I am very tired tonight as I write this. Not sleepy, per se, but that deep weariness in your chest tired. The kind of tired you can push through, but only with a lot of sighing and occasionally staring off into the distance. There is rest in the near future. I can see it on the horizon. But for now I must push on.
It was a long day at work. And I have been doing push ups and pull ups, so that would explain why it feels so good to take deep breaths, to stretch out my chest. And of course I have 4 kids under 5 and a wife that is just as exhausted as I am by the end of the day. And there are so many dishes. And toys. And why does it take so long for kids to put on underwear?
As I was wondering what to write about tonight, it occurred to me that this deep down tired is something I have been feeling on a spiritual level as well. Spiritually tired.
I have always been interested in God. And I think I have always had a picture of what God needed to be if he was to be true. He must be loving. He must be good. If he was neither of these things, then even if he was real he was not someone I wanted to worship or even appease. And so as I learned more of my faith, the various approaches to it, the various argued doctrines and practices, I would try one and then the other, picking and choosing as I went.
I went for a hike by myself one time while camping with some friends. It was supposedly an established trail, but at some point I lost the trail and found myself following what was probably just a deer path. Instead of turning around though, I looked at my map and decided that I could probably just keep going and eventually run into where the trail should be. As I wandered the forest, I could see landmarks in the distance that helped me orient, I could see the lay of the land and compare it to the map on my phone, and above all, I just had this deep "feeling" that I was going the right way. This went on for about an hour as I climbed higher into the mountain. I would follow one deer path, then another that would fizzle out. Then I would backtrack a bit and keep going. Eventually I found myself in an open part of the forest on an unexpectedly flat ridge and thought maybe I had made a bad decision to keep going. I was just following animal paths, for crying out loud! And animals rarely care to go the same places I do. Just as I was considering giving up and turning around, I saw an actual deer trotting across my path up ahead. I stood still and he had nearly passed me when he realized I was standing there. And then he bolted. I jogged forward to watch him bound away and suddenly realized that while I had been following the paths of his people, he had been following the paths of mine. The trail had appeared out of nowhere and I immediatly knew where I was.
This is a great metaphor for my spiritual life so far. I knew where I was going. I had the landmarks of scripture and the good examples of the men and women I respected to follow. But I still just didn't know where I was. In the end, no matter how good I was at orienteering, no matter what my dying phone was telling me, I had never been to that forest before and I had NOTHING to tell me if I was on the right track. I mean, people did tell me I was on the right track. Or they argued that their track was better. But they were just as lost in that forest as I was. They had no more credentials, no more authority that I had. So where the hell was I? And where was that F'ing trail?
The problem with Protestant Christianity lies in the fact that they fought the wrong battle. In their desire to free themselves from the corruption of the Catholic Church, they decided that the only real authority they needed in their lives was the Scripture. Which would be fine if the Scripture was written for that purpose. But it is not. Rarely does it answer directly the question we want answers to. If we want to know about things like the Trinity, a foundational Christian doctrine, we must piece it together from random indirect references to it in books and letters that really aren't talking about it.
The battle was never about the authority of scripture. In fact, the Catholics themselves recognize that scripture is authoritative. Everyone does, actually. Scripture is the one thing we can point to outside of ourselves to give credence to whatever we're saying. The authority of scripture just isn't in question. Its the interpretation of it that is. Protestants claim that every person has the ability to read scripture and determine the Truth about God. They are constantly claiming things are "scriptural" and "Bible Based" as if their opinions about what the scriptures say is completley obvious. But its not obvious. That's why none of us agree with each other. We all read the same scripture and either copy what someone else says or come up with our own ideas. Solo Scriptura doesn't work. No matter how strongly I feel about whatever deer path I'm on, I don't know any more than any other bloke lost in the woods where it goes.
And then I found Orthodoxy. They have a Tradition of interpretation that can be traced back to the disciples of the disciples of Jesus himself. And there's the real revelation. Jesus says that to know the Father you must know him. He is the full revelation of God. Scripture, written by other people about Jesus may be very informative, but it is the person of Jesus who fully reveals who God is. And to think that I, 2,000 years later would be able to understand the person of Jesus better than anyone who came before me, even those who sat at his feet as children, that's the kind of arrogance that gets you really lost on the wrong side of the mountain. That's when I realized I was so tired. Tired of having to be right. Tired of realizing I was wrong and I needed to come up with a new way of seeing things. Tired of pretending like I had any idea where I was. I needed to see that the whole time I was following that deer path, the deer were following the actual trail. I thought I could get myself out of the woods, but what I needed to do all along was just look up and see the actual deer with enough humility to follow.
I am ready to submit to a Tradition. I am ready to say that maybe I don't know it all and can't figure it out all on my own. I am thankful that Jesus did not reveal God to his disciples and then leave the rest of us hanging, desperatly clawing meaning out of whatever scraps are left two centuries later. I am ready to admit that I'm lost and I need some guidance on where the trail is. I am ready to get out of these woods.