Ethan Renoe's Blog, page 15

The Depths, Part 3: A Ship Without Sails

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Start with Part 1 here!

Hours later the lights had descended from the horizon as the thing got closer and closer to shore. We could now see that it was a gigantic ship—one bigger than I ever could have thought possible, and the lights aboard it were mesmerizing. I couldn’t believe such a vessel could even exist, it seemed more like a dream than reality.

My father had told the men to take up their arms and keep watch on the shore. Meanwhile, he had gone down to the small boat where he would die and from which he would eventually sink into the deep.

I met him there, where we were finally away from the other men and the women and children who had also woken up from the commotion. I asked him what he knew about it.

My father hesitated—something I had never seen him do in all my years—and kept working his hands along the small ropes in his boat. Then he did another thing I had never seen him do: he spoke to me without looking at my eyes.

My father always maintained an intense gaze whenever he spoke to someone. He said that to look away from someone while speaking to them shows weakness and men should not be weak. At other times he had told me that men who cannot look you in the eye are often lying.

That thought passed into my head and for the first time in my life, I wondered if my father may be lying to me. He had never lied before—or at least, not that I knew of. Now I began to question everything.

“Father?” I asked hesitantly, hoping he would look up and meet my eyes with his own.

But he did not. He kept his eyes down on the ropes where his hands worked.

“What is that ship, father?” I asked again.

“This is my fault,” he replied without looking up. “I brought them here, so I will go out and meet them.”

“No!” I instinctively shouted before I could think. “I can’t let you go alone!” I continued to speak without thinking, but as the words came out of my mouth, I felt my throat sink down into my stomach. “I will go with you.”

“No, my son,” he replied. My resolve to accompany my father to the larger ship hardened. Inside my head, I thought that if he rowed out alone, I would take one of the other small boats and go out behind him.

The sky’s blackness began to crack and give way to a gray morning. The sun had not yet breached the horizon, but it was getting easier to discern shapes and people. The ship didn’t seem to have gotten any closer, though I’m sure it had. The horizon is a long way off.

My father had finished preparing his boat and turned to the rest of the tribe gathered on the shore. In a loud voice, he yelled, “I will go out to these lights on the horizon and find what they have come for. I will not let them harm you. If I do not return, it was an honor leading you, my people, and dying on your behalf. Goodbye.”

He promptly stepped into his boat and used the oars to push off from the beach. No one moved, they simply watched him paddle off into the water. Ten yards, then twenty. I waited until just the right moment to run for one of the other boats and follow him. It had to be a long enough time that the other strongmen had dispersed, but not so long that I couldn’t catch up with my father.

Eventually the moment came. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, so I slowly walked to where the other eight boats were overturned on the shore. Then I began moving quickly. I flipped over a small craft and lugged the oars inside. Then pulled it to where the waters were lapping at the sand. I didn’t look behind me, but I heard some of the men talking to me. They were not angry yet, just confused and asking what I was doing.

I pushed the boat out into the water and once the hull left the sand, I hopped aboard. It oscillated beneath me as I found my way to the bench and got the oars into their rings. It was only now that I was facing the shore and saw some of the other men had run down to the edge of the water. They were not coming after me, they were primarily just watching me row out away from them, toward my father and toward the large ship.

After several minutes of pulling at the oars, I could hear my father yelling at me. It was so faint I couldn’t understand the words, but it was clear that he did not want me to follow him.

We continued this way for a while. Every time I glanced over my shoulder, I seemed to be the same distance from the ship, as if I was going nowhere. The shore in front of me continued to get smaller though.

This reinforced my hatred of the water: it didn’t seem to align with the laws of land and math and sense that the rest of the world did.

And as much as I tried not to look beneath my vessel, I couldn’t help it from time to time. Each time I looked down at the black waters holding up my craft, I had to remind myself to breathe. I was sitting atop the chaos and for some unknown reason, it continued to hold me afloat.

At one point, I glanced behind me and saw the ship finally appeared to be closer. It was marginally larger than before. my father stayed a steady distance behind me. He occasionally yelled out for me to turn back, but I kept rowing after him.

The skin on my hands burned but every time the blisters rubbed the handles I pushed the focus on them from my mind. I glanced behind me again and the ship was closer. I could now make out multiple levels of the ship. It had lights and poles sticking up from it, and as I slowly got closer, I could detect humans on board.

Suddenly it hit me: why the ship seemed so strange to me. It did not have sails. Nor did it have oars—though they would have to be massive to propel a ship that size anywhere, bigger than a tree trunk even. I wanted to just stop and stare at the ship, but I couldn’t look at it and continue rowing at the same time.

The waves tossed me back and forth. It was not a choppy day on the waters, but with such a small boat, even miniature bumps in the ocean would toss me back and forth. Even when the boat rocked violently from side to side, I tried not to look down into the depths. I knew what awaited me there: death and chaos. I knew there were things living beneath my small craft which could withstand the might of the water without being sucked down into its stomach. Perhaps I feared these faceless creatures more than the water itself.

I was now close enough to the ship to see the faces of men and women on board. They looked nothing like me. They didn’t look like anyone from my tribe—or any of the surrounding tribes for that matter. They had light skin and their clothes were dark blue and bright white. I had never seen cloth so white in all my life. It was like wearing a cloud, but it was cut so precisely.

I saw the men throw a rope down to my father. He was now only a few lengths from the massive ship which was as tall as a tree. Taller, perhaps.

“Father!!” I yelled. I stopped rowing and watched to see what would happen.

My father took the rope and hitched it to the boat. He looked at me, then began climbing up the rope along the hull of the impossibly large ship. The men on board looked down at him and watched as he made his way up the rope. The strength of his arms still surprised me, as he was about to die and now he was climbing up a rope to a foreign ship.

I rowed my boat next to his as quickly as I could, and despite being terrified, intended to climb up the rope behind him. When I came alongside his boat, I threw the oars into mine, grabbed the rope at my feet and tied our boats together. Then, as quickly as I could—which was difficult in two flimsy boats in choppy waters bouncing in the wake of a massive ship—I stepped from my boat to my fathers, and then grabbed the rope leading up to the deck of the ship.

My arms were not as strong as my father’s, but by putting my feet on the ship’s hull, I was able to slowly walk and pull my way up after my father. He was already standing on the deck with the men, but I could not see what he was doing—or what they were doing to him. He had stopped yelling at me to turn back and had apparently accepted me coming after him.

I finally crested the deck and what I saw amazed me—even more up close than I had seen from a distance. There were poles and wheels and all sorts of colorful tools made of materials I had never seen before. I could not believe my eyes. I was stunned for a moment such that when my father spoke to me, I was still staring in disbelief at the machinery.

All my life I had only seen wooden shafts and poles and weapons made of sharpened stones. We cooked food with fire and lived in tents made of animal hides. My brain could not even comprehend the complex technology I was now trying to take in and figure out all at once.

“Son,” said my father, holding his hand toward one of the other men on the deck, “This is Captain William.”

Continued here in Part 4!

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En Route

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If nothing else, this quarantine has shown us that all of our anxious busyness of the past served to hide us from our true teleological aims.

Let me put that in English:

Before the quarantine took effect, we were always going going going. I know a lot of people — including me — who talked about being still and meditating, but rarely actually did it. Because if we were ever actually still, we may have to encounter ourselves. And we may have to encounter God. And we may have to address the void in us which reminds us that there is a hunger there for more meaning than material can give us.

All of our going helped occupy our minds away from the fact that all of us are going to die some day. That we are on a journey, and that each minute of each day counts. Maybe this specific minute is boring or meaningless in and of itself; if you could hold any random minute under a microscope, it may not reveal much to you.

But each minute, in the context of your life, matters because each one moves you an inch closer to your grave. It slides you a hair closer to the portion of your life which is lived out on the other side of the soil.

In this quarantine, take advantage of this rare moment to examine your life and look toward your death. Are you prepared to approach that Great Mystery, or are you busy binging Netflix to distract yourself?

Don’t lose sight of the journey you are on; a journey called life. And more importantly, don’t forget that all journeys lead somewhere.

Where is yours taking you?

Closer to God or away from Him?

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The Depths, Part 2: Lights on the Horizon

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Read Part 1 here first!

When my father had closed his eyes and drifted into his dreams, I left his room and went to find my woman. It was late, but she had said she would stay awake for me. I made my way to her home and whispered out her name at the entryway.

She came out and didn’t say a word, she just wrapped her arms around me. I could tell she had been asleep before I came, but it was the sort of sleep which was light as she waited for me to come by.

Her arms remained wrapped around my waist for a long time, and it was here, in the safety of her presence, I could finally let the tears out which I held for so long beside the bed of my father. They ran down into the hair of my lover and she kept her head tucked into my chest. Her ear was against my heart, as if listening intently for something.

I had always been drawn to this woman, and there was something about her small size which drew me in. I always found that the warmth and size of her presence was inverse to her physical size. I could wrap my arms around her and feel the entirety of her being fit within mine. But the comfort she brought my body; the way her nearness seemed to relax every molecule of my muscles, was far bigger than her stature.

I found that even before I met her and adored her, I was always draw to smaller women. In many ways, they contrast the unfathomable vastness of the water. The water is an untamable void, black beyond comprehension and mysterious to the point of agony.

This woman—the end of all things—is equally mysterious, but at least I can comprehend her dimensions. I can measure her small, brown shoulders and hold all of her at once. This small woman is the antidote to my fear of the deep.

I held her outside her home for what felt like hours. My tears ran dry eventually and her grip around my waist loosened and she took a step back, letting her hands slide to my sides.

She looked up at me and said, “you will get through this.” Even in the darkness I could still sense the intensity of her big eyes looking up into mine. “You’ve been a good son and you will get through this.”

I could have stood on the ground outside her home all night, just holding her close to me, but that’s when everything changed. Her home was several hundred feet from the shore and that moment is when I looked up and saw something out on the water I had never seen before. It was a light. No, it was multiple lights, but all very close together, as if they came from the same place.

I had never seen lights so bright from such a distance. It was like they had tied miniature versions of the sun together and bound them to the horizon. Fire was not so bright, not at this distance, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. My woman saw my eyes and turned to see for herself.

“What is that?” she asked, as if I could possibly know.

I didn’t answer, but I took her hand and began walking toward the shore. Even being so close to the shore sent a shiver down my spine. The mysterious lights on the horizon only added to my quiet terror—after all, could this be a creature risen from the chaotic depths? Are those hideous beasts capable of radiating such bright lights, visible at this distance?

I tried to hide the quivering of my body from my woman, but I’m sure she still felt it in my palm. If she did, she didn’t say anything about it. She already knew about my fear of the water, despite my efforts to appear brave. My mind raced and I contemplated running to my father and waking him so he could see the lights. I made that decision inside a second and, turning to gently pull my woman by the hand, made my way back to my father’s home.

She understood and followed me silently toward our home, both of us constantly turning to watch the horizon and see what the lights would do. When we made it to my home, she waited outside the door while I went in and gently touched my father’s arm.

“Father,” I whispered. He didn’t stir, so I pushed harder and repeated it louder.

“Mmm, what is it, son?” he then jerked his entire body but then looked up and saw me, his mind still deciphering dream from reality. “Mmm what?”

“Father, there are lights on the horizon. They are brighter than fire and they are all grouped together, like a home made of suns resting just on the horizon of the water.”

Suddenly my father sat up and paced to the doorway. Without pausing to put on his day clothes or shoes, he tore down the trail that led to the water so he could see the lights for himself. It was as if he knew what was happening, like it had happened before. Like the wolves were back and were tearing apart the children.

He paused when he came to the clearing of the beach and looked out. His eyes were weaker than they once were, but he as far from blind. He stood there, staring out over the water for no longer than ten seconds before turning and running back into our settlement. He went to several of the homes where the strongmen lived and called their names.

The lights from the deep remained exactly where they were every time I turned back to look at them.

My woman and I, our hands still tied together, followed my father around at a distance but his crazed haste was nearly dizzying as he zigzagged from one home to another. Eventually, he slowed enough for me to approach him and ask, “What is it, father? What are those lights?”

He looked back into my eyes and at first said nothing, letting the smoldering burn of his gaze burn the gravity of the situation into my mind.

“Is it something from the water? Are they coming for you?” I asked.

“No, son,” he answered firmly. “This is far worse than a sea creature. It’s—” before he could finish his explanation, some of the other men had come out of their tents and were coming to him for instruction. He turned to them, leaving our conversation in the air, and began delivering orders. I watched his back, with his two long braids running down his back, as he ordered these men who had known and obeyed him all of their lives.

I turned and looked at my woman, still holding her hand in the darkness, and she turned from the movement of the men to meet my eyes. My hand impulsively squeezed hers and neither of us said anything.

Read Part 3 now!

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The Depths, Part 1: “In the morning I will die.”

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“I’m ready,” said my father to the room full of elders and tribespeople gathered around his bedside. They’ve come to see him off, to witness his departure from our tribe; from the world. His long braids lay on either side of him, running silver and black along his body.

He was not ill, but his strength was failing and he was not able to lead in the way he once did. One by one, the families slid out of his presence, starting with the families with young children. Then the youths and the rest of the women.

When only a few of the strongmen remained, my father reached from his bed of stacked pillows and grabbed my forearm. His strength surprised me as his fingers clamped my wrist and pulled me closer to him. He then spoke as if to me, though loud enough for the rest of the men to hear.

“Is the boat ready?” he asked me intensely, as if the world would splinter and divide if it were not. I was accustomed to this intensity in my father, but tonight the subject was more difficult than ever before.

I nodded, “The boat is ready, father. What do you—”

“Tonight I will be with my family,” he cut me off. “You will stay by my side. I will hold the hand of my woman until I rest. I have completed the work of my land, and I have led my tribe as well as possible. I can honestly say I have led my people to the best of my ability. Not perfectly, but to the best of my ability.” His voice thundered through the room and I sensed that my eyes were not the only ones brimming with tears.

My father continued, “I will rise in the morning and go down to the water. There at the edge I will say goodbye to you, my son. To my wife. To my tribe. I will get in the boat, and there, tomorrow morning, I will die.” He must have sensed my arm trembling because he—still holding it—gave it a squeeze that said be still.

I sniffled and stood up straighter.

“I have done what I have needed to do, so tomorrow morning I will die.”

I didn’t want to imagine the waters just a few hundred feet from where we were. Those waters which I had stood beside hundreds of times with my father, as he explained that the waters are chaos. The waters are the womb from which the entire world rose.

One time, when I was a young boy, he led me through a whipping storm down to the water’s edge. The waves roared triple the height of my father, and he pointed to them. “See this, son? This is the fury of the gods.”

And indeed, the fear of that tempest never fully left my bones. I never set out very far into the waters the way the fishermen did, nor did I ever desire to quest beyond the horizon. In all my years, I don’t think I ever went as far as the crest of the horizon which is visible from shore. It always frightened me to see how the earth bent there the way it did no other place. The forestland prevented me from being terrified of the depths because you can only see so far in every direction.

The prairie gave me whispers of terror if I ever stood on the shoulder of the world and beheld it as it yawned out to the sky, an awful span of space wide before me. The land was flat and wide on this edge of our settlement and you could dedicate a lifetime to pacing every cubit of all this visible land and never cover all of it.

The breadth made me dizzy. I was scared of staring across the prairie too long, but it was the water I truly could not bear.

Whenever I went out on a boat with the other men, they displayed no fear or hesitancy to place their feet on the thin boards separating them from the chaos, but I gripped the mast for my life or wrapped ropes around my fists just in case of a capsize.

Beyond boyhood I could not even look over the edge of the vessel into the water because to look down may be to glimpse that which is greater than I: that which can withstand the chaotic deep.

The other boys would invent stories of what dwelt beneath our tiny ships, our pathetic attempts to tame the depths. They would tell me of monsters and of the dead who, much like my father in the morning, make their way down into the darkness of the waters but never fully die. If you fall off of a boat or swim down too deep, you could feel their fingers reaching out for your own. You may feel a palm of their hand graze your back, but at such depths, you can never be sure what you’re really seeing or feeling. The boys sometimes have contests to see who can swim down the deepest, but of course I never participate.

I imagined my father’s hand, which still gripped my arm, graying beneath the water and floating lifelessly, reaching out for any passing fish or swimmer or monster. I pictured his eyes pecked out by the lipless fish as he made his bed on the ocean floor eternally.

“Tomorrow I will die,” he said, but he did not say how. He simply told me to hitch the smallest boat in our fleet on the dock near our settlement and the rest would unfold exactly as it needed to.

I didn’t know if I would see the life of my father end or if he would sail away and die past the horizon. I wondered if I would know when the moment had come, when he had fully surrendered to the deep.

I feared for my father though. I was afraid of him descending into the water. I was petrified to think of a storm rolling in again and the waves casting his decayed body back upon our shore, a blatant sign of what happens to those who give in to the chaos.

My father showed no fear as he lay in his bed presently. He did not weep like the rest of the men surrounding him, nor did his voice waver like mine does when I think about the waters, or when I fought another man.

Last week—my father did not know this—I challenged another man my own age to a fight because he had stared at the woman I admired, and we decided to fight with our hands to find who would earn the right to pursue her. As I approached the place of our battle, my stomach spun and rattled within me like a wind blowing through tent flaps, and I only hoped that my exterior did not betray such insecurity.

I won the fight of course—there was never any question about that. Even as I approached the location, though my stomach fluttered, I knew I would have her. It was her. It has always been her. I never doubted for a moment that she would be my witch.

I know many of the surrounding tribes use that word to mean someone who devours infants and casts spells on her enemies. In our tribe it stands for something different: Woman into the Chaos. WITCh. I forget that not everyone is familiar with the language of my people, but the origin of the word, as it has been passed down, is just that this woman will be with you forever, until you step into the chaos. The two of you spend your lives together until the waters swallow you, at which point you are literally in the chaos together.

And the men are the HITChes. The Husbands into the Chaos.

There was never a question who would be my witch—it would be her, and it could be no other. I knew it since I first laid eyes on her small form, pulling crops from the fields even though her head barely rose above the hedge. Her black hair fell along her back in two neat braids and I couldn’t take my eyes away, even after she looked up and caught me staring at her.

And that was the moment—when I first saw her eyes. They were as black as her hair, laced in almond brown skin which rose and folded around her sharp features. I knew that to look into her eyes for the rest of my life may send the same shivers down my spine as the black waters themselves, but that was a thrill I was willing to embrace.

And there was no one for her but me, so I knew that I would win this fight, or I would be as good as sunk into the waters. It wasn’t an option, it would simply happen that I would win.

He stood a full head taller than me, but I knocked the man out in under a minute. He did not have the same desperation for this woman that I did. I then walked directly to the home of my woman. I wrapped my arms around her neck and kissed the top of her head. I stepped back and held her shoulders in my hands

I asked her to be my witch, and, even though she knew I hated the waters, to be with me until I sank into the chaos. Tears were already running down her face and she nodded. Her father came to the door behind her and smiled. He opened a case of the hardwater and we shared a swig. The burn bolted into my stomach as the fire ran down my throat and blossomed into a warm ember.

I held my woman beneath the stars for many hours that night. We talked and we sat in silence and then we talked and then we sat in silence.

It was always her, there was no question.

My father never found out about the fight, but he did rejoice with me for my woman. He smiled and placed that firm grip on my shoulder, but when I asked him if he could postpone his voyage to the deep, the corners of his mouth dropped and his voice lowered.

“My son, the day is set. I will be surrounded by my people in the evening, and then in the morning I will die. I will set out into the vast waters and be swallowed by her entirely. I will join your mother in the ancient chaos.”

Upon hearing this, I lost control of my body and slunk to the floor like a hollow puppet.

Neither my mother nor my father would be present for the happiest day of my life, when I would become one skin with my woman. They would not get to see her adorned with the rare flowers of the prairie, or me standing tall in the garment of my home (That garment is a special tradition among my people. We compile our garment in just the right way such that it weaves together our childhood bed sheets, our adult bedsheets, certain flaps from the entrance of our home, signifying that we have passed through each necessary stage of life, and then a new patch of fabric which we create from our mother’s loom. This has a new design which we create and it’s presented for the first time at the ceremony). They would not know my children or help raise them.

I knelt on the dirt before my father, pleading with him to witness my union with my woman, but he held my head and told me it was just not possible. The voices of the deep were calling to him and he could not alter the course of his future any more than he could tell the gales to stop their blowing.

We would rise in the morning to find, however, that my father would be late to his appointment with the waters.

Read Part 2 now!

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Jesus, the Tornado

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Last night I stood in the post-shower mist of my bathroom and watched the water particles swirl through the air, thinking about how sooner than later, every one would fall victim to gravity before settling to a surface and resting until evaporation called it back to the air again.

I was thinking about how motion is central to the experience of the world, and if you think about it, every job you’ll ever have is simply to move one thing to somewhere else. You may be a literal mover, helping people move boxes of their crap from one home to a bigger one. You may be in finance, moving digital money from one digital wallet to another one, or maybe you’re a banker who still moves tangible cash.

Whatever your job is, you’re being paid to move something, and often this movement requires more skill than just picking something up and putting it down. A skilled plumber removes the old wax seal and affixes the new one around the base of the toilet. Picasso moved paint to the exact right position on his canvasses in order to propel him into worldwide fame. Et cetera.

The world is bursting with fitful new ways to move things around, and new things which need to be moved.

With all this motion going on all around us, it’s hard to believe in the inevitable heat death of the universe in a trillion years; the death of all things.

The coming cessation of the spinning of all atoms.

The mist of protons and electrons, just like the steam after my shower, will all settle into silence and rise no more.

Unlike us.

Unlike the people whose bones will eventually settle into their coffins which function more like sci-fi sleeping pods than permanent crypts.

The issue is, when I look at the flurry of a world which surrounds us — the reality we woke up into one day, and one day will fall asleep beneath — it’s hard for me to believe in a coming stillness that will seize the tendons of the faithful.

And the unfaithful.

That’s the problem with Christianity as I grew up knowing it: It’s static and still. It doesn’t fit into the vibrant buzz of the world. It was like the dirt lying on the ground, offering some support but mostly just lying there.

Enter Jesus.

The Tornado from Nazareth came kicking up all the old dirt and debris alike, spinning everything into a flurry — dead old religion included.

The problem with tornados is, you can’t squeeze them into books. Sure, you can read about the science of a tornado and the how’s and why’s of them. You can very evidently see their aftermath too.

But you can’t contain one.

And no matter how many books you read about tornados, you’ll never understand their screaming ferocity until you’re curled in your basement covering your head from the steel-twisting wind wrenching your home apart. In elementary school I was so terrified of tornados — not unlike photos of the deep —the other students would bully me just by showing me pictures of them. The twisting, tubular bodies of the untamable entities haunted my mind like specters. Even a little textbook photo of a tornado would send shivers down my spine and make me jolt to the next page. It was something about the wild, uncontrollable arc of raw power tearing everything apart that dominated my prepubescent (and pubescent and post-pubescent) fears.

Many of us prefer the pictures of twisters they see on TV or in their science textbooks, but don’t want to feel the breeze. And I’m not talking about actual tornados anymore.

Are you content to close your Bible on a Sunday at noon and relegate your experience of The Tornado to your church time? Or will you let Him blow some things around? Or blow everything around? It’s funny that the Hebrew word for Spirit is ruah. Almost as if God wants us to know that we can no more contain His movements than we can those unruly twisters rampaging across Oklahoma.

The thing I’ve been learning for over a year now — but don’t yet know how to give language to — is this:

The more emphasis we put on doctrine and knowledge, the more we miss the Man, Jesus, Himself. For decades, I thought I had Jesus figured out and nailed down. But you can no more nail down Jesus (heh) than you can a tornado. The religious leaders tried two millennia ago but even they couldn’t hold Him down.

I thought I had a concrete list of who was in and who was out. 

But the more I get to know Jesus, the more He uproots these lists and blows them all over the place, to the point that I’m beginning to wonder if anyone can really ever stop moving altogether like the flurry of atoms that make up our very molecules. The textbook depictions of hell which crawl more from Dante’s imagination than from the pages of Scripture don’t satisfy me anymore. I’m more scared of tornados. Or non-existence.

Everything must keep moving or cease to exist.

Here’s the thing about certainty. If Jesus wanted us to know with certainty about life after death, He would have told us. Instead, we are left with vague references to what we now call ‘heaven and hell’ and argue about piecing them together.

What was Jesus concrete about?

Feeding the hungry and giving to the poor.

Praying a lot.

Being humble and freeing the oppressed.

Why do we give more conversation to the unclear topics of the afterlife when Jesus put so much more emphasis on how we live in this life? Well the answer is pretty simple. Because if we paid attention to those, we would be uncomfortable.

We may be forced to act.

And to give up things we like.

Or worse: to love people we don’t like.

Welp, I’m going to try to wrap it up there, as much as any human can wrap up a tornado. The world spins madly on, and with it spins Jesus the Tornado. Or maybe it’s the other way around: Maybe He is the ultimate motion of the universe and we’re just caught up in His dance. I fear that nothing in the universe will ever stop spinning until He does, pulling all of creation into His vortex — all our dead religion, pain and sources of shame rise up.

New life is breathed into the limp bags in which we stored them until they no longer resemble the pallid things they used to be.

All things are made new within the twirl of this Tornado, and Jesus is slowly convincing me that He really means all things.

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God Is Not An Ethical Rulebook

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Tonight in the shower, for absolutely no reason, I was transported back to 8th grade Bible class when my teacher gave us a creative writing assignment. Everyone else in the class rolled their eyes, but I dove my pen into my notebook and couldn’t pull the ideas from my head to the pen fast enough, primarily because of the prompt he gave us:

“Write about a day without God.”

I should fish through my old papers and find the original story, but mine began with badgers crawling out of their holes and eating people. Then the earth began splitting and peeling apart as the ground on which existence rested was wrenched.

A few days later when we shared our creations, I was frankly disappointed/bored with my classmates’ stories. I recall pithy sentiments like “I was walking around the mall with my brother and people were stealing things and doing what they wanted,” as if God only existed as a Jiminy Cricket character whispering ethical nothings in your ear like a backseat lover. Mine was easily the most extreme, but few other stories actually conceptualized God as more than a conscience or a moral judge.

Only in hindsight have I caught what this little exercise revealed about the way many of us view God.

For many of us, God exists to monitor the good and bad things we do. When I was a youth pastor, I can’t count the number of times a high schooler would accidentally swear in church and then make a guilty face toward me as if they’d just slapped my mother.

“You can’t say that in here!” one of their friends would scold them.

Why couldn’t they swear in a church? Because it’s where God lives and because God is a cop who will pull you over if you swear or kiss your boyfriend, but only in places where he can see, like in a church building.

Have you ever felt like this? Like the religion you inherited from your parents or your pastor is nothing more than a moral checklist of do’s and don’t’s, as if God were chiefly concerned with monitoring your behavior?

How different this approach to God is than the one the Bible presents! How anemic and weak!

As mentioned before, I have been teaching slowly through the Bible and am seeing new and glimmering sides of Christ I never saw before. In fact, you’d be surprised how few moralistic instructions come out of His mouth. Whenever there is something like that coming out, He is usually rebuking the Pharisees (religious teachers) for their religious pride and false righteousness. More often, Jesus is demonstrating just how, exactly, God is bigger than their ethical laws on every front.

He calms the storm and the winds and the waves obey Him. (Power over nature)

He heals numerous diseases and disabilities. (Power over human bodies/disease)

He tells demons and other ‘unclean spirits’ what to do. (Power over spiritual realm)

And yes, He even invades the Jewish religious structures and eradicates them in favor of the outsider. (Power over human religion)

All this is to say that if your god is nothing more than a mere series of ethical codes, you’ve got Jesus all wrong. You haven’t just gotten Him a little wrong; you’re answering in a different language. You were asked what 2+2 is and you answered with “purple.” You are trying to dig a hole in the ground by climbing a tree and shooting a pistol at the clouds.

That’s how wrong you are to fathom God as nothing more than an ethical conscience.

Let me try to explain another way, and you’ll have to strap on your philosophy helmets for this one.

At the inception of philosophy, the world seemed pretty simply structured  in a foundational hierarchy: At the base you had everything as it existed: the world, birds, dirt, men and women, and so on (metaphysics). Upon this was knowledge, or what people were capable of knowing (epistemology). Then, pulling from what people were capable of knowing came ethics, or the right and wrong way to live.

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Millennia later, the bottom two flipped. It began when Descartes questioned the very nature of what people are even capable of knowing and burped out the phrase “I think therefore I am,” or cogito ergo sum. Post-modernity saw a flipping of the way things are interpreted and the way things actually are in the universe:

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Knowledge became the base of everything, and we wound up with questions like, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” This is a philosophical question because it begs the question of whether anything exists outside of human experience.

I could go on, but I’d end up chasing a million rabbits down their trails. The important thing here is the top component: No matter what era of philosophy you dropped into, you would find ethics at the top of the pyramid.

Why does this matter? Well, if God only plays in the ethical sphere, then He is not primary, nor is He secondary, but tertiary. He is third-most-important in the construction of the world.

It stands to reason, then, that God cannot be merely an ethical entity. He is so much more than that, and so much more foundational.

He informs the metaphysical and the epistemological, yet most of us spend our time relegating Him to the ethical sphere. This explains a lot of unhealth in our religion in three ways:

It makes for far too small of a god. It makes a god who is dependent on other things in the universe, and he will just take care of the ethical sector.
It makes us disproportionally fearful of Him. After all, if He is 100% ethics-based, that has to be His main game. And he’s gonna git you.
Our theology becomes unutterably small. If our God is the God of rules and only rules, then what do we do with beauty? What do we do with secular poets or deep, rich human experiences which seem transcendent in some mystical way? What about what the Irish call Thin Spaces, which are places where the barrier between the natural and the divine seems thinner than others?

Ok, you can unfasten your helmet and take a breath.

Cramming your God into the teeny-tiny box of ethics is clearly unhealthy and a manmade invention, not the way God intended for Himself to be known. This is why, as Eugene Peterson put it, Christ plays in 10,000 places.

It is tragic that so many people see God as nothing more than a small cricket on their shoulder hoping they make the right decisions throughout the day. This is what my classmates’ stories betrayed: That they believed in a character/conscience but simply gave him the name of ‘God.’ How small!

No, God is the God of orangutans, the depths of the ocean, and the depths of our hearts; of blackholes lightyears away, and the distance between former lovers. To pigeonhole Him into a list of rights and wrongs not only pains His heart, but it calls a bottle of brackish water the ocean.

You can often tell if someone has this ethics-only picture of God by the language they use of Him:

Do they speak of Him as if He is the ground of all existence, or as if you’re about to break a rule?

Do they speak of Him passionately like a lover speaks of his beloved, or like they’re restricted to listening to Christian music and watching Christian movies?

Can you see where I’m going?

How many of us are trapped in this cycle of seeing God through this narrow lens of ethical do’s and don’t’s? It’s like trying to take in the sunset while peering through a straw.

God gives us ethical implications, of course, but to assume that this is all He is is entirely wrong. It’s more akin to the Pharisees’ picture of God than the ones Jesus praised: the prostitutes, tax collectors, and outcasts.

Let’s be more like those people—the ones who acknowledged how unclean and undeserving they were, and approached God rightly. And when they were around Him, we don’t get the impression that he was wagging a finger at them; it seemed more like a party.

Let’s find Him everywhere, not just in shameful rulebooks and guilty feelings.

Let’s be people who delight in the God who dwells in every single facet of the world.

May He become the ground of your existence, not a mean father unfastening his belt to give you a cosmic whooping.

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