Church Shopping

And how to become a beholder

We’re trying to find a church for our family now that we’ve moved to Malibu, California. Although we are Anglican, the nearest church is over an hour from us. We have visited a dozen of the nondenominational variety in the area, accompanying friends wherever we are invited. The process is so difficult not because we are trying to find a church that “suits” us (I’ve read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, and I don’t want to fall prey to Wormwood), but because we want to serve and most churches want us to consume.

“Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.” —C.S. Lewis

Almost everywhere we go, the churches are seeker-friendly: they are trying to entice those who do not know God to come closer and see how God can fulfill them, change them, bring them joy. I delight in the motives, but I worry over the methods. I’m too aware of my sin to criticize; I’ll trust that God can move where’s He’s wanted. But for our family, I do not want my children to be formed into consumers. I don’t want them to think God is entertaining. I want my children to know how to lay down their lives….

In Rome, the Empire fed the masses and entertained them with the Colosseum. When we hand out donuts and put on a show with Christian music, are we forming people in the way of the world with a Christian guise? If church is providing merely a parallel form of bread and circuses, then how are we different from the world? The faith requires more than a different message but a different medium. “Do not conformed to the image of this world, but be TRANSFORMED by the renewing of your minds,” Paul writes to the Romans (read all of chapter 12 on being living sacrifices and the gifts of the church). To transform people, we must ask something of them: prayer, prostration, sacrifice, hymns, challenging exegesis, confession, Eucharist, passing peace, benediction, liturgy.

“Between Two Waves of the Sea,” 2003-2004, Mineral Pigments on Kumohada Paper, 89 x 66 in ©MakotoFujimura

In my classroom, I consider the liturgy of the church for re-forming students into His likeness. For example, my students and I spent two weeks reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. On the first day, I brought them to the Weisman Art Museum where Makoto Fujimura’s paintings of the quartets were on display. We stood before the paintings while listening to a recording of Jeremy Irons read the poem. Standing that long can be uncomfortable. Listening without talking or checking the phone (one student tried to pull out his smartphone) requires stillness and patience unfamiliar to us. We meditated communally on the words of the poem, which were befuddling and mysterious. Art is NOT a replacement for church. However, in a world of chaos, distraction, and entertainment; beholding art—poetry, music, painting, etc.—transforms us in ways that parallel practices of Christian faith.

“These things, these things were here and but the beholder wanting….”

—G.M. Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

In Genesis, after God creates each thing, he beholds it and says, “It is good.” When God creates humans in his image, it is in the image of subcreators and beholders. We too are meant to see the good and love it. To be a beholder is to be one who sees, but it is a seeing guided by love. The medieval Christians would say ubi amor, ibi oculus—which means, “The eyes see better when guided by love, a new dimension of ‘seeing’ is opened up by love alone!” (Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings). To be a beholder is to love what we see.

The practices of church liturgy accomplish many ways of transforming us, but one of the ends of such practices is to form us rightly into those who behold. A friend of mine, Dr. Lanta Davis, recently wrote a book titled Becoming by Beholding based on the premise that we become more like Jesus Christ by beholding the images that once saturated the church—cathedrals, icons, bestiaries, stained glass images of saints, and so forth. (Dr. Davis talks to Dr. Lynn Cohick about her book on The Alabaster Jar.) If we are to be transformed, it cannot be only by argument or self-help books, but must be through our imagination and practices. Of course, Willie James Jennings, James K.A. Smith, Karen Swallow Prior, and others have been reminding the church of the need for renewing our imaginations for awhile (It’s my starting point for The Scandal of Holiness).

At the end of the semester, my students were asked to memorize and recite a poem of their choice. They were all surprised by how good the practice was for them. I had students filming their hikes while they recited Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” and other students painted Eliot’s “Little Gidding.” When Dr. Davis talks of the Christian imagination, she emphasizes our nature as wax upon which our culture imprints itself. We must choose what we desire to be imprinted upon us. It makes a great deal of difference if we have been formed by art that demands something of us versus that which entertains us.

In Psalm 115: 8, the poet warns us that we will become like the idols that we make. As our family seeks a church where we will be formed and in which we may serve, we are praying for one that is countercultural. We want to be compelled to relinquish our desires for others’ needs. We want to be reminded of the Truth that is so high above us and by which we acknowledge our lack. We are praying for a church that asks us to BEHOLD Him and all his goodness and beauty and love that we can go out into the world to be good, to make beautiful things, and above all this, to love. Thankfully, the caution of Psalm 115 has a positive correlation: rather than become like our idols, we can, through His grace, become like the God that we worship.

This Summer

• April 30-May 4 are the Harbor Lectures—Pepperdine’s annual Bible lectures which have been happening since 1943. The Book of Hebrews is the focus for all the speakers. Join us!

  

• Our family is going to Switzerland with Pepperdine for May-June. During their time at Pepperdine, approx. 80% of students go abroad because our programs are THAT good! U.S. News messed up a lot of things with their new rating system, but they got it right that we are #1 for our international programs. I’ll be teaching a course on Women Writers in Faith and Culture.

  

• From July 29-Aug 3 I’m teaching at Regent College in their summer program. It is open to all applicants, so you should consider joining my course on Reading as a Spiritual Practice.

Recent Links

• The Yale Center for Faith and Culture had me on their podcast discussing “How to Read Flannery O’Connor.”

• Sophia Stid reviewed Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? for America Magazine.

• I was a guest on Saturdays at Seven encouraging people to change Christian higher education from within it and via social media.

• The Living Church had both Steve Prince and me on for a conversation about our partnership in bringing O’Connor’s unfinished novel to readers.

• Have you listened to all the conversations hosted by The Scandal of Reading podcast? Season 3 will include a couple more episodes. If you have not listened in awhile, tune in.

• If you missed it, Raymond Arroyo interviewed me about Why Do the Heathen Rage? on EWTN.