Black Bear Diner, Colorado Springs, June 23, 2012
“My mind, at the time you asked, was building a case for the elders to bring her back,” David continues. “I didn’t know the answer to your question would be that I would quit my job, separate from my wife, and find ways to start pursuing my own dreams.”
“That is ‘a head-shaking lot of change.’” Ethan smiles. He’s cupping his right cheek with his thumb and index, middle, and ring fingers and speaks with calm objectivity. This is why David trusts the former pastor. If Ethan is ever agitated by anything David says that is out of the church’s box, he never shows it.
“How do you like teaching, Ethan?”
“I love it. Why do you ask?”
“Cheyenne Mountain High School is looking for a Health and PE teacher. Preferably one who can become their new tennis coach.”
“And you want to leave the ministry.” Ethan replies in a neutral voice.
“Truthfully, I want to return to my childhood dream of teaching and coaching.” David confides that out of laziness, he gave up on his own dreams and has been living everyone else’s -- his parents’, his church’s, and now his wife Pam’s. Thankfully, he kept his own dream on the back-burner and minored in Health Sciences and took some Education courses. Cheyenne Mountain’s principal told him they’d let him earn his teaching certificate over the next few summers.
“You need to pursue this, David.” Ethan admits that he had never seen that spark in David’s eyes during David’s internship, and he shares his own satisfaction of his move from pastoring to teaching Hebrew at college. “Sometimes university politics are vicious, but church rules can be worse.”
David’s face pales and he looks down at his plate with eyes of sorrow. He hadn’t realized how far out of keeping Quail Canyon Community Church is with his own values, until Jasmine had approached the church leadership for prayer and accountability after their kiss. Instead of providing it, they sent Jasmine out of church and told David to quit mixed doubles. “I’m not going to critique Quail Canyon, but their way isn’t mine anymore--” David’s voice trails off, “--or maybe ever was . . . ?”
“You’re finding what you most treasure. Keep listening to your heart.”
“Thank you, Ethan. Most people, especially in the church, are trying to force me to live what they treasure, or just believe in.”
“That’s because most people live lives of conformity. They may appear like individuals on the outside. They dress themselves unique, dye their hair unique, make jokes that sound unique, and put on an exterior of individuality, but they live a life that conforms to whatever group they find themselves in, and Christians are no different.”
“Conformity.” David pierces his eyebrows together in concentration. “Obedience.” He speaks the word “obedience” almost like a question, with his eyebrows still pierced together. “It’s interesting that you say that, Ethan, because I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the church’s obsession with obedience as a moral imperative, when sometimes they are asking us to obey the wrong thing.”
Ethan gives a soft nod while David continues. “I wonder if ‘obedience’ is another word for ‘conformity.’”
“It can be. Not always of course. But conformity, and even too much obedience, can be dangerous. Hostages have been known to take on not on the mannerisms, but even the crimes of their captors. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl described that sort of thing among some of the prisoners who were given guard duties in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. They are an extreme example, of course, but conformity in much more mundane ways is the norm, and it’s been ingrained into us since childhood. To overcome it, we have to ‘become like little children’ again.”
David replies that a return to childhood sounds refreshing. By the time he was a teenager, he had wanted so much to be “good” that he had forced himself into ministry, forced himself into the tradition that had been handed to him, and then forced himself to love the woman who was pursuing him because that was “easier” than to risk rejection with the woman he really wanted. David shakes his head in regret. He can’t go backwards and change his choice in college; nor can he change his choice to marry Pam; but he can go forward before children enter the scene.
Ethan tries to catch David’s eyes from his bowed head to reassure him he can move forward into whichever direction he is led. “God did not design marriage to be a trap.”
David lifts his head and returns Ethan’s gaze. Go on. “Marriage is a tangible, external symbol of an internal mystery, the union of the masculine and the feminine within each individual. Since our external life mirrors our internal self, generally when two partners work on their marriage, they also each grow on the inside too. Has this been true for you?”
David affirms that it has and that it has also helped him rediscover who he really is. He adds that he and his wife have been seeing a Christian marriage counselor. “He’s intent on saving our marriage, but not on listening to us.”
“Example?”
“Both Pam and I have been dissatisfied in our marriage, and our counselor insists our dissatisfaction must be about pride or selfishness. But we’ve been working through that and have both been learning how to love each other better. But I’ve learned that the heart of my dissatisfaction is about truth: the truth of who I am, of who I love, of what led me into my marriage, of who I was then, and of who I am now.”
“A spiritual therapist, Maria Chandler said, ‘The more you wake up to who you are, the more unbearable it becomes to be who you are not.’”
David fixes his eyes on Ethan and color returns to his face. “I needed to hear that.” He takes a deep breath. “Pam has told our counselor she married the man I was pretending to be, and she’s even tried to change that man I was pretending to be. I’m neither one. She also admits the man we are learning I am is not the one she would choose to marry.”
Ethan nods with understanding. “No fault divorce is true for some couples.”
A deep exhale runs through David’s body. Finally, someone from the church, his senior pastor mentor no less, has admitted the legitimacy of his marital trials as no fault by either him nor his wife.
“The unified man,” Ethan muses. “The one Paul called ‘the new man.’ The tradition that raised us both, David, is missing the gems of wisdom by interpreting as literal history stories that were designed to reveal the mysteries of the soul.”
“Like what?”
“Like the union of the opposites within. These are first shown in the creation of Adam: from the dust -- the earth part -- and the breath of God -- the spirit part.”
“That sounds like the two opposing selves Paul talked about in Romans when he says he does what he doesn’t want to do and doesn’t do what he does want to do. Maybe the earth part of his is in conflict with the spirit part of him?”
“Yes. This is why I enjoyed mentoring you, David. You’re quick, and you’re not stuck in what you were taught in seminary. What a tragedy that Augustine missed this very important creation of our opposing parts within and claimed instead that men were born into ‘Original Sin.’” Ethan pauses, puzzled. “His hypothesis has been followed for millennia, yet the Bible presents us as humans in duality, just like Adam was.”
Ethan’s explanation resonates with David. He shakes his head, remembering his seminary training with its paltry two scriptures attempting to support “Original Sin.” He marvels that he had been pulled into a career that pressured him to teach concepts that made little sense to him.
“We see the metaphor of our two opposing selves again and again,” Ethan continues. “Cain and Abel. The twins Jacob and Esau. Isaac and Ishmael. Joseph and his brothers. The notion of these competing selves continued in the early Christian church, but the strongest instances of it were in texts removed by the Council of Nicaea. Did you know, David, that a highly credible gospel that was not included in the canonical Bible records Jesus to have said this . . . ?”
"When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom."
David shakes his head. “That statement is a little weird. Where does it come from?”
“The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 22.”
“If most of that gospel sounds like that, I can see why they chose not to put it in.”
“Yes, the Gospel of Thomas is a list of riddles, sort of like Zen kaons. They are not for the masses, so the Council of Nicaea probably decided to avoid confusing their parishioners.”
“It confuses me too. What does it mean to you?”
“I see it saying the Kingdom is about merging the two sides within ourselves into one. The earth part and the spirit part, the external and the internal, the upper and the lower, and the masculine and the feminine. This, to me, is the deeper meaning of ‘marriage’: marrying the two parts of ourselves within.”
Ethan pauses, looks at his former intern, and adds that it also suggests this: “There is a feminine side within you who dreams, and a masculine side within you who acts. If you suffocate the dreamer from dreaming, the actor can’t act.”
“Then I’d better start acting on my dreams.” David gazes out the window. “That might be easier said than done.”
“Most certainly,” Ethan
affirms. “But worth it.”
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