The Divine Echo: It's Not Us or Them, It's To Love Regardless
Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing there is a field; I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
This is either the first or one of the few times I’ve written a blog without using Scripture in the first lines. But the truth is, I believe this thought to be right in line with the way of Jesus.
And it was why I quoted it to my fiancé when I proposed to her and why she used it in a sweet letter she wrote to me in response to my writing months prior.
Here in words written down in a simple phrase we see without delusion, without bias, without judgement and without pretense. That mystical middle I’ve articulated clumsily in the past comes to the forefront, obscuring the regularity of polarization, of either/or, of in or out. What Jesus described, this kingdom of now and not yet, of wrong becoming right and of the poor becoming rich is clear as day. It is a place called love, a place where words are without weight because love is our language.
But this way is lonely, oh so lonely.
Here’s my report of why that is so.
(And why I’m so glad I found the love of my life)
I’m concerned about our world. I think there are few that disagree. Climate change has been something I’ve pushed to the back of my mind but which is only getting worse. Ukraine has been war-torn for a month, and many other countries with a predominantly brown or black populace have been war-torn for decades let alone years. Poverty doesn’t seem to be going anyway, thanks be to inflation yes but also to rising rents, rising student loans, rising gas prices, rising wealth of the upper crust without any indication that it’ll be slowing down.
The response from news outlets, social media algorithms, cable news channels?
It’s their fault. It is always, without fail, 100% of the time their fault. All the ills of the world, of policy and inflation and crime rates and substance abuse and suffering in society… it’s the other guys fault. I say that as hyperbole, mostly, but the lingering reality remains; what causes suffering is those people and is never my people. We are hyper aware of the faults of the other side; we are strikingly blind to the faults of our own. Awareness of others without awareness of ourselves is no awareness at all.
I feel I have said this a hundred times in a dozen different ways over the years with my writing; more and more, we are operating in a matrix of our knee-jerk reactions, worst impulses, and deepest held anxieties; this then informs every article we read, every comment we make on social, every dismissal we have of someone veering away from our own echo chambers.
I’ll own mine as I’ve done before; I’m liberal leaning moderate, or moderate leaning liberal. Yes, my feed is about that crazy racist GOP senator, that un-woke transphobic comment, that decades old tweet destroying the reputation and career of an otherwise uncontroversial celebrity. I see the faults here, I see the loopholes. And I want to avoid them.
While I can’t speak for those on the right or the left or who have middle tendencies like me, I believe these external forces, these elements outside of our control, are now dictating far more than what we shop for or what’s the next show to binge.
They are influencing us all, in almost exclusively negative ways, to not contemplate. To not push into our faults and weaknesses. To see the darkness of others, without seeing it in ourselves, only for us to run toward the light or whatever seems to be the opposite of the apparent darkness of those people.
Introspection is virtually impossible in 2022. So is arriving at and sharing in nuance with others, especially online.
So if you’re evangelical, that’s shunning ex-vangelical thought or assertion not in line with mainline protestantism. If you’re ex-vangelical, that’s shunning all olive branches or signs of genuine change and repentance in churches in favor of the ongoing forest fire of embittered angst about unfinished processing of trauma caused by church. The divide extends to other categories; if you’re conservative, ignore liberals like the plague. And if liberal, shame the discompassionate conservatives.
Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, news feeds, etc. all working in conjunction toward two ends; isolating us from each other physically and bringing us together digitally over shared hatred.
Echo chambers only echo dissent and never ascent. Our human impulse toward negativity bias is dialed to eleven and the only good thing about us is that we aren’t a bad thing.
Wrestling in the middle leaves you lonely twice. Lonely because you don’t adhere, strictly, to the majority impulse of your political or religious bent and lonely because our whole world is gearing toward screens displaying caricatures of people rather than people revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of their heart.
All of this can be summarized as such; I miss my friends who went to church. Not because I don’t see them anymore or because they stopped going to church. Rather, I miss the shared journeying toward an exciting and uncertain destination, the wrestling toward a faith that was one part honest about our misgivings of God (more so, the church) but was also equally another part trusting that God would somehow reveal the truth (even within the messy church).
I can’t point the finger at the friends that left. Neither will I take the blame myself for what they do or don’t. I’m not their mother.
But I can say with utter sincerity that I’ve been there. Sometimes, I’m still there. Abhorrent toward anything resembling capital C church. Furious that this great God I felt so endeared by was somehow left in the reins of the phony, two-faced, stubbornly dogmatic bride of Christ. Or at least, the American bride.
I painted my views about all things Christian and boy was my brush broad.
Yet for me, the only person I can, in fact, ever speak for completely, my pain was personal. Particular. And aimed squarely at a specific kind of Church and Christian and theology.
That baptist school that unjustly fired my mom. That administrator that, when hearing of my nephew’s birth out of wedlock, with seemingly all genuine conviction, told my mother “sorry for your situation.” That view of sexuality that left me addicted to porn and left my fiancé trapped in a world where her own body she viewed with ambivalent distance at best and outright disgust at worst.
I have a dog in the fight against that bastardized kind of church, and I always will. I am stubborn. And will always be a thorn of the side of any Christian context where ignorance, overspiritualization, and trite dismissal of trauma runs rampant.
Hell, I’m getting a Master’s in Counseling to counter all the pious pathology disguised as airtight theology.
But the problem with the problems I have with church? I am a part of the problem. I can’t ever NOT be apart of the problem.
And unless you are an African slave or a woman pastor or an indigenous church elder or gay community group leader, you are a part of the problem. Even communities of color or of the LGBT community carry blame too, just nowhere near the same degree as those in dominant or majority cultural status (even those that are an “ally” of both).
This would be the part of the sermon where I’d say “the problem is sin.” And yes, that’s right. But no, that’s wrong.
It’s not just sin that is the problem, it’s what we do about sin that’s the problem. Especially the sin of others. Circling back to the matrix of polarities, self-promoting piety, and blaming the other, it’s as if we all know so much is wrong in the world and yet so rarely admit how we contribute to the wrong. Thomas Merton writes:
Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
The rectangles in our pocket scream at us what’s wrong or distract us abundantly from that reality squarely to have us never, ever examine what is wrong within.
And also, what is genuinely right.
I was at Greg’s house, circa 2016. Post fall-out of most long-term relationship to date, six years out from the blessing and bliss of my soon to be married state come July 3rd, 2022.
I had had my mom tell me of this thing called a highly sensitive person. She said she was one. Big shocker it was not. My mom tears up about every little thing. Problem was I was right behind her.
And boy, sensitive was as apt a word you could use to describe me as any.
I got the book because right around my mid 20s I began to binge video games and tv shows less and began to read words on paper more.
Damn, this author lady was spot on. Finally, someone articulated my experience.
Bright lights, strange sounds and smells, and deep reactions to… pretty much all the things. That was me, Caleb, and I thought it made me distinctly fucked up even though I hadn’t really lived that fucked up of an experience or had had that fucked up of a childhood.
I said the f word three times to make sure you’re actually reading.
Anyway, I researched more and, wow, there were like a lot of us. What a relief.
Galavanting through the inter webs all the more, I saw there were support groups.
Support groups? For being sensitive? I mean, I was mildly alcoholic at the time and knee-deep in pornaholism all while daily and nightly in the clutches of Spicy Nacho Dorito-ism and so on. But the notion intrigued me. So, “what the hell,” I thought.
Let’s do the thing.
Walking in to Greg’s house was about two-thirds a shrine to the happy, meditating Buddha and one third an altar to the depressed, crucified Christ.
We aren’t in conservative southern Oregon anymore, that’s for sure.
And, welp, I’m the only 20-something by a few decades.
There weren’t a whole lot of rules, which I loved. I also loved that everyone nodded, sighed, and appreciated what I had to say. When I would talk about something personal, share good and bad about Christ, and do anything in between, there was zero judgment. Zero apprehension. Zero concern that I was backsliding or questioning or saying what I was saying.
Strange thing to say but I realized that, there in this space, I could be a Christian and be me. I could be mad at God. And probably happy at Him too. I could doubt and believe, express joy and shout in anger. Somehow, some way, I still had hope even in spite of the despair. Whatever was present was whatever was present, and that’s what the community liked. C.S. Lewis describes something similar:
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
To be sensitive is to be exposed externally for whatever you’re feeling internally constantly. But in that group, it was safe.
And it was where the divine echo of God sung so deeply to me. I noticed that He actually didn’t preach to me a lot. And even now, I don’t think He preaches to individuals (but rather, to entire communities).
Instead, I saw God in my work with kids. In my going to the front of the church for prayer. In my ongoing helplessness to coping and substances. Wherever I was, in my good and my bad and especially my ugly, God was always there.
With me. Constant, kind, convicting, all in that order.
There He still is. His divine echo, the voice that prods me neither toward liberal nor conservative, neither evangelical nor ex-vangelical, is always there if and when I make the space to listen.
And I think, both my friends who left church and the friends who still go and don’t understand why people leave, struggle to hear what is even hard for me to hear at times.
This impulse to drown the divine echo in our own impulses, our own extremities, our own darkness, because the light cannot shine where our eyes don’t care to look. It’s as simple as not letting bandwidth for God to speak.
And this could be solved as simply as practicing prayer or silence or solitude, but it could also be as complex and perplexing as knowing where to find God in a world filled with persistent busyness, with deafening anxiety, with deadly depression. God honors us and won’t yell for our attention because we could never be compelled by yet another pull to one extreme or another.
Rather, I believe the divine echo, the voice of God, the stirring of the Holy Spirit is actually all about yearning for a third answer, a third way, a third faction. Our world is always us versus them and the church has done a damn bad job about feeding into that lie. In truth, the only us versus them is humanity versus the principalities and powers. That’s the true war.
The divine echo whispers love your enemy. Listen to your political opponent. Turning the other cheek WHILE resisting evil. Bearing with each other in love.
That the greatest answer to the ever present problem of suffering is to love those who are suffering, love those who are causing the suffering, and to love ourselves as we bear the brunt of the suffering of others and of ourselves.
Believing this is so damn hard. Madeleine L’Engle said it simply:
“Believing takes practice.”
But practicing a belief as absurd as this takes a whole lifetime of practicing to do well.
Another way to write this whole blog; the answer God poses is simple yet nearly impossible; to do what the Bible says. To love even though to love in our world is naively ridiculous at best and completely foolish at worst. If you fear you aren’t up to snuff for this; good news, I don’t think I am and neither did Brennan Manning:
In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve.
And yet, the divine echo will never be silenced.
That field the famous poet Rumi alluded to, I think that field is God. And He is beckoning always toward love. And is why I will always call myself a Christian, will always follow Christ, and will always (sometimes begrudgingly) be apart of the bridge of Christ called to bring in this kingdom of love no matter the cost.