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👆 I posted this on Instagram about a month ago and a bunch of people asked what it was that I wrote about Rob. This is that.
Most of the recent A Becoming posts I’ve written have come to me in the form of an emotion or split-second let’s-call-it-a-recognition while I’m reading in the mornings, and then I get annoyed because I don’t want to let that spark pass, but I’m also in the middle of reading.
Nevertheless, the book’s flat on the desk and here I am opening up a new document and taking advantage of a clear-enough section on the water’s edge to bypass the brush and step into the flow of the river.
Right now, I’m reading Rob Bell’s What Is The Bible: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything.
I’ve read it before, but I found a new copy for 75¢ at McKay’s on a day when I went on a bender an bought a stack of similarly-priced books $80 high.
This post probably isn’t really about Rob Bell, even though — and this might sound ridiculous unless you know cuz you know — his very name caused so much turmoil for me at a certain point in my life that I still, despite being a fully competent, grown-ass man, find myself checking for residue and tsk-tsks whenever I happen to share his work.
The Bible’s a tricky thing. I still try to enter into it [often, through side doors] and I can’t tell whether I do that much because I’m actually compelled to continue, or because I’m just addicted to not stopping. (Hopefully it’s something more like transforming.) I am still heart-drawn by men and women — dead and alive — who pull beauty and wonder and mystery and poetry and love and goodness and truth out of these pages, but I had to let myself leave them be. As I say it, I’m finally not as ashamed of that as I have been in times past. The truth still sets you free, I suppose.
Anyway, in the introduction, Rob writes that he finds the Bible “more compelling and mysterious and interesting and dangerous and convicting and helpful and strange and personal and inspiring and divine and enjoyable than ever.”
What really struck me was the word “enjoyable.”
You know, when I was fifteen (fourteen? sixteen? call it a draw…), my mom gave me the book Velvet Elvis. I used to sneak out onto the back porch of my house after the rest of my family had gone to sleep and pack a pipe full of tobacco that I wasn’t supposed to have and read and watch the moon and smoke. To this day, I recollect those nights and that book’s controversial invitation into mystery as one of the first times that I — me, the Self that I am — felt anything like a real, authentic stirring of Love toward Jesus.
I don’t know. Call it the soul’s recognition. Transrational or bust, baby.
I wouldn’t have had the language to talk about a journey at that point. Especially not an internal one. What good is there to be found inside your detestable self? And yet, two decades later, I can recognize that pinprick of Light in me way back when, and the way it leapt inside my stomach in the Presence of a Voice it knew like some Old Mother. Like something umbilical.
As I type this out, I realize that I’m describing a way in which institution can — even in the name of the God it seeks to protect (a hilarious sentence) — extinguish the very Spirit of Life that intuitively knows within us all. I believe that’s there, for everyone. It blows wherever and however it pleases. It seems not to care much about playing chords that sound dissonant to the rest of band. It captures heartstrings according to the tunes that are uniquely yours. It is not containable, and I don’t know that I really believe, anymore, that it cares much about what I believe, so long as I know that we are not absent one another.
In the words of a one Jim Finley, “Jesus never said it was belief that saves you, but faith.”
Anyway, I still enjoy Rob.