Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy, and Orthoscript

Training Ground rests on three pillars of Work, Wilderness, and Worship. Work seemed to hammer its way into our consciousness every morning at 5 am when our alarms would begin to squeal one by one around the darkened room. Wilderness also seemed to demand our attention with every fishing trip and hiking excursion the enormity of the natural world onto our tiny retinas. Worship interjected its way into our lives in a very different mode. We attended the equivalent of a weekly course on hermeneutics with Dr. Paul Penley, but much of our spiritual growth came through the zeitgeist of the program.

Paul had appointed our only pre-program homework and through his assignments revealed the direction of his class for the entire summer. Our reading list included the dry Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall and the more engaging The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren. Grasping God’s Word, written as a textbook for Bible college hermeneutics classes, set the serious academic tone for the class. The author focuses on the importance of learning how to break down and understand the Bible as one would break down and understand a John Donne poem. The focus of McLaren’s book, however, is more personal than intellectual. His goal is to introduce the reader to the person and personality of Jesus. His description of Jesus as a revolutionary leader conducting a guerilla war of love behind enemy lines introduced me to an enthusiasm that previous iterations of Christianity could never conjure for me.

Paul is the kind of person that you meet and immediately understand functions on a higher intellectual plane than we young padawans. Reading his resume of precocious academic achievements only lends greater credence to his Biblical apologetics. Coming from a largely secular background, I was slightly concerned that I would begin this aspect of the program hopelessly discombobulated and only get lost from there. In some ways I did start at a disadvantage as sly comments about different pastors’ preaching styles never failed to sail ten feet over my head, but I had a steep learning curve and everyone was more than happy to catch me up to speed on any prescient concepts I may have missed by not being immersed in the Christian culture. Paul introduced me to the Emergent movement, carefully outlining the limitations as well as the radical Biblicality of some of the tenets.

I was introduced to the ideas of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthoscript. Many conservative churches focus exclusively on the idea of orthodoxy or right ideas. Ostensibly having the right ideas will lead to the right actions, but sole focus on right ideas can often lock Christians into a struggle about being correct rather than being Christlike. Orthopraxy or right practice, on the other hand, can often gloss over important Biblical truths to focus solely on corporeal rather than spiritual realms. Paul then introduced his own Greek and Latin portmanteau of orthoscript or right story. His contention is that the Bible is that the Bible is trying to do something to us and that through study of the context we can apply its teachings with faithfulness and creativity. The Bible is trying to show us the story that God is creating on Earth and that we have been invited to become an integral part of that story. Too often we try to fit God into what we’re trying to do with our lives and instead we should be focusing on what God is doing and how we can be a part of it.

Worship was not confined to Wednesday nights, however. An affable young man named Toast that I met on one of the jobsites explained to me that everything we do should be an expression of our gratitude to God, our commitment to God’s plan, and a form of praise. I often wrestled with the spiritual concepts the most in the days and weeks later when work or wilderness would give me the physical and emotional space to process my own thoughts and emotions. One concept that would not let me go was the idea of the three stages of faith. The first stage of faith is ‘notitia’ or understanding: understanding the existence of God or the fact of sin. The second stage of faith is ‘assenus’ or mental assent: agreeing intellectually with the veracity of Biblical doctrine. These first two stages had never been an issue for me. I felt as if I was born with such an understanding and assent. The third stage was the edge of a cliff for me. The third stage is ‘fiducia’ or trust: an emotional connection with the truth previously only understood and assented to. My greatest struggle was my deficiency in personal relationship with God. I felt that God was a distant being that had little involvement in my life. Over the course of the summer I realized that one of the pillars of a real relationship is just showing up. When you have a real relationship with someone, you show up again and again even when it’s hard, even when you don’t feel like it, even when you’re upset with the other person: persistence. I learned this summer that if I keep showing up then so will God.

People of Walmart

After two weeks of day labor, we were despairing of ever having steady work over the summer. Strategic Staffing, the temp agency we had been relying on, had thus far proven uninformed, unreliable, and incompetent. When we finally were informed of jobs remodeling a Walmart, we were told to report for work at 5am on Sunday, as our jobs were supposed to run from 5am to 2pm Sunday through Thursday. Grant, Dave, Matt, and I shuffled to the back of the largely deserted Walmart and began our search for a manager. After ten minutes, we were finally informed by the manager that our jobs were actually scheduled for 5am to 2pm Monday through Friday. Although excited by the slightly more amenable schedule, we were all exasperated at being misinformed and at our unnecessary 4am wakeup call.

Chris, who was also supposed to be working with us at Walmart, was somehow overlooked by Strategic Staffing and so continued day labor for another week. Before his eventual integration into the Walmart crew, he expressed his concern that he was sinking into the comfort of rhythm and complacency. I often feel the same way and fear that I’ll fall into a comfortable but ultimately unchallenging and unrewarding life. In The Departed, Matt Damon’s character says to his girlfriend, “If we're not gonna make it, it's gotta be you that gets out, cause I'm not capable. I'm fucking Irish, I'll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.” I know I have this tendency so I have to be constantly vigilant.

Our first few days were mostly silent drudgery, tearing down, building, and stocking shelves. We would communicate only to receive commands. Breakthrough came in the form of conversation. Working alongside our manager, Bunny, I got the opportunity to strike up conversation and begin asking questions about her life. I began to realize that, far from my low expectations of a Walmart employee, Bunny was an exceptional woman. Beyond being a single mother of three and a full-time Assistant Manager at Walmart, she played three club sports, coached youth basketball, and was a voracious reader. Over the next few weeks we developed a rapport that led to mutual respect. She quickly realized that, far from her low expectations of temporary workers, we were intelligent and could handle increased responsibility. Surprisingly, we began to take pride in our work and take ownership of projects. Did I just spend three hours laughing while working at the “Evil Empire”? Weird.

Perhaps it’s the social equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion, but life seems to work in dichotomies. After a few weeks of work, we completed the remodel and were assigned to the Platte Walmart to work on a much larger project. Rather than a manageable group, 50 temp workers were corralled, cajoled, and coerced in an attempt to completely overhaul a store that had not been remodeled since Clinton’s first presidency. Our task masters fostered disempowerment through what seemed to be a carefully concocted mixture of a lack of communication, trust, or respect. Our motivation was daily drained by the incompetence of our superiors. It became almost a daily occurrence that we would receive an order, protest that the assignment should either be done another way or not done at all for any number of valid reasons, be rebuffed, and then 30 minutes later be proven prescient as we would inevitably be tasked with redoing or undoing our previous action. One of the most difficult moments for me was when one of our bosses, a 23-year-old with a GED and three children, reprimanded me as “an idiot” for not putting in a shelf correctly. It was much more difficult than I had imagined not to snap a reply about how I must have missed shelf-building 101 while I was getting my MBA.

Morale slowly dripped from our bodies leaving little puddles of broken spirit whenever we congregated for too long. We all struggled in vein to remain awake and alive, but Dave alone seemed to excel at remaining in high spirits. Although he didn’t always succeed, he always asked himself, “How can I have a positive attitude today?” He had set the goal for himself that, by the end of our time at Walmart, he would be offered full-time employment. Dave understood the importance of motivation and taught me that you can give your best no matter the circumstances.

Working at Walmart was awful. Doing awful things can be great. Climbing the educational ladder often puts distance between me and large swaths of people and experiences. I’m very certain that the average MBA graduate doesn’t challenge themselves in the ways that I was challenged working at Walmart. Spending so much time working with others every day gave me a lot of time to be myself. Spending a lot of time also working by myself, I was also able to analyze what being myself was. Where do I find fulfillment? How do I motivate myself? What are my goals? What is my attitude towards work? What is my attitude towards my bosses? I struggled with so many questions, but as with most of the summer I think that the struggle is just the first victory.