Reflections on 40

In the first 40 years of my life, I…

Played ZORK. 

Observed Halley’s comet.

Witnessed the birth of the Internet.

Met the band members of Skid Row.

Fell in love with the most amazing, intelligent and beautiful woman.

Married her.

Had better friends than I deserve.

Made good music with good people.

Was given three incredible sons.

Played on stage with an internationally known musician.

Graduated College.

Earned a Master’s Degree in Theology.

Worked through two careers just in time to pursue a third.

Read nearly everything C. S. Lewis has ever written.

Watched a space ship explode.

Backed over a police car.

Sat in the back of a police car.

Received 14 traffic violations at once.

Taught Driver’s Education.

Hosted a talk show.

Performed theatre with amazing people.

Lost 75 pounds.

Spoke much of God’s love.

Solved the Y2K problem.

Managed multi-million dollar international projects.

Worked in the R&D Department of two software companies.

Was called both the devil and a saint.

Sinned much.

Forgave some.

Stared at the stars in the absence of any human-made light.

Baptized two of my children.

Knew everything about God.

Discovered I knew nothing about God.

Dreamed too big.

Dreamed too small.

Chose the hard way more than the easy way.

Counted the cost and stood by my convictions.

Laughed until I couldn’t breathe.

Returned good for evil.

Survived.

In the next 40 yrs, I hope to:

Love better.

Give more.

Laugh harder.

Write much.

Publish something.

Be okay with me.

Teach.

Earn a second Master’s Degree.

Visit Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Grow old with my wife.

Celebrate my sons.

Keep learning.

Speak much of God’s love.

Live more of God’s love.

Forgive all.

Keep dreaming.

Go with grace and joy.

Leaving Exile

“Someday you’ll thank us for this.”

As he finished speaking I glanced out the window at a landscape marbled with graying snow and slate black Iowa dirt. Winter was easing its white-knuckled grip on the world. I looked back across the table at these men who had been my friends and brothers. Most of them looked away.

I was no longer one of them. Our gods were different. My God had come down from the mountain of fire and traded his thunder for thorns, his honor for humility and his wrath for the scandal of selfless love. Their God was feverishly working the bellows of hell for their enemies. It is only a short step across a drawn line that makes a brother into an enemy. There was nothing left to say. I was empty and too tired to be angry. I was overwhelmed with the worst kind of sadness, the kind that seeps down into your belly and quenches what is left of fire with exhaustion and apathy. The anger would come soon enough, but there was just no room for it in that moment.

They smiled and hugged me as they demanded my resignation. Their smiles stretched the skin so thinly across their faces that it became transparent. Only teeth and contempt lay beneath. They told me how much they loved me as they leveled not-so-subtle threats. I hugged them back as I fought the bile backing up in my throat.

I walked out that day feeling a loneliness that I don’t think will ever fully leave me. I could have fought. I could have pulled the church apart. I didn't. I stood in front of the congregation and told them that I agreed with the decision of those few men. I did agree. What future can there be in the absence of trust?

In less than a week, all but a few of our closest relationships were severed. It’s impossible to explain that kind of pain. We had moved a thousand miles away to a place we had never seen. The people there had become our family. After six years together, they were just gone. The collateral damage left deep scars on my wife and children. Perhaps things would have been better for them if I had kept everything inside. I tried, but I couldn't. I was hemorrhaging distrust, self-doubt and despair and, though I kept it from the rest of the world, sometimes it sprayed all over the people closest to me. I had never expected the church to be anything more than human. I could never have guessed it would be less.

I wasn't perfect. I had made mistakes. Still, the lies shocked me. I was lazy. I was a liar. I was a thief. I guess the truth is malleable when you are constructing an enemy. I understand now. Nothing unifies like a common enemy. Nothing comforts like knowing who is wrong and who is bad. In the end, I was really only surprised at how many people believed the lies.

That was a long time ago. These days when people ask me where I go to church, the question always makes me uncomfortable. I usually hem and haw. I awkwardly explain how most weeks I find a place to worship with other believers, but that I don’t belong to a particular church. I tell them that I love the local church. I have been blessed through it and tried to bless in return. But I don’t know how to belong there anymore. I have tried. Even if I did know how, aligning with one group often implicitly means aligning against another group. I don't want that. I want to belong to the community of all people who have, in some way or another, chosen to follow Christ in selfless love. I want to learn from each of them instead of sitting in judgment over those that differ from me.

Some people don’t understand that answer. I can see the bolts and locks click behind their eyes as I am slotted into some box neatly labeled “uncommitted,” or “fallen” or simply “other.” Some try to recruit me. Some politely dismiss me. Some mistakenly pity me. Yet there are a few - more and more as the years go by - who understand. I can always tell by the way they exhale, the way the muscles in their faces relax. I think it is because, in those moments, each of us knows that we are not alone. We, too, are a community of faith.

There are nights when I find myself lost in the stars. They have always moved me. They remind me that we were made to wonder. I wonder about hope and life and truth and dreams. Mostly I wonder about God, and how beautiful it will be to someday sit with him and listen as he tells my story, instead of experiencing it from this dreadful time-bound perspective inside the narrative. I am reminded that the stories borne on the light of these stars are already millions of years old. Still, they are magnificent, each one authored by a God who loves beauty and light and perhaps, above all, a good story.

I think of Abraham looking up at these same stars that hover brightly in the darkness like bits of broken glass in the light of the moon. I remember how God called him away from his home to a land he had never seen. Out here in this desert of faith, I can relate. Under these stars, Abraham believed a promise that God would give him a place and make him a blessing to others (Genesis 12:2-3). Abraham was an outsider. Jesus was too. Maybe these stars are my promise too, from One outsider to another, that God’s love and blessing might sometimes shine brighter out here where the city lights begin to fade.

It seems fitting, then, to finally say thanks to those unlikely prophets who meant for evil what God meant to me for good. Without them, I would be a different person. Without them, I would know a smaller God. Without them, I might never have left home to follow God out into this land where the City of God meets the City of Man. It is a strange promised land. But it is the promise and not the land that matters, and the promise is that God will always be with us wherever we land. So, I'll raise a tent here and an altar and I will seek to be a blessing in the name of the God who promises his love to us and seals it with a cross.

(Re)Imagining a Desert Faith Community

I attended a spiritual retreat recently led by author Carl McColman.  Though not himself a monk, he loves the monastic tradition and holds a formal relationship with the monastery as a “lay Cistercian”  As soon as he began to speak, I felt a strange kinship.  In fact, some of his words about contemplation and intimacy with a knowably unknowable (I make up words) God had dribbled from my own pen earlier in the day.   I had a chance to speak with him afterwards.  During our short discussion, I told him of my fascination with the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) and how I felt that there must be some kind of similar space in Christianity today for those who live at the periphery of the church.  

His response filled me with hope.  I paraphrase.  "We are living in a kind of new Reformation today," he said, "where we have an opportunity to re-imagine the church."  Re-imagine the church.  I like that.  I love the church, but there is a deep and central part of me that longs for something beyond what I have encountered.  

I love my Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran brothers and sisters with their rich history and beautiful liturgies filled with wonder and majesty.  I love my Baptist and Methodist and Evangelical Non-Denominational family with their simple pragmatism and fierce devotion to heart-focused faith.  I love my charismatic friends whose strikingly supernatural and mystical worldview resonates in so many ways with that of the Desert Fathers themselves.  I love the house churches in their clutches of individualized personality and piety.  Each is imperfect, but all are beautiful.

And yet, I long for something else.  Not so much something more.  To say that implies there is something insufficient or inherently wrong with the church in its current form(s).  I just feel a calling to something... different.  Not something in opposition to the church as it is, but something in relationship with it.  Something that takes all the beautiful things of the church and mushes them together into something simple and equal and good.  I have tried unsuccessfully for years to articulate this idea or vision or hallucination.

A Lutheran pastor and friend of mine recently spoke bluntly to me.  “What you want is a church for people outside the church,” he said.  I cursed at him.  Then I agreed with him.  But that’s not exactly it.  Not a church in the common sense of the word.  God knows the world doesn’t need another church.  There are plenty of good churches, and I have a dark suspicion that one of every two church planters harbors a secret desire to build his/her own little empire.  The Christian faith has had enough of empires.

So, let me try again.  I envision a faith community without hierarchy, dogma, compulsion or demarcation lines.  A resting place for nomads, oddballs, outcasts and the spiritually injured.  A wayside gathering for those of us who are going somewhere, but have yet to discover exactly where; who need each other not so much for accountability as for inspiration and company on the journey;  who love the church, but are at peace at its edges; who are simply looking for Jesus Christ wherever he may be found.  Maybe that dream is too idealistic.  Maybe it’s impossible.  Probably.  Should I want it any less?  

What if it’s dangerous?  That’s a good question.  I suspect that all good things are dangerous.  All can be taken too far.  All can be manipulated and abused.  The gospel, too, is like that.  But safety also comes at a cost:  an opportunity lost.

Questions:  

1.  Do you identify with a deep love for the church and yet find yourself not quite "home" there?

2.  Do you live "at the edge" of the church?  How do you live an active and satisfying spiritual life?  How do you find ways to relate to the church while finding yourself at its borders?

3.  What would a re-imagining of the faith community look like to you?