Dirt Window

Self-disclosure

2012-01-25T10:14:00.000-08:00

Self-disclosure

This very act blurs the line.

If self-disclosure is the door to friendship, then the danger for pastors, teachers, doctors, and counselors is that the very nature of their jobs requires those to whom they minister to open up about the parts of their lives that they would normally choose only to share with a friend. This very act blurs the line.

Do I share because we are friends?

Are we friends because I share?

In many cases, neither is true. But it feels true. So there is an imbalance of power, of influence, of affection. And it is all too easy to misinterpret signals. Or to take advantage.

Sacrifice

2012-01-19T14:52:00.000-08:00

Sacrifice

the present-day Christian addiction to the Calvary cross has replaced Jesus' entire ministry ... with a single act of sacrifice

Left unchecked, an evangelical focus on Christ’s sacrificial death could be the death of the Church. It’s skewed our theology, messed up many of our relationships, and created a culture that thrives on guilt and judgment. But it’s not Jesus’ fault. He tried to warn us.

Here’s the deal: Jesus lived his message, and it was a message of love. But the present-day Christian addiction to the Calvary cross has replaced Jesus' entire ministry -- both before his death and after his resurrection -- with a single act of sacrifice, making that willingness to die for a belief and a people the proof of Jesus’ love.

It doesn’t work that way. Sacrifice -- of anything for anyone -- is powerful because of its selflessness. But sacrifice has some problems as well.

1) Sacrifice, to be effective, requires the misfortune of others. I cannot save someone unless he needs saving, hence the Church’s reputation for passing judgment. 2) If the act of sacrificial death teaches us the value of someone we previously took for granted, it remains powerless to heal that relationship. There is no reconciliation without life. 3) The pursuit of sacrifice in the form of hoped-for martyrdom is to give up living altogether. What is the value of a life that was never lived? 4) Sacrifice, as we understand it, involves a completely selfless giving without any hope of receiving in return. It is not a contract. This makes death the end of all sacrifice. Except for one thing -- Christians have the hope of resurrection. Unbelievers have no such hope. Logically, this would make the sacrificial death of an atheist more powerful (and more ethical) than the death of a believer.

I could go on.

But I’ll end with this, instead. When Jesus preached that “The Kingdom of Heaven is here” or that God desires “mercy and not sacrifice,” when he offered rest for our souls and spoke of a banquet to which all those found along the highways were invited, when he healed the lame and the blind and the bleeding, he was pointing to a wedding, not a funeral. And the wedding is here. Now.

It’s time to change our focus.

And our tone.

Fringe Christians

2012-01-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

No wonder the Church is largely considered irrelevantand even destructive.

A student described to me a debate -- hosted by his church -- in which two men attacked each other for almost two hours. The issue? Whether water baptism is required for salvation. This student, exhausted by the speakers’ anger, told me he’d decided it doesn’t really matter.

Another student told me about a Christian teacher -- respected in the community -- who made the claim that figure skaters, female gymnasts, and English teachers are prone to lesbianism. This student wanted to be an English teacher. Now she’s reconsidering.

A chapel speaker had students stand if they’d read any of the Harry Potter books. He told them that they’d opened themselves up to demonic influences and that they were in danger of experiencing the fires of Hell.

No wonder the Church is largely considered irrelevant and even destructive. Fringe Christians like these seem -- more and more -- to be stealing attention away from the majority. They claim that the only issues that matter are the sanctity of life (code for anti-abortion), the institution of marriage (code for anti-gay marriage), and other inviolable pro-family principles (code for anti-yoga, Halloween, public Ten Commandments displays, Supreme Court appointments, and any other politically-expedient social issues).

But these people don’t represent the thousands of pre-Civil War Christians who set their slaves free and hired them back as workers, paying them a fair wage.

They don’t represent the German Christians during World War II, who had to be told by their government -- again and again in official announcements -- to stop giving up their bus seats to Jews.

They don’t represent the community of Amish Christians who shocked the world in 2006, when they publicly forgave a man who had killed their daughters.

And I hope they don’t represent you.

Humility

2012-01-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

Admitting my actions are rooted in selfishness and also arrogance is in fact the way humility works. Humility, after all, is a kind of truth telling, facing up to who I really am.

Secrets

2012-01-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

Do I trust the members of my community with the secrets that I'm holding? Of course, if I don't trust them, then I'm probably not experiencing community, no matter how much I claim to "love" the people with whom I worship. The hard part for me is balance. What if the members of my community have their own secrets, secrets that make them less able to help me carry my own? What happens if I go first?

Rubber Bands

2012-01-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

Rubber Bands

These numbers are generally
in line with downward trends among all mainline protestant denominations.

For hundreds of years, churches have been like rubber bands. Their focus has been on getting as many people as possible inside the circle (of tradition, of polity, of community, of doctrine). The bands only stretch so far, however, making it inevitable that a point will come at which some people will get squeezed out unless the old band is replaced with something newer, larger and less restrictive in each of the senses listed above.

This model isn't working the way it used to. Southern Baptists—the nation's largest protestant denomination—reported in April 2008 that new baptisms were down to the lowest level since 1987 and that membership had dropped by about 40,000 people that year. These numbers are generally in line with downward trends among all mainline protestant denominations.

How should Christians respond? Maybe it's time to reconsider the model. Who says the world should be knocking on our door (let alone sitting in our pews)? After all, Jesus didn't tell his followers to sit in an upstairs room—door locked—counting down the days to His return. He sent them out to be his witnesses "in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Longevity

2012-01-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

An important element to longevity in ministry seems to be humility. Not the false humility of claiming I'm not really as good as you think I am. Not the false humility of pretending I'm lower than I really think I am in order to make sure I'm not perceived as arrogant. Not the kind of false humility that is selfish and needy and dependent in its projected selflessness. Real humility, recognizing and admitting who I am -- strengths, weaknesses, lightness, darkness, nuance, simplicity, complexity -- as honestly as I can, especially to myself.

Addiction & Grace

2012-01-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

Last week, I had a discussion about whether relationship with Christ is required for the experience of grace. And I understand the tension. It’s been argued by Gerald May that our incompleteness – the hollow parts we try to fill, the addictive efforts of trying to fill – “is the empty side of our longing for God and for love.” The more traditional view might be that I must actively turn toward God in order to experience God’s “flow of grace.”

But I’m not sure that’s true. At least not completely. Why would I need to name the source of grace in order to recognize its power? Why would I need to know the source of grace in order to experience its presence?

Activity

2012-01-01T17:52:00.000-08:00

Christ breaks the power
of winter in my soul, inviting
me into celebration.

Activity is addictive. And like any addiction, there are consequences: headaches, depression, loneliness, irritation, shallow relationships. I have experienced them all. I have not taken the time I need for rest. But in order to change, I need to find a new rhythm, recognizing that . . .

Christ breaks the power of winter in my soul, inviting me into celebration.
Intimacy requires more than monologue. Real prayer is a dialogue.
The darkness is broken when I find that ministry helps me to see in the countenance of another, not another number, but the very face of Christ.
Sabbath is fundamental to life, to both spiritual and emotional health. It is the day that gives purpose to all my other days.
God longs for me to rediscover the rhythm of the life for which I was created.

It’s not a duty. It’s not a space in time waiting to be filled by human activity. It’s a gift.

Grace

2011-12-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

All stories follow the same trajectory, touching on issues of relationship, rejection, redemption, and reconciliation. Grace is necessary. And in really good stories, we find it all over the place.

The Name

2011-12-28T10:26:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to "profess the name"? I've heard an awful lot of professing that didn't have much if anything to do with relationship.

I am convinced it's possible to know Christ, to respond to the inner workings of his spirit in love and obedience, without knowing his name.

Freedom

2011-12-26T17:41:00.000-08:00

October is the busiest month of the year for me. Only July comes close to matching October for office hours, events, and other activities. This year, as I’ve thought about the work I do, the time I spend doing it, I’ve noticed that the work I feel I need to do tends to fill up whatever time I give it. And there’s never quite enough time to get it done the way I want.

I’m learning to recognize that this feeling is a trap. That there’s never enough time. That I have to take control of my schedule and of my life if I want to experience any semblance of freedom.

Boundaries

2011-12-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

People without good boundaries are almost a kind of invasive species -- like cancer. Whether needy or autocratic, they don't know where they begin or end. The result is that they are miserable while also making others miserable.

Self-deception

2011-12-22T10:06:00.000-08:00

I continue to be shocked by the level of apparent self-deception -- of victimizers who think of themselves as victims.

Separation Anxiety

2011-12-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

Separation Anxiety

as long as I’m defining myself
by what I can do for others, I’m failing
to be separate (let alone whole)

Not so many weeks back, I felt overwhelmed by busy-ness. But I also felt the importance of understanding how I got there in order to help protect myself from simply cycling into and out of busy-ness. I want to change.

I gave myself an assignment.

I took most of Saturday as a reading day since reading’s my favorite free-time pastime. And I read a book, Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve. In the book, Friedman makes a connection between Bowen Theory (a family systems theory) and the shadows that we carry with us in ministry.

In one section, Friedman claimed that all emotional systems – families, churches, local and national governments – carry a chronic anxiety load. What matters, however, isn’t so much my activity in the face of that chronic anxiety. The real issue is how I respond to acute anxiety, the sudden changes – both positive and negative – that raise the level of anxiety in the system. Friedman listed four typical responses – fight, flight, freeze, caretake.

I’m a caretaker. My response to anxious systems and situations is to take on extra work, to fix it for others. My problem is one of differentiation, for as long as I’m defining myself by what I can do for others, I’m failing to be separate (let alone whole). I have to learn to separate in order to keep from separating.

Work

2011-12-14T11:41:00.000-08:00

I've
found a
propensity within myself to blur theboundaries.

I have long wished for a place in which I could live what I think of as the integrated life, one in which I can live in, work in, play in, and worship in a single community. My current place of work – a medium-sized church in a medium-sized town – is just this kind of place. I live across the street in the old parsonage. The main floor of my house is where I do much of my programming work with and for youth. I live two blocks from the center of town, so other than for my trips to the seminary on Thursdays, I don’t drive.

The integrated life is good. But I’ve found a propensity within myself to blur the boundaries. Because all is one, I’m thinking and acting as though more and more of my life fits within the boundary of work. And I love my job.

It is not a balanced life.

Not too long ago, I was sick. Sore throat. Earache. Runny nose. Fatigue. I was so tired. That day, thinking about an approaching deadline, I realized that I had to sleep. I had to say no to work. Even if just for a day. But I still went to a lunch meeting. And I still helped with an event that evening. And I spent time in the office, typing this journal entry.

Not working is also work.

Apology

2011-12-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

Apology

The Loudon County GOP was in the news not so long ago for an email that went out, picturing President Obama as a zombie “with part of his skull missing and a bullet through his head.” People were outraged, and the chairman of the Loudon County Republican Committee issued a formal apology.

“Apparently, some individuals have interpreted an image of Barack Obama that appeared within the e-mail as intending to portray the president as a victim of a violent crime. Nothing could be further from the truth, and we deeply and sincerely apologize to the president and anyone who viewed the image if that was the impression that was left. The LCRC deplores any effort to display, suggest or promote violence against the President or any other political figure.”

Not so many years ago, I might have accepted the apology as written and gone on with my life. But I’ve become convinced through the writings of Henry Cloud that “feelings are on our property.” What was offered above isn’t an apology. It’s an accusation. The LCRC is sorry for my response – “if that was the impression that was left” – not for its actions.

I think this kind of thing happens all the time.

Purity

2011-12-02T16:30:00.001-08:00

we do not fully know what it means to becomehuman to another

A student called me the other night. He needed help with a paper, but as we talked, it seemed that the task was an excuse, not the real reason, for his call. So I asked a few questions, and we discussed his classes, his family, his friends. Then, abruptly, he asked for advice.

His story is that he made out with his girlfriend’s best friend. She was drunk. He assured me that they did not have sex.

And he is conflicted.

Because of how it felt. Because of what he wants.

He wants to have sex. He also wants to wait until marriage. He wonders if there’s a way around the moral boundaries that up until that night seemed completely reasonable and good.

The nature of desire is multi-layered. And the contemporary struggle for purity involves loneliness and sometimes anguish and sometimes hope. But struggle it is.

For we do not fully know what it means to become human to another.

Socialization

2011-11-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

Socialization

Be more willing
to hear, than to offer
the sacrifice of fools.

In liturgical Christian tradition, children enter into the faith through a formal, church-directed process such as catechism or confirmation. Among evangelicals, it is largely understood that one becomes a Christian by making a personal decision to believe in Jesus Christ. Historically, Quakers fit with neither group, relying instead on a process of “socialization” in which children were raised into faith by their families and by the larger community of believers.

Howard Brinton’s survey of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century Quaker journals, published in 1972, demonstrates the process by which many young Friends first came to faith: a childhood experience of God’s presence, a period of youthful distraction, an “experience of a divided self,” and sharing publicly in open worship.

Of this first stage, William Penn wrote how it was when he was 12 years old that he first experienced “divine impressions” of the Lord’s presence. Mary Penington wrote that it was at the age of 10 or 11 that she first desired to know the nature of true prayer, later pouring out her soul “to the Lord in a very vehement manner.” John Crook decided at age 11 that he would “serve the Lord God of heaven and earth, whatsoever I suffer.”

But many of these young Quakers set faith aside in favor of “youthful frivolity,” investing their time in music, sports, fashion, friendships, humor – all activities we would deem normal. For these young Quakers, however, it wasn’t the activity itself that was wrong as much as it was the effect these activities had on them personally. They had become divided, tempted, as Margaret Lucas wrote, “to discharge myself of the worship due to God” in order “to attain happiness.” Job Scott wrote that he tried to “persuade (himself) there was no harm” in “frolicking and gaming.” Scott sometimes skipped meetings for worship in order to play cards with his friends. But he could not overcome a feeling that he was missing God’s best for his life, “returning home at night in condemnation, and sometimes sighing and crying.”

The point of change – the evidence of baptism by the Spirit into Christian community – frequently came through vocal ministry. John Yeardley, for instance, recorded that he spent 11 years of his life, resisting God’s nudging, refusing to share in open worship. But he finally came to a place in which he “could not doubt the time was fully come.” John Churchman wrote that it took him eight years to work up the courage to speak in meeting. But he finally stood, expressing “what was on my mind, and therein had peace.” Martha Routh first felt she should speak at age 14. But she did not speak in meeting until she was 29, and even then, she spoke but one sentence: “Be more willing to hear, than to offer the sacrifice of fools.”

Witch Trials

2011-11-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

Truth will stand over them, and Friends
will be clear.

The witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, comprise one of the darkest periods in American history. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned under the charge of witchcraft. Of those, 29 were convicted, 19 were hanged, and one man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under heavy stones when he refused to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. But contrary to popular belief, American witch trials were not simply the provenance of Massachusetts Puritans. There were also trials for witchcraft in New York, in Virginia, and among Quakers in Pennsylvania.

The first Pennsylvania trial took place almost a decade before the more-famous trials in Massachusetts and was presided over by William Penn. Two women – Yeshro Hendrickson and Margaret Mattson – stood accused of bewitching “calves, geese, cattle, and a few persons.” Mattson’s daughter testified that her mother was in league with the Devil. Several sources also report an exchange in which Penn asked whether it was true that Mattson was a witch: “Hast thou ridden through the air on a broomstick?” When Mattson answered in the affirmative, Penn responded that he knew of no law against it. Both women were set free.

In 1695, members of the Chichester and Concord Monthly Meeting minuted that two young men, Philip and Robert Roman, had studied astrology, earth divination, palm reading, and necromancy. The brothers agreed that if members of the meeting could convince them of the evils of witchcraft, they would give it up; and it was later reported that both brothers had set aside their studies of the dark arts unless it was found that such arts might be used “to do some great good.”

Instead of letting that be the end of the matter, local authorities commanded a trial. Robert Roman was found guilty of possessing certain questionable books. He was fined, ordered “never to practice the arts,” and released.

Responding to this crisis early in 1696, the quarterly meeting issued a testimony against all forms of magic, divination, and witchcraft as an “abomination to the Lord,” further warning that Friends everywhere must “use their utmost endeavors, in the way and order of the Gospel practiced among us, to bring such person or persons to a sense of their wrong practices . . . and, if any shall refuse to comply with such their wholesome and Christian advice, that then the Friends of said respective Monthly Meetings do give testimony against them; and so Truth will stand over them, and Friends will be clear.”

Convincement

2011-11-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

Convincement

He had no need to fear the God who had become for him “a restingplace in the day of trouble.”

Civil authorities in 17th-century Antigua weren’t known for their love of the Quakers. They banished some and jailed others. Charges brought against Quakers included speaking out in church, holding meetings in their homes, refusing to bear arms. But when George Fox visited the island in 1671, he found a community of Friends that included most of the island’s landed gentry, including his host, Samuel Winthrop, the owner of a sugar plantation that covered more than 1,000 acres and required the work of more than 60 slaves.

The irony is that Winthrop would befriend a Friend, let alone become one. Winthrop’s father, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was the first to banish Mary Dyer from the New England colony, the same Mary Dyer who was eventually killed for her defiance of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s anti-Quaker law. Winthrop’s brother, Connecticut Gov. John Winthrop (the younger), had Quakers banished, fining and forcibly removing those who entered the colony.

What convinced Samuel to cast his lot with Quakers? Nobody knows for sure, but historians trace the time of Samuel’s convincement to a letter in which he addresses his brother as “thee,” when in all previous correspondence, Samuel had used the formal, plural “you.” The suggestion is that Samuel’s thoughts on the death of his mother had borne in him a rejection of Puritan moralism in favor of what David Hackett Fischer calls the Quaker mode of “fatalistic optimism.” Samuel wrote that death no longer frightened him. He had no need to fear the God who had become for him “a resting place in the day of trouble.”

Winthrop’s convincement to Quakerism gave him peace. But it cost him politically. In 1671, Winthrop lost his post as registrar and as lieutenant governor. In the same year, Winthrop wrote to his brother John: “Be comforted in the Lord, who abideth forever."

Parenting

2011-10-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Being a parent has got to be one of the hardest things a person does. And most I know don't think they do it well. Too many broken hearts. Words that might better have been left unsaid. Misunderstandings. Suspicion. Fear. On the other hand, I don't know many who would give it up. Or admit regret. Hard work. But worth it.

Things

2011-10-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Things are things. Not good. Not evil. Amoral. And when kept in perspective -- used and valued as designed -- things can help me to live well and to do well. But when valued for what they represent, those same things easily become objects of worship, obstacles to relationship, obstructions to an experience of the Divine Presence.

Faith

2011-10-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

Some traditions tend to focus on coming to faith as an event while others present it as a process. I've sometimes wondered whether the experience of "event" or "process" has more to do with my faith personality than with my tradition or my experience of reality.

Maturity

2011-10-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've been challenging myself this year to live in the tension between competing desires and expectations. It's so much easier to quiet the stressors in my life by leaning one direction or the other, but I'm learning that the place of tension -- that liminal place of not quite one or the other (but both) -- is the place I need to be, the only place where I can find the balanced maturity that I seek.

Realistic

2011-10-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

I like to think of myself as a realist (rather than optimist or pessimist), but all that means is that I'm less likely to think of the glass half full or half empty than I am to suspect that I can smell the faint odor of chlorine.

Presence

2011-10-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

I'm often distracted, not because I'm not focusing, but because I'm focusing on something other than the experience of the moment. I struggle with being present.

Hope

2011-10-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

Would
you be willing to
give up what you want in order tomake a difference?

As a high school student, I knew where I was going in life. I would graduate at the top of my class, enroll at a top-tier university, work at a large private law firm and eventually find a way into politics. I wanted to be well-known, well-liked and well-off (not necessarily in that order). But along the way, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On a family trip along the Oregon Coast, I was “impressed” with a question. It was just in my head, but I knew it wasn’t from me: “Would you be willing to give up what you want in order to make a difference?” I suspected that God was the asker, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what it might mean. Whatever it meant, however, I knew it was what I really wanted, what I really needed.

Over the years, I’ve had a variety of experiences like that one – times when I’ve had a dream that provided clarity, times when I’ve heard someone say something they didn’t actually say, times when I’ve been “impressed” with a question or an insight or a new perspective, times that I’ve only recently come to recognize as mystical.

So I’m reading the mystics. Because I hope

to learn how to listen better,

to recognize the workings of God in my life and in the lives of those I love,

to better attend to the daily presence of a God who desires for me to experience the communion that brings joy, peace, love and life.

Materialism

2011-10-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

Materialism

food for the stomach, a roof
for the rain, a window, a cup of hot coffee, a book, a fire, a friend

I have a box in the basement utility room. It’s next to the washing machine, and it’s the place for stuff I just don’t need any more. When I checked the box this weekend, there were shoes, old gloves, a shirt, three books, a toy car, a ping-pong paddle, an insulated coffee cup. When the box gets full – about once every three weeks or so – I take it to a thrift store down the street. Add it up, and I’m giving away 16 or 17 boxes of stuff. Enough to fill up a minivan floor to ceiling. Every single year. And I’m not keeping up. At least twice a year, I do a major cleaning – move out old pieces of furniture, a rug, a pile of books, dead plants, broken tools, a television or a microwave.

I’ve been challenged to consider the temptation of the material, a temptation to collect and store and value, a temptation to have and to hold that can keep me from growing closer to Christ. Augustine likens these passions for the material to a serpent we must destroy. Teresa claims that our soul – having experienced spiritual reality – is no longer able to find pleasure in anything of the earth. De Caussade says that to delight in God, “we must strip ourselves naked, renounce all desire for created things.”

And I know that they’re right. But I fear they go too far, suggesting as they do that there is something wrong with the material, that there is something wrong with human passion for created things.

I have too much. In order to live a life with room for God, I must intentionally cast off what otherwise obstructs. But the truth is that there is also much value in the material: food for the stomach, a roof for the rain, a window, a cup of hot coffee, a book, a fire, a friend. For this reason, I’m grateful to C.S. Lewis’s noticing that “the attempt is not to escape . . . . It is more modest: to reawake . . . awareness.”

Broken

2011-10-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

the practice of mysticism – an awareness of God's reality and presence in all places, times, andsituations – is easier to do when I feel like it

The washing machine started in the normal way: filled up with water, moved the clothes back and forth, stopped for the soak cycle. But when it came time to spin, it clicked into place and stopped. There was no revving of the electrical motor, no blurry whir of spinning clothes. And the water wouldn’t drain. Even now, thinking back, I can feel the tension in my stomach. The anger. I don’t have time to deal with this. Not now.

Of course, it’s not just now. I wouldn’t have time to deal with it tomorrow, either. Or the next day. Or the next. But I had to.

The machine simply wouldn’t continue. Couldn’t continue. So – frustrated though I was – I packed up the car with more than a week’s worth of dirty clothes and drove to the laundromat.

Sitting there, waiting, I thought of Brother Lawrence’s claim that “all our actions . . . [should] be little acts of communion with God.” And I realized that the practice of mysticism – an awareness of God’s reality and presence in all places, times, and situations – is easier to do when I feel like it, when I’m at peace and at rest, when I have room for the silence.

But do I ever have room? To stop? To wait? To listen? To experience?

I named that night’s realization. Called it The Lesson of the Broken Machine. Because if I don’t have time to deal with a pile of dirty clothes, a swamped utility room, and a washer that won’t spin; then I don’t have time for God. Or me. Or the people I love. But that’s OK. Because it seems that Brother Lawrence didn’t really have that time, either. He worked so that others might have that time. The difference between Brother Lawrence and me is that he invited God to be part of his work – washing pots, preparing a meal, picking up the pieces of a broken stack of dropped dishes. May God teach me to do the same. Even in a laundromat.

The Mystics

2011-09-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

The Mystics

I do not know what I know. Nor do I know as much
as I suspect that I know.

Reading through a scattering of Christian mystics this summer, I've been challenged to rethink what I believe, what I do, and why. In that process of re-perceiving and re-acting my faith, I have wondered how much of my learnings should stay with me, informing who I am as a Christian, and which -- if any -- might be good to share with you. Here are just a few:

1) God is bigger than my imagination. In addition, my experience (and knowledge) of God is limited. I do not know what I know. Nor do I know as much as I suspect that I know.

2) If I really desire to experience the presence of God, I must work on identifying what is and what is not me, letting go of all the stuff I carry around, the stuff that burdens me and blocks me from actually seeing (let alone, knowing) God.

3) From time to time, it's not a bad idea to let go of all the traditionally pious practices – spiritual mourning, loving prayer, physical suffering, confession, study of the Gospel, simplicity, solitude, child-like adoration and worship – in order to simply express and experience love of God, in God’s presence.

4) Finally, if I cannot find God, it may be that I’m looking in the wrong places. If God's presence is as simple as a kiss, the breath of another, a challenging conversation, then I might be able to find God – and especially the love of God – by intermingling my life with the lives of my friends.

Spiritual Autism

2011-09-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

It is a gift that sets aside our initial and limited physical sensations and that opens us to a super-sensual experienceof God’s creation, of God’s people, of God’s nature.

Gifted children often carry extra burdens. For instance, during my years as a facilitator of gifted and talented programming, I found that the most intelligent students at my school were also – in many cases – the most likely to be diagnosed with depression, ADD, autism and a variety of anxiety disorders. I worked to meet the needs of each but found that I had a special ability to relate to the experience of children on the autistic spectrum. I could get “inside their heads” and help them to make important connections. I was frequently asked to meet with such students outside of the classroom. One of these students taught me an important spiritual lesson.

I met with this boy each week. He was intelligent. He was curious. But he was also different from his peers. He struggled to make and maintain eye contact. He missed (or misinterpreted) social cues. He experienced great difficulty discerning the difference between what is intentional and what is unintentional. He had only limited language for his feelings. In fact, this boy’s biggest problem was that his inability to name his feelings made it almost impossible for him to process and resolve them. Instead, he had “meltdowns.” In our meetings, we would explore the events of his day. I asked questions, looking for emotional buttons. I knew I’d found just such a button when this boy refused to answer a question. And I didn’t let up when he shut down. I worked at getting a response – any response – tears, a clenched fist, yelling. Then we would analyze his experience. How did his face feel? His hands? His shoulders? His stomach? Hungry? Tight? Bloated?

“I don’t know,” he would say. “It just hurts.”

“Does it hurt because . . .” I would ask, listing a number of reasons derived from what he’d shared. We negotiated. By the end of our conversation, he had named a new internal experience. On a good day, he had also come up with strategies he could try the next time he had this feeling. I was giving this boy words for his emotional and social experience. I was trying to be a sensitive ear and an honest mouth for him.

Jacob Boehme, a 17th-century shoemaker (and Christian mystic), suggests in one of his books, “Breaking the Chains,” that God can teach us to do this kind of work.

For God.

We can actually, really, physically be God’s body, God’s “eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking.” God can hear and see through us. But this hearing and seeing isn’t a kind of therapy we offer God. Instead, it is a miraculous opening, given to us by God, that we might see and hear what God sees and hears. It is a gift that sets aside our initial and limited physical sensations and that opens us to a supersensual experience of God’s creation, of God’s people, of God’s nature. And when we give ourselves up to God, we let God become a sensitive ear and an honest mouth. We let God open for us the mysteries that we otherwise miss, that otherwise overwhelm us because of our own spiritual autism.

The Trinity

2011-08-30T08:36:00.001-07:00

The Trinity Within

We bear in ourselves
a living representation of Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost.

Put three children in a room together, and they will play.

Take them to the lake, and they will swim and laugh and explore. They’ll take turns pulling a raft. Or pushing. Swimming in front or behind. Pulling down a corner to fill the raft with water. Then jumping in and helping to bail it all out. They’ll attack from beneath, flipping the raft and its occupants. Then they’ll have a mud fight. Go for a swim. Jump in the raft together and do it all over again.

Take them to a waterfall. They’ll climb rocks: “Look! Up here!” “How’d you get up there?” “There’s a trail. No, over here. It’s easy!” One will find a snake and yell for the other. Or maybe they’ll slide as far as they dare toward the back of a hole behind the falls.

Choose what children you will. It doesn’t matter. Even those labeled “shy” or “loud” or “disagreeable” find a way to fit, to take part, to interact, to play.

One of my new favorite writers – William Law – suggests that we must turn “to the Light and Spirit of God” that is within us. We bear in ourselves, he claims, “a living representation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

We were created for communion.

Children know this, and they are naturals at creating community through play.

I spend most of my days with children and youth. And it is this aspect of my job that gives me so much for which to be thankful. My schedule from just one week this summer: On Sunday, I drove a handful of fourth- and fifth-grade girls to Twin Rocks. On Monday, I took a dozen students to the St. Paul Rodeo. On Tuesday, I hiked to Wahclella Falls with 10 middle school boys. On Wednesday, another youth pastor and I drove 20 students to Hagg Lake. On Thursday, back to Wahclella Falls with another group of boys.

And it’s not always a joy.

They spit paper at each other while I’m driving in Portland traffic. They run ahead of the group and try to lose the girls. They toss their empty water bottles in the creek and complain when I ask them to wade in and retrieve them.

But they also play.

They let Thomas have the front seat even though Noah got to the van first. They lean into one another for a group photo. They offer to stay and clean the van when we get back to the church.

They don’t even have language for their experience. Other than that it is fun.

But I do.

And I am thankful for what I see, thankful for this every-day experience of communion, hoping that I am faithfully reflecting “the Light and Spirit of God,” hoping that I am helping youth to see in themselves, “a living representation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Misogyny

2011-08-24T00:40:00.000-07:00

In his advice for men, Miller used the words
seductive or seductress five times. In his advice for women,
Miller used a form of the word slut four times.

Earlier this month, Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz (and quite a few other really good books), wrote a pair of blogs about love. He counseled men to provide safety, security and emotional stability if they want to be attractive. He wrote that women should “stop acting like a victim. If you want a strong man who can protect you and your children, stop trolling for predators by crying all the time.” In his advice for men, Miller used the words seductive or seductress five times. In his advice for women, Miller used a form of the word slut four times. Miller tells men to write “a great love story.” He then says to women that they must “train hard” in order to get included in such a love story, likening it to a marathon and further counseling women that they must suffer in order to win.

Nine days later, Miller announced the deletion of both blog posts, offering a kind of ersatz apology. But he didn’t apologize for denigrating women. He didn’t apologize for blaming women. He certainly didn’t apologize for the sexist content of either blog post. What did Miller apologize for, exactly? Here it is. In his own words:

. . . I write blogs on a whim. . . . I’m thinking out loud. What I never expected was to incur the amount of traffic the blog received. And for that matter, the feedback both negative and positive.

Miller apologized, first, for the negative comments his blog received. He was only thinking out loud. He had no idea this many people were reading. He stresses that there was also positive feedback.

To be honest, I wrote the blogs and never reread them, even after all the traffic. I’m writing books at the moment and didn’t feel the need to go back.

Miller apologized, second, for not actually caring enough about the subject to pay any attention to it. He’s writing books, after all.

I write blogs, misspellings and all, as a way of journaling through ideas. That said, after receiving critical feedback from people I greatly respect (along with support from people I greatly respect) I feared a backlash. Not a personal backlash, mind you, but a backlash against the actual ideas the blog presented. That is, I feared many would say “who are you to tell me how to live or how to love, I’m going to do anything I want.”

Miller apologized, third, for people who don’t understand or agree with his argument. He also indirectly labels such people sexual libertines. Reading through the comments on Miller’s original posts makes it clear that many of these people are women.

I’ve seen this sort of backlash before in other arenas. I’m convinced a number of preachers drive as many people away from Jesus as they invite toward Jesus through the harshness of their rhetoric. I’m not interested, then, in driving people away from a good love story simply because I used language and presented ideas they found offensive. Especially when the ideas were generated in no more than half an hour . . . .

Miller repeats his out that he’s too busy for this kind of thing.

But he’s not.

Yesterday, Miller posted a new blog, asking, “Ladies, Why Do You Hook Up?” Maybe Miller’s just curious “why some girls give up sex easily.” Maybe Miller really does believe that women “use sex for some kind of social power.” Maybe Miller doesn’t know that the Getty Images photo he posted with his blog is the same photo used by Time Magazine in its online post Monday regarding the top 10 most promiscuous cities.

When one of Miller’s readers asks why Miller isn’t “asking the same questions to men,” it might just be that Miller’s right in saying, “All questions can’t be asked at the same time to all groups of people. While I appreciate your consideration, it really isn’t helpful. Honestly.”

Then again, maybe not.

Humanity

2011-07-22T17:14:00.003-07:00

To Be Human

we live in a
culture that can't talk
about sex

I read an essay not so long ago, written by a woman who received a Facebook friend request from a man who 13 years earlier had raped her. Although she never accepted the request, she did call him. Opened her woundedness. Asked him to talk about what he did and why. She writes that this “hour-long phone conversation with the man who raped me . . . was more helpful than 1,000 hours of therapy.”

It was a compelling piece of writing, and the author handled her subject both honestly and carefully. It was refreshing because – frankly – we live in a culture that can’t talk about sex. Not without a sneer, a snide comment, a joke, or some kind of sotto voce complicity (as though the discussion itself is suspect).

That’s what I find so refreshing in the Bible’s Song of Solomon. There is no shame. Instead, there is honesty, vulnerability, passion – even the passion that will continue to pursue in spite of cultural boundaries (implied by the beating received at the hands of those “sentinels of the walls” who “took away my mantle”).

And that’s what I find so frustrating in some of the early church fathers, such as Origen, who seems convinced of the evil of “fleshly desires.” He writes that only those “free of the vexations of flesh and blood . . . withdrawn from the desire for corporeal nature” may read this Old Testament book. And that’s what I find so frustrating in Bernard of Clairvaux’s insistence, likewise, that perceiving the message of the Song with “any shadow of corporeal substances” is nothing more than an “evil suggestion[s] . . . forced upon us by the bad angels.”

If Jesus was fully human, then we should be free to be the same, opening our woundedness and our longings, discussing with honesty and passion what it is to want.

At Barclay Press.

Community

2011-07-12T07:04:00.000-07:00

As to how we make community happen, I often feel like I'm stumbling in the dark, not even sure what it means (let alone how to get there). What I do know is that I have a longing for shared living. I have a longing for being known, being understood. I have a longing to know and understand. I have a longing for relationship. I believe these are universal longings, and this is why I argue that the “love” part of Christ’s crucifixion isn’t so much the sacrifice as it is the opening for reconciliation, the opportunity for celebration, the invitation to community.

Androgyny

2011-06-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

if we aren't willing to
let our perspectives be shaken, we'll never
really learn to see

The two creation accounts in Genesis have largely been read as separate stories; but the fact that they are next to each other demonstrates that someone thought they should go together. Rather than arguing over the differences, we would do well to consider why they have been treated as they have, what this paradox of placement reveals about how the texts are meant to be read and experienced.

What if the first story is vertical, emphasizing the relationship between God and the cosmos? The second story, then, is lateral, focusing on human existence in God’s creation. Notice how the two stories hinge on Sabbath, a point at which the first story of “the heavens and the earth” is flipped and projected into a future story of “the earth and the heavens.” The ending, then, of God’s creation – Sabbath – offers a transition into a new beginning, a new creation, a time in which human work and God’s plan coincide to start the long-term work of cooperatively creating.

The problem with this reading – as seductive as it is – is that the texts don’t present a unified view of humanity. In Genesis 2, the relationship between man and woman is unequal, a major difference from Genesis 1 in which God creates both man and woman in God’s image. In Genesis 2, inequality of the genders is demonstrated in the order of creation (man first, woman second), the quality of creation (woman derived from a man-part) and the purpose of creation (woman created as “a helper”).

The two texts were put together. But why? Maybe there’s a question left un-answered in the first, a problem that has to be solved. Maybe it’s a question we can’t see because of the cultural expectations (and assumptions) we bring to both texts. We do have a key, however, and that key is the work of P. A. Bird, work that makes clear the terms used for male and female in Genesis 1:27 are “biological, not sociological.”

What if, instead of reading these stories as poetry or historical narrative, we try the genre of mythos? What if these two accounts are meant to be read as potentially fantastical stories that answer questions of identity, purpose and morality? The fantastical part, according to Jennifer Wright Knust, the part we miss, is the possibility that “male and female” is referring to one, not two. If she’s right, then like the Native American story about how the chipmunk got its stripe, the second creation account answers, among other questions, why we are no longer androgynous.

Crazy? Only in that it controverts the way we're used to reading the stories. And if we aren't willing to let our perspectives be shaken, we'll never really learn to see.

Creativity

2011-06-20T07:36:00.002-07:00

I think of playful creativity as one of humanity's greatest gifts, so it makes sense to me to consider that gift a reflection of our Creator. But I've taken it for granted. I haven't considered whether it's true. Or what it might mean.

Between-ness

2011-06-13T10:33:00.003-07:00

I find that much of my work as a youth pastor involves helping students to live in rather than evade the tension of authentic living. Within my own denomination, for example, there are emphases on both simplicity and stewardship. Should I carefully steward what I have for the future? Or give away everything, taking a vow of poverty in order to live simply?

It's human to want to resolve the tension, to want to move in one direction or the other. But that kind of resolution almost always ends in an extreme (making me an extremist). It's much harder to live in the tension, to daily struggle with balance, with paradox, with the between-ness of never quite getting it right and never giving in or giving up.

On Hell

2011-06-08T10:41:00.002-07:00

What if there were no punishment and destruction outside of what we call "natural" consequences? What if our conception of hell is just a concept? Is it useful? Does it work? What if the purpose of God's "barking" against sin is to draw me away from danger, to draw me into relationship and community? Does that bark need a bite?

Worship

2011-06-03T09:15:00.002-07:00

The Image of God

my attitude toward the
name of God reveals the integrity
of my relationship with God

Do I worship God, the giver of all good things? Or am I beholden to an idea, an image, a concept? How might I know which it is? How might I study my own actions and thoughts, my comings and goings and doings? How might I discern whether my worship is real?

In “Unsaying the Word ‘God,’” David James Duncan suggests that the way in which I use the name of God reflects on my relationship with God. Do I love God’s name? Or simply use it as an object of power (threatening power)? Duncan further suggests that my attitude toward the name of God reveals the integrity of my relationship with God. Am I in awe? Am I humble? Or do I simply seek to humble others? Finally, Duncan claims that my experience of Creation reflects my experience of God. Do I bask in the warm sun? Or am I prone to spend my energies calling others from a sunny spot, futilely striving to get them inside my own circle of sunlight? Do I truly enjoy what God has made? Or do I set aside enjoyment in order to advertise what I’ve yet failed to appreciate?

And what is the source of this enjoyment (of my very being)? Olivier Clement insists in “God, Hidden and Universal,” that God is love. That God is life and light and breath. That God has always been and always will be. That God is mystery.

Seeing

2011-05-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

There are so many who are invisible. I want to be like Christ: to see the blind man, to stop for the bleeding woman, to love even Samaritans.

In the Beginning

2011-05-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

What we could do is think about not
what the story says to us, but what it might
have meant to its first hearers.

Genesis 1:27 makes clear the equality of men and women as imaged after God’s own self. What then are we to do with the second creation account, the one where Eve comes from a rib, lives as a helpmate, falls for the forbidden fruit, and ultimately gets kicked out – with Adam, it must be admitted – of the garden?

What we could do is think about not what the story says to us, but what it might have meant to its first hearers. And why. Because this second account is not a happy story. It includes wrong decisions, deception, secrecy, shame, and ultimately, punishment. And the story has long been used as instructive. But cultural deconstruction – a critical literary process that requires the reader to reverse her cultural expectations – reveals a few interesting ideas:

1) Adam and Eve live as nomads, freely partaking in the riches of God’s garden. When they leave God’s garden, they are cursed with the responsibility of making their own garden, of becoming agrarian, a cultural system that requires specialization of tasks, a system rife with all kinds of inequality.

2) The curse is echoed in the murder of Abel, a shepherd, by his brother, Cain, a farmer. Cain is physically marked with his curse. And he builds a city, further covering over (exploiting?) God’s garden with his own constructions.

3) The people who passed down this creation account, generation after generation, were a nomadic people. They had sheep. And goats. They traveled (except for when they were slaves). Continued conflict with their agrarian, sometimes urban, neighbors led them to build cities of their own, to request a king, to collect wealth. To stop living as nomads.

What, then, if this creation account – the one that seems to cause us so many problems around sin, around male-female relationships, around identity – were a story of what went wrong with “those” people rather than a story of how “we” were created? What if this account is an explanation early Israelites gave to their children in order to make sense of their crazy, sinful, and out-of-balance-with-God’s-world neighbors?

Discovery

2011-05-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

When God intervenes in human affairs, what is the nature of that intervention? For instance, I believe God can and often does correct our misunderstandings. But I mean that as directional, not terminal. I think -- and I'm just trying this out here -- that God's corrections are like soft side barriers that keep us from veering too far off course. I don't think God's corrections leave us with a definitive understanding of the nature of God. God gets us back on track without ending our journey of discovery.

Eighth Day

2011-05-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

The story of Christ is a creation account, an account in which Jesus' resurrection serves as the eighth day of creation, a new beginning for an old world. It's a story in which our response to Jesus' invitation plays a part in what the world becomes. To those who say it is finished, I argue it's just begun. After all, there's lots of work yet to be done and plenty that needs undone as well.

Anti-World

2011-05-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'm convinced that most streams of Christianity come across as anti-world, no matter what their claimed intentions. Conservatives want to take over the world, so they can fix it. Liberals strive for relevance to the needs of the world, so they can transform it. Many of the rest of us simply avoid the world, defining ourselves by what we're against.

But what if we joined with the world rather than criticizing or fighting? What if we learned to see God reflected by and active in? What if we learned to love?

Egalitarian?

2011-05-02T11:31:00.002-07:00

On Feminist Theology

What if the story we’ve believed – about
hierarchy, about power, about apostolic succession
- is really just a story of what we’ve become

What if Mary were “the disciple Jesus loved”? What if Esther were a woman “after God’s own heart”? What if Junia were the primary writer of the New Testament epistles? What if God created them – both female and male – in the image of the divine? What if the story we’ve believed – about hierarchy, about power, about apostolic succession – is really just a story of what we’ve become, not the story of what we were or what we were meant to be? What if the story of freedom is the real story?

If it’s not true, then the Church is a tool of oppression.

If it’s true, then the Church as organic, egalitarian community has succumbed to a masculine culture.

That’s what’s called a lose-lose proposition. And the only way to deal with it is straight on. We have to face what we really are. We have to deal with the mess we’ve made. We have to admit that doing so will take both time and work. Hard work. And a lot of time.

We start by re-imagining what it means to be the Church, and starting with an inversion of gender shows us one possible beginning. What if “womankind” stood for all humanity? What if “Jesus came to save all women”? What if we only spoke of the “motherhood of God”?

When we laugh aloud (or privately scoff) at such a suggestion, we reveal the truth of the argument. Whatever it is that makes us uncomfortable deserves further inspection.

I'm not arguing for the feminization of theology or of the Church. Instead, I'm arguing for freedom and for a freedom that extends to all. My hope is that the Church might become truly counter-cultural, truly transformational, truly revolutionary, that the Church might become Christ’s body, offering saving grace and liberation to a culture in chains.

At Barclay Press

The Other

2011-04-26T07:48:00.001-07:00

A friend -- during a recent visit to South Africa -- had a discussion about Apartheid with a man born in 1977. This man had lived in both the old and new South Africa and had reason -- my friend believed -- to have a unique insight from the inside. But this man was puzzled by her interest. He admitted that he hadn't really noticed Apartheid until it was officially repealed. Life had seemed normal to him. The separation and subjugation of indigenous peoples had been completely invisible.

I wonder how much of our own treatment (and mistreatment) of others is similarly invisible. I wonder how our progressive but infrequent stands "for the other and marginalized" look to those who are genuinely "other and marginalized." And I wonder if it's possible for those of us on the inside to work for change.

Choosing

2011-04-24T12:39:00.002-07:00

It seems we often choose to do what's right not because it's right but because we have no other option.

Reading

2011-04-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

We do a disservice to the faithful (and to the scriptures) when we insist that they read in a certain way and from a certain perspective. It's fun to explore, to imagine, to re-think, to challenge. It's creative. What if we could learn to encounter both God and scripture in the way we often encounter those closest to us -- with a sense of play?

Poverty

2011-04-15T15:00:00.004-07:00

How do we overcome the American belief in unlimited resources and unlimited opportunity – a belief that makes us less likely to share with the needy, more likely to see their poverty as the result of poor choices?

Not Knowing

2011-04-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

The recognition that I don't really know -- that I'm not in control -- helps me be humble. But I don't settle into the complacence of I'm-not-God-but-He-knows-what-He's-doing thinking. Instead, I choose to live in the tension of not knowing, a tension created by the sense that these questions matter and that the search for an answer may not result in definite conclusions, but it certainly will get me closer to a kind of understanding, to a kind of sensing, to discernment.

Stranded

2011-04-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

The phone booth in the desert – a kind of secular
confessional – gave many of these characters their only
meaningful (and vulnerable) human connection.

There’s a phone booth that used to stand in the Mojave Desert, 8 miles from the nearest paved road, 15 miles from the nearest numbered highway, miles and miles from any buildings. It’s telephone number was (714) 733-9969. The booth was eventually removed, but there had been a time in the 1990s in which a man, who claimed direction from the Holy Spirit, camped at the booth for more than a month, answering the calls that came in each day (more than 500 in all).

A movie was made, Mojave Phone Booth, one of the most tragically comic films I’ve ever seen. I sat for a screening at the Boise International Film Festival, a screening punctuated with loud laughter as audience members connected with the painfully funny moments of space-alien paranoia, a botched suicide, an out-of-work administrative assistant sucked into a lucrative ménage-a-trois, a desperate man who breaks into his girlfriend’s car and steals her stereo system (four times) in an attempt to convince her that she’ll be safer living with him.

It’s not that people in Boise, Idaho, are weird enough to have shared similar experiences. Instead, these impossibly strange scenarios perfectly illustrated the common American phenomenon in which we long for intimacy while resisting commitment. The phone booth in the desert – a kind of secular confessional – gave many of these characters their only meaningful (and vulnerable) human connection.

In the movie, there was a woman on the other end – an older, English-accented lady with a fondness for Canada – who several times a day placed calls to the booth and spoke with whoever answered. She listened to them. She asked questions. Sometimes she offered advice. In the movie, she had started calling the booth seven years earlier, seeking to connect with someone, anyone. Instead, she discovered a calling in listening to the problems of those on the other end.

While watching this film, I was overcome by the work of God reflected in the care offered by this woman, her continued calls, her endless patience with and for the pain of others, her love for a people stranded in the desert, looking for direction.

At Barclay Press

Nostalgia

2011-03-17T10:12:00.004-07:00

I sometimes think that contemporary worship has the effect of encapsulating Jesus's body, making it a product of our past. We have replaced God with Jesus-as-historic figure, making the object of our worship something other than the divine, something much more like a memory.

Tension

2011-03-10T10:17:00.006-08:00

Living in Tension

It's much harder to
live in the tension, to daily
struggle with balance

I find that much of my work as a youth pastor involves helping students to live in rather than evade the tension of authentic living. Within my own denomination, for example, there are dueling emphases on both simplicity and stewardship.

Should I carefully steward what I have for the future? Or give away everything, taking a vow of poverty in order to live simply?

It's human to want to resolve the tension, to want to move in one direction or the other. But that kind of resolution almost always ends in an extreme (making me an extremist). It's much harder to live in the tension, to daily struggle with balance, with paradox, with the between-ness of never quite getting it right and never giving in or giving up.

Waiting

2011-03-02T09:35:00.003-08:00

yesterday's
concerns don't apply
today

The long, dark nights of winter make the early morning a time of almost – almost light, almost new – and I find in these early-morning, liminal moments, the perfect threshold for prayer. It is still quiet. But the morning quiet is a quiet of anticipation, not the evening’s tired silence. It is still dark. But the morning’s black sky, edges changing to silvery gray, makes a promise of warm light to come. It is still, the perfect setting for contemplative prayer. For waiting.

So I wait.

And each morning, as I wait, I feel peace, at ease. I feel that yesterday’s concerns don’t apply today, that everything hard’s been set aside, that it can wait.

Giver

2011-02-17T10:22:00.005-08:00

God as Giver

My dad tried explaining
Santa as a kind of
bureaucrat

I asked my dad at Christmas once why other children believed in Santa? The very idea made no sense. The need. After all, it seemed so obvious that no one could love me more than my parents. Why would anyone want a Santa?

My dad tried explaining Santa as a kind of bureaucrat, delegating responsibility to individual parents the same way our heavenly Father gives us earthly fathers (as if I needed to know how gift-giving worked). It was a mistake. But my dad realized it too late. I, in my 4-year-old wisdom, had already countered with a new line of thought. If God was like Santa, then who needed God? What’s the use of a heavenly Father if I already have a real, live, loving and touchable Dad, someone whose lap is always ready, whose hugs are never withheld, whose goodness is apparent even when expressed as discipline?

I remember my parents being concerned. And quiet.

Then my mom told me a story about her dad, a story I hadn’t heard before. The man I knew as Grandpa was her step-dad. Her real father, her “daddy,” had died when she was only 10 years old. I don’t remember why it made sense at the time because it didn’t really answer my question, but my Mom simply said, “Not everyone can have a daddy like yours.”

This, then, is what I learned (or at least what I remember): why God gives as he does and how he does and when may not make sense. Why others try to quantify or control God often doesn’t make sense either. Not everyone can have a daddy like mine. And sometimes, even for me, it’s hard to recognize or understand that, at heart, God is a giver.

For Barclay Press.

Proximity

2011-02-14T12:17:00.003-08:00

we also touched on the proximity
of God, the experience of Christ, the power of
a phrase both breathed and lived

On a Sunday night in October, the regular worship leaders for high school youth group both had other plans, so I took advantage of the opportunity created by their absence to try something new. I asked students to choose one of about 60 different “breath prayers” I’d created by taking short phrases from Psalm 119. Students worked for 45 minutes on collages of photos, words, colors, and other images cut from magazines while focused on the breath prayers they had selected. My plan was for the collages to give us something to do with our hands in order to cut down on distractions during the time of worship, but many of the finished pieces were complex and beautiful representations of the prayers themselves.

During the exercise, I encouraged students to experience the time of prayer as a time of freedom; so even though I wanted them to have an experience akin to what Alonius called “only myself and God,” I made it clear that getting up for a snack, answering the door for trick-or-treaters, conversation, laughter, simply being together were all completely appropriate activities during our worship experience. Even so, our time together was a time of almost complete silence. Students were completely absorbed in their prayers and their creations. In fact, as parents arrived to pick up their children, many students had trouble finding a clear stopping point. They wanted to continue, longed for completion. Most left in silence.

The next afternoon, I had coffee with one of the students who’d been part of our worship experiment. We discussed homework and parents, music and poetry, philosophy and the Church, all of the usual topics. But we also touched on the proximity of God, the experience of Christ, the power of a phrase both breathed and lived, an experiment with prayer that had changed us both.

Immanence & Transcendence

2011-02-03T08:46:00.003-08:00

Immanence & Transcendence

watching as one last
leaf describes a curve in the
slant of afternoon light

Nearly 400 Friends convened in Colorado Springs at the end of December for Summit 2010, the first national gathering of evangelical Quaker youth and young adults. We spoke of missions, of community, of our identity as Quaker followers of Christ. There were discussions on women in ministry, on the importance of theological education, of the tension between pacifism and patriotism, of spiritual formation, sexual purity, immigration, and incarnation. And underlying every conversation were differing conceptions of the very nature of God. Close and personal, the inner Light? Or distant and powerful, the Creator of the universe?

What if God is both?

A meditation:

I live in God. God created me. God also created the boundaries of my life, the places where I touch others – where our boundaries bump (or overlap) – the crossroads of our lives, the space in which I stop to find myself.

I can’t get away from God. For God is here. And there. Now. And then. And when. If not for God, naught I’d be. Not now. Not ever.

Yet I am nothing. A grasshopper. The nation in which I live is a drop in the bucket, a speck of dust, a mote. To what could I compare God? With whom? A potter? A goldsmith? A counselor? They all fall down. Fall short. Fail completely to encompass the God who, in Isaiah, “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”

Even so, it is God who holds me together. It is God who has reconciled me to himself. It is God who has invited me in, made me part of his body, the Church. And as I find myself a part of God’s body, I also recognize – though painfully – that I am unworthy (and unable). How am I to know God’s ways? God’s thoughts? God’s very word?

God is far away. But close. God fills both heaven and earth. And God is here. As I type. As I think. Looking out the window, watching as one last leaf describes a curve in the slant of afternoon light, I know that God has made this moment. Is making. God draws my attention to the beauty of his work, to him.

Father in heaven, You are holy, wholly beyond my understanding. Give me what I need. Let me forgive. Forgive me. Protect me. Above me. Beside me. Within me (and yet separate). I don’t understand. But I am thankful. You know my needs.

I know, God, that you are present as “the inner Light.” You inform, inspire and guide. But I also know that you are separate – so much bigger – from my selfish, suffering, sin-sick existence.

For Barclay Press.

Blessing

2011-02-02T12:02:00.002-08:00

I realized, that each day as
I’d prayed for God’s blessings for others,
I'd also been praying for me.

Every Monday morning, I meet with an 8th grade, home-schooled student for a writing session. Afterward, as I walked to the post office this week, I prayed that he would feel good about the work that he’s done, that God would help him to think clearly and to organize his thoughts as he works to become a more effective communicator.

Early on Tuesday, I watched from my office window as high school students rushed to school, filling up the parking lot across the street. I prayed that God would ease their anxieties, help them to slow down and enjoy being in community no matter what the work for the day might entail.

On Wednesday morning, I was scheduled to meet with another youth pastor for coffee. He texted me two minutes before our meeting to say he was sick and unable to come. Instead of walking back to the office, I sat in the coffee shop and prayed that God would give him comfort, relieve him of the stress he feels as a young minister, carrying parent and community expectations, wondering if he’s doing decent work.

On Thursday, I took the back road past Champoeg State Park on my way to the seminary, both praying for and experiencing God’s blessing in the mist, in a stand of trees back-lit by early sun, in an open field, in the sky.

And I realized, that each day as I’d prayed for God’s blessings for others, I’d also been praying for me.

Starting Over

2011-01-29T08:59:00.001-08:00

In order to grow spiritually, we often have to bury the “Jesus” we once knew.

Moving to the Center

2011-01-25T09:44:00.003-08:00

Moving to the Center

I have trouble remembering why
it was such a hard choice, why it
felt like I had so much to lose.

The metaphor I've found most useful in thinking of prayer is a circle with God at the center and people (me included) at the edge. In prayer, with heart directed toward God, I work out my salvation in a life of prayer that draws me ever closer to the center and ever closer to others.

During my junior year in high school, I found that the more time I spent in prayer, the more sensitive I became to the needs of others: alcoholism, neglect, loneliness, depression, desperation. And even though I was overwhelmed by the need, it was a measure of need that previously had been invisible to me. Prayer was creating in me a measure of empathy.

That summer, during a trip to my grandparents’ home, I felt God challenging me to reconsider my path: would I continue to seek a future in the public eye (politics) or would I be willing to set aside what I wanted (wealth and influence) in order to serve others? It felt like a calling. I struggled – in prayer – over what kind of a life I should lead, over what kind of a person God was creating me to be.

During that process, many others joined me in praying for clarity (and for strength to choose well). Today, nearly two decades later, I have trouble remembering why it was such a hard choice, why it felt like I had so much to lose. In this process of prayer – in this daily practice of moving closer and closer to the center – I’ve found both clarity and community. And I can’t even begin to imagine going back.

Supplication

2011-01-18T14:14:00.002-08:00

My grandpa didn’t get
better, but for a long time, he
didn’t get worse either.

When I first heard – a few years ago – that my grandfather had terminal cancer and only three weeks to live, I asked for help. I asked God to heal my grandpa. And then I took it back. Apologized to God for being selfish. Told him how much I loved my grandpa. Thought for awhile on some of my favorite memories: Grandpa teaching me to bottle-feed a calf, helping him move sheep, walking through an old barn together, his laughter on the phone as he told about teaching Grandma to use an ATM, his pride in a perfectly-browned turkey, his whistle. I asked for a chance to say goodbye.

I believed then – and still do – that God was present in my remembering, that he helped me to know what to pray for, how to ask. My grandpa didn’t get better, but for a long time, he didn’t get worse either. And we visited. And he laughed and I laughed, and we both told stories. And then, about five months later, my grandpa fell asleep. And stopped breathing.

When I heard the news, I remembered: on the phone, a few days before, we’d said goodbye.

Zombies

2011-01-11T16:38:00.003-08:00

We Sound Like Zombies

these chants, spells,
and prayers reveal something of both
how we pray and why

It can be awkward to enter a religious community that’s not your own. Especially when the people do things that you don’t do at home.

At my first Catholic mass, for instance, I didn’t know how to “pass the peace,” and I couldn’t figure out the patterns of posture – when to stand, when to kneel, when to sit. On my first visit to a Russian Orthodox church, an old woman had to push me out of the way of the priest and censer. My first experience in a Presbyterian service involved communion, and I’d never previously heard it described as a service of reconciliation. In my first Nazarene service, there was a corporate reading of scripture. What I remember most is that the people sounded like zombies.

A piece I recently read on prayer in the Greco-Roman world explores an ancient influence on prayer in the church. And I recognize in the discussion of prayer in “fictional literary contexts” an echo of my own experiences with prayer in literature, experiences that account for my reflection that the Nazarenes “sounded like zombies.” I think of the witches in Macbeth: “double, double, toil and trouble.” I also think of the Harry Potter series, the Earthsea Trilogy, The Odyssey (and others).

What I hadn’t previously realized is that if art imitates life (as well as the reverse) then these chants, spells, and prayers reveal something of both how we pray and why. It’s a revelation that’s somewhat painful. Am I praising God, after all, or simply looking to control the Creator? My motives aren’t pure: after all, there is this idea within me that I bring something to God with an expectation that God might give me something in return. Even when the only things I bring are an attitude of humility and a contrite heart, I expect – and sometimes demand – that God answer.

Richard Foster challenges my expectations with a section in his book on prayer, “The Most Complete Prayer.” He implies that the heart of Christian prayer is nothing more nor less than an experience of the flesh and blood of Jesus, an experience of what it means to be one in Christ, an experience of one-ness. This word from Foster helps me to know that there’s no harm in spoken, corporate prayer (and probably lots of good). But I still think we sound like zombies.

At Barclay Press

Quiet

2010-12-23T08:22:00.003-08:00

I could not quiet my mind,
and I did not have a quiet heart.
There was too much noise.

During a week-long prayer practice with Psalm 94, I found that the hardest part was the noise.

On Monday afternoon, I prayed in a hotel room; I was attending a conference. I read, “Great is the Lord,” as a vacuum bumped against the wall in the room next door. As I pondered God’s steadfast love, I could hear the television in the room on the other side.

On Tuesday evening, I prayed in my room again but at a later time. And it was quiet. But the lack of noise made it hard for me to read the psalm aloud. I was concerned with what others might hear (and think). The most difficult line of the psalm was the one I whispered: “Rise up, O God, judge the earth.”

On Wednesday afternoon, I prayed while walking. It was raining lightly, and a nearby park was deserted. Still, I found Psalm 94 one that was difficult to speak aloud with its cries for vengeance on the wicked.

On Thursday morning, I found shelter from the rain in a coffee shop. And I read the psalm to myself, taking a sip of coffee and a bite of coffee cake before and after each reading as a symbolic step forward and back.

Then, when I was done, I wondered at why such a simple practice had seemed so hard. I wondered at my need for a kind of quiet that goes beyond silence. Because I found a quiet room on Tuesday and an empty space on Wednesday. But I could not pray as though it were just me and God. I could not stop thinking about others and what they might think if they saw, if they heard.

I could not quiet my mind, and I did not have a quiet heart. There was too much noise.

Circle

2010-12-09T09:05:00.003-08:00

Prayer as a Circle

a life of prayer that draws
me ever closer to the center and
ever closer to others

The foundation of prayer is love, so to grow closer to God through prayer will also – by its very nature – bring me closer to other people. The metaphor suggested in this idea is a circle, with God at the center and me at the edge. In prayer, with heart directed toward God, I work out my salvation in a life of prayer that draws me ever closer to the center and ever closer to others.

During my junior year in high school, I found that the more time I spent in prayer, the more sensitive I became to the needs of others: alcoholism, neglect, loneliness, depression, desperation. And even though I was overwhelmed by the need, it was a measure of need that previously had been invisible to me. Prayer was creating in me a measure of empathy.

That summer, during a trip to my grandparents’ home, I felt God challenging me to reconsider my path: would I continue to seek a future in the public eye (politics) or would I be willing to set aside what I wanted (wealth and influence) in order to serve others? It felt like a calling. I struggled – in prayer – over what kind of a life I should lead, over what kind of a person God was creating me to be.

During that process, many others joined me in praying for clarity (and for strength to choose well). Today, nearly two decades later, I have trouble remembering why it was such a hard choice, why it felt like I had so much to lose. In this process of prayer – in this daily practice of moving closer and closer to the center – I’ve found both clarity and community. And I can’t even begin to imagine going back.

Image

2010-12-01T08:02:00.005-08:00

It’s as though the image of God
within is little more than shards of broken
glass in the dusty rubble of real life.

Being made in the image of God connects us to God as well as to our neighbor (someone I’m more likely to think of as other). Prayer, then, is a discipline of connection, of noticing, of focusing, of attending to these connections, staying God-directed, God-centered.

What of the "passions"? Maybe they are simply those desires that lead me away from God and from community. The virtues? Signs of God’s character, stamped on my life, leading me into the quality of service and relationship God intended from the beginning. And temptation – though natural – also holds within it, if I allow it, the potential for distraction from relationship and disruption of service.

Recently, I've been challenged to confront those passions that live at my center, to let prayer “cut to the heart” that I might find freedom in being the person God created me to be.

So simple. And not.

Created in the image of God, I also carry within me desires that distort, that fragment that image. It’s as though the image of God within is little more than shards of broken glass in the dusty rubble of real life.

I want to trust that it’s as simple as prayer, that it’s as simple as letting go, that it’s as simple as Jesus. And I'm trying.

At Barclay Press

Without God

2010-11-27T17:34:00.002-08:00

Life Without God

they have
no knowledge
of God

A student and I were discussing the possibility of life on another planet. “What if we find sentient beings, who are our equals in every way with one exception” – I asked – “they have no knowledge of God?” He responded that the lack of faith would make them superior – less needy, more independent. I disagreed, arguing that belief in someone or something larger, more intelligent, and vastly more powerful than ourselves makes possible society, keeping us humble enough to tolerate, live with, and even care for others.

2010-11-22T10:31:00.002-08:00

And even though the journey
was painful and lonely, it was a process that led
to both perspective and maturity.

Nearly a dozen years ago, I made a serious mistake in my position as a youth pastor in a small Idaho church. In spite of my carelessness (and stupidity), I had not been fired; but I faced painful truths about my character, questions about my place in the community, confusion about my future calling. I took a week away from work and drove to Oregon for a spiritual retreat at a primitive cabin near a private lake in the Willamette Valley.

And I prayed.

Or at least I tried to pray. One morning, I read Psalm 119 over more than a dozen times. Then I waited in silence. I wrote out a question for God. And another. And another. But each time, as I waited in silence, I had no peace, no sense of God’s presence. I went for a walk. I climbed a tree. I ate. I slept. On the next morning, I tried again. And the next morning. And the next.

At the end of the week, I felt just as confused as at the start. But I was convinced that God had been present, that God was waiting for me to work through the problem I’d been given, that God trusted me to learn and grow from the struggle.

In Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Richard Foster recounts a similar situation from his own life: his attempt to solve a long-standing problem at the university where he taught. And I recognize my experience in his claim that “we often pray in struggling, halting ways. . . . We do not know what to pray. We do not know how to pray.”

Roberta Bondi builds on this truth in To Pray and to Love with the story of a friend who discovered that “‘Success’ in prayer finally has nothing to do with how we feel, not even whether we feel the presence of God.”

That week I spent in prayer was the beginning of a journey that led me out of ministry (I resigned my position a year later) out of church (I stopped attending another year after resigning) and then back. And even though the journey was painful and lonely, it was a process that led to both perspective and maturity. It was a journey that brought me closer to God through hardship, heart-ache, and humility.

2010-11-18T10:22:00.002-08:00

Contemplative Prayer

I’m not used to
silence. It is hard to wait.
I am impatient.

I love that Roberta Bondi refers to other people in To Pray and to Love as God’s images. It reminds me that I must see the value in others, the truth in others, the love of God in others, the good of others – even and especially when I disagree with their behavior or their ideas. But we’re not talking about “warm feelings” for the other. We’re really talking about noticing what was previously invisible. And I read in this book a personal challenge.

First, there is the challenge of growth, that I would not expect an overnight transformation of myself into the person God created me to be, nor will I expect such instant change in others. Instead, I will celebrate even the slightest glimpses of growth. I will notice the faint shadow of God at work in both my life and the lives of others.

Second, I must continue to pray. Unless I am intimately connected to God, I cannot see the work of God in me or in others.

Third, I must practice humility. I want to be a non-anxious presence, “realistic about all human vulnerabilities,” especially my own.

In Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Richard Foster offers with his chapter on "Contemplative Prayer" a method for growing more intimately connected to God so that I might become both transformed and a transformational presence in my relationships, in my church, in my community. The key, according to Foster, is silence. I must close my mouth and wait. I must close my mouth and listen. I must close my mouth and let God lead.

In addition, Foster suggests that the ultimate goal is union with God – not for the sake of transforming myself, others, or the world – but simply for the sake of knowing God. These other byproducts of prayer are honorable, but the point is relationship. Foster calls it “union.”

But this prayer is difficult. I’m not used to silence. It is hard to wait. I am impatient.

2010-11-11T09:45:00.003-08:00

Our names for God
are human constructions, even if they
are revealed in scripture.

Each of us has an image of God. In our lives and in our communities, we have created God in our image. And we continually recreate that God as a reflection of both our experience and of our need.

We have many names for God – gracious Father, Father God, Abba, Daddy, precious Savior, Jesus Son of Mary, Redeemer, Comforter, Emmanuel, Adonai, Lord – but our words for God represent nothing more than “our conceptions of the divine nature” (Gregory of Nyssa). They do “not convey the meaning of that nature.” Our names for God are human constructions, even if they are revealed in scripture.

Why, then, do we name God?

The issue of naming is an issue of control. Consider the formula “to pray in Jesus’ name,” a formula that simply gets it wrong. To pray in Jesus name must always be a prayer of humility, must never be a prayer of control.

What, then, is spiritual maturity?

It is a willingness to let God be God.

At Barclay Press

Death

2010-10-28T11:20:00.002-07:00

We have this idea in the Western Church that Jesus came to Earth for the single purpose of dying.

Paradox

2010-09-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

Most theological truths are expressed in paradox. Trying to resolve a paradox tends toward heresy. Our belief in the power of prayer to influence God, for instance, can be viewed as a kind of control over God – magic. On the other hand, a focus on aligning myself with the mind/character of God can lead to fatalism, a sense that prayer doesn’t matter.

2010-09-20T08:42:00.003-07:00

Simple Prayer

Foster describes the experience of a
boy, afraid of a dog, who foolishly thinks he
knows how to fix a broken world.

When I was five years old, my dad bought me a Dalmatian puppy and named her “Candy.” For her sweet disposition. But Candy was not a nice dog. She barked. And she bit ankles.

I asked my dad to get rid of Candy. He laughed. So I prayed. I knew that God answered prayer. I asked God to kill Candy and take her to heaven to live with him.

It was a selfish prayer. But two weeks later, Candy got sick. And she died.

I remember that last day of Candy’s life. I was sitting with her in the back yard. It was a beautiful day. Quiet. Candy lay in the grass. I slowly stroked her ears. And I wondered about this thing called prayer. I knew I had asked God for a cruelty. And God answered. The all-powerful creator of the universe had opened up access to power for me, a child.

This last week, reading Richard Foster on “simple prayer,” I recognized in Foster’s description the request for help, the question, the complaint, the cry. Foster describes the experience of a boy, afraid of a dog, who foolishly thinks he knows how to fix a broken world. What Foster doesn’t discuss is power or the idea that we can manipulate God by praying the right words in the right place at the right time in the right way. He doesn’t mention any of the things I tend to attribute to prayer, such as its effects or how to make it more effective.

I might not have killed Candy. God might not have killed Candy. All these years later, I may be unnecessarily carrying guilt for a dog’s death -- guilt that’s not mine to carry. I had an idea that prayer’s purpose was to get things done. But as far as Foster is concerned, prayer is a commitment, a discipline, a practice. And the purposes of prayer are faith, hope, perseverance, relationship, personal and communal transformation that naturally flows from our increasing sensitivity to God’s presence and God’s character.

Simple prayer -- being honest about who I am before God, being present with God -- is a beginning. And 31 years ago, a five-year-old boy who hated a dog made that beginning in the only way he knew how: simply.

At Barclay Press

2010-09-16T15:01:00.001-07:00

it's not just
the young who
have questions.

In much of the Church, there's a cultural divide, a kind of gap between adults and adolescents. Psychologists suggest that adolescents are undergoing a process of identity formation -- figuring out who they are and what they'll stand for -- that causes them to question their parents, their friends, themselves. Sociologists suggest that these questions -- something we often label "doubt" -- make us uncomfortable, that they can create conflict.

Here's the issue; doubt is dangerous. First, because it's disconcerting. The right question in the wrong place can throw everything and everyone off rhythm. Second, it's deviant. People who challenge the status quo identify themselves as not fitting in. They're outsiders. They're weird. They don't belong.

But these questions -- these doubts -- reveal something important about the young among us. Many of them simply want a first-hand experience of Christ. Their faith isn't going to be (can't be) based on someone else's beliefs.

What, then, might happen if church were a different kind of place, a place where questions could be asked openly, a place shaped by freedom not fear, a place with plenty of room for doubt?

My sense is that God has been shaping us into just that kind of community for a long time now. My sense is that it's not just the young who have questions. My sense is that we're in this together.

2010-09-14T08:39:00.002-07:00

Christianity

Being a
Christian isn't
about belief

A friend asks, "What is the heart of Christianity?"

I answer: Hypostatic union and the Trinity.

He responds: Is that what it means to be a Christian?

And I realize the answer is no. Being a Christian isn't about belief. It's about practice. What makes me a Christian is nothing more or less than my desire to reflect Christ's character.

Life Eternal

2010-09-09T11:07:00.001-07:00

What if living “eternally” is a quality of life much more than it is a length of time?

Change

2010-09-06T08:10:00.003-07:00

It's not enough to say the unexpected. I must also learn to say it in unexpected ways.

At the Coffee Shop

2010-09-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

That man in plaid flannel and moustache,
beside the window,
in front of a book.

That woman with dreadlocks and polka dots,
her bright yellow purse,
burning.

A nubby green sweater.
A mermaid in pearls.
A white summer suit and straw boater.

I, in the corner,
take strength from this crowd
of the trendy.

They, with their glances,
take note of my notebook,
my pen,
and smile at their good fortune.

2010-08-30T08:27:00.002-07:00

a rock, hanging
off the edge of a hill, gave me a
place to sit.

There are places people go when life gets rough -- separate places, safe spaces, sanctuary. My mother locks herself in the bathroom. My brother goes on long walks past the library and into the north edges of town. My father rolls down the windows and drives the back roads. My sister used to hide in bed with a book or her journal. I have a rock in the Owyhee Mountains. Just up the hill behind the Catholic church in Silver City, Idaho -- past open mine shafts and sage-brush clumps -- lies a red dirt path. That first time, I followed it because it went up, and I wanted to go to the top. I wanted to see. But I found more than a view. I found a separate place. Hanging halfway off the edge of the mountain, it felt like the top of the world. I climbed up on top and sat at the edge. Sitting there, dangling my legs off the edge of the edge, I could see for miles down the creek to Jordan Valley, up the creek to Silver City, along the road to Murphy. And I was alone.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life looking for that rock, trying to find a place where I can catch my breath, see where I’ve been, and just be alone for awhile. Sometimes I wonder how other people live, people who haven’t found a rock. Sometimes I sense in the story of scripture a collection of people trying to find a rock, trying to talk about their journey and what they discovered along the way, trying to lead others into an experience of sanctuary. Sometimes.

Most of the time, it seems like I’ve missed the boat, lost my head, hands tied behind my back, barking up the wrong tree, washed up. People have stuff to do and places to be. There’s no time for side trips, no room for quiet, no space for space. And the Bible’s just a collection of dusty letters and foreign poems and depressingly inscrutable commands and old-fashioned feel-good stories. And the churches are PC clubs for white people with too much time (or guilt) on their hands. And Jesus is a TV personality who just wants to be friends with your kids and maybe try a little magic trick or two to lighten the mood. And then there’s the joke where Paul Tillich gets a letter from a critic of the faith. It’s filled with the details of a recent archeological find -- coordinates, descriptions, lots and lots of photos. It seems they’ve found the bones of Jesus, and the critic finishes with a mean-spirited postscript, “There goes your resurrection!” Tillich turns over the paper, confused, and breathes -- astonished -- “You mean, he actually lived?”

Do we live in a world that’s moved beyond belief? Are there no longer separate places? Have we been doomed to frantic, fear-fraught lives? to standards un-bending? deadlines pending? stress un-ending? Are we burned out on religion?

I was. But when I first started contemplating leaving my home church, back in 2002, I struggled with the fact that so much of my identity was intertwined with church. I volunteered with the youth, drove the bus, worked on committees, changed the sign board, cooked for potlucks, showed up at business meetings, represented the local church at denominational events. Surrounded by people, busy with ministry, I felt unloved and unappreciated. And I was lonely. But who would I be if I left? What, if anything, would be left of me?

I’d worked for several years on the staff of a local church. But I felt like a foreigner. I didn’t fit. So I resigned my position. And then I stopped attending. That’s when the questions started: was I in conflict with the pastor? was I depressed? did I have secret sin? I wish I could have articulated what was happening. But at the time, I only knew that I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I wish that I could have told them how frustrated I was with church. I wish that I could have told them that so many of the spiritual answers sounded to me like empty promises, platitudes. I wish that I could have pointed out that many of the practices of church speak to a culture that no longer exists. I wish that I could have told them that church as we know it and practice it is dying.

But I couldn’t say any of those things. I didn’t even know why I was unhappy. I was desperate for truth. I wanted to understand reality and learn to live spiritually. I wanted to know God. I wanted to be fully myself rather than just playing a series of parts. I wanted to integrate faith and vocation with community rather than continuing a kind of compartmentalized existence. And I couldn’t find a way to fit all this stuff into church. The box was too small. So I left.

But I kept coming back, kept hanging around and showing up, watching and waiting for others to exhibit some of the same symptoms -- not people who hate church but those who desperately want something bigger, something that transcends our limited notion of what it means to have faith. Today, I’m even on staff at another local church. Why am I still around? Because I know there’s got to be something better than what is. And I’m not smart enough to figure it out on my own. What I do know is that there’s something about places of sanctuary. What I do know is that people need separate spaces -- for quiet, for peace, for perspective. What I do know is that a rock, hanging off the edge of a hill, gave me a place to sit.

After a little while, I stood up, walked down the hill and drove back to town. But I keep coming back to that rock. One of these days -- some day soon -- I’d like to take others there with me.

At Barclay Press

2010-08-19T07:32:00.002-07:00

Parable of a Bridge-Jumper

Am I more likely to
sacrifice for a neighbor
in need? or take pictures?

Idaho's 486-foot-high Perrine Bridge is one of the world's most-frequented sites for parachutists who jump from fixed objects. But when Tamara Judkins and her daughter, Rebekah, drove through on a summer day in 2008, they noticed that the man "sobbing and leaning over the railing" didn't have a parachute.

Judkins recounted to the Times News of Twin Falls how she circled back, parked, and told her daughter to call for help. Then Judkins did something that none of the 20 or so bystanders had thought to do: "I took off towards him, wrapped my arms around him and held onto him."

Judkins later said that as she tried to talk the man into coming into town with her for a cup of coffee, the gathering crowd just watched, "many of them snapping photos."

Eventually, Twin Falls County sheriff's deputies were able to grab the man, whose name was not released, and pull him back over the railing.

For weeks after I read of the incident, there was one detail that I couldn't get out of my mind -- those people in the crowd, watching and snapping photos.

It reminds me of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Plenty of passers-by saw the man at the side of the road, obviously suffering from his injuries, naked and close to death. But most of them were too busy to stop.

In this newspaper account -- a parable for our age -- the issue isn't one of busy-ness. No, we are a society of gawkers, eavesdroppers and peeping Toms; and we have plenty of time. The problem is that suffering -- a potential suicide, a televised hanging, tortured prisoners half a world away -- too easily excites prurience instead of sympathy . . . leaving me to question my character (and my motives):

Am I more likely to sacrifice for a neighbor in need?

Or take pictures?

A day in the life . . .

2010-08-09T15:46:00.001-07:00

We rose in the dark and
showered in silence.

We shaved in our cars,
waited at red lights,
red-eyed.

We burned our mouths on hot coffee.

We zipped.

We zoomed.

We slid down on-ramps,
weaved across lanes,
darting, dashing --
more darting.

We turned up the volume
"By the power of Grayskull!"

We were the new Speed Racer.

We started each day -- a crusade -- and

we cursed
the harsh glare of new sun,
the inevitable red glow of brakes,
the insidious ineptitude of the deliberately slow.

We power-walked the centers of hallways.

We answered our phones
with loud laughter,
with tense murmurings,
with a hand on our ear and a dirty look at our loud neighbors.

We hauled paper stacks and portfolios.

We ate ham sandwiches,
ordered Chinese,
crowded into that new sushi bar and
ran (oh, did we run!)

We whistled in restrooms and
sang the national anthem as

we slammed down our phones
on the rockets red glare
and the home of the brave, and

we put aside thoughts of another day as

we jingled our keys
and raced for the elevators.

We were heroes.

We were villains.

We were done, and
the night was still young.

Broken Promises

2010-08-05T07:25:00.001-07:00

He promised
cool-running waters, washed stone, sun-brushed blossoms --
blushing --
delicious grass-green vistas, petal-strewn, shadow-dappled;
candy-apple sunsets, marshmallow clouds,
the sound of bluebirds, songbirds, lovebirds
and laughter --
so much laughter.

She lost herself in a dream.

When he left, she couldn't wake up.
Pinching, slapping, biting the insides of her cheeks
did no good --
nothing but a dreamscape, a moonscape, no escape from
brown-powdered footsteps on the edge of a crater
and silence
under a panther-black sky with sparkling white teeth.
It filled fiery-orange each morning
and glared blood-red each night
as she cried.

2010-08-02T07:12:00.003-07:00

a point will come
at which some people will get
squeezed out

For hundreds of years, churches have been like rubber bands. Their focus has been on getting as many people as possible inside the circle (of tradition, of polity, of community, of doctrine). The bands only stretch so far, however, making it inevitable that a point will come at which some people will get squeezed out unless the old band is replaced with something newer, larger and less restrictive in each of the senses listed above.

This model isn't working the way it used to. Southern Baptists — the nation's largest protestant denomination — reported in 2008 that new baptisms were down to the lowest level since 1987 and that membership had dropped by about 40,000 people this year. These numbers are generally in line with downward trends among all mainline protestant denominations.

How should Christians respond? Maybe it's time to reconsider the model. Who says the world should be knocking on our door (let alone sitting in our pews)? After all, Jesus didn't tell his followers to sit in an upstairs room—door locked—counting down the days to His return. He sent them out to be his witnesses "in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Read more at Barclay Press.

2010-07-27T06:48:00.007-07:00

The Golem

exempt from the crushing
strictures, from the ills,
cruelties, and inevitable failures

A friend recommended that I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and it is amazing. Toward the end of the story, Joe Kavalier, a Czech emigre, is considering his life's work as a comic book artist and compares it to the Jewish tradition of creating a golem -- a living creature that has no soul and acts for the protection of its people. I found the following an inspiration:

"The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something -- one poor, dumb, powerful thing -- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation."

And I wondered at my own golems, the words I've ordered on the page, the creations (some ill-conceived) of which I've been a part.

2010-07-26T07:02:00.001-07:00

leaving the converted
in a land not their own
and dependent on us

Faith is fused with identity. I am what I believe. As a result, the discovery of a truth opens new worlds and changes my character.

What, then, is the danger of conversion, trying to bring others into truth? It is this. To convert is not to open up new worlds. Instead, its aim is to destroy old ones, leaving the converted in a land not their own and dependent on us, their human saviors.

Do you see that proselytizing is patronizing? That it is a way for us to lord over the less-enlightened? That it objectifies?

Too often, we seek to convince people that they must exchange their boxes for ours. This is sin. Our aim, instead, must be to help them tear holes in their boxes, to see the light of day, to enter this new world as free men and women.

But first, we must work on tearing down the walls of our own boxes. After all, the beam must be removed from your eye before you can take the speck of dust from your brother's.

Night

2010-07-19T07:51:00.001-07:00

On a high desert road,
where the wind chips away
at the skin of the world,
sand snakes
across the asphalt,
slithers into ditches,
and ravening packs
of tumbleweeds bite
at the tires of passing cars.
The sun, an open
wound, inflamed,
oozes into the horizon,
while a tattered stand
of junipers huddles
under the darkening sky,
and bats tremble
in their sleep
(rustling, restless dreams),
waiting for the night.

2010-07-09T08:19:00.002-07:00

The Way of Peace

Right of way is
something you give, not
something you take.

Is self-defense a natural right? American dads teach their kids to stand up for themselves in a fight. American moms argue with referees at Saturday soccer games. What are our rights?

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.

When I moved to Idaho, I had to take a test to get an Idaho driver's license. I'd been driving for five years, but I was nervous about failing the test, so I spent hours memorizing the Idaho Driver's Manual. I remember a piece of wisdom I discovered in the section on 4-way stops. The manual explained how the sequence of turns takes place. And then I read these words at the top of the next page. "Right of way is something you give, not something you take."

That's the core message of peacemaking. It's a difficult message. It's a message we ignore at the peril of increased conflict.

Since that time I've pondered these questions:

What about people who talk behind my back and slander my reputation? I should hold them up in love, noting their positive traits and building their reputations every time I get the chance. What about those who threaten or manipulate in order to get their way? As far as it is within my power, I must give them what they need, not what I think they deserve.

The only way to make peace, the only option for diffusing conflict is to refuse engagement. If they grasp, I let go. If they accuse, I refuse to argue my defense. When they break in, I make them welcome.

Jesus lived and died this truth. I pray for courage to follow.

2010-07-06T07:42:00.002-07:00

life at its fullest
is heavy with
vital contrasts

We live in a culture of violence, a place where it is "known" that the best answer — the pragmatic answer — to evil acts is stronger acts that punish or even kill.

I call myself a pacifist — a peacemaker — and as a Quaker, I'm not alone. The denomination has a long history of peacemaking. But if we are to make a difference, to actively bring peace to the world, we must teach our neighbors that life at its fullest is heavy with vital contrasts:

Unfulfilled waiting teaches patience. Through suffering, we learn to experience joy. Deep love — the kind that changes the world by giving life to another — comes best from a heart that's been broken.

2010-07-05T09:39:00.004-07:00

Happiness

And the fish swim
in the lake and do not
even own clothing.

Aristotle claimed that happiness is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. We seek riches, he argued, not because we desire wealth but because we believe money will make us happy. We seek fame, not for the sake of being famous but because we believe celebrity status is a means for achieving happiness.

Yet so many people are unhappy. In fact, clinical depression is the leading cause of disability in North America and is predicted by the World Health Organization to become the second leading cause of disability worldwide (after heart disease) by 2020.

Mother culture holds up an ideal for reaching happiness, claiming that any goal can be accomplished through hard work and determination. We call it the American dream. But it doesn't seem to be working, and millions of people are coming to their senses, waking up and realizing that there's something wrong with the way we've been living.

Unfortunately, we've learned to quiet the questions that bother us by removing silence from our lives. So we know something's wrong, but we can't or don't take time to think about it.

Listen to the voice:

When it asks, "Who am I?" turn off the noise.

When it asks, "Why am I here?" stop what you're doing.

When it asks, "What is the meaning of life?" listen.

"What's it gonna take
to slow us down
to let the silence spin us around?" — Switchfoot

"And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing." — Ezra Pound

At Barclay Press.

Silly Dreams

2010-06-28T09:38:00.003-07:00

I want to invest in people who sense there's something wrong with the way they're living, people who dream of different lives.

Even the silly dreams.

Even the stupid ideas.

(Especially those.)

2010-06-23T07:42:00.002-07:00

we are isolated from
those we love by a failure to communicate
what we really mean

Often, while speaking of God, I will talk in one direction, stop, turn, and stop again, only to find that I've run out of words without completing my thought.

At the beginning, the issue seems clear enough. I'm moving along under a full head of steam, when I suddenly spot a break in the track up ahead. I jump to another line, engine shuddering, as I try to maintain speed. But just around the corner, there's that same break. Except for now, it's a chasm. So I stop, try another metaphor, pull out a different analogy, hoping that this time I'll jump the divide. But there it is again, looming ever larger.

And I wonder at this gift of words that is also a curse. After all, language gives us freedom to relate, to connect and create. What is the Church? It's just a word. But the collection of our shared understandings, of our hopes, of our fears, of our deepest needs has made this word into a physical place of refuge for some, a family for others.

This same language, however, also confines. We are imprisoned in a society held up by words that are not our own, and we are isolated from those we love by a failure to communicate what we really mean, what we truly need.

What then can I do when my experience of God — of the very source of love, truth and life — transcends language? What dare I try when words fail me?

At Barclay Press.

Inner Light

2010-06-22T08:57:00.001-07:00

I don't bring God to others. Neither do I bring others to God. I can't. If God is omnipresent, then He's already there — everywhere — and He's already working in the lives of each person He's created — everyone.

2010-06-16T07:38:00.002-07:00

Integrity

I haven't yet
become the kind of
person I claim to be

I hate losing, mainly because I'm so bad at it. I yell, cheat, make snide remarks, and when my situaton seems particularly dire, I sometimes find myself whiling away the time between turns, plotting violent revenge against whoever happens to be winning. Last night, that was my sister.

We were playing Risk, a board game in which players fight for world domination. My sister had publicly proclaimed, however, that her only aim was to destroy me, even if it meant letting my dad win the game. This, to my experienced judgment, seemed unsportsmanlike. But my thoughtful advice as to how she might improve her strategic position, coupled with a kick to the shins (subtly delivered under the table, of course), only succeeded in deepening her resolve.

So when Bethany finally lost, I rejoiced, even though I'd already been out of the game for an hour. In the midst of my quiet (and tasteful) celebration, however, I spotted a flaw in my position. During the game, I'd planned and plotted and sulked. I was consumed by my competitiveness, by my anger.

Please don't misunderstand. For the duration of the match-up, I looked and sounded like any other normal adult. I smiled and laughed and held up my end of the witty repartee required when playing parlor games. But it was a farce. Underneath the happy face, I was anything but happy.

It makes me wonder. If I could successfully separate inner experience from outward expression during a game — a kind of social schizophrenia — then doesn't that make me a liar in real life?

This caused a problem for me as I claim to be a Christian. If God is the source of all truth and if all truth is God's truth, then the Christian character must be marked by integrity.

I realized (once again) that I haven't yet become the kind of person I claim to be, and it's beginning to look as though this journey is going to take at least a lifetime.

At Barclay Press.

2010-06-15T07:54:00.001-07:00

I thought about buying
a burger when I saw him smile,
but I kept walking.

Back in December 2006, I was thinking about the person of Jesus. Here's what I wrote:

I saw Jesus today. She drove up in front of my house at 6:35 this morning, jumped from her smoking Ford van, and ran over to hand me my newspaper. She wanted to tell me a story about my dog. I listened and nodded without hearing a word. But I remembered to wave before driving away.

I saw Jesus today. He was ringing a bell outside the "B" entrance at Fred Meyer. He had a moustache and a denim jacket. He asked about my day. I walked away.

I saw Jesus today. He stood on the corner of 6th and Burnside, holding a sign: "Visions of a hamburger." He'd grown a beard, and it was graying. I thought about buying a burger when I saw him smile, but I kept walking.

I saw Jesus today, and I was too busy to stop, too embarrassed to care, too indifferent to offer help.

On the day that baby was born, covered in rags and placed in a feed trough, shepherds came to worship. But I went shopping.

Worship

2010-06-14T10:56:00.001-07:00

If I believe that God loves me and that God is everywhere, then I will not suggest that I need to go somewhere special or do any sort of ceremony in order to meet God. There is nothing especially spiritual about a life with God; he's simply there, wherever I am, no matter what I'm doing.

Allegiance

2010-06-11T07:06:00.001-07:00

If I have promised to obey God no matter what, I will not also promise to always obey any other power. I will not say that I will, sing that I will, or sign a document that says I will. God is the only one with absolute call on my life and my allegiance.

Honesty

2010-06-10T09:34:00.001-07:00

If I believe that God is Truth, then I will tell the truth. Always. No exceptions. It is possible to live and work without deceiving others, and if I cannot do this where I live and work, I need to live and work elsewhere, or differently. I will not lie even if it is expected, if everyone else does it, and if it causes me embarrassment or hassle or costs me dearly to tell the truth.

Patriotism

2010-06-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

If I believe that God's kingdom is not made by human hands, then I will be careful to examine the kingdom that has been made by human hands rather than assuming that it must be just as good as God's kingdom. I will not believe any earthly kingdom is God's kingdom simply on the word of others who might say so, even if they do it frequently and with picnics.

Peace

2010-06-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

If I believe that God is the Prince of Peace, I will not accept that any effort to wage war on others is anything but sinful. God may have, at times, commanded people to go to war. But short of that direct order, I am to be a bringer of peace.