Wayside Pulpit

A Broken House

I am on a bus heading through San Francisco, CA. I really miss living in the bay area. I wish I could easily go back.

My house has a foundation problem, and that has made me consider the issue of foundations in my own life. I think the ones I have are also cracking. This belief, coupled with the reality of a broken house has led me to consider that the universe is trying to tell me something.

I feel like my house is dying, and I really don't know how hard I should try to save it. I don't think I have the strength to walk away, but maybe I should. Just maybe that is the best thing to do. How long do you try before you accept that a house just can't be saved; that it isn't the house you really wanted in the first place. Or, the house just doesn't feel like home. I guess is all comes down to that last question, and the question of love.

Not to stand alone

I will miss Mass today; I do not feel sad about it, or guilty about it, more that I have missed out on something special. It is a kind of jealously for those that were able to go. I think it was better that I stayed home and worked on next weeks presentation, but I do wonder if I could just have managed the same productivity this afternoon.

It is that draw toward Mass that drew me towards Catholicism. Though, I have to say, there is not much difference from Catholicism and Mass (at least in my mind). When I was attending protestant churches there was little that actually drew me towards a Sunday service. Even when I was preaching or involved in the liturgical process (as minimal at this is in most protestant churches), I was never drawn toward Eucharist.

I think that was that draws one toward the Eucharist cannot really be explained but only experienced. This is why progressive non-Catholics are so mystified about why anyone would actually want to be Catholic. Yet, even for those of us who ignore many aspects of Catholic moral teaching, despise much of the arrangement of the church hierarchy, and are frustrated by the silence and lack of accountability regarding clergy sexual abuse, we are still drawn to the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is magical. One of its most magical properties is that it does not matter how creepy, old, conservative, misogynistic the priest who consecrates the bread and wine. The Eucharist stands, not alone, but really with the community in which it is embraced

The Closet Door

I stood in my hall today and beat on my closet door for fifteen minutes. I imagined it to be a personification of that which I believe is the cause of my anger and anxieties. The door was not a person, but stood as some real solid place to vent what I have been feeling.

Normally when I feel this way I hit myself in my head. In fact, last February I hit myself for such a frequency that I ended up with a concussion. It is strange, I don't even mind writing about this wacky behavior because one, there are very few people who read this blog, and two, it is the truth of who I am. I hit myself when I get angry or frustrated.

The greatest thing about the closet today was that I could turn my frustration and anger outward instead of toward myself. I wasn't angry at myself (at least I don't think so), I was angry at what I had projected onto two people. I really wanted to tell them both how absolutely irritating they were, how much I hated them, and that I wished they would just get out of my life. (So silly in retrospect because one was a stocker putting chocolate chips on a shelf at the store. Really, like I will ever see her again).

So, I came home and beat the crap out of the door. I screamed at the door. And, yes, I kicked the door, which proved to be a slight mistake, but hey, at least it wasn't my head that broke; equally,I did not direct my anger toward myself.

All things considered, this was all an improvement.

Time Off

The evening passes into tomorrow
I grieve the loss of the day
even though
all things expected
I will wake

Today I found myself
just briefly
not noticing myself

(This can only be appreciated
if you are one
who understands
what it means
to walk
this world being
weighed down with
the sound of
your own voice)

The freedom from my
own tyranny will not last
but the respite has embraced tonight
with softness and warmth

Becoming Catholic

I will join
at your table
because God has called
me to supper with injustice, patriarchy, and misogyny,
all the while being fed
the food of love.

So, anoint me to initiate me,
join us together--
put yourself between my lips
hear my voice whisper in your ear
and feel our consummation.

Your own oil moves
me deeply inside
your body surrenders to mine
and I am surrounded
with all that is you.

And in our joining
the change confirmed
will alter the table
and we will never
taste the same again.

Otherwhen

Last night I attended a taping of the National Public Radio program “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!” The taping took place in Santa Barbara, California at the newly remodeled Granada Theatre. The theatre was packed and much laughter was shared by those on stage and those of us sitting in the auditorium. I’m looking forward to hearing the edited version of the show tomorrow to see which parts of the live show made the cut.

There was one aspect of the evening that I found troublesome. The trouble wasn’t anything about the show, but rather the audience. As I walked into the theatre I was struck with the homogeneity of those bearing tickets for the venue; almost every single person was Caucasian. In fact, the place was so white I found it creepy. I suspect that last night’s attendance was around 1400. I don’t know how long it has been since I was in a place surrounded by that many white people. My life is lived in a much more multi-cultural frame where difference is so normal it ceases to be different.

In a sea of white skin we left the auditorium. As I walked down the stairs I watched the money, the thinness, and set after set of blue eyes pass me on the right and the left. The ornate reconstruction of the theatre followed us out the doors and I had a strange historical displacement. I saw all of us in Germany in the 1930’s; all of us leaving the theatre to get into our black cars, to travel to square row houses, to kiss our little blond children goodnight. This flash of otherwhen struck me bone chilling cold, and even sitting here some twenty-four hours later, I still can’t quite shake it off.

Wilder-Than-This

When I think of the wilderness I am immediately turned off. I don’t know if my dislike of the “outdoors” comes from some bad outdoor experiences when I was child, or from just a more general appreciation of human creation over the “natural” way of things. As a child I was forced to like to go camping and hiking. I lived in the mountains of Colorado and being outside was something that one just did, and did it with joy. I really did despise every camping trip, ski trip, and outdoor excursion. I would much rather have been with a book, on my bed, listening to the birds through the window.

I have, as I’ve grown up, been more apt to be outside in the woods, but not really for long periods of time. I’ve gone camping at camp grounds and tent cabins where I can bring the Colman stove and take a shower down the road for a couple of bucks. I enjoy hiking for the sake of exercise and so I can eat a really high-fat dinner and feel like I earned it. All in all the wilderness remains just that to me, the wilderness; it is a place I may stick a toe or two into, but not a place I can call home.

I will tell you, however, that just because I don’t find much joy in the wilderness, doesn’t mean that I don’t like the unknown. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like to explore and be in situations that are uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to test my wits against forces larger than my simple human self. I feel sometimes that because I don’t want to be in the great outdoors that I am seen as having sold my soul the modernist company store. This is greatly the case in liberal religious environments where there is strong move to see God in nature. In truth I see God much more in the human ways we’ve constructed the world, than in any star or blade of grass.

This intimate truth reflects a large part of my personal theology; a belief system that knows that God is in us. Therefore, when I see the human hubbub on 96th and Broadway, a conversation between mother and son, or a high-speed train rumbling through a station, I know I am in the presence of the Holy.

Some Kind of Healer

Ministry abounds with the concept of the wounded healer; the idea that we bring comfort and healing from those places inside us where we’ve been wounded. I think that this idea isn’t altogether true. I think that comfort and healing come not from wounds, but from the places we’ve been touched. It could be that we’ve been touched by grief, by happiness, by horror, by abandonment, by fear, by love, basically, by really anything.

I feel exposed when I preach. I find myself a few hours after a sermon wondering why in the world I told people all the stuff I did. I think I find writing a similar experience – though not quite as intense. I come forth to the world from the places that have touched me and they are very personal, so personal I don’t know if anyone can ever relate. The underlying fear being, “If you don’t relate, what does that say about my experience of the word? Am I as weird as I sometimes feel that I am? Am I normal?”

Am I wounded? No. Am I not wounded? No. The truth of the matter is, we are not about wounds, as much as theology and psychology would like to think we are. We are about the questions, the aches, the insights and the flashes of knowing and unknowing that pass through our experiences. The energy of this space, the whirling dervish of the soul, this is where healing comes from.

Blessed with Awareness

“One thing that enables servants to love others is their appreciation that the personality is not the person” -- Erie Chapman (from: “Radical Loving Care: Building the Healing Hospital in America”)

Social conditioning creates us; molds our reactions, our dreams, our moods, our responses, our fears and our desires – it creates our personalities. We are each a product of the myriad of ways that parents, peers, religion, rules, politics, beliefs and such have chiseled us through our lives. The fascinating thing, for me, is that all this social conditioning does not touch the core of who we are. It can cloud it, illuminate it, color it, mask it, but it does not change the fundamental spiritual/magical/mystical nature of what burns underneath.

I don’t think that many of us actually ever really get to live from the place of our souls. How can we? Conditioning is set up to stop us from living from this place (Think about it - what would happen to our social systems/structures if we all lived from the core of who we really are?). It is a battle for many of us to step out of the conditioning, the social expectations, the written and unwritten rules to become who we truly are.

Some people get it, they see the conditioning and they can disidentify. They can sit down and watch the movie, knowing that the conditioning is not them, rather what they have been told to be. These people are from all kinds of places, they might be spiritual, they might be religious, they might be old, they might be young, they might be anything. See, awareness does not discriminate. Those that get the gift of this kind of sight are blessed indeed.

I’m not so lucky. I am one of those that struggle, but I’m beginning to have the upper hand. I have moments where I see the conditioning, where I can actually choose to do something completely different than I have been “taught” to do.

It is a freeing feeling, but unsettling indeed.

Indefinitely Christian

Those speaking for Christianity, and those speaking against it, love to use the definite article. In fact, if I were to go back and reread many things I’ve written, I would suspect that I do the very same thing. It seems to come out something like this, “The Christian view of such and such….” I’m hear to tell you, and to remind myself, that there is no one Christian view.

It is often said, “Well, I don’t believe in the Christian God.” What is the Christian God? What defines it? What makes it so definite enough that it deserves a “the” before its capital G? If by “the” you mean the big white guy with the beard in the sky, then I’m sorry to say that many Christians I know don’t hold that view. If by “the” you mean a God that has a hand in how things come to play in our lives, I’d again have to tell you this view doesn’t fit all Christians. Simply, there is no one view that can sum up how God is understood from one end of Christendom to the other.

This same semantical play works for other theological and political statements as well. There is no one Christian view on Jesus, abortion, Christ, sex, communion, LGBT issues, afterlife, the death penalty, peace, war, evolution, marriage, guns…. It isn’t the monolithic structure that appears creeping out of newspapers, court cases, tomes decrying Christian faith and glossy television pulpits. It is infinitely multifaceted and to sum it up in a single “the” takes its beauty and turns it into a beast.