How do we find God's joy and wonder in a cynical and weary world?

There used to be a lot more flax fields.

Walking along the roads was like reliving Moses, passing between two oceans of periwinkle blue, rippling in the wind. If a whale had leapt from the waving flax, twisted into the air, and disappeared back into the earth, I would not have been surprised.

Purple mountain majesties are easy to appreciate. It’s the amber (and blue) waves of grain rippling in the wind on the Great Plains that people miss out on. Few people will plan vacations to watch the wind blow the grass against a treeless horizon and endless sky.

The memory be green.

– William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2)

I live in town now and am not as connected to such things as I once was. I want to say that the memory is still green, but it is not as fresh and poignant as I would like. The sharp edges are blurring.

There are still moments, though.

On my regular walks on the walking path near a bit of wilderness close to the Missouri River, deer or wild turkeys often confront me, often flipping their tails up. At times, when the nearby road traffic is light and cars are few, the air is filled with the sounds of a kind of orchestra. The soft cooing choir of mourning doves, interrupted now and then by the tinny trumpet blast of a pheasant, punctuated by the tenor drum of a woodpecker and the trilling bells of black birds. Once in a while, the Canadian geese add a bassoon honk. On my way back to the house, if the wind is blowing from the south, I take the sidewalk that flanks a row of evergreen trees to hear the wind soft-whistling through the pine needles. It reminds me of riding horses through a double row of pines at my grandpa’s farm, where for about 100 feet, you could imagine you were in the Old West.

But it’s easy to miss.

I have to pay attention. I have to want to hear it. I smile and greet the other walkers on the path, most wearing headphones or earbuds or talking on their phones. I’ve passed parents out walking with their children, talking into their phone on speaker instead of to their child. Not only is this bad for situational awareness, but it’s a shame. They’re missing out on something better, though they’ve managed to control their experience well and to their liking.

There’s a lot more to see than we understand.

I wonder if we know too much. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil never did us any favors. The more we know, the less we see. Years ago, standing in a grassy field and attempting to paint my great-grandfather’s long barn, I could not get the colors correct; I could only see the details, and they were distracting me. Frustrated, I took off my glasses, and the world became a blur. Suddenly, I could see what I needed, blocks of color instead of blades of grass. I could see how it all worked together.

"Prairie Basilica" © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

I grew up in an Assembly of God church, and while I don’t attend one now, it’s not because I’ve abandoned the beliefs. I find myself singing the old hymns and choruses I grew up on, glad that they, at least, are stuck in my long-term memory so I have something to snack on down the road when my short-term memory fades. Lanny Wolfe’s song has been coming to mind a lot lately, though I’m not sure why.

Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.

I can feel his mighty power and his grace.

I don’t feel much of anything; the fact that these lyrics keep popping into my head makes me wonder if it’s a mockery or an encouragement. I’ve been told that feelings don’t matter, and facts don’t care about my feelings, but God gave us feelings and He cares about them; they matter even if they aren’t what we are to use to make decisions.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt much of anything in church, but I did as a child. Bible camp services or Sunday night church bring to mind those flax fields, but with voices instead of blue flowers and stems. If you’ve never experienced a congregation singing in the Spirit, it’s hard to describe perfectly.

It’s not crazy and boisterous. There’s a kind of quiet and holy demeanor, little or no music accompaniment, singing in tongues or other praises, like hallelujah, a mix of English words and other sounds, often light weeping, no particular melody but somehow, all directed into a kind of harmonic chord, even as the voices move around the octaves. It’s like the wind moving across that flax field, as if God was blowing across the top of a glass bottle and there was an echo chord. You could almost see the sound as voices ebbed and flowed, growing louder and softer in waves of the wind of the Spirit moving across them. It would start and stop unannounced, leaving an almost tangible feel to the air when it was over. There was quiet and stillness, the pastor often reluctant to break the silence and start the sermon.

It is a precious memory, but I don’t talk about it much because everyone loves to make a joke or argument directed at Pentecostals. Perhaps that’s why the memory is not green, that lack of regular resuscitation.

I’m not interested in debating and arguing anymore. Romans 12:18 says “if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Hard to do, unless I just keep my mouth shut.

I’m not going to trade a lack of feeling for angry feelings. I don’t want to throw precious pearls to see them ground down under the guise of iron sharpening iron, which has, so far, mostly sharpened my faith to brittle thinness. I can’t meet the standards of other believers—the right Bible translations, the perfect theology—and I miss being able to sing Wolfe’s song from both a place of knowing and feeling.

As I often do, when such feelings threaten to crash over me, I read Galatians. It’s my go-to when I feel there are many rules and expectations—some of my own making—that I can’t possibly meet.

“I’ve been a Christian my whole life,” I told my friend, “but there’s always someone willing to tell you that you’re doing it wrong.”

Jesus’ yoke is easy, but we like to put some weights on it because we think the race for the goal is handicapped. We weigh down the wonder, tipping heads down instead of up. We don’t like to operate in an area where the answer is “I don’t know, I can’t explain it.” The weights keep us occupied to avoid that discomfort because we can know the weight. We prefer to operate in the rigid limits of our own understanding. There’s a sense we can’t just collapse and cry and feel before my Father; we have to cite a creed or complete a church process first, where our theology is verified.

Today’s exploding number of discernment ministries—people who create content solely to inform you of what denomination, belief, leader, or teacher is wrong—tend to target the things I grew up with that were so precious and hopeful.1

It’s a robbery, of sorts, stealing away the joy and wonder I once felt with the people of God, before I was aware that the world of Christianity can’t get along and that the enemy only needs a hairline fracture to open up a canyon. In a world of endless denominations and even more church splits, I don’t know how to process Jesus’ prayer in John 17, in which he prayed that the church would be one just as the Trinity was one.

But there is something to learn from this.

I tell myself that if it’s possible for me to feel that uncomfortable and unworthy around other believers, imagine how non-believers must feel. I could live with prickly believers more tolerably if the lack of wonder and deadness hadn’t grown to accompany it.

Perhaps that’s why a recent Rod Dreher article hit me hard.

I’ve read Dreher’s previous books, and his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, is what this article references.2 Not every chapter is a favorite; he draws on the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and I don’t necessarily recognize the value of what he says.

But I understand his question. His personal revelations are quite raw and real.

Somewhere, between people flocking to UFOs and psychoactive drugs and the occult, and those running the other direction to churches with tidy program schedules and a controlling hierarchy, we missed God. The former is about feelings and experience, the latter about control, and both miss the point in their exclusions.

Dreher is surprised by the amount of occult in today’s Christian church, and I was, too. Any kid from my era who was raised in the Pentecostal tradition was heavily warned about astrology, the occult, Ouija boards, horoscopes—you name it. You didn’t touch it. When a high-school friend pulled out an Ouija board at her house one weekend, I freaked out and said that it shouldn’t even be in the house. I insisted she put it away. In the Pentecostal tradition, we were very aware of spiritual warfare, but the answer wasn’t to avoid the supernatural and hammer down all the wonder. Instead, it was to embrace a godly supernatural.

But that was fifty years ago.

We careen further towards extremes, either chasing feelings and spooky experiences to give us the sense we can control things around us, or seeking refuge in structured church programs that are organized and function on the American business model to give us the sense we can control things around us.

Because Western order and systems make the most sense to us, the former is obviously dangerous while the latter seems benign. We see no problem with a handy systemization of belief that fits into workbooks, the calendar, and various products in logical progression. Yet people buy sage and smudge their apartments and watch witchcraft on their television while churches are futzing with staff management and new carpet and expelling those who colored outside of their lines.

Dreher, I think, is trying to navigate that difficult middle, and I appreciate that effort.

He wonders, like I do, how it is that the church has lost its wonder and become so transactional and rote when the world is careening eagerly towards all things spiritual and bizarre? Was our answer to the growing “spirituality” of the world to go hard in the opposite direction?

How, in a world where we are all jaded and weary, where we brag about being an old soul and cynical, where we plod through each day thinking of earthly things, do we make the memory of the origins of our faith fresh and green?

There must be order. The church buildings must be managed. The Bible must be preached. The bills must be paid. But I can’t shake the feeling that the veil between spiritual dimensions grows thinner every day, and a church armed with programs and systems of control is ill-prepared to handle what happens when it rips fully.

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1 I have noticed that many discernment ministries stem from someone who came out of a wrong, abusive, or harmful situation. Naturally, they react very strongly against anything that reminds them of it, much like a recovered alcoholic avoids even cough syrup and rails against all alcohol use. If you came out of the New Age or a hyper-charismatic church, the Reformed or Baptist traditions are going to be safer for you, and you will advocate accordingly based on your own experience. I understand that, and I want to show grace and not argue.

The tension is real, with sincere believers in absolute disagreement, warning others about each other. I’ve struggled with it my whole life, and I have come back to this concept that Dr. Allen taught me in my first year of college, which was at a Bible college before I headed to a state university. I’ve mentioned it several times elsewhere, but it’s based on the three types of convictions found in the Bible:

This is similar to what C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity when he was talking about temperance and how it had come to mean not drinking alcohol, though originally meant “not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotalers…Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up…but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.”

Some discernment ministries get it right as long as they stick to what is Biblical. But if they need to keep their ministry alive, all they do is go hunting for heretics; it follows that eventually everyone but themself is a heretic. There is little differentiation between Biblical, and cultural and personal (like Lewis described).

2 Dreher and I often don’t see eye-to-eye, but he is an excellent writer. I mentioned Dreher’s book Live Not By Lies, which was the perfect antidote during the pandemic, prominently in my own book about the Pandemic, Alone Together (available as both ebook and paperback). Along the same line, I am also reading Your Story Has a Villain: Identify Spiritual Warfare and Learn How to Defeat the Enemy by Jonathan Pokluda. It further develops some of what Dreher wrote, but within an Evangelical perspective, not an Orthodox one. Please note that links to Amazon may be affiliate links through which I get paid if you make a purchase.