faith / general — 4 comments
16
Nov 10

go to hell

I wish the church would just go to hell.

Into the deepest depths of hell, in fact. Not just the surface level, but down into the white hot flames, the most painful, excruciating places.

Where the suffering is intense. Where people come to curse the Lord with as much fervor that could otherwise be mistaken for worship.

Where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Where death is reality. Where darkness rules.

Church: one of the few entities on earth that has a core message potentially worth living and dying for. Light of the world. Salt of the earth. Unconditional love.  That is when it doesn’t get bogged down with selfishness, superiority, or cynicism.

We should be convinced that life is not about acquisition – that living generously is a better way to live. Giving food to the hungry or resourcing the poor is not an obligation or a chore or a bullet point on a job description. Our intended trajectory away from greed and self-centeredness is counter-cultural and inspiring.

Rob Bell, in Velvet Elvis, says that one of the worst things to have happened to the Christian faith is the movement towards heaven and hell being some distant places – separated from our day to day experience.  It leads to us wanting to escape this planet that must be void of God, in this scenario.  Our trajectory becomes about saving our souls from eventual damnations and more about ME spending forever in bliss and satisfaction.

Instead, heaven and hell are present realities.  Eternity started on day one. Hell is right here right now.  It’s the mother who can’t feed her children.  It’s the pain of loss.  It’s disease.  It’s ridicule and bullying and genocide.

You want to get to heaven…. bring it.

Jesus didn’t leave some mystical land to come to our neutral ground to persuade people to be good so they can ride the salvation express to heaven.  He came, himself, and brought heaven with him – by healing and feeding, by turning people’s hearts in a different direction, and by turning water into wine.

I want the church to go to hell, too.  I want people to see the comparison – to consider the alternative.

I want people to understand that heaven isn’t about walking streets of gold and wearing sparkling white robes.

Heaven is about the tears and pain and the bruises that come before restoration.  It’s about hard-core, unabashed love that doesn’t ask questions or require any thing besides your being.  It’s about getting rid of the darkness by shining in s spark of light – not about pointing out how dark hell is.

Heaven is what moves in when hell is pushed out.

But you can’t push hell out of the picture from the sidelines.  You can’t feed hungry people if you don’t go where the hungry people are.  You can’t build relationships by sitting on your couch.

What a hellish perspective then to celebrate “some glad morning” when we all will “fly away.”  For those who think that trying to live like Jesus is the best way to live, it seems counter intuitive that God would have his people fleeing the scene.  Who’s left to advocate for those with no voice?  To feed those with no food?  To visit those with no friends?  To give hope to those who have nothing to look forward to?

So, I’m done with the halo envy.

I’m done with looking forward to my mansion and streets of gold and diamond harp.

If there’s no more hope or love or happiness today than there was yesterday then we’re all missing something.  If we’re living as if this place is doomed, then we’ve screwed up big time.  If you’re not concerned about replacing hell here and now with heaven here and now, then we are diluting the redemptive message that Jesus was supposed to be all about.

Jesus example, if we believe it, says that being concerned that someone’s stomach isn’t full is at least as important as the state of their soul.  It shows that aiming towards emotional maturity is at least as important as aiming towards spiritual maturity.  He tries to convince us tax collectors, and prostitutes aren’t the wrong crowd.

Jesus didn’t seem to think that going to hell was such a bad idea.

In fact, it was probably the most important thing He ever did.

general / life — Comments Off
07
Nov 10

community-ish

All around me, people are engaged in pursuits.  Personal ventures.  Journeys. Marathons. Self-discovery.

Truth.

These are the well-known pursuits.  These are the ones that we have come to expect.  The thirty-something has pride on the line as he dons his iPod and prepares for the half-marathon.  It says, “I’ve still got it.”  Somewhere there’s a small-business woman who keeps pushing through levels of exhaustion that would do most of us in to make her business succeed.  It says, “This is what I can accomplish when I stick with it.”  We do our counselors proud when we have a moment of epiphany.  We say, “I’m finding myself.”

We’re deep, spiritual beings, us humans.  Our souls run deep into the existential realm.  We can pursue ourselves for a lifetime, identifying desires and working hard to meet them, analyzing shifts in our passions and aiming our longings at other targets.  Contributing to the notion that the west is incredibly materialistic is this very inward drive. Those scratching the surface in this journey often respond by buying clothes or cars or catamarans.  It’s not hard to understand why much of the world takes this self-centeredness for granted.

At our core, though, I don’t believe that our culture, or any person, is wired to be self-consumed.  I don’t believe that we are designed to be islands unto ourselves, to exist as idealized individuals.

And our rampant materialism proves it.

I would argue that our pursuit of positions and possessions are more an indication of a desire for community than anything else.  Yes, it’s obviously misdirected, but it speaks volumes.  Some will argue otherwise, but I have a strong sense that most luxuries we pursue have much to do with our standing relative to others.  I don’t just mean in terms of comparisons – i.e. Look at my thing; my thing is better than your thing, therefore I’m better than you.

There’s also the desire to fill the role of provider.

We have come to a point in this crazy journey called the “human race” where need and want are nearly synonymous.  Take this completely believable example: Maybe you own a high speed train.  Given that we’ve misconstrued one’s want to ride on a high-speed train with a need to ride on a high-speed train, your offer for me to ride your high-speed train is actually contributing to community.  It may well be driving your self-centeredness and feelings of grandeur through the roof…. I get that.  But we have a notion that the community benefits as well.

You can feel free to replace “high-speed train” with “sailboat,” “awesome sick car,” or “deck with an incredible pool and to-die-for grill.”  It all works the same (except for riding on the grill which could get to be slightly less confortable than the sail boat).

Even in what seems like were being selfish, perhaps we’re being community-ish.

We exist in a culture where the dominant message reinforces a strong sense of self-worth, self-dependance, and self-reward.  It’s impossible not to incorporate some of these concepts into out daily routine and understanding.  But even in the most extreme examples, I argue, that there is an underlying innate sense of community life – dare I say, of communal life.  A world where what I have is (somewhat) yours.

There are plenty of questions to be raised at this point about trust and choice and freedom and liberty and Russia and China.  Even as tribesmen we shared the spoils of the hunt with our tribe while we tried to annihilate other tribes.

I’m simply saying that maybe the fame and fortune and position and possessions that we’re pursuing is not all meant for ourselves.

And if that’s the case, what else can we do for our community?

general / life — 4 comments
06
Nov 10

matter

God of the worn and tattered

All of your people matter

Give us more than words to speak

‘Cause we are hearts and arms that reach

And Love climbs up and down the human ladder

There are three new women in my life that I can’t get off of my heart.  They are loving and kind and beautiful.  The story of how our paths first crossed is an interesting one, involving my wife, a school project that she was not looking forward to, and an introduction by a mutual friend from another country.

It’s never been tempting to say that we met by chance.

My friends are actually a happy, loving family: a mother and her two precious daughters.  The mom has endured some pretty tough circumstances, but her heart has remained soft and compassionate.  Her daughters, 3 and 5, are supernova-energy-balls wrapped up in tiny human bodies with cute little human faces.  They are curious and loving.  It is incredible to spend time with them, hearing about what they did that day and what they want to do tomorrow, deciding what kind of cake they want on their birthday and which Disney or NickJr character is currently the focus of their attention (FYI: it’s Dora).

It’s one of those friendships where you have to be strategic about visiting.  Kristy and I have to been keenly aware of what sort of appointments are bookending these visits, because once the conversation gets rolling time morphs and stretches, shrinks and reconfigures until we’ve missed class or are late for work.  Yet somehow it’s still worth it.

To be fair, one of the reasons why we have to watch our time is because time is far less of a concern for this family.  Their days are much more loosely organized.  They get up, and get some breakfast at no set time.  From then on it’s pretty laid back until dinner, and pretty laid back again until some indeterminate bedtime.  There is no job to interfere with their daily plans.  It’s free and easy.

Except, it’s not free and it’s significantly difficult.

You see my friends live in abject poverty, at least by American standards.  Now they’re fighting circumstances, consequences, and systemic shortcomings in a effort to find a better way.  The story of how they got her is heart-breaking and filled with abuse and pain.  What is even more depressing for me as their friend is to have to stand beside them and watch as with every positive step they take some mysterious force deals them another blow.

I know how it is.  Middle-classers can say with relative ease that “They’re just dealing with the consequences of their choices,” or “Let them pull themselves up by their bootstraps… America is land of opportunity.”  Few, if any, of their choices landed them where they are.  Pulling themselves up by their bootstraps is only possible if they could afford to buy boots instead of being forced to wear the same pair of $5 Old Navy flip flops that the mother has owned since the first day we met.

Systems have failed her.  Forms that should have been filed in duplicate were accidentally filed in triplicate at some head office and so this mother went without any sure way of providing food because she was suspected of trying to game the system.  Social workers have advised her to stand in line for three hours at facilities that have never claimed to be able to meet any of her needs.  State child care workers have tried to enforce what can only be described as their own petty preferences instead of prescribed policy.

Yet, this family understand that it’s just another day with another adversity to overcome.

I see her and her situation.  I hear her trying to figure out a way to get winter coats for her kids, and who of her friends can help provide meals for them until her food stamps are reinstated (after being mistakingly cut off).  I see her kids attempting to process what it means for a woman to have a loving husband.

More than this I see her desperately trying to make life better for her kids, finding a way out of her dangerous neighborhood, applying at every business that might hire a woman with less than a high-school education while looking for ways to achieve her GED.  I hear the fear in her voice as she talks about what it could mean when the father of her children gets released from prison.

All this happening in the shadow cast by some meaningless skyscrapers where meaningless finances are traded and bought and sold every day for meaningless profit and meaningless bonuses.

Take away everything that I’ve just described about this family.  The government assistance.  The prison terms.  The questionable practices by social workers.  The lack of food.   The high-school drop-out. The abuse.  The five dollar flip-flops.

Laid bare as a generic mother with two generic children, you and I would have no trouble whatsoever in saying that these people have worth and are deserving of opportunities and some basic necessities.  It’s only as we pile on circumstances that we begin to doubt and question and wonder if she should be left to deal with the bed that she has made.  It’s a sorry state of affairs but I’m glad we keep her all but locked away in public housing where I don’t have to deal with it.

By God, this woman still matters.  She is worn and tattered, but she still matters.

And there are millions like them.  And there are $millions frivolously wasted and metaphorically burned each day simply because it’s mine.  What are we doing?  More appropriately, perhaps, what are we not doing?

Give us more than words to speak

‘Cause we are hearts and arms that reach

And Love climbs up and down the human ladder

faith / life — 1 comment
01
Nov 10

pursuit

I am beginning to capture the essence of the pursuit.

Pursuit is not merely chasing something that you’ve longed for. It can be, and it is often rewarding when you reach the end of the journey. Recently, though, I have begun to re-evaluate the pursuit, to see it in a completely different light, and to recognize the central role that it plays in our lives.

It started with my wife.

As is the case with most couples, we faced a shifting landscape – from a love filled with dates, and flowers, and sappy love songs composed on a whim at the piano to one filled with an understanding that one of us usually takes the trash out and sometimes she really does have a headache.

There is a falsehood that many couples begin to believe and that is that the pursuit ends with “I do.” One lavish ceremony marks with near laser precision that transition between passion and tolerance.

We say that God is an infinite universe of knowledge and depth and love and that we are created in His image. If that is true, how can we so decidedly declare that we have reached the end of what it is to know another human being? Each of us are creatures of infinite worth and value and mystery. There is no end to what there is to know.

And so the pursuit.

It never ends.

We get so enthralled with a perceived end that we miss the excitement of the pursuit.

This is not just true with romantic relationships. It’s true of every pursuit of value that I can think of.

There is no end to the spiritual realm, for example. It weaves and twists and turns and while there may be a trajectory towards some ultimate reality, the pursuit always goes on. At the end there may be a truth that we’re pursuing but each experience along the ways forms us, molds us, and makes our path unique.

The pursuit is the point. It translates as “I still care. I’ve not figured it all out. I’m not so proud as to think that THIS way, MY way, is THE way. The pursuit is where we feel life with it’s joy and it’s sorrow and pain and frustration and meaning.

No one ever says, “Remember when we finished our trip? Remember when it was all over?”

They say things like:

“Remember when we took that wrong turn and got lost in New Jersey?”, or…

“Remember when we found that awesome little mexican place where we had the best tacos of our lives?”, or…

“Remember when we first drove north into Virginia and saw those amazing views for the first time?”

I would argue that you don’t make memories by arriving. They aren’t given out as your trip comes to an end.

It’s important to visualize goals – to reach for something of worth. But the goal is never the point, or the reward. It merely orients us towards something. It gives us a direction, a trajectory, a launching pad.

Life is lived, relationships are forged, meaning is discovered, pain becomes teacher, loss becomes gain on the journey. It is the pursuit that matters.

The pursuit is the point.

general / life — 1 comment
12
Oct 10

vulnerable

“I want to expose the wound to as many people as possible because there may be someone who could help the healing” :: Jeremy Current, Watershed Charlotte

There are moments of artistic openness that as a listener you absolutely have to seize, to grab ahold of knowing that you’re likely to learn something incredible. This was made true for me this past Sunday at Watershed when Jeremy Current, a guest vocal artist, began telling some of his story. While exposing some of the wounds that birthed one of his tunes he shared the quote above.

I was absolutely captivated, evidenced by my leaning forward in my chair and widening eyes. What I felt was a combination of a deep connection with this truth and yet an amazement at the succinctness with which he was able to verbalize truths that have taken me 30 years to even acknowledge. There are still chasms to cross before I begin to understand it.

It is not that I was unwilling to be vulnerable for fear of showing weakness. There are not enough über-masculine bones in my body to justify this. Essentially vulnerability required me to be satisfied with being embarrassed about the nature of my wound and required others to be at all interested in my being wounded and needing healing. Neither were realities that I could comprehend.

What I’m learning about vulnerability, though, is that it is provides the fuel for inspiration, transformation, and even revolution. Consider the concept of famous last words. When faced with challenge, defeat, looming destruction it depths of your soul, your heart, your core desires are the things that come out. The most well-known response when staring down the barrel of a gun is: “Please … I have a wife and family.”

These things come from down deep. It’s unfiltered soul-speak without any pretense or filter.

These are the important things.

The “I don’t want to be here anymore” things.

The “I don’t know what to believe” things.

The “I’m sure we can make it if we just have one more chance” things.

And, it is often in the vulnerable moments when we hear ourselves audibly speak the confessions and fears and troubles and questions that have been floating around in our heads that change can take took.  It’s fertile ground.  It’s shaken.  It’s soft and prepared for new things.

Seize those moments when you or someone close to you is being vulnerable.  Drink in the confession.  Let it stimulate your mind and heart. Let it stir your soul.  Let it connect you to another being.

And while you and I may never stare down the barrel of a literal gun, our hearts will break and our souls will be wrenched. We’ll be disappointed in our self.

Our failure.

Failure, though, and disappointment are the critical components for relationship.  Transparency breeds trust.  It is in the togetherness of life that my vulnerabilities and your concerns become our collective strength.

life — Comments Off
06
Oct 10

like

I’m probably that guy that you don’t know very well.

There’s good reason for this. Until very recently, it probably seemed that I didn’t have much time for or interest in you. First, I’d like to apologize for this because you’re a very important person and I certainly don’t mean to give you the impression that your not.

When I say “it’s not you: it’s me” I truly do mean it.

Well, I used to mean it.

But something very strange has been happening to me for the past few weeks… maybe months. I know that people always experience change and sometimes it’s lasting and sometimes it’s not. With this, though, I’m convinced that I’ll be looking back at August and September a few years from now and be able to distinguish a couple of powerful milestones, reference points along my journey.

I’ll reference things as being being before or after September 2010. It really has been that profound.

I’ve been a hermit for as long as I can remember. As a child in would spend hours by myself in my room: reading, playing, whatever. Contentment for me was sitting by myself, keeping myself occupied without any need for human interaction. I didn’t need anything else.

So it should come as a considerable surprise to you and me both that the profundity of what has happened to me has instilled a voracious appetite for meaningful social interaction in the self-proclaimed king of social-awkwardness.

I am . . . or was . . . that king.

While I can’t explain the mechanics of the situation I can at least attempt to deal with it from a philosophical perspective.

With no hesitation whatsoever, I can say that I had a lot of misplaced intimacy. I didn’t need any other interaction with people: I had reached capacity, however dysfunctional this may have been. There was no room for anything else and therefore no drive for developing relationships beyond casual acquaintances. There was no room for genuine interest for the joys and sorrows of another human being, because I was to interested in my own self-aggrandization.

If you’ve read my previous post, Clean, then you already have a sense for this, so I won’t go into it again.

I can testify, though, that when this substantial malignancy was exorcised from my soul, the vacuum it created was back-filled with utter happiness, awe, and an affinity for relationships that I never thought was normal, let alone possible.

I am a changed man.

Going forward, I will likely be as overbearing as I was once (and possibly still am) socially-awkward. You should know this and take the appropriate precautions. But I can’t apologize for this.

It’s only because I like you.

faith — 5 comments
30
Sep 10

bar

The church needs to get back to it’s roots.

Back before evangelicals, and reformation, at crusades, and popes, there was the book of Acts.  These guys knew what “church” was all about.  They invented it.  They ate together.  They hung out. They sang.  They talked about God as if it was OK not to know every little detail.

And, best of all, they lowered the bar.

They lowered the bar so we could all walk across together.  At some point they realized that their expectations were too high.  People were interested in getting involved but couldn’t live up to the standard that had been set.  These people knew that there was something altogether different about this Jesus guy they had heard about and wanted to try to live like him because they thought it was a better way to do life.

Of course, now that he had been crucified and was long gone from the scene, the people left over were those who had encountered him, or encountered people who encountered him.  This first group of insiders, then, were Jews.  There were thousands of years of history and tradition and ritual that came along with that – there were time-honored traditions that became as much a part of their faith and practice as God himself.  You may remember that part of what God wanted the Israelites to do was for the males to undergo a little surgical procedure as a sign.

I know, I know.  That’s a whole other story.

It’s not even like these people were “converting” to Christianity.  They were inventing it.  With all of their baggage and history and tradition, they were figuring out with other people who encountered Jesus (again, all raised within the Jewish tradition).  They understood that Jesus was a Jew.  They understood that he was a Rabbi and so he acted in certain ways, and reasoned in certain ways, and did things that religious Jewish men did.  He ate kosher.  He studied the Torah.  Everything they had seen Jesus do had been in the context of Jewish life.

So what about when people who weren’t Jewish, who had no idea what it meant to be Jewish, who loved red meat, came and wanted to know more about this Jesus guy?

The people who were already in had a couple of choices.  The first was to simply say, “Sorry, you don’t qualify.  You’re not a Jew, Jesus was a Jew, unless you’re willing to become intimately familiar with Jewish law, practice, ritual, and nuance, you’re out.”

But that’s not what they did.

Instead they sat down, and they tried to figure out that if Jesus story was in fact for everyone then what they had was a situation where a lot of the rituals and nuances that grew out of living life as a Jewish individual may not apply to non Jews…. you may know them as Gentiles.  What they came up with was this:

“…we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

It goes on to say that they didn’t want to burden the Gentiles with any rigid requirements.

They “lowered the bar” so that more people could learn to figure out Jesus without having to worry about how many grains of wheat could be picked on the Sabbath, what songs to sing at what time of day, or how they were going to pay for that surgical procedure with no health insurance.

Now, contrast that with today.

We’ve got churches who figure that they’ve got it all figure out.  You can’t be a member here unless you wear this, or pay this, or believe this.  Another tragic turn from our roots of inclusiveness, tolerance, love, acceptance.  We add condition upon condition, barring access to Jesus like we’re the oafish doorman outside the trendy nightclub.  We had a good thing going there for a while, but then we let our power get in the way.  At some point, we switched from the desire to have more people come live this life to the desire to have them meet our expectations.  Nevermind that half of these “doctrines” are at least irrelevant to how I live my life, and perhaps even as far as counter productive to what Jesus wanted to do.

It makes me angry that people who honestly just want to see Jesus to figure out if he’s the real deal, if what he said in his day was worth living for, have to go through the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that we’ve added to the process.  He doesn’t care what you look like or what you do.  He doesn’t want you to figure it out first, and then come talk to His people.  Half of what we say is heresy anyway.

I say “Lower the bar, Church.”  We’ll all be more like Jesus.

faith / general — Comments Off
23
Sep 10

first

Jesus as a philosopher is wonderful: there is no greater role-model in my mind than Jesus Christ. It’s just a shame that most of the people who follow Him and call themselves Christians act nothing like him.
Bill Maher :: O’Reilly Factor

It’s no secret that people think Christians are complete and total wackos. I think most Christians are wackos. We march around the city, and the country, and the world proclaiming our message of love by saying some of the most slanderous, hateful things, by imposing our values on others, and feeling that we can justify it all by messages direct from God that we pull out of our preferred version of “Life’s Little Instruction Manual”

See what I mean? Complete and utter lunatics.

There’s this misplaced nobility that causes us to behave as if we have something to protect, that we need to act as God’s cosmic body guards from Satan’s mujahideen. The problem is that God doesn’t need anyone to come to his defense. We can’t humanize God and think that His feelings get hurt when somebody badmouths Him. Or talks bad about His momma.

He doesn’t have a momma.

I have every confidence that God doesn’t need us to defend anything. That said, I don’t think He’s interested in us going on the offense either. That’s just as bad, if not worse.

We’re offensive enough as it is!

To steal a page from Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, this whole faith journey is more like a trampoline that you enjoy than a brick wall that you defend. You stand around and guard a brick wall because, even though it’s solid and secure, it can be topple over if too many of the bricks get damaged or warn. The whole thing can collapse. Bell talks about these bricks as representations of Christian beliefs (e.g. the trinity, the virgin birth, that homosexuality is a sin, that alcohol is evil, etc). If you neglect the wall, if anyone has a substantive argument against one of your bricks, and it gets removed, the entire wall (aka Christianity) comes crashing down.

At the same time, if these same beliefs are allowed to flex and bend as a trampoline spring flexes and bends, you enjoy the experience of jumping. We can go as far to say that the flex of a spring is essential to the process of jumping. When you live in a better way, choosing generosity over green, love over hate, tolerance over intolerance, compassion over criticism, when the springs can bend, you can enjoy jumping.

You can’t jump on rigid springs. You can’t invite your friends over to enjoy jumping on a trampoline with springs made of stone.

But when there is flex and movement, the experience comes alive. You jump and are free. It almost becomes a challenge to see how far you can stretch the springs to see how high you can jump.

Bell says, “You defend a wall, but you invite people to a trampoline.”

It’s true, but the church has allowed us to pollute our view about what the invitation is. The invitation is not to sign up as a member. The invitation is not to come to a ninety minute meeting to listen to a preacher drone on and on about the evils in our lives. It’s not an invitation to an uncomfortable prayer meeting and it’s certainly not an invitation to a rally designed to crush the spirits of another human being.

The invitation I would argue is not even one to pick up a cross.

The invitation is simply to jump.

You don’t jump on a trampoline and frown. You jump and you smile and you laugh and you flip and you lay on your back and look at the sky. You don’t have to love Jesus to be generous and either way it’s a more rewarding way to live. You don’t have to love Jesus to encourage someone, but it’s a better way to spend your time. You don’t have to love Jesus to be positive and it beats being negative either way.

You don’t have to love Jesus first.

You just need to jump.

general / life — 1 comment
18
Sep 10

clean

“Pobody’s Nerfect”

If the state of the world wasn’t enough to have to deal with, we all go through life adding on and disposing of mental baggage. Sometimes it’s a lack of confidence. Sometime’s it’s rejection. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s much more serious. Many times, however, our baggage accumulates from the myriad of mistakes that we are prone to make or the poor decisions that we felt would end with a different set of circumstances.

What complicates life is that we can have an aversion to just coming clean – of telling someone that we messed up, that we’re not perfect, that we haven’t got it all figured out.

Success in 2010 depends on a great deal of self-promotion. We have to be conscious of presenting the idealized self. And so on Facebook we tell other’s about the books we’ve read that affirm the image we’re trying to project. We careful craft our status postings to reflect the level of sophistication we want to portray. In real life we buy suits and cars and homes that reinforce our status and dress for the job that our ideal self deserves.

So it makes sense that we hide the aspects of our lives that are less than desirable. Having skeletons in our closets can be scary (I do not want to be attacked by zombie skeletons when all I really wanted was a sweater… just sayin). Admitting these skeletons can mean that you won’t get that job, or that thing, or that you will lose respect, or admiration, or that you ego will no longer be stroked.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, it is the catharsis that comes from telling another human being about your shortcomings that may help you deal with them. While I can speak only anecdotally about this (that is, I have no proof), there is a change that happens when you move from a defensive, hidden posture to an active, humbling posture in relationship with someone. There is a definite shift. It may be just the simple reality that the truth has been spoken and yet the world around us has not spontaneously erupted with laughter or ceased to exist whatsoever.

My situation on this front was one where I falsely believed that I had to live up to an idealized version of the real me. And so there is baggage that I’ve accumulated over the years that I made every effort to veil. To have someone else know these things, I rationalized, would have been far too costly and, frankly, embarrassing. Mine was a personal struggle, I reasoned. There were times when I even tried to convince myself that it would actually be harmful to the OTHER PERSON if I were to tell them.

(As an aside, I do realize that I’m speaking very cryptically at the moment. This IS intentional. If I’m interested in going into detail, I’ll do it in person… not to the safety of my computer screen).

I want to be able to say that the act of telling people about these experiences has been very rewarding. They’ve not. Or, at the very least I would not use the word rewarding. Perhaps I need only to go back to the opening line, here, and say that it has been cathartic. The world, in fact, has continued, as have my relationships with those on the receiving end of my confessions. Now there are people in the world who seem to think about me in much the same way as they always have, except now I KNOW that they know that I am not, and cannot be, perfect. And, so, I no longer have to chase after this unattainable ideal with the same fervor as before.

The other interesting component of this experience has been the affirmation of “there can be good in every situation” mentality. For me, this good has been a new down-to-earth-edness that didn’t exist before. For you readers of Velvet Elvis, it’s the take “super-whatever out back and end his worthless existence.” This humility has come in waves. The first recognition come with an admission to myself that something was amiss. My behaviors didn’t line up with my beliefs and claims. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. That took a while to sink in before I could move on to step two: needing someone else to know that I’m not as good as I thought I was.

Step two is altogether hard, incredibly worthwhile, and sometimes unexpected. For me, it started following a flippant, passing remark during dinner one night at a local pizza place. The opportunity blindsided me like nothing had ever blindsided me before. Within the eternity that was just a couple of seconds, I reasoned that this was do or die; a “you HAVE to walk through this door” moment. So I did. And with that, the remorse and guilt and fear that saturated my consciousness for literally half a lifetime began to precipitate out. It was visible. It was just there. In the open. It could be measured and poked and prodded and evaluated.

But it couldn’t be ignored. And it couldn’t easily be dissolved back out of sight.

And then today I had the opportunity to be the first to walk though that same door rather than simply responding to someone else’s first move. It was undramatic and worthwhile and altogether incredible.

Once and for all it suddenly seemed like something separate: something that wasn’t me, but something that had continued to live parasitically from me. It didn’t drain me of happiness or joy or life. It just took the excess. It didn’t need all of my self-confidence. But it took enough so that other areas of my life suffered. It thrived when I should have been thriving. It lived when I should have been living.

It suddenly seemed so overdramatic to have spent such a great deal of the last fifteen years working to hide and feed this life-sucking leech.

And so freeing to live free of it.

From here, your guess is as good as mine as to which way this will go. I’m not expecting it to be the easiest thing in the world. Once you get used to living a certain way, changing is a challenge to put it lightly. But it’s intriguing to me that it’s in my weakness that I’m strong. It’s in my shame that I’m proud. It’s in my pain that I’m alive.

There are a few moments that I can honestly look back on and say they’ve changed my life. The day I learned about “active and passive” living and my wedding day are two that come to mind. I suspect, in a few years that I’m living another of those moments right now.

faith / general — 2 comments
13
Sep 10

answers

Recently I heard a conversation between pastors; an interview that centered around our drive for singular answers to every question imaginable.

We have this concept in our lives that we need specific, provable answers to questions.  This is a relatively modern development in terms of human history.  We have not always needed to have THE answer.

The point was illustrated with this parable.

There was a man who came to a Rabbi and said, “I’m a student of every type of logic you can imagine.  I am a deep theological thinker and want you to test me.  Please, Rabbi, test me.”

The Rabbi hesitantly agrees and presents the following scene, “Two men come down a chimney.  When they get to the bottom, one man washes himself and the other does not.  Tell me: which one washes.”

Proudly the man replies, “Obviously, the one that was covered in soot.”

The Rabbi responds, “No.  Don’t be so silly.  The man who was not covered in soot sees his friend and decides he himself must be dirty as well.”

The man, unfazed by his incorrect answer, says again to the Rabbi, “Please, Rabbi give me one more chance.  I can do this.”

The Rabbi says, “Ok.  Different question. Two men come down a chimney.  When they get to the bottom, one man washes himself and the other does not.  Tell me: which one washes.”

Confidently, the man responds, “Well the first one.  He see’s his friend covered in soot and decides he must be dirty as well.”

Chuckling, the Rabbi says, “Stop trying to be so clever.  Of course not.  The man who is dirty and covered it soot, who feels it on his arms and in his eyes, washes himself.”

Finally, the man says one more time, “Rabbi, please.  Just one more test.  I know I can pass this one.  Ask me another question.”

“Ok” says the Rabbi, “one last question: “Two men come down a chimney.  When they get to the bottom, one man washes himself and the other does not.  Tell me: which one washes.”

“Is it the first man, but for different reasons?”

“No.”  responds the Rabbi. “How can you think that anyone would come down a chimney and think that they’re not dirty.  Both men wash themselves.”

The point, of course, is that there is no singular answer.  There are infinite answers based on context and circumstance.  We try to process the existential realities of life and faith in the realm of a modern quest for facts and figures.  Some questions, however, are simply not meant to be answered with clear facts.

It is awesome to me that the universe is perceived to be infinite in proportion.  But the minute that someone puts a static, verifiable figure on the volume or weight or age of the universe, it will not be as incredible or hard to believe.  Some people might even say, “Is that it?  I would have thought it was much bigger.”  When we replace the unknown we are removing wonder and awe.

In our curiosity, we look at gods and miracles and faith and try to answer the questions – believing like everything else that we’ve learned that there’s something to figure out.  Once we were completely at home in the realm of the unknown.  Now, we abandon belief in favor of proof.

Surrounded by a universe filled with wonder, it’s incredibly short-sighted to opt for knowledge.

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