Subversive Orthodoxy

In the Land of Bottoms

2011-03-11T05:33:00.000-08:00

A score of words and deeds issue from me daily of which I am not the master. They are begotten of weakness and born of shame. I cannot assume the elevation I ought...for want of sufficient bottom in my nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals

I have shared with close friends my "on again off again" encounters with depression. Profoundly polar, it appears my deep incessant hunger for openness and responsiveness to life, beauty, community and God are equally informed by this chronic loss of heart. In recent months I have taken off a significant amount of weight. As a poet, I am always looking for the spiritual metaphor hidden in my response & interpretation of the world or reality. Depression in its most profound sense usually brings with it a "weightiness of soul." This mass of sorrow takes on an actual volume in the soul. Full of this empty, normally fluid emotions now are frozen and muted. There are times when I feel like a thousand pound deer caught in the headlights. No act or engagement with others makes sense. Why? I have exhausted all my energies, my perceptions, my skills, my mental & emotional acumen in regards to life and it is still out of my control.

The mere fact that everything changes remains a bone in my throat. The impermanence of the outer world is more than tiresome. It often mocks me with ceaseless shifting and endless meandering to places not on my planned-out maps. These were not my dreams for this life. This is not the place I had decided to create for myself.

In this new place I discover once again, the limitedness of my own ability to fit in, to know how to act, to know what to feel, to actually know who to be. I am confronted once again with the very vapor-like nature of my sense of self. I thought I was so together, so intelligent, so wise, so loving. Now, in a new place, a new time, with a new people, I find my heart freezing up in resentment and fear. I feel the very edges of my sense of self melting away and I feel a sense of shame.

Why can my soul go so high in moments of aesthetic bliss and wonder and yet feel so small and weak in the dark new places of change? Growing up in a Christian holiness tradition (this is the perspective that one can be sinlessly perfect), I found very early on in my teen years an overwhelming impression of anxiety & guilt. Very early on I knew I was not the airy, light, spiritually victorious person I was being raised & groomed to be. My inclinations towards earthiness & the love of music (especially R & B) informed me even in budding adolescent childhood that some part of my journey involved going deep as well as going high. In fact, the way of depth intrigued me more than the way of light, white, strength and power. I sensed in my weakness a doorway facing heaven that is easily missed in seeking a spiritual glow & knowledge of God.

It is interesting that Emerson sensed he did not have sufficient tools and inner strength to allow his soul to move in and about the darker parts of his heart. He knew his shame and guilt were telling him something. He was not sure what. God is trying to speak to me through this loss of heart. Given my history and access to spiritual knowledge, hubris disguised as love and care and wisdom are my nemesis. As Thomas Moore says, "Shame corrects the hubris of the spiritual ascent." Any pastor knows that his ministry if often spilt between the Sunday morning service and the weekday counseling session in a private room. This conversation with pastors in the counseling room represents the Church's underworld. This is the sin we refuse to repent of, this is the fear we run from, this is the pain we avoid, this is the shame we refuse to embrace, this is the guilt we project on others, and yet in this place we encounter the proper love of self needed to properly engage the vicissitudes of life. And yet the torturous patterns of personality and soul are often not only neglected but seen as an optional or even an avoidable bother.

I am naive if I do not see the darker side of my depression. As much as I know the love of the Father is the ultimate antidote to this noonday demon or sickness of soul, I also know the lurking self-absorption hidden in depression's cycles. To enter the story my loss of heart is telling me is to know & feel the fluid feelings running deep under the glacier I call my persona or public self. To actually be as vulnerable as my feelings are telling me they are is to fall apart on some level. Within these stories lie uncertainty, sorrow, anger, helplessness and fear. Hidden in the chapters yet to be published also awaits my own complicity, my own broken nature inclined to blame and yet avoid any responsibility for change, for life, for forgiveness.

When my sadness is overwhelming I know I am in need of a great emptying. My very heart is to full of emptiness. My very heart knows pain beyond its ability to feel it. I must share this knowledge. I must weep together with others. I must tell someone of my overwhelment.

Is there a different dialect to the Spirit's voice in "the land of the bottoms?" When will I stop seeing the world before me as mere meaningless interferences? When will I regard the unsettled self as a benevolence of soul offered as a gift?

I am always amazed at the shear idiosyncratic complexity of the friends that are in my life. And yet I want my own life to be simple and uncluttered. I want my engagement of life and the Lord to be free of sorrow and sadness. I have had my fill of this emotion thank you!. And yet Scripture is replete with images of the ongoing spiritual warfare involved in the blossoming and fulfillment of the call upon one's life. The way of our Savior and the Cross is wrought with this kind of darkness and travail.

So as I feel this loss of heart, this sense of transgressing social expectations (often my own unexpressed projections), and the failure of my plans, my ideals, my own sense of righteousness and self, I discover much is rising up from this weakness and shame. Like Emerson I am in the "land of the bottoms" and I am seeking the engulfment of the Savior. I will sit in this vulnerability today. I will let the fire of the Spirit burn the chaff and stubble and create embers to warm my chillier traits. In this, and out of this I pray I do fall completely into the arms of God and as Bonheoffer realized, one can ..."take seriously, not our own suffering, but those of God in the world."

Does Religion Drive Us Mad?

2009-10-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

A Response to Franky Schaeffer's book Crazy for God

Recently I came across an interview with Franky Schaeffer, the son of renowned Evangelical philosopher and teacher Francis Schaeffer. The interview was a brief segment on a cable talk show. If I interpret bias and slant with any degree of accuracy, this particular segment was positioned to malign and undermine what many call the “religious right.” I have read a few books of Franky’s in recent years so I was prepared for his “unique” read on the remnants of the Moral Majority but I was not prepared for the observable primal delivery of his rant.

As I said, I was prepared for the ideological placement of Schaeffer’s story but was not prepared for the emotive spillage that observably overshot the host’s intentions. I am sure she was rejoicing in the scathing and pointed barbs Schaeffer hurled at Evangelicals and yet at some point it seemed like his inner vitriol was not serving her audience. I can only imagine the stereotype many have about Evangelicals and Franky’s read certainly more than substantiated those existing prejudices. But the intellectual disdain many project on Evangelicals is much more ideological and an underlying distrust of religion in general than some personal encounter with the shadow side of faith. Schaeffer’s bearing was noticeably tense and restless. His speech was flighty, inordinately intense and blunt.

Schaffer’s latest book Crazy for God was undoubtedly the impetus behind the producers booking Franky and he wasted no time in cutting to the chase. The Rachel Maddow Show host branded as “mind over chatter” so her preferential style of dialogue is low key and riddled with humorous irony. There was no humor in Franky’s weigh in and the irony was probably lost on most with the exception of a few disaffected Evangelicals. But Franky kept on.

He was a man on a mission and he did not merely wade into the water but belly flopped off the high dive and called Evangelicals “the village idiots” of the religious world and called the eschatological fiction of LaHaye & Jenkins’s Left Behind series a dangerous narrative that allowed this particular enclave to demonize most of the world and elevate their own status in God’s eyes. I knew this was much more information than Maddow needed or wanted but Franky has never been one to fit into any molds. He kept on.

It appeared that at some point she just relented to his denunciation and let him go as his deep-rooted loathing seemed over the top even for her most ardent Evangelical and Fundamentalist haters. This was a rage & woundedness that was aimed at someone and something beyond mere political & ideological differences. This was a profound & uneasy disclosure for reasons I would have to explore to begin to empathize let alone understand or critique.

The cable news world is a pimp for authors, politicians, activists, and specialist of all ilks. It sets the stage for the worst in all of us to emerge and Franky was used as a shill like so many others who take their Wharholesque 10 minutes of fame with an unbridled zeal and unabashed self seeking. It is equally & somehow voyeuristically fascinating. We are drawn to the seething edge of another’s wounds. It touches something locked away in our own unspoken diatribe. We listen to “the other” for we feel the same rage. We feel the same confusion.

From the opening response to Rachel Maddow’s initial question it was apparent and palpable that this was a man working out his life on camera. This may be the attraction with reality TV. We get that in many cases the unscripted nature of the program releases a subterranean tributary that can cascade a person into a deeply human experience right before our eyes. This is not acting. This is real. And I could see that happening with Franky. The host touched a rivulet most likely hidden until the convergence of Franky’s emotions, the awareness of millions of viewers, and the years of desiring a platform converged & his invective became a tirade. Deeply animated and direct, Franky was not talking to Rachel or her audience. He was talking to his supposed perpetrators. He was talking to his father’s shadow; his mother’s idealized sense of calling and purpose. He was working out in front of humanity the role of being a son to parents who loomed large on the historical landscape especially for those in the Evangelical camp.

I am sure her producers were aware of Crazy for God’s premise and felt Schaeffer would offer up a reasoned and balanced view of this group. I am sure their hope was he would deliver a substantial wound to the heart of the movement. That is what cable does best. Set up the court, pick the jury, judge the accused and offer a verdict and then hang them openly. This is daily fare for this genre of news spectacle. But Schaeffer was having none of it. His emotional and intellectual biorhythms were on a different lunar cycle and he was going to deliver his testimony regardless of the jury. This was a man who wrote a book ostensibly about his feelings regarding this group called Evangelicals and specifically his life as the son of a famous couple in Francis & Edith Schaeffer. Rachel and producers brought him on to articulate his position and critique of the Christian right and although his vitriol certainly splashed on to anyone in that vicinity, his fury was directed and intended for more than an amorphous faction in the world of religious pluralism. This was a man who more than estranged from his past was now actively speaking out against their dangerous ideologies and openly bore upon his soul the scars of their abuse. He needed no baiting. He needed no clarification of his regard for this group. He was angry and he knew why.

It has been my experience that five minutes of cable generally gives me just enough data to create more confusion surrounding an issue. But in Franky’s case I think I got his message loud & clear. This exchange or depositing if you will was not ideological or even theological at its core. This was penance and grief work all rolled into one. This was a man conflicted and the cable news format gave him just enough windows to open a storm of unrehearsed and misdirected accusations. A sacred sorrow offered up in the profane setting of infotainment becomes dramatic display and it was in that light that the entire segment became seared into my mind. As soon as I was near a bookstore I bought the book. I hoped its examination might give me insight into this man’s interview which became his soul’s deposition, a declaration of revenge and reconciliation poured out as proof that this group called Evangelicals were more than bothersome. Some of the people responsible for much of the current town hall angst and outrage were insidious and ultimately unredeemable. It was the delivery of that ultimate verdict that touched some long silenced sting harbored in my own soul. That night I saw myself in Franky & it longed for its naming.

Recently an acquaintance released a book entitled The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. I was immediately drawn to the title and knowing what I think know of this man, surmised there would be some comfort in his journey into the spirituality of questioning. In retrospect, I imagine my thoughts were drawn to David Dark’s writing because I knew his observations would bring respite to my weary quandary filled soul. I was drawn to Franky’s Crazy for God for totally different reasons. There was a pain and unresolvedness in this man’s life and writing that beckoned the darker ghosts of my own past. While David Dark’s work was personal in part, its thrust was culturally interpretive and theological. He is a master at drawing together seemingly disparate and paradoxical happenings and issues and weaving them into an acceptable account. In The Sacredness of Questioning Everything there was a man who was offering a grid or flexible net if you will for holding & addressing the questions of life.

Schaeffer’s intent and delivery were far more amorphous and disquieting. Franky’s writing seemed more confessional, almost like a Christian tell-all. It is a hard book to categorize, if one even needs this assistance, and even harder to lay down after you picked it up. I read the book in two settings. That should tell you something. I devoured the book and on nearly every other page found myself nodding inwardly, smiling outwardly, making notes along the edges of the paragraphs in solidarity, disgust and occasionally experiencing a deep sense of violation. Franky’s, his parent’s and even my own boundaries seemed to be tossed aside for some odd confessional expedition meets witch hunt. I was not sure who or what he was pursuing at times but I felt the sweat on his temple, the heavy breathing of the chase, and the final resignation of discovering once again it was his own soul he met in the lonely darkness of acrimony and resentment.

What I did glean from Schaeffer’s work was insight into the man. I am not sure that was his intention but I felt his sorrow and grief on every page. I sensed his questions that by now had become encrusted and calcified into some inner posture he deemed intellectual and aesthetic. This was art he was offering up I am sure he announced to his inner critic. Maybe it was or is. I don’t feel qualified to assess that but much of the manuscript seemed like a man defending his current self-protected and defensive position on life, faith, and his past. Here was a man at odds with himself over the explanation of his life. Stuck on anger, his tears were held for fear of once again being abandoned. Here was a man whose very victimhood shamed him even more and upped the ante on condemnation. He was stuck in the victim-punishment stage of life & couldn’t get out.

I can imagine Franky’s editors working relentlessly to discover some over arching narrative or life message that connected all the pages but for me the book was nearly like a confessional diary. There was no admission of guilt but page after page of embedded denial. This was a man who was working out his life on the page and his inner dislocation made the spatial nature of his writing lack context and humanity. It was not robotic or clichéd but fragmented and emotionally scattered. It was if his history was still held hostage somewhere in the universe & he was imagining what it might look like but unsure of its authenticity. And oh does Franky desire authenticity. He wants his artistic confessions to be redemptive for their honest appraisals of life, love, sexuality and the burden writers have to tell the “real” truth. Yet there was something persistently unsayable that was holding his soul’s voice at bay. There was something unacknowledged that pushed him to and fro looking for the missing conversations. He was broken but not broken open.

Upon completion of the book and a reviewing of the cable show it struck me as to the extremely embedded sense of innocence lost in Franky. This was a man who sorely wanted to believe but had way too much information to the contrary to allow that act to emerge without major grief. All through the book I felt an overwhelming sorrow even in the segments meant to be joyful or titillating. The placement of certain memories and reminiscing moments felt forced and arbitrary. None of the emotional vignettes dug deep enough into a larger “we” to give me a sense he knew I was just like him. In fact, I felt what may be the core of unacknowledged arrogance in writing on many of the pages. Arrogance is a posture my own soul knows well. I find it riddled throughout my journey, always standing at the threshold of every new healing. Each time I put forth my suffering as mine & mine alone. Each time I build a story out of my pain that gives me the right to demand of life some kind of repayment. Each time I weary my soul with ego and wounded demands for justice. It was Franky’s damaged soul that bore his conceit. It was his early emotional impairment that kept him self-absorbed, looking for himself in himself. He must discover the artist his parents could really love and admire. He must.

As one who identified with much of his hurt, I did not identify with his victimhood. Still a casualty, Franky’s naming drained a deeper beauty his soul has to offer but here-to-for remained untapped. It seemed clear to me why his biographical historicity tied him to his shadow. This was a man who relived over and over again the lack of love, the disloyalty and self seeking of his parents and adults while he was left to his own childhood and teenage devices. This was a man still standing outside the camp (L’Abri) waiting for the father to run to him or at least call out to him. This was a man whose childhood was ignored in the larger callings of zealous believers who assumed God would cover all the bases of child rearing while they attended to “higher” matters.

Reconciliation is an infrequently preached message in the churches I have attended over the years. Evangelicals believe in salvation and that act is imbued with such restorative power in regards to one’s life in & towards God, it may be seen as the only volitional act a Christian need ultimately do in this life. In other words, reconciliation has already taken place so any of the unresolvedness, the questioning, the sense of loss and imperfection are minor irritations at best and should be ignored to get on with the real stuff in life.

Throughout the book, while Franky raged against Evangelicals, there arose in me a deep sense of ambivalence. I have spent a life time with “these people.” Of course I feel a kinship with the friends and families with which I worship. Of course I feel a deep sense of agreement around theological and cosmological issues of life and faith. We are in fact fellow Christ followers. But Schaeffer’s tirade touched some long ignored or buried emotional uncertainty regarding my place in this community. I too have often felt uneasy and unsure about my identity and likeness to this enclave that spoke into so much of the culture wars. Often I have felt a deep embarrassment and even sadness in the demeanor & rhetoric of my brothers and sisters as they spoke to the world without the camp. Many times I gave them a pass on how they dealt with a person inside the walls of faith as it were while castigating with stridency someone on the “outside.” Just the metaphoric choice of the word walls tells me something as I read back this blog. What are we keeping in and what are we keeping out?

In recent months since a new president has come into office, I have been alarmed at the tenor of what I have come to call “political speech” by self proclaimed Christians. Fueled by media ideologues and town hall meeting chaos, a lot has been said by those referring to themselves as Christians and would most likely call themselves the Christian Right. I have found the spectacle of this emerging troubling to say the least. So often the vitriol seems to belie the very heart and posture of the Gospel and our Lord Jesus Christ. But….this is my family: weird uncles, judgmental aunties, and dysfunctional brothers and sisters. It is all part of loving and living. I know my own bigotry and fear so I offer up as much grace as I am given and open to receive.

But Franky is a brother too. Well at least to me he is. He may feel estranged, he may feel abandoned, he may be full of questions he no longer even acknowledges, but he is still a brother. These observations and assertions contained in this writing may very well be as much for me as Franky. I too know the nagging sense of unease and dislocation. I am as well the son of a larger than life father who was an author, preacher, and ministry leader for thousands of people. During my childhood years I seldom saw my father as he was ensconced in ministry, preoccupied with the challenges of shepherding the flock. My mother, of course felt called to assist him, so my sister & I raised ourselves: literally. I get the chill of a large man’s shadow. I get the loneliness of being forgotten after everyone else has been comforted. I get the seeming emptiness of waiting outside the camp longing for my name to be called and sadly never hearing that calling. At least by my parents.

At the end of Franky’s book he haltingly attempts to wrap his bitter grief into a yet to be realized encounter with awe and wonder as embodied by the Greek Orthodox Church. Most of the book is void of spiritualizing and in the final moments he seems to reach out for a life line, a home for his hungry heart. Although on the edge of this world of faith (or so it seemed) he does feel it calling him into this deeper metaphor out of which God will make Himself known. At this point in Franky’s life, the Father seems so distant and aloof.

All through the book & ostensibly his life, Frank and his parents bonded around art. They spent most of intimacy’s currency at museums, art shows, nature walks, and late night free flowing discussions with hundreds of “cultural creatives” that frequented L’Abri back in the 60’s and 70’s. It makes sense to me that he has spent a life time trying to be the artistic genius he needed to be to call out the desire in his parents he so longed to foster and embody. My first encounter with Francis, his father, was in the series of lectures entitled “How Then Should We live?” Single handedly that series offered to baby boomers an aesthetic life line to a Church still under the shadow of iconoclasm. We had no pictures to go with our stories. We had no images to serve as doorways into metaphoric grandeur. We were a people of famished imaginations.

Franky was raised on beauty. Franky was encouraged to picture his world with wonder. Franky was subtly told to be Van Gogh or Picasso while I was told to be Wesley or Moody. Franky took on himself all the reticence and personal sense of dislocation his parents had with words, theology, and propositional truth and unknowingly deemed it a small burden to displace or carry. He had no idea what it would cost him some years down the road as an adult. During the “Moral Majority” period Franky and Francis discovered the shaky bond and sense of community shared by famous Christians who had much too lose in being misunderstood or deemed liberal. This was certainly not about beauty or goodness for that matter. This was about truth, who understood it, who could offer it, and ultimately who could own and defend it. This was an iconoclastic tearing down of secular images and had little or nothing to do with Franky’s early idyllic years at L’Abri discussing faith, values, art history and aesthetics. This was about power and the direction of a nation.

Franky got taken to school. This was Evangelicals meets the Great Evil One –Liberalism! This was a cosmic smack down way more heady and full of ego that Franky was groomed to endure. It appears he is yet to really embrace the duplicity here in the historic retelling and naiveté about his own motives. This neglected or unfinished inner work usually fosters revisionism of the highest order. But maybe he has unveiled his own duplicity and that is the rub. How can he forgive himself for leading his own father directly into the very center of the storm that could destroy his father’s legacy of art and beauty and root his primary historical influence in the rancor of the culture wars and the political infighting of a Church capitulated to nationalism and an unspoken desire for power and control?

As my own story nudges me towards winter, much like Schaeffer, as a writer, I am trying to fill in the grief on memories held for decades. My guess is that Franky longs to be a “writer” specifically because he has way too many pictures in his head and not enough language or purposeful language to make sense of what he has seen and experienced. He is still back at L’Abri chatting with the forces and gods of change as if they were visiting for the weekend and he could ultimately hand them over to his father after he charmed them with his wit and creativity.

And his father did have words. His father did have some boundaries, some theological foundations, and some bottom line ways of naming he would allow to form and inform him of the ultimate truth. Franky does not remember that part for some reason. I do not know why.

I am haunted often by Wittgenstein’s statement,” Language precedes reality.” I take that to mean the arduous task of naming, renaming, and thickening the very way we speak about ourselves, others, and the world in which we live is essential to navigate any awareness of ourselves and the world. Words surely matter. Throughout the book Franky speaks over and over again of the need to write, the struggles of being an author and the desire to become a better writer. He is beginning to grasp the price his soul paid for the cultural wars in which he served. Much like a soldier coming back from war with traumatic stress so powerful it crowds out the normal everydayness of the world, Franky seems unable to be truly present. He is always caught up and lost in some grandiose narrative hanging above his life. Like an alien abduction, he has been captured and held hostage. During the Moral Majority years he was able to live above earth’s atmosphere in this grandiose idealized world of untested ideas which were going to change the world. But that excursion into messianic political answers had very high price tag as well. He may have just been longing to be with and around his father and thought promoting his father during this time would be a way to draw close and be desired by his parents.

It is clear in retrospect he had little to no inkling as to the impact the culture wars would have on him, his father, his father’s legacy and his own role in that chronicling. The book is in part repentance to or at anyone who saw Franky’s divided energy promote his father & this view of the world he now believes malevolent and crazy. The gathering of all these Evangelicals with political aspirations much more deeply entrenched in their theology and cosmology than he, used both Francis and Franky. The Falwell’s and the Robertsons knew why they were there. They had counted the cost, prepared for the battle and had the inner resolve and financial resources to weather the battle. Francis was an unwilling and unwitting shill while Franky, according to his own words, saw the opportunity to expand his father’s reach and regarded the “movement” as a potential carrier of the Schaeffer brand. By his own admission he was sorely under qualified and overwhelmed by the real reasons this convergence of men & mission were involved in political and faith movements. He and his father were seemingly both willing but would only later discover their dangerously moldable naiveté.

I have been privy over the years to quite a few famous people most of which were Christians. As an employee of a Christian music and book publishing company and then later a public relations marketing analyst, I was in part involved in many pseudo events that hyped themselves as real moves of God. I am still, much like Franky, walking quietly upon the old ground looking for land mines and the lives my complicity may have sold religion in a box. So I am fully aware of what American consumerism and faith can create when a few things in the mix go wrong. Fame and the projection of countless followers and admirers feeds the ego but starves the inner man. I have yet to meet one person of prominence who did not pay a huge price for having their deepest personhood monetized and every personal moment carry a spiritual responsibility that was just too heavy for any adult to carry let alone a small child or teen. So many celebrity Christians I know become addicted to the adrenaline rush of being “messianic” and larger than life. It is usually not the vices against which they preach that become their nemesis but the more subtle insidious movement of the heart that sees itself as special, anointed, above, the golden child. After all, whose ego would not experience a great rush of self adulation that then haunts us as we spend more of our lives looking for the same scenario, with the same or similar people, all seeing us as high and lifted up? When we are doing things for “God” the ego rush is ignored as all involved are diverted from the duplicity of their fallen nature. There is indeed a big part of the heart that desires God be glorified and lives be changed. But in my experience, the grandiose planning of huge undertakings appears to always have some degree of the broken and false self emerging. As one deeply spiritual psychologist said,” Our accomplishments become our pathology. “

So it is not if, but when. I have yet to see a movement emerge without some significant compromise taking place within those in the lead or to their families in the next generation. Franky and many like him raised by larger than life parents live their lives holding their breath. The heroic platforms created by these movements are stratospheric and demand a high degree of self forgetting and sacrifice. As valiant as the momentary sacrifices feel, the pay off of power and notoriety never bring a softness or deeper humanity to the soul. It barbiturates the very part of the heart needed to be a child, humble and open to love. So those at the top become numb. And, their children learn to ignore the parts of the soul unnecessary to the grander vision, the cause, the healing of a nation. So the quiet, behind the scenes, ordinariness needed to explore the inner landscape of the soul sinks back into shadows. As a leader in this messianic vision you can’t let down your guard. You can’t let anyone see you cry. You work and work to become the now gigantic idealized shadow the movement projects on you and expects you to sustain and animate for the cause. There is no turning back. The only way out is death or defection.

Crazy for God, if anything, is a conversation with the forgotten soul, now, for the first time saying out loud what has been unsayable. The times always demand a spokesperson or advocate. The baby boomers were exiting the church in groves during these years and conservative Christianity needed an acceptable apologist to fuel the counter culture’s ferment. Given the shear enormity of his father’s shadow, the convergence of his father’s love of truth and his growing book sales (Franky was selling books as well) it all seemed to make sense on some mysteriously odd level. Franky not only jumped on board but fueled the fervor with grand and seemingly noble marketing plans to build the Schaeffer Empire.

But what seems providential and right at the time often in retrospect is wrought with grandiosity, hidden agendas or worse yet, a mutual unspoken agreement of most involved to use the moment as a stepping stone for each and every person at the table. This goes on all the time but no one ever calls each other out as the complicity brokers the deal and paves the way for mutual exploitation of the critical mass. Most intuitively know that gigantic emergent moments of power and notoriety never last. The wisdom of the world nods inwardly communicating to each other's shadows that redemption will be sought after the fact but while the battle rages and the energy is high, take no prisoners and keep as much of the booty as you can. This has been my experience and I am still repenting. I indeed project this onto and into Franky’s epic journey of the soul. He may discover something much nobler but I think not.

Certainly the complexity, intentions, and broad ranging historic implications are open to dialogue and interpretation and Franky seemingly has no one in his world to proffer a counter balance to the now re-emerging Christian Right that is hauntingly similar to the Moral Majority of Franky’s heyday. It is out of the eerily similar moment in time that Franky emerges from the darkness of his own exile and begins to shout at the top of his soul. “This feels crazy! Does loving God make you this way? Is this what He demands?”

On a personal level, indeed, his complicity to the ultimate role he and his father played in the birth and character of the Moral Majority is going to be hard if not impossible to untangle. He has no ear or proximity to his cohorts of those activist days. (read Os Guineess’ review of Crazy for God for some great insight into Franky’s version of those times) Franky has long ago changed clothes, his name, his birthplace and created a new persona. He will not be that man. But alas, he is that man on some level and the book reveals the remnants of the ego still longing to be desired by the ones who matter most- his father and mother. For this conundrum of the heart I give much compassion and stand alongside in solidarity as he enters the dark and dangerous waters of contrition and the search for the beloved within. How could the son of one of Evangelicals most celebrated philosopher teachers come up with words to make sense of his father’ life or more prophetically the impact of his father’s life on him? For this is the naming we all avoid-our own. How long must we attempt to name our parents grief? How long do we wander from experience to experience longing for an inkling of ourselves strong enough to offer reconciliation?

So how will Franky get reconciled? Does he even want to be? If grief is a part of that process I would say he does not want reconciliation at this time. The grief is too large. Much larger than his father’s shadow. The sorrow he wears is his own unnamed presence. He is not present to himself. It is apparent in his writing. What struck me in his work were the awkward transitions from historic remembrances to emotive interpretations of those happenings. The subtle nuances of experience that should ground the author and the reader in the recollection were scattered to and fro much like his grief. This book was a quest. This book was a purging. This book was longing out loud. I get that. I get the voyeuristic obsession we have with each other’s need of reconciliation. We are all longing to belong. Franky has no home, has no people, has no place he can be broken or whole for that that matter. He is still wandering, still on a quest his father did not finish, still trying to name his father’s longing, answer his father’s questions, offer up his father’s dreams. And he is angry and tired. It was Franky’s unnamed state of the heart that called out to me. We men do anger better than sadness. I wonder if a resident sadness is necessary for our humanity to be soft and approachable? When I know my sadness I am present to others. When I am detached from my need for longing and yearning, for a place to disappear into my own beloved brokenness, I bear the weight of my family’s unresolved story, my nation’s constant yearnings and my world’s sense of being disconnected. After all, on a good day, that just might be part of the reason Franky got involved in the grander vision.

When I enter my own grief, sit in it, let it roll over me, my weeping is worship. My sadness is sacred. My tears are a cleansing. That night while I watched the cable interview I cried. I cried for Franky, for his father, his mother, for the larger extended family of Evangelicals who have been raised on picture-less words, and ideas without a beautiful story. I cried for countless disaffected believers who feel lost in the shadow of idealized leaders who struggle to be super human to everyone including their children.

Franky bears a doubly confounding destiny as he was offered the balance to this group’s shadow (Evangelicals) in his father’s work and life, but alas, he did not get tradition, foundation, and words as protectors and ideas as reflections of the mind of God. He mistook his father’s shadow as his light never doing his own work to reunite that space within himself. In many ways, the light side of his father seems crazy and disconnected as he now attaches it to the seeming darkness and shadow of the Moral Majority and movements like them often take on dark and demogogic energies. His anger towards Evangelicals is his unfelt sorrow for what he did not get from his relationship with them. They could not give it for they did not have it to give. Ironically both groups looked to Francis, the father, for his balanced embrace of truth, beauty and goodness. It appears neither really got the blessing.

Franky is a museum without a curator. He is an art show without an artist. I on the other hand, see myself welcoming myself in Franky. I picture late night discussions where I walk alongside the young boy and father him like his father did not and tell him he matters. For that is the burden he carries. He wonders if God even cares about his sadness. I can imagine in words for Franky and say whole heartedly, “He does Franky. He does.”

Subversive Orthodoxy Revisted

2009-09-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

The Impotence of Government & the Inadequacy of Democracy to Give Freedom

As I listen to many of the current conversations in the world of pseudo events called the media, I see reflected over and over again the struggle we humans have in discovering and fostering what we have come to call “freedom.” We live in a democratic society that is a major advance from despotic rule but still seems mired in a philosophical addiction that creates its ongoing ferment.

As much as we appear to have moved beyond feudalism and its accompanying obeisance to monarchies and despots, I wonder if we are still inordinately obsessed with our government as the source of our freedom. As a Christian I find the acknowledgement of government’s power in our lives as a strange dependence given Christ’s Lordship and the rulership of His reign over the universe. Just too even use that language sounds grandiose and deluded. Most of my Christian friends talk incessantly about politics and the seeming impotence of the current party in office. That impotence never seems to be healed or banished as each party in control finds it unable to move the nation forward at least in terms of their agendas and mandates.

Have not the teachings of Christ powerfully directed our dependence towards our heavenly Father as our source and the Kingdom as the philosophical structure out of which we find our ethos and pathos. Paul tells us that we fight not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities. This portion of Scripture alone is powerful in revealing our false & misunderstood dependency upon the material world of legal documents, laws, and political procedures to define our world. This is not to say that these crucibles do not indeed create a world. But it is not ultimately the world in which I truly inhabit. My citizenship is in heaven thus my understanding of who can give or take power or give or take freedom is based on this heavenly government under which I live.

I sense that we are all hungering for this deeper freedom. Can we find this in and from our governmental systems? Are we as believers looking for democracy or spiritual freedom? Are they the same? When I project power onto the government I then conclude that laws equal freedom. But as a believer I am told by our Lord that man made laws are not the constraints placed upon my life as His follower. As His follower I am beckoned by a much higher calling. I am bought with a price. I am not my own. My freedom is Christ.

In the Kingdom rule, I am called to become the leader I am looking for. I am called to develop the qualities that I insist other leaders have. Rather than see “flesh & blood” or humankind as the one with power, I am now able to see the invisible realm of minds, hearts, and intentions as the place of power & struggle. When I discover the true Lordship of Christ I begin to grasp the true governance of this world and to whom I must bend my knee to find true freedom.

Scripture tells us that this new law is written on our hearts. This means that no law or piece of paper will be a prescription for freedom. It is the realm of the ineffable and transcendent that rules and reigns over this world. It means that salvation, my own, is the beginning of the transformation of this world. This is not to make the salvation of the world as something outside myself. Quite the contrary. I am called to be a light on a hill. I am called to engage all systems and realms as those which will someday bow their knee as well. But this is not a political posture. This is a kingdom posture.

I grew up being taught in Civics class to look to my government as a source & provider of freedom. Right alongside that I was taught about Christ. As much as I was told Sunday after Sunday that Christi’s rule & reign were preeminent and all powerful, it was clear from an eagerly age that my family and my church saw the government as the most powerful source of authority in their life. When I finally came into a community that bent its knee to this invisible kingdom I began to see clearly the false dependence on man made governmental systems as the source and definer of my real freedom.

So often when I listen to the current visceral debates and conversations (if I can call them that) surrounding the current governmental leadership they seem so disembodied and removed from my freedom in Christ. I am not talking about hiding or dismissing the concerns that are represented in these conversations. Quite the contrary. I am merely wondering why we talk the way we do? Why do we empower our government with so much control over our lives? Why do we see this power as so preeminent? In fact, for those who may regard my perspective as escapism and some kind of detached spiritual flight, I am actually looking to the ultimate source of healing and truth for healing and restoration of the social ills that are much of the ruckus around these current debates.

Once again, my faith community has been teaching me about real governance and real submission and real freedom. When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God He appeared to be confused to many especially the Pharisees and those who thought they knew how truth should be organized. When He talked of the Kingdom He said it was …”here now… but not yet.” It was in our midst…. but located somewhere in the future. What did He mean? I am sure I don't grasp this paradox for that is indeed what it is (a paradox)

What might our Lord mean when He talked about this in breaking & yet future kingdom and how does it relate to us today? Could it be that Christ was saying that "The Kingdom is here now…….. But not yet.”
The freedom we desire and have received is not held tangibly in some form of government, some set of laws, some group of buildings or shrines. We live in the tension of being in and not off this world. That is the challenge. To live in the here and now, to serve in the here & now, but to receive through faith the inner down payment on a life that we are becoming, on a world into which we are moving, into a realm through which all things will be under the submission of our Lord.

As much as we want heaven here on earth through humankind’s system of governments, this is not to be. When we deify or unduly demonize a human made system, we lose the essence of the here & now kingdom and the not yet realm. We are looking to the wrong source for a freedom they cannot ultimate bestow. We are entangled in the flesh & blood of the skirmish and not focusing on the hearts & minds of the people who need to know & experience our Lord. We cannot usher in the Kingdom with bitterness, hatred, or even mocking and dismissing. In fact, I have yet to see divine love as a tactic in this supposed “war on truth.” These are strongholds and will only be taken down through spiritual means. Much of the protesting & the rancorous posturing on all sides is so far from a kingdom response I cringe when I hear people equate their engagement to spiritual values and mandates.

So this freedom we so crave and the demands we place upon our government give to us, they cannot. They are powerless here. Only a relationship with Christ can begin to offer the down payment on this ultimate gift .Maybe an analogy might help. Think about someone you love. We are all hungering for a deeper encounter with the ones we love. Their very absence makes us long for them more thus it is their absence that makes them more present in our minds & imaginations. So to, in the incarnation and His embodiment of His bride the Church, Christ has been brought near. But who He is and what we are to become in & through our encounters with Him IS YET TO BE fully revealed. It is still "not yet." So for me to anchor myself “ONLY” in the now is to disconnect myself from what I am becoming.

All this visceral discussion regarding the government seems misplaced at best & strangely manic at worst. The very act of looking towards our government for ultimate freedom is to remove from the Gospel its true overcoming power authority offered to us through the Life of Christ.

I would imagine that this perspective will be misinterpreted as being unpatriotic, severely naive or the ranting of a spiritual malcontent. “Get real,” someone might say. “Are you living in another world?” Well …..yes…I am.

The Great Dismantling of Leadership as We Know It

2009-09-11T20:13:00.000-07:00

Vision by Chaos

There is a grand collapsing of power & authority happening in our day. How then might one lead or point the way? Here are some thoughts...

May we reject "authority in position" in favor of "authority in relationship."

Authority is bestowed in the moment of communal need & simultaneously acknowledgement.

To lead I must be with “the other” thus I am never “over” but “among.”

I lead by standing close and being present. I listen and wait. Thus, my gifts, my knowledge, my judgment and wisdom are made real at the beckoning call of the community.

I lead when I am subordinate.

I lead when I am a peer.

I lead when I am a superior.

These are all made concrete only through example. Not being an example but simply being. Assuming I am an example inverts my gifts causing me to lead primarily out of my shadow.

I assume I know because I have been elected or chosen to know.

Assumption is a second order presence. Rather than be in the moment, in my body, I take my energy up into my head causing me to see an abstraction as a real thing. I am talking with my "idea" of my friend who is right in front of me. I am not talking with him but at him. This abstraction is a way or type of knowing but not the best way of seeing or feeling. It takes me out of “the others “ presence and tends towards making me “name” them once and for all. I need not be there to be there. I know there. I know them or at least I think I do. They are held in my head, not in my heart or soul. But in fact, there is never "there once and for all." Here is where there was a moment ago.

The point in this abstraction by the way?

To lead is to acknowledge the fluid nature of human presence and honor the collaborative emergence of “the right word fitly spoken.” To truly listen to another’s voice is to offer a response and watch the dance begin. You can not dance in your head. You must do it with your body. So too do we lead with our bodies and our minds.

I can never be merely given true authority. This is not to say there are not leaders and that they are not acknowledged and honored. It is to say that leadership cannot ultimately come through a hierarchical system as a real bestowing. There is no soul in an organization or its structures that can arbitrarily bestow leadership once and for all upon a person. Systems and hierarchies are small ciphers of truth at best and weak and sieve like at worst.

I do not provide answers as a leader. More like an air traffic controller, I do not fly the airplane but provide safe paths for flight and coordinate the interactions once in flight. Thus, my role is often invisible to the outer world.

When I lead I am like an orchestra conductor. I do not tell others what to play or what to do but assist them in "hearing what is." I am listening along with the players and inwardly paying attention to the "silence" within the music. I am not commanding others as much as being a presence of obedience. I find myself in the losing. I facilitate the music as it plays the people.

I am a scribe of a collaborative improvisational story being written on the fly. This narrative is much like an operating system but rather than lead by linear categorizing and pontification I proffer my own inner confusion as the reason to pay attention. I submit myself to the inner seeking of the group and support a new way of seeing some may call “vision by chaos.”

I am not a CEO, nor CFO, but a poet, prophet, and story teller. Leading is more about listening to the needs of others and walking along the path of faith with them rather than in front or behind.

I hunger for order but know that arbitrary efficiency is more of a corporate and technological metaphor that needs hierarchies to manifest its intended goals of profit. I feel at home in more organic models of leadership where much like nature we may have hundreds of leaders leading along side of each other in differing capacities. We are not a corporation but a family.

As a man, I distance myself from alpha male energy or the heroic Greek model of leader & see my own desire for being more goal directed or competent as a possible ruse for self expansion. I am not a professional human.

My leadership is not a confidence in my skills or insight but an admission of my lack. It is my obedience to the call that beckons me thus much like Frodo I say, “I will carry the Ring to Mordor…though I do not know the way.” This life is fellowship of the ring for sure.

I see the Wizard of Oz in my heart and allow my fraudulent self to be discovered so as not to hurt the Dorothy’s of this world. I honor Dorothy and humbly submit myself to her bewildered, vulnerable yet seeking self. It is her transparency that allows me to trust her. May we tear down the curtains in our hearts.

God has not called me to be a Bible analyst. Nor is my voice to be slick and amplified. Life is not a machine so I need not see people as objects that need my technical expertise. Those with which I live and love need not be a conquest. At no time need I be a warrior salesman who launches, markets, or sells the truth. I cannot use my brothers as rungs of a ladder to achieve my personal goals. My credentials are not carte blanche to see my career as more important than my life or the life of others.

I do not see myself as a solver of other's problems thus freeing me up to not to have to “fix” others. Nor am I an apologist that will use my skills with words or phrases to position my view with power and presumption. I commit my tongue to the service of the community.

I am an adopted son of the most high God. Therefore I cannot banish anyone from the community through threats or mocking. My ability to speak or command an audience when misused not only confuses and harms others but forces me to take myself out of community through arrogant exclusion. I distance my myself from others in hopes they will move towards me out of woundedness. In fact, it is I who has distanced me from myself, others & the Father.

I am not sure what I know. There is so much of which I am unaware that confidence in my knowing is dangerous to the community. This is not to say I don’t have perspectives, opinions, or beliefs, It is to say that my collaboration and improvisational offering is not the answer but my human voice in the emerging story of salvation. Answers are not what we are seeking but the presence of God.
I am not an island. To the degree I play a solo act is the degree to which I create a place where only one can stand. There is no place where only one can stand. That is a myth.
Like Dorothy I gather my friends who are equally as needy as I and believe that the common quest may offer some healing.

I will lead by offering my deepest and most revealing questions. Rather than seek solutions I invite dialogue. Community or the Church for that matter is not a tool to change the world but to be the identifiable location of God’s work of redemption and the presence of the future Kingdom.

By fostering dialogue I serve the men by deepening and widening the sense of our mutual experience. I allow myself to be invisible and go beneath and below through service to discovering the meanings & rhythms of our hearts and community.

Rather than offer advice I share a poem. Rather than demand my painting be the one and only painting I allow myself to occasionally be the frame.

I am not an entrepreneur who sees the community as a resource but an artist who fosters our imaginations so as to cultivate an environment where people might hear & understand their own story in the stories of others.

No leader owns a community although they may have been primary in the creation of the infrastructure. Community needs structure but the value is in the participants.

No one can create community on demand for it is self creating thing. It is also maintained by the community which is why leaders cannot arbitrarily demand obeisance. Emerging leaders are more like gardeners than architects.

Leaders build on flexible and stretchable terrain rather than build a foundational that is static and demands no one move or change its structural foundations.

Leaders help shape community not create it.

Leaders facilitate connection rather than demand arbitrary alliances.

Putting Our Own House in Order

2008-11-30T16:34:00.001-08:00

Our Story to Write

I WAS WALKING ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON several years ago with an older friend. We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend's memory, and he told how the old-time people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as "sitting till bedtime." After supper, when they weren't too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other story. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, "They had everything but money."
Wendell Berry The Work of Local Culture

I begin this blog with a Wendell Berry excerpt about his friend’s lament. Berry, a radical agrarian localist, has made his life about the small beautiful circle that is his land and town. He has made it his imagination’s service to build powerful metaphors in which to carry the stories of his neighbors and family. He has committed himself to preserving the fragile discussion between creation and economics. He has made his home & village his bully pulpit.

As I have watched the New Adam community grow and change it has been interesting to watch the power of the home in this emerging enclave. From Eric Brown’s dinners to Dave & Angela Carlson’s holiday pageants and celebrations, it is clear that our stories come alive when they are housed. These nonfiction plays are offered a sacred place when we gather together and listen and share and create a larger story.

As I have pondered and ruminated over the current financial struggles of our nation and world I continue to go back to Berry for vision and solace. He is a renaissance man and his engagement of land, labor, and literature represent to me the kind of mentor for which my soul longs. I, as many men, long for leadership that is rooted in a place, rooted in a heartfelt commitment to be truly human with a people.

As New Adam and Samson have begun to offer a context for our personal stories to be told, we are now beginning to see that our personal lives are indeed a tapestry of narratives that create a world be it small and fledgling. E.F Schumacher’s famous work Small is Beautiful was written about economics but it is evident from authors like Schumacher and Berry and now writers like Michael Pollen (The Botany of Desire), that local is reality. Trans local and global are concepts but they are unable to contain and sustain the deepest parts of our humanity. We are world citizens after we are neighbors.

That is why this current crisis in confidence regarding economies is actually a good thing. For the first time in my life time we are beginning to question the power of the expert to oversee and steward our lives for us. Powerful corporate forces and global conglomerates are experiencing meltdown and in some ways this is due to their actual non existence on the local level. Except for political power they do not exist. You cannot have relationship with a company or global enterprise. When I say they do not exist I mean this on an ontological level. Obviously they exist but their inability to be truly human means their conversation with me is always forced, larger and more abstract than my real life is, and finally unable to see and know the impact of their behavior on me and my family. How many of you have a local banker. How many could go to a bank in their town and ask for help from a person who you knew and who knew you. These days are gone.

As money is continuing to go out to support and sustain the financial sector, it appears that many are bracing themselves for some tough times ahead. Many are beginning to sense that they must get their own house in order and one of the primary ways to do that is to take back the power of the local. How might the New Adam community take back that power to write our own story together?

Get out of Debt

One of the reasons many of us do not share our personal stories when it comes to finances is that we are ashamed of the predicaments into which we have gotten ourselves. We realize now the lack of wisdom in many of our purchases and business ventures. Our speculation was often only submitted to those who had little negative feedback and leveraging was the way we got what we thought we needed sooner than later. It has become evident that many mortgage and loan companies, for example, were more than predatory in this most recent debacle of international borrowing. Because they did not really know our “real life situation” they hedged their bets as best they could but in truth hoped the house of cards did not crumble in their life time. Much like corporate polluters, they hoped the barium and lead burial grounds were never found in this lifetime. Oops!

It is clear now that the debt load of many Americans may put them in debtor’s prison for their entire life time. Scripture is revealing in this area but most of us do not or did not want to hear that kind of cautionary wisdom and discretion. We were living within our means as defined by consumer culture not biblical culture. Most of the companies willing to loan us money had little knowledge of our true estate. Most bought into the ever increasing worth of homes phenomenon and believed that borrowers would use those inflated prices to pay off their commitments if worse came to worse. The conversation as to whether one should borrow or not is never local as most of the companies from which we borrow and buy view personal liability statistically and not literally. The impact of you defaulting on a loan plays little into their ability to exist. They view your relationship statistically and feel comfortable in the downside possibilities based on prior economic cycles. However, much like the existence of a black swan or 9/11, it is not what can be predicted that changes everything. It is what seems irreconcilable and chaotic that can alter the landscape of a world, a nation, or a family in a brief moment in time. It is clear that smart and savvy CEO's went beyond statistical caution and much of the world is close to going under due to their caprice.

Getting out of debt will mean rearranging many of our dreams and taking money’s we deemed for leisure, pleasure, the future or just technological up selling to now go to the hidden world of debt repayment. I say hidden because this means our consumption must on some level cease or be greatly curtailed. This is always hard as paying off debts means using “hard dollar cash” or real money for what we have already experienced and in some cases even used up. Credit card money is on some levels not real. Real money is money one earns and has power over how they are going to use that money. Most of us do not even realize the fine print on many credit card applications. We are truly the servant to the lender.

We must make debt an issue of great discernment and be willing to see the American dream as a counter narrative to the biblical mandates given to us by our Lord. As Michael Hudson has said, “No economy can keep up with the burden of debts growing at exponential rates faster than the economy itself is growing.” For many of us, our debt reduction is happening at such a slow rate we are giving away our retirements and children’s college funds. Flat out, we have no more to spend. Our coffers are dry.

See Our Money as “Our” Money

To return to the local is to understand the impact of being unable to help others when they need it. When we are so highly leveraged we cannot allow anyone of need into our space. We must keep them at bay and stand in Pharisaical judgment over their current neediness. In truth, we may be weeks or months away from the same predicament and our stern reproof is that hypocritical tendency to judge the self we see in others more harshly. This is not a problem like drinking. It is more like a food addiction. Just like we must eat so must we work and earn a living. Therefore, what we do with money and what money does to us matters.

For most of us, money has been a powerful force for either avoiding or shoring up our wounded selves. The power and the prestige that comes through the accumulation of things was our sign to the world that “we are doing just fine thank you.” In the game of life we are the winners. In the game of life we are the survivors. We know this game and have figured out how to procure and sustain our stuff in times of down turn and recession. In fact, in most cases we are rewarded for our opulence and wealth regardless of how we got it or sustain it. This is the Achilles heel in American Christianity where we obsess about gay marriage, communism, pornography, divorce, and totally ignore the dark side of absentee fathers, working mothers, latch key children, premature death due to over exhaustion, and the mono personality of the type A working boss we all put on our boards and seek direction for the paying off of our mega church complexes. We have difficulty seeing all this as a malady as we are still not convinced of the down side of greed.

Truly Usher in the Sabbath Rest

Our obsessive work lives reveal our deeper ruminations of how we truly believe the world works. We are capitalists and technologists before we are Christians. We are desiring to usher in democracy and liberty to nations so they too can have the opportunity to buy our stuff and compete with us for goods. We are sharing in a Kingdom but it is not the Kingdom of God.

To move to the idea that money is not owned merely by one person is to see ourselves as a people and to see land, production, food, power, government, and family as entities that swim in the same waters. These groupings and ventures of life are not separated through some theoretical definition of observation. They co-mingle and when we attempt to sever them from one another we get thalidomide cities and deformed families. We are not meant to be so separate that one family can suffer such need while another goes through life with wasteful abundance. When these two families attend the same church the absurdity of that scenario is even more heightened.

If we are to move into a Sabbath rest and truly experience that grace God has given us in and through His Son, we must begin to submit these parts of our lives. This of course is difficult as much of modern American Christianity is actually going in the opposite direction. Much of our discipleship is so highly personal that the impact of our behavior on anyone but our nuclear family is never even addressed. This is my problem with the deification of the family by many specialists in the para church organizations. I have noticed that one of the central concepts our men in New Adam must embrace is the isolation that the cocooned nuclear family is under through TV viewing, Mcmansions that have all the amenities for the family to use alone, and the underlying message for families to keep up with the Joneses. These are powerful formative messages sent to us at every level of our middle class lives.

We have allowed discipleship to be so personal that men are praying without discernment and knowledge. No one is speaking into our lives. We are infants often talking to a concept of God that is highly sentimentalized and nostalgic. We want God the good old dad that offers up whatever we want. When He does not, we stand estranged from Him much like our earthly fathers.

By taking discipleship out of a place (a town, a city, a state, a country, and a world) we make spirituality about only the inner life as it relates to psychological needs. For real community to take place we must have a place where the redemption and kingdom can be seen in all levels of human activity.

Ironically, the attention many evangelicals have given to the political realm has usually involved single issues and has not asked politicians to build stronger communities. Many involved in political debates in the evangelical subculture are familiar with the voting records of senators and representatives as well as Supreme Court judges but do not know the mayors or school board presidents, PTA leadership or farm subsidy representatives in their local areas.

We are not writing our stories with the people in which we live. More to come.

The Ushering in of Paradox

2008-11-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Sabbath Rest as Provision

“The question of paramount significance is whether or not anyone is in control of the political, economic, and cosmic histories of which we are a part. Is human life, indeed all of life, at the mercy of uncontrollable and random forces that care little for our well-being?” Norman Wirzba

How could the resting from labor be the answer during a time of great economic downturn? How could inactivity be the resolution to a seemingly bloated world full of goods with no one to buy? In Wirzba's essay The Idea of a Sabbath Rest: A Theological Framework for Economists” he outlines the Jewish teaching on the Sabbath. He points out that rather than merely be a cessation of work, the Sabbath of God was an invitation to cease from our striving. The Sabbath was a sign to us from God that work, play & production had their seasons and flow. The Sabbath was a devotional time of restoration through which to view all of creation and see it as good. When the Sabbath gaze and experience were missing so too was the delight and beauty of creation. Without a pause in our frenetic pace we see nothing but the morrow and our lack. We are stuck in day six of the creation story.

How might this teaching of the Sabbath impact our world today and in particular our current economic crisis? These financial times for many of us reveal a deep presumption about the impact of our dreams and aspirations. We have been formed out of a highly narcissistic inclination and nearly all in the culture at large bow down to its bidding. It is during a significant downturn like this that we begin to discover that our sadness, our obsessive worry; our endless ruminations over what may come do indeed reflect our state of heart. Once again Scripture tells us something about the ruminations of the Spirit and cycles of birth, death, and resurrection.

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
-John 12:24.

I have been pondering more and more the deeper intentionality of the Father's Sabbath rest and have been considering my own role in the ushering in of that heart condition and Kingdom reign. Church history reveals that end time scenarios, countless interpretative grids on the moving target of history, and revelation ultimately point to truths beyond a single heart. It is in times like these that our communal heart and prophetic sensibilities must come together to see where "we" are going. This is not a time that the question “where I am going?” holds up under scrutiny. We are a people. Modern consumerism has so fragmented that sense of connectedness that it takes times like these to reevaluate why humans are even brought into this redemption story.

It must be for more than our own personal worth and retirement fund assessments. It must be for more than the seeking out of our own piece of the pie. It is in times like these that my own heart so hungers for more and I am overwhelmed with my own shallow reservoirs and must tell others I feel so emptied. It may very well be that I have been emptied. It may very well be the very nature of creation to pull from my consumptive hands and heart this deeper desire to usher in the Kingdom with my resources be they large or small.

Once again the Kingdom teaching is so clear about the beauty and power of the small empowered by faith to build a mighty foundation for God's next engagement with this world. It appears that God’s created realm does indeed have a voice in this conversation about how we then should live. Even strident conservative economists & environmental globe watchers will admit that creation has been taking a beating of late. Global warming may be controversial in terms of its ultimate impact, but its reality is not questioned by many. We have treated the world as if it were a bottomless pit of goodies. We have treated the day as night and night as day.

Growing up in the conservative Midwest, I was taught from early on that the Sabbath (Sunday in the parlance of conservative Protestantism) was a time of rest. Biblical literalism meant resting. As much as I loathed the stridency of this weekly mandate, I knew that Sunday was a down day. We worshipped and we rested. We did no labor, avoided leisure and spent time with the family of God. In retrospect, the oversight of this teaching became legalistic but its intentions were powerfully reflective of truth that has now allowed me to see firsthand what “stopping” does to a worried, stressed out, overly busy heart. I was frantic and frenetic even as a child. I chaffed under the seeming law and considered it one more repressive legality to push faith down my throat. Now I see it a missing jewel that cries aloud for replacement in the diadem of faith.

Blue laws that used to confine alcohol and the selling of certain goods on Sunday now seem anachronistic and silly. We want our goods seven days a week twenty four hours a day. Once again the environmentalists tell us that we cannot continue to work the same land, dig the same pit, and draw lumber from the same forest over and over again without some sort of diminished resources. Periodically shutting down trade and consumption is more than an anachronism. It is a principle deeply imbedded in the very center of creation.

As I have taken my place in a local community I have begun to see that more than ever how my own economic activity reflects the real condition of my heart. As Wirzba says, “The structure of our economic systems should be seen as the clearest, most honest indicator of religious authenticity, because it is in our economic practices that we can see most directly whether or not we have ordered or lives to be in harmony with the Creator’s intention.”
Recently I told a friend that one cannot usher in what one does not greatly anticipate. This idea of the Sabbath economy is one such idea. Poets, musicians, preachers, and painters need to bring into the communal imagination a yearning and longing for this deep rest we are missing. That means that much of our longing will manifest itself in tears, lamentations and the singing of the blues.

In recent weeks some of my best friends have been laid off from jobs they had for 30 years. Their pensions and medical plans are also in jeopardy. As I watch these erosions of safety and care manifest themselves throughout the universe I wonder if we are too late to usher in this Sabbath. Much has been said about the end times in Christian literature of late. I, however, have never felt comfortable being an alarmist or survivalist. I have never thought that the end times meant a historical outworking of some final plan that would take most of the world out. Yet I am beginning to wonder if that dark apocalyptic dream many have espoused may have drawn us into this chasm out of fear and for a lack of vision. I do not mean that we are responsible for the financial crisis , terrorism, or the "liberal agenda" (whatever that is). What I mean is that much of the American Church has offered up a very narrow selfish perspective on the reign of God and the ushering in of His kingdom. We have been busy building our corporate & denominational agendas, decorating our lives, fulfilling our personal life goals and directives and now feel a bit embarrassed that the universe seems to be ignoring our well layed plans. We are taken aback at God's seeming absence in all this. Why were we not prepared? Why has God allowed so many believers to suffer?

This may very well be the time to reawaken our deeper selves to the real incoming of God's divine "Yes!" This is the time to cease from our sense of material provision and hunger and thirst for heavenly things. Now is the time to deeply anticipate a new way of being. Now is the time to truly enter into this Sabbath rest.

The Rebirth of a Kingdom Mythos

2008-11-22T18:23:00.001-08:00

The Merits of a Sabbath Economy

The whole work of creation was performed for the sake of the Sabbath
Jürgen Moltmann

What is played out in the imagination of the artists foreshadows, however dimly, the social reality of tomorrow Daniel Bell The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

I don’t frequent the discussions of end time musings nor do I relish the world’s potential demise due to its hubris or faithlessness. In fact, I feel as if my own heart has been revealed in recent weeks and months as the financial worlds of global business communities and governments have been shaken to their very core. The scenes played out in countries as far apart as Iceland and the US disclose a deeper array of images that form the very manner in which we see and know the world. Our economic imaginations are famished and the word is weary from the toil.

The breakdown of trust in the world of commerce is not a mere blip on the screen. This is an erosion of hope and is in part due to revelations that much of the world has been under the same spell as America. Although we now shame the elite of Wall Street and corporate America, in retrospect, we too turned our eyes away from the avarice of undue remuneration. From sporting figures to the cream of the crop religious leaders, we (as a culture) paid them and paid them well. We all thought the world and its coffers were limitless and so we kept on borrowing and kept on leveraging. We too used inflated housing markets to build our dreams. We too partied when our savings were nearly gone. We too toiled well into the midnight hours hoping to hit the jackpot and make it rich. This is not the disease of the privileged and coddled. This is the very dream of America and much of the world.

Why the crash now? What has happened to us lately that reveals the deeper truths? Some have pointed to the ultimate wilting of the modernism’s flower. After centuries of the self being exalted and the individual being regarded as the center, we now are realizing our children and their children now see little meaning in tomorrow. The Protestant work ethic has little spiritual juice to maintain any sense of direction as self preservation and personal survival trump any sense of community. Time itself has narrowed to our private desires and the hero of bourgeois society is the self made man full of himself and impenetrable to other’s attempts to dethrone him. Our very sense of time and space has been so restricted by our own personal dreams and aspirations that our awareness of history has equally shrunk to contain only that which our psychological self can imagine.

Our story has become my story. Our redemption has become my redemption. The salvation of the world has become deciphered through my personal devotions and God’s hand in my personal life. As I said above, our very imaginations are famished and our dreams are fitful nightmares of personal comeuppance. We’ve tried to get God to join our franchise and He has declined. We’ve tried to make true prosperity to mean financial gain. The sense of confusion on the part of the Church in America is due in part to the capitulation of our calling to a foreign understanding of work, rest, and abundance. We have given the very heart of our faith over to someone else’s definition of wealth. Now, in a world of an abundance of things, the very soul of humankind is so so hungry for something more. We are now frightened by our very selves and our own insatiable appetites . As the adage says” We have discovered the enemy and he is us.”

Is there a divine perspective on these economic times? I have wondered why so little has been said by the Church at large. Are we as well totally given over to the whims and maneuverings of the consumer culture? Are we too unable to make sense of all the seemingly indiscriminant and irrational jumps in the stock market and world economy? Some have said this is a crisis “of the system” and not “in the system.” We are not in a time where we should retool or refurbish the old model but totally redefine the manner in which we engage economics. Is this the time for us as a people to offer up a divine point of view on economics and work itself?

This is a great opportunity for the Church to reintroduce the truth of the Sabbath rest. Will authors and poets bring the new lexicon of meaning into our deepest parts or will we go back to worn our concepts and wearisome assumptions about how the world works? Some of this work will involve deep repentance and submission to one another. This is more than a shift but a total turning away from a false God. Are we up for it?

The Death of a Grand Mythos

2008-09-29T03:38:00.001-07:00

The Limits of Creation

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the present
And let our illusions die
W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

I am a boomer. I have been formed out of the optimism of technology’s bosom. I have grown up in and through the cultural mythos of progress and growth. I have been fed and nurtured on the fantasy that fuels and animates contemporary culture. That is the deeply embedded caprice of limitless power and potential wealth. (See Bill Moyer interview with author Andrew Bacevich)

In recent weeks we all have been privy to a disettling picture of the present and our future in the so called bailout crisis. For many of us this prospect represents the end of a lifelong pursuit of personal independence. We boomers were weaned on the breast of self determination, autonomy, and a lack of restrictions. Choice, unfettered choice was our birth right and our non-conformity was rewarded through our inventiveness, creativity, and an ever expanding national and world economy. We were constantly told by politicians, pastors, and the gurus of personal space that the world was our oyster. We could throw our dreams into the cosmos with abandon for we were meant to enjoy this world of our making with unconfined desire.

I am an optimist. However, I am being forced by my own swampland visits to come to the powerful realizations that indeed there are limits to all things. Not only my personal mythos but the ones that fashion and shape the larger world into which my own resides. We are in unique times. For the first time in my life the chicken has truly come home to roost. The world I have constructed for myself and those I love is quickly proving to be much like a home off the coast of Galveston. It can take certain gale winds but these hurricane forces are not your garden variety wind storm. They are powerful forces that only nature and creation can muster.

Are we in spiritual and existential times of the same order? Are we now realizing that our leaders have given us what we want? And what have we wanted? It appears that what we have wanted is an endless opportunity to consume, purchase, and expand our personal space beyond its limits. We are coming to the realization that the world may indeed have an edge to it. We may fall off. There are constraints to desire. Even the actual frontiers that were so much a part of America’s mythos are now being auctioned off for the fuel we need to run this gargantuan machine of craving we have mistaken for longing.

I have had a longing. I still do. This longing is represented by my desire to be a part of true community. What I am witnessing in this nearly Kafkaesque scene being acted out in national politics and the financial worlds is a collapsing dream that years ago became a trance. This trance was fueled by unbridled desire, ambition and American exceptionalism. We have been told since I was a child that we were the saviors of the world and our form of government and ways of life (Christian and capitalistic) were not merely better but destined to take over the world. The manifest destiny that brought us to the shores of the Americas is a testament to that broad and powerful mythos. It has remained as a part of our grand narrative for centuries.

What we are witnessing is the end of a way of thinking about the world and ourselves. Because we have seen life and creation as commodities that could be exchanged and profited from, we have continued to value those entities to suit our own personal avarice. Whether it is our homes or businesses, we purposed to profit no matter the cost to others and now we are beginning to realize that others were doing the same thing. We are not as clever as we thought. The Chinese have already found us out. American has its Achilles heal-it loves to consume and it is willing to do it all on credit (borrowed time and money)

Now this mythos of limitless craving and profiteering off the needs and desires of others has become a global amusement. In recent years I have sensed from some of my friends at how pleased they were that Russia collapsed along with Marxism due in part to the US sending over our ideology of personal consumption. I too was equally glad the regime came to and end. However, I saw and see much more disturbing reasons for all this collapse. Glasnost, as welcomed as it was throughout the world, was really a moratorium on the cold war so Russians could finally go to the mall like everyone else in the “advanced” first world countries. Now the Chinese as well are being formed by this consumptive narcissism and their need for resources for expansion is enormous. So enormous that their fever could kill us in the States.

How many of us are aware of the money we borrow from China on a consistent basis? How many understand our place in the buying chain between producers and consumers? Everything in the world goes round when credit flows and America can consume. A few weeks or months of no consumption and the entire world economy gets frightened and should as we Americans hold up the house of cards. Our ability to buy more and more allows for our imperial global expansion to continue. Just like our capitalistic ventures into the former Soviet Russian, it is as much contingent on credit as it is on stealth bombers. In fact, war has always proven to put a drain on the entire process but our fears and lack of learning from history lean our expansionistic inclinations towards aggression.

We have offered up and exported this myth of limitless access to power and wealth and now our dream is quickly revealing itself as a fantasy filled with glaring holes and cosmic restrictions that here to fore we have ignored. This culturally shared story is now reaching its maximum threshold as it becomes a global ambition. It has proven to be not merely plagiarized but a fiction. The universe is not complicit with us on this one. There are limits to all of life and those realizations are returning like a tide that has been out to sea for centuries. Creation was meant to be stewarded not plundered.

The emerging threshold is a day of reckoning for many of us. Personally I am having to sit in years of decisions I made about my finances, my career, my personal goals, and finally discern the boundaries of my own humanity. On some days I am overwhelmed with my own personal sense of shame and responsibility. I am morally liable and accountable for my decisions. Ask the bank. Ask my credit card company. Ask my closest friends.I can blame no one. Yet, I must have some grace on my self. There are powers outside myself that impacted those decisions. There is a cultural trance that we mutually agree to induce in one another. Yet my own naiveté and desire has overtly and covertly colluded to push my humanness to its limits and now the confines of those checks and balances are meted out with great pain and stress. I come to community with a lot of baggage. My own personal story of unchecked and uninhibited dreams has a weighty reality to it at this point in my life. I am beginning to see just how much my own aspirations can inhibit the true bounty of this world to be accessible to others. My own consumptive habits purposely kept me unaware of the deepest needs of others. I have wanted primarily for me. Now I must learn to long for "us."

More than ever we need community. However, the communities we are going to need to deal with these impending tides are not yet in place. They will only come as we are forced to identify our real families. I am always amazed when I watch the TV program that gives away a house at how many in great need stick together for all they have are each other. Until all we have is each other, we will continue to ask the politicians and banks to create a larger credit line, an ever expanding economy, a limitless access to cheap fuel, and the ability to stay mobile so our profiteering does not finally come to an end in love for one another. I encourage all who are on the threshold of collapse be it personally, in business, or in your ability to navigate your own small world; there is a deeper net about to appear. It only manifests when the free fall begins. Greater love has no man than he lay down his life for his brother. Some of us are having our world weary hands full of stuff yanked from our clutching only to discover the embrace of our true family. I cannot reach out nor receive when I hold onto what was never mine to own. To the limits of desire in this world and the limitless love of God in the ever restoring Kingdom of the now and forever! May our Lord's name be praised.

The Politics of Suffering

2008-09-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

Empathy & Compassion as an Embodied Response

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.
Felix Adler

“I feel your pain.” This statement has become a bit of iconic humorous presidential lore as delivered by Bill Clinton in recent years but I think its resonance goes unconsciously deeper than its apparent humor. To tell someone you feel their pain says something about you and the relationship you have with another. Empathy is now emerging as a concept that is crossing multiple disciplines as conflicts between individuals, companies, genders, races, and nations continue. What happens when we empathize? How are we drawn into someone else’s experience through our imagination and what takes place when relationships are formed and informed through the lens of empathy? How does empathy produce compassion as a deliberate act to resolve the felt pain between individuals and groups? Is it possible that embodied empathy or compassion is actually an interpretive posture through which one relates to the world?

The media is not a reliable interpretive window on reality but daily incursions into its vortex reflect a world in significant flux and deeply troubled. Much of this has to do with shifting power bases through the globalization of the world economy and the fight over resources. On a much more existential level, however, is the apparent diminishment and failure of the modern enlightenment project to direct the world through reason. For centuries it was perceived that reason and logic would ultimately prevail and that knowledge would always be processed and mediated through the ability of the individual to come to an unprejudiced understanding as to his or her reality. We were assuming that the power of intelligence and good sense would prevail if given an opportunity. Well…it has not happened.

In our attempt to solve human dilemmas we have begun to understand that the desire for understanding and the logical assertions as to how and why cooperation might be advantageous for both parties often does not prevail in the subsequent engagements of differing parties who may have a history of dispute and opposition to one another. Regardless of the ultimate goal of cooperation, understanding, and insight, thoughtful sympathy does not ultimately triumph. Why does difference and struggle reign in much of the world today? Why are many individuals, communities, groups, and nations seemingly locked into the dispirited position of hopelessness? Is it possible we need to create an entire area of study entitled the "politics of suffering"? Is it possible that the locus of that study should be the actual human body? Is it possible that compassion and empathy as distinct human acts give us a different set of interpretive sensibilities in resolving human struggles?

I opened this blog with the statement regarding feeling someone else’s pain. It is clear that certain individuals seem to have highly formed skills and sensitivities to sensing and interpreting another’s pain. When this pain has been prolonged and historic as in the case of endemic racism, only person’s who have had similar experiences or who are bodily aware of the pain the experiences caused can speak into the conversation. It is the old adage of walking a mile in someone’s shoes but on a deeply spiritual level.

One of the reason politicians often get nowhere in solving the apparent misreading of disparate groups and their struggles has to do with the lack of empathy and compassion. It is one thing to see the dissimilarity of perceptions, the history of the dispute and acknowledge both sides or one particular person’s experience. It is another to enter deeply into the experience of pain through which these individuals daily live. In my work with healing retreats I am amazed at how deeply felt injustice is in bodily pain. The idea that the mind is a separate entity floating above the body is a significant misconception. Humans are a whole. The inequity of life is not merely some idealistic philosophical concept discussed in classrooms and courts. What humans experience tells them who they are. Prolonged injustice cannot help but deeply form individuals into whom and what they have become and are becoming. Compassion is a way of seeing that pain.

In the rough and tumble world of men, crying is usually considered a sign of weakness. Strength in needed to traverse the vicissitudes of this life therefore acknowledging injustice through emotional expression is considered by many men to be wasted energy. “What is the point,” they may ask. “My pain is seen as a weakness and thus any open expressions of its formative power on my ability to live only place me farther down the power chain.” This is a highly over simplification of this phenomenon of men’s complicity to affective silence but it is clear that many men seldom if ever emote their present condition as it relates to the psychic pain they are experiencing. You will never know how they “feel” about an incident or issue. You may hear their detached impression or conclusion regarding an encounter; however, this should not be mistaken as this person’s final or ultimate understanding on the injustice or pain to which they are referring.

Suffering always has an implied powerful narrative to it. When one begins to listen to another’s story of pain and suffering, inevitably one will hear about power and governance. Someone controls something someone else needs. This may be actual resources or be more reflective of issues of human spirituality like love and respect. Someone desires to have it and someone else has decided not to give it or gave that impression. The politics of suffering engage this narrative from the perspective of the pain that is felt in the body (which includes all human experiences and emotions). The question ask here is, “And how do you feel about that?” This question is not to deify emotions as the most articulate reflection of truth or reality. These emotions are always riddled with reconstruction, memory’s here say, victimization, and anger. This question is ultimately part of the act of compassion. To be compassionate is to know bodily (in other words in your own body) how another feels or felt when certain things happened to them. This means being in touch with your own encounter with injustice and the ensuing suffering that came as a byproduct of that experience. To be compassionate is to, through the resonate power of your own imagination, begin to make that person’s story part of your own. You are now in divine collusion with this person. This pain is not merely their pain but “our” pain. This is what humans do: listen to each other’s stories.

The act of compassion honors the experience of this “other” as a reflection of the divine creation and desires to see this pain healed and the person restored. Once again this does not deify the emotional suffering. It spiritually brackets the suffering through empathetic compassion. Embracing the impact of certain events on someone else is validating the sense of the injustice through compassion. This does not mean one acknowledges all perceptions as true (ultimate assertions as to who is responsible) but as “deeply felt” and part of this person’s spiritual grid.

To feel another’s pain is to acknowledge as real the suffering this person has experienced. The naming of that suffering, its nuanced outworking, and its impact are ultimately healed through compassion inside of community. This is where these wounds become sacred portals through which healing must come for humans to be more human. When the community does not have the ability, commitment, or space into which this compassion can be ministered, injustices will continue to fester, grow, and even permeate into larger trans local skirmishes. We tell others when we are hurt and we demonize those people. This demonization becomes our history and to a certain extent, “the others” history from our perspective. The politics of suffering asserts that humans can hear these stories of pain and bear them up together. The politics of suffering through compassion offers an interpretive experience through which humans now can bring this disturbing account to the conversation and find empathy and support. This bond now appreciates the insight gained through the empathetic transference of one person’s injustice as seen through the eyes and heart of another. I can speak up now when I see and hear of injustice for I know its malevolent and revolting power to cloud and malform. My empathic experiences now make me a prophetic voice for the weak, lost, abused, and emotionally silenced. Compassion is now not merely an insight, but an ethos and value through which human beings live out their very existence. I feel your pain and you are real.

Holy Discontent as Time

2008-09-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

When Waiting is No Longer an Option
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
Maria Rainier Rilke

The greatest barrier to moving into a new place in God is the comfort we find in the one we are currently living. I am yet to hear anyone say “isn’t this level of anxiety great?” Isn’t it wonderful to move into a place of complete trust that involves walking away from what I know even though it is not working anymore? Humorous but true. We are like the ancients. There may be dragons at the end of the map. Is the world really flat? We may fall off. In truth, whatever fears we cannot not understand or acknowledge, we will feel and feel them with a vengeance.

When does a holy longing become a holy discontent? When our cry of a deeper revelation of Christ can no longer wait. Our souls naturally long for enlargement. We are meant to walk into the full stature of Christ. For that to take place, God will allow our resources to dry up and our ways of coping to no longer bring the peace we previously received through the these experiences. We will feel a “crying out.” It may manifest itself differently from person to person. For some it comes as a sense of emotional deadness. We go to work, we do the chores around the house, we come to church but all the tasks seem like they are deadened routines. For others, those closest to us remark how “out of sorts” we seem to be. Whether it is excessive anger, to much sleep, going through the motions with little joy and an embodied sense of presence, life is beginning to run out of juice. For others the malaise may actually come from finally receiving the thing we have sought, fought and lived for. The job promotion, the new house, the honor in the community, the life long accomplishment finally come to fruition, or whatever and we now feel almost let down. Now we have what we so diligently fought for and somehow the deep hunger for more continues to persist. In fact, now there is an intrusive sense of panic. If this is not it, what is? You say to yourself, “I should be fulfilled with all this. I should finally feel fulfilled and connected. I should finally feel like I am who I was meant to be. Has my ladder been leaning against the wrong building all this time," you ask?

All the protestations seem to only detract us from our daily tasks. We live in a world where we must get up each morning and head out claiming the provision of each day so pondering too much to fast can throw some of us into a deep deep depression. Depending on how long we have held the longing at bay is how powerful it will rise to the surface. There are some things in life that just will not wait for the right time or the correct moment to “handle the situation.” This is not about handling anything. No, it really is the opposite. This is about listening to a part of us that here to fore has either been deadened, missing or just quiet and dormant. This is about welcoming the dawning of something mysterious and walking away from other things that although meaningful and maybe even worthwhile, just do not provide the deeper foundation upon which we daily stand.

It has been said by sages and mystics that all significant rites of passage come through suffering and prayer. Maybe that is why we call them mystics and sages. No one wants to hear these hard sayings. No one wants to be forced into prolonged periods where the only thing that makes any sense is silence, prayer, beauty, innocence, and letting go. We are really addressing what Christ calls “transformation." This is different than mere internal change or the acquisition of some bit of spiritual truth. This is a deeply disturbing yet beautifully scandalous move of the Spirit.

One of the first conditions of the soul Christ will confront during these times is our cynicism. Cynicism is really about hopelessness. When we loose hope, even the simplest acts of devotion are dry and void of sustenance. All those around us seem naive and much of our daily routine seems silly and without meaning. Why? That is the deep question in our soul? Why even try. Nothing I do will make any difference. Nothing I can offer to this life will ultimately change my condition. It is this lack of hope that makes us bored with everything and everyone around us. A fragile as hope is, it is a fuel the soul needs to form a future. Without it we see life as a series of disconnected actions. We are a bit player in a theatrical novel in which our fate has been sealed. Nothing can change that. This is what cynicism does to hope.

Paul J. Wadell so powerfully tells us the foundational need for hope when he says, “Hope is empowered by a vision, the vision of our most promising possibility of intimate union with God and all the saints.” This is why cynicism is a dangerous cancer to community and not just to us as individuals.

As many move forward in conversations about community, closeness, friendship, belonging, and truly being loved, we will most assuredly come face to face with our cynicism. It may manifest itself in a variety of different ways. Here is what we tell our selves.

1) Let’s just wait and see

Although all commitments to living and loving do indeed take discernment and prayer, much of what we consider wisdom and patience before jumping into life is really an underlying inclination to hold at bay any potential for being hurt. We just flat out do not want any more disappointment in life. By the time we reach an age where our personal stories begin to take shape, we surely know the pain that others can cause in our lives. From family and friends to churches and bosses, so much of life comes with a price tag. At times that price seems just too expensive. Thus, we wait until we are convinced that nothing hurtful or dangerous to our souls will come into our lives.

2) Let’s regroup and see if what we are currently doing will come back to life even though we have tried to breathe life into the cadaver hundreds of times

As humorous as this statement may sound, I am so convinced that I am animating hundreds of lifeless bodies in my world. Even though “Elvis has left the building,” I am still hoping against hope that some new source of life will peak its head above the lifeless corpse and bring some joy and meaning. There is so much truth in what many call the definition of insanity. Why do we continue to do over and over again what has ceased to make any sense or difference in our lives for years? Habits die hard and spiritual growth comes with funerals. We must put some old ways of living and being to rest. Let them go to their permanent resting places with honor. But, let them have a place to rest in peace.

3) Loose ourselves in tasks that are meaningful and need to be done but could wait.

I am amazed at how often I will pick up a noble task once again and try and breathe life into it just to avoid the yearning my soul longs to embrace. On some level, I find a sense of purpose in some these tasks, but it truth, it is not what my soul requires of me at this time. This task brings a degree of meaningful information and purpose into my life but does not offer the transformation for which my soul demands.

For many in this conversation, we sense we are on not just on a search for fulfillment but a pilgrimage of sorts. We realize that we are approaching a time where much of the distraction and busyness of our soul must now come under His Lordship and we must embrace the gifts yet unopened. Maybe we should call this journey “The Waiting Gift.”

Breaking the Trance

2008-09-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

Community as Place of Vulnerability

How does community happen? Down through the centuries many learned and Godly people have asked this question. On some level the answer is always the same and always different. It is the same in that it is always the divine “yes” of Jesus that begins the conversation. It is different in that how that yes comes to us is always in the language of our hearts, in that time and in that place. In other words, God is a missionary and He knows how to speak our language.

As I go from house to house one common denominator seems to arise and that is the trance like state that comes from the isolated self(ves). Biblically we would probably call it a strong hold but it does create trance like states of suspended awareness such that great pain and great truth are mutually ignored. Richard Rohr said it is hard to remain spiritually hungry. We want our answers too quickly and we want the pain to go away. Thus we tend to activities that either hide the pain or dull it or in extreme cases just ignore it all together.

A few months back I had a trip to the hospital. It involved some intestinal track issues in which the pain was pretty excruciating. As many of you know, a few years back I had a bout with cancer. To say I have an aversion for hospitals would be an understatement. On my way to the hospital I realized once again just how fragile I really am. Part of my humanness keeps me from that awareness most of the time or I probably would not be able to function at all. In some ways we are much like that on the spiritual level. There are so many areas of my life that need to come under the scrutiny of the Savior. If He were to reveal Himself in His fullness to me I would surely die (literally). I could not handle the truth of His revealing. However, shame is the word our culture uses for the emotion that hides from the truth because of the fear of being discovered as needy and wanting and unable to deal with the powerful nature of life. Is this such a surprising realzation? On one level, of course I know that life is bigger than me. On the other hand I constantly berate myself for being too weak to handle the ongoing pain and struggles that I encounter. I am ashamed I need anyone for anything. This is one of the primary postures of this trance. I am so ashamed that I need anyone for anything that I will let my sickness, my malady, my pain, my illness, or whatever, just continue on and on so I do not have to reveal my true estate.

What has happened in the church is that we have created a healing place into which no one can check into? When I say we have created” what I mean is that God in Christ has made a way for us to find restoration and safety. He is totally self emptying, totally self giving. And yet we are unable to receive this part of His nature because we see ourselves as unworthy. Our unworthiness ironically is reflected in that fact that we are needy. Do we see the absurdity of this? We theologically know that God in Christ is offering us the fullness of Himself which can and will heal and restore us over time and yet we create a system that only allows us to receive this outpouring if and when we are so defeated and needy that He is our last resort. Let us tear away the shame that keeps us from entering into His rest. Let us tear away the fear of being discovered as imposters.

Issues of leadership and what that means have come to the table for discussion in recent weeks. We have so many models for leadership and being a pastor’s kid, I have been privy to many styles and theories. Recently, Dan Allendar wrote a book entitled “Leading with a Limp” and I must say that this book has revolutionized my understanding as to the nature of true leadership. In “Leading with a Limp“ Allendar takes note of the fact that most leaders see taking charge as an issue of power and control. We lead because we know. We lead because we are where everyone else should be. We lead because we have discovered systems and principles that will allow others to reap the bounty of wisdom that we as leaders can offer. Obviously I am tweaking this point to make a point. Samson Society and the New Adam community has taught me some invaluable things in the last few years. One is the amazing power of organic leadership and the ability of most people to lead on some level at some point. We call it being “fully authorized.” What I have observed is the powerful and beautiful gifts that naturally flow from people as they walk not only in their strengths but in their weaknesses. In other words, it is our wounds that often are the biggest blessing to others. We have been there or we are there and thus we can not only empathize, we can join with our brothers and sisters and walk the journey together. Whether it is finances or health or children or illness or parents or intimacy, we all are human and we all long for healing and restoration. This is the gift we offer to one another.

I opened up this latest blog installment with the question “when can true community happen?” I am convinced that is has been happening for nearly two thousands years and recently we have seen an outbreak of real community in our midst and we are merely following its aroma. Its aroma is sweet. It tastes really good to us once we discover that our shame is keeping us from Him and each other. It is sweet to discover that not only do we not need to hide but that it is our very brokenness that is our gift. It is the fact that we endured or stayed with the struggle or pain or persevered or maybe we didn’t and we saw the Father like a good shepherd come back for us a make sure we were brought back to the rest of the flock. We have memories and testimonies of His love and sufficiency. What a gift to give others.

Pain is a teacher. Suffering is a doorway. For many of us, this is a season of deep pain. I am convinced that once again, the reason this pain is so overwhelming is the trance like power of "the isolated self." We are suffering alone. We are weeping alone. We are waking up so afraid of the future alone and we actually believe that life will not get better. Life is full of ascent and descent. To promise a life of painlessness or a world where there is no struggle would not just be a lie, it would keep us from our Savoir. He knows our broken hearts.

Many communities are on the threshold of discovering this safe place of suffering in public.
We are moving beyond the need for answers alone (we need truth mind you), and beginning to see the Savior in our midst in the lives of each other. Our pride is dieing and we are beginning to see that our life is truly hidden in Christ. We are beginning to see that when Christ is revealed in us, our true glory is revealed as well. Hiding through shame and fear get us no where.

In the end all we have to give away is our journey- our story.

Being There

2008-09-02T01:30:00.000-07:00

The Practicing of Sacred Space

Looking back over nearly fifty years of sprawling suburbia and its veracious appetite for space, green, and peace, I wonder along with the characters in Jurassic Park the movie, “You scientists never ask yourself whether you should build it. You just did it!”

Had we pondered a bit more from our ancestors some of the foundational human propensities, we may have undoubtedly come up with a deep need for people to belong. This belonging is not merely existential or metaphysical. It appears to be hard wired into our very DNA. We feel more ourselves when we are a part of something, somebody and some place.

Wendell Berry has a penchant for what he calls “sacred space”. He has lived in the same small town for nearly 60 years and thus able to clearly reflect on the beauty and sanctity of that place over the long haul. Most of us would not even have a clue how that kind of longevity might impact the eyes of our hearts. To live in one place for 60 years…how could it be?

All this talk about space is really a discussion about the discovery of a common place. I currently lack that sensibility and its lack leaves a hole in my soul. As I maintained above, our ancestors seemed to get the need for a common place and they built that sense into the very architectural fabric of their communities. Now…we cocoon…and we feel isolated…and we are depressed…..and we are ashamed we are depressed….thus we isolate even more.

A few weeks back a friend in East Nashville referred to Franklin as a faux community. Part of me resented the comment but as usual my felt sense of offense told me something of the truth. Many of us have longed for a deeper sense of connection and community in the Franklin area and the proliferation of churches on every block is a metaphor for that desire to be planted in something alive and real.

Our loose knit communities have clearly articulated in the last few years or so the price of isolation. Satan loves to get us away for the herd as it were. Once we’re alone, all our brokenness and strongholds take us to places where no one individual can truly survive. We were not meant to fight these battles alone. So what about this common place? What might these characteristics look like and could this very well be what the Kingdom reign turns into the Church?

What are the characteristics of community around a common place?

1) Spontaneity

I love ritual and tradition. Communities are formed around the deep symbols to which they honor. With that being said, true communities also hold up the value of spontaneity. So much of our daily lives are lived out in the moment. Meals, serendipitous meetings after the “show,” or spur of the moment get togethers, generally reflect that this common place is more about family and relationships and less about programs and meetings. My prayer is that this family will continue to come together because they are drawn and allow the sacred moment to reveal to us the glory of our gathering. We can thank Eric B. for modeling this gift.

2) Availability

It has become so clear to me that as we grow in Christ we become more available to His bidding and to His perception of reality. I can be so self absorbed when I choose to be. Out of that space I demand that anyone entering my life do so on my schedule with my time parameters and needs preeminent in their approach. Messy friendships, time consuming encounters, and confrontational relationships are just not on my radar. I want people around me who allow me to coast, to sleep, to rest, to hide. This, of course, is not something I am aware most of the time but as I have made myself more available I am discovering the wild expressions of human personality and the shear amount of experiences I can have in a day. Just being there becomes its own blessing.

On the other hand, I do not want to feel like I am putting anyone out when I have a need. I like being available for others but shun being “needy myself.” I love to give to others. I struggle much more letting others restore me. Being the strong one is my dominant persona. There are reasons for my reticence about being “needy.” Over the years I have sensed friends who comply and help me out but drag their feet the entire time. I get the shear burdensome nature of my life on theirs. In truth, I am sure I have been that friend.

Now more than any time in my life I am allowing my day to have buffer times where I can just sit and listen and love. The simple gift of one’s presence is glorious and holy. May we allow the playful serendipity of life to bring us together and make ourselves available whenever and however God chooses? We can thank Art Dearmond for “being there” for so many of us.

3) Frequency

Once a week contrived encounters make for friendships that are strained and plastic. I cannot and do not come to the larger Church gathering with my brokenness out in the open. It is not only inappropriate, it is just not what the moment demands. However, to get to know someone is to take the time (frequency) to hear their story, sit in their home, love their children, and listen to them be childlike and silly. Scripture tells us how the early Christians met together daily. What would happen if we were intentional about meeting with one another on a daily basis? The early believers devoted themselves to teaching, breaking bread, and fellowship on a daily basis. Why? Could it be that this sense of camaraderie was so strong and vital that being together was indeed a gift and blessing rather than a burden and purposeful scheduling issue? If I hear one more person say…”Heh, let’s get together.” And not do it, I will scream. I see that now (saying, Let’s get together,” when you do not even intend to do that) as a false sense of community and a need to appear intimate when indeed there is no intention of growing together. Words mean something and the human heart is looking for belonging. Are we willing to plan or not plan for that matter, friendships into our lives? Kyle Rigsby engages in the frequency thing and many are blessed.

4) Common Meal

Was the breaking of bread together in their homes just a formality or was and is there something deeply sacred about the act of sharing food together? We all resonate around the Eucharistic meal and understand its sustenance in light of who Christ is. I wonder if we somehow ignore the communal nature of breaking bread as another manifestation of Christ’s feeding of the human soul. Have restaurants grown in popularity in recent years because this engagement is more than mere sustenance for the body but also for the soul and spirit? I and many others are a bit bluer (you have to have been there to get this one) today because of the many meals we have shared at E. Brown’s home. The Carlsons know how to through a hearty feast as well.

5) Geography

This is the hardest trait to engender as suburbia has divided people into classes by creating subdivisions that reflect financial abilities to purchases homes. That has always been the case on a certain level, but in recent years, certain areas of town are created specifically for those who see themselves as a “gated community.” Is there a point where you move to were you find the most family? Is there a time when proximity is the very thing that allows for availability and frequency? The home has become the ultimate personal choice for middle class families. Where we live says so much about us and our aspirations. What would happen if the issue of where we lived said less about our economic status and more about the friends and families through which we lived and formed life? This is happening more and more and it is impacting architecture. Shared housing and cooperative housing are now on the radar of many who desire community and a sense of common place as much as the accouterments of class, technology and leisure.

These characteristics above truly foster a sacred space or neighborhood in “days gone by” parlance. These challenges will begin to allow us to cut down on the commute, maybe even live off a single income, and finally set some boundaries around who and what we are a part of by freeing up our schedules enough to be a neighbor. Now, playing in the front yard could actually be a part of the kingdom expression and reign. Now, we are identifying our common community not only through intellectual assent and doctrinal unity but through geography, proximity and experience. This is why we need to inaugurate a radical reinventing of what we call the “CHURCH.”

Many of these ideas taken in part from book “The Connecting Church” by Randy Frazee

Being Human in Public

2008-09-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

Community as an Intentional & Sustained Spiritual Conversation

Life opportunities have offered to me the experiential difference between solitude and isolation. Given my need to write, a degree of seclusion is necessary to create the space into which the words will inhabit. The process of entering that space is always wrought with distractions, amusements, and emotional digressions as that which is hidden, is so for purposes currently veiled. Those things out of sight are secrets to me at this point.

However, the concealed for many is wet and heavy with shame making this burial mutually and complicitly a bond the heart makes with the tongue. The contract of the soul is made inside the hiddeness so many are unaware of this pact and wonder why their voice seems so small and attenuated. It is this sense of smallness and mystifying discomfort that causes many to drop out of the human conversation all together.

Wellspring is a loosely held together community of misfits, spiritual wanderers, and those in the process of being broken open. Maybe it is this initial condition of imperfection that offers up the beginning stages of a brand new way for humans to be themselves in public. My beginning declaration offered up the possible distinctions between solitude and isolation.

Solitude it would seem is a much more generative escape into the confines of the soul and goes there for restorative purposes although it might be led through pain and tears. Isolation is a different posture altogether. It is one of seclusion and remoteness. It is an intentional attempt to separate oneself from others and to foster the powerful emotion of loneliness.

Humans are indeed lonely and to push away the experience may close windows on the soul that are opening for deeper purposes. However, when isolation rules the process of disclosure, little to nothing gets in or out. We set ourselves apart, heighten our emotive state and declare to all that no one or anything can remove this mantel of shame and distance we feel from ourselves and others.

Generally we do not think about the distance we feel from ourselves. In fact, loneliness is usually attributed to someone or something else that is not aggressively seeking us out. We are lonely because we do not deserve to be in this state. Someone should see this and offer up their life and gifts to us in grace. We are lonely because others do not see our worth.

Solitude is not a stance that seeks to separate oneself. It is a bearing that comes from a deep desire to unite all things and do so both individually and corporately. There is work to do alone so that community can take place. But if solitude is seen as isolation, our ability to then be human in public is diminished if not made impossible.

The statement made above that we are lonely because others do not see our worth has a ring of truth. Is it possible that the worth of the soul is not ultimately meted out in private? Is it possible that who we are at the most profound level comes only when we are with others and they see what we offer to the conversation. In this setting we are offering up our voice to the mix, our words to the story, and taking our place at the table. The place setting has our name on it after all.

Few teachers or scholars have studied the impact of dialogue and conversation on groups and individuals like the now deceased physicist David Bohm. He offers in his research some amazingly spiritual reasons for making sure real dialogue is taking place in communities all over the word. Bohm contends that “generative listening” is essential for profound conversations to take place. Because life is so multi layered and mysterious, it is vitally important to listen to others with a desire to understand rather than build a case. As the race for the presidency has now taken center stage, it is often observable that this posture or demeanor is lost in many a conversation. I would contend this posture is lost or deeply buried in most conversations.

We talk much about the need for a safe container in our community. We do so in many ways to foster this kind of conversation. It is a great battle internally to hold in tension opposite ideas and allow for someone else’s beliefs, conclusions, and assumptions to rise to the fore. When I begin to be truly human in public I allow my voice to offer up my personal meaning but I do so assuming that there are countless meanings in that space in which I now reside.

To discover the host of differing, contrasting, and even opposing assumptions and conclusions about life, truth, and experience is to begin to see the shockingly and beautifully exquisite assembly called humanity. It has always been this way. Bohm and other scholars tell us this through their research but we want to assume that the group we hang with thinks much like we do and that allows us to feel like a self in their midst.

Is it possible that our fears to express our loneliness in public settings are because we wonder if it will be heard and taken in as valid or real? If our experience in community is that certain voices are stifled and muffled or removed, that is a message to beware of being too open about our thoughts. Could it be that prolonged isolation creates profound loneliness and this is due in part to our inability to be human in public?

I learn how to be me. One would assume that being a self comes naturally but it appears that the dance of life is just that and we learn from one another the blessings and cursings we offer up to the conversation of life. What happens when our listening is deep and generative? We begin to not merely offer a space for others to be human but the container itself offers up this space. This is a divine operation not merely ours. This safe container is what allows for us to live out our meaning and express our voice in public. Who we are was meant to be shared. We are a gift. Our voice was meant to be heard.

Much of life feels like a rehearsal and in fact it is. No one comes to this life the second time around thus none of us are experts. We often want our voice to dominate, or we purposely hide our voice and make the community discover from where its quiet cries are emanating. Is there a brand new way of being human in public and is it essentially connected to our place in the conversation and our solitude? Will all our native giftedness begin to arise and serve others when we allow our voice to be heard, when we step away from isolation and offer up our voice, our meaning?

The Kingdom is being ushered in as we speak. Listen.

1 Corinthians 12
Spiritual Gifts
1-3 What I want to talk about now is the various ways God's Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often mis-understood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable. Remember how you were when you didn't know God, led from one phony god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it? It's different in this life. God wants us to use our intelligence, to seek to understand as well as we can. For instance, by using your heads, you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say "Jesus be damned!" Nor would anyone be inclined to say "Jesus is Master!" without the insight of the Holy Spirit.
4-11God's various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God's Spirit. God's various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God's Spirit. God's various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:
wise counsel
clear understanding
simple trust
healing the sick
miraculous acts
proclamation
distinguishing between spirits
tongues
interpretation of tongues.
All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when.
12-13You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you're still one body. It's exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.
14-18I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn't just a single part blown up into something huge. It's all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, "I'm not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don't belong to this body," would that make it so? If Ear said, "I'm not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don't deserve a place on the head," would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
19-24But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn't be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, "Get lost; I don't need you"? Or, Head telling Foot, "You're fired; your job has been phased out"? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the "lower" the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it's a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn't you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?
25-26The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don't, the parts we see and the parts we don't. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
27-31You are Christ's body—that's who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your "part" mean anything. You're familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his "body": apostles prophets teachers miracle workers healers helpers organizers those who pray in tongues.But it's obvious by now, isn't it, that Christ's church is a complete Body and not a gigantic, unidimensional Part? It's not all Apostle, not all Prophet, not all Miracle Worker, not all Healer, not all Prayer in Tongues, not all Interpreter of Tongues. And yet some of you keep competing for so-called "important" parts.
But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.

Finding Direction in the Needs of Others

2008-08-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

The discovering of God’s will for one’s life is a conversation that is common place amongst believers. Many a verse is offered up as guidance and much of the trajectory of people’s choices and intentions arise from a highly personalized sense of how God directs. Is it possible that we will find a deeper sense of the authentic self when we look at our futures through the lense of those around us or in proximity to our awareness? Could the actual needs of our friends, our family, our community and our world be offering a path to follow?

As the self wanes in its exaltedness, the possibility of relationships and purposes outside the highly introverted sense of choice come to the fore. We begin to actually find meaning & direction by being in relationships. We find our self in the selves of others and in the projections they place upon us. We see the glory of others and this glory causes us to dream and plan for a better world. Our plans, however, begin to take place with those directly in our presence. There is no future home. There is now.

Joanne Vance, a visual artist said the following about her life and work. “The essence of my work is humanity; how we value ourselves and are valued. This goes far beyond brush and canvas. It is my aim to blur the distinction between my life and my work so the two become inextricably linked. Hopefully my life will become my art…maybe eve vice versa.” She goes on to say...” I am an artist, mother, and wife, not in any particular order. I am interested in people, family values, fidelity, integrity and hope. I am passionate about touching the lives of people who feel undervalued and irrelevant, not for my gain but for theirs. Obviously, with that sort of ethic, come great rewards anyway, so it’s a winning situation.”

What causes some human beings to offer up their lives as a gift of service while others make an art form out of self aggrandizement? Is it possible that the template for self discovery and expression as reflected in Western European societies is not merely sub biblical but antithetical to the very story Jesus offered?

Give and it shall be given. You are not your own. Pick up your cross daily. Die to yourself. Serve. These are all parts of our Christian story. Yet for many of us a competing ethos has crowded out our ability to incorporate those truths into our idea of the self and our life direction and work. We have been formed deeply by a narrative that ties so much of our worth around our paycheck, our status and our productivity as defined by economics.We are busy building barns and fences.

Upon closer scrutiny we may find that much of our intentionality about the way we engage life direction depends upon the maximization of our abilities to acquire, spend and protect. Getting, spending and hording now overwhelmingly replace other activities and our very souls become reflections of the consumer that we have become. More always trumps better. Or, we make sure that we have control over the acquisitions and are the sole administrator of the estate we have acquired.

To acquire involves our presence. If life direction is the acquisition of personal wealth then the wealth of others, community and the world becomes of secondary importance if important at all. Wealth (the good kind) in this case is the perception of development of the assets and opportunities afforded us by seeing life direction through the needs and presence of others. This kind of wealth is generally not on our radar. Why? There is an untested consensus in the West that more is always better. There is an unquestioned complicity that individuals must first take care of themselves before they can take care of others.

There is a well known financial guru who teaches in many ways that the biblical mandate for financial stewardship is to first get “your house” in order and THEN help others. As I have watched this man’s disciples of sorts go out into the world I find that they never get their house in order because no one has ever tested the foundational philosophies around what their house should look like. No one is asking them what their life direction is about. It is assumed that the mandate of a society built around financial independence is sacrosanct. It need not be questioned. It is just the “way things are.”

When the needs of others become the possible voice of God, we listen differently. We begin to see their needs not as burdens to bear but opportunities to share. In the sharing we deepen our own humanity and begin to have solidarity with others around their deepest most human parts and not the superficial issues of acquired wealth and status.

The incarnation is more than a theological concept. It is the story and posture of a God who decided that the sharing of Himself was His deepest desire. As love, what else could He do but offer His very best? When we continue to see life direction through the needs of others, the story of the Incarnation is written again in our hearts. The very nature of the world turns towards restoration and redemption. The Kingdom of God is manifest on earth as it is in heaven. We become a gloriously rich community able to see the very Godhead in each other’s neediness. This is a gift. "There is enough when we share." - Jim Wallis

Community as Dowser (The Divine Diviner)

2008-08-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

In recent years my wife and I have worked with a large village in

Kenya

. The word village is really misnomer as the village is really a small city with nearly 20,000 people surrounding the center of the town. As it is with many villages in Africa, water is highly prized and wells are actually fought over (in terms of placement and location).

Christ's statement as to His status as the living water is a metaphor many of us in the West have highly spiritualized. In Africa, living water is a premium. Much of the water they have access to is full of bacteria and disease that either makes one tremendously ill or could at some point kill you. What a strange phenomenon that the very water your body thirsts for could actually kill you if it is not living water. Living in this sense would be considered life giving rather than death giving.

We in the States take water for granted. We do not need to think about what might come from quenching our thirst. We can drink up without fear. Ironically our access to unlimited sources of water is in some ways another metaphor for the over abundance we have in Western societies. We no longer grasp the conditions that many face throughout the world and in that lack of awareness a strange thing happens to the very water we drink. It begins to bring small doses of bacteria that begin to saturate our soul. These small organisms enter our soul and slowly over time alter the very way our bodies and souls engage the world.

Taking this metaphor further I offer up this scenario. Is it possible that because we take one of life’s most vital life sources for granted, we then take the provider of this gift for granted? What is the by product of taking God for granted and how did we get here?

As I enter full fledged middle age I find that discovering spiritual wells is getting harder and harder. Ironically it is not due to my lack of thirst but my awareness as to how I hunt for water. My water dowser (a term people in the backwoods use for one looking for a place to dig a well), has been taken for granted due to the culture in which I thirst. I have dug my well deep into this world and now my soul thirsts for water of a certain kind. My tongue thirsts for increase and growth. I have lived my life from an economic perspective that says I can sell the water that is a gift. My life is available to the highest bidder. This has all been unwitting as I did not know the God of success was enshrined in my heart, in my thirst. I discovered the source of my thirst when I began to discover that I saw myself through this lense of worth, merit and accomplishment. I am what I do. I am what I earn. I am where I live. I am what I have. I am who I know and I know people of power and prestige.

Of late my thirst has begun to change and the very refreshment my soul used to find refreshing now has a strange and even dis-settling taste. I have come to see that my ability to create wealth for myself and others is an elixir that no longer washes over my soul with any sense of refreshment. As I enter middle age I begin to see that life in indeed filled with mortality and limitation and that my thirst for unlimited access to water is not the way the universe works. The water my soul has taken for granted is a myth. I can drink of this water but it is really sugary soda pop or some saccharine version of living water. My tongue did not know the difference but now my heart has begun to inform my bodily appetites and my thirst is changing. I can no longer satiate my thirst with liquids that indeed are filled with salt thus making my thirst a never ending returning to the very things that are making my thirst unquenchable.

Lately I think I heard the Spirit say, “Dig here.” In my heart I am thinking, “What, dig here? There is no water to be found in this location.” As I reluctantly stopped my incessant search for water at the wrong well I began to discover something about the water the Spirit offers. His water is not just for me. He wants to build wells for the village. He desires that this water be accessible to anyone - the just and the unjust. He says the rain falls on all. He seems indiscriminant as to how He offers us this living water. Now my thirst is quenched in the shift in my intentionality as to my digging. Whereas in the past I may have dug for myself, for my own edification, my own personal wealth and thirst, now I have begun to dig with & for others. We are digging. We are dowsing together. We stop and pause and ask corporately, "Is there water here?”We acknowledge together our need of this living water. We are all thirsty beyond our ability to attain anything in this life. The thirst, the real deep down thirst comes in our common humanity. When we begin to see that under our clothes, past our accomplishments, past our marks we have made in this world, we are all the same. This search for water is a communal search and the place of the well must serve many. It is not for my personal private thirst.

I thirst along with others. I dig along with others. I am digging the well along with others. In Africa many of the wells get vandalized and then become inoperable. Our spiritual wells in the West get vandalized as well through our ignoring their maintenance and oversight. When we dig a well for the thirst of others we create a space in this world where people gather. We place the well in a community, hopefully at the center of town; we gather together and admit our thirst for living water. We admit who we are and why we were attempting to build our private little wells that allowed us to have access to water any time we wanted. In Africa, the rich often close off access to water wells to the poor for obvious reasons. They do not want to identity with these people. Even though the thirst is the same and in sense water is a gift from the creator, wealthier people close off the source of water and put up fences around the well.

I want to offer access to the well to anyone and all. I want to coalesce my searching for water in isolation and bring the process under the community and make it a search together. Help me this day to be a good dowser. Help us as a community of thirst to be a place were people know they can get their deepest thirst quenched. Help us God dig deep into You for the sake of one another.

Longing inside Community

2008-08-19T14:13:00.001-07:00

The Risks of Dreaming the Impractical

We all have aspirations. We all have dreams and goals. But I am convinced that too much talk about life as though it were controllable if one only figured out all the steps, has inadvertently made dreams perfunctory excursions of the soul. I say perfunctory in that they now lack the enchantment and hopefulness that are really at the foundation of the soul. Who and what are we at our very depths but dreams? When these dreams are bantered about as though easily formed and easily accomplished, they lose their intrinsic glow. They lose their ability to offer hope. The loss of hope is a terrible thing. At this point the resignation allows for much of the fallenness of this world to berate and attack our soul and we are passive and quiet. We have no sense of childlike expectation.

The soul obeys out of expectation. This posture is not merely wishes and plans but is the very basis of trust in the world. When we lose our trust nothing has clarity. Nothing has substance for all is reflected in its fallen state. We only see the specter of what is not. To dream and anticipate is to trust beyond common sense.

We are taught from very early on that certain behaviors are sensible while others are not. I am convinced that if Jesus were to show up in Western advanced countries today he would appear like some wild eyed misfit and most of His teachings would be considered unrealistic, unusable if not downright useless.

So much of what animates our deepest parts is birthed and nurtured in hope. When that possibility is shot down through feasibility studies, cynicism birthed from our own unwillingness to admit we have lost our dreams, or a lack of conversation with the community, gatherings take on a selfish tone. Ironically, real dreams of hope always involve the whole. They involve the whole because individuals are willing to reveal their deepest most seemingly idealistic imaginings to others risking ridicule. When we have the courage to be children in front of one another we find that our authentic self begins to speak. We say what we believe the world should actually be like. Now the conversation begins. Now we must begin to trust for these heartfelt disclosures are the only thing really holding up our soul. This is the foundation below the foundation. This is the air our very being breathes.

Recently in our community the discussion reflected on how we are all learning how to love. The only way that action is poured out in our community is when we see two things – our lack and our hope. To allow our deepest needs to become apparent is to risk loosing our hope. What if our needs are unmet? What if no one cares? What if I am left alone? All these doubts and suspicions are equally real. They reflect the experience we have had to date when it comes to trusting other human beings. So why trust again? Why allow for our hopes to be rekindled? Because it is who we are.

When we choose to stop longing for the “really real” we become cynical, angry, busy, full of self, overly religious, and despairing. I have had to fight this last one for many months. When all hope seems to be lost where does one go? Where do I go? To those who I sense love me. This is dangerous for now I am really opening up my deepest desire. That deepest desire is to belong.

We live in times where belonging is often based around money earned, position in life, power, who one knows, and many other things that keep our selves set apart. For this community to go deeper into the longing we must go deeper into the impracticality of our dreams. We must go deeper into the sorrow of each person who is losing that power as we speak. We must have the courage to look at one another and carry that darkness for one another. We must say, “Let me long with you.” “Let me hallucinate the divine possibilities of obeying our Savior together and build a highly inept community and village. Let them say (about us) that they are crazy in love with one another and offer up all they have when they have so little. Is that not the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Let our longing cause us to share our loaves and fishes today and usher in the unworkable, unreasonable, impractical, beautiful Kingdom where everything belongs.

The Kingdom & the Church

2008-08-13T08:07:00.001-07:00

It has been a number of years since I would consider my relationship with “the Church” as a healthy one. Whether is was attending a mega Church with unbelievable speakers and programs or a tiny church plant begging people to be involved in the worship gathering, the entire enterprise just seemed to be a necessary evil. To ascribe that word to the Church reveals the depths of my confusion and ambivalence. I longed for something more and I was told that Church attendance and involvement were part of the fulfillment of that longing. So….I attended church with great consistency, commitment and focused attention on all I could do to maximize that experience.

Church for me was the gathering, the building, the programs, the offering of the leaders to me as a congregant. I never felt good about being called a member or congregant. It seemed corporate at best or just anonymous at worst. Growing up as a preacher’s kid, church attendance was obligatory. If attendance represented any one’s closeness to God I was nearly glorified by the age of 10 attending meetings sometimes four and five times a week. Maybe it was this highly trained routine that was placed deep within my habitual response to life that made my need for a “church fix” so strong.

Unfortunately the church as a gathering, a program, and building really disappointed me. In fact, it nearly destroyed my life and marriage. I was attending one of the nation’s larger churches and striving diligently to be used by the full time staff on some level. However, there were few slots open for my gifts and the expectation was that my commitment was really going to be manifest by my attendance , my compliance and yes, even my full enjoyment of what was going on at the church. The unspoken assumption was that if I was really desiring to be a humble servant I would understand how hard it was to “run” a church and fit in when I could and be the guy who spoke for leaders.

Now I realize the manipulation of someone who asks for my compliance as if it were servanthood and sees any questioning as rebellion or just rocking the boat. As a preacher’s kid I was very willing and able to co dependently oblige anyone who was in leadership. I wanted them to like me, to tell me how much I was needed, even if all they needed from me was to sit and attend, sing, pray corporately, and support through my tithes and offerings.

Any sense of deviations from the “plan” handed down from on high was tantamount to setting the church up for a spilt. So you ate all your questions, all your concerns, and even your own needs as all your relationships centered on supporting the status quo. There were groups of people who were cheer leaders for the leaders. They would always have a smile on their faces, always have a good word, and always make sure that any complaints were always followed up with “ but the leaders are doing the best job they can do.” I was the “nice guy.” I knew the hearts of the leaders (in some cases I did and in others I did not) so I wanted to smooth over any conflicts and quickly move on to the work of the church which these men (mostly men) knew way before I ever even had these things on my heart and mind. I was passive and compliant and thus able to be supportive of any and all programs that came down the pike.

This statement that leaders were doing the best they can do of course had some truth to it. I do not think I ever met any leaders who got up in the morning and said “Today I am going to take advantage of the flock. Today I am going to push my own agenda regardless of whether it is in the best interest of the family of God or not.” Of course no one says that so trying to get to the core of the issue from the idea that leaders are purposely avoiding truth or duping their people is just not the point.

So what is the point? The real challenge in discovering “the point” is that when you spend the majority of your spiritual life giving away your own personal sense of God’s voice, when you mistake compliance and complicity for unity, then you are a sitting duck for church abuse.In recent years a number of authors have addressed the issues surrounding church abuse. It is clear that there are certain churches and certain leaders who would undeniably be convicted of the crime of abuse. Most churches, however, are not abusing people as much as they are ignoring them. This ascribing of the people in the church to those outside the scope of leadership and God’s voice is in part, part of the problem. It may be just as much of a crime to ignore someone as to misuse them.

Why do many in leadership ignore their flock or offer up simplistic programs to keep them busy and in some case diverted? I think it goes back to a foundational misunderstanding as to what happens in the process of seeking truth and living life. Somehow we have created the misnomer that when Church is “working” all conflicts, all misunderstandings, all conundrums and potential heresies will not only be put to rest, they will not even rear their ugly head. Is this unrealistic and naive or is it so wrong Satan uses it to keep people from discovering deeper truths and more substantial ways of living the Gospel?

How does a group of people hear from God? How does God speak and how might we know if it is God or just humankind hoping to speak for God? Evangelicals have made God an easy mark when it comes to speaking for Him. Christian publishing houses are full of books that probably should have never been written. This may seem a presumptuous thing to say but the shear amount of books claiming to know the heart & mind of God are part of the reason those “outside” the Church regard the whole process as ludicrous. I am not suggesting that the Church attempt to explain itself to those outside its ranks on all issues of truth. It is the presumptuous claim and posture of being God’s spokespersons often void of any brokenness or humility to which most are reacting. In fact, often times the posture of arrogance and smugness is interpreted as standing up for the truth.

As one of the “insiders” as it were, I know that most of the time this posture is actually far from the actual hearts of those wanting to share their faith and message. This posture in some ways is created by the need to placate the “religious” literalist in their midst who want to make sure all things are in order and all things are said according to some scripted rhetoric. No one really knows where the scripts originated or who actually scribed its contents but there are those spokespersons for this exactitude that are guardians over the Spirit of God and those with whom He might mistakenly share His life if the guardians are not vigilant.

The sarcasm here is really more irony. It appears that those claiming to know the voice of God with such clarity and precision are often those who seem to be the least able to offer up His supposedly most dominant character trait-love. As many are attempting to explore the machinations surrounding building community it is clear that one of the elephants sitting in the middle of the room is the deep mistrust and distance Christians have between one another when it comes to discerning the truth. Where does this mistrust and demeanor of suspicion come from? Why do we seem to fluctuate between surrendered obeisance and outright rebellion and cynicism on the other?

We are children of the modern. Part of our DNA is to question. We have been taught from early on in our educational experience that the self and its unveiling only arrive through formidable extrication from tradition and authority. Thus, deep within our ways of knowing we may appear to comply but this compliance is buying us something or we would not bow our knee. In the case of religion it is our fear of being shunned or of being one of the “outsiders.” Thus when we come into the organized Church we bring with us the competing responses of a willingness to cooperate and an underlying distancing that will only go so far and in truth, will bale if the going gets a little to rough. Rough here may mean forgiving, committing to relationships even when it has ceased to “assist” us personally. Is it possible that it is easier to set up a system where unity and community are built around a degree of intellectual assent rather than a deep deep commitment to live out our lives with one another? ( i.e. The Kingdom)

One of the strongholds I believe many have encountered in the dialogue about forming a church plant is just how messy all this talk of community might get when they actually start to live out our lives with one another. Your sin, your brokenness is going to cost me. It will spill out all over me and my family. You greed, your pride, your sloth, your fears come with the package. I cannot separate your need of a Savior with your joyous gifts that you may freely bestow on me as well. I get the beautiful brokenness in community and I really feel more comfortable with the old Church model. Give me programs. Give me technique and list of things to do and be. Write it out on the wall. Make teaching more like parenting rather than a journey we take together. Make loving more about what we share in common (what many of us call friendship) and less about sitting with you even when your sin has now brought me to me knees along with you. (An aside- marriage is often wrought with this reality)

This is what I am frightened of. This is what I want to avoid. I do not want to get hurt. I do not want to be a part of something that might turn sour. I would rather dip my finger in the luke warm water of organized religion than the nitty gritty world of life and the Kingdom that are so big I am frightened in its shadow.

It makes sense to me that I run from pain and hurt. Who in their right mind would willingly step into the path of a careening automobile driving headlong into their midst. This ironically is the underbelly of every and all churches. We are dangerous. We are a group of wounded people poised to either do damage or bring relief to sorrow and suffering. Most of the time it is both. I want to faucet that gives only pure water. I want the community that is risk free. I want the church that has made all the hard decisions for me and all I have to do is “buy” into the program and comply. Thus, much of the compliance that I complained about above, I have had a hand in creating. I am the man!

What do I do?

Like many rants, as some point we must empty our inner outrage only to discover the very hypocrisy of which we observe is equally in our own heart. I must repent Father. I am the one afraid of moving out into this space where You are my only source. I want the protection of formality and structure even if it is not forming anything in me of worth. Please help me walk in the fullness of Your Spirit and hear and listen to You. I am not sure if I would even know the voice of God sometimes. I know I must learn to listen together. Listen in love.

This is it. This is the sacred task.

Listening

Listening

Loving

Loving

Listening

Listening

Loving

Loving

What are You saying Father?.

Speak to us.

Replace Your Career with Your Life

2008-08-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

Years of modern philosophical constructs surrounding our description of life have now made the soul a commodity to be maximized. The work of our hands and hearts have now become mechanisms for profiteering and our deepest nature is up for sale. It is said that the average person will have over five careers in their life time. These are not just new jobs but actually changes in how one configures their life around vocation and job issues. It is clear that for those who define themselves primarily or narrowly around the weight a job title or position offers may indeed find themselves without an identity. Rapid shifts in global economies now make career planning and company loyalty a crap shoot at best and a game of voodoo darts at worst. It is as if we are ask to define ourselves around a vapor and then wonder why we feel so adrift and without a core self.

To replace our career with our life involves a significant reorientation surrounding how we name and embody our decisions in life. In decades past it was expected that one would move to wherever their company ask them to re locate. It was also clear that retirement in the company you started out in or engaged in one’s 20’s very well might be where you ended up. Our parents and grandparents experienced this phenomenon. This kind of experience is nearly laughable at this point. However, people are not laughing. They are hunkering down even more into the soil of career as a source of identity but are doing so with a much more self aggrandizing sense about the search. If companies are going to be ruthless then so will employees. Loyalty to company goals and ideals is a thing of the past.

This kind of loyalty came natural to post WW I & II veterans who knew how to obey and hungered for a better world. The promises of industrialism and now technology and big business were tantamount to earlier forms of manifest destiny which brought Pilgrims to American shores and caused many to suffer for a better world in the here and now.

Unfortunately that better world was built upon an erroneous understanding as to the worth of the human soul. Not all things can carry with them a price tag. Much of life is gift plain and simple. In many ancient cultures, the idea of gift is written into the manner in which people groups communicate their worth and respect for one another. As we lose the concept of gift and the blessing of its exchanging, we begin to grow cynical as we then begin to wonder why no one sees our intrinsic worth.

As we replace our career with our life it is clear that the word ”our” is essential in this redefining. To find ourselves we must indeed work out that process in & with a set apart group of people who likewise desire to gift their lives to others. Could it be that the very nature of life transcends career and the degree to which we set the depth of our being down into this soil is the degree to which we are tossed about by every wind of change? We live in the climate and milieu of technological capitalism. This is a pervasive ambient presence that permeates all we do. From i-Pods to Game Boys, we are all hooked up to some form of leisure technology that feeds our interests and need for fun. This way of being means that we are constantly looking for things to buy to fulfill us. We consume not just for certain goods like milk and bread but clothing and music that reflect our deepest reflections on how we believe the world should or does operate. Thus, our consumer purchases become one of the few ways we can express ourselves. To replace our career with our life we must redefine our very purposes on this planet. Are we here merely to produce and consume? Is the most important thing about this life the material world and all its benefits? To make this shift we must move ourselves out of the center and place ourselves into a new hub and new center. That pivot point is community.

Make Community the Center

2008-08-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of years of autocratic governments, monarchies and despots made the search for the worth of the individual sensible and essential. The life of a serf in millennia past was hard and cruel. In these centuries past community was a central part of individual’s lives but kings, rulers, and sovereigns cared little for any one person. Thinkers, spiritual leaders and indeed our very Lord presented new ways of being that honored the self and in many ways salvation itself is the Father’s way of telling us our worth to Him. Ironically, as the emergence of the worth of the self and the power of the individual began to permeate Western European thought, we began to see primarily during the Enlightenment, a shifting away from the re defined sense of the self’s worth to the power and status of the self over all else. The self, or the individual now held precedence over all else and could trump the impact of other social ties and entities from the family, to the state & to the Church. At the risk of a laborious history lesson, the point here is that years of communally formed individuals were now being eroded in part due to the abuses of past autocratic leaders and rulers.

Fast forward centuries and we now live in times where the self is exalted, goes unquestioned, and is assumed to be the center of humanity’s search for meaning and worth. TV programs like Oprah Winfrey even go one step further and offer up the search for the self’s core as the ultimate purpose of human endeavors on this planet. We are here to discover ourselves and reveal to others our specialness through expression and demonstration. We are here to see ourselves blossom as individuals.The shift from self as center to community as center is difficult and wrought with challenges. Utopian dreams have fostered many well meaning communities that have gone on to be more abusive and autocratic than the one’s from which they were supposedly delivering its members. There are reasons Enlightenment thinkers fostered such thoughtful and powerful ideas as democracy and the worth of the individual. In the shadow of 20th century’s therapeutic deepening of the idea of self and the technology’s ability to fulfill most of our deepest longings, we now live in a time where the power of self absorption and narcissism are dangerous and spiritually unhealthy.Even much of American Evangelicalism has fallen into the Gospel of self worship as it has made God’s will equal to one’s personal goals and dreams and prayer and personalizing of God’s activities here on earth in the form of a personal shopper for His people. God wants us to be blessed and prosper right? We can laugh at this on some level but the erosion of community as a discerning force and a friendly and loving place in which to work out one’s life is truly sorrowful.

We are in darker times than the Church would want to admit. Ironically, those who do not believe are often much more willing to articulate the dark underbelly of where world cultures are going as we continue to exalt the self and all its proclivities as the center of the universe. In fact, it is the duplicity of secular culture that makes the cynicism run so thick and even cause believers to doubt the world can be a better place. Pundits warn us of this slide into hyper narcissism and yet the very context of the sharing involves some form of commercial exploitation. Everyone sees the greed. We are just waiting for someone else to lay down their stuff first.

When community is the center there is sufficiency and even abundance.. Jim Wallis said, “when we share, there is enough.” Could this reorientation of our lives around the sufficiency of the whole versus the ultimacy of the individual help us discover the abundance we are all so looking for? The abundance may not be enough to build high walls of protection around our lives such that no one or hard times can get to us. Much of the saving and retirement plans of many of my aging boomers are really forms of Christian survivalism. They are going to make sure they have to depend on no one. This posture of course cannot be sequestered only in the area of finances and fiscal protection. This posture becomes a pervasive knee jerk mannerism of our very soul. We all become calculating expedient neighbors waiting for the other to go down so we can buy their stuff at a rummage sale.

Signs of the times are always hard to read and the Church has been one of the main purveyors of dooms day projections. However, we are in challenging times of transition. Would it not behoove us to reorient ourselves to a new way of living? One that was much more reflective of the heavenly enclave into which we be inaugurated at some point in eternity? There is more to this story you know.