“The order to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed.”

This is one of the lines from Christopher Hitchens’ book “God Is Not Great.”  It’s not a small thought or some quippy, dismissive jab; Hitchens sincerely believed that the strain of christian moralism hurt people mentally and emotionally… and I agree with him.  For this reason and many others, I’m deeply thankful for the work of Christopher Hitchens.  

Reading Hitchens exposed for me the difference between playing a game against the practice squad in practice drills vs actually getting hit in the mouth by an opposing team; I had to mean what I said and know what I meant when I made crazy religious claims like “prayer works,” or that I was “born again” or even that “God is good.”  His work forced me to face my religious claims and practices from outside my tradition and honestly, critically evaluate what it is I believe wholeheartedly vs what I only claim to believe.  In doing so, he performed a service that very few within my tradition either can or will perform; to sincerely challenge the roots of faith without the safety net of cherishing that faith. 

-His challenge that religion does not make people more “moral” led me to see the difference between learning to live well and learning to “be good.” I recognized that I do not believe that religion makes people moral and furthermore that it should not be the goal of religion to do so.

-His challenges regarding the effectiveness of prayers for healing led me to far more critically receive such claims and more fully rejoice when I come to believe them true.  

-His challenge that religion gives license for all kinds of destructive acts led me to deeply re-evaluate the ways I justify aspects of my own behavior in light of my calling or vocation.  I’d not previously dealt with how serious a thing poorly practiced religion is and that it really does destroy lives.

When a pastor, speaker or chaplain presents a challenging question, those in attendance know that, in the end, the issue will be resolved; much in the same way a crisis is presented in an adventure film. We all know that somehow, Borne or Bond or Batman is going to make it out alive, get the girl and defeat the bad guy.  But with Hitchens, this was and is not the case; He believed firmly that religion was not only false but damaging.  Hitchens wasn’t asking questions in order to prepare the faithful for conversations they might have “out there in the world,” he was telling the Truth as he saw it and challenging those in opposition to either prove that it was not or change the way they thought and lived.  Such a confrontation and conversation has been priceless for my faith to be sincere and be fully lived.

I am better for having read, watched and listened to Christopher Hitchens.  I am clearer on the difference between believing in God with all the challenge, mystery and internal conflict that comes from such a belief and settling into a kind of faith that dismisses critique as blasphemy only. 

Many of the songs that make up the CMY(K) project are written for and about friends, each of whom has or will receive letters about the songs. I’m posting a few of those letters here.  ”Heaven Knows″ is written for a young brother I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for years and seen wrestle with the authenticity of his faith.  This is the letter I wrote to him about the song:

Brother, 
I wrote the song “Heaven Knows” for and about you.

You deeply desire to know and speak Truth. Your feet search for firm ground to stand on. You’d rather say nothing at all than echo the insane speculations of overconfident, arrogant and uninformed religion you remember from your past.  These things are honorable in you and worthy of celebration.  They are also evidence of a Divine work in you. The hard part of that work has been that it has meant years of restlessness and an inability at times to act with confidence.

You’ve engaged in many great conversations, read many insightful texts. Yet, more recently, the words of others have begun to fall short of your heart: you’ve not been moved and comforted by the same conversations and ideas you had been moved and comforted by previously.  I believe that this because it is your heart that needs to speak rather than be spoken to.  The time has come to act on what you do know rather than wait for further instruction, the next revelation or some deeper insight.

Until now, you have been full of words but few to none of them have been yours much less God’s. You have had little to no internal room for your own words because of the cacophony of voices swirling in you. Even the words you did speak were often arrangements of words you received from parents, your past or your former religion. But the time has come for you to speak your own words and to do so in confidence. You’ve come to know that the ground is there to stand upon and that the Truth is not as evasive as it once appeared.

You are not being asked to name anything. The time for conclusions and ‘naming’ has past (and another season like it is yet to come). For now, you are simply being asked to bear witness to what you have seen and let everything else be everything else. You are being asked to act according to what you know is True, regardless of the incompleteness of that knowledge.  Just as Phillip was bid by the Spirit of the Lord to “Go South” with no further explanation, you have your own “Go South” to obey.

So, I wanted to give you a way to see and remember that work begun in you is real and that it will be brought to completion; a way to see remember that your circumstances, present or past do not direct your path;  Your circumstances are not concrete; they are malleable.  The thing, moreso than any other that you are being asked to bear witness to, the thing that must direct your course of action henceforth is your identity in the Father, who calls you “son.”

Thomas Merton writes “God is not a ‘what,’ not a thing …there is no ‘what’ that can be called God. There is ‘no such thing’ as God because God is neither a ‘what’ or a ‘thing’ but pure ‘Who.’ He is the ‘Thou’ before whom our inmost ‘I’ springs into awareness. He is the I AM before whom, with our most personal and inalienable voice, we echo ‘I am.’”

You are not stuck. You are not paralyzed. Not anymore. You have come to a moment you do not recognize; one that you were not prepared for. It is a pure moment… a moment without further breakthrough… no more revelation.. no deeper enlightenment.. You know everything you need to know. This moment is not about deeper knowledge, it is about the choice to act on the knowledge you’ve been mercifully granted; that you are a son of God.

Justin

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You can pick up “Heaven Knows″ and the entire “M” EP at iTunes
You can check out the digibook for “M” at my Issuu page

Heaven Knows
You have asked me to feed them
With my blood and my bones
But my body is burdened with concerns of my own

Heaven knows that I want to
I want to but I just can’t

You have asked me to follow
To believe and obey
But the very thought of it is what keeps me away

Heaven knows that I want to
I want to but I just can’t

“Do you want to get well?”
It always seemed like the strangest thing to ask a man

Father, I do not understand Your world and even less when I think of the world as “Yours.”   Calling it “Yours” causes a tension in me I’ve seldom found release from.  In the one hand, I hold the knowledge that You are Good; that You are the Root of all that is good in the world.  In the other hand, I hold the heavy weight of knowledge that, among any number of other atrocities, tens of thousands of children will die before the end of today due to things that could have been averted.  This second knowledge is one I share with far more of my friends than I do the first.  It is a knowledge so prevalent as to become innocuous at times. And that is what breaks me as I try to hold both things: that something so terrible as starvation can be so fundamentally true in a world governed by Someone so fundamentally Good.

You do not relieve this tension in me.
I have asked you to. But you do not.

I have also asked for some form of certainty or clarity, even if only for the purposes of explaining You and Your Mind to others but You offer nothing remotely like the kind of answer I’m asking for.  What I have from You is what You’ve always offered; an assurance of your Presence and the challenge to let that be sufficient. You say what you have always said “Do not be afraid, I am with you.”  You offer the knowledge that, in regards to those who truly suffer, You suffer with them; that You are the God of the Cross, Who stretched his good arms out to hold together the tattered edges of the world He made and loves. I am also aware that my own only truthful response to what I’ve seen is to do as You have done; to offer my presence, to do so sacrificially and to trust it is enough.

What I see is that there is so much wrong. What You tell me is that You are Good and that You are here.  Though it honestly tears me in half sometimes, I hold both things to be true.  I am fully aware that my comfort with Truth does not make it any more or less True.  Is it enough for me that you suffer with us?  There are days when it simply is not. Yet I’m learning that it is this way with Truth; that there are times when it is clear and bright and there are times when it is cold as a stone.

I wrote a letter to you, Lord
Not unlike the one You wrote to me
Not to explain myself or anything I think
Just to tell You what I see

Which brings us to where we are now
Where I don’t know how to begin
You won’t explain Yourself to satisfy my mind
And I simply won’t give in.

They say Your love is great
But maybe they should wait
Until it’s their child dying of diseases that have cures

They say You’re faithful like the sun
I watch it rise most every day
But if I stand here still and wait here long enough
The sun will also go away

All you’ll say is…

You’ll say Your love is great
With Your body broken, Your spirit faint
For a world turned over and laid to waste
While Your people treat each other like it’s some damned game
Cuz they’re all Your children aren’t they?
Yeah, they are all Your children anyway
Yeah, they are Your kids dying of diseases that have cures.

——-

You can get this song for free at Noisetrade
You can pick up the entire EP at iTunes

Just as he did with “C”, Author and friend David Dark has offered a generous and insightful overview of “M.”

“Listening to “M,” the second installment of Justin McRoberts CMY(K), I’m amazed by the way a determinedly hopeful affirmation of the always-redeeming presence of God in every aspect of everyday existence can sit alongside a derisive skewering of the easy “Praise God” talk that abides–and even sustains–everyday, human injustice. With an ear for righteous indignation, dark humor, and all the ways we pull the wool over our own eyes, Justin documents his own ambivalence and offers a lyricization of Flannery O’Connor’s adage, ‘It’s harder to believe than not to.’ ”

You can get a free single from the EP at Noisetrade
You can pick up both “C” and “M” at iTunes

CMYK is a color spectrum most of us have encountered. If you’ve ever looked closely at a printed image you may have seen the tiny cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots characteristic of the CMYK color printing process. Each color is important, otherwise the printed images aren’t as vibrant as they should be. My desire with the CMY(K) project is to highlight “colors” in the spectrum of the human experience that are often regarded as too dark or even ugly when isolated. In part I’ll do this by arranging them next to  “colors” of the human experience that are more readily recognized as good, true or beautiful.

Midway through Terrence Malick’s brilliant film “Tree of Life” is a sermon in which appears the phrase “He alone sees God who sees when God turns His back as well as when He turns His face.” Those who say that God is ‘unfair’ or ‘absent’ are saying something as vital and as true as those who say that God is ‘just’ or ‘faithful.’  Therefore, experiences and expressions of disappointment or abandonment are necessary elements (colors) in a picture of the good life, rather than defects that need treatment.

Many of the songs that make up CMY(K) are stories of friends whose picture of life and God is a great deal more dappled and complicated than they expected. Some are songs for friends who no longer consider faith in God possible at all. Some are personal reflections on the facets of life that have affected these loved ones of mine.  All of them are songs that fit within the long, multicolored Christian tradition of seeing God both face to face and with His back turned.

—–
The first installment of this project is available now.

This past weekend I took part in a panel discussion entitled “Conversations With My Inner Atheist.”  The stated purpose of the discussion was to “normalize the faith struggle,” by sharing the past and current hangups of a few of us who have been around the block with Jesus a few times.  Our stories ranged from personal to academic, as one might suspect…

**Abusive childhoods leading to questions of God’s sincerity…
**A knowledge of global injustice leading to questions of God’s ‘goodness’…

**Confusion regarding God’s violent character and rhetoric in the Old Testament…

**Difficulty drawing ‘in vs out’ lines between heterosexual and homosexual friends…

The idea was not so much to assuage the doubts associated with these questions but provide whatever sense of normalization might come from hearing older, wiser and fully-engaged christian men and women airing their grievances with God and struggles with faith.

Three ideas came to the forefront during our discussion.  The first I’ll make brief comments about now while the other two I’ll tinker with in posts over the next week or so.

First, while the pastoral impulse in me was (and generally is) to fix and heal whatever wounds of history, spirit and mind were aired during the session, there was something close to magical in the simple act of sharing our humanity for a while.  As one of the panel participants put it, “these two words can take you a long way in life and in ministry:

‘Me, too.’ ” .. shared humanity

As I thought of the many scenarios in my history that have led to serious questions about the reality or goodness of God and of Life, I remembered that ‘answers’ never did my soul much good.. Instead it was the presence of others who had shared or were currently sharing my grief or my struggle that saved me.

A further step in this thought process led me to the very Story we hold in question when our certainty wanes. It is, oddly enough, a story in which Jesus himself has reservations about “The Plan.” (http://bible.cc/matthew/26-39.htm)  It is a story in which the pivotal moment is when God, the One who sets the very stage where all our comedies and tragedies take place, says two words that go a very long way in life and in ministry…

“‘Me, too.” … shared humanity.

Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting thoughts about the other two ‘ideas’ that shone during our discussion. Namely..

…that “chutzpa” is a necessary and responsible religious posture. Chutzpa, in the religious sense, means having the guts to face God and say “I disagree.”

And lastly, that certainty is not the aim of faith. That, in fact, making certainty a goal in any area of life can be, and often is a recipe for existential paralysis.