Tuesday Tome - The Love that Matters

I first heard of Charles Featherstone's memoir, The Love that Matters, through a post on Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative. Dreher had just read the unedited galley of the book on a flight to Boston and was very moved. He wrote:

"It [The Love that Matters] started out good, and it kept getting better, and finally I couldn’t believe how good this thing was. I’m not kidding when I say this: Charles Featherstone has written an American spiritual classic. I have never read a book like this — one that’s so ragged, raw, and real. I couldn’t put it down, except that one time, when the shock of recognition was so great that I had to set the book aside and think deeply about what I had just read. People are going to be talking about this book when it comes out." 

That was enough to make me preorder my copy. It arrived a week or so ago and yesterday I finished reading it for myself. It's an exceptional and ordinary story of a person trying to figure out who he is, what life is about, the discoveries he makes, the joys and traumas he experiences, and the person he becomes through it all.

I'm not sure what audience the book is for, but I am somehow in that audience. It's definitely something I would recommend to pastors, to those trying to make sense of calling, to those who feel marginalized by institutional church, and for those interested in what a spiritual journey looks like for an unchurched person looking for meaning and direction in post-protestant, post-modern, pluralist America.

Here are a few of my favorite passages, which are unsurprisingly toward the end:

"Suffering poses no theological puzzle for me. It challenges no long-held assumptions I have about God. Or the order of the world. It is the way of things. People are, more often than not, inexplicably brutal, cruel, and violent. I believed in God not despite my own suffering, or the suffering of the world, but quite possibly because of it." [p. 204]

"I didn't yet know if any of the people at seminary really cared about me, but they said they did. They spoke a lot about being welcoming and open to strangers, and while I was inclined to view those words as nonsense––lies no one really meant, things said mostly to make people feel good about themseles, designed to be discarded once the strangers proved to be too strange and dealing with them either too difficulte or too uncomfortable––part of me said no, stay, make them prove it." [p. 210]

"I don't know if any of this could have happened without the mess, without the pain, without reliving and going through some of the worst feelings I've ever had about myself and the world. But how true was that for me generally? . . . Anything could have happened. But we don't live in a theoretical world. I met God, learned to love, learned to be loved, in the things that actually took place. In the history that happened." [p. 214]

"Forgiveness is power, the power to say 'you do not get to tell me who I am.'" [p. 218]

"Prostestantism tolerates no ecstatic visions, except those of the social reformer. All others are irrational and unreasonable, to be explained away by a resort to soft science or medicated into oblivion.

"Because in Newton's cosmos, the the Protestant imagination, there is no God in disordered lives. Such people are, at best, the subjects of much sympathy, charity, and even professional management (whether from social workers or prison warders). But if they cannot get their act together, well, that must be proof that God doesn't really bless them. God blesses ordered lives, lives in which people make all the right decisions, plan the right plans, want the right things, save and acquire and achieve.

"Believers earn their blessing through their hard work, their patience, their adherence to expectations and norms. Because that's how God blesses the world.

"There's still a lot of this in Protestantism. Lutherans speak a great deal of God's unearned grace. And we are actually living that out here and there. But for many, our lived confession, how we really treat each other, is actually much harsher: 'If you really, truly need God's grace, you clearly have not earned it.'

"We are not kind, or as kind as we should be, to people whose lives are, for whatever reason, a mess. We don't want to see God––or God's call––in the mess. And we should." [p.227]