The Old Rugged Cross

My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate and rhetorical, 

easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; 

men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of a talent for happiness.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.

It's a rainy, unpleasant Tuesday, and it's nearly Christmas; can you imagine anything more depressing?  As a matter of fact, I can, which in and of itself is part of the problem.  I can almost always imagine myriad ways in which things can get worse, and generally think that they most probably will.  When I first read C.S. Lewis describing his father and his father's family, I actually laughed out loud, not because it was humorous, but rather because I self-identified with the description.  I had no idea that it was an ethnic identity.

I'm not particularly keen on the whole practice of tracing ones genealogy back through the sands of time.  Partially because, on my Mother's side the whole issue is rather a dead letter office, she was adopted, and the people I know as my family are really the important part.  I suppose that's a value I was given by my mother, and it has led to some level of disinterest in the swirling seas of various gaelic genetic material embedded in the nuclei of my cells.

But I know I've never been one to go in for glad tidings and good cheer, in fact, I can remember, one Christmas, when I was probably about eight or nine, when I made the connection between Christmas and Easter: that the Baby Jesus was also the crucified Jesus, and well, things just haven't been the same since.

Maybe it's natural predisposition, maybe it's more complicated, but I have always intuitively grasped the foolishness of the cross.  Even when I wandered away from the church and from faith, I always held on to the austerity of a Good Friday sort of faith.  Not because of atonement, I'm not sure I always believed that part, but because I understood that God would get in the muck with us.  Even when the resurrection seemed like a sort of sentimental pipe-dream, I felt the presence of God in the contemplation of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

In the HBO series True Detective, Rust Cole has a cross in his apartment, despite the fact that he is avowedly an atheist and a fairly nihilistic atheist at that.  He says he meditates on it and considers what it means.  I get that in my gut.

It's like rainy days, it's like sad and wistful poetry, it's like The Cure, or various Seattle bands from my youth, it's like the blues. It's like THIS!!

I always look for it.

When it's lacking, I am deeply suspicious.  Thus my suspicion of folks like Joel Osteen and various other prosperity teachers, I look for the Cross, and I don't find it.

Lately, I have been watching the happenings around Rob Bell, former pastor of a big old megachurch in Michigan and now Christian-ish representative in the celestial sphere of the Oprah.  Back in the day, I was a big Rob Bell fan.  I loved his NOOMA videos, still do.  I listened to his sermons on the Mars Hill website, and he gave me inspiration.  I read some of his books and really enjoyed them, even if it did only take me twenty minutes or so.  I liked Rob's liberal slant on evangelical Christian faith.  I defended him against people who talked about him as though he was a traitor and a heretic.

But I always had this feeling that maybe he was getting to be a bit of a cult of personality, but his heart seemed to be in the right place, and I could still find the cross somewhere in his teaching.

But now I'm a little worried about Rob.  Not for the same reasons that the Rightish, Evangelical folk are, it's not his orthodoxy or lack thereof, it's not his alliance with Oprah (though that does give me a moment of head scratching).

It's that I'm looking for the cross.

He's a celebrity, he's rich, living in California and surfing, doing a TV show, and hanging out with Richard Rohr and various other luminaries. He has apparently abandoned the rather passe and imperfect community of a normal church to just kind of hang out in a religious sort of way with some people he knows.

I'll admit, maybe it's just jealousy talking.  Maybe it's just another example of me not having much of a "talent for happiness," but the trajectory he's on reminds me a lot more of the prosperity/self help gospel of don't worry be happy than it does the cross centered gospel of Jesus.

Not that it matters much what I think, I'm just sharing it with the dozen or so people that read my little blog, because I think it's a question we all need to ask ourselves in our privilege and in our comfort: where is the cross?

Rob's story still has some chapters to unfold, and along the way, he will likely do some good for the kingdom, he will certainly have the audience.  I wish him well in my rainy-day, Welsh sort of a way, but I'm still going to look for the cross, because without it, there is no resurrection.