Today at the Mission

Went to see Shane Claiborne in Toronto last night. It was a good night, a great presentation. Shane and Chris Haw are doing valuable work for the Kingdom.

When we came into the church we found a shiny brochure and a poster on every seat. The poster was the upcoming movie, "The Ordinary Radicals". The brochure was for the magazine being launched by the Simple Way called "Conspire!" I sat there, with these two glossy advertisement in the pew rack in front of me and considered them, carefully, as I listened to Shane and Chris talk about subverting the empire.

Subverting the empire: the movie. Subverting the empire: the magazine. Subverting the empire: the book tour.

I don't know what else to say.

At 3 0'clock in the morning the whole world is an broken old shoe. At 3 o'clock in the morning all your regrets sit quietly at the foot of your bed. At 3 o'clock in the morning all your old loves come to visit, your losses whisper their names, your youth skips stones from the other side of the river, all of it a peculiar madness cloaked in a seemingly ordinary sanity.

There is no ritual to rescue me from the existential emptiness that yawns like a cavern in the middle of this night, no incantation, no prayer that will suffice. I am Jonah in the belly of the whale, Jeremiah weeping at the bottom of the well, Saul searching for a boy David to sing a lullaby. I am a valley of dry bones.

I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was a time when I had the answers. I could explain biblical doctrines of ridiculous complexity with clarity and ease. I knew what the questions were. I knew where in the bible to find the answers to those questions. I was saved. I could tell others how to get saved. We could say the prayer, together, you and I . Then you could be saved. The deal would then be done, the bargain struck, the contract signed, the ticket punched. Then all you had to do was go to a bible-believing church every Sunday, read your bible every day, pray every day, study to show yourself a workman approved, always be ready with an answer for your faith, not cause a brother to stumble, know your mission field, say "here am I, Lord, choose me."  Tonight? Now? In the compelling quiet of our little home, with the Resident Love Goddess sleeping so wonderfully and peacefully a few feet away? Well, let me tell you, I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about anymore. I've got nothing except that woman I love so much, and two red cats, and this broken old shoe and Jesus, somehow mixed up in it all. 

I think about the same things all the time now. I think about preaching. I think about starting a church. I think about God, and Jesus, and the Holiness of Spirit, and about the pains and hurts and loneliness and lies and busted up hearts and lives that are all around, every day, and about how I just want us to put one in the hand of the Others and see what happens. I've stopped telling people about this in real life because they inevitably insist that I am doing exactly that and,  while they're speaking, there's a voice in my head that wonders if it might not be better to just shoot myself in the foot with a nail gun, over and over again, rather than to try and explain what empty is, just one more time. The only thing I can do now with hurting people is talk pretty about Jesus, offering just enough information to suggest that maybe they ought to talk to him and not me, because I'm a truckload of destitute on the road to nowhere in particular. Sometimes folks here ask me to pray for them, and sometimes we pray together, an exercise in plumbing the depths of inner desolation that always ends with the same three words: God help me. Those with whom I bend the metaphorical knee seem grateful and comforted by this, and I have no explanation for that, either.

And so, here I am Lord. And it's 3 o'clock in the morning - again - and, well... damn.

From Under the Overpasses:

Every Monday in June and July a group of teenagers from a local camp come to the shelter to do a service project. I usually begin with a tour of the facilities and then turn their eager hands loose on a project. One young lady who is one of the camp counselors said to me on the tour, “You can read a person’s life by that person’s bedside table.” I was intrigued by what she meant by that. She said that she could learn everything she really needed to know about her campers by looking at their bedside essentials. “It’s the last things you lay down at night and the first thing you grab in the morning. It’s what is important to you in the middle of the night when you are alone.”

After you read the rest of this funny, touching, wonderful post you'll probably do exactly what I did - go look at what's on your bedside table. On mine? A stack of books I'm reading, a bible, 3 journals, 2 water bottles, an alarm clock blinking 12:00, CPAP machine, a plastic bag, a couple of pens, a bottle of shampoo. What can I say? I am a cluttered soul. On the Resident Love Goddess's side of the bed? Well, her table is a picture of elegant simplicity: alarm clock, lamp, a library book, a daily devotional, a small teddy bear.

What's on your bedside table?

Father's Day at church today. Every Sunday morning the kids come up to the front of the church just before the sermon and they're prayed over and then sent downstairs to "Junior Church". Today the Associate Pastor asked the kids if they wanted to say one thing they liked about their dad and then went down the row of kids with microphone. Some of the younger ones were, understandably, shy and didn't say anything at all. One or two of them were so delightfully cute. Then one kid said, "He's nice", and the most of the others repeated it. Most that is. One child simply said, "I don't know."

Then the Pastor preached the Abraham sermon. You know the one, where God tells him to kill his son and he says, "Okay". Doesn't argue, doesn't question, doesn't resist, doesn't ask if there might be another way, nothing. Packs up his son, packs up his knife, off they go. That's the Father's Day sermon - some guy heading off to kill his son because God told him to. Nice. The lesson? We should have such faith.

Oh. 

I've been hearing exactly the same sermon since I was a kid. Word for word. And you know, I could live with it if the lesson were about how willing we are to sacrifice our sons to the gods of our own making. I would be uncomfortable with this story no matter what, but perhaps less so if the message was that workaholics sacrifice their sons to their careers, that addicts sacrifice their sons to the god of the bottle or the syringe, that all those soccer moms and hockey dads bellowing and cursing at the referee - and the coach and their own kids - might well be sacrificing their kids to the gods of their own failed dreams, their own ambitions. I could live with that a bit easier than the shopworn goods I endured this morning, which boils down to we should have the same faith as Abraham, the guy who was willing to kill his child because God told him to. Of course, the story doesn't present us with any of the options I would prefer. No, the story forces us to confront a God who would ask a man to murder his own son, and the father who was all too willing to do it, but we don't want to talk about that, do we? Because somewhere in that conversation - as opposed to the monologue church is now - we'd have to acknowledge that not everyone comes from a perfect nuclear family, that some of us carry the weight of an almost unbearable emptiness that, given both our failings and those of our fathers, only God can fill. Of course, we'd then have to talk about exactly how God does that, which ought to be an interesting conversation; an enlightening conversation, one that may lead us to healing, freedom and wholeness even.

So tell me, seriously - Is it too much to ask for church to treat us like adults? Really too much to ask? That maybe we can handle the tough questions, that we might actually, you know, need to talk about the really difficult stuff, that it might be the very soil in which God wants to plant his new life within us, to nurture and grow his presence into our healing and our love for him and for one another, that this might be the very desert God wants to bring to bloom as we begin to minister to one another where and when and how and why it matters most.

Right. Never mind, then.

The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and so quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. (From "Surprised by Hope, p. 115)

I don't think this is at all self-evident from the 'ascension' alone but it does neatly explain the surprising nature of Christ's post-resurrection appearances.

As if any explanation was, you know ...adequate.

Over the past few weeks I've had a number of people ask me what's going on. I've not been such a happy camper, lately. (Right now my sister is asking, "What do you mean, lately?") I've been having this argument with God over the last few weeks. Well, I've been arguing. He's been waiting for me to finish.

Over the last couple of days, well, since what's come to be known as the Great Salmon Incident of 2008, I've been seeing evidence of his presence everywhere. Nothing spectacular - nothing even recognizable to anyone else - but each time I knew - absolutely knew - he was talking to me, just letting me know that he's here. It took me until tonight to figure it out and, although there's been these ordinary and yet incredible things happening all around me, it's been through the pages of scripture that he spoke - really spoke - to me. As I've been ruminating once again on the creation story, it seemed to me that the real message behind it all is that God is present. He's present in the very fabric of creation, present no matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter what's going on. He's present. He's here. Now.

I know that's probably not such a big deal for you, but it's been huge for me. I'm old enough to remember the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup, and it's taken me this long to realize my Heavenly Fatheer isn't going to abandon me, isn't going to disappear, isn't going to just not show up one Saturday morning.

You have no idea what this means to me.

My horoscope tells me this will be year of profound change - of spiritual change, no less. This amuses me to no end, partly because I have no trust whatsoever in horoscopes, and partly because it echoes the very sentiment I've had for some time now. Such is the nature of faith in this world, I suppose, but here I am, midway through the promise of a momentous year, wondering when said promised moment - or momentum - is to begin.

Then, today, between the humble club sandwich at the diner 'round the corner and the vanity of a Starbuck's Doubleshot on ice, I found myself in the car, navigating lazy weekend traffic, thinking about what it takes to manufacture such a new reality in our life, about whether or not it's even possible to manufacture a 'spiritual' change in our being, about the creative process God employs, about creation. I'm glad the traffic was thin.

Where to begin with this promised new creation, it seemed to me, was with the creation story itself. This is the story that stays in the sub text of every story, of every one of our stories. Creation. The very word fills the mouth with both understanding and wonder, familiar as my mother's handwriting on the outside of an envelope, mysterious and inaccessible as Katmandu. The bible begins with the creation story, with God whispering into the infinite, chaotic, terrifying absence, the abyss, the deep. He breathes words that bring light and life and no little sense into what we now call the world, the universe.  We take that story, read it, consider it, interpret it not in view of the world God created but the one we have now, and then pronounce the story to be lacking, to be flawed, to be absent certain details we would rather have included, to not live up to our modern, western, scientific, rational and entirely suspect sensibilities. We then tell the bible what it really means to say, never suspecting we are as mad as Carollian hatters.

I don't suppose for a moment that the world was created in 7 literal, 24 hour days, though I'm quite comfortable with the notion that it was, in fact, created in 7 days. By way of explanation, I doubt that Moses, who penned those three immortal words 'in the beginning' had a watch. To Moses, tramping and trudging through the dust and gravel of a pre-ancient Palestine, the day began when the sun rose, and ended when the sun set; so was the morning and the evening of the day. His descendants would later reckon the day began when the sun set, as those first immortal words were spoken by God in the darkness; that each new creation, each new day, begins in the dark. The point is, Moses takes great pains to tell us there were morning and evenings involved, if for no other reason than to tell us that millions of years weren't a part of the story or, perhaps, to tell us that God creates in cycles, with sunlit mornings of light and the sweet, fresh dew scent on the air, industrious afternoons and the sang-froid of early evenings, followed by periods of dark, dream-world chaos and midnight uncertainties. Perhaps he wants to tell us that life and death are endlessly co-existent, that we cannot separate God's light and life and love from the abyss of unknowing and unbeing that awaits us all except - oh glorious thought! - he waits there for us, ever speaking into the eternal darkness, 'let there be light', as he walks us in the garden of his love and serenity.

Such a clumsy notion, this New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, dangling on some kind of celestial crane, crunching the buildings, cars, cats and dogs, shops and people of the old Jerusalem underfoot with the new, improved, all pearls and emeralds Jerusalem. So hard to believe, this creation story at the end of the bible, preceded as it is by the chaotic thunder of trumpets, the pouring out of vials and bowls into the chaos and madness in the abyss of humanity's heart of darkness. This new created world - this new Jerusalem - seems so unlike, and yet is so similar to, the creation story at the beginning of the bible. We begin in a garden and end in a city. Yet one story has a tree of life, the other echoes the refrain with a tree of healing at its center, while both have flowing rivers that water the earth, God is at the center of everything, there is so much light. So hard also to grasp this story of Jesus, corralled in yet another garden, awaiting his death and subsequent life, that we might die and yet live, that we might be created anew, reborn. It's as if the story has come full circle on itself, as if the beginning has become the end has become the beginning, as if all of the world is a circle, trying to return to itself, as if God is in all and all is in God. We are so hard pressed to believe the story it tells, yet we hear that story in our bones, in the soles of our feet, in the scent of summer rain on a baby's skin, in the inexpressible sorrow of a love lost to the enternity in which we hang, suspended like a cloud, racing to the horizon.

And so, I'm amused as I read my horoscope. God is always creating, always restoring, always redeeming, always returning us, through him, to him. With each passing year there is less and less chaos, fear, anger and uncertainty in my life. No small amount of this spiritual growth is, without doubt, simply the realities of age and having traveled this road through a storm or two, yet experience offers no hedge against loss, pain, death. My life circles round itself again, and again as I realize anew that we must become like the child we once left behind in order to enter this kingdom of God, we must die to be born again, we must wait through the night before the dawn. I begin by wondering when my new creation is to unfold, borne into my soul by the very breath of God, and end by realizing he's  been here all along and in that I am truly - and at long last - content.