For the Unanswered Prayers, Missed Trains, and Blessings to Come

I have no idea how I wound up here.  Over 7 years into this almost ludicrous adventure it still baffles my mind and teases my soul.  A constantly schooled, city-bound, office shaped guy living on a farmstead, raising vegetables and chickens…and smiling in the company of an indulgently loving and endlessly curious wife, observed by amazed and amused kids who still wonder what happened to their Dad.  It is not what I prepared for.  It is not the brass ring toward which I had reached.  It is…fascinatingly…gloriously…laughably…different.  How did this happen?  

Some have speculated a lost mind.  Some have guessed “mid-life crisis.”  Some have indulged my enigmatic, inexplicable sense that this was where I was being called to be.

Who can say?  It still takes my breath away.

 Years ago, Garth Brooks famously gave thanks for unanswered prayer — that divine dispensation of grace that saved him from the myriad consequences of the stupid, or even well-meaning but misguided, things for which he had earnestly asked. I always loved that song, even though I had no real clarity about the hypothetical eventualities from which I’d been spared.   Regardless, perhaps that accounts for some part of an explanation.  

Years later, my brother introduced me to a song by Walt Wilkins with a similar but differently turned sentiment:

Here's to the trains I missed, the loves I lost

The bridges I burned the rivers I never crossed

Here's to the call I didn't hear, the signs I didn't heed

The roads I couldn't take the map that I just wouldn't read

CHORUS

It's a big ole world but I found my way

From the hell and the hurt that led me straight to this

Here's to the trains I missed

Lunacy.  Unanswered prayers.  Missed trains that led me straight to this.  Perhaps.  All I know is that this is where I am, and this is what I am doing, in partnership with a beloved whose very presence in my life amazes and blesses me and constantly surprises me -- all despite everything that I had intended, prepared for, dreamed of and practiced.  I know all that, and that I am grateful.  Unspeakably grateful.  And happy.

Standing here in the waning candlelight of an old year ending, approaching the threshold of a New Year still gelatinous and unformed, I wonder what insight my past has to pass along to my future.  At the very least it suggests that I am not as bright as I like to think I am, and certainly not as prescient.  My bigotries and preconceived ideas lead me to think I know what’s best — for myself and quite possibly others.  My experience, however, suggests an humbler reality.  As often as not, I don’t.   I hope and pray I can take that to heart.

In this New Year erupting I have no idea what’s ahead, nor which trains I should catch — or miss.  I will do my best to pay attention and discern; I will run down the tracks in pursuit of those engines that seem promising and prudent.  But I pray for the circumspection to anticipate that, as often as not, I’ll be wrong.  

And to be relieved and thrilled by what that mistake and missed opportunity occasions in its place; that I had no way to predict.

Here, then, to the ever-surprising possibilities of the New Year, whatever they may be.  I’m open to them.  

“Night is drawing nigh,” wrote Dag Hammarskjold, former Secretary General of the United Nations in his journal, Markings.  The night of this day, to be sure, but more poignantly the night of this old year.

“For all that has been — Thanks!

To all that shall be — Yes!”

Thanks…

…and Yes!

That's a pretty good way to say "goodbye" and "hello."

Happy New Year.

The Great and Holy Circle Of Love

After singing “ Do You Hear What I Hear” a couple of weeks ago with friends, all of us hauntingly implored to “pray for peace, people everywhere,” I confessed that most of my life I had thought peace to be all about absence — absence of stress, absence of conflict; absence of war; absence of fruitcake. And while all of those things are blessed contributions to it, I’m finally coming to comprehend that more than any absence, peace is above all a presence. 

I should have known it. Scripture is pretty forthright about it — in the flood story where Noah is instructed to make sure that every animal is represented on the Ark; in the Gospel parable in which the servants are commanded to go out to the highways and byways and urge everyone to the feast; in the vision that Peter has of a sheet being lowered down from heaven bearing every imaginable creature, with the instruction to take and eat; to which Peter responds, “I can’t eat what’s unclean.”  “Don’t call unclean what I have called clean,” the voice pushed back. 

In fact, I should have caught a glimpse of it in the very first chapter of Genesis, at the end of the creation story, where…“God looked at everything created and said, ‘It’s very good’”.  Everything.

As if to drive that point home, Paul writes to Timothy what may well be the most challenging assertion in scripture:  that “Everything God created is good, and to be received with thanks.” (1 Timothy 4:4, MSG)

Everything, which is a challenging affirmation on the farmstead where bugs and rabbits invade the vegetables and possums and raccoons invade the chicken yard.  But there is the biblical insistence:  Everything. It’s the reason Jesus came among us according to John 3:16:  because God so loved this world.

We borrow the Hebrew word for it — shalom — without bothering to grasp the expansiveness of its meaning.  Far more than the mere absence of fighting, shalom refers to the presence of wholeness; fullness; completeness.  

In recent months Lori and I have had the joy of organizing and teaching a Sunday School class for Burmese refugee children.  Nearing the end of one of the first sessions, helpers began distributing snacks.  One little boy immediately tore into his packaged treat and began to nibble away.  Another boy, perhaps 6 years old, touched his arm and kindly, but sternly, told him, “You need to wait.  We all do this together.  And first we need to pray.  

Together, with a prayer.  Shalom.   

Peace, then, not so much an absence, but rather the beloved presence of all that God loves.  Like each one of us, and each other.  On his new CD released last month, Minnesota singer/songwriter Peter Mayer sings of just that expansive awareness…

Jesus spoke, entreating them

To live together in a great circle of love

When his followers asked him then

“Who should be included?”

Jesus said…

Let everybody in, everybody in,

Everybody in to the circle, circle.

Everybody, everybody; everybody, everybody,

Everybody into the circle, circle.

 Everybody.  That which God managed to communicate to Noah, and to Peter and the other disciples we are still trying to get our hearts and minds around:  that when any one of us is excluded, we are all diminished — which, more than stars and snow and stables and shepherds, may well be the bigger Christmas message. 

Shalom, then.  Peace on earth, good will to all. 

All of us in this great circle of love. 

Light in the Longest Night

There is a full moon tonight -- forthrightly there, anchoring the night sky just beyond the Christmas tree window.  On first impression it might seem that we could use the extra light because tonight also marks the Winter Solstice — the point at which the earth’s axis is tilted as far away from the sun as it will be all year.  For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere that cosmic tilt results in darkness; the longest night of the year.  It doesn’t soothe us much to know that those in the Southern Hemisphere are simultaneously enjoying their longest day as a result of precisely the same phenomenon.  That these things eventually balance out is little consolation.  Culturally, and perhaps even psychologically speaking, being “rich in darkness” has never really seemed like wealth.

Ours the pity. How else would we see the stars?  How else to fully embrace the perfection of this glorious moon?  How else to give our eyes a break and flex our other senses?  Absent sight we hear more acutely, smell with heightened discernment, and feel our way around with fingers become antennae.  Pressed to eat, we taste with a sharpened mixture of caution and exploration.  All of which is to indulge the reality that darkness both invites and occasions awakened attention.

To my knowledge, no one survives who attended the birth of Jesus.  Nonetheless, absent first hand verification, we persist in locating this occurrence “after hours”.  Whimsical or not, I rather like the idea.  Whether or not the night was “silent”, I’m certain it was holy.  Births, of course, are always holy; but more than that, the darkness would have added a kind of wondrous pregnancy all its own.

Capacity.
Possibility.
Wonderment.
A crackling electricity of fearful hopefulness...

...the very kind of essential nourishments so easily overlooked or crowded out in the light of day.  We are so distracted when the sun is up -- frenetically trying to "get it all done", trying to see it all and do it all.  But, of course, in the urgency of such pursuit we miss more than we catch. 

When else would grace be born but in the expansive infinity of darkness?

I have heard these present days referred to as darkness, and I am aware that the description is not intended as a compliment.  I’m inclined, though, to receive it as such.  If, indeed, it is only at night that we see the stars and appreciate the full splendor of the moon; if, indeed, it is only amidst the darkness that our senses flex their muscles, then let this be a long and deep darkness in which we can “see” most clearly...

What is true...
What is bright...
What is noblest...
What is our highest aspiration for ourselves and the community we hope and help to fashion.

Let it be dark, so that we might feel the pain of others, taste the bile we have churned, smell the stench of injustice and hear the cries of those who are lost.  If it is, indeed, in the dark of night that our soul’s antennae are most exposed and receptive, then withhold even longer the sun.

Minnesota-based singer/songwriter Peter Mayer offers this musical invitation:
Come with drums, bells and horns
Or come in silence, come forlorn
Come like a miner to the door
Of the longest night
For deep in the stillness, deep in the cold
Deep in the darkness, a miner knows
That there is a diamond in the soul
Of the longest night
Of the year.

There are diamonds, then, to be discovered; work to be done this Winter Solstice.
Lots of discerning, healing, birthing work.

Thankfully, this longest night of the year affords us a little more time — a few extra and darkly precious minutes to get it done.

Don't be afraid. 
Use it well.

Happy Solstice.

Morning-After Kissing

First of all, thank you to all who offered themselves up as candidates to the rigorous eternity of tire-kicking that is the campaign season. You’ve done something quite heroic. Go back to whatever you did before this began with a merit badge of civic blessing.

Secondly, congratulations to those who prevailed. Take this brief moment to enjoy a deep breath. That’s about all the respite you will get. It’s time to set yourself to the task — and it won’t be easy. The process, itself, sees to that.

There is a country song that ruefully acknowledges, “It’s hard to kiss the lips at night that chew your ass out all day long” (The Notorious Cherry Bombs).

It’s a clever turn of phrase which, when it is on track, is country music’s stock and trade.  Earthy, I'll admit, but clever.  It makes me smile.  But it’s a wry smile.  Most of us know how difficult it is to walk back out of hurtful words we’ve spoken into a more promising and productive space.

I think of that challenge on a day like today — the day after a bitter political season ground to a close; the day after the clock counting down the hours of a very long “day” of ass-chewing finally ran down.  It won’t be easy in the coming days and months for these elected officials to practice statecraft with these lips that have spent this season in character assassination and moral diminishment.   We are increasingly brutal in our politicking— increasingly personal, and dishonest in our representations.  Suddenly, then, with the votes counted and the machines stored away until next time, fierce opponents are supposed to cohere into a productive and representative governing body.  It’s going to take more than puckering, but if we are going to be a functioning country that’s the work ahead.  

And it’s not just the politicians, of course, who have this difficult relational work to do.  Given our collective comportment over the past year and more, there is a good chance there will be a few lips gathered around our holiday tables in the month we aren’t looking forward to kissing.    The carving knives aren’t the only sharp objects laying around, and we will have some relational healing and accommodating to do.  But if we are to be a functioning family and community that’s the work ahead.  

So how will we manage it?  I remember reading about the awkward difficulty American clergy experienced in the wake of World Wars preaching healing and reconciliation after so lustily preaching against the enemy throughout the war.  It’s easier — and usually more fun — to froth up our righteous indignation and demonization than to work up a sweat in service to healing and common cause.  Which ought to give us pause.  Like it or not, we are going to have to kiss these lips.

I’m not suggesting we merely throw another log on the campfire, hold hands and sing “Kum Ba Ya” — although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t humming it right now.  Life together in this public space is more complicated than that, and infinitely more difficult.  I’m simply saying we had better find other ways to debate the very serious matters confronting us — global warming and the degradation of the environment, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and the genuine challenge of existing as but one member of a diverse and messy global community, and our various and seemingly multiplying ways of abusing each other — than with our teeth.  

And listen afresh to what our various religions teach us about the value of human life, the care of our neighbor, and the imperative to love.

Because there isn’t finally anywhere for us to go but into each other’s arms.  

And may God help us to finally comprehend this fundamentally basic truth:

That it is hard to kiss the lips at night that chew your ass out all day long.

Voting With a Different Rubric

I haven’t yet voted. I am happily among the dinosaurs of this citizenry who still enjoy stepping into the voting booth on Election Day and penciling in my choices. As this impending opportunity approaches, I have been thinking about my rubric — how I decide for whom to cast my vote.  In elections past I have carefully reviewed the candidate responses to media questionnaires, noted scores on issue-based report cards, watched televised debates and read with interest the newspaper’s endorsements.  In elections past, positions reigned supreme. But I’ve grown weary of the mud wrestling.  And I’ve become increasingly disgusted by the moral fibers out of which those “representing” me are woven.  So, I’m changing the way I prepare to cast my vote.

While my interest in the positions a candidate espouses on the myriad of issues remains a priority for me, that consideration this time around has been demoted a notch.  After all, it is precisely this kind of blindered voting that has gotten us into the odious mess we are in. 

So it is that I have moved into the place where if “who you are speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you are saying,” the odds are good that you don’t get my vote.  This time around, then, I will impose a prior screen that has lamentably fallen into collective neglect.  In this election, and those that foreseeably follow, I will only consider those who: 

• to the best of my ability to determine it, keep their zipper up/skirt down, and their hands to themselves; 

• honor their spousal vows if they’ve entered them, and professional integrities, believing that if someone doesn’t keep faith with those closest to them I can’t expect them to do so with me;

• respect the validity of facts, even when they are inconvenient;

• have more than a passing acquaintance with the values of circumspection and humility; 

• demonstrate, beyond the campaign trail, a reverence for the sacred value of humankind and the world in which we live;

• pause to think and consider rather than jumping to immediate action; 

• can meet an opponent’s position with equanimity rather than ridicule;

• come from particular places and tribes but exercise the capacity to see beyond the parochial, not simply for the good of the moment but the good beyond their time. 

Only then, from among those who remain viable after such a vetting, will I consider their politics variously espoused.  

I know there are those who consider this to be an impossibly high bar for a candidate to clear — an assessment I find to be embarrassingly sad. To the contrary, I view it to be such a pathetically low standard so base that it’s hard to imagine how we could have possibly abandoned it.  Surely this is simply the least of what we should expect of each other.  

And tomorrow, in the voting booth, I will.  The days and years after, as well. 

Because another election is never far away.

Happy Birthday; Don’t Rest In Peace

Happy birthday, Lady Liberty.  I read this morning that on this day in 1886 the Statue of Liberty was officially unveiled and opened to the public. France had been the birth mother, shipping the statue in 214 crates to be assembled in New York.  Thinking about the generosity through contemporary eyes, I’m astounded by the gift.  Today it’s hard to imagine one country doing anything like this for another, but as the 19th century ebbed to a close the French apparently felt an extravagant appreciation for — maybe amazement at — the love of freedom they felt we held in common.   According to my source, dedication day was inclement, but crowds ignored the chill and the rain and jammed the space.  Responding to mixed signals, the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, who was alone in the statue's crown, dropped the veil prematurely, interrupting the festivities.  No one seemed to mind.  It had been the statue that had drawn the crowds, not the prospect of tedious speeches.  

In the years leading up to this historic birth, the project’s pregnancy was not without difficulty.  Fundraising stalled, delaying the completion of the pedestal on which the statue would be installed.  In 1883 poet Emma Lazarus wrote and contributed a sonnet to an auction held to raise money for the lagging project.  Eventually, in 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and attached to the statue’s base.  

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I think of it as something of a baptismal name.  

A post-natal consecration.  

A lens, amplifying it’s intrinsic identity. 

And there she stood, symbolic flame alight, her invitational lyrics sung out.

“Stood.”  It’s a vacant pedestal these days.  We don’t much care for immigrants these days, erecting barriers literal, procedural and relational to bar them entrance.  Only the uninformed or the politically blind complain about our “porous” borders.  It takes years to navigate the system — often decades.  And money.  Unless, of course, you are well-connected, in which case you can cut to the front of the line.  Unless, of course, you are willing to perform a job that no one else wants to do — like cut meat in a meat packing plant, or harvest fruits or vegetables in a scorching hot field — in which case we will turn our head and ignore your presence until that is no longer convenient.  Meanwhile, if you are caught we will cage your children like dogs and send you elsewhere.  “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

There is, in the news of recent days, a caravan of refugees — thousands — walking north from Central America toward our southern border.  They aren’t, and won’t be, welcomed here.  I have every expectation that their arrival will be met with resistant, repelling force, if not brutality.  We will collectively, and with a mixture of righteousness and helplessness, assert that we had no other choice.  We have our laws and a border to defend.  And we have all these precious jobs to protect…that nobody actually wants.

And believe me, I do not know the alternative.  There has to be, I acknowledge, some kind of a screening process.  But I have never sensed that the Ellis Island gates through which most of our ancestors passed erected quite such labyrinthian obstacles, and somehow we all managed.

I don’t suppose I really blame the politicians.  They, too, have their job to do; their laws to enforce.  What puzzles me are the good and conscientious church folk who read their Bibles as faithfully as I.  Unlike the varieties of modern topics about which we volubly argue on which scripture only vaguely or ambiguously speaks — and often then only by extension and extrapolation — on the subject of immigrant welcome, the expectations are repetitively clear.  Old or New Testament, it doesn’t matter:  “hospitality” is to be our name.

“Don’t exploit or mistreat the refugee,” commands the prophet Jeremiah.  “Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers,” notes the book of Hebrews, “for some who have done this have entertained angels without knowing it.”

These two among dozens of others.

And so it may well be that as happens on many other issues, our patriotic interests conflict with our Christian obligations.  Sadly, we can seldom tell them apart.

And so it is that on this day, 132 years ago, that the Statue of Liberty was born.  October 28.  It’s less clear to me if there is an equally specific date on which she died.  It just doesn’t take much of a look around to confirm that she has. Lazarus' sweeping invitation has been replaced by our stern warning:

“Don’t even think of bringing us any tired or poor.  Keep your wretched refuse on your own teeming shore.  We won’t have them.  These golden doors are dark.  And closed.”

May she never Rest In Peace.

Pied Piper Beyond the Chocolate Bunnies

It wasn’t a promising beginning. 

In the early years of my Iowa ministry I enjoyed the company of a small, ecumenical clergy group that met regularly for support, friendship, and shared learning.  Someone along the way recommended that we read together a book by Eugene Peterson.  I was skeptical.  Through the years I have vetted authors unfamiliar to me by the publishing companies who promoted them.  Peterson’s publisher at the time was one who raised red flags for me.  I gritted my teeth, bought the book and read along.  It was fine, but my prejudice got in the way.  

Some years later I encountered his writing at a more receptive moment.  I was growing sick and disenchanted with the state of the contemporary American church.  It had less to do with the congregation I was serving at the time — which was pushing mightily against the tide — but the ecclesiastical milieu at-large was becoming suffocating to me.  Seduced by the lure of success; hypnotized by the siren song of the marketing world’s emphasis on “bigger, better, more”; adopting the language of business, fixated on expanding market share and popular attention, we quoted “leadership” gurus as glibly as scripture, designed glitzy programs, gave away chocolate bunnies to the kids at Easter and advertised special guest appearances by “Sky Divers, Beauty Queens and Professional Quarterbacks for Jesus” to draw a crowd; installed cup holders in the theater seats, giant video screens in the chancel, and amped up the praise bands.  Infatuated with flame and fizz, mock-turtlenecked or Hawaiian-shirted pastors waved platitudinal shiny objects and orchestrated constant frenetic movement through the worship space, while the “amazing technicolor dream church” slipped effortlessly into the lifestyle of religious prostitutes, willing to turn ever more unsavory tricks in pursuit of butts and bucks.  I wasn’t any good at it, and it made me increasingly ill to feel the pressure to jump on.  Besides, I looked stupid in a Hawaiian shirt.

And then Peterson quietly but forcefully spoke up from the pages of his current book.  “The church is not called to be a purveyor of religious goods and services,” he cautioned.  And I exhaled.  Throughout that book and the subsequent volumes I hungrily consumed, he mapped a more integral path.  He wrote of his own discovery of the nature of congruent pastoral work — one that led him away from “staying awake at night laying out a strategy or ‘casting a vision,’” and into the lives and souls of his parishioners.  It was, for me, like being handed a cup of cool water.   I found in him not only a life raft, but a literary conversation partner.  Eventually, an actual conversation partner.

Always interested in writing, I was constantly frustrated with my inability to work the discipline into my ministerial life.  Competing responsibilities, tasks and distractions were a constant.  Peterson, I observed, hadn’t seemed to have that problem.  Incomprehensibly to me, he had managed to publish dozens of books while serving as a local church pastor.  How, I wondered, did he find the time and the mental focus?  The only way I could think of to learn the answer was to ask.  I tracked down an address, shared in a letter my frustration, and asked the question.  By return mail I received a two-page, single-spaced reply, outlining first how he organized his daily work, and then how he and his congregation had come to understand and validate that work as an extension of their shared ministry.  It was a beautiful, generous gift, closed with this contextualizing and nudging P.S.:  “Through the years, the most important Christian writing has been done by local church pastors…like the New Testament.”

Some years later, while attending a small conference at which he was presenting, I had the opportunity to express my appreciation, though I almost squandered it.  Finally overcoming my inhibitions late in the experience, I approached him with my copy of The Message.  Usually surrounded by fans, he was in this moment uncharacteristically alone.  I apologized for asking him to autograph a Bible, but confessed that it was the only one of his volumes that I had brought along.  He smiled gently as he took my book, set it in his lap, and replied, “when it first came out, I refused.  And then I thought to myself, ‘Oh, get over it.’”  We both chuckled, and he handed back my now-inscribed Bible.  But I couldn’t manage to say more, until a day or so later, on the crowded ferry back to the mainland, I found myself wedged against the railings next to Peterson.  It wasn’t a perfect setting, but it was now or never.  “I want to thank you for saving my professional life,” I blurted out, and then the rest of the story spilled out into the conversational, wave-sprayed opening.  He patiently listened, smiled, and patted my arm, receiving with uncomfortable grace my gratitude.  And that was it.  

Until a few months ago.  Hearing a replay of a broadcast interview with him from a couple of years prior, I felt again the full weight of my indebtedness.  Rereading one of his more recent books, I once again tracked down an address, composed a missive again recounting his indelible fingerprints on my life, and dropped it through the mail slot.  Truthfully, I had forgotten about it when, a few weeks later while collecting the mail, I shook out a letter with a Montana postmark.  Inside was a preprinted card from Janice Peterson, Eugene’s wife, acknowledging my letter and noting that Eugene wasn’t corresponding much at this point.  And then, in the white space remaining on the card she had handwritten, “I’ve shown him your letter and he has reread it multiple times.  Thank you.”

Two weeks ago I learned that he had entered hospice care, and last night I learned that he had died.  I’ll confess that it feels like a part of me has, too.  And that the church has lost a critically important, steadying voice.  

But only, I know, in a certain sense.  The rest of that truth, perceived through my tears, is that every time I see chocolate bunnies being handed out during a children’s sermon, every time I see the liturgists swinging figuratively through the sanctuary in a tawdry performance of “Church du Soleil,” I’ll hear the humble music of his voice piping us toward a more faithful way.  And he will be moving among us — at least alongside me — again.  

Thanks, Eugene, for the metaphors, the theological poetry, the attention to spiritual integrity, and your rigorous ability to write it all down, through it all encouraging us to live “the Christ life in the Christ way.”