The mix in the air sustaining us is 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen. Oxygen is food for fire and nitrogen builds structure. We know too much oxygen is fatal and needs nitrogen’s stability but nitrogen needs oxygen’s ability to ignite. Every social and religious movement needs both and that is where the Apostle Paul and those who wanted to keep the new faith as part of the old conflicted. Paul was not just a breath of fresh air to Judaism. He was pure oxygen.

The Swiss psychologist, Erik Erikson, studied men and women who start movements and wrote.             ‍

“Virtually every leader of a movement for change has a San Andreas fault line down the middle of their personality – and those who follow them live near it. Greatness always harbors massive conflict.”  ‍

Paul experienced a 9.0 quake where the plates of grace and law had been pushing against each other for years. Sudden conversions often have long histories. It’s what geologists call diastrophic distortion or subterranean plates driving against each other for decades and finally snapping.

Paul’s resolution of the conflict was not reforming the old but setting it aside “to experience the power that brought Christ back from the dead.” He wanted to live with the risk of never being good enough versus the certainty of the law. He could wager it all and live without the clear comfort of customs and traditions he had loved all his life.

What would it be like to throw away the very things that defined you? Not the inconveniences and things you would like to discard anyway but those you love the most? Not forgetting just the failures but the successes as well. The experience with Christ unfit Paul for the world for having seen what is to come, he is never again truly at home in this one. Who can live like this? Who can live on 50% oxygen? This is not the self-help religion we teach and long for today. We look for the pursuit of happiness faith but not problem creating religion. So much religion is about a false resolution of the conflicts we all face. But instead of resolution we only manage to make ourselves numb to the life to which Christ has called us. ‍

The Next Handhold‍

I want this world to be home. I want to find my place here. I want respect from people that matter because I’ve not seen my real home the way Paul had. This is the result when our faith settles in and the wheels come off the mobile home. We become good citizens of this world instead of sojourners and what looks like practical Christianity makes us – long term – more miserable than those without faith, for we once saw more. Remember the scene from the movie “Pan” with Robin Williams when Peter and the lost boys realized that Peter had forgotten how to fly? What had happened to him? What had growing up done to him?

That’s the question we all face not only as we age but as we too soon settle into the routines that make life comfortable and controlled. How do we come to terms with life but not lose the fire? How do we escape the religion of self-improvement and superficial happiness? What is the mix of oxygen and nitrogen in our lives now?

There are change points in history resembling the arc of a trapeze. At great moments of change there is a person like Abraham, Moses, Luther, Augustine, and Paul so vested in the customs and traditions of the old system that only an earthquake will dislodge them. Incremental change works when people and institutions gradually adapt but discontinuous change occurs when an insider, like Paul, experiences a revelation and then leads others out. At the right moment they are taken hold of and let go the trapeze – making the change irrevocable. At the top of the arc when one system has reached the height of its swing, the moment between old and new, someone has to let go and carry people across the empty space to the next handhold.

Again, Erik Erikson writes” “Born leaders seem to fear only more consciously what, in some form everybody fears in the depth of their inner life – and they convincingly claim to have an answer.”‍

Someone has to step into that place, like Abraham, where God is silent – even cruel – where everything is taken away and all that is left is trust and hope.

Our lives will always be a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen – structure and fire – but now and then we can hear the rumblings of risk and residing shoving against each other fifteen miles below the surface.