Changes

For some time now I've been adrift, a small raft on a very big ocean. I've been looking for a place to land. I think I've found that place.

I'm now working towards becoming a ministerial candidate with the Free Methodist Church in Canada. During this process I will be contributing to a four year old church plant here in the Little City that Could. There's a lot to do and I will continue to work full time at the Mission. As a result, this blog may have seen it's last entry for a long, long time. Work, Church, meeting the denominational requirements, Blogging, Twitter, Facebook - alas, there are only so many hours in the day.

To each and every one of you - to those of you have read, commented, stopped by occaisionally or been here since day one - Thank You

What a long, strange, wonderful trip it's been.

Canadian Thanksgiving

Tonight, after a marvelous dinner and evening with family and friends, the Resident Love Goddess and I drove home in the midnight hour. The road took us through farm fields bathed in moonlight, past silent, stoic barns and country homes, some with lights still burning cheerfully. We were cocooned in the warmth of our car, listening to quiet music by the gentle blue lights of the dashboard. And we talked. Oh my, how pleasant and loving and gentle and fine was our talk.

For the first time in almost twenty years I have real optimism about what life will bring us in the next few years. I have, for the first time in those same twenty years, real, genuine hope. The world is as chaotic, unpridictable, worried and fearful as ever, but I truly sense that the Resident Love Goddess and I are being held in the palm of His hand, that we are deeply, powerfully, wonderfully loved.

And I am so very thankful.

Illuminated Manuscript

Photo via Illuminated WorldThere are people in the world who have the bible on their desk. I'm talking about the others. Thy're hiding the bible because it's too connected to church. When they get visitors they know it is uncomfortable."

That quote comes from Dag Söderberg, who was the CEO of one of Sweden's largest advertising firms. His mission? To "introduce today’s audience to a revolutionary contemporary Bible, one that encourages dialogue and is culturally relevant, readily accessible and easily digestible for any reader regardless of religious, economic, racial or social background."  The result is a visually stunning bible - an illuminated bible - for our times.

To introduce this bible to Sweden a series of photographs from the bible, with accompaning biblical text, were assembled in an outdoor display in Stockholm. 10% of the city's population visited the display. That amazes me - engaging 10% of the population of a major European city with the bible. I'm guessing that bible sales in Sweden come nowhere close to America by any scale of comparison, but I'm equally astounded by this: "Testament" increased bible sales in Sweden by 50% without destroying existing bible sales in that country.

What happens when an advertising executive illuminates the bible? See for yourself. Yes, there are 'biblezines' out there. This is something altogether different. This is, I think, the start of something new in our world.

Added: More from Bene Diction Blogs On ...and I love the way Bene handled the troll. Class act, that Bene.

Yeah, Whatever

Mike Todd - he of Waving or Drowning fame - is brilliant. Absolutely. He's written a post called A Fork Cross in the Road for which he fears he will burned in effigy. I doubt it will come to that but who am I to say? This world is an anarchist's dream.

Last night the Resident Love Goddess and I sat and watched the season premiere of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.They do some amazing renos for some deserving people - and they deserve to be lauded for the work they do. But what kept nagging at me as I watched the show was something more than the number of times they focused on the various family members crying, or asked questions designed to start the tears, as if to heighten the drama. Underlying the entire show was an assumption that says, "Now you have a beautiful home. Now your life will be good." I can't quite put my finger on it, but after reading Mike's post I can't help but think the problem isn't just that we don't care, which is enough in itself, believe me. It seems like so much more than that - like we're just screwed up on so many levels that everything seems fine. As I said, I can't quite put my finger on it. It's greed, it's selfishness, it's short-sightedness, it's misplaced values and priorities, it's an essential misunderstanding of the message of Christ, it's egotism, it's ethnocentricity, it's... I don't know, it's almost like we have to invent a new word for the complexity and sweep of screwed-upness the world is in. Total Depravity comes to mind, though that term might be overworked in some circles.

I think our moral bankruptcy is, essentially, the absence of any connection whatsoever between our individual rights and freedoms and our collective responsibilities. This may say something about the nature of democracy and it's relentless elevation of the individual above the village. Democracy is the single most pervasive paradigm of our society, having such reach as to have compromised even the gospel of Christ with a cross that speaks to the guilt free life following the sinner's prayer, the apostrophe always before the 's', and never after. I don't know how we can read the Lord's Prayer, or the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments and not recognize the collective nature of those documents. I don't know how we can watch a show like Extreme Makeover Home Edition and not recognize that's something's wrong. I don't know how we can go on like this. 

This week, in our small, fair city on the shores of The Tiny Perfect Lake, two men died. One drowned in a small creek, in less than six inches of water. The other was found in the marina. In both cases a street person drank too much, passed out, fell into the water and drowned. Their names have been withheld pending notification of next of kin and I understand the significance of that. For right or wrong, for good, bad or otherwise, however, these men were members of our community and it feels very much like they are every bit as faceless and nameless in death as they were in life.

I don't know what to say about that, either.

Sons of Our Fathers

I saw my father from afar today. He was in a grocery store, in one of my early morning dreams. I watched him, peering over the top of his glasses as he read the label on a can of soup at the end of the next aisle.

When you are a child your father is larger than life itself. He is inconquerable, immovable, unstoppable, the biggest, most important idea in your universe. He is a moral centre and compass, he is the source of all approval, the guarantor of meaning and value, the source of all love in your home of homes. As our childhood lives evolve we begin to realize - suddenly and shockingly, often - the limitations of our fathers. He can't fix a broken arrow, he can't guess what happened at school today, he's afraid of snakes. His humanity grows in our childhood hearts, and our humanity grows with him.

Later, our childhood almost - but not - quite passed, we will test the limits of his authority, of his character, of his love. We will search him out when we don't need him, and stubbornly refuse his help when we do. We will resist his advice but embrace his foibles as our own. We will begin to hear his voice - his other voice, the one hidden within his great fears and anguish, within his great love for us - and in learning to hear his voice will forge our own. We will strive to be unlike him, never consciously aware of how ridiculously impossible this truly is.

Our teenage years will pass, though, and work and life and loves and responsibilities all our own will arise. We will be cocky, we sons of our fathers, and arrogant and stubborn and proud, and we will, as many times as is necessary, get knocked flat on our backs because of it. We will know our fathers from less of a distance now, much less, having held the very love of our lives in our arms on our wedding day, having held a newborn baby, in all its tiny, messy wonder, and having realized that the overwhelming sudden terror of unworthiness gripping us in that moment is exactly what he felt embracing our mothers, embracing us. He will be real.

Some of us will have our fathers taken from our lives far too early. Some will watch, helplessly, lovingly, as his strength and vitality fade into the parchment paper and dry, brittle leaves of old age. We will think deeply, know deeply and be, at the very depth of our soul, who he is.

I saw my father in a dream this morning, and watched him from a distance. He did not see me, I was hidden from him. Yet in this place of my mind, where dreams are born, where I am so deeply engaged by a crossword puzzle and a newspaper chess problem and the smell of Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke on warm, rough skin, in this place where dreams and reality meld he peers over his glasses and, though he does not see me standing here, I see him, standing there, where he has been all along, inside of me, inside of who I have become.

I find this dream of my father, seen silent and iconic within a ghostly quiet grocery aisle, fading as I stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. With my hand cupped beneath a mound of wet shaving cream I realize, with both certainty and finality, that this is exactly as it should be.

Most Interesting Thing I've Heard All Week...

"Expectations are resentments waiting to happen."

How true that is...

Meltdown

Jesus Manifesto has posted "The Death of Evelyn and the Failure of the Church."  Definitely worth reading.

My first reaction is simply to say that I can't write that kind of post anymore. I'm just too tired. My second reaction is that it still doesn't answer the question - "How could a lovinjg God allow this too happen?" I mean, seriously - if this is the work of the people who bear God's name why hasn't he stepped in and done something to make us grasp his vision, to make us understand the consequences of not caring for one another, of not living justly?

Unless, of course, the current economic meltdown is just that...