Omphaloskepsis! You Mean He did it too?

Yes, I believe he did. That is Joe. My friend Joe. That is not his real name of course, there is that privacy thing, but I hope you will understand. And in many respects, his name is immaterial, because in so many ways it could just as likely be any of our names. And Joe’s story, his story, our story, gets just a little bit sensitive at times.

As a young man, Joe really did have it all. He had it all going for him. Talk about a family history: being born at just the right time, into the right culture, into the right family, into the right religious heritage, into a world exploding with new thought and opportunity. And my friend Joe was nurtured in this incubator of holistic medium.

I first met Joe when I was a young teenager. He was just a little older than me. But there was something about him that filled me with intrigue. And in time we became friends. Good friends. And at first I knew nothing of the angst in this life. For neither he nor I were even capable of thinking of those kinds of angsts. And nothing ever happened between us, at least nothing like “that.”

His home life was one of middle class . . . albeit on the upper side of middle class. Kind of typical of so many SDA families where the parents own successful businesses, have college educations, exist in comfortable living conditions, and can afford to get the best in education for their kids.

His hometown was famous for the kind of industry it fostered. It was a combination of location with the agricultural environment in the surrounding area, that made its reputation extend far and wide. It was somewhat of a cultural center as well. And it certainly drew a viable mix of peoples, to include a thriving congregation of his little niche religion in a world of main-stream and niche religions.

His parents owned a business. They transformed a couple of disparate, yet similar agricultural products involved with fabrics into marketable and needed commodities. They did well. Joe learned the family business and became skilled in the technology involved.

But as geeky and nerdy as he was, he was somewhat of a bookworm. He was an incessant reader. He studied. He was precocious. He even had the audacity to question. To argue, to challenge the status-quo. And his family saw something in him that suggested that he wasn’t going to be satisfied at just carrying-on a family business. And so they made certain he would be sent to the best school available that seemed to meet his intellectual needs.

And for Joe . . . that was to be the Seminary. To study the “true” theology. To embrace theology. To incorporate theology holistically into his very being. To learn, to understand, to commit himself to the works of theology. To learn the traditions, the laws, the legalities, the interpretations, the explanations of the implementation of theology. To learn the arguments, the proof texts, the rationales, the implications of theology. To learn how to impose this code of obligation on all others. And yes, to learn of the angst that was swelling within him.

Joe got caught up in the revival movement.

He sensed what was pure . . . he knew what was profane.

And what he outwardly saw as the profane was the heretical movement within his own religion that seemed insidious. And if allowed to fester and grow, that heresy could destroy his world of theology.

And in his passion for the pure . . . he aligned himself with the group of enforcers to rid this cancerous infection from the implementation of his notion of truth.

Joe was as zealous as they come. Brash, confident, outspoken. A mind like a steel trap. You simply couldn’t win an argument against him. There was always a ready answer, a proof text, an opinion espoused with the force of indisputable fact. And through intimidation alone, none dared to cross him.

His reputation preceded him. And people learned to fear him. And they wondered as to what it was that drove this man with such ferocious intensity.

The conservatives loved him. He had that way about him to feed that succinct feeling in the righteous justification of promulgating hate. He would feed right into their self-fulfilling feeling of self-righteousness. He made it simplistically easy to believe that deluded notion of “my way or the highway.” He could be so soothing in his juxtaposition that it is the despicable sins of everybody else that is the doom for mankind, while it is we who are the sole guardians and custodians of “The Truth.”

The months in Joe’s young adult life proceeded onward. The administrators at The Seminary saw in Joe a tool, an effective tool, to protect the purity of the religion from the insidious heresy that was spreading like wildfire. So Joe was commissioned. Commissioned to infiltrate and expose and terminate the spreaders of this sinister wildfire.

It was a passionate thrill for Joe. He excelled at it.

It was also a way to attempt to vent the angst within himself.

Then! It was on one of his assignments. Something hit him squarely between the eyes.

His paradigm shifted. His target was revealed for what it really was. Hypocrisy hit him with blunt force reality.

Joe was stunned.

He dropped out of sight for awhile. We all kind of lost track of him. He had to go into some sort of exclusion to catch his wits again. He had a lot of thinking to rethink.

In some respects, it could be thought of as a kind of “road to Damascus” experience for Joe. For it certainly was a reversal of the orientation of his spiritual poles.

But his rethinking of his thinking was not so much a transformation as it was an evolution. The progression of a theology to another progressive level. And his picture of theology coalesced, came together, sharpened, focused, became paramount, became evangelical.

And Joe re-emerged as a new-made man. He took up his work as an independent minister with a new gospel for all of the masses. And it took awhile for his acceptance and trust to be earned.

In time, he was both invited to, and invited himself, to cities around the world. He set up big evangelistic campaigns, preached this new gospel, fired people up with liberation and hope.

And all this while he fought with an internal angst that he feared would consume him.

Some saw it strange that Joe’s personal life was a little aberrant for one called to the ministry. For the most part, the aberrancy was simply overlooked. Excused. Shrugged away. For his not taking a wife was simply explained away as being the result of his driving zeal for his ministry and having no time for the obligations of a family. It was not unheard of, just unusual.

Joe became a renowned preacher and writer. His words were powerful. His books articulate. His reasoning of the essence of the gospel seemed to be divinely inspired. His opinions and revelations and speculations and learned traditions were skillfully interwoven into academic arguments and treaties and theses and discourses and primers that were fascinating yet near overwhelming. It almost seemed that his goal really was to explain the impossible in near impossible ways. And at times, his zeal brought forth harsh words. That old edge in him would flash through. The lawyer-like thing . . . the oratorical rendition . . . the hitting of sensitive social justice issues squarely in the solar plexus of vulnerable and sensitive areas.

He lived in a perceived world of dichotomy. He knew, he thrilled, he reveled in the sanctuary of the holy church. Yet he knew of the deeds of the seedy side of town. He knew of debauchery. He knew of the ways of cruising. He knew of the man-boy dalliances. He knew the practices in some “religions.” He knew of things that repulsed and revolted him. He knew what to say about it. He knew how to say it. He knew how to fire up his doting audience.

He knew the human condition. He knew all about the sins of the flesh. He knew the demons of the soul. And he could preach with the ferocious veracity with a righteous passion against the glory of the flesh. And his followers just ate it up.

But Joe was conflicted. Horrifically conflicted.

On the one side, he would rail against women . . . so patrician-like. Yet some of his best friends and confidents were women. So like some gay men that many of us know.

He would verbalize at times about a malady that controlled him, something he was convinced was sent from Satan himself to buffet him.

He couldn’t understand what he is was doing to himself, and whatever it was, he hated it. Yet he continued to do it. And he rationalized as to why.

He talked about his “member” waging war with him. And it was no ideal rambling or sinister joke. He equated it with sin. Called himself “wretched.” Called for death to set himself free.

His inner turmoil at times seemed to consume him.

And we too know that feeling. We know of secret angst. We know of raging conflict. We know of the pleading with a God, “but why me?” We know its near destructive power until we finally give up and accept.

Yes, we know about internal angst.

And yes, we have seen it before. We know how it can happen. We know the power of internal torment. We know why we may live a life of hypocrisy. Why we have to live a life of hypocrisy. Why we loath living a life of hypocrisy. We know the fool-hearty risk of secret behavior. We know the living horror of exposure. We know how the body wages war against a mis-understanding mind.

We know.

We know.

And we are filled with a whirlpool of rage and sorrow and despair and grief and anger when that explosive power of the internal angst escapes from our very being. And the world as we know it is forever changed. And the internal angst is now an external horror. And the defeat in the battle of the body versus mind is debilitating. And it happens all too often within our very midst.

Why in the last year alone.

A Congressman in the United States, of an affiliation promulgating the values of honorable families, the demonizing of the sins of a certain kind of flesh, the railing against the terrorization of the insidiousness of a supposed homosexual agenda . . . outed with the duality of his own life.

And yet another. This time a prominent evangelical minister. A champion, an administrative leader, another railer against the sins that would destroy traditional marriage and would somehow destroy families. The promulgator of an old theology of hate and demonization. A minister caught in his own trap of scurrilous man-on-man sex and illicit drugs. A mighty idol of a mega-pulpit now fallen in the face of his masses. The inevitable extraction of a confession that the demon of homosexuality was indeed dwelling in his mind. And that demon drove him into doing things that were risky and unthinkable and secret, and yet to scream louder and louder from his bully-pulpit with his hate and repulsion of the very thing that was consuming him. And then, to further deceive himself into thinking that a mere three weeks of mind-altering conditioning would rid him of who he really is.

And yes, we are angry about the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of demonizing gayness . . . and then that very hypocrite being exposed for being gay.

Yes, we are angry. We are hurt. We try to understand. We think we understand. And for some, it is the breathing of a silent pray, “But for the grace of God, that could be me.”

And yes, there are others.

There were others.

There will be others.

And in every situation . . . it is an unnecessary tragedy that can destroy a life, a family, a career, a heritage.

Oh, the blessed relief to live free. To live as the child of God that we are . . . in the way that we are made. And to be free of angst.

And my friend Joe, well, he never did live to be truly free. The angst was always there. And that battle unfolded in dark, clandestine ways.

It was the little things. Some of the things he said. In his sermons. In his books.

He knew all about what it meant to “glory after the flesh.” He knew what that meant to many of his parishioners. He knew what the flesh was doing with flesh. And that recognition, couched in the terms of his legalistic theological training and culture . . . filled him with zeal to counter it.

At times he used his own personal status of being a single man to illustrate to his worshipers how he overcame the carnal, Satan-infused, desire, to glory after the flesh.

He knew that his zeal and fame and reputation had spread far and wide, and that he had a near cult-like following that formed wherever he held his evangelistic meetings. He knew enough to know that he, himself, could succumb to feelings of exaltation.

And he knew there was an angst in his life that was infused to his very core.

And this angst in Joe’s life would at times, threaten to nearly kill him.

A secret so insidious.

He recognized it as evil. As a curse. As something of the Devil himself.

Something so despicable he would rather die than have it exposed to the world.

Yet it would at times nearly consume him. It was a force that made him do exactly the opposite of what he wanted to do. And it was a force that made his body behave in ways that were antithetical to his very notion of salvation. He would see himself in terms of being a wretched man. And he longed to be set free of it, if it meant death itself.

Joe struggled. It was a an awful, painful, conflicted struggle. Mind against body. And body would seem to win. And as strong and zealous and powerful and committed a preacher that he was to the theology that he loved the most . . . that cursed body would deem to destroy him.

Unlike Congressman Foley, or Preacher Ted Haggart, Pastor Joe did not ever meet with the overt exposure of the thorn in his flesh.

But he struggled. He fought. He was not only a powerful preacher with influence over his flocks, but he was a powerful fighter over the demons in his soul.

He called for the strength of his God.

And when my friend Joe’s life did eventually come to a premature end, he was comforted and filled with solace that he had indeed fought a good fight. That he prevailed over the perceived demon that did its very best to destroy him.

A battle of mind versus body. A battle of body versus mind. And a paradigm of theology and culture and history and misunderstanding and peer pressure and acceptance and ignorance and willful deceit and flat out hatred and bigotry ensnarling the vary mission and battle plans of this internal epochal battle of angst.

And in Joe’s world, to succumb to that demon that dwelt within him, was to succumb to evil itself.

For his battle of mind versus body and body versus mind was couched in the terms that mind was the superior, the dominant, the will-enforcer, and the body would succumb in compliance.

It was beyond his theology, his culture, his religious heritage, to think that a body was made and programmed and even capable of operating with its own autonomous biologically infused operating system, as it were.

And that battle filled Pastor Joe’s life with angst. It made him miserable. It made him say and do things in more extreme and hurtful ways than were necessary, all in an attempt to drive that biologically driven demon into his own submission.

And Pastor Joe did leave us with a little of his experience of omphaloskepsis [om-fuh-lo-SKEP-sis]. The reflection on one’s naval.

The looking inward to see just what that angst is doing to each of us.

To look inside. Through our naval as it were. To recognize that we too have our story of angst. And how we have/are/will deal with it.

And I suppose by now, you have figured out that the Joe’s name was not really “Joe.”

Perhaps you will see great similarities between Joe and another prominent preacher that fought a demon of a “thorn” in his flesh.

Yes, the Apostle Paul did indeed fight a demon. And there are some who are repulsed and horrified and sickened to even think their beloved Apostle could be accused, let alone could be inflicted with homosexuality. But there are others who see clearly that the “sin” with which he “practiced,” meets the characteristics of a closeted gay person in conflict with them self.

And so what if he was.

For whatever the fight was that Joe and Paul and you and I did, and are, and will fight, it is indeed a “good fight.”

And Paul’s faith assured him that he, a man with a naval hiding his angst, would indeed, receive his crown of glory.

The Refectory Manager