As both a writer and a musician, Jesse keeps his eyes open for signs of God\u2019s kingdom breaking into our world. I\u2019m glad to share this testimony about how God is showing up in his life.<\/em><\/p>\nBy Jesse James DeConto<\/p>\n
On Trinity Sunday in June 2007, I went to a little church that met in a photographer\u2019s studio above a coffee shop in a historic business district near Duke University in Durham, N.C. We sat around a circle, on couches or big cushy chairs, and a pro musician, Wade Baynham, who had built a regional following on the West Coast with his band The Basics before moving to Durham, led us in singing music from Over the Rhine and U2\u2013songs seeking spiritual meaning in everyday human experiences.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d met Wade while working on a freelance story for The News & Observer about another local musician, \u201cRandy\u201d who had played on Letterman and Leno and toured Europe with an extremely successful Christian crossover band before an angry split in Nashville and his new career teaching drum lessons and preschool in Durham. I\u2019d hung out with the two of them while Randy recorded drums for a client\u2019s record in Wade\u2019s home studio. Between Wade and Randy and this tiny fellowship, I\u2019d hoped to find the real friendship I thought might save my terminally-ill marriage.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmergent\u201d or postmodern churches like this one tend to attract worshippers in their 20s and 30s who think they hear a divine call to love each other and the world around them but at the same time doubt the human ability to understand anything God might have to say. There is no magisterium or dogmatic priest to interpret and explain the world or the Bible with any absolute authority. The people, with all their strengths and shortcomings, success and suffering, idiosyncrasies and expertise, together in conversation with sacred texts and Christian tradition try to figure how to follow Jesus in the 21st century.<\/p>\n
The name of this particular group, Emmaus Way, comes from a story in the Gospel of Luke where two of Jesus\u2019 followers meet him on the road to a Jewish town called Emmaus and don\u2019t recognize him until after they offer him hospitality as a lonely traveler. \u201cAs he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him.\u201d Emergent churches are built on the idea that spiritual truth depends upon experience in community, that God is known in relationship, especially sharing meals together, an idea that had motivated so much idealism back on my wedding day.<\/p>\n
But there was something more than just the transparency of sitting in a small room, looking at one another across an intimate circle. Wade had gone through a divorce \u2014 with his songwriting partner of 20 years, no less \u2013 and had just remarried that spring. Randy had absorbed bitter conflict in the Christian-music industry that was supposed to be telling a story of love. They had watched hope disintegrate before their eyes, yet they were still here, helping us worship, not denying the pain, but looking for God in it, as though God hadn\u2019t been the one to let them down but was, instead, the Comforter who knew suffering on the cross and could walk through it with them. On this Trinity Sunday, Wade led us in a song, a prayer he\u2019d written after his mother\u2019s suicide when he was 17 years old:<\/p>\n
Will you feel with me the feelings that I feel?<\/em>
\n Will you help me tell what\u2019s not and what is real?<\/em>
\n Will you be the one to save me from my fear?<\/em>
\n Will you save, will you save me?<\/em>
\n Will you save, will you save me?<\/em><\/p>\nFor me, at that point, salvation wasn\u2019t just finding hope or making the best of bad circumstances. I thought our marriage could be redeemed. In our counseling sessions, I had seen how my wife\u2019s need to be taken care of and my need to take care had whisked us into a toxic soup. She couldn\u2019t help but whine, nag and sigh about all the disappointments of her life. I couldn\u2019t help but try to fix them. She couldn\u2019t help but be disappointed in my fixes, because what was broken was inside of her. I couldn\u2019t help but sink into depression, a failure. She couldn\u2019t help but pile on more complaints. I couldn\u2019t help but explode in rage, once every couple of months or so, screaming about her humble suggestion that salt would help the water boil faster.<\/p>\n
The answer, of course, was for her to deal with her brokenness and for me to deal with mine. So what if she believed in the death penalty? So what if she didn\u2019t like compact-fluorescent lightbulbs or want to live in a Christian commune? Maybe we just spent money differently. Maybe we just thought differently about what God wanted from us \u2013 how we were supposed to treat others and the environment, what value we put on material things versus people. Maybe I\u2019d become just another liberal fundamentalist, and she had every right to feel judged, as she said she did, by what I left unsaid.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod\u2019s very being is a being that\u2019s in relationship with himself, you know, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, eternally in relationship with himself,\u201d said Trigger, a skater-theologian, bald-headed and baggy-pantsed, one of several Duke Divinity students at Emmaus Way.<\/p>\n
Pastor Tim had prompted us to reflect on the Trinity.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just interesting that there\u2019s this otherness, in a sense, within God, and it\u2019s kind of like the way that we relate to each other in a body,\u201d Trigger went on. \u201cIt\u2019s engaging with the other, it\u2019s like the Trinity itself can be a model for church relationships, human sexual relationships, all sorts of other types of relationships can be understood in a Trinitarian way of thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eternally in relationship, yes. But how had I missed that \u201cotherness\u201d aspect of the Trinity and how it served as a model for marriage?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trinity is difference and intimate unity,\u201d Tim said. \u201cThe best way to get some really bad theology is to grab one of those two but not the other. Unity often means, \u2018We\u2019ll do it my way, and we\u2019ll feel good about it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPreach it, brother.\u201d<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t really say that. Emergents don\u2019t say that sort of thing. But I could have. Tim hit me square between the eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnity and difference radically changes a whole philosophy of partnership,\u201d Tim said. \u201cOur whole philosophy of ministry should be that of embracing difference, letting different be different, and in some way fashioning intimacies in that difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes. Yes. How had I missed that back on my wedding day? Yes, Tim said, paraphrasing C.S. Lewis, God does invite us into the Triune life, but we have limits.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t do that as human beings,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t say that my life is intimately in your life. I can\u2019t say that, because I\u2019m not divine. We are not a Trinity. We don\u2019t relate in the way God does.\u201d<\/p>\n
That Trinity Sunday was a turning point in my life, when I started to admit that I would never see the perfect image of God in myself or anyone else. I would see it only through a glass darkly. And once you admit that, you can start to give and receive grace. That is, once you stop chasing the image of God, you might find it\u2019s not that far away.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jesse James DeConto is a writer and musician in Durham, N.C. He is working on a book of creative nonfiction, tentatively titled\u00a0This Littler Light: Finding Grace in the Dark<\/em>. Read more at\u00a0jessejamesdeconto.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I met Jesse DeConto when he was a reporter covering faith-based resistance to the death penalty in North Carolina. We caught up a few years later and wrote a piece for The Christian Century on Project TURN, the prison-based education program that School for Conversion runs. As both a writer and a musician, Jesse keeps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-testimonies"],"yoast_head":"\n
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