“And there is … a type of modern man who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.”

—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

At Thanksgiving, some of us were sitting around discussing the crazy reality shows we’d watched recently. Naked and Afraid was probably the most intriguing scenario. A man and woman who don’t know each other are dropped in a remote place with a few implements and no clothes and expected to survive for a few weeks. Oh, and there’s a film crew there to capture it all for television voyeurs … er, viewers. The idea is kind of ridiculous and uncomfortable to think about, but it did prompt me to wonder how we would live differently or what would be important if we had to do everything naked and in front of a camera. Personally, I think the world might be a much humbler place.

Maybe you think I’ve placed a gratuitous hook at the beginning of this post, just to catch readers. Trust me, it does relate. The creators of Naked and Afraid, while maybe far from creating art, have at least realized that their draw is in showing (instead of telling) the audience what it would be like to try to survive on an island with a flawed naked stranger while fighting off monster mosquitoes at night and trying to find enough fish and coconuts to eat … and also while being a flawed naked stranger to your partner. It’s not pretty, but it’s real.

Flannery O’Conner, in her words above, lays out the primary problem and thus a primary objective in creating artful fiction. Readers are casting about desperately for their lost God and finding no satisfying vehicle to carry them into belief. The writer who is masterful will make belief believable … at least some tiny bit of something believable to one who is hardened by this world against believing anything. He will plant a mustard seed, carve an inroad, or ignite a spark in an otherwise cold, dark interior that leads his reader into a place of relief … a place that is true even if it is uncomfortable. It is a place where the reader is sure that his complicated self, his holiness and sin and everything in between, is understood. Characters living, moving and speaking as real people do make us believe. It is true in fiction and it is true in life.

I read O’Connor’s thoughts on fiction with interest, first because I have enjoyed her writing and wondered about the person behind it. If she wanted to explain why she, a devout Catholic, often wrote grotesque (her own word) and shocking things, I would be curious enough to pay attention. Furthermore, when I am not working or caring for my family or writing here, I also write fiction. At least, I try. But that is not the point. I’m just telling you why I am interested … why I paid attention to Ms. O’Connor.

It was while I was paying attention that I realized that the primary problem that writers of fiction have … making belief believable … is the same problem we all have if we want our people to know Christ. I know. I know. Most days we struggle with our own dang belief. We aren’t so much thinking about helping others with theirs. Nevertheless, it is the Church, the family of God, by virtue of Christ, that is the bearer of divine life.

We would not be here having this more than decade-long discussion on Michael Spencer’s blog were it not for belief having been made believable to us, or at least the hope of it being made believable. It was the string of stories starting with Adam and culminating in Christ, carried forward by apostles, martyrs, evangelists and fathers of the faith all the way up to our contemporaries who have touched in some way the multitude of us who come here to read and talk.

Now, I admit that the idea of making belief believable induces a pressure I don’t want. It is pressure akin to what I felt when I spent one whole summer in high school at a Christian leadership training event. We students worked during the day to pay for our living expenses and went to the streets at night in a mountain vacation town engaging passersby with “surveys” that would provide opportunities to invite them to evangelistic events or read through tracts with them. I was pretty sure there was something wrong with me because after three solid months I could never get the hang of it and couldn’t get over my fear in doing it. I’m not lazy, but I am very shy and the whole thing felt inauthentic to me. Articulating that thought on one occasion evoked a verbal smack down, resulting in me being certain the fault really was mine.

Years later, I came to the conclusion that, while I have many deficiencies and flaws, the real problem in that scenario was the same problem fiction writers often have in making readers believe them. A whole lot of telling and very little showing makes for fiction that does not engage the reader because it doesn’t feel real. That’s essentially what we were doing on those Rocky Mountain streets … talking it up with people we didn’t know and who didn’t know us. Furthermore, we teens were immature in every way, physically, emotionally, intellectually and more to the point, spiritually. What could 17-year-olds possibly say that would arise out of wisdom and true understanding of life and elicit someone’s belief? We were googly-eyed and innocent for the most part. Our naïve take on sin and salvation and the idea that, “All you have to do is receive Christ and you’ll be fixed,” didn’t recognize, allow for and bring grace to the grotesque and shocking truths that are inherent in the human condition.

Before I get accused of over generalizing or of devaluing the need and command to evangelize, let me just say I know there are exceptions all over the place. Some people truly have an ability to talk to strangers about spiritual things in very meaningful ways. The case of Phillip and the Ethiopian (Acts 8:26-40) comes to mind and I have a son-in-law with a similar gift. I also know that if the apostles and first disciples had not gone out on evangelistic missions the church would not have launched and we would not be here. That being said, we tend to focus on the moving-our-mouths-part and overlook the living-amongst-the-people part.

To be honest, I don’t even like the word “evangelism” anymore. Forgive me if I sound disrespectful. I don’t mean to be. It’s just that the word conjures up so many unsavory images for me. I won’t mention any, lest what is unsavory to me be cherished to you. Yet I would hazard to guess the word conjures less than lovely images for most of us. It wasn’t meant to be that way, though, and that is why I think I have latched on to O’Connor’s idea of making belief believable. It is infused with the authenticity that seems to have gotten stripped from evangelism by our mishandling of it.

St. Francis of Assisi famously said, “Preach the gospel always and, if necessary, use words.” He has stated the fiction writer’s first rule in spiritual terms, “Show, don’t tell.” For me, that brings both fear and relief. I fear not showing my Father and my people that I love them by failing in my actions … and I often fail. But I’m relieved to know that I don’t have to pass out tracts to strangers to show people their lost God.

Still, we need to give our people something … namely our naked selves. Showing them their lost God isn’t about what we tend to think it is (i.e. perfection). It isn’t about the choir preaching to would-be choir members. Those days seem gone. Ms. O’Connor says, “The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man’s encounter with this God is how he shall make the experience—which is both natural and supernatural—understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well-nigh insurmountable one.” The encounter is mostly with people who dislike religious robes and have no plans to wear them, so ours have to come off too.

It’s not that our people have stopped looking for their lost God, but they are coming more jaded and harder of heart … more suspicious of motive and less willing to trust … more enlightened intellectually and darkened spiritually. They are still coming hungry for God, desperate and impatient, but they often walk away angry when they are denied or deceived or disappointed. It’s a very tough crowd. It’s hard work making belief believable in such cases. It’s tempting to throw up hands and circle wagons and turn away. Tempting yes, but not acceptable. Besides, it’s also not ultimately satisfying … to cave to convenience and leave potential brothers and sisters on the outside looking in. Alexander of Alexandria wrote in one of his epistles, “Two very bad things are ill-will and unbelief, both of which are contrary to righteousness; for ill-will is opposed to charity, and unbelief to faith …” Here, we see both sides of the problem at work. Unbelievers come with their shocking human selves … and we should not be shocked because we are also human … but we take offense and meet them with condemnation and ill will.

The ill will may come partially in response to encountering such hard chips of unbelief, but it may as likely come from our fears. We don’t know what to do with the irreligious and robeless ones. Their addictions and inadequacies frighten us. They remind us of what we are like under our own robes. Yet, isn’t this truth the very thing we have come to Christ for? It’s why I have come and keep coming. We want to know that God loves us for our naked, messed up selves and not for the beautiful robes we clutch around us. Those looking for their lost God will have a hard time finding him, unless they see us also naked before God and being loved by him.

When I was seventeen, I thought words were the answer. I could tell people how to find their lost God with words. Through the many intervening years, I have thought it was about service. I will love my people so much by how I serve them that they will see God. Isn’t that showing and not telling? Partly. But we are still in a crisis in the Church and we wonder why. We give money. We go on mission trips. We have food pantries and free clinics and counseling ministries. We lead Bible studies and small groups and mentor the young. We might be serving and giving ourselves into exhaustion and not really getting anywhere because we are still wearing robes. Maybe these acts of service are our robes.

Those looking for their lost God can’t really believe God loves them because we don’t really believe he loves us either. And the beautiful robes we insist on wearing tell them that only the beautifully robed get loved. Perhaps more profound than we believers demonstrating the love of God to our people is what happens when they see us loving and being loved by God in the midst of all our selfishness, sickness, sorrow, bewilderment, conflict, failure and devastation. The gospel we preach … the story we write and that God is writing in our lives without words … makes belief believable when we stand wordless and let our people witness us getting hauled naked and hurting out of our own pits.

My friend Harry, at church, is a good example. About a year ago, a lingering limp took him to the doctor and he was eventually diagnosed with ALS. His time on earth is short and he is already dependant on a motorized scooter to get around. He’s matter-of-fact … naked, if you will … about the reality of what he faces in coming months. But Harry makes his belief believable to me. When I look at him, I see a man emanating grace and bearing what would seem an incredible suffering with lightness. I see a man being loved into heaven by his God.

I am saying all this very badly and I am certainly not trying to write a how-to on something that I also do very badly. This is more a mental processing of something God is showing me about myself. The biggest fear of my life is to be seen as I truly am … weak, sinful … and getting older without having very much figured out. I’ve gotten past believing I can ever hide anything from God. I don’t bother trying, but I still hide everything I think is ugly from the world. I’m always sure my people wouldn’t like me for these things … but if they could see me in my humanness and nakedness being loved by God and also believing in his love, that would be a sweet reason to shed the robes.