Boxes are the paradigms and prejudices

that grow out of our basic belief systems—

the baggage we each bring with us

to our lives—and dialogues

Ethel Herr

boxes are confining structures

in which we’re fed rules that we are to follow

most, blindly..

we can’t see out of them,

so there’s no point in asking questions…

just do what we’re told.

ellen cohen

Ethel Herr  and  friend,  ellen cohen
For story, click here

I grew up stuffed into a zillion boxes. Some were tiny, some huge—boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes—all with windowless walls and lids nailed down tight.

Most of us good Baptist kids were brought up this way in my day. We knew nothing else—nor did our parents before us:

“Believe this, Ethel—the Bible is God’s infallible message, God created the earth in seven literal days, Jesus was born of a virgin and is the only way to God. THEREFORE, thou shalt not dance or go to movies or play cards or smoke or drink, or listen to jazz music or play baseball with the neighbor kids on Sunday…”

The lists went on endlessly! And always, for me, it included the true biggie: “Because you are a hopeless sinner, when anything goes wrong it is surely your fault!”

From the start, I learned that if you ran afoul of the “thou shalt nots,” God would not be happy with you. We had Scripture verses to support every item on the list. Convinced that God lived only inside these walls, I never questioned. Here alone I could be safe and free from all the vicissitudes of the totally evil world outside.

My boxes were even more rigid than most, because I was the preacher’s kid, and my life and behavior must be a blameless model for all the rest. Our family had been chosen by God for a special mission. We had to win the world to our point of view, capturing everyone we met and stuffing them into our boxes.

By the time I reached my teens I was committed to devoting myself 100% to the things that counted for the kingdom of the boxes. Any rule that anybody could give me that would help me achieve this goal, I was eager to follow it to the furthest possible extreme. I even became quite adept at creating my own rules.

Then I married a man, also from the boxes. He had just joined the US Air Force and we took it as our mission to work with the military chapel congregation. We must help spread the Gospel of the boxes to folks who had missed it in their “substandard” or “false” churches back home.

But God had a surprise for us there. He gave us a chaplain who had come from the very boxes we knew so well. But in their time in the military, he and his wife had learned that life and God existed outside the confinement of the walls. Their mission lay in passing on the pillars of the faith while crawling out of the boxes and letting God decide what was safe and what was not.

Something in my long-restrained soul responded to this new view of freedom. Over the next years, one step at a time God used many different kinds of people and ideas to prepare me to climb out and finally watch some of the box walls collapse around me. When I started writing and attending writing conferences, the process escalated until a memorable encounter with reality at a Memorial Day weekend writers’ conference.

Now, I never go to writer’s conferences as a conferee—only as a teacher. But this time, deep down in my soul, I felt a nudge and so I went and took a class in poetry. On assignment from the teacher, I sat alone on the edge of the high desert, with pencil and a big yellow lined pad, and asked myself—and my God—what was I here for? what profound ponderings could I put into poetic form on my paper?

Again, I felt a stirring in my soul, this time a deep desert-like ache. I felt with a pang a host of bound-up places just waiting to be set free. How could that be? I’d accepted Jesus into my heart when I was a little child. Hadn’t that set me free for a lifetime?

I began to write and the ache grew stronger.

Desert Dance
In the warm June breeze
of a hillside forested with pines and new-green cottonwoods
an effervescent wind
wraps me round in its unsettling burst.
Each gust tugs at the fraying threads
that have so long tied me down
to rusting frames
a deeply rooted heritage
forever profusion of
Shoulds and Ought-tos
and safe Duty-Moorings.
What if, at last the strands snap
and cut loose, and I lose my way and float,
wafted by the wild caprice of these strange and fearful winds,
up and over yon mountain steadfastness
into some far-away desert wastescape?

How could I submit to that never-ceasing dance of dehydration?

I've heard it said there's life in the desert--
a wealth encrusted, muted and deathly silent.
The vision escapes my tortured clinging heart.
Yet something in this pneuma voice speaks
of sparse foliage made strong, forced by ravenous thirst
to suck up water through desperate roots
from wells that trickle through the sands.
But the bushes are scrubby-- pale, hard, twiggy--
strangers to safe dampish roots and lush creeping vinery.

And sometimes in a surprise moment of decades-old tedium,
One bush is sanctified with fire in its branches
that crackle on the hearth of hallowed ground.

Back in class, still mystified by what I’d written, I took my turn and read this strange poem to my classmates. Then I confessed I sensed an inner ache to be free from something—though I knew not what. This teacher-turned-student on the edge of the desert suddenly felt naked and vulnerable, unsettled and overjoyed (?) Yes, overjoyed!

Three weeks later, at another writer’s conference—this time I was the keynote speaker-- I met a woman with a commitment to her strong secular Jewish background. Almost instantly we seemed to be drawn together. Then once we’d returned to our homes on opposite coasts, we began a most unexpected e-mail dialogue about the differences in our boxes and pillars. Again and again, my friend backed me into corners and confronted me with a wider picture of reality. I found myself asking questions I had never asked before, and being coaxed out of some of my boxes~ at least for a good look around. Was this the loosing of bonds I had dreamed of back on the desert?

Yes, yes, yes, it was! It is!

In the years since that meeting, I’ve had some astounding new visions of God and faith. Scripture has come newly alive to me on every page. God has been opening for me the door to a new kind of inner freedom~ His freedom.

(1) God’s Freedom comes not from discarding the foundations and pillars of my faith, but by wrestling till I come to a fresh new vision and experience of them. This means every time I am confronted with one of those backed-into-the-corner challenges, I look at the point in question and ask: Who taught me this~ was it only the preacher in the pulpit or God Himself through His Word? What does God really say about it? Can I be sure? Or must I go on questioning, searching the Scriptures to see whether these things be true?

Often I recall some words I heard at a writers conference many years ago and cannot be sure which of the long line of my mentors spoke them. But they have helped me through this authentication of my freedom immensely:

“When God collapses our box walls, He turns them into dance floors.”

I shall always have to search to know whether the thing I’m questioning just now is indeed only a box wall or one of the pillars that shall forever hold up the dance floor it has become. Things like the virgin birth, inspiration of Scripture and salvation by grace alone~ these are pillars I will never cease to cherish while rejoicing at the creation of new dance floors from old slaveries.

(2) God’s Freedom enables me to be the person He created me to be. Just before my encounter with reality on the desert, God had been showing me, through a pastor’s-wife-friend, a beautiful hint of what it means that we are created in the image of God.

Our mission, she taught me, is not to win the world for Jesus Christ—certainly not to stuff anybody into our boxes. We are created to reflect the character of God in all our human life, relationships, and activities and let Him do the winning.

Each of us has a distinctive place in the Creator’s great cosmos. Only as we find that place and learn how to function there, are we authentically free.

“We are called to be stewards of our singular point of view,” wrote Philip Yancey. “This is all any writer can offer, especially a writer of faith : a unique perspective of creation, a point of view visible only from the point where I am.” (Soul Survivor, pp. 261-262)

(3)God’s Freedom frees me from the duty-drivenness of centering my life on keeping the rules. Keeping the rules had always been the most important thing in my life~an absolute slave-master I served by obligation and with little joy. I didn’t even realize how often this had made me harsh, demanding, and judgmental. In a word, I was arrogant! I honestly believed that the viewpoint in my boxes was the only right view about everything. If you didn’t agree with me about most things theological, you were doomed. I was duty-driven to make sure you understood that and repented.

Now freed from duty-drivenness, I am guided by a gentle Master. I am learning to look for the approval of His eye rather than the harsh demands of the rules.

(4) God’s Freedom entices me to worship Him and let Him make me gentle, tender, and gracious. For years I had dreamt of writing a book that would take the readers by the hand and help them experience the mind-staggering multiplicity of God’s character. But not until I stopped being enslaved by the rules, could I write it. Smitten to my knees by God’s person, I discovered one more surprise. He has become, to me, some huge and glittering diamond with facets too many to count, each one showing me one more side of His unsearchable character.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that His rules flow from His character. So if I concentrate on getting to know Him and worship Him for Who He is, two incredible things happen:

First, He changes my paradigms so that the rules that are important reveal themselves to me through His character.

Second, I fall in love with Him. My heart’s desires also change so that I want to be like Him. Following hard after Him and seeking Him and all He is becomes my controlling passion. Then automatically I seek to follow all the rules He designs me to follow.

(5) God’s Freedom teaches me to sing and dance and laugh and play—to enjoy coloring outside the lines! I’m learning to recognize God’s glory reflected, not only in the beauties of nature, but also in the arts as well as in all kinds of people. Enjoying these things is a way to worship Him who created each one.

Nature reflects Him, surely. Sun, skies, seas, creatures, plants, the human body…It all shouts His love, His pleasure, His sense of humor.

But the arts? That depends. Or does it? A few years ago when I taught a class on “What Does God Say About the Arts?” I discovered that all the laws that govern art of any kind are God’s laws. He creates all things by these laws. Interestingly, no matter how evil the heart of the artist, or how vile may be the content of his work, if he produces real art, it also uses God’s laws. For every man, woman and child on earth is created in the image of the creative God.

I’ve also discovered that all people reflect their Creator in ways I had not suspected. One day I told my Jewish friend that my goal in life was to live in such a way that all who knew me would see the glory of God reflected in everything about me.

“And do you only see God’s glory in Christians?” she asked. “Or do you ever see His glory in me?”

At that moment, I had to admit I saw the glory reflected in her smiles, her kind words, in her keen insights, even at times in her theological questions and ponderings. That’s when I knew that God’s goal for me begins with my being humble enough to see His glory wherever He displays it and learn from all He sends my way.

(6) God’s Freedom urges me to think and search all manner of truth, to ask big questions and not rush to chisel the answers into tablets of stone. Looking back at my boxes, I discovered one more thing about the church community I’d grown up in.

The church is very good
at punctuating all we say
with periods—
“Thus saith the Lord.”
We also love commas
that allow us to keep adding,
explaining,
illustrating…
ad nauseum
in endless Apostle Paul style sentences
so complex they take a lifetime to untangle.
Exclamation points dot our proclamations
attached to Hallelujah’s and Amen’s decorating our margins
And across the bottom of our pages,
march all those scholarly footnotes
like uniformed soldiers
in solemn, predictable, authenticating rhythm.

Three marks we fear,
all squashed down in our boxes:
Question marks…
Who? What? When? Where? Why?
and Are you sure?
Semi-colons…
Surely there is not more than one way to see a thing
All “Truth” must be conclusively decided by now—
codified, memorized
waiting for us to plumb its depths,
but never to question its meanings!
Ellipses…
God, could You have left some things out?
Refused to give us answers
to the tough and painful
apparent contradictions?
Left some holes in our catechisms?

My new inner freedom is teaching me that life swarms with ideas we cannot fathom and puzzles we cannot solve. And theology does not point us always to clear answers with periods, commas and footnotes. But we are free to ask, to seek, to accept the holes and pauses and apparent inconsistencies imposed on us by our less-than-divine wisdom.

(7) Inner freedom keeps me safe, no matter how big the risks it leads me to take. How secure I felt in those days when I never allowed myself to listen to a piece of jazz music, go to a movie, own a television, wear a sleeveless dress or to miss church for even one Sunday!

Then little by little, the walls had begun to collapse around me and I found myself dancing on floors that would have terrified me half a century ago. Thanks to my Jewish friend, I was now struggling to find answers to some huge unanswerable theological questions. Like the day I told her that God shows His love to me by putting food on my table everyday, and she asked: “Does that mean He doesn’t love the child I saw last night on tv dying of starvation?”

I looked around, hoping for an answer beyond the pat words hanging on my box walls: “In heaven I will know.” They suddenly seemed so inadequate. But nothing new came.

I cried out to God: “Lord, it’s scary out here on this dance floor. Stripped of my box walls, I feel so naked and vulnerable!”

Instantly, I heard His voice: “Ah, my child, don’t fear! I am your Dance Instructor, and My arms are safer than all the box walls in the universe!”

“Even when the steps You’re trying to teach me don’t make sense?” I asked.

“Mostly then,” was His calm answer.

I’m beginning to get the picture that life does not consist in having all my doctrinal statements in order or in finding satisfactory answers to questions about world hunger and the like. Yes, life, either in the boxes or on the dance floor, is risky—always lying beyond my ultimate control.

I need not always see the end from the beginning or seek for evidence that every venture I undertake is safe and predictable. In the end the secret lies in trusting the God whom I can never fully understand to do what is right for all involved. Dancing on His floors means letting God be God!

My friend, Joy Sawyer, wrote, “If we choose to live according to the risk-free law rather than the risky Spirit, our lives will read like trite, bad poetry.”

Lord, give me,
the courage to take risks
to ask hard questions
and live consistently in Your arms
~right next to Your heart and Your whispered voice~
to go wherever You lead
because I know You are there
and are patiently forging me,
in the flames of my perpetual struggle,
into Your creative golden masterpiece.

“Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden,and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30 (For more on this text)