Life Unsettled: A Scriptural Journey for Wilderness Times

Life Unsettled

Life Unsettled

A Scriptural Journey for Wilderness Times

Cory Driver

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

LIFE UNSETTLED

A Scriptural Journey for Wilderness Times

Copyright © 2021 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [email protected] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Unless otherwise cited, the Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (TLV) are taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014, 2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from the King James Version.

Cover image: bkirac/iStockphoto.com

Cover design: Alisha Lofgren

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6321-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6322-3

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Kathy

Even when she is lost and confused, she still shows us the way

Contents

Introduction

1. Preparing for the Journey: Who Is God?

2. The Journey: Who Are We?

3. Place of Vision: Where God Is Leading

4. Women in the Wilderness

5. Place of Moving Forward

Notes

Select Bibliography

Word & World Books

Introduction

Shortly before I started writing this book, my mother-in-law, Kathy, with whom I have a very close relationship, called me about the 2016 presidential race in the United States. She is conservative in her politics, evangelical in her faith, and cares very deeply about eliminating abortions. As is probably needless to say, my mother-in-law’s electoral preferences tend to be Republican.

This phone call with my mother-in-law occurred after the tape of then candidate Donald Trump’s hot mic conversation with Billy Bush. He was recorded bragging about repeated sexual abuse, not to mention a lack of fidelity. Kathy is nothing if not principled, and she is not one to overlook problems with candidates simply because they are good on other issues. In a word, Kathy was stuck. She had to choose between her preference for a candidate who said that he would take action to support her antiabortion position and her revulsion at the thought of voting for a serial sexual abuser or, at the very least, someone who thought bragging about being a serial sexual abuser was funny. She told me, Cory, far more than any other time in my adult life, I feel like we as a country are all in the wilderness.

The notion of being in the wilderness that my mother-in-law struggled with is the central concern of this book. This is not a book about politics, though I will address how reading Scripture leads me to think about some political issues. Rather, this is a book about what we do, and what the people of God have done before us, when we find ourselves confronting strange experiences outside of everything normal and comfortable.

When you read the word wilderness, what do you imagine? If you are from the American Midwest, as I am, you probably imagine a desert of some sort. That makes sense, as it is the place that we are least familiar with and seems the most removed from our daily lives. In the Bible, the Hebrew word midbar, which we translate as wilderness, specifically implies not a desert but rather simply a place where people do not live or farm. In fact, midbar is frequently a good place to drive flocks, because good pasturage for the sheep and goats can be found. Cities, in the Near Eastern world of the Bible, were frequently surrounded by midbar/wilderness, where shepherds grazed their flocks. That land was wilderness specifically because it was not city. The land does not have to be hostile to be considered wilderness, but it must not be normal, settled life.

In the Greek New Testament, the word eremos, which is translated as wilderness, carries a similar valence, but perhaps even more intensely. The word, whether describing places or people, means something like solitary, lonely, desolate, or deserted. A desert, rain forest, or tropical island in the middle of the ocean each can be described as wilderness by virtue of the lack of human habitation.

What happens, then, when we find ourselves in a wilderness time in our lives? Maybe we have just moved and have not formed our own community yet. Maybe a drastic change has altered our social network, whether we’ve faced rejection or had to head out on our own in order to make healthy decisions. Maybe we’ve simply outgrown a community that was perfectly supportive previously but is insufficient for helping us face our current situation. The unsettling wildernesses that we face frequently have more to do with feeling lonely in a crowd than being in some isolated geographic location. In such wildernesses, more often than not, the control that routine, habit, and society exert on our lives and our thinking becomes temporarily weakened, and we can experience the new, novel, strange, and transcendent. If you have ever taken a walk in a forest, gone hiking in the mountains, or been fortunate to find yourself (purposefully and temporarily) on a sparsely populated island, I suspect you probably already have experienced this openness to new ideas and experiences. The reason we take vacations is to get away from normalcy so that we can have time and space to reflect on our routines and whether they are building life in a direction that is positive. Experiencing wilderness can be a good and useful thing.

But what do we do when we find ourselves in the wilderness apart from our own choices, as my mother-in-law did? She felt suddenly alienated from her deeply partisan friends and alone in her discomfort because she wanted to affect policy but was unwilling to disregard the horrifying words of the candidate who seemed most likely to support her policy. She was in an unusual place, unsure of how to proceed and not willing to carry on as if things were normal. Her predicament was an almost perfect definition of a wilderness experience: she was isolated in a moral/ethical place that felt deeply abnormal. The election season and following years have left many of us feeling like we were suddenly living in a wilderness place, a place that is neither familiar nor normal. For me, this was not a new feeling.

My Wilderness Journeys

I was born and grew up in the US Midwest. My family moved every few years because my father worked in the banking industry during the 1980s and ’90s, a time of frequent mergers and acquisitions. I remember enjoying moving because it afforded new opportunities to make new friends and learn about new places. I was raised in mainline Protestant traditions. Because we moved frequently, we found our way to different churches, usually Methodist or Pentecostal and very occasionally Lutheran or Catholic. A key experience happened when I was eight years old. I remember begging my parents to let me sit in the pews with them instead of having to go to Sunday school. All I wanted to do was read the Bible and maybe hear some of the sermon. But they thought it was better for me to go to Sunday school to be with kids my own age. I went, reluctantly.

Let me be clear and preclude any fears: my Sunday school teacher did not abuse us in any way. We just were not on the same page, so to speak. I do not know what the other second graders were thinking, but I wanted to learn about God, and so I asked questions about God. I had just moved to the area and had not made any friends yet. I did not have a sense of what the other children were going to do, or not do, so I spoke up. I cannot remember the exact question that I asked about what God is like, but I remember the Sunday school teacher’s answer. Our teacher drew the diagram of the three interlocking circles and proceeded to explain that there are some parts of the Trinity that are just Jesus, just God, or just the Spirit; some parts that are made of two of them overlapping; and some parts that are all three comingled. He said that was all we needed to know.

Probably he just wanted to get back to his planned lesson and for the nerdy new boy to stop asking questions. But I wasn’t finished. In fact, I was disgusted. I had been reading the Bible and was hoping that we were going to talk about some of what it said. But instead of a discussion on the character of God, the ruler of the universe, the Messiah, and the Holy Spirit were reduced to interlocking circles, and that was what my teacher wanted me to know about God.

That lesson was hard enough to take, but the straw that really broke the camel’s back was when we were talking about Noah and about God’s love. I was bothered by the lack of attention being paid to almost everyone on earth drowning and what that meant about God’s love. My teacher told us that God put Noah in an ark because God loved Noah. I asked why God did not love everyone else. I was told to go sit in the corner because I was purposefully missing the point. I don’t think I was, though. It has always seemed to me that the story of the flood ought to be about, or at least include, the flood.

After being punished for asking questions in Sunday school, I felt like my comfortable, homey church environment had been taken from me. As we moved, one of the few constants was the churches where we children were welcomed, if not always appreciated for being ourselves. But in this new church, it felt like we had plopped down into a spiritual wilderness where I did not know what to think, whom to turn to for answers, or how to get my bearings. I became deeply suspicious of Christians and especially Christian leaders who preached about letting the little children come to Jesus while in practice just trying to keep them contented with crafts, songs, and theological exercises, which in all fairness may have been exactly what my fellow students needed.

With the hubris that only an eight-year-old can possess, I decided that even though I loved God, I was not going to be like one of the anti-intellectual church people I saw around me. I did not want to be Christian if being Christian meant sitting around, singing songs, and listening to a sermon that we would forget by lunch.

I remember consciously choosing to follow God actively (whatever that meant at the time) in my teens. But I was still, and increasingly, deeply suspicious of Christianity and Christians. I soon would get a crash course in other religious traditions.

When the attacks of September 11, 2001, happened during my freshman year of university, I was one of the tens of thousands of Americans to start studying Arabic and comparative religion to better understand our Muslim neighbors. From 1998 to 2002, the number of university students studying Arabic more than doubled, and from 2002 to 2006, the number of institutions of higher education offering Arabic courses rose from 264 to 466.¹ While many of my friends put college on hold to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (and some never returned), I stayed in school and changed my major. Instead of focusing on prelaw in my quest to be a lawyer, I took all the comparative religion and Middle East studies² courses I could. Growing up in the semirural Midwest and never imagining studying, much less preparing to move to, other parts of the world, I was suddenly welcomed into a new, unsettled life for which I was not prepared.

In addition to studying Arabic and Islam, I also studied Hebrew and Judaism formally for the first time. I was preparing to move to Jerusalem to study the Second Intifada’s impact on the Israeli tourism economy. I had started taking Hebrew in the year prior to improve my ability to conduct research and basically just survive. Only sixteen months after changing my major and the direction of my life, I flew to Israel to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This was not a religious endeavor for me at all but purely about studying Southwest Asian political economies and, if I am honest, a bit of budding political Zionism.

While pursuing my official studies and research, I couldn’t help but be exposed to rabbinic thought. My Hebrew was still remedial (and almost twenty years later, it still is not excellent), but I was fascinated by religious traditions that not only did not shun questions but welcomed them. The Talmud is famously overflowing with unresolved questions. In a time when I felt deeply uncomfortable with the varieties of Christianity I had grown up with because they avoided open questions or sought to provide the quickest safe answer and then move on, Judaism offered a breath of fresh air for my soul. For the second time in only a few years, the path of my life became unsettled again. Instead of focusing on Southwest Asian politics, I turned to Jewish studies and particularly to rabbinic approaches to the question-raising boundaries of religion, gender, and ethnicity. I took all the Jewish studies courses I could when I returned to the States, planning to go on to graduate school. But once again, I found myself in an unsettled wilderness.

After applying to several schools, I had failed to gain admission to the graduate programs I had applied to, and I was not sure where to go or what to do. On a whim, I decided to join the Peace Corps. Having all my plans fall through was enough for me to experience something of a personal wilderness, but my experience of living in a place outside of regular human settlement would land me in a literal wilderness as well.

The Peace Corps posted me in the interior of Morocco and gave me the task of helping rural women weavers to form government-sponsored cooperatives. For two years, I lived in a rural town in the mountains and had the whole day to do what I wanted. I woke up early, had breakfast with my Arabic-speaking Muslim host father, and then read the Bible for a couple hours. Then I went to work, which was really just talking with local folks about what kind of businesses they might want to start and encouraging them to go ahead with their plans. While they went for a siesta, I studied and read for a couple more hours before returning to work. Because of all the studying and all my quiet walks to neighboring villages, I had a lot of great time with God. Though I had taken several semesters of Arabic as an undergrad, I was utterly unprepared to speak Moroccan dialectal Arabic, let alone the Tamazight (Berber) that was the mother tongue of most of the people with whom I was to work.

More than language issues, however, I struggled with living in the high desert, which was so different from the towns among the corn and soybean farms of my youth. Every morning, I would sit with my host grandfather, Moha, and he would tell me stories of how he survived his years in the desert, fighting in the Sand War between Morocco and Algerian proxies. For the first several months, these stories were wasted on