Thursday, July 15, 2010

On Grumpiness

I've said for years that all of my heroes are grumpy. Whether we're talking about C.S. Lewis, Luther, Amy Carmichael, or Yoda, the common thread is a certain impatience with fads and a generally fiesty outlook on the world. In a word, grumpiness. Grumpiness means compassion and patience where real problems are involved--and only where real problems are involved.

It means seeing that "the way things are now" is just as transitory as the way things were a decade or two ago.

It means realizing that, while circumstances evolve and change, people are still people, living with the same needs, desires, failings, limitations, questions, and hopes that we always have.

It means pursuing honest questions as far as we can chase them, recognizing that only honest questions are worthy of the time and effort pursuit demands.

It means not letting a confused, short-sighted idea of love keep us from speaking the truth.

It may be that this sort of grumpiness comes from chafing at the friction between how things are and how they ought to be. ("Ought," by the way, is an indispensable term in the vocabulary of the grumpy.) The particular starch-in-my-underwear experience of the conflict between what is right and what is practical gives rise to a certain unwillingness to accept the status quo just because it is the status quo.

As a Christian theologian, I have often been informed that I am too idealistic. This is certainly an occupational hazard, I readily concede. That does not, however, change the fact that it is my function in the life of God's people to point to how things ought to be, and will be in the coming Kingdom of God. To those who would exhort me to live in the "real world," let me say that I do live in the real world--it just hasn't fully arrived yet. Until it does, the way things are will rub me the wrong way, and it should. Humph!