The eCrozier

In Augustine’s Confessions, he prays to God:
Noverim me. Noverim te. Let me know myself. Let me know you.

Augustine is right when he connects our self-knowledge and self-awareness with our capacity to know God. And getting to know ourselves in all our complexities is a necessary precursor for the faithful exercise of our vocations in the church. Without self-awareness and self-knowledge, we can’t know God and we can’t really know the Good News of Jesus. And to honestly know ourselves, we must embrace both our accomplishments and our failures, which is to say our humanity in all its truthfulness, glory, and defeat. Frederick Buechner writes: Our lives are full of moments in which for better or for worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us, and around us, and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God, too.

If you don’t regularly read Mockingbird on the Interweb, I hope you will because it’ll help you connect the Good News of Jesus with the reality of our human experience in this culture. Recently, Duo Dickinson, who’s been an architect for 40 years, wrote an agonizingly honest piece simply entitled, Failure. He writes: I know that I am owed nothing. If you play, sometimes you lose. What is harder to accept is that for all living things, physical failure is inevitable. We die. And the good and bad “things” that result from all the efforts are not around much after us. Our children will die, too, and their children. Everything I have written will be forgotten. Most architects can’t relate to the truth that everything built gets scraped off this earth in the next Ice Age. So, Dickinson continues, nothing really counts, so chill. Have another drink. Binge watch. Eat the bacon…. No. Stuff matters beyond failure. Even beyond success. I just wish I felt the love of Jesus so deeply that I could know that grace was all that really mattered, and that love is the only thing that lived beyond my death. But, like Groucho [Marx], I am not sure I could join any club that would have me [as a member].

As I listen to the voices in our culture right now, I hear a collective longing for a story that lifts us up above our divisions and self-deceptions helps us imagine something we long to become. Some in our culture feel trapped in stories of nostalgia that glorify the past and demonize the people who they perceive are bringing us down. Others feel left out of optimistic tales that imagine things will be “great again.” People want, it seems, a better story than the one in which they currently live. We have that story in the Good News of Jesus, which both confesses our deep brokenness while envisioning what Dr. King called the “beloved community.”

To lead the church in such times, we need to pray to God:
Noverim me. Noverim te. “Let me know myself. Let me know you.”

Johnny Cash was one of the most self-aware people we’ve had the privilege to witness on the public stage in our lifetimes. If you don’t read The Bitter Southerner, you should. Our own John Hayes, history professor at Augusta University and sometime vestryman at St Augustine’s Augusta, wrote a brilliant piece recently on how Cash expressed a deep theology of self-knowledge and self-awareness in his music. It’s at once hopeful as well as honest. In his music, Cash explored the darker side of our humanity while always hoping for God’s redemption. Hayes writes: Cash approached the American experience and Christianity from the darker side. He was a Southerner who wrestled publicly with national and religious identity. His music presented the American story from the rough underside and Christian faith from the ragged margins… He was a Christian who didn’t cast stones, a patriot who didn’t play the flag card…The “ordinary” people in [Cash’s] story-songs are heroic: Their hard, desperate struggles and human longings have dignity and honor. But they don’t win. Cash honors them and puts their stories at the center of the national experience, but there is no victory celebration. The rough reality is heroic defeat, not the American dream.

“Heroic defeat.” Might we be willing to name that in ourselves and embrace it as our vocation? What separates “heroic defeat” from the extremes of self-pity and self-righteousness is our spiritual practice of staying near Jesus on his cross and trusting him to grab us by the wrists and yank us into the new life of his resurrection. Such a spiritual practice guards against our tendency to wallow in the self-pity, you know what I mean, how we’re not properly appreciated for all our hard work for the church; that we’re over-worked and under-paid, etc. Or, our tendency toward self-righteousness, when we simply can’t believe other people don’t rightly see the injustice and sins of the world just the way we do. My favorite New Yorker cartoon of all time has a clergy person in clericals sitting at the breakfast table and saying to their spouse: “Last night I had the most wonderful dream. I dreamt God agreed with me on everything!”

Lord knows, we need one another for such a spiritual practice. If we’re not regularly meeting in colleague relationships, then we’re the wrong kind of fool. If we’re not availing ourselves of the support of a coach who will hold us accountable for what we say we wish to do, then we’re the wrong kind of fool. If we’re not reflecting on our lives with a seasoned therapist or spiritual director, then we’re the wrong kind of fool.

But what’s the right kind of fool? To answer that, we return to Brother Buechner. Speaking to a seminary graduating class about their call to parish ministry, he said this:
It’s a queer business that you have chosen or that has chosen you. It’s a business that breaks the heart for the sake of the heart. It’s a hard and chancy business whose risks are as great even as its rewards. Above all else, perhaps, it is a crazy business. It is a foolish business. It is a crazy and foolish business to work for Christ in a world where most people most of the time don’t give a hoot in hell whether you work for him or not. It is crazy and foolish to offer a service that most people most of the time think they need like a hole in the head. As long as there are bones to set and drains to unclog and children to tame and boredom to survive, we need doctors and plumbers and teachers and people who play the musical saw; but when it comes to the business of Christ and his church, how unreal and irrelevant a service that seems even, and at times especially, to the ones who are called to work at it.

Noverim me. Noverim te. God, let me know myself. Let me know you.And let us embrace our heroic defeat together for that’s the way of our Great High Priest, Jesus.

+Scott