This past week of chaplaincy at Kwantlen overflowed with a
huge variety of experiences. My Fleetwood CRC chaplaincy committee visited the
campus early in the week. Together we explored both the physical and spiritual
space of Kwantlen, with its well-designed libraries, classrooms, offices, and
cafes, all the while imaging and sharing our sense of the deep spiritual
desires and questions that this community of learning is wrestling with. We
asked ourselves, how can our Christian chaplaincy make a home and hospitable
centre for this piece of God’s creation?
I met some students for the first time who came to the
Multi-Faith Centre with a spiritual intensity and questioning mind that led to
very fruitful and exciting discussions. I thought long and hard about the
importance of the Multi-Faith Centre, about how it can be both inclusive of all
perspectives and religious traditions as well as allowing for the
distinctiveness of thought and practice that each of those traditions has to
offer, whether explicitly religious or secular. I met with Kwantlen
representatives to discuss and think about that very issue. I connected with
other Christian Reformed campus ministers, sharing stories, ideas, and
encouragement. And I even encountered some disagreement this week, a difference
of opinion on how the Multi-Faith Centre should function.
Many of these experiences were spiritually intense and
charged with an excitable energy. Some of my week was lower key, writing emails
and doing online research about Multi-Faith Centres on other university
campuses.
But whatever the energy level or emotional impact of these
varied experiences, I am increasingly convinced that the Christian life is exciting. Thinking, practicing, and
living out the Christian faith is not simply about ordered and proper
theological frameworks, church structures, or ethical systems. While all of
these things are important, they are only so insofar as they are caught up in the
thrill, danger, and excitement of following Jesus.
In his book “Orthodoxy” G.K. Chesterston wrote something
that continues to haunt me: “There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.” Orthodoxy he is talking about, the rich, thick tradition of
Christian faith. Not the thrill of heresy or being supposedly ‘liberal’ or
‘progressive’ and rejecting Christian institutions or traditional doctrines, as
if Christian tradition were dull, uninspiring, and in need of science or
secularism to jolt it out of its slumber. Instead, Christianity carries within
itself the seeds of its own destabilization and unsettlement.
It is Jesus who
jolts both the church and the world out of its passive slumber. Jesus calls us
to the excitement of love, justice, joy, and creativity. And not only that, but
the Christian tradition is deeply invested with working out who Jesus is and what it means to follow him. We are caught right in the middle, not
of bland doctrines, but of exciting tensions that lie at the heart of the
Christian faith: Jesus is both fully human
and fully divine, the Kingdom of God
is both now and not yet, the Church both receives
the love of Christ and gives the
love of Christ. And Jesus himself formulated one of the most paradoxical and
exciting teachings of all: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25).
Through this past week I have been struck by how this thrill
of Christian life can make its way into both the menial and more inspiring
tasks and experiences. Every moment of following Jesus is centered around
living in the exciting and fruitful tensions of power in weakness, of giving to
receive, of divinity and humanity. As his followers we are at the heart of this orthodoxy. Of course, we
often fail to live out of this energy; the tasks of the world drain our energy
or we are tempted to close down the thrill for the sake of safety and security.
But if we continue to try to follow Jesus and be inhabited by his spirit of
life, then the excitement, peril, and joy of Christian faith will always be as close as
our very selves.
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