Claiming Manhood

I just finished reading Carlyle Marney's Priests To Each Other and although I haven't understood everything in it, it has ministered to me at this point in my life. As some of you know, I am going through a battle of sorts at the place where I was associate pastor for 4 years.

There are a handful of people who are attempting to replace the Gospel of unconditional grace in our Lord Jesus Christ with a dangling threat of hell and a demand to live holy (as they understand it). They have been conniving, disingenuous and downright dishonest in their depiction of what I believe and what I have taught.

Hell and holiness are power trips. With hell you can control the outsiders - "Jump through our hoops and we will keep you out of hell." With holiness you can control the insiders - "Live the way we say is a true Christian and we will include you in the inner circle." Power, control, fear.

Leadership has become afraid in the wash of the pervasive fear and abandoned the fight, summoned the spirit of Rodney King and attempted to "just get along", or been persuaded that what is needed is a returning to that old time religion that was good enough for you and me (before it killed us).

So I was heartened when I read this by Carlyle Marney:

On my more nearly obedient days I have tasted a recovery of nerve which is a manhood in the ministry. This means one can speak up! This issues in a recovery of meaning known only to personal theologians or theological persons and produces the prospect of communion, the church in your own house.

Do you see? I am really speaking of a conversion toward manhood. (In these preacher schools they look at me as if I were sick sometimes when I say we need our manhood more than we need to be ministers.) I mean by this that I was forced to an acceptance of guilt, my guilt, and more - of my shame. My teachers here were Hobart Mowrer and a twelve-year-old after communicants' class:

"What is guilt, little girl?" I had asked her, thinking I knew. "Guilt is a shame you can talk about," she answered. "And what is shame?" Head low, eyes averted, but lifted toward the Kortheuer Crucifixion on my wall and the spectator-figure of despair with which we both had identified, she said, "Shame is a guilt you can't talk about." And we let the matter go.

The conversion of manhood begins here for me in my acceptance of my guilt-ness. Where all are guilty, none is guilty. I meet a new notion of redemption in the child. It's all right to be guilty lest I lose my brother who is guilty, too. There is no redemption which is not a brotherhood of guilt as well. It's all right for things to be this way.

All of which has showed me how far we have to go. I am on some days aghast at the rooms upstairs still unoccupied, at the waste areas still unclaimed, at the ghastly power of sin, evil, and my own unconscious and conscious capacity for both; and I throw up after meetings with shallow pretensions of us professional churchmen. But these very points - a hope - I am being saved by the Christ, by you, and by my brothers.

Thanks Carlyle!