Crumbs at the Feast

Election Year Blues

2012-01-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
(John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, (1834–1902), otherwise known as Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887.)

I don't know anything else about this quote other than what I just learned from a 10 second web search. Still, it seems like an apt quote to ponder this election year.

Election year. Ugh. The circus has been going on for months and it's only begun.

It's troubling to me how much religion gets tossed around in these election years. Even more troubling, to me as a Christian, is how Christianity gets tossed around in election years. So much of the time, I don't see recognize the theology I try to live out expressed from campaign trails. More often than not, I'm embarrassed by how Christianity is used, and I mean used by these candidates.

I'm not likely to write much about the election. Those who know me and know who I'll be voting for and those who have followed this blog can probably guess. I'm a left-leaning, queer, Christan---most of the time. There are also all sorts of ways that I hold to traditions and honor the past---and anytime we start talking about preserving traditions, that's inherently conservative talk. There's a lot of ambiguity in terms like "conservative" and "liberal" for me, and I find myself leery of people who use them with absolute certainty and conviction.

Am I liberal? Some would say quite so. Am I conservative? Others would say quite so. What do I say I am? I admit, I try not to, at least not in those terms.

What I am fairly certain about is that this line between "conservative" and "liberal" is drawn in the shiftiest of sand. It turns out that once you claim one of the labels, you're given a test to determine if you/re conservative or liberal enough.

Ack. Talk about test anxiety.

Here's the thing: Jesus was a liberal, shaker-upper of the status quo. Yes he was. He was also an adherent of the law and customs of his people, which is really right in line with being conservative. I laughed at a recent opinion piece I read that suggested, in that always popular game of making God in our image, that Jesus was spiritual but not religious. How can one look at the gospel accounts and say Jesus wasn't religious? He was repeatedly in the Temple. He read scripture there. "On the night in which he was betrayed," or so we're told, he was observing a ritual meal with his disciples. These are religious activities. Fairly conservative ones at that.

So I wish---with all the futility of wishful thinkers---that we could stop claiming Jesus as being on "our side" during these political seasons. I mean, Jesus is on "our side" in a broad sense in that Jesus is for us. All of us. The more important question is always, "am I on Jesus's side?" That's the important question because I think, whoever we are, whatever our stance, however well intentioned and scripture informed we may be, Jesus is going to surprise us. And probably tick us off a little bit in the process.

That quote up there about power . . . I think the best thing we can do during election years is to remember that we are voting for politicians who are, at some level, seeking power There may be all kinds of rhetoric about serving the country, but let's face it, there's power in those seats and power will always try to maintain itself. That's the surprising thing about Jesus, if we're to believe the second chapter of the letter to the Philippians. Jesus never maintained his power, but emptied himself of it. No one we vote for is going to do that.

God is not conservative and God is not liberal. God is, however, an extravagant lover, bringing abundant life, bringing the sort of justice that cares for orphans and other at-risk people over maintaining power. At least, that's what's been running through my head the last few days, every time I've heard people talk about being conservative or liberal. I'm just trying it out here. Let me say it again.

God is neither conservative nor liberal, but extravagant.

May we, as we vote our conscience (and maybe the lesser evil?), see a way to live our lives in this extravagant love, in this abundant life.

The Bad Rap on Repentance

2011-12-05T10:08:00.001-08:00

I would start with this text:

Mark 1: 1-15
1The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,who will prepare your way;
3the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:‘Prepare the way of the Lord,make his paths straight,’”
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.
7He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.
8I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.
11And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
14Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

The first few verses of this was the assigned gospel text for the second Sunday in Advent. It's as close as the Gospel of Mark gets to a Christmas story---which is to say the Gospel of Mark doesn't have a Christmas story. But it does have this great opening: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

It also has a call to repentance in this text. This is often heard---and preached---as a pretty harsh call to consider your sins, to work up some tears and wailing, and be a better person.

Sometimes that is appropriate. Some of us might do well with more examination of our sins, to the point of wailing. Some of us might do well to try to be a better person. (That's the first person use of "some of us," by the way.)

But I don't think that's what's in this text, or at the very least, it's not all that's in this text.

The last line gives us some clue, even if it has "repent" in it. The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news."

Jesus seems to think what he's up to is good news. That we have turned good news into a message of wailing and regret seems rather disappointing, to say the least.

The Greek word for "repent" (and I've known this so long, I want to assume it's common knowledge, but I suspect it's not) is metanoia. Meta=Change (think metamorphosis, the changing or transformation of a physical form). Noia=mind (think paranoid, beside or outside the mind). Metanoia, transformation of the mind. Beyond the literal pieces of the root words, there are also cultural connotations of "changing your heart" or, furthest from the root words, "turn around."

And so I think repentance gets a bad rap. People don't want to be reminded to repent because they hear angry preachers yelling "Sinnaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahs repeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeent!" Even at my lowest, even when I know I've screwed up badly and done a lot of harm, I don't find this to be a helpful shout.

Also the coming of the Reign of God has, thanks to the violence-fueled fantasies of Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, is often heard as a scary, even bloody coming.

And yet, I believe Jesus when he tells us to "believe the good news." "You're a miserable sinner and God is coming with a kingdom full of power to get you and make you pay" does not strike me as good news.

What is the Reign of God? Is it where sinners meet God and get their just rewards? Or is it where the poor are heirs of God, where the mourning are comforted, where mercy is met with mercy and not derision and violence?

There are, no doubt, those who would argue with me, but I'm betting everything on the latter.

So, here at the end of advent (which at one time was a season of penitence, much like lent, but in my Lutheran tradition has seen the emphasis turn toward a season of hope), I offer this re-imagining of repentance:

Look! The time is now!God is right here at hand and it's a beautiful thing! If you're hungry, come and eat. If you're hurting, come and get healing. If you're mourning, come and get comforted---and if you're none of these things, come and be part of the Reign of God and feed, heal, and comfort! Change your heart, change your mind, change your ways, and believe that you can be a part of this better way! This is good news! The old ways aren't working, and change is possible. Here it again: You can be a part of a better way! Believe it!

Turn with wonder! Turn with awe! Yes, yes, there is fear and trembling at all the ways you think you may not fit into this vision, there are all kinds of ways that it can and will go wrong, but the hope of the whole world depends on this good news that Jesus went about preaching. The Reign of God is right here! Stopping waiting for it! Change your heart and mind and ways---Believe this Good News.

This is the beginning . . .

Hackberries and Advent

2011-11-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) may already suspect what I'm about to confess: I don't really plan out a blog post very thoroughly. My blogging is the unedited me. For better or for worse, this is all fairly raw writing.

So that last entry about having a hackberry faith . . . I had really some vague intention of tying it into the season of Advent, which (for those of you not observant of the liturgical calendar) began this past Sunday.

Advent is a season of hope and vigilance. We read the "keep watch" kind of passages during this season, reflect on the "you know neither the day nor the hour" kind of things. Yes, it's about watching for Christ, both in preparation for the celebration of the Bethlehem event, but also watching for Christ coming again---and all the ways we can mean that.

And finding myself in this familiar place of having lost faith in the church as institution, I think it's a watchful place to be. I need to pay attention, keep vigilant for when and where the Body of Christ might renew my faith, where it might reveal itself in all it's incarnational wonder and glory.

Tonight was one such event to watch. My congregation gathers on Wednesdays evenings during Advent and sing the Holden Evening Prayer service. It's a lovely, singable (and danceable, I daresay) setting of some of the oldest lyrics known to Christian hymnody. And I was reminded, yes, I do believe in this. This being gathering together and singing. Maybe I don't believe every phrase, but I believe in the singing and praying together.

It's a small and significant thing and I won't belabor it.

Just sit back and smile at the places a new shoot comes up from roots still green.

A Hackberry Faith

2011-11-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

"Then I say the Lord's Prayer, trying not to recite it, and one morning it occurred to me that a prayer, whether recited or said with concentration, is always an act of faith." ("A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus)

Yesterday, something my pastor said in his sermon made me pull out my pocket notepad and write, "Our faith is a hackberry tree."

For readers who are unfamiliar with the hackberry tree, it is often referred to as a "trash tree." It will "weep" on your car if you park under it. It will send out its roots along the top soil and other trees will sprout up like weeds from one tree. They don't really produce anything of use. No fruit, no useable lumber. They're more a nuisance than anything else.

They're also very hard to kill. Chopping down a hackberry tree is to invite a shrub of sprouts from the routes in the next growing season. I did a web search on "how to kill a hackberry tree," and found the most common suggestions were high powered herbicides (some of them controlled by the government) or kerosene poured on the stump---sometimes a combination of the two was suggested. So you have to poison a small patch of ground to kill a hackberry tree. And because the root system will travel, there's no guarantee that you've absolutely killed it. If it's not in an area that is mowed regularly, it's quite likely that the next growing season will find a sapling (or 3 or 12) a few yards away.

And, of course, when I said "our faith" in my notepad, I was using the first person singular "our," the "royal our," if you will. My faith is a hackberry tree. Of questionable use and hard to kill. A "trash faith."

If you've read the spotty entries in this blog over the last year, you might rightly guess that I'm grumpy, mostly with the institution of the church. It's fair to say that I've lost my faith, really, although where I end up is in this ecclesiastical agnosticism. While I remain a theist (as I did the last time I went through this cycle), believing in God, I'm not sure that I believe in the church. And when you lose faith in the church---a large part of that faith being in the teachings of the church---the theism becomes a little vague.

About twelve years ago, the last time this happened, I would tell people, "I believe in God, I just don't know what I believe about God." That's less true this time, as having gone through this ecclesiastical agnosticism before, I feel somewhat secure that I've rebuilt a theology that is a little more solid than what I had before the first loss of faith. Still, I hear things said with such appalling certainty that I end up wondering if I can say I'm a Christian. I can say I have a "Jesus thing going on," I can even say that I want to follow Jesus---I'm just not sure how much I can say I'm a Christian, given all the things I hear being said about what a Christian is.

This is not terribly unsettling to me. I'm not worried about it, honestly. I puzzle over it, especially when I'm sitting in church, filling a role as "assisting minister" and questioning every third line that I lead the congregation in saying. I puzzle over my integrity, over my hypocrisy in doing this. But it's not worrisome.

I suppose it was more unsettling last time, but having gone through it before, I know there is little bad to come from it and some good to be found. I take comfort in the line above, from Andre Dubus' much-anthologized story. An uncertain faith is still expressed as a faith, even when it's not done with full attention and conviction.

And so, barring someone coming along with kerosene and herbicide, I trust my trash faith will sprout again. And I shouldn't be so hard on the hackberry tree. It will provide shade, no small thing in a place like Texas. In fact, I hope this open expression of doubt will offer some comfort. If I have experienced one recurring theme among the unchurched, it's their discomfort with certainty. Well, here's my uncertainty. It's an expression of faith, actually, and by some accounts, it's not a very useful faith. But settle here for a bit. Find some cooling comfort here, especially if you've been burned by certainty. Even if it's a severely pruned faith, it'll bush out again soon enough.

‘For there is hope for a tree,
if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,
and that its shoots will not cease.

Job 14:7

Equus / Worship

2011-11-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

From Equus by Peter Shaffer, Act II, Scene 25:

HESTER: Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
DYSART: I don't.

As of this writing, I'm halfway through a two-weekend run of Equus at the University of Houston-Downtown (where I currently work). I play the father of the young man who is central to the story.

The young man in question, Alan, has taken a religious impulse and focused it on horses, building a rather complex theology around his "god-slave," Equus. In the end, the theology results in a violent attempt to destroy the god. Still, the psychiatrist treating Alan, Martin Dysart, recognizes that what's at the center of Alan's religious impulse is a need to worship. Something.

The above exchange smacks me against my head every performance. "Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that."

"I don't."

As someone who has had a lifelong impulse toward worship---one that I've embraced and fought at different times in my life.---I'm left to ponder how destructive it may or may not be. In the context of the play, we have Dysart dreaming of being a priest in ancient Greece, sacrificing children. The dream doubles as an expression of question his own profession as a child psychiatrist and as a yearning to have some powerful way to respond to something larger than himself, something that he feels but doesn't allow himself to express.

In my own tradition of Christianity, we have remnants of this bent towards destructive worship. Rooted in the Hebrew tradition of slaughtering lambs, goats, or doves in worship of God, we have references to the Lamb of God, Jesus, who we celebrate as having died for our sake. We even have a ritual meal that, no matter how you deconstruct it, has the surface appearance of ritual cannibalism.

Of course, the Eucharist is hardly a wild ceremony, nothing compared to Alan's midnight rides on his horse-god. People do not approach the communion rail with anything like the abandon of Alan howling in the mist, riding naked on the back of Equus.

I don't even know what to say about that. I mostly just lift it up as something to consider. It may be that worship can be destructive and it may be that taming it down to our slow line toward the communion rail is a reasonable maturing of the sacrificial language of ancient religion. Or not.

Again, the context of the play: Alan, the son of a very religious mother and an atheist father, finds no way to please either. He gravitates toward the bloodier aspects of Christianity, and when his father rips a particularly gruesome picture of Christ's approach to Calvary off Alan's bedroom wall, Alan replaces it with a photo of a horse his father brings home from his printing business. And so Alan's religious focus shifts, or rather the shift is completed, a shift that started years earlier with a childhood encounter with a horse. His mother gave him a religious impulse, his father gave him a new focus for it.

I've seen people describe Equus as a play about a boy who falls in love with a horse. Alan falls in love with a horse in the same way Teresa of Avila fell in love with Jesus---which is to say, horses became the medium for Alan's mystical experience. The "love" is sensual only in the sense that ecstatic experience is sensual---which it is and it certainly can feel sexual. Teresa didn't shy away from that and neither does Alan.

So is what Dysart calls "worship" really mystical experience? And is it destructive? Hester knows it isn't. Dysart doesn't.

I don't know that I could clear it up for them.

Later in the same scene, Dysart says, " . . . Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that . . . I shrank my own life." This also smacks me against my head. Worship . . . Awe . . . Wonder . . . Fear . . . Reverence . . . These are the words that come to mind, and if I'm reading Shaffer something like right, these are the things that make our lives expansive. One might even say, abundant. I think I can say that when I've tried to stay away from worship, something was missing. I might not have said I shrunk from the absence, but perhaps absence is a kind of shrinking.

I'm devolving into word play.

Devolved as I am, I am left with these words and they worry me like a pebble in my shoe, even as my big toe worries the pebble. What is worship? Is it destructive or expansive? Are those words mutually exclusive?

If we can choose, how do we care for our worship life, nurture it, so that it is a vital and compelling as Alan's wild midnight rides and as expansive and fulfilling as Dysart hopes it is?

And . . . So What?

2011-10-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

The month of October has flown by. I've been meaning to follow up my "ranting" of a month ago with some thoughts and the time has simply not been there. (And the time spent has been very good for me, so the lack of time, in this case, equals very good things.)

Because after a rant, the inevitable question is, "So what? What are you going to do with all that ranting?"

This is just a quick note to say one thing: I know this is not a sustainable place to live in. I've had a rough patch of things. The year 2010 kicked me hard. The year 2011 has been all about finding a new normal, re-prioritizing, maybe setting new goals. All this is pretty bumpy, too. I do not feel settled. Actually, I don't know that I've ever felt settled, but a few years ago I at least felt like I was on a path, a track. Maybe some of us never feel settled. Maybe "settled" isn't the point. Maybe being on track is the point. Moving forward.

So this place that is publicly oblique but personally unsettled and results in deconstructing a well-intentioned (but still, I maintain, failed) "welcome" video . . . All I have to say at the moment is that this is not a place one can live in. I'm not building a house here. I just pitched a tent here for a while.

There's cloud and fire out there, just ahead. It's moving. I have to follow.

Okay, a Rant (part 4)

2011-09-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

If you're just now joining this rant, you may want to go back and at least skim the last three entries, to see why the National Back to Church Sunday video made me grumpy. (Actually, I've been grumpy for a couple of months. I'm using this video, which didn't lighten my grumpiness, to illustrate my grumpiness.)

------------

I won't go into the final invitation. It's all very pleasant, as I've said is the whole video. It's great that the congregation in question will welcome you regardless of your past religious affiliation. (I pause to point out that the only non-Christian background welcomed by name is "Jewish," but I suppose we can infer that Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and other world religions are welcome, too. Or we can infer that only converts from Judaism are invited. Hard to tell.)

But then, I'm assuming something here: I'm assuming that this is a Christian congregation that is inviting me to their church. How would I know that? Is Jesus or Christ ever mentioned?

In fact, unless I missed something, the only mention of God was in the somewhat presumptuous statement "right were God wants you."

This is a marketing video that is trying to convince a consumer that they're welcome, that they're okay in their not-okay-ness. It's so pleasant and inoffensive that it completely avoids all offensive things like Jesus.

Throughout, I've been complaining about how unrealistic the answers are to the excuses for why people don't go to church. The final invitation hits on the big unrealism: They're selling a utopia for people not only want to not be okay but also be accepted in their not-okay-ness. And, I know we're never going to be completely well, we're always going to be not-okay, but I kind of hope for some progress in the journey.

There's an awful lot of talk about "authenticity" in church circles. What I think this is after is an acknowledgment that everyone comes to church (or anywhere) with their own set of luggage, and we need to exercise some tolerance and grace with one another. To the extent that this video is trying very hard to acknowledge our brokenness, I can go along with it. But the problem is no matter how hard they try to sell the idea of church as a utopia where everyone feels at home . . . well utopias simply don't exist. I'll go so far as to say it's a false idol.

What would be more realistic?

Come to my church. We're all bumbling, broken people, but sometimes we help each other. We come with a variety of needs, wants, and experiences but we return each week to be reminded that the Reign of God is among us. We get angry, we get hurt, but we also have this place where we're reminded that if we turn away from anger, revenge, selfishness, and actively work with God, respond to the words of Jesus to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, protect the weak and powerless, we we see God among us.

Come to my church, we're trying our best---some days, not all days---but some days, in good weeks, most days we're doing our best to keep up with Jesus, to follow where we hear Jesus leading us. We're going to argue about that. Okay, but we're all going to sacrifice something and lay it at the foot of the cross, and we're going to go away with a blessing.

Come to my church, because during the week, you're going to have some good stuff happen to you and maybe you'll want to come praise God with us. And in the weeks where bad stuff happens, you'll want a place to lament---in community. Yes, we can all be thankful or be sad on our own, but when we're thankful or sad together---well, it's another place where the Reign of God breaks into the world, breaks up the powers of this world. Maybe not every Sunday, but there's an accumulative effect and eventually, you'll have a bad Thursday and a line from the lackluster, boring, emotionless, cold, "I got up for this?" Sunday before will come to you, be with you, sit with you. And you'll remember the life, words, and sacrifice of Jesus and you'll make it through until Friday. And on Sunday, you'll want to praise God in the company of the community.

This is not utopian, and I hope it doesn't sound that way. This is the hard work of faithfulness. All my excuses to not go to church---and I have a few, some in the video, some not---are not going to be answered by one phrase spoken by an appealing actor. I've traveled this road too long to be placated by platitudes. I'm writing this an angry, bruised man (who doesn't air his dirty laundry in public, or at least tries not to). But good things happen and bad things happen. I find meaning in the Good News of Jesus, in the sacraments of the church, and these still outweigh the the ways I feel hurt by the institution of the church (for I do recognize that, for the most part, it is the cold institution of the church---and it's gatekeepers---that I feel have hurt me, not the Church, the Body of Christ).

So, come to my church. Sing hymns and pray with us. We won't promise miracles---we can't control such things. But we will tell you that we live under Grace, that we are loved beyond imagining, and when we gather in praise, lamentation, service, and support---the Reign of God is among us.

That's really all we have to offer.

-----

So, this completes my rant, such as it is. It doesn't really tell you everything, but reveals my mood of the moment. I don't like going to church right now, and this video just pushed some exposed and raw buttons. This writing is an oblique, if not opaque, explanation for why I stopped blogging for a couple of months. Actually, writing through this has give me some catharsis, exposed some over-reaction to myself (if not to you). What does it do for you? I don't know. But Miles wanted something from me and this is what I had to offer for the moment. Blame him if this was more self-indulgent than usual. (Insert smiley face here.)

Okay, a Rant (part 3)

2011-09-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

If you're just joining this program, already in progress, you may want to start with the two previous posts. The brief catch-up is that, from a rather grumpy disposition, I'm deconstructing a video that you can see by clicking here.

------------

7. "Church is for wimpy girly men."
Thomas says, with Scotty glowering beside him, "You want to say that again?"
tag: . . .

Where to start with this? There's so much that rubs me the wrong way here.

How about: "Real men" obviously are threatening, however good-naturedly or humorously the threat may be delivered. That the threat is the only text to answer the excuse tells us something: we expect men to be violent if their great god, "masculinity," is threatened.

Or maybe I should start with: Does this mean that wimpu, girly men are NOT welcome?

I realize I consort with a minority population. I'm part of that minority population. As a gay man, I cringed at this section. I cringed at the thought of transgendered friends seeing it. It is, quite possibly, the most UNwelcoming piece of the video.

And seriously, what is wrong with straight men that the need this sort of constant reassurance? "Don't worry, going to church won't make you less of a man! See? We have a couple of burly men who could smash you to pulp right here!" Why would I, as a gay man who (I've been told) exhibits a range of gender expression, be enough of a threat to keep straight men away, anyway?

I've tried to imagine a similar section directed at women, but they all come out so offensive that I can't publishe them on my blog. Which would sort of make the point about how offensive I find this particular excuse/response.

By the way, notice how there is no tag line at the end? It's as if the producers of the video couldn't find a polite way to say, "church isn't just for fags!" So we just have a final shot of the manly men with their names. That should say it all, right?

And perhaps what troubles me most---since I'm going on about realistic expectations in these posts---is that this may be the most honest section in the video. The church does lack men, men do tend to see "mother church" as feminizing (as if "feminine" were a bad thing), and men do tend to get threatening if they're accused of being less than "real men." Whatever those are.

What do I want a video like this to say? "All gender expressions are embraced as aspects of the Image of God" would be a lie (never mind creating unrealistic expectations) in the vast majority of churches.

So this section sipmly hits me on all the tender spots. It farily truthfully expresses what most congregations want and makes me realize all over again how far the church is from being a safe place for LGBT folk.

8. "If you knew me and what I've done, you wouldn't want me."
Retired pilot Mike answers: "If you knew me and what I've done, you wouldn't be worried."
tag: Forgiven.

This would be more powerful if didn't immediately assume that what these people had done was maybe had an affair or some other sin not punishable by civil law. As awful as that is, I think that's where churches are with this kind of forgiveness. I think if Mike had told us he'd committed heinous war crimes in Viet Nam or Iraq, we would be relieved that was all that was bothering him when he came to us for for confession and a word of grace.

It would also have been more powerful if we were told that everyone at Mike's church knew that he had molested a child but that their love had turn him from that destructive and life-shattering behavior.

It would have been a lie, but it would have been more powerful.

The sad, likely fact is that Mike may have had a profound, life-changing experience of God's forgiveness, but he probably keeps the particulars from the majority of his fellow church goers. He probably talks to people just like he spoke in this video: "If you knew . . . "

But he's probably not going to let them know, because most of us longtime church members know that it's not safe to tell everything. There may be very close friends who know Mike's past, but not everyone, I can nearly promise you. We're kind of back to the previous bit about how the church is full of hypocrites and preach forgiveness while shunning the forgiven.

I sound very cynical, don't I? Well, here I am. And there's a thin line between being a cynic and just paying attention.

-------------

And I'm not done here, yet. I have to stop here for the evening, but I'll try to get the rest done tomorrow. There's at least one more part to this rant. Maybe two. But we're through all the "excuse/response" portions of the video, so we're close to the end of my general grumpiness with this video.

Okay, a Rant (part 2)

2011-09-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

Read the previous entry first, if you're just wandering by. The short introduction is I'm ranting for a few days about the video that you can see by clicking here.

Okay, so we're up to this excuse:

3. "All they care about is your money."
Geoff, CFO, replies: "They care about me, not my money."
tag: People are priceless.

You know what? The church cares about your money. Flat out, any congregation is really interested in what you put in the offering plate. In many cases (at least in my denomination), the welcome package comes with a box of envelopes for said offering.

To a certain extent, that's fine. Stewardship is important. Supporting your congregation is important. You want a place to meet, in climate controlled comfort, with a staff to make sure everything gets taken care of, we all have to chip in. Furthermore, speaking again for my denomination, a portion of the money goes to places beyond the congregation. There are local to national to international programs that are supported by our offerings. This is very meet, right, and salutary. The church should not be only looking at the local, at the needs and wants within one congregation's campus, but should, indeed be participating in alleviating the effects of hunger, disease, and disaster everywhere. And so, the offering plate is, in fact, coming to you for your ease of chipping in.

Hopefully, the congregation will care about you, too. Hopefully, the congregation will care about you more than your money. Sometimes, that gets out of balance, though, and at the very least, it sometimes can feel like the church cares more about your money than about you. The church needs to keep aware of this.

I may be splitting hairs here and looking at the subtlties more than any video could address---but that's part of what I'm writing against. This soundbite evangelism too easily creates false expectations.

4. "Is there some kind of dress code?"
Ingrid, a mom, answers: "Yes. The code is: wear some clothes."
tag: Come as you are.

I hope this is mostly true. It's truer than it used to be. The last two congregations I've belonged to saw Sunday morning worshipers in everything from suits to shorts, heels to flip-flops. Some people want to honor the house of God by wearing their very best. Some find the house of God to be the one place where they can relax and dress casually. I think both are legitimate pieties, so long as no one is forcing anything on anyone. I mean, it's just clothes. Wear some and don't worry about what everyone else is wearing.

All of which to say, while individual congregations may vary, I have the feeling that this is most realistic of the video's answers.

5. "Church just makes me nervous."
Mary, a consultant, tells us: "I was nervous at first and then I felt right at home."
tag: Right where God wants you.

I don't have a huge quibble with this, except for the, again, false expectation---or promise---that you're going to fit in and just relax into this new place. Why someone feels nervous by church is more important than any kind of platitude about being "right where God wants you." Cultural, familial, and institutional history for any individual will make this much more complex than the video suggests. And as I suggested in the last post, I've been a church member my entire life and I don't always feel at ease with it. Why would I expect someone to settle in if only they would just give it a go?

6. "I'm not sure I believe everything that you believe."
Donovan, sales manager, says: "But you can still belong."
tag: Doubts welcome.

Wow. I think there exists places where doubts are truly welcome. Maybe. But seriously, who feels safe saying out loud all their doubts in a chruch setting? I've known agnostics who served on church councils, but I'm pretty sure they never expressed it to the whole council.

Doubts welcome? Maybe some places. But, personally, I wouldn't go into a new congregation wearing them on your sleeve.

------------

I'll stop here for tonight. That's enough for a single blog post. These were the less annoying sections of the video, so I may not be sounding like a ranting lunatic as I may feel. Just remember: I'm Lutheran. We have a more subtle ranting style.

And the next section is the one that set me off the most, and if you know me, you can probably already guess why.

But that's for tomorrow.

Okay, a Rant (part I)

2011-09-26T16:57:00.001-07:00

If you intend to read all of this, you might want to go get a beverage or maybe something to eat. This might take some time.

As I said in the last post, I'm not a very good mood for talking about churchy matters. The whys are mostly not for public discussion. But Miles has pushed me on this, and it's fair. So I'll start here.

I realized that I was carrying some anger and maybe not fit for blogging on spiritual matters when this fairlyinnocent, pleasant, well-intentioned video set me off. Watch it here and see how pleasant it is.

* * * * *

Okay? Now, what about this pleasant video, a friendly invitation to church, would set me off and make me want to rant for a few pages?

For the most part, I think this video sets up unrealistic expectations for a visitor looking for a church. And . . .

Well, let's just take it piece by piece, excuse/answer by excuse/answer.

1. "I can't come to church until I get my life together."

Lisa, hairdresser, says, "Church is how I got my life together.
tag: A place for new beginnings.

I'll start by saying taht I find this actress really appealing. (I assume it's an actress, not a real hairdresser. I'm willing to be proven wrong.) And I've known people who have the experience of joining a church and it being a very grounding experience for them. Thanks be to God. This is how it's supposed to be.

That's not my experience, exactly. I grew up in the church and it was a great way to grow up. I mean that and stand by it. As an adult, however, I tend to find deeper involvement in the church to be a little . . . I don't have the right word. Stifling? Damaging? Those words sort of work.

I'm reminded of a line from Sting: "Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one." That's more my experience.

But again, I find the actress to be appealing in her quirky, awkward way. She pulls off a sort of redeemed ledge-sitter. I'm happy for her. I just don't believe it's everyone's experience and I'm not sure it's an expectation that many congregations can meet.

2. "Church is filled with a bunch of hypocrites."
Randy the pipefitter says, "And there's always room for one more."
tag: Imperfect people welcome.

I admit, this always sets me off when people say it. I used to work with a supervisor who always said the definition of "religion" was "hypocrisy." Of course, he was also the supervisor who was constantly telling workers to do more work and less talking while he spent hours most days in spirited conversation about college football.

I can't deny the church deserves its accusations of hypocisy, but that's because it's always easier to preach morals than to preach grace. Once you set yourself (plural or singular "you") as a paragon of morality, you're going to screw up and probably in some really big public way. It's just that simple and we all do it, with or without religion. It just seems the church does it in flashign neon.

So in this case, everyone kind of annoys me, the excuse-maker and the promise of welcome tot he imperfect. You're going to get judged at church. Someone's going to shun you at church. And at work, and at the grocery store, everywhere you meet people.

Maybe---and this is only maybe---at church, there's a mutual understanding that repentance from judgment and shunning is desirable, a goal to move toward. And I do believe that's worth something. It's just a far cry from a promise that imperfect people are unconditionally welcome.

-----------

Okay, I see that this is going to go on longer than I even realized. I actually have this written in long hand (which is not how I usually blog), and I think it's best if I break this up into individual posts. I'll try to add some everyday. It looks like it might be a 4-part rant. Feel free to tell me how unreasonable I'm being so far. I feel a little unreasonable, which is why I stopped blogging for a while (even before I saw this video). Just don't stop here. I think I'm going to come to a point . . .

Hiatus

2011-09-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

It surprises me more than a little, but I've actually been asked about the lack of new posts here.

Kinda makes me feel missed and stuff.

It has been two months since I posted here. There have been similar "quiet periods" in this blog's history, and I've never even attempted to be any kind of regular with the postings (except, maybe, during some liturgical season, perhaps---and then I think I've always failed).

This one has been a little different in that I'm not exactly without things to say, but I am without much nice to say.

Which is to say, my current relationship with church (the institution) is a bit on the rocks lately. And while that doesn't necessarily have much to do with a relationship with God---well, it kind of does, actually. You can't have a relationship with the Head of Christ without the Body of Christ. Well, I guess you can. It's just awkward. If not unnerving.

Anne Lamott has said that if it happens to you, it's yours, and you can write about it. If the people involved don't like it, they should have behaved better. (I'm paraphrasing or else I'd put it in quotes.) I'm not quite there with that sentiment, despite sort of going with it recently with some things I wrote for a dance film I worked on for Frame Dance Productions. I prefer writing fiction for a reason.

So, my silence here is the result of not wanting to write screeds and diatribes. It comes from not desiring an unfair advantage of having a forum where others do not (although this blog is hardly a huge forum---then again, I'm not particularly interested in dueling blogs, either). I do still believe in kindness, grace, mercy, edification, and loving those you really want to smack. Ranting doesn't help much. And, besides, that's what private dinners with close friends are for.

So . . . yeah. For now, a silence. I've come close to breaking it a couple of times recently. Maybe I will sooner than later. I just thought that since I was asked, I might explain.

However opaque and/or oblique that explanation may be.

Adopting Evangelism

2011-06-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had an exchange with a longtime friend, the Rev. Cindy Beck (a pastor of the ELCA). In the course of this email exchange, she said:

"How do you become part of a family? Birth, marriage, and adoption. Adoption is when the family seeks YOU out. Nowhere does one become a part of a family by looking around at pretty houses, visiting them during dinner and asking, 'Wow, you are a great family, can I join you?' Nope, doesn't happen that way. If it did, I would be living in a beautiful house with rich people who support me unconditionally."

I've been thinking about this and trying to form a blog post around it. Then this morning, I read this article at Living Lutheran and I realized Cindy's words work all on their own, without any editorializing from me.

For now, anyway.

Ecclesiastical What Ifs

2011-06-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

When I was in seminary, I had to do a yearlong internship. Interns get handed lots of projects that usually include a lot of recruiting.

Seventeen years later, I don't even remember what I recruiting for in this particular instance, but I do remember this story:

One particular fellow had expressed interest in whatever it was. One night, we had something going on at the church and his wife was there. She came up to me and said apologetically, "He's so sorry, but he's going to have to say no this time. He's so busy right now with Boy Scouts and the Volunteer Fire Department, he really doesn't have the time. He feels really badly about it."

In the moment, I just said okay, and started thinking about who I was going to ask next.

But this stuck with me. Here was a man, an active member of the church, also being active in his community in ways that were really significant. It's not as if he were going home after work and watching TV.

No, it finally dawned on me, he was out in the world, being salt and light, being among people other than Christians, doing good things. Why should he feel bad about that?

It seems that there must be other ways to be the church than simply being busy at the church building.

This is one of those posts where I don't have answers, but a few questions (some answers implied, some not, but all open to discussion).

What if Sunday morning were the center of our Christian life. What if it was the time of the week when we all came together to worship, lament, praise, hope, pray, sing, eat, hear, and speak?

What if rather than spending so much time trying to find ways for people to get involved at the church, we were instead asking about---and encouraging!---ways that people are involved in the world? Where are you salt and light? Where did you add savor to the world? Where did you illuminate a dark corner? Praise God! Thanks be to God! Is there a need over there for more help? Can I help leaven that loaf, make it rise? What if people saw us engaged in the world, in whatever way God calls us, and were amazed at how we moved in the world, not just holed up in the church, maintaining the organization?

It seems like a big, but maybe just a subtle shift in thinking about what a congregation is or does. There are always administrative needs to be taken care of. There are always people needed to count and deposit the offering, to prepare and wash the communion chalice. But it also seems there are always endless needs beyond our church walls. What if rather than a council with many committees that can't find members, we had a council with more support functions, that were less about recruiting people to be involved at the church (although some of that is obviously needed), but were there to help make sure that people were involved in the world?

I don't have a clear picture of what this would look like. I think in the end it would create less work for the administrative staff (including pastors). I think it would open us up more fully to the movement of the Spirit---following gifts and callings rather than proscribed slots on a committee that may not be needed anymore. I think it would turn people toward thinking about a Christian life that is lived 24/7, rather than just when we are in the building with the steeple. I think it would be evangelism in the root meaning of the world---I think it would be Good-News-bearing to the world.

This feels even more incoherent than usual. I'm so close to the current model of how we do church that even as I brainstorm about a new way, I find myself thinking "that'll never work."

But there needs to be another way of doing church, a way that encourages and rewards people like the man in in my opening paragraphs. There needs to be a way of being the church that doesn't make someone involved in ministry feel guilty for not being involved in the church.

Pentecost 2011

2011-06-12T18:17:00.001-07:00

It's the birthday of the Christian church.

What do I say about it? Today, I think I say something vulnerable and honest and hope we all find some grace along the way.

I have a love/hate relationship with the church. This was not always so. There are people who used to joke about how much Neil loves church. And it was true and on some days it still is. But it's not like it used to be.

Sometimes you start to notice things you wish weren't true, and you wish it so much that you think denying it will keep you from noticing it. But the funny thing about noticing is that once something is noticed, it's terribly hard to un-notice it.

It's hard to un-notice all the ways that the church is often racist, sexist, homophobic, and self-preservationist. (Is the last a real term? Spell check allows it. I hope it communicates.) There are privileged people, for whom the church has never been anything but great. I think I was one of those people until about 10 or 15 years ago.

I should have an actual narrative to go along with this shift. I don't have one. The narrative thread is thin, or else it's presented in anecdotes, disjointed scenes that don't connect so much as stack up. I can say that I tried leaving the church. Gave it a go. I'm a failed ex-Christian, but I have sympathy for the successful ones.

This is not the post about the church I've been thinking about writing. I hope I get to that soon.

But on this Pentecost, I'm really thinking about this: I do love the church and all the great things it accomplishes---disaster relief, building hospitals, things like that. And I hate the church when it becomes a bloodless institution bent on preserving itself while letting bloody people suffer. I love the church and all the ways that it lifts up the lowly and offers possibilities to traditionally trampled people and I'm appalled when I see it tramples those people still.

But what are you going to do? The church can only be made up of the people available in any society. As much as we might have flashes of transcending and unwinding the sinful systems of racism, sexism, homophobia, and self-preservation at the expense of others---we'll be made up of people who are caught of in those systems, people who are, to varying degrees of consciousness and will, racist, sexist, homophobic and out for no one but themselves.

People like me. And, I suspect, like you.

So ultimately, I stay because as a gathered people, there's hope (often thwarted but never defeated) that we might sometimes step outside those sinful systems and be---however briefly---better.

We might hear the call to turn around, change our hearts and minds, and look. The Reign of God is at hand. Sometimes the church still reminds us of this. Sometimes the church is this.

As you might suspect, I'm in a period when I'm not entirely enamored of the church. The temptation is to walk away. I'm not doing that. Instead I'm praying with the ancient Hebrews and the early church, and the generations since:

Come Holy Spirit! Renew the face of the earth!

Rapture Thoughts

2011-05-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

This whole rapture business has been interesting, especially with the aid of social media. Facebook gave me multiple opportunities to laugh and ponder.

Let's divide this up a bit.

The Laughter, the Silliness, the Scorn

It's hard to not enjoy an event that gives us the phrase "rapture prank."

I enjoyed the idea of putting out empty clothing, laid out to look like the former occupant had evaporated (presumably to meet Jesus in the sky in the altogether). I much further enjoyed the idea of putting dry ice in the clothes so they appeared to be smoking.

I sort of dared someone to run a car into a lamppost and leave it running, empty. Found no takers.

I hadn't really read up on the predictions and I asked innocently what time zone were we supposed to be watching for the passing of 6:00 p.m. I was told that it was supposed to happen as each time zone turned 6:00 p.m. The brought to mind an image of Jesus standing stationary somewhere in the sky with a big Hoover, sucking people up as the world turned below him.

Obviously, it was hard for many of us to take this rapture business seriously.

Of course, some people got ugly about it, and maybe I crossed that line a time or two. It's easy to mock, to heap scorn on a belief that we don't share. That it's a grossly misguided belief is beside the point. Some people pointed to the prophets who sometimes made some disparaging remarks towards people who weren't quite clear on the concept of God's expectations. It might be said even Jesus wasn't too verbally gentle with the Pharisees. To me there's a qualitative difference between putting out empty suits of clothes and calling another human being rather mean-spirited names, but then maybe that's because I find one funny and the other less so. Perhaps to the person who held the belief in a rapture, we all look the same.

Which brings me to another reflection.

Sometimes, We Expect the Wrong Thing

Everyone who has had any faith in God has been disappointed. Maybe that's too broad a blanket statement, but I think it's pretty close to the truth.

I'm including here the childish faith I had when, as a kid, I really really wanted to fly. Well, I wanted to be a superhero, but I really wanted to fly. I wanted to believe that if I asked with a sincere heart and truly believed, with no hint of doubting, that God would let me fly. I would go out into our pasture (out of sight from the house) and I would run, expecting that the ground would fall away from my feet. I knew God could make me fly, I promised I would use the ability for good, and and and . . . and I'm really glad I didn't believe enough to go try jumping off the barn.

But I also have to include all the prayers for healing that end in funerals, all the prayers for conception that end in miscarriage or stillbirth, all the trust that God will provide even as you're losing your house because you can't find a job.

Somewhere in this range fall the people who really believed they'd figured out the Second Coming. They really believed. They quit jobs, they sold off possessions and used the money to warn unbelievers. They believed with a belief that I've never really had. They jumped off the barn while I just ran around the pasture.

And there's a part of me that aches for them in their disappointment. There's part of me that even understands the people who are saying "we miscalculated" or who say "no, the rapture happened and now the world is going to shatter in October and we've been left behind to suffer these last days." I doubt I'd have much patience in their presence, but at a distance, I can ache for their disappointment.

Because we've all believed things, wished for things that were simply the wrong thing to wish for. Some people lose faith, stop believing altogether. Some of us would like to except for the pieces of the miraculous that remain, bearing witness in the face of the disappointment. It's a hard thing to let go of something we believed in with our whole heart.

I contend that God is good and, sometimes, in letting go, our hands open up to receive something better. Not always, but sometimes.

Crazy Stories

John Dornheim, a pastor friend, posted on Facebook yesterday (in response to a thread I started about Harold Camping) the following response:

"Stepping outside of the story, I am wondering about the fact that I routinely stand in front of a purportedly like minded people and remind them of an incredible story, one of which they are well familiar, and expect them to respond in a particular manner which includes the financial support of the organization as well as spending significant portions of their time "telling" others. Why do people really respond to a really crazy person like Harold and a moderately crazy person like myself gets a 'are you effing nuts-you want me to do what?' stare?

"I mean, is the story I tell more or less credible than his?"

(Another pastor friend immediately "liked" this.)

This struck me as not only true, but a bit of a poignant cry from the mainstream of Christianity.

The thing is, the story of Jesus is an amazing story, or even more precisely, the stories Jesus told are amazing stories. Sure, he had a moment or two of apocalyptic speech, but for the most part, he told these really unbelievable stories about the poor being blessed, the peacemakers being children of God, the naked being clothed, the hungry being fed. He insisted that the Reign of God was right here, at hand.

Think about the context of this insisting. A brutal Empire ruled with an iron fist (however covered in velvet is might be at times). There were all kinds of ways that the world was scary---how many of us would not be terrified in a world lit only with fire? How many of us wouldn't cry out for God's help in a world where a sound in the darkness might be a wild beast or a thief? In a world where people routinely made deals with God in the face of natural disaster and meteorological phenomenon (our responses to flooding rivers and endless tornadoes are tempered some, it seems to me, by a better understanding of the science behind them), Jesus---and the prophets before him---had the temerity to speak of God in terms of loving kindness, of gentleness, in terms of a father's or a mother's care.

And some people believed him, as I imagine some people believe John (and the pastor who "liked" his post).

But too many people are fascinated by wrath. Too many people are ready to see God in the storm than in the stillness.

And there you have the rapture folk. They can't quite believe the more incredible story of being blessed by mourning, by being naked, by making peace, by being hungry for righteousness. There's too much evidence for them that God is wrathful and they miss the truly prophetic notion that, in the words of another friend, we are awesome and we are loved---loved by a God of mercy, grace, kindness. All of us, not just select few who are going to get Hoovered into the sky.

(I don't know if I really need to, but I pause to point out that this whole rapture business is a rather late addition to Christian thought and, to be blunt, comes from a group of barely literate, superstitious folk in the 19th century. Superstitious folk like the wrath, it seems. And since then, lots of people have made a lot of money off this notion. I also pause to admit---going back to the second section above---that I was a teenaged Hal Lindsey fan.)

Love is a hard sell. It doesn't make for great special effects in the movie adaptation.

And it is apparently much harder to believe in than wrath.

But people---my friend John isn't effing nuts.

Turn around. The Reign of God is at hand. Believe the Good News.

Chance Operations and Improvisation

2011-05-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

The way Merce Cunningham and John Cage worked together would have, once upon a time, terrified me. Cunningham would make his movement, Cage would make his sound, and then put it together for the first time on opening night, before a live, paying audience. Cage and Cunningham said dance and music were two separate things that happened to be occurring at the same time.

I had to do this recently with a few young people at my congregation. For Easter Vigil, for the assigned Isaiah reading, I turned the reading into something of a choral reading for three willing kids, ages 13 and under. I asked a high school student who is studying dance to choreograph something to go with the reading. They four were in the same room at the same time only briefly. I worked with the readers, I worked with the dancer to help her set her choreography. They never had so much as a run through together before the Vigil.

It's not how I prefer to work and maybe the kids were a little nervous about it, too. Somehow, it worked, and it worked amazingly well. I could not have predicted how well it would have worked. It was beautiful in ways I never expected.

Cunningham and Cage spoke of "chance operations" (which really means something much bigger and broader than what I describe here, but I'll leave it here for now). I prefer to rehearse all elements of something, rehearse it all together, make sure it's all together where I want it to be, leaving very little to chance. But I can't deny that Cunningham and Cage's way of working works.

+ + +

This morning (Sunday), during the offering, I noticed some slight misstep in rhythm. I guess we were short an usher or something and I think one usher enlisted his granddaughter, who was an acolyte, to help him with the offering. It's not how it's supposed to go, but as I watched it, the grandfather smiling and making a quick step to get someone who was missed, I thought, "It works. It's improvised and not according to guidelines, but it works and there are smiles and we remain church even when an acolyte plays usher."

In grad school, one of my classmates, Kelly, had been in an improvisation performance group. She gave our cohort a workshop in improvisation. As a theater major, I had always been terrified of improvisations and just accepted that I was bad at it. Well, I'm still not great at it, but for the first time, Kelly gave me a framework for at least understanding how improvisation works. The one big piece she gave me that I'd never heard before was that improvisation wasn't about being clever and especially quick on your feet (although that no doubt helps), but it was about approaching your cast mate with the attitude of "yes, and." Instead of derailing each other with new and weirder pieces, a good improvisation practitioner goes along with each other, never contradicts, never says "no" to the direction they're heading, but always says, "yes, and." (It can get plenty weird with that.)

I think that happened this morning. The acolyte said, "yes, and" to her grandfather and if it wasn't what was planned, we remained the church.

+ + +

Sometimes, things that hit me as a big lesson look dumb on the screen. Yes, of course, the church goes on and won't be brought down because an acolyte plays usher one Sunday. What I'm getting at, is that these little thing remind me of larger things. It reminded me of Kelly and it reminded me of "yes, and."

Life is full of unexpected . . . things. Loss of jobs, loss of health, loss of loved ones. New jobs, healing, new loved ones also come unexpected. Each, in their own way, can traumatize, paralyze, make you shift gears because you can't take this curve at that speed.

But, as I like to say, we can't control everything. Or much of anything, really.

So we work on our movement and have to hope someone else's sound will work with it. We can make our plans (and to be clear---sometimes a well-placed "no" is needed before the "yes, and" but that's another blog post), but in the moment we sometimes have to grab some help or make a quick step or two.

Maybe it won't always work, but sometimes something amazingly beautiful happens and we move forward into Eucharist despite it all.

When in Doubt

2011-04-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I love about being a liturgical Christian is that the liturgical year never lets you pretend it's all glory and angels and sparkly shiny goodness. (This may, indeed, be why some people choose NOT to be a liturgical Christian!) Right after Christmas, we have the feasts of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and the slaughter of the children we remember as the Holy Innocents.

Easter is a little easier on us, but every year, the second Sunday of Easter gives us John 20:19-31 as the Gospel text. Without you having to surf over to oremus.org, I'll tell you: this is the text of Thomas not accepting anyone's word for the resurrection. Thomas has to see, in fact touch for himself.

We're reminded this following Jesus thing is a little hard to accept, even for those who walked all over Palestine with him. No wonder this generation is having some trouble with believing.

But I'm not really interested in Thomas tonight. I'm just reminded of him and his place in our liturgical year because the last few days have had dear friends and complete strangers express doubt, or maybe just unbelief. I've heard a an anguished confession of finding no comfort in the faith that once comforted. I've seen faith disregarded as "belief in an invisible overlord."

I suppose Flannery O'Connor was on to something when she remarked in a letter, "It is much harder to believe than not to believe." But when I've heard this quoted as a sort of bravado, a sort of "look at me, I'm doing more difficult thing!" brag, I've always felt it was a shallow thing to say in the face of someone expressing unbelief. (Flannery didn't mean it in that way, I don't think. Click the link to see her slightly larger context.)

So what do I have to say about doubt and unbelief? Maybe more than I do about faith, actually. More than could possibly fit in a blog post.

But here's a couple of things I'll acknowledge tonight.

I doubt many things. Even as I find myself wrapped up in a life of faith, I question much of it. (And I do not believe my questions are "of the devil" as one questioning friend has been told by her church circles.)

In fact, there was an incident in 2000, an incident that I've tried writing about and still haven't found the right way to talk about it, that caused the bottom of all my beliefs and theologies to fall away. I tried to walk away from the church for a bit (and failed miserably). In the years since, I've found myself rebuilding a faith, a theology even, that is far from systematic and more than a little messy, but it is real and full of surprises. It is a faith that is comfortable enough with lost faith for a friend to actually tell me she has lost her faith. It is a faith that lets us sit with that without having to convince anyone that one or the other is right or wrong or going to hell or going to heaven. It is a faith that loves in the face of faithlessness. It is a faith that has found a love that loves through the faithlessness.

Here's the thing I know for sure, for absolutely certain, that I don't believe. I don't believe in the magical faith, the superstitious faith. This is the faith of the "if you just believe and pray the right way" folks. Listen, "praying the right way" is just another way of saying you have to know the incantation. I don't believe that living a moral life and making precise statements of faith will protect you from harm. I don't believe faith is about protection. I overheard a woman on her cell phone one day telling someone "you got to read your Bible day and night so God will give you a house." I'd sooner expect to win the lottery without buying a ticket. If my friend has lost this kind of faith, good riddance. It's the faith in an "invisible overlord" and it'll just make you crazy. (See much religious programming on tv.)

I guess I've been at this faith thing so long that I've come to expect the questions, the doubts, the periodic bouts of unbelief. I'm not alarmed by them. I think it was Frederick Buechner (and someone correct me if I remember wrong) that said "Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but a component of it." Yes. Absolutely. My faith has little meaning outside the context of my doubts. I embrace this. I don't know what comfort this is for someone going through a crisis of faith. Maybe it's not meant to comfort.

But who knows . . . maybe Thomas knew this, too. Maybe Thomas had lived with Jesus and his miracles enough to know that he was safe questioning and doubting. Perhaps it is more blessed to believe without seeing or touching, but to see and touch is still a blessing.

One thing more: My seeing and touching may be more metaphorical than what is recorded in the Gospel of John, but I have seen and I have touched and, perhaps when I least believe, maybe I will again.

Being metaphorical will not lessen the impact. Without a doubt, the response will still be an awestruck, "My Lord and my God!"

Slippery (call it an impressionist response)

2011-04-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus thought he was just another fellow traveler.

And I thought . . .

I don't know what to think.

What have you done with my lord? Don't you know what has been happening in Jerusalem?

Resurrection is a little slippery. You think you know death and then life surprises you. The very one you mourn is standing right there, calling your name or handing you a piece of bread.

He calls us out of our grief and distress, feeds us.

But he won't be held.

(Can I at least touch?)

It's baffling. And true. Love is not contained by a grave or by our grasp.

But we recognize Love when Love calls our names, when Love let's us have a taste of bread.

It's tempting to say, "and then he's gone again."

But that's not true. We just can't hold him.

Thomas has to touch the wounds. Blessed are you if you don't and still believe.

Stay with us, for it is evening.

Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener.

I thought . . .

Alleluia.

Alleluia.

Alleluia.

Nothing Left

2011-04-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

What do you say about death, however noble, however ignoble? The end is the same. Dead.

The heart stops and will melt away. The brain stops and will melt away. Everything on our bones stops and melts away.

It's ugly. It's no prettier for kings and billionaires than it is for the pauper and beggar.

After a time, there is nothing left. No beauty to claim recognition, no sinew to claim strength.

Nothing is left but the bones, just calcium deposits of a certain shape.

Nothing left but bones.

Unless you count that last rattling breath that left the lungs.

Maybe the breath is left, too.

"Mortal, can these bones live?"

I answered, "O Lord God, you know."

A Brief Thought on Sin

2011-04-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

Holy week creates such a great opportunity to beat up on ourselves. Maybe I've been doing it this week here. "We're rotten, stinking, excuses of animated carbon and look what we did to the Lord of All Creation."

Well, I suppose there is that.

But that's not exactly what I'm after in these posts.

If you have not begun to think of sin as something larger than your personal transgressions . . . well, consider this a Holy Week invitation to start.

We are born into sin. This means more than we are born into a sinful state, a congenital disorder that keeps us from doing good (although there is that). We are born into systems that coddle us in that disorder, that even rewards our inability to do good.

For a personal, easy target, there's no way that I can deny that I've been the recipient of some good things due to white privilege. At the very least, I've never had the experiences I've seen some black friends and coworkers endure (like the time a woman told a black cashier she'd prefer to wait for the next [white] cashier). Or male privilege. There are all sorts of ways I move in the world because I'm not female. For example, no one has ever felt the need to escort me to the church parking lot after a night meeting, although we do it for women all the time. I have a freedom of movement in our society simply because of the chromosomes in my cells.

These, among other things, are simply sinful systems and I'm rewarded repeatedly for being born into on the fortunate side of a dividing line. (Of course, there are other lines where I fell on the unfortunate side, but that's not the point today.)

I can work with the system or against it. That's really what a lot of our choices come down to, when we're conscious of it. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly conscious enough all the time---my privileges are simply the way my world works (and where I lack privilege---same thing, only I tend to be more grumpy about it).

Power is its own system and I'm despair of it ever having a sinless component. Power demands the system stay in place, stay in power, be self-regenerating.

And when someone bucks the system, it usually does not go well for them. The 20th Century alone gave us several such system-bucking martyrs. The ones that come to mind just this moment are Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Mohandas Gandhi. They woke up enough to realize that they were part of a system and they had the courage to say they wanted out of it. No, more than that, they said the system had to change.

I think that's where Jesus ended up. He lacked the good sense to make allies. He made enemies of the Romans, he made enemies of his own people, who were oppressed by the Romans. What alliances he made were with people who couldn't stand up to either power.

So he was knocked down. Or nailed up, if you prefer.

Yes, Jesus died for our sins, especially if you read "for" as "because of." Jesus died as a scapegoat to a powerful world that didn't do well with dissent. Jesus died because too many of us are unwilling to die with him, to buck the system with him.

We can ponder our individual sins---this is good to do---but even more this Holy Week, I invite you to ponder the power systems in which you participate, in which you benefit, the sinful networks that actually reward you for not bucking the system.

This is not to beat ourselves up over our failures---this is to find where we can change the world.

Let's Kill Him

2011-04-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

Triumphant, victorious,
our One True King comes to us
Humble riding on a donkey
Shout aloud, loving cups
Behold! A king comes to us
...Humble, riding on a donkey
The Savior, scattering the money
Coming, the pushing and the shoving

Let's kill Him

When I first heard this lyric sung by Sarah Masen on her 2007 ep, A History of Light and Shadow, I laughed out loud. If you don't know this singer/songwriter (and you should), you may not know she sometimes sings a thin, almost girlish voice, airy and innocent. The voice helped add to my laughter. It was a laugh of surprise as much of humor. This sweet voice recounting the Messiah's triumphant entry into Jerusualm and then simply deciding, "let's kill him."

Of course, it's a sad thing, too. Someone comes preaching good news to the poor and release to the captives, and we shout out "Hosanna!" because we want our bit of salvation, too. Then, we see who he means. He means not only (or necessarily!) us, but also those people over there. You know the ones. Those people.

And when you get right down to it, isn't he kind of sickening? Putting on this show of humility, riding a donkey, acting all lowly? C'mon, you're our King. This is amusing and we'll praise you for it, but now, let's get down to business. When are you going to overthrow our oppressors? When do we get to see them get theirs?

What? We don't? You're not gonna? This royally pisses me off.

Let's kill him.

It's funny because it's true. That's how we are.

It's sad for the same reason.

Crying Out

2011-04-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Hosanna! Save us!

We so need saving.

Today we celebrate Palm Sunday and remember Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem. The Pharisees didn't like all the shouting. Jesus told them that if the people were quiet, the stones would have to shout.

So it is good to cry out "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" (It is unsettling when the stones start shouting.) It is even better to mean it, to trust in the salvation we call for, even if the salvation that comes looks nothing like what we expected or wanted.

Better still is being able to continue the cry all the way to the cross. So many of us will not. So many of us will fall away, afraid, disappointed, disillusioned, wanting something other than a king on a cross.

Still, for today, we cry out, we praise, we wave the branches, we proclaim the triumph of the Messiah.

This is good to do.

Eugene O'Neill

2011-04-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

I'm re-reading a play by Eugene O'Neill, which I first read over a decade ago. It's called Lazarus Laughed. I remembered thinking it was a strange play and it is. This post is not about that play. (There is a high likelihood of one at a later date.)

This blog post is about the introduction to the book wherein I found the play. The book is Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill. I picked it up in a used bookstore somewhere (in Nebraska, I think), and appears to have been published around 1932, so well before O'Neill died (in 1953), well before he wrote the posthumously produced (and perhaps most personal and successful of his plays) Long Day's Journey Into Night. So this is O'Neill mid-career-ish.

The introduction is by Joseph Wood Krutch, whose name I did not recognize. He was apparently in personal contact with O'Neill and this piece caught my eye:

" . . . I find my mind going constantly back to a remark which he once let fall in conversation. 'Most modern plays,' he said, 'are concerned with the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am interested only in the relationship between man and God.'"

Krutch then goes on to make a case for why this was true of O'Neill's body of work to that point. Which is also not the subject of this blog post.

The idea that a body of creative work---in this case, dramatic literature---is about the relationship between humanity and God has me thinking. In my own creative work (which, of course, will never been mentioned anywhere else with the same breath as Eugene O'Neill anywhere else but here), I've acknowledged that "God stuff" was at it's center, almost always, pretty explicitly so. And I've been wondering if that work---and the work I'm most attracted too---is also about the relationship between humanity and God.

And I'm not sure I can say that. I mean, I'm absolutely drawn to work that is explicitly full of God-stuff. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead comes immediately to mind. But I'm not sure it's the relationship between humanity and God that is what attracts me in that case. Or in my work.

If I had to state what my interest in God stuff is, I would say---once you're in relationship with God, what are you gonna do? Which, I guess, can get to be about relationships between people, with God stuff layered onto those interpersonal relationships.

I have a draft of a novella. I'm going through it, making corrections, adjustments---your basic edits. I've been saying that it's about different ways we try to be faithful---not just to God but to each other. There are judgments and promises made between people because they have a relationship with God. I'm interested in how we treat each other, often in the name of remaining faithful to God.

Eugene O'Neill is going to be looking over my shoulder as I continue to work on this novella, or at least the mid-career O'Neill is. Krutch goes on to quote a letter by O'Neill to another person:

"The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it---the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one . . . to comfort its fears of death with. . . . It seems to me that anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around the surface of things and has no more real status than a parlor entertainer."

I'll just let that sit there. I have nothing more to say. Tonight.

The Cactus of Encouragment, Addendum

2011-03-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

I thought I should show the beauty that came. I include the photo with my hand to give scale of how small the pot is. That's a lot of flowers for a little pot. At least, I think so. I've never seen more than two blooms in a season on these cacti.

No deeper theological reflection than such beauty and the part it plays in this abundant life.

(Or, to quote Image Journal: Beauty Will Save the World.)

Disaster and Connection

2011-03-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

I am not one to stay connected at all times. I have a cell phone but I seldom use it. I don't have text. I've often watched people walking around looking at a gadget in their hands or talking to someone we can't see via a gadget in their ear, and I think, never have we had so many ways to stay in touch and yet remain so disconnected to our immediate surroundings.

But I do love the internet. I love Facebook and the way it has created connections for me, both with people I used to know and with people I have never met. In the '90s, I loved listservs and developed a number of friendships via them. To this day (and often on Facebook!), I remain in touch with people I "met" via listservs devoted to Joni Mitchell fans, to Mark Heard fans, and to the joys and struggles of being gay and Christian.

One such person is Darren. We "met" first, I believe, on a gay Christian listserv. Then I noticed his name pop up on a listserv devoted to singer/songwriter Sam Phillips. I emailed him off-list to point out the connection. We developed a correspondence off-list. When I moved to Chicago in 2001, he and his partner, Atsushi, visited me for a few days.

Eventually, our correspondence lessened and we drifted. It happens. I never had anything but kind and warm thoughts of Darren and Atsushi and was happy to reconnect via Facebook some months ago.

Darren and Atsushi live in Tokyo. Despite being badly shaken and everything in his apartment "strewn all over the place," Darren has been able to post to Facebook that he is okay, that they've been in touch with Atsushi's mother (who had been out and stranded for hours before making her way home), and are doing well for living so near an enormous earthquake.

Thanks to the internet, the Japan earthquake is more personal than other such disasters. I have a face and a name to place in the middle of the rubble.

I almost always respond to these sorts of natural disasters through the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Disaster Response, which has a great reputation for getting relief to where it's needed.

This time, more than Haiti, even more than New Orleans, I feel something more personal at stake. Darren is in Tokyo. Someone in the disaster has a name I can call, and it belongs to someone I've met, hugged hello and goodbye.

Of course, Christian love demands that I care for the people I don't know in Haiti as much as I do for Darren. We know this and we respond as we can to this demand. I don't mean to say that this tsunami and earthquake are in any way worse than Hurricane Katrina.

I'm merely reflecting on how some email listserv postings from over a decade ago are affecting me today. The ripples in this web of connection.

I don't have anything much more profound to say about it. Except that I will pray for Japan and I will pray for Darren and Atsushi, for those I do not know and for those I have called friend.

I suppose that's how it always is.

Taking Up a Cross

2011-03-10T20:21:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I was at a meeting with an opening devotion that included the question of taking up our own cross and following Jesus. (Some variation of the saying is in all three of the synoptic gospels and I admit I don't recall which one was used for the devotion.)

As is often the case with this text, the conversation circled around what "taking up the cross" isn't more than what it is. A bad day on the job is not "taking up the cross." Having to care for a sick relative is not "taking up the cross." Living next door to bad neighbors is not "taking up the cross."

But we're not ever really sure what "taking up the cross" is. I sat silent in the conversation, listening, hoping for once I'd get some insight to what it is. The closest we ever come is that it has something to do with dying to ourselves and discipleship.

Whatever those are.

I recently found a place in my journal from 1985 where I boldly wrote that I had "heard the call of Jesus." I was a terribly pious 22 year old and I cringed at the language I used to write about this calling. At the same time, I read it and realized, "dang, that's what's still nudging at me."

The whys of having heretofore not fulfilled that call are many. After a while it looked frivolous. It was even a little embarrassing to say out loud (and I'm not typing it tonight!). And then I realized I was gay and I couldn't see how a gay man could fulfill this sort of calling in a world (and I'll say it---a church) that doesn't very much want gay men. And, really, I don't know that I ever really got much more than a pat on my head if I dared talk about it. No one is really asking for this vocation to be filled and people are often really quick to offer alternative routes.

And I'm a pleaser. Well, there are people who might argue that point, but I am more often than not willing to say yes to things that I know I won't like doing, won't do well, and will resent doing later simply because in the moment I want someone to like me.

So I've started a little lenten exercise (which is sort of a discipline, I guess) wherein I'm spending just a few minutes brainstorming in a notebook about how this calling might take shape.

I need to get over my embarrassment about it, get over pleasing all the people who would have me do any number of other things, and get on with this thing that has popped up over the last 25+ years and I keep avoiding.

Is this dying to myself? Is this taking up a cross and following Jesus? How will I know if it is? Or isn't? (I'm dubious about "success" or "failure" as being a measurement of vocational fulfillment.)

Really, needing those answers are also a part of "self" that needs to die. Maybe.

Maybe the point of carrying your own cross to your own execution isn't about success, failure, pleasing, or fulfilling a need.

The point is to follow.

It's a little scary. But baby steps are being made toward Golgotha. Jesus has gotten a little ahead of me. I'm hoping he'll slow down a bit and let me catch up.

Ash and Fast

2011-03-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 58.6:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Today, people around the world are giving up things for forty days (not counting Sundays, of course). It's the lenten fast, when I've heard people promising to give up everything from chocolate to porn.

It's not a tradition I grew up with. In my rural, Texas upbringing, Roman Catholics did things like receive ash and give up things for lent. We were Lutheran.

I picked up the habit in college, I guess, or came to understand it was a tradition with broader observance than I had been lead to believe. And for a time I took on things, according to a fashion of the moment. I took on extra reading, or extra writing, or other such tasks that might serve me spiritually.

Centuries of all this giving up and taking on . . . and here we are in a time with such gaps between the super-wealthy and the crushed-by-poverty. The words of Isaiah haunt us as we live in this disparity.

Poor people are in prison on nothing more than hearsay and rumors, mostly for lack of adequate counsel.

Megalomaniacal antics of "stars" occupy us more than the dying hungry.

Political uprising is applauded or decried depending upon the profits to be made.

It's all so overwhelming. How do we fast from such a culture?

Yet, this, I believe, is what Isaiah is calling us to. A fast from the culture of prisons for those too poor to defend themselves adequately. A fast from a culture that turns its collective head toward every outrageous comment and flashy explosion, literal and metaphorical. A fast from a culture that follows the flow of money, right down to the polluted waters of political abuse and bloody profit.

How do we fast from the way we move in the world? How do we give up our worldview and understanding of our place in it?

I honestly haven't a clue.

Still.

Let us choose this fast. A fast from the bonds of injustice. A fast from oppression. A fast from a yoke too heavy to bear.

As we learn to do without injustice and oppression, perhaps we will learn what it is to be in the world but not of it.

The Cactus of Encouragement

2011-03-07T20:49:00.000-08:00

I took the above photo a little over a week ago. It is a small cactus I have on my balcony. My palm can cover the entire group of prickly orbs. On them you can see several buds. None of them have bloomed, yet, but I think a couple more have appeared since I took this picture. Today, I counted 16 in all. I have had this cactus for about 5 years now. I've never seen more than 3 buds on it in a season.

I suspect that the reason this little pot of cacti is so full of buds is that I left it outside for a portion of the cold weather we had here in Houston. I brought it in when the temps got into the 20s, but before that, the cacti experienced some low 30s, maybe even a little nip of freezing temps. I've noticed all around Houston that other plants are starting to put on buds and it looks like it might be a more colorful than usual spring around here.

The stress of the cold weather makes the plants bloom a little extra.

I've mentioned here more than once that 2010 was a hard year for me. Now in the third month of 2011, I'm still a bit stressed. At present, I have only part-time, temporary work, which will run out at the end of May. So I'm not feeling so secure these days. Luckily, I've never counted security to be a god worth trusting anyway, so it could be worse. Still there is real stress.

So I check this cactus everyday, to see if it's blooming. It's not, but the buds continue to swell. It will bloom.

I find this encouraging.

So I give thanks to the God of prickly, blooming things, that I have them as a sign and a reminder: Something beautiful is coming.

(This is always true, but doggone it if I don't need the reminder!)

Gratitude is . . .

2011-02-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

. . . a life lived aware of the gifts.

. . . receiving the gifts with "thank you."

. . . taking time to ponder the gifts and the grace it implies.

. . . taking time to use the gifts with an eye toward good stewardship.

. . . not wasting the time the gifts afford.

. . . hard to express.

On Bullying

2011-02-24T20:53:00.001-08:00

[note: this is something I wrote a few months ago, when all this was in the news. It was intended for a specific audience and, for whatever reason, was never used. I ran across it and I decided that it was still worth sharing somewhere.]

I imagine many of you have seen recent news stories on teenagers committing suicide after having been bullied by schoolmates, one in nearby Spring. This has been weighing on my mind quite a lot. The current focus of the stories have been teens who are gay or are perceived to be gay (which makes it especially personal for me), but everyone knows there are a number of reasons bullies choose their targets. Weight, academic achievement, religion, economic status, fashion choices . . . these are just the ones that come to mind at the moment.

As a nerdy, fat, goody-two-shoes, sissy boy growing up rural Texas, you might assume I was a target of some bullying. The potential was certainly there, but when I read of what some kids are enduring (or not) these days, I cannot say I was seriously bullied. What I endured might be better categorized as being "picked on" now and then, but I was never the victim of physical violence and the verbal abuse was comparatively mild. No one ever told me I should go hang myself.

When I think back on why getting picked on never escalated to anything more serious, I can come up with only one answer: the adults in my life. The teachers at school, the adults at church, my parents and extended family—they didn't put up with the meanness that lies behind bullying. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I do not recall anyone really being bullied in my schools as I grew up. There were popular kids and unpopular kids, but not blatant abuse. It was a wonderfully safe place to grow up.

What breaks my heart most of all about the recent suicides is that these teenagers felt as if there were absolutely no adults they could turn to for protection. This is inconceivable to me. Had things gotten out of hand for me, there were any number of adults around I could have turned to for help. How do these teens not feel the same?

I have no children and only limited interaction with children. Since these recent news stories, however, I find myself paying more attention to the few kids around me, whether at church or in the store where I work or on the bus. I find myself listening to their language, how they treat one another as well as how they're treated. Kids should feel like there are adults around them who care and will protect them. If I ever hear something that is outright threatening, I pray that I have the courage to say something and the wisdom to say the right thing.

I ask that you, too, pay attention to the children and teens around you and step in if things are getting out of hand.

There is a YouTube video series from adults who were bullied as kids, telling kids that "It Gets Better." These are messages of hope and I applaud them. I also believe that kids shouldn't have to wait for it to get better. My encouragement for all adults is that we make it better. If a nerdy, fat, goody-two-shoes, sissy boy growing up in rural Texas can have a safe childhood thanks to the adults around him, surely every child can have one, too. The key to that sentence, however, is "the adults around." Let's be the adults around.

in/of/it

2011-02-17T22:08:00.000-08:00

This world.

Culture. Language. Stories.

We create it, and it in turn creates us.

Someone took the time to record the story of the man under the Bodhi tree.

Another man retreated to a cave near Mecca to await revelation, and the story ended up in a book.

Despite countless men dying cruelly on the Roman cross, the story of one such death is recorded in four well-distributed accounts.

And these stories have shaped cultures, changed lives, influenced decisions, created peoples.

A few weeks ago, I asked if it weren't time to start telling new stories. I believe it is, even as we continue to reckon with these old stories.

Because the stories we receive and the stories we tell shape the world around us, shape us. I grew up hearing stories of Jesus and it has shaped me, for good and ill, out of obedience and rebellion, and I do not know who I would be if I had grown up hearing stories of Muhammad or Siddhartha. The way the stories of Jesus were told to me, the language in which they were told, the context within which I heard them---all of these have unique impact on me. Hearing Lutheran Sunday school lessons in central Texas via the English language is undoubtedly different from hear the stories in Coptic, in an Egyptian desert. In either place, the community around me would have also been shaped by the stories as well, shaped by the storytelling style (colorful leaflets or oral tradtion?), language, human history.

These things are on my mind, cross my mind regularly. American Christianity lives in a tension of trying to engage the larger, commercial, capitalist culture and trying to set itself apart from it. Immersion or separation. Sometimes it's both. We immerse ourselves in the capitalist culture by setting up Christian shops and we separate ourselves from the mass media culture by setting up Christian shops. It's all a bit of a mess, and it's hard to tell where we really are in this world.

St. Paul would have us know that we are in the world but not of it. We are bound by, bound in the culture within which we find ourselves. It's as simple as trying to have a conversation with a teenager without knowing who Justin Bieber is or missing a reference because you don't recognize the name of a Super Bowl quarterback. To engage the world(s) that knows these things, we have to know something of them, too. We are in the world, a world we create with these cultural touchstones, and to engage that culture we need a passing knowledge of them.

But we need more imagination. I recently read this blog post and generally agree with what its author is saying, but I think there is one more step to it. The way the author writes about our failure of imagination is still a reaction to the culture. It's not leading the culture.

How do we lead the culture with our stories? How do we engage the world we're in without becoming of it?

I write stories and those stories are very much shaped by having grown up hearing stories about Jesus. Still, I acknowledge I'm writing in a tradition that is very much a part of the cultural tradition I've received---the literary short story. Is working within that tradition capitulating to the culture being of that world instead of merely in it? If I write a play (and that's distinct possibility), how do I exercise an imagination that it not of this world, but can still engage it?

Are these even important questions?

Stories explain the world and shape it at the same time. I think what I'm circling in on here is that I believe art-making can be a means for engaging the world, the larger culture, but if we are too quick to co-opt the world (as in, say, sales goals), will we be recognizable as being anything else but part of that culture?

I'm not sure I'm quite getting at what I'm trying to say.

So I'll close, echoing how I started.

We create culture, art, stories. The culture, art, and stories in turn create us.

Is it possible to get ahead of that cycle so that what we create creates a new creation?

Good and Evil and What to Do

2011-01-29T07:29:00.000-08:00

A "conversation" on Facebook has me pondering on the unsolveable problem of evil. Disease, war, famine, natural disaster . . .

It's a concern of comfort for someone who is experiencing these things. There are bits and pieces in the Bible that suggest (okay, say outright) that God creates good and evil, God brings blessing and curse. And there are places that suggest that evil comes from somewhere else.

When someone is hurting, it's almost impossible to have this conversation. Feeling like God is against you is not when you want to hear platitudes about God's love and care. If this is care, who needs curse?

My sole contribution to this conversation was:

"There is the theory that the Hebrew scriptures are the history of Israel's wrestling with God, that the encounter at the Jabbok is paradigmatic for reading all of the Hebrew scriptures. (I believe it was a Jewish scholar's writing where I r...ead this.) I'm not sure I can elucidate further on that. I think it helps to read with an eye towards mythological or analogical or something other than literal storytelling.

"What does your experience tell you? Does God bring you your pain? Does God bring you the disease that takes loved ones, the violence that divides families, the natural disasters that devastate the good and evil alike?

"Luther has us teach our children:
'The Sixth Petition
'And lead us not into temptation.
'What does this mean? God tempts no one. We pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice. Although we are attacked by these things, we pray that we may finally overcome them and win the victory.

'The Seventh Petition
'But deliver us from evil. What does this mean? We pray in this petition, in summary, that our Father in heaven would rescue us from every evil of body and soul, possessions and reputation, and finally, when our last hour comes, give us a blessed end, and graciously take us from this valley of sorrow to Himself in heaven.'

"In both cases, of scripture and catechism, I'm reminded of a dying's friend's word: "Which God will you believe in? The one you read about in books, or the one who comes knocking at your door?" He said this as he explained the thing God healed most in him as he was dying from his disease was his distrust of God, his suspicion that God hated him and cursed him with the disease. The God that came knocking on his door told him about Love. And compassion. Suffering with. "

Like all answers, it is inadequate. I don't disagree with anything I've said, but in a moment of suffering, I know it's inadequate.

So where does that leave us? I'm not entirely sure. But when I went to bed last night, this conversation was on my mind. As I was turning out lights and thinking about suffering, I was reminded of light shining in darkness. I was thinking about lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. In the face of unanswerable questions of suffering, perhaps the only answer is care, compassion, kindness. Not words spoken, but actions done. Striking a match rather than speaking a curse.

I woke up this morning with this quote on my mind. I'll let Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have the final word here:

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. "

Telling New Stories

2011-01-25T22:10:00.000-08:00

Political rhetoric escalates and then when a public official is shot . . . the political rhetoric escalates placing blame. I played my part in that until I realized I was just being another ideologue, defending the indefensible but preferred (and not even fully liked) political party.

We need to learn to tell new stories.

Somebody at at a nonprofit with the word "family" in it (so you know you can't be against them because you can't be against "family") railed about how a purple heart was given to a soldier because he had risked his life to save a comrade, not because he had bravely gone out and killed a bunch of the enemy. The "family" man said giving the medal to the saving soldier "feminized" the medal, that we were "feminizing" the honor because we were afraid of giving a medal for killing a bunch of the enemy. And I wonder what is not brave about being feminine? What is so brave and medal-worthy about killing a bunch of people?

We need to learn to tell new stories.

Last fall, I went with a friend to see Avatar, the crazy long rehash of old stories in (admittedly) pretty 3-D. Really, it's a beautiful film to look at. But the story is old and while it was discussed as some sort of touchy-feely, white-guilt-about-the-Native-Americans parable, I couldn't help but think it advanced the discussion not at all. The good guys and bad guys are distinctly drawn---and they all act reprehensibly. There is the aggressor, there is the revenge moment when we see---and cheer cheer cheer---the moment of comeuppance, when the villain gets his right between the eyes. Boom! Hooray! An old story of violence met with violence. Is this the only way?

We need to learn to tell new stories.

I am a Christian and I cherish the stories of the Bible. I count myself lucky that I grew up in a tradition that does not treat the Bible literally, but does take it seriously. I can read of slaying giants and conquering nations and see the metaphor---or else even have the freedom to read some stories as being more important than others, the "canon within the canon." But it seems that as we, as a species, becomes more technologically advanced, we also become more literal. We are losing (have lost?) the ability to read stories and find a deeper meaning than the simple events presented, and I'm afraid we see---and love!---the violent, the bloody, the destruction that justifies our violent and destructive ways more than we see the call to stand up to evil, to speak truth to power (as has become the cliche), even to the point of self-sacrifice, without become evil ourselves.

In 2008, a dear woman and fine poet, Anne McCrady, published a chapbook of poems called Under a Blameless Moon. In the poem that gives the collection it's name, we see the reflection of a mother, wondering how her grown son learned to believe in a "good kill." She comes to this gut punch of a conclusion:

Maybe I was the one who taught him
this version of a soldier's song...
didn't we sit together
beneath a blameless moon
while I told him the story
of David launching the stone?

We need to learn to tell new stories.

Don't we?

Seasonal Thoughts

2011-01-02T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's barely still the 9th day of Christmas as I write this.

Throughout Advent, the season of hope and expectation, I've wondered what I was hoping for, what I was expecting.

Then, on Christmas day (one of them, anyway---it may have been the second day of Christmas) someone wished me a Christmas full of wonder. Now I've been wondering what I wonder at.

The year 2010 sort of bruised me up a bit. I don't think I've let on to people around me just how much. They know some things, not everything, or not the extent of everything if they do know. And I'm cryptic and vague about it even now, so how could anyone know? Well, I whine enough as it is and I'm afraid if I talked about all the ways I've felt bruised this year, I'd just sound whinier. No one likes a whiner. Especially me.

But here's what I hoped for and expected through advent: While I'm in a rough patch, I'll not always be here. I've been in rough patches (some rougher) and they pass. I hope and expect that I'll not be bruised forever, that there will---once again---be healing and restoration and joy. As is the way with our faith, it already is here and not yet. But I hope for it and expect it. We profess a faith in a God who will bind up the brokenhearted.

And here's the wonder of Christmas. Incarnation. We have a meaty faith. There is flesh on the bones of this creed and we are the flesh that carries it forward. It's so hard sometimes, when the flesh is bruised (literally or metaphorically) and there are so many ways that the Body of Christ is bruised and hurting. The wonder of Christmas has been seeing that so often the bruises come from the very people who bring healing. Like me. The wonder of Christmas is that I can find myself as the incarnation of so many parts of the gospel stories. I am Herod wanting to protect my own power and I am the wise men who thwart power's machinations. I am the one who tries to throw Jesus off a cliff and I am the one who washes his feet with tears. I am the one flogging Jesus as well as carrying his cross. I am Mary Magdalene running to tell everyone Jesus is risen and I'm Thomas refusing to believe.

I cry out "Rabouni!" and "My lord and my God!"

The bruised and broken Body of Christ teaches me about bruises and breaks. Sometimes I touch the wounds and recognize the One I've followed all these years.

It's now 2011. It's so arbitrary to have this mark on the calendar for us to resolve to do differently, if not better. It is, after all, just another mark on the calendar. Any other day would do. (If you asked Martin Luther, he would say everyday is made for resolution---although he called it "repentance.") Still, there is something in our human nature that likes these marks on the calendars, these clear demarcations of "that was then, this is now." Bono once told us "Nothing changes on New Year's Day," and to an extent he was right. On the other hand, we have some choice in the matter. Don't we?

I'm rambling, I know, as I am want to do in my blogging. I really didn't have a plan when I sat down to write. I just knew I wanted to write during this season of wonder and incarnation. If you get something out of it---count it a Christmas miracle.

As for me, I'm going to bed, remembering 2010, with all its bruises, was then. 2011 is now.

God still binds up the brokenhearted. And we still cry out Rabouni! and My Lord and my God! We say Merry Christmas! and watch for resurrection.

More About Dead People

2010-12-11T23:47:00.000-08:00

I'm really not obsessing on death. It just so happened that I made a quick trip to Austin yesterday and I passed the cemetery where my parents are buried. It had been a while since I'd stopped in there and I had my camera along. It's the season of advent and so there's something about death and hope in these sorts of stops and, I guess, in wanting to take a picture of the headstones. Death and hope . . . are there really any other themes?

Anyway, so I have these few pictures of the headstones. Like my feelings about touching a dead body from my last post, I find cemetery visits to be somewhere akin to reminding myself that there is physical evidence of these people, of the memories I have of them. On top of that, most of the people I know or am around these days never had an opportunity to meet my parents. As silly as it sounds, these pictures are some sort of evidence that I am not the free-floating element that I may appear to be. I have antecedents.So the above is the headstone of my parents. And my shoe. I really was trying not to get my foot in the picture, but there it is anyway. Okay, evidence of me as well as my parents.

Above are closeups of Mama and Daddy's individual sides. It's a little shocking to see how long ago it was that they died. When I turned 40, I remember thinking what had happened in the last decade and I remembered I was 30 when Mama died and I couldn't quite make sense of the fact that she'd been dead for a quarter of my life. I'm now 47, so she's now been dead for over a third of my life. And Daddy died when I was 25. In 3 years, he'll have been dead for half my life. It's simple math and the passage of time, but it all seems unlikely that they would be absent for such large chunks of my life. I guess they really aren't. I dream about them regularly, even still.

The above picture is to give some idea (if the gate picture didn't) that this cemetery is out in the country. There's not a building in sight. This shot also gives my parent's wedding date. All Saints Day, 1939.

And if you still don't believe this is out in the country . . .

Those are a few head of cattle just on the other side of the cemetery fence. I find this exceedingly appropriate. We raised cattle on on our farm and I think Mama and Daddy both enjoyed them, but I think Mama especially loved her cows. When Daddy died, Mama sold all the cattle---a decision she and Daddy had made before he died, so she didn't have to fool with feeding cattle by herself. One of my brothers, Glen, bought most of the cattle and kept them on the farm, so Mama saw them all the time anyway. Glen came out to the farm to take care of them, but Mama was the one telling him which cow was about to calf and things like that. When Glen had calves old enough to sell, Mama bought some of them, so she could have her own cattle again. Glen was coming out to feed his, so he could help with hers, and she felt better knowing that some of the cattle she was watching were actually hers again. I sort of laughed at her and she laughed with me. But if you love cattle, what are you going to do?

None of this is particularly theological or religious. It's all rather sentimental, really. It makes little difference, theologically, if Mama is buried near where cattle graze (and if she were able to watch them, it would make her crazy that they weren't hers, so it's just as well that she can't) and having a gravestone to visit isn't any more certain hope of resurrection than ashes scattered on a lake. This is my experience, though, and even if some of my musings on it are fanciful . . . well, even religious/theological musings can be a little whimsical now and then.

Sometimes, I just like an excuse to talk about my parents.

Bodies

2010-11-30T16:43:00.000-08:00

Last night, poet Angela Alaimo O'Donnell posted a link to her facebook page to her essay about her mother's body and how important it was to Angela. The essay is posted online here, but a paid subscription is needed to see the whole thing. So if you subscribe to Commonweal, head on over there and take a look at it. It's good stuff.

It made me think of my own recent ruminations about death and the bodies it leaves inanimate. I don't think I'm ready to write a whole essay on this---although it has crossed my mind to do so---but in this season of preparation leading to the feast of the Incarnation, I think it's appropriate to stop and think about our bodies---animate and not.

It's been my custom for several years now, if I am able, to touch the body of someone who has passed away. I did it just recently, at the funeral of a church member, someone I didn't know all that well, but saw nearly every week. I was there to assist at his funeral service, but I paused by the open casket before the service and put my hand on his shoulder.

There have been people I've loved for whom I was not able to do that. I regret it. Their death remains somewhat unreal. It's as if they simply disappeared, moved without telling me where they were going. There is absence, but no confirmation of where they went.

But if I touch them, I can feel they are dead. It is real. The person is real, the death is real. None of it is imagined, none of it is mysterious. The absence makes sense.

I've learned that I'm unusual in this regard. Many people I run into do not want their bodies on view at all, much less touched. It seems many people I know are appalled at the idea of just seeing a body on display---however cleaned up by the funeral home---and would rather everyone were simply cremated. That way, all we'd have to look at is an urn or box of ashes.

I don't know what this says about our relationship to death. Maybe it simply says some neither need nor want to have the kind of physical closure I speak of above. I want to say there's a disconnect between us and the reality of death. I think there is evidence to confirm this idea.

I believe in the resurrection of the body. Even as I type the words, I don't know if I mean that literally or metaphorically, but I believe in the resurrection of the body. An inanimate body, without its spirit/breath, is real, the person is really dead. It's just a stage. I believe in the resurrection of the body.

So when I die, as I will, I hope some people will look at me, inanimate, without breath. I hope they will touch me. I hope they will realize, "This is Neil. He is real. He is really dead."

I hope they will believe in the resurrection of the body, in whatever way it makes sense of them, and that my death will make the hope of the resurrection just as real.

Hoping Like a Fist on Your Sternum

2010-11-29T20:04:00.000-08:00

It's sort of a joke. I like to play the curmudgeon because, well, I just think it's funny and fun. I've been called Eeyore and have the plush animal someone gave me to prove. My internal self-image, however, is really rather hopeful. Mostly.

2010 has not been kind to me, at least not emotionally. From a significant death early on to the impending loss of a job at the end of the year, with some heartbreak in between, it's fair to say that I earned my Eeyore plush and maybe more.

It all seems rather incongruous, really, when I look back over the year professionally. I've expanded my freelance writing from regional to national. I'm especially proud that I've landed bylines in both The Christian Century and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, all in one calendar year. I've read both periodicals for years and some people I very much respect have appeared in both. It's kind of a thrill to see my name on the same contents page as Andrew Holleran.

Which all goes to show that accomplishments aren't necessarily the source of all joy. They're the source of some joy, but not all.

Some years ago, an image I used for hope, especially when you're feeling hopeless, is a hand reaching into your chest, grabbing hold of your sternum, and pulling you into the future. It's an image that has come back to me this year. Sometimes, to make it into the future, we need someone to be that forceful with us, that rough. When all you want to do is curl up and stay where you are, in the sad feelings (which do have, I admit, an addictive quality), making it to tomorrow can feel like a violent attack.

And praise be to God for it.

I've never been diagnosed for depression and after reading Kathleen Norris' Acedia and Me, I realized that I'm probably more guilty of the sin of acedia than a victim of depression. They are not mutually exclusive, of course, as Norris notes, but seeing as how I seem to be climbing out of the pit without use of prescription drugs suggests that I'm not depressed in the clinical sense.

So I'm being pulled into the future by a hand that has invaded my chest and grabbed my sternum. It's pulling me forward, out of a past that I can't have anymore, into a future I cannot see. Psalms help. Community helps. The small joys of accomplishment help. But they are all tools supplied by the owner of the hand.

Sometimes hope comes as a rainbow after a flood. Sometimes it's a little less pretty. But hope comes. Thanks be to God.

Nice, but not Necessary

2010-09-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

For nearly two years, I've been facilitating a small book club at a retirement community near where I work. By "facilitating," I mean I mostly ask "what did you think of this month's book?" and let them go. It is almost always women, and there's really been two who are the core of the group. I've loved doing this and I love these women. They have become models of how to grow old. When I am in my 80s and 90s (should I live so long), I want to be like them, curious, involved, still engaged in what's new and now.

Today, we were choosing our next book, which takes place in the WWII siege o Leningrad. This led one woman, a doctor, to tell the story of hosting a Russian woman doctor some decades go. The Russian had survived Leningrad, and was bewildered by American abundance. In the American's home, the Russian would point at something and ask what something was, what it was for, many of them appliances that we take for granted. Like an oven. The American would explain what it was and how it was used. The Russian would, more often than not, reply, "That's nice, but not necessary."

This came to me like a word from the Lord. As I begin looking for work in anticipation of losing my current job at the end of January, it was somewhat ironic that I would hear the difference between "nice" and "necessary" in a retirement community located in the Galleria area of Houston. This is the nice place to retire, in some prime real estate. People who have to make regular distinctions between "nice" and "necessary" don't get to retire here. But then, God has demonstrated throughout history a keen sense of irony.

But I digress. We had a fun conversation about what was necessary, most of them telling stories of lean years---they couldn't always afford to retire in the Galleria neighborhood---and the importance of remembering that there is a distinction. The extremes of the Russian woman, who found an oven and a knife rack unnecessary, were acknowledged as, indeed, accurate. So much that we take for granted is not necessary.

When the Russian was leaving the States, she told the American doctor that when she got home, she would talk about her trip like going to see exotic animals in Africa and that her friends would not believe her.

I will never know what it was like to be in Leningrad in WWII. Still, the first thing I thought of as we talked was the difference between what I grew up with in rural Texas and what I can walk past in the Galleria. A single blouse on a clearance rack can cost more than all the clothes I'm wearing at any given time. I watch people in the Galleria wandering around, looking for something "nice," not because they need it but because they can. Surely a $500 handbag is never necessary. It may even stretch the definition of "nice."

And as I wander around the Galleria, marveling at these things, it occurs to me that our entire economy is built around people buying "nice." If not the entire economy, a huge honking part of it. We're constantly hearing how the government is trying to figure out how to get us into the stores and spend and get the economy moving again.

But if we're not spending, perhaps it's a clue that we don't need as much as we think we do. Doesn't it?

Of course, there are people going without essentials. The worst crime in this country is that there are hungry people in all our abundance. But still, what we really need to get this economy going again is to get more people into the mall, not because they need anything, but because they'll browse and find something nice to buy.

Surely basing a national economy on this sort of casual display of disposable income is a justice issue.

But again, I digress. Or maybe not. All I know is that as I look at unemployment or underemployment, I'm going to be looking even closer at what is "nice but not necessary." I, who own no car or working television and therefore already live out of step with the larger culture, may have to realize that I still live in opulence compared to some places in the world, even some places in this city.

Certainly compared to a survivor of the siege at Leningrad. And I give thanks for the witness of the woman who, across decades, brought me this prophetic word: that's nice, but not necessary.

Change is Bad. Or At Least Difficult

2010-09-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

In the year 1985, the prophet Joni Mitchell brought us a word from the Lord:

Sometimes change comes at you
like a broadside accident
There is chaos to the order
Random things you can't prevent

This is 2010 for me. It started with my friend's recurrence of cancer and her eventual death and will end with the day job I've had for 7 years ending. Some other, more personal things, which I won't discuss publicly, happened in between that have made me less than happy, maybe even a little depressed.

It's just been a bit of a crappy year.

Except I believe in redemption.

Change is very hard, adds unreasonable stress, creates grief. Especially the unplanned kind, like the death and job things. I mean, I have some changes in mind that I want to make in the next year or so, but on my timetable, please. Well, maybe all these other crappy changes will speed up those wanted changes. Or delay them. Hard to say. I keep saying security is a false idol, so I guess this is the proof and I get to figure out where my God really is in all this.

And God is in the redemption.

In the middle of the awful, hard, grieving things of this year, I've also had some wonderful things happen. For example, I've expanded my freelancing into places that I'm very excited about. Those are opening other doors to more work. I'm also finding people to help me with a performance piece that has been percolating for some time (see my other blog, neoNuma Arts, where I'm relating some rather euphoric forward movement). And even if God isn't in these things, God peeks out at me around corners, whispers from dark corners, gives small signs and wonders. I have to remember to remain thankful, rejoice in all things.

Funny, isn't it, that I feel the need to relate in my art-creating blog my euphoria and in my God blog my disappointments and grief. Well, both are true. In some manic-depressive way, I'm tired, a little depressed, hurting and I've got some really good things going on that give me hope for months ahead.

After all, the prophet Joni's next two lines in the above referenced song are:

There could be trouble around the corner
There could be beauty down the street

Security is an idol. Trouble and beauty, God comes along for the ride.

On my best days, I hope God is the driver.

(Joni Mitchell lyrics from "Good Friends" on her album Dog Eat Dog.)

The Kind of People Who Follow Jesus

2010-07-30T16:42:00.000-07:00

Sara Miles' book, Jesus Freak, has had me reflecting on my own reticence to engage with homeless and/or mentally ill people. I've had homeless people approach me and I've talked with a few. One or two have even thanked me for responding, because most people won't.

Let's just say I'm far from consistent in this behavior. I can ignore voices and avoid eye contact with the best of them.

And Sara has me asking myself, why is this?

Here's my answer: I'm afraid they'll start approaching me all the time. I'm afraid they'll follow me around and want more from me, if all they want is to talk. I even have a term for people like that---emotional black holes. I'm afraid of getting caught in the gravitational pull of whatever put them on the streets (or mental hospital) and no light will escape. I'm afraid that everything that enters that gravitational field will simply be crushed.

Some Sundays ago, I don't remember the exact context, a reference was made to the crowds that followed Jesus. Now, I don't know about everyone else, I admit that I've generally pictured these crowds as being fairly ordinary, middle class, sane people. Sure, I know there were some oddballs in the group. Prostitutes, demoniacs, whatever. I guess I pictured a sort of Hollywood hooker with a heart of gold. And the demoniacs were healed, so they became nice people, pillars of their communities, people who knew how to act in public and only answered voices everyone else could hear (and politely at that---no screeching or yelling).

Reflecting on my own fear of "emotional black holes" and hearing of the crowds following Jesus, I suddenly realized that nice, middle-class, comfortable, polite, sane people don't go around following a preacher and his band of merry men. (For one thing, they're all busy with their nice, polite, middle class, sane, careers.)

What if those crowds, the same people Jesus kept telling "the Reign of God is among you," were those people I avoid because I'm afraid they'll suck me into their black hole? Even worse, what if the crowds who followed Jesus and wouldn't leave him alone looking nothing like me and the congregation I worship with every Sunday morning?

And what if we're called to risk that gravitational pull to help find a light that resists the black hole? More than resist, but turns the black hole inside out, so that it no longer pulls in and crushes, but reaches out and heals?

That's the miracle of Sara Miles' stories. The ones I'd call black holes are moved to serve. Miles doesn't whitewash the burnout and frustration of working with the people who come to St. Gregory's food pantry, but she testifies to changed and changing lives.

I'm not sure what to do with this new point of view, this new vision of the crowds following Jesus. My escape route is to rationalize that not everyone is called to Jesus' type of ministry---or even to Sara Miles'. At this moment, I'm sitting with this, recognizing the risk involved in maneuvering crushing gravitational forces, keeping in mind Sara's testimony that in serving there is healing and resurrection, not only for the one being served, but maybe also for the server.

Fault Blame Responsibility Etc.

2010-07-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

So after weeks and weeks of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, we have a pause. We have cautious optimism. There are still things that could go wrong, but we have progress and hope that the worst is behind us.

However.

Has anyone else been looking at what they use everyday? I don't own a car, but I take the bus which uses petroleum products. Plastics come from petroleum products. Does that include the plastic in the pens I use daily? The disposable drink cups at coffee shops and fast food joints? The many disposable containers that bring food into my home, from produce bags to peanut butter jars? What about all that shrink wrap on everything from books and CDs to new furniture? What about all the plastic on this computer I'm using right this minute? Are these seemingly innocuous things part of our "addiction to oil?" (I'm actually asking. I don't know what other sources produce plastics. Are there other sources? I know, I know, I live in the age of Google, I should be able to find this out. My first attempt, though, confirmed the "plastics from petroleum" thing, but then got technical rather quickly. I'm totally a fine arts/liberal arts guy. Technical stuff loses me very quickly.)

A few weeks back, there was a rather silly video with kittens "acting" out the attitudes of oil executives. It wasn't all that profound, but it's final statement haunts me: "Because you're not mad enough to stop driving your car."

I spent about 15 seconds feeling smug about not owning a car, but then started looking at everything I have and use and dispose of daily that are made of plastic. I've tried to think about how I would go about not using plastic. Talk about a lifestyle change! Is it possible to get any foodstuff into our homes without using plastics? Short of hunting and foraging for our every need and storing leftovers in containers made of stoneware or metal, it appears impractical to try. The ubiquitous convenience of oil and it's byproducts so saturate our lives we practically need new lives to do without it.

And that's the thing. Convenience. It's easier to complain about BP and it's carelessness while sipping on our plastic straws from our plastic cups than it is to give up the lifestyle of consuming BP's product. All these plastics are convenient. To try to live around and without plastics would be hugely disruptive to any life in these United States.

In thinking about all these things, a slight theological leap occurred within my pea brain. Over the centuries since Jesus walked the earth, there have been attempts to blame someone for killing Christ, most famously the antisemitism that wants to blame the Jews---and not just the Jews of 2,000 years ago, but contemporary Jews as well. Of course not everyone believes that and there are arguments that lay the execution of Jesus at the feet of the Romans. But either way, or some third or fourth way, we are left with the fact that someone went about preaching the Reign of God and healing and feeding and raising the dead and other crazy things and some powerful people found all this rather disruptive to their way of life. And rather than let their lives be disrupted with Good News, they chose to kill the central disruptive figure. And while this makes people angry, that someone would unwittingly kill the Messiah, I have to say: few are angry enough to follow Jesus in feeding and healing people. We're just going to keep on going our way, never realizing that we can keep Jesus alive, piously condemning someone else for killing Christ.

We're basically a lazy species. We so easily give into routine, inertia, and pointing out who is to blame, who is at fault, who is responsible. It's just plain inconvenient to change our ways. Call it human nature, call it sinful nature, but the truth of the matter is that the ones responsible for killing Christ and the ones responsible for the risks taken on Deepwater Horizon are the same people.

As Pogo Possum famously said: We have met the enemy and he is us.

In the Middle of a Beautiful Mess

2010-06-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit of a mess these days. I mean, a bit more than usual.

If you've read the last few entries, you know from this blog that 2010 has had its hard knocks for me. A little grave illness here, a funeral or two there. It begins to wear on a person.

And that's not all that's going on to put me in this messy state. But that's enough for public consumption.

Suffice to say, it's not the best of times. To trip up some Dickens, it's not the worst of times, either. But it's a time of some messiness.

In my heart, I am a nomad, no matter how long I may stay in one place (so far, Houston is creeping up on a record---this address has already set a record at 6.5 years). I'm never quite settled. For a while, I felt like I was at least on the right track and now even that is fuzzy. Somewhere, I've been derailed.

An abba in the desert once said, "sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything." So I suspect my current restlessness has some lesson in it. At the very least, I try to practice a "running to" rather than a "running from." During my 20s, I spent a lot of time running from. With the abba's words in mind, I've spent the last decade or more trying to make a point of not running from, but looking out for a reason to run to. The best example is that back in the late 1990s, I was anxious to leave a job I didn't much like, but rather than leave it because I didn't like it I stayed until I had somewhere to go, in that case, grad school.

Still, I feel change in the air. Or maybe just restlessness. Hard to tell, isn't it? I've even had dreams that, after some research (and by "research," I mean I googled "dream dictionary"), seem to suggest that I am contemplating or expecting change. Since my Lutheran congregation is reading through Genesis right now (in our expression of the ELCA's Book of Faith initiative), and at this moment reading the Joseph story, dreaming wants to take on more significance than it might usually have for me.

But I'm no Joseph. Are you? Not that I much care for all of Joseph's interpretations any more than the chief baker did, but some clarity would be nice. And maybe I'll get the chief cupbearer's kind of interpretation . . .

I'm rambling, aren't I?

The point being, here in this public blog, I confess that I'm a bit more of a mess than usual. I'm finding it difficult to make plans. I see doors I wish to go through, but they don't appear open at this time. I try to convince myself that where I'm at isn't all that bad, that I do actually experience forward movement in some portions of my life.

But I feel a mess.

Maybe it's just grief, maybe it's just a tantrum that some things haven't turned out as I wished. So I'll sit in my cell, waiting to learn the lesson this cell has to teach me. God is here, and where God is, there is hope and beauty. I'll try to trust God is trying to tell me something or will lead me somewhere or else will use me to help someone else learn something. (I have to remind myself it's not all about me, which I hate, but there it is.)

As I said, it's not the worst of times. Some actually wonderful things are happening in the middle of this mess. So I'll call it a beautiful mess and hope it ends up more beautiful than messy.

When the time comes to move, my nomad heart will be ready. In the meantime, I'll try to listen to this cell, what lessons it holds.

Come Holy Advocate, Our Defender and Hope

2010-05-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

This morning, Pentecost, I listened to the Gospel lesson (John 14:8-17, 25-27) and was reminded once again of the legal terms in our faith. An "Advocate" is the lawyer who defends the accused before the judge. ("Counselor" is another word that comes up in regard to the Holy Spirit---another term associated with lawyers.) Jesus promises that while he'll be leaving the disciples, he will not leave them alone but will send the Advocate to be with them always.

The word "satan" is also a legal term, translatable as "adversary." This is the lawyer that brings the accusation before the judge. It is Satan who accuses Job of not being such a faithful person, who makes a case against Job that Job is faithful only because he has an easy life.

These were my musings even as I listened to my pastor rightly discuss the ongoing movement and transforming power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. My mind kept going back to the law and the grace that protects us from it's condemnation.

So, nothing new or profound here. Just a quiet reflection on all the ways I do not live up to the new commandment Jesus gave us just a few chapters earlier in John's gospel (chapter 13 for those checking). On Maundy Thursday, I heard the new commandment: Love one another. Despite the resurrection power of Easter, I remain woefully inadequate to fulfill this commandment. But it is God's kindness and goodness that leads us to repentance and, look, Jesus promises the goodness of an advocate who, despite all evidence, will argue for our innocence.

And so I'm compelled to pray:

Come Holy Advocate, our defender and hope. You show us such mercy and goodness, give us such hope of acceptance, that we fall down in worship and praise. Now, help us rise up and turn around. By your kindness and mercy, lead us in this new discipline of loving one another. Come Holy Advocate, and renew us once again.

Ritual and Grieving and Renewed Hope on the Bus

2010-05-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

This evening, I attended the memorial service for Dr. Margaret Flowers, who we all called Meg.

Meg was the music director at the congregation where I belong. She ended her ten year service there this past January, when she resigned to fight a recurrence of cancer. I'll admit I've been a bit heartbroken over her resignation. It's been a hard 2010 without her. It's simplest to say I loved her.

She's also the reason I'm in this congregation. I landed there at the end of 2003 when I first moved to Houston. I didn't church shop, I just landed there because it was in a convenient place. After a year there, I wasn't quite sure it was the place for me. I didn't feel connected to anyone there, and I wondered if I might fit better somewhere else.

Except I connected to Meg. I don't know why, don't really remember how. She was the arts person in the congregation, so I guess I naturally gravitated toward her. I didn't sing in the choir, at least not much that first year. Maybe not at all. I honestly don't remember. I just remember loving Meg.

Then she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Even though I was ready to leave this congregation and, hence, Meg at that time, I decided I couldn't possibly do it while she was going through chemotherapy. I decided to stay and see her through treatment.

She was remarkable. She continued with her music director duties while doing chemo. She had some rough days, to be sure, but with a little help from her friends, she didn't miss much time. We talked about how much cancer treatment had changed since I watched my mother go through it ten year earlier. They have much better meds for the nausea now. She lost her hair, but kept her appetite for the most part.

Then a remarkable thing happened to me. I started feeling connected to other people in this congregation. While I watched Meg battle cancer, I also began to love other people. By the time Meg completed her treatments and was declared in remission, the taproot had started to take hold in this congregation. I have a church home because of Meg.

During the four years when we were hoping she'd beaten her cancer, she continued her worship and musical leadership in our congregation. She had a definite idea about what a church choir was and was not. She spoke to us about being worship leaders, not performers. We led the congregation in hymn singing and we sang anthems to draw worshipers more deeply into the season or message of the Sunday.

She also kept vigilant over the designs of our new nave. The architect understood in no uncertain terms that, whatever else we decided about the design of the worship space, it had to have good acoustics for music. Since the nave was completed nearly two years ago, nearly every musician who has come into that space and remarked on the acoustics. Of course, there was a whole building committee there to affirm and back Meg up with the architect, but without her vigilance, it's quite possible compromises could have been made. One of her legacies to our congregation is this worship space that is great for singing.

She was one year away from that magical five year anniversary, when she would have been considered cured, when she started getting intense, debilitating headaches. For six months she went in for test after test, every scan known to modern medicine (and in Houston, that's saying something), and they could not figure out why she was having these headaches. At first, they ruled out cancer. They couldn't find it. Then, after at least two spinal taps, they recognized cancer cells in her spinal fluid.

I'll say no more about the diagnosis and treatment from there. I don't want to tell lies and I'm not clear on all the details. What matters is treatment was very hard on her this time (despite keeping most of her hair). She resigned as music director. She started getting confused, not being able to find the right word she wanted to say. Today was her memorial service.

If you click on her name above, you'll see her obituary. She had quite a career in church music, so of course many of her colleagues came to sing and remember her today. The music couldn't help but be glorious. It was a fitting way to commend her to God's care and eternity.

She was very dear to me. I'm going to be sad for a while. Even though she's been out of the position as music director for a few months already, we're only starting to find our new normal in our congregation. I'm not nimbly leaping into the changes her absence brings. I'm a little angry. And sad.

After the service, another member of our congregation, another friend, Akiko, asked me if I was okay. She knows I loved Meg. She did, too. I shrugged in my cavalier way and said, "yeah, I'm fine. It's only grief." I was being flip and everyone knew it, but in a way, I'm being genuine. It is only grief. It is something I've felt before, multiple times, and I suspect I'll feel it again. It is serious pain with serious tears. I'll acknowledge it's presence, acknowledge it's impact, but it won't rule me, not for long. I read some singer (I don't remember who---a gospel singer) once quoted to say that when his father died, the remarkable thing he learned was that the healing started almost immediately. The pain and anguish was real and present, and then something would happen to make the family laugh. He remarked how merciful God was, that we weren't left in our grief for too long, that the healing begins right away.

Case in point:

Coming home from Meg's memorial service, there was a man on the bus with an iPod and he occasionally bobbed his head and raised his arms in graceful, rhythmic patterns. Though he was sitting, I guessed that he was tall. He was definitely thin. He had large, strong hands, the kind of hands Michelangelo sculpted. His head was shaved and he was dressed all in black, shirt tales untucked. His skin was dark, a shade lighter than the darkest skin I've ever seen. His eyelids were heavy, his mouth full and serious.

He was beautiful, but his beauty was beside the point. He danced while sitting on a bus. On a day of grief, he gave me joy and made manifest what I already knew: I won't always feel this way.

He got off the bus suddenly, too quickly for me to tell him that he was a sign and a gift from God.

Vigil of Easter 2010

2010-04-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

Just got in a while ago from keeping vigil with my congregation.

Let me say, having first experienced Easter vigil years ago (1990-ish), as an adult, it has become The Service for me out of all the year. As we were getting ready for it before hand, I began to feel giddy, sort of like how I remember getting excited about Christmas circa 1970. The anticipation drives me a little bonkers. I love the fire outside, the candles, the long chant telling us over and over "This is the night!" I love all the readings, reminding us of God's mighty acts throughout scripture, all in a dark church. And when the lights come up . . .

Stop. Let me back up. For those not familiar with Vigil, let me say that it is not a self-contained service. It is, in fact, a continuation of the services from the two previous days, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Maundy Thursday, the altar and pulpit and any other so draped pieces of furniture are stripped of their paraments, as we chant the 22nd Psalm. When I first experienced this ritual, I found it very moving. We've heard the story of the last supper, of the betrayal, of the new commandment, "love one another." We strip the the nave bare, as Jesus was stripped of his humanity by an inhumane system. It seems ridiculous to connect the two outside of the context, but the stripping of the altar never fails to move me. It seems unbearably sad to remove all sign of festival, leave the nave unadorned.

And it stays that way for Good Friday, as we hear again the way Love is treated in this world. Love is beaten, condemned, hung out to die. We remember our own part in killing Love. We leave the stripped nave in darkness.

But after long chants and readings, after many prayers, the lights come up in the nave during the Vigil and the tomb is declared empty. The bare altar is dressed again, before our eyes, in the golden paraments of Easter. Alleluias are sung. Lilies are set about the nave. Love does not remain dead. Love always rises.

So, for me, the full cycle, the stripping of the alter to the dressing of the altar, is cathartic for me. Vigil ended about two hours ago, and I'm still giddy.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Now. I've had a hard spring, my whole congregation has. This giddiness will fade and the reality of grave illness and death will still be facing us. That doesn't mean tonight's celebration was for nothing. It means that in the middle of grave illness and death, we are always reminded that Love always rises. All of this is being redeemed, somehow. We may not see it with our eyes. Indeed, my pastor said tonight that God works in darkness much of the time, from the creation of the world, which started in darkness, to the Exodus from Egypt, following a pillar of fire by night, to the resurrection of Jesus, which happened while everyone slept. We don't see God working. It's often too dark to see God working.

But then the lights come up---Let there be light!---and there are lilies and golden paraments and a choir singing.

I doubt many things, but I trust in resurrection.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

The Humility of Dirty Feet

2010-04-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

We, as a culture, don't practice foot washing, not as first century Palestinians did. We don't travel by foot, wearing sandals. We do not enter another's home with dusty feet. We do not greet our dusty-footed guests with a water basin and towel.

So this practice comes down to us only as a ritual, disconnected to its cultural moorings. Is a ritual so disconnected still meaningful? I've been a part of discussions that have wondered what a 21st Century sign of welcome might be, that we might substitute for a Maundy Thursday ritual. We always come up empty. I don't know if that means we no longer practice hospitality or if our hospitality rituals are simply not so obvious. They're certainly not so intimate.

People have issues with feet. Feet are disgusting. Or a fetish. Or ticklish. I suppose for Jesus and his contemporaries, feet weren't hidden so much, and probably didn't stink so much. They simply got dirty. They were just a part of the body that was seen all the time. They were probably more calloused than ours. And I imagine there were some disgusting, fetishized, and ticklish feet in Jesus' time, too.

But still, it was good manners to greet a traveler with water basin and towel.

Some churches practice foot washing this day. Most do so with some hesitancy, some sensitivity to others' feelings about feet. There is an enormous opt out clause, in neon letters.

I'm going to go out on a limb. In our American society, the ritual of washing feet isn't about having the humility to serve another by washing his/her feet, although that's still there. I propose the model for us isn't Jesus in the gospel story. It's Peter.

Whether Peter was ashamed or too proud, I suppose we can open that up to discussion. Shame, pride, I believe them to be two sides of the same coin. Either way, Peter doesn't want to let Jesus wash his feet. Peter isn't good enough to have his feet washed by his teacher. While we would do well to pay attention to Jesus's humility in bending to wash his student's feet, we should more, nowadays, pay attention to Peter's ability to set aside his pride (or shame) and let Jesus serve him, touch his feet, have that physical intimacy once practiced between a guest and the host.

Is this ritual, separated from its cultural practice, still meaningful?

Speaking only for myself, I'll answer sideways: I seldom have wine or bread with a meal anymore, but the most meaningful meal of my week consists of only wine and bread.

Hosanna! Save Us!

2010-03-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

The blogging discipline didn't go so well this year. I'm not feeling too badly about it, either.

I was just talking to a friend who I hadn't seen in a while and gave her the laundry list of grave illnesses and death close to me the last few months. What's sort of sad is that I remembered a couple more that I didn't think to tell her about.

Let's just say, all these things have me a bit blue. And blogging hasn't been the priority I meant to make it this lent.

And today, we start Holy Week. This morning, we sang "hosannas" and waved palms. We read the Passion story, and some of us made plans for the many things we're doing for the rest of the week, in connection with the many services at the end of the week. That last bit sort of takes me out of the "now" of the hosannas and palms. I think I would benefit from spending some time with the hosannas and the palms.

"Hosanna" is one of those mysterious words in the Bible. It's not easy to translate, apparently, and has levels of meaning. It has an element of praise. It has an element of supplication. I suppose the people laying down their cloaks under the donkey were expecting a certain kind of deliverance from this humble king, and many (most? all?) were disappointed.

Still, we sing "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" Help! You can help! Please help!

The deliverance that will come will not be everything I hope for, but I believe deliverance is coming. I believe I might even be blessed to recognize it when it comes, but that isn't where my hope lies. Redemption is at work. I must work with it. And the betrayals I'll perform before Thursday . . . well, let's not think about that just now. Right now, I and a lot of people around me need a savior.

Here's another cloak on the road.

Commending Spirit

2010-03-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

One of the abbas from the 4th century desert once advised: If you do not keep death ever before you, you will lose courage.

I've thought about that a lot, lately, naturally enough. I thought about it tonight, at our Wednesday evening lenten service. We're using the compline service out of Evangelical Lutheran Worship. There is a chanted responsorial in it (light print for the leader, bold print for the congregation):

Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.
Into your hands, I commend my spirit.
You have redeemed me, O Lord God of truth.
Into your hands, I commend my spirit.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
Into your hands, I commend my spirit.

I was taken, tonight, with the source of the repeated responses. This isn't just simply saying "My life is in your hands," this is quoting Jesus on the cross as he dies. Are we praying, in this response, "I'm ready to die now"?

If we do not keep death ever before us, we lose courage. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

The psalm for the evening was part of Psalm 136, the one that has the refrain, "for God's mercy endures forever" (your translation may vary).

I'm ready to die now, for God's mercy endures forever.

It works for me.

In that I'm-not-really-ready-to-die-now, kind of way. But whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. And if we don't keep death ever before us, we lose courage.

There is much need for courage these days. The member of my congregation who had the massive heart attack on Sunday has been non-responsive since Sunday afternoon. He has swelling and bleeding in his brain. Things don't look good for him. So it is not my death, but his that is before me at this moment. But as John Donne would have it, there is no difference.

So in my prayers for healing, I hear the refrain, into your hands, I commend my spirit. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. For God's mercy endures forever.

Amen and please. Please and amen.

Lent

2010-03-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've not counted the days, but we're here, somewhere near the middle of the season of lent. This season of renewed discipline, rededication to almsgiving, of prayer is a solemn, serious time. I fail at all these. Discipline, almsgiving, prayer, solemnity.

Repentance is another word associated with lent. So as I fail, I stop, turn around, try again, try another way, try to do better, getting better at failing all the time. This isn't me beating myself up, this is me trying to take stock as I look around me, trying to gather some courage and find some action to take during this season I'm in, this season of cancer and heart disease. Friends and acquaintances in dire straits and here I sit, sadly lacking in skills for oncology and cardiology.

I read once, long ago, that "lent" comes from an old English word related to "lengthen," as we in the northern hemisphere experience a lengthening of daylight during this season. Maybe that's what I'm looking for. More daylight. More illumination.

Well, who isn't? Who is seeking to sit in darkness?

One of my favorite prayers is comes from our Vespers service:

O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, p.317)

Long nights give way to long days, and we cannot possibly know what the light will reveal. We think we know some things, but if we're lucky, the Spirit will remind us of how little that is and that we walk by faith, even in these lengthening days. Give us faith to go out with good courage.

I don't know what to do. So I do what is in front of me, the work that has come my way, whether it's my days in retail, my nights with freelance writing, my time with my congregation, but trying to be present, trying to pick up what is there that needs picking up. It won't be enough. I will fail and I will try again. Exercises in humility, putting aside the idol of success and trusting that trying will accomplish some small part, trusting in the hand that is leading, in the love that is supporting.

The Reign of God comes in small pieces, broken but glorious.

Reminisce Interrupted

2010-03-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

Well, my lenten plan to remember God-incidents hasn't gone so well lately. I'm finding myself quite distracted these days.

In my head, I've started calling this "a season of cancer." Starting in October with the death of my friend Pat Clark, who I wrote about for All Saints Day, I've since assisted at a funeral of another friend at my home congregation, which was the week before Christmas. Then, in January (I think) a dear friend was diagnosed with cancer. And now, last week, another friend. Terribly scary time for people I care about.

Then, yesterday, between services, a member collapsed with a massive heart attack. He's in the hospital in critical condition. So, this season of cancer is expanded to heart disease. (Forgive me if I make this about me for just a moment, but I do pause to point out that the heart attack victim is exactly my age---and I've already had one heart event in 2006. Hard to ignore these things.) I might add, it is a sobering thing when you see a defibrillator used on someone you actually know.

I'll get back to my "Memories of God" series and will likely do them occasionally after Easter has come and gone.

In the meantime, I'll stop with the gloomy news and note that there are other things going quite well for me. As I told someone on Facebook the other night, my prayers lately are something along the lines of: "thank you. what? wow. oh no. squee! stop it! really? please." with varying inflection and order.

When things are swirling around as crazily as they are right now for me, I have to guess there is some kind of Breath moving. I'm reminded of (of all things) an Amy Grant song with the line: "The same wind that knocks us down, if we lean into it, will drive our fears away."

Leaning. Leaning.

Journal as Reminder and Clarifier

2010-03-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #10

I was just reading my journal from my last year of college. That was the '86-'87 academic year.

Wow. I was in a lot of pain. I was regretting a lot. I was graduating with a degree in theater and wishing I'd been a commercial art major. I was in something like love, but feeling shameful and damned about it. I came across an entry where I wished I weren't alive. I said I didn't want to commit suicide, but it would be okay if I just ceased to exist, that it would save everyone a lot of trouble.

During this period, I tried to keep a journal as if I were writing to God. It was a short-lived experiment. I found writing to an omniscient being to be redundant, and so many of my entries are full of "O Father, you heard that conversation." Which, of course, means little to me more than two decades later. Thankfully, I let that experiment go pretty quickly.

But there's the thing. In the middle of regret and not a little despair, I was still talking to God, looking so hard for God's leading. True, it was that early-twenties angst-ridden sort of searching, the kind that immobilizes and becomes addictive for it's sweet agony, but it was still an earnest seeking.

I thought I would put in a few paragraphs from that time, but they're complicated, too complicated for the time I have to explicate. There are also names and places that are not entirely mine to publish on the web.

But, well, take for instance this Lutheran Student Movement regional retreat I attended. There was someone there doing guided meditations. I had a powerful experience with one of the exercises, one that pulled me back, if only a little, from the brink. Pulled back just a little is enough to save a life.

I'm being vague tonight. That's sometimes required to protect people who didn't sign up to be written about, and to obscure some of my own embarrassment about those years. I write tonight to remember that God was there, in this time that I felt like I was taking up more than my share of space on the planet, when I wanted to disappear. At a retreat, God sent some people who were God's hands and voice to pull me back from an edge. How will I ever be grateful enough?

Experience as Idol

2010-03-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #9

I don't remember how or when I came to this conclusion, but it's maybe worth noting as I reminisce about God.

There was a period of fairly intense experiences of what I would call God. This was late college years and a few years following. I've mentioned or otherwise alluded to a couple of them.

Then somewhere, those experiences stopped. Not entirely, but the intensity of them did. I wanted those spiritual highs all the time, why were they suddenly absent?

And I realized that the highs were becoming my god, not the God I met in the experiences. Subtle difference, I suppose, but it's a bit like a love relationship. You can only have so many orgasms until someone has to get up and go to work. There are other things to do besides making love---which is how many mystics allude to their experiences.

So as I spend some time these lenten days, reflecting on my memories of God, I feel it's important to pause and remember: sometimes there are no fireworks. Sometimes you go through days hardly noticing or acknowledging one another. These are the days of ordinary time, days of contentment, days of discontent, but days that make up our ordinary lives.

They are days of choosing faithfulness in the boredom. They are days of knowing God by not feeling a tap on the shoulder.

It's knowing God by remembering, holding God in our memory even as God remembers us.

Everyone Dies (part one)

2010-02-26T19:22:00.001-08:00

Memories of God #8

Our pastoral care professor in seminary would say that being present as someone dies is one of the few "supernatural" occurrences we modern people may still see---and we're hiding it away more and more. His main point was that our scientific age, for good and ill, has taken away much mystery in our lives. The sound we hear in the dark is easily enough dispelled with the flick of the switch, whereas there was time when one had to light a fire to explain the noise. And lighting a fire wasn't always as easy as striking a match.

I've been present at the deaths of a handful of people, maybe 4 or 5. Most were unknown patients when I was a chaplain in a hospital one summer. One was my mother. We all die and it is a terrible, mysterious event, but it can be full of revelation as well.

A very few years after seminary, I had a friend who was dying. He was coughing to death, having lived into his late 30s with cystic fibrosis. His name was Bill. Simultaneously, a seminary friend had a friend, also named Bill, who was dying from brain cancer. She asked me to pray for a miraculous healing, for her Bill to be fully cleared of cancer. I said I would, of course, and asked her to pray for my Bill. But then I asked a terrible question, one full of theodicy.

Why do we pray for a cancer patient to be fully healed while another has a congenital disease that we simply accept will kill him? We might reasonably expect a cancer patient to be healed---there are treatments and sometimes they work. But there are no treatments for a cystic fibrosis patient, except maybe a lung transplant, and then that's only temporary. Eventually, s/he will cough to death. She saw my point, but promised to pray for my Bill all the same.

Which brings me to this particular experience of God, one that troubles me less than it once did, but may be troubling for others. Praying for my her Bill, I had a very distinct feeling that there was nothing to be done. I felt that the answer to the prayer was, "everyone dies and this is how her Bill dies." That seems like a terribly rotten answer from an all powerful God. But I suspect even God might feel badly about that.

Is God all-powerful? If so he is cruel to let us die in these terrible ways. If God is not all-powerful, what do we make of the power God does have? This is not an answer to be received in a blog post, after libraries of books have been written on these questions.

What I do believe is this: We are mortal. For whatever reason, we're designed with this flaw of fragility. And all the terrible ways we die---disease, violence, disaster, alone---are but opportunities for God to work some sort of redemption out of it. Stated more plainly, while I don't believe that God sends disease, I do believe that God goes about the business of redeeming the event of the disease. More scientific data is gathered to prevent further suffering. A family or separated friends are reunited. Comfort comes from unexpected places and the Reign of God breaks into the horrors of our lives.

My friend's Bill died and so did my Bill. I know less about the aftermath of her Bill's death, and I know only some about the aftermath of my Bill's death. I do know that my Bill's death has found some redemption, from writing he left behind, from achievements his wife has made that would have been impossible while she was caring for him.

I don't know that I'm expressing what's on my mind about this very well, and there's always the question, "but why did they get sick in the first place?" hanging in the air. No one has been able to answer it. I only know that redemption comes for those willing to work with God, watch for God's movement. I trust when my time comes to die, someone's grief will be blessed by God's redemption, too.

The Fingers Around My Sternum, Pulling Me Foward

2010-02-25T19:43:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #7

Ambiguous story tonight. Few details because they're hard to report.

In the final years of being in college, I was appalled by the fact that I was in a relationship with a man. To call it a "relationship" is to define it broadly. It involved some strong emotions, most of them involving me in a puddle of tears telling God I'm sorry and I wouldn't do it again.

It was not a healthy time.

There are . . . events? That suggests definite occurrences. There were ongoing tugs. If you're praying an awful lot, you might expect God to answer, I suppose. There were no answers that I wanted at the time, none that seem to address the immediate situation.

But--and I may have mentioned this before somewhere, as it's a favorite illustration--a dearly departed friend once described God as a triage doctor. God looks at the wounds and decides which are the most life-threatening and gets to work on that. My being gay was not the biggest threat to me just then.

I hesitate to talk about this time because I know how fortunate I am. Any number of people in similar situations have not received this answer and have perished. Not everyone escapes the whirlpool. Still, this is my story . . .

As I felt the pull of an undertow, I felt some sort of tug into the future. This is how I've described it before and it still seems the best description: It was as if the fingers of a hand were plunged into my chest, between my ribs, and grabbed hold of my sternum, like that was the best handhold to pull me up. It is one of my images of hope. When the whirlpool looked like it might win, this painful grip got hold of me and pulled me into the future, out of the sadness and despair. A painful but insistent hope.

I can't explain it. Maybe shouldn't try. Here I am and it hurt to get past those years, but I've had some amazing joy along the way, too. No regrets. Happy to have felt the grip of God on my bones to bring me to this place.

Dramatic

2010-02-24T20:27:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #6

Back in 2006, early fall, I started feeling what I've come to call "nudges" from God. A nagging feeling. (Yes, I worship a God who sometimes nags.) I remember praying one night, "Okay, I hear you whispering, but I'm too dense to get it. I'm afraid I'm going to need something more dramatic than the 'still-small-voice' thing."

At the end of November, I found myself spending 6 nights in the hospital due to a clogged artery on my heart. (At first, no one was calling it a heart attack, but since then most visits to doctors have included a discussion about my heart attack, so maybe I had a heart attack. Or the difference between what I had and an heart attack is too slim to matter.) I remember sitting in my hospital gown and saying, "Okay, this is dramatic. But---WHAT?"

(I pause to note that I'm not entirely sure that God sent me a heart attack to get my attention. At the same time, I've suffered so little for this heart disease, that I recognize an awful lot of grace in it and therefore can't help but look for God in it. But maybe that's another discussion about God sending good and/or evil and probably not well suited to a blog post.)

The "WHAT?" is still unfolding, still an ongoing journey, even now, 3 years later.

But as I pondered my life and its hazards in the hospital, I realized that two separate friends had recently defined me as a gay, Christian artist/writer. Not precisely in those words, but it became clear that is how they see me. I pouted over that, as I really just want to be a writer or an aritst, sans labels. I pout that only straight white men get to be writers or artists. Everyone else gets adjectives: woman writer, black artist, gay author, Christian musician. Etc.

Around the same time, I received page proofs for two different stories that had been accepted for publication. One story was a sort of a fictional memoir, with me as the first-person narrator (it is based upon dreams I have of my parents visiting me in my present circumstances, even though both are dead). It was accepted by Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature. The other, a short-short story about a man who reframes some family history into "just so" myths. It was accepted for an anthology called Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling. I couldn't help but notice a trend.

So over the last 3 years, I've made some effort to own my adjectives. Gay and Christian. I believe being more "out" as both has led me to some interesting places. Whether or not God is directly involved in these things, from heart attack to finding reward in being open about the two biggest adjectives in my life, I am thankful for the journey. In all things, give thanks, St. Paul said. It's hard to give thanks for a heart attack, but I'm thankful for the redemption for it. I always find God working hard at redeeming these awful things.

There's much mystery involved with where God is leading me, but I believe God to be active. I'm in a cloudy time right now, as if God is nudging me again. I'm hopeful I can discern some direction without another hospital stay. I'm trying to pay closer attention.

At the very least, I'm no longer asking for something dramatic to get my attention.

A Sustaining Abundance

2010-02-23T21:31:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #5

I work retail and live in a neighborhood that is not so posh. There are times of stretching to make ends meet. Some of this is a chosen lifestyle, some is just how my particular cookie crumbles.

In my neighborhood, there are deep ditches along the back streets, places for the occasional torrential rain Houston gets to run and not flood. Water often stands in these ditches, but there are also drier seasons, when there is no water in them.

It may be my farm boy early life, where I had acres and acres to explore, but sometimes I have to get down in the ditches and see what's in them. There are wildflowers of various sorts that I can't name, and they give me endless delight. These are not big-blooming, call-attention-to-themselves flowers, but small, easily overlooked blooms.

For example, there is some plant in those ditches that grows very close to the ground. It blooms in small clusters, about the size of a winter coat button. The individual flowers in these clusters are tiny. They are a classic 5-petal arrangement, like we learned to draw in grade school, but they are about the size of a large pin head. I cannot imagine how little nectar or pollen a flower of that size produces, what part it might play in a ecosystem, but then beauty is its own purpose.

I first noticed this flower during a particularly hard stretch a couple of years ago. In the middle of some economic hardship, I spontaneously thought, "What abundance!"

That tiny, tiny flower brought to mind that I live in a world of tiny beauties that add up to something overwhelmingly spectacular. This came to me in a ditch, beside tin warehouses in a not-so-posh neighborhood.

It is not abundance that pays the rent, but it is abundance that sustains me more than the easy payment of utilities. It is abundant life.

Gracious Love

2010-02-20T19:25:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #4

"Merciful Father, we offer with joy and thanksgiving what you have first given us - our selves, our time, and our possessions, signs of your gracious love. Receive them for the sake of him who offered himself for us, Jesus Christ our Lord."

The above prayer will be familiar to Lutherans who used the Lutheran Book of Worship every Sunday for 30 years. It is the "offertory prayer," or the prayer after the offering. I don't know if it's in the new Evangelical Lutheran Worship or not and I'm not taking the time just now to look. I just know my congregation hasn't used this prayer since we got the ELW.

In the spring of 1995, I was finishing up my seminary career. My mother had died the spring before, I was making my first steps out of the closet, I was completing a Master of Divinity degree that I wasn't planning on using---in short, the future was looming with lots of "new normals" to be discovered. In short, I was a mess.

Well, I'm often a mess. If there is one recurring issue in my life, a "besetting sin" (as some might call it), it's that I just can't imagine that I have anything of real value to offer the world. Forget the world---to offer much of anyone. I hate putting that out there. It sounds so remarkably whiny and not a little self-absorbed. Okay, add that to my list of besetting sins. I'm sure I'm not the only one who can make a list of them.

But the 1995 version of the mess that is me: I was all kinds of heartbroken, grieving, uncertain about my future. One day, that spring, we were in chapel and we prayed the above prayer, as I'd been doing since 1978. This time, though, there was a (non-literal) tap on my shoulder and a (non-literal) finger pointing to the one line: "our selves, our time, and our possessions, signs of your gracious love." I heard a (non-literal) voice say to me, "See? You are a sign of my gracious love."

I burst into tears and didn't really stop crying for the rest of the chapel service. I'm sure people around me were concerned I'd finally cracked. Maybe I had. It wasn't something I could explain right away. I can't explain it now.

Part of the problem is I don't really believe it. Maybe that's just as well. Maybe it's something for others to believe, although I'm sure I can produce witness who would gladly plant a seed of doubt against that (non-literal) voice. At the very least, if I ever live up to the (non-literal) voice's word to me, it is sporadic and often despite my intentions.

The more important thing is that the prayer speaks in plurals. If my sorry self can be a sign of God's gracious love, then others are the same. It forces me to look at other people, the "our selves" around me, and see the Imago Dei in them, the sign of God's gracious love that they are to the world, too.

In general, I have a fairly low opinion of our race. I'm not proud of that, but that's my knee jerk reaction. People suck and it's a terminal condition. Except all "those people" (and I am one of "those people") are children of God, heirs of the "Merciful Father," who loves us despite our terminal suckiness.

We are the beloved of God. Let us be reminded of that and live according, as signs of God's gracious love.

God in a (Mail) Box

2010-02-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #3

Growing up on the farm was a great, great childhood, but it was occasionally isolating. We lived a half-mile off the highway and no neighbor within shouting distance, so during the summers, when we maybe went into town twice a week (once for church, once for groceries and/or other business), the only contact with the outside world was the mail box a half-mile away. (I should also say we didn't have a phone in those days. Sounds so primitive, doesn't it? Just my version of normal.)

So everyday, I would ride my bike (or walk, but once we got bikes, why walk?) down the gravel road to get the mail. Thursdays brought the weekly local paper, but other days were unpredictable. I would save cereal box tops and send off for stuff, join record or book clubs, subscribe to comic books, anything to generate mail. It happened so seldom, but the greatest excitement on some days was to get a piece of mail that was addressed to me, with my name on it. It's nice to get affirmation of one's existence and I guess I'll take it where I can.

There was this one time---and I wish I could remember how old I was, but late elementary, early junior high I'm guessing---when I was wondering about atheism. I don't think I was ever going to really commit to the idea, but it sort of intrigued me that some people just didn't belive in God. Taking this question and using it to put God to the test seemed like a reasonable thing to do---and maybe use it to generate mail with my name on it (because I really did believe God existed and figured God probably wanted me to keep believing).

So I prayed something like: "Dear God, If you are real, there will be something in the mail today with my name on it." Ridiculous, I know. Sometimes I think it is my ridiculousness that keeps God from striking me down, even today.

It came to ride down to get the mail, which was about 9:20 a.m. as I recall. I pedal on down, pull up to the mail box and open it with anticipation. A post card! It's addressed to me! There is a God!

I turn it over. It's from my dentist. It's time for my check up.

I laughed. Not only did I learn there was, indeed, a God (and would play along now and then with being put to the test), but I also learned God has a sense of humor (hence my faith that being ridiculous entertains God and keeps the smiting away).

* * *

In seminary, I told this story during a sermon. Afterward, another seminarian came up to me a little indignant about the whole thing. "You know that was just a coincidence, right? What if there hadn't been anything in the mailbox?"

I just shrugged and said, "Then that would have been a different story."

Godspell Spirit

2010-02-18T18:50:00.000-08:00

Memories of God #2

I'll say this with some uncertainty, but I believe it was the 1983 Lutheran Student Movement National Assembly in Bozeman, MT. If it wasn't, it was the assembly in '84, in Missouri.

One night at the assembly, we saw the film version of Godspell. I don't remember a great deal about the film itself, but I do remember being moved by it. (I've never seen it since and I've read that it's not a very good film---but that matters little.)

Either later that night or later that week, there was a worship service that used music from the musical. At the passing of the peace, we sang "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord," over and over and over. There was a band playing and the entire assembly---I don't remember how many that would be, maybe something like 300-500 college students? maybe more?---wouldn't stop. We were caught up in the moment and there was a euphoria in that place as we went throughout this university hall, hugging one another, encouraging one another to make the crooked paths straight (not that those were in the lyrics, but they are in the Isaiah passage that John the Baptist is quoting in the song). In retrospect, it is a good song for preparing for the Eucharist.

Anyway, we're singing, the one line over and over, and it got away from the worship leaders. We were all laughing and crying and singing and hugging. I remember saying to my friend, Shari, "I don't even know why I'm crying!" She said, "I don't either!" But we kept on crying and singing and hugging.

I don't know if this is really a memory of God or not. It may simply be a memory of mass hysteria. I do know what it's like to get caught up in the enthusiasm of a crowd, how it can take over, how good it can feel.

I was in love that night with several hundred strangers. I didn't want it to end. Movement of the Spirit or just the madness of a crowd, I'm thankful to have experienced it.

Lying in the Grass, Looking Up

2010-02-17T14:03:00.001-08:00

Memories of God #1

Sometime in my preschool years (before we transferred from the country church to the town church), a Sunday school teacher commented that God was not an old man with a big gray beard, but was a spirit that was everyone all at once. Seems like a heavy idea to be laying on preschoolers, but this comment stayed with me.

Sometime later (that week? that month? I don't remember), I was in our backyard, lying in the grass and watching clouds. I was thinking about what that Sunday school teacher said. I don't know that it's fair to say a preschooler was "meditating" but I was definitely trying to wrap my young mind around that idea.

Then, at once, I was aware that God was in the grass under me, in the pecan tree a few yards from me, in the crepe myrtle next to me, in the clouds way above me, all around me. God was in the air that moved about me.

It would be 20 years or more before I knew that this was called a "mystical experience."

But it remains foundational in my faith. In my life. The world is shoot through with God.

This is one way I understand the Reign of God is at hand.

Controversies and Voices

2010-02-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

I'm doing it again. I'm engaging in internet debate. It's a practice I swear off now and then, but my recidivism rate is alarming.

What set me off this time was a claim that there is no biblical explanation for the ELCA's actions at last August's Churchwide Assembly (check out posts from last August to learn more, if you don't know what that's about). These claims came from two individuals who have had explanations given to them over and over, biblical and beyond. The problem is they simply reject the interpretation.

Which is really okay. I reject their interpretation of the Bible passages in question. Bible interpretations vary widely on any number of issues and have been used to justify building hospitals and torture devices. I believe the rigorous discussion of interpretation is essential to avoiding abuses and outright horror. Obviously, the church has not always been so good at such rigorous discussion.

The thing about the whole GLBT debate is that it really is about whether or not people can be comfortable with the idea of two men or two women living together in emotional, spiritual and sexual relationship, because the issue of things in the Bible that refer to heterosexual sin can't get a good discussion going. I've repeatedly brought up the ELCA's allowance of divorced and remarried pastors to serve, despite very clear words from Jesus himself that such a relationship is adultery. The only answer I get is "that's too complex to go into here."

Which I read to mean, "heterosexual sex just doesn't bother me so much and I can overlook that problem." Or else, "there is s double standard for people who are heterosexually oriented and those who are homosexually oriented---one may sin and continue in their sinful relationship, but the other may not."

I'm not sure how else to read their comments.

What annoys me most of all, however, is the abdicating from the conversation. Almost always we get to this point and the anti-GLBT ordination person will cry foul, say there is clearly no room for a conservative voice in the ELCA, and leave the conversation.

Huh?

Asking questions you don't want to answer is denying you your voice?

I'm at a loss. And I'm leaving the conversation, too, because I have too many other things to attend to.

But here is my wish, and it may need another post, but I'll end with this wish:

I wish we could put aside terms like "liberal" and "conservative." I feel certain that they get in our way. Somewhere along the way, we decide, "well, yes, I want to be a conservative" and then we go looking for what conservatives think and believe and teach. Same with liberals. I swear, I've known people from both sides who, if told by the right person (Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, for example) that the liberal/conservative thing to do is to paint your houses canary yellow with hot pink trim, there would be canary yellow houses with hot pink trim. And there would be arguments about how it's important to uphold the conservative/liberal value of canary yellow houses with hot pink trim.

But this conversation is held among Christians, where we allegedly claim Jesus is Lord. We do not claim conservative values are lord, we do not claim liberal values are lord, but Jesus is Lord. From day one, 2000-and some-odd years ago, there have been arguments about what that means and how we live under that Lordship, but that doesn't mean we can't look to that as the guiding principle.

Can we come together, in the love of God, and discuss, ARGUE, even, about things without claiming a liberal or conservative silencing or bias? Maybe not. But we're also supposed to be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit, who, scripture might lead us to believe, is always doing something new, even some shocking things. I'm willing to bet that if we could somehow learn to pay attention to the leading of the Holy Spirit, people who claim both liberal and conservative labels will be blown away by the surprising newness of what's in store, and all camps would all be brought to the ground, their faces in the dirt, in worship and awe of how the Spirit breaks our preconceptions and shows us the crazy wild beautiful Reign of God.

Keeping Chist out of the Holiday Sales

2009-12-10T15:09:00.001-08:00

To follow my last post, briefly . . .

I'm not hearing much in the way of people picketing and threatening boycotts because this or that store is calling something a Holiday Sale instead of a Christmas Sale. I suppose we've finally hit a tipping point of real problems that has such complainers busy elsewhere.

But while I'm musing, this Advent season, on my complicated relationship with capitalism (and hence, my job), I'd just like to say:

I'm perfectly fine with "Holiday Sales." And this isn't so much about being all warm and fuzzy about respecting other religions' winter holidays (although I do try to respect other religions' winter holidays).

It's really about using Christ as a marketing tool. And I'm against it.

If, as the above-referenced complainers might say, we want to keep Christ in Christmas, then let's do something about the crushing poverty that puts babes in modern-day mangers. Let's see about fulfilling the angel's song about peace and good will to all. Let's see about coming to adore him, Christ the king.

But making sure Christ is on a storefront's sale sign? I'm sorry, but that feels like pushing blasphemy.

Just saying.

Jesus Came to Save Retail

2009-11-29T16:55:00.000-08:00

I have a complicated relationship with capitalism.

My day job is in retail and it appears no one has gotten word out to all the consumers that the recession is over. (It must be over---I heard it on NPR!) Sales are terrible and so there is no little hand-wringing over how to increase them.

Christmas to the rescue!

Suggest Christmas gifts to people, push certain product that is supposedly "hot" this year (which is to say, convince a customer that a product is hot and therefore must be bought).

I love my job. I really do. If I didn't, I wouldn't be there for 6 years at a wage suitable for part-time college students. I love helping customers find what they're looking for, I love making suggestions if they have some ideas but nothing in particular. I even love trying to figure out what it is they're looking for when they have only partial information. I actually use a lot of my pastoral care training from seminary. I ask questions, rephrasing what they've said to help jog their memory, tease out information they didn't realize they had, that sort of thing. I've even told a few customers along the way (when they've asked for something that's a little embarrassing), "don't worry, talking to me is like talking to your therapist. Nothing goes beyond this transaction." It's good for a laugh and it seems to put them at ease.

I think I'm really pretty good at this. Judging from the repeat customers who have told me, "you're always so helpful," I think I can back that up with testimonials.

But I'm a terrible salesman. I don't really believe in convincing people of things that are not their idea. I don't really believe, in fact, in consumerism for the sake of consuming, which is what a lot of selling is. "You don't realize you need this, but here's why you do."

This year, perhaps more than any recent year, Christmas is going to make or break some retail establishments. Every year, it's the Christmas gift-buying that shores up businesses, keeps them in business for another year.

And here is my complicated relationship. I don't want to see anyone's livelihood disappear. I also don't really believe in buying gifts just to sooth guilty consciences or otherwise puff up false attitudes of generosity. I don't believe in the expectation of Christmas gifts. I need to keep my job. I don't like taking advantage of people's paranoia about needing one more gift for someone.

On Thanksgiving Day, I saw A Charlie Brown Christmas with some friends. I couldn't help thinking about how many people have seen this cartoon over the last four-plus decades and how little difference it's message of anti-commercialism has made.

I really just want to tell people, "you know, if you don't know what they like or what they want, maybe you don't know them well enough to buy them a gift." Maybe the money is better spent on a charitable donation to something everyone can get behind. Cancer research, for example.

I am not against Christmas gifts. I enjoy buying a handful for a few dear people in my life. I enjoy getting a few from people who know me well enough to make it a real show of care for me (even if it is a frivolous gift but still shows they know my particular tastes in frivolity).

But I'm still disturbed by how much our economy depends upon Christmas. It's an economy built upon false desires, false obligations.

Jesus didn't come to save retail stores. It just looks that way.

Saints and Saints and Saints

2009-11-01T05:46:00.000-08:00

All Saints Day. Remembering the faithful who have gone before us . . .

November 1st, I always remember Mama and Daddy. Lucille and Alfred. I was born late into their lives. Mama was 42, Daddy was 46, and they had 6 kids before me. I always say this doesn't look like "planned parenthood." At the same time, I never felt unwanted or in the way. Maybe I was just unexpected. Well, for all I know, I was expected, too. I shouldn't judge by appearances. But when your first daughter is about to have her first child and you find out you're expecting your 7th . . .

We were a "churched" family. I was baptized as an infant, St. John's Lutheran Church, Paige, TX, at the age of 17 days. We weren't necessarily an every Sunday family, but most Sundays we went to church. When child #6 became the age for confirmation class, we transferred to the "town" church, Martin Luther Lutheran Church, Giddings. There weren't any other kids Gary's age in Paige with which to be confirmed and we went to the Giddings schools, etc.

I don't always know how to talk about my parents, to give a good idea of who they were to the people who never met them. Daddy was annoyed by the 1970s fashions of longer hair and jeans without a belt. Looked "sloppy" to him. We, in turn, were annoyed with him. I believe he also had a sly sense of humor, which I was only getting to appreciate when he died in 1988. I have memories of him saying things like he was fussing at us, and then looking up at him and seeing a faint smile. I find myself doing the same thing with kids, saying things that sound like reprimands, but are really just that "picking on" sort of humor that we grew up with in our rural German community. It may be that, as in my case, the things we were doing were nonsense to him, but I wonder if he sometimes also knew that it was just a generational thing. Maybe by the time I came along, he'd already raised a generation and saw how it went. Maybe for my older siblings, the reprimands were more real.

Mama was probably the stability of the family in many ways. I used to not believe it, but I've come to realize that maybe she and I had a slightly different relationship than my siblings had with her. (Some of them had told me for years this was so.) I do know I have little objectivity when it comes to her. I was completely devoted to her. She was fighting her cancer---and appearing to beat it---when I went on my seminary internship to Nebraska. I cut my internship short when it became apparent she was not beating it and I have often regretted losing so much of the last year of her life to a vocation I never really felt (professional ministry). She died in 1994.

Speaking of, that reminds me of when I told our pastor that I would not be pursuing ordination when I finished seminary. He asked me if I felt free to not go into ministry now that my mother was dead. I laughed. Of all the people encouraging (if not pushing) me to be a pastor, she was the only one who looked at me and said, "I don't know, I don't quite see you as a parish pastor." (Well, there was one other person, my best friend growing up, Dean, whose grandfather was our pastor.) She knew I was always active in church, she even said once, "Neil got his degree in theater, but he majored in Campus Ministry," but she somehow felt with me that I was not called to ordained ministry.

Today would have been Mama and Daddy's 70th wedding anniversary. All Saints Day. This was something I realized in seminary. Mama and Daddy never said anything, that I remember, about the connection. But then, we weren't a family to celebrate every day on the calendar. We barely acknowledged birthdays, so it's no wonder that we didn't make a big deal of them getting married on All Saints Day, 1939.

I remember now, though. Every November 1, it is the feast day of my parents, who raised seven children in the church, who made sure we had food, clothes, and a roof, all on a farmer's budget.

I dream about them at least once a month. Usually more often.

+ + +

This week, another saint enters my list of faithful who have gone before. Patricia Blaze Clark. Those of you who are Episcopalian can find her name in the index in the back of the Episcopal Hymnal Supplement of a few years ago. She was a classmate at seminary, although on the Episcopal side of the street.

Here is my earliest memory of Pat: As new seminarians, we were sent to a retreat center (a convent, actually) for a few days. It was a formation thing, I guess. Also, an intensive way to meet and get to know new people. I guess. I'm not sure exactly the reasoning behind it, now that I stop to think of it. Anyway, all of us new seminarians were at this convent . . .

We met in one room regularly, chairs arranged in a big circle. We barely fit in the room, so the circle was a bit irregular here and there, which is to say, a jumble, with a few sitting on the floor. As we were gathering, I sat next to Pat, more by accident than by design. As I watched people slowly fill in, I leaned over to her and said quietly, "I wonder what would happen if we started removing one chair at each break."

Pat had these wonderfully large, expressive eyes and they grew wide with mischief. "Like a big game of musical chairs!" she said. We laughed and wondered how long it would take before people started noticing that more were sitting on the floor.

We didn't do it, of course. But the twinkle in her eye, the glint of mischief told me, this one will be my friend in this place.

Pat once told me her story, that she'd spent time in a convent as a nun (she had since married). She said that growing up Roman Catholic, she always felt a call to be a priest, but all her church had to offer her was nun. I looked at her and said, "wow, I always felt the call to be a monk, but all my church has to offer me is pastor." She never became a priest and I'm not likely to become a monk, so we also shared this life of replacement activities, trying to find ways to serve that made sense despite not quite scratching the itch.

She became a hymn text writer. Google Patricia Blaze Clark and you'll find two collections of them. Some she wrote to existing tunes, others she wrote for composers to set to new tunes. She gained some reputation in church music circles and I know this gave her great satisfaction.

Pat also had multiple health issues, chief among them, lupus. She seemed to manage it pretty well, but it was the lupus that was the main reason no bishop ordained her. A few years ago, when she was diagnosed with cancer, it was the lupus that prevented aggressive treatment. Like her lupus, her doctors had to be content with managing her cancer with a hormone treatment and occasional bouts of radiation. This went on for so long, I think many of us just assumed it was under control. The tumor never grew or if it did, some treatment would shrink it again. Chemotherapy was out of the question, though. Chemo would have killed Pat faster than the cancer.

Except the cancer did kill her. It suddenly got aggressive and grew quickly. A month ago, she was still teaching a class at St Edward's University in Austin. This past Wednesday, she died at Christopher House, a hospice.

And so I remember Pat. The hymnal index will remember her as Patricia Blaze Clark, but to those of us who loved her, she will always be Pat. Funny, occasionally fiery, always a friend.

O blest communion, fellowship divine,
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia! Alleluia!

A Water that Runs Deeper than Blood

2009-10-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

When [Cardinal Roger Etchegaray] visited Rwanda on behalf of the Pope in 1994, he asked the assembled church leaders, "Are you saying that the blood of tribalism is deeper than the waters of baptism?" One leader answered, "Yes, it is."

from
Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith
after Genocide in Rwanda
by Emmanuel Katongole
with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
(page 22)

I first read these words a few months ago, and they continue to echo and rebound in my brain. Much of Father Katongole's book does so, but this brief passage does especially. It summarizes so much of the world.

I live in the USA. I've never been to any part of Africa, much less Rwanda, and don't really imagine that it's on my itinerary. Father Katongole, however, gave me a picture of what happened in the Rwandan genocide that does, indeed, seem to be a mirror for the church, at least here in the USA. I recognize myself in that reflection.

When I describe myself, I often say "I am a German Lutheran farm boy." I therefore identify with Germans, with the theological descendants of Martin Luther, and with a rural upbringing that is more often at odds with my adult urban life than I may let on. These are the "tribes" that I belong to, the ones I claim.

Given a certain circumstance, I might also say I am a Christian, which may be implied by "Lutheran," but is a larger tribe. The larger tribe, admittedly, I do not always claim, certainly not certain sub-tribes of Christianity.

I'm loath to describe myself as Democrat or Republican, as I find neither sides really represent me as I would like to be seen. I struggle with words like "liberal" or "progressive" because I find different people hear wildly different things when those words are spoken. So I suppose I don't identify too clearly with a political tribe, but I'm quite aware that by most people's standards, I fall into the liberal side of the spectrum. I suppose I do (except when I'm pushed on specific topics).

The point of all this tribe-identifying is this: When push comes to shove, with which tribe will I align?

Father Katongole suggests that to claim baptism as the marker on our soul, we cannot claim any tribe, or else being Christian does not matter. He points out that Rwanda was one of the most successful missionary stories of all Africa. Nowhere else in Africa did the population embrace Christianity as Rwanda did. And when the machetes and guns came out in the name of tribalism, that success story mattered not at all. Neighbors who once sat in the same congregation to worship the same God were suddenly washed, not in the blood of Jesus, but of each other, at each other's hands.

Is the blood of tribalism deeper than the waters of baptism?

This is a mirror to me because I fear for the current mood of the USA. The talk of some groups, found in places ranging from fringe internet groups to nationally broadcast radio and TV shows and nationally distributed magazines found at your local Barnes & Nobel, is turning violent and threatening. A Facebook poll asks if the president should die. Newsmax, a fast growing periodical, had an opinion piece on its website (I don't know if it was in the print edition) stating that a military coup might be appropriate in the current political situation. Talk show personalities who basically get paid to rile up people with outrageous remarks (with specious factual foundation) are hoping this presidential administration will fail and calling the president a racist.

And I begin to wonder what statement will it take (and who will make it) to bring the machetes out in these United States?

And where does the church stand (or fall) in the middle of all of it.

There are many arguments about whether or not the USA is a "Christian nation." That's beside the point. I don't know if everyone in these arguments identify as Christian, but I believe it's safe to say that many do. And the point then becomes, what difference does being a Christian make if we let political powers draw lines between us?

Are the waters of baptism deeper than the blood of Republican and Democrat and liberal and conservative? And if so, what does that look like? How can being a Christian make a difference in a powder keg nation?

I have no answers, only some fear and trembling. I believe that being a Christian does, indeed, transcend all the divisions among us. And yet we see in Rwanda how little that transcendence is embraced.

Am I merely being paranoid? Or do you look in the mirror of Rwanda and see yourself, too?

Sign of Jonah

2009-09-04T19:07:00.000-07:00

Who would I like to see reject the Good News?

Jonah came to mind recently. And shortly thereafter, Jesus' somewhat cryptic reference to "the sign of Jonah." Before I consulted the texts, I thought, "what? prophets make giant fish vomit? What kind of sign is that?"

Of course, that's not the sign.

There are only three references to the Sign of Jonah, two in the Gospel according to Matthew (first in chapter 12, later again in chapter 16) and then a parallel saying in the Gospel according to Luke (chapter 11). (Mark 8 has a parallel, except Jesus leaves out the Jonah bit: "The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, ‘Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.’ And he left them, and getting into the boat again, he went across to the other side." [NRSV] Mark had a less loquacious Jesus.)

(In case you don't know, there are a couple of handy websites for looking up Bible passages on line. For the widest number of translations, go to Bible Gateway but if you want the NRSV, you have to go to Oremus.)

The Matthew passage says the three days in the big fish prefigures the three days in the grave, but then it goes on to agree with the Luke passage that the sign has something to do with the preaching Jonah did in Nineveh.

Let's review briefly. The story of Jonah isn't about a whale, even if that's what you remember most from Sunday school. It's about a prophet who doesn't want to go and preach the word of God in Nineveh. In fact, Jonah doesn't want to preach to the Ninevites so badly that he runs from God, which lands him in the belly of a big fish for 3 days. Then the fish finds prophets hard to digest, and so Jonah ends up on a beach. God again sends Jonah to Nineveh and this time, Jonah goes. It's a message of destruction, but also a call to turn from their wicked ways. The Ninevites receive the word and repent, turn away from their wickedness. God then has compassion on them and does not destroy them. This ticks off Jonah, who apparently didn't much like Ninevites. He apparently would have preferred to see fire rain down on Nineveh. So he goes into the wilderness, pouts about the goodness of God, and almost dies for his trouble. (That'll do for now. Look up the whole book of Jonah. It's kind of fun and really pretty short.)

So, anyway, the Sign of Jonah. Jesus tells some of the Pharisees that while the Ninevites heard Jonah's message and believed, the Pharisees are being dumb by not receiving Jesus' word. They are being so dumb that the Ninevites will rise up and condemn the Pharisees on the last day, because all they had was Jonah. The Pharisees had something greater than Jonah.

Now, we don't know how Jesus would have reacted had the Pharisees repented from their ways, but we might assume, since Jesus was greater than Jonah, that he would not have gone out in the wilderness and pouted about it.

Still, I wonder if there isn't one more layer of this Sign of Jonah thing. It seems that we Christians spend a lot of time preaching to people (let's call them Ninevites), but really don't expect or want them to turn to God. After all, who wants the Ninevites in the church anyway? But then when the Ninevites hear the word of God, repent, make an effort to live godly lives, we can't quite be happy. We were kind of looking forward to seeing the Ninevites "get theirs." Even worse, while they repent and try to live godly lives, they have the gall to remain Ninevites. And we just don't like Ninevites very much. So we sit out in the wilderness, under the scorching sun, and pout and complain about God's reckless and rampant mercy.

So I ask the question again. Who would I (or you) like to see reject the Good News? Who are my (or your) Ninevites?

Post Assembly

2009-08-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly, I've cried much less than I thought I would, although I haven't been tear-free.

The church of my entire life (via the predecessor body, the American Lutheran Church), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has voted to make a way for same-sex couples to enter into publicly accountable, monogamous relationships. Or something like that. I'm not getting the language exactly right. Basically, we can now have "commitment ceremonies" in the church. We can stand before our church families publicly and without fear of censure for the couple or for the pastor officiating or the church hosting the ceremony. There will be a process to this. There are rites to develop and what not. But the door is open.

Which opens the door for the ordination of men and women in monogamous, lifelong, publicly accountable same-sex relationships. This, too, will be a process. I don't expect things to change on Monday down at the Lutheran recruitment centers.

But it's all set in motion.

Today, I wore a red shirt to work. It is the same red shirt I bought to wear for Pentecost last year. I intended the connection, if only for my own quiet celebration. I intend to remember August 21, 2009 like a birthday, anniversary, or holiday (holy day).

Tomorrow morning, when I go to church to see how my home congregation is taking all this, I will wear more subdued clothes. I honestly don't know what will happen at church tomorrow morning. My pastor has sent out a call to meet during the Sunday school hour and talk about the Assembly. This is good and important. I suppose there will be some there who are upset. I will wear more subdued clothes because it is insensitive to celebrate when others are hurting over the same thing.

The presiding bishop of our church, Mark Hanson (who has proven himself to be a rock star of a bishop and I could not be more happy with his handling of the assembly), has asked that we hold each other, not gloating, not celebrating in the face of others' discouragement (I'm paraphrasing, of course). I hear his wisdom and will try to keep my happiness at bay when others are hurting. We must remain in conversation about these and other important issues facing the church. Some actually have to do with things like feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick.

I just ended a big of vigorous debate with someone on the ELCA page of Facebook. Well, I didn't end it, it just got to late to continue and he's a pastor and has his hands full for tomorrow as well. Blessings on his ministry and the people he pastors. What I think that conversation really highlights for me, however, is that this is truly about how we read scripture, what pieces of scripture we hold more important than others. Despite endless scholarship discussing how the few passages in scripture that might be refering to homosexual practices have little to nothing to do with how we understand and experience monogamous, committed homosexual relationships today, we still have a tendency to grasp at them as somehow inviolable, while we are able to squirm our way around such harder passages about divorce or usury. (Do you know that some churches actually have credit cards in their names?!?!?)

This discussion will ultimately not be about gay and lesbian couples. It will finally be about how we as a church read and use the Bible to guide our lives. We, as a church, as never used words like "infallible" or "inerrent." We refer to the Bible as "inspired." This allows for the many culturally bound elements of the Bible we no longer hold as true. The writers did not have the science to know the earth revolves around the sun. They did not understand that women provide half the genetic material to make a baby (men planted a seed, which held all of the child's life while the woman was either a fertile or barren field for the planting). They did not hold the same kind of regard for reportage that we expect today of our newspapers, or else we wouldn't have the conflicting stories of Judas's death (even if we may find something true in each account for our edification). Our tradition has always approached the collection of writings we call the Bible with a critical eye. Martin Luther spoke of a "canon within the canon" and condemned the Letter of James as an "epistle of straw." Still, no one would accuse father Martin of not taking the scriptures seriously.

I do believe this needs to be the site of our discussion, how we speak of, refer to, regard the Holy Scriptures. The scholarship on homosexuality has been done. I know of no credible scientific body that regards homsexuality as a chosen orientation. There are copious amounts of biblical studies done on how the biblical writers didn't understand homosexuality as we do and how their references were about idol worship, pederasty, or other abusive or unequal relationships. This sways too few people.

What has to happen is that we have to address how we read the Bible, hold each other accountable when we read it capriciously to support our comforts and prejudices.

If I may expose my canon with the canon, I would propose we start this process with these two pieces of biblical advice.

1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and your neighbor as yourself.

2. Let us put on the mind of Christ who, though found in the form of God did not count equality with God as something to be grasped at, but emptied himself, putting on the form of a slave.

In joy and sorrow, let us move forward with the work of God.

Methodists and Gays and the Holy Spirit

2009-08-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

Years ago, especially when I was in seminary, the workings of the ecumenical dialogs were of great interest to me. As a very small child, I didn't understand why there were so many churches in our small community and as a young adult, I was very much enamored of the idea of working towards "full communion" with other denominations.

Today, I smile at the vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly to approve entering into full communion with the United Methodist Church. To be honest, I've lost count of how many full communion agreements this makes for the ELCA. I'm thinking at least half a dozen. Anyway, the Methodists had approved the agreement at their last national gathering (I don't know exactly what they call their gatherings).

This comes at a time when the ELCA is making apparent strides toward accepting GLBT folk into the full ministry of the church. The UMC, by all accounts, is taking steps away.

I'm reminded, once again, that my existence as a gay man who believes in the Good News of Jesus, is a part of the problem of church disunity.

This hurts me more than I may show.

If only I could denounce my faith, go back on the baptismal promise, and just be a godless queer like so many want to believe I am! (I guess there are days when I do all the above. I'm guessing at about the same rate as your average Christian, gay or straight. But perhaps that's another discussion for another time.)

Well, who knows? We're still 24 hours (give or take) away from knowing what the ELCA will be doing with GLBT clergy and commitment rites for same-sex couples. Maybe this will not be a hindrance to our relationship the Methodists for the immediate future .

What amuses me at these gatherings is how different groups are claiming the movement (or lack thereof) of the Holy Spirit. Yes, I would like to think that the passing of the social statement on human sexuality (which is more of a teaching document than a legislative one) is attributible to the Holy Spirit, but I will try to have the humility to say I can't be sure of that. I would like to think all the full communion agreements are signs of the Holy Spirit regathering us scattered sheep into one fold. Again, I can't be sure of that. Therefore, I will make no claim of knowledge as to how the Holy Spirit is moving.

I'll simply rest in the sure knowledge that the Spirit moves and groans with us creatures as we strive to be a people of Good News. Or try to rest. I do have restless moments, too.

There are some interesting conversations going on in the Facebook community. Somone brought up the "inerrant and infallible" word of God. There were more than one responses pointing out that the ELCA has never used those words to describe the Bible. We refer to the Bible as "inspired." Not quite the same thing. For one thing, the Bible is clearly just wrong about some things. Hares do not chew their cud. Men are not the sole bearers of new life (the seed) and women are not merely fertile or barren ground (this passed for sex ed in the Bible). And I don't care what narrative gymnastics you want to perform, the two stories of the death of Judas cannot be harmonized in any way that makes sense. The attempts I've seen require a lot adding of detail and if you're going to be literalist, that should make you pretty anxious given the last few lines in Revelation.

Honoring the Bible as the inspired word of God lets us be a part of the ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We share in the same Spirit at the biblical writers, we share in the same baptism as the writers of the New Testament. Trusting in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to always move the church, we are better able to understand how Jesus and his first followers were able to re-interpret the inspired words they inherited. Inspiration---the breathing in---continues. We are not a people of a stone God. Our God is made of wind!

So, is all this activity of the Churchwide Assembly part of the movement of the Holy Spirit? Well, in my congregation's Faith of Book Bible readings, we recently read in Acts, chapter 5, the story of the pharisee Gamaliel. When speaking of the new Christian movement, he said, "if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them---in that case you may even be found fighting against God!" (NRSV)

In other words, we may have to wait a few generations to know how that plays out.

But right now, I say yes to Methodists and I say yes to the ordination of GLBT pastors, sinning boldly and trusting more boldly still in the grace of God.

Schism

2009-08-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Day two of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly. I'm less anxious today. I have nothing to which to attribute that. Maybe when it comes to anxiety, I just can't do a marathon.

I have been thinking about schism. Mostly, I think that's a poor word choice. It suggests that another church body could form, that the ELCA will be like an amoeba splitting by the end of the week. For one thing, as my pastor pointed out to me some months ago, forming a new denomination is no simple task. Ask any of the independent Catholic groups that sprung up during the 1990s. I don't know if any of them are still in existence. I do know that, tiny as they were, they were splitting into factions within 5 years of forming.

I think the more likely scenario is a migration to other church bodies. Episcopal or United Church of Christ seems likely for one group, maybe the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, Presbyterians, Methodists are more likely for another group. Maybe some will go to independent churches, maybe some will become unchurched. But the formation of another church body? It would take a body of well-organized and focused individuals with significant resources to pull it off.

I've said before that someone has to choose to leave and if they make that choice, they are the cause of the schism, not the ones who stay.

But of course, the desire is that none leave, that we manage to remain a united church body that is able to agree to disagree. This maybe an impossible goal. And maybe the best we can do is strive to keep the unity, let those who chose to leave go with blessings and prayers.

That's easy to say on the second day of the assembly. What if things don't go "my way" by the end of the week?

Ack.

Two weeks ago, I would have said I would be disappointed, deeply so, but I couldn't imagine leaving my lifelong church home. Then, this past weekend, as my anxiety ramped up, I started imagining leaving.

I'm not saying I will, not saying I won't. Being Lutheran, I'll probably make a decision after some study, prayerful reflection, and maybe some committee meetings. All I'm saying is that I could, that I think there are reasons to do so. I think I'd rather have a leg ripped slowly from my body for all the pain it would cause me, but I think I could leave. I think there are options.

Which made me more compassionate for anyone who might find that a reasonable option for them.

If things go "my way" by the end of this week, I would like to ask those who consider leaving to consider this as well.

Ask yourself if this issue is enough to leave your church home. Ask yourself what it costs you if a Lutheran church somewhere else has a gay pastor (because I can tell you that's already happening, and in some places, it's more open than you might imagine). Ask yourself if a local option for gay clergy is such an awful thing, ask yourself, given how we go about assigning clergy, if it's a real possibility that your congregation will call a gay clergy person within your lifetime. I'm quite certain that there are places that will go decades before they even consider it---just as there are congregations that have gone 4 decades without ever considering a woman pastor. Really, the local option is nothing new. Congregations have been exercising it ever since the ordination of women became a reality. (If you don't believe me, ask some women clergy where they get to interview for calls.)

If after all that, you still feel you must leave the ELCA, I'll ask you to find another church home. Don't let this issue keep you from Jesus altogether. There are options and if we cannot stay within the same denomination, then let us stay within the larger body of Christ. Find a place that still preaches Christ crucified and risen and the grace of God and forgiveness of sins. Find a place that still will feed you with word and sacrament. Do so with as little anger and with as much sadness as you can muster. That last part is important for your own soul. I know. I have angry days and it is rough.

And if I decide I must leave the ELCA, I promise to do the same. I will find a place to receive word and sacrament, a place to remain in the larger body of Christ. I will do so with as little anger as possible (some will be inevitable, but pray for me that it doesn't consume me) and the sadness will be like a brick I'll carry with me all the days of my life. I also know that tears are good for the soul, the grieving over our brokeness and our irreconcilable differences this side of eternity.

I'm less anxious tonight. I'm still overwhelmed with what this week might mean for many, many people. Let us keep praying.

(a small postscript: today, I was telling a young lesbian friend about our Churchwide Assembly and the measure to be voted upon this Friday. She asked me if she could come to my church, that she and her girlfriend needed to find a church. I tell you, I truly believe allowing for GLBT clergy is going to turn out to grow the church . . . )

Churchwide Is On

2009-08-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

Tonight, there are even more Lutherans than usual in Minneapolis. The 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA has opened. Reports of a lively opening service and productive first plenary session are flowing over the internet. ELCA.org even has live video of the sessions as they're happening, although I doubt I'll follow those. I'm glad they're there, but for me, it's enough to catch reports from Facebook friends who are there. I'm obsessing over the Assembly enough as it is.

Honestly, over this past weekend, I've been surprising myself with how obsessed, and I mean anxious I am over this assembly. Two weeks ago, I would have said it is an important gathering, and I've been saying for weeks that whatever happens, I imagine I'll be in tears before the weeks over---whether joy or disappointment remains to be seen. But this past weekend, this feeling has ramped up and I'm full fledge anxious and a little moody about it. I'm daydreaming about what I will do one way or another. I hadn't consciously thought about it much, how much this Assembly might create paths for me. Sort of, a little, but I hadn't let myself dwell on it. This week, I'm dwelling on it. This assembly has some life-changing potential for me. And I'm in knots. Tears by the end of the week? I've had to find a private space once or twice to dab my eyes already.

I'm being vague. Well, I swim in the sea of ambiguity (as my campus pastor once told me). Let it suffice for now that I'm finding an even more personal stake in this assembly than I've allowed myself to acknowledge.

But of course, this assembly isn't all about me. (Shocking, but true.) I'm gay, I have an M.Div., and I admit I've been hearing God knock on my metaphorical door for about 3 years now. But there is much more at stake than what path lies before me.

What's at stake is the next generation, the kids who don't even know yet if they're gay or straight. What's at stake are the kids who were picked on by their teachers, as reported last week, because they were perceived to be gay. It's about the 11-year-old boy who killed himself last spring because he was bullied at school, because the kids at school perceived him to be gay. It's about endless incidents like the above that go unreported but happen because there are not enough places standing up for these kids. Whether they are gay or not is beside the point. I can't find the reference, but in at least one incident, a suicide left a note saying he wasn't even sure if he was gay or not, he just couldn't take the bullying anymore. It's the way "gay" is used to demean and bully and destroy kids. That's what this is about.

We need another church body to openly say, "you are fully welcome here, not just tolerated but fully allowed to explore the full range of vocational options in this church." As long as bullies see the church denying us full inclusion and participation, the bullies find a loophole to justify their cruelty.

And that's what this Assembly is about. It's about saving kids lives, literally and figuratively.

That is what is at stake.

Lord have mercy.

Reconciling Lutherans

2009-08-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

For those who followed my lenten blog about GLBT experience in the ELCA, you will know that I am anxiously awaiting the Churchwide Assembly to see if GLBT folk (like me) will be affirmed and welcomed fully into the life and ministry of this church.

If you, also, would like to see this come to pass, I entreat you to go to this link to add your name to the Reconciling Lutherans roster, a public list of individuals who support full inclusion of GLBT in the life and ministry of the church.

As noted in the previous post, the passage of the statement on human sexuality and the recommendation for ministry policies are two of the items before the Assembly.

I've said about all I know to say about the issue during my 40 day discipline of blogging this past lent. If you want to see (or revisit) those thoughts (some more serious than others, I admit), the blog is still up.

From all angles, whatever your opinions on any of the issues before the assembly, remember to keep all the voting members in your prayers in these final days of preparation.

ELCA Churchwide Assembly---Next Week

2009-08-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

I've made no secret of it: I'm Lutheran. Next week, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will be holding it's Churchwide Assembly. Like every organization these days, money will be discussed. Budgets and the like (but then, that's always up for discussion at Assembly). Also on the floor:

---A malaria initiative to combat the disease with other organizations.

---A proposal for full communion with the United Methodist Church.

---Consideration for a social statement about justice for women.

---Funding an HIV and AIDS strategy.

---A statement on human sexuality.

---A report and recommendation on Ministry Policies (mostly having to do with GLBT clergy)

All this an more will be discussed in Minneapolis. The ELCA webpage has a pretty easy-to-navigate page for learning all about these things. Click here to look around.

I have little to say about these things just now, except to raise up the Assembly in thought and prayer. Prayers for the voting members and other participants are important as they prepare to travel.

This is going to be an emotional one for me. I know I will be weeping no matter what happens.

Bread Thoughts

2009-07-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

Today marked the beginning of a series of readings from the Gospel According to John about Jesus and bread. "I am the bread of life."

For those who do not know, nearly 3 years ago, I spent 6 nights in the hospital, due to a clogged artery. Long story short, no surgery was required, but I have a stint in a vessel on my heart. And my GP has me on a diet to help keep my body from producing cholesterol. In short, low-carb. In his words, "You need to treat bread as toxic."

It was the first thing I thought of today as we're hearing the story of the multiplication of the bread loaves (and fishes---good for the heart, so maybe it balances out).

I wish I had something deep and meaningful to say about that. Seems like there's some theological comment to be made, some way to say, "Yes, but Jesus is the Bread of Life. Not toxic like your dinner roll." Sort of how people insist that God is absolutely Father, even if people had terrible abusive fathers. "But God is the Good Father."

I guess mostly, it's a reminder that not all analogies work for everyone. And I've never been a huge fan of bread anyway.

+ + +

Alarmingly, at least to me, it's not all about me.

My pastor had a good sermon on the text, pointing out that the multiplication of loaves is the only story in each of the 4 canonical gospels (makes you think this story really caught the first century imagination) and that explanations for the miracle (such as people started sharing what they had and revealed that among them, they had more than enough even though it first looked like they had nothing) are irrelevent because in the end, there were still plenty of leftovers.

Abundance is there. A small gift is multiplied and abundance, to paraphrase a common phrase, happens.

It was a good reminder for me today. Ever since my trip to Durham, I've been in a funk, feeling rather discouraged. I heard stories from people at the top of their field eking out an existence and people who have given their lives to art looking at their twilight years with less security than most people who lost millions on Wall Street last year. Even though all of these people spoke of not trading their lives for anything, I've been angry and depressed (seldom at the same time because it's a little difficult to pull off) that this is how our culture treats people who sacrifice their lives to create beauty and/or mirrors to the world though their art.

More to the point (because even though it's not all about me, I'm shockingly gifted at making it all about me), I felt like there was little point to the effort. I've been writing for years, doing some performing, and (outside a few people who seem to have been truly affected by a couple of things I've done) it all seems like useless energy. Millions of dollars are going to be spent on making another explosion movie and millions of dollars are going to be spent going to see it, and people with deeper, more subtle messages are going to be ignored.

Why bother with my meager gifts? Why pretend all the energy expended is worth it?

Because, I'm reminded today, God takes the outrageous scarcity of our lives and multiplies. In the illogical arithmetic of grace, the scarcity, the poverty of our lives becomes abundant life.

I've experienced it over and over. So why do I let these things get me down? Call it my personal sin. My sin of discouragement. Which in turn becomes a sin of stinginess. My loaf of bread isn't appreciated anyway, so why give it? What I have to give isn't appreciated anyway, why offer it?

I'm reminded that however poorly my loaf is received, I still need to present it, put it out there, let it go. God does the multiplication. God holds the calculator here, and I don't know how the miracle happens, but the knowing how is irrelevent. To mix metaphors (and parables), I can only sow the seed I have, however poor. I won't know or maybe even see who gets to reap the harvest.

Sisters and brothers, let us re-dedicate ourselves to putting in our loaves. Let us re-dedicate ourselves to planting.

+ + +

Silliness: Sometime ago, and I believe this was a true story although I can't footnote it, I read a story about a group of Bible translators working with some culture that didn't have a grain-based diet and hence, no bread. Without bread a staple, phrases like "I am the bread of life" make little sense. Turns out that this culture did have a starchy staple, however: the sweet potato. So the translators translated Jesus' words into: "I am the sweet potato of life."

It kind of sheds new light (here comes the silliness) on all of the "I Yam" sayings . . .

Network and Community

2009-07-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

Still in Durham and pondering a question. Maybe someone here has some ideas. Ponder with me, if you will.

I've been here two weeks and meeting wonderful people, people I hope will remain in my circle for years to come. They're from all across the U.S. and all have really interesting lives.

I'm also meeting people who travel so much for their work that they are only home for maybe 3 months of the year. One even spoke of having a home in one city, but his life wasn't really there anymore. He made it sound exciting and enviable.

It hit upon something I've been wondering about myself lately. Now, I'm an introvert and I can be content to sit in my apartment alone for a fairly extended amount of time. No one has ever used the word "gregarious" to describe me (so far as I know). So maybe this is idiosyncratic to me and my personality and more extroverted people feel differently.

But I wonder . . . sometimes, as little as I travel, I have still felt like I have more of a network than a community. I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that, at least insofar as I don't know that how I'd define the two words with great precision. I simply throw it out there, wondering if anyone else feels that way, especially in this world where we have a million ways to be connected but are so seldom present to one another.

Anyone else feel this way? What are you doing about it---that is, if you feel like there's something to be done.

Just thinking at the keyboard tonight . . .

Theology and the Body

2009-07-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from the campus of Duke University, where I am participating in the Institute for Dance Criticism as an NEA fellow at the American Dance Festival.

Watching all these moving bodies (I've so far seen 4 different dance companies and will see 2 more before I leave) leads me to some contemplation on Christian language. Jesus is the incarnation of God. We believe in the resurrection of the body. Collectively, we are the Body of Christ. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. And at the risk of taking some literal liberties, we also speak of being made in the image of God. This might mean many things to many people, but is often illustrated with human faces (not, I'm quick to point out, human feet or hands or torsos---and I wonder if only our eyes are made in the image of God or could possibly our knees tell us something of God's image, or, for that matter our large intestines as well as our hearts).

In the room full of dance critics, there was a brief discussion of the dominant western performance dance form---ballet---and how it reflected the rigid and restrictive philosophy of the west, i.e. Christian theology. There was some contrasting discussion about, say, African dance forms, which are considered more "earthy," perhaps in part because there is a belief that the gods are in the earth, not up in heaven. Ballet is all about lifting the body upward in space, the torso rigid and all expression taking place in perfectly placed arms and legs. Beautiful, perhaps, but hardly earthy.

I listened carefully to the conversation, not really knowing what to say. I could theologically counter most of the assertions about Christianity, but I also couldn't deny the history of ballet. I simply said that this was, in part, why I preferred the 20th Century invention of Modern Dance. I love the weight of the body. I love how gravity can be played with in physical expression. Any further discussion would have led to a discussion about theology in particular and I recognized this as a slight diversion from our more focused discussion on dance, so I left it at that.

Talking about dance leads to talking about bodies. One woman reveals she wanted to be a ballerina, but was too tall. Someone mentions how beautiful another woman looked on stage, but appeared frighteningly thin close up. I don't need to detail the discussions of men in tights. None of these things have anything to do with the art of dancing and yet it is all inescapable. These are the bodies that incarnate the ideas of choreographers. These ideas, however abstract or literal, are expressed with these masses of muscle, blood, bone, and nerve. These are the bodies that entertain, challenge, entice, and repulse us.

We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, dancers remind us of the beauty we embody. At other times, we are reminded that our beautiful bodies expectorate, defecate, copulate, ejaculate . . . stop me before I rhyme again, but you get the idea. Some of the work I've seen here in Durham has reminded me of the beauty and the disgust of the body, nearly all at once. What a mixed up piece of work we are! And yet, we hold the image of God. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Maybe this says something more about God than we usually like to think about.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (I amused myself by scribbling on my notebook the other day: "The dance critics motto: And the flesh became word.") I think a lot about dance in relation to incarnation. More and more, I think this has less to do with extreme flexibility and highly developed virtuosity (I appreciate both), and more to do with the deep expression of the spirit moving the muscle, blood, bone, and nerve. Spirit moves a body, taking pleasure in the moving---moving itself and moving others, in all the ways we can be moved. We find physical ways to express the inexpressible, from exuberant alleluias to groans too deep for understanding and every shade of life in between.

And that's as close to a conclusion as I can come to tonight. More fervently than usual, I invite ruminations on this topic.

Why I Go to Worship

2009-06-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, my church's worship and music committee discussed worship attendance. If talk from the recent Gulf Coast Synod Assembly was any indication, it's a synod-wide problem. Church members are skipping out on church services.

After some discussion, through which I sat silently, I asked the other committee members, "Why do you go to church?" The chair asked if that was a rhetorical question and I said, "No, I really want to know, because I'm not sure I can articulate why I go to church. I've tried to stop a couple of times but I keep coming back, but I'm not sure why."

There was some discussion after that, but none of it really helped my inarticulateness. Being a writer, inarticulate moments frustrate me, so I've been pondering this ever since.

Here's what I have so far.

It's largely a relationship thing. What do I mean by that? Are my best friends at church? Not necessarily, although I am quite fond of many people there and would name them among my friends. Some of my closest friends don't even go to church, aren't even Christian, so it's not as if church is the sole or even primary source of my friendships.

I often think, however, where else will I sing with other people? Having grown up in the church, I have a list of hymns that hold a number of associations for me. "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" is one that I really enjoy singing, and I wouldn't care to do it as a solo. Where else will I sing "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" with a group of people? I think there is a nearly religious dimension to singing anything together. I've heard people who have come back from the Kerrville Folk Festival and talk about singing songs around a campfire long after all the performances have ended. They speak of it in quasi-religious terms. So it's not as if I couldn't find groups of people with whom to sing. I'm not hugely fond of "Just As I Am," a hymn with to much emphasis on the first person singular for my theological tastes, but when I'm singing it with a congregation, well, it's okay. And where else will I do that?

There are people at church I wouldn't know any other way than because we go to the same church. Engineers, lawyers, school teachers . . . I might run into these categories of people in my job as a retail bookseller, but where else will I have breakfast with them? Left to my own devices, all I'd know would be artists, performers, and writers. Going to worships exposes me to people from walks of life I wouldn't normally hang out with. And my life is made richer.

But it's not only a relationship with people thing, although that's an inescapable dimension of it. We gather as people of God, as followers of Jesus. And one thing that is true, even when I've tried to avoid the church, is that I'm a little in love with Jesus. There I said it. Sounds sentimental and mooshy, doesn't it? Well, it's not some box of candies, flower arrangement kind of love. Jesus doesn't really work all that hard at being consistently loveable. But I find Jesus compelling. I'll allow that it may be because I grew up in a Christian family and in church, but even though there are Buddhist or Taoist teachings that I find very interesting, even edifying, it's Jesus that I want to follow. It's the God that Jesus pointed to that interests me. That I love.

And seeing as how the church is the body of Christ, I suppose that means I'm a little in love with the people with whom I sing and pray on a Sunday morning. Sometimes we sing to God, but it seems we more often sing to each other. "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" isn't addressed to God or Jesus. The liturgical hymn of praise "This is the Feast" is not addressed to God. "Lift High the Cross," a hymn with strong memories attached, is not addressed to God. So we must be singing to each other. And there's where something remarkable, even mystical happens. Singing together, we may be praising God, but we may also be singing to one another, as the body of Christ. It is as if Christ is singing to each of us. Exhortation, comfort, encouragement---where else will I hear dozens of people singing these words to me as from Christ? Where else can I, with dozens of people, sing these words to someone among us, someone who is needing that hymn sung to them by the body of Christ?

So this relationship thing, this love thing . . . I don't always feel it, not every Sunday. I do trust it's there, regardless. I do trust that there is something bigger than my feelings happening among us. I live in hope that because we gathered together, someone is leaving edified, renewed, hopeful, loved, even if that someone isn't me.

I'm not sure this explains it all, at least not to my complete satisfaction. I don't know that it's comprehensive enough. The sacraments are very much a part of my need for church, and I haven't even mentioned them here. Maybe another post. I'll have to see if I can find the words to talk about the sacraments in ways that express why I need them. This inarticulateness is frustrating. I hope my muddling through these thoughts might stimulate some thoughts of your own. I welcome responses.

A Thought on Worship

2009-06-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

A book that I'm likely to reference frequently here is Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda. It is by a Ugandan Roman Catholic priest and scholar, Emmanuel Katongole, who teaches at the Duke Divinity School. It is a book that fell into my hands somewhat accidentally, not something I would have normally sought out, but seems to have animated my imagination in ways that few books on religion have. His main hypothesis is that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is reflective of how the church in many societies, in the West as well as in Africa, operates. That is, the church as it currently exists simply doesn't matter. It didn't matter that Rwanda has been considered one of the most successfully evangelized African nations. Christians killed Christians and often in direct, hand-to-hand combat (which, for some reason, strikes me as even more atrocious than if the genocide had been accomplished by long-range missiles or even simply pulling a trigger on a gun---hacking people to death with a machete is much more . . . personal).

Katongole asks, what difference does being a Christian make? If we call ourselves Christian but then can kill our fellow church members simply because the government says they're the enemy, what good is saying we follow Christ?

As I say, there is much in this relatively short book (it's under 200 pages) that I will likely bring up in weeks and maybe months to come, but I want to put out there one short quote from him (in part because I was at a worship and music committee meeting today):

"I do not think it is any accident that the civil rights movement in the United States grew out of black churches where people were used to worshiping Jesus for two, three, even four hours at a time. Christians who cannot imagine worshiping God that long may want to reconsider their cost/benefit analysis of discipleship."

This strikes me as terribly indicting of the church when I hear complaints that a worship service goes more than 10 minutes over an hour or that a hymn was too long or there simply were too many hymns.

I'm not sure I'm advocating 3 hour worship services, but I am pondering the cost of being a church member. That is, I'm wondering if we even think there is a cost to being a church member. What are we willing to "pay" for the right to call ourselves disciples?

(Obviously, this is a question applicable to countless other areas of a Christian life, not just worship. Spin it where the Spirit leads.)

Come Holy Spirit

2009-05-31T19:37:00.000-07:00

I had intended to start this blog with some musing on the traditional prayer of Pentecost. "Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the earth."

Maybe another time.

Tonight I'm a bit heartsick at the news of a shooting in Wichita, Kansas, at Reformation Lutheran Church, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the church body to which I belong. Somehow, when these sorts of things happen in an ELCA congregation, I take it to heart more than if it happens in another denomination. This betrays my sin of tribalism---something I think I'll be blogging about in the coming weeks.

This sort of violence is also something that I'll be blogging about in the weeks to come. It's something that has been on my mind for some time, increasingly so in the last three or four months. I'll blog about it because I don't know what to do about my feeling of helplessness in the face of violence. Writing about it feels like doing something, small though it may be.

Of course, what happened in Wichita is muddied by the victim's profession. He was a doctor who performed abortions. Most of the news stories I've read have been quick to point out he performed "late-term abortions." I'm not sure what that means, exactly. I have a friend who used to live in Wichita who told me he performed late term abortions on extensively deformed fetuses. I don't know what that means, either.

And how I feel about all that is difficult to sort through just now, too. Maybe someday, I'll write about my feelings around abortion. Not tonight.

I'm increasingly disturbed by these attempts to take the law into one's own hand, and a very "frontier-style" of law at that. I'm disturbed that this took place in a church building. I'm unsettled that an usher at a church was gunned down while his wife was in the choir. I grieve that there are children in that congregation who will know that a church building is not a guarantee of safety.

What I do know is that the God I worship is not the same God that encourages people to make comments on news stories that revel in the violent death of this man.

Just last night, I put wrote the introductory note on the side of this blog, and I ended it with a paraphrase of Tertullian. "Let us show the world how we love one another."

Today, I feel we only show the world how we judge on another, how we condemn one another, how we hate one another.

Come, Holy Spirit.

Lord, have mercy.

Crumbs at the Feast

Election Year Blues

The Bad Rap on Repentance

Hackberries and Advent

A Hackberry Faith

Equus / Worship

And . . . So What?

Okay, a Rant (part 4)

Okay, a Rant (part 3)

Okay, a Rant (part 2)

Okay, a Rant (part I)

Hiatus

Adopting Evangelism

Ecclesiastical What Ifs

Pentecost 2011

Rapture Thoughts

Chance Operations and Improvisation

When in Doubt

Slippery (call it an impressionist response)

Nothing Left

A Brief Thought on Sin

Let's Kill Him

Triumphant, victorious,our One True King comes to usHumble riding on a donkeyShout aloud, loving cupsBehold! A king comes to us...Humble, riding on a donkeyThe Savior, scattering the moneyComing, the pushing and the shoving

Let's kill Him

Crying Out

Eugene O'Neill

The Cactus of Encouragment, Addendum

Disaster and Connection

Taking Up a Cross

Ash and Fast

The Cactus of Encouragement

Gratitude is . . .

On Bullying

in/of/it

Good and Evil and What to Do

Telling New Stories

Seasonal Thoughts

More About Dead People

Bodies

Hoping Like a Fist on Your Sternum

Nice, but not Necessary

Change is Bad. Or At Least Difficult

The Kind of People Who Follow Jesus

Fault Blame Responsibility Etc.

In the Middle of a Beautiful Mess

Come Holy Advocate, Our Defender and Hope

Ritual and Grieving and Renewed Hope on the Bus

Vigil of Easter 2010

The Humility of Dirty Feet

Hosanna! Save Us!

Commending Spirit

Lent

Reminisce Interrupted

Journal as Reminder and Clarifier

Experience as Idol

Everyone Dies (part one)

The Fingers Around My Sternum, Pulling Me Foward

Dramatic

A Sustaining Abundance

Gracious Love

God in a (Mail) Box

Godspell Spirit

Lying in the Grass, Looking Up

Controversies and Voices

Keeping Chist out of the Holiday Sales

Jesus Came to Save Retail

Saints and Saints and Saints

A Water that Runs Deeper than Blood

Sign of Jonah

Post Assembly

Methodists and Gays and the Holy Spirit

Schism

Churchwide Is On

Reconciling Lutherans

ELCA Churchwide Assembly---Next Week

Bread Thoughts

Network and Community

Theology and the Body

Why I Go to Worship

A Thought on Worship

Triumphant, victorious,
our One True King comes to us
Humble riding on a donkey
Shout aloud, loving cups
Behold! A king comes to us
...Humble, riding on a donkey
The Savior, scattering the money
Coming, the pushing and the shoving