Courage, Faith, Fiction and Martyrdom

So often I think that we isolate our personal experience and commitment to our Christian faith from the historical Judeo-Christian community of faith which has accumulated some 4,000 years of written testimony. The stories of early Christians are not idealistic metaphors of martyrdom from which we are supposed to gain resolve. They are gruesome, traumatic accounts of violence and rage akin to today's honor killings. They are amazing accounts of triumph and joy tinged with love and celebration in the expectation of an eternal future in God's company. We align ourselves with the potential to join the company of those saints and martyrs when we emerge from baptism's plunge into death clothed in the resurrection power of the risen Lord Jesus Christ, trusting in the redemptive declarations of His blood.

But, then, familiar rhythms of the work-a-day world resound louder again to our ears than His heartbeat and we tend to return to some lesser normal. Lesser, at least if the portraits of His kingdom and glory destined to cover our earth are to be believed. Normal, but not wiser through what can only be gained by stepping into a divine folly.

I was reading Bryan Liftin's book review for Alan Kreider's The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. Liftin references the "counter-imperialist" activism of such men as Tertullian, Cyprian and Lactantius. He calls them courageously patient. He concludes that it takes "courage to wait on God's timing" and contrasts that courage with an "impatient taking of matters into one's own hands". He characterizes the early Christian church as having had that courageous patience but that, once it relinquished that counter-cultural position, in the days of Constantine and Augustine, Christians became impatient and self-reliant. Taking matters into their own hands, the likelihood of martydom also diminished. 

This may be the first time I am satisfied with a definition of patience. Patience waits. Patience requires courage. Patience does not take matters into one's own hands while the judge of the whole earth is deliberating. Patience is positioned to move when God's timing and decrees arrive, and patience is most likely to be counter-imperialist, counter-cultural and ready to both articulate and die for a higher cause which we could name social justice.

What does any of this philosophizing have to do with writing fiction or with how any of us might choose to live our lives?

When the pastor's ex-wife and protagonist of my novel, Terry Soldan, found the courage to leave her abusive husband, she lost everything - her identity, her reputation, her friends, her children, her grandchildren and her sense of normal. It may look as if she had taken matters into her own hands on the surface but, in actuality, she gambled everything, not even knowing for sure if her faith would be found to have been built on sand or rock. The book is about her courageous patience when nothing was guaranteed and everything seemed shifting.

Abuse, whether perpetrated against a people by a Nero or a Hitler or against an individual by an abusive husband or sex offender, injects a pervasive trauma into the victim's status quo that takes a kind of all-or-nothing martyrdom to oppose and escape.

Without the glimmer of something far surpassing the normal, this kind of trauma is a hard shell and an inescapable dungeon. The risk is only taken when it is deemed to be worth courageous waiting. Each example of courageous patience waiting on God adds new voices to Job's original anthem and protest song against the normal - though He slay me yet will I trust Him. This is what happens when authentic faith encounters trauma and has to wrestle with unimaginable risks. This is what my fiction is dedicated to unpack even as such courageous patience persistently serves to disentangle my heart from its various traumas until I make the next risky decision to wait on God's timing rather than to take matters into my own hands...