Introspection: Anger and Humility

Six kids and me acting like one around a bowl with a fish and a mirror.  One thing that the kids would do was to put a mirror in front of the Beta fish.  The Beta would become irritated, annoyed, frazzled and eventually angry.  It is angry at what it perceives as another.  In some ways its so difficult to watch the Beta fish.  

You wish to just tell it, “hey, that is you, stop being angry at the face thinking its another one. Your angry at yourself."  

For the fish to realize this….it would be awkward, awakening and agonizing.   Now hold onto this story.  I will come back to it. 

I have had a hard time describing my experience with church and faith.  Like I told my mom the other day, the key to read my blog is to “read” what is not written.  You may have noticed a void.  The void is the specifics about my actual church itself.  It’s a rather complex and, at times, difficult topic that is more suited to a conversation over tea.

One of the closest analogies I can come to about my experience with general life and church here is this. 

For those of you who know the East Hastings area of Vancouver, this will be at lot easier.  Basically, in downtown Vancouver you find posh, affluent life of the downtown.  Then you can walk a couple blocks and enter a world of poverty, drugs, and prostitution.  In a matter of blocks this happens.  It’s a shocking, scary and alarming walk—a walk that you rather forget--but really it is rather unforgettable.  

Now imagine, having a church right in between the posh part and the destitute part of Vancouver.  Say, a church in that block right before Hastings.  And this church draws people from both parts of Vancouver--the rich and the poor.  It has the very very richest people of Vancouver along with those whom are poorest.  They all gather in the same place for singing, hearing God's Word and fellowship. 

One of the choices of the rich looks like this.  You could come to church, do your thing, and leave or you could come to church and be changed and change both Hastings and your world.  The rich have made this church a massive building filled with the latest technology and finest furnishings. Going to church here could be the most comfortable thing ever.     

In this church, sitting next to the poor, against all assumptions that it would change the rich, shows little signs that it does.  The poor are expected to be there, it just the way things are.  Sure, some food and money is given to them.  In fact, some people far away are paying lots to help the poor here.  The poor mothers, stay poor, there is no way out for them.  In short, helping the poor is nothing more than an expected task of the church—it is just protocol.  Some people can not feed there kids well. 

Some people have no toilets.

Some people can not send there kids to school.  

But you can ignore this all, just show up in your SUV, hang out with your cliché, and then head home and live life behind your gated home or your strolling in the mall.  It actually is very possible for you to not be change even if you share the same pew or street with those whom hope to met life's needs, but struggle greatly to do so.  

There is of course another reaction to attending a church like this--suspended between the rich and poor.  The reaction is one of working towards empowering lives and seeing the call to bring justice as a central act of worship.  There are glimpses of this in certain people and at certain times, but as for the church community as a whole, this course of action seems to be the path much less taken.  

A then there is me.  Being apart of this church like I have this year, could also be something that—well, let’s see—wrecks and changes you.  It inflicts damage on your faith.  At times, you doubt the church.  You are troubled by the people that fill it with disregard for empowering the poor and lack of intentional interactions with  Muslims to know each other more deeply.  You lose trust in passionate sermons preaching shalom when the actions that follow are faint.  It looks to you like a race to the top of the economic ladder.  A flight to capitalism and all that it can bring.  It looks like a big jack-pot, some win and other lose—it’s the game.  There is no real way out for the losers, the winners work hard and it some sense have earned it—the losers just need to follow course.

Not a day goes by that I do not stare into this abyss between rich and poor and the abyss between God's Kingdom call and what happens.  Staring into tears me apart.  It’s ugly, lonely and damaging to the soul.  When the church looks like this it makes me not want to be a pastor.  Something is deeply not the way its supposed to be.  It is an awful sight. It can feel devoid of a God of compassion and intimacy.  The church feels like an institution, concerned with money and power.  

Now remember that story about the kids, me and the Beta fish.  Remember what the fish is actually angry at?

I think the part that hurts the most is how I have realized that the "face" that I get angry at, is actually me.  It's actually myself.  The names, attitudes, hearts, priorities, actions and words of those whom fill the church and make me want to leave it are, when it comes down do it, a lot like me.  It's an awful and awesome discovery all at the same time.  It's being angry and then realizing that the one you are angry at is actually your reflection. It's realizing that I am the Pharisee in in the Parable in Luke 18:9-14 who boasts and is angered by the tax collector, only to realize that the tax collector was a reflection of himself.       

It is one thing to go a place where all live relatively the same economically. 

         Live in the affluent part of your city, that makes faith easier.  

         Live in a place where poverty is ubiquitous, it will often make faith harder.

But,

        Live in a place where affluence and poverty tangle, it makes you angry, then introspective.  

Like the Pharisee, I also find the path to humbly look introspectively at the "face" that is the end of pride and condemnation one of struggle and denial.  Denial that at the end of my frustration is really myself.  Faith is humility.  Faith then becomes anguish.  I am moving past denial and trying to bear the cross of humility in terms of my experience in Indonesia.  It is process.  And it is slow.  But Jesus has me convinced that it is worth it.