Prefatory Comments

I became more conservative through my middle years. As a former Marine, tax lawyer, corporate executive and church elder, I just seemed to move in that direction. But a return to graduate school at Harvard at age 54, and an extraordinary corner turned in my prayer and spiritual life, challenged and changed my sense of identity, purpose and direction.

In December 2004, I started writing about it and couldn’t seem to stop. An edgy personal anthem, a statement of complaint and declaration of changed identity just demanded expression. I titled it Out of the Box for reasons evident in the reading of it. Other essays soon followed clarifying or expanding on aspects of the first, then still more were called forward to address issues of faith posed by some of the earlier pieces.

These essays reflect the earlier stages of that personal change process. They are about the discomfiting understandings found in constraining aspects of life and identity—and particularly Christian identity. But more, they acknowledge the new corners being turned in my spiritual journey and that Christian identity.

They are titled, Identity’s Complaint, an apt description of the collection of pieces included here. The tone of some is edgier and more rhetorical, but a few reflect a softer tone, a sharing of new landscapes on a spiritual journey. But all are intended to be provocative in the sense of challenging our spiritual sense of identity, our understandings, directions and actions.

Some of the edgier pieces are also related to a bill of particulars against co-opting political and cultural religious agendas, and Christian faith in the context of those compromised identities and relationships in the world.

Although I have lodged some clear complaints and shared some new views, in the end these writings are as much an apologia as anything else—more intended to explore and share why my views have changed than to change anyone else’s. Those views are explored and shared more fully in the series of essays that follow this one: What God?, Cassandra's Tears, and Beyond Life's Boxes.

Greg Hudson
September 2007