How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help is on the Way and Love Is Already Here - Jonathan Martin

An inspiring book, leaving me with nagging questions.

This is the third book I've come across which addresses the spirituality of a life in crisis, and the new and better perspective to be had on the other side of the crisis.  The first was Richard Rohr's Falling Upward; I did not get through the introduction as Rohr's writing annoyed me too much.  The second was Nick Page's The Dark Night of the Shed which I read all through, entertained by his light and humorous writing style, and appreciating the lessons he draws from a man's midlife crisis, especially the desire to build a shed.

What Martin's book shares with these is the assertion that a significant life crisis (be it shed building, falling, or a shipwreck) can and does change one's perspective on life, God and the world around fundamentally, and for the better. He writes:

...it's useless to try to make ourselves or anyone else see the world with more empathy and compassion. That kind of seeing is not native to us in our self-interest; it is the gift only trauma can give us.  People don't just wake up one day and decide to see the world through the lens of grace - and suddenly want to change the world.  We aren't able to engage the world differently until we are disillusioned with the way we saw ourselves before, until we begin to doubt the integrity of our old way of seeing.

Nobody sees the world differently until life happens to them and the illusory lines of set-apartness are blurred by our pain.  (p.179)

Even if we make it to shore, like Paul and his companions floating on pieces of the ship did, the journey took far too much out of us for us to be celebrating any arrival too much - the journey in itself has been far too humbling.

And yet what I hear repeatedly from people who survive a shipwreck of any sort is that the life they live on the other side is simpler, cleaner, more coherent, more focused.  We are learning to live after the model of the Trinity, of the God who is three-in-one, instead of dividing ourselves.  We are no longer spinning the information or maintaining the ego.  The life we live is becoming more and more the life we have chosen, whole and authentic - however unspectacular it might seem.  (p.196)

Through the book Martin describes how his experience of 'shipwreck' taught him to let go of what was not important and to accept our own smallness in the vastness of God's creation.  "The gospel doesn't fulfill our quest for significance, but exposes its essential folly. It gives us something better than meaning - namely, love.  The love of God gives us unfathomable value despite our objective smallness. But it still leaves us blissfully unimportant."  (p. 86).  He speaks of the essential natural and spiritual practices of "Eating, Breathing, Sleeping" as experienced by Elijah when God met him fleeing from Jezebel (ch. 4).  In chapter 5 Martin explores the story of Job, who has his own major life-crisis, and speaks of God's creation of Leviathan and what we can learn from monsters and chaos, rather than avoiding monsters and always seeking order.

All this is founded on Martin's early assertion that salvation comes to us through humiliation as we realise that what we have made for ourselves is worthless, and we must rely fully on God who loves us.  I agree with this, and with virtually all of Martin's fundamental theology, expressed as it is with passion and rooted in his understanding of God, the Bible (his favourite quote is "In Him we live and move and have our being"), and his experience.  One of his most quotable theological statements comes towards the end of the book:

Along with all the pain and violence of the world, Love will finally burn away the damnable doctrines of demons that turn the Savior of the world into the kind of monster he came to save us from - that say there are some people he destines for destruction, that he gets some abstract kind of glory out of tragic car wrecks, that he engineers praise out of mothers with cancer and babies with AIDS.  This God is not some rogue FBI agent on a TV show who uses instruments of torture to bring about some greater good in the world.  This is the God who let himself be tortured on our behalf and exposed the weakness of all instruments of terror by the power of his own unfailing love.  We know what this God is like because we know this God is like Jesus.  (p. 212) - Amen to that!

Much of what Martin describes as life after the shipwreck is life, a Christian life of following Jesus, that I aspire to: holding on to what is important, letting go of what is not, humbly walking the path of discipleship and taking up my own cross.

In the context of much contemporary conversation about white privilege, I feel the force of Martin's challenge:

But now I see that all academic conversations, all theoretical discussions, are in their own way untruthful, no matter now honest you try to be.  Even when you are well armed with Bible verses, commentaries, and research papers, how truthful can any conversation be when you are sitting at the head of the table?  That was the life I had before I experienced profound brokenness, suffering, and shame - the life live from the shallows not from the depths.

I don't claim - any more now than I ever did - to have all the answers to complex questions of faith and life, and I would not proffer any here... What I care about is perspective, which unlocks the door to any authentic wisdom.  My simple appeal is not to trust your own, especially when you're judging the world from on top of it.  I wonder if we ever know much of anything about anybody until we are on our backs and in the position of needing God and the image of God in others.

But this book, like Rohr's and Page's, leave me a nagging question: What if I haven't had such a crisis? 

I can appreciate that the crisis, a shipwreck, can precipitate the changes described, but is it essential? As quoted above, Martin says this change of life "is the gift only trauma can give us" suggesting that it is essential.  (It was certainly, in my memory, essential to Rohr, which was one thing that put me off so much: if I couldn't understand this, I clearly had not reached a point of sufficient enlightenment.)

How do I, feeling that I have not had a significant life crisis as Martin describes, seek the life with God he advocates?

Do I seek a crisis, and if so, how?  That would seem perverse (but again, maybe that indicates I've missed the point.) 

Will pursuing the life of discipleship itself precipitate such a crisis?

I am left feeling my own privilege and seeing the good in the life after the shipwreck, but unsure what to do about it!