Chisel Away the Stone

I once heard a joke that went something like this, “What’s the easiest way to carve a statue of an elephant?  Take a block of stone and chisel away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” 

In some ways, that seems like the most fitting way for me to describe my uneven, ragged experience of being a Christian: struggling to transform a raw block of stone (and, in some instances, a heart of stone) into something that approximates what I’ve long heard a true Christian is supposed to look and act like.

I was recently challenged to think about that on two separate occasions.  Last Thursday during the inaugural session of a creative writing group at my church, it was decided that we would write a summary of our spiritual journeys and how God’s hand has been involved in our lives.  The following day while meeting with a longtime friend and spiritual mentor, we were discussing (and I was lovingly but constructively being scolded for) my perpetual habit of replaying all the old dogmatic tapes in my head that were blocking me from living a more authentic and unencumbered spiritual life.

When I was a child, my parents didn’t take us to church.  It’s not so much that they were non-believers, but they just weren’t churchgoers.  Instead, the task of shepherding my two sisters and me to church fell to my maternal grandmother, who lived next door to us.  “Grammy” made sure that we didn’t miss a single Sunday.  As a child, one is told what to believe, what is needed to be learned, what to take into one’s heart and mind in order to be on the right path in life. 

When in church, including my childhood church back home in Mississippi, the lithographed portraits of gentle Jesus meek and mild snuggling a lamb with little children sitting in rapt adoration at his feet were ubiquitous, and we all believed in that stock imagery because it was the only frame of reference we had been given at that age.  (The comforting simplicity of that innocent, cozy faith – and trying to regain it in our cynical, analytical adulthoods – is a topic I wrote about in an October 4 Decatur-Avondale Estates Patch blog post, “”.)

After my grandmother died in 1981, we three kids became latchkeys when it came to church attendance.  I don’t recall much of a push from my parents beyond a casual effort to keep us in church, but, again, it was merely because they weren’t devout churchgoers themselves, so they didn’t pass on a sense of worshipful urgency to us. 

I don’t harbor any resentment toward them for that, however; it was just understood.  The continuation of our regular attendance in church was up for grabs, and we did go periodically into our teenage years, but not with the same great discipline as before.

As I waded neck-deep through the thick sludge that was my awkward, surly, outcast teenage years, I did what I suspect every teenager does: explore and search along the fringes for a relatively rebellious taste of what life was like outside the confines of the religion he or she was raised in. 

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some people who would assert that because I had lacked a more substantial grounding in the church via my immediate family, it left the door open for all sorts of wickedness and barbed loose-ends to flog me in my vulnerable state.  I would disagree with that, however, because I felt even from an early age that my basic instincts lay more within the alluring realm that was ruled by logic, reason, and free thought.  Of my own accord, I was becoming less attached to organized religion.

I was never an outright atheist, but was definitely agnostic.  I wasn’t actively seeking God and really had no idea what – or if – it was.  My eyes weren’t open to recognizing ways that God might be present and working in my life.  And yet, for all my wandering and secular explorations and refusals to carve my beliefs in stone just yet, I suppose there were still deeply-latent glimmers that it wasn’t time to completely give up … not just yet.

Next week: “Chisel Away the Stone – Part 2”