The Ghost of Christendom’s Past
I’ve been revisiting some of the posts from my old blog “Pastoralia,” where I wrote about church in one form or another from 2006 to 2016. So here I am, ten years removed from something I did, fairly intensively, for ten years. That’s a bit jarring for me to think about.
In 2006 I was a mid-thirties, Evangelical, large-church pastor in the mid-west. By 2016 I was a deconstructed Exvangelical in Southern California. I abandoned church for five years before landing in a small Mainline denomination in 2015. Back then I thought blogging was a lot of things it turned out not to be. Mostly it turned out to be a way to figure myself out in public. I suspect that may be true of a great many things I’ve done.
I wonder if you’ve ever done something for a good long while. Something you took quite seriously. Then looked back sometime later and realized the whole of it was for just one part. Like if the densest concentration of the mass of your entire life, its insatiable center of gravity, happened somewhere in the middle. And later you realized all the years before were prelude and all the years to follow were afterword. But that singular moment? It was the whole book.
I sort of feel that way about “The Death Rattle of Christendom.” I posted it on May 5, 2010. Somewhere in the middle. The year I quit church. It’s not the best thing I’ve written – just a silly little allegory – but it is, undoubtedly, the singularity of all I’ve ever written on the subject.
I share it here, sixteen years later, as the first post on my new blog because, while the “old girl” is long dead, she haunts me in the most pleasant way. I expected her to die. I expected her to haunt me. I did not expect her ghost to be such a delightful conversationalist.
Your mileage may vary. But looking back, I realize the pastor I am today – the church I pastor today – could not exist without her.
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The Death Rattle of Christendom
She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered, turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute, but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Dear Fyodor,
It’s getting rough for the old girl. Despite the rattle of death in her chest, there’s still a hint of the former beauty and dignity behind those eyes and, as anyone would tell you, she’s as feisty as ever. Still, the truth is she’s dying and there’s nothing to be done about it. As we sit around her bed praying and waiting, her moments of lucidity come with rapidly decreasing frequency.
Everyone here is dealing with the ugliness of her death in their own way. My sister refuses to let her go. She stands just beyond the door, arguing in harsh whispers with the doctors and nurses. She won’t believe the facts of the case, and it’s easier to argue over the interpretation of charts and data than to look straight at the old girl herself. I don’t blame her. Looking is hard.
My older brother looks but doesn’t see. “She’s just a little out of shape,” he says optimistically. “If we can get her up and out she’ll be back to her old self, ruling the roost!” And so he hangs a dress on her and rolls on rouge and glides her round the ward in a wheelchair festooned at the handles with curly ribbon and helium balloons so she might speak with the people. I tell you it’s horrible. Such a thing would be bearable (commendable even!) if compassion was his aim, but it’s not compassion he seeks from her fellows in the ward. No, it’s her rulership he hopes to re-animate and so he props her up like some animatronic relic – a broken-down ecclesiastical Chuck-E-Cheese promising fun-and-games for all the good little children.
Sadly, she scares the children. They weren’t around when she was bright and beautiful. They never attended her grand parties. They don’t know who she was (and let’s face it, as good as she might have been she was also a hard taskmaster, perhaps taking her job of keeping us safe too seriously and – I think – secretly hoping we would never grow up). So the children shrink and shriek and their lack of piety (or pity) has fermented my brother’s optimism into a swill of bitter insistence, rendering him defensive and defiant and refusing the temporary inebriation of grief.
(Can I tell you the truth? I fear her death is more than he can take. He always seemed the stronger one growing up, but I’m not sure he can keep his sanity without her strict order around the house – without her barbed-wire fences to separate the wild vines from the cultivated ones. I don’t think he realizes it was always her intention that we harvest the whole field, and I think all these years later she might even be happy to see us tear down those fences if keeping them meant letting the whole field go to waste.)
For me, it’s her delirious rants that are the most heart-wrenching. She’ll stubbornly hoist herself up to rebuke people who aren’t even in the room – resurrected memories of conflicts and passions long dead and gone to everyone but her own cruelly vivid memories that now, in her mortal distress, seem to have taken on a quality that simply overwhelms her present reality. Perhaps it’s for the best – perhaps it’s mercy – but for better or worse I find I’m not just grieving her death, I’m grieving the robbery of her chance to see the transcendence of death by the legacy she leaves in us. I think she would rejoice in that. I think she would look us in the eye and say, “It’s good to grieve me, but celebrate too. If I live on like this then death wins by making me into a mockery of life. But if I die then the life I lived will be victorious by passing on to you. Now take the best and go.”
She deserves that moment; it’s her birthright. But we won’t let her have it. We insist on preserving her because somehow we think our life is in her, when actually her life (all life!) is a gift that grows in the giving, until one day it grows so fat it swallows every one of us whole, death and all. Who would have thought, Fyodor, that the nihilism you so strenuously decried would lead not to the depraved insistence on rationalized death, but to the dogmatic insistence on irrational life?
You must be wondering how she can possibly endure for so long. It’s the machines that keep her alive. Pray for a death rattle in the chest of those monstrosities so she might finally be free from our obsessions, and enjoy a long night of rest in a well-deserved sleep.
