Farewell too soon

This last month, fond readers had to say goodbye to one of the finest sites the web has seen, The New Pantagruel. The parting lines of editors Dan Knauss and Caleb Stegall have been ringing in my ears ever since I read them:

Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation.

What the Pantagruelists really got–and so many others miss–is vocation. Too often we use the word in only its most narrow sense, usually referring to our specific professions, our “day jobs.” But that hardly captures the depth of the idea that God has called each of us to our varied and particular times and places. Our surroundings, with all their mundane tribulations and seemingly meaningless tasks, are no accident.

This sort of doctrine makes sense for a religion that worships the God who became Man. The scriptures underscore it over and over: “When the time had fully come,” Christ Jesus entered the world. God’s magnificent plan to rescue the human race hinged absolutely on the particulars of Christ’s time and place, person and work.

Our calling shadows His. There is no context for receiving or announcing the Gospel outside of the stuff of our own lives. The Gospel is for people with particular sins, not abstracted ones. And its power has real impact on the lives we’re actually living. The power of God unto salvation is no Platonic fantasy, drawing our minds or spirits up into the great unblemished beyond, but the resurrection and glorification of our thoroughly blemished, dying and dead bodies.

This sort of thinking has obvious sacramental connotations. God delivers Himself to us through bread, wine, and the Word, elements that are necessarily bound to time and place, because we are bound to time and place. Through the gift of the sacraments and the divine calling of our vocations, God invests Himself in our timeline and moves it toward His very definite end. No foretaste of the coming kingdom will ever be found in the realm of the imagination or the psyche, but instead thoroughly and completely burst into our present experience in exceedingly humble and scandalous (read: cross-like) ways. The inconsequential, indiscernible, and unthinkable is somehow the sovereign motion of God.

Whether we realize it or not, we are implicated in God’s grand plot; eavesdroppers on its mysterious dialogue, immersed in its final scenes. The more we plug our ears and cover our eyes to the context and content of our lives in Christ, the more we skip right past the ongoing unveiling of the greatest story ever told. Uncovering it in the meat of our lives does not imply an egotistical and self-centered doctrine, leading us to continually obsess over “God’s will.” Nor does it mean we subject our personal experiences to some kind of Christian decoder ring. Rather, this Divine mystery is apocalyptically revealed in the work and announcement of the Gospel of God’s grace; uncovered and unleashed before our very eyes by the power of the Holy Spirit. We hold fast in the knowledge that we are now and for all time bound up in Christ’s life, death, burial and resurrection–that now means this moment, and the next, and the one after that. Casting lots and laying out fleeces is not required, and there are no magic formulae. We confess and believe the Gospel in the context of this wash of time, we pray for discernment. Faith, hope, and love carry us on.