Number One Hundred

TV shows make a big deal of their 100th episode; it’s a milestone of a good long-running series. This here is my 100th post. I decided not to make a big deal of it.

(You weren’t expecting content were you? Go watch TV!)

The Faith Project

I was unexpectedly hired today by a friend of a friend, or rather a client of a client, who is putting together a project on faith from 250 or so tapes he has shot over the last several years in numerous countries where he has interviewed people from a wide variety of backgrounds on their views on God, faith and religion. He has come to me as a consultant of sorts, to get him set up on the front end with technical issues and work flow, which – hooray for some extra cash. But what seems even more interesting is what all those people had to say. It seems from what little I know about it to be hours (weeks really) of reflections, experiences, stories and meditations on faith and God. What an incredible labor of love he’s putting together – I’m intrigued to learn more.

Don’t Pray

One of the best things I’ve read recently on prayer in a long time, found here. Joe Thorn quotes from and comments on a book he’s reading by Paul Miller.

My prayer life is so spotty largely because I get frozen when it comes to what to say or figuring out what I really want to pray about or how I’m really feeling about something rather than praying as a natural extension of my life and thoughts without all the constant metaprocessing and backstepping and analyzing. And deep down I find I’m also looking for an experience each time – some moment of peace or clarity or otherness that lets me know I’ve connected with God rather than just blabbered at the windshield. Miller has this to say:

Don’t hunt for a feeling in prayer. Deep in our psyches we want an experience with God or an experience in prayer. Once we make that our quest, we lose God. You don’t experience God; you get to know him. You submit to him, you enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.

I’ve heard the exhortation to be natural in prayer, to speak as I would to a friend rather than composing religious-sounding language. And I’ve heard the one that says don’t go experience-hunting. This though somehow strikes me differently. It goes beyond just prayer for me – it challenges my perception of God. If I’m looking primarily to experience God, then to me he is an event or a set of circumstances. If I’m looking to get to know him, then he is free to be a person, and experience is only a part of the relationship. Joe quotes Miller again as saying,

In prayer, focusing on the conversation is like trying to drive while looking at the windshield instead of through it. It freezes us, making us unsure of where to go.

With a relationship it’s like spending all your time thinking and discussing how the relationship is going rather than just having it. There are downsides to being überanalytical when there’s life to be lived.

Just a Little Song I Learned in Vacation Bible School

My five-year-old niece sang this one to me this evening, complete with fist-pumping choreography:

You’re powerful
You’re unshakable
You shake me
You break me
You make me again

And while my first reaction of course was to say something like, “Wow, good job, what a fun song” or some other affirming sort of schlock, my inner reaction was – Does she have any idea what she’s singing?? Do kids this age really get explained to them the humiliation and utter destruction that God brings into the lives of people who are serious about following him? Did her Vacation Bible School teachers really get into the personal cost of believing in someone who is powerful and unshakable, and who has an intentional hand in our lives? How if this is really what we believe, and not just something we say to certain people at certain times when it’s safe or socially acceptable, our lives are for all other purposes forfeit?

“OK children, once we’ve all affixed our flies and boils onto our felt Job figures, let’s recite our memory verse for the day. Repeat after me: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him…”

I don’t think I would have been any more appalled had she dropped an F-bomb and pumped her hips.

The Song That’s Stuck in My Head #3

“A Thousand Winters Melting”
The Myriad

I’m realizing with each successive TSTSIMY post (plus the handful I posted when this feature was a page unto itself) that the songs featured here aren’t usually ones I’ve listened to recently, thought of specifically, or otherwise intentionally allowed into my grey matter. Instead they pop up unbidden, cracking into my consciousness with a protruding melody or phrase and prying their way into full foot-tapping status. So it is with today’s sticker, a galloping statement on love from my latest favorite band The Myriad. The verses talk about angels and the comfort of supernatural presence, but for me the haiku-like chorus is where I live:

Love, love
A thousand winters melting
Love, love
As you wrap your arms around me

The LTDC, volume viii: Opening My Eyes Again

My faith has been extraordinarily sluggish in its expression and growth over the last five years, largely because it’s done the opposite of grow during that time. I was talking with a friend the other day about our experience of faith and life and how it has evolved from our twenties into our thirties. I was very…exuberant in my twenties. My faith was vibrant, my confidence was high, and I knew how life was supposed to work. I could take big risks and try new things, I could pray with passion and move across the country to follow my dreams. The world belonged to me, in a manner of speaking. Now I am not so certain about things. Perhaps I belong to the world, no scriptural references intended. A poem by Stephen Crane comes to mind that I discovered in high school and admired then as a person admires a distant planet:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Lately I think I am living on that planet. Or rather in that universe. It is…I was about to say humbling, but that gives me too much credit…discombobulating at times, devastating at other times, to discover how insignificant I am on these terms, that life is not actually all about what I want and how big I can dream. This has been my process during the last five years, which readers of this blog are probably aware of.

Lately though, it has felt different. Freeing, in a way, since I am frankly no longer as important. I am discovering a bit more of what it is to be, to exist and do my part and not worry so much about myself. And perhaps this could be just as profound and life-changing at times to others as I imagined in my big-dreaming ways that confident, bold faith could be.

Time seems often to hold me back. Time to sit and process where I’ve come to, to poke at the carcass of what has died and look around at the other things that have grown around it. Time to blog and read blogs, and books, and have conversations. Ah, who has that sort of time In any case, I seem to be looking around again, even if I can’t see very far right now. My life, I have come to decide, is really not all that bad.

Photo credit: sevenphonecalls

Is the Emergent Movement Only Temporary?

In this interesting post, pastors Dave Schmelzer and Charles Park propose that the emergent movement, while currently very effective and relevant, is by its nature reaching primarily a transient population that will eventually disappear, leaving emergent-oriented churches high and dry, so to speak. The observation is essentially that the emergent movement is most attractive to the currently high volume of people leaving the church, rather than the growing population of unchurched folks, with its message, “we’re not your father’s church”, or in other words, we do church more authentically, or with more relevance, or effectiveness, and so on. It stands to reason though that eventually this outflow will stabilize as people settle out into whatever church or unchurch they choose, and the population of folks looking for what emergents uniquely offer will more or less dry up.

Now I’m all for the emergent movement, and certainly gravitated in recent years toward the values it espouses and general culture of faith it promotes. And I’m certainly not up on all the nuances and distinctions of what the emergent movement is or isn’t (what’s emergent vs. emerging, for example?). So I’m not looking for predictions or pronouncements on this question. But criticism and bickering aside about the supposed validity or theological soundness of emergent’s aforementioned nuances and distinctions, this is the first sound proposition I’ve heard that emergent is a passing phase, though one currently seeming to hit its stride.

What do you think? Are Dave and Charles’ assessments omitting something important? Or is emergent the right thing for right now, but not so much for, say, 25 years from now?

The Song That’s Stuck In My Head #2

“Obsession”
Delirious?

One of those songs that makes the rounds in my head every year or two. This time it popped up on shuffle and stuck there. I realize that much of the songs and films that I like best are the ones where someone finally just lets loose about what they want or feel. Lifehouse’s “Everything”, or Mike Nichols’ Wit come to mind. This one seems to sum up some of the things I don’t know how otherwise to say.

What can I do with my obsession
With the things I cannot see?
Is there madness in my being?
Is it wind that whips the trees?
Sometimes you’re further than the moon
Sometimes you’re closer than my skin
And you surround me like a winter fog
You’ve come and burned me with a kiss

And my heart burns for you
And my heart burns

The Pukies Have Found Me

Last week all three kids did their rounds of puking – two of them at night, one mercifully in the afternoon. Then we were done, except for one lone puking incident Monday morning. And yesterday they found me. Woke me up at 6am with that feeling in my belly that says ho boy I hope this only gets better and not worse. It got worse. I went to work for a couple hours hoping that it would pass, especially since I was the only editor in the office. After a short while though I realized this was not going to end well. And before I could round up all my stuff it hit me. It was like my belly was a slot machine and someone hit the jackpot. And won my breakfast and what was left in there of my dinner – little pieces of rice and corn no longer on the cob suspended in the goo. Is this too much information? I spent the day in bed, though fortunately without a return trip to the ass-pool. I think I’ll change the subject now.

I used to journal quite a bit. A lot, really, several times a week for multiple pages at a time. I had a lot to say apparently, or had many things to process. My first journal was in the third grade; it was for school and I had to write five sentences in it a day. More than once the last two sentences were something like, “I had a good time. It was fun,” or some other space-filling repetitive drivel that I could still get away with when I read it to the class (it wasn’t a diary, after all). I picked up the same journal again in eighth grade, when I needed somewhere to process the otherwise uninterpreted experiences of junior high, the raw trauma of a thirteen-year-old painted across the pages in the most colorful language I could think of. That was half the point really, was to have somewhere I could safely call people all the names I wanted to, a place to vent the pubescent angst that my heart hadn’t had time yet to learn to deal with.

I put the journal down through high school, until somewhere around college when I began to take my faith more seriously and again had quite a bit of prose to dump, and even poetry (and no I will not reprint any of that here. Ever.) My relationship with God was new, and I had questions, and thoughts, and new experiences and a whole lot of processing to do. That more or less carried me through about a year or two ago, coincidentally about the time I started this blog, when my questions started feeling…heavier, like there stopped being answers.

Anyway, I’m thinking of all this tonight because I picked my journal up again yesterday afternoon, only the second time in over a year I’ve written in it. I had seven hours to kill in bed, and our laptop recently bit it, so I got out my journal. It’s a different space there than the blogosphere, more personal perhaps, and more slowly paced (when was the last time you filled a page with writing by hand?). The artistry of forming the letters with the pen alternately competes against the speed of my thoughts spilling out of my brain and paces them. I splurged on this journal; usually I pick up a notebook or cheap blank book, but after perusing the selection on this site, I couldn’t resist getting a nice leather-bound one. Of course that was about two years ago and I’ve filled perhaps a seventh of it.

Being by nature an external processor, I need places to go to process stuff. Journaling has often been a helpful one; conversation with trusted friends is another. Sometimes this blog helps too. Without these things I’m not so good at sitting down and contemplating.

I Am Transparent

I’m running out of time to waste putzing around and not looking for my passion. It won’t be very long before the kids start to notice. Either there is more to the world than a bunch of carbon-based life forms swarming around a ball of dirt hurtling through space, or there is not. Lately in my life I have lived as though there is not. Wake up, go to work, make some money, pay some bills, spend time with my family and my friends, go to sleep. Repeat. Subsist. Not unlike a virus on a host organism, although a socially oriented virus. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy my days, all in all. And on these terms that might be difficult enough for most folks.

There is a part of me that is aware though that life is not as bleak as all this. That life is pretty darn good, regardless of whether or not people around me agree with that or live like it’s so. Perhaps it is the tendency of someone in the habit of hearing and understanding other people’s worldviews to take on the burdens inherent in those philosophies as well,  stubbornly believing that everything is explainable, redeemable, if not mutually inclusive or compatible. The end effect though is I end up more burdened than I began. Not to mention still passionless.

I often find myself stuck on the first step back to life. Or rather, stuck looking for it. Show me the stair and I’ll take it; at least that is what I say to myself. I am the dead ready to be wakened at the first sound of the call. And perhaps I already know the stair or have heard the call but have discredited it on a failure or two of my own and the testimony of others. And perhaps my mental calisthenics are all a careful ruse to keep myself from risking too much, from caring too deeply or living too passionately.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

It is safer that way, though I will be the first to tell you it is not better. But my words in the end will be buried with me. So again: show me the actions and I will take them. Or perhaps what I am saying is show me the actions that I can accept as the correct ones and I will take them. This part of me pushes me up when I sink too low; that part of me stuffs me down if I threaten to rise too high. I am the wrong person to ask to save myself.