Feline Mutiny

This may sound a little strange, but if you are reading it, you probably know me, and as such are used to me being strange. So here goes. I only ever feed my cats chicken or fish cat food. I’m a vegetarian, and they are not, but I still have a thing about not wanting to feed them mammals.

See, I told you it was strange.

Anyway, I accidentally bought beef cat food this week. I didn’t notice until I’d already opened the can. By that time, they were circling me with looks that said they were going to eat me if I didn’t hand over the contents of the can. So I set it out, apologizing to them for getting the wrong food.

And guess what? They ate it. Voraciously. They acted like they’d never known anything so good could exist. The little traitors.

Because I practice metablogging (my blog knows it is a blog), this is the part where I have to comment on the fact that I’ve gotten to the part where I need a point.

So here’s my point.

It’s very easy to forget where the boundaries between ourselves and others begin and end. It’s very easy to forget where we’ve imposed our own values, ideals, or preferences on others. It’s very easy to assume we know what those we love like or want or care about. Then when they don’t fall in line with what we expect, we feel betrayed. We aren’t betrayed. We just feel that way because that is human nature. We’re all little control freaks at heart, whether we mean to be or not.

I have four more cans of beef cat food. I’m thinking about donating them to the Humane Society so I can get right back to pretending my little traitors don’t really care to partake of mammal-feasting.

We Got Blogged!

I must say I'm proud to have been a part of this.

Nietzsche is Dead

I realize the old "Nietzsche is Dead" line is pretty used up, but hey...it's hard to resist.

I was thinking today about Nietzsche and the old Apollonian and Dionysian dichotamy he talked about regarding the Dead Greek Guys and Western Civilization and all that, and my understanding of this is that we tend to historically catagorize eras as being one or the other. Western history is a series of "enlightments" always followed by a kind of "romantic" rebellion against reason as the primary motivating force for behavior and culture and life as we know it.

The way I see our own age is that we are living through a societal identity crisis. To pay my little bit of homage to the Dead Greek Guys, we have very powerful impulses attempting to shape our cultural "ethos" through both "logos" and "pathos" at the same time. We are living through a time that is both an "age of reason" and an "age of romanticism" simultaneously with little sense of harmony between the two. Politically, due to wars and terrorism and rapid change, we lean more to being driven by emotion than logic. Yet, we are also in a time of "media minutiae" in which it's nearly impossible to hold anyone or anything up as heroic, and we have a great desire for ever increasing amounts of information in order to feed our desire for ever increasing claims to rational decision making. But what we are inundated with in the end is not real information. It's merely noise or often enough misinformation, shadows flickering on the walls of the cave. Thus, our loyalties are divided, not so much by what we believe in and what we hold dear, but by how much we feel cheated by the sea of hollow and unreliable factors through which we make both our rational and emotional choices.

Maybe people in every age have felt the same. Maybe we're just more aware of it due to mass communication and transportation. And Mr. Plato, what if the cave is a happy place? What if the shadows are so very entertaining?

This is the part where I should have a concluding thought, but I don't. I'm just taking up blog space to write this down before I forget that I got this far in my current line of thought (read "procrastination").

Embrace the chaos. It's alright. And it's already embraced you.

God Has Pity on the Kindergarten Children

by Yehuda Amichai

God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.

Guilty Pleasure

I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work today. I had nothing in particular in mind. I just knew I needed food, and I knew I didn't have time to put any thought or effort into it. Really, I should have known better. I should have stopped at Wendy's for a salad. Instead, I went to the grocery store and bought a box of ice cream bars, a bag of frozen french fries, and a pack of cheese. Carbohydrates R us.

My ability to discipline myself seems to work in direct inverse proportion to the amount of stress I'm under. I'm using up all of my energy right now to make myself grade research papers. I have no inner resources left to devote to avoiding ice cream.

It's my firm belief that we're entirely too hard on ourselves when we think we have to always avoid junking up our bodies.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll exercise and eat right tomorrow. Today I'm indulging my need for mental fortitude with Snickers ice cream.

The Numbers

April 15, 2006--As Christians around the world celebrate Easter, 83% of Americans believe that the person known to history as Jesus Christ actually walked the earth. A Rasmussen Reports holiday survey found that 6% disagree.

The survey also found that 78% believe Jesus "was the Son of God who came to earth to die for our sins."

Seventy-five percent (75%) believe the central claim of the Easter celebration, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Fourteen percent (14%) say the Resurrection did not happen.

African-Americans are somewhat more likely to believe these claims about Christ than other Americans. Those who earn more than $100,000 a year are a bit less likely to believe. There is very little difference on these questions by age.

Twenty percent (20%) of Americans say that they are Evangelical Christians. Another 47% claim some other Christian affiliation.

Thirty-six percent (36%) say they attend some form of religious services every week, a percentage that increases with age.

From RasmussenReports.com

I keep hearing that we live in a post-Christian society, but these numbers don't appear post-Christian to me. What they say is we live in a post-Church society. If 78% of Americans believe Jesus died for our sins, and only 36% regularly attend Christian services, what has lost currency is the institution of the church, not the faith.

Hmmm...

Predictable Disillusionment

Phillip read this excerpt from an ESPN article by Chuck Klosterman today in church. It really did strike me as profound enough that I rushed right home and looked it up. I'm posting it now before I forget where I found it.

In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election, and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act like that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings, and everybody cried for two months. And then Enron went bankrupt, and the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and "The Simple Life" premiered, and gasoline became unaffordable, and our Olympic basketball team lost to Puerto Rico, and we reelected the same president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and three Oscars for an especially bad movie called "Crash."

Things, as they say, have been better.

I'm only 33 years old, so I'll concede that my life experience is limited. But the past five years have been an especially depressing stretch to be an American, and I don't think many people of any age would disagree with that sentiment (except for maybe Kelly Clarkson ... things seem to be working out OK for her). If it's the era of anything, it's the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually -- and then suddenly -- hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn't been paying attention to begin with.

The question then for a Sunday morning audience is how do we exist as people of faith in an "Era of Predictable Disillusionment"? How do we stand as witnesses to something we hold as truth with a big T in a world conditioned to disbelief and disillusionment? What do we do with our hope that others will get what we're getting out of belief?

Phillip, because he was doing the preaching and because we had all dragged ourselves out on a Sunday morning to hear him say something to make us feel better, would most predictably have to follow these questions up with something about Jesus and something about the Holy Spirit. He did that, of course, but I wasn't really paying attention by then being still preoccupied with "Predictable Disillusionment." And he's right, of course, in whatever it was he said about Jesus and the Holy Spirit while I wasn't listening. That has to be the answer to people of faith in this era, however we want to label it. We've got nothing else. The questions remain enormous. There's no logical evidence that in an us v. them scenario we even stand a chance. There's no logical evidence that in a humanity v. postmodern society scenario humanity even stands a chance.

It's just sad, and it's overwhelming, and I, along with (I suspect) most Christians, am just as vulnerable to disillusionment as anyone else.

At some point this year I saw a sign in front of a church that said, "Instead of telling your God how big your storm is, try telling your storm how big your God is." It's a rip off from one of those popular Christian motivation books, but since I can't remember which one I may have been better off not to even mention that part. :)

It's true that concentrating on your source of hope rather than on your problem is the first step to overcoming any obstacle. I believe that with everything in me.

And here's where I find hope--People untimately want something to believe in. They want something they can trust. They want faith, hope, and love to exist in large and real ways in their lives. They may not know that's what they want, and they may not immediately see how they can have something real in their lives that isn't itself just another illusion and therefore another risk of disillusionment, but in their hearts they want to believe in something. That's just how people are built.

People over 17 eat at McDonald's only because it's cheap and convenient, not because they like it. People feed on steady diets of negativity, despair, disdain and disbelief because they are easy and pervasive, not because they're enjoyable.

All of this is just to say that though I do not have answers I did hear enough of what I wasn't listening to this morning to agree and to hold out some hope that with the help of Jesus and the Holy Spirit there is a way to make a difference in this confused and skeptical world of ours.

And all God's people said Amen.

Praise

“More than any other church I’ve known, this one collectively understands what the red words mean.”

This was said in the car yesterday on the way down to Pearlington, MS where a group from UBC was going to work on a house that had been destroyed by Katrina.

I don’t think praise comes any higher than that.

Later, Judy, a woman with our group, said to Cecil, the owner of the house, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

He replied, “I’ve had so many blessings in my life that if I never get another one I’ve had my share.”

I don’t think attitude comes any better than that.

If you’ve been wondering whether you should go down to the coast and help out, let me give you one more reason to do it. Go for the people you’ll have the privilege to get to know.

I am continually amazed by how things work out so that every time I go on a Katrina work day, there is something for me to do. Honestly, no one could have less know-how or less of an eye for what needs doing than me. A neighbor asked me just the other day if I needed help changing the bulbs in my flood lights because I’d left them burned out for so long. I’m really that bad.

At some point during the day yesterday, one of the women with the group said, “Isn’t this amazing? Anyone can build a house.”

That’s the way I feel every trip. If I can do this, anyone can. And it is amazing.

Yesterday, I learned to mud sheetrock. At least, I mudded a lot of sheetrock whether I’d learned to do it or not. I also mudded myself, the floor, and a couple of friends and loved every minute of it.

It was a good day. We all left feeling good about what we were able to accomplish despite the fact that most of us would not be anyone’s “first pick” for a construction team. That feeling of accomplishment leaves me wanting to say once again:

1. If you show up to work for Jesus with nothing more than a willing heart, there will be something you can do.
2. The other people who show up to work for Jesus are da bomb.

Reasons, Seasons

I don't normally like to perpetuate those sappy things that go around in e-mails, probably because I have more than enough sap of my own to perpetuate without borrowing any. This one really meant something to me, though. It meant even more because it was sent to me by my brother who has had to learn about finding meaning in loss in the harshest way--through the death of his wife.


People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. When you
know which one it is, you will know what to do for that
person. When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is
usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have come to
assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance
and support, to aid you physically, emotionally or
spiritually. They may seem like a God send, and they are.
They are there for the reason you need them to be. Then,
without any wrong doing on your part or at an inconvenient
time, this person will say or do something to bring the
relationship to an end. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they
walk away. Sometimes they act up and force you to take a
stand. What we must realize is that our need has been met,
our desire fulfilled, their work is done. The prayer you sent
up has been answered and now it is time to move on. Some
people come into your life for a SEASON, because your turn
has come to share, grow or learn. They bring you an
experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you
something you have never done. They usually give you an
unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it, it is real. But only for
a season. LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons,
things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional
foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person
and put what you have learned to use in all other
relationships and areas of your life. It is said that love is
blind but friendship is CLAIRVOYANT! Thank you for being a
part of my life, whether you are a reason, a season, or a lifetime!

Exhaustion. Sets. In.

I'm too tired to even procrastinate. I'm too burned out to care enough not to care. Like my friend said a few days ago, "I feel like a trapped bee." I just keep buzzing around in a frantic effort to merely keep up, but I can't seem to accomplish anything for all the buzzing around.

I look around me at work, and everyone seems tired. At church, even the pastor is tired. Who knew Easter was such a big drain?

Another friend pointed out that we always expect December and the Christmas holidays to be very tiring and very stressful, so we are somewhat prepared for it. But we forget every year that April is just as stressful, so we let it slip up on us, and then we go around acting all offended by it. I guess T.S. Eliot really knew what he was talking about when he called April the cruelest month.

Looks like we're all in need of a spiritual/emotional/physical/mental pick-me-up. No wonder this is when people used to go on prilgrimages. Everyone needs a sloughing off event at least once a year.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to quit buzzing around the piles of work and clear my head enough to do something about them. I'm going to turn down the volume on the stress and go down to the coast to help out for a day. For purely selfish reasons. I'm going to go help someone else because it will make me feel better to get my mind off myself and all of my responsibilities. And the physical activity will help me overcome my mental exhaustion.

So there you have it. I'm a terrible person, but I could be much worse. :)

Let's all join hands now and sing a round of "The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow."

Or not.

There's a lesson in here somewhere. I promise. Some assembly may be required on your part, however.

Unholy Sonnet

by Mark Jarman

Breath like a house fly batters the shut mouth.
The dream begins, turns over, and goes flat.
The virus cleans the attic and heads south.
Somebody asks, "What did you mean by that?"
But nobody says, "Nothing," in response.
The body turns a last cell into cancer.
The ghost abandons all of his old haunts.
Silence becomes the question and the answer.
And then--banal epiphany--and then,
Time kick starts and the deaf brain hears a voice.
The eyes like orphans find the world again.
Day washes down the city streets with noise.
And oxygen repaints the blood bright red.
How good it is to come back from the dead!


Click here to read more of Mark Jarman's Unholy Sonnets.

Postmodern Christianity?

Clicking around here and there, I keep running across the term postmodern as applied to theology and church. I’m not quite sure what people mean by postmodern religion, and I suspect that the more I try to figure it out, the more at a loss I’ll be. I suspect its meaning is determined by who you ask and on what day.

When I think postmodern church, I picture high energy, performance based services, casual (very casual) dress, messages put forth in flashy sound bites, and an absence of any large demands on a person’s commitment in terms of time, service, or even lifestyle choices. In place of large demands would be a kind of playful hopefulness that church could provide “momentary stays against confusion” as Robert Frost once said of poetry.

For the more serious members, there’d be small group discussions in which people read Derrida and Ecclesiastes side by side making lots of notes in the margins about signifiers and grand narratives and ah, vanity of vanities.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I want from church. Honestly, if I wanted to go to Sunday School with Roland Barthes, I’d just head over to the coffee shop on Sunday mornings and have a latte with the other depressed poets. No matter what people might say, you know, nobody really wants the Author to be dead.

I don’t want a hip-hop church; neither do I want a Puritan throw-back. I just want a—dare I say it?—Jesus-centered church, one that really practices and preaches that old “love one another” routine.

Oh, well. Like it or not this is the information age, and the people who stay in the game are the people who know how to ride the new waves of knowledge, so I’ll probably try to actually find out what this postmodern Christian thing is all about and not just make it up as I go along. Maybe I’ll even give it a chance. Maybe. :)

Happy Easter!

My hands are covered with stamps that say things like, "He lives," and "Christ is risen." I'm overstuffed, maybe a little bit sun-burned, and generally feeling pretty good. It was a very nice day with the family.

I missed getting to go to my normal church today, and I mean that. I really missed it. I went to church, but it wasn't like being at home.

However, I did hear an excellent sermon from my five-year-old great-nephew. He said to his cousin, "There is a real meaning to Easter. Some people killed Jesus, and he woke up from being dead, and went to be with his Daddy. That's what Easter is really about."

Thanks, D. We all need to remember that.

Philip Pullman, Part 2

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education probably tells as much about where Pullman is coming from as anything you might find. He attacked Narnia. How thick is his dragon skin?

Douglas Adams was an atheist who worked his atheism into his stories, and he remains one of my favorites. I'm not on any kind of campaign to warn people away from atheist writers.

I'm just saying...

Parental Supervision Advised

The Doctor Is In (The Tardis)

Remember Doctor Who? Remember the Tardis? Remember Saturday afternoons of watching old BBC shows on PBS? Remember adoring the very cheap and corny special effects? Remember the celery?

Well, the Doctor is back. The Sci-Fi Channel is now running last year’s season of BBC’s latest incarnation of the longest running science fiction show ever. Much to my chagrin but not really to my surprise I’ve discovered the Brits are already seeing a different actor in the role of the Doctor. Just when I was starting to really like this one…

That’s Doctor Who.

Everything you want to know about life, the universe, and time-space continuums you can learn from the Doctor. He is a Time Lord. He is in fact the last of the Time Lords. His kind were all killed in last great time war against the Daleks. The Doctor knows everything. He’s traveled in his phone booth through the whole universe. He’s traveled as far back and as far forward in time as anyone can imagine. He is the wisdom of the ages.

But wisdom is never enough, is it? That’s what Rose is for. Rose is the Doctor’s traveling companion. She is really just a kid who tags along, but she always has lessons of her own to teach. The Doctor might know everything, but Rose is all about responding from the heart, and together the Doctor’s mind and Rose’s heart manage to conquer any adventure they encounter.

In the episode called “The Dalek,” that aired last night, the Doctor learns the importance of compassion and forgiveness when confronted with Rose’s reaction to his most serious enemy: the last remaining Dalek. The Daleks had obliterated the Time Lords in the great war that no one won. One Dalek survived. He is on Earth. He is capable of destroying all of civilization. He is genetically predisposed to mass destruction. And only the Doctor possesses any knowledge at all of how to stop him.

At first it looks as though Rose is going to aid in the destruction of her own planet by showing compassion to the Doctor’s most dreaded and deadly enemy. The Dalek tricks her into touching him, then uses her DNA to regenerate himself and grow stronger. Poor little fool, you might think. Her soft heart will get millions of her own people killed.

Ah, but there’s a glitch. Like Voldemort, who because he has no real soul, cannot tolerate being in contact with the things like love and compassion that make up Harry Potter’s soul, the Dalek ends up unable to tolerate his own existence when Rose’s DNA gives him an awareness of human emotions.

The Doctor rushes forth ready to destroy the enemy only to end up learning to pity the one creature left in the universe responsible for the worst thing that ever happened to him. Ultimately, it is Rose’s goodness that defeats the soulless violence of the Dalek. We’re reminded that compassion—the kind of real, tough compassion that means you have to have love in your heart for those who have truly damaged you and yours—is the most powerful force in the universe.

And with that, my fellow time-travelers, we are ready to climb back in the Tardis in search of another adventure.

Thought for the Day

I like today's Think Exist quote:

When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.

~Catherine Ponder

That's a pretty appropriate thought for Good Saturday.

Philip Pullman

Imagine this:

God is dead. He was killed by an archangel. No one mourns this loss, though, because when God was alive, he was a petty tyrant, the dictator of all dictators. The fallen angels were really the good guys. They subverted God’s reign of terror and gave consciousness to humans as an act of revenge.

Now imagine this as the premise for a children’s story.

Imagine that it is a children’s story coming very soon to a theater near you.

What are you waiting for, parents? Go read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series before your kids do.

I read the whole series last summer. They’re captivating. They’re as intriguing as anything you’ll ever come across. I was so engrossed I read them straight through barely stopping to eat or sleep. By the end of the series, I was more disturbed than I think I’ve ever been by a book. And I read Amityville Horror when I was only twelve.

I’m the last person to call for censorship of any book. Magic and mystery don’t offend me in the least. In fact, I am Harry Potter’s #1 fan. But I’m convinced the only reason the fundamentalists are bothering to pick on Harry Potter is because they don’t know about Pullman’s Lyra and Will. Yet. They will. Soon.

If this were just an obscure book somewhere sitting on a library shelf, I’d be prone to advise simply that it is not for young children, though it is marketed as children’s literature. Even for older children, I wouldn’t let a kid in my family read it without lots of adult discussion.

There is a motion picture in the works, however, and that means kids everywhere are going to want to read these books soon…if they haven’t already. In light of this, I feel like I should go a little bit farther out on my limb of warnings.

First, let me just say that The Golden Compass, the first book in the series, comes across as a whole lot more innocent than The Amber Spyglass, the last book. You don’t really understand the message of any of the books until you get to the end. And even I, with what I’d like to think is a very broad-minded view of literature, don’t know how to explain the message of the His Dark Materials series as anything other than anti-Christian. It is certainly anti-established-historical-institutionalized-Christian-church.

Second, let me say that before you know it, it’s going to be almost impossible to ignore these books. My advice then to parents would be to go ahead and read them now to give yourself time to decide what you think about them and how to approach them once the movie does come out. That’s really all I can say.

*Edit*

The first movie in the His Dark Materials trilogy has a 2007 release date.

Things You Want to Know But Don't Want to Ask

I wish I'd kept a list of things I've wanted to know in my life but have not wanted to ask. It could be a real service to others to go around giving unsolicited answers to these things.

Today I got an answer to one without having to ask. The baptismal waters at UBC are heated. Whew! Since I did not know this before I stood up said I wanted to be baptised at my advanced age, I can say I was willing to get cold for Jesus if I really had to. But I sure didn't want to.

My relief is downright embarrassing.

Just Do It

My body and I woke up this morning as mortal enemies. I forced it to go to Pilates last night for the first time in about six weeks. I am suffering for it today. A couple of Ibuprofen and a warm shower later, though, and I believe I may be getting the upper hand.

Not too long ago I was all excited about Pilates. I was working hard and getting in shape and feeling great and just spreading the joy around wherever I could. Come on, I said to all my friends. Follow me, and we’ll all be happy and limber together.

That was then.

Now I’m back to battling with myself just to show up and finding my stamina only in the loathing in my heart.

Every day is a new opportunity to learn, and if we didn’t have to be taught some things over and over, we’d be so egotistical as to be unbearable to one and all.

My lesson that I never seem to learn is that if I try to do too much, something always cracks apart.

Today it is literally cracking every time I move a muscle. But what’s life without a goal to work toward, hmmm?

Things You Might Not Know About Me

--I’m a vegetarian.
--I’ve been a vegetarian for more than ten years.
--I did not, as my father suspected, become a Buddhist when I became a vegetarian.
--I’ve read some stuff about Buddhism and think it is interesting.
--I’m still not a Buddhist.
--My family calls me Shaddy.
--Shaddy is shortened from Shadrack, who is well-known for not eating meat (and that little thing of surviving a fiery furnace unscathed).
--I don’t really know why my family nick-named me after Shadrack; they’ve called me Shaddy as long as I can remember.
--I became a vegetarian briefly as a child when my father sent my friend, Dumplin’ the cow, to the slaughter house.
--About ten years after that, my brother told me that my good Christian mother got me to eat meat by rewrapping freezer packages in grocery store plastic so that I would think I was eating strangers.
--A few years after my brother told me this, I became a vegetarian for the long haul.
--I think I just did it for health reasons and not really because of Dumplin’.
--I don’t care if other people are not vegetarians.
--Despite my commitment to healthy eating, for supper tonight I had a bowl of ice cream.
--Last night, I had a peanut butter cookie and a brownie.
--I have no idea what the point of this list is.
--If you read this far, you probably know at least one thing you didn’t know about me before.
--Tag. You’re it.

The Gospel of Judas

There’s been a pretty big splash this week over the Gospel of Judas. People everywhere are talking about it. And people everywhere are making no sense within my framework of The Gospel According to Sharon.

I watched the National Geographic special on T.V. last night. They kept saying things like, “This new revelation could rip apart 2000 years of church teachings on the crucifixion.” Before and after hearing the “revelation,” I thought “why?”

Then this morning I looked around online a little and saw people warning against reading the Gospel of Judas lest we be led astray by false doctrines. Too late. I had already read it, thinking “why not?”

I’m going to quote P.L. from my Bible study class as my official stance: “This doesn’t shatter me one way or the other.”

I have to admit to being ignorant on Gnosticism, and I have to admit that much of this newly recovered gospel was incomprehensible to me, but I got the gist of what everyone was making such a big deal about. The writer claims that Jesus basically conspired to bring about his own crucifixion and that Judas was the most trusted and beloved of all to have been the one to agree to sacrifice his own reputation in order to help Jesus fulfill his purpose of dying for the sins of the world.

Yeah? Okay. And?

I might not be the most accomplished New Testament scholar, and I may have day-dreamed through more sermons than I’ve heard in my life, but as luck would have it, I read John 10 pretty thoroughly just the other day. (Thanks to Randy and Kathy. Hi, Kathy!) I counted five times in that one chapter where Jesus said, “I lay down my life.”

Ergo, I’m just a little stumped on why a gospel that claims Jesus planned his own death is a threat to Bible believers. Maybe someone out there who is a New Testament scholar can explain this. In the meantime, it seems that any faith that would be torn asunder by something like this couldn’t be very strong in the first place. As for me, I’m sticking with the “I’m curious but not at all shattered” crowd.

Confession

Something was mentioned today about little, white lies, so I am feeling compelled to confess. Every Sunday morning, in front of God and the congregation of UBC, I tell a lie. I move my lips with the music, but I don't actually sing. I can't carry a tune in a bucket, but I don't want to appear to be unwilling to participate, so I just sort of fake it. Believe me. Nobody wants to hear my joyful noises even if they are unto the Lord. I'd feel a whole lot worse about this too if I didn't suspect others of doing the same thing. :)

That is all. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

A First

There was a wedding in town tonight, and I saw something that I have never even imagined happening in all my thirty-something years--a Baptist preacher dancing. Let me be the first to say it did my heart good, especially since I see no signs whatsoever that we have to take a vote or split up the church or anything over this. Thank God Almighty. We're free at last.

And the wedding was as beautiful as any I've ever seen, beautiful on many levels. I'll echo the officiating minister to sum it up: "This is the night the Lord hath made."

*Edit*

I posted this, and then I thought, "Oh, no. I can't say that." People might take it the wrong way, or they might think I'm spreading evil rumors, and then we really will have to take a vote and split the church up. I can't have that. So I have to add that I only saw him dance once with his wife and once with his daughter, and if you don't approve of dancing, maybe that wasn't even what it was at all... :)

Have I ever mentioned that I grew up in a church that considered Southern Baptists to be liberals? So some of us are free now, and some of us are still working on it. But thank God Almighty anyway.

*Late Edit*

The dancing preacher suggested that I say he's really bad at dancing, so any he might be seen doing doesn't really count. I take this to mean he hasn't had a whole lot of practice.

Jeanne and I talked about this today, and we both said that we cannot dance at all because we grew up in non-dancing homes, and we are overwhelmed with self-consciousness at the very thought of it. I can't play any kind of cards either for the same reason. (Okay, that's not really true. I can keep up with any four-year-old at Go Fish.)

Green-Eyed Calico

Last night I did my absolute most favorite thing to do on a Friday night after a long, hard week of work. I stayed home and watched T.V. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older, but more and more I really treasure that crash time.

While I was propped up in the easy chair just enjoying the fact that I wasn’t trying to accomplish a single thing, my cat jumped in my lap. Then my other cat jumped in my lap. Soon the cats were edging closer and closer to my head, each trying to be sure that she was the getting most of the attention and affection, until finally Callie was actually sitting on my face. Simple jealousy, through and through.

There is this game people play with babies in which they torture the poor dears by hugging all over their mothers. You know what happens when you hug on a baby’s mother. He becomes very agitated and does everything he can to get to his mother himself. She is his, and he just can’t take the chance of anybody else taking away some of that love and attention that belongs only to him.

It amuses us to see this in babies and pets. It’s so basic to our nature that we really adore seeing it in its most innocent form.

Yet it is also something that all of the world’s religions warn against. We know that, but somehow we also know that jealousy is more complicated than anything a mere warning can address.

1 Corinthians says love is not jealous, but Exodus says that even God is jealous, and since 1 John says “God is love,” what are we to make of that?

Then there are those places where we are told to try to make people jealous of our relationship with God. Or at least that’s the way the Bible is often interpreted in the context of living life as a testimony. “This little light of mine,” they taught us to sing at VBS, harking back to Matthew 5:16, “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, who is in heaven.”

We’re taught that if we shine for God others are going to see our lights and want some of that for themselves, and this is a good thing. It means we’re being good witnesses.

Oh, but if you’ve never been to a 75% off sale at Betty Ann’s and had the sweater you were about to try on snatched right out of your hands, you’ve never lived. For all of the good bonding and inspirational experiences jealously in its more innocent form can provide, it can show its dark underbelly quicker than almost any other human trait. It’s not called a deadly sin for nothing. Jealousy has great power to destroy relationships, jobs, families, nations, reputations, and on and on.

And it always starts out so innocently. We’re just born with it. Even animal babies are born with it.

Adorable in babies and atrocious in adults.

Those are always the toughest vices to avoid, aren’t they?

The Unredeemed

I think the tendency on a blog like this is to post things you think you at least almost have figured out, even if you know you have a long way to go to really have them work out in your life. Here’s something I don’t have figured out, though.

Are there people in this life who are not redeemable?

Sociopaths, psychopaths and the like? They appear to have no hope of ever improving as human beings. Medical science cannot help them. I’ve never seen any amount of love and kindness do any good for them or make them better people.

I believe there is such a thing as fate, but ultimately I believe it is our own free will that determines our destiny. I don’t adhere to any doctrines of pre-destination. I think everyone is called to serve our Creator.

But within my own belief system I can’t answer the question of “what about the sociopath?”

We can pray for sociopaths, but the prayers seem to be more for our own benefit than for theirs.

I’m reminded of the old saying, “God takes care of babies and fools,” but somehow I can’t reconcile the idea that the sociopath, who has done the greatest evil in the world, is just “taken care of” because he/she is not capable of being any better.

I saw somewhere once, maybe on a T-shirt, the saying, “Perhaps the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others of what not to be.” Some people really do seem to have no other purpose, yet sometimes that purpose can be pretty powerful. When we meet them we work extra hard to be better, more loving, more spiritual individuals out of pure fear that anything about us might be like them.

So this is my question that I don’t know the answer to. What about the sociopath? What about the people who appear to be unredeemable?

Alas, And Did My Savior Blog?

This guy gets my prize for the best blog title.

He's also recently chosen to attend Asbury Seminary in Kentucky. I believe that's where my father went to seminary back in the day.

God speed.

I look forward to the day I find him again at "And Did My Sovereign Wiki?"

The End Times

When I was a teenager, the little country churches hadn't quite caught on to the concept of "youth fellowship." Their idea of entertaining us was to herd us into the sanctuary and show us movies about the Rapture. Then, of course, we'd all sing "Just as I am" for about an hour while the adults in charge stared us down until we finally caved in and came to the altar. We were such sinners that we required frequent teary visits to the altar. Once, in a poem I wrote I compared it to the old ladies in the church going back to the beauty shop every week. They all got their hair done on Saturday morning, and on Sunday evening they took turns praying out loud for the youth to answer the Call and renounce their wicked ways.

After some of those Rapture movies, I remember thinking, "You can't scare me. I live in the parsonage. I haven't taken a single step in my whole life when I wasn't being watched."

It seemed like the theme of these movies was always "there will be nowhere to hide," and I often wondered why anybody thought there ever had been. Obviously, they'd never met my Granny. As I said, I'd never taken a step in my life without being watched.

Last night I learned that "my generation" is a subject of study at some sort of church growth workshop going on at my church. It seems there are whole books written on this subject that I could have told you about years ago. "My generation" is largely unchurched, and we don't respond well to traditional means of recruiting new members. The books call it a "deep seeded distrust of institutionalized religion." All it means is we're afraid if we come to your church you're going to make us watch Rapture movies and listen to the old ladies cry through an hour or two of "Just as I Am."

But here's the thing about "my generation." Here's the real story of why we left the church in droves. For all of our religious education, the church was not a place in which felt loved above all else. If you have anything at all to do with youth and church, remember that first. We left in droves, my generation and I, not because we didn't understand or believe the warnings about the states of our eternal souls, but because we simply did not feel the love. And there you have it. Selah.

For the Beauty of the Earth

Lord of all, to thee we raise

this our hymn of grateful praise.

What Saves Us

by Bruce Weigl

We are wrapped around each other in
the back of my father's car parked
in the empty lot of the high school
of our failures, the sweat on her neck
like oil. The next morning I would leave
for the war and I thought I had something
coming for that, I thought to myself
that I would not die never having
been inside her long body. I pulled
her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
inside out by the storm. I pulled
her cotton panties up as high as
she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
was in sight. We were drowning on our
tongues and I tried to tear my pants off
when she stopped so suddenly
we were surrounded only by my shuddering
and by the school bells grinding in the
empty halls. She reached to find something,
a silver crucifix on a silver
chain, the tiny savior's head hanging
and stakes through his hands and his feet.
She put it around my neck and held
me so long the black wings of my heart
were calmed. We are not always right
about what we think will save us.
I thought that dragging the angel down would
save me, but instead I carried the crucifix
in my pocket and rubbed it on my
face and lips nights the rockets roared in.

People die sometimes so near you
you feel them struggling to cross over,
the deep untangling, of one body from another.

.......

I've carried that line, "We are not always right about what we think will save us," around in my head for a long time, and it still gives me the shivers. I've also seen these guys who served in Vietnam, even thirty years later, still struggling to find the the thing that will save them from themselves, from their own memories. Even for believers, it isn't easy. Some things run so deep they never are untangled. Still, poems like this teach us that there is comfort in places we may not ever expect.

Read Ye Now!

Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Picador, 2006
ISBN 0-312-42440-x
Amazon Link

This is a wonderful book. Rush out and get your hands on a copy as soon as possible. You are welcome to borrow my copy, but I’ve already promised it to Jeanne, so you may have to get in line.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is well-deserving of its acclaim. It is the story of Congregationalist minister John Ames, who has been diagnosed with a terminal condition and is spending his last days writing letters to his young son.

Before I read Gilead, I read a review that described the book as a depiction of Ames’ lifelong struggle with faith and doubt. I wondered how respectfully a book characterized that way might deal with the matter of a Christian minister’s doubt. I found that I had misunderstood. The book is not at all about Ames’ doubt. He remains devout throughout his life and ministry. The struggle with doubt has to do with his deep, abiding and very spiritual reflections on how to minister to those who approach his faith through doubt. It is also about the larger-scale doubt that creeps into the society surrounding Ames through the latter part of the nineteenth century and the earlier half of the twentieth century.

And it is about his opportunity, at the end of his life, to learn new lessons in the kind of faith, forgiveness, and love he has preached for decades when his namesake and the “prodigal son” of his dearest friend comes home again.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I will say no more than read it, read it, read it. Gilead is profound and thought-provoking through a kind of steady, gentle lyricism that matches the character of Ames himself.

Some experts:

Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the
conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It
is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a
copy of La Nausee or L’Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief,
when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible. And
they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what misery it
is. And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them
“proofs.” I just won’t do it. It only confirms them in their
skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of
defense. (177)

…..

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number
of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is
beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not
satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances
among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to
the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same
notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to
coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
(197)

…..

There were two further points I felt I should have made in our earlier
conversations, one of them being that doctrine is not belief, it is only one way
of talking about belief, and the other being that the Greek word sozo, which is
usually translated “saved,” can also mean healed, restored, that sort of
thing. So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word in
a way that can create false expectations. I thought he should be aware
that grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of
ways. (239)

The First Epistle of Sharon

I wrote a letter that went out in the church newsletter this week. It is also posted on the church website. Originally, I wrote it to send to Phillip, the pastor of University Baptist, in an email. It was very difficult to write, and it took all the courage I could muster up just to send it to Phillip. I was really in a dither when he asked if it could go in the newsletter. I write every day, and I have had years of practice of exposing my writing to others, but this was different. This was very personal. It was tough.

I told him it would be okay, though, because it just seemed like that was the thing to say. Then when I told my friend how nervous it made me, she said, "You have the ability to express something people need to hear. You'd be a jerk if you didn't do it." That pretty well settled that.

It's a good thing that I didn't actually know it was going to be in the newsletter that went out this week. I didn't have time to second guess what people were going to think of it before they started calling me. And people have called and emailed, and I've been very touched that they took the time to respond. I've also been, well, astounded by how many people have said my letter spoke to their own experiences growing up in church.

Today also happened to be the day that I answered the "Call to Commitment" and asked to join the church. I'd been talking to Phillip and others about this for several weeks, and today just seemed like the right day. It was in fact incredibly emotional because it coincided with that letter.

People who came through to "welcome me to the fold" were near tears at times. I left thinking, "This is a family. I've become part of a family." It was a very special experience.

I guess my point is that we never really know what power words can have, and sometimes it is those words that are the most difficult to wrench out of ourselves that we are called upon the most to share. And maybe the point of that is these are the words that require real love to express. We have to truly care about what we are saying and who we are saying it to in order to dig deep enough down that it hurts. Something to think about...

It's a Small, Small World

I barely stuck my head in the door of my Sunday School class this morning. In fact, I'm not sure I even got that far. I was hiding behind Lynn who thought it the polite thing to do to inform our class that we two were defecting to another class just for the day to hear a report on the church's work at Pearlington. At which point, the dear and remarkable Virginia Ann bolted out into the hall and said, "I need to talk to you." (Big grin on her face.)

I thought, "Oops. What have I done?"

As it turns out, the girl preacher that I was so taken with a few days ago that I went to the trouble of actually creating links on my sidebar just so I wouldn't forget to check in on her from time to time is the daughter-in-law of the woman I've been sitting next to in Sunday School for months.

I realize I've already used up my cliche quota for this post with the small world thing, but I'll risk pushing it to say, "The Lord works in mysterious ways."

Last week I went to the Conference on College Composition and Communications in Chicago. One of the sessions I attended was a meeting of the Christian SIG (special interest group). When asked if anyone was interested in researching Christians who blog or Christian rhetoric on blogs, I raised my hand. It was one of those "oh, HELLO" moments for me. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me yet to seek out other blogs that were talking about Christianity and spirituality and life in contemporary times...or whatever it is I'm doing here.

So I went on a fishing expedition, not really for research purposes yet. I was just looking for Christian bloggers who would personally appeal to me. And there you have it. My first find in my first search was the girl preacher who just happens to have personal connections to the church that has helped me find my way to my own Strong Refuge.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Pearlington

University Baptist and CBF have been working hard all year in a little town called Pearlington. I've been down twice to work, and if there is a single person left in that town who did not lose everything during Katrina, I'd be amazed.

Click here to see an article about CBF's work in Pearlington. Be sure to watch the video as well.

The first home I went to belonged to an older woman. Her grandson was there that day, and he told us that that family "went swimming" as the flood waters came in. The floodline was over the rooftops of these little houses. It is a pure miracle than anyone survived.

Everything in that house was covered in mud. We had to shovel it out, carry the ruined contents of the house out to the street for debris crews to pick up later, clean out the maggot infested kitchen, and basically gut everything. The wet, heavy, stinky, moldy carpet had to come out. Everything had to be gutted. I've never seen a group of people work harder than the folks from UBC did that day. I've never seen people more willing to just jump in and get dirty and get the job done, even knowing that once they got covered with all that river muck, it would be a long day and a long ride back to Hattiesburg before they could get cleaned up again. I've also never seen a group of people get a bigger blessing out of helping others.

The second house I went to had already been gutted. We were there to start rebuilding. This house belonged to a family with several children. If I'm not mistaken, they said they were living in a FEMA trailer with two parents, three children, and two dogs. I don't know what model they had, but most of the FEMA trailers I've seen have just been tiny campers that would be a tight fit for two grown ups without the kids and dogs.

This second house also presented the biggest challenge for me. I have no skills. I have no skill saw. When I got to the church and realized that this was not a trip that many women were going on, I really wanted to back out. By that time, though, my Diet Cokes and granola bars were already in the pastor's jeep, and I was already loaded into a van with guys who did bring skill saws, and it just seemed like it was too late to speak up.

I'm very glad I did not back out. That's the day I learned what an important job a "gofer" has. They kept me busy. I even tried my hand at a few nails, but my skills were more need in the running and fetching department.

One day last fall in the children's sermon, Phillip brought out some little toy hard hats. He said, "Jesus always needs workers, and sometimes it's just our turn to put on a hard hat and get to work for Jesus."

One little girl answered, "I have a bow in my hair."

I've learned this year not to worry about bows. If you show up to work for Jesus, there will be something you can do.

I'm telling all of this to say that Pearlington and other towns along the coast still need our help.

If you have a church group or a student group or just a few friends willing and able to come to Mississippi to help, contact UBC or CBF. You'll be glad you did.