The Great Wall

I listen to music. Every day, I sit and listen to different kinds of music - worship, rock, pop, even some ghetto rap. (What can I say; I get bored easily so I have to mix it up!) In our new home, if you sit in the living room and turn out the lights at night, look up and out our window, you can see an ornate roman cross sitting on a Catholic Church steeple, gleaming over the city streets. It stands tall, high above the dirt and the filth and the sin and the pain that limps around the streets of the north side, the place we call home. When I’m in prayer or worship, I find myself staring at it in wonder and fear, from the corner of my couch. I turn out the lights to watch it glisten, as if somehow, Jesus is there.

It’s funny, I don’t believe in idols. I don’t believe in making images to capture and solidify God or any aspect of the Triune Majesty I worship. Yet, this cross has come to, in some ways, be my golden calf. When I’m asking for wisdom or a sign to help me make decisions, I’ve found myself staring at this distant and highly held cross and wondering if Jesus hears me.

Tori Amos sings a song called “China.” It’s one of those beautiful chilling songs full of double meaning and intricate depth. Tori is always good for that. Part of the chorus says, “Sometimes, I think you want me to touch you. But how can I, when you build The Great Wall around you? ooohh, China…”

I was listening to this beautiful song during a darker moment a few weeks back and had this thought while staring at my window cross: what if God, in all of His glory and holiness, stands like that cross - high above the harlotry of humanity, protected by The Great Wall called the institutional church? True to Tori’s song, I do feel Him asking humanity to touch Him and to taste Him and to intimately know Him. He calls out, from the cross and from the streets even, Emmanuel, God with us. And yet, somehow, so many of us have lost the ability to find Him. All of a sudden, as I get closer and closer to the core of the church, I sense the looming Great Wall, a tremendous divide.

Something in the church, something about staring at that distant highly held cross, puts me outside the intimate place. While I know He is a relationship and not a religion, I stumble on the idea that to find Him and really know Him, the hoops and the hype of church are required to hurdle in order to be in the center of His will.

All of this, in darker moments, makes me wonder if I want to be part of any of it; the massive historic and deeply rigid walls the church has built that keep people in as well as keep people out. The rules, the hierarchy, the struggle for power and position and placement, the marketing of salvation and faith – Red China, The Great Wall, unbending. It’s hard sometimes to see, where He ends and His church begins. Something about The Great Wall blurs my vision and I’m left to really think through what it means to know my Savior inside and outside that wall.

Is He who He says He is, or is He what is demonstrated? Intimate or distant? Is He protected behind a wall of rules and reason and distance or is He a mystery and a relationship? These are the questions that pop circles around my head and my heart; after all, I’m part of the “jaded generation.” Regardless of personal belief and faith, I’m duty-bound to ask the questions.

And I am asking, limping and broken and unsure, I stare at the distant cross, feel The Great Wall, and pray with all feebleness and honesty that Jesus move and breathe outside the walls, away from the lofty steeples and glistening untouched crosses, to find me… in the dirty streets. To find us… who move in and out of China.