Merry Christmas 2009

1 of my Top 4 Christmas songs

I heard the bells on Christmas day
      Their old familiar carols play,
      And wild and sweet the words repeat
      Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And thought how, as the day had come,
      The belfries of all Christendom
      Had rolled along th’ unbroken song
      Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Till ringing, singing on its way
      The world revolved from night to day,
      A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
      Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head:
      “There is no peace on earth,” I said,
      “For hate is strong and mocks the song
      Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
      “God is not dead, nor does He sleep;
      The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
      With peace on earth, good will to men.”

-- Henry W. Longfellow

I must say that this is one of my top 4 ‘Christmas’ songs.  I love the timelessness of the truth, the honesty with which it assesses the state of the world and the hope it speaks of for the prevailing power of God to overcome and establish the peace that all men seek.  I love the movement of the lyrics and the notion of bells that ring of truth.  Of course, not knowing the truth, one would not know of what they ring.  But knowing it brings a sigh of relief to my soul.

By the way, my other 3 (not necessarily in order of priority) are:

• Hallelujah Chorus
• Oh, Holy Night
• Snow Angel

December 2009

...more stuff here.

Where We Least Expect Him

Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again.  Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous of depths self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too.  And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.

-- Frederick Buechner

Busyness -- Not as Good as it Might Seem

Busyness.  There seems to be merit to the notion that busyness is a good thing, to the extent it that complements the notion that “idle time is the devil’s time”.  Perhaps there are other merits, too, to being 'busy' like the accomplishment of things, the production of things, the growth that comes from experiencing different things, from being challenged, from being used up…in good ways.

But lately I have been wondering more about the risks and threats of too much busyness, at least in my own life.  There is something about busyness that is self-perpetuating, like a self-made inertia.  One, in fact, that seems hard to stop or even steer.   It also seems to breed something inside of me that creates distance from myself, from others.  A something that feels like a kind of independence, a self-sufficiency of sorts.  Busyness calls upon something naturally bent towards achieving efficiencies in life, which on the surface don't necessarily seem like a bad thing…but often seem to mask my attempts to control more and more of life.   Where, in fact, have the virtues of efficiency been spawned?  I was wondering recently, for example, where notions of efficiency are honored in things like faith, and in the Scriptures.  Is it ever even mentioned? 

Busyness' off-spring, efficiency, seems to beckon something more deeply in me each time it calls. It seems to try to pack more and more of life into smaller segments of time.  And, it ever so subtlety, at least along the way, seems to turn into a requirement for things to work down to the minute, if not the second.  Something seems awry under such an approach to life, especially when it sneakily become a quest in life.  It isn’t always obvious how it goes about its work, but something is ‘off kilter’.  Busyness seems to leave less room for things that don’t comply with the model…of efficiency, of effectiveness.  It seems to try to intimidate or overshadow things that don’t fit the mold of getting things done, leaving less and less opportunity to recognize the value of mystery, of waiting, of wondering at things that aren’t obvious in deference to things that are, or appear to be. 

I’ve also noticed that it waters in me a root of something that requires something of others that it shouldn’t…the least of which is a kind of expected cooperation with my tightening agenda on things…and the greater of which seems to be a judgment about others that has little room for humility about who they are and that turns them into something of value relative to what I need to get done.  Efficiency seems to deny the virture of patience and the God of it, promoting a false sense of value within that is based on a kind of productivity that God doesn’t seem to recognize as very valuable to our need to learn about our dependence (on Him), rather than our independence. 

Busyness, at least mine, seems to leave a taste in my mouth, an aroma for others that doesn’t draw together…rather, it seems to create distance in nearly all directions inwardly and outwardly.

I am less and less comfortable with the fruits I see of busyness.  I am less and less comfortable with the size I have to remain to be so busy.  I want to be smaller, less important; more willing to respond to promptings within and without...than evaluating such opportunities for their impact on what I need to get done.

Fighting Myself

When I vacillated about my decision to serve the Lord my God, it was I who willed, and I who willed not, and nobody else. I was fighting against myself. All you asked is that I cease to want what I willed, and begin to want what you willed.

-- St. Augustine

Earnest Enough

Our wilderness experience doesn’t simply tell us how badly we’ve offended God, it’s also a measure of his earnestness when he says, “I will redeem you, I will save you!” How earnest is God in his purpose to redeem us from sin? Earnest enough to subject us to pain that purges us. Earnest enough to put us to grief to open our eyes. Earnest enough to burn into our souls that we aren’t self-sufficient, that we’re totally dependent on him for everything. The wilderness, if we have the heart to bear it and the trust to live in hope there, is another of God’s ways of taking us seriously. So anxious is he to live with and love us that he subjects us to the curse of the wilderness, subjects himself to it as well, and finally, in Jesus Christ, he experiences the curse to the full, drinking the cup, and experiencing in the Son the full meaning of abandonment. That God bothers to do any of that should make us stagger, not only at what it says about him but us. Who are we and who does God intend us to be that he engages with us in these ways?

-- Jim McGuiggan

Bo & Woody

Woody on Bo:

"If 'Bo' is not a winner, I never saw one and I should know. He beat me the last three games we played. We've fought and quarreled for years but we're great friends." [Quoted in The Lantern February 10, 1986.]

Bo on Woody:
"There was plenty to criticize about Woody Hayes. His methods were tough, his temper was, at times, unforgivable. And, unless you knew him or played for him, it is hard to explain why you liked being around the guy. But you didn't just like it, you loved it. He was simply fascinating." [From Bo by "Bo" Schembechler and Mitch Albom.]

UM vs OSU 1934

Beauty is the Salve for Its Own Wound

I feel a strong need to write this morning. A feeling of pent-up-ness surrounds me, daring me to burst towards its suffocation. Expression is demanding my voice.

I so regularly encounter an ache within myself. An ache from incomplete-relating with others, an ache from beauty, an ache for something never quite reached, a ache for something never fully tapped. I think I recognize some of the categories for this ache, but at times when the ache is more overwhelming, I wonder whether or not I know much of anything about it.

I want to respond internally to a tumultuous week of a few highs and what seems like many more lows. At the same time, I feel compelled to watch for today’s sunrise, even as I try to to stay in bed past 6am on a Saturday morning. Beauty calls out to me, piercing the yet dark morning. I woke wondering about the tragedy and power depicted in the film Grand Torino, which I watched last night. So much greatness and beauty in a description of living and dying. As a middle-aged man, I want every young and every old man to see this movie, but I feel a sadness that such truth has to come with such a price tag – through the tragedies of this world.

The horizon is on fire now, with what seems like again unprecedented color. I feel the urge to try to capture just the smallest elements of it with my camera, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately. The pictures are OK, at least in terms of capturing the colors and contrasts of these late fall mornings. But they don’t get enough of what the eye can see, and of what the brain processes for the soul. I stare intently anyway, searching for a frame on it all. It feels too alive to hold, and too free-ranging to fit in to anything square. I am inexplicably drawn in by both the richness and magnitude of its beauty and realize that today’s attempt to frame it is with these words. Much like a lens, though, I feel more of the inadequacy of words than anything else. …another reflection of my oh so common ache.

I love, however, the replenishment such effort brings to my soul, even as it leaves me wounded in its panting for more. What a wonderous beauty God does each day, whether I notice it or not. Whether clouds hide it or not. I can no more capture it than I can get my hands around the sky, but I can enjoy it for its momentary transforming giving-ness to me.

I long to give it (or show it) to someone else. But all those around me slumber on. I feel I would be an imposition by even attempting to share something so sacred. I must almost trust that the giving of it must be as unique to each person around me as it is to me. For all giving comes from God. This must be a part of what glory is. …something I can only join, not create.

I have noticed lately, though, that my own children now rush to bring my attention to sunrises and sunsets. Something must be being transferred. But, I suspect it is largely my own unfettered enjoyment of it that is the magnet to such things in their own souls. I feel an internal smile and I am grateful for the mystery beauty calls forth.

…and this causes something in me to relax over the friendship my ache is becoming.

Beauty is the Salve for Its Own Wound.

Unmitigated Morning

Which part?

Some of what I think and say isn’t really true, I just don’t know which part.

The Range of Nature

...yes, more morning glory here.

Morning...Glory

...yes, more morning glory here.

Kids these Days

...is was great to be together again.

Succulence's Deception

...yes, more tasty colors of fall here.

Amazing Grace!

Click the pic and just listen!

Bonheoffer...Things More Important

Dietrich Bonheoffer, after being in prison for a year, still another hard year away from his execution, forging long letters to his friend Eberhard Brege out of his strong faith, his anxiety, his longing for his fiancée, and terror over the nightly bombings: “There are things more important than self-knowledge.” Yes. An artist who believes this is an artist of faith, even if the faith contains no god.

-- Christian Wiman, Image, 20th Anniversary Issue

Cultivate Emptiness

We humans, somewhere along the way, seem to have picked up the bad habit of trying to get life on our terms, without all the bother of God, the Spirit of Life. We keep trying to be our own gods; and we keep making a sorry mess of it.

We have so little encouragement to cultivate emptiness.

-- Eugene Peterson, from The Wisdom of Each Other

Suspended Buzz

...more photos from VSF Church Camping 2009 here.

Drops of Red

UM vs EMU 2009

...more photos here.

Mystery is not...

Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

-- Gabriel Marcel

Truth is Tough

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

We fumble...with where to put it

Our music is about the realization everyone gets at some point in their lives that the world is broken, and we don't know how to fix it, and the longing we all have for it to be set right - and the ways we fumble when we're trying to work out where to put that longing.

-- borrowed by OtR from Sara Zarr

Remember, Sinner

Remember, sinner, it is not your hold of Christ that saves you -- it is Christ.

-- C.H. Spurgeon

Savory Salmon's Aging Hues

3D Purple

Dripping Yellow

Nature's Pink

One of the many things in nature that just about can't get any better.

2 Things

Two things I ask of you, O Lord; do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, 'Who is the Lord?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

-- Proverbs 30:7-8

Chicago from Atop the Sears (Er, Willis) Tower

...more photos here.

The Sway of Fullness

Life once again feels very full. I move back and forth now in a sway between perceiving it to be ‘too full’ and simply a good ‘full life’. I wonder about what makes me perceive it to be one way or the other at any given time. I wonder if my disposition to it stems from either pressure I feel from others (real or not) or pressure I put on myself and that, therefore, the movement in my feelings towards this fullness of life is not really what I think it is. At times I can get quite anxious about this, but usually if I am willing to engage in a process with it, I find that my anxiousness is rooted in a belief that something is ‘up to me’ that in reality, really isn’t up to me. I’m thankful for a process that regularly leads me away from anxiousness and towards a letting go of it, a dependence on something else (someone), if you will.

When I am in or coming out of one of these seasons, I catch myself more often than not thinking that if I didn’t have to spend so much time and emotional energy at work then I could be more of the person I would like to be. I’m guessing at some simple, practical level this is logically true. But I wonder if this assessment and conclusion misses a bigger more significant point. That point being, that perhaps it is less a factor of work being an obstacle and more that it is a pathway. The nirvana that I imagine in a well organized, spacious, and thoughtful life perhaps is not achieved by sedation of certain things that impose themselves on my attention. Perhaps it is the obstacle itself that leads me towards the God that organized, spacious, and thoughtful life would afford.

As I reflect on the notion that God caused the curse in ‘working the field’ for Adam, it seems that it is in the very curse itself that God was creating something for man to find Him. Of course, we can as we regularly do, miss the point of God’s curse and therefore Himself. But I’ve more regularly noticed that a flower seems to grow from the soil of my anxiety over the lack of ability I have to get myself and keep myself in the serenity I desire. I suspect that if could I do it myself, I would again be content to hold on to ‘it’ rather than the one who provides it. This all seems to point to a God who is way ahead of us in understanding what we really need and even want in life. He is orchestrating our existence by creating opportunities that push and draw me to Himself, even through His ‘curses’. My opportunity is to believe that this is true, that it is not up to me to create my utopia or whatever mini-version of it I can concoct, and trust that it is often through the very obstacles that I feel that I find this God. I often try to find a way around such obstacles, when the opportunity is the pathway through them. God knows this. He knows the value of suffering and He lovingly does not relent to my understanding of ‘the better way’ I may be imagining.

So, off I go to another day of work…when I would rather be thinking, resting, or playing in the sunlight of the natural world. There is not only purpose in it, but a pathway to the very deepness I long for in God. Selah.

Mystery & Logic

The Holy Spirit, in the inspiration of scripture, has kept quite a few things out of our purview, to keep us humble and open to mystery. Living with some tension, in mystery, is part of the life of faith, and it’s what keeps us growing. The minute we become dogmatic, we close our minds. There’s a lot to be said for saying, “I don’t know.” Some parents don’t say that to their kids enough.

Image: Speaking of parents, what do you think about parents who say to their kids, “You can be anything you want to be?” Is that a healthy thing?

EP: I think it’s a sick way to instruct our children. One of the important things we learn as human beings is limits: how do we live within limits? A lot of mischief is done in the world by people who want to be big, want to make a lot of money, want a lot of influence. I think it’s a mistake to say that to children. Look at the trouble it’s gotten us into.

The minute we take our humility, our inadequacy, our sense of striving out of the story, we destroy it. There’s no lack of excellence in scripture, and there’s no lack of failure and humility, but they’re all part of our organic whole, which Jesus hold together, with his presence, his forgiveness, his commands, his promises. The minute we start unraveling it, we get into a lot of trouble.

-- Interview with Eugene Peterson, “Image”, Summer 2009


In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

-- G.K. Chesterton

Worship

Worship begins with finding you finding me
and ends with this neverending.

-- Tim Koshnik

Honest Doubt

Honest doubt is different from an ironclad commitment to doubt itself. Honest doubt is painful, but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.

-- Christian Wiman, Harvard Divinity Bulletin

Country Road, Take Me Home...West Virgina

For more scenic views, click here....

Predictably Unpredictable

I must say that at the very least life is unpredictable. …so much so that I find myself wondering why I try to predict it. I think I really do spend more time and energy trying to anticipate life than I realize. I’m not even ready to say this is a bad habit, or even unhelpful. But I do think it is conspicuous that I work pretty hard at wondering about the future and its impact on me. The thought crossed my mind recently, ‘isn’t it obvious that no one knows the future?’ No one. So…why? Why do I live out of an anticipated future? I suppose I’m going to have to do the honest work of figuring what I mean by this question. For example, I think I often catch myself thinking thoughts like, ‘if I knew what was going to happen, I would…’. If I knew what was going to happen with the economy, I would spend my money differently. If we are headed towards some crisis, where the whole game is changed and money becomes only a commodity of the rich, I would…learn more about gardening, learn a more practical skill that I could use in trade for the things I need in life.

Another one, if I knew more about what was going on for my wife at any given moment, I would be more able to identify how I should ‘be’ towards her going forward. Or, if I knew what was lacking or what was growing in the person of my son, I would be more able to speak into certain things with some certainty. If I knew how long I was going to live, I would know how much money I need and I could think more effectively about the work I am doing, the way I spend my time. If I knew if my parents were going to live a long and healthy productive life, I would know more about how to orient myself towards them. If I knew that they would have an extended battle with mind-altering diseases, I would know more how to prepare. And on and on it goes, limited only by the hours of the day I am awake…and even then my ‘night mind’ seems to continue this effort.

But the obvious thing is, that despite all of the effort to anticipate things that feel important, I have really never known what was coming my way. And, I think in fairness to the whole dynamic of using the experience of my past to predict the future, I have never really seen clearly (if at all) what the past has taught be about what is coming. Even if there are some identifiable patterns them, each day and season, to one extent or another is (relatively speaking) a surprise. What are the implications of this? I suspect there are many, but I only now seem to be getting a glimpse of them.

In yesterday’s entry for example I awoke a mess, emotionally. Tossed around the room of my mind by the strangest of dreams, I yanked myself out of one only to discover how exhausted I had become supposedly ‘sleeping’. It was an undesired start to another day, weary of something before I even started it. ‘How will I make it through this one?’ was the unspoken question before me. But, all I could do was simply to roll out of bed and do the next obvious thing. In this case, brush my teeth.

I had wanted to buy donuts for my department at work, so I did that. I ate a couple myself. I had lots of meetings throughout the day. The weather was truly awesome. I went running, learned of the potential absence of all my children that evening, wondered out loud about a ‘date’ with my wife, learned that one child would be home after all, reached the pre-conclusion that the date I was now looking forward probably wouldn’t happen, discovered that my child’s plans reversed again, went to dinner with my wife, enjoyed great conversation and food, watched the movie ‘Fireproof’, and fell asleep again in the arms of a wife who really loves me. Who knew that all of this would happen with a thousand more details in between…when I awoke that way I did that very morning before?

As I started above, life is at the very least unpredictable. And this description of my experience of just this one day seems to be fairly reflective of many days in my life and of many seasons of my life. I don’t know what is coming in the future.

I also know that the goodness I often am ‘planning’ for myself (anticipating future) is replaced by a goodness of wholly another kind…on-going experience with God. This is slowing changing me from being a planner, a predictor, a self-providing goodness-giver, to being a responder, an acceptor, a willingness-to-wait-for-goodness-receiver. And as I observe just the tips of this ice-berg and relax from the figure-out-the-future-coming approach and to the future-being-given-to-me-one-day-at-a-time approach, something releases within me to do and be the same for others. I can now feel their tensions over the very same kinds of things, in large part, because my own tensions over them are less pre-occupying. This is a wonder to me. The future-anticipating approach is self-fulfillingly self-absorbed. The future-receiving approach is self-givingly other-focused.

It was raining today when I awoke (I nice, soothing rain I must add) and many of my thoughts drained towards what adjustments I would have to make today because of the rain. In the few minutes of this written reflection, the rain has subsided and the sun is poking its face through the clouds. What will this day bring anyway? I just don’t know, but I have a feeling it will be good.

3 Handsome Guys

...well, the 2 on the right anyway...after a recent 5k together in Winona Lake, IN.

Choosing and Chosen

There is a certain similarity between marriage and the Christian religion, which is suggested by the text in our gospel reading: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” The dominant note at the beginning of marriage is the joy of mutual possessing, of a ‘choosing’ triumphantly accomplished. And this is as it should be. 

So in religion there is at the beginning often a searching and a choosing, an affirming of that good which one may serve with conviction. And this too is as it should be. But in time we see more. We become aware that our seeking and our choosing is not so self-determined as we had thought, but our response to a Seeker who had already found us. We are come to understand that text: "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you." 

So with marriage we understand more in time. Deeper than the joy of a ‘choosing’ triumphantly fulfilled is the awareness of a need to be met, of a claim acknowledged. Few things are as potent to give meaning to life as the sense of answering a need and fulfilling a responsibility which no one else can meet. 

It is wonderful indeed that we can choose and achieve our choice, but still more wonderful that we are chosen. 

-- Sue Miller, The Story of My Father, homily by my father for my brother’s wedding

Poems

Poems are not words, after all,
but fires for the cold,
ropes let down to the lost,
something as necessary as bread
in the pockets of the hungry.

-- Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

Pictured Rocks 2009

...of course (!), more pics here.

Many eyes go through the meadow, not many see the flowers in it.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson


What am I looking at today?

Morning

The delicate combination of morning sun eeking over the residual dampness of night is such a beautiful sight, sound, and smell. Something inside me both relaxes and quickens at the same time, in part knowing that all is well in a world that tries to hold so much more than it should. I love these simple reminders from God through the natural world. I find myself increasingly conflicted about the organization of my life that misses these simple but powerful realities so much of the time. What do I do to remain more in earshot of such voice from God? What am I clinging to that prevents the simple embracing of such things…in a way that trusts God for ‘the rest’, the things that call out that ‘I need to take care of’, that propel me on into the whatever of this life and away from the quiet beckoning of my ‘trust me’ God?

Or, is the starting phrasing of this question (what do I do, what am I clinging to) more a reflection of the ache in my soul still submerged in a cursed earth that yearns for a home just not yet fully available to me? …ah, the agelessness of this familiar question. One that makes me both tired with its ever-presence and closer to an opportunity to ask a better question…a question closer to ‘God, how can I be with you in this earth-bound, human state?’

Would Jesus not have felt something similar? …after knowing in the most intimate of ways what it was like to be un-earth-bound with the Father, even as He was traveling in his humanity here. It is hard for me to imagine that He didn’t know these questions far more deeply than I. And, while I feel like these pull me apart…I suspect for Him, they were the very opportunities that drew Him ‘in’…towards His Father. I wonder if that is happening for me. I think it might be. But my daily memory fails me, and the voice of the Accuser says again that this is not an accurate description of what is really happening, that I am being separated from something rather than grafted into it.

But the morning’s voice remains calm and silent and even more powerful…as I wait for its mysterious effect to do its soul-salving work. Perhaps that is a more fundamental issue, my willingness to wait…for His time-honored Way to love me as I need to be loved and not yield to the false voice trying to name the loss and death I will surely experience by choosing to simply wait.

One more time, I will choose to wait…not perhaps for the ‘last time’, but more hopefully for the first ‘next time’. Thank you, Morning.


The relationship between God and man is more private and intimate than any possible relation between two fellow creatures.

-- C.S. Lewis

The only thing that counts...

The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

-- Galatians 5:6

In Love with People

What saves me from the tedium of another day is falling hopelessly in love with the people I meet: the curly-haired barista at the coffee shop who hands me my change as if dipping his fingers into holy water; the girl with Down syndrome who talks loudly about vacationing with her grandmother; the elderly couple who grow giant bubblegum-colored puffs of dahlias at the corner of Twelfth and Chambers; the toddler girl across the street who bleats sweetly, "Mama, come see!" I fall in love with the deep timbre of my brother's laugh; the way my mother says my name; the way my father calls me sweetheart; the way my sweetheart calls me baby.

-- Bobbie Willis, Oregon from The Sun

The Morning Light

The morning light makes promises it has no intention of keeping, but why quibble? Look how it shines on my aging face and my fading to-do list. Look how it caresses my wife of twenty-five years. As if darkness has been banished. As if everything is lit from within.

-- Sy Safransky

Nothing to Lose But Our Illusions

Derrick Jensen: What do you say to people who feel they are busy struggling to get by and don't have time to help others?

David Edwards: Once you start to see through the myth of status, possessions, and unlimited consumption as a path to happiness, you'll find that you have all kinds of freedom and time. It's like a deal you can make with the universe: I'll give up greed for freedom. Then you can start putting your time to good use.

Jensen: And if someone says, "But the problems are so big, what can one person do?"

Edwards: Once you realize that helping others is also helping yourself, the size of the overall problems becomes irrelevant. You're not a one-man or one-woman army out to save the whole world. You help simply because it does good and it feels good.

-- The SUN

Choose to Let Nature Nourish

It seems to me, in this time and space, that one must choose things that are important. An example, solitude. In the swirl of noise almost constantly surrounding us, I'm thinking we have to decide to move towards it - to choose it. In the end, solitude may do the choosing for us, but it is very patient…waiting for us to choose it. It seems that our world is bent on noise, noise organized and noise unorganized…but really anything that will keep us moving toward something or away from something else. To stop, to choose quiet, in fact seems to require a conscious choice. Otherwise, it feels like a nearly constant scream of ‘hey, look at me’, ‘notice what I am doing’, ‘look what’s on’, ‘listen to me’, ‘watch me’, ‘go here’, ‘go there’, ‘do this’, ‘do that’…is all around us, surrounding us. In one of the gaps it can’t fully fill in, we have to ask what we are trying to avoid by filling ourselves up so much with stuff, with activity, with constancy? …why? with more than ever to do, more than ever to consume, do we actually hear and feel the phrase, ‘I’m bored.’

Perhaps we are looking for something; something we can’t find in the places we are looking, something that we’re being told is ‘over here’, when really it is ‘over there’…looking for something ‘outside ourselves’ that is really ‘inside ourselves’, something that is man-made, rather than something not made by man.

Go sit in the woods for 2 hours and watch what happens to yourself internally. Notice the battle that emerges in your mind in the first hour, but gut it out…and then notice what is emerging in your spirit. Tempted to consider that perhaps noise is selling us something more than toxic? Turn it off, get away from it, be quiet. Take the long walk you need. Take a long trip into nature. Notice, for one thing, that it’s not selling you anything (this is a wonderful place to be, all by itself)…it just exists and quietly points to something…not trying to get you to notice, just waiting until you do.

Nourishment. What in our time and space actually comes anywhere near this word, this idea? Nearly nothing…seeks nourishment, nearly everything seeks consumption and the craving to move on to the next thing. If you don’t believe me now, call me in 20 years when the lack of nourishment has left nothing but the brown and worn husk of empty being.

Nature seeks to nourish you; God does really, through it. Allow it...by choosing it. You will be choosing a lot more than you realize.

The Draw of Honest Christian Human-beings

There’s nothing quite as drawing as an honest Christian human-being. Why does this seem to be the case? In part, because it seems like many who think of themselves as Christians, don’t seem very honest about very much. And, even before I start down the road of appearing (even to myself) to not being one of ‘these’ people, I have to be honest and admit that this only makes sense to the degree that I myself acknowledge that am often not very honest. At the very least my honesty is quite selective. So I can accuse no one without accusing myself.

That being said, though, I think Christians often fit quite nicely with many people who simply do not want to face the realities of this world, both the world inside them and the world outside them. I think an honest Christian human-being is often quite near the end of their rope in terms of what they live with day in and day out, recognizing in human terms how precarious things are…how unlike the false reality marketed by our culture things really are. Our cultural falseness, our un-reality, leads straight away from where the desperateness of real reality leads us. We are alive and we are in constant danger one way or another, and we must admit this against a culture that refuses to do so.

The irony is that in all of its falseness, our world is so addicted to so many things, to so many kinds of escape; how could we even imagine it to be telling us the truth about how good things are. Honesty, in part, is about acknowledging this, naming it, speaking it out loud, if not for the ears of my own heart, then for the ears of others.

…and it is in the so doing, that we realize the more accurate position of our humanity and, perhaps even more importantly, our need…our natural, real and true state of dependence. Our desire for true love, is recognized substantially on the cusp of our desperation. This is a Love that we cannot provide for ourselves, that can only be provided for us. And only by someone who can really love like this – God himself.

A lack of honesty, though, skips over all of this…and misses nearly everything we truly need.

There was nothing left of me. I had drifted so far away from God and every stabilizing force in my life that I felt there was no hope…My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I'd felt over the years, seemed finally complete. It wasn't. I thought I'd left Him, but He hadn't left me. I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. Then my mind started focusing on God.

-- Johnny Cash

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves.

-- C.S. Lewis

Honesty leads to something as magnificently wonderful, as profoundly powerful…as forgiveness. The ability forgive oneself is centered again only in something that can’t be provided by ourselves, it is something that we can experience from and with God. But we have to be honest enough to see our need for it. Forgiveness when experienced, is something like the ocean tide, it washes over us, drowning us in mercies and ebbs back to its next destination. We, though, are now part of the ocean that descends on the next person and actually become part of the delivery of it to others. This is part of the power of such a thing like forgiveness.

Honesty then, as a virtue, is a portal to the soul – our own and others – through which the flood waters of forgiveness can flow…to and from us.

To be Christian is to be fundamentally human and to be truly human, you and I must be honest and open to the saving graces of a Loving God. When that happens, we are drawn to people and people are drawn to us.

Be honest.

Mothers Day Bike Ride - 28 Miles

We had a great day biking as a family on Fort Wayne's Rivergreenway on Mothers Day. 'Mom' liked it a lot.

Running

...finding her form, wind, and speed in 7th grade.

Flat

I’m feeling really flat today…as a person. I felt this coming on yesterday. Perhaps it is because the landscape of my requirement this weekend is fairly open…or perhaps because there is nothing dramatic to anticipate. I feel tempted to find ‘jolt’ in my life. I’m wondering why. I’m reminded of Parker Palmer’s video interview…I am flying too high? Am I trying to? I’m feeling altitude in my attitude. I want to be closer to the ground, to acknowledge the humility I need and treasure, not (I hope) to avoid the pain of crashing, but more to live at my right size…not bigger than I should be. Perhaps this is a healthy kind of 'flat', even if it doesn't feel like it.

…as my emotional energy wanes and I finish even the stumbling nature of this self-identifying writing, the sun has burst into the sky, overcoming the grey of the earlier morning. My spirit is lifting a bit, but warily. What will this day hold?

No Time for Each Other

The world today is upside down because there is so very little love in the home, and in family life. We have no time for each other. Everybody is in such a terrible rush, and so anxious…and in the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world.

-- Mother Teresa

Being Human

At times I am overcome with gratitude for the range and depth of God’s love and provision. At other times, and usually without much separation, I am overcome with the dramatic inconvenience of an obstacle in front of me that HAS to move…for me to live or be happy. What a strange creature I am…being this thing called human. The conflict of this range of experience internally makes me want to grab for a middle ground, for the middle bottom of the pendulum’s swing, some disposition that will avoid what feels often like cheap inconsistency within my spirit.

But what appeals to this desire for freedom from such a thing as inconsistency? What voice values that? Who equated consistency as a hallmark of independence? Is it not true that to be fully human IS to be fully dependent.

Solitude is the Garden...

Solitude is the garden for our hearts which yearn for love. It is the place where our aloneness can bear fruit. It is the home for our restless bodies and anxious minds. Solitude, whether it is connected with a physical space or not, is essential for our spiritual lives. It is not an easy place to be, since we are so insecure and fearful that we are easily distracted by whatever promises immediate satisfaction. Solitude is not immediately satisfying, because in solitude we meet our demons, our addictions, our feelings of lust and anger, and our immense need for recognition and approval. But if we do not run away, we will meet there also the One who says: "Do not be afraid. I am with you, and I will guide you through the valley of darkness."

-- Henri Nouwen

Let’s keep returning to our solitude.

God's Glory

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word darkness on the walls of his cell.

-- C.S. Lewis

HH - 2009

Birds of Hope

I hear the birds singing loudly today...because it is beautiful Spring morning or do they sing unrestrained for the hope born this Easter morning?

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of Me.

-- Emily Dickinson

Flat-screen Fast & Easter

I fell asleep last night with such high hopes for an 'awakening' morning. It is Easter morning and I knew the weather would be quite Spring-like. And as I awoke with pain in my feet, a chill in the air and deepness of sleeplessness forfeited the night before, I realized that there felt like a lot to get through to the awakening I wanted. I finally made it to my computer. But the Lenten ‘fast’ I had just finished from the ‘flat-screen’ world of relating called loudly to me as I readjusted my ‘offline-ness’ to being on-line again. So many, so many distractions…that seem so innocuous, yet are so unambivalent in the waste of their pursuit. I wonder if the appeal of online reality (or unreality as it may be) is the illusion of choice. The belief that I can choose what I want to pursue, big or small, with the only restraint being someone around me giving me the feeling that I spend too much time doing it. Does choice offer me power, false as it may be? Do I believe in a kind of power that is simply easier to follow, easier to navigate than the thick thickets involved in real human relating?

I think the thing that caught my eye at the origin of this year’s fast were the following lines from an article, by Anne Jackson, called, “The Facebook Fast”:

Online connections are good. They can be deep and good for our souls. But when we turn them into an online community, they can, and do, impact our face-to-face interactions. When we spend more time staring at a glowing monitor than we do into the eyes of those we love, or need to love, it might be time to shut off the computer.

Among other things, I think it is just easier to choose 'away' from people. We are lazy. We are often confused, hurt, and paralyzed by how to move towards other people. And so, an option to devote more energy to our own ‘profile’ makes things feel much easier. And then there is the addicting part of self-presentation…and the deception it leads us towards about ourselves. Looking into the eyes of others is a highly personal and intimate act, which forces us into something we might not otherwise believe or know about. There are things that are much greater than the confusion and pain we often experience with others. Things much, much greater. And the false-security we are offered through non-human relating is, at the very least, a naïve and unfortunate forfeit of the greater mysteries of courage, compassion, and love.

I have found that I am far more tethered to the flat-screen life than I would like. My bills now come on it, my communication is now embedded in it. My way of participating, even knowing the world is now almost inextricably dependent on it. We, as a culture, are all about doing things fast, quickly. And much of our non-human technology is designed to help us ‘relate’ more efficiently. It simply takes less time to e-mail a bunch of people about something, than it does to call them or go see them. But on the hill greased with the appeal of efficiency I wonder about the quality of time I spend ‘getting more things done faster’. Do I really get to know people better, more deeply or do I mostly spend myself telling others about me, the way I would like them to see me. When I talk with someone or visit them, I have to listen. I have to at least act interested. It is required; to not do so would be rude. But I don’t even have to pretend on-line that I am interested in what someone else is saying.

In many ways, things that take time are better and believe it or not, efficiency is not. As I leave my fast this year, I want to acknowledge the humanity of those God has placed around me. They are for me and I am for them. We are not made to experience each other primarily through a flat screen. We are not card-board cutouts waiting for the apparel and hairstyle change of the next commercial we offer of ourselves. We are the fallen, sometimes beautiful, but more often than not messy human-beings that have the mysterious power of God, not in our presentation of ourselves, but in the participation with ourselves in the same messy lives of others, to offer to someone else. I believe more and more that ‘life is the discovery of God’…in nature, in ourselves and in others. Let’s keep turning towards this truth and away from the illusions we are enticed with from this increasingly dehumanized world.

This is part of the power I hope for from today’s Easter reminder.

Humility

My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, he muttered to himself, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hurt & Love

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

-- Mother Teresa, "The Simple Path"

Have you found this to be true as well?

If this is true...and how often have we been willing to test it...I wonder how fear again trys to win in lying to us by only telling us about the death of pain...rather than the truth about the life that comes from pain.

Humility vs Entitlement - My Ageless War

Learn to humble yourself, you are but earth and clay.

-- Thomas à Kempis

I fear that humility has escaped me again. How and why does it get away so regularly? There are certain areas of my life that affect my ability to lose perspective on nearly every other area of my life. And when those areas are being hammered on, I go down and stay down. And the quote above reveals to me today…that humility has left my building again. Or, perhaps something else has entered my building and is trying to re-establish residency. I don’t know exactly what that is, but it seems to have something to do with the feeling that I deserve something that I’m not getting at a relational level. Let’s call it entitlement for now. I think Entitlement sneaks in through an open window somewhere in my life…perhaps the window that is opened whenever I am put in a situation where an unusual and prolonged amount of effort feels required of me.

I think, in simple terms, that I just want some help…or perhaps I just want someone to be with me. I think that is pretty close to the kind of help I think I want. But Entitlement seizes the opportunity and pours in through the opening at unexpected rates and starts setting up shop in my mind. It creates walls with substantial and shining plaques on it. One that I recognize is called Justified. The plaque reads, “You on justified in your need for help…after all, look at all that you’re doing!” And, on the back of the plaque, in some strange way that defies the fact that you should only be able to see it from the back, are the words that eek through, “You Deserve It.”

The simple reality is that when such things occur in my life, something really is being lost…even though I don’t often recognize it or know what it is. And, because this is the case, something normal is to be grieved. But grief is un-handy, it is un-tidy, it is vulnerable, it is exposing…it requires (in a healthy way) something from someone else…and therefore creates a wider imposition. It is not self-contained. We want things to be self-contained and therefore we don’t want to grieve. Entitlement knows this and rushes through an opening whenever it can, like an arrogant salesman that shoves grief to the background. Its promotional display is attractive and compelling; hard even to resist because of the utility it offers in heading off the kind of vulnerable and slow dependency that grief leads toward with God. Grief leads me to God in perceived uncomfortable ways. It doesn’t appear to offer me Relief. Entitlement offers me relief of a different flavor, an independent one, and urgent one.

In reality, Entitlement attempts to hide God as the offerer of true relief through dependence. It says I can get what I want another way. It lies about this, because I can’t get it another way. But it knows what it is doing and uses arrogance and pride and independence and righteous justification to lead me away from God – to hide Grief.

Humility doesn’t do this. And, it is willing to wait until the barf of Entitlement is in full stench. Humility says the truth, “You really can’t do this on your own. You really do need help. The help you need isn’t in the cooperation you seek from others. It is in the dependence you have on God, which allows you to give up on the keeping-on-going of things in your life.” You see there are things in my life that I don’t want to give up. And, many of these things are good things. And, it appears for a while that I can keep all the things that I like being and doing. But things change in time and circumstances and these are controlled by God, not by me. Humility whispers these things to me…. But I often don’t hear them when I am trying as hard and as loudly as I am to keep going, to not have to grieve, to not have to acknowledge that God may be changing things for me, for someone else. Entitlement says, “You do know what is best, keep going. You can get what you want if you try hard and long enough. …but don’t bring God back into it.” Humility says, “You don’t know…what is best, but you can trust God who does. Allow Him to be in it.”

So, in very simply form, I need to acknowledge what I am made of – clay…dirt really. And the only way life can be experienced from such a starting point is by acknowledging in very practical terms (like what I want right now) that God is the breather of life into dirt. Otherwise, dirt is dirt and nothing more. Only God can do such a thing, I cannot do it…in spite of what Entitlement says. I have to be willing to wait for His breath…and to receive as joyfully as only any dirt could when it happens. This is humility and how I learn it...again and again.

Money

One of money's evils is its beckoning to isolation. 

-- dana williamson 

 ...before I explain, what is your initial reaction to this simple statement?

Phil Keaggy

A master musician...a priviledge to have seen him again!

Goals, Values...and the Spirit of God

Hey, bored of TV, check this out:

http://www.ysmarko.com/?p=3953

It is usually fun to see what a bunch of people we don't know anything about thinking about stuff we also think about. Actually, it was a little fun just to write that sentence. Anyway, I think the thing that rings true for me in this domain is that while goals can (and should?) have a base in values, values can (and should?) have a base in the Holy Spirit. I find that even my values, or perhaps my expression of them, change (or develop?) over time. In other words, what is dearer to me today is not the same thing that was dear to me 20 years ago. I don't think that's a sloppy thing (though it could be, I suppose), rather a thing that is rooted and guided by the Spirit of God. He shows me and teaches me what to value. From that dynamic value-system, I orient my life in my understanding of who I am and in what I do...and plan to do (goals).

People and organizations have rotated on values and planning many times and, I suspect, will continue to do so. I find that the 'life' in values, though, is something that needs to be regularly fueled (energized, guided, updated, debunked, etc.) by the Spirit. Otherwise, even values become wooden and doctrinal-statement-ish.

Anxious?

And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?

-- Luke 12:25-26

Be Patient with All that is Unresolved in Your Heart...

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.
And try to love the questions themselves.
Do not see the answers that cannot be given you
Because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
Live along some distant day into the answer.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929

Suffering: Does it Lead to Freedom?

It is impossible for a person not to be puffed up by his good works unless he has first been deflated and destroyed by suffering and evil to the point that he knows that he is worthless and that his works are not his but God’s.

-- Martin Luther

The Power of Freedom

Several times now I have said that our real hope lies in that no matter how oppressed we may be, we always retain some spark of capacity to choose. We can use the ember of freedom to choose to risk ourselves to the goodness of God or to continue to strive for our own autonomy or give in to the powers that oppress us. I am convinced that nothing whatsoever determines the choices we make at this primal level. Here, finally, the choices are totally up to us; we really are free. 

Ironically, freedom becomes most pure when our addictions have so confused and defeated us that we sense no choice left at all. Here, where we feel absolutely powerless, we have the most real power. Nothing is left in us to force us to choose one way or another. Our choice then, is a true act of faith. We may put our faith in ourselves or in our attachments (our addictions) or in God. It is that simple. 

-- Gerald May, Addiction and Grace

Rest. Rest. Rest in the Goodness of God's love.

There is something comforting about time after all, even as it seems to hasten us on into oblivion at times. The chance to reflect and revisit a prior time reminds me that all is well in the soul that yearns for God and that the march of time is a bringing-us-closer to something, rather than a taking-us-away. As I reflect today on the significance of things, this first day of a new year, I am reminded of a writing I wrote exactly one year ago. And, as I re-read that writing, I noticed a call to a kind of rest that has slowly deepened within me over the last year. A quote from the mystic, Madame Guyon, captures it well:

Rest. Rest. Rest in God's love. The only work you are required now to do is to give your most intense attention to His still, small voice within.

-- Madame Jeanne Guyon

As best I know, at this point in time anyway, this rest is a growing awareness and confidence in the goodness of God towards mankind, towards me. Perhaps the threat we feel from the oblivion we so often dread is really based in sense of loss in the goodness of things we have experienced as we age – goodness defined on our terms, base on our own personal histories. And the voice of this loss chagrins us into brokering our sense of goodness from within ourselves and through what we experience. This, though, is really a false voice. A voice not of the peace of God, but a voice from one trying to distort peace by basing it on our own ability to manage things, to secure the goodnesses we seek. This distortion of goodness changes the game from something we desire, to something we think we deserve. And, when we operate from a sense of things we deserve, we miss the very nature of goodness. The very nature of God himself.

One of my conclusions over the last year is that God is the ultimate author of goodness. And, because this is true, my attempts to manage it based on my very limited perspective of what goodness should look like are really just sad and pitiful, at best. The fact is, I really don’t know how to write a story about goodness. But that is not my job, my role in life. My life is to be about participating in the goodness that God designs for life. Goodness that extends itself to me, and not simply to me. And the way I participate in it is largely by being willing to wait for it, rather than by trying to make it happen. And the way I wait for it is largely due to my willingness to rest (rather than work hard) and listen for God’s voice.

This is something I think I was recognizing a year ago today and something that I believe more and more in now. I don’t control goodness. I receive it. It is gift. It is something I can be a part of…something because of the nature of it, to offer to others…to give away.