ. For my mother's side, I want to relationships to drop any pretense of religious guilt or obligation that stabs like a knife between siblings, cousins, and generations. Love can simply be love, liberated of conditions so that we may speak of the Chiricahua ancestors who died in the wars against America, or of the Mexican Revolution that wrought havoc on our villages in Chihuahua. The Ego would like to say that "justice" involves the repayment of suffering upon those who caused all this pain; I say they have reaped what they sow, for the world only continues its suffering.

But there is an audacious image that has haunted me for the past few months. Its beauty attacks the center of my own defenses, and since it came in the Sacred Silence before unconscious sleep, I choose to conclude that it was a gift from the Holy Spirit, and not of my own imagination. But even if it is my own mental doing, who is to say He is not active in these mental pathways?

Written into this imaginary space beyond time is another interaction. As I walk behind my Polish grandmother, my Scots-Irish cousins, and the Mexican peasants finally speaking freely to the Indian warriors and medicine women, I come to a solitary man. He is dressed in a thick dusty coat, once crisply pressed but now grey and worn. He has stripped medals and insignia away, and his black cap falls to reveal a thinning mop of hair combed hastily to one side. His face is aged beyond the mid-fifties, but its features are unmistakable. His hands drafted letters, called meetings, and sent millions of his own countrymen and millions of others to their deaths. The infinite pain of Adolf Hitler is finally streaming from his eyes in constant, silent tears. A voice calls his name, spoken with tenderness and familiarity in perfect Austrian-inflected German. At first Adolf flinches, for the short man who approaches wears the peasant garb of Galilee, with sharp features and wooly hair, clearly Jewish. The man Yeshua does not hesitate, he reaches up and wraps Adolf in a firm embrace and they both weep...sorrow, grief, and joy wrapped up in that infinite moment of tenderness. The breath finally steadies as Hitler recovers from his sobs and Yeshua steps aside while a woman younger than both of them, tears streaming silently, trembles in their presence. They embrace, and Adolf speaks her name, "Klara...mutti..." and an ocean of heartache is transformed, here at the End of all things.