Getting Edgy

[Photo Credit: Norway's Pulpit Rock by Dylan Shaw on Unsplash]

There's a scenic drive in the mountains of Montana that tempts you to survey the scenic vista while, at the same time, forbidding you to do so. The Going-to-the-Sun Highway is a narrow two-lane road that flanks the Continental Divide at Logan's Pass, just south of the Canadian border.

The alpine meadows, glaciers, and mountain waterfalls are stunning. In all likelihood you will see mountain sheep, elk, and other wild creatures along the way. But the mountain drops away just a few feet from your tires, disappearing down into the valley floor, a mile below. You'd gawk if you could, but you don't dare. You keep your eyes on the road.

Conventional Christianity is like that. There are all these intriguing possibilities--visions, angels, miracles, revelations. But the church guards her treasures jealously. It expects its members to stay on the straight and narrow, granting them access to its mysteries, if at all, only through its authorized channels.

As a parish priest, I was once asked to perform an exorcism of a house, a rare but legitimate request. I'd seen exorcisms done in charismatic circles, but never in the context of traditional parish ministry. None of my overseers were able to give me advice on how to do it. I consulted the prayer book: nothing. I turned to the prayer book of a sister denomination: consult the bishop, it said, an ecclesiastical Catch 22. So, I went ahead and trusted my gut, said some prayers and, fortunately, that proved sufficient.

The church likes to see itself as mission control, managing from the centre what we believe, how we worship, who's 'in' and who's 'out, and who's allowed to do what. But it forgets that when Jesus started out, he didn't seek the blessing of the religious establishment of his day. He went to an eccentric, itinerant preacher who'd positioned himself on the fringes of mainstream society, out in the Judean wilderness.

New life always comes from the edges, never from the centre. Jesus seemed to know this. He had neither the religious bona fides of having attended the right schools nor the social status of having hung with the right people. But seekers were flocking out to the River Jordon to hear John the Baptist because they felt the realness of his message and the authenticity of his witness. Apparently, that was enough for Jesus.

This is why faithful Christians steal away from time to time to visit the edges of the church world, for the shot of new life that awaits them there. I've known church-goers who snuck off to attend seances to hear from their dead relatives; others who attended charismatic tent meetings to bray like donkeys and shake like leaves; and still others who slipped into an Orthodox worship service, just for the exotic thrill of a liturgy that hasn't changed in almost two thousand years. That they felt these had to be clandestine forays to the fringes says a lot about the freedom people don't feel within the church, to find their own way and to forge their own path. Like children.

Tami Buroker is a life-long Christian. Jesus still figures centrally in her prayers and in her religious imagination. She goes to church. But her training as a Child and Youth Worker, especially in the neurosciences that help explain why young people do the things they do, this has prevented her from adopting the judgmental attitudes she sees in other Christians. Hell, where non-believers go, has become a foreign concept to her. Her personal experience of the power of prayerful visualization has opened her to the possibility of healings and miracles that otherwise would seem too woo-woo for mainstream believers.

Tami's faith embraces the edges of conventional Christianity. Life out there draws her curiosity and gives her hope that the created world is still evolving, and us along with it. To regard God only in terms of correct doctine and authorized rituals, this makes little sense to a follower who prefers the intimacy, and the uncertainty, of a living relationship with her Creator. And, above all, she has come to believe, this Creator calls us to love. Period. No definitions, no qualifications, no equivocations.

It was a delight for me, by now a seasoned doubter and seeker, to meet Tami and to recognize in her the same faith I recall in myself some years ago. I wouldn't say that I've grown cynical. My own living relationship with the Holy prevents it. But it's no longer a faith mitigated by religious authorities and spiritual laws. I like being at the edge, even if it makes me dizzy. And so does Tami. She reminds me that faith doesn't have to be quashed by the traditional vessels that presume to contain it. Faith, a living faith, has the confidence to walk right out to the edge, and look over. Because the whole world is in God's hands.

To hear my conversation with Tami Buroker, just click on the Play button below.