Toxic doctrine, healing story

In "What Am I Without You?", (New Yorker, June 12, 2023) Jiayang Fan writes of her relationship with her mother in its different eras. She tells the story of a Jehovah's Witness visitor her mother calls "Missionary Lady", whose mission is her mother's salvation. Jiayang finally asks her mother, "Did Missionary Lady accomplish her mission?" Her mother replies, "It's a good story, but a story can't save me."

What if a story, a good story, is the only thing that can save me, save you, save us? What if the story is all we have?

It started, after all, with stories: Adam, Eve, Abel, Cain, Noah, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac (barely), Esau and Jacob tumbling in the womb, a blessing, a limp, Rachel and Leah (it's complicated), Joseph and slavery, Shiprah and Puah, Moses, Miriam, Aaron, Joshua, judges, kings and prophets at loggerheads, exile and return, Ruth and Boaz, Samuel, Jonathan, David, Bathsheba, Uriah, Solomon, Song of Songs, Herod, Innocents, Manger, mission, healing, parable, courage, imperial victory, and the question posed by resurrection. 

Somewhere along the line, some people took authority over the story, and in fairly short order turned it into doctrine and theology. It isn't all that strange that when the story passed into Greek and Roman hands, there was a move to order it (theology) and teach it (doctrine).  All the same, that wasn't the only possible way to receive and hold the story. Rabbinic Judaism, with Midrash and Talmud, is more often more exploratory than categorical and definitive, and by times playful, irreverent, comic, and earthy. 

I wonder if part of the reason that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism have followed such different paths has to do with the fourth-century social and political ascendency of Christianity within the Empire, and its subsequent close association with subsequent empires.  I wonder if the cost of that imperial hospitality was both the ordering and the distorting of the stories of Israel and Jesus so as to support and sustain the historic imperial order of, say Rome or Britain, and the contemporary imperial order of, say, Russia or  America. Most recently, we saw the vestigial fragments of that ordering and distorting of the stories in the anointing of an English king by an English archbishop. This assertion that the king is chosen by God to rule may mean little in this age, but it divided England in civil war when the "rule" was endowed with meaningful power. And the shameful role of the Russian Orthodox Church in supporting the current genocide in Ukraine assures us that imperial hospitality continues to demand order and distortion from the church. 

Our own church has its own story of seductive state hospitality, particularly in the sorry history of our participation in the Indian Residential Schools, where we laid down the stories of Israel and Jesus in favour of a chance to "Christianize" a people in service of Canada's cultural agenda. Order and teaching.

I wonder what would happen if we focused on people's learning instead of the church's teaching. What if we understood the longing that lurks among us - for friendship, for purpose, for healing, for our broken hearts? What if we nurtured the part of each soul that sees other souls as companions, not competitors? What if we could hold hard questions open to grace and story and the complexity of human webs? What if we offered the stories of Israel and Jesus, explored in community, as a resource that supports people in entering "life in all its abundance"? What if our energy over the past century had not been spent on teaching about contraception, divorce, and sexual orientation, but rather on how the stories of Jesus and Israel can help us learn about intimacy and honesty, courage.

I invite you to wonder, too.