Five AM. Haven't seen five AM in a while. Hours have shifted so that I routinely see light and dark, but not so much the time in between. Remembering how much I love this hour of transition, I tell myself I need to come here more often, but no promise really intended. Cool air, not a breeze, pours over the sill of the open window like water over the edge of an overflowing bathtub, streaming past bare feet. Light begins silhouetting hilltop trees, and I can actually feel the planet underneath turning toward the heat of another August day. Every time I look, sky is brighter, hillside details and colors emerging. One distant bird sounds off, now dozens--some right outside the window, and I realize swallows have built a nest under the eves. When did that happen? How did I miss the process? Any moment, sun-disc will crest the hill bringing the heat and ending this breath-held moment between, before.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Another hot August day. How many Augusts? How many days? How many left? This day's details illuminate with the increasing light: what must be done, who must be seen, what will be left over to do another day. All these details, all this activity... Does any of it mean anything? Is there any significance here or just movement? But there's a sticker on my arm. Proof of life. Like a watch in the sand of a deserted beach stating that someone was here, that intelligent life once passed this way, an impossibly orange face reminds me that somewhere in this silent house my son is sleeping, blissfully unaware of the coming heat. All this activity, all these details mean at least that much to him, though he knows nothing of it. Maybe his unawareness of the gift makes it even more significant to those of us who are-- who find themselves holding a long breath at five AM, sitting quietly in the betweenness and beforeness of another hot August day.

[08.15.10]

In the dim light of our meeting last night a man is speaking to the group. Southern drawl. What is it about Southern accents that make them so listenable? The cadence and rhythm, the way words bend and roll like taffy on a pull--rounder and slower than brittle Yankee-speak. I can't see his face through the silhouetted heads, but his words are saying that the moment that mattered, the one that began to change everything was a few evenings ago when his young daughter begged him please, daddy, don't take a shower now. Why not? Because if you take a shower, you won't come out all night... The group reacts with a collective sigh and the shuffling and murmurs that say they know his meaning as intimately as the stab of their own painful memories. When a meth addict goes into the bathroom to take a shower, he ends up alongside the toilet for the rest of the night, and small daughters and wives remain outside locked doors.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

There are moments like this in each of our lives. Moments when a veil is suddenly pulled away and for an instant we see ourselves as others see us and not as we imagine ourselves to be. For that moment we see the effect we have on those closest to us, who live with us, who are trying to love us as best they can--or as much as we allow. I remember walking through a busy hotel lobby and between passing bodies caught sight of a man walking alongside. I looked at him and he looked back. It was a full beat before I realized the man was my own reflection in floor to ceiling mirrors. To see myself as just another face in the crowd, to take stock, to judge the way I judge anyone, every stranger I meet, is a moment that can't be manufactured. We can never sneak up on moments like these; they just appear from time to time--brown paper parcels on our doorstep to open. Or not.

That this Southern man was at the point in his life that his daughter's voice could break through the haze of self-involvement and self-destruction was a miracle in its own right--and it became a watershed the moment he opened the package. When the student is ready, the teacher appears--even if it's just a little girl. Maybe especially if it's just a little girl. In the most real and concrete way, the reality we believe is the reality we endure, and yet the reality we believe about ourselves and our world is just a precariously constructed house of cards. We live there only by choice; we play by its rules only to maintain the illusion of its walls. But every once in a while, in spite of all our efforts, we get a fleeting look outside the window. Whether we see ourselves framed there directly or reflected in the faces of those who are trying to tell us how much they really want to love us--we are being given a gift. A gift we could never give ourselves: a chance to believe a new reality that includes all those faces waiting outside locked bathroom doors.

Southern man didn't take a shower that night. His moment brought him all the way West to our dimly lit meeting instead. Moments like that should always take us somewhere we least expect.

[04.29.10]

A few precious days at Monterey Bay with my family. I do believe the California central coast is my favorite place on earth so far. Something about the air and quality of light...feels like morning all day long. Images collect: expensive windows facing the sea at Pacific Grove; Asilomar state beach with its lighthouse, black rocks, and white spray; water and kelp hyperventilating against the docks at Cannery Row; the impossibly far side of the bay whitened and barely blue with distance. But despite all these, the highlight is the Aquarium of course. It's all our boys can talk about. We get to go on a Friday when everyone else is at work, at life. Almost like having the place to ourselves. Our little family schooling along the halls, over catwalks, through the immense spaces of exposed girders and rivets and cables and all those floor to ceiling windows framing the bay. The four of us moving together: right, left, forward, reverse; stopping here to look, someone darting off then coming back, rejoining the flow.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Entering the Outer Bay exhibit, I stop, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, trying to take it all in. It's a cavern, dark and blue with pin-hole lights in the far-off ceiling and a musical soundtrack as massive and slow as the real bay out there. A balcony overlooks a single, continuous window the size of a diesel locomotive--maybe two. How thick must that plex be to restrain all that water? Blue-in-blue water looking out into what seems infinity. Shafts of light angling down through the constant motion in the blueness: yellow fin, hammerheads, those crazy cut-in-half-looking sunfish... But with all the spectacular species parading, it's the smallest that capture me. A shoal of sardines, several thousand, moving together as one--one mind, one body. How do they do it? Perfectly coordinated, choreographed. All those silver bodies pointing one way, then instantly another. I break away from my family to sit in the balcony and stare. With more distance, individual fish merge to a single entity, a constantly shifting shape flowing across the glass. Here, round and dense, almost black; there, stretched out with silver fillets popping like paparazzi in the shafts of light. The shape flattens into a disc that seems to slowly flap its wings, then bursts in a July 4th explosion at a shark's touch, only to coalesce once again when threat has passed.

How do they do it? Communicate direction and velocity, warning and ease? I sit alone in the blue and watch thousands of individual parts functioning as one organism with purpose and intent--maybe only the purpose to survive and the intent to eat--but purpose and intent nonetheless. Purpose and intent that is not possible alone. Only in the group, the school, the shoal are such things realized. A sardine doesn't know this, isn't aware of strategy or purpose--but a thousand sardines, a hundred thousand, know something together that each fish will never understand... How do they do it?

My five year old runs up to pull on my sleeve. He wants to go to the more fishes. Hard to pull away, still printing to memory that silver shape in the blue, but I take his hand. He leads me downstairs to the rest of my family, and we set off together, moving this way and that through the halls and big spaces. Knowing something together, something unspoken and largely unthought. Something bigger than a single silver fish..but not a thousand.

[03.21.10]

Forests and trees. There is a very special relationship between forests and trees... Sometimes we say we can't see the forest for the trees, and when we do, we mean that nose on bark, we've gotten so lost in minutia and details--mind so focused on what and how, that we've forgotten why...and that there are all these other simultaneous trees out there telling a story no single tree could ever tell alone. And yet without each tree, there is no forest, no story at all. The forest is the sum of its trees, and each tree gives itself to the forest, creates the forest, simply by existing where it stands. Is forest greater than tree? Vice versa? Should we remain focused on individual trees or let our eyes relax over a sea of green canopy?


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

I remember years ago buying an astronomy computer program that allowed me to plot a point anywhere in the solar system and spin around looking out in any direction from that vantage as if I'd flown there in a pressurized craft. I flew to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. I spent several hours looking for the perfect spot from which to see all the planets and their moons aligned or spread out like a fistful of world-sized balloons suddenly let go among the stars. But whatever I tried and from wherever I looked, the view was always pretty much the same--a disappointing field of stars with just one planet close by. And then it hit me...that I had completely missed an obvious point. That distances in space are so great, you can never be close to more than one thing at a time--that once you draw close to one thing, every other thing is necessarily shrunken to a featureless point of light by those unimaginable distances. Hard to appreciate a forest like that: where you can only be close to one tree at a time...all other trees just points on a white-noise backdrop.

Lives and moments have a very special relationship too. A life is the sum of its moments, and each moment gives itself to a life, creates that life, simply by existing where it stands. We don't normally say that we can't see our lives for our moments, but we tend to live that way. We tend to think that attention to individual moments, nose on bark, is small-thinking and short-sighted. Unambitious. Irresponsible. We tend to focus on the long term, the broad plan written across the tops of our collective moments as imagined from 30,000 feet. But if we're serious about living, if we live long enough seriously, a truth begins to emerge: that we can never see all our moments gathered together like balloons on strings, that we can never ever be close to more than one moment at a time. Every life is lived and experienced and known as just one moment, one tree. A forest doesn't exist apart from its trees; a life has no meaning apart from its moment. We imagine our lives as a whole, a forest of moments, when in reality there is only this one single shining moment standing in stark relief against a field of stars.

[02.17.10]

There's an old saying...actually I'm not sure how old it is...but it is a saying, and it goes: A conservative is just a liberal who got mugged. Now I know that half of you reading this are already traveling down the road toward being offended, but before you get there, please know that I'm not trying to make any political points here. Looking past the obvious bias and the merely political to the larger point implied: what happens when our idealistic notions of the way things ought to be slam headlong into the way things really are? I mean, when it comes right down to the way the wide world works, how often do our expectations and experience really match? The road behind is always littered with the wrecks of unmet expectation, which eventually begin to alter our perception of the road ahead.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

A woman confides to me that she doesn't know what she believes anymore. She remembers church and worship experience from a decade ago when everything felt bright and alive and afterglowing. Now she comes to sing familiar songs and waits for familiar responses but they are nowhere to be found. She studies and hears nothing, prays and feels nothing. She is beginning to wonder whether God ever really existed at all or just doesn't exist for her--if somehow, somewhen along the way, he just let go of her hand. She hasn't given up, but it's getting harder and harder to keep telling herself that the way it used to be is still out there somewhere. I tell her that though God does very much exist, the way it used to be may not. As she reaches back for the way she used to experience her God, she is reaching back through years that include a devastating church split that separated her from the people and community she loved; years of not being able to replace those relationships or even begin to trust new ones; and a physical attack by someone she knew that left her in bruised therapy--and swimming through the deep end of the legal system.

Just how are we supposed to understand God and his love after the mugging...as we're still sitting in the wreckage of the way we always thought things would be, ought to be, were told it should be? Before the mugging, it's easy to imagine the world as we wish, to unquestioningly follow the principles and beliefs of those around us, feel secure in the arms of our expectations about God and life. After the mugging, we must somehow bridge the disparity between expectation and experience and deal honestly with a risky world. The days of unquestioned following and thoughtless faith are over. The honeymoon is over, and we are left with a choice to make. We can double down, try harder to recapture the way things used to be--just as an older child may revert to infantile behavior when seeing a younger sibling still being cradled and suckled in mother's arms...or we can berate ourselves for our unbelievable naivete and stuff all our beliefs along with old toys and teddy bears into a sack for the thrift store. Or, maybe between the extremes of nostalgia and naivete, we can allow ourselves to release the restrictions of expectation and fall into a different kind of embrace--one completely unexpected and unlike anything that used to be.

After the mugging, there is a window that opens on a different view of life and love. One that appears harsher at first, but on closer inspection is only a differing quality of light, a moving from the perspective of one who is embraced to one who can embrace. Before the mugging, we may feel that we are loved, but it's only after the mugging, in the moment we stop trying to recapture what was and fully embrace what is, that we ever begin to know it.

[01.26.10]

Five AM. Awakened with a thought I can't put down until I put it down. The house is dark, quiet. Phones are dark, quiet. Light rain falling outside. Christmas lights still burning on the house across the street paint colored streaks across wet pavement. Christmas lights...bright reminders that another year is shuffling offstage with yet another in the wings. The tree downstairs is dark, but we'll light it up and gather around in just three more days. I suppose the word breathless best describes the last few weeks' run up to three days before Christmas, and I'm left with unlikely Christmas images in the five AM darkness.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Five nights ago, waiting at a stoplight, I have a front row seat at the crosswalk. Through the passenger window, I catch what must be father and daughter beginning their walk across the intersection. Moving very slowly. I wonder if they'll get across in time. Both carry cardboard coffee cups in their right hands, but while his free arm swings with each step, I notice hers held stiffly bent against her side. She appears eleven or twelve years old as I collect details: left hand curled cruelly back at the wrist, left foot turned sharply inward and the limping shuffle it creates, thick glasses and puffy features...it dawns why they move so slowly across my glass screen. Father matches her pace with practiced grace. Unhurried, vaguely protective, but not hovering either. They went to Starbucks. He bought her coffee or maybe hot chocolate amid all those lights and decorations. I wondered how it all appeared to her through those thick glasses. I wondered how it all appeared to him...to be forced to walk slowly, to match that slow shuffling pace for eleven or twelve years--for the rest of her life or the rest of his. Perhaps to learn to see life as his daughter would always see it. A tragedy? A very great blessing? A blessing none of us would ever choose, but when chosen for us, immense, if accepted.

Christmas has a way of bringing vague, submerged things to the surface the way hook and line bring up fish. We find ourselves suddenly grasping squirming emotions that should have nothing to do with Christmas, with what we think Christmas is supposed to mean, what we remember it used to mean. You see, we imprint the meaning of Christmas through a child's eyes, then mourn its loss each year through adult eyes. Christmas hasn't changed; the possibility of Christmas returns every December. We have changed. We've lost the pace of childhood. I'm thinking maybe Christmas-as-remembered happens exactly when we stop trying to make it happen. When we stop running faster and faster trying to catch the stored experience of childhood, new experience and meaning finally have a chance to catch up and catch us.

It's light now. Gray and wet outside. Christmas lights still burn across the street, but muted, casting no reflections. My house will wake soon, the phone will ring. This quiet moment will pass--is passing--like the eye of a storm. I can't choose the pace of life around me anymore than I can alter the course of a storm. But maybe I can choose my own pace. Maybe I can allow myself to shuffle slowly through the crosswalk with a warm cardboard cup in my hand and the sense of a patient father at my side.

[12.23.09]

If you want to understand something, go to the beginning. If you want to know something, go to the end.

The difference between understanding and knowing is as vast as that between a PC and an Einstein...between a spreadsheet and the Mona Lisa...the classroom and the concert hall. If understanding is understood as the mental image of a thing, then knowing is the experience of the thing itself. Still, understanding often precedes knowing just as beginnings precede endings, so priorities are nicely established. And beginnings are a very good placed to start. Everything is most vulnerable at the beginning, most transparent. Before power and wealth have been amassed, there is no need for defense or secrecy--nothing to protect or penetrate. Before stature and fame, there is nothing to maintain--nothing to exaggerate or embellish. Unaware of their own importance, beginnings like infants can be just exactly what they are. Unselfconscious truth telling an unvarnished story.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

From the moment some eighty years ago when we first found evidence that our universe is furiously expanding in all directions like a single firework on the Fourth of July, we also imagined running the film in reverse, watching everything contract back to a tiny point of beginning. Now with eighty years of theory and experiments behind us, we understand that our beginning was much simpler than our middle or imagined end. In reverse, the complexities we see through telescopes and microscopes combine and merge into fewer forces and forms until at the very beginning, there was only one thing, one substance vibrating at infinite velocity and temperature. A grand unity in Einstein's mind.

Back on earth, what does all this understanding help us know? Look around. Life seems dizzyingly complex, expanding outward in all directions, begging us to choose one thing or another if only to keep down the noise. But sometimes life looks like a wave, sometimes a particle. Sometimes it works like law and justice and obedience, and sometimes like mercy, compassion, and freewill. Sometimes it feels like showering grace and othertimes like the sweaty work of social justice. It flickers in the light of a single mystical candle for awhile then blinds us in an intellectual glare: miraculous one moment, convinced of rational explanations the next. Sometimes life is truly beautiful--sometimes it's only cruel, and we think it surely can't be both at the same time. We think we have to choose. But life is not just one thing; it's all things at once. There is only one Way through, but that way is never either/or; it's always both/and. Our mistake is not in choosing incorrectly, it's in thinking that any one choice, any one understanding, is ever all/only. And the bigger mistake is trying to impose that understanding on someone else. Because life is not meant to be understood. It's meant to be known.

Kingdom is living life in such a way that endings look more and more like beginnings--where what we understand and what we know tell the same unvarnished truth: that we come from one thing and return to one thing and the complexity in between is only necessary illusion. Can we learn to live like this? Endings embracing beginnings...unenviously gathering smooth unknowing into exhausted experience? Beginnings resting against the heart of ending...dreamlessly secure in just the rhythm of the beat? To inclusively vibrate between the poles of life--loving both, preferring neither--and after all our exploring, end where we began and know the place for the first time... Kingdom is a life like this.

[12.08.09]

There's a scene in the film Amadeus that often comes to mind. The film follows the life and work of the classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and in this scene his wife and father are arguing again, and as they escalate in volume and anger, he slowly backs out of the room into another containing a billiard table littered with his notation paper. The argument rages on as he leans over the table and absently bounces a ball off the bumpers, catching it on its return. Then focusing on his unfinished manuscript, we hear his music rise to subdue and mask the fading sounds from the next room--the thick richness of the interior music rolling over the raw voices of the exterior world like a carpet over needles. He picks up his pen and begins to write with nothing of the physical world left touching him, troubling him...lost in the singular beauty of the inward orchestra flowing through him and out out onto the paper.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Sometimes the world is just too much. Too loud, too demanding, too harsh...too long. Too long since we've heard the music, since we slowly backed out of a room and let our music rise inside to silence all that noise. When is life pure? Where is that singleness of purpose we seem to remember when our work or relationships or faith were new? How did everything get so complicated, so adulterated, so diluted? Thank God for Mozart moments. Moments when the frames roll backward and life moves impossibly from complex to simple again, from diluted to concentrated, from mixed to crystalline purity.

Last Tuesday night, I brought all my noise with me to worship--all my intertwined problems and their attached emotions swimming around the room like sharks with those little remora fish in tow. Didn't want to be there or play with the band that night. My guitar, usually a best friend, barely made it out of the case. But song by song, I could feel myself slowly backing out of the room until it was as if someone else commanded my fingers and voice, and the music within rose and carried me along...a carpet over all my needles. And as I felt the smile spread across my face, the last vestiges of the physical world fell away for just a Mozart moment. All was restored in that moment. I could remember without thoughts and say without words why we were there, why we do what we do. In that moment life made perfect sense.

We don't need to be musicians to have Mozart moments. We just need to back out of the four walls we have constructed for ourselves, expand the self-determined scope of our lives and hear again for the first time the music that is always playing inside...let it rise and overtake us and carry our burdens for just a moment.

Amadeus means love of God. Mozart moments are those that occur when we allow ourselves to hear just that. And only that.

[11.20.09]

Mostly we think of life as a road. A road extending in two directions from anywhere, anywhen we stand...stretching off to the twin vanishing points of the past behind and the future ahead. We think this is how it must be because looking back, we can remember and catalog each step, each choice, each event of our lives--and like stepping stones in the lawn, they form a chain, a road of connected dots. The path taken looks this way, so we assume the path not yet taken is the same: extending out in front of us, complete and finished and waiting be traveled like a new home waiting to be occupied. But this is where analogy breaks down and inadequate concepts and thinking keep us from the very future and destiny we seek.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Future and destiny are less like a road leading to infinity and more like a dock leading out just past the water's edge. With only a few steps before the way abruptly ends, we are left with a sigh and a choice--to step out into unknown depths or remain at the familiar edge of things. Each step is a choice, and each choice is an opportunity to experience something essentially valuable, something that can't be either planned and anticipated or bottled and stored. And each opportunity is a real-time-only chance to experience the reality of life, to know there is more here than what we can see or touch or dream of in our philosophies. We can't reason our way to God--logic runs out, ends where the dock ends. We can't plan our way to destiny--future is only realized in the taking of individual steps...especially the steps never conceived in the plan. The map is not the territory; the plan is not the journey. Future and destiny are not fixed, not knowable by any means, because rather than pre-existing, stretching out before us, they materialize under our feet as we go; the dock extending forward to catch each tenuous step we place in empty space.

You may have heard of death by a thousand cuts, but how about life by a thousand band-aids? We want to look way down the road, get the big picture, find the answers that we believe will map our futures and construct a solid path under our feet. Minimize risk, guarantee results. But the big picture of future and destiny doesn't exist all at once--it doesn't exist at all until the moment it becomes the present. The future is not a road, but a cloud of possible futures, an opportunity to take one step, put one band-aid on one cut, heal one more wound that has added its pain to the sum of our fears--fears that paralyze and keep us from finally stepping off the dock to find that God's will-as-destiny is not out there somewhere, but right here in this choice and moment. Jesus invites Peter to step out past the end of his dock and join him on nothing but surface tension. We obsess over whether such a thing is physically possible and miss the deeper meaning--perhaps subconsciously and purposefully so--because we are Peter, and we're frightened too. Peter wasn't called out on the water at some fixed point in the past. Past is as present as future. Peter is being called now, this moment, because we are being called now, this moment.

We're being called to follow someone who, by continuing to take steps in a single direction, learned that there would always be a path under his feet, even over the face of the deep. The sum of our fears holds us at the familiar edge, drives us to manage risk and seek security. But it's in the taking of the most absurd risk of all--a long walk off a short dock--that we begin to trust a future and a destiny we'll never see coming, but will never fail to support our weight.

[11.03.09]

A friend and I have been writing back and forth trying to come to understanding about how this Kingdom thing works. How do we "enter" Kingdom? What is the experience of it, the qualifications for it? Purpose, meaning... In his last post, he fired this across my bow: How can we experience God, know Him, when we are incapable of yet even imagining Love, Light, and Life enough to be adequate to the task of simply envisioning some here and now effect in a Kingdom of Heaven? I’d like, for example, to know how to love with effect. Can you explain the mystery of that to me? Now that's a question. And the short answer is: no, I can't--not even close. But standing on the shoulders of others, I might be able to point toward something that resembles an answer--or at least a few steps further forward...

Ever held up a sign at the airport with a person's name on it? If we don't know a person, never met him, we'd never know that he passed right by in the flow, unrecognized, unheralded. Ancient Greeks understood this to the extent that some of them thought that the pursuit of truth itself was pointless. How can you know what you don't know? If you don't know something, you wouldn't recognize if you found it, and if you already knew it and could recognize it, then you didn't need to pursue it in the first place. But Socrates comes to the rescue with a word and an idea, anamnesis--literally means unforgetting. We would call it remembrance. Socrates believed that we already know the things we are pursuing--from our souls, from before we were born--it's just that the trauma of birth causes us to forget. There is no real learning in life; there is only unforgetting... From its earliest centuries, the church has used this word, anamnesis, to describe communion, the Eucharist. To remember Jesus' life and teaching, to bring the past into the present and present into the past, to merge things eternal with things herenow is the meaning of this sacrament--to make everything one--to unforget that everything is and always has been one.

How can we know/recognize that which we don't know/recognize? Things like light, life, and love? Like Adam and Eve we experience oneness before we experience separateness. As children before the age of reason, we've known the security of unity before we experience the fear of aloneness. Light, life, and love are a remembering, not a learning--a vaguely familiar face in the crowd, a deja vu, that causes us to follow, to pursue, and ultimately to unforget what we once intimately knew. When Jesus said we must be like little children to enter Kingdom, the word he used was talya. Talya means child, but also house servant or bond slave at the same time. Merging the qualities of the child: wonderment, exhilaration, innocence, dependence, trust--with that of the servant: humility, submission, loyalty--is the essence of Kingdom, the ingredients that make awareness of Kingdom possible. The maturity of the servant gives the child power to choose--the innocence of the child gives the servant power to unforget. Kingdom of Heaven literally means Reign of Unity--the merging of heaven and earth. There's only one Kingdom; it exists here and now--which is everywhere and everywhen. To love with effect is simply to unforget that we are all one--already one, have always been one.

What flows out of that unforgetting always looks like perfect love.

[10.15.09]

Will I recognize my mom when I am in heaven? What if I don't? I loved my mom, have never really gotten over her death...[tears]...how can I be sure I will know her in heaven and that she will know me? [more tears]... Don't you just want to gather this person in your arms and hold on for a while? But then what? Beyond the hug, is there anything more we can offer in addressing the questions behind the tears? You know where questions like these come from--you've asked them times and times yourself. We all know that gnawing place of deepest human longing to be connected, to stay connected, to peek behind the green curtain and get a glimpse of the gears and gauges of God's machinery--as if knowing how things work may somehow make them less frightening. Seems we always worry most about the things of which we can know the least, while the things we can know for sure lie stacked around our lives like discarded packing boxes.

God is maddeningly non-specific when it comes to the things of eternity. And though he has showered us with everything we need to touch his face right here in this moment--to know him fully even without fully understanding--we still obsess over the mechanics of eternity, drawn to the one tree from which we were forbidden to eat like moths to flame. Jesus has different priorities. He speaks most of earthly things, simple things: money and crops and domestic issues--rarely of the world to come and never of the abstract. He knows that to be grounded in this life is to be already grounded in the next. He knows that a finite mind could never hold a single infinite thought in a lifetime of trying, so he knows to stop trying and to start living. And yet in a rare moment when he is asked about marriage in the next life, Jesus tells us that no one marries or is given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven... Now stop for a second. Really think... This tiny detail packs a tsunami of insight. To have no exclusive relationships, no wife or husband holding you at night; to belong to no one in particular but everyone in general; to have no best friend or confidant or lover who is exclusively yours and keeps your deepest secrets; to have no secrets...to be so completely connected as to feel no need for anything at all is to be utterly filled and fulfilled in a way that is simply inhuman.

When I was in Catholic grade school--first or second grade--a little girl asked the nun if she could have her dog with her in heaven. Now I don't remember a lot of really profound stuff coming from nuns when I was growing up, but her answer this time was a certifiable gem: If you want your dog, he'll be there... Little girl left smiling with a beautiful simplicity that I remember to this day but has taken me a lifetime to appreciate. If... If I want... God never delineates the mechanics of eternity--merely the absence of if. In the presence of perfect unity, oneness, resolution of conflict and separation, there is no if, no want. How could there be? But now and here in our human spacetime, if you believe you need your dog for heaven to be heavenly, he'll be there. And if you want to see your mother, know her and hold her and feel that release and connection, you will. But through it all, Jesus' voice continues to urge us to step away from the speculation and begin to really live our lives on the ground floor. And to begin to imagine the possibility of an absence of if.

[10.01.09]



Lots of conversations lately exposing the big issues--ones that directly affect the quality of our lives and relationships. Someone tells me she heard a radio host say that anyone abused by his or her parents has no moral obligation to maintain any semblance of a relationship with them. Someone else tells me that a longtime friend and mentor who studied forgiveness in Jewish law now believes that we are only obligated to forgive when the offender first asks for forgiveness, that God is on the side of those who have been sinned against, that justice belongs to the victim... Rightness and wrongness, forgiveness and justice... justification...the big issues don't get much bigger. But whether any of this talk is true completely misses the point. As long as we look at life and relationship and faith through the lens of justice and obligation, we'll reserve for ourselves all the space we need to be completely miserable...and forever the victims of life.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

When I was learning to drive an ice age ago and instructors were trying to get the notion of defensive driving through my head, there was this corny poem they used when it came to the subject of right of way: He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong. Might have been corny but the point was solid. What comfort does right and wrong bring when the emergency vehicles are screaming? What comfort does right and wrong bring when relationships are torn in tears? Being right is highly overrated. We're trained to think our purpose in life is to be right enough, without mistake enough to be acceptable--even if it kills us. After all, misery is a small price to pay for rightness. But what if our purpose in life is not to be right, but to be forgiven? In Jesus' language, forgiveness and liberation are the same thing, the same word even--sebaq. To be forgiven is to be set free and to be set free is to be forgiven.

Forgiveness isn't about right or wrong, about rules or obligation or long memories of ancient abuse. It's not about an apology offered or received. God doesn't side with victim against perpetrator--he is impossibly on everyone's side all the time with no contradiction or embarrassment. Until we realize forgiveness isn't about fairness, doesn't even require restoration of a broken relationship--that it has nothing to do with another person at all--it will always elude us. Forgiveness is always and only about being set free from all the misery and bondage and separation of our victimhood. Anything less is mere rule of law and has no place in our purpose. Jesus said that if we don't forgive each other, neither will our Father in heaven forgive us. So we dutifully conjure up images of God withholding forgiveness as punishment, but nothing could be further from the truth that sets free and forgives. If we want to hold to our legal right of way, Jesus is assuring us that no power in heaven or earth will interfere. It's our God-given right to be as miserably right as if we were wrong. To forgive is not to approve the wrong done to us or absolve the guilt of someone else. It's simply to release ourselves from the grip of our victimhood, to defy gravity and rise like a dancer in impossible, wingless flight...to finally understand that we are forgiven and set free together at the same time and exact moment that we realize we already are.

[09.17.09]

I'm going to be straight with you, he said... Really having trouble with the whole Resurrection thing. Did it happen? Did it happen the way people say? What if I don't believe? What do I do? It's so natural for us to reduce things to their constituent parts and think we know the whole. To look at the logistics and mechanics of something from a safe distance and think that equals reaching right into the heart of it, moving wholly into frame, finding the beating source of the life that makes it really true and not just accurate. How can we know for sure if something happened two thousand years ago? Or two days ago? If we weren't there to witness, is there ever enough evidence to take us beyond reasonable doubt?


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

We're trained to search the spectacular, to examine each clue looking for the trail of breadcrumbs that will lead us back to truth...as if such things ever move from the outside in. The Easter moment wasn't so much an event that happened at a specific place and time as it was an experience for all time. We think of the Easter moment as that instant when a stone rolled back and an inert body breathed again, when a burial shroud emptied out like a deep sigh. But what did such a moment do for Jesus' closest friends as they cowered in their hiding holes? What did it do for the women who came to look for the living among the dead? For Jesus' friends, that moment in the tomb went unnoticed, and they remained unchanged. But there were other moments soon after: a worker in a garden, a meal in a nearby town, a breakfast of broiled fish on the beach before sunrise...simple moments of everyday experience that snapped Jesus' friends one by one into a new reality. A reality they felt couldn't possibly be accurate, but was true just the same...Jesus was alive and not dead.

Each of these was an Easter moment...a moment when they experienced the reality of Jesus' life--as real as bread and fish and sunrise. It wasn't a series of clues that brought them to these moments, a twisting of mind around a physical impossibility, but an all-at-once experience of the living Lord that changed their perspective and their lives from the inside out. We think we must understand before we can believe. Or that belief-as-understanding is the litmus test for salvation. But all we really have to understand is that there is the promise of life beyond anything we can understand. That if we want that life badly enough, we can overcome our fears and dive headfirst into an experience that will tell us all else we need to know. And that if we wait for understanding before we dive, we'll wait forever because we've misunderstood the nature of the Easter moment itself.
Jesus is alive and not dead. But we'll never really believe until we realize that the Easter moment is not one to look back on, but to enter into...that for each one of us, there is no Resurrection until we have our Easter moment.

[09.05.09]

Heard abruptly yesterday that a friend had died. Was just getting to know him and looking forward to more--but there isn't any more. There's always that moment of disbelief, when you think maybe you didn't hear it right, when your mouth opens and breath catches and your mind slowly winds around the fact that someone you saw just yesterday won't be back tomorrow. Late last night standing out in the dark with another friend watching him trying to process this death... Wanting to help, but quietly listening to the grief and anger and guilt that every death elicits. Saying what I could, but knowing that the process of grieving is inescapable: ends only when we are through with it. But also knowing that though words never short the circuit of grief, my presence alone was a good thing.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

In the first book, we didn't get to eat of the tree of life in the Garden, and so we have moments like this. And we'll keep on having them until we have our own...and our friends are standing out late at night swallowing their emotions in the dark. But the last book tells us that the tree stands again in the new city of God, and with that tree before us all things are possible. When someone I know dies, I'm reminded like a slap across the face that this person I just saw yesterday--whose neck I hugged--is now standing before that tree, and all the things the rest of us can only wonder at and imagine is known to him. To her. So amid the sadness and mix of difficult emotions, there's also a bit of envy tempered with the knowing that my turn is also coming sooner than I probably expect.

May sound dark, but that knowing is a healthy thing. How different would my life be if I really knew how brief my moments are? Would colors be brighter, food tastier, smiles wider? What would I do differently herenow, living squarely between the first and last books? With the promise of the tree before me, I could finally stop grieving the loss of the tree behind. No longer grieving, I could simply practice living in the presence of life--each moment precious because it is finite, because there will be a last one. But the last moment here is the first moment somewhere else so fear has no hold. Here between the books, between the trees, there is this sweet spot, this Camelot moment. What we do with it defines who we are. The sweetness of Camelot moved in and out of focus in flash. It was much too perfect to last. It couldn't be preserved, only savored--as with everything in this life. So my friend's death is his gift to us, his plea to treat each moment and each life as the precious, unique gift that it is. Right here, right now, between the books and the trees.

[08.20.09]

Almost twenty years ago a presidential candidate talked about a great sucking sound that he said was the sound of American jobs going south. Has that much really changed? Seems at any point in our lives if we listen hard enough, we can hear the sound of something going south. Sometimes we don't even have to listen, it's all we can hear even with hands clapped over ears. Sometimes we can even feel the gravitational pull of its intensity. As our world becomes less and less stable--from economic to political to ecological systems--that sucking sound gets louder, and we get tenser, more anxious. That's why I love this image. It's sort of the quintessential picture of the person of faith: calmly waiting on a manhole cover for the whole visible world to go down that hole. Yellow vest and hipboots against that tremendous sucking sound just a couple feet away...


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Sometimes we think living in difficult times [when the sucking sound is loudest] will bring out the best in us--bring out hidden reserves of faith and strength...patience. In truth, difficult times only bring out more of what we already have--reveal who we already are at core. Who we are with that sound in our ears is who we really are. How we react, what choices we make, the attitude we maintain tell us all we need to know. But can we know about ourselves beforesound? Can we know if what we say we believe is really true or just what we've agreed to believe? Can we know if what we believe is true enough to still be true when that sound is threatening everything in our visible world? Perhaps we really won't until we're there in that situation, but there are clues:

At his trial for heresy, when all was sucking southward, Socrates famously said that an unexamined life is not worth living. Facing execution for corrupting his students--teaching them to examine their lives, to question authority and all accepted knowledge--he remained cheerfully firm in his belief right up till they made him drink the poison. An unexamined life is not worth living, or better, is a life not really lived at all. And an unexamined faith is a faith not worth having--one that will be sucked with everything else right down that hole in the middle of our lives. To examine our faith is to examine our lives, our purpose in life--to know God. And to know God is to live him, experience him, to handle him, and to have been handled by him. It was never enough to be told about God or to have read about him, to pledge allegiance to a creed about him. All such things must be examined too--and questioned. Accepting the faith of others is never substitute for knowing the set free truth.

Some things in life are not transferable: they must be lived to be believed...if what we mean by belief is that which allows us to calmly stand by the drain of the world, knowing that our boots will keep us dry and our vest will keep us safe...and that when every last suckable bit is long since south and the manhole cover replaced, our God will remain. And our life will remain. And the relationship between the two.

[08.12.09]

My son is one day old--less than twenty-four hours old to be really accurate. Nurse in green scrubs and running shoes pads into our recovery room pushing a cart with the clear, plexiglass bassinet on top. I hover over looking at the impossibly small face framed between stocking cap and that burrito-bundling-blanket thing they do to newborns. I like the look of the early morning light streaming low-angled across his face and position my camera and snap just as he opens up in a yawn big enough to swallow himself. Red, hairless, toothless...absolutely beautiful. Breathtaking. Thoughttaking. I look at this photograph now, and I can think about that moment. But in remembering, I realize that at that moment, I had lost the power of thought.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

There are moments in life that not only take your breath away, they take your thoughts away. Moments so compelling, so complete that you move into them like being sucked into a painting on the wall. From observer to participator, from audience to actor--immersed so fully that the distinction between where you end and another begins is lost. The edges of your own identification as an individual fall away and open you to an experience that is too big for words or even thoughts to contain. To think or speak of such moments would not only be useless, but blasphemous in a very real way.

Why did the ancient Hebrews forbid speaking the name of their God? Because to name him was to limit him, to show dominion over him, to open the possibility of denying the power of his name by denying the moment in which it was uttered. To think of the moment is to leave the moment, to name the moment is cease all experience of it. Silence is God's native language. To learn to speak silence, to allow silence, is to learn to leave ourselves behind and experience the God who is. It's ironic that as soon as we realize we've been joyfully adrift in a silent mind, we reflexively grasp our thoughts again like a drowning man gulping for air. The exhilaration, joy, wellbeing, contentment we feel at such moments depend on the wordless connection with God's spirit--and last only as long as thoughts and words remain at bay.

[07.29.09]

Have you ever seen a wave in this way? I'd imagine even surfers who live inside the curl would find something new and breathtaking in this image...crystallized, captured like a living ice sculpture. A photographer is not just someone who takes great pictures. A photographer is someone who sees which pictures are great--and then takes them. A photographer sees the immense in the miniscule and the spectacular in the commonplace. A photographer helps us see the everyday in stunning new ways--or for the very first time. In the same way, a writer is not just someone who writes, but someone who sees connections and relationships that have been missed by most of us and so becomes someone who actually has something to say. A musician doesn't just play music, but hears the music already playing and then makes it hear-able to everyone else.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Every form of art is like this. Though we call it creative, it's not really creation--it's our hands reworking and making sense of all that has come from God's hands. Call it re-creation. Hopefully recreation too. Everything we need, everything there is to have is already present and waiting. All we have to do is learn to see beyond the skin of things, connect the dots, hear the music, and we become artists too. Artists who can take the abundant raw stuff of life laying all around and shape it into endlessly unique expressions of our passage. Artists of life, of living life. The elder brother of the prodigal son, bitter at his father's unconditional acceptance and celebration of his younger brother's return, hears his father's voice saying that everything he has is already his own. Will he eventually see that this is literally true? Will we? What part of everything don't we understand? As we wait impatiently for our turn in life, when will we see that the stuff of our acceptance and celebration, of Kingdom, is all around right herenow waiting for us?

A favorite song that I can never separate in my head from Louis Armstrong's voice contains a central line for me: "I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night...and I think to myself, what a wonderful world." Skies, clouds, day, night--the background noise of every twenty-four hour cycle of our lives. But when the bright day becomes blessed and the dark night sacred, we have begun seeing with the photographer's eye. The world becomes wonderful the moment we begin to see that it already is. And not a moment before.

[07.15.09]

Someone wrote to me the other day asking me what I thought about "chastening" love. She had come across an article dealing with the oldest question in the world...the one that asks why bad things happen to apparently good people. In the article, those bad things were characterized as God's "chastening love," and "the rod of [God's] discipline, applied by his loving hand." Which begs the second oldest question in the world, the one that asks where these bad things come from in the first place. From a blind, mindless universe? From a knowing God? From ourselves as cause and effect? Book of James tells us that bad things [he calls them trials] come to complete us and mature us in our faith. Ok, but where do they come from? From God's loving hand?


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Back in the day when anyone was still publicly talking about spanking as a means of discipline, I remember reading child psychologists saying that you should never spank your child with your hand. If you must spank, use some object instead of your hand, because your hand should always be a source of pleasure and connection and loving caress. Using your hand as the means of discipline is to break a human bond and teach the child to shrink from your approach. Jesus told us we could learn something about our relationship with our Father in heaven through our relationships with our children on earth when he said that if we who are incomplete know how to give good things to our children, how much more will our Father in heaven give good things to us? If there's a correlation between earthly parent/child relationships and the one between God and us, does God pay any attention to child psychologists? When bad things happen to good people, do they really come from God's hand?

The world is set up in such a way that trials--bad things--come to us as a consequence of the laws of physics and our choices in life. The effects of our actions [ours or others or groups of others in the form of governments and armies and economies] account for most of the pain in life. That's not God, that's us. And the rest comes from the motion of weather systems, ecosystems, geological systems, astronomical systems...and the course of our physical lives. Such things are neither good nor bad, but if they frustrate our hopes and dreams or kill our expectations, then we see them as bad. God understands these systems; he created them and knew how they would operate in our lives, always providing alternating seasons of pleasure and pain... "Chastening" is built in there I suppose, but not from God's hand. If we hear Jesus well, the most important thing he's saying is that his Father doesn't bring bad things into our lives, because there is no "bad" in him to bring. He's just not in the thunderbolt business.

What comes from the hand of an unconditionally loving God? You may say tough love or chastening love as you shrink from the approach of his loving hand. But God doesn't need to chasten us. Life does that for him. And for us. Never the source of pain and suffering, God is always and forever the source of the comfort and provision and strength we need in the face of the pain and suffering we encounter. To trust God is to know that his hand is always the hand of connection and caress--never wrath. We need never shrink from his hand or question the composition of the love it brings.

[07.09.09]



I used to pole vault in high school. Fact that I wasn't particularly good is sort of beside the point right now. Fact that you can train just as hard to be mediocre as you can to be great is closer to the point. I trained hard; I ate and lived and dreamt pole vault. I can remember standing with pole resting on ground and shoulder, staring down the runway, every ounce of energy and mental focus aimed at box and bar and the pit beyond. But for all that, I can't remember ever seeing the runway itself. After all, runway only had one purpose: space to create speed enough to propel vaulter over bar. Glued to the box where I'd plant the pole, coordinating arms, drive knee, and jump foot--all was focused on clearing the bar, on the amazing feeling of flying and falling and the sweet slap of mat on my back. Exhilarating...and congratulating too, if I could just clear that next level...


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Seems we could use pole vaulting as a metaphor for our lives...the concentration, the focus, the exhilaration, the applause. But I'm thinking in different directions these days. I've got a friend who told me that he always had trouble talking to girls to whom he was attracted--that he'd find himself fighting for the right words and walk away kicking himself over the words he found. Funny thing though was that he never had trouble speaking to girls to whom he wasn't attracted. It's all about outcomes, isn't it? If there's a girl we want to impress, a bar we desperately want to clear, we never see runway or conversation--they exist only to gain enough speed to propel us over the top. All outcome, no runway.

We forget that our lives are really almost all runway, punctuated only at intervals by boxes and bars...momentary outcomes. And we can't control outcomes. We can train and work as hard as humanly possible, but genetics and wind resistance and another person's choices can have their way. To focus on outcomes is to abandon the majority of our lives--and the irony is that we'll never be more attractive to another person or more relaxed as we approach the box than when we are fully aware of runway, of every inch of reddish earth. The psalmist sings that God's word is a lamp unto our feet, a lamp that throws only a small circle in the darkness, just enough to illuminate a single step, the next step. So instead of pole vaulter, maybe a better metaphor for our lives is the common garden snail. Firmly connected to earth along the entire length of its body, seeing [or sensing] only millimeters ahead, it glides through life oblivious to outcomes, negotiating whatever comes into its path without comment. All runway, no outcomes.

Pole vaulter or garden snail? If we can't learn to love process more than we desire outcome, we'll miss all our moments on the way to somewhere else. And if snails seem unappealing, then let's decorate our shells and celebrate the feel of runway sliding slowly underneath...parade of beautiful floats leaving silver trails in the wake of our moments.

[07.02.09]



I know I talk quite a bit about my son, Brennan...he just keeps giving me so many reasons to do so. At four years old, he's the true Kingdom resident in the house, constantly reminding us of what that phrase actually means. He runs around the stage of our lives like a court jester, like comic relief, breathing new life and energy into hours gone tired. All our kids did this at his age--all kids do, I did at his age. At my age now I need to be reminded, and he does so every time I see the little face peering up from under a table or through stairway railings. I don't remember my other children being like this, but I know it's not so much that Brennan is different from them as that I am different from then. I'm finally ready and willing to be taught what a four year old can teach. At least on a good day.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

I love his every mispronounced word, never correct him, and mourn the day that he finally gets it right as another step out of the Garden for him--and for me. When he finally leaves the Garden of his unselfconscious innocence, who will be left to teach me? Remind me? Maybe there's something I'd better be learning as quickly as Brennan is forgetting. For months now, Brennan has been calling waterfalls, wonderfuls... Wonderfuls. Why would I ever correct him? As long as waterfalls are wonderfuls, everything is full of wonder, and a suburban back yard is an Amazon adventure. As long as waterfalls are wonderfuls, mom and dad can always make everything better, and the most hysterical crying fit can be soothed and forgotten with a hug and a cold soda. As long as waterfalls are wonderfuls our little boy is really ours to hold and watch over--his entire world spans just the home we build around him.

I know too much now to live in the Garden with Brennan, but he takes me there whenever I let him, like a three foot guest pass. I don't let him often enough; my world has grown far beyond our backyard jungle and calls me out to protect the home we've built around ourselves. On a good day I wonder, though, who's protecting whom? Unless waterfalls are wonderfuls, what is it we're protecting? I know someday he'll get it right, and waterfalls will just be waterfalls. Maybe he's already got it right; I'm afraid to ask, don't want to know. But I know that someday, I'll be the one reminding him of wonderfuls when his world grows large, and he's focused off east of Eden just as I was, as my father was, and his. For now, I'm trying to learn the lessons I'm being taught. Trying to take the torch before the fire goes out, keep it lit with my own heat long enough to pass it on. For now, for as long as my teacher is with me, I'm trying to impress indelibly on my soul that waterfalls are wonderfuls just as long as I believe they are. Who's going to correct me?

[06.23.09]

In at least one respect, performing a wedding is like delivering a baby. When you go to a doctor because you're sick or injured, you're already in a bad way and you hope the doctor will make you better. But when you're pregnant, you're already well, and you certainly don't expect the doctor to make you worse. You go into pregnancy expecting a well result, and if you don't get it, you tend to blame the doctor/messinger...malpractice insurance for obstetricians is many times higher than for any other MD. For ministers, funerals are safer than weddings for the same reason. People expect a good result at a wedding, and if they don't get it...well, I don't know of any malpractice insurance for pastors. The wedding I performed a couple of weeks ago was picture perfect--beautiful bride, groom in Marine dress blues--all going to plan until I saw something like panic growing in the bride's eyes, and she whispered that she had to sit down. So we cleared a seat and sat her down in the first row [bride's side, of course] and continued for a few more lines when the groom suddenly made the best decision of the afternoon. To get back to eye level with his bride, he dropped to one knee, dress sword resting on the carpet. The collective sigh from every woman in the room could have been heard in the next county. No malpractice that day.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

The image of that bride's eyes searching her groom's face under the cover of his white cap was the icon of romantic love, the pinnacle of many of our aspirations in life. I couldn't be sure whether bride or groom were hearing what I was trying to tell them that afternoon--do brides and grooms ever really hear anyone on their wedding day? The traditional Jewish weddings that Jesus would have attended in the first century were all arranged in advance bythe fathers of groom and bride and later with the aid of the local matchmaker, the shadkhan. Most often, the first time the bride and groom would meet was on their wedding day itself. Such a thought is unthinkable to us today: destroys our sense of fair play, self-determination, free will...no one can or should make such a decision for us. After all, we marry for love.

And yet those ancient unions were much more stable than our own. Why? It's because we believe we marry for love. Because we believe that love has to exist in order for marriage to exist, that love comes before marriage--like a single push on some marital perpetual motion machine. In their timeless wisdom, ancient Jews believed that love comes not before, but after marriage, that marriage exists in order for us to learn how to love. It has been said that when it comes to marriage, ancient Easterners like the Jews put cold soup on the fire, and it becomes slowly hot, while we modern Westerners put hot soup in a cold plate, and it becomes slowly cold. If we think there's any one push that will keep us rolling through decades of relationship, we've been misinformed. No intensity of feeling or depth of beautiful eyes can push that hard. There's too much friction in life. When Jesus said, "love your neighbor," the word he used for love was rehem, a love that gushes from a deep place, as between mother and child or bride and groom. When he said, "love your enemy," he used a different word, hab--a love that is kindled from dry twigs and dead grasses--carefully tended and nurtured into a roaring blaze. Hab is the only love standing between us and a spouse who will become our enemy over time.

I don't expect arranged marriage to be making a comeback anytime soon. But understanding and celebrating the
difference between love we feel before marriage and that which slowly grows afterward is the best marital malpractice
insurance you can buy.

[06.17.09]



I got an email last week from a good friend who wrote, "Some days I am worried about the future of our finances, my relationships, my kids, or the health of those I love. Other days I am just content to have a roof over my head and can blissfully clean the garage without a care..." He also wrote about going for a walk that morning with his dogs: "I thought to myself how cool I am going to be out for 30 minutes surrounded by nature, my loving critters...who every time we go for a walk act like it's the first time and maybe the last time they will ever get to go out--so happy and appreciative--why can’t kids be like that?"
He called his walk that morning a "manufactured kingdom moment" and wanted to know if I knew what he was talking about, if it made any sense. Felt like the understated question of the year to me. In the midst of a whirlwind of details and deadlines, I'd been clinging to moments like these...manufactured or not.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Is it right at all to think of manufacturing a kingdom moment? A moment when cleaning the garage is bliss, when a walk through the trees on your street carries the intensity of the first time, or the last? Is such a thing even possible? I remembered two moments from the film Harvey with James Stewart and had to see them again. Besides watching one of our greatest film actors melt into a role, Jimmy Stewart manufactured a kingdom moment, a kingdom character, right before our eyes--and in this scene tells how he never has time anymore because he's so busy sitting with friends and listening to their big hurts and even bigger dreams and warming himself in all those "golden moments." Again, from my friend's email: "I love people and love to share experiences. Some psychologist may say I am insecure or co-dependent--I don’t know and really don’t care. I just feel like if you paint a beautiful picture or make a movie and no one ever sees it, what's the point?"

What is the point? We fall in love with our film stars because they repeatedly take us where we've never gone ourselves or show us where we've already been with style and a soundtrack. At their best, speaking the words of equally gifted writers, they open windows to emotions and perspectives and circumstances that we find hard to access on our own. If we can use those golden moments recorded on film or in an email to recognize and embrace our own golden moments when they arrive, that's a point. And if instead of merely waiting for our golden, kingdom moments to arrive, we learn to move out and meet them, to "manufacture" them to the beat of our own internal soundtrack, that's an even bigger point. Our moments are up to us. We decide which moments are golden. There is no kingdom moment apart from our decision to make it so. And if we never connect the dots from our life to another--whether real, written, or recorded...there is no point.

[06.08.09]



Faith and feet. The feet of faith...now there's an association we don't normally make--dots we wouldn't imagine connect. Faith and heart maybe...faith and mind, faith and church, creed, religion...but feet? We venerate our Hebrew heroes of faith in scripture, read their stories, try to emulate them without ever coming to understand the nature of their faith, what they meant by having faith, or the great gulf between our notion of faith and theirs. When it comes to faith, we vote with our heads; our Hebrew heroes voted with their feet. For us, faith is what we think--it's about what we think we believe or agree to believe. For ancient Hebrews, faith is what we do--it's about how we live and the quality of our lives. For them, faith was never where your head could take you; it was where your feet could take you when your trust and confidence in God were secure. Faith was never relegated to spiritual or other-worldly meditations, but rooted and expressed in the flesh and blood moments of daily life.
And only there.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

The Hebrew word aman means to believe and have faith, but only through trust: it means to support, nourish, confirm, make lasting. Related to aman is emet, which means truth, but only through firmness, sureness, reliability--and emunah, faithfulness as in constancy, steadfastness, stability. Our word amen comes directly from aman--to affirm what we believe is trustworthy, reliable, solid, lasting. Scriptural faith has nothing to do with thought and everything to do with consistent, confident action.

We think that to have faith is to have no doubt, as if faith and doubt are polar opposites. We think that to have courage is to have no fear, as if courage and fear are opposites. But faith and doubt are no more opposites than courage and fear. Courage is the ability to act in the presence of fear--without fear, there is no courage. And faith is the ability to act in the presence of doubt--without doubt, there is no faith. When we shift our faith from our heads to our feet, the opposite of faith is no longer doubt, but paralysis--the inability to move our feet. When we can move out in life as if certain things are true, even when evidence is missing; when we can live life as if all is well even when evidence is contrary; when we can look past the doubtful, fearful thoughts in our heads to see our feet still moving, carrying us toward the land God has promised, then we can place our feet in the circle beside those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

[06.01.09]




Last Sunday after our gathering, as we were all milling about afterglowing, our little guy Brennan discovered the joys of a live microphone and began doing what he does best--talking. But what came out--just audible above the recorded music--silenced the knots of conversation around the room as we were all drawn one by one to that little voice. It didn't make sense in the normal sense of that word...it wasn't logical or sequential or even grammatical, but it created its own logic as it went along. And we could all read between the lines of a four year old mind struggling to put internal knowings into newfound language: "Love...I have my family, that's for real...I have all my friends and that's how I have my conversation...you are all, and thank you for that...living for Jesus...and now that you are all alive, that's how the cross is going to...and that's how you know it's good to have love--Jesus." At that point he walked off the stage, but then came running back a few seconds later to say, "Amen."


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

When our children speak, we smile and nod and think "how cute" or "how touching," even as we remain separated from and untouched by them--as if they're little aliens having nothing in common with our world of adults. Yet Jesus quotes the psalmist to tell us that "out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have perfected praise." Brennan's prayer was an unfiltered look at the deepest experiences of his life. He knows what's important; he knows what brings him life and safety, but he barely has language enough to express them. He opens his mouth and out come words he's been taught...love, family, friends, Jesus...and he strings them together with...real, conversation, alive, thank you, and amen. He knows these sounds point to something central, but doesn't know enough to think through grammar and syntax and logic. He just opens his mouth in a room full of people and unselfconsciously speaks, and in that speaking, praise is perfected, made complete. We think it's cute, but of course much more is expected of us as adults--that we have to make sense, have to truly articulate our faith and our praise to make them real.

The moment we begin to understand that we can never make sense of faith or articulate our praise; that thoughts and words can ever do more than point in the general direction of what's really important; that no matter how old we get, we can never do better than Brennan or any child in expressing the inexpressible...in that moment of just going for it, something happens: our faith and our praise become perfect.

Here for audio of Brennan's prayer.
[05.22.09]



Haven't been feeling particularly blessed last few days. It happens. Tempted to pray for God's blessing as always when feeling disconnected, uneasy, overwhelmed. Seems we're always asking for God's blessing to change things we don't like or to stave off things we don't want. We bless hospitals and houses, babies and midterm exams--we bless our food before we eat it as if to transfer God's holiness and goodness to something that doesn't already have it. But Jesus and his followers never understood blessings this way. To ancient Jews, when God made the heavens and earth, he looked and saw that they were good...you can look it up in Genesis 1. Over and over, each and everything he saw was good--couldn't be otherwise, it was part of him. To Jews, blessings don't transfer holiness, they are the permission or authority to partake in the abundance, the goodness, that is already present all around us. When a Hebrew father gave his eldest son his blessing, it meant he now had the authority to partake of his entire estate.

Does your faith life make you feel like this?

We bless our food before we eat it. Jews say their blessings after they eat. A superficial difference? Profound. To bless before in order to make something pure or holy as opposed to blessing after as thanks for participation in abundance is as different as night and day. A glass half empty or half full. Is the world a dark and evil place awaiting God's bulldozers in the last days to come scrape it clean and start over? Or is it a place of light and life and abundance at which right now we are all being called to table? In trying to placate his eldest son, the father of the prodigal says, "You are always with me, and everything I have is yours." What part of everything don't we understand? How can we ever get more than the everything, the allness, we already have? All good, all God...all blessing that's ever going to be done has already and always been completed from the very beginning.

To find a stump of carrot in an open field is a real blessing. Are we trying to bless it again?
Or simply allowing ourselves the blessing of enjoying the inconceivable blessing already in hand?

[05.15.09]



Last Saturday I was honored to be asked to officiate the wedding of the daughter of a good friend of mine. Amid the usual pre-wedding chaos of last minute setup, groom waiting impatiently for his best man to arrive (late because he was actually at a store buying a pair of black shoes to go with his suit--I'm not making this stuff up--nice shoes, though), bridesmaids primping and attending the bride in her beautiful dress, photographer flashing in all directions...a little girl, about 4 years old caught my eye. Gorgeous little thing with huge dark eyes and long dark hair. Turned out to be the flower girl named Madeline who wasn't going to throw petals but carry a bunch, she told me. At the climax of the ceremony with bride and groom facing each other in front of me, I ask if they have their rings. And in that breathless moment when you could hear a pin drop as the best man in his new shoes and the maid of honor are producing the bands and giving them to the almost new couple, a little flower girl voice pipes up at full volume, "I want a ring too!"

It takes a while to recover from that kind of laughter.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Now I get to thinking that we have and always will continue to to draw on Jesus' parallels between children and Kingdom, but sometimes a moment just rises up and slaps you in the face with its simplicity and unselfconscious exuberance. We all want rings too, don't we? We all want to be brides and grooms in beautiful clothes at the center of attention in that breathless moment before launching into new lives and new love. We all want rings too--but how many of us will just blurt it out in front of a big room full of people? Why is it only the four year olds among us who have the audacity to announce their hearts' desires and fully extend toward them. It's not so much about not caring what people may think as much as not even being aware that anyone is watching or listening at all as we move fully extended toward life and love and all the things that really matter. It's about being so immersed in the dance that nothing but I and Thou and the Music exist as we reach, with everything that is in us,
for new life--creating beautiful lines of expression in the process.

[05.06.09]



Ignorance or experience? When you look at an image like this you have to wonder. How does a person stand calmly in a doorway when the end of all things is apparently approaching from behind? Was this a rogue wave of which the lighthouse keeper had no knowledge, or had he weathered dozens of storms and knew exactly the tolerances of his tower? Either way, he probably got really wet in the next frame. Ignorance or experience...it's said that ignorance is bliss--why not experience?


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

When Mother Teresa was asked by someone to pray that he would find clarity, she refused. When the questioner asked why, she replied that "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of." When he commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity, what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God." >From the outside in, trust looks like clarity because someone who really trusts can calmly stand in the doorway of a wave-besieged lighthouse when all others are running and screaming. >From the inside out, the person who trusts has no more clarity than we've got, but their trust tells them that somehow everything will be just fine--or more to the point: everything is fine. We spend our lives looking for certainty in an uncertain age. But every age is uncertain, because life is uncertain. Until we truly experience the certainty of God, we'll be forever scanning the horizon for waves and ducking for cover at each swell. Or we'll move to Idaho and dig a bunker.

Ignorance [unknowing] is better than clarity if at least it gives us bliss.
But trust [experience of the certainty of God] is the only thing that takes us home.

[04.30.09]



I love this image. The light is warm and soft, the materials are rich and textured, and both water and feet look clean and inviting... But as nice as this image is, it depicts a ritual act--a symbol based on real action--not the real act itself. It's only the real act that can convey the impact and meaning of Jesus' example. Washing a person's feet in 1st century Judea was a dirty, disgusting task reserved only for the lowest of slaves, a humiliating task carried out by inferiors to superiors. Washing a person's feet in that culture would be more akin to us washing someone who had soiled themselves in our culture. Knowing this, Peter's initial refusal is much more understandable, his outrage more pointed--that his master, messiah, and king should do this to him, for him. But without it, Jesus says, he would "have no part with" himself.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

We have a way of insulating ourselves from inconvenient or uncomfortable facts. Leaning back into the safety of ritual acts or symbolic images is like turning down the volume on a song we don't like, walking quickly past a homeless person while avoiding eye contact. Jesus is real. Stark. Uncompromising. Full blast. He is telling us that our world is upside down. We idolize and strive for all the wrong things. We see value in glittering valuelessness and walk right past incomprehensible, but unglittering riches. Our God, the creator of heaven and earth, is a God who washes our feet, occupies a station in our lives that we can't and don't even respect, let alone emulate. Our God is a God who serves us. And our God is a God we will walk right past on our way to the lights, cameras, and action of what we believe and expect true power and value to be. It's blasphemous, outrageous, and world-bending to see God in this way, but if Jesus and the Father are one, then what other conclusion is there? Until we can learn to see through God's eyes, we will "have no part with him..." that is, we will never experience the infinite extent of the love by which we are loved, and we'll never feel safe enough to show another the extent of the love that covers them as well.

[04.21.09]



Last Sunday, Easter Sunday, we talked about why we continue to "seek the living among the dead" and about the limitations of our own beliefs and expectations that keep us looking for God's new life in all the wrong places--why we, along with the first followers of Jesus, have such a hard time recognizing the risen Lord when he presents himself. Then we took time to consider where new life, regeneration, vitality, and energy come from in our lives, and we wrote those down on a common poster. The poster is here, and some of the wonderful, colorful, and really touching responses are here too--reminders of the real directions in which to look for life and the living, risen Lord.

What brings new life to our lives? :: my family who once was broken and now is whole! :: my grandchildren and their smiles :: butterfly kisses :: my parents and their unfailing love :: living in the moment :: music--and for not knowing what tomorrow will bring :: my husband's strength to fight his addiction and embrace his family :: knowing God will never let go :: my son's baptism and God's never ending love :: seeing our daughters serving God :: the here, the now--love you, Lord :: the comfort of knowing you're there :: my church :: my children's smiles :: my new life with God in the center :: sunsets :: leading a smoke-free life by God's grace and forgiveness :: creative expression :: living in the moment :: medical procedures that are giving me hope of healing :: giggles :: family old and new :: the ocean :: my son and soon to be wife and love for God :: starting over :: the fellowship of theeffect and my children's love :: dear Lord, you are the reason for the joy in my life.

[04.16.09]



And so we are already come to Holy Thursday--Maundy Thursday. On this day the church has traditionally celebrated the events of the last supper---the washing of the disciples' feet, communion, and the giving of the "new commandment"--as well as the agony and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. The new commandment that Jesus gave us, "to love one another as I have loved you," gives Maundy Thursday its name, since new commandment in Latin is "mandatum novum," and mandatum comes through Old English to us as "maundy."


A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
[John 13:34]

This Thursday as we prepare for Good Friday and Easter Sunday, I want to keep this new commandment in the fore of my mind and heart--to continue to learn to love anyone and everyone in my path as I have been loved by my God. And I want to continue to celebrate and emulate the life of Jesus even as we prepare to commemorate his death--the symbol and reality of the allness of his presence among us and his willingness to give everything he had to everyone and anyone near.

[04.09.09]



I just love this image. Riveted my attention first time I saw it. My first thought was: what in the world is that? Oh, ok, now I get it. Second thought: what contortions did everyone have to bend into to get their hands in those positions... Third thought: there just seems to be no end to what we can do with our hands. It amazes me to think of the limitless sets of skills we can acquire--the endless training we can give our hands: from coaxing music out of an instrument to building a skyscraper, from drawing an image on paper to signing a language in the air, from giving a healing massage to delivering a fatal martial blow to simply waving hello or goodbye our hands are the very extension of our desire and purpose in life. They reveal who we really are--much more than do our words.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Just the night before last a young man asked me how he could really know for sure that God existed and cared about him. Now there's a big question. And though he was looking for an answer in words and ideas, the real answer lies not in our heads but in our hands. In the language Jesus spoke, to know is yida. Unexpectedly, the roots of the word yida form the word for "hand." To know in Hebrew/Aramaic is not to hold an idea in our heads, but to hold its reality in our hands. True knowing is to know the way a carpenter knows the feel and weight of his tools, the way a musician knows her instrument when it falls naturally into her grasp, the way a lover knows the curves of his beloved's face. When Adam knew Eve, they had a son together--now that's knowing. To know for sure that God is real and cares about us is to handle him, experience him, live with his presence day in and out. There is not a thought or concept in heaven or earth that can take us where our hands, as the extensions of our desire, will take us by simply living well the moments of our lives.

[04.01.09]



Someone recently told me that he needed excitement in his life, that there was nothing to look forward to. Someone else was telling me that she was completely dry, and the work she used to love was uninspiring and dead to her, that the coworkers and clients she still loved deserved more and better than she could deliver. I could certainly understand. I'm sure we've all been there, done that: feeling the edges of burnout or ennui crowding into the corners of our eyes, threatening hostile take over. Truth is, regardless of how we view them, our lives are made of moments. Nothing more. Just a string of moments from birth to death, or better, a single moment constantly changing in its detail and composition. And most of those moments, or the details of that one moment are usually pretty ordinary, commonplace--what we'd call boring from a certain point of view.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

We keep looking for our moments to inspire us, to fill us from the outside with the meaning we can't find on the inside. But this moment right now, like an island, is self-contained--if we don't bring meaning here, we won't find it here. The circumstances of our moments have no intrinsic meaning. Everything in life is equally meaningless--or meaningful--depending on what we bring to the party. If we spend our moments waiting for or trying to manufacture those rare peak, "exciting" moments, then our lives become flyover country, like the plains of Nebraska we fly over to get to the coasts...and all those precious moments viewed from 30,000 feet appears flat and dimensionless. But we are all just a moment away from transformation. And when we can simply revel in the warm updraft from a grate ballooning our skirts, when we can come back down to earth and fill our moments with our presence, our moments will be full of Presence--exciting and meaningful...and not a moment before.

[03.26.09]



My wife and I and our two boys were driving somewhere I forget--the destination as always being much less important than the driving together in a comfortable, dedicated space. Brennan, our four year old had brought his then favorite stuffed playmate with him--it changes every week or so--and made a huge fuss about making sure Elmo had his seat belt on. When he finally got Sean, our twelve year old to help buckle him up, the car quieted down nicely. So I turn around to see this little red guy relaxed and belted and apparently reading along in Sean's book, and as the smile spread across my face two things struck me: first, I had to get a picture...which took several stoplights...and secondly, how important the small things are...


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Mother Teresa said that "In this life, we cannot do great things, we can only do small things with great love." We spend a lot of time looking for great things--great things to do that will make great differences for the greatest number of people over the greatest length of time. But great things can be seductive for all the wrong reasons. When people really are writers, they write. Artists draw. Golfers golf. Fish swim. Can't keep them from it; it's who they are. They may dream of the big time, but in the meantime, they'll draw or write on napkins if they have to and every hallway is a fairway. As people of faith, sometimes we forget that the quality of our love is not based on the greatness of the result, but simply on the irresistible desire to connect. If we're really people of faith, we're never caught waiting for a great thing; you can't keep us from connecting in every tiny detail of life. From an encouraging word to a smile or a hand on a shoulder at just the right moment, it's about caring enough, paying attention enough to know when and how. And in that moment, the smallest thing becomes great--even if it's just belting in Elmo for a concerned four year old.

[03.18.09]



My son just came in the door from trying to fly a new kite, but there wasn't really enough wind to launch properly. There's something about wind, breath, moving air that evokes life and freedom and exhilaration--it blows new vitality into our faces and threatens to lift us right off our feet. In Jesus' language there was just one word for wind, breath, and spirit--ruha. Wherever you find those words in the Gospels, they mean all three at the same time. So when we breathe the wind, we are breathing God's dynamic spirit that is always in motion--and through that motion, though it can't be seen, its effect is as visible and stirring as the wind on a flag or a beach towel.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

I remember a fitness expert once saying that in aerobic exercises, you don't have to worry about inhaling--that will take care of itself; the body does that on its own. All you have to think about is exhaling fully, and inhaling will happen all by itself. Most of us don't exhale completely, allow the lungs to really empty out so we can take a deep new breath that will give us the oxygen and life we need to carry on. We are very concerned about breathing in God's spirit, filling ourselves with knowledge and right action and attitude, but if we could stop worrying so much about the breathing in--if we just focus on breathing out fully, emptying ourselves of everything we've accumulated: unlearning, letting go, clearing space within--our very next breath will automatically occur...bringing God's life and love into the deepest places that were simply never uncovered before.

[03.12.09]



This shot riveted my attention. I'd never seen clouds like this before...like mid-air twisters or alien mother ships--or as if the sky were the surface of water in a sink viewed from below as the water whirlpools down the drain. Well, in fact, they are lenticular clouds that form regularly around the peak of Mr. Ranier when conditions are such that moist updrafts cool and condense into these characteristic formations. So there it is: a detailed, scientific explanation that is at once perfectly accurate and perfectly misses the point. It's not a scientific understanding that causes people to stop their cars on the highways and stare into the sky like children at a toy store window.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Our four year old son, Brennan, was playing with a stick, dangling it off the edge of his chair and announced that he was fishing. My wife said, "Why don't you ask your father to take you fishing?" He looked at her quickly with a puzzled expression and simply said, "I am fishing." Children don't necessarily distinguish between their imaginings and their waking life. As adults, we spend nearly all our time making such distinctions and call it virtue. Children can enter into their imaginings and experience them so fully that they become real. As adults, we bullet through reality so quickly we often don't experience it at all. If we can't look up into the incredible beauty of a lenticular cloud and see the finger of God stirring our morning coffee, then we have impoverished ourselves and moved our mailbox out of Kingdom. Perhaps the spiritual journey is nothing more than finding God in each moment by finding that free child within--the one we used to be when every stick and every chair was an adventure and clouds were rabbits or elephants or anything other than water vapor.

[03.05.09]



If this face doesn't make you smile right now, then something's really wrong. There was a line I remember from a movie I forget that went, "If it's bad new, I generally do believe it." I think that sums up much of our human condition. We are conditioned to believe bad news and minimize or rationalize away the good. Either we don't think we deserve it, or we're afraid it won't last. And whether we believe we've blown too many chances or taken too few risks or good guys finish last or bad guys are never blessed, we often put up impenetrable force fields between us and the possibility of simply sitting in a field and letting the breeze blow our ears over our heads.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Difficult times do occur, and tragedies come without warning, but most often the distance between us and that field is a simple willingness to be there, present in whatever field we find ourselves. God is everywhere, but everywhere is just one place--this place, right here, right now. When we hurt, when the moment hurts, we run from the pain and ironically from the only source of comfort we will ever know. To lean into the moment, to be present even to difficult circumstances is to also be present to God's spirit, the Way through the difficulty. When you find yourself rehearsing the same dark thoughts and feeling the same dark feelings, at the moment you become aware of them, take a breath and lean in--really look into someone's eyes and hear them, really see the scenery around you, feel the task at hand, immerse yourself in each breath, and let God blow your ears around. Take just a moment's vacation from your bad news, so you can begin to believe the good. Repeat as often as necessary.

[02.27.09]



Last Sunday we talked about what it means to be "entirely ready" to allow God to become a real part of our lives--to change our lives in ways we found impossible on our own. I told the story of my skydiving adventure--when eight hours of training on the ground hearing about all the things that could go wrong and all the things I needed to do and equipment I needed to trust, boiled down to one breathless moment gripping the edge of an open door and staring down two and half miles of nothing but air. At that moment, whether to jump amounted to a mere tipping of the scales toward trust...toward everyone who was telling me that I could survive this and away from the fear that was, after all, supposed to be part of the fun.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

We spend so much time trying to make a certainty out of life. To find the sure thing, to remove risk, to insure against the risk we can't remove. And yet, at the same time we live for the moments that make our hearts pound and create breathless anticipation: roller coasters and love affairs; extreme sports, gambling, and action films; fast cars, dizzying heights, impossibly beautiful sights... If we could just connect the dots and realize that without the element of the unknown, without risk, without a deadline, life is dull and ultimately not much worth living. But the difference between invigorating risk (whether in a love relationship or a zip line jump) and paralyzing fear, is whether we really trust we can survive in the end. Until we know who our God is, that we are loved with a love that can't be lost because it also can't be gained, then life is just too scary to be fully lived. If we don't really believe that we will survive this most amazing thrill ride ever invented, that our Father will be smiling and waving and waiting to take us home when the car comes to an easy stop, then we'll never breathe from our heels and smile from our ears and learn to simply enjoy the ride.

[02.17.09]



I was talking to a friend last week who was really in distress, having a truly difficult time, and she was holding on to a passage of scripture that promised that God would never give us more than we can handle. Trouble is, when you're feeling completely at the end of yourself, how do you know how much more you can handle? How much longer you can hold out, hold on? And how do you trust a God who gives you this kind of trouble anyway? If he's the one giving you the grief, can you really trust him not to give too much?


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Does God do this to us? Give us hardships to test us, watching us like a white-coated scientist with a clipboard, making notes... Paraphrased as my friend did above, we miss the point of I Corinthians 10:13, which reads, "No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it." Reading carefully, God isn't in the business of handing out hardship--the test, all trials are only what are common to all of us as human beings--they come with the skin suit. But the trials that life brings, that we bring to ourselves and each other, aren't beyond what we can bear because God is always waiting in the midst to show the way out, over, under, through, around... In those most difficult times, if we can keep just enough spiritual balance to remember to lean into the moment--not run from it--God's steadying hand can and will come from the most unexpected places.

[02.13.09]



Last Sunday we talked about the Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who under the most difficult of conditions remained not only steadfast in his own faith, but found the presence of God and therefore beauty even amid the horrors of the darkest days of the second World War. He was a light and a comfort to his people and helped them live rich and meaningful lives despite their hardships. He repeatedly refused offers of escape from the Nazi imposed ghetto and concentration camps in order to remain with his people and was eventually shot to death by camp guards.


Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943)

When we look at his picture, we see someone who seems so alien to us--at once ancient and culturally incomprehensible. But surface differences aside, he represents the epitome of a spiritual leader, pastor, rabbi, priest: a shepherd who wouldn't leave his sheep even in the face of personal danger, a follower who continued to see the presence of God regardless of circumstances. For any of us desiring to truly follow our God and help others follow as well, Shapira is not alien at all, but as close as our next breath. There is so much more that connects than separates us when we begin to understand that our circumstances don't dictate our awareness of God's presence--our awareness of God's presence in each moment dictates our perception of circumstances.

[02.06.09]



Someone gave me a greeting card years ago with this image on the cover. I've had it on my desk ever since--and that's about three desks now...it moves with me wherever I go. It's called First Snow in Kazan and was shot in 1970 in what was then the Soviet Union. Every time I look at this image and see those two little faces I think of two things...that children are children wherever and whenever they are--the children with whom Jesus played looked just like these children and these children look just like ours. And secondly, that these faces are exactly what Jesus meant by Kingdom.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

These children would be in their early 40s by now. I wonder if they still have these smiles? Did they jump and squeal and run for the door at the sight of the first snows this winter? Did they turn their faces up and greet each flake landing on their cheeks and tongue? Did you? Did I? The difference between these faces and ours may be the difference between Kingdom and not Kingdom. We can enter Kingdom--be Kingdom--anytime we want...anytime we can lose ourselves in a first snow.

[02.03.09]



I wonder if this is how God sees us? We all need something--all the time. It's part of being human, and that need, if focused in the right way, can be a beautiful thing as it directs us back to our Source.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

I arrived at theeffect one morning last week thinking that it would be dark and quiet as I prepared for a counseling session, but I forgot that our women's AA meeting was just ending at that time, and the courtyard and main room were full of life and action and laughter. I loved it. As I talked with some of the women, more people showed up, and throughout the day there was nonstop activity. For many of us, our needs are directing us toward each other and our little community, and from there to our God. Too often I see my needs as a chore or an annoyance or even a weakness. I'm realizing now that God sees them as a way for us to connect--humbling maybe, but beautiful--if we choose to see them that way as well.

[01.26.09]



Marian found this image--and of course I immediately gravitated toward it even though as Marian will tell you I'm not a dancer...much to her dismay. But even though you and I may not be dancing on the outside, we can still be dancing on the inside if our universe has become a friendly place. Our universe becomes friendly when we become convinced that everything will be alright regardless of the problems we face now--that wrongs will be righted and we will be cared for--that God's fingerprints are all over each of our moments. I hope you are realizing a bit of God's presence right now in this moment looking at this image of sheer exuberance and abandon.


Does your faith life make you feel like this?

Maybe this is what Kingdom looks like...beautiful, fluid, and little goofy.

[01.15.09]



I love the rain--always feels clean and safe somehow to me. Driving around today, I noticed the drops forming on the sun/rain roof of our car and thought of our effect drop of course. It was a kingdom moment for me laying across the front bucket seats with a camera watching the drops fall and gather, grow bigger and then run off again--waiting for the best moment to shoot through the glass. Thinking of you all the whole time.


effect drops all over the sun/rain roof of our car...

We're a lot like this in our faith communities: falling together and gathering for a time--growing collectively and personally through our time together, then running off again in new directions. It's the way of life. Sometimes it hurts, but I hope to make better friends with it and learn to enjoy every drop.

[12.17.08]



Slowly catching up on the backlog of stuff, so here's a couple more message available on the web. Also, thanks to my friend George Jenkins who sent this interesting shot that got me thinking...


Sometimes the difference between possible and impossible is just a matter of perspective.

We're saying goodbye to our good friend Grant Bruscoe who's going home to Washington state this Friday. Grant has been with us at theeffect most of this year, and he goes home to pick up the threads of his life and family relationships there. We prayed with and for him last night at our Tuesday night gathering and many tears were shed. But our hearts go with him and we trust and pray that the connection he found with God and each of us goes with him as well to strengthen and brighten every moment.

[11.26.08]



We've been talking about bliss and God's will and living with abandon and meaning and purpose, so thanks to RB for sending this pic--it was evocative for me of what we've been discussing and how hard it is sometimes to be a green tree in a sea of lavender. Also, Ingrid Paulicivic sent the attached little video clip that was an amazing testimony to what is possible when someone born without arms follows his bliss--even when his bliss is to play the guitar...take a look.


Following your bliss means being whatever color you really are regardless of what you see around you.

[11.19.08]