what if its just life

do not despair.

The efforts to remake Christianity- to make it weird or more ancient or more muscular or more equitable, however you’d prefer- miss one important thing. This is that Christianity is not a project aimed to make men better. Its rather a set of practices ordered around one chief fact- that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. This fact reorders all of human life around the impossible-but-true. In the resurrection we have a new reality, because the enemy of all humans- death- has been defeated. If death lives no longer, our lives can defy its demands. Time is not ticking for the Christian. We live toward death as ones who know that life can spring up beyond the grave.

The siren song of modern life- time is short, move quicker, make something of yourself, seize the day! - is resisted with Christianity’s own echo, which is that God has all the time in the world.

Attempts to “remake Christianity” should reflect this rejection of control. We should reject moral perfection and any attempt to make human life into a project. Christianity is just this- the tomb was empty. In spite of it all, he rose. The way Christians should live, now that death is overturned, is not toward securing Christianity’s future. Christianity’s future is hidden in Christ. It is both ours and beyond our grasp. Attempts to control or claim or even predict the shape of Christianity are not only boring, they miss what it is that religion is, and what it is for.

If God has all the time in the world, Christians should be the ones who are free to create and wonder and be present to each other. We can gape at the needless beauty that exists in the world and imagine places where we can make beauty out of darkness. We can sit with the sufferer and make art in the gutter and believe most of all in mercy as the heart of God. This is the reason there is no “Christian art”; all art is Christian to the degree that it resists despair.

The resurrection makes a stark claim: there is no darkness or devastated place that is beyond this newborn light. Anywhere, beauty can spring up. Even a weed is a form of life.

Christianity is always tempted to protect its own future. It does this by seeking to provoke certain forms of life- - whether it is encouraging larger families or creating certain kinds of churches or certain political structures. Perhaps some of these things are downstream of Christian claims. But in focusing on them (and hoo boy are we focusing on them) we miss that it is life itself that clues us in to what God is about. Life in all of its ceaseless diversity might remind us that these rigid forms might not be what living is about.

Choosing to live according to reality means recognizing that life does take a ceaseless number of diverse forms. There is no “best of all possible” lives that you might live. Any gardener knows that you can’t plan for a harvest based on perfect gardening conditions. These never exist. You can only live the life that you have. You must learn to use discernment. Discernment is something many Christians unconsciously despise. Many would rather have the rules given to them, without deviation, than choose for themselves. No one wants to be left holding the bag of their own life.

The quotidian world is not like this. Discernment doesn’t mean that you are responsible for the result of your own choices. It means that at the end of your life, your choices tell a story. It was you who did the choosing, and what you chose comes to narrate the shape of your loves. We cannot predict the results of our choices, but we can faithfully choose, which means we can become Christians.

Our world is a place of discernment, of prudence and imperfect calculations. This is the world of the ostrich feather and the mosquito, a world of uneven equations where input and output do not match. It is also the world of the Northern lights and of the peacock- of beauty that exists for beauty’s sake alone. It is a place of laughter.

But to live in this world, you cannot go searching for the Best Possible Way, for the One Set of moral rules that will serve all times and all places. That is not the kind of world we live in. It’s not the kind of world that God made.

Life exists for beauty, and sometimes it seems for beauty alone. You don’t need to look long at the crocuses of early spring or the diversity of a bird’s feathers to know this. Surely there is no reason there are thousands of kinds of tulips, billions of shapes of snowflakes. There is no meaning behind this display. There is simply the goodness of life that springs forth in all its variety.

I once almost bought a house because I fell in love with the woman who lived there. Her home was filled to the brim with collections. She had beautiful bird feathers in a bowl on a table and organized embroidery floss hung on the wall. There were canvases midway painted and tablecloths newly pressed and hung. There was a tiny bird’s nest, perfectly preserved, holding a few small bird’s eggs from which the hatchlings had emerged, and flown. The house was old, nearly two hundred and fifty years, but I walked in and burst into tears. I was at a season of life where childrearing was very intensive and I did not have much help. What I missed most of all in that season was being the kind of person who could collect a bird’s nest. This woman was there, gathering things of beauty and marveling at them. Like the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet, she loved much.

That woman, after all, is the icon of Christian devotion. Matthew tells us that this nameless woman will be forever remembered, because of how she chose to spend her needless beauty.

Meanwhile we march forward with our religious fads and theological rules, like a giant vat of weed killer, seeking to tamp down what might be new growth. Christians have always been weird. They sang hymns near tombs, after all. That death could not hold them should call forth life in all its variations. This is the kind of remaking I’m here for— not morals so much as meaning. Meaning is what holds you beyond the grave. It is what allows us to suffer with hope. It collects bird’s nests. It sings a song in the dark.