Water To Wine: Some of My Story

by Brian Zahnd

The kind of Christianity that has the capacity to endlessly fascinate is not produced apart from struggle and suffering. It’s the pain of struggle and suffering that confers character and complexity to our faith.

I would place The Divine Conspiracy in rare company indeed: along-side the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Wesley, John Calvin and Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.

N.T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, Miroslav Volf, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Bentley Hart, Wendell Berry, Scot McKnight, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr,

Real faith is not afraid of doubt, but the faux faith of certitude is afraid of its own shadow. I have no idea how to arrive at real faith without a journey involving doubt.

Christianity looks like love absorbing sin and death, trusting God for resurrection.

The Spirit of God is an artisan, not an industrialist.

was a poverty-stricken Christian...and I didn’t even know it. My poverty was theological and it was the sad consequence of my arrogant sectarianism.

The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we think God ought to do, but to be properly formed.

we think of prayer as “just talking to God” and that it consists mostly in asking God to do this or that, then we don’t need to be given prayers to pray. Just tell God what we want. But if prayer is spiritual formation and not God-management, then we cannot depend on our self to pray properly. If we trust our self to pray, we just end up recycling our own issues—mostly anger and anxiety—without experiencing any transformation. We pray in circles. We pray and stay put. We pray prayers that begin and end in our own little self. When it comes to spiritual formation, we are what we pray. Without wise input that comes from outside ourselves, we will never change. We will just keep praying what we already are. A selfish person prays selfish prayers. An angry person prays angry prayers. A greedy person prays greedy prayers. A manipulative person prays manipulative prayers. Nothing changes. We make no progress. But it’s worse than that. Not only do we not make any progress, we actually harden our heart. To consistently pray in a wrong way reinforces a wrong spiritual formation.

Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Impatient saints don’t exist. The saints have learned the secret of being patient with the world, with themselves, and even with God.

Temple is a rigorous enforcement of purity codes that prohibits the unclean. Table is a welcome home party celebrating the return of sinners. The temple was temporal. The table is eternal. We thought God was a deity in a temple. It turns out God is a father at a table.

This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won’t be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee that those we call “us” will have what we call “ours.” We call it security. We call it defense. We call it freedom. What we don’t call it is what it is...fear. Driven by our fear of scarcity we create an organized, large-scale, slow-motion version of anarchy. A mob on a looting and killing rampage is called anarchy. European colonists looting and killing indigenous people is called glorious conquest—but it’s just looting and murder on a grand scale. Kings are tasked with looting our enemies on our behalf.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes was intended to be a sign pointing us to a new paradigm. Jesus was constantly teaching people not to worry about scarcity, but to trust in God. Jesus wants us to see that we don’t live in a closed universe; reality is not zero-based. Instead God breaks into our world with the beauty of the infinite, to borrow a phrase from David Bentley Hart. The sign of the loaves and fishes was intended to show that with God all things are possible, and that the paradigm of scarcity is a satanic lie. When the Galilean crowd failed to get this message, but instead wanted to use Jesus to start the cycle of conquest, war, famine, and death—those hideous horsemen—Jesus withdrew to the mountain for a night of prayer. The next day Jesus took a different approach with the crowd:

Indeed, what is church without the Eucharist? It’s an insightful and important question. In a very real sense the church is the ecclesial body of Christ sustained by the sacramental body of Christ. Week by week we feed upon the flesh and blood of Christ that we might be an incarnation of the flesh and blood of Christ within the world. “This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). This is why for most of church history the sacrament, not the sermon, has been the central aspect of Christian worship. Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information. Making church more about the sermon than the sacrament is a move toward secularism.

Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.—Wendell Berry[1]

On the high tundra beneath the big sky a petty theology of a small and capricious God appears as ludicrous as it is. It’s probably dangerous to do all of our theology in the close quarters of indoors. Theologians need to be outdoorsmen.

This is a deep mystery, but the capacity for self-awareness is related to the gift of God-consciousness. When God breathed upon our ancestors, animate creatures formed from the dust of the earth, they became human, which is to say they possessed the capacity to contemplate their own existence, seek intimacy with their Creator, and bear the divine image within creation. The impulse to seek after God is intrinsic to human nature and is perhaps our most human instinct. Humans are the God-marked, God-obsessed being.

T.S. Eliot said, “A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.”

When we make salvation mostly postmortem, all about the afterlife, we create a barrier—a wall of separation between redemption and the land of the living. No wonder so many shrug their shoulders in disinterest. But when we locate salvation here and now, people are naturally interested. Salvation is about being human. This is why the Word became flesh—human flesh. Jesus came to give us back the life we lost ever since we stumbled out of the garden to wander in the violent land east of Eden.

Any understanding of salvation that doesn’t lead us to love God’s creation is far more Gnostic than Christian. Or perhaps it’s just voracious capitalism dressed up in Christian garb—a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If we cannot love the primeval forest, I’m not sure we can love either God or neighbor.

A Christianity that has no room for the mystics can expect to be increasingly ignored, left to molder in its own arrogant assumptions. The rise of global Pentecostalism in the twentieth century is just one portent of the type of spirituality that is capable of addressing the spiritual hunger of the postmodern world.

Europeans had learned how to dominate nature, but not how to live with nature. Half a millennium of that trajectory has left our planet in peril. Perhaps, while there is still time, we should become humble enough to consult the wisdom of those who knew how to live in respectful relationship with the rest of God’s creation. This was the instinct of Saint Francis, the spiritual savant who spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Fire and Sister Water. It’s this type of integrated spirituality—Christian theology and aboriginal wisdom—that compels me to read both the Swiss theologian Karl Barth and the Native American poet John Trudell. I benefit from both.

Maybe with chastened humility we could ask if cultures who have lived in close harmony with creation for thousands of years can teach us how to become custodians instead of conquistadors, participants instead of plunderers. For in plundering the planet we have pillaged our souls, leaving us with an emptiness that systematic theology alone cannot fill.

As Terrance Malick says in his Tree of Life, perhaps the greatest film ever made, “Unless you love, your life will flash by.” Love alone gives meaning to our fleeting fourscore sojourn.

I think Elder Zosima is right when he says, “I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘Hell is the suffering of being no longer able to love.’”

The refusal of love is to hate being itself. If we hate being itself, we are consumed in the fire of our own wrath. Either we love or we punish our own existence. Think about the pictures of judgment given to us by Jesus in the Gospels. What is the criteria of judgment? Love, always love. In Jesus’ parable, the rich man ends up in hell, not because he failed to believe the right things, but because he failed to love Lazarus. For all we know the rich man had impeccable theology. What he lacked was love. In the parable of the sheep and goats, the goats are not condemned for wrong belief or for failing to pray a sinner’s prayer, but for failing to love the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the imprisoned.

If Jesus is to be trusted, it seems we will not be judged by how rightly we believed, but by how well we loved.

Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, St. Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Søren Kierkegaard, George MacDonald, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, Frederick Buechner, Eugene Peterson, Walter Brueggemann, Wendell Berry, Kalistos Ware, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rohr, N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Miroslav Volf, David Bentley Hart,

The sad lesson I learned is that within Christian cultures that have confused faith with certitude, it’s almost impossible for leaders to make any significant change, which means there is little or no freedom to really grow.

Entire streams of Christendom are not only stuck at stage-two faith, but actually train and require their ministers to interpret the Bible through the mythic-literal eyes of school children. Growing up and moving forward is rebranded as backsliding; maturing is perceived as falling away.

To become spiritually mature we have to recognize that suffering cannot be avoided and paradox is part of the program. But American consumer Christianity specializes in offering gimmicks that promise to eradicate suffering and theologies that claim to eliminate paradox.