A Tale of Two Fields
A Personal Journey Out of Legalism
by
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“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” With these opening lines, Dickens' timeless classic, A Tale of Two Cities, was delivered into the world one word at a time. With no such classic rattling around in the haunted closets of my soul, I begin simply. It was neither the best of times nor the worst of times; it was simply a time, a summertime, a summertime tale of two fields in which was hidden a summertime revelation of two views of the church. The church institutional and the church dynamic. The church organizational and the church organic. The church uniform and the church unique. The church sterile and the church relational. The church as a culture of sameness and the church as diverse in individuality. The church legal and the church spiritual. And in some very particular way this was my time, my summertime, my summertime journey between two fields, my summertime tale of two fields.
In this age of information overload words and images, signs and symbols from every nook and cranny of the globe wash over our consciousness through the ever-evolving shiny gadgets of our technology, until the mind has been dulled into a stale fog of numb insensitivity. I suppose we know “more about” yet understand “less of” than any of the preceding generations, or perhaps all of those generations combined. We know how to get there, but know not where we have arrived nor yet how to behave upon arrival. Our science and technology even allow us to explain how individual, personal identity and definition makes its way from one generation to the next and the next and the next. I look upon fading pictures of my long dead parents and conclude that as to material definition and image they will never be totally absent so long as I and the rest of their brood are present. And beyond us, their grandchildren and great grandchildren assure the same.
But what of our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates, our interests, our passions?
What of the things that stir life, causing it to spark and flash and flame and to burn hot with total being-consuming obsession? What of the things that beget dread and loathing and numbness and death? How do these realities of soul - inner world pulses - move across the generations with such consistency? Even here there is a physiological dynamic that science delights to articulate, making the boast that with the articulation all wonder is expelled, all mystery has come to an end, which, after all, were only the marks of our blissful ignorance.
But for all of this there remains a certain core notion that be-ing is more than physiology. Consciousness is more than chemicals in gray cells and electrical pulses racing up and down a central nervous system. Life holds definition, meaning, value, wonder, and mystery beyond the test tube, beyond the lab door. Something or Someone far greater than the most brilliant scientist possesses the final explanation of my life and consciousness. And without discounting the incredible value of the lab in relation to that reality of being which is physical, material, body, there remains for me a reality, a dynamic, a definition of being, a consciousness of existence that is so non-physical, so non-material, so non-body, so other-worldly.
Spirit - just as real, and more so than things physical, things material.
Spirit - God essence, angel substance, and therefore beyond capture and containment in the lab.
Spirit - present in the physical but always transcending narrow materialism.
Spirit - filling time but losing nothing of essential reality, definition, being, and identity when time has long since surrendered to timelessness.
Spirit - before time and dust, and eternally present after time and dust.
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About the Book
The first act of false religion - religion defined as the effort of the soul to make oneself presentable and acceptable to God outside of relational accountability to and submissive dependence upon God - was performed by our first parents in a garden “sewing room” - the stitching together of fig leaves in an effort to cover the shame of personal nakedness. But the real genius in this first act of religion was not the ability to create coverings; the far greater wonder was in the uniformity of the coverings. An apron is an apron, and I suspect there was no distinction, difference, or uniqueness between his and hers. And there the two core characteristics of false religion emerged: self-effort and uniformity.
The great post-flood corporate expression of this was the
Therein lies the ancient conflict between the religious soul caught up with the pinching uniformity of doing and the infinite broadness of Sovereignty, who’s unlimited provision negates and renders ridiculous our silly fig-leaf aprons. The flashpoint of this historic engagement - the place where true and false religion collide - is that mysterious world in each of us where S/spirit and soul meet in the dance.
About the Author
Raised in the rigid narrowness of staunch legalistic religion and the unhealthy view it created of authority and authority figures, Dale Lloyd’s perception of God was that He was the ultimate abusive authority figure in the universe. Dale had accumulated just about all of the soul devastation that gathers around a shame based life - just one half breath short of suicide. He feverishly reached for redemption. Instead of redemption he discovered that no measure of reaching, no measure of effort, no measure of sincerity, no measure of discipline, morals or ethics could in the end measure up. Life became an endless exercise of this futility. The effort always collapsed in more failure, which in turn deepened the crippling and disabling death-grip of shame.
At mid-life the performance came to an undiplomatic, awkward and convulsive stop. With the sudden cessation of the spinning of his world every religious work he had crafted and protected as dictated by the majority insistence of his own history - including, and most especially, 25 years of ministry - went flying off to be burned up in the atmosphere. The end had come.
Encased in life-threatening pain and despair, while stumbling through the rubble and debris, Dale made a most incredible discovery. He found a mere trifle of faith hardly the size of a mustard seed. And wonder of all possible wonders that faith had nothing to do with the incessant demand of his religious roots to measure up. Rather, that faith delivered him right into the relational presence of the one and only Person who met the measure and now dispensed righteousness and guaranteed justification on the basis of faith and faith alone. The end turned out to be the end of “works religion” and the beginning of dynamic, relational S/spiritual reality.