On the first day of class, this is the offer I make to the college students enrolled in my courses: “Here is a 3x5 card. Write any question you have for me on the card and I’ll do my best to answer it.” Well, I receive many questions but inevitably and in every course, I find this question written on one of these cards: “Dr. Torvend, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” I receive the question as a sincere desire to know something personal and “spiritual” about the professor who is teaching a course in the academic study of religion. At the same time, I know it is a trick question since the enquiry always comes from a student within a conservative evangelical or non-denominational church, a student who wants to know if I can pass the litmus test by which he or she judges someone to be a true Christian. I have never answered Yes and I have never answered No to the question. I have always responded with these words: “The question is too small for me.” Let me tell you why I think the question too small.

My students, and you, and me have been raised in a culture where the individual reigns supreme, where individual rights, individual liberties, and individual initiative are clearly prized and cultivated. In contrast to other cultures around the world, we are expected to leave home in early adulthood and make our way in the world, alone, on our own. If the individual, if you or I “succeed” (whatever “success” might mean), the individual gets all the credit. And, of course, if you or I or another individual “fails” (whatever “failure” might mean), we have no one to blame but ourselves, right? In such a culture, whose air we breathe in and out from the day of our birth, it is not hard to understand my student’s question since, in this deeply individualistic culture, the primary spiritual relationship is between me – the great American “I” – and the deity” Jesus and me or God within me. In this context, it is not difficult to recognize the remarkable value placed on the “self-made” person: self-made and self-motivating in work, in relationships, and – yes – self-made in faith. If it is all up to me or to you in life, it is certainly so in my, in your spiritual journey.

But the fact of the matter is that I am not a self-made human being in work, in relationships, and in faith. To tell the truth, I don’t think about it very often but my existence as a human being was and is utterly dependent on the fact that through the agency of sexual relations, my parents created me. Yes, two people created you. Two people created me. I have my father’s short fingers, my grandmother’s smallish eyes, two of my grandparent’s height, and a voice no one has in my extended family. Whether or not we have a happy and healthy relationship with our parents, or a distant but benign relationship, or perhaps a troubled relationship with them, their physical features – for good or for ill, their manner of speech, the genetic, ethnic, and cultural legacy we have received through them takes form in the distinctive person each of us is this day. In contrast to what I consider the great cultural falsehood, the cultural lie of the perpetually self-making and isolated individual, I would make this claim: our human nature is fundamentally social and relational. Yes, without suppressing the personal, without overlooking our precious uniqueness, we are profoundly social beings, created for relationship, created to live with the other, dwell in the household, travel with the tribe.

Of course for Pacific Northwesterners, a people marked by exuberant admiration for the “maverick,” such a claim may sound heretical if not down-right addled. “Didn’t we move here to leave all that communal crap behind?” argued one professor with me, someone gladly proud of his “personal freedom,” and yet, and yet unable to receive the generosity of his colleagues and the commitment it might entail. If we think about it for a moment – begrudgingly or willingly – our very lives, our basic needs and well being, our emotional, artistic, and intellectual vitality, our dreams and failures, our past, this present moment, and the unknown future are bound up with and shaped by others: human others, more-than-human others (our pets), the days and seasons, soil, water, and air of the earth. Indeed, do we not know now, if only dimly, that we are enveloped in a relational web of splendid fragility? Do we not know now that we are meant to be drawn out of the self – out of the self – into the other by the spouse, partner, friend, lover, child, parent, or colleague, by the person sitting on either side of you, in front of and behind you? Indeed, that lovely word transcendence, one of words we use to describe God, simply means to be drawn or lured beyond the self and its often self-centered tendencies into the other: into the one can reveal more to us of our selves than we imagined possible; into the one who can tell us a hard truth about our selves while we are nonetheless held in loving and strong arms; into the one who can help us open our hands to receive the generosity of others.

A number of years ago, Melissa asked me why I kept coming back to this church. My answer was quite simple. In this place, with this people, through this liturgy, I said, I experience myself being drawn into something greater than me, something attractive without having the words to name that attraction, something incredibly beautiful yet remarkably challenging, a way of being together that clearly honors the personal yet always pulls us together – together – into the Mystery that includes us but is greater than any one of us or all of us together, into that Mystery around whom the six-winged seraph lead us in singing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.” And yet, at the same moment, our song is sung in the presence of the One who has become incarnate, embodied, in our flesh, among us, within us, drawing us through the waters of the font and shared bread and common cup to each other, to each other. No, you see, the question my student asks is too small for me.

In the 14th century, Julian of Norwich, the English anchorite and mystic, lived alone in her anchor hold, her hut, set next to the Church of St. Julian. She lived by herself yet received communion through the church window every day. She lived alone but prayed the daily office with the priest and any others who came to the church at sunrise and sunset. She lived as a hermit yet received visions from the Sacred Three. There, in her small room attached to the church, dressed in her one tunic, with one cloak hanging on the peg in the wall, she wrote of God as our Clothing, enveloping Christians in her day with a mantle, a clock, of gracious and blessed love as the plague killed hundreds and thousands, as the economy crashed, as the homeless appeared everywhere, as the nation entered into a civil war. God is our Clothing, she mused, still providing the Adam and the Eve in each of us with garments made from nature’s gifts, with food and drink that we might live. God is our Clothing, she sang, putting on our human nature in the Incarnation, wearing Adam’s tunic, short and soiled though it be, Christ who wore holes in himself in service to others. But there is yet another surprising insight. Christ, she wrote, is “richly clad in blissful largesse,” that is, Christ is richly dressed in us, for we have become his garment through baptism, his clothing in the world. And yet this more she writes: “Christ is richly clad in us and we, we be his crown.” Yes, she says, we are the gleaming crown which Christ wears, shining because our faith leads us to do those works which benefit our neighbor. And then she writes this: God is our Clothing, a garment of fire, invigorating us with lively breath and drawing us together, enfolding us with blessed love. God our Clothing: creating, protecting, serving, and invigorating.

And so I say to my earnest student who wants to know if I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, the question is too small. You see, with all of you, it is not that I am trying to make my lonely way to God, but that the Holy Three are always coming to us, always coming to us, always coming to us, clothing us with nature’s gifts, serving us in our greatest vulnerability, and drawing us into the blessed and delightful asymmetry of this assembly.

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