Thanksgiving Musings - Weddings Without Trials and the Mission of the Church

Thanksgiving Day, 2013

I’m reading Alan Roxburgh’s Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011) on a cold, relaxing morning before we go over to the home of our former foster daughter, her boyfriend, his adopted son, and their parents and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving as a vastly different kind of family than Norman Rockwell had in mind. Roxburgh argues that in retelling the sending ofthe 70 in Luke 10, the Doctor/Evangelist of the late first century reorients the story of Christ’s followers from an ethnic/geographic/religious enclave to an infinitely wider world where the Spirit was at/in play. Jesus sent the seventy ahead to live with people as aliens and strangers in need of hospitality – not to convert them to Christianity but to experience the mind-blowing presence of God’s realm at “pagan” Tables and homes, where Christ had dismantled the walls of labels, hostility and misunderstanding.

Then Roxburgh asks a simple question: “Where is the church in this passage?” (145) And of course we already know the answer, as surely as we know beyond doubt what the answer is not – even though we are afraid to admit the former and beyond frustrated that the latter should be so astonishingly true. Where the church is not? Precisely where we have always said it really is, for all this time: in the Temple, the synagogue, the gathering of the elect, the sanctuary, the cathedral. The holy, consecrated building. That part is so easy we’re tired of saying it – even if we don’t want to admit it because we cannot begin to imagine a viable alternative.

The part we’re afraid to speak out loud involves the former question: Where is the church (big or little “c”)? And something in us knows it’s in a pagan home where pagan hosts receive a pair of disciples and take them in as guests – no, as members of their household. The roles of alien and host have been reversed, and in that reversal, the Spirit plays and scoffs at our notions of church, revealing a much larger space for God’s presence than we could have possibly imagined before undertaking this impossible journey because Jesus told us to do so. We have nothing to offer but our obedience and our need. And perhaps a blessing at parting, but before we can offer that blessing, we will share food and work and life together with strangers who will be sad to see us go, as we will be sad to leave them.

We (and they) will have been called out together – ek-klesia – to a strange place that will become our home, among strangers who will host us into membership as a family beyond blood, skin color, dress, or language. We will eat what they eat, keep faith with them in our continuing presence, and work alongside them for daily bread at a common Table, where we will come together to share our food and our lives more and more each day. Thus the kin-dom will come among us, healing what had been broken, body and soul.

And suddenly, all I could think about was the morass theUnited Methodist Church finds itself in regarding the prohibition against our pastors conducting same-sex unions, the acts of civil disobedience by a few pastors and congregations (no same-sex unions on United Methodist property, either!), and the inhuman trials that preserve law (that half of us feel is unfaithful and inhuman) but not order. Such is our Discipline without love or grace before a watching world. We have become a laughing stock – the butt of jokes among functional atheists for whom our anachronistic arguments are yet another sign of our irrelevance. Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds. (So long as you are like us!)

Then it struck me that the dilemma lies in our confining church to property and people in positions of authority. This confrontation has traction only because our ordained functionaries are entirely dependent on the church for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. We would not dream of taking Christians to trial. But what if we widened our gaze to the parish that is God’s world and the priesthood of all believers? Even the Roman Catholics understand marriage as a sacrament conducted not be priests but by couples (priests are merely witnesses – as in fact everyone present is a witness – to the vows exchanged that legally bind a couple in this covenant).

If instead we understood the church to be that place where two or more were gathered in the name (the Spirit?) of Christ, and the sine qua non of a marriage ceremony as the vows exchanged by the couple (who could memorize or read their vows to each other as well as they could repeat them, line by line, after a priest, preacher, Justice of the Peace, friend, family member, or person who just received a mail-order ordination “certificate” with no other qualifications besides their ability to pay for it). Quakers have no priests: everyone present signs the marriage certificate. What could those who would deny persons the right to exchange vows of love with each other based on their sexual orientation do to stand in the way of these ceremonies? Put the world on trial?

And here’s the really interesting thing. The revolution would not stop at same-sex weddings. Priests/preachers/clergy would be repurposed in the manner of Ephesians 4:11-12, to equip the saints for the work of ministry. The suffocating death grip of United Methodist property (and perhaps all religious property holdings) would be broken as people of God recognized the presence of Christ in all relationships, regardless of geographic location. Thus impoverished, the Church (definitely big C) would be able to embrace the invitation Christ offers to us to sell all we have (all of the things that own us) and give it away to the poor – and then to come and follow him into the neighborhoods our buildings have prohibited us from seeing (or caring about).

We would, like the seventy, be homeless wonderers with only the clothes on our backs and a radical dependence on God’s grace such as we have never known. And thus we would go to our neighbors, knocking on their doors, begging for their mercy and grace. And some of them would take us in, and lead us to a Table where our eyes would be opened perhaps for the first time to recognize the risen, living Christ among us. What an amazing thing that might be, to find Jesus the Christ at Table with our neighbors!

DMin Project Cradle

A DMin colleague suggested that I think about using Moodle community as the basis of my DMin project earlier this week. I had spent most of the weekend getting smart about how to install Moodle on our server and set up courses/enroll students. Then I invited a dozen or more people to check it out and see what they thought. So far as I can tell (using the logs) a couple of people did actually check it out. But either no one figured out how to post on the forum or no one bothered.

Several people said they weren't ready (I invited a mix of ages and genders. One said typing was too difficult because of a recent injury. I feel a bit like the messenger in the parable inviting people to a party that no one can make the time or effort to attend. As in the parable, I get the idea that I may be inviting the wrong people. I've been thinking about how to entice people to join the forum. Judging from our DMin online experience, all I'd need is 8-12 dedicated people to co-create a worthwhile experience. Of course, we also have the motivation of a degree, a grade, and the money we're paying for same.

I thought of how much money would draw people in (but where would I get it)?

Then I thought of other people I know. Like Sue (Quaker wannabe) and Rob (rejected the church that rejected him) at the skate rink. A couple of friends I've gathered through lay speaker courses I've taught. Jim, my good friend who lives in Denver. I could reach out to any number of people in and beyond any wall or boundary I could imagine. Create a kind of online, virtual community. Drop in/out depending on what else is going on in your life. The hub wouldn't even have to be connected to me - because it would be easy to invite friends.

You would have to know your way around a computer, but so many people do. People who have yet to find (or to see a reason why they need) a connection in a church. It would be important to create drop in and out times, like an open house. We could use other methods of meeting and chatting. I could never be standardized, but always evolving. Like the Matrix, where some "rules" I have come to know could be bent and some could be broken.

I just thought about the "rule" that would bring us together. Search for truth? For Truth? How about: "I see/experience God in you." And "God" could be the unity (power, force, presence, love) that emanates and resonates and gravitates all that is. Our truest home. Our belonging. Our raison d'être.

Now feels like the right time to stop writing and to perk awhile. What of roles? Of rules? To deal with the harm we might cause each other in sharing our anxiety? People could simply drop out. We could learn more of the flow of this Unity in which we live and blog and move and experience our being - not alone but related, reunited.

I'll stop, though I could go on. And on.

Close Encounters with Jesus

My Encounter(s) with Jesus

My mother, a devout follower of Jesus with the gift of Tongues, tells me she prayed me into God’s Kingdom while carrying me in her womb. While my father believed, my mother was a believer, and we were never far from the Methodist church of my mother’s family, or (after the middle of my second grade year) the Baptist church of my father’s family. We lived in the heart of the Bible belt, in North Carolina, where the churches were as plentiful as tobacco fields, and where many folk attended church several days a week (and twice on Sundays).

After baptizing (christening, Mom says) me in the Methodist church when I was six weeks old, my mother walked me through the sinner’s prayer when I was two and a half, teaching me that if I invited Jesus into my heart, he would walk with me and talk with me - as well as forgive my sins and assure my place with him in heaven. My parents gave me my first Bible (KJV) at Christmas when I was seven, and encouraged me to memorize and highlight my favorite verses. By the time I went to college (I would give the Bible away to a classmate with whom I was sharing my relationship to Jesus), the Bible was a rainbow of color.

The Baptist church of my youth offered many opportunities to give my heart and life to Jesus. I walked down the aisle first when I was ten, and was baptized by immersion. But many, many times after that Sunday, I felt compelled to walk the aisle to the preacher in front of the altar to rededicate my life to Jesus. I learned about him in Sunday School and at Royal Ambassadors (and at Camp New Life in the summers), read the Bible, prayed and journaled to him in my private devotions, and sang to him and about him and remembered him in worship.

I knew Jesus loved me and that a relationship with him was essential to salvation, but I also knew there were many things he refused to do for me/us. One of my brothers remained severely mentally challenged, in spite of our fervent prayers for healing. Our church split when several people began to raise their hands in worship. Among the hand raisers (who left) were Johnny and Jan Baker, our youth leaders. Johnny’s favorite tee-shirt said “I’m a fool for Jesus” on the front and “Whose fool are you?” on the back. I struggled as a teen with alcohol abuse.

Baptist theology taught me that once my salvation was settled, most of these other questions were impertinent or irrelevant. I had a gift for singing, and in addition to reading the Bible, personal prayer and journaling, music became my primary lifeline to Jesus - and my tears the primary sing that he was near. Besides hymns (“He Lives!” was my favorite), my cousin, a radio deejay, introduced me to contemporary Christian music (the Imperials, Dallas Holm, GLAD, David Meece, and Keith Green) which gave me a new and powerful way to express my love for Jesus.

At the Naval Academy, I was thrown in with the Protestants, and introduced to a wealth of hymnody in the huge chapel services (where the primary text was Jesus’ glowing approval of the Roman Centurion and the stained glass celebrated an angel guiding Admiral Farragut past the mines to defeat the southerners in Mobile Bay). I had begun to yearn for more than the crossing the line of faith emphasis of the Baptist church, but this more overwhelmed me and left me yearning for simplicity. I married a woman (and classmate) in part because of her fierce faith in God, and we joined a United Methodist Church where we sang in the choir (and gave Sunday evening concerts), led Bible studies and taught the junior high youth group. After a year, we made public what we had been exploring privately: God was calling us to serve as ordained pastors.

Through the Duke Divinity School’s dismantling of some of the weakest elements of my faith, and the inevitable disillusionment of my own and the church’s failings, I continue to encounter Jesus in prayer, scripture, worship, music, relationships with those who serve him and those who don’t, and in serving and loving people in his name. These repeated encounters give me the balance to explore (and embrace) the quest for the historical Jesus (which scratches an abiding itch), and the theology of Alfred North Whitehead (God nudges) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (“Before God and with God we live without God. God let’s himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”), while continuing to sing, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!”

Jesus at Asbury United Methodist Church (established 1945)

There are few pictures of Jesus in the church building and sanctuary. In the main hallway, outside the sanctuary, hang two pictures of Jesus, one from behind, as he walks with the disciples on the road to Emmaus (by a Swiss painter named Robert Zund - 1828-1909), and another depicting Jesus holding a lantern and knocking at a door (William Holman “Hunt’s the Light of the World”, painted in 1859). A large stained glass window at the back of the nave contains several symbols of the faith, notably a cross in the center, but no figures, other than the hand of God touching the hand of a human being (from Michalangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling), and no symbols, other than the cross, evoking the person of Christ.

The predominant image of Christ at Asbury is the (empty) cross. Besides the large stained glass cross in the back, and a golden hanging cross above the alter in the front (with spikes radiating from the center, and the letters IHS, with a red background, to evoke rays), the audio visual tech often shows a picture on a screen above the alter of a cross with a crown of thorns. Christ has sacrificed himself for us on the cross, and is largely absent or distant.

A man in the church makes crosses for people to hang on their walls at home, and women in the church make prayer shawls and distribute them to people in hospitals along with these crosses. Several men in the church pass out little wooden crosses for people to wear around their necks, and last Easter had enough to give everyone who attended Easter services.

Prayers (during worship and at meetings and Bible studies) are offered in Jesus' name, but typically addressed to God or Father.  A Christ candle, or Paschal Candle flanks a small baptismal font, and is lit during the Easter season, at Baptisms, and at funerals.  We celebrate communion every Sunday morning at a small 8:30 gathering, and once a month at our regular worship service, during which we commemorate and celebrate Christ's body and blood given for us all on the cross.

Sermon series during Advent and Lent focus on the meaning of Christ (the prophetic Messianic testimony), and his life, ministry, death and resurrection. Sermon series ate other times of the year, particularly in the summer, focus of the life and ministry of Jesus.

I’ve been asking members and leaders how they experience Jesus at Asbury:

• Love from members of the church
• Bible study experience - in the desire people have for spiritual growth
• The innocence and joy of children
• Worship music - like a prayer
• Not sure that some people in the congregation are experiencing what I’m experiencing (chatting in worship). Martha and Mary approach - we have different experiences of Jesus here.
• Prayer to the Father (personal prayer or prayers for forgiveness to Jesus)
• To me, Jesus looks like the painting that young girl made - dark skin with curly hair
• Hiking - walking in the artwork of creation, when Jesus was God’s instrument of creation, or at a microscope - seeing Jesus' handiwork.
• Asbury is a lens to sharpen my focus on Jesus. Bible study is an oasis to forget about work and look at Jesus more closely (I don’t typically see Jesus in others and Bible study helps me to do so).
• When I’m corrected (in a nice way) by an inner voice to treat others better
• Jesus is an “out” or relief valve when I’m in an overwhelming situation. He has always been there for me since childhood, and I give an hour in worship to him in return for his kindness to me and in respect. Jesus looks out for me. When I was 15, someone hurt me and I prayed that God would punish them and they lost their job. It frightened me to realize that Jesus responds to my emotions. Since then, I’m careful not to be responsible for this kind of divine vengeance by guarding my emotions.
• I experience Jesus in the welcoming smiles and faces of my church family as I enter our church home. Also by listening to a friend and sharing our experiences.

Dead Man Walking During the Season of Lent

How interesting to be going through a transition from Skyline Church, where I have been privileged to serve for the past 14 years, to Asbury Church, to which God is leading me to help nurture and encourage the movement of God's people gathered there. The resources I have gathered to help me navigate this passage describe leaving a long-term pastorate as a form of death - saying so many goodbye's and handing over ministry tasks among the saints here that have defined me for so long to other capable followers of Jesus who will carry on some of these tasks and lay others that have meant so much to me aside. At the same time, we are in this season of Lent walking together a spiritual path of remembrance of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem and the cross - a journey that beckons each of us to take up our cross and follow Jesus - to lose our lives to save them.

This journey of Lent calls into question everything we think we know about death and life. We think that death marks the end of our lives - the obliteration of all that we are. We fear death, as the last inevitable sign of our weakness and powerlessness before the power of evil and darkness in this world. Each day of our lives when we sin, and fail ourselves, or others, or God, by doing something that breaks our connection to God and others or failing to do something that would strengthen our connection to God and others, we draw closer to the ultimate separation from all things which is our death.

Or so we think.

The death of Jesus is so different from any of these misconceptions - these haunted dreams we carry with us about death - that his death on a cross in Jerusalem redefines what it means to die (and what it means to live). Throughout this journey of Lent, Jesus reminds us of the inevitable destination: the Son of Man will be handed over to his enemies; he will suffer terribly; and he will be put to death. The disciples don't want to hear it, of course. What can his demise mean for the movement toward God that his life represents that they have each given up everything to follow? Without Jesus, they are nothing. They will be utterly lost. Yet on he leads them towards the Holy City where he will suffer and die for the sake of love. On he leads us all.

You get the idea that Jesus has in mind a different destination that the one that strikes fear into our timid hearts. He walks resolutely and purposefully toward this death; this death begins to look like what he was born to do. And as we follow Jesus in our own time, toward our own inevitable death, we can learn something invaluable by resisting the temptation to move to quickly to the resolution of Easter and the miracle of the resurrection.

In my own between time, God calls me to pay close attention to the way Jesus journeys toward Jerusalem and death. He walks with an absolute trust that follows a trajectory beyond the veil of death - his own death or the death of his followers or the many, many people he has come to love. And he invites me (and you) to walk on this reimagined path as well (those who cling to their lives will lose them; but those who lose their lives, for my sake, will find true and abundant life).

So what does walking along this new path that leads to and beyond death look like? The principle characteristic of this path is peace - freedom from anxiety and fear - a peace that defines each step with intentionality and gratitude. There are no coincidences and nothing is left to blind chance. Every moment on the path that leads beyond death participates in an eternal unity that profoundly connects to God. We ware walking this path, yet every step brings us to an arrival, a homecoming, a place of belonging - we are at any particular "here" for a reason - receiving and participating in God's presence and power as we bestow and receive the blessings of all creation.

Can we ever say enough about this peace that passes all understanding? The angels sang of this blessing Jesus would bring to all people at his birth. On his last night with his friends, Jesus blessed them with peace - not as the world gives - but the peace that enabled him to lay his life down for his friends, and to invite them to love each other as he loved them. We cannot imagine the power and promise of this peace of Christ - our birthright. Peace that transcends pain, paves the path of forgiveness, invites us to rejoice in all things, swallows up death in victory, and trumpets the nearness of the Kingdom of God.

He has not left us orphans. We know the way he is going. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Toward death, certainly, but also in peace that sees beyond the death of our pride, our fear and our isolation, toward communion with God and with all creation. I should be glad for such a death.

Thursday, 27 January 2011. A new day.

(Note: I wrote this Blog the second morning after I learned that the Bishop had appointed me to leave Skyline after 14 years. At the time, I did not know which church I would be privileged to serve, but only that I would have to leave.)

I am slowly getting used to the idea that this Summer will mark the end of 14 years of service as a co-pastor among the saints gathered at Skyline United Methodist Church. In these few days that mark the savor of that growing idea - while at the same time not knowing about what the next invitation to serve will involve - I have the luxury of reflecting solely on what these past years of ministry have meant to me and to others.

That I understand this waiting time as a luxury marks the gift of wisdom in this time of waiting and watching with Jesus. Even though most times I sleep; yet he rouses me. I have felt the sleep of emotional numbness as I have given vent to my darker angels in the past couple days - mostly to Vicki. A quarter of my life - how that phrase has become something of a mantra, meaningless beyond an expression of exasperation. Longevity cannot by itself reveal any self-apparent truth about the meaning of my life.

I have lived in the unfolding of the time here among a particular group of people (always changing and transforming before my eyes, even as I have changed and transformed in relation to them and apart from them). We have blessed each other with our lives of faith in the midst of circumstances beyond our control and beyond our understanding. We have honored the relationship between us as best we could, learning to live with the ways in which our actual choices do not match our expectations of ourselves and each other.

I have known much grace here, much inner growth, much sorrow, and a great deal of joy. Together we have built a living monument of praise to God, and a house of hospitality to the strangers in our community who have become our companions. We counted the cost as best we could, but we could not have known the true cost - so we have learned to live with the consequences of launching into unknown and unproven territory. And in a way, my leave-taking at this particular time marks a necessary payment of that debt we incurred in the hopes and growing convictions of our prayers.

I have always known that it would be me who would be called to head out into the waters of the unknown - who would depart on a voyage of discovery to a far country. If that is payment to secure the victory we have long pursued, it is a payment I am glad to make, on my behalf and on behalf of so many others. And truth be told, I relish the promise of cutting the lines to shore and putting to sea again. Joy commented that I have tasted the bitterness of rejection of the prophet in his own country. She hopes that in that far country, I will find a people thirsty for the passion that is my life.

Yet in this blessing of time before the lines are cut, God invites me to discern what has happened here, to me and through me. I have chased the wind of uncertainty too long since Derrick called; now I can attend to the blessing placed in my hands: the gift of knowing where I stand before launching into a new place among a new people.

The flood of versions of this story give the impression that nothing - or only one thing - can be known about what this time together has meant. Joy wisely reminded me that no pastor acts alone, but that we all are products in so many ways of the people who gather at the churches we serve. My unidimensional pronouncements - of any flavor - take flight from the delusion of my autonomy.

Then, too, there is a deep context we ignored at first, but which asserted itself as the years unfolded. We merely added a chapter to a story told by others in and beyond the church called Skyline. The first seven years here marked my ignorance of that story; the second seven blessed me with a vision that we were neither alone nor singularly responsible for the undoing of nearly everything we had done when we arrived here.

Besides the context of a stagnant, conservative, homogenous demographic, we inherited a story of volatility, transition, conflict and mistrust between laity and clergy, and schizophrenic theological identity. What we have built together here has become an oasis of hospitality to strangers and all manner of spiritual searching - and that not without cost. Yet even the cost itself marks a measure of spiritual maturity here that fits into the larger story of Skyline.

From it's inception, this community of faith has always been marked by an invitation to costly investment of self and to a demanding and unsettling wideness of understanding spiritual hospitality. We have not buried that talent, but have consciously nurtured it in the fires of anxiety, indifference and hostility. Time and again, we have traded away comfort for what we discerned together to be faithfulness to a Savior who died to set all people free and who called us to take up our crosses and follow.

As co-pastor here, I have certainly made my share of mistakes. I have been impatient for change and I have talked when I could have profited more by listening. At first, I spent too much time working on the wrong kinds of things, and at the end I struggled daily with the paralysis of what I perceived to be a world without a map. Yet for all of these mistakes, grace abounded in and beyond the walls of myself - expanding even my notion of self.

So many walls came down for me while serving here with Vicki and with the saints at Skyline. Through it all, we never seemed to forget our first love. We witnessed the power of Christ to break down every barrier that separated us from each other and from God that we forgot what it was like to live beyond faith; we assumed God would act to strongly support our hearts that belonged to God alone. The horse would talk, though we could not know when or how.

More than anything else, I learned to walk by faith here among the saints at Skyline. I did not teach this trust, but I participated in the way this entire community claimed it. Each one mattered (and matters) far more to any of us than the 99. For us, the time was always propitious to follow in the path of faith, though we walked through the valley of the shadow of death. We learned to trust in God together, not measuring the consequences of our action but realizing the enormity of the cost of inaction.

Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that I am physically stronger now than when I arrived 14 years ago. The past seven years of famine have been for me a time of unprecedented growth in soul and body, as if I have been training for some great event. And regardless of the future, I have come to know that the event for which I train is the unfolding of each day following God to places where darkness pretends to reign. Though I cannot light them all, and though no one else may know, I have the strength to light up the darkness - and to bear witness to the light - wherever and to whomever God calls and sends me.

There is no good time to do a wrong thing. Skyline is the place where heaven and earth meet. We are on a journey of faith, and though we are on vastly different places in that journey, yet we can journey together. You preach the Gospel - we will run the church. Festival of Light. All means all. God bless our pastors. Jesus saved my life. I have been searching for a place like this. Come as you are. Transform us, O God, from getting here to being here. We're going to do something a little differently today.

I have learned that I cannot do this alone - but I have also learned that I do not have to do this alone.

Just like we planned!

How Skyline Has Changed Me - January 26, 2011

(Note: I wrote this Blog the morning after I learned that the Bishop had appointed me to leave Skyline after 14 years. At the time, I did not know which church I would be privileged to serve, but only that I would have to leave. I remembered an old pastor prophesying that Skyline would change me and I took the time this cold January morning to reflect on how Skyline had changed me in the last 14 years.)

Since arriving with my wife and co-pastor, Vicki, at Skyline in the Summer of 1997, I have matured in the areas of conflict management, postmodern theology, evangelism and ecclesiology, and clergy-lay partnership in ministry. The experience as co-pastor here for 14 years, through two church splits and a two million dollar construction project, has given me deeper insight into faith, pastoral leadership, and who God creates and calls me to be as a person. I have exchanged a one-size-fits-all church "growth" model for a more responsive emerging church model at resonates especially with people in search of a faith relevant to postmodern life.

At Skyline, I have come to see the role of pastor in the context of the ministry of all believers. Our lay partners in ministry here have taught me both the extraordinary power of God's Spirit poured out on all believers as well as the perspective of pastoral leadership in articulating both the shape of God's presence in the gathered believers and the trajectory of God's movement among God's people. At seminary, I came to accept the dogma of a gulf between professional and lay Christians. The people at Skyline have given the lie to this myth, and have encouraged me to speak the truth in love as I have listened to and witnessed the courageous power of their faith.

I have witnessed the best and worst in people here and in myself, and have come to rely time and again on the miracle of God's forgiveness for us all. At times this miracle leads to a transformation in others, but always it opens the way to an inner transformation in me. The most profound change I have experienced as co-pastor here involves the peace these repeated and sustained transformations have wrought in my soul. Peace in parting (by death or other leave-taking); peace in the stillness of waiting (while God's presence deepens); and peace in witnessing in awe and wonder that truly "in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose".

That peace in Christ, as a weaned child on its mother's breast (a bittersweet comfort if ever there was one!), has become the only meaningful consolation and affirmation of the narrow way I am following. That peace has calmed my inner fears and doubts, and stilled the raging storm of my ego and anxiety when all around me seems to indicate failure and danger. That peace has become the author of my faith in God, in cemeteries and contentious meetings, whether the people of God (or especially when I, myself) fulfill, exceed, or fail to meet my expectations.

Most especially, that peace has sustained me when the image I carry of God burns to ash in the fire of life. In the wake of that profound silence, I have learned to pray in the darkness until light shines again - knowing beyond understanding that it shines whether I sense it or not. I have walked often enough in the valley of the shadow of the death of my dreams and of my faith in God at Skyline, with a changing cast of companions on this journey who encourage and confound, challenge and heal me along the way - but without fear. I have learned that in the faithful act of returning to the grave to minister as I am able, resurrection dawns, and with it, a transformation of the relationship and the calling I thought I had known.

Dying and rising so many times here, I have learned to leap into chasms of darkness in the exhilarating knowledge that falling does not kill me - the fear that pins me to the precipice alone has the power to kill - and that power has long been broken here. And if it is not exactly flying, it is a form of falling with style and grace. The things have tried to do here at Skyline have not always (perhaps never) had the effect I originally intended. But the fact that they have turned out serendipitously has taught me to offer my creativity and conviction (and to listen without judgment as a non-anxious presence) in the certain faith that God will honor such offerings by incorporating them into a tapestry that looks like a plan in retrospect.

Of all the things I have tried to accomplish while serving as co-pastor at Skyline, none compares with the humbling and profound honor of serving as a foster parent to several children over the past few years. Apart from the people of Skyline, I would never have been able to answer this call to welcome the strangers which has profoundly transformed and blessed my life. Through the welcome Vicki, Joy, Eli and I have been able to provide for others, we have found a place at the table God sets for us all. As the experience of fatherhood converted me to a new sense of love (giving and receiving this love), so too has the experience of sheltering a child of God as a foster parent converted me to a new way of life in God's love.

I take my leave indelibly marked by this transforming love, filling and overflowing my life. The blessing to love and live as a generous friend to those to whom love is a stranger marks and guides my life now as never before. I have come, as Jesus comes, that they might have life in all of it's abundance. I am a traveling midwife who will stop at nothing to assist in birthing that abundant life in all of God's children - paying no heed to the Pharaoh.

I bring a fearlessness and reckless creativity to the pastoral ministry, wherever God sends me from this place of transformation among the saints gathered at Skyline. I mock the Pharaoh, and I follow blindly in the path of Jesus, crucified and risen, not only on the third day, but in me, and in every gathering of saints with whom I am privileged to serve.

And one final reflection:

Serving as co-pastor with Vicki for the past 14 years has been the catalyst for every transformation I have celebrated above. Surely we have experienced a profound synergy in our partnership and in our love, but that synergy has made possible a wealth of partnerships in ministry at Skyline and beyond, in the larger community we serve. As a co-pastor, I have learned to value the other parts of the body of Christ of which I am a part. And because of this partnership in ministry that extends beyond the two of us as co-pastors, any ministry in which I am involved in the future will also be an expression of my love and partnership with Vicki.

Nothing - absolutely nothing that has happened here at Skyline in the past 14 years - could have happened without the synergy and support of our ministry as co-pastors. We modeled partnership and mutual interdependence for others and for each other. That model created sacred space to nurture great faith in times of despair, light in places of darkness, and fierce hope where the path gave way to wilderness. Our partnership with each other and with other ministers at Skyline made a way where there was no way, time and again (just like we planned).

So our partnership does not end with this parting - or rather, with this new way of serving together with God in each other and in other members of the body of Christ. Before serving as co-pastors at Skyline, my vision of our partnership in ministry and in love was bound by restrictions of space and time. But serving together for so long at Skyline has revealed the many ways in which our partnership in ministry and in love transcends and is not dependent on those restrictions. I understand now that just as nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, so too can no space or even time prevent us from serving in the profound realization that God's love binds us together in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses.

Since we are fully committed to God, we know that God will strongly support us, wherever we serve (2 Chronicles 16:9a). And wherever God sends each of us from this gathering of grace and love, we will serve in the power of our love for each other, and in the mutual encouragement and wisdom we give to each other day by day. I leave this particular expression of co-pastoral ministry in the knowledge that every calling will of necessity be a co-ministry. In short, I go knowing that neither I nor Vicki will ever have to serve alone - God will always provide gifted partners with whom we can be in ministry.

Two Concerts at Christmastime

We attended two concerts in the last two nights. We watched the first one, Messiah Rocks, at the DuPont Theater, and performed the second one, Festival of Light VI, at Skyline. Whether listening or singing, I experienced a surprising sense of celebration and joy. 

I had sung the Messiah several times in college, graduate school and while serving at my first church, Bethesda UMC in Salisbury, MD. I know the tenor part of the Hallelujah chorus by heart, as well as several more of the choruses and tenor solos. But Jason Howland's fresh approach to Handel's classic oratorio opened a window of fascination for me to hear and see (and to participate in) the celebration of God's gift of the Messiah in a new way.

From the opening guitar and violin riffs, as the tenor sang "Comfort" with an easy confidence and infectious enthusiasm, my tears told me that these old songs had discovered a new way to speak to the deepest longings of my heart. The concert Friday night reminded me what its like to breathe the fresh air of (there's no other way to say it) salvation.

I'm not talking about a ticket to paradise. Nor do I mean some imagined divine seal of approval for a particular religious understanding. By salvation I mean the foundation of the hope of creation and the joy of life in all it's fullness. Perhaps because these concepts are so mysterious, they can only be glimpsed in the majestic mystery of song. How telling Friday night when the performers repeatedly invited us all to join in that song: "For all of us a child is born!"

Then of course, we had our own songs to sing the following night. It was the concert that shouldn't have been. We faced so many obstacles and scheduling crises, they ceased to surprise us. And for an hour Saturday night, we came together as a band in a way I could never have imagined. 

And it was fun.

For most of the previous five Festival of Light concerts we have put on at Skyline, the music has involved far more work for me than play. For one thing, the project of an hour-long concert involves many hours of creative, musical, interpersonal and technical skills. And for various reasons, the task of music selection and rehearsal direction has fallen to me. 

For the past five years at Christmastime, I have felt too keenly the responsibility of pulling everything and everyone together for the FOL concert. And before last night, I had always assumed that this crushing responsibility came with the territory of taking on such a difficult task. Last night should have been worse because of all of the difficulty we had pulling everything together in the days and weeks before the concert.

But perhaps because of the over-the-top difficulty we navigated en route to the concert, adapting became a part of the plan. Gregg McCauley said it best after the show when we were backstage together: "life is improv". In the weeks leading up to the concert, and during the Festival (in every sense of that word) I discovered the joy and not the cynicism of that statement.

I've been reading a bit of philosophy lately. Through the tough sledding, I've discovered some insightful statements about the nature of life that invite me to focus on the simple daily transactions between our experiences (life that happens to us) and our creative response to life (so much more than merely reacting). 

So much of the life we experience runs counter to what we expect, we run the risk of being immobilized by our frustration that nothing goes according to our plan. Recently I read an evolutionary sociologist's contention that without forgiveness, community would be impossible - because humans consistently fail each other's expectations.

Sometimes, these failures involve moral violations. But most of the time, failed expectations signify only that we are vastly diverse creatures. I suppose they also remind us constantly of our limited perspective of the world. And in one sense, that nagging reminder of our blindness and contingency only adds to our anxiety, fear and loneliness.

But in another sense, we can interpret our boundedness on all sides as a vast network of experience, perspective, and creative response that expands our sense of self and profoundly connects us to the human community. Two people standing back to back see completely different views of their world, but together they can see a range of nearly 360 degrees.

The secret involves recognizing that the limits of our perspective, precisely those places where our expectations are thwarted, form the gateways to the vast frontiers of human community. Repeatedly as the concert approached, I found it easier to look beyond the frustration of my failed expectations of others because new possibilities emerged - both in my (new) reactions and the creative wonder of others' lives.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul celebrates a God               
"who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us" (Ephesians 3:20). Our thwarted plans make way for new possibilities beyond what we can ask for or imagine. So when another person does not (or cannot) meet my expectations, I am learning to expect a creative response (from both of us) that expands my imagination.

This year's FOL concert far exceeded my expectations and imagination. I stood amazed at the many unexpected creative gifts of people connected to me with bonds of forgiveness, understanding and creativity. And I learned to be amazed at myself - especially at the ways I am learning to look beyond my frustration to the very real possibility of amazement and wonder.

So we sang. And we danced. And we were not for a moment trapped in anyone's expectations (least of all mine!) of how a concert should go. We were singing love songs to our Savior, who confounds and expands our expectations of ourselves and of others every moment. The words and the music flowed. A child joined us and danced while we sang. And the music flowed far beyond our ability to perform it - in everyone who was present not merely to witness but to participate in the joy of a Festival of Light.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never overcome it!

Cultivating Gratitude Year-round

Brooks Twilley shared with me a recent (11/22/10) NPR radio interview between Dan Gottlieb Ph.D, host of Voices in the Family, and Dr. Robert Emmons, professor at University of California, Davis. His primary interests are in the psychology of gratitude and the psychology of personal goals. He's the author of "The Psychology of Gratitude." The show's a rebroadcast and originally aired in November 2009. Brooks asked me for my thoughts about the conversation, which I felt was so meaningful that I wanted to share them in this blog.

You can listen to the conversation here.

I like boiling happiness down to faith (hope), forgiveness (grace) and gratitude (praise). I heard once that persons who commit suicide suffer from a catastrophic contraction of their perspective of these aspects in their lives. Suicide, in this sense, becomes a fatal symptom of depression. They talked about the truncation of options in life being related to ingratitude later in the program.

I also enjoyed Dr. Robert Emmons' definition of gratitude as thoughtfulness and remembrance. Another way of thinking about the way they talk about the physical/neurological/psychological (as well as spiritual) effects of gratitude, thoughtfulness and remembrance is meditation, or perhaps contemplative prayer. Vicki recently read a great book titled "How Prayer Changes Your Brain" that explored the power of prayer from a neurological perspective. Some of this reminds me of the Psalms that catalog the good things that the community of faith remembers and celebrates God doing among them over time, and the old hymn: "Count Your Blessings".

The concept of movement beyond self focus to connection to others is the sine qua non (without which none) of any authentic religious practice and understanding. And I liked the concept of distinguishing between gratefulness as a desire or attitude rather than a feeling. The conversation about giving up the illusion of control (and self-sufficiency) and gratitude as acceptance was powerfully helpful in articulating what happens in religious, transformational experience of "the Holy".

One caller struggled with his inability to believe in a God/god who could receive his thanksgiving. When the host talked about giving thanks to the animals and the people who brought the food to the table, I was reminded of the prayers in the Cormac McCarthy book, The Road. I don't think being grateful to specific people and not wanting to deflect this feeling of gratitude to a transcendent reality (god?) because a person does not have an experience of God/god is necessarily a bad thing. I love that the caller felt a tug drawing him to experience what the AA group calls a "Higher Power", and I believe that to settle for anything less would prevent him from experiencing the blessing of getting in touch with the reality of what I call God.

To put it another way, I think the pathway to experience the transcendent reality of God/The Holy/The Divine is precisely through the immanent/incarnational relationships with real people in real circumstances of life. Ironic that I was just reading in 1 John 4 this morning:

16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.
18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love because he first loved us.
20 If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen.
21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love one another.

The caller who talked about raising a special needs child and being grateful for every little thing hit home with me, as a sibling of a special needs person, and as a parent of foster children. The issue of the human need for the contrast of adversity in life (between good life and bad life) in order to "wake up" to gratefulness says something about the question of the necessity of evil in a cosmos/universe/world created by God - and of the necessity of suffering. Near the end of the conversation, I loved the observation that people who have experienced great loss are the most grateful - for all of the little things in a life that becomes precious in every little moment. I remember a book by (social scientist) Dan Ariely called "The Upside of Irrationality" in which he described persons who had endured great pain and healing (as he had, as a burn victim), even partial healing, had a far higher tolerance for pain than people who had not experienced great pain and healing - precisely because those who had suffered a great deal believed things could get better through the pain of suffering.

What a fantastic conversation to share with people struggling in times of deep uncertainty.

Washing Dishes and Walking the Talk

Tom DiCampli read from an obscure visionary passage in Daniel in worship at Skyline yesterday and ironically claimed (twice) that he was "no theologian". Then, after confessing the unintelligibility of the text for him, he shared an explication of the meaning of the text he had discovered through a process of reflection and meditation: he read to us from a prayer journal in which he had recorded his reflections in a burst of insight he received while washing the dishes.

I thought of Brother Lawrence, a simple spiritual sage of another time who celebrated the practice of the presence of God in all of life experience - particularly while doing mundane tasks such as washing dishes. I wondered at the courage it must have taken Tom not only to read the scriptures for us, but to follow his heart and to share such powerful, intimate testimony - to recognize that we must not merely be hearers (or readers) of scripture, but that all scriptural encounters can become invitations to a living interpretation of the profound truths embedded in the stories and mysteries of scriptures.

I also recalled the first time I witnessed the miracle of speaking in tongues in a Pentecostal worship service, when after the sermon, a member of the congregation spoke in an unknown language for perhaps a minute, followed immediately by an interpretation by another member of the congregation. What struck me was two simultaneous and related insights: first, how utterly mundane the translation of the mysterious language was; and second, the miraculous sense of God's presence among us that we experienced by witnessing the spiritual courage of the two among us who made themselves totally available to God for the sake of us all.

Jesus taught that we know the tree by its fruits. Perhaps no theology can unlock for us the mystery of faith. But all theology must stand or fall on the fruit to which it bears witness and which it inspires. Tom inspired me not necessarily by the content of his epiphany, but by the tremendous courage it must have taken for him to bear witness to it's reality in his life. Jesus also made a great deal of fuss about the absolute necessity of bearing witness to our experience of God's presence and realm - and the consequences of our choosing to bear witness or to extinguish the light under a bushel. Tom's witness set the stage for similar encounters with God among everyone in worship who listened to his powerful testimony.

After Tom read the scripture from Daniel, shared his testimony of spiritual insight, and prayed over Vicki, I listened as Vicki shared the stories and reflections she had experienced in her reading of the text. She also complained about the apparent impenetrability of the text, but (like Tom) ironically went on to explicate the story for our time and experience. Once again, I marveled at the courage and faith Vicki demonstrated by walking a path on which she was ostensibly lost, yet walking with confidence and complete trust that there was a way regardless of her ability to perceive it.

And perhaps the greatest irony of all was the fact that the essential kernel of insight both Vicki and Tom sought to communicate to us was an assurance of God's sovereign, benevolent care of the world regardless of the delusions and pretensions of events and experiences that seemed to contradict our faith in God's loving presence and redeeming power among us. Each of them in their own way bore a living testimony to God's reality and reign even as they could not fully realize those realities. Vicki also shared a collection of stories and testimony from others from within and beyond the Christian tradition reinforcing this message of hope in the reality of God, which gave me a sense of powerful assurance tat something far more powerful was at play in the confluence of these diverse human testimonies of experience than mere wishful thinking.

Then Vicki called Dr. Lee Anderson to join her and to share with us the story of a journey of a calling that the Governor of Delaware recently celebrated with an award for excellence in service to the community. Dr. Anderson bore witness to the power of God to dismantle even the barrier of death that pretended to separate her from her father. And once this barrier had been overcome, she experienced a succession of walls that came tumbling down and made possible the restoration of suffering families, kindled the power of forgotten life legacies, and created a profoundly miraculous community of former prisoners freed from hopelessness for joyful service and love toward one another.

Not surprisingly, the congregation at Skyline celebrated Dr. Anderson's story with a spontaneous standing ovation. It reminded me of the way we recently celebrated the recognition (again, by the Governor) of Joe Masiello as Delaware's Teacher of the Year. He is another of the Skyline saints who dares to believe that his faith can draw out the best in children in a classroom or in a refugee tent in Haiti.

Now, as all of this celebration of the signs of the assurance and power of God's presence in our midst was going on all around me, and as Vicki lifted up a picture of our community of faith as "dangerous" to the powers that pretend to rule this world, I began to experience a healing vision. The vision extended to a place of peace a nightmare I had in seminary over 17 years ago - a nightmare I had not thought of again until this week, when I stood helplessly watching as doctors and nurses tried to determine the nature of a health crisis earlier this week that left our daughter, Joy, in pain and unable to walk for several hours.

In the dream, I led a party of pilgrims into a vast desert wasteland in search of a holy place of refuge. We traveled for days - weeks - in the hope at I could lead the party safely to our destination, an oasis of spiritual and physical refreshment and healing. One night, after everyone else in the party had succumbed to sleep, and I sat alone by the dying embers of a fire under a vast expanse of stars, I came to a startling realization: I was hopelessly lost. Moreover, I was profoundly alone, as this realization came with an acceptance of the fact that I would have to carry this burden alone, in order to preserve a measure of hope among the pilgrims who trusted me.

There was much more, of course, involved in my carrying the burden of despair alone among the pilgrims. In the movie, Das Boot, a senior enlisted man upbraids an officer to whom the task of command has fallen when the captain dies. The inexperienced acting captain has shared his angst with the crew and has admitted to them that he has no idea what to do next. The burden of command, lectures the senior enlisted man, involves bearing the hope, the sense of mission of the crew even when hope is lost or imperiled by circumstance or fate. In a similar way in my dream, I felt a sense of grave responsibility (even trust) for and among the community for rising in the morning and for leading us all with purpose and faith, regardless of my doubts or despair.

Some Gethsemane prayers must be prayed alone - while the rest of the company sleeps.

My sense of helplessness, fear and anger by my daughter's bedside ushered in a fierce remembrance of this long-ago dream on the eve of my ordination as a Methodist pastor. But as I experienced the palpable hope of group of pilgrims at Skyline in worship the following day, I caught a glimpse of the dawning of a resurrection of hope in what I had mistakenly named a nightmare. As we sang, prayed, testified, witnessed, and proclaimed the hope of the world among us Sunday, it dawned on me that another way to think of my lostness in the dream was of a disorientation/reorientation experience of transformation.

In other words, what if, in the morning after the dream takes place, I realize that we have in fact arrived at the place for which we have been looking: and the place is a community of pilgrims, celebrating God's presence on the way. To discover such an epiphany, one (especially one bearing the responsibility of leadership) must necessarily undergo the despair that creates a way for a new understanding of direction and purpose to emerge. And Sunday, as I celebrated a sense of having arrived in a place for which I had long searched, I celebrated the nightmare of failure that made possible that realization.

If I would save my life, I must lose it.

Today is Monday, as it happens, and the realities of what it means to lead a community of faith in the midst of uncertainty and doubt make themselves at home in my life. The financial report does not look promising and bills abound. People struggle with stubborn personal failings and with the pain of the personal failings of others around them - they wrestle with prayers for healing of body, mind and soul seemingly unanswered. Yet on we pray and on we walk in faith.

Pondering the End Times - and What That Means Today

Human history is replete with cycles of ominous political or environmental circumstances attended with prophets confidently predicting the end of all things. We witnessed this phenomenon most recently as 1999 clocked over to 2000, and it appears we are witnessing it again. Logic says that at some point (astronomers tell us that in 2 billion years when the sun consumes half of our solar system, including the earth!) the prognosticators will be right. History tells us that there is always a crowd that will be drawn to these prophets, even when they are wrong (when the date passes peacefully and the world continues).

I read an interesting book about this phenomenon a couple of years ago – Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things”. His answer: Because we want to. There must be something comforting about knowing how or when it all ends, even if that means trading away a future. Shermer devotes a chapter to apocalyptic prophets and their followers over the last two centuries in America and Europe. I was particularly amazed at his finding that when the prophet was proved wrong, his followers typically hung in there with him when he announced that he had made a miscalculation and adjusted the end date to another time in the not-too-distant future.

I have always taken my cue from Acts 1:6-8.
“So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, "Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?" He replied, "The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere-- in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (NLT)

Jesus’ authoritative “[These end times] are not for you to know” followed by his command to tell people about him everywhere seem straightforward enough to me. Getting all wrapped up in predicting and worrying about “those dates and times” is an age old human temptation Jesus addressed in the Sermon on the Mount:

32 These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.
33 Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
34 "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today. (Mat 6:32-34 NLT)

That said, since our own scriptures include sections of apocalyptic literature, I have a theory about why – which has little to do with knowing or predicting things that Jesus tells us are not for us to know. I believe that the apocalyptic stories and visions are not about the future, which, thanks to God’s gift of free will, is an ever-unfolding tapestry of our making as co-creators with God. I believe that these stories and vision are about our own time – our present. They are a warning, to be sure, of the probable end points of a trajectory of our present actions and behaviors, perhaps. But I think that even more, they are a way of understanding what is happening now, and how we might make better choices, by adopting a perspective of one who looks back toward our present from one possible, nightmarish future.

I believe that apocalyptic literature is like the game we play with ourselves at times when we imagine what a person from the future might say to us – the advice they might give to us, given what they know about the consequences of the decisions we make now. One key element of apocalyptic literature lost on the false prophets who use it as a scare tactic for gullible believers unfamiliar with the teachings of Jesus involves the triumphant way in which God’s kingdom rule prevails. If we have faith in such a future, we can live in hope that this will be true regardless of the many ways in which our senses tell us otherwise – and make choices as if it were already true. So ironically, apocalyptic is not about the end of all things, but a new beginning of hope in the midst of chaos – it’s a way for the blind to see.

In our upcoming worship series: “Letters from the Future: Daniel’s Apocalypse” we hope to explore the many messages of hope from this apocalyptic message written in the between times of the Bible, when the prophets were silent and shortly (a century or two) before Jesus’ birth. The book of Daniel looks both to the past (the exiles in Babylon) and to the future (to a time when the Ptolemies no longer desecrate the Temple and Jewish culture. The upshot is that the people whose lives are enriched by the stories are empowered to live in their own time with a renewed sense of God’s rule in history. And in that sense, they (and we) create a new future by the way they live in the present.

In addition to the worship series, I’m offering a Sunday morning Bible study linking scripture texts with a series of apocalyptic movies from the past five years, starting October 17. If there is enough interest, I’d be happy to offer the course during the week as well. I pray that looking at these tales of a dark and terrible future will enable us to live now as if our lives and the choices we make have significance in creating a new future – a future where all people recognize and rejoice in the Kingdom of God drawing near to us all.

Peace,
Bo

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (to what it means to be human)

Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic tale The Road compels you to travel to places you might not want to go. The slow moving story traces the agonizing journey of a boy and his father who walk across a barren, hellish landscape toward the death of all things. Along the way, they struggle to remember and to act as the "good guys" in a landscape haunted with roving bands of "bad guys" who threaten their survival (and the survival of their identity) at every turn in the tortured road.

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay."

(P. 77 - the man has just killed one of the bad guys)

The Road cuts life to the bone in search of the essence of life - that which survives until the bitter end - perhaps the foundation of life and or love and hope. McCarthy's experiment or perhaps parable makes its home among our most terrible fears about the thin veil of modern sophistication straining against a postmodern universe of nihilism and despair. I have been impressed of late at the proliferation of apocalyptic tales that one reviewer theorizes cropped up in the wake of 9-11. All of them seem more to me about our present than some nightmare of a future. The Road journeys through the landscape of our lives, asking the kind of penetrating, uncomfortable questions that we've been too anesthetized (by comfort) to ask.

"They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe into it being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."

(P. 57 - the man's wife leaves them both for death)

McCarthy invites us to explore the ashen barrenscape of life without labels, where the labels have ceased to carry meaning because even the memory of the things the names represented has vanished. The names of people, for instance, relationships between people, the names of dates and years, species of animals long extinct, and plants and foods that have vanished from a burning, cold planet. The Road points to a destiny worse than death - a road that leads to annihilation of existence and memory - of nearly any meaning humanity could have imagined in our sojourn on planet earth.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of it's referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

(P. 89 - by the fire at camp)

On the Road, we experience only the silent, menacing present - all past and future have been obliterated. Stories of these time frames have been exposed for the lies that could not protect us from our inevitable end - books are good only as fuel for the dying fire. And our beleaguered anti-heroes choose only when they will die - most likely by suicide - as they walk from oblivion into oblivion. Yet on they walk, improbably, as the man blows on the embers of the "fire" he claims the boy, especially, carries within him.

It is not the fire of the scorched earth, but a fire of warmth and light, that keeps the two wanderers alive in body and spirit on each successive, relentless cold night. Like their campfires, the crushing reality of despair mutes this fire within - yet it stubbornly refuses to wink out forever while there is yet one human being to tend it. The man lives only that the fire within the boy will never go out, and we know from early on that there will not be enough fuel for the fire within both of them.

The Road defines humanity as a pilgrim species, forever on the move as we bear this fire. One of my favorite passages reveals the way our life in the present reshapes our past into a future we stride into with each step we take in the present. When we don't know where we are going, we refuse to stop (though some of us do refuse) and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Though we never learn the details of the catastrophe that brought humanity to its knees, The Road renders this memory moot in relation to the task we face in each present moment. McCarthy beckons us to step into the eternity of each unknown moment free of the determination of the past or of the future.

"Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake up from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning and thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

(P. 131 on dreams, reality and memory)

Without spoiling the ending, I mention here only that McCarthy invites us to consider the monstrous cost of attempting to control or to assure our destiny, or the destiny of those we love. The Road paints a monochrome vision of hope and also of grace in a harsh environment that appears to deny both. We cannot know what the end of the road looks like, or where it leads. But the boy, especially, asks the man in us all to count the cost of looking too far down the road.

I was glad to be released from this dark and haunting vision, and yet it remains with me like the smell of smoke in my clothes after sitting by a campfire at night. While there are still fish in the waters, birds in the sky, and cattle on the green earth, a boy and a man whisper relentlessly in my ear to attend carefully to the map of the universe borne by every form of life - including my own - on my leg of the journey. We, too, carry a fragile but relentless fire, capable of ravaging or renewing the earth and others on this journey who wonder whether we are bad or good.

Unity and Agency - Divine and Human

I've done some more thinking about God this trip. I was experiencing gratitude for the journey I have thus far experienced in my life of faith - or in my life illuminated by faith. Having received it from my forebears, I have come to own my faith, even as I realize more and more each day how much "my" faith redefines and claims me.

Unity and agency have consumed my thoughts about faith this trip on a couple of my walks and rides. Unity has become the foundation of my new faith home, of late. Agency presents my mind with far more misgivings, so that I begin to wonder whether agency is more useful as a way to anthropomorphize God than it is a way to describe God.

Agency (at least agency as we understand it) involves the ability to affect action - not in some way that merely calls the nature of the thing so affected the agency of divinity (a la Clockmaker) - but action that in some sense reflects the consciousness of divinity. Agency is God's action in the world that reflects and results from the consciousness of God. Judaism and Christianity call this God's will.

And because the universe is a closed system, the way we think of God's agency must change or die, because the present concept of divine agency violates the observable laws of the known universe - at least in terms of Newtonian if not necessarily in terms of quantum physics. What is more, any conception of direct divine intervention in human affairs must account for the apparent amoral (or immoral) caprice or indifference that prompted the Greeks to imagine a divine game of dice on Mount Olympus.

One handy fallback position invokes the tawdry "God's ways are not our ways" cliche, a meaningless attempt at theodicy that ignores the imago Dei aspect of the Jewish tradition and incarnation of the Christian conception of God. Philip Clayton calls God's agency the push of the divine Spirit communicating with human beings, who must decide to act or not on these experiences of divine nudging. I begin to wonder if our (religious adherents') inability to comprehend God's agency stems not from the inadequacy of our theodicy, but from a misapprehension of how agency might "work" from a perspective that takes seriously a spectrum of existence from quantum to cosmic.

To put it another way, I propose to consider agency from a perspective of unity of all existence, at all levels of existence. From such a perspective, the human agent ceases to be the primary referent for agency. In fact, such a unifying perspective not only allows for a reconsideration of divine agency, it transforms our comprehension of human agency itself.

Ironically, the best way for me to begin such a project involves reexamining our notions of human agency, as well as our notions of selfhood. My chief assumption about my own agency involves my creation of a reality outside myself that initially takes form within myself - in my mind or in my will. I think; therefore it is. I want to do something and I do that something.

I think of this process most powerfully in any act of creativity, art or handiwork. I conceive and design a bookcase; I build a bookcase. What I conceived in my mind, I brought into the reality I share with others as an object that more or less reflects my original conception. The act of composing a text (poetry, prose, or a play) involves this process of willing some idea into action or reality.

This will-to-action process serves as a basic definition of agency for any agent we could consider. Such a definition links agency to consciousness, which is why an inanimate object could not exercise agency. This definition also leads to the notion at any animate creature could exercise some form of agency - exerting some form of change on it's environment based on conscious or instinctive will.

But I do not have to explore the boundaries of this definition (sea anemones, a virus or plankton) to expose some serious dilemmas attendant to this definition of agency. And the immediate problem this conception of agency faces is the ubiquitous relational nature of all possible forms of agency.

Take for instance the example of an author composing a text. The language, grammatical conventions, style, form, models of inspiration, and potential recipients of the text (including the author) all precede and inform the text before the "author" conceives it. In the case of language, grammar, literary form, and cultural context, these preconditions of the text bind the text in a way that dictates what any author can conceive or create.

Any agency an author might exercise would be culturally and relationally contingent to such an extent that to consider the text solely the creation of an author-agent would require an act of Herculean myopic blindness in perspective. How else could any other reader ever understand or appreciate such a creation? Yet this blindness to relational and cultural contingency results from the ubiquity of the phenomenon itself: we can no longer see what pervades our existence. Here is the chief problem with our notion not only of agency, but of our understanding of the individual self.

Not only human will, but human identity lies in the vast context of relational and cultural contingency. We cannot comprehend ourselves other than relationally. Cultural norms and values define the spectrum of possible manifestations of self and give comprehensibility to any possible manifestation of self. Any personality trait lies within a spectrum of similar manifestations of this trait. We do not understand these traits other than in comparison these other manifestations. Any self is only comprehensible as a self in terms of it's relationship to others.