Spiritual Surgery

I was reading through these books like crazy, hoping to uncover the springs of internal Christian experience on the hidden forest floor of our faith. My intention had been to open up these springs, sip a little here and there, and trace the ways in which they flowed out into the rivulets of Christian expression and finally into the deep pools of our church’s confessions. I was on the hunt for original cries of the heart, the pure sources of Christian piety. I wanted to separate them out from the apologetic excesses of succeeding years, and to offer the cup of life-giving truth in less disputatious ways.

All was going well until a few months ago. Underlining phrases, marking paragraphs, jotting notes in margins, dipping into ore-rich convictions about Christ, and peering into the annals of deep souls, I was speeding along until I crashed into the hospital. The physicians all agreed; abdominal surgery could no longer be postponed. Scar tissue and strictures were closing me down.

Accepting the inevitable, I tried to make provisions for my mind as well as my body. A biography of Bonaventure, covertly tucked among the folds on the rolling stretcher, rode to the operating room with me. One of the volumes of The Philokalia containing early Greek orthodox writings was sent to my beside table. I was ready for it.

The surgery was over; the days passed; the prognosis was excellent; and the morphine button finally abandoned. I was walking the halls. But I wasn’t ready. The Bible yes, but nothing original later than 125 in the Christian era. Something had happened. It didn’t improve after returning home. I approached my bookcase. I stared at the book spines and froze. For some reason, I couldn’t touch a single one of them. I recalled Flannery O’Conner’s The Enduring Chill. In the story the ailing character, Adrian, comes home. His mother calls the physician to attend him. Adrian then looks up from his bed and says that what had happened to him was “way beyond Dr. Block.” We are left wondering what mysterious ailment of the spirit this could be.

This was not a pleasant recollection. The surgery had a successful outcome but as a remedy it had its limits. Something had changed in me. Was it something beyond Dr. Block?

I had reached a level of fairly intense interest in these spiritual books, and I began to wonder, had I gone too far into space out beyond all the Dr. Blocks of this world, theologians as well as physicians? Actually the opposite might be the case. Maybe I had been reading deep stuff with a shallow mind.

I thought of the service station attendant who opens the cap and inserts his measuring rod down into the underground tank. He checks the amount of the fuel by the mark it leaves on his stick. Someone had stuck a soul stick into my tank during this surgery, and the mark left on it was surprisingly low. In all that reading could I have just been doing a little trifling with the mystics?

Run over by a truck in the mountains of New Mexico as a 16-year-old, I had spent several weeks stuck in a hospital for injured copper miners. They must have contacted my high school principal back in Atlanta and decided that what I really needed was to go to time-out. Put into the only single room in the hospital, I was isolated in some remote region near the rafters. As I watched the rays of the sun shift across the horizon, I had turned to the only books available, a collection of stories by O. Henry and an introductory text in physics.

These odd volumes, the apparent entire hospital library, became a sort of rosary of the mind. Lying there, Ignatius-like, I began to ponder other things. What kind of inventory should I be taking of myself as I read through these unlikely choices?

What kind of inventory should we take as a denomination? We have been, so to speak, run over by a few things: loss of members, worship wars, diminished resources, battles over ordination entitlements. All of these and more are showing up as symptoms. Should we be looking for something more? We seem to be headed for a time-out that someone else has chosen for us.

As Adrian’s internal pain increased, his voice changed. O’Conner says that it became frayed and then turned into a sob. We are becoming a little frayed, but have we as yet begun to sob?

Returning to my own book shelves I can imagine these authors, some of whom wrote at the cost of blood, saying, “Have you checked the depth in your spiritual tanks lately?” As graduates who toss their hats into the air, we have been pretty busy telling ourselves how smart we are. But as Christians, called to become bearers of the image of God and the word of divine truth, have we been busy celebrating when we should have tried more sobbing? Have we been trifling with our calling?

It costs a good deal to undergo a surgery of the spirit. There is no co-payment. There is Christ’s full payment, but his payment, uniquely, leaves us much to bear. There is certainly no anesthesia, no morphine pump, no way of avoiding all the pain. Accountability has not been a welcome sight, and what its diagnosis reveals is that spiritual surgery cuts as deeply as it heals.

The Cross, spoken of in doctrines, sung about in hymns, becomes the bridge over which we walk into the castle keeps of each others’ hearts. It is no Trojan horse fitted out in surreptitious ways, to slip our current ideologies into another’s life. Is it not, rather, the place where we lay down our weapons, and realize that the roughly hewed planks on which we walk once bore the marks of someone’s familiar hands riveted tightly into place?

There had been two repairs required, my surgeon said, both somewhat hidden earlier from sight. Are there such places remaining inside us as a church: one that reveals a greater need to know what Christ has done, and one that opens up new ways to understand each other? To press the image, the Cross becomes, by the Spirit’s holy work, the scalpel which relieves us from the hardened tissues which have too often choked our love.

Richard A. Ray is a minister living in Bristol, Tenn.