Religion & Bondage

Sometimes I get a slap on the wrist from other Christians if I call my faith "my religion." As the expression goes which we often repeat, "it's not a religion - it's a relationship with Christ." That's the absolute truth. All human rituals and superstitions are dissolved by Christ's sacrifice on the cross and we can have a personal relationship with God the Father through Him and His atoning death and resurrection. And, I suppose another reason Christians don't like for Christianity to be called a religion is due to the world's habit of lumping all beliefs in all deities of any kind or source into one big hasty pile called "religion." God is holy, a word meaning set apart; I can certainly understand, in that respect, why my brothers and sisters in Christ may wince at our faith being added to the pile of religion.

But for me personally, I hope to be religious in the most literal and spiritual sense. The word religion means "bondage." I yearn to be, as Paul was called, "a bondservant of Christ." I want to be fettered to Him with chains I couldn't break if I tried - and I do try, all day and all night sometimes, to break "the ties that bind" Him to me. My natural self craves things harmful to me and others, and harmful to my relationship with God; so my flesh claws at the chains that keep me attached to Jesus. And though it is an "easy yoke, a light burden," He strengthens the shackles for my own good.

I want to be a slave of Jesus Christ, my heart fettered to His.

Thank God for these bonds! The fleshly, worldly mind would object, "I don't want to be a slave! I want to have freedom in my own thoughts, my own desires! What about what I want?"
I'm scared to death of my own thoughts and desires. I'm such a rotten and wretched man without Christ and His Scripture that any thought or deed I've done apart from Him, anything I've done or said in which I had to run from Him with an unsteady, shackled trot, has been selfish, greedy, lustful, bitter, hateful, bigoted, racist, arrogant. All the things Christ despises, all the things He died to cleanse me from. My imagination is one of my worst enemies.

When humankind is left to its own devices, we come up with the most miserable and vile things we can imagine. We murder, rape, torture, bicker, hate, fight, covet, exploit, abuse, turn a blind eye to injustice and want, indulge in the safety of ignorance, and find a hollow solace in the thought that we're following our own course, the course of human history, governed by humankind's own majestic imagination.

I don't want that. The rest of the world can have its freedom, but I want to find my liberty and peace on the narrow way described by Jesus. It's not fun - it's gritty, it's painful, it's boring, it invites criticism and humiliation. But I would desperately rather be a slave to what is good than a free subject of sin, leaving a wake of hurt and despair wherever I roam.

The most frightening thing God can to do someone is to let them have what they want.

Lord, chain me to Your heart!

Amarillo City Transit Blues / My Homeless Future?

I have a thought. It's not a vision, and I'm not yet convinced enough to call it a revelation. It's just a thought, albeit a heavy one that hasn't left me since the day it first came. The thought is that someday, somehow, I will lose my disability benefits, my Medicare, my medications, my apartment, and will eventually become a mentally ill homeless man. Just like the kind you see all over the city.

If my thought ever comes true, and I become a crazy derelict, if I ever join that unwanted street parade, a walking, breathing city ordinance violation, have some patience and salt toward me.
There's a man who rides my bus - we'll call him "Chad" - he lifts up his t-shirt, talks to his chest and feet, looks up and waves goodbye to someone only he can see, and talks almost non-stop to who I can only assume is the same phantom to whom he bids farewell. Chad makes any newbies who may happen to be on the bus uncomfortable, especially when he flicks on his lighter and holds it dangerously close to his palm. Every time he gets off the bus at his stop near the resource center downtown, I sigh like every living feeling I've ever had is coming out of me. I've been tense the whole bus ride, worried Chad is going to burn himself or the contents of his garbage bag, tense because of the tenseness of the other passengers, fear that one of them will say something stupid and cause a situation, and hopeless knowing there's nothing I can do for him.

I believe that a little over half of my own generation (myself included) is made up of self-righteous dilettantes whose world views are based eighty percent on sentiment and anger, with only fifteen percent rooted in experience (the other five percent is a mixture of statistics and faulty math). I know I sound like every old person ever, but that's just how I feel. My feelings aren't rooted in some bitter notion I've inherited or been taught by former generations who were just as smug and self-assured; my feelings are rooted in one simple thing: the bus. The Amarillo City Transit, a combination VFW meeting, social worker's waiting room, Pentecostal church, underfunded mental hospital, and racist clubhouse on wheels. Riding the bus has opened my eyes to how entitled I am, how oblivious I am to the struggles of the world - they're very different when you see them up close, not through the lenses of memes and Facebook posts. If you ride the bus enough, you'll encounter many people who will humble you and make you feel downright ashamed for buying a $6 latte that morning instead of giving $6 to the High Plains Food Bank - just once, that morning. Maybe twice a week, $12 to the High Plains Food Bank. Maybe Wednesdays and Thursdays you can drink the nasty stuff they have at work instead.
Shame is not of the Holy Spirit, but humility is. If you spend enough time with people who have little, you'll realize that your zealous protest of the FCC's repeal of net neutrality is the stuff of outer space down there in the real world. I'm sorry you may have to pay $15 extra to your internet service provider for the social media package, or $20 extra for the porn package. But try telling that to the guy sitting across from you on the Amarillo City Transit, the most alert and coherent among them. He'll tell you he's got gangrene in his leg, $8 to his name until next month, needs new glasses, and he's been out all day looking for enough cigarette butts to make him feel like he smoked a whole one.

I feel guilty. I feel sinful for having a well-fed gut, a smart phone, clean socks, and an mp3 player that keeps me from hearing this guy's life story, or hearing what Chad is saying to the specter only he can see. If you're reading this and you're chubby like me, you can feel the way you want about your weight - this isn't some decree about overweight people, except for myself - but I don't feel good about my weight. Not because I think I'm unattractive, or because I'm in any poor physical health, but because there are people I encounter on the bus who haven't eaten since the day before yesterday. It just seems wrong that I'm fat in their presence. I'm no socialist, but it just doesn't seem right, and it embarrasses me every time I step on board the miserable mystery tour.

But, having said that, I ask of you one thing: if and when I become dissociated and dirty beyond recognition, when you see me and begin to feel uncomfortable, whether you recognize me or not, please don't inflict upon yourself the same self-loathing and guilt as I have. Again, shame is not a fruit of the Spirit. Keep your heart open to conviction from God, whether He tells you to give me a $5 bill or not, whether He tells you to buy me some socks, or to use that money to help someone else, or even to use it for that morning latte. It's no sin. Pay attention to convictions, delight and be glad that He convicts you, but remember God does not want us to hate ourselves, even if, like me, we've warped ourselves into thinking it's a "righteous" self-hatred, some pretentious morally heroic stance. Hate is hate, and it's wrong for me to despise myself because I have something someone else doesn't.

One's blessings only become gluttony when they're not shared or used for good. But this must be action and not mere sentiment, like a rich rock star pleading with those on whom he relies to buy his albums to "imagine no possessions."

Most people who know me know I hate "Mental Health Awareness Month," which is May. I hate it because it doesn't do enough to show what mental illness really looks like, the depths these sicknesses truly reach. Social media takes on the job of promoting "mental health awareness," showing black and white Instagram pictures of a girl (or angel/fairy wearing a black corset for some reason) looking sad with the generic caption that "not all scars can be seen" or some other such easy cliches. What you're not going to see during Mental Health Awareness Month is people like Chad, his shirt rolled up, talking to no one, his teeth broken, face unwashed, legs covered in scabs. That's not romantic. That's not quirky. And that's what Mental Health Awareness Month is about. Maybe it wasn't intended that way, but that's what social media and compulsively shared posts have made it.
If you want to leave your ideological bunker, if you want to see what mental illness looks like, if you want to be as aware of mental illness as you can get without a trip to Big Spring State Hospital, that rotten place I hope burns to the ground someday, go downtown and spend some time on the bus. Try to talk to the woman who wears a plastic garbage bag as if it were a scarf, who eyes everyone and curses them before she pulls the cord to get off at a random stop. Try to cram her into some feminist/socialist/liberal/conservative/capitalist box and see how well she fits. Try to put her in line with your talking points and the hashtags and catch-phrases you learned from your news feed. She won't fit as well as if you try to fit her face over yours in the mirror. You could be her someday; someone has to take her place in the street parade.

My favorite Bible verse is John 21:18, in which Jesus tells Peter that he'll someday be martyred for his faith: "Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." This verse gives me such strange comfort in its surety of suffering. I keep this verse in mind when I feel any hardship coming, whether it be personal heartbreak or the disaster that awaits the Texas panhandle this summer if the current drought continues. I know God promises me I'll suffer, but that nothing He allows is for no reason, nothing is in the random, and He will strengthen, refine, and ordain me as a herald of His Son, in any situation, no matter how bleak and ugly. And I know that I can't stop it; it's as if it were already a memory, and that I must take my part in it.
Someday I may be clothed by another, a clueless teenage kid handing out faded t-shirts from the Salvation Army at the park, instead of Walmart's finest Oxford button-down shirts that I'm accustomed to; carried where I do not want to go, by exhaustion and numbness, to my night's home on the sidewalk on 6th avenue, outside the empty bar that used to be Sassy's.

If that happens, don't be ashamed to stare, so you'll be truly aware of what mental illness looks like, and what it does because of what we don't do; and if you can't help, don't hate yourself for it - if I'm destined for the street parade, and you for the comfort of a roof and a bed, it's been ordained by a far wiser Power than you or me.

"The world is nothing more than all the tiny things you've left behind."

PS If this ever comes true, and you see me loitering somewhere, please don't snap a picture to post with some sociopolitical analysis about class division and the one percent or whoever else you're blaming for my plight - instead, sell your camera and use the money to feed me, clothe me, or buy my medicine.