The Thinks You Can Think

Merry Christmas

2011-12-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just need to breathe, stop talking and listen. Autumn is a good time for that, so that's what I've been doing. Advent, "the Holiday Season" for you non-religious types, brings on a surge of commentary. From the secular world, we are deluged with messages of rampant, unapologetic consumerism. From the religious world, we are deluged with whining about rampant, unapologetic consumerism.

I have come to the startling conclusion that Christians should be happy that the world does not understand, or give a hoot about the "real meaning of Christmas." It's where we should be, on the outside looking in, as strangers in a strange land. I have come to see that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century may have been the worst thing that could ever have happened to a group of people who seek to be disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.

Republicans, cover your eyes: Jesus was poor. He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, he was even poor in the resurrection, though it didn't matter much at that point. He insistently identified with the outcasts and the losers of society, even going so far as to actually talk to Samaritans and, gulp, Gentiles. He would have Occupied Wall Street, or Pittsburgh or wherever, and had a good old time teaching all those rude, smelly hippies that polite society loves to mock all about the kingdom of Heaven.

I know, I'm certainly not the first to point out that Jesus was a radical. But here's the thing: he wasn't one of these bubble-headed, soft-hearted radicals that thought the man was trying to keep him down. (Though, in fact, the Man, actually several iterations of the Man, were indeed trying to keep him down) Jeshua had a platform, a foundation, a core conviction, some might say a Holy Spirit that could be equally offensive to those he threatened and those who followed him.

He was difficult, maybe impossible, to understand.

His own Disciples didn't get him.

Why are we surprised that the secular world has turned the celebration of his birth into an indulgent orgy of Mammon worship?

Perhaps that is as it should be.

Perhaps Christianity can now be done with the mess of Empire and go back to being a counterculture that rings with the voice of prophets.

Maybe we can stop whining about keeping the Christ in Christmas and worry more about keeping him in OUR lives the other 364 days of the year.

Merry Christmas.

Are we worth the trouble?

2011-09-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

I think what I love the most about science fiction is the ability to ask the questions that simply haven't come up yet: what happens if computers develop feelings? Would clones have a soul? If yes, where does that soul come from? If you travel back in time and mess with the past is it possible to destroy your own existence and therefore never be able to go back in time and mess with the past? You know the kind of thing. Most often these questions are downgraded from serious inquiry to gimmicks and "plot twists." Once in a while though...
Enter the "new" Battlestar Galactica. I watched the "old" tv show when I was just a wee tike, because my Mom, after seeing Star Wars, became a huge sci fi fan, so much so that she has been able to stomach even the post Deep Space Nine Star Trek series. When the "new series started a while back, I got to watch the first episode and then, mysteriously, my cable provider moved the sci-fi channel to a package I couldn't afford while I was in Seminary. A couple years ago I caught back up with the show and enjoyed the last two seasons. Now in Netflix Instant view, I have access to all 76 episodes and am working my way through them. I know where the show is going but what I am being surprised by in every episode is the serious grappling with some very deep issues: What constitutes humanity? how do we name our enemy? How do we treat our enemy? What is the nature of God? I can see why this show got stuck on cable. There is no way a network was going to sign on for this stuff. They liked the late 70's space cowboy routine.
In the "new" Galactica, the Cylons have become human, manufactured clone style humans but, thinking, feeling, flesh and blood nonetheless. At first the Cylons appear sinister and genocidal as they did in the "old" show. As the show progresses we find that perhaps humanity is the sinister and genocidal group and the Cylons are doing God's work (they are also monotheists, and the God they believe in is loving and forgiving, Hmmm) and getting rid of a dangerous, violent race of pagans.
The show is dark, I don't let my kids watch it with me, my wife won't watch it with me because the people "creep her out." Fair enough, people can be pretty creepy, and I think that's kind of the point. In the midst of the darkness is a story that is informed by some startling value judgments (at least coming from a TV show). Violence as a means to an end (and other utilitarian ethical principals that are tacitly accepted in action genres) is explored and ultimately rejected. The rejection is often subtle and not at all peacenik preachy.
The question that is asked repeatedly and in multiform ways in the context of a story where the last of the human race is struggling for their very existence is: should we survive? Should we continue to go on if we never figure out how to live in some form of peace? Should we go on if brute force is the only language we really understand? Should we go on if faith is lost and love is trampled? Should we go on if we fail to see the "humanity" in things that are not human?
The best thing about the show is that it doesn't really answer these questions. It leaves you with a sense that there is truth out there, but they're not about to tell you what it is. That would ruin the story.

The Good, the Bad and the complaining

2011-07-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

After almost two years of waiting since we got the tickets and nearly 25 years of waiting since I wore out my first copy of Unforgettable Fire, Michele and I got to see U2 at Lincoln financial field in Philly.

It was a great show, up there with the best. I'm not even going to rank them in order but the top five are: U2, Springsteen, Bad Religion, Metallica and Eric Clapton (it was the tour right after his son died and the whole Spectrum sang tears in heaven with/for him).

U2 360 definitely gets props for showmanship edging out Metallica's Black tour, yet not quite topping Gwar and Marilyn Manson, then again that's apples and oranges.

U2 are among the relatively small number of bands, who ala the Grateful Dead, are even better live than on recordings. Bono's on stage antics, obviously getting on Larry Mullin's last nerve as he all but licks the stoic base player, swinging from a microphone and otherwise cavorting like he's not 50 year old guy with a reconstructed spine are really just a little spice to a band that plays together seamlessly and with an artfulness that is almost beyond comparison.

Mix in a few socially conscious sidebars, an uplink to the international space station, a message from the elected but imprisoned (now free) leader of Burma, and singing happy Birthday to Nelson Mandela and you have a show that leaves you feeling light and clean, and just darn happy.

Then you go out to the parking lot and curse the idiocy of trying to navigate the swarm of 65,000 people who are now in their shiny metal boxes heading for home. Curses to those people who charged us $20 to park and then didn't even stick around to help us get out of their lot.

Philly Phan, in true form, calls into the talk radio show the next day (I'm listening in the car on the way out of town) with the following diatribe:

"Dat was da greatest show I ever seen. U2 is freakin' awesome, but dat parkin lot is a cryin' shame! It's like dat for everyting (sic), Iggles, Phullys, everting (sic). It's like no one cares how you're supposed to get home, you gotta just sit there for like an hour, you might as well go to da bar and have a few drinks, wait for da crowd to thin out and den go home."

Amen, Philly Phan, Amen.

The Beautiful Game

2011-07-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to figure this out and I just can't do it. After church yesterday I turn on the TV and the end of the Women's World Cup soccer match is on. It's the end of regulation, tied 1-1, hmmm, normally I'm not a big soccer fan, though I did get interested in the men's world cup tournament last year. Well, I think to myself, this is a good time to pick up this game, it's about to go to extra time, if anything exciting is going to happen, it's probably going to happen now.

I have been a fan of American sports since I was 12 or so, football, baseball, basketball, even hockey, but soccer just never caught my interest except for brief moments. But here it was USA-Brazil in the quarterfinals, the US was down a player because of a red card and they give up a goal early in the overtime period. I'm getting emotionally involved and I can't figure out why.

With mere seconds left (or as near as we can tell given the arcane way soccer games are timed) Megan Rapino arcs this beautiful pass thirty yards across the field to Abby Wambach and she heads it in the goal, tying the game and sending it to penalty kicks.

I had a knot in my throat, and I don't know why.

It happened last year when Landon Donovan scored that goal against Algeria too.

I got choked up, and I really don't know why.

I don't like soccer that much.

I'm not really even a bandwagon jumper, I won't rearrange my schedule to watch it or go out of my way to learn more about the players or the rules. I don't understand how and why things happen with regard to red cards or penalty kicks or even time keeping but in these moments I think I understand why most of the world is so slobbery about the Beautiful Game.

Very rarely do I get goosebumps watching the NFL, which I follow quite carefully, yet almost every time I watch an important soccer match, something happens that brings a lump to my throat.

The only thing I can figure out is that it may have something to do with the World Cup, which is a lot like the Olympics in that it's invested with all sorts of patriotic feelings and national pride. I guess I don't know or care much about track or swimming and yet the Olympics hold some interest for me.

Still, I'm mystified by Soccer, there's something that blends raw athleticism and grace with patience and precise timing, and sometimes, maybe more often than I know, it is beautiful.

2011-07-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot about how we perceive truth. Particularly when it comes to Scripture but generally in almost any sphere of consideration. I have not come to any broad conclusions but as I was thinking about one of the more common issues of interpretation: which was first, I came across a sparkling example in one of my favorite songs.

There is a common misconception that the "original" is better than the copy. I say misconception because it is by no means a universal truth. It is, in fact, mostly true, that the original is the best and what comes after is a poor copy. However, sometimes there is a flash of brilliance or a slight change of context that takes something that was mediocre to good and changes it into something transcendent. As an example I offer the following two videos.

First we have the original:

Nine Inch Nails - Hurt

You will notice that this is emotionally raw, visually powerful and quite sincere. I fell in love with this song when I was in college. I consider it to be one of the best songs of the 1990's.

However, when Johnny Cash gets his hands on it... well, just watch:

Johnny Cash - Hurt

Watching that video can border on a religious experience. Sometime, if my congregation had a big screen, I would like to just read Romans 7-8, play that video and go home, 'nuff said.

Osama's Dead, U-S-A?

2011-05-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

Pyrrhic victory: too costly victory: in reference to either of two victories of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, over the Romans in 280 and 279 BCE, with very heavy losses.

2,430 soldiers dead, how many more wounded, how many who will wake up with night sweats and suffer from PTSD for the rest of their lives.

CNN put that number up on the screen and then showed the picture of the now departed Osama Bin Laden, a man who probably figured that martyrdom was about the best thing that could happen to him.

45,000 people at a Phillies game chanted U-S-A in the ninth inning as news spread of the death of public enemy number one (they eventually lost in the 14th to the Mets so not everything went right) even the perpetually denounced Philly Phan got some props for getting it right.

President Obama, and just about everyone else, says that we have to remain vigilant, that this snake has too many heads and we just cut off one.

But we got the @#$%&!

Pardon me if I feel an overwhelming sense of ambivalence about the great triumph.

I can go on Google Earth and see a satellite photo of my dogs in the back yard eating their own poop and yet it took us that much to catch one dude with a turban and an AK-47?

Does this make all those mothers who no longer have sons feel that it was all worth it?

For that matter does it make anyone who lost someone in the World Trade Centers or on Flight 93 feel even a little bit better about the 10 years that they have grieved?

I don't know, I sure hope so.

Don't get me wrong, if there was ever an evil dude who needed got, he was it, I am in no way mourning the death of OBL. What I am mourning is the endless cycles of violence that we just can't seem to break. We still have terrorism and in many ways the last 10 years have done a lot more to damage us as a nation than those planes did. We have run ourselves into a hole that is a lot more unpleasant than that spider hole we found Saddam hiding in. We have rid ourselves of a handful of bad guys but we've uncovered a lot of stock-broker types who are every bit as sinister as al Quaeda and we can't shoot them.

Over the past two weeks as I have studied the end of Jesus' earthly life and the beginning of the resurrection, I am struck by how he so painfully avoided acting as a terrorist, even when he was crucified as one. I am also struck by how he in no way endorsed the power of Caesar, yet forgave the centurions who crucified him. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to reconcile the motives that are so roundly applauded by the world and the kind of "kingdom" that Jesus was always talking about.

Forgiveness? We can't really forgive Osama, because he didn't really repent and he probably wouldn't want forgiveness from the likes of us anyway. But this morning I really feel like I need forgiveness because I'm glad he's dead.

U-S-A!?

Field Reversal

2011-04-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

You know those holographic pictures that look like a bunch of random swirls and dots until you "relax your eyes" so that you suddenly see the image? I've never really been able to see those, but I can usually pick up most visual tricks and optical illusions pretty well. Paradoxes as simple as the Mobius strip or more complicated like an M.C. Escher are pretty fascinating. Sometimes, in order to get the true effect you need to experience a field reversal, see what is normally the background as the foreground and vice versa. You have to look through the obvious and see what lies beneath.

It occurred to me that perhaps the same sort of process could be useful during Holy Week to effect a sort of spiritual field reversal. It started as I considered the story of Palm Sunday and how everyone but Jesus was all hearts and flowers (well actually palms). They thought he was going to lead an insurrection and "save" them from the Romans, he knew he was going to be killed and "save" them from themselves.

To understand how this is so you have to get a bit of field reversal going. We generally conceive of God as a sort of distant authority figure: having created the universe, God now resides in heaven watching how it all unfolds, sometimes being pleased, sometimes being angry. To use the metaphor of a stage production: God designed the set, wrote the script (though there is some debate about what the "true script" really is), directs (either in a sort of loose improvisational way or a rigid authoritarian manner depending on who you talk to) from afar and generally leaves all the drama to humans, who may or may not "fit in" to his plan.

Now for the field reversal: Jesus. Jesus shows us that God is not only writer, designer, director, producer but also actor, in fact He is the primary actor. It is His story that we are all involved in. We need to get that right or else so many other things go wrong. The people who shout, "Hosanna!" are the same as the people who shout, "Crucify!" The mistake is the same: to think that somehow God will serve our story and follow our plot line, but the error doesn't stop there. Even if we get to God's sovereignty we can still miss God's INVOLVEMENT with us throughout the story.

What you get, when you relax your preconceptions, is no illusion but rather the ultimate reality.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

2011-04-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

On the day after you could have turned thirty

I went for a walk and saw buds on the trees;

Delicate, yet audaciously hopeful little things.

Just a moment of bitter pang in the lower soul

Then the buds win, it is spring.

On the day you would have turned thirty

I thought about the surprise party - missing.

the nieces and nephews - missing

the jokes about getting old - missing

all the springs that never sprung.

On the day after you should have turned thirty...

It was spring.

Some Reservations

2011-03-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while the diabolical idiot box comes through with something truly transcendent. I was watching one of my favorite shows, Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations, this evening. I generally enjoy this show because the host is cranky, sarcastic and otherwise someone I would want to spend some quality time with. I also enjoy it because, since I am trying to control diabetes with diet, watching someone else eat obscene quantities of food is about as close as I can get to indulging gluttonous tendencies.

Tonight's rerun was Bourdain in Nicaragua, for the most part a typical Latin American episode filled with creative uses for entrails and internal organs. But at one point, between drinking and eating Bourdain took a trip to the Managua city dump, and witnessed the people who make their living by trash picking. The host, who is normally never at a loss for words, had the look of someone who had just been dick punched. A little girl, about the age of his daughter, was scrabbling about in a pile of garbage for food and recyclable material. I've never seen him cry on screen, but I'm pretty sure he was about to.

The blank expression on the face of a well traveled, gritty New York chef speaks to the general incomprehensibility of abject poverty. Particularly to Americans, we tend to think we know poverty, we see homeless people, we know about ghettos. What we're never quite prepared for is the children living on the brink of starvation, sifting through the refuse of society. This is real poverty, unmasked, unapologetic and brutal. We can think what we want about the welfare state in this country, we can look down our noses at people who live on the dole or work the various handouts that make up our "safety net." We can even surmise that sometimes said "safety net" does not work but in the United States we are amateurs when it comes to poverty.

And we should never forget it.

Latin America, Africa, Asia and India have people who are so desperately and chronically poor that it makes someone living in a homeless shelter seem like Warren Buffet. The fact that we have soup kitchens and food pantries that routinely give out enough food to feed a family of four is a staggering gift of bounty compared to those who make their living sifting through garbage or selling used motor oil by the side of the road.

The main pinch of being poor in this country is that you are "under-privileged" compared to the almost obscene standards of the American middle class. Starvation is a reality for very few. Hunger is a possibility but there are many ways to get around it, if one knows where to look.

Bourdain made the observation that his job: "traveling around shoving food in his face," was pretty much an obscenity in the light of the children who had to sift through the filth for their daily bread. We should live with such an awareness; it's really the least we can do.

We can do much more, we can help, there are agencies, there are funds, there are many ways, big and small to reach out and try and help those who live in the vise-like grip of extreme poverty. We just have to do it, stop making excuses and do it.

Somewhere between Winter and Spring

2011-03-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

That things with age decline in strength, suits not the Way;

And not to suit the Way is early death.

-Lao Tzu, The Way of Life

I've got something stuck in my craw. I keep trying to spit it out and move on, but I can't. I have been trying to examine carefully what it is, whether or not it's of my own creation or whether it is a holy thorn, placed by the Spirit to kick me in my complacency.

The latest irritation is, in many ways, just another relative of the general malaise that sets in whenever I consider the spiritual state of Western Christianity. The Presbytery vote last week was the latest symptom of a disease for which there seems to be no cure: the ossification of tradition. Let me just state for the record that I am generally a traditionalist. I much prefer How Great Thou Art and Be Thou My Vision to anything that has dripped from the keyboards of contemporary Christian artists. At the same time, I wonder why the spiritual life does not inspire much in the way of truly great music, as it once did. It would seem that music has left religion behind and all we can do is hearken back to "the good old days." This is, in fact, what mainline Christianity has been left to do, look back and wonder why things don't work like they used to.

Longevity and deep tradition have become relics that need to be defended, often at the expense of doing (or saying) anything new. Meanwhile the world is crying out for the truth of the Gospel stated in a way that lives and breathes. In Scripture God's creative breath (ruach and nephesh in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek) is the force behind everything that is, it moves by definition. Jesus told Nicodemus that you cannot control or even predict the wind. There is another kind of breath (hevel, nothingness, vapor) that is also the word for idol. God help us, but I think we might have our breath confused.

I see a tendency, at the various levels of the PC(USA) that I am able to observe, to spend a great deal, if not all, of our energy in holding on to things we think we have. I think, from conversations with my colleagues from other denominations, that this tendency is not a Presbyterian affliction, but a dysfunction of Western Christianity. Lest you assume that I am simply going to trumpet a liberal-progressive agenda of damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead to change, I will observe that the non-western church is generally much more conservative than their western counterparts and this disease does not seem to affect them, yet.

What has happened is that the church, for centuries, was afflicted with the worst possible disease that could possibly afflict the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth: success. We became an institution and in fairly short order the way of the institution forsook the Way of Jesus Christ. We didn't forget everything He said, we didn't throw him out on the trash heap, rather we tucked him neatly up behind a curtain and begged that he stay there while we went about our religious business.

One of the things that happened when Jesus was crucified, at the moment of his death, the curtain in the temple in Jerusalem was torn in two. This curtain separated the people from the Presence of God, and it was torn in two. For a good long while, Western Christianity has been carefully repairing that curtain with threads made of fearful superstitions and stale orthodoxy. The only reason we haven't screwed things up completely is because of God's stubborn insistence on forgiving us, for we know not what we're doing.

Now we use words like Christology and hermeneutics to mask the fact that what we really have done is put the old curtain right back up. In the Church, you really can't argue much with someone when they say that they are following the Word of God because the Bible, incredible and diverse as it is, can be used to support a staggering variety of social, ethical and moral positions. I have become deeply suspicious of any argument that includes the assumption that it is founded on the written word, because it includes an assumption that the individual making the argument has come to an authoritative, unassailable interpretation of those words.

I've met some brilliant, faithful people, and ain't none of them got there yet.

What we can hear in scripture is the Word of God, but we have to understand that it is a living Word. It is inexorably intertwined and interrelated to our living understanding. I am willing to stake my life on the absolute truth of the Living Word but I'm not willing to stake a thin dime on the absolute truth of a dead word.

My kids love to catch bugs and keep them in containers. They love these bugs, lately ladybugs, the bugs are their pets, they are fascinated by them and learn a lot in observing the buggy things they do. However, the bugs quickly die in captivity, they are not meant to live in a container, even if we punch a few air holes in the lid. Our concession to the Living Word has mostly been to punch a few holes in a container that we feel should allow us to carry the power of an Almighty God around with us. But the Living Word demands to be let out or else it will die. The Living Word should make us uncomfortable with great frequency and it should always challenge our assumptions about truth. If it is not a challenge, there's a pretty good chance it's not living.

Jesus said, "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father, but through me."

Business as Usual

2011-03-09T06:21:00.000-08:00

Last night our Presbytery voted on the Confession of Belhar (see last blog entry). The vote was close: 38 in favor of adopting the confession into our constitution and 41 opposed. I did something that I have heretofore never done, I actually got up and spoke in favor of adoption. I was aware coming in that the motion was doomed. My Dad's Presbytery (West Jersey) had voted it down; West Jersey is a suburban/urban Presbytery, which tends to lean farther to the left than Kiskiminetas, which is in the part of Pennsylvania that is not Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, in other words the red state part.

I'm used to public speaking but that sort of commentary: timed, heavily scrutinized, and unlikely to convince an audience, most of whom have already made up their minds, is particularly nerve wracking. But I felt almost compelled to speak, especially since I was fairly certain that it was a losing cause. I needed to tell what I thought, probably for much the same reason that I write this blog, because when it comes to issues like racism and oppression, silence is deadly.

Even though I knew I was tilting at a windmill, I got up and spoke what was in my heart: that I would rather stand with the cause of justice and equality than try to maintain some false sense of secure orthodoxy. Christian orthodoxy, rather than holding on to dogmatic illusions of purity, needs to be engaged with the struggles of the world. The fight against apartheid was one of the great triumphs of justice in my lifetime, God knows there have been enough defeats to go around. I can't help but feel that last night, on a local level, on a spiritual plane, fear won again.

As I drove home last night, thinking about the things I wish had said, or not said, or maybe said differently, I realized that it really does hurt to care about justice. I knew as I walked up to the podium, that I was not going to be able to convince the people who had already made up their mind, dug in with their dogma, and spiritualized their unwillingness to accept a new word.

I respect the people who disagreed with my position on Belhar, but I cannot get around a profound sense of disappointment that we let ourselves be persuaded by fear. That was the core of most of the opposing arguments; even though they do a skillful job of explaining that fear, even though they may "prove" that their fears are justified, they are still operating out of fear rather than hope. It is the motivation of conservatism: keep things the same because most change is really for the worse.

As a confirmed moderate I don't find much solace in either side of the political fence. As a Christian I don't find much solace in a church that let's itself be ruled by political agendas. Yes, I know, all human endeavors have a political element, but calling it your job boss sure don't make it right. The speaker who immediately followed me, a man I respect, said, "a vote against Belhar is not a vote for apartheid." In some sense he is correct. Apartheid is dead, it has been defeated by the progress of human dignity. But my heart tells me that the spirit of apartheid is still very much alive and well in the world. My 10 year old niece, who is bi-racial, has experienced racism from both black and white, and that makes me sad and angry. I want my church to stand up and say that is wrong. Belhar will not fix the world, but as Martin Luther once said, "Here I stand, I can do no other."

When I consider where I want to stand, I find that I want to stand with Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu, Martin Luther King and all those who have stood up and said, "injustice is evil." Most importantly, I want to stand with Jesus, who reached out to the people on the margins of society, who did his work, often in defiance of what the religious institutions of his world said was appropriate. If the Presbyterian church does not have the courage to count coup on a dead enemy how are we ever going to have credibility when we tell our children to "love justice."

That is really the core motivation that sent me up the aisle last night, I want to be able to tell my children that the church that I serve stood up and said, "NO!" to racial injustice, even if it was 20 years late. I want to be able to say that I did everything I could, even if it was only standing up for a losing cause, to claim a world where they don't have to accept that systemic, institutional injustice and oppression are hard, cold facts of life.

For my kids, for my niece and nephews, I stood up, I spoke my mind, I lost the vote. I've never felt quite so justified in losing and I hold on to the hope that someday the reason I stood up will win.

Return of the Jedi

2011-02-22T21:06:00.000-08:00

So I notice that I haven't done anything here since November. Chalk it up to the latest redesign of Facebook (they no longer have the link to this page on my profile) and the fact that I have been wasting time playing Wii with the kids instead of rambling on about this and that. Anyway the only thing I've really had to rant about for the past three months is the weather: it was cold, it snowed, and snowed and snowed and now it's almost March and it's still snowing. I'm beginning to feel like a Narnian during the reign of Queen Jadis, but the groundhog says spring is almost here; Lord, please let the rodent be correct.
There are other things afoot, apart from winter, Presbyterians are voting and arguing, or arguing and voting, or arguing and voting at the same time, it's hard to tell. At times like this the Scottish bloodlines come to the surface. The two most controversial issues are also the most futile and boring issues but in the midst of debates over nFOG (new form of government) and the latest iteration of the ongoing argument over who's allowed to get squelchy with whom, there is a new confession up for a vote.
Now honestly, with most of the material recommended to Presbyteries by the General Assembly, I tend to look first at the possible harm it could do. I generally wonder why they can't just leave well enough alone, but in the process of looking deeper into the Confession of Belhar, I have become gradually convinced that the 219th General Assembly has actually done something good. Proving that the sun will indeed shine on a sleeping dog's rear-end, occasionally.
At first I avoided the usual commentary on the Belhar, I knew that the Coalition would hate it and the Covenant would love it, I didn't need to hear much from either end of the spectrum. Knowing that I am almost certainly going to vote no on the legal amendments coming later, I really wanted to give the confession a shot.
We're about due for a new one, the Brief Statement of Faith was made in 1983 and I can't really think of a better place for the church to take a stand than against Apartheid. It's cool; Bono did it on Rattle and Hum, Peter Gabriel wrote a song about the murder of Steven Biko, they've even made a sports movie about Mandela inspiring the South African Rugby team to victory. It would have been cooler if we had adopted this in the 1980s, when the Dutch Reformed Church wrote it, and when Apartheid still existed someplace besides history books but we're Presbyterian, we like to look before we leap. Better 20 years late than never.
After I read the confession and the accompanying letter, I was moved, and not at all offended or troubled by the content of the creedal statement. It talks a lot about Unity and Justice and how we (the Church) shouldn't just stand by and shrug our shoulders when Hatred is running the show. The Confession of Belhar doesn't really break any new theological ground, it just stirs up a little good old liberal-protestant equality talk with a bit of liberation theology for spice and says that Apartheid and systemic oppression of that ilk are bad things, Amen.
Not surprisingly though, some have found the devil lurking behind the bushes, and just like on South Park, he's gay. See when you start talking about not discriminating against people based on race, it doesn't take too much creativity to extend that sort of rhetoric to include homosexuals. After all we have come to understand homosexuality as a condition that is not of our choosing, we have ceased to define it as a disorder or even an abnormality, therefore it must be very much the same as the difference in skin color or the shape of the eyes. Equality under the law is something that should indeed be afforded to all people, regardless of race, creed or (gulp) sexual orientation. However, the direct equivocation of the discrimination that homosexual people face with the crushing systemic injustice of Apartheid is a bit laughable.
Not only that, but the idea that the Confession of Belhar would be ammunition to be used in the ongoing struggles over the issue of ordination within the PC(USA) is simply a procedural falsehood. We are "guided" by our confessions, and many of the confessions are more valuable for showing how the church responded to a historical crisis rather than for their theological statements. The Book of Confessions would not be properly used as a battering ram to crash the gates of orthodoxy, even if one did view the content of Belhar as expansively as those who fear it do.
In summation, it saddens me to see our denomination reject a creed that challenged one of the greatest evils that I ever learned about in Social Studies because, it maybe, might, kinda could be, applied to the issue of homosexuality as well as race. I'm not at all sure it would be good for our culture to allow homosexuals to get married, or for our church to ordain such, but I'm fairly sure it would not be the absolute worst thing we could possibly do. I am sure that Apartheid was one evil mess. If I have to be on Apartheid's team in order to voice some reservations about sexuality issues, I'm going to request a trade please. Maybe Carmelo can give me some pointers.

November

2010-11-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

November's cold chains,

Made of wet boots and rain.

-Tom Waits, November

It is a dreary day that smells like wet leaves. The rain is cold and has none of the cleansing, life giving properties of an April shower or even the snows that will be arriving shortly. The November world does not have the brilliant gold tints of October, or the crisp chill of anticipation that will come in December, or even the silent dormancy of January and February. November is the back half of the year's middle age, sliding drearily towards death, with all the luster of life gone and very little but mud and dead leaves to commend it to the senses.

I think that the only reason we have Thanksgiving is to celebrate the fact that November is almost over. Yet this too has a purpose. It is nature's bedtime ritual: bathe, brush your teeth, read a story and get tucked in under that silent blanket made of what is left of the year's labor. The animals have one last flurry of activity: feeding, breeding and getting ready for the deep freeze, when they will all but disappear from the frosty, snow-covered world.

November has a place in the yearly rhythm of life, but its like the bridge of a song that comes too close to the coda, there doesn't seem to be time for resolution. You must have faith that a new year is coming and life begins again, or else there will be no peace.

A Fall Poem

2010-10-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

A black cat prowls

through brown grass

bent gently by wind

under a gray sky.

Newly bare trees

stand stoic against

the pale morning.

Ravens call

no one in particular

Leaves are flaming out.

Winter comes

But not yet...

House on Fire

2010-10-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

One of my facebook friends just posted this story a while ago, and I think most of us can agree that it is a pretty terrible scenario.

Firefighters watch as home burns to the ground

www.wpsdlocal6.com

What I found particularly telling in the whole story was that the property owner had refused to pay a YEARLY $75 fee to support the fire company. It's not clear whether the company is volunteer or municipal but in either case, failure to pay such a small fee is sheer stupidity. Of course, none of us, no matter how stingy and stupid we are, deserves to watch their house burn to the ground. I'm guessing that the homeowner in question probably would have been seriously put out if whatever municipal jurisdiction he lives in had raised his taxes in order to pay for the fire company.

I live next to a volunteer fire department, and know many of the firefighters personally, any of them would practically bite through their tongue if you told them to stand by and watch someone's home burn. But even a volunteer company isn't free, they don't get much in the way of government funds, the best they can usually hope for is a grant to match the money they make by hosting bingo and various other community events. They work hard to raise money so that they can be well equipped and effective.

I don't see this as a conflict between capitalism and socialism, I don't believe any fire company, volunteer or professional is in the business to make a buck. Rural communities, if they're going to have a fire company, usually support the department through donations and relatively small yearly fees. Urban and Suburban communities support them through higher taxes. If you don't want your house to burn to the ground, use smoke detectors, observe fire safety standards and for God's sake pay the $75.

Back to School

2010-09-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

We went to back to school night with our kids this evening, one of the lesser rites of parenthood. Stand around and listen to a list of bullet points from a teacher who mostly deals with six-year-olds, look at all the adorable little things the kids have made in the first couple weeks of school, go have some cookies and punch (well all of you without diabetes get those), then go home, feeling tired and really glad that you are not six again (to counteract many times when you wish you were). Our educational system is quite impressive on a micro-level, the teachers really seem to care about the kids, the kids actually seem to like their teachers (at least this is the case presently, though I suspect that will change with age). I am glad to send my children off to be taught to read and write and apparently do a good bit of coloring (which never hurt anyone).

Then there is what I know about the educational system from long experience with its products. Even though children are beginning to be proficient readers by the end of kindergarten, they often graduate from high school only barely literate. I wonder how this process, that starts with so much promise and creativity, ends with kids who don't like to read anything more cultured than Harry Potter or Twilight.

And I'm not being snobbish, I was one of those teens, I bluffed my way through book reports like anyone else. But I guess I got just enough Shakespeare and Emerson in High School, so that when the peculiar desire to read more deeply arose years later, I at least knew who they were. I see kids, good kids and smart students, who are being drastically deprived of literary and cultural depth in order to do well on standardized tests, which by their nature have absolutely no soul.

Sure, forcing kids to read Homer (not Simpson), Dante, Milton (not Berle), Yeats, Keats, Whitman, Thoreau, and the like is a little sadistic. They will find it hard in most cases and probably boring in all cases but it will be enlightening as well as educational. Sure, it's easier to tow the line with math and science, but we often ignore the higher levels of those disciplines as well. I would rather read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English than mess around with Calculus again, but at least I am aware of the existence of the discipline and the importance of having people around who didn't get a D.

We are neglecting literature, which is, among other things the record of human thought and the telling of our great tales. I don't blame this on first grade teachers but somewhere along the line a lot of us are missing out, and our society is the victim.

9-11 is no joke

2010-09-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe it's been nine years since the terrorist actions that took place in New York and D.C. Many people remember feelings of shock and tragedy on that day. It has been referred to as the day the world stopped turning or the day the world changed. But this morning, as I think back, I remember what seems to me a peculiar reaction that stirred in me that morning as I sat in front of the TV watching the towers burn: worship. I had this overwhelming feeling, even as the events were still being explained, that God was still in control. I took out my guitar and I sang whatever songs came to mind, I remember singing Dylan's A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall, written in response to the Cuban missile crisis (another day the world stopped turning), I remember singing Amazing Grace, I remember praying deeply.

In the days that followed the peace that I had in those moments stayed with me, even as grief and anger took their turns. The sense of God's largeness in the face of such human tragedy has stayed with me for almost a decade, through personal trials of a different sort, through the blessings and struggles of ministry and fatherhood, I know that God is in charge.

This has shaped how I see 9-11 and the consequent response to the horrors of that day. It occurs to me that our response to that day, while it shows a certain amount of grit and determination also shows a bit of vengeful anger and imperialist pride that is probably what the terrorists expected and perhaps even wanted.

For about two weeks the nation turned to God, then we went to war. Paradoxically, when we turned to God the hatred of our enemy was futile; when we went to war, our enemy got what he wanted. Is our nation today worth the sacrifices that have been made in the last decade? Sure, but it would be worth more if we had responded with more trust in God and fewer bombs.

The motivation for the 9-11 attacks was misguided zeal for the will of Allah. Wouldn't we have been better served to respond with zeal for the One True God, who shows us the way of the cross? How much staying power would terrorism have if their enemy proved that it trusted God more than they feared terrorists? Has our violence ended the threat or put fuel on the fire?

I don't know about you but I don't feel any better about what happened now than I did nine years ago. I still trust God, I still love my country, I'm still sorry for those that were lost that day, and the wars we fought and the fear we've fed don't make me feel any different.

Walk On

2010-08-31T10:01:00.000-07:00

For about a month now, since learning that I am diabetic, I have been walking as many mornings as my schedule allows, it usually amounts to about 15, maybe 20 miles a week. It is a blessing to live right down the hill from an old railroad right of way that for most purposes is every bit as walkable as a paved road or a track. The one drawback to this old path through the woods is that it is made of packed coal cinders, black and sooty stuff that makes your ankles and lower legs absolutely filthy.

Walking through your environment puts you in touch with a lot of things you might not otherwise notice and it occurs to me, in the age of the automobile, many of us have completely forgotten what it means to know your path. We remember turns and road names but we pay little attention to inclines and the quality of the terrain. The dust of the road doesn't touch us, our feet don't bear the marks of our journey.

I have always enjoyed walking, from strolling with my dogs to backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, but lately it has taken new significance. First, the diagnosis of diabetes lends a sense of urgency to why and even how I walk. Second, I realize that my ability to move through my environment and my connection to the world has become limited by steel, glass and petroleum fuels. I want to get back to the trail, I want to be in shape enough to go backpacking with Jack and Cate, and I want to be around long enough for them to be old enough to go with me.

I think of this each day as I scrub the black coal cindered mud off of my shins and ankles.

Five

2010-08-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow my daughter will turn five. If you read the previous post you know that Caitlyn's birthday is almost a month from the anniversary of my brother Jonathan's death, he never saw her on this side. My little girl has lived her entire life in a period where I have been mourning a tragic loss. I remember her birth but most of the details of the days leading up to and following that momentous event are lost in a haze. Michele remembers everything, I'm not sure I was even there except for a couple hours.

I was there though, and have been there for every little bit of her life, but when I see her pass milestones: walking, talking, potty training, first day of school, birthdays, especially birthdays, there is always a twinge of pain. It's like I have this little imp in my chest who senses these happy little moments and automatically pinches a sensitive area.

Five is a good age, school isn't stale, cartoons are hilarious and life hasn't had much of a shot at grinding you down. But five is a bit bipolar, going from giddy to distraught in a matter of seconds and often not sensing much a transition between the two. Fivers are tough to live with but capable of such great joy and wonder that you really wish you were them.

I often wonder at how fast kids grow up, an experience that many parents of 25ers have assured me is not unique. With Caitlyn though, growing up has an added dimension for her father, the more she grows the farther I get from one of the most painful moments in my life but I also get farther from one of the happiest moments of my life.

The positive side of this is that she's still here to make many more happy moments.

Happy Birthday Cate!

Failure

2010-08-12T07:04:00.000-07:00

It would seem that the trip was doomed without being terrible. Five years after my brother died, I talked myself in to giving the beach another shot. My wife and her family are Jersey shore people and since Jon passed the Jersey shore has seemed like one of the outer circles of Hell to me; it's crowded and over-regulated (because of the crowds). It's like I have a cup, in which I put things that I just have to tolerate; the problem is that when I consider the beach the cup is already at least half full of sadness, leaving much less room for things like crowds and fascist lifeguards.

One of the things that no one seems to understand is that surfing was one of the biggest common denominators I have with my brother's tumultuous and short existence. We talked about it, dreamed about it and never quite got to live it out. It's not like we spent all our time surfing, we were just at the beginning, having just reached the age where we could afford boards and contemplate travel.

Since Jon died the boards have been stored in my parent's garage, and I noticed some level of dread even as I pulled two of them down from the rafters. I put them on the car, but I didn't get them secured quite right, an hour into the trip they finally worked loose and flew off the roof. I got a sick feeling in my stomach like I had just had what the younglings would call an epic fail. Fortunately the boards didn't hit another car and magically they only had minor dings on the very back end. I sensed my dream of returning to be a swinger of birches (or a surfer of waves) was about to go down the tubes. I never did paddle out into the lineup, it was too crowded and I'm not good enough to deal with avoiding other people as I struggle to remain upright.

Above, or should I say underneath, all of that was the pervasive feeling of sadness that I was hoping had gone away. Just walking on the beach is a little painful, watching surfers stings a little bit more. I realized at some point that I don't actually want that feeling to go away, or really even to fade. The reason I'm holding on the surfboards and the dream of being someplace where I can actually use them is because that is the strongest connection I have to my brother. Here's the weird thing: I don't want to let that pain go. I'm glad I have worked through most of the rest of my issues. I realized though that I don't want to let go of the dreams we had, even if they do bring a deep melancholy.

As I walked down the beach where everyone else was having fun, I realized that this is what I have left. I don't want to "deal" with it, I don't want it to get better. I want to remember what it is that I lost, I want to think about all the vacations we might have taken together, I want to think about the nieces and nephews that we will never teach to surf, I want to ride those waves because they're all I have left.

O to live on Sugar Mountain

2010-07-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

The day we got back from our vacation there was a message waiting from my doctor's office. I called in and found out that the blood test I had taken before leaving revealed that I now have type II Diabetes. This was not a complete surprise but it definitely caused re-entry to be a bit hot. I have been overweight since about 3rd grade and I often eat for all the wrong reasons. I like to say that I'm in pretty good shape for a fat guy but I'm definitely a fat guy. It would seem that the need for that to change is no longer theoretical.
I spent about two days feeling really alone, despite the fact that I know how many people live with this disease, and I have plenty of faces and stories to keep me company. The issue is not the disease, as it would be with cancer or something like that, it is the fact that the "cure" for the disease lies in a paradigm shift regarding one of my most fundamental relationships: the one I have with food. The community of our church immediately stepped in with some very subtle but valuable help: people who have lived with it and one person who is a nutritionist, gave me the information I need to deal with it. I don't even meet with my doctor about all the details until next month but I'm already on the road with a new diet and hopefully, before too long, a reshaped relationship to what I eat.
Diabetes apparently doesn't go away, just like AA tells their folks: once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. Funny thing is that I'm finding out that food is and has been an addiction for me, I use it for all sorts of things other than nourishment, I eat anger and anxiety, I eat because I'm bored, sometimes I just eat because I can. I have battled various other addictions in life: marijuana, alcohol, cigarettes, all of them I was able, by sheer will power, to quit cold turkey. I guess you could say I have an addictive personality. The thing is, with the other stuff, I made the changes, they were hard. Weed was the toughest, even though physically it is the least addictive, because it required a lifestyle change, new friends, new ideas about what to do with myself.
Food addiction is going to be the worst, because I can't go cold turkey, I can't just stop eating, I have to live with my addiction and keep it under control. Unfortunately, I have to somehow make the change. It's funny but almost five years to the day since my brother lost his battle with addiction to Heroin by trying to "outsmart" his addiction by mainlining cocaine, I find myself going through some of the same mental processes as I try to "outsmart" my addiction to food. I would love to find a "magic pill" that would cure the diabetes and let me go on being fat and happy but that's going to kill me, I know it. I've had hypertension since I was 26, now at 36 I've got the big D, I need to change my attitude towards food. I can get all the little booklets and read all the articles on what is good and bad for diabetics but the underlying cause of the problem is not my blood sugar or my insulin levels, it's what is going on in my soul that's the problem.
Thanks to everyone for the advice on diet and exercise, I'm going to give it a shot, now what I need is prayer.

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry

2010-07-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

Coming to the end of our week on the farm it occurs to me that life has become unnecessarily complicated. We have been taking daily excursions in between caring for the chickens and sheep. One was an overpriced but thoroughly enjoyable tube trip down the Delaware River, yesterday we rode an old time railroad, which was once a spur on the mighty Reading Railroad system but now just runs on Saturday and Sunday, up and back a three mile stretch of track between the towns of Kempton and Wanamaker. For eight bucks a head you can experience about 45 minutes of 1920, no air-conditioning, open windows and wicker seats, and you can get a glimpse of what it was like before automobiles made us hyper-mobile and independent of all such communal travel arrangements. Imagine if you had to plan a whole day to go get what you need from "town," you had to catch a train, ride along slowly, stopping periodically to pick up more folks with whom you then had to share your carriage.

Something as simple as shopping has largely become a solitary, insular affair, where simply talking to the cashier who takes your payment is about all the human interaction anyone can handle. In the old way, this sort of simple errand was rife with community involvement, a community that runs train lines, tends small town stores, rides together with no cell phones or Mp3 players to conveniently distract them from the simple nicety of talking to your neighbor.

The farm we have occupied for the last week does not have a television, which, far from being an inconvenience is perhaps the best sabbath I can imagine. (it does have internet service obviously and a Mac, which I am frankly quite in love with) We have chickens who lay eggs, and entertain children, we have sheep for the kids to "make friends" with, there is a little garden out back, a golf cart to ride the fence line and generally keep us amused.

As we prepare to go back to normal life I think of all the things we have unintentionally lost as a culture in our mad push to advance technologically. I love tech gadgets, I love digital cable and high speed internet but I wonder whether it's good for us as human beings to be so isolated. Personally I would like to find this sort of balance in life more often. Technology, there for the using, but perhaps with a little more life around too.

Under the Broom Tree

2010-06-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

Charles Bukowski wrote a poem entitled, you get so alone sometimes it just makes sense, honestly the title is about all you really need to know about the poem. There are times when we feel really, really alone, but in that loneliness there is a certain kind of symmetry and peace. Some might categorize this aloneness as solitude but I generally think of solitude as something one seeks out intentionally. I seek solitude in going fly fishing, or taking a walk alone. Aloneness, if I may coin a new word, may strike you at odd times, often in a crowd or, as it did me on Sunday morning, in front of a congregation of people listening to my sermon.
I was telling the story of the Prophet Elijah, on the run from Ahab and Jezebel, the last of his kind, the final prophet of Yahweh in a culture that had gone after the Canaanite thunder god Baal. All of the sudden, as I was talking about Elijah sitting under the broom tree in the desert, waiting to die, beyond all hope and utterly alone, I felt this crushing sense of empathy. I looked around at the sparse crowd of the faithful, the people who are always there. I wonder if they noticed any sort of look on my face, I wonder if they felt the empty space in the pews around them and considered the reasons for that emptiness.
God said, "Elijah, what are you doing here?" Meaning, why had he abandoned his post and fled into the wilderness, why was he giving up?
Elijah answered, "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, and the people of Israel have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, killed your prophets with the sword, now I alone am left and they are coming to take my life as well."
God asks twice and Elijah answers the same way twice.
As I looked around at the faithful, who are too few, I was grateful for their presence, but their presence did not make me feel less alone, it made me feel more responsible and thus even more alone. Elijah felt somehow justified in fleeing the country, partially because he thought he was the only one left who was faithful to Yahweh. It's easy to feel that way in a culture where religions of iron clad dogma and feel good gospels seem to do well and the all to easy hedonism of materialism surrounds us. From Atheists to Zoroastrians and everything in between, including a dizzying array of Christian variants, Religions always strive for a certain level of Baalist certainty, and most achieve it some way or another, usually at the expense of the truth.
Meanwhile, The LORD, the God of the angel armies, the I AM, is out there in the sheer silence that comes after the chaos of everything has passed, but most people don't want to listen to Him.
What does this God do? He waits until all the chaos has played out and then gathers His remnant to Himself. In Elijah's day it was seven thousand, who had not bent the knee to Baal or kissed his lips. Seven thousand, nice round number, but a pretty sparse crowd if you consider the hundreds of thousands who were living in the northern kingdom before the attack of Hazael, the revolt of Jehu and the purge of Elisha.
Yahweh is not about numbers. It doesn't seem to bother Him in the least that Elijah was the last true prophet, if He's got one that's enough. Even if that one is burnt out, at the end of his rope, sitting under a broom tree waiting to die, as long as he's got breath, he's enough.

Remember Apartheid?

2010-06-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

I was watching the opening game of the World Cup this morning while Caitlyn was having some morning quiet time, curled up on my shoulder. As they were playing the national anthems for Mexico and South Africa she asks me, "how many of those people are there?"
I couldn't figure out what exactly she was asking, soccer players, fans in the stadium. "How many of what people honey?"
"Dark people."
"Lots and lots of dark people honey."
"I'm glad we're not dark."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
I sat there a little bit stunned by the nature of this conversation. It's a startling reminder of how innate some of our more base tendencies really are. This is not what you could call racism, a four year old has no concept of different races or of the assumption of superiority of one race over another, she just knows that these are people who don't look like her. There were Mexicans of varying shades, Africans, light and dark, but to Cate they were all dark people.
I felt a wonderful teaching moment presenting itself and as I tried to formulate a way to tell my daughter about the tragedy of apartheid that had seemed so intractable when I was in high school, I found that I was getting choked up. Part of me was happy that my daughter lives in a world where apartheid is a thing of the past. Part of me was sad because the same prejudice and fear that generated such systems is still an all too real part of our world.
I finally managed to put together the following simplistic summary: "when I was a kid the country where all these people are playing soccer together was different and didn't treat the dark people very nicely, but now they're better and the dark people and the light people try to get along."
She reiterated her definite preference for her lightness, which I suppose, in itself is not a bad thing. Social studies classes will give her enough guilt trips about being caucasian. I felt the need to try and subvert any small bud of racism: "Honey, dark people are just like us, they just have different skin."
She looked at her arm and said, "okay," and that was the end of our morning conversation on race relations.

Dude Seriously?

2010-06-03T12:07:00.001-07:00

It's things like this that give aristocracy a bad name. It's all good and fine to live a life of luxury on the backs of the common man but when you degenerate to the point where you just can't help killing people, well the peasants are liable to be at your door any moment. In modern times the peasants are the journalists and tabloid media.
I'm not a big follower of media sensationalism, except, I suppose to comment on how often it gets out of control. But even I took notice that Joran Van Der Sloot is back in the headlines and yet another young lady is dead, this time they have a body to prove it. I'm going to try to avoid judging someone guilty when they haven't actually been convicted of anything but isn't it a little too much of a coincidence that this kid ends up being the last person seen with two young ladies who met with an untimely demise?
In the case of Natalee Holloway, Joran was seen drinking with her and heading off down the beach for a little nooky. This type of behavior is not what one would hope to see from their daughter but it shouldn't be a capital offense. Things get dicey and unknown and lil' Natalee is never seen or heard from again. Van Der Sloot, who even has the name of an entitled snob, is in fact the son of a big-shot judge, a rich one at that. He buys the best lawyers, they haggle around over habeus corpus, while the ocean buries whatever truth might be out there deeper and deeper in Davey Jone's locker. Van Der Sloot becomes the new OJ and, unlike OJ, gets to go back to the life of a rich brat.
They still haven't learned for sure what happened to Holloway but her family and the prosecution still like ol' Joran a whole lot. Anyway, you would guess that, after that sort of close call... maybe it was an accident, maybe she really did just have one too many and decide to go for a drunk-swim... you would think that Jojo would keep his head down, you know, never go near this sort of situation again... you would think that, apparently Slooty didn't think that.
Now there's a dead girl in Peru, and she's from a pretty swanky family too. Guess what? Last person she was seen with? Ding Dong! What kind of girl goes out drinking with this dude?
I'll concede the possibility of accident or even complete innocence in the Holloway thing, but this dude is now getting a body count. He's either got some seriously questionable hook up practices or he's just picking girls that are way too fragile (like humans tend to be). Maybe he should go for a Klingon chick, they can stand up for themselves.
The sadness of this whole fiasco is the two lives that ended, regardless of whether or not they were on the up and up or whether they did some really stupid college chick stuff, they deserve to be alive. I for one plan to teach my daughter to trust no one, especially rich kids, and then get her a blade and training on how to castrate someone real quick and dirty.

Identity Crises

2010-05-24T18:33:00.000-07:00

We had our monthly session meeting last night and we were answering a questionnaire from our Presbytery about our experience of the particular relationship between local church and the next level of church government. As per usual we got off on a tangent, someone asks a question and Mr. Rev. Pastor here gets talking. Consequently that is largely why I write this blog, to vent on things so that I don't inflict these sorts of diatribes on unsuspecting church members who just had a simple question about using the church for a baby shower.
The funny thing was, I really got on a roll and found myself saying things out loud that I had been thinking for a while but was never quite sure I should actually verbalize. Fortunately, I had been thinking these things over long enough that they weren't outlandish and radical, in fact they were mostly true, or at least as close to true as I can get about these things. We were considering the future of the church and going over, again, the grim reality of the "Mainline" denominations (Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran) all of whom seem to be declining at a steady pace. The observation was made that, at least in our area, the more fundamentalist brand of Christianity seems to be gaining traction. That's what they see, Baptist churches that do not accept women in leadership and employ a very literal hermeneutic perspective are doing well. Non-denominational churches that are even more extreme in their approach to holiness and purity are also springing up all over, growing like mushrooms and then imploding, and we're in a rural area where new stuff just doesn't happen that much.
Folks are confused because people seem to want God, perhaps to such an extent that they will accept a false god (though I'm not making that accusation against our neighbors that wouldn't be fair). Yet, apathy seems to rule the day in our community, we can't get good commitments out of our members, some of the same people who lament said lack of commitment are the same people who are absent from worship on any number of Sundays per month.
I might be tempted to think it's my fault, if this trend wasn't shared by most of my colleagues and wasn't part of a statistical trend that started when I was about four years old. Even taking blame for this would be egotistical. The reality is that the old way of being church, while it seemed to be so solid and faithful was actually wounding and alienating people. A church that, perhaps mistakenly, took itself to be the arbiter of morals is now reaping the empty pews, while churches that teach people to point their finger at the moral turpitude of "others," are hauling them in.
The sad thing is that people in this congregation really want to grow, they want to see new people come in but what I finally pressed home last night (or at least I think I did) was that, in order to do that, we might have to change some things about who we are and how we do things. They weren't too surprised by this revelation, they know it, but I don't think they're sure what exactly they want to do about it.
When you boil it down, what folks want is for the church they love to grow, and the church they love looks a certain way and acts a certain way. If growing means changing the looks and the action of the church, they're really faced with a kind of loss. Give up what you love so that something different can take its place. Say what you want about the continuity of the church, change is a reality. A Presbyterian from 100 years ago wouldn't recognize, and probably wouldn't much care, for what we are today.
The death, even the suicide, of the Mainline church, is bad news for Western Culture because, like it or not, we're a foundational piece of society. If and when we go all you'll have will be Roman Catholics, Bible Belters and the Emerging church (if it ever figures out what it's going to emerge into). The faith of the men that founded this nation will be a footnote, the keepers of the intellectual and theological heritage of the past 600 years will flicker out of existence. It's frightening when you have to trust Papists and a loose conglomeration of adolescent-minded searchers to defend the faith against creation scientists, pre-millenialists and televangelists.
If the Mainline loses itself entirely you might want to consider moving to Africa, you may not have clean water but at least you'll be able to find a protestant church that's not psychotic.

The Stubborn Log

2010-05-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

A theme seems to be emerging in the last few weeks; it's always difficult to tell whether these things are really inspired or whether I'm just fixated, maybe it's a little of both. The theme is that often the biggest stumbling block to people experiencing God's grace is the religious systems that are built to help people experience God's grace. The idea that the human institution and systems that are predicated on God's presence and love somehow fall short is not really that surprising though. If one wanted to develop an appreciation of democracy and societal discourse, one would be ill advised to visit the U.S. Congress or the British Parliament (or watch the 24 hour news cycle that covers them).

Right now, in the West at least, the church is acting as a repulsive agent to those who feel a desire to know God. Unfortunately, it's not exactly what we're doing that is wrong, it's what we are perceived to be that is doing the damage. Equally troublesome is the fact that, in postmodern euro-american society, no amount of reality is going to counteract people's perception of the truth. The log is truly stuck in our eyes, the eye of the church, the eye of the people, the collective eye of our society.

First off, the church, because like Jesus said, "first take the log out of your own eye." We are stuck in the rational imperialism of the last 600 years. We use words like mission, or if we make a poor attempt at separating ourself from the visions of Jesuits and conquistadors, we might change it to missional activity or outreach. What we're really trying to do is mask the reality that our mandate to make disciples of all nations has often meant: make everyone like us. We do an absolutely wretched job of bringing Jesus with us. Happily for us, God's grace has a way of working with us so that, by some miracle, we have not just created clones of the medieval church in different lands. In fact, the more one studies church history, the more one realizes that the survival of the church has very little to do with the efficacy or event the goodness of what the church has tried to do. But the modern church muddles along with this flawed idea that we will figure out what we are supposed to do by some other mode than simply trusting God, one day at a time.

The log in the eye of the people is that they have forgotten how much they need God, a delusion that the church has often tacitly reinforced for them. Years, if not centuries, of trying to get people to come to a rigidly organized and often lifeless institution for the fulfillment of spiritual need has blown up in our face. Once people saw through the all too human artifice of the church they became disillusioned. Once those disillusioned people found life fairly comfortable, or at least tolerable, without the troublesome notion of responsibility to God, it was just about all over. But the reality of our connection to community and our Creator does not simply shuffle off into the void that is home to old myths and superstitions. People still crave and need God, and the messy truth is that we need each other in order to really connect with God. Our Creator is about community, not about private devotion or introspection.

The church in the west has become about rules and gate keeping and no one, including God, has much use for that. But this brings us to the log in the eye of our society, which is different from the impairment of individuals. I would argue that society has abdicated it's responsibility for morality and dumped it on the church. The church, while it seemed all too willing to take up the task, is ill suited to regulate people's behavior. The church that Jesus sought to establish was about welcoming those who are broken and sinful, but at it's best was not the authority that established what that meant. The church is meant to be a healer, leave the work of pathology to the collective consciousness of society.

I think it would be fine if the church let society define what sin is, there will always be plenty of that. Let's focus our attention on forgiving and healing the sinners. I think that society must be the one to define what is good and what is not, to put that on the church (except perhaps on the core issues of the Big 10), is to hitch your thoroughbred to the manure cart. It's a lose-lose proposition, if the church lowers it's standards it begins to dissolve and loses it's holiness, if the church holds too tight to it's holiness it becomes rigid and empty. Let him who is filthy be filthy still, let him who is righteous be righteous still and stop trying to put on the judges robe, it doesn't fit.

The twist in this is that postmodern society has become fairly adept at dodging it's moral duty: "it's not our place to say what is right and wrong." But it is, it is always the function of human communities to define what is good and acceptable. It is quite amazing that, if you look across the lines of race and culture, almost all human societies follow the basic structures of the Ten Commandments. They're a good place to start, and we don't really need to go down the road of the Levitical code (hey that rhymes, road, code).

If the church is going to stop trying to be the arbiter of morality, which would make the church and the world much safer and happier, then society is going to have to take up the task again. There was a time when church and society were the same thing, or very nearly, but those divorce papers were signed long ago. Now we need to get our responsibilities ironed out.

Emergent, Schmemergent

2010-04-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an article in the May edition of Sojourners magazine about how the "Emergent" church is basically the same old white-male dominated institution as the traditional church. This is not the first criticism I have heard of the Emergents, and like most of the other criticism I have read, it has some validity. From Brian McLaren to Rob Bell, Emergent posterboys tend to be, well, boys, they might have tattoos and play in bands, they almost certainly have iphones, but are they really that different from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson? They're certainly less conservative, for the rest, only time will tell. This leads to criticism from the masses that essentially the Emergent movement is just a trendier version of the old mainline elitism.
In truly postmodern fashion the movement, or should I say its spokesdudes, give a glib mea culpa, and say they're trying their best to be more diverse and open to anyone and everyone, but the reason why they like their coffee shop churches and their random collection of ancient mysticism, is because it speaks to them. The traditional church dropped the ball on the post-boomers, it's their fault blame them, add it to the list. Slap a liberal coat of social justice speak on the whole mess and you have a "new" kind of church, which apparently is quite attractive to publishers and journalists.
What I have noticed from afar, as an interested but certainly not unbiased observer, is that the "emergent" movement is extremely resistant to criticism because of a peculiar formation in the zeitgeist: the abhorrence of classification. The postmodern mind resists attempts at definition and classification like my son resists eating his peas. Broad, generalized statements like the ones I have made above will be dismissed as uninformed and unenlightened. Criticism is not so much answered as deflected, and amorphous vagueness is lauded as a characteristic virtue.
Let me just say, I like the emergent thing, but I'm getting a little weary of this post-adolescent identity crisis that seems to grip the "new thang." I serve a small town church that is still, and perhaps ever will be, non-emergent. We do not have powerpoints or praise bands, and except for in the mind of this Gen-X pastor, we have no desire for such things. We will probably not replace our pews with couches or start showing movie clips during the service, coffee will still be served in the kitchen and probably not make it into the sanctuary. We do have one thing that most emerging churches don't have. This is a thing that is both a strength and a weakness, this is a thing that both defines and limits us: old people.
I'm not talking about the Boomers either, let's, for once have something not be about them, even though some of them are chronologically getting old. I'm talking about their parents, people who have lived through two major cultural paradigm shifts as full grown adults (1960-1975 and then 1995-present). These people have been around long enough to remember a world without electricity, let alone the internet and the only use they can find for an iphone is to use as a coaster. To this generation the things the emergents are doing are fairly narcissistic, and yes that is a subjective value judgment, most of them think that 80 years or so earns you the right to make those.
This is not urban or suburban, this is not trendy or postmodern, a lot of the time it's not even good, but it is reality and there is no identity crisis. Though, as their pastor, I sometimes forget it, they know very well who they are. I suspect that the emergents might eventually get out of the sands of the ancient, and want to learn something from the merely old. I just hope they get to it while they still have some living witnesses.

Wanna Feel How Hard I Can Punch?

2010-04-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

So we got a note home from Jack's school, apparently there was a bit of an altercation on the bus earlier this week. Some kid hit Jack in the face, Jack hit back, there was blood, and a visit to the nurse for the other little boy and stern talking to from the powers that be. As Jack's Father I gave him the obligatory lecture about how violence doesn't solve problems and how it's better to go to the teacher if someone hits you and let them handle it...
But as Jack's Dad I was a little glad he plastered the little punk. I've got a philosophical quandary on my hands, I know, and believe that non-violence is the better way. I have spent a good amount of effort and some suffering learning the ups and downs of forbearance and forgiveness versus violence and revenge. Violence and revenge are more fun up to a certain point and forbearance and forgiveness only pay their dividends at the end of a long road. It's hard to explain that long road to a six year old.
It's even hard to believe it as a six year old's dad. I have a lot easier time philosophizing about how I might respond with Christ-like forbearance if someone walked up and punched me in the face, and even in that case I have a bit of doubt about whether or not I could or would turn the other cheek. When it comes to Jack and Caitlyn that doubt becomes more severe, I want them to stand up for themselves. As much as I want them to learn the right way, I don't want them to get punched in the face.
Given the fact that the world is full of little craps that will probably try to hurt them at some point, it's a little reassuring to know that they can fight back, even while I give them the lecture and threaten dire punishments for a repeat performance, I secretly want to say, "way to go."
I guess this just goes to prove that I have a long way to go before I become completely like Jesus, as if extra proof was required.

Not Like a Tame Lion

2010-04-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will be preaching on the same text that I used for my very first sermon. Eight years and a few weeks ago, I climbed up into the pulpit at The Presbyterian Church, Sewickley and gave preaching a try. Now, almost a decade later, I am preaching every week in two churches and most weeks I enjoy the heck out of it. Like most people, when I was in high school and college, public speaking was something I enjoyed about as much as having a sack of hungry weasels attached to my nether regions. Somewhere between that first sermon and now, preaching has become what I live for professionally. The reason for this is probably strongly tied to the content of chapter 21 of the Gospel according to John.
Jesus shows up at the Sea of Galilee and finds the disciples back at their old job: fishing. He has breakfast with them and then has a very challenging conversation with Peter. In this conversation he asks Peter three times if he loves him, each time Peter dodges the question by answering with a different sort of love than Jesus is asking for. Jesus is asking for self-sacrificial love that seeks the best at all costs, Peter keeps saying, "yes Lord, I love you like a brother." This answer isn't what Jesus wants, and it isn't the answer that Peter needs to give. Peter needs to give the answer that heals him of his three denials, that purges out the hypocrisy of good intention but cowardly action. Peter needs to get his mind right and become the Rock on which Christ can found his church.
Many of us dodge God's call and deny our association with the Lord when it becomes uncomfortable. I have done it many times. When Jesus asks you about it face to face you realize that God is not at all as gentle and timid as you might have thought. I have always loved C.S. Lewis' analogy of Aslan: Jesus. The Lion image reminds me of God's power and holiness, while not being impersonal or unapproachable but you have to remember that "he's not like a tame lion," he's not something you can control and keep at arm's length. He might just show up at breakfast and ask you some uncomfortable and convicting questions, he might just ask a shy kid to preach for a living or a frightened fisherman to be the head of the Church. He might just do it, because he's not safe, "but he's good, he's the king I tell you."

The Whirlwind

2010-04-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

Looking back on my calendar for the past three weeks I feel a little dizzy. There just wasn't a lot of time to reflect on anything, the demands and the action of Holy week tend to push clergy beyond our comfort zone and into a sort of overdrive. Most of the christian community goes into a time of reflection and celebration but those of us up front are way too busy for that.
It's kind of a shame really because we need it as much as anyone. As I noticed that my last entry was March 24, I realized that my little on-line journal reflects the lack of introspection that inevitably comes with the Eastertide.
This is not good, the week after Easter was even worse than the week before Easter, if it hadn't been for my wife almost forcing me to come home and visit with her family on Saturday afternoon, I would have spent almost two straight weeks running and preaching and "doing" ministry.
Now that I have some blank days on the calendar I can reflect a little on the busy-ness of our culture, that occasionally gets the best of all of us, and some of us more than occasionally. This is not a healthy state, this is a whirl and a blur and I think that it can and does eventually make us ill. We need to slow down.
I can almost hear several of my people say, "and how are we supposed to do that?" I can almost see the helpless expressions on some of my colleagues faces as they acknowledge their over-functioning and over-extension. Slowing down is easier said than done.
That's why God put the Sabbath day at the top of the list, that's why He gets to that so early in the story, that's why it has stayed on the cutting edge of what it means to be a good Jew for nearly 6000 years. It is troubling that so many Christians have abandoned the principle altogether. Of course it's also problematic to make Sabbath observance a gnostic/magical ticket into heaven but not doing it at all is really bad for us.
"Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy."

The Stones Will Cry Out

2010-03-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

"I tell you," he replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out."

-Luke 19:40

Palm Sunday: Hosanna (Lord, save us), the crowd makes a ruckus and there is this moment of great importance, this moment of seeming triumph, but you just know it's not going to last. The story, at this point, has picked up so much momentum leading to the cross that it is absolutely unstoppable, and completely unforeseen by anyone but Jesus. Lots of people have a part to play in the story, some big, some little but there is only one person who really matters.

I always get the feeling that Jesus is profoundly alone, even on Palm Sunday, even when there are crowds of people shouting praises for him. He is alone like a ship in a hurricane or a log in a flood-stage river, he is alone because no-one else could go where he was going. Like the old song says, "Jesus had to walk through the lonesome valley." The story is absolutely unavoidable, it must be this way, it must be this time, it cannot go any other way, it's going through the narrow gate.

God has given up His freedom of choice and dedicated himself to this path. Jesus set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem and no one else has anything to do with it. I remember being really mad at Judas, at Pilate, at Peter and the disciples when I was a kid, I wondered why they couldn't be different, why they couldn't stand up and say no to the currents of darkness that seemed to be pulling them along. But despite the evil and brutality of the cross, it is not borne along by darkness, it is intended by God. If these people don't shout Hosanna, the stones will cry out. If Judas doesn't betray Christ, someone will, if Pilate doesn't condemn him someone would, the story is going this way, it needs to go this way.

Health and Caring?

2010-03-22T10:39:00.000-07:00

Obama-care has passed. To some this is the dawn of a new day in America, to some this is a loud flushing sound that rings ominous in the giant toilet of life. Me, I do not hold to either position. There are some aspects of the new bill that I find encouraging and others that worry me a little bit, but I hold to the reality that some change is better than doing nothing and that there really is no perfect solution out there.
Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the whole mess is that our system of government actually seems to work, they actually managed to do something that was necessary even though it encountered significant resistance. Give the Dems credit for duking it out and eking out the slim majority, it took some political cahones.
If the new system succeeds they will get to claim the credit for "fixing" a system that was profoundly broken. And that will be good news, when average folks no longer have to sweat so much about paying for healthcare and when sick people just have to worry about getting better, not how to pay for it.
All is not so dark for the Republicans either, because, if this plan is as flawed as they say it is, then it will fail, perhaps catastrophically. It is a little discouraging that the GOP has hitched its mules to the "we hope it's gonna fail" wagon but that's the only way that the 213 reps that voted nay are going to be able to save any sort of political face.
The most likely scenario is that the new system will continue to be a mixed bag, it will actually not be a shining success but neither will it be an abject failure. If the political pundits and career politicians would stop drinking their own moonshine long enough to really think about it they would realize that this is not the promised land, but nor is it the lake of fire. My guess is that the two party system of near detente will endure and some people will always have a reason to complain about the system.
The sky is not falling but things are far from being fixed, that just seems to be the best we can hope for in American politics, at least they did something.

Rainy Monday Blues

2010-03-15T17:55:00.000-07:00

Call it seasonal dysphoria (if you know what that is, I'm sorry but you're probably in the same boat), call it the sobriety of Lent, call it the blahs. Sometimes I just get this way and usually I get this way around the end of February and on through March. It's probably the coincidence of my Scotch-Welsh (with a bit of Irish mixed in for good measure) heritage and the season when the weather in Western PA most closely resembles the gloom of my ancestral landscape. March is a time for melancholy, and it's a good time for it too.
Winter may be a little frostbitten but there's something about weathering the snow and freezing temperatures that inspires the blood. You feel alive because you have to fight it out with the elements. March offers little resistance, just cold, but not too cold, damp enough to make you feel clammy but without any of the bursting life of April and May. In this climate: February is the cross, March is the tomb and spring, whenever she gets here is the resurrection.
Every year about this time I start wondering a little too much about where I'm going and what I'm doing, I start feeling like I'm trying to walk around through deep mud and wondering if anything is ever going to start growing in all this mess. Spring and Summer dance right around the corner but I can never catch a glimpse of them. When my hope holds out I know I'll get there, but on a Monday like today, I really begin to wonder.
It puts me in mind of one of my favorite, scratch favorite, let's say habitual, Lenten traditions: put the resurrection out of your mind and pretend that you were one of Jesus' original 12 disciples. Pretend for a moment that you really missed all the warnings and teachings he had given you to warn you about his impending death. Then imagine what those three days felt like, with all your hopes broken and your dreams torn apart. It's a bit of tricky mental exercise, trying to forget something you know about the story, but it fits March pretty well for me.
Of course you may ask: what good is this sort of gloom going to do? Well, it helps you get some glimpse of what Easter was really like, what radical hope is all about, what it means to find that something that was even beyond your capacity to imagine is actually true.
People that are perpetually happy trouble my soul, and I find very few of them in the pages of Scripture. It is odd that often the public face of American Christianity is so bugging optimistic. Hope and optimism are not the same thing; optimism is the view that the sun will come out, hope sustains you on rainy Mondays in March when it really seems like the sun doesn't actually exist. Optimism would have been absolutely crushed on Good Friday, hope gets you through to Sunday morning.

The Unwelcome Guest

2010-03-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

And they'll take the money, and spread it out equal

Just like the Bible and the Prophets suggest.

But the men that go riding to help these poor workers

the rich will cut down like an unwelcome guest.

-Wilco, The Unwelcome Guest

The above words were written by Woody Guthrie, an old school liberal, a radical, a friend of the workingman, a singer of songs of freedom, hope and often rage against the injustice of the status quo. Woody was the kind of liberal that I would like to be, Woody had a certain understanding of Christ that, while it was not broad, had a diamond hard clarity not defined by moral relativism but rather by the certainty that all men have dignity.

What might surprise the modern Democratic ideologues is the frequency with which Guthrie founds his philosophy and his ethics on the teachings of Jesus and the Scripture. And there are not many Woody Guthries out there, and there aren't many G.K. Chestertons or C.S. Lewises either. These were people who really "got" Jesus, not that they were necessarily Christlike, but they at least had a concept of what he was really about. Woody understood his identification with the common man, his compassion for those who are down and oppressed. Chesterton understood his location in a story, that was beautiful, joyous, and often funny. Lewis had a vision that God's work was maybe more and bigger than the closet most Christians keep it in.

None of them were clergy, in fact, in the case of the latter two, they consciously avoided becoming professional religious people. Woody preached with his songs, G.K. and C.S. through their books, they were who they were and in that they incorporated their understanding of Christ and became a part of his body. And through them, many heard, and came to know the way.

For those who are trying, and maybe even succeeding in living a worldly life, the word of the Gospel becomes unwelcome and afflicting. It is only for those who feel the wrong of the ways of the world and the sting of injustice and the ache of human suffering that the Gospel is the Word of Life.

The End of Something Sacred

2010-03-07T12:41:00.000-08:00

It has happened all over this part of the world in the last 50 years: coal mines and steel mills have shut down and then, gradually, everyone went away. First businesses close, then property values drop, then sometime, the most resistant entities of the community begin to fold. Churches were usually one of the first things to go up in these mining towns and it's a sad day when they fold.
I am dealing with the closing of one small church, Rossiter Presbyterian, where I have been moderator of session for about 5 years or so. They have held on by their fingernails, they have suffered enough and finally the 6 members that remain have reluctantly decided to close the doors.
We had a meeting this afternoon to set the closing date: September 5, 2010. We then proceeded to talk about how to "dispose" of the church property. There is a nearly 100 year old building, there are a bunch of tables and chairs, there are pews and paraments, and it's hard to figure out what is going to happen to it all. This is not just junk; these are sacred artifacts of a congregation.
Say what you want about religion, say what you want about the way the church sometimes loses it's connection with Jesus, but I got the distinct sense that God is sharing in our grief today. I think of all the marriages, baptisms and sacraments, not to mention all the funerals and memorials that took place inside those walls. I think of all the lives that passed through that place and the community that was once vital within.
It ends up being a question of economics, they can't pay the bills, they have no hope for the future, their part of the body of Christ dies. It happens, it's sad, and it's going to happen more and more.
The world has passed the small church by, different kinds of churches are flourishing, the message is alive in some form and that, at least is good. But congregations that are primarily about community, whose main strength is the ability to hold on, have lost their grip. People have become consumers of religious services and old hymns played on out of tune pianos are not worth much in the retail market.
One of the ladies from Rossiter said that an acquaintance of hers from a nearby non-denominational church asked her, "what's a matter with you Presbyterians don't you have any faith? Our church was dwindling and we came back." The implication is sickening, if you just have faith you'll never die. While it is true that many churches have come back from near death, almost all of those cases involve such radical change that it is more like resurrection than revival. That's what it would take for Rossiter, but the folks there have so much faith that they're almost unwilling to give up, they're unwilling to surrender and so resurrection is not an option. But it's not from lack of faith, it's from lack of hope and that's not the same thing.
They feel like the world no longer wants them, no one wants to come to their church, they would rather go to those Non-dom, fiery faithed, fundamentalist churches. But those churches don't hang on for 100 years, I give the immortal saint of the prosperity gospel and her ilk about 20 years tops, let's see how they do when they can't pay a pastor to whoop them up and have to worry constantly about the gas bill. I doubt they would last as long as Rossiter.
This place will end, it's the way of things, even churches: "the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable." The best you can do is face the end with dignity and honor the sacredness that is part of life and death

Camping as Conspicous Consumption

2010-03-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

We are shopping for an RV, the process is fairly mind boggling. I have always loved camping, I would gladly rough it in a tent or even under a simple tarp. However, I married a Jersey girl and I have two kids with said Jersey girl. She has made it pretty clear that backpacking trips together are not part of our marriage vows. So, we compromise, we both have realized that we can't afford cruises and beach houses but we maybe can afford a camping trailer, a pop-up or maybe even one of the new hybrids, so we engage in the great American pastime: we shop.
There are a staggering number of dealers, most of them far away, there are a staggering number of varieties and options available. Most of them cost around or above $10,000, which leads me to the ethical dilemma of this little adventure. We are about to spend (meaning finance, set up monthly payments) on something that is basically a toy, a thing we use to make our recreation more enjoyable. We really can't afford to plop down 10 Gs, so we get credit and we pay interest and, over the course of 10 years we pay off a recreational vehicle that is probably nicer than the homes of a good percentage of people in the developing nations of the world.
Not only that but we tow it behind our full size SUV, with a big old Chevy V8, that will probably drop down to about 12 or 13 mpg towing a trailer. Yet this is one of the most "green" options available to the American vacationer, we will be supporting national parks and enjoying the great outdoors. We're not buying a big old diesel behemoth, we're buying an ultralight trailer, but we're doing it on credit and we're wondering if it really is the most responsible thing to do. Oddly enough it seems like it is. Such is the power of self-justification.
Anyway, we're really putting in some work to make sure we get the right kind, the kind that meets our needs and will get us out there on that elusively enjoyable family vacation. WallyWorld, here we come.

Deal Kindly with My People

2010-02-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it.

Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

-Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish, circa 1854

It is humbling when those who have no background in Christian faith get it right, when we get it wrong. It is akin to the moments when Jesus noted that Gentiles seemed to hear the message of the Gospel better than the Jews for whom it should have been fulfillment. Chief Seattle was pleading for the kind treatment of his people by the white man. By 1854 the great nations of the Pacific northwest had dwindled and declined and those who remained felt the inevitable tide of history leaving them behind, washed up on lonely reservations as the world went a direction that was anathema to everything they believed and lived.

Their proud leader made a humble but biting plea to the whites, warning them that the day of their empire might one day pass as well. Seattle spoke of the inheritance that is due to the ancestors of his people and perhaps all of humanity. He warned that the ultimate legacy of his people were the "invisible dead of my tribe," who could never be bought or driven away by worldly might. This reminds me of something that Christian theologian G.K. Chesterton once talked about with regard to our need to respect tradition and values, that we should not allow the tyranny of history by the fairly small percentage of humans who just happen to be alive at the moment.

Perhaps we forget that we are responsible to be stewards of what we have been given. We are responsible to our ancestors and our children, and in being such stewards we will, almost inevitably, honor our God.

As I read Seattle's speech, I am struck by the ringing of biblical images, which come not from any written source but from the common human imagination that rested within him and his people. His perspective on the whites and their Judeo-Christian faith is prophetic, he experiences the faith of the whites as legalistic and angry. Would he be shocked to read the words of the prophet Joel about the dreams of old men? or Deuteronomy about writing the Law of God on your heart?

It is no accident that, in the hands of caring messengers, the message of the Gospel is well received by almost all indigenous people, because the Gospel is much more adept at being held by those who stand in a community with traditions, dreams, visions and hearts. The Gospel as a tool of empire has always been an abomination.

The church today stands very much where Chief Seattle stood 150 years ago, watching as the tide of history washes us up on the beach. "Men come and go like the waves of the sea. A tear, a dirge, and they are gone from our longing eyes forever. Even the white man, whose God walked and talked with him, as friend to friend, is not exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see."

As a leader of a "Mainline" Christian congregation, I certainly feel like a brother to the ones who were marginalized and watched the disintegration of a once great people. I am struck by how well he understood the incarnation and by how little he saw any real demonstration of the Kingdom of Heaven from the so-called Christians.

The words of prophets, ring out everywhere, yet so few of us listen.

Sweet Dreams

2010-02-22T11:50:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like a gray Monday in February to bring on melancholy. It actually seems entirely fitting. I just found out last week that the local library has a complete set of The Sandman comics/graphic novels. Sandman, was immensely popular among the crowd that I went through college with. I have found that, over the years, few things have held their appeal quite like them. I remember my friend, who did a fairly passable job of looking like Death, and my roommate who impersonated the gloom and darkness of Morpheus, the stories of the Endless bring back a vivid, all though confused, time of life.
Sandman, was an interesting, narrowly focused, cultural phenomenon. It masqueraded as something the Boomers thought they had all figured out, the comic book, but in reality it was much more than that, it was art, it was decidedly thoughtful and often graphic. It did not shy away from sex, drugs and the dark side of life but it didn't cross the line and become pornography. The story is what matters, the art, variable and intense, adds to the words that sometimes seemed like poetry and sometimes seemed like vulgarity. In all things though the story that was being told resonated with a generation that was searching for a truth beyond themselves and beyond the world they had been conditioned to expect.
It remains something of an insider's jewel. You have to be geeky enough to read comic books, you have to be literate enough to appreciate the way that mythology enhances reality, and you have to be able to dream. The main character is the Lord of Dreams, Morpheus, the Sandman, he is one of a family of immortal beings called the Endless, who are all personifications of elements of human experience: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium, nice how they all start with D. The scope of the story is impressive but approachable. The tone tends towards the dreary, perfect reading for a gloomy Monday.
The story is on par with true literature. Sandman, becomes more than you would ever expect in a comic book, it tells us the truth about ourselves by taking us through the dark corners of our imagination. It's not for everyone, but for those who "get it" it's quite a journey. One I'm enjoying all over again.

The Good Journey

2010-02-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

And a little trouble makes it worth the going

If it's worth the going than it's worth the ride.

-Tom Waits, A Little Rain

I am preparing to teach on Acts 13-14, Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey through Cyprus and Asia Minor. What I notice is that at every stop they have some success and some failure. The Gospel is just not received by everyone. This is an interesting reality that it would seem has become a stumbling block to the modern church. We seem to dwell, not on all those lives that are transformed by the Word, but on those lives that are not. Paul and Barnabas didn't dwell on the anger and mistreatment they received because of their message.

I have had several conversations with people, some of them pastors, for whom the exclusion or non-receptivity of some has become a stumbling block to theology. I admit it is troubling to think that a loving God would exclude some from His Kingdom but what I always return to is the reality of those who do hear and who are changed.

I don't know why some hear and some don't, I can't take that responsibility as a theologian and especially as a pastor. What I must do is what the Apostles have done from the beginning, take those who do hear and who are changed, and feed them and help them grow.

If you think the life of faith is supposed to be easy and peaceful, read Acts 13 and 14, notice how every success is balanced with some sort of failure, how challenges to the message are every bit as valuable to the church as enthusiastic acceptance. T.S. Eliot once said that the worst thing in the world for Christianity is to be tolerated. This faith of ours thrives in persecution. Chesterton said that our faith has proven it can survive persecution, it has not proven it can survive prosperity. To me the comfort and freedom of the west are the very things that are causing the decline of Christianity but given our history I am not afraid of decline.

The emphasis, perhaps over-emphasis, on salvation and blessings that has taken over the western church has polluted our understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. Salvation, eternal life, these were parts of the puzzle but they were not the whole puzzle, there were always strong ethical and communal components to the church. In the Amish and Mennonite branches of the Anabaptist traditions they view faith as integrated into all aspects of life. The way you grow in faith is by living it out, being part of a community that focuses on certain truths is integral to the faith.

Much in American society leads us into a disintegrated way of life. We focus on individuality, independence and what "I" get out of things. Thus church becomes one category of consumption. We attend the church that we like, that does "it" for us. We don't think of a congregation as a place that we NEED to live into in order to follow the Jesus way. Thus small churches, community churches, churches that still provide some framework for living in the body of Christ as opposed to learning about the body of Christ are disappearing and declining and despairing.

Even as some lament the decline of community, those same people seem to prefer to follow after trendy, entertaining, cutting edge forms of Christian faith. Read the literature, the magazines, what makes news? Emerging churches that construct "new" and "improved" forms of Christian community without the troubling traditions and roots of the past. Mega churches that bring in thousands. If you ever read about a struggling church in a depressed small town that still manages to proclaim the message despite all those who do not hear (like the ones Paul and Barnabas started in Asia Minor), let me know.

Zeitgeist

2010-02-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

I watched the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics last night, my wife insisted and then fell asleep in her chair. First of all, let me admit that I am not a fan of pop music or Broadway musicals, ballet or interpretive dance of any sort. I felt that the use of the aboriginal people was overdone to the point where it became silly and a little exploitative rather than honoring their heritage. The solemnity of the occasion was forced, especially given the backdrop of a Georgian Luger's death yesterday morning. When you consider that a young life was ended the desired sense of the austerity of sports becomes a little absurd. The winter games are, after all, games. This is one reason why I think the X-Games are so watchable and the Olympiad is like going to the dentist: they Olympics take themselves too seriously.
Sure all the athletes train hard and dedicate their lives to doing what they do, but ultimately they're still competing in sports that no one really watches or follows all that closely. Commercial sponsorships have created this world, not the human competitive spirit. As I watched the spectacle that cost between $30-$40 million, with lights and dancing and orchestration, I wondered how much clean water and emergency food Canada could have sent to Haiti instead of giving themselves a big old ass-kissing. It occurs to me that a lot of the hoopla we throw into our Super Bowls and World Cups could probably be better used in humanitarian service.
It's not that the Olympics don't have value, they do, they certainly do. They are one of the few things that demonstrate the hope we have that one day we might all just get along. They demonstrate that young folks from all different countries can get together and play the sport of their choice (and apparently shag each other quite a bit), in peace and harmony. However, like so many other entertainment events they just get over done and the opening ceremony was a prime example of that.
I don't even want to think about the resources that China sunk into the opening of the summer games in Beijing. I heard they have starving kids in their country.
K.D. Lang became the latest in a long line of diverse artists to perform Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, I'm beginning to wonder if that song is following me around.

Hey, Hey, My My

2010-02-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

It's better to burn out, than it is to rust.

-Neil Young

The time has come to face the facts, the 1960's are now officially fifty years ago. This means, among other things, that it's time for this country to finally get used to civil rights, having a black president is a good step though maybe not the complete dream of Dr. King. Second, it's time to admit that the sexual revolution, while it's been fun, was probably a bad idea and led to AIDS, astronomical numbers of abortions and contributed to the general decline of the nuclear family. On the plus side, we did get breast implants and better trimmed pubic hair as a result of rampant serial promiscuity. Third, as illustrated by the halftime show at the Superbowl, the rock gods of the 60's and 70's are now officially parodies of themselves, and probably need to "retire."

The Stones can still pull it off alright but I'm really worried that Mick is going to throw out a hip or Keith is just going to stroke out on us during a solo, I think it would be safer for them to take up golf. The only Beatles left are Paul and Ringo; Ringo's cool but he wasn't exactly the musical genius of the group and Paul... one word: Wings, nuff said.

Which brings us to The Who, another British Invasion band, in many ways right up there with the Beatles and the Stones in musical talent and attitude. I love The Who, they are the cool, edgy brit band, with a little more swagger than the Beatles and a little more scream than the Stones. But what performed at the Superbowl was not The Who, it was the who?

First off, let's talk about who's not there anymore: Keith Moon, drummer extraordinaire and general wild man. Keith, like Bryan Jones and Jimi Hendrix ended up dead way too soon, drugs of course, no real surprise there. The Who now have an adequate drummer, who is much younger than the ancient ones but who is clearly no Keith Moon.

The drummer though, is far from the problem. Pete Townsend, guitar god, closet queen and smasher of instruments is now well past middle age and frankly looks bored when he plays. Townsend was known for his athletic jumps and windmill arm moves, he was angry and maybe a little dangerous, now he looks like that sad bachelor uncle that everyone talks about being so quiet and pleasant that they can't imagine why he never found a nice lady friend.

Then there is Roger Daltry, owner of the best hard rock voice ever, who used to shriek with blood curdling intensity and was probably the impetus for a thousand grumpy father's yelling: "turn that noisy crap down!" Roger just can't do it anymore, and he knows it, so he doesn't really try. He just drops it down an octave and sings, won't get fooled again, like it's a number in a summer stock musical. Roger was right up there with Jim Morrison and Robert Plant among guys who actually looked sexy in bell bottoms with no shirt on, now he looks like a math teacher, but hey is is like 65, definitely retirement age for Rock gods.

I guess I knew we were in trouble when Boost mobile ran an ad that featured a "remix" of My Generation that changed, "I hope I die before I get old," to "I don't wanna die, I wanna get old." Neil Young was so right. You really can't make your living on youthful rebellion in the Teenage Wasteland and expect people to still take you seriously when you're sixty. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and especially Leonard Cohen have managed to grow up with their music, changing, working, adapting to aging vocal chords and in Cohen's case even becoming more powerful: more gravel, more gravitas. Unfortunately, The Who have not released a significant new song in over forty years, and they certainly can't do justice to the genius of their youth.

So next year, if you're a classic rocker and the Superbowl comes calling, say no (you listen good Led Zeppelin, you're not so pretty in spandex anymore). Tell them that Janet Jackson's boobie wasn't that terrible and Prince was damn good a couple years back. Tell them to have U2 back or get the Foo Fighters or Pearl Jam, they're old enough to have mass appeal. Whatever you do, don't trot out there and ruin our image of you as rock gods on the path of destruction. I want to remember Roger and Pete for lines like: "I woke up in Soho doorway, a policeman knew my name, he said, 'you can go sleep at home tonight if you can get up and walk away.'" Not for Pete's white English flabby belly hanging out of shirt as he windmills during Baba O'riley. Be The Who, not who was that?

It's Snowing

2010-02-05T21:12:00.000-08:00

It's snowing and just after midnight. I don't particularly want to go to bed because I know I will have to go through about half an hour to forty-five minutes of hacking phlegmy coughing as soon as I assume anything like a recumbent position. The cough is growing to be the most unpleasant byproduct of my gall bladder surgery, the after effect of having a tube down your throat.
I am looking forward to tomorrow though; we're getting a nice, deep, powdery snow. It may be one of the biggest snows we've had since Jack turned one, and it's definitely the biggest snow either one of them will remember.
For me this is one of the best parts of parenthood, seeing things through the eyes of your children. Jack and I have been watching Star Wars movies together, starting with the prequels. Like many a child of the classic Star Wars era, I have certain opinions about the quality of the newer backstory movies. At times I even feel slightly angry at George Lucas for not being a better writer of dialogue and plot development. However, in watching Phantom Menace with a six year old, I have gained some level of peace and understanding; balance to the force if you will.
I see that imagination has little to do with how well one publishes one's vision. The story, the galaxy far, far away still has the ability to grip the imagination. Maybe the reason why so many of us thirtysomethings have trouble with the new movies is that we're not six anymore. We're not even 15 anymore, we really can't get into impassioned arguments about the details of the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive. But a kid finds that world wonderful and if you really care about a kid you will learn to find it wonderful too.
That is a gift of parenting, you give them pretty much everything but they give you their eyes and their hearts and the ability to see the world fresh. Yeah, you also get to see the world when it's frustrated and petulant and disobedient. I refuse to remember childhood as being idyllic. I remember and am often reminded by my children that there are a lot things that suck about being a kid: shots, homework, having to eat stuff you don't like and parents with lots of seemingly arbitrary rules and demands.
But I am looking forward to waking up to a fresh, thick blanket of snow and wondering at how the world has been made so perfect while they slept.

Recuperation: a nagging pain in the side instead of constant sickness

2010-01-31T18:08:00.000-08:00

My diseased, stone-laden gall bladder is removed. I have survived the failure of one of my less than necessary organs. It's a good thing we have at least a few organs that are less than necessary. My experience with modern American medicine is drawing to a close, now all that's left is paying the bills, which will be a much longer and more painful process, with no anesthesia.
In a culture that avoids the painful and unpleasant at all costs the experience of being sick enough to have surgery is perhaps one common exception to our general chickening out. We will, it seems, bite the bullet if a doctor tells us to. Thus the metaphor of enduring the discomfort of the short term for the benefit of long term health seems directly applicable to our current crisis of existence.
Thinking holistically, the great anxieties of our time, are all related, in one way or another to our inability to sacrifice in the short term for long term health. For instance: health care, where the metaphor of surgery to remove diseased parts and rampant malignancy should be abundantly clear. We need to get over several important things in order for the system to be salvageable, politicians can't do it for us. The first hump is the culture of litigiousness where physicians are forced to spend more time on CYA practices than on the Hippocratic oath. Malpractice suits and insurance, along with the myriad of mostly unnecessary tests and "just in case" practices that drive up the cost of healthcare actually create a vicious cycle that involves entirely too many entities beyond the doctor and the patient. There has to be a way to defend against negligence without putting cement shoes on the entire health care system. The second hump is the sheer profitability of medicine, many physicians view themselves, and expect to be paid like celebrities. The amount of money to be made in the medical fields is absolutely staggering and since the consumers are people searching for that most basic of commodities, good health, there really is no limit to how much revenue it can generate.
Except that there is a limit, there is always a limit. If the economic crisis has taught us anything it is that even the overflowing cup can get drained, pretty quickly. It was bad when the sub-prime mortgage market went sour, it would be catastrophic on several fronts if the medical tits run dry. And the blame in this regard is not just for physicians it is for pretty much everyone in our society. We don't just want a good living we want an excessive existence. We don't just want our MTV we want it on a big screen, with surround sound (sorry mixing phenomena of different eras). We have become really bad at saying enough is enough.
It is a misconception to say that we live in a universe that has no limits. We live in a universe that exists because it has limits, there are certain thresholds that cannot and perhaps should not be crossed. God built them into creation, then he made us, and he put within us the biological, almost cellular, urge to push those boundaries. It has set up an interesting dynamic: there are some boundaries that should be pushed, and some that should never be transgressed, and sometimes they are the same ones.
Which brings me back to my gall bladder surgery. As I recover from the operation I find that I have certain limits, of motion, of diet, of activity level. To some extent the more I push those limits, the better I feel from day to day. But when I push them there is some price to be paid in discomfort or agitation of the system. To solve any long term crisis this cost-benefit must be reckoned. If we are going to preserve the ecosystem we must restrain our activities, if we are going to establish a healthy economy we must make responsible decisions that live within our means, if we are going to provide for the health of all we must be willing to stand by the notion that our neighbor's right to life and health is more important than our right to sue.
The life of responsibility, stewardship and charity is not a pain free existence, but it is the only existence that is worth it in the long run.

Healthcare: An Inside Perspective

2010-01-25T17:23:00.000-08:00

I am putting the healthcare system through its paces. I'm not deathly ill but I'm not exactly well either. Over the past week I have had to go to several doctors, get blood drawn four times, get an ultrsound and an MRI. A few observations:

I am lucky. This needs to be said before any complaining gets done. I live in a country where I have ready access to things like Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Ultrasound. I have insurance, not great insurance but insurance that is going to keep me from being in debt for the rest of my life because my gall bladder went south. My appointments with doctors were a matter of hours in one case and days in another and I am fully cognizant of the fact that people in much of the world would have been waiting weeks, if not months for the kind of care I have received. I also realize that in the pantheon of health issues me having gall stones is little more than a hangnail compared to the gray-skinned little boy wearing a surgical mask who was waiting limply on his dad's shoulder outside the lab for what was probably his 100th blood test.
There are many ways that this process could be better. Many of the reasons I am lucky also point out the flaws in the system, because you shouldn't have to be lucky to have access to healthcare. I am educated and employed, I have access to the system and the werewithal to take advantage of what's there. I can follow doctor's advice and understand what he or she is saying and how it really impacts my well being. Not everyone is me but even if they aren't they deserve to get well. Improvements in the system don't need to be made for people like me, they NEED to be made for people who aren't like me. There is a veritable minefield of insurance issues that need to be navigated issues that need to be understood, tests that need to be endured, not to mention the general misery of being sick in the first place.
The cost is a delayed illness. Through all of this I know the bills will be coming. I'm lucky but I still have a deductible, I will owe roughly $1200 out of pocket for this little adventure. Our hospital has a no-interest payment plan for stuff like this but again you have to know it's there and sign up for it and be able to make about a $50/month payment for several years. The stress of medical bills doesn't go away just because you have insurance, and the costs are astronomical. When I was in the hospital for about six hours last February the tab ran to about $8000, I don't even want to speculate about how much this is going to cost, the 1200 I'm responsible for is bad enough. For someone already on the verge of poverty it would be really bad news. Did I mention that all I'm doing is having my gall bladder removed? It's minor really, we've heard from dozens of people who've had it done, it's not exactly exotic or extreme surgery. But I bet it costs well over 10 grand.

The temptation over the past week has been to feel sorry for myself but the more time I spend in hospitals I realize that I am really lucky. It has raised my level of indignation to a potentially toxic level. When I think of all the poor people, right around me, not to mention in the two-thirds world, that live without insurance and thus without access to a lot of the treatment that I have been given. I think of all the people who are really, really sick, who just can't afford to get well. It needs to get better; for the sake of those who aren't so lucky.

Excretory Excisement

2010-01-21T15:33:00.000-08:00

The Gall bladder had to come out, everyone agrees on that but in the name of being careful we have to get all sorts of tests done before they can fix my body's septic system. It's amazing to me how much our insides resemble plumbing and how much what goes wrong with them is more or less a problem of clogs and leaks. I have gall stones that like to jam up the common bile duct, the little subdivision of your digestive system that is home to the liver, pancreas and the gall bladder. The liver is basically the cul de sac of the neighborhood, it secretes bile that helps your body digest stuff. The pancreas secrets insulin, which any diabetic will tell you is important stuff. That means you have two heavy hitters of the internal organ world, living on the same street, but Mr. Gall Bladder, who is really just a sort of toady for the liver, can basically block up the entire street.
The Gall bladder normally just holds excess bile created by the liver when you're not eating. When it senses you've just downed a cheeseburger or some fried chicken it knows your intestines are going to need some of that reserve bile, so it contracts and squirts the bile into the common duct and thence to the intestine. The bile then does it's job, helps digest the food and consequently turns your poop brown. When mine was backing up my poop was grey and my pee was brown, TMI perhaps but I found it interesting.
Problem: for reasons fairly unknown to medical science, some people get stones in their gall bladder, crystals that precipitate out of the bilious fluid. These stones mostly just hang around in the gall bladder, but from time to time get ejected into the very important bile duct that is shared by liver and pancreas. Sometimes they pass, other times, like they did for me last week, they get stuck (hopefully temporarily) and cause the bile to back up through the liver and into the blood stream at which point it must be handled by the kidneys instead of the intestines (thus brown pee).
So now I have to get an MRI of my bile duct to make sure it's not clogged before they can operate and take out the little pouch of rocks that is my gall bladder. Fun stuff.
Even more fun is the litany that surgeons are required to give you before you have this type of surgery. Even though most everyone I've talked to, and there has been no shortage, who has had this operation found the laproscopic option to be fairly mild in terms of recovery, there is always the chance... "Always the chance," has to be the most insidious phrase in medicine. It immediately ratchets up the anxiety level surrounding an otherwise routine procedure. It is the reason that you have to listen to those absurd disclaimers at the end of every drug advertisement: "blank-omycin is intended to treat minor skin irritation, in some cases it has been found to cause internal bleeding, violent diarrhea and spontaneous generation of random appendages, call your doctor if you go blind or vomit up purple liquid while taking blank-omycin as these may be signs of a serious side effect."
I'm trying not to think too much about "always the chance."

Everybody must get stones

2010-01-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

Last week I got really sick, I thought it was kidney stones again, which would be bad enough but no, this time Gall Stones. Gall stones are just about as bad as they sound, painful, disruptive to other bodily functions and worst of all immune to percoset. After about a week of suffering I finally went to the doctor and found out, as my father always suspects that I had "IT." Now I am in the process of trying to schedule surgery to have my gall bladder removed. I am no fan of surgery, the prospect of being put to sleep, sliced open (or in this case punctured in three places) and having one of my innards removed is none too glorious but if it means I never have to go through that sort of pain again, so be it.
There is always the prospect of something going wrong that lurks in the back of one's mind, even though I have been finding out that gall bladder removal is about as run-of-the-mill as you can get, in terms of surgery. But still, it's surgery, it's doctors poking about my insides with sharp instruments, it's just creepy. It's not even so much the pain, I've discovered that I actually have a fairly good pain threshold, after the whole kidney stone episode and virtually smiling through my tattoo, I can now almost watch when the nurse goes to draw blood (as opposed to nearly passing out at the same procedure 10 years ago).
I'm really trying not to think too much or too long about what medical science is going to do to me. I know that some part of me has ceased to function correctly and has gone over to the dark side of chaos and disease, it needs to come out, stones and all. My liver and my pancreas need to breath freely and secrete their mysterious enzymes without interference from a lumpy gall bladder. So it's on to the slab I go, after a week of subsisting on toast and bananas, the thought of which makes me wish they would start cutting sooner so I can have a pizza.

A Decade of decadence

2010-01-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

2010: A landmark date in any Sci-fi fan's mind. Like 1984 and 2001, it seems that 2010 will not quite live up to the literary and cinematic visions fashioned long ago. In some ways though the last decade has produced exactly the type of rapid technological advancement that the discovery of the monolith in the Tycho crater on the moon spawned in Arthur C. Clarke's novels. Except this time it was due to Al Gore inventing the internet. 10 years ago no one knew what a blog was and people's thumbs were much less agile (those letters above the numbers on phones were primarily used to spell out ad slogans for lawyers and phone sex).
So the invention of the I-phone is somewhat less glamorous than a trip to Jupiter to find out what had gone wrong with the worlds most advanced computer (who in the movie was ridiculously large and cumbersome to operate (remember all those huge clear crystal memory cards? Apparently Clarke never envisioned Intel). The fact of the matter is that our technology has out-raced fiction in some regards but our vision for what to do with it remains stunted. We don't go to Mars or Jupiter because it's not financially beneficial to do so; how boring is that? What ever happened to climbing a mountain because it was there?
There is more money to be made in developing a faster Pentium, a smaller ipod and a thirty megapixel digital camera than in visiting another world, why do think we haven't been back to the moon? Clarke used a strange message from a mysterious monolith to kick humanity off of the earth, I wonder what it will really take? Ecological disaster seems the most likely culprit but nuclear war still remains a possibility and of course you always have the good old asteroid strike. Maybe I'd like to see us go into the galaxy for reasons other than catastrophe but then again I'd also like an Iphone, so I guess I can live with it.

Into the Great Wide Open

2009-12-25T20:27:00.000-08:00

I can't quite figure out why I've had time to blog so much this week. Maybe it's because I'm up late, trying to decompress, maybe it's just that I have a lot on my mind. The week between Christmas and New Years seems to be a dead zone for a lot of pastors, vacation time. We go away but it's not to vacation it's to family visits. This year particularly, I feel some analysis, reflection, dreaming, visioning, whatever you want to call it, coming on. Maybe it's just the fact that I get fed up with the material side of the way we do Christmas, maybe it's because the year is ending, maybe it's just because I've had way too much sugar, but I feel the need to think some things through.
First of all: why have the old ways failed? With regard to the church the failure is complex and deep rooted but the overwhelming symptom is that nobody cares. But the church is not the only place where tradition and generational continuity have been shut up in the nursing home of our collective consciousness. I looked out at my congregation on Christmas Eve and I realized something very important: I am with them. I am not ahead of them, I am not privy to some knowledge that they don't have. I am every bit as puzzled as they are that this beautiful faith, with it's rich music and deep intellectual traditions, not to mention the genuinely nice people that participate in this thing we call church, is dying. We sang the old songs, and unlike many Sunday morning hymns, we sang them with feeling and joy, we prayed the old prayers and followed the old liturgy and I dare anyone, no matter how anti-religious they might be, to say that it was not a thing of beauty. But the church is still dying; why?
What I felt very deeply was that I didn't want this to die, not this part, not the part where a bunch of people actually worship God in spirit and in truth. I can be of a very deconstructionist mindset. At certain times I find within myself the iconoclastic tendency to tear down things that have become old and dead. The general idea of stripping away all the bullshit that passes for religion, Presbyterian or otherwise, is something that seems attractive and exciting; except when we were all singing O Holy Night.
At times I think that I would like to preach to a crowd of people who hear this stuff with new ears and get excited about it and want to come to church, and want to tell everyone they know, and want to sing a new song unto God. Sometimes I envy Rob Bell and Brian McLaren, who have become the faces of the "emerging" church, who basically do whatever they want, who re-frame the faith, taking the pieces they find useful and leaving the rest, free of all the baggage that comes from 500 years of reformed church history and the public image that goes with being a "mainline" church, the frozen chosen. Free of all the old timers that just want what is familiar and who wince a little bit when they see my guitar on the stand at the front of the sanctuary. Then Ruth Marshall, 84 years old, soft spoken, servant of the church for most of her life, faithful lady, who would probably feel right at home having tea with Mother Theresa, grabs my arm with the hand that isn't braced against the pew to help her stand and tells me how wonderful my sermon was. A sermon that made use of Rob Bell's metaphor of faith as a trampoline instead of a brick wall from his book Velvet Elvis, a sermon that called this church to strive for something different than the same old, same old.
I looked into her eyes and realized that she got it, she got the message I was trying to get out there. I also realized that, while Mars Hill may have 10,000 members and adherents, they don't have Ruth, they probably don't have anyone like her. Sure they have a lot of people, probably a lot of those coveted demographics that are so painfully absent from churches like mine but they don't have the old warriors. Maybe, if it's their job to bring the old faith to a new audience and thus create a new kind of church, then it might be my job to bring the new church to the old faith.
Maybe I ought to listen to Wendell Berry too when he talks about how his place defines his work. Maybe I ought to pay attention to the idea of scale and appropriate, sustainable use. Maybe I ought to be careful about thinking new techniques and ideas can save the day. Maybe I ought to get more comfortable in my own skin. Maybe I ought to realize that Christ has called me "for such a time as this," in such a place as this, with people like this. Maybe that's okay, Rob and Brian seem to be doing a good job at what they do, maybe I should let them.
Actually, there's no maybe about it.

Maturity

2009-12-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

It's always easier to be the least mature member of a family of mature individuals than to be the most mature member of a regressive family.
Or, in other words, the squeaky wheel always gets the grease. This seems to have become a truism that guides many American families, and perhaps even our whole culture. We seem to make a habit of adapting our behavior to the difficult, the hypersensitive and the dysfunctional. I don't think this is what Jesus meant when he talked about the "least of these."
Edwin Friedman, the author of the above quotation, notes that the tendency, which is now embedded in the internal organization of our families and society is "regressive" and "counter-evolutionary," in both the Darwinian sense of the word and in the sense that means against progress, stagnate or moving backwards.
Think about your family preparations for Christmas, who gets the most consideration? Is it the pleasant and agreeable members of the family who like to gather, enjoy a meal and conversation and who might even help clean up the dishes? Or is it the termagant, cranky and easily offended that you honestly wish you didn't "have to" invite in the first place?
Now think about American politics, which groups have the most powerful lobbies? Who makes the most noise and throws around the most money? The NRA, big tobacco, the ACLU, groups on the left and right who have an ax to grind, that's who. It is not the well adjusted, educated, informed and rational. As Yeats and Walker Percy have both told us: "the centre cannot hold."
When the society adapts to weakness, those who are strong find themselves sabotaged, shot at and otherwise pressured to come back to the herd. Don't get too far ahead, you might make somebody feel bad. Leaders are bombarded by insistent and often shrill voices from the fringes, lunatic and otherwise, that demand some version of their "rights."
This is why politicians that seem promising, hopeful of change, and even somewhat mature and responsible are quickly ground up into hamburger by the political machine of Washington and other capitals. It's not really their fault, the system is much larger and more powerful than any individual and the herd mentality is supreme, when you are in the middle of it, it's like a stampede. Everyone swears that running in one direction is the right thing, and everyone around them agrees, because they have no choice.
Leaders who do try and differentiate from the herd are quickly labeled elitist, un-democratic and ironically even socialist or communist. The peculiar thing is that this sort of anti-evolutionary adaptation is going to lead to disintegration. By trying to give everyone what they want, even the most selfish and dysfunctional, we will make sure that no one gets what they need. Pick your favorite political agenda and run a quick test in your mind, is it compromise or is castration?
If, on the other hand, we adapt to strength, this doesn't mean we roll over for totalitarians and fascists, it means we follow the lead of those who are mature and have vision. Friedman defines maturity as "being responsible for ones own being and destiny," which is not at all the same as being old. This means you don't blame the tools, the circumstances or other people for all your problems. It means you are able to define who you are, what you need and where you want to go. If we adapt to the best of our society, it is not exceptionalism, it is simply encouraging everyone, whether they are a garbage collector or a physics professor to strive for growth and maturity. Instead of catering to whims and fearfulness, encourage those who have sufficiently differentiated themselves from the regression of the system, and take responsibility.
A society that functions will care for the least of these much better than a society that is overridden with chronic anxiety and dysfunction.

Shema, Yoga, and How to Fix Christmas

2009-12-21T14:02:00.000-08:00

I was listening to a sermon about prayer a couple days ago and the preacher was teaching about the Lord's prayer. He mentioned the connections that Jesus' prayer had to the Hebrew practice of prayer, particularly the Shema (which means Hear), the daily prayer of devout Jews, drawn from various segments of the Torah. The preacher, as near as I could tell, was actually a professor of biblical studies at some university or other and he was able to recite the first part of the Shema in Hebrew. I thought that was a really cool trick, and having had the urge to brush up on my Hebrew for a little while now, I decided that I might like to learn a few lines of Shema, maybe even the whole thing.
It's going to be slow going but, Jews being the first class memorizers that they are, it is nicely divided into short, lyrical phrases. I also remember more vocabulary than I thought. Why am I doing this? Because I want to and because I have been feeling a need lately to separate, somehow or another, from the silly religiosity that passes for Christianity, especially around the winter solstice. Jesus was Jewish and, as such, probably said the Shema frequently, if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. I have not been one to memorize Scripture much in English and much of my knowledge of specifics is more or less a paraphrase. Learning it in two languages at once is more interesting.
I have also decided to take up Yoga, I ordered an introductory DVD last week. I'm primarily interested in the physical benefits: flexibility and balance, that Yoga promises but I'm also intrigued by the meditative and spiritual qualities as well. It occurs to me that Protestant Christianity has so carefully avoided any sort of connection between spirit and flesh (at least in practice) that perhaps Hindu/Buddhist practice is the only available source. I can't think of any Christian practice that's going to help me get back on a surfboard next summer. I guess I just need that from my religion at the moment.
Our faith needs to make more requirements of its western adherents, maybe then we would get some sense that we should participate. We barely make folk memorize the Apostle's Creed and the Lord's prayer, let alone the Westminster Catechism. We apparently thought that by making it easy and approachable we would attract more people to the faith. But Jesus didn't make it easy or approachable; he said, "take up your cross and follow me." That wasn't a particularly attractive invitation, even before they saw him get crucified, everyone knew what that looked like. We have lost disciplines like fixed hour prayer, regular worship, actual preparation for the sacraments and a whole list of other stuff.
You would think that by making it easy we would be welcoming seekers but what we're actually doing is making it cheap, making it seem worthless, taking it for granted. I guess that's why I want to learn the Shema, to stretch my mind like Yoga stretches my body. Here it is in English:

Hear, O Israel, The LORD is our God, The LORD is one.

Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever

And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart.

And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.

And you shall bind them on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.

and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates

And it shall come to pass if you surely listen to the commandments that I command you today

to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and all your soul,

That I will give rain to your land, the early and the late rains

that you may gather in your grain, your wine and your oil.

And I will give grass in your fields for your cattle and you will eat and be satisfied.

Beware, lest your heart be deceived and you turn and serve other gods and worship them.

And the anger of the LORD will blaze against you and he will close the heavens and there will not be rain and the earth will not give you its fullness.

and you will perish quickly from the good land the LORD gives you.

So you shall put these, my words, on your heart and on your soul;

and you shall bind them for signs on your hands and they shall be frontlets between your eyes.

And you shall teach them to your children and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

In order to prolong your days and the days of your children on the land that the LORD promised your fathers he would give them,

as longs as the days that the heavens are over the earth.

My New Favorite Word: Regressive

2009-12-17T15:54:00.000-08:00

Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house,
family dysfunction was making us grouse.
Enmeshment and Gossip were the tools of the day,
Screw togetherness, you can all just go away.

You might get the idea that there is some large scale trauma going on in my extended family system; but actually there's not, and that's the annoying thing. People are managing to make themselves miserable (on the in-law side of the tree at least), over absolutely nothing. My wife is being tortured over trivialities that Seinfeld couldn't even work with. The problem seems to be largely based in what Edwin Friedman calls a regressive system, which includes the whole gamut of interpersonal dysfunction and is rooted in chronic anxiety.
Lest you think that I know not of what I speak, note that my family can be regressive as well, our dysfunction has actually resulted in teenage pregnancy, drug abuse and the death of my younger brother to an overdose, so no, we're not the Cleaver family. But when my wife's clan can't even plan a family get together without at least three or four crying, screaming phone conversations, all sorts of backstabbing gossip and a whole bunch of hurt feelings, somewhere in my heart I want them to experience just a little of raw pain of life and death drama.
But they don't, and thankfully, they probably won't. Unfortunately for my wife she is the one person who is trying to differentiate from an enmeshed and regressive system, while remaining somewhat connected to her family. This is very difficult, there is a lot to commend the path that her brother took: complete disengagement, living far away and only dealing with his family of origin on his own terms, that's what I would have done.
Enough with the details though, this could start sounding like a case study and this just isn't the venue. What I want to think about is this concept of regressive systems, meaning systems that are not moving in the direction of health and growth but are overrun by anxiety. This causes either paralysis or even a headlong drive towards disintegration. It doesn't seem to be an overstatement to say that the majority of American families, organizations, and even our culture as a whole seems to be in a state of regression.
We often think of dysfunction in terms of symptoms: divorce, infidelity, domestic violence, abuse, children who act out, drugs problems. But regressivity can be asymptomatic, like many forms of cancer, until it is way too late. And constituents of a regressive system have an uncanny ability to negate or minimize the importance of the symptoms that do manifest themselves. We adapt technological patches to cover the holes in the fabric of our relationships, within families, organizations and culture as a whole. We cover it up and say everything's okay or is going to be okay as soon as we get this or that patch in place.
But the underlying cause, the regressive condition, will not go away.
Is differentiation something I can put in my wife's stocking this year? (oh, yeah, see above paragraph).

What Do We Expect?

2009-12-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

We have all received gifts that we didn't expect; some of them are good, some of them are not so good. I am coming to think that perhaps the only gifts that really count are ones that are unexpected. I'm not talking about getting something that seems strange, or useless, or just a poorly thought out gift, perhaps re-gifted, or bought on clearance in order to fulfill some sort of giving obligation. Those gifts may be "unexpected" in the sense that you didn't expect (or want) that particular gift but the dissatisfaction with the gift stems from the fact that they are "expected," seen as a entitlement.
Gifts that come unexpected are true gifts. They come with no sense that they are owed as fealty to some standard of relationship, there is no assumption of reciprocity, there is no thought except the will of the giver to bless the recipient. The test of this is that these unexpected gifts are almost always received with genuine gratitude and perhaps even amazement. When the Magi appeared and left their gifts for the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph had no choice but to receive their gifts and ponder the unexpected blessing of such extravagant and valuable materials. They could not reciprocate; they could not put the Magi on the list for next year, they simply didn't have the resources to give so lavishly.
We have turned the gift giving of Christmas into an exercise in consumption and materialism. We feel obligated to give and entitled to receive, because we expect the "exchange" to take place. We try to "bless" people by giving things we think they want or need but our expectations have sapped the process of most of the blessings that should occur naturally in giving and receiving.
In Jesus Christ, God has circumvented this problem; He has given us something that we can expect but never fully understand. He has given us a gift that is as predictable as Aunt Marge's fruitcake, which also never ceases revealing new and wonderful aspects. We spend Advent each year ramping up our expectations, which would just about ruin any other gift, the way Kenny G can ruin O Holy Night. But the gift is perfect, the gift is living and changing, the gift is a child, a Rabbi, a Messiah, a Savior, a King.
Our expectations and sinfulness cannot rob the gift of it's glory. As for the other aspects of the giving and the season, that's another story, but I've done my Bah-humbug for this year.

A Failure of Nerve

2009-12-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

I have been reading several books at the same time, which is generally how I go about things unless I get really gripped by one. Funny thing is though, the books, even though their subject matter is vastly different are sort of coalescing around a theme that has been ongoing in my vocation for several years now. The first book is A Failure of Nerve, by Edwin Friedman, the late author of perhaps the definitive family systems book Generation to Generation. Friedman was in process with this follow up when he passed away in 1996, leaving it unfinished. However, Friedman identifies certain cultural trends that are causing all sorts of havoc on many levels of society from the family level to the White House. The theories he presents in this work resonate with a sort of truth that is quite rare in the genre. He describes a breakdown of systems that is beyond the control and even the understanding of the technological approach. We wonder why our families, our economy and our politics seem to be breaking down, Friedman had apparently come up with an answer. His answer does not depend on technique, data collection, personal effort or sweeping reforms of the deteriorating system. His focus is on the ontological condition of those who lead the systems, their state of being.
This is a radical departure from any self-help, leader-training, motivational scheme that I have ever seen. It's not just the power of positive thinking, it goes beyond behavioral strategy and seems to demand a spiritual paradigm shift in how we do things. It has a strange resonance with a collection of agrarian essays by Wendell Berry that focus on food: how it is grown, how it is valued and how it is consumed. The two subjects are vastly divergent but the "solutions" that arise are decidedly of a spiritual nature. Berry rails against the industrialization of agriculture, where efficiency is prized above responsible use, where bigger is better, where mechanization is better than manual labor. Berry describes a system (our whole culture) which is in a state of disintegration. He and Friedman, in fact are in exact agreement, though one is approaching the disintegration as farmer, describing trends and phenomena as they relate to agriculture, while the other is looking at more general trends in business, religion and government. Both insist that the compartmentalization of the various facets of life, is a destructive habit.
This seems to me to be a Scriptural truth, we cannot serve God and mammon, our lives must be unified to be healthy. People who honor the LORD with their lips but not with their lives are not getting it. People who think they can earn (i.e. apply a technical solution to sin) their way into heaven are not getting it. Trust in God is the only thing that can circumvent the dysfunction of a system defined by chronic anxiety. We cannot confine our relationship with God to an hour on Sunday morning, or even to much more frequent prayer intervals (such as the daily offices or the Muslim practice). Even though these episodic contacts with holiness can provide some relief and structure they are ultimately technical solutions to what remains a spiritual problem.
The message of both Hebrew and Christian Scripture is fairly consistent in that human beings cannot do it on their own. No matter how righteous they are, they will be sabotaged, overwhelmed and consumed by the anxiety of the system. Entropy will run it's course and chaos will increase unless God's creative will is exercised constantly. God has given humans a dangerous level of agency in this battle between order and chaos and this responsibility often overwhelms us on the most basic level: interpersonal relationships. The failure of responsibility becomes magnified and more dangerous as we move up the hierarchy. The disintegration of a family effects 10-15 people, the disintegration of a government affects everyone in the district, state or nation, the disintegration of economy affects the entire world.
Friedman blames those who lead for being absorbed and overwhelmed by the chronic anxiety of the systems they are trying to lead, calling it A Failure o Nerve. Leaders must be differentiated, they must be willing to rock the boat and persist through sabotage and attack, even persecution. Berry says everyone, farmers and consumers alike, must recover the priority of responsibility to avoid ecological disaster and an apocalyptic collapse of the world's food production capability. Jesus said, "take up your cross and follow me."
I think they may be saying the same thing.

'Tis the Season

2009-11-29T16:34:00.000-08:00

I'm going to get my Bah-Humbug out early this year, then I will most likely accept the insipid materialism that has over-run celebration of Christmas and move on.
I suppose that Christendom kind of deserves this. I mean, when you blatantly co-opt pagan symbolism (evergreens and such), when you time your celebration of the birth of Christ to roughly coincide with the winter solstice, when you steer so far away from any biblical narrative that even "biblically literate" folks get more of their Christmas imagery from hymns than from scripture, really what do you expect?
Gift giving and receiving has become the sacrament of the season and the holiday has lost all semblance of holiness.
Maybe, for the increasingly few who are so inclined, there is an hour or so on Christmas Eve, where we put the party on hold and actually reflect on the incarnation of God. It occurs to me as I wrote that phrase "incarnation of God," what an audacious claim it really is. If we really understood it and actually believed it we would spend Christmas in widespread, awestruck silence.
What can you say about the birth of God in human form? What can you say about the Creator of the universe entering the world as something so utterly vulnerable as a human baby? What can you say about his birth to a young girl, just barely married. What can you say about the Savior being born into a poor family, among an oppressed people, in an age where the light of the human spirit was easily and swiftly crushed?
Well, what can you say?
Merry Christmas? Happy Holidays?
I reckon I'm going to shut up now.

Sabbath Poems

2009-11-19T19:42:00.000-08:00

These times we know much evil, little good

to steady us in faith

and comfort when our losses press

hard on us, and we choose,

in panic or despair or both

to keep what we will lose.

-Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, Sabbath Poems

Poetry is something that you should live with, though many choose not to. Many, and I at some times have been one, say that they have little use for poetry and poets. This comes, I suspect, from a sort of cartoonish vision of an imaginary poet: a nasal, turtlenecked beatnik reciting banal, abstract and thoroughly inaccessible poetry that only the snooty and pretentious pretend to like.

The inward turn of poetry is the cause. If the poet looks inside and finds only vanity and pretense, or worse does not look inside at all and only sees the surface of things then poetry will be banal and tedious in the extreme. This is perhaps what separates the good poets from the bad (perhaps one must read many bad ones to truly appreciate the good). Inward and outward are balanced, forms are not just obeyed but given honor and reverence and as Mr. Berry (definitely one of the good ones) tells us: Poetry "should not disturb the silence from whence it came."

But it takes almost as much work to read poetry as it does to write it. You become involved in a good poem, and a really good one becomes involved with you. And that's quite an investment, almost a prayer-like investment, in a collection of words arranged just so.

Punxsutawney Ink

2009-10-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

So I finally got the tattoo that I have wanted for years. I had to overcome my fear of committment, my aversion to needles and my general dislike of pain. The financial aspect that I thought was going to be trouble ended up not being so bad for a simple, moderately sized, black and white tatt.
On the way home I considered the irony in my situation: the tattoo is generally a mark of impetuous youth, however, mine was something I never would have done as a youth, or even a young man. My ink was the end result of years of consideration, careful thought and a good deal of life experience. There is nothing about the art that is frivolous.
First of all, it's all about Jesus, the cross, the star, the alpha and the omega. Second the outline of the cross is roughly the same shape as my brother Jon's cross tattoo, though the simplicity of mine better represents my personality (his was pretty fancy and shaded with purple).
I got my ink in what can only be described as an "old school" tattoo parlor, by a guy named Spike, an aging, bald guy with an enormous fumanchu mustache, who studied chinese but is not even a little bit asian. Spike seemed a little annoyed that I interrupted his game of solitaire but he helped me put together what I think is the perfect tatt for me.
I was a little worried that it was going to hurt - bad - but it didn't really. It kind of felt like bee stings or a really hard scratch at some points but at other points it almost tickled. It doesn't feel good but at some points the pain was kind of good, like biting off a hangnail. Seeing the end result in the mirror made it all worth it, like most women describe childbirth (though this was undoubtedly less painful). It was an act of creativity, permanent as anything mortal can be.
Even though I purposely kept it up on my shoulder, so it can be hidden by a short sleeve shirt, I am not ashamed of the ink. Indeed, I am exceedingly proud of it, maybe even a little too proud. I love the way it looks, I love the way I feel for having the guts to get it, there really isn't much of a downside. Then again, I'm 35, married for ten years, two kids, a Presbyterian minister for six plus years, I'm not exactly getting my girlfriend's name put on my arm. I am at an age where I can think, and commit, and I am putting the signs of my LORD on my arm, there really isn't anything to regret later.
I'm already thinking about what I might get next.

It's not easy being green

2009-10-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, Michele and I decided to "go green" with regard to our grocery transporting needs. Instead of using large numbers of plastic bags we bought several of the re-usable bags that almost all grocery stores are selling for about $1.00. Feeling quite responsible and satisfied with our own righteousness we packed up the bags, intending to be green from now on.
One problem: we keep forgetting the bags in the back of the car.
We intend to do good, to reduce, reuse, recycle, but we can't remember to bring the darn things into the store. The first time we forgot, hey, it's the first time, it's a new habit that needs to catch on. The second time, alright a little more irritating, by the fourth week I start grinding my teeth and consider making some permanent alteration to the dashboard of my car that says: remember the stupid grocery bags idiot.
The thing is that the reusable bags are vastly superior to the flimsy plastic models. We can load them up and they don't rip, we can use less than half the number of bags and we're not stuck with vast supplies of used plastic bags, waiting for us to remember to take them to the recycle bin. If it would just catch on, so people remember, so you don't feel like a freak carrying your empty bags into the store, one small thing could save a lot of waste.
Most environmentally responsible choices are like this, they don't require big adjustments like driving a hybrid car or putting expensive solar panels all over your roof, they simply require you to sort your garbage, start a compost pile and go to the recycling center every couple weeks. Things like turning the water off while you brush your teeth and following the standard of "if it's yellow let it mellow," can save lots of water.
Good Stewardship of our resources is a spiritual choice and it doesn't mean you have to become a tofu-eating earth mother. Simply rethink the dogma of conspicuous consumption and take some baby steps. The planet and its creator will thank you. Now if I can just remember the freaking grocery bags...

Ecclesial Logjams

2009-10-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

I just had a thought this morning, morning thought being a rare occurrence for me I thought it significant. The thought is born of a string of conversations with fellow Presbyterian folk about the direction of our particular appendage of the Body of Christ. We often talk about what works and what doesn't, mostly facing what doesn't and scratching our heads or making excuses about it. The bugaboo that keeps coming up is not on the role call of moral turpitude and it's not even really the big tent of materialism that encompasses so many of the world's problems. It is somewhat related but perhaps an even larger and less closely scrutinized assumption: Individualism.
We have made the individual an idol to such absolute extent that almost no one even criticizes someone for governing their life based on personal preferences and largely aesthetic criteria. The language of the collective is even condemned because of the atheist tendencies of Marx and his disciples. Post-enlightenment communism and socialism share the weakness of assuming that human community can function without God but that doesn't mean that capitalism and the ethics of individualism are sanctioned by the Creator. The glimpse of reality that I have just caught, and am trying to hold on to, is that God is ultimately concerned with creating community. The relationship of the Trinity being the archetype for community, God has made us to be in relationship with one another and with our Maker.
A church that is true to serving a communal God will be destined to fail if it tries to cater to the needs, tastes and opinions of individuals (no matter how wonderful those individuals happen to be). We sometimes recognize this weakness when we resist those whose whims would lead us into dysfunction and dissolution, we often don't discern and resist when the intentions of the individual seem good and perhaps even holy.
The situation is this: the world in which we now exist (at least in Western Europe and America) has made the individual into a god. Just like the ancient Hebrews were led astray to the worship of Baal and Asherah many, many Christians living in this cultural context have submitted to the tyranny of the self. They are governed by drives and though processes that they cannot recognize as being against God because they have made God in their own image. What they think is good, God must think is good, or else God must not really be God. If church doesn't meet their needs, they have no need for it. They are "spiritual but not religious," which essentially means they have turned all contemplation of a higher power inwards, relying on their own combination of thoughts, emotions and experiences to shape the universe they live in. Essentially they are trying to act like gods, they are fashioning them self into an idol.
It is really just the latest iteration of the fall of humanity. Remember the temptation: eat this fruit and you will be like God. Community is a corrective for this tendency, perhaps the only corrective. You need someone else to challenge your assumptions, someone who can demonstrate that there are, in fact, other individuals in this universe. Your recognition of how far the others fall short of God hopefully will lead you to realize that you also fall short of God. The activities of the Church involve confession, and not just the confession of individuals but the confessions of the community. When we confess sin we are acknowledging that we are not gods but that we are creations that have fallen short of the will of our Creator. Beyond confession the church gathers around the Word to find a truth that is not dependent on your point of view (a task which is long and difficult, requiring discipline and dedication). In response to the word we give ourselves to the community of God (sometimes called the Kingdom of Heaven), we gather (literally) at table and share a meal that we call communion and we go out into the world to somehow, someway represent the reality that is higher than ourselves.
This happens is most churches, even though the music style is different, even though the liturgies might change (or almost disappear). By the grace of God it continues, century after century. The problem is not with the church it is with the individuals that come in the door and doggedly, dogmatically, hold on to the idol of themselves. Like pagans who secretly resisted forced conversions to Roman Catholicism by placing their idols in hidden places under the altar of the church, people shop for churches like they shop for shoes: which one is most comfortable? Which one works for me?
The problem is that shopping for a church to meet your needs is liking shopping for a glove to wear as underwear, it's probably going to make you uncomfortable and will not do what you want it to do. The church is in decline because people don't like to give up the idol of them self, some might realize the need for or even desire a more moral existence, some might find the music and message entertaining, but very few come in the door hoping to lose what they are. They may want to get rid of their flaws but that conviction is quickly tested by the call to take up a cross and follow Christ.
A community cannot exist if everyone insists on getting their own way. God's plan can fit everyone but not everyone wants to put it on. The church functions best when individuals put aside their demands and start looking for ways to serve, ways to fit, ways to be like Christ. Notice that Jesus had power over the troubles of mortality but submitted himself to the community of humanity completely and perfectly, in obedience and without sin. He put aside his individual wants, needs and concerns for the sake of us all. That is what it ultimately boils down to: being less like us and more like him.

The Chalice

2009-10-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

For some time I have been writing a series of reflections on my brother's life and death. The work has produced moments of clarity in which I feel God speaking to me, and perhaps to the world. One of the most interesting was the one below, which almost organically, took the form of a chalice. It is part of the criticism of the self-centered materialism that defines the worst of our culture. We want more when we already have too much.

Thus says the Lord to America:

You have so much on the outside;
But you feel empty, vacant, sad.
You have eaten more than your fill;
But you crave more and more.
You sing: “God Bless America,”
Can’t you see that I already have?
Lose yourself in something holy;
Find yourself in something simple;
The other way doesn’t work.
Believe in me.
I believe in you.
Bless
The
World.
For that is why
I have made you
In my image, my children.

Nothing Is Very Much Fun Anymore

2009-10-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

Presbytery committees met last night, ugh. It's not even that there were fights and arguments, it's just getting to the point of futility. We are becoming that church in Laodicea, you know the lukewarm one that God was going to spit out. When we disagree we fight like cats and dogs, when we agree we have no motivation. The culture has beaten the optimism out of us. It is becoming abundantly clear that most Americans, while they may have some spiritual inquisitiveness, are just not interesting in being the Church. The Church is the only segment of society that doesn't believe it. Sure there are ways to change but they involve bold, creative and often scary moves. I'm not sure the people who ARE in Church now are ready, willing or able to make the changes, and even if they do there's a pretty good chance that we still won't get people, that we'll always be ten years behind the curve of what folks want.
The Liturgy is dead, not because the Liturgy is bad, but because people have lost contact with it. The Liturgy of the church: the forms and traditions of worship, the corporate prayers and confessions, the conventions of preaching, even the blessed Sacraments have lost currency. The flaw is not in the construction but in the reception. Old preacher types, church scholars and the like fiddle with ideas that are founded on the way things have been in the past. There is a misconception that if we just update and smooth out some of the edges of the liturgy then people will receive it with the same reverence as they used to. But they won't, at least not the majority, because the flaw is not with the food it's with the eaters.
When I hear someone say that they stopped going to church or changed churches because the old church, "just wasn't meeting their needs," I want to scream and beat them about the head and neck. When I see large fancy churches with large fancy budgets growing I know that their growth is mainly at the expense of smaller churches that don't offer as many programs. I don't feel that any of them are reaching new ears with the message of the Gospel, they're just wrangling around for the dwindling supply of people who still understand enough about church to actually find God there.
The sad thing is that there really is nothing we can do about it. We cannot become all things to all people unless they want what we are. To be honest about it, I don't even want what we are. But I find God in our imperfections, in our lackluster singing of the hymns, in our sporadic attendance, in our utter resistance to commitment. I find God's forgiveness, I find God's comfort and I find God shaping me, like he shaped Moses and the prophets. I find God in the hearts of the faithful people who still show up to worship but I also recognize the value that is missing from the lives of those who don't.
I can't change the hearts of those who will not come because, "it just doesn't do anything for them." Until people learn that worship is as much about what is going on in your heart and head as it is what goes on up front and what is printed in the bulletin, this is just not going to work. All the speakers and programs and technology and small groups and fellowship events in the world aren't going to get people to know and love God.
We are in exile. Somewhere in the last fifty years a foreign power has conquered our culture and driven us off to the rivers of Babylon. As the Psalm says, "we hung up our lyres and we wept when we remembered Zion." We remember something that was good and right and holy but we also remember that we took it for granted and, in the blink of an eye, we have lost it, we can't get it back by our own efforts. "How can we sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?"
Glassy eyed optimism will not serve a remnant that must survive in the wilderness or under the oppressor's hand. If the Church, and all the value it contains, is going to continue we must somehow survive the exile of postmodern America where greed and self-interest rule and the gods of football, shopping and golf strip us of a holy Sabbath and replace it with mere recreation.
Of course this is where I, and just about everyone else who shouts at this ocean, runs out of ideas. When you try to turn the corner and think about reconstruction, about restoration, about resurrection, you can't. We still have the exile to live through, we still have 40 years in the wilderness, three days in the tomb. Faith is the only way; maybe we will learn deep lessons in exile and wandering, maybe our comfortable seat was a little too comfortable, maybe we need to learn how to serve a Holy God among the rocks and dust of the wilderness.

Better than Ezra?

2009-09-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

So, I forgot that Sunday was my turn to teach the adult Sunday school class, bad Pastor! But as usual I can talk for a long time without much preparation. The text was from the book of Ezra, one of those books of the Bible that Pastors and Rabbis find interesting but pretty much everyone else ignores. Ezra was the top priest of the people of Israel as they returned from exile in Babylon. My on the spot ruminations Sunday morning about the role of priests in religious activities have been rolling around my head all week. A few thoughts:
1. Perhaps the biggest thing that sets modern, reformed churches apart from most of the other religions is that we don't really have priests. We have ministers or pastors, which at first glance might appear somewhat priestly in their function but, in fact, are different in ways that are more than just semantic. Reformed theology, in reaction to Roman Catholicism, de-emphasized priesthood and hierarchy and unleashed the chaotic and sometimes wonderful doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, in which we no longer need the intermediary persons and structures of the church to relate to God. In theory this is a good thing... in theory. In reality it does exactly what the papists of the 1500s said it would do: create a climate of schism and division over the most minor points of theology and polity.
2. What's done is done, we can't stuff the Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed genie back in the bottle, besides the Roman church doesn't offer us much to go back to after 400 years of thinking too much. But with the exception of the Orthodox, Roman Catholics and a few staunch liturgical Anglicans like my friend David, nobody laments the vanishing of the priesthood. As a member of clergy, standing in one of the streams of Christianity that flows far away from the priestly, hierarchical trunk of Catholicism, I only show glimmers and glimpses of the priestly role. When I officiate at our sacraments (which we have pared down to only two) and when I participate in those moments (marriage, intercession for the sick, confession), which we no longer even consider sacramental, I experience a very subtle difference in feeling. This difference, I suspect, is a sort of mystical connection with that part of the cloud of witnesses that has been set apart to serve the Lord as priests, pastors, ministers, whatever you want to call it.
3. I personally feel more called to the role of prophet, the speakers of the word, trafficking in ideas and speech (it has nothing to do with predicting the future). I am growing into the priestly functions but I'm not sure I will ever really feel at home in those vestments. The story of Ezra reminds me how important a priest can be to people who have lost their way, who need something to hold onto, someone to tell them that God is still with them and demonstrate the ways they can experience that presence. While there is no bright line that separates the functions of prophet and priest there is definitely a differential gradient. I am certain that my angle of repose is towards the prophetic end and I must put forth extra effort to tend to the duties of the priesthood.
4. Due to recent malfeasance among the Romans we are apt to feel a certain slimy quality in the very title of priest. This too is unfortunate and demonstrates the fact that often the loss of a structural member is often due to a failure of the member and the structure that held it. The weakness and sin of individual priests was amplified by the rigidity and secrecy of the hierarchy that held them. In the process children were harmed in unspeakable ways and that is something Jesus told us must not happen. But the priesthood, if it is good and right and true is not an evil apparatus of dark secrets but a bearer of light, a city shining on a hill, and so some day I hope it returns again to be.

10 Years

2009-09-19T09:55:00.001-07:00

Michele and I took a short trip to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We went just far enough away to get some peace but close enough not to have to knock ourselves out with travel. That place turned out to be Erie, PA (the original idea was Europe but real life got in the way). The chap at the hotel asked us what brought us to Erie, Michele said, "Our anniversary." His raised eyebrows said that he either suspected we were really shacking up for some illicit affair or that he just felt sorry for two pathetic folks who couldn't afford a better spot.

But life is what you make it.

We found what I would call a jewel of a place: Presque Isle State Park, a little spur of land that sticks out into Lake Erie. It has wind, waves, and surprisingly nice, deserted, sandy beaches. In mid-September the summer crowds were gone and there were just a few people roaming here and there. It was good place to reflect, to be together, to consider where we are and where we have been. We took off our shoes and walked in the warm sun balanced by a cool breeze. We walked through rising clouds of seagulls and sandpipers, we picked up smooth rocks and skipped them through the surf, we talked a lot and were silent for long stretches of time as well.

As is often the case when we are away, particularly on our anniversary, we thought of our children. Their lives are contained entirely within the sphere of our marriage, and as one might expect with four and five year olds, they tend to define much of what we do. We occasionally mentioned that they might like this or that but mostly what we treasured was their absence, at least for a moment.

It's not a matter of love, it's just a matter of survival. Children are so all-encompassing at this age, they are a force of nature and they don't quit. The thought of them is always with us, like our shadows, but it's good to be together alone once in a while to remember what we look like.

The past ten years have seen a lot of action. It's hard to imagine that the next ten will be so full of change, but, of course, they probably will.

Is It Hard to Believe We Need a Place Called Hell?

2009-09-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fear,

Bury the rag deep in your face,

now is the time for your tears.

-The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol, Bob Dylan

I'm sure you've seen those commercials for the SPCA that have all these pictures of abused animals playing slowly while Sarah MacLachlan plays in the background. I just saw one that someone posted on facebook that used the same song, Angel, to tell the story of a little girl who was beaten to death by her step father, chronicling the abuse, the bad decisions by Mom and the legal system, all the ways in which grown ups failed a helpless two year old. We live in a world where abuse of the helpless seems to be pandemic, whether it's animals or children, or the elderly, or women, it seems there are no shortage of raging maniacs out there to beat on them.
Except the abusers aren't raging maniacs; their evil is not clearly identified by a hockey mask and a machete or by a swastika on their uniform. But evil they are. I do not excuse abusive behavior under any circumstances. I have anger issues, I can blow up with the best of them. I believe in spanking as a form of discipline for children or animals (not for women or the elderly, though you could make an argument in some cases). I am by no means perfectly even tempered but I have never hit one of my kids, or even one of my dogs any harder than I meant to. When I say I don't buy "losing your temper" as an excuse I am not speaking as a hypocrite, I am speaking as one who knows what losing his temper means.
I am also speaking as one who believes in the existence of evil. While I am not quick to name every little human shortcoming as evil, I will name abuse of those who are weaker as undoubtedly evil. At the bedrock level the only really good use of governmental power is to protect the weak from the strong. Weakness and strength are defined differently in various situations, but no matter what the situation, a two year old child is almost always the weak.
There are those who can be physically weak but economically or socially strong, there are those who are physically strong but economically or socially weak. Take for instance the case of a poor, 19 year old from whatever rough neighborhood you want and the CEO of a large corporation. In certain ways the CEO has all the power, he could buy and sell the young man, or ruin his life, if he really wanted to. But if you give the young man a knife and put the two of them in some back alley the tables are turned. It seems to me they made several movies out of similar premises.
Power and violence are dynamic principles that most of us think of purely in the abstract. From the hilltop they might seem to be all there is. Stripped of names and faces abuse, murder, even genocide, are nothing but numbers, statistics of violence that represent the struggle for power. Given faces, names and perhaps a heart-tugging soundtrack, they become evil. The law always tries to objectify it's decisions and usually ends up making mistakes: convicting the innocent and serving up victims to killers on a silver platter. So what can we do?
There is no full solution short of Jesus coming back but there are several things we must do to even make a dent in the problem:
1. Take responsibility for your actions, don't be a victim of your past, don't inflict your wounds on the future.
2. Learn to recognize and name evil, real evil, not just people who look and think different from you.
3. Realize that it is your problem when the innocent suffer. When evil reigns we all suffer.
4. Leave the judgment to God but do everything you can to stop the symptoms.

Will we ever live in a perfect world? Probably not.
Can it be better than it is? I have to think so.

The Winter of Our Discontent

2009-09-10T07:37:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare had such genius with words that a phrase of his can be turned into a novel and a great novel. Steinbeck is a gifted storyteller who uses his characters and plots to put the clamps to our assumptions and social conventions in a way that is nothing short of prophetic. I have thought a lot about what it means to be prophetic and how those who attempt it often go wrong. The first error is made when the prophet holds themself above their audience, often subconsciously. Rather than locating themself within the story as the primary target of the message, they identify themself as an unbiased conduit or, even worse, a source of God's message to "the wicked."
A prophet must take some ownership of his message and recognize how his own assumptions shape the content of the message. As one of the best trailers in movie history states, "In space, no one can hear you scream." Sound cannot travel in a vacuum because there is no matter to transmit the vibrations of the source. God's word travels through human words and is spoken and received by human ears and hearts. A certain amount of distortion is always present.
The phrase: "The winter of our discontent," used originally by Shakespeare in Richard III to refer to a time of political alienation in England was used by Steinbeck as a title of the story of Ethan Allen Hawley, a disinherited member of American aristocracy, who sets aside his moral and ethical code to pursue worldly gain, only to find that honesty would have brought him the same result with greater inner peace. The phrase was also used in the Gen-X comedy, Reality Bites, by a character played by the actor Ethan Hawke (eerie coincidence of names, no?).
One phrase resonates through different settings and concerns, it indicts different forms of fallen humanity, it seems to randomly bounce and echo around the sensorium.
Distortion is not always bad. Prior to the 1960's the distortion of sound waves coming from guitar amplifiers was considered an unpleasant nuisance. Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townsend, among others, decided to embrace and use distortion in musical expression. Without distortion, Purple Haze and Baba O'Reilly are somewhat lackluster, with the proper control of distortion they become masterpieces.
Postmodern society is in the process of harnessing the underlying order in what seems like chaos. Steinbeck found an underlying and surprising order in the chaotic downfall of the careful machinations of a man who tried to temporarily suspend the rigorous order of his ethical code. Gen-X has begun to emerge from meaningless slacking as the first Generation that is actually comfortable in dealing with the "rapid, discontinuous change," which characterizes the postmodern existence.
Winter ends in spring, discontent can be resolved by new life, direction and purpose, these are the actions of God.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Hard Choices, Not Made Lightly

2009-09-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

It has been more than 5 years coming: a meeting that I knew would eventually have to take place. The moment I walked into Rossiter Presbyterian Church as their moderator I knew that the small family gatherings taking place in that building were going to come to an end.
Yet I believe in palliative care, both for individuals and institutions. The reality of death is painful enough, without having to grit your teeth in agony. So I walked with them through pointless routines that mimicked the activities of a normal life. I cared for them when I was there and prayed for them when I wasn't, but I knew they were dying, and they knew it too.
There were a few times when THE END became a point of discussion, in these moments I felt like I was walking a tightrope. How to drain out the fear of death without falling in love with it? I didn't want to end up with a suicidal congregation on my hands, I like them too much to want them to go away.
Sometimes I was the doctor, informing them of a situation that they already knew was dire. Other times I was the morphine, assuring them they could go on, albeit under somewhat limited terms, for as long as their heart and lungs kept pumping. For a congregation with a 150 year history, 5 years of hospice care doesn't seem like too much.
Yesterday, the last three Elders voted 2 to 1 to call for an administrative committee to begin the final countdown of their precarious death balance. The AC will try to get all the legal and practical ducks in a row before the church runs out of funds sometime in 2010. Palliative care is one thing, life support is something entirely different. The Presbyterian approach to dissolution is characteristically decent and in order, there are procedures and checklists to follow and even some attempt to help support the grieving but it all seems pretty hollow.
Insipid pats on the back and sighed platitudes sound even worse coming from an institution than they do from an individual.
I think the saddest part of the whole mess is the confusion that I see on the faces of the people I have worked with for years. They aren't mystified by the fact that they are dying, they wonder why it was so impossible to go on living. They wonder why the younger generation doesn't long for community and connection to each other and to God. They wonder why there aren't 30 and 40 somethings ready to take up the mantle of leadership from those in their 70s and 80s. They wonder why something that has been life sustaining and sacred to them for most of their lives is doesn't even warrant a couple hours a week and a few dollars from their children and grandchildren.
The world is changed.
While Rossiter Presbyterian has not been vital for a very long time, while their ministry and mission is almost non-existent, while they have 7 members and are spending more than they take in every year, I can't shake the conviction that the world is a better place for at least a few of God's people because of their existence. Just for the record, they are important, their passing is not a "good" thing, the kingdom of God is going to lose yet another outpost. Necessity, practicality, inevitability, always seem to be cards up Death's sleeve, as if he didn't have three aces already.

Triggers, detonators, and their results

2009-09-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

The other night we took Jack and Cate to the playground in the evening. The weather here has been so great the last week or so that it's hard to round things up and head back indoors. There was a whole gang of little girls playing and our kids joined right in. It is really nice to see that my kids don't share the reticence about social situations that I had even at their age. Anyway, Jack was the only boy in the whole crowd, a fact that didn't seem to bother him in the least.
At one point I see Jack talking to the girl who was closest to his age, it didn't really seem like a normal conversation for a five-year-old though. I have no idea what he was saying, some of it was in intentional whispers, what struck me was his posture and gestures, which were clearly discernible from across the playground. He was chatting her up, as clear as day. I don't know where he learned it but the gestures were unmistakable, but they weren't mine, they were my brother Jon 100%. Jack bears an uncanny resemblance to my late brother, in both physical appearance and mannerism but it was even more apparent as he talked to the little girl on the playground. He knew he had her attention as Jon most often did. He was utterly confident in his suggestion (probably something like, "hey let's ditch all these little girls and go play on the slide together"). His approach had swagger and the almost perfect effect. Without any sound whatsoever I could tell that she was a little shocked and almost 100% engaged in his suggestion but responded with authentic demure.
At the moment it was hilarious, like watching a Muppet baby performance of my brother and countless waitresses and girls at bars. It was flirting, plain, simple and harmless. Jack is a natural just like Jon, he certainly didn't learn it from me, I can't flirt for squat. I always end up being way too sarcastic. The look on the little girl's face was priceless, Jack talking with his hands, leaning in close to whisper things in her ear, seemed utterly charming, completely anachronistic in a kindergartner.
What I wasn't expecting was the stab of grief that hit me the next morning on the way to the dentist. I was driving down the road rolling that charming little scene in my head and remembering good things about my little brother, and damn it, it still hurts. Things like that are landmines that just lay around, seemingly completely dead, until you step on that trigger, then BOOM.
Completely unexpected, they explode.
I guess the bright side, if there is one, is that I have become good at surviving.

A Sky So Blue

2009-08-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

Today is one of those days that is so nice, it almost seems too good to be true. The sky is blue with fluffy white clouds meandering aimlessly through it. Every once in a while a breeze that smells sweet and feels cool comes just in time to cool off skin that was just getting too warm from the sun. It's like a consolation for the rain and general dankness of the past few weeks.
I was all set up for a nice afternoon working in the back yard. I had my bible, my notepad, the latest Sojourners magazine, I was going to get my mind set on the book of James and his preaching of good works and social justice. Cate was going to play on the swing set and I was going to get fully back into my routine: time in the word, praying the psalms, writing notes and journals, a really good Monday.
Then like kids so often do Cate had other plans. She's been sick and stayed home from school today but I wasn't quite prepared for what happened. She crapped her pants. Mind you, she's been potty trained for almost 9 months and generally only has #1 accidents but her weak spot is when she just doesn't want to leave what she's doing to go to the bathroom. Maybe she thought she could hold it, maybe it was flatulence gone bad, but all my thoughts of justice and benevolence towards mankind didn't even make it to my daughter.
I could tell something was amiss just looking at her from across the yard under the shade maple where I had set up camp. She had a downcast look on her face and she was just sitting there on the swing, not moving. "Daddy," she said in a little, barely audible voice, "I think I pooped in my pants."
In moments like this my normal calm rationality goes right out the window. I do not like dealing with shit, at all... then again I suppose most people share this aversion. There was much yelling and lecturing as we made our way up to the bathroom for a quick hose down in the shower. I really do feel a little bad about being a hard ass sometimes but... did I mention I hate cleaning up poop?
The good part of it was that, given her state of being "in trouble" she did not resist the commandment: "thou shalt take a nap." For a little girl who has been sick for two days a nap is really what the doctor ordered. She's at the age where naps can only be imposed in cases of severe fatigue, sickness or as punishment for wrong doing. Crapping one's pants is definitely wrong doing. This parenting thing is tough, and messy.
But that sky was still wonderfully blue.

Re-Entry

2009-08-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Walker Percy once observed that the reason so many writers and artists drink quite a bit is in order to ease the stress of what he called re-entry. Using the analogy of a spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere he described the stress that is produced when one has been away from whatever one considers their native environment and then returns. In writing or producing art one exits the world of the empirical and the concrete and inhabits, for a time, the world of metaphor, relationships and creativity. Eventually, you have to come back, you can't live in that space forever.
Re-entry of a spacecraft is made traumatic by the atmosphere, friction with the air that surrounds us causes immense heat. Speed and heat and gravitational forces combine to make re-entry the most dangerous part of space travel. When writers and artists attempt to re-enter normal everyday life with all its ordinary details a similar friction occurs. Percy says that these folks often lubricate this friction with alcohol, which may not be exactly wise. Another mode of re-entry is travel; going to an exotic or at least different location so that one can re-enter a world that has "thinner" concentrations of what is seen as normal and everyday. Re-enter the general world of humanity in a different location and then undertake the lesser re-entry of getting back to your specific world of humanity.
Coming back from two weeks away is tough. A week of vacation and a week of FPP (First Parish Project). Of the two FPP creates a more difficult angle of re-entry. First of all I have to re-enter my family, go back to being Dad instead of some character who can stay up until 3:00 AM talking on the back porch. I've got kids to take care of now and they get up early. Second I have to transition back from the theoretical realm of talking about being a Pastor with others who have similar perspectives to actually being a Pastor of a non-theoretical congregation.
And there's no time to drink, I've got a sermon to write.

Mountains, Rivers, Lakes and Relatives

2009-08-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

It's midway through my two week vacation in North Carolina. I'm sitting in a beat-up old chair looking out back of Aunt Joy's cabin in Spruce Pine. Michele and the kids packed up in her Dad's car and are en-route to Plumville. Later today I will be headed further south to the Hinton Center for a week of the First Parish Project. We have spent the past week vacationing here with nearly twenty members of Michele's family. We rented the big house next door to Aunt Joy's cabin, a beautiful chalet mountain house with a glass front overlooking the lake, a big deck and open ceilings. We have slid down waterfalls in mountain streams, tubed down the south Toe River, driven up to Table Rock, driven the Blue Ridge Parkway, swam, canoed, fished and floated in the lake. It has been a wonderful and memorable vacation.
There has been some family drama, as there almost always is. Michele's cousin is eight months pregnant and thus a little testy. There is the general friction between the womenfolk and some griping about who is doing their part etc. etc. etc. But it is nice to be headed off to a week of study leave already decompressed. The absence of certain in laws has made this vacation seem - well - more like a vacation and less like some gauntlet of fragile emotions and poorly controlled ego. You can't pick your relatives, and neither can the person you marry.
It has been some time since I truly enjoyed myself on a vacation. The kids are finally getting to the age where they actually do fun things. Jack and Cate even (with some cajoling) climbed up the water fall and slid down into the cold, cold water. They learned how to ride in the canoe without making it tip over. Jack is really, really close to swimming and they generally had fun doing whatever we were doing.
It has been nice.

Forgive Us Our Debts

2009-08-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

I was absolutely shocked last night, right about the end of the first quarter of the Steelers - Cardinals game, a news break came on and I found out that the Philadelphia Eagles had signed Michael Vick. The Eagles are the team I grew up with and the team that still holds my loyalty, even though, living in Western PA, it would be a lot easier to just become a Steeler fan. The Eagles have never been what I would call daring in their roster moves and personnel choices. They're coached by a Mormon who is about as exciting as creamed corn, they always seem to be sitting on the sidelines of big time signings (i.e. Randy Moss). Their one experiment in questionable personalities (Terrell Owens) was an exciting but disastrous failure. Everything seemed to indicate that the Iggles were going to sit this one out.
Except for the fact that their two backup QBs are Kevin Kolb (injured) and AJ Feely.
From a football perspective Vick makes a lot of sense: if he is anywhere near as good as he was two years ago, he is light years better than Kolb and Feely. He is also no threat to Donovan McNabb: the book on Vick as a QB goes like this: dangerous runner, powerful but inaccurate passer, amazing athlete, but probably will never take you all the way. This is, consequently, almost exactly what the "experts" said about McNabb a couple years ago. Vick will join an offense with an established leader who just happens to be the best African-American Quarterback playing the game (maybe ever). Vick will be working for a coach who loves to run novelty plays and who will move and shake his playbook for the talent he has. Vick will be working in a system that is almost identical to the one he last ran in Atlanta, and Vick doesn't have to be THE guy. Donovan is THE guy, he's squeaky clean, he's been through hell and back and he was instrumental in talking the team into taking a risk on Vick.
The early reaction is mixed, there are some who apparently think Vick out to be cast into the outer darkness for his part in the whole dog fighting thing. I was outraged and sickened when I learned about the sordid details and cruelty of the whole situation. However, Vick was not alone, and dog fighting is all too common. As part of his rehabilitation Vick has been working with humane societies and animal rights groups, his visibility as an NFL player makes him a powerful voice for righteousness. If we do not allow him to be an NFL player we are "punishing" him but robbing him of a voice that might actually atone somewhat for his sins.
Atonement aside, what about forgiveness? This story is deeper than football; it is about our ability to forgive a person who has made a mistake. Vick has dealt with the legal consequences of his actions, he now has to earn his way back into respectability. He has a pretty good shot. In Philly, even though there is some outrage now, as soon as he comes in for a trick play that scores a touchdown against Dallas, or the Giants, all will be forgiven. What gives me pause is that there are so many other folks who don't get the same chance to wipe the slate clean. Most convicts are released into a world that is not so willing to forgive. I hope that Vick makes good on the second chance that the Iggles and the world have given him. If he does maybe there's a Lombardi trophy in store for the Birds (Hope, even irrational hope, springs eternal in the hearts of Philly Phans!).

Turn and face the strain

2009-08-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

Watching the news talk shows lately one is bound to notice that the conservative voice in this country is growing increasingly shrill. I know, that's what one gets for watching news talk shows, shrillness, hyperbole, and fear mongering, from both sides of the aisle. But listen, can't we learn a little from history, perhaps even from the opposition? The liberals (ala George Soros and Michael Moore) spent 8 years telling us that we were on the road to fascism, that W was going to turn us into a totalitarian military state, that the polar bears were dying because Republicans smoked too many cigars in their 8 mpg Cadillacs.
Now 8 months into the reign of change and "Yes, We Can." We have apparently made that 180 degree turn and are now headed down the road to socialism. People fear Obama, the man we ourselves excruciatingly vetted and examined, inspected, injected, and elected. It's not just that we disagree with his policy, though I find very few people who can actually define his policy clearly at this stage of his administration. People fear Obama like he's some kind of master villain, Kaiser Suse (The Usual Suspects: "I believe in the devil Agent Cullion, and the only thing that scares me is Kaiser Suse").
I find myself in a position to defend bureaucracy very rarely but this is one of those times. The framers of our government were smart guys. And when I say smart I mean they were intelligent and also highly educated and well read. They read philosophy, they were abreast of scientific progress and many of them (yes, even the slave owners) were great humanitarians by the standards of their day. They had the knowledge and experience to draft a basic form of government sufficient for regulating the society in which they lived. They also had the foresight to know that their society wouldn't stay the same forever (the illusion that things could stay the same forever was the fatal flaw of most monarchs). They knew their Constitution, their very society would have to change with time.
But they knew that change is dangerous and scary. Whenever new things happen you always have folks standing around mourning for "the good old days," "the way things used to be," "the America I grew up in," etc. etc. etc. So the Founders made it hard to change things, they installed checks and balances and branches of government. They observed how hard it was to get 13 colonies to agree on anything and decided that if a change was really worth it they would, in fact, have to agree.
For better or worse, that's how our government runs, slowly, methodically, redundantly. And sometimes even that isn't enough, for example The Civil War. Oddly enough the wailing and shouting in the town hall meetings is exactly what the Founders probably figured would happen. I just wish the Politicians that have taken their seats would have some vision that lasts longer than a four, six or eight year election cycle. Maybe we'll make it another 200 years, maybe not, it's all vanity and chasing after the wind anyway.

Wakinyan Tanka

2009-08-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

We had a pretty good thunderstorm this evening, the sky was black, the lightning was hitting all around and thunder was crashing right overhead or at least rumbling in the distance for a good while. We didn't lose power, which is good, but the lights in our little domestic bubbles flickered a couple of times to remind us that there is power out there in nature. When Jack was a baby thunderstorms used to drive me pretty close to panic because the idea of trying to cope with an infant in the absence of electric lights and running water was beyond what I would call an adventure. Darkness I can live with, that little electric pump in the well going dead, not so much.
We are insulated from nature, we rely on technology to "save" us from the ravages of - well living without technology. We have also cut ourselves off from a rich and imaginative understanding of the world, in which things like thunder are not mere scientific phenomenon: the collision of air masses filling a vacuum left by the sudden discharge of static electricity.
The Brule Sioux have a legend of a creature called the Wakinyan Tanka, the Great Thunderbird. The Wakinyan Tanka travels in the dark cloud of the thunderhead and are the guardians of truth. They are thought of as being generally benevolent to humans but not entirely safe. One never controls a Wakinyan Tanka, in fact, because they move contrary to almost everything else in nature, if you have a dream of a Thunderbird you will become a heyoka: "an upside-down, hot-cold, forward-backward man." Should you find yourself in this condition the Sioux have a ritual to get you straightened out; according to Sioux Medicine Man Lame Deer, "you wouldn't want to stay a heyoka for too long."
Wasichus, white people, never dream of the Wakinyan Tanka, but we are still, by Sioux standards heyoka. Lame Deer describes the Thunderbirds as follows, and note the faith and reverence:
The Wakinyan have no bodies as we imagine them - no limbs or hands or feet - but they have enormous claws. They have no mouths, but they have big, sharp teeth. They have no eyes, but lightning bolts somehow shoot out from the eyes which are not there. This is hard to explain to a wasichu.
One of the things we modern folk (wasichu regardless of skin color) lack is the ability to stand in the presence of a mystery and simply feel the joy of not being able to explain. The Wakinyan are not the creator god of Sioux mythology, they were parts of the creation, greater than man but still created beings. They are ways of understanding, through story and vision, power and movement that are beyond our immediate grasp.
Our science gives us similar stories, which are rarely as interesting, but which claim empirical truth to the exclusion of all other explanations. The sad fact is that empirical truth often robs us of our imagination and keeps us from seeing a deeper truth. It is instructive that Elijah did not find God in the fire or the whirlwind, but in the still silence that followed, yet God was responsible for those as well. The imagination of pagans is like their visions of the Wakinyan, they never see the whole thing, but then again neither do monotheists, neither did Moses or Elijah. We see in part, through a glass darkly, but that should be enough. To see a part of the Wakinyan, to experience a word from the Lord, to see what He chooses to reveal, that should be enough to key us in to the truth.

The Revolution will not be Televised

2009-08-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot about limits lately. For several years I have run across the idea of proper boundaries, in interpersonal relationships, community, and life in general. Wendell Berry makes limits sound so healthy and good that I almost feel like dropping out and becoming Amish. Then I talk to my wife about the idea...
I just finished re-reading Eugene Peterson's Under the Unpredictable Plant, where he uses the story of Jonah as a model for a new kind of pastoral work. One of the elements of the approach is spending time in the belly of the fish. The Greek word he uses to describe the condition is Askesis, from which we take the word ascetic. Asceticism, for those who even know what it is at all, has acquired some unfortunate baggage over the years: monks flogging themselves, wearing hairshirts, cilices and nearly starving themselves to death.
But the Greek root simply means "to apply oneself with commitment to some activity, to practice." Peterson argues that one of the elements of life that is horribly wrong in modern society is our lack of ability to live with limits. Askesis happens when you are confined and focused (ala Jonah in the belly of the fish). If you think about it, we apply this model to learning all sorts of things: to study, to sports, but very rarely to prayer and devotion.
Limits and boundaries are not the same as oppression, especially when we apply them to the spiritual life. As with Jonah, proper askesis is the road to obedience, salvation and health. Practically applied to prayer, askesis means keeping it small, don't pray for big blown out expectations, don't pray for a laundry list of woes, work on giving thanks for what you have and listening for the answers to the questions that face you immediately. Praying for things that are too far out there is often the opposite of having faith, it is a set up for failure and loss of trust in God.
Jonah had to learn some remedial lessons in trust and obedience from within the confines of the fish before he could go and do the "big" thing of calling Nineveh to repent. The faith of most Western Christians jumps over the small, interior and confined disciplines of askesis and leaps up to grab at blessings and prophecy and most of all salvation. Our ultimate model, Jesus, submitted to dramatic askesis on the cross and in the tomb. If we are going to follow him, it might help us to learn how to pray as we ought.

Worldwide Pants

2009-08-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

America may have her flaws but I am reminded at least daily of how lucky we are to live here. I just read a news story about Lubna Hussein, a female journalist who is on trial in Sudan for violating one of the dictates of Shari'a Law. Her scandalous behavior is obscene and indecent, it threatens the very fabric of civilization. This uppity, westernized Muslim woman has dared challenge the powers that be, threatening to unleash chaos and immodesty upon the poor unsuspecting nation of Sudan. What did she do you ask?
She wore trousers.
If the Sudanese government knew what was good for them they would just drop it. Given what I know of the situation in Darfur and how they respond to UN authority and international "pressure" I doubt they will. Hussein faces forty lashes for her affront to all that is decent, you heard that right forty lashes, probably delivered by a whip man in a black hood too. That is really no joke, you can die from forty lashes, but it's a punishment so far removed from anything that even resembles 21st century justice that it seems cartoonish. It would appear that the medieval powers that be in Sudan are about to restate their claim to being the most savage government since the US took out Saddam Hussein (no relation).
Lubna Hussein has decided to fight this fight, she resigned from her position with the UN, which would grant her immunity from prosecution by the Sudanese inquisition. I'm not entirely sure whether she is a brave advocate for human rights or just another westernized Muslim who underestimates the savagery of less enlightened Mohammedans. I'm pretty sure if we had publicly flogged Rosa Parks the civil rights movement would have taken a different track.
I really don't know whether to laugh or cry. Sometimes our behavior makes monkeys throwing poo at each other seem civilized; they don't like their women wearing pants either.

Ancillary gods

2009-08-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

Definition: Ancillary: 1. subordinate, 2. that serves as an aid; auxiliary.

American religion has taken freedom and an almost embarrassing array of blessings and bootstrapped itself to a station somewhere above God. Religious writers and critics often bemoan the phenomenon of consumer religion because of its obvious effects but the root cause is even more troubling. We have come to think of God as a sort of life preserver or even a turbo boost to our human goodness.
It is in our prayer: handing God a laundry list of concerns and laments, "trusting" Him most with the things that are obviously too big for us to handle on our own.
It is in our behavior: we prioritize just about everything that has any weight whatsoever ahead of our relationship with God.
It is in our worship (when we get around to it): we want what we want, the condition of our hearts is a dependent variable resting upon everything from the quality of our dreams on Saturday night to the Pastor's necktie, or lack thereof.
It is in our tacit and subconscious assumptions that faith is sort of like gravy on the meatloaf of life: a good addition but not absolutely necessary.
We shop for churches. We enter the sanctuary with much the same attitude as we enter a buffet: it will take the edge off of our hunger but expectations for the fare are low to medium.
This is not just an accusation but a mea culpa. As a Pastor I am often caught up in the logistics and technicalities of leading worship, and sometimes even down-hearted by the lackluster appearance of it all.
There are moments when I catch a glimpse and something about what I'm doing catches fire. I don't know if anyone sees it and sometimes I even hope they do not. In these moments I am aware that all our prayers, hymns and sermons do not do what they're supposed to do. But it's not a flaw in the prayers, hymns and sermons, it's a flaw in the attitude of those who pray, sing, preach and hear. We want God to serve us, we want to be moved, lifted, relieved by a cosmic masseuse, who will help all the cares and concerns just melt away, but the dynamic is backwards or at least sideways.
We seek an ancillary god, who will help us feel better, respond to our needs and perhaps lend a hand if things really get out of control. God doesn't work that way. He is the ultimate not the subordinate. The amazing thing is that God has chosen to meet us when we inevitably fail to reach him but that should not be misconstrued into a concept of cheap grace. When we approach God's throne, we are the penitents, the servants. He is One who can easily live without us but chooses to let us in.

The Sum of all Fears

2009-07-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

I spent the night of my 35th birthday sleeping in a tent in the back yard. It was not a futile attempt to recreate the joy of childhood because turning 35 made me feel old (it did). My night in the outdoors was a result of parental, spousal and neighborly responsibility, very grown-up (old).
We had planned to have the kids, Jack(5), Cate(3), my niece Paige(8) and our neighbor, Sidney(8), sleep out in our big tent, while the adults slept comfortably in their own beds. Our neighbor's house is actually behind ours, our back yard is their side yard and we share the space quite nicely. The doors would be unlocked for bathroom breaks or midnight panic. The plan was to get the kids tucked in and sit around the fire until they were asleep, which actually happened much faster than I expected. The giggling, talking and such petered out into beloved silence by about 11:00, they were asleep.
Then the Mommies started worrying. Michele and Shannon started to wonder what would happen if Caitlyn, who can't open the gate by herself, woke up and wandered out of the tent at 3 AM. They started wondering if any local miscreants might try to harass the kids, unprotected in their tent. I saw where this was headed: me sleeping outside. Shannon is eight months pregnant and can't even sleep comfortably in a bed at this point, Michele probably could but doesn't like sleeping outside much at all.
I tried to head them off at the pass: "there's nothing to worry about, kids sleep out in tents in the back yard all the time, they're dead tired and haven't even made a peep, this is Plumville, not Detroit, what are you worried about?" Before I had given them the best of the sermon, a group of three or four late adolescents came staggering down the road (this is 11:30 at night) and they were visibly impaired. I've seen enough David Lynch movies to recognize a harbinger when I see it. I went and got the cot and slept in the yard.
It was an interesting thing, I was not exactly gripped by the same fear that had the mommies but I had a healthy dose of reality: bad things really do happen in this world. As far as I could see the simple fact of my presence with them would prevent almost all negative contingencies. Nothing bad happened, they slept, I slept, it didn't start raining until after we were all inside for breakfast.
I still agree with Roy Batty in Bladerunner: "It's a terrible thing to live in fear."
But it wasn't too bad sleeping in the back yard on my 35th birthday.

Movin On

2009-07-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

Things move, things change, some good, some bad. It is a futile attitude to fear change and it is perhaps equally futile to expect that all change is for the good. Today, I gladly moderated my final congregational meeting for a congregation that I have been serving as moderator for two and half years. It's interesting how fast two and half years can go by. I was in seminary for three years, I was in college for four and a half years, both of those tenures seemed much, much longer than the two and half years I spent as moderator in Dayton and even longer than the six plus years I have been in Plumville as Pastor.
Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads keeps running through my brain. I'm going to turn 35 in two days, 35. Pardon my french, but shit how did I get to be 35? I have been messing around on Facebook for a couple years and I now have 120 friends, not a massive number but the composition is, in large part, people that I haven't seen in over 15 years. People I went to high school with, we're all married, some divorced, most have kids and some only get to see them on weekends. I'm lucky, I think, because I have a job that is more than just a paycheck, not an easy job by any stretch of the imagination but a job that, at it's best, makes a difference in people's lives.
I wonder how I got where I am. 15 years ago, at 20, I stressed over taking Speech Communications 100, the general education requirement in public speaking. I stumbled through, earned a B and moved on figuring I'd never have to do that again. Today, I stood up in front of two different groups of at least 60 people and preached a sermon, officiated at a sacred ritual, then went to moderate a congregational meeting at another church to elect a pastor, a decidedly nervous moment in the life of a church. In all three of these roles I was calm, collected and even funny.
My kids keep growing, they will start school in less than a month, Jack will be full time, Cate will be half day Pre-K. How did this happen? I have two cars, one of which is fully paid off. I have life insurance, retirement savings, dental coverage and a level of responsibility that scares the bejeebers out of the 20 year old that still haunts my subconscious. Ferris Bueller was right: "Life goes by pretty fast, if you don't pay attention, you might miss it."

A Day that will Live in Infamy

2009-07-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

This should get easier by now. It's been four years since Jon died, four years since I got the worst news of my entire life to this point. Sure it's not as raw and painful now as it used to be but it's just not going away, and it should, it really should. I don't remember much that happened four years ago with this kind of clarity. Kids being born doesn't stand out this way, I remember those days too but not with the sort of searing illumination that I remember Jon's death. I remember going to the hospital, I remember holding little pink wrinkled things but I am in the first person in those memories. The moment when I returned my Dad's phone message on July 23, 2005, I see in the third person, like I'm standing in my own kitchen watching a guy who looks like me get the worst news of his life.
I try to forget it every year, I know it's coming but yet I wake up on July 23 every year blissfully ignorant of the significance of the date. This actually makes the moment when I remember even worse: I forgot, how could I get so wrapped up in my own stuff that I forgot?
I look back on the last few days, I've been irritable and depressed for no good reason, I've been more sarcastic than usual (and that's pretty sarcastic). Grief is like a syndrome, lets call it PDS, Post Death Syndrome, because I don't think anyone will actually need that term for a different condition (think about it). This condition sneaks up on you and makes you miserable before you even know what's going on. It forces you to make life for yourself and those around you quite miserable. You can try to ignore it but it wears away on you like water dripping from the bathroom faucet in the middle of a sleepless night.
There is no Midol for this one though, you can't go and crank down the handle real tight, you can't even call a plumber to get it taken care of once and for all. It's going to come when it's going to come and you just have to live with it. So here it is again July 23... this has got to get easier sometime... doesn't it?

Whining and Dining

2009-07-21T17:34:00.000-07:00

Why is it that little girls communicate primarily in the form of a whine?
It's not that little boys don't whine, they certainly do but little girls seem to do it all the time. My daughter, who is almost four, and my niece, who is going on nine, both seem to use this intensely irritating high pitch twanging, which is several octaves above any normal human speaking tone. It varies in volume, low volume means they just want something, high volume means they are either angry, hurt or both.
I love these little girls but I'm starting to grind my teeth.
It's not just that they have high pitched voices, my daughter's normal speaking tone is sort of raspy, young Lauren Bacall, nice really. The problem is I only hear it maybe twice a day, then it sounds like sheer music, a Beethoven symphony. The rest of the day it's more like Lady GaGa. My niece is twice Caitlyn's age, yet she still whines, a lot. I'm not sure this is universal of eight year olds (she has been horribly spoiled by grandparents). But if it is a harbinger of the next four years I think I need to puncture my eardrums now, music is overrated anyway.
What is it that teaches a young lady to communicate in such a wretched fashion?
Does it get them what they want?
Do people simply give them whatever they ask in order to make it stop?
That seems like a firm possibility.
I love kids, I really do, particularly these kids, but the whining has to stop. Maybe we need to re institute a stricter standard ala 60 or 70 years ago when you could get whupped if an adult didn't like your tone. It may seem severe but you ought to hear it at my house.

Catching My Breath

2009-07-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

The last four days seem like nothing but a blur of visits and driving. It started with a funeral on Thursday morning followed by a drive to New Jersey for dinner at Michele's parents with a cousin that I had never met. Friday we went out to breakfast with my Mom and Dad, then Michele went to lunch with a friend and my Dad and I drove up to Columbus to get a bushel of Maryland Blue Crabs at the farmer's market. Friday afternoon was a brief rest before the steaming and eating of the above mentioned crabs. Saturday Michele went to a bridal shower for my cousin Sarah in Media, PA, I picked her up in Media at 3:30 and we proceeded to drive back to Plumville, arriving around 9 PM.
This morning I preached and this evening I had a session meeting complete with Triennial visit from COM, followed by a short visit with the neighbors around the inaugural burn of their campfire ring in the backyard. The fact that I'm writing this instead of sleeping is a testament to how much I like to write.
I am reminded of how much energy we can summon when we need it, but I am also especially aware of the need to charge my batteries. With VBS a week away, I'm going to need to fully recover from this little jaunt before too long or else I'm going to be squarely behind the 8ball.
There are times when we live our life in fast forward. We can do it but it's not healthy in the long term. Stress will eventually take you out if you don't learn to catch a breather every now and then. The things that grind you down are not always unpleasant, that's lesson number two from the past four days: good things can wear you out too.
If you're one of those people who can just keep going like the energizer bunny, good for you, it's never been possible for me. God ordained a Sabbath for our benefit, not as an escape but as a chance to recharge and refuel. Following the pattern laid out by the discipline of a Sabbath will put you a remarkably salubrious path. But we will let such trivial things get in the way of our observance and the rest of our souls, in this also we fail miserably.
You would think that: "Thou Shalt Take a Day Off!" would be the most popular commandment but it is perhaps one of the most neglected (right after thou shall not covet). Maybe it's because we're too possessive of our "spare" time, maybe it's because our "spare" time isn't really "spare" at all.
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy; a law made for our benefit, to keep us sane and allow us to tap into the rhythm of the universe and our Creator. You work well and faithfully six days and you earn your rest. I need my Sabbath now.

It's So Hard to Say Goodbye

2009-07-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

I just found out that one of my favorite people has gone to be with the Lord. As I am starting the process of preparing for her funeral, I consider a life. Not actually a whole life, just a little part of one really. Peg was 96, almost 97, I have known her since she was 90 and that gives me some perspective on time. She was born before WWI, her youngest son has kids almost my age. By the time I met her she was already really old but I had the somewhat sad privilege of being her pastor through the last years of her life. I say it was sad only because we both kind of knew that it would come to this: me doing her funeral.
I think she was more prepared for it than me.
There's not a lot of good stuff that happens to you after you turn 90. Our bodies just aren't made to last that long here. Peg was one of those folks who was blessed with a sharp mind that didn't suffer the same ravages of age as the rest of her. She was a persistently sweet person, patient, forbearing and humble. She lived on her own until almost the very end, and kept track of what was going on better than I do.
In an age where we idolize youth, Peg helped remind me that age, while it may be painful, is what gives our lives depth. When you start to see 100 peeking up over the horizon, you don't have much interest in messing around in the shallows of life anymore and quite honestly, death doesn't scare you (especially if you have faith).
Peg loved our kids even though they tried consistently to break her stuff. She always asked where they were if I had the temerity to come visit without them. I didn't want to bring them because I felt they would disturb her neat and proper world of breakable things. She wanted me to bring them because they reminded her of life, pure, unspoiled, unbroken, somewhat uncontrollable life. I had to learn to see them through her eyes before I could truly appreciate this and just relax.
In the last six months Peg said she was ready to go whenever God wanted her. I always told her that there was a reason for every day she stayed. She spent her last day with her family, who always took over on Sunday for the nurse who stayed with her during the week. She was at peace and sometime in her dreams last night God wanted her. She has taken her depth and her sweet disposition and her love of life to be with the Author of Life. Enjoy Him forever Peg.

Feeling like Fred G. Sanford

2009-07-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

We're having a garage sale today, which means we have spent the better part of two weeks (well mostly Michele has) sorting through all the crap we don't use. It is a sobering exercise in the wastefulness of American culture. Today we are participating in an age old tradition of recycling. The crap which has been cluttering our basement will soon be exchanged for a dollar or so and taken by someone else and will, most likely, end up cluttering their basement.
The exception to this rule is probably the various baby paraphernalia and kid toys that our kids have grown out of; most of it is lightly used and the duration of the baby phase is so short that garage sales are ideal for such purchases. The people who come to buy our trash are mostly women who just like to shop and garage sales offer the perfect fix of sorting through random things you didn't know you "needed." All things considered, this little event is an interesting social phenomenon.
Mostly we just load up our unwanted stuff and dump it at Goodwill and they do the work of selling it cheap as a community service of sorts. Are we doing a community service or are we just engaging in yet another capitalist consumer adventure? We have a garage full of stuff for sale and we haven't used most of it in years. What we are selling amounts, at least in mass and probably in dollar value, to more than what about 1/3 of the human population owns. Believe me I'm not oblivious to that reality.
We have so much more than we use. I look around at cabinets and a refrigerator full of food and think, "Man, there's nothing to eat." I look at a cable channel guide with over 150 channels and think there's nothing on. I have high speed Internet access, which allows me instant access to everything from Puritan poetry to pornography (not that I really pay much attention to either one just going for the alliteration, see), yet I sit in front of this machine with such amazing potential for good and evil and largely do nothing. I drabble out this blog, I try to think of something clever and relevant (even clever and irrelevant) to say on my facebook page. I basically launch myself into cyberspace in some narcissistic desire for connection.
Yet the thought of sitting in the garage talking to actual people engaging in our social recycling junk sale does not float my boat. Our world is a strange place, we (and I very intentionally include myself) are not happy with what we have, even if we have too much. There's always a better house, a better car, a better job, a better spouse, better kids (well maybe we just think our kids could be better), out there somewhere.
Lord, help me be happy with what I've got. Teach me to let go of what I don't need. Give me the grace to hold on to the things that are really important, not to tightly but not too loosely.

My Dog Is Paranoid

2009-07-07T17:24:00.000-07:00

Every evening, as folks take a nice walk around Plumville, our normally relaxed Labrador goes bonkers. I don't know why. Labs are known for their pleasant disposition and she is no exception, she'll let kids sit on her and pull her ears, she'll joyfully greet anyone she meets but when people walk by on the side walk she storms from window to window barking and growling. Maybe it's because she feels they are on her turf, maybe it's that she envies them for being on a walk (no probably not, too anthropomorphic), it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
I think a lot of people are kind of like that, they react badly when they see "strangers." You see it so plainly in little kids and dogs, so why assume that adult humans are any different. The natural reaction to an outsider is a growl and a threatening bark, and, in some of the more unpleasant cases, urination.
Maggie just got so riled up that she knocked over one of my guitar cases. After that she came slinking into the office with a sheepish look on her face, I told her to sit, she did, not because she's well trained but because she knows she might be in trouble. If only we could overcome human paranoia and xenophobia that easily.
Why is it that we fear the other?
Perhaps the hardest thing Jesus tried to teach us was to love those who are different from us, those we feel are enemies, those we fear because they aren't from here. It is definitely more difficult to relate to different categories of people but we are called to do it nonetheless. The politically correct scam that would have us try and ignore differences is ultimately unhelpful because it makes it too difficult to talk about our differences for fear we might offend someone.
It occurs to me that, if diversity is ever going to feel natural, we're going to have to be able to be real with each other. If we always walk around on eggshells for fear of giving offence we will not understand, nor will we ever be understood.
I might be able, through training, to make Maggie stop charging around the house growling at strangers from the window but I wouldn't be changing the root cause of her behavior. What is interesting to me is that her nature seems to be outgoing and friendly when walls don't separate her from the outside. Perhaps it is the walls and fences we build for the sake of security that actually breed so much aggression. Are you listening homeland security?

Touch Ultimate Emptiness, Hold Steady and Still

2009-06-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

I love eastern philosophy, though I must admit to being a novice in my understanding. Lao Tzu wrote: "Touch Ultimate Emptiness, Hold Steady and Still." Not altogether without cognates in other worldviews but so economic in expression. I'm pretty sure everything Nietzsche ever wrote could be contained in those seven words, we westerners love to hear ourselves talk (the irony police will be at my door any minute for making that observation on a blog). In moments when I have the discipline I aspire to write a poetic phrase or two, usually more than two actually. That's the problem brevity is hard, saying something of value in few words is even harder.
Most people have heard the story of Hemingway writing the world's shortest novel in a bar on a dare: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." It's an interesting exercise to tell stories and relate ideas using the fewest possible words. My father's mentor used to say that he always wanted to preach short sermons but never had the time. In order to maintain clarity you have to talk a lot and explain or else people will get the wrong idea. Part of what made Jesus' teaching so incredible is the fact that he had the discipline to tell a parable and leave it sit, assuming that people would get it, or at least the right people would get it. Lao Tzu and Confucious had a similar teaching method: assume that those on the way would understand, and those who aren't... well it doesn't really matter does it?
Everyone has a different definition of ultimate emptiness, though many of us will think ours is the right one and that we are one of a select few that have really "touched" it. The reality is though that everyone has touched ultimate emptiness but very few can hold steady and still, that is the work of a disciplined soul. Your common person, confronted with ultimate emptiness, is either swallowed by the void or runs away screaming, all of us respond one way or the other the first time it happens. It is only with time, experience, faith, truth, trust and discipline that we can touch whatever the big empty is for us and remain steady and still.
See how long it took me to talk about that, and believe me I could go on, defining, describing, cogitating, bloviating... but I'm not going to. I'm going to leave you with it.

vacation, vacancy, vanity

2009-06-22T18:24:00.000-07:00

When malaise hangs around too much in your life you can't get away from it. If you leave mentally it's always there when you come back, if you leave physically you often find you have stowed it somewhere in your luggage brought it with you. Michele and I expectantly looked forward to a week away in the Poconos with my parents, last year it was a great time, we explored waterfalls and had campfires, this year water fell in the form of rain and we went to New Jersey for two days at the end of the trip. Despite somewhat less than ideal circumstances the trip was not exactly a disaster, we had some fun and it was good to get away.
The problem was that, in addition to the truckload of physical stuff we packed and lugged across PA we brought some emotional baggage we had been hoping to get away from or perhaps even deal with on our vacation. This winter flat wore us out, we are in a time of discernment that rarely leaves you feeling happy go lucky. The kids are in that peculiar whiny phase between infancy and honest childhood, they still need everything, every moment and they decide to tell you about it in the most annoying way possible.
Vacations have been problematic for me since my brother died. First, I found out that the beach was kind of a bummer because that's what we did growing up, my brother and I boogey-boarding, skim boarding, surfing, so much of that scene was tied to Jon, it's hard now to enjoy what was always my favorite spot. Now it's a tricky balance: what can we afford? who are we going to go with? where are we going to go? Nothing seems to work out quite the way we want. Someone is not happy, something keeps us from getting what we really need. There is a vacancy in my family, left by my brother's death, that I feel, even when I'm with my in laws, which, of course, they absolutely do not understand. For a couple years I accepted vacation as a sad time, a vacant time, a time to just survive. Not that I went with that mindset but once I was there and grief was with me I was forced back into it.
I know this is vanity, I know this is not seeing the forest for the trees, I know this is self absorbed but I'm caught now. I feel burned out from not getting away and so I have to get away but when I get away it takes me weeks to recover from the emptiness that I(we) experience. I'm pretty sure this is happening to Michele too, she hasn't been happy on a vacation for a long time but she doesn't attribute the cause as directly to grief as I do. Though to be honest I'm not sure grief is the only culprit.
The ennui and dissatisfaction started before Jon died, it may be actually a part of his life that is now carrying over and afflicting me (us). He was never satisfied with sitting still, there was always something better around the next corner, a little further up the beach, tomorrow, next week, next year, sometime other than now. I see that it was wrong yet it still afflicts me now. Even in moments when I try to appreciate the moment as it passes, I fail and end up feeling sorrow, discontent and even anger; this is not restful, not even a little bit.
What do I do? I don't know. Try again, different place, different time different people... same result?

Confessions of a recovering Pharisee

2009-06-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost said in one of his poems: "I never dared to be too radical when young, for fear that it would make me conservative when old." While I have no desire to join the ranks of George Soros or Al Franken, I have become fairly ashamed of the conservative label as well. Email forwards from right-wing relatives regularly trigger my gag reflex, and I find myself increasingly suspicious of dire warnings about the "liberal conspiracies." I remain in favor of religious freedom; I remain opposed to abortion as a form of birth control; I still think that folks ought to get married before they live together and I feel that, on some level, it would be damaging for our society to consider homosexuality normative behavior (though there is much careful line-walking to be done in this particular arena to avoid the evil of persecution and bigotry).
The problem is that I can no longer defend much of the status quo, and I never really bought a whole lot of the conservative agenda anyway (i.e. immigration policy, the death penalty, the war on drugs, and laissez faire economic policy). There is so much dogma flying around it begins to smell like dog crap. In the most recent forward from my dear Aunt an "outraged" woman from Beverly Hills, CA (Yes, THAT Beverly Hills) writes about feeling disenfranchised because she has to push a button to choose between English and Spanish, EVERY TIME she goes to the ATM! What is this country coming to? This woman, if she actually exists and is not a figment of the Internet imagination, purports to have a PHD and was writing in response to a Wall Street Journal article entitled "where is the outrage?"
Do we really need to even ask that question? It seems to me that everyone is outraged about something, they just don't agree on the target. It doesn't take long before I get my Christian Ethics dander up, something I fear too many Christians don't actually have. I think about the example of Christ, his compassion for the least of these, his daring acts of boundary breaking, his challenges to the status quo, and most of all his stubborn refusal to ever bear down on anyone like a jackhammer. His "outrage," his indignation was reserved exclusively for those who claimed to know all about God and who used the status quo as a shield for their own greed, pride and wickedness. Hello? Conservatives? You're the moneychangers! You're the Pharisees! And I suppose I have to submit a Mea Culpa, for I have been one of you all too often.
I don't thing Jesus can be classified a liberal either (I'll take that up some other day) but I do know he was tri-lingual (Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic) and I don't suppose he would have minded choosing English or Spanish at the ATM.

Seven Pounds

2009-06-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

We saw Seven Pounds last night, which was one of the saddest movies I have seen in a long time. It was one of those gut wrenching movies that, despite a redemptive message, is like being punched in the head repeatedly over the course of two hours. Will Smith has come a long way from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, he plays a character who is lost and numb with pain. His single purpose is to find seven people who are "worthy" of life changing gifts. He gives his beach house to a battered woman with two kids and that's the easiest of the redemptive acts.
Tim is wracked with guilt over the death of his wife and six others in a car accident he caused by trying text on his blackberry while driving (get that warning text-heads). He gives away one of his lungs, a kidney half of his liver and some bone marrow, finally he commits suicide and donates his eyes to a blind man and, most powerfully, his heart to a woman with whom he had fallen in love.
It's not really about suspense, you kind of get the idea about what he is doing though maybe you wonder why and how it's all going to work out. He is seeking redemption through giving of himself, though perhaps you might question whether he's actually sane in his methods. He's not really, he's suicidal, but you have to admire his discipline and timing. He's willing to live on and go through an obviously painful process of choosing who to help and how.
There is a flicker of doubt when he falls in love with Emily (the heart recipient) and you see him begin to ponder the possibility that she might get another heart donor and then they might actually begin to build a life together. However, when that seems dark he goes into the final phase.
His actual method of suicide is perhaps the most unlikely but also the most interesting plot point, he kills himself via jellyfish, specifically a box jellyfish, one of the world's most deadly animals. He keeps his executioner as a pet and finally gets into a bathtub with it. The neurotoxin takes quick and painful effect and Emily's transplant pager goes off. One life is given for the sake of another but I wonder if God intends us to make this kind of trade off?

It's alright Ma, I'm only bleeding

2009-06-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning in a bad mood. Everything was grating on my nerves, Jack and I had our first battle of wills before we were even dressed. He injured Caitlyn somehow or other and flat out refused to apologize. It seems like raising kids this age is one struggle after another, stretching into a seemingly endless battle, to try and make them act like the human beings you suspect they may be. I'm the hard ass of the family, I don't put up with disrespect and savagery. On mornings like this though I get borderline arbitrary. I've known enough folks who suffered through abuse to know that one of the hallmarks is that you never know what's going to set off the abuser, so even on my worst days I try to be pretty clear with my kids about what is going to get them in trouble.
I'm pretty old school about discipline: I believe in spanking and don't mind informing them when they do something dumb. I find myself using lines that made no sense to me when I was a kid: "I'll give you something to cry about!" or the best one ever: "Do you want a spanking?" Of course no one wants a spanking, it's the worst rhetorical question ever. Caitlyn is more afraid of a spanking than she is of the bogeyman, so I rarely have to follow through on the threat. Jack is stubborn and gets about one every other week or so. But having established the threat, and consequently the restraint to know when to use it, I'm pretty sure the current aversion to corporal punishment is rooted in the memory of many who grew up with parents who just didn't get it. My parents got it, I rarely got spanked but I knew the threat was there, when I got whooped I knew I had gone too far.
I see a lot of parents who have no control whatsoever over their kids, especially their boys, the boys sulk and pout when they get "timeout" but they don't have the fear of God (or Dad) in their hearts. My wife, who is educated in these things, tells me that I'm wrong, the experts tell me I'm wrong, but life tells me I'm right. The kids that I know who grew up to be what I consider well adjusted had parents who knew when to bang some heads, not abusive but not wishy washy either. The kids that I know who had breathless milquetoasts for parents, who grew up with timeout, taking deep breaths and stuff like that don't seem to manage as well when the world shows them the stick instead of the carrot.
One thing I do much different than the old school is make sure that my kids know I love them, when they're being good I never miss the chance to tell them so. Success doesn't really build self esteem unless they know failure is an option. When they pick right, when they do the right thing, when they stand up and succeed, they need to know you are proud. I think though that they need to know when the opposite happens too.

The space between stars

2009-05-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

Dark matter. Science that sounds more like science fiction. An inference made from anomalous data. The universe does not fit neatly into expected patterns. Yet this is something that any first year art student will explain: negative space is not nothing. In fact the proper use and proportions of negative space can make or break a photo, a painting or a drawing. Japanese art holds what is not there as dear as what is.
Why is it surprising to astronomers that, on a cosmic scale, nothingness exhibits properties of somethingness. Dark matter is suspected as the glue that holds the universe together, but we can't see it, or touch it or do any of the other things that prove something is real. Dark matter, dark energy, the dark side of the force, who says science doesn't involve faith?
Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated by the prospect, just like I believe that quarks gluons and other sub-subatomic particles exist. To me this just confirms what Hamlet said, "there is more in heaven and earth Horatio than was ever dreamt of in your philosophy." I love this religio-scientific stuff, I can watch the discovery channel for hours and listen to all kinds of wild speculation about the behavior of the universe or of lemurs, it doesn't make any difference to me. I can be interested and not driven mad because I know what causes it all: God. To me there is no disconnect between science and faith. I know that God breathed order out of chaos and hung the stars in the sky, all the rest is just details. And the real details are way more interesting than anything you find in Genesis, although no where near as concise and definitely not as believable from a purely empirical standpiont.
I mean, come on, how are we going to believe this stuff about dark matter and dark energy and somehow, randomly a planet was made and life evolved and people invented the idea of God and then killed the idea through pure intellectual power. Hold on a damned minute! We're not that smart, we're not that significant, unless God makes us so. Without God in the equation (so to speak) although I doubt any sane mathmetician would seek to derive the "God constant," we are nothing more than a peculiar, self destructive, and morose species of ape. With God we are special and put in a certain place at a certain time for certain reasons. Our presence means something, and our absence will mean something as well. Stars burn for a time and then burn out to become novas and black holes and, well, dark matter.
Our ancestors imagined that loved ones who passed away became stars in the sky, but perhaps we have a more important job to become the stuff that holds the universe together. Like everything else we do we'll have to rely on God for that too.

Roadkill

2009-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

We have a family of chipmunks living in a corner of our front yard. For the past several weeks I have enjoyed watching the little critters scurrying around the yard stuffing their cheeks with maple seeds and scooting back to their hole. This morning, just in a random glance out the front door, I saw one of them running down the edge of the lawn and then veer out into the road just as a large Chevy pickup came rolling down the hill. The result was pretty brutal but quick. I'm not sure the driver even saw the rodent, I know he probably didn't even feel a bump under his tire.
I can't say I was heartbroken but I was definitely a little sad. The death was pointless and unnoticed. If I hadn't been looking out the door, quite by accident, at that precise moment no one would have known what happened except God. The tire rolled, the critter twitched and then, nothing. A little while later I saw one of his relatives in the driveway gathering seeds oblivious to the fact that her husband or father or uncle had become an unrecognizable pile of fur and guts only 10 feet away. Look what I'm doing... I'm creating a little story, I'm assigning relationships, gender and character to chipmunks! Human beings, unlike chipmunks, mark the passing of our species, we record events, we have funerals, we remember.
We even struggle to find meaning in the meaningless. I began to ask myself questions like, why did that happen? And why did I see it? I began to imagine the "feelings" of the other chipmunks when "sparky" didn't come back to the hole. I felt a little silly until I remembered that God marks these passings, no matter how obscure or insignificant. Telling stories and creating meaning is one of the unique ways we are made in His image.
If I was an atheist, a nihilist, or even an existentialist, I might not have anything to say about the passing of sparky the chipmunk. But when I become aware of how all life connects, of how I was looking in exactly that place at exactly that moment, of how the narrative of that truck and that chipmunk intersected at precisely that moment, and of all the ways it might have been different but wasn't, I began to see the complexity of what God has done in creating beings who not only live and die but also find meaning in doing so.
In many ways we're no different than the chipmunk, we go about our gathering and living in our holes, occasionally we have unfortunate rendezvous with truck tires or landmines or serial killers. But unlike our small furry cousins we occasionally think, speak and tell what we witness.

Silence

2009-05-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Silence doesn't change, it always remains constant. The context in which we experience silence changes a great deal. For instance the silence of a house with sleeping children is wonderful, the silence of a winter night is peaceful, silence in prayer is reverent, but silence in a difficult conversation, silence when you get bad news, silence when the doctor comes to tell you the news, those can be painful and terrible silences.
The worst silence of all is the silence you experience when you really want an answer, whether it is from a person or God. You find yourself asking, demanding, even raging for some insight, some direction, and you get nothing. Not a no, not a yes, nothing. It's that scene in Cool Hand Luke, where Luke is standing in the middle of a thunderstorm, while all the other inmates are running for the truck. He's demanding something from God, "Love me, hate me, kill me, anything, just show me you're up there." We can want a response that bad, where even death is preferable to silence.
How deep is our need for God? That deep? Is it worth everything we have? Everything we are? My hopeful answer is yes, but many people do not agree. Luke stood in the middle of the storm boldly because he really didn't expect an answer. He wanted God to be there on some level but had the crushing intuition that He was not. Most of us wouldn't dare ask the question in that way more for the fear that the answer would be yes than no but the no is really the more frightening of the two options.
The "no" means the universe is run amok, that it's little more than chaos, that suffering and death have no ultimate meaning, that the order of our cosmos and our own lives is nothing more than an accident. It is an abyss that cannot be stared in for too long without going mad, thus most who call themselves atheists simply state, "yep, that's an abyss," and wander off into other areas of contemplation before the absence of God creates a unsolvable conundrum in their consciousness.
Those who believe in some kind of god, approach that void and see something there. Vague and undefined though it may be, it allows for one to look into the tremendous mystery without going completely insane. Silence becomes bearable, unknowing becomes acceptable, mystery becomes compelling.

late spring, drifting off to sleep

2009-05-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

Cool air comes in the window,
music plays softly,
mingles with nightsounds,
TV far enough away.

Just dark at 9:30
lots of people and things
stir in the pleasing dark,
it's easy to be content.

Easy to imagine the earth
spinning through endless dark
reflecting the light of a million stars
carrying billions of people, oblivious and busy.

The cool is not cold,
The dark is not blind,
The lonely feeling is not sad,
The memories, good and bad,
All welcome.

I Want My Beard Back!

2009-05-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

Most of the time when I make a decision to alter my appearance I'm fairly pleased with the results. When I grew my hair long in HS, it was cool, I had good hair, I looked a little too pretty for a boy but in general, the locks were a plus. Orange hair in college, my mom hated it but I loved it. Growing a beard like eight years ago, good choice, really good choice apparently. I found out this morning just how good a choice it was. I mentioned to my wife that it was time for a trim, just making conversation, you know, nothing controversial. I mentioned that perhaps it was time to shave the sides and just go with the goatee, like last summer. So she says, "you ought to shave the whole thing."
Now I knew this wasn't a good idea. I've seen pictures of myself before I grew the beard and I always think, "wow good choice to grow a beard." Beards don't work for everyone but there are some people who just need facial hair: Gandalf the Gray, Tom Selleck, Lemmy from Motorhead, and, apparently, me. I don't have a great beard, I don't let it get too long, I keep it trimmed up and not too bushy. But without it I look way too young, way too fat (which, okay, I am too fat but the beard at least covered up the double chin and at least de-emphasized the jowls). I feel naked and it's not just that I'm not used to it, it really looks bad. I walk by a mirror and wonder who that dork is and then quickly realize it's me.
My kids keep laughing at me and telling me how silly I look, even Michele, whose idea this was in the first place has completely backpedaled and decided that smooth feeling really isn't that great. Which just goes to show you what women can make you do if they try. She just made some sexy comments about how she used to like it when my face was all smooth and clean shaven and off I go to shave off a facial feature that I had since 2002. My kids had never seen me without it, I forgot what the hell I looked like without it. My chin whiskers make my face look longer and thinner, they hide way too much white flesh, they puff out and make my chin look, well... present.
A beard may not really make you wise but it helps you not look like a fool. I will be returning to the realm of facial fur as soon as follicularly possible.

Malaise: The Condiment of the 21st Century

2009-05-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

The fact of the matter is that, for most of human history, there was way too much suffering to ever get bored. Being bored was a luxury reserved for the aristocracy, until finally, after Victorian society had just about perfected the demeanor of detached ennui, the peasants and freemen began to revolt and start creating democracies. America threw off Britain, France beheaded some Louis or other, and eventually even God couldn't save the queen from Parliamentary rule of law (though I suspect He probably didn't want to).
What we have earned, in the long run, is the right to be vaguely dissatisfied with just about everything. Despite the fact that we have a staggering array of entertainment options, despite the fact that education, information and conversation are facilitated by an almost instantaneous network, despite the fact that anyone and everyone can have space to say and post whatever they want (absolutely free) on a personal blog, we are still bored and alienated. What's worse is that we don't exactly know why.
We could get angry about a lot of things: corrupt and ineffective politicians, health care, the economy, buyouts and bailouts, unemployment, injustice, starving children, a bipolar legal system that cracks down on "poor" crime and winks and nods at all but a very few cases of "rich" crime, you name it, we could, and maybe should, storm the Bastille any day now. But we don't, because we have cable, internet and a Wii. I can channel all my righteous outrage playing Halo and watching UFC.
When we look at history, we somehow convince ourselves that people who lived without modern conveniences were poor miserable wretches and in some ways this was probably true. They certainly lived harder lives and mostly died younger but when you read their account of the whole deal, or if you look honestly at the living fossil record that is the Amish, you find that, in fact they are not anywhere near as miserable as your average suburbanite. I don't mean to idealize the past, there certainly were drawbacks but the trials had names, sometimes terrifying ones (i.e. The Black Death). If someone lost their wife in childbirth and he was moping around feeling sorry for himself at least he knew why, and so did the rest of the community therefore they could help, or at least grieve with him.
When we grieve now we grieve alone, when we suffer we often can't say why, our trials sneak up on us in back alleys, they have no names and bystanders who see us struggling with them figure it's none of their business. Malaise has become a way of life, and mostly we accept it the way that our ancestors accepted leprosy and syphilis: as long as it happens to someone else, what can we do? Just don't bring it near me.
Community is a possible solution, but not just any community. To combat malaise a community would need roots and traditions as well as the ability to adapt and the motivation to give a shit (in other words care). In community you can be busy with things that aren't just about you, that aren't just about performing some pointless activity in order to collect a paycheck. Being involved and engaged in community is different from just being busy. You can be bored and busy at the same time, believe me, I've done it. Over functioning will not ward off malaise it will only drive you nuts: you'll keep asking yourself why you're not fulfilled and satisfied despite your six figure income, you'll wonder why you never seem to get anything done in a 70 hour workweek, but these questions are punching air, there is nothing solid to hit.
Being engaged in a community that has a center and a foundation that is non-transient is the only answer. The Church and, honestly, most religions give us access to this kind of community. As a Christian I want to say that being a disciple of Jesus Christ is the best way but that would be introducing a certain value judgment and a consideration of salvation, which is way too long and complicated for this blog. Maybe some other time.

The Misfits

2009-05-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

"Who is in need of a doctor?" - Jesus

Liberation theology has something right: God loves the disenfranchised and the oppressed. The place where most stripes of liberation theology go wrong is in defining the parameters of disenfranchisement too narrowly. The fact of the matter is that we all feel like misfits at some point, some of us even feel that way most acutely in church. Churches, as human societies, are guilty of creating the same cliques and insider networks as any other social group and in doing so we are failing to pay attention to the way God actually works. God never plays the front runner, even though, by most of our understanding, that is always what He is.
God picks the youngest son, the widow, the foreigner, the pilgrim, the stranger, the leper, the woman (in the ancient world that was a serious disadvantage), in short God picks anyone who is not part of the "in crowd." Here's the thing though, at some point that is everyone; rich, poor, smart, stupid, strong, weak, I don't care who you are, at some point you have felt alienated (that means left out for anyone who is vocabulary challenged). The good news is that when the world rejects you harshly you have the greatest chance to feel God's unfailing love. Sure, you can say that God loves us all the time, He certainly does, but what does that matter if we don't know it. Brokenness allows us to feel God's presence; like an injured child searches for Mommy or Daddy, we look for God when life crushes us.
The problem is that, as a culture, we are losing touch with the God stones. Imagine if you would the most primitive pagan place of worship, probably a circle of stones or perhaps even a small pile of rocks. Whatever configuration, this is a place where the gods are present, and that presence is understood by the people. Many pagans were pantheists that saw gods in everything, yet they still constructed idols and altars because they needed to be able to locate their gods, even the gods of the sky and water. Now that we have been introduced to the One True God through the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus Christ, we still need our God stones. We need something to touch and hold on to that will constantly and effectively remind us that God is not an empty idol.
But we are losing our stones (take that however you want). We are intentionally throwing away the things that keep us in touch with God and his persistent involvement with losers like us. Quite frankly, when I read the Torah, I can't escape the fact that most of the characters, except God, are complete ass-heads. Going back to Abraham himself, the people God chooses are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. Jacob, the eponymous ancestor of Israel, the father of the twelve tribes, is pretty undeniably an asshole: he lies, he cheats, he steals, he plays favorites in his family and sows all sorts of dissension and jealousy, his sons are completely out of control and in the end he can't even feed his family. But God provides for them and raises them up into a great nation. Let's not even talk about David.
Lest I be accused of being too hard on the Hebrews, the New Testament doesn't get any better. Jesus doesn't choose scholars and leaders to be his apostles, he chooses fishermen and tax collectors and one who doesn't even graduate from disciple school. It's funny, and perhaps mysterious, how the church has gotten a reputation for being a society of snobs and prigs. Maybe it's just an inevitable result of long tradition, liturgy and the seriousness of living our faith in general that gives the impression that we're the best and the brightest, rather than the poor and needy and broken in spirit.

Generation ?

2009-05-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

Teenage angst has paid off well,

Now I'm bored and old.

-Nirvana, Serve the Servants

Jack played his first organized sport last night, tee ball at the elementary school. The adults in charge have brilliantly removed all semblance of competition short of not having teams at all. Tee ball has never been what you might call cut-throat but now there is no score, there are no outs, everyone gets to bat in every inning, and no one loses. I'm sure child psychologists will say that this sort of thing is good for the kids but it calls me to consider what the point of all this might be. I'm quite sure I can get Jack and Cate more exercise in our backyard playing a loosely structured variety of games in the style of calvinball (see Calvin and Hobbes for a definition). I'm pretty sure that the kids have very little concept of team because, quite frankly, there is nothing in this so called sport that requires teamwork. In the field you pretty much just stand there until the ball comes your way, then you chase it, or don't, it really doesn't matter. You don't try to tag anyone out or throw the ball to a base or anything, every hit is a base hit, every kid is a "winner," and most everyone is bored stiff.
Jack also suffered his first sports related injury, confirming and adding a new twist to our family heritage of being bad at organized athletic pursuits. He scratched his left cornea on a wire wicket which was holding a sign marked with a number. These numbered signs tell the young players where to stand and allow for a rotation that lends the game about its only excitement: after each at bat the players rotate one position in the field, thus allowing everyone to field every position once an inning. This amounts to mass confusion, particularly in a game where there is no real objective to fielding anyway and bases are little more than mysterious, white cushions in the dirt. So you put a bunch of confused five year olds in a field with three of these strange cushions and 10 little white signs with numbers and what do you think they're going to do? Of course, they start taking things apart, and if possible, poking each other with them, I think just to stay awake.
I vaguely remember playing tee ball, I'm sure it was not this boring, in fact I remember being confused and a little scared, there was some element of danger in flying bats and balls but there were no sharp wires sticking out of the ground. I think the numbers are a good idea but there needs to be some purpose for them. Sure, if there are winners, then there have to be losers but that dynamic sets up a certain motivation to pay attention, which five year olds need desperately. I have observed in raising kids that idle hands are indeed the devil's playground and I always find myself fighting the urge to join in my generation's preoccupation with over-protection of our children. I know they need to be kids and as much as I hate trips to the emergency room I have no inclination to try and keep Jack in a bubble.
Things like scratched corneas and broken arms haunt the dreams of many of my contemporaries. They feel like bad parents when their kids get hurt. On the contrary, if my son gets hurt in the process of a sport or something he enjoys, then I say, "so be it." The thing is, if we're going to take that risk, let's at least make it fun, let's let kids learn how to win and how to lose, let's unleash the chaos of five year olds chasing each other around with a ball, I think modern medicine is prepared to help us with the consequences.
I know that my generation suffers from abandonment issues and anxiety disorders. We watched our parents trade in their Utopian dreams for jobs selling insurance, we saw the bedrock of the nuclear family get blasted into shit soup, we were latchkey, shared custody, video game junkie kids. Now we're trying way too hard to give our kids the perfect childhood that we read about in books from the 1950's. But that childhood was unsafe, kids drowned in quarries, they shot themselves in the eye with BB guns, they pinched their fingers in erector sets, they dealt with bullies, repression and racism, it was far from perfect. Imperfection defines who we are; it gives us something to work on and keeps legions of therapists and counselors in business (not to mention legal and illegal pharmaceutical industries).
So I think I let Jack keep playing tee ball (when his eye heals) and just hope that he doesn't remember how lame it was until he watches his kids playing with a padded marshmallow, in full pads on one of those giant rubber mats.

A Gracious Sabbath

2009-05-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

Surrounded by cold rain; an IV drip for a thirsty land.
Things have started to grow; resurrection is taking hold.
Beginnings are all around; the season of endings has yet to begin.
A little time here and there; to grow roots, or to appreciate place.
Graduations, weddings, lilies, azaleas; still ahead.
Seasons of life ready to erupt; prefigured by daffodils.

If only we have space to breathe between raindrops;
If only we have time to rest between storms;
If only we have time to live between birth and death.

The sun will come out tommorrow; bet your bottom dollar.
Don't despair the rain; it can't rain all the time.
But don't forget to let it go; bid fond farewell.
Warmth feels sweeter on rain and tear soaked faces.
Time together is more blessed among those who grieve.
A small light is more profound in pitch dark.

Let it shine, shine, shine.

Being Dad

2009-04-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

Jack got a note sent home from school today. I always love those: crimes and misdemeanors in the world of a five year old. Apparently he knocked over someones block building three times despite a time out and other privilege revocation. I'm all about supporting the teacher in her efforts to keep order in the class, so I gave him a stern talking to and sent him to his room. The funny part was that he seemed utterly flabbergasted that I found out so quickly about his bad behavior, I read him the note, leaving out the part that said, "this is not normal for Jack."
So he was having a bad day, now as his Dad, I am honor bound to make it worse. There are definitely days where I feel like knocking someones blocks down for no reason. He has been showing these little flashes of belligerence lately, he gets this intense look on his face, which I am fairly sure is mimicking my angry face, and he goes into unreasonable mode. He will not listen, he will not respond until you make it worth his while.
Both our kids got a bit of the stubbornness of their parents but I think Jack is more like me, he shuts everything out. Caitlyn lets the drama fly with great passion. I know that somewhere in that whole situation he feels that he was treated unfairly, maybe the first time he knocked the blocks down, maybe the third time, maybe when his teacher took away his line leader duties, maybe when I sent him to his room. Wherever it was, once we get our justice issues tweaked, we're fairly hard to deal with.
Sorry, Miss Hopper, I'll do what I can.

A Brighter Day

2009-04-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

It's been raining all week but right now the sun is shining. Early spring in Western PA is sort of a cruel beast; some days it's so nice it almost makes you weep for joy, most days it just makes you want curl up in the fetal position and watch daytime T.V. (which makes suicide seem like a sane option). Maybe it's just all those Celtic bloods mingling in my veins, but I feel good under a gray sky. Scotch, Irish, Welsh, somewhere in my genetic code it says, you ought to live on a big, rain soaked island. There's something to be said for this disposition, it makes one stoic and it is essentially the impulse that created the great empires of the world. Thus modern society is probably most indebted to the cold, wet climates of northern Europe, it makes people miserable enough to try and do something about it. Notice that the kings of Tahiti and Indonesia were always pretty much content to rule their islands and maybe a few others.
If you can survive wearing a loin cloth and fishing from a dugout canoe, why in the hell would you want to change? If you can prosper, get a pretty wife (or two), and raise a whole gaggle of children, why do you need to discover electricity, invent the internal combustion engine, or run investment banks. Most of the wonders of modern technology and a whole lot of the world's problems are caused by people whose ancestors were stupid enough to try to live in an unpleasant climate. I can't figure it out; the tropics don't seem that crowded.
I guess there's a reason for it. My progenitors must have thought, "it's just too darn hot here, let's go that way," and pointed North. I suspect the Welsh, Irish and Scottish parts of my family tree just kept moving until they ran out of places to go (at least until they figured out how to get to Iceland). When they settled down they began to see the rugged beauty of the landscape, they came to appreciate the somber beauty of rain and fog. God has blessed the Celtic people with the ability to endure and even love the drear of winter and spring and live on the fuel of a few sunny days here and there. It's a certain temperament but that sun does feel good.