THE CARGO PLANE THAT DELIVERED THE FAITH

A reflection on the allure of Islam, the failures of the Prosperity Gospel, and one Christian’s journey into Catholicism. Through the metaphor of a battered 2,000-year-old cargo plane, this essay explores how Scripture, tradition, ritual and community carried the Christian faith across the centuries.

Christianity did not arrive in our generation from nowhere. Before discarding ancient traditions we do not understand, perhaps we should ask how they helped preserve the faith that ultimately delivered Christ to us.

The Prosperity Gospel is nothing. Nothing.

And I am glad we are beginning to understand the allure of Islam.

When I first visited Dubai in 2006, Kosa and I would kneel whenever the muezzin called the Muslims to prayer, and we would say our own Christian prayers. The call was Muslim; the prayers we prayed were Christian. But there was something profoundly moving about a whole community stopping what it was doing, several times a day, because God was calling.

There is something extraordinarily powerful about a society in which faith is not merely something one does for two hours on Sunday morning. The fervency, devotion, discipline and brotherhood I saw among Muslims are things Pentecostal Christianity desperately wants — envies, as a matter of fact — but too often tries to manufacture through excitement rather than cultivate through a shared life of faith.

And the brotherhood!

I had rarely felt more safe or more accepted in a foreign country than I felt in Dubai. We were not living in the glittering, postcard Dubai either. We lived downtown, among ordinary people, in the not-so-glitzy parts, and the experience left a lasting impression on me.

It also reinforced something I have increasingly come to believe: many of our woes as Christians are self-inflicted.

Christ is simply lacking in so much of the Christianity practised across our denominations. Yet strangely enough, after wandering for years, I found HIM hiding within the confines of the Catholic Church.

Hidden in plain sight.

Not because Catholics are necessarily better people, and certainly not because every Catholic practice comes naturally to me. But because beneath two thousand years of dust, argument, ritual, scandal, beauty, failure, saints, sinners, martyrs, monasteries, councils and cathedrals, I found something astonishing:

Continuity.

I found a Church that remembered.

THOSE IMAGES!

And suddenly some of the arguments I had heard against Catholicism all my life began to sound rather childish.

"Oh! They bow before images!"

Really?

What about you who tell your congregants to "raise your offering," "speak to it," and "declare what you want this money to accomplish"? At least the Catholic is bowing before an object regarded as sacred. You are raising, speaking to and investing spiritual significance in a filthy, diseased piece of paper called money.

Perhaps a simple search for "Why do Catholics bow before images?" might be worthwhile. At the very least, we might first ask Catholics what they believe they are doing before confidently telling them what we have decided they are doing.

And while we are at it, why do you kneel in prayer and stretch your hands towards a television when the television minister tells you to?

Oh! You don't know a television contains images?

What makes the statue in a cathedral automatically idolatrous while the glowing image of your favourite preacher on a 65-inch Samsung television is somehow spiritually neutral? The important question cannot simply be whether an image exists. The question must surely include what you believe you are doing with it.

Just because you haven't thought about it doesn't mean it ain't so, brethren!

THE FAITH THAT ARRIVED

We have received a faith that was delivered across the ages and somehow arrived in our hands two thousand years later. Think about what that means. Christianity survived persecutions, empires, schisms, barbarian invasions, plagues, wars and the collapse of civilizations. It survived through monasteries and universities, councils and controversies, through monks copying manuscripts by hand, and through priests, bishops, theologians, mothers, fathers, hermits, martyrs and countless ordinary believers teaching their children what had first been taught to them.

The faith did not arrive naked.

It came accompanied by sacred traditions and observances that helped communities preserve and transmit it. It came with imagery and ritual, prayers and sacraments, seasons and feast days, fasts and calendars. It came with the memory of saints and martyrs. Most importantly, it came through communities of people who understood themselves not merely as individuals who happened to believe similar things, but as members of one living Body — a community of saints and aspiring saints.

A living community.

And then we modern Christians arrived.

THE OLD CARGO PLANE

Imagine an ancient cargo plane landing on a runway after the longest flight in human history: two thousand years in the air, somehow, impossibly, still flying.

Its doors are creaking, its fuselage is dented, its engines are dirty and its windshield wipers barely work. The aircraft bears the scars of storms, wars and near disasters. Emerging from the cockpit are these ancient, greasy pilots who appear to have been flying the thing since the Roman Empire. Worse still, they speak some quaint old language we can barely understand.

Latin!

We look at the aircraft in horror. Look at this ancient thing! Look at those doors! Look at those pilots! Look at those ridiculous clothes! Surely God cannot still be using THIS!

But there is one small problem with our mockery:

The cargo arrived.

The faith arrived. The Scriptures arrived. The story of Christ arrived. The Cross and Resurrection arrived. The teachings of the Apostles arrived. The testimony of the martyrs arrived.

The Gospel arrived.

And instead of first asking how this battered old aircraft managed to carry such precious cargo safely across twenty centuries, we grab the boxes, run away from the aircraft, declare ourselves the new crew and leave the bewildered old pilots standing on the tarmac wondering what exactly they did wrong.

"We delivered it, didn't we?"

THE NEW CREW

Instead of carefully reading the manuals and ancient manuscripts that arrived with the cargo, the new captains began deciding which parts they liked, which traditions were unnecessary and which interpretations were obviously correct because, well, we had just thought of them.

The history of the biblical canon itself should make us a little more humble. Martin Luther famously expressed serious reservations about several New Testament books, especially James, which he described in an early preface as an "epistle of straw." He did not simply erase James from his Bible, but the fact that such a foundational Reformation figure could question its apostolic weight should at least remind us that the history is far more complicated than the tidy stories we sometimes tell ourselves.

Imagine Christianity without the uncompromising clarity of James:

"Faith without works is dead."

We would undoubtedly have reached that truth through other passages of Scripture, but perhaps not quite so unmistakably.

And therein lies my difficulty with modern Christianity. A faith that spent centuries discerning, arguing, debating, praying and preserving its inheritance cannot suddenly be reduced to:

Me. My Bible. My interpretation. My church.

Because an obvious question follows: Who gave me the authority?

If two thousand years of Christians can be casually dismissed because I bought a Bible last Tuesday and received a "revelation" on Thursday, Christianity has ceased to be an inherited faith.

It has become spiritual improvisation.

SO WHAT IS MY POINT?

My point is simple, although I know it will irritate some people:

Christianity in its totality is found in the Catholic Church.

That does not mean I am comfortable with everything. Far from it. I remain terribly uncomfortable with "Queen of Heaven" language and with several Marian practices. Some things still make this relatively new Catholic squirm in his seat.

But I have also learned some humility.

I understand now that many of these practices, doctrines, devotions and traditions are part of the cargo hold that delivered this glorious faith to me. Before I smash the cargo hold because I don't understand why it was built that way, perhaps I should first ask the people who built it. Perhaps I should read. Perhaps I should study. Perhaps I should listen. And perhaps I should remember that Christianity existed for a very long time before I arrived.

And so I cherish those to whom Marian devotion comes naturally, even when it does not come naturally to me. Within this enormous, ancient and occasionally bewildering faith, I have at last found Christ — hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps hidden from those who would turn Him into an instrument for personal gain; hidden beneath the noise of those who reduce the Gospel to wealth, turn the Cross into a motivational seminar, worship into entertainment and prayer into a technique for acquiring things. Hidden from those who have somehow transformed the Son of Man into the chairman of an eternal prosperity scheme.

HE DID NOT LEAVE US A MAKE-IT-UP-AS-YOU-GO CHURCH

Those are my thoughts.

Jesus did not leave us an anything-goes, make-it-up-as-you-go, pleasure-loving, sensual Church. He did not call people to Himself by promising that everyone would become rich. He called fishermen and tax collectors, sinners and outcasts. He called people to repentance, service and sacrifice. He called them to take up their crosses. Many of those who first carried His name into the world eventually paid for doing so with their lives.

That is the faith that eventually reached us: bruised, battered, ancient and sometimes difficult to understand, carried in an old aircraft whose pilots occasionally embarrass us and whose machinery sometimes appears hopelessly antiquated.

But before you mock the aircraft, remember what it carried.

Across two thousand years, somehow, by the grace of God, it landed.

The doors opened, and there He was.

Jesus Christ.

Still alive. Still calling. Still demanding that we become something radically different from the world around us. Not prosperity, spectacle or religious entertainment. Not endless declarations about ourselves.

Christ.

And perhaps He already gave us the simplest test by which every ancient tradition, every modern denomination, every charismatic preacher, every cathedral, every megachurch — and every one of us — should ultimately be judged: BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM.

Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi

#MyFrancisEssays | #OldManInTheMolue