KINGSVIEW

ATHEIST AND BELIEVER WALKING AS MYSTERY, TOGETHER

Michael A. King

This article has been long brewing. It finally burst forth the day I received a package from my friend Alan Soffin. In it were a poem, "Atheist in a Believer’s Graveyard," and photos he had taken in a graveyard in Tucson, Arizona, to go with the poem.

As I experienced the words and images, the skin prickled along my arms and then up into my cheeks before the chill, a holy chill, spread finally into my soul itself. Rarely has a Christian writer touched me more than Alan, unbelieving soul-brother Alan, writing of the howling each of us does in the dark, and of the listening each of us at times fruitlessly engages in, then observing that "Here Jesus stands and there, / As if to speak, / And Mary, gently, everywhere, / In stone. . . ."

In stone. Only in stone. But at least in stone. The words are paired with photos of Jesus and Mary dwelling, literally carved in stone, there in the graveyard backgrounded by the sere beauty of the Arizona desert. From within his poignant awareness, at least as I read him, of what for him is not there, Alan nevertheless acknowledges and celebrates that there it is, at least in stone for him, and as even more for those who believe.

When have I heard a Christian so ready to honor the belief of the other if it is not one the Christian shares? So quick we are, we Christians, to witness, as we like to put it, to our Lord, to speak of Jesus standing there, and Mary, and not in stone, but alive. So quick to want the other to honor what we understand to be truth, so slow to honor what the other sees as truth.

Imagine if Christians treated atheists like Alan treats us. Imagine if, instead of we who are right against you who are not only wrong but damned, we walked with each human being first as a human being. Imagine if we were able to conclude as Alan does, the atheist there in the believer’s graveyard—risking his own viewpoint to let the other’s soak into him—"For it is true and not / Belief / That we are mystery / Together."

But how imagining ourselves as mystery, together, frightens and angers. In his own way, in the January 12, 2004 issue of Mennonite Weekly Review, John A. Lapp imagined this. Reviewing a book on Journeys of the Muslim Nation and Christian Church, Lapp dared to imagine Christians and Muslims learning from each other. By February 12 one letter writer suggested Lapp risked turning Jesus into a liar and that "Lapp’s conclusion may be politically correct, but it also strips Christianity of its essence and power."

Another writer was "shocked and chagrined. . . . There is no way that Christians can conscientiously perceive the Muslim and Christian journeys as complementary. . . . There is only one true biblical way. To view Islam from this perspective is a compromise of our faith and borders on being apostate."

All of us draw lines, whether we are Christians rejecting the Muslin journey’s validity, Christians who want to be other than those who reject the Muslim journey, Muslims who reject (or not) the Christian journey’s validity, or atheists who see these stones as symbolizing only what is longed for, not what actually is. But I hope we can honor each other’s line-drawing callings; otherwise, how alienated we each will be, hunkered down behind our particular line.

The calling I hope others will honor was brewing in me already when, as a boy, I’d ponder the passion of my missionary parents to witness to others. They did so in ways charitable enough that I see myself as learning from them still, not opposing them.

But I could never make my own peace with witnessing as a one-way street—I witness to you, not you to me—because I could never get my mind to ignore this possibility: I thought like I did because I had been raised like I had been. The people my parents witnessed to thought like they did because that was how they had been raised.

So I would imagine my way around the world, into all the places I knew other missionaries were trying to convince people to become Christians. And I could never shake the suspicion that what from within a way of life and thought looked so one-true-path appeared the opposite when seen by those on another one-true-path. Then I would wonder what it would be like if we would all talk with and not just at each other.

Still today I wonder that, as the one-true-path battles of Christendom and Islam and so many other my-way-or-the-highway clashes unfold, as ceaselessly we expect the other to honor our way rather than begin by honoring each other’s ways.

I don’t mean we should stop believing in or sharing what we believe. I am intending right here to share and stand for what I believe. I am a Christian. A committed Christian. A passionate Christian. This means that I am not, like Alan, an atheist. It means I am not, like so many millions, a Muslim.

But does that mean my only option is to say to Alan that he must believe like I believe and to say to the Muslim that you must believe like I believe? And if that were my only option, why should not Alan then see his only option as to convince me to believe as he does? And the Muslim to convert me? If I would fiercely oppose having the other do this unto me, why should I so easily do it unto the other?

There must be a better way. I think Alan points the way: It’s to honor the other’s truth even as I expect the other to honor what I hold true. Then it’s to walk as brothers or as sisters discovering what gifts we offer to and receive from the other—together.

Interestingly enough, this approach seems to invite me to take more seriously beliefs affirmed in my own faith heritage. For example, if God is anything like the God beyond human limitations Christians say God is, isn’t this God inevitably beyond my and our ways? Doesn’t Jesus himself, claiming to speak for and in some sense even to be God, constantly shatter the too-small views of God held in his day? Isn’t he suggesting some one-true-way-fans will be shocked when he teaches in Matthew 7:21 that "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven"?

So imagine if the Muslim had something to teach me, and not just I something to impose on her. Imagine if Alan had something to teach me, and not just I something to which to convert him. Imagine if we were mystery, together.

There is no need just to imagine, however, because I have been privileged actually to experience how much those who do not share my faith but are mystery with me have to offer. To this let me witness.

I think, above all, of my friend struck with cancer. At the time I knew him only as the father of one of my daughter’s friends. But in the months following his diagnosis, we began to be drawn together, at first by our shared love of Indian food. Then over time the journey went deeper. And deeper. He was traveling to the very edge, we knew. We hoped it would be only to the edge. But walk by the very edge we did, for over a year, looking across to what neither of us could fully see yet knew he would likely face, as in the end he did.

And we walked as what we were—I as a Christian and a pastor, unapologetic, but convinced I know only in part, as if through a mirror dimly, as the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13, not in full. And he first as an agnostic, because he too believed he knew only in part, so he couldn’t be sure there was no God, though he doubted.

Then some Christians committed to the one true way told him he was going to hell unless he got right with God. So he did get right with God. His way. He decided a God who would have made creatures like that was not one he wanted any part of. So he became an atheist—ready now to affirm full faith in no God to keep his integrity and not be dragged into heaven wriggling on some know-it-all Christian’s fishing hook.

Still he granted me, also a Christian, at a time I wouldn’t have blamed him for declaring a pox on all our houses, one of the greatest honors anyone has offered me. He asked me to preside over his funeral. And he asked if I could do it in a way that told the truth of who he was while still allowing the many in his circle of friends and family who believed in God to draw strength from their faith.

Meanwhile I consulted with several Christians regarding how I should handle my pastoral role in this situation. To their great credit, they had big enough hearts that, even as they could not fully support my approach, they gave me the space to minister out of my promise to my friend to honor him as he was: a person of great courage and insight who had found no way with integrity to affirm more than that he walked into mystery—and whose ultimate home (our worry, not his) only God could know.

I needed to respect that it was hard for them, however, to offer this space. Their key worry was this: He must have gone to hell, so how could I with integrity say anything other than that? Should I not be witnessing to Christian faith in God as the one true path at this time of great opportunity to spread the gospel?

They were troubled by my conviction that God had placed me in my friend’s life to be mystery, together, not to know all and convince him of it. They struggled to come to terms with the reality that if I had related to my friend as they thought I should have, he would have cast me, outraged, out of house and heart—just as I would be tempted to cast out anyone who used friendship to worm his way in before admitting his motive was to sell me something, even if the product was God.

Let this be clear: I appreciated their holding me accountable to their and my mutual commitment to Jesus. Indeed Jesus says in John 14:6 that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to God but by him.

Yet I hoped we could also learn from a story Jesus tells (Matt. 13:25-30) of the kingdom of heaven being like a field of wheat mixed with weeds. Only God, Jesus says, knows precisely what plants (meaning people) in that field are wheat to be harvested and which are weeds to be burned.

And only God, I believe, knows precisely what happens to any of us when we die or how God addresses the faith of the one who cries "Lord, Lord" yet doesn’t really walk the path versus the one who walks it without being able to say "Lord, Lord."

So I was prepared to travel with my friend not as the one who would show him the way but as one who would walk with him within a mystery neither of us could fully solve. As we discussed, I hope I’m right enough about my way that within the depths of God’s existence and love he and I will somehow meet again. I also know there are times, when I hear the rap-tap-tappings of my death at the door (faint but drawing closer), that I think of the courage with which he faced his death, determined to be an atheist rather than a fake, yet ready to honor the beliefs even of those by whom he had felt so savaged.

Then I am reminded of how much I learned from him about how to be brave, how to be honest, how to be a man, how to honor the beliefs of others—even about how to be a Christian walking as mystery with another.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine. Quotations from "Atheist in a Believers’ Graveyard" are used by permission of Alan Soffin, all rights reserved.