A Geography of God: Exploring the Christian Journey

By Michael L. Lindvall

In A Geography of God, popular author and preacher Michael Lindvall describes the life of a Christian as a journey with three parts: "Leaving for Home," "The Way," and "Life on the Road." The first part of the journey struggles with the question, why go anywhere at all, spiritually speaking? The second part names the road, the way found in the ancient map of God called the Trinity. The third part describes life on the road as many others have known it: full of mile markers, road signs, warnings of perilous curves, refreshments for the weary, and notices of lively things to be seen along the way. This wonderfully written book provides readers with some hints about what they may experience during their individual journeys.

This book is ideal as devotional reading for all Christians, and it provides helpful explanations of many of Christianity's foundational beliefs for those new to the Christian faith. Educators and pastors will also welcome the book as a help for sermon illustrations and adult and young adult study classes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2007
• ISBN: 9781611644128

Michael L. Lindvall

Michael L. Lindvall is Senior Pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City and has previously served as pastor to congregations in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Northport, Long Island. He is the author of What Did Jesus Do? A Crash Course in His Life and Times and two novels, The Good News from North Haven and Leaving North Haven.

Book preview

PART I

Leaving for Home

Chapter 1

Spiritual Maps

The novelist John Gardner once generalized that there are only two plots to all the stories ever told: a stranger came to town, and someone went on a journey. The Christian faith includes both. The Bible is populated with a string of strangers come to town: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, most certainly Jesus, and in one place after another, Paul. And the people of Scripture are the kind of folks who don’t much stay put. They travel from Ur of the Chaldees to the promised land, out of Egypt and back to that land of milk and honey, up and down the Galilee and then to Jerusalem. Finally, these travelers crisscross the known world. But it’s not only the ancients who met strangers come to town and then went on journeys, both outward and inward. The One who once came as a stranger to fishermen and tax collectors comes to us now, again as a stranger. And these ages later, he still invites us to rise and go on a journey ourselves.

In my experience, few people have been argued into believing in God. Nevertheless, I have begun this book with a whiff of apologia—apologetics in the old sense of the word: a reasonable argument for believing in something beyond yourself. Those of us contemplating the journey, even those who are already on the road, need to remember that it is a reasonable quest after all. At the far end of this volume, I have included many pages that have about them something of a faith manual—specific, even practical suggestions for how you might live in faith from one day to the next. In my experience, however, there are as many ways to be a Christian as there are Christians.

This book is divided into three parts: Leaving for Home, The Way, and Life on the Road. The first, in the tradition of apologia, offers a response to the obvious question, Why go anywhere at all, spiritually speaking? The second part names what I have come to believe to be the road. This is the way found in the God that the Christian tradition has long understood (as best mere mortals might understand Divinity) by the ancient map of God called the Trinity. In the eloquent and ancient terms of Trinitarian theology, the stranger come to town becomes the knowable stranger and not quite a stranger at all. The last and largest part describes life on the road as I and other pilgrims have known it. Here are traveling companions to be met; I will introduce you to some of those who have helped me find my way. In these pages are mile-markers and road signs, warnings of perilous curves, refreshment for the weary, and notice of lovely things to be seen along the way by watchful eyes.

Some twenty years ago, the philosopher E. F. Schumacher wrote a remarkable little book called A Guide for the Perplexed. It is a subtle and complex argument for the Christian faith that begins with this story:

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of any of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said, We don’t show churches on our maps. Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. That is a museum, he said, not what we call a living church. It is only the living churches that we don’t show.

Schumacher then offers a personal reflection on this oddity of Soviet-era mapmaking:

It occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things that I could see right in front of me. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life.¹

Those who would make spiritual journeys need spiritual maps. But the little book before you is not an attempt to make another one. The map, if you will, has already been drawn. I would only point it out for the benefit of those restless for the journey. I will also offer thoughts about how to read this ancient map and hints about what you might experience as you travel. In the end, the most eloquent testimony to the Christian faith is the word of those who have taken the road before us and found more than they first sought along the way.

Chapter 2

Rise and Shine

My wife is an early-morning runner, so I’m seldom the first person up at our house. I’m usually second, and for some years it was my job to wake our teenage son. I had to do this because when he was fifteen and sixteen, he was more-or-less impervious to alarm clocks. Waking him up in the morning was a delicious pleasure, because for the first five years of his life he woke me up. Until he was five, the child never slept, or so it seemed. In truth, he slept in brief snatches and kept his parents awake night after night.

My wife was doubtless up with him ten hours to my one during those years. Nevertheless, my memories are still keen enough to remember musing as I sat with him at three in the morning that there would come a day in perhaps a decade when I would get to go into this kid’s bedroom when he was sleeping soundly and shout, Benjamin! Wake up! And then I would imagine him rolling away from me, pulling the pillow over his head and saying, No, Dad, no! Not yet! Please! And then I would say, Yes, now! It’s four thirty in the morning, and it’s time to get up. He would moan, and I would reach down and shake him by his shoulder and rouse him out of his sound sleep.

Now I do get to wake him up every morning, but, oddly enough for a teenager, he is remarkably easy to rouse. I come into his bedroom at 6:40 and say the same words that my father (or was it my mother?) said to me and my brothers: Rise and shine! And he does. At least he rises, and then after a long shower and a bowl of breakfast cereal he may shine.

Rise and shine are biblical words; they are more or less the first words of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah. After I had heard them as a child and then quoted them to my son like a mantra, it dawned on me one early morning that these old words invite a question: Why? Why get up in the morning at all, much less shine? What will this day mean? What do all the days piled up on top of each other mean? What is life for?

I run the risk of tidy generalization, but I think there are basically two answers to the question. The first reason to get up in the morning is that there may well be things that will please you in the sixteen to seventeen hours to come, and anyway, you have to. You get up in the morning because you have to eat and because people expect things of you. Somebody’s got to pay the bills and mow the lawn and take the Jeep in for an oil change. You get up because you like to play hockey, or your job is often an interesting challenge, or you look forward to an evening with friends. Sometimes when I wake Ben up in the morning, I toss one of these number-one reasons at him: Ben, you have to be at school on time. Benjamin, you’ve got a 9:20 hockey game in Pontiac; the coach called and he needs you to play left wing, and anyway, you’ll have a great time.

At its bleakest, the first reason for getting up in the morning is that you simply must: the day’s progression of activities that keep life chugging along, food on the table, gas in the car, and chaos at bay. At its best, this first reason for living declares that you really can enjoy life. Your job may give you satisfaction; you enjoy growing tomatoes or playing pickup hockey. Even better, you rise and shine because you find that being with people, especially people you care about, gives you great pleasure. At its best, the first reason to live is that you have been able to fill your days with some sweet things, good food, interesting events, and pleasant people, all of which more or less conspire to justify getting out of bed.

In the late 1980s, Life magazine ran a feature article that asked forty-nine oddly assorted Americans to pen a few words in response to the question, What are we here for? The writers included movie stars, cabbies, even a handful of theologians and philosophers. One Jose Martinez of New York City offered a startlingly frank summary of why he gets up in the morning: We’re here to die, just live and die. I drive a cab. I do some fishing, take my girl out, pay taxes, do a little reading, then get ready to drop dead. You’ve got to be strong about it.¹

Taken together, you gotta and la dolce vita form a credible reason to rise and shine. For many people, it is all the reason for living they ever expect or experience. Perhaps they are oddly blessed, or maybe they are oddly cursed. Part of me is tempted to envy acquaintances who seem content to spend their days without feeling pulled beyond a life of obligation and personal satisfaction. Another part of me wonders if providence will ever bless them with uneasiness.

But for many of us, perhaps most of us sooner or later, a life lived for reasons no more than duty and pleasure becomes soup too thin to sustain life. This awareness grows slowly in some, like the tide rising to the legs of your beach chair while you have your nose in a book. It intrudes into other lives like a bolt of lightning out of a sudden summer thunderstorm. Either way, it demands a response to the older and deeper questions: What does life mean? Is there a God after all? And if there is, can I know anything about such mystery?

The British newspaper columnist Bernard Levin wrote an op-ed piece some years ago in which he said this:

Countries like ours are full of people who have all the material comforts they desire, together with such non-material blessings as a happy family, and yet lead lives of quiet, and at times noisy, desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motor cars and television sets they stuff into it, however many well balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it … it aches.²

Few of his readers know that before his early death, the French existentialist novelist Albert Camus frequently attended the American Church in Paris. He even discussed the possibility of baptism with the pastor:

The reason I have been coming to church is because I am seeking. I’m almost on a pilgrimage—seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing—no one else knows. Certainly the public and the readers of my novels, while they see that void, are not finding the answers in what they are reading. But deep down you are right—I am searching for something that the world is not giving me.³

There comes the day in many lives when living for little but good pleasure, even the nobler pleasures of personal achievement and loving relationships, can no longer fill the void. The pages of your Franklin Planner unfold nowhere except into another year and then into the year after that. What the world names success cannot altogether satisfy the hunger—not the career, not the great house, not the one-in-a-million apartment, not the grown-up toys, not the retirement investments, not the hobby, not even family. Sweet as it all may be, it cannot quite quench this particular thirst.

Saint Augustine, the great fifth-century Christian theologian from North Africa, came to faith after years of intellectual and spiritual wandering. He had lived a life that he had tried to fill with everything from rigorous scholarship to serious partying. Eventually, he would come to pray, Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee. Others have imagined a God-shaped void inside every human being.

Fifteen hundred years later, the American novelist Walker Percy battled a cynicism and depression that nearly pulled him under in his twenties. He ached for more, and at the age of thirty-one came to faith. He was baptized and confirmed on the same day as three hundred schoolchildren. Walker Percy, great man of letters, towered over that procession of twelve-year-olds, not minding a bit being led into the church by children.

An Indonesian friend of mine once said to me, We Asians must have two stomachs. One is for regular food—vegetables, meat, fish, and fruit. The other stomach is for rice. No matter how much we eat, if we do not have rice, we are still hungry. Remembering an echo of something I had once heard, I thought to myself, if Jesus had been an Asian, I’ll bet he would have said, I am the rice of the world.

When people of faith are at their most candid, they acknowledge the very thing that many of us are often too proud to admit. Some longing once led them to look deeper and ask the underneath questions about life. They may speak about the questions that set them on the road. They may speak of their journey itself and a trust they have formed in the One who pulled them beyond the constricting boundaries of self and set them on a road to more.

Chapter 3

Finding or Found?

C. S. Lewis, Oxford don and resolute atheist, became a Christian in his middle years. He would write some of the most popular Christian literature ever penned, including an autobiography of his early years and later