TMI

Boyd Camak’s blog post reflects on the communal aspect of Christianity, contrasting it with a solitary, existential approach to faith. Camak grapples with the idea of Christianity as a “team sport,” emphasizing the importance of community and mutual support within the church. He shares his personal struggles and how partnering in prayer with his church community is helping him navigate difficult choices. Camak underscores the need to listen to God and rely on the body of Christ for support, rather than trying to solve problems alone. He expresses faith that God will provide what he needs and highlights the value of trusted relationships in discerning God’s will.

Voice dictation

There’s always been a tension in my thinking about Christianity because, as one Eastern Orthodox Mount Priest or somebody said, he said he didn’t understand the idea of a lone Christian, or to put it more colloquially, Christianity is a team sport, a team sport, and although I think that idea of a team sport or that phrase may be more at home with evangelical Protestantism in the United States in terms of proselytizing, although proselytizing from a spirit of goodwill, I would say that the notion of Christianity being a team sport really goes back to the idea of the body of Christ, and not just as a sacrament or a symbol, and certainly by the term symbol, I don’t mean only an abstraction.

I do believe that in a mysterious way, we do partake of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and the other sacramentals that are components of the liturgy, although I don’t even think the term component is appropriate, it seems too mechanical, but I do believe that we are caught up in this mystical body of Christ, which is not an abstraction, it is a physical reality in addition to a spiritual reality, and I don’t want to try to put too fine of a point on the distinction between spiritual and physical, but the essence of Christianity in my view is that Christ became incarnate of the Holy Spirit, and so our fleshly, everyday mundane lives are much more important than mountain-top experiences, and certainly esoteric, gobbledygook, all that esoteric stuff is usually a gateway to the occult.

So the point I’m making though is getting back to this idea of Christianity being a team sport.

I think often times you hear that concept used, although not those words, but for example in the Eastern Orthodox Church, I remember having conversations with a subdeacon at an Eastern Orthodox Church, and they were using the term, they were using the idea of community as part of their askesis, part of their becoming more like Christ and pursuing Christ through ascetical practices, and it’s funny, I just looked up Christ’s view of the concept of fasting, and I think it was a much more human and much more pastoral, more loving approach to fasting than say these ridiculous extremes that people have gone to over the centuries, and certainly when that gets infused with diet culture, which I’m learning more about, which is downright demonic, in the sense that it is enslaving diet culture that is, but again getting back to this idea of Christians being individuals or part of a whole, I’ve always wanted to believe that contemporary Christianity offered true community that could actually help you with practical problems versus just empty prayer or empty promises of prayer, and I don’t believe all prayers are empty.

I don’t think any prayer is empty, but I’m just thinking of the spirit of James, the book of James, where James calls bullshit on empty talk versus actually helping people.

I’m not saying that I’m any kind of saint on this, I’m just as guilty of indifference and callousness, if not more indifferent and callous than other people.

I just think that it’s hard in our society, political considerations aside, our society, if you could even call it a society, has delegated some charitable activities to the state, social services, etc., better than nothing, but not much better.

Of course, some callous and or ignorant people, which I have been heartily in league with in my previous days, and when I say in league, in terms of my political opinions and whatnot, but those opinions being that even that pittance of a gesture that the state makes to help people, some ideologies would want to get rid of even that, with the idea that whoever can be king of the mountain, the best and the brightest is everything, and those who don’t have talents or who have had some kind of challenge or challenges or just average people, they don’t seem to deserve as much in this view, or that all charitable and compassionate activities should be constrained only to private charity.

But anyway, getting back to this idea of Christianity as kind of a solo existential enterprise, that’s how I’ve approached it, out of necessity.

Just on paper, I needed to evaluate these different claims that these traditions made on me that say that they are the true church, whether it’s the Roman Catholics, whether it’s the whoever.

But again, the promise is that if you become part of these historic communities, that you’re going to be a part of the body of Christ, and they’re going to help you in your journey to heaven, and they’re going to help you with practical things.

But in fact, you’d be lucky if you just got away without getting your child sexually abused, or your patriarch baptizing a war of aggression, or whatever else.

Fortunately, I’m in a church home now that I think is demonstrating to me that there is a possibility still that a church home can actually do something more than just pay lip service to real needs.

And this is an act of faith for me to think about this.

Because I’ve gotten to a point in life where I have a set of circumstances that are not just about existential crises or theological pretzel logic.

I’ve gotten to a set of situations in my life now where, as I told some friends at church, it’s a round square.

I’ve got some hard choices to make, and there are no good options, or rather, one option.

They all have things that all need to be done, but they can’t all be done together.

There are some dilemmas.

But thanks to my journey of faith last year and another hard challenge where I was unemployed for nine months, God taught me how to stop and listen.

Stop and listen.

And maybe listen for a long time.

And maybe the point of listening is to have myself changed, healed, admonished, whatever.

And so my prayer needed to get away from prayer as a team meeting where I tell God what the action items are for the week, and I asked Him to do the things on the action item list that I came up with, and then ask for some other whatever.

But no, it’s about stopping and listening.

And so I’m in a season now where I am partnering in prayer with people at my church, and they’re helping me listen.

I’ve told them, this is a round square.

I don’t know how I can do all the things that I need to do in this situation.

There are, you know, doing one thing I need to do prevents me from doing other things I need to do.

And these are all things I need to do to be a responsible human.

And so what I learned last year is to stop and listen, not try to roll up my sleeves and solve the problem on my own.

And frankly, even if I wanted to roll up my sleeves and solve the problem on my own, I couldn’t do it.

Certainly not my own strength.

And I know that if I tried to do that, I would just make it worse.

And so I’m going to stop and listen.

And I know that God doesn’t promise me a happy ending in worldly terms.

It could end in a tragedy.

I also don’t want to use black and white thinking and make it more dramatic and whatever than it is.

So I’m just going to stop and listen, and I’m talking to people at my church, and they’re going to listen with me.

And I’ve told them, I’ve told them the situation in confidence.

I’ve told them what I’m doing with.

And I’ve told them that I have faith, not a leap, not a leap of faith, but I have faith based on my own experience that God can deliver me out of whatever he wants to deliver me out of.

And that he is perfectly capable of giving me exactly what I need, when I need it, to do his will.

And my job is to stop and listen.

And so what I’m asking them to do is to help me listen, help me listen day by day, because life gets hard.

And the enemy, the evil spirit, Ignatius of Loyola would talk about the enemy, the evil spirit that tries to discourage me, the enemy that tries to confuse me.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to have the peace of Christ that passes all understanding.

I’m going to set my faith on Christ and not worldly circumstances, not the impermanent world.

And we can talk about impermanence from a Buddhist perspective, but more importantly, we can talk about impermanence from a Christian perspective.

This world is a passing show.

And so my hope and my faith is in Christ.

And thankfully Christ has allowed me to feel his presence.

I’m feeling consolation, as they would say in the Catholic tradition, I feel God’s presence.

Now God may choose to take that presence away from me.

He may want me to have a different presence.

He may want to have me, you know, there’s a book I have called, When Jesus Sleeps.

It talks about when Christ was asleep in the boat.

And the disciples were like, you know, we’re perishing.

Wake up, you know.

But I’m going to listen to Christ.

He may give me a sense of his presence.

He may not.

But I’m going to trust him.

And like the apostle said, you know, we have nowhere else to go.

We have nowhere else to go.

I know that trying to try to go somewhere else just makes it worse.

And I’ve seen Christ work in my life.

And so here I am.

I’m going to wait and listen.

And I’m going to talk to my prayer team.

And they’re coordinated through one person.

And I’m going to help them.

I’m going to ask them to listen.

I’m going to tell them my situation.

They’re people I can trust.

I’m going to tell them my situation.

And they’ve asked for updates.

And I’ve already started seeing things happen.

And I have to think their answers to prayer.

And I don’t understand prayer.

I don’t understand if, you know, this idea of asking for something and I don’t understand prayer.

There are a lot of ways to think about it.

I just try to do the best I can.

But mostly I try to listen these days.

I try to listen.

And I’m going to listen.

And I’m going to trust that God can square the circle that He can, He can deliver me in His way, in His time.

And so the new thing that, you know, the new thing I’m doing this time is I’m not only listening myself, but I’ve been blessed with people that can help me listen.

And we’re going to listen together.

We’re going to trust.

And that is the difference between the body of Christ and this idea of the existential Knight of Faith.

If I, I don’t even remember what Kierkegaard meant by that, but, but basically I’ve got the situation now where I can’t, I can’t solve the problem on my own practically.

And I’m so worn out.

I can’t even, I can’t even solve it on my own spiritually.

If that’s even the right way to think about it.

You don’t really solve something spiritually.

But, but the point is that we’re bearing each other’s burdens.

I’m bringing my problems before the church, before trusted people.

We’re going to listen together.

And who knows what might happen?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I’m just going to listen and I’m going to trust that God’s going to, God’s going to help me through this one way or the other.

And the point of the point of this post, the point of this message is to talk about the communal aspect of faith, the communal aspect of faith.