The Real Ancient-Future Church

A summer trip to my parents' house deepened my conviction that birthdays are a conspiracy orchestrated by the same syndicate of mad scientists who invented Rogaine, Just For Men, botox, and mid-life crisis sports cars - especially when a birthday represents a big round number. In my case, the number thirty.

My brain understood that the final day of my 29th year was not demonstrably different from the first day of my 30th, but logic and emotions are two very different things. I learned the power of emotion half a lifetime ago, when Cupid's arrow first slaughtered my virgin heart and sowed a craving for a girl, to melt like wax and sink my disintegrating self into her every open pore. Then, ten years ago, the rocky, foaming waves of teenage angst spat me ashore on the sands of adulthood. And now, I'd wandered off the beach, into a deep-delving gorge, and lost the status of a hip twenty-something.

Thirty. Halfway to sixty. A third of the way to ninety.

As I paced the creaky wood floors of the old brick house at 1514 Beech Street, the arbitrary milestone heightened my awareness of how much everything had changed. A new deck in the back yard. New cribs for new grandchildren. White paint where I had decorated my bedroom wall with a pencil-drawn abstract mural. The room seemed smaller. Too small to live in. Like an outgrown pair of Buster Brown Sunday shoes.

Three decades of personal relics sat in storage in the attic, in piles of boxes my parents made me sort through, against my better judgment. There, I found my 30-year-old teddy bear (yes, the same age as me), missing an eye and a part of the zipper on the back, but otherwise unscathed by years of hugs, horseplay, runny noses, tears, drool, vacations at Lake Erie, and horrific encounters with washing machines. The music box grafted to his spine still played the same melancholy rendition of "Teddy Bear Picnic" that had lulled me to sleep in the old wicker crib now stored in the garage, collecting dust instead of diapers and violating numerous safety regulations.

I also found baseball jerseys; sparring gear; battle-scarred action figures; atrocious hand-written manuscripts; Writer's Digest magazines; the ribbons from my ROTC uniform; ripped coveralls; a hard hat; the robots I used to sketch instead of doing my algebra homework; the engagement ring returned to me by my high school sweetheart. Caesar Augustus could not have felt gloomier looking on the ruins of the Circus Maximus, despising his failures because he could not hide them, and his victories because he could not keep them.

What, I wondered, had I accomplished in the years since my college cap and gown were stored away? How many shards of myself had broken against life's unpaved path and fallen to the wayside? Could I travel back in time, to simpler, happier days and get a do-over? I wanted my room back, my toys back, my dog back, my dreams back, my privileged place as the only sibling with a driver's license back.

The truth is, I've always resisted change. I cried when my parents sent me to kindergarten, grumbled when my father taught me how to shave, withdrew into melancholy silence when we had to move into grandma and grandpa's house. And now, my mind was a broken record replaying a scratchy disco bass line in a world of mp3s, like a pillar of salt regarding Sodom, or Adam pleading with the cherubim to sheath the flaming sword.

The Garden of Eden represents innocence, and the loss of that innocence, but not, properly speaking, a return to it. There is no going back. Eden's history ends at the banishment, and is never invoked again, and man is driven onward to new lands and new promises. Boldly going, as the wise Captain Picard used to say, where no man has gone before. By contrast, the timeline that traces earth's circle, returning inevitably to the point where it began, has more in common with pagan fatalism than Christian rebirth. The cross crashes through the earth from outside the world system, shattering our timeline and bursting old wineskins.

I used to be involved in a Christian fellowship that prided itself in being firmly set in its ways. It was comforting to know what to expect and where to expect it; to stand, sing a Psalm, bow your head, hear a sermon, and not have to worry about your neighbor falling to the floor and speaking in tongues. But there's a dark side to that comfort; a danger of becoming an idolatrous love of the past. The worship of the past for the past's sake is not religion's preservation. It's the stink and rigor mortis of a church already dead - a creed-less, conviction-less church embalmed in candle-wax and choir robes; just as the worship of progress for progress' sake is the twilight of progress itself and the dawn of agnostic despair. When we were newborns, our bald heads, toothless mouths, dirty diapers, and fumbling feet offended no one - but we would not consider those attributes a goal to be pursued in our old age. We demand the young to be rid of young things simply to be rid of them, but we move forward with a vision of a caterpillar growing wings and taking flight.

We are not conservatives. We are not progressives. We're a people for all times. We are keepers of a key in a spiraling, segmented hall, leading to larger and larger chambers connected by smaller and smaller doors. Mere conservation secures the key in a pocket and stands still. Mere progressivism drops the key, walks into walls, and forgets they are different than the door, and believes a myth about a jawbone that splintered during a fall and just happened to take the shape of a particular keyhole it slipped into on the way down.

What progressives deride as old and worn is really a lock of golden hair on a thinning head of gray. What conservatives reject as newfangled is really the baby step our two-millennia old appendages were designed to achieve. The ancient church was a forward-moving traveler equipped with an unchanging roadmap.

Neither Jesus nor the Apostles ever promised a return to the Garden of Eden. But they did promise something enormous: a new heaven and a new earth and our total sanctification through trials and tribulations. We can learn from Adam's mistake, but we will never be just like him. We can hope for the day when we will stand before the glittering Tree of Life, but we will never stand before the tree as Adam did, beholding the infancy of the world and the choice of all choices and not knowing the taste of sin. No, we will do something radically new. We will eat the fruit of Life, and it will open our eyes to an everlasting peace beyond Adam's wildest visions; a peace that can only be conveyed to our universe in crude and cryptic images raised like road signs just beyond the faintest blue mists atop the furthest, highest mountain.

I suspect we will never stop chasing that mist. There will always be a more distant cloud, a new red ribbon on a fresh horizon, a new splash of suns and stardust and a rumor of cosmic secrets hidden behind them. And the boxes in our attics will be remembered with a grin, or even the belly-rolling laughter of a joke among old friends you had to be there to understand.