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May 21, 2018

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Autobiography, Spirituality, The Paranormal, Theology

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Alterations of Death

The image of a blanket, woven with various patches, filled with stitching, and mended with quilting, is not one uncommon when we describe our human experience. Often have writers invoked the image of a patchwork quilt to describe the many pieces that constitute our lives.

Many of us have quilts made by mothers, or grandmothers, to which our mind immediately races when this image is invoked. We may even go to our closet, pull out those quilts, and gently pass our hands across the patches, the stitches, and the signature where our loved one’s hands had once been. Even as they made this quilt, and this quilt is a thing itself, it is not hard to imagine that that quilt can be an analogy for our lives: we are all nothing more, or less, than pieces of a whole that has been placed together by the relationships in our lives.

We are a whole quilt, but we are not whole without the many parts that make us who we are.

Any quilt, however, no matter how well made or how many times stitched, will eventually become worn if it is used. Quilts can remain pristine if we keep them in a closet and never use them, but the quilts that are used will eventually need to be repaired; they will need to be altered.

But what happens when our quilt is altered without being worn out, when something happens that rips the quilt into 2 pieces or pulls the stitching out and destroys two patches? What happens when the quilt cannot be turned back into what it once was and it has now become something that cannot be repaired? It just can’t. It has become something else.

This is what death does. Death alters the quilt and it alters it to such a degree that this quilt cannot be fixed. It turns the story of your life into another story even as it is the extension of the same story.

Some will come by and say that “the quilt gets easier to use” and that “missing piece will one day be a spot for a new piece” but all of that is crap. The quilt doesn’t get easier to use with time and it never becomes what it once was. Even if you try to repair it it can never get back to its originary state. It can be functional but even in that function it’s destruction is clear.

But why? Why can’t we repair the quilt and move on?

Because using the quilt forces one to continue looking at what it isn’t. If the quilt is in fact your life then being alive is a reminder of the part of the story that has taken an unexpected, and unnatural, turn for something that is not part of this quilt you’ve been unintentionally weaving.

Death alters our quilt; it alters us. The only way it doesn’t is if a.) that part of your quilt didn’t mean much and hence finding a new piece to fit into the torn spot isn’t too difficult or b.) we sedate ourselves from our own materiality with the allure of not death (I”ll fly away O Glory). Response “A” means that that part of your story was not consequential and response “B” means that perhaps we have not rested with death long enough to realize what it is: Death…the cessation of that which makes us alive.

It is hard to describe how death alters a person or changes our quilts beyond repair. All deaths are not equal.

I am not special. Many people have had death visit them through their family. In my immediate family, I have lost a cousin at 19, all of my grandparents have died within the last decade (I lost my first grandmother exactly 10 years ago this week), and I have experienced the untimely and sudden loss of my 65-year-old father. Going through the death of my cousin, and grandparents, did not prepare me for losing my dad; not even close.

All deaths are not equal but that does not mean we do not love all those that die. We can love them and say goodbye to them. We can see their contributions to our quilt and come to a resolution that this part of the quilt is finished but it is not destroyed. Our quilts can stay intact. But sometimes death visits in such a way that your life literally changes after it happens. Sometimes the quilt is mangled beyond repair.

We have all been to funerals, paid our respects, left, and then went about our daily lives as if we had never attended the funeral. We have all been to funerals of grandparents we mourned, yet we understood that 89 years of age is an honest age and it is part of the human condition to live, and die, in time. We hate it but accepting it is not an impossibility. We go to the church for the funeral, have dinner, good conversation, and then go to our homes…business as usual.

This doesn’t mean we are bad people; it just means that there is a season for everything and when things happen in season it is easier to accept.

When it snows in January we are fine; it’s the snowstorm in July that shakes us up.

THEN, there is that death that after it happens your life literally changes. It is not the same afterward. You cannot go back to business as usual. It alters you, sometimes physically. It destroys the quilt and there is nothing that can fix that loss. That patch is not made anywhere else and even “moving on” or “recovering” or “getting better with time” does not make the quilt what it was. It’s just irreparable.

People who have never had a loss in what I call “out of time” have no idea what I’m talking about. I have experienced “in time” and “out of time” loss and the latter is torture in its immediacy. There is something especially tragic about premature, sudden, untimely death. In this kind of death, you have the benefit of not seeing your loved one suffer, but you carry the eternal burden of no final words, no more moments, no more embraces of love. As quickly as you blink that person is gone…without warning. Depending on how interconnected your life was will determine on how this moment presents itself to you.

The quilt changes; its not the same and taking advice from people who have never had their quilt destroyed beyond repair…or living in a culture that just replaces quilts…leaves no room for the real-life PTSD that can follow death.

Death, the kind of death you feel in your bones, alters you. The quilt is never the same and it is hard to describe if you’ve never lived through the kind of death that is only beginning once you put your loved one in the ground.

I said at my father’s funeral that his death would change history. Probably not world history, but my history, my family’s history. Like Back to the Future an alternative 2017 was created when my dad died, and we have been on that alternative timeline ever since. Unlike Back to the Future, I am unable to go back to that time in history and make it right.

When I consider the alternative history, it is shocking how much has changed even though so much has stayed the same. My quilt is jacked up but places I take it are still familiar.

What alterations have happened?

For starters, and sadly, it has now been long enough for my little girl to begin forgetting her grandad. My daughter is 2 and when my dad passed those 2 were just beginning to develop a relationship. Her personality was coming out and my dad always loved the babies. He loved how the babies would be captivated with him and reciprocate his childish demeanor. First it was my 3 boys, then my sister’s girls, and my little girl was next to be the apple of his eye. But now…he is a faded memory. For a few months after she would mention that “grandad was sleeping” because that is how I described him at the funeral home.

But now? She’ll see him in a picture and ask who he is. He died just 2 weeks after her 2nd birthday. Their relationship has been altered.

My boys were 11 and 9 when my dad died. They did a lot with him when they were younger. My dad loved his boys; they were, after all, the first grandkids and twins to boot. As they got older my dad would wrestle with them, take them four-wheeling, and toss them around in the pool. He would bring them home pizza, share his A&W Root Beer with them, and teach them Karate. Two of my oldest boys have autism so they did not always reciprocate affection to my dad as he would have liked but that’s not because they didn’t love him; it’s because they have autism and relate to people around them differently than the norm. My dad struggled to understand that as my boys got older.

Now? They have no grandparent to do that with and cannot learn to develop the kind of relationship with an active grandfather that would have been so pivotal for them.

In business, changes have been drastic. After getting a crash course in self-discovery of all the things my dad never showed me, I became chief executive officer. Don’t let the title fool you; it really means I just get to do more work. My sister and I split up the office work, but I believe I may have taken any stress on myself that my dad used to carry. My work weeks went from a standard 45 hours to 60. My focus went from strictly operations to wearing all the hats one needs when running a small business. I now find myself in the sort of job that will not get done even if I work 16 hours a day 7 days a week. When you own your own business there is always something to do and you bring work home with you every day. I didn’t realize how much I didn’t have to think about when he was here. Now…I get to be concerned with all of it.

As the CEO and CFO of our company, my dad was the gatekeeper. All of the family, and even employees, could come to him in confidence with any item. Now that privacy was over. What was once hidden became transparent as I know needed to have that knowledge.

Familially, my mother, who had been married to a man that owned his own business, suddenly had to rethink her relationship to myself, my sister, the business and what it means to be a widow at only 58. She is still struggling with that transition and experts say widows can take up to 5 years to adjust to the loss of a spouse. My dad was kind of the intermediary between all of us in the family and since his death we have had to renegotiate how we relate to one another, and in many instances, discovering we do not know one another as well as we thought.

Academically I have had to put on the brakes. I had just begun my 2nd year of a Doctor Of Ministry program and was doing some intriguing research when my dad passed. Suddenly, I had 0 motivation to write and no inspiration to do so. I found myself questioning the very academic enterprise itself. If life could be snuffed out without warning, then what am I doing wasting my life writing papers no one will read and reading books that I can discuss with maybe 5 people? When I am dead I doubt anyone will recall the articles I’ve written or the books I helped edit. Most likely some poor student will come across them incidentally but for the rest of the world my meager academic contributions will be swallowed by the oblivion of academic prose.

Death caused me to question the value of everything. Those that know me know academics was a big part of my life. I love to learn, write, do research, teach. I was not a smart kid in High School but in the liberal arts I had found my passion. Suddenly my dad’s death made me question my motivations and how I spent my time. What once had supreme value became almost meaningless. I had to take an “incomplete” in the class I was taking at the time of my dad’s death and it took my 9 months to write the last two papers I needed to finish the course. It seemed like a monumental task that beforehand would have been chump change for me.

Recently I received emails about registration for classes and I had to be honest with my advisor that I am still not in a place where I can meet my own expectations. I believe I can do good work and I want to finish. My thesis project is novel and would be a fine contribution, but now I have business responsibilities that take precedent over my passion for learning and working in the faith. If my dad had not died, I would be starting year 3 of my Doctor of Ministry and probably have a few chapters of my thesis written. I would be 1 year from graduation. Instead, I have completed 1 year with nothing but academic ambiguity lying in front of me.

Personally, one of my main hobbies was powerlifting. The night before my dad passed I was in the gym prepping for a power meet in the late spring. I was weighing 180lbs at 5’7 and deadlifting 450lbs, doing sets of 315 for 10-15. My lifts were strong. I would spend about 4/5 days in the gym, getting workouts in when I could depending on work. My goal for my meet was a 400lb squat, 500lb deadlift and 330 on bench. Even if I had to hit the gym from 11pm-after midnight I would get it in.

Since my dad has passed, I am lighter than I have been in a decade. I stopped eating nearly half as much and found minimal time for the gym with my added responsibilities and lack of mental focus for heavy weights. I weigh 150lbs and have lost most of my strength gains. I have went from benching 315 lbs to having a max of 230. Now I can’t pick up 400 lbs and I used to be able to just bend down and pull that for 5 reps like it was nothing. Spending hours in the gym is no longer appealing to me. The killer mental focus I used to have for weight training is gone and I am unsure if it will ever come back.

Basically, none of my clothes fit. I went from needing XL T Shirts to now being able to wear Medium shirts I haven’t worn since 2010.

Lastly, his death altered my view of things. Things I used to enjoy buying, like vintage baseball cards, have lost appeal. The problem is that when he died all his stuff stayed here. Stuff that he loved, like his car and some of his coin collection, just sits to be eaten by moth and rust. We all know we can’t take it with us but when someone leaves suddenly, and the things they loved are left behind just taking up room, we realize that so much of what we “enjoy,” or pursue, is worthless in the end.

In addition, things usually only mean something if you can share them with others. It’s no fun to buy a car, a new ring, or even an Al Kaline rookie card if you have no one to show and share it with. Our relationships make things matter but in the end the thing is nothing more than a token that deepens the relationship.

There used to a bumper sticker that read “he who dies with the most toys still dies.” Its cliché and when I read it back in the day it seemed obvious…but when I really learned that lesson it changed how I think of things and how I spend my money. Stuff is just stuff; it is meaningless. So why do I work, if not for things? If not to have more money to buy more stuff?

Now I work for my family and for those that work in my company. I don’t work to have things; I work to make my company the best it can be to provide for my family and be the best it can be for my employees. A job well done means more to me than any money I can make from the job because that is how I will be remembered when I die.

No one will care what I had in my house, but they will remember how I treated others and handled my business. My family will remember how I put them first.

Death that you feel alters you. You don’t have to seek it out. You won’t have to wonder if this death is an altering death. You will live it and it will change you. It won’t leave you alone; you won’t get over it; you’ll basically learn to live with it even though you’ll suck at living with it most days.

The trouble with deep death is that it alters the quilt we’ve been working on and not time, a trip to Hobby Lobby, or looking forward to the final eschaton will make that better. The quilt is just jacked up and that’s kind of not fair because the ones that die don’t have to deal with death like us.

This is where death gets tricky. Only the living experience death. The moment of death is felt by the dying but only those left behind get to live through death. Those that die are relieved of that burden. The only way to live past death and avoid it is to die ourselves. Ain’t that some crap?

Death is full of irony, dialectic if you will, in that death is the only release from death; it’s the only way to save the quilt. For us unlucky ones that get the quilt destroyed without proper wear and tear we are just stuck with the reality that death alters us, the quilt will never be or feel the same, and the journey toward remaking that quilt is one that will most likely end only in the death of ourselves.

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February 19, 2018

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Autobiography, Book Reviews, Spirituality, The Paranormal

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Considering Books

Several weeks ago, in passing, I read an on-line post wherein a friend of mine mentioned they had gotten rid of their theological library. This person, at one time an active teacher and writer in the field, had for assorted reasons, moved on. I imagine, he, like myself, would wander into the room where books lay dormant on shelves and think to himself, “what am I ever going to do with all these books? At one time they mattered, but now, they sit idle, seemingly mocking me with each passing glance.”

Of course, I cannot speak for him; I can only speak for myself. I confess I have projected a little here, but his post began my pondering of the same question, “Why do I have this library? What purpose does it serve? If I am not chiefly making money through its use, then why allow it to take up room in my house?”

My library and I have a love-hate relationship. My love affair with books began in college, when I was 18. Prior to my freshman year, I had been a genuine product of public education and had managed to read less than 5 books, in their entirety, by the time I entered the university. To say that the University was a baptism by fire…was an understatement. I had literally gone from a place where I could get by without reading, to a place in which not reading would prove disastrous (and not to mention lead to a profound waste of money).

I recall a class I took in the Spring of 2000, titled “Biblical Exegesis.” Prior to this class I had read only 2 novels cover to cover and one of them I had read in the 6^th grade. My record with books and reading was dismal. I came from a home that didn’t discourage reading, but certainly didn’t encourage it. My parents had no book shelves or books, the Bible withstanding. I say that not to disparage my home, but to say that books were foreign objects to my parents who were concerned with the practicalities of everyday life.

As a fledging theology student, I stridently walked into this class desiring to learn but not yet exposed to the manner of learning. The course had its usual introductory fare: greetings, syllabus review, brief lecture and assignments for the dearly departing (or so I felt). Our first assignment was to read Chaim Potok’s novel The Promise, in its entirety, and write a 6-8 page response to the book…ALL IN 1 WEEK! I had only read 1 book completely through in the last 6 years and now, in less than 7 days, I had to read an entire adult novel AND write a 2000-word response.

Baptism by fire.

At the time, I did not appreciate the method, but looking back, I am thankful for the results because this class is where I learned to love books. The class taught me to read, taught me to engage, taught me to passionately strive with texts, both biblical and secular. In sum, it was the class where I began to learn to think and it started with this book, placed into my hands, by one of my dearest teachers who has subsequently become one of my dearest friends in the many years since Spring 2000.

From Biblical Exegesis came many more classes and many more books. At first, my library grew as anyone else’s: composed of texts used in classes, proverbial Deuteronomic stones set on my shelves to remind me of the waters we had crossed together. Slowly a strange thing began to transpire, I began to buy books out of will, out of a desire to learn, to engage, to have my worldview expanded with information and imagination. I was no longer the person that bought “what I had to for class,” as I became the person that bought books for the love of reading, the love of learning.

My library grew to mainly include books on theology, philosophy and biblical studies. When I entered seminary, my library began to shift and I began acquiring texts on economics, linguistics, psychology and sexuality…as well as continuing to purchase texts in the prior areas. As I matured, I began to appreciate the role of fiction and history, and so my library grew to include these sorts of texts. Now, my library includes a healthy array of books across all these categories, and while it is not as prolific as many who have taught me, my humble library can boast a thousand or so texts, maybe more.

This library, however, has not become what I thought it would when its collection began. It has not been utilized as I thought it would. I have 2 degrees: a BA in Religion and an MDiv with a focus on academic research. I am not a fulltime pastor (though I am ordained) and I am not a full-time teacher (though I am published in a few places and enrolled in a DMin program). I do not use my library to wield my trade, at least the trade that supports my family. For many years I have balanced church freelance work with secular part time work. The goal was to eventually be one who trades in intellectual property and shapes minds or one who stands in a pulpit and shapes lives…yet I do not do either of these in the way that is conventionally accepted. My library was built with this intention, yet this library is not used in this way.

As my friend rid himself of his theological library, I too have thought of ridding myself of mine. I get it; I understand what it is to stare at something that seems to be holding you back even while at one time it was symbolic of that which propelled you forward.

As life has taken me to this place, I have struggled with what to do with these books that have at various time acted as an albatross slung about my neck. My books have challenged me, pressed me and comforted me. Equally, however, they have made me angry, their very presence a reminder that I am not “where I should be.” They have been symbolic of an occupation not fulfilled or of a passion unrealized.

Since 2015 I have taken liberty to rid myself of some books. In fits of frustration I have decided that some of these books are of no “use” to me so I have expunged them. Truthfully, this was an act of despair and simultaneously an act of logistics: I needed more space and some of these books were simply taking up space. While the process of ridding myself of books may have been instigated through depression, the result has been a little more space (that I have probably already filled with more books).

Those who know me well can most likely not divorce me from books, or at least not divorce me from the learning process associated with books. Books, and the wise people who placed them in my hands, turned the lazy teenager who had never read anything into a man that has matured because of what he has encountered in the thoughts and words of others. Books have been that which lay battle to the atrophy of mind that our culture so easily thrusts upon us.

Considering books, I often consider my own. I wonder why I keep so many. I wonder what purpose they serve.

My day is filled with running a business, communicating with clients and employees, paying bills and organizing marketing. My day is filled with being a PR and HR representative, engaging our community, helping organize our office and offering supervisory support to our several locations that often involves driving 300 miles round trip multiple times a week. I am busy with the practicality of a secular job and do not have time for the trivialities of theories published in pages that most of the world has already forgotten or the conjecture of a theologian who apparently has nothing better to do with their time than ponder what God knew and when did God know it. Life doesn’t afford me the luxury of determining whether God is so powerful as to even be able to create a rock that even God could not pick up.

So, I consider books and I wonder why I keep so many. I wonder their role and their use. I do use some of my books but there are others that will rarely be used again. In this regard I imagine my library is not so much unlike the library of others: landmarks of studies done, concerns resolved, classes developed.

Why, if these texts are not a means to an economic end, do I keep them around? Why can I not, like my friend, rid myself of them?

The answer is simple: their presence keeps me humble, but it also keeps me hungry.

It keeps me humble because they are a constant reminder of how small I am, how finite my intellect is, and how unrealistic it is to think I can know everything of anything. I am reminded of how provisional most of my knowledge truly is as my ideas and opinions could never begin to usurp the sheer mountain of text that a library represents. Whenever I bemoan my inability to read all I want or know all I desire, my library represents my inability to do so and it humbles me, enabling me to give thanks for what I am able to do, be, and know, even while I recognize there is a world of knowledge that will always lay beyond my grasp.

It keeps me hungry because even as I am confronted with my liminality I am also driven to overcome it. Books are an endless quest that contain endless worlds that are only a page away. Books are the key to knowledge, knowledge to power, power to influence, and influence to persuasion. If I am to be a person of persuasion that can influence the world, and others, for good then that process begins with reading and being informed; it begins with speech and speech is rehearsed in texts. Books keep me hungry because their presence keeps me from settling even when settling is exactly what I want to do.

If I live I am a person who is being shaped, who is hopefully growing, maturing, and living into the calling of my life…and books remind me that life is not done with me even though at times I feel down with it.

Books have kept me mentally spry, witty, well informed, imaginative, engaged, and not to mention drastically improving my vocabulary through these last 18 years. Were it not for books, my writing would be akin to the musings of a dim-witted fool (though I do not object that could still be the case). Books are not only interesting but the most interesting people in my life are those who have also wrapped themselves in a world of books (the Good Book as well).

But this is not the whole. Books do keep me humble and they do make me hungry, but there is more: I want my children to see a house full of books.

In an age of glowing screens, I want my children to see their father read; I want them to come by and ask me questions about a book I have been pouring over or walk past a shelf and wonder what “theology” is or who “Slavoj Zizek” was. As they grow up and begin to ask big questions about history, science, faith, love, and the ultimate meaning of it all, I want them to have resources to engage and explore. I want my house to be a house of inquiry. Though I may never pick up some of these books for study again, their presence marks a place I once traveled and it offers a path by which anyone who lives under my roof can follow when they begin to wrestle with the sorts of questions that keeps us humans up at night…and that wake us up in the morning.

Thus, I cannot act as my friend, and rid myself of these things. I must keep them here and there, as reminders of a life I have lived, and of a life that continues to call me even though, at times, I’d rather not listen.

Considering books…I often consider reducing them to capitalist instruments, set to be burned if they do not contribute to my bank account. Then, however, I reconsider, and I wonder where my life would be and how weak my mind would have become, if I had not had such tragically inspiring codices in my house all these years.

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October 27, 2017

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Autobiography, Poetry, Spirituality, The Paranormal

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The Ground Before Me

Here I stand, at the foot of my Grave
Staring at the Ground before Me
Sun drenched grass, Heaven stretched skies
Staring on the Ground before Me

All roads lead here, no matter how far
Staring at the Ground before Me
My eyes grow dim, my heart grows faint
Staring at the Ground before Me

Haunted by this hill, a vault for my mind
Staring at the Ground Before Me
My feet may leave, but my heart remains
Staring at the Ground Before Me

Peering over my world, a world unrecognizable
Staring at the Ground Before Me
All I love and All I have wanted
Staring on the Ground before Me

The Pages of life all lead to this place
Staring at the Ground before me
Before me it was and after me it is
Staring on the Ground before me

What is calling, purpose, infinity of soul?
Staring at the Ground before me
All humans alone as we peer down this hole
Staring at the Ground before Me

Unwelcome friend is Death
Staring at the Ground before me
I hate you for bringing me here
Staring at the Ground before me

What torment, what humility, what nagging nihilistic embrace!
Staring at the Ground Before Me
I want more, more is less
Standing on the Ground Before Me

My hands pressed down, against this earth
Staring at the Ground Before Me
From this I come, to this I’ll go
Staring at the Ground before Me

Quaking Mind, Tremoring Resolve
Staring at the Ground Before Me
Beckoning to me, Siren of the Soil
Staring at the Ground Before Me

Here I stand, at the foot of my grave
Staring at the Ground before Me
O How I wish I had never, found this place
This Ground that is ever Before Me

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May 23, 2017

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Autobiography, Biblical Studies, Christianity, philosophy, Religions, Spirituality, The Paranormal, Theology

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Leaning Into Death: An Alternative Reading of Acts 2.42-47

Preaching from Acts 2 this Eastertide, it dawned on me this familiar passage was saying something much simpler, yet more profound, than providing fodder for theological arguments between Pentecostals and, well, every other Christian.

The early portion of this chapter (tongues of fire, upper room, etc.), gets most of the attention in the chapter, and rightly so. It’s bizarre, unusual, and produces a proclamation that had never happened before.

In Chapter 1, Jesus ascends into heaven and the disciples go to Jerusalem (to the Upper Room) to wait, for something unaware. Chapter 2 continues the action answering the proverbial, “so what now? If Jesus isn’t here, what happens and where are we going?” The tongues of fire episode is the first part of the answer.

But the tongues of fire is the easiest part of the answer.

I mean, who doesn’t like a religious experience? Plenty of people thrive on experience, feelings, euphoric highs that charge our life. We have all been witness to the power of religious experience, perhaps even experiencing something religious ourselves. The two fastest growing segments of Christianity in the world are the two that offer an experience, a doing, with God: Pentecostalism and Catholicism.

Ok, so you’re not religious and don’t like that analogy? Do you like sex, the experience of sex? Or is it better to think and talk about sex as opposed to having sex?

Do you enjoy the experience of cheering for your favorite sports team, cheering for your child, experiencing joy? If you’d rather go to Disney World than talk about it, you prefer experience because participating in something powerful makes you feel.

Thus, we understand how powerful, and preferable, great experiences are. You don’t have to be religious to appreciate that we humans LOVE to experience FEELINGS.

It is little wonder Acts 2 and an experience of the Holy Spirit gains the traction it does. Its powerful, it’s refreshing, it’s renewing.

Yet, the early portion of Acts 2 is not the end game. The end game begins when the experience of the first part of this chapter takes a form of life, a form of life in Acts 2.42-47 that is a daunting reminder/request.

Acts 2.42-47 is a troublesome text that offers a vignette of life in the early church while simultaneously making the rest of us nervous at the consequences. It reads:

⁴²They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. ⁴³Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. ⁴⁴All who believed were together and had all things in common; ⁴⁵they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. ⁴⁶Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

There’s just something about the implication that we should fellowship, commit ourselves to the teaching of the apostles, pray, break bread and praise God that seems like too much work. And lest we get too comfortable, let’s not forget this idea of “holding all things in common and selling our possessions” in order to provide for those who have need that makes us spiritually wriggle and physically convulse.

While this list seems odd to us, it is not uncommon for Luke to give us these summary statements about life in the early church, brief portraitures of how they organized their communal living. He does so in several places throughout Acts, such as chapters 4, 6 and 9.

In so doing, Luke is not only telling us how the early church lived, but he is gently nudging us to go and do likewise.

The trouble with these summaries, however, is that they are often lifted out of the chapters in which they occur. These summaries, like Paul’s lists of “dos and don’ts” that keep people out of heaven, are summarily read and rehearsed with little regard to the stories preceding and following them.

While debates about religious experience and the political ideology of Acts 2 are intriguing, I have a different question: Why does this summary occur here, in this part of the Acts 2? What larger narrative is at work behind this summary? And why does the Lectionary ask us to read this text at this point in the Easter Season?

The problem with reading Acts chapter 2 is that it is read as two separate texts. We have a 2.0 and a 2.1 version: a Pentecostal experience and a purview into life in the early church. We preach an experience OR we preach a political obligation. Rarely do we seek the coherence of this chapter.

Simply put, Acts 2.42-47 is impossible apart from Pentecost. This is a way of life that cannot be lived apart from the Spirit. The episodes of this chapter are episodes but they must remain a singular chapter, parts of a larger whole. But let’s not stop there.

Acts 2.42-47 cannot happen apart from the Resurrection in Luke! The Resurrection of Jesus in Luke, the Ascension of Jesus in Acts 1, and the Giving of the Spirit in Acts 2 are three stages of a singular event in which Jesus is glorified and given back to creation.

If Christ be not raised, then living in the kind of community discussed in Acts 2 is laughable. If Christ be not ascended, then there is no giving of his presence to the Church. If there is no giving of the Spirit, there are no tongues of fire, no empowered proclamation, and no Church.

Therefore Acts 2 is part of our Easter readings. At first blush, one would surmise we should read Acts 2 during the season of Pentecost, but if we understand this larger movement we see that Acts 2 is not describing a Pentecostal community; it is describing an Easter community empowered through Pentecost.

It is because Jesus is raised, and the end of time marked by the outpouring of the Spirit, that those who believe on Jesus are compelled to live a life in which they sell their things, hold all things in common, break bread together, worship, and commit themselves to the apostles teaching.

Easter has empowered this early group of believers to not hold so tightly to life and empowered them to grasp more tightly to one another.

In a world without Easter, we cling to our life. In a world with Easter, we grasp our death, and through death find life.

The early church knew how to grasp their death. They understood it to such a degree that they lived their life toward death, leaning into it. They leaned into to such a degree that they held loosely to all that was theirs and committed themselves to one another, anticipating that the end that had started in the Resurrection of Jesus, and been confirmed in the giving of the Holy Spirit, would overtake them all soon.

The early church took Joel 2.28 seriously,

“After this I will pour out My Spirit on all humanity; then your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will have dreams, and your young men will see visions.”

Here is the kicker: only people who are convinced that in Jesus’ Resurrection the end has begun can live according to Acts 2.42-47. Only people who have received tongues of fire to proclaim the ridiculous message that Jesus is raised and that we can share in his resurrection can live as Acts suggests.

Moving one step further, people who believe this, and have experienced the outpouring of the Spirit, can do no other than live as Acts 2 suggests because they understand they are living toward death, living toward the end that is God. People who know the end is near have no time to be consumed with grasping to a life they will lose so they lose the life they have. The Apostle Paul insinuated something similar when he proclaims, “I am crucified with Christ.”

In the debate between paradox or dialectic, in this instance, we side with paradox.

One may believe this end will come in the clouds with Christ, or believe it comes at the time of our own death, either way, we must lean in toward the end. This is what the early church does and why Acts 2.42-47 is odd; it’s a way of life that doesn’t grasp life.

I call this a hermeneutic of loss, a hermeneutic grounded in the death of Jesus and the loss of the world.

As such, Acts 2.42-47 really functions as more of a reminder of what matters than a dictum to be followed. The texts job isn’t to exacerbate our failings, but to remind us that this is how people live who live toward the end: People who believe the end is now in the Resurrection, Ascension and Coming Holy Spirit of Christ. When we forget life is found in death, we live life for life-sake and when death comes we wish we’d lived toward death, because we will regret living as if the end wouldn’t happen.

But this reading shouldn’t come a surprise.

I have never known a hermeneutic of loss, or read scripture as texts toward death, until I lost my own father nearly 12 weeks ago. After suddenly losing him, scripture has just as suddenly become a new land. I see in it things hidden before; I feel in it things I never knew to feel. Eerily, parts scripture make more sense now because it too was born out of a series of traumas that led to life in/through loss.

After my father’s death, all I wanted to do was do these things in Acts 2 with him. I wanted to sit in his Sunday School class one more time, hearing the apostles teaching. I wanted to eat with him again, break bread. I wanted to fellowship more, visit his house after work. I wanted to pray for him, with him, share in the simple pleasure of hearing him pray one more time before dinner. I wanted to be thankful more, enjoy life more, not let the trivial things of life irritate me when I was around him.

When he died, he left behind all the things he loved and enjoyed. His family, his hobbies, his business: it is all still here. Yet, my father lived as one who never held too tightly to these things. He left them behind, he knew he would, so he spent his days doing as much of Acts 2 as he could. If you knew him, you lived Acts 2 with him as well.

Acts 2 reminds us that at the end of our days, either at the appearance of Christ in the Clouds, or in the face of death when it comes for us, we will not regret anything except that we had lived more like the picture given to us in Acts 2.42-47.

My suggestion?

Discover the resurrection of Jesus. Discover death. Lean into it. Find life. Find Freedom.

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April 29, 2017

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My Final Gift to my Father: This Burden

My Dad at our home on 2/11/2017 for my daughters 2nd Birthday Party, Minnie Mouse themed. 16 days before he passed

Unsuspecting subjects of the fates is what we become. Persons wandering the land only to be shackled by a yoke fashioned in the randomness of life. Living life, free, free of this burden, the world a place of solace and comfort, then suddenly, that world dies. There is no more freedom, not from sin, not from death, not from your thoughts, not from this burden.

When I was younger, naïve people in church who meant well would often implore us to ask God to burden us with something: those lost to Christ, those children dying of hunger, that ministry God needed you to do. Lord, give us a burden for you.

What poppycock. As if a burden sought through voluntary prayer can become something other than voluntary. As if a burden we choose to receive can change our inner core. This sort of “burden” was an act of piety to get us to feel something, move, and do something. It was a faith seeking a burden in order to make that said faith relevant. Without the burden, the faith seemed empty, not to mention selfish.

Yet, the burden to seek our faith in the first place was not something sought so flippantly, nor voluntarily.

Something about God’s prevenient grace questing after us, unrelentingly, seems to ring more of a bell than a faith so easily chosen.

The most precious things in life are not chosen by us; instead, they enter without our choice demanding our attention, until we can choose no other.

This is what a burden is. It is not something we choose; it is something hoisted upon us. It is that which we cannot choose to discard. It stays with us. It doesn’t leave even after we ask it to do so.

It is a tortuous refining fire that makes us suffer with it.

It is a real burden. Those are not simply prayed for, nor are they prayed away.

On 2/27/2017 this year I was given a burden. It is one that showed up uninvited.

On this day, my father, a 65-year-old man in good health, collapsed, suffering cardiac arrest. No warning. No signs. No medical history. And, of course, no goodbye. As we stood by his bedside where his dead body lay, saying goodbye to him after the ER had done everything they could, we hugged his warm body until it turned cold.

The burden found me then though I didn’t realize it. And God, I wish it hadn’t.

What is this burden? What is it that I now carry with me, the burden I owe to the death of my father?

My father died young, in good health, and he died suddenly. As we would all wish our loved ones to die when they must, even as we wish death for ourselves someday, my father died that way. Fast, quick, and painless, with dignity.

He did not have any pain. He did not suffer. He never grew old. He never grew sick. He never experienced the deterioration of his body that would make his loved ones prefer death for him over life. My father did not experience dementia or Alzheimer’s and he did not have to fight cancer.

He did not become the waste of a human person that so many of us will become, spirits trapped in flesh that steal our humanity from us.

My dad didn’t have to do that. He had a good death. A clean death. A painless quick death that he most likely didn’t know had happened. He died as we all hope to die.

Yet, his good death gives me a great burden.

For my father to die as he did, I will necessarily carry the pain of sudden loss, of regrets, of the goodbye never spoken. Here one minute, gone the next, he was raptured from our life.

I will not have the closure experienced by people who get to say their “I love you’s” and “thank you’s” and “I am sorry’s” before their loved one’s pass. I did not get the final hug, kiss, or hands held tightly that I would have wanted.

In order for me to have had closure, he would have needed to grow old, grow sick, give me time to expect his death, say our final words, and then say goodbye when the season of goodbye had arrived.

In other words, for me to feel good about his death he would have had to have felt pain, loss, and the realization of his own pending death. He would have had to experience his own dehumanization for me to experience grief without so many rough edges. He would have had to suffer greatly so that I could suffer less. My father would have had to experience what I would never want my father to experience.

My peace would be his hell and then he would die.

Yet, this is not how it happened. The irony is that my father gave me what he would never want to have given me in order for him to die as I would have wanted him to die.

In the end, the burden that I must suffer his death when he was young, and without a goodbye, is the final gift I can give my father even as I’d rather not give it. It is the burden I have to give him because he gave me the death I didn’t want to experience even as it was the death I would have wished for him.

This is the trade-off. This is the gift I can give to my father. I must carry the burden of his sudden loss so that his death could be the kind of death I would want him to have if he had to have it.

I hate this burden. I hate that I must carry it. I hate the pain and shock that accompanies it. I did not pray for it and I certainly didn’t need God to give it to me. Yet, it found and forced itself upon me.

I will hate it until I meet my own death. I hate that he left too soon. I hate everything about it.

Yet, 8 weeks from my father’s passing I find I love this burden because it is the last gift I can give my father in order for him to die the death I would have hoped for him all along.

For him, no matter how heavy gets, I will carry it through tear stained pain and with a heart of gratitude for the man I am proud to call my father. I will carry this burden because my dad deserves nothing less.

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April 21, 2017

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Death asks Questions. Ecclesiastes Answers.

ecclesiastes whats the point

Sudden, premature, Death is the great equalizer. Both for those who die and those they leave behind.

For those who die, suddenly, everything they were, or weren’t, did, or didn’t do, is finished. Their dreams, their opinions, their loves, their hates, their things and their family, all stay behind. The prince and the pauper meet the same fate. None is greater than the other and the earth swallows both.

For those who live, suddenly, everything that meant something now means less. The world stops. Priorities change. Things that didn’t mean so much, like small conversations, hugs, “I appreciate yous” or the game of golf you skipped for work…now take precedent over work, money, or any problem you thought mattered before your loved one passed away.

Death makes us all equal and it equalizes all things. It crudely displays the valueless nature of our system of values and the value of things we once took for granted.

Here, at the arrival of my father’s death, two main questions began to emerge.

First, how can something this unjust happen to someone who didn’t deserve this fate now, given all the work he still had to do? How can I process such an unjust death? It simply isn’t just and there are no theological jumping jacks that can make it so.

My dad had no vices, relatively healthy, in good shape, and no medical history of cardiac issues. The very thing we never thought would kill him did, while people who abuse their bodies, cannot move due to obesity, and are walking diabetic laboratories get more time on earth.

My father’s death is a miscarriage of cosmic justice.

Some people say it’s because God has timing that we can’t understand. I heard this from many folks during the weeks following his death.

Me? I call that stupid. If it sounds stupid when you say it, it probably is.

God had nothing to do with my dad dying. He was human and had an unfortunate internal chemistry that led to a tragic event. These other people that are alive and shouldn’t be? These walking diabetic laboratories or people who have abused their bodies with vices for decades…these people? They are just lucky. Somehow, I don’t think God kills the good ones and leaves the negligent ones as if to reward their abuse of creation.

And if God does do that? Well, when I get to the pearly gates I’ll say “thanks but no thanks” because I couldn’t stand to be around a being that capricious for eternity. When Ecclesiastes tells us that it rains on the just and the unjust that is simply what it is. There is no reason for it. Its life, even in a world created by God.

The second question I asked, however, was concerning meaning. It is almost laughable how death turned me back toward those foundational questions of religion and philosophy: What is the meaning of life and what is my role in it? Furthermore, how do I know my answer to these questions is true once given?

Before my dad passed, I thought I knew the meaning of life; I thought I could give someone a satisfactory answer to the question if they’d asked. Afterward…immediately afterward? I was left without a good answer. What meaning is there? Where is meaning to be found if in an instant death can rupture creation and render all meaning endowed with life meaningless? We give the world meaning by what we invest in and love, yet all our investment and love can come to an abrupt end without warning! In an instant, the meaning maker that is the human being can be made meaningless.

Through my father’s death I came face to face with the meaninglessness of meaning. When he died, suddenly, the meaning I had endowed with work and the problems at work were whisked away. The meaning I had ascribed to my education, my fitness, my calling, my professional life, etc., all mattered no more than a pile of manure. Human resource problems, customer complaints, goals for the new year, my to do list for the week, papers I wanted to write, pursuing my Doctorate of Ministry, reading any books, caring about ministry, having fun, etc., etc., it all disappeared and didn’t matter.

Everything that I thought meant something…now, meant nothing, thus leaving me to ask, “Did it all mean anything to begin with then?”

I know, I know, some people will say this is grief, depression, the low water mark of dealing with loss. To an extent, I agree.

However, as I have now had nearly 8 weeks to contemplate the sudden death of my father, I have come to realize that it is not simply his sudden departure that makes me feel this way. It’s not that my melancholy leads me to these conclusions. Rather, it is the revelation that just as he died, so could I, and without notice, and in that moment, all the things I am doing become meaningless. All my cares, worries, , loves and accomplishments can be just as suddenly buried…and within months or years my family will move on without me…living. Within days, most of the general public will no longer care I am dead.

To pass away is to be dead to the world, our terminal condition revealed for what it is.

This is what death is: it is the cessation of existence in time, the loss of consciousness, the death of what makes us an “I.” To echo Robert Jenson here, to think otherwise is to cheat and think death as not death…in which case it isn’t really death we’re thinking and I’m not sure what we are thinking about death if we don’t truly think of it as being dead.

This is what makes the ant hill of human civilization and society meaningless: that all our striving and loving all ends the same and could do so without a warning.

How does one get excited about anything knowing this Grim Reaper lingers so close, even closer than those of us in our youth care to imagine? How can one invest time reading complex theory or engaging in banal political or theological discourse knowing that none of that can change the place we are all going? How can we be stupidly consumed with sports and entertainment when it all mounts to nothing more than a distraction of our pending death? It’s as if we are simply wasting our time to simply pass the time until it is our time.

As I have pondered both these questions (the injustice of my father’s death and the meaninglessness of life), I have found myself in Ecclesiastes. Like the Psalter, prior to my father’s passing, Ecclesiastes was a book to be studied, something to be understood with the mind, not felt with the heart. I could ascend to what the author says by simply knowing what the words and phrases meant…yet after this tragedy I now realize I didn’t know then what I know now. Now, I get it.

Myself and the Preacher are blood brothers.

We all know the famous phrase the Preacher uses, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” The message is simple: one day we will die and all our toil is for naught. Everything turns out to be as a vapor, here for a moment, and then gone. Human life is no exception.

There is no better time to read Ecclesiastes than after a tragic loss because the Preacher is saying what many of us our thinking, and thankfully, his piety doesn’t keep him from saying it or our forefathers from making it Scripture.

Thus, as I revisited him I began to know for the first time what he was saying and I began asking him, “Then why do anything? If all is vanity, why act at all?”

Then, I came to chapter 9. He paints us this bleak picture:

For I have taken all this to my heart and explain it that righteous men, wise men, and their deeds are in the hand of God. Man does not know whether it will be love or hatred; anything awaits him.2 It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and for the unclean; for the man who offers a sacrifice and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good man is, so is the sinner; as the swearer is, so is the one who is afraid to swear. 3 This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all men. Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. Afterwards they go to the dead. 4 For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. 5 For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything, nor have they any longer a reward, for their memory is forgotten. 6 Indeed their love, their hate and their zeal have already perished, and they will no longer have a share in all that is done under the sun.”

In this passage, the preacher and I are speaking the same language. I get it. This makes complete sense. In the face of complete hopelessness there is simply more hopelessness, especially with death the fate of all, the fate of the one who tries their hardest and for the biggest slacker on the planet. For the Holy man and the indulgent sinner.

What I find most amusing is that one of the most famous passage in Ecclesiastes, the kind of verse that make its way on desk ornamentations and in Pathway Bookstore pictures, Ecclesiastes 9:10, isn’t near as cute as it seems. In an apparent betrayal of how it is used, however, we find the answer to complete meaninglessness and vanity.

9.10 reads, “Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might.” This is usually where the verse stops and we like to use it as encouragement to do our best for God, you know, gird up that Protestant work ethic and work hard. If God wants anything, it’s a hard worker.

In fact, when I had shared about how sudden death had made life purposeless and meaningless, I was told by one person, “well, that’s one way to look at it. The other way is to see that life is given meaning by doing everything for God.” I get it. I understand the sentiment and why you need to tell yourself that…but that didn’t suffice for me. It didn’t sit well with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes either. I needed an earthier answer.

Why should you do with all your might everything your hands find to do?

The answer is in the second half of 9.10, “for there is no activity or planning or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol where you are going.”

No wonder the whole verse isn’t sold at Pathway. Verses 11-12 further impress the message:

I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all. 12 Moreover, man does not know his time: like fish caught in a treacherous net and birds trapped in a snare, so the sons of men are ensnared at an evil time when it suddenly falls on them.

When read in context, the flowery passage of doing with all your might what your hands find has a very dark connotation: You will one day die and then you can do nothing. Further, even if you do heed the advice of 9.10 it really doesn’t matter, for the battle does not always go to the one who does it with all their might. Life is fleeting. Random evils overtake us all. Use your hands while they can be used because your righteous life will end just an evil life.

My father did not know he was going to die. I suspect he never knew what happened to him. When he stood before God he was probably as shocked as anyone to find himself there. He was hit so quickly by an unknown force he could do nothing to stop it. Like Ecclesiastes says, “Man does not know his time…time and chance overtake them all.”

The night my father died he was that fish caught in a net, unsuspecting, yet still caught. Living life, swimming, yet death was lurking in the shadows.

Where is meaning in this? Why care? Why go on? Why learn, why act, why be, when Ecclesiastes (and life itself!) teaches us that righteous men and evil men have the same fate…and the just are done unjustly while the unjust are dealt justice?

Why? Ecclesiastes answers: Because to not live, to not do with all your might what your hands finds to do, is to already be dead. We are alive. We are creatures. We must do with our bodies the most that we can because one day our bodies will do nothing. We should live because we are alive. There is plenty of time to do nothing when we are dead.

Our doing is our protest against death.

Yes, we are stuck in a universe that is random. We are blips on the universal screen, here only momentarily, yet we are here. We are alive. We are not uncreated but God thought it worthwhile to create even if every created thing also has a created end. For only something alive can “fear God and keep his commandments.” (12.13)

Scripture says that death is the final foe; it is not a friend. It is not something we should run toward but should deny as long as possible by engaging in life vigorously and unabashedly.

I know many of us look for grandiose answers to our simple questions, but sometimes, the answer is just as simple: Live now for when you are dead there will be no activity. Embrace life while you can embrace it.

There is no feeling like suddenly losing a loved one without any preparation. It is a special kind of hell. I never understood how a tragic event can suddenly render the world obsolete until now.

Ironically, however, in losing one world I have gained another. I have been given a new love for my family. I deeply hurt over the loss of my dad and I hate that he is not here. I literally hate it. I still go back and forth between acceptance and denial. Waves of grief still hit when I think of all he’ll miss, of moments when I want to talk to him, of time I wish I had been a better son. I hate that I did not get to say goodbye.

But now, I cherish my family more. I hug them more. I kiss my kid’s goodnight more often (even though a couple are 11). I let my 2-year-old girl drag me around the house and play silly games that I really don’t have time to play because I really don’t have the time to not play with her. I am more kind to people. For the few men in my life that are my best friends, we tell one another we love each more frequently. I am not as angry and frustrated with work as I had been before his death even though work has now become more daunting. I am reprioritizing my life around what I value the most when all values lose value. I am making an effort to be more loving, more empathetic, more understanding. With the help of God, I am trying to be an incarnation of love to those around me and I am trying to give myself to others, my friends and my family, because one day I will be dead. I am trying to live as if tomorrow will not happen…and if it doesn’t I want to leave it all on the field, so to speak.

I am trying to do with all my might what my hands find to do because that is all I can do as a creature and as one that with each moment alive must tell death, “not yet.”

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March 24, 2017

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A Prayer of Lament & Forgiveness

How Lonely sits the city where silence now resides

The doorways are clean and empty, the water basins full

Yet, there are no ripples in the water

No footprints in the walkways

The corridors are silent- only filled with the tears of lament

The joy of my heart has ceased, our dancing has been turned to mourning (Lamentations 5.15)

My eyes fail because of tears, my spirit is greatly troubled

My heart is poured out on the earth because of the destruction of my home (Lamentations 2.11)

Oh Lord, forgive us for taking this place for granted

For abusing our life with nonsense and frivolity

Forgive us for being so sure of our life

Forgive us for not loving one another as we should

Shame us for our stupid arguments and selfish spirits

For dwelling on problems rather than love

Forgive us for valuing things over people

Forgive us of our laziness toward one another and your world

Forgive us for not loving you by loving to the fullest those whom you have given us

Forgive us for not seeing our families as grace, as gift

The gift is now gone; it is no more

You have given, You have loved

Our Father loved us as you loved us, he loved us as you loved the world

Forgive us for thinking the city would be filled with laughter forever

My soul has been rejected from peace. I have forgotten happiness

So I say my strength has perished and so has my hope from the Lord (Lamentations 3.17-18)

He has walled me in so that I cannot go out, He has made my chain heavy (Lamentations 3.7)

O God, we have taken our breath for granted

We have worshipped at the idol of invincibility

We were asleep – we are awake – to an empty city

Our Father is gone, He is with you

Remember what has befallen us, Look and see our reproach! (Lamentations 5.1a)

Create in us a new heart and purge us of our filthy presumptions

Our haughty unloving selves

Do not hide your ear from my prayer for relief (Lamentations 3.56)

Amen.

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March 19, 2017

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NO! You haven’t been here: The Singularity of Grieving Loss

master-a-grief

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Experiencing the death of a loved one is not fact to be stated, a proposition that is an absolute truth. That a loved one has died IS a fact; that one has experienced the grief of the death is not a fact; it is a subjective experience unavailable to all people except the one in grief.

It is not an experience that is shared or something with which one can empathize. It is unique, personal, and subjective because it is larger than the fact of its happening; it taps into the recesses of the human experience that cannot be harnessed by our words or shared.

One may have in fact lost a father, a husband, a child, a friend, but the proposition “I lost my husband too” is simply that; it is a statement of fact, not a statement of truth because truth lies in experiencing the fact that was stated. Facts have no value. They just are. They do not denote a common experience; they denote an event. Since facts have no value facts do not denote the meaning of life. Real life, what we hold dear, what we care about, resides outside the facts. Ludwig Wittgenstein beautifully portrays this when he writes:

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world, everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value — and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.” (Tractatus 6.4)

Just because a fact has happened to us does not imply that we then know what that fact means for another.

Take a sunset as an example. We would agree that we can look at a sunset and see that it is beautiful, yet we would also agree that what makes it so is different for both of us. My impression of beauty is not imputed upon you or vice versa. The same could be said for joy or laughter. We allow that individuals can experience the same emotion while experiencing it differently…yet when it comes to grief we think that because we have experienced grief that you must also experience it as me.

Of all the emotions that refuses similarity, grief refuses it the most yet it is the one we tend to harmonize and try to share.

Grief is the most complex yet we have made it the simplest by the way we relate to those in it.

This is impossible. The truth of tragedy, beauty, grief or joy is they all transcend our ability to state them as facts and that is what makes them truthful; they are the stuff of real life because they transcend what can be thought, said or expressed. All of these things refuse thought. They refuse analogies whereby they can make sense. They refuse a universal experience even though they are all experienced universally.

Thus, of most human experience it is impossible to speak, to describe, to bring under the submission of our ideas. Wittgenstein held that a logical language can only deal with what is true, and unfortunately, what is true is precisely what evades language.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”

This weekend, a month ago, he was at my little girls birthday party, wearing Minnie Mouse ears and being the world’s greatest grandad. Now, my father has been dead for 19 days. For the first time in my life, I experienced a sudden rupture of the world; a reversal of what is normal into an alternative reality in which the tragic has defined the common place. On Feb 27, around 5:30pm, I told my father “see ya later dad” for the final time as he left our office to go to a Karate Workout.

In the office that day we talked about what had to be done Tuesday if it didn’t rain, what the week would hold, and that I’d be able to help him with some things Wednesday. We talked about family history briefly, talked about repairs being done, and he asked me if he should go workout given he had a sore rib. We talked about mundane things. Regular things. We talked as if tomorrow was a given.

I was within minutes of leaving the office to do a monthly inventory at a store and someone stepped into my office and said “someone from Paul Huff called, they said your dad is having another episode.”

My father didn’t have “episodes.” I had no idea what that meant but I needed to find out.

I made one call, then ran out of the office to my car and sped down Peerless Rd to the gym where my father was working out. There, I encountered my 65 year old, 3^rd degree black belt father, tied to a gurney, with a pulse and shallow breathing. This situation did not feel right; it wasn’t good. I was optimistic but my gut was beginning to sink knowing that the man I saw, my father, was on the edge of life…hanging on.

I grabbed my father’s bag from his instructor, threw it in my car and raced to the hospital to meet him there. Along the way, I stopped for gas (I had been on “E” all day in town and didn’t need to run out now). I called my wife, called my sister, tried calling my mother. Panic had overtaken my body but I was hopeful…until the paramedic van took much longer to go to the hospital than it should have. Finally, it appeared. I followed it to the hospital, called my pastor as I parked, ran to the ER, and was immediately taken to Consultation Room 1.

My pastor arrived within minutes and was with me in the room when the ER Doctor comes into the room and says “Hi my name is (X). This is not good. I am not optimistic. Your father is not responding to anything I am doing. Can you tell me something about his medical history that may help me?”

Astounded at the breathtaking bluntness, I had nothing. My dad took a small dose of cholesterol medication. That was it. I told him he was healthy, had a good recent physical, no known illnesses or disease. The Dr. left the room. I looked at my pastor and said “So, how many times have you gotten news that stark right out the gate?” He shook his head, “nada.” This doctor was not giving me any false hope.

About 10 minutes later, around 7:45, the Doc reentered the room, with long face and a low heart, he looked at me and said “I’m sorry, you father is gone.” At that moment, my entire heart sank to the ground, my heart raged, my mind confused, I screamed and yelled. I hit the wall, I fell against it and I sank to my knees as I wept for my father with a groaning and weeping I didn’t even know existed. I hugged my pastor and I cried. I squeezed him as hard as I could. My mom had entered the hospital as I heard the news. She heard me wail…and that is how she knew my dad was gone.

She entered the consultation room broken, weeping, herself in her hands. We embraced and shook our heads in disbelief. At 5:30 I talked to my dad. At 7:45 he was gone. Rupture. Disruption. Darkness. Confusion. Disbelief. Pain. Fear. Loss. Bottomless Sorrow. What is this new world?

At 9pm we were escorted back to the room where my father lay. There, lying in a hospital bed and covered with his sheet up to his chest, was the man who only hours earlier had been with us. Entering the room with me was my mother, sister and wife. My pastor was also there, along with my dad’s brother and his family.

We spent 3 hours with my deceased father, not wanting to leave him. We touched him, hugged him, we wept, we kissed him, we talked to him. His body was still warm when we arrived but by midnight he was cold. I walked around the room shaking my head, looking at the singularly most important man in my life, wondering how I would grieve him, how life would go on, what this new epoch would be.

How is it that MY DAD IS DEAD?!? Death resisted, and resists, my thinking.

He was at work that morning, this Monday morning. Everything was normal. He said goodbye to me for the day. I am not even sure I looked up to say goodbye, but I did look up to see him close the door behind him. That was the last time I would see my father upright.

He went for a Karate workout. He never came back. That night my father died…and even as I type this I cannot believe I am typing this.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”

Grief. Or as one of my friends described it “the bastard of sadness.” How I wish I did not understand that definition.

I have been alive for 36 years. I have lost people close to me, particularly my grandparents. I was lucky enough to have all 4 of my grandparents well into adulthood. They passed at the age of 75, 83, 87 and 89 respectively. All of them were sick, some more than others. Some we knew they would die, others it wasn’t a surprise but neither was it expected. For all, I wept. For all, with the blessing of my family, I eulogized them. For all, I knew life also meant death and all of them had lived a full, long life. I didn’t want to let them go, but I knew I had to.

None of their passings prepared me for this. Not even one.

My father passing suddenly, unexpectedly, without warning and without any family history of cardiac arrest, is not the same for me as losing a grandparent I knew was sick or a father that had cancer whom we knew would die soon. Here I am, trying to process losing my father a full 24 years before he lost his! My dad was 63 when he buried his father…he had him his entire life. I get to have my father half of mine.

I am trying to process going to karate one minute, dead the next.

I realize some people never had a father or some may have had a father for lesser years than me. I am thankful I had him till he was 65 but I mourn he was taken too soon…and knowing I had him 36 years doesn’t change what happened or make my situation easier to compute or accept.

Now, overnight, I’m grieving my father while sitting in his desk, going to his church, running the business he started. I am using his pens, reading his writing daily, using the folders and notebooks he organized…using his checkbooks with his last entries directly above mine! I do not get to evacuate his presence and go back to my life because OUR LIVES ARE CONNECTED! I don’t get to bury my dad in his town and then go back to mine. I have to walk the same sidewalks he walked, talk to people he spoke to, tell people who call for him that he is dead, and use his emails to conduct business!

Most people don’t have to bury a father and then do what I do every day.

No, you may have lost a father but you don’t have to wake up and wear his shoes.

This is too much!

My father dying isn’t the same for me as attending my old father’s funeral, whom I knew was sick and would die, and with whom I had time to say my last peace, tell him I love him, tell him I’m sorry for ever being anything but grateful. This is shock. It is rupture. It is confusion. It is senseless. It is morose.

Likewise, my mother was married to him for 38 years; She was 19. Now, suddenly, she is without him. Overnight, her house is silent in the morning and it is silent before bed. The garbage doesn’t fill as fast. The dishes are only hers and the laundry doesn’t have any of his clothes. My mom did not lose a sick, aged man, who had been dying and whom she knew she would lose. She experienced something totally different.

She lost her world in a single day and now she lives in another one without any warning.

When I think about what happened I cannot help but feel a sense of injustice, injustice that my dad took care of his body, was wary about what he put into it, had regular physicals and blood work, had Lifeway screenings, exercised and refrained from all dietary vices…yet still died without warning while people older, sicker, and in far worse shape avoid the Grim Reaper for some unknown reason.

It rains on the just and the unjust…and this isn’t just.

I don’t really know what people’s expectation of me or my family is. When does the world expect me to be “fine?” When should I be happy again? When is my mind free of my father’s constant memory?

I am not sure I know the answer, but if you expect me to be fine after just 3 weeks…I won’t be. I am not fine. This situation is not fine. I will look fine and I will function, moment by moment, but inside I am thinking about my father…and missing him. Seeing my 65-year-old father in that casket 10-15 years too soon is not fine! I will tolerate it but I am not fine.

It will be a while before “I” and “fine” are one again…and spiritual platitudes do not make it easier.

I am not an expert at grief or loss. If I am lucky, this will be the hardest loss I suffer. I will die before my wife and kids, and my own mother will grow old and I will say goodbye to her in our time, with time and with notice.

I am no expert but I have observed something I feel compelled to share.

It is simple: you do not understand my loss. You cannot relate and it is not the same as yours. Likewise, I am also removed from your loss…for good or ill, bigger or smaller…you don’t understand mine and I don’t understand yours. If yours was easier to deal with, great. I am glad you had that blessing. If mine is easier, than you are in my prayers…because this pit is its own special hell and I would hate to see where you are but I’ll acknowledge you’ve been to a place I haven’t.

This is blunt: you do not understand my loss.

Losing an old, sick father, is not the same as me losing a healthy father suddenly. The slow rupture and loss you felt as you released emotional connection to a man you knew would die is not the same as my father being jerked out of my life, out of this world, and into another.

Just because you lost a dad, doesn’t mean you have any idea how the loss of mine feels. Please don’t compare it…and please don’t tell me you understand…because you don’t.

Likewise, you don’t understand what my mother feels. You may have lost a husband, and you may be a widow, but you didn’t talk to him at 5:30, hear him tell you he’ll see you at 7:30, and the next time you saw him was 9pm, in an ER bed, dead. You losing your old husband isn’t the same.

For those of you who have experienced sudden, rupturing loss, you have an idea…and you know the depth of how bad it sucks…but even then, none of us can experience the grief of another nor should any of us impute our experience of grief onto another person. I will not grieve as you, nor you as I, so please let’s save the nicety and be honest: we don’t understand how one another feels.

All we can do is be present…and stop with the impossible empathy and reminders that God has a plan because if killing humans is part of God’s plan and “timing,” then perhaps we should revisit whether a capricious God like that is worth our attention. I digress.

Likewise, I do not understand what it is to lose my father when he was 40, after he dropped me off at school, only to find that later in the day he will commit suicide. I do not get that pain. I don’t understand that…but one of my friends does. I lost a father, you lost a father, but none of us lost a father like that! We don’t understand her loss even though we lost the same “person.”

You may understand what it means to lose a father, but you don’t understand what it means to lose one that left this world by his own actions.

My uncle lost a son at 20. He said goodnight to him, hugged him, told him he loved him at 9pm. 6-7 hours later police knock on his door and tell him his son is dead. He was killed in a car accident, ejected from the back of the rear window, thrown 200 feet, and DOA. You may have lost a son…but did you lose him like that?

I pray I never lose a child like that…I don’t understand that kind of loss…and I never want to. Many people have lost sons, and fathers, and wives and daughters…but each loss is unique. Yet we seem to think that because we have lost that same “person” we understand what the grieving person is feeling.

Well, we don’t. I never understood that quite like I understand it now so I am sorry if I ever told you “I understand” when I really had no idea.

We need to stop saying it because all it does it either belittle our own loss or it belittles the loss of the other; It does nothing to comfort the hurting person. We can never feel the grief of the other. We are always outside someone else’s experience.

I am not writing this to negate your loss or say my loss is greater than yours…but I do believe, and psychological research reinforces this, that certain types of loss are harder to adjust to and process than others. Loss and grief is not universally experienced. Your loss may be greater, or easier to process, but our losses are not the same.

Your experience is unavailable to me and mine is unavailable to you.

As for my loss, I do not expect anyone to understand even though people have told me they do because they “lost a father too.” I don’t expect empathy because my individual experience is just that: individual.

I appreciate all the thoughts and prayers and texts, but the experience of grief via the death of a loved one is not universal. It is singular and it is experienced singularly via the relationship we had to the departed. You losing a father isn’t like me losing a father, or vice versa…and you losing a father or husband in old age isn’t like my mother losing a spouse.

I’m sorry we can’t feel for one another but the nature of feeling refuses its synonymy.

Honestly, I feel cheated and robbed by what happened. My father’s death not only ended his life, but it will change and shape the direction of my life, my mom, my sister, and my kid’s life…all in a way that if it had happened in a decade from now wouldn’t have been the case. Most of all, his untimely death doesn’t allow me to be a better son, speak power into his life, encourage him when I knew he needed it but was too busy to take the time. While I will move past those regrets, I will get to live with them.

My grief is mine. It is not ours. The sooner we understand this the better humans we can be toward one another when we experience loss, and at some point, we will experience it for ourselves or we will share it with others.

Not all people will go through sudden loss.

Some of us will be lucky. We will grow old, our parents will grow old, our children will grow old…and we will bury one another in appropriate seasons. I pray that is what happens for you. I pray you never feel what it means for a loved one to be instantly removed without warning. I pray you wake up each day to a familiar world with familiar people. I pray you get to let them go gently. I pray you are that fortunate…and I pray I am that fortunate moving forward.

Some Deserts may be traveled with others but they are experienced alone.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”

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njnapier

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March 12, 2017

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Autobiography, Biblical Studies, Sermons, The Paranormal, Theology

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My Fathers Sermon on Peace

Dad and Leon

Two weeks ago, Feb 26^th, was my father’s last Sunday alive. In usual fashion, he found himself at church around 9:30am preparing to teach Sunday School. I did not attend his Sunday School class that morning. I missed his last lesson. In retrospect, I wish I had not worked so much on the weekends, long Saturdays, and had had more strength to wake up and drag my troop to church for Sunday School regularly. I’d have liked to sat in on a few more of his lessons, asked a few more questions, and sat more readily at the feet of the singularly most important man in my life.

Today, is Sunday, March 12, 2017. My father would have turned 66 in August, he just celebrated 38 years with my mother. He was just at my daughters 2 year old Birthday party two weeks ago and tomorrow is my 36^th birthday. The first one I will spend without my father writing me a card, telling me he loves, wishing me a happy birthday. I am not much worried about memorializing my birth this year. In tribute to what my father did each Sunday, and would be doing today if he were here, I share with all of you a rare thing: One of his sermons. He preached a handful of times and this is one of them. It is on a topic he held dear to him: inner peace.

Below is a typed copy of the 4 page handwritten manuscript of my father’s sermon on peace.

Peace was a central gospel theme for him: peace through trust in God, peace through salvation by faith, peace by knowing it is well with your soul, peace and harmony in relationship to one another as indicative of our love for God. A Gospel absent the peace of God in Christ is no Gospel. My father longed for, and lived, with peace and harmony with everyone. I cannot recall a single person he ever spoke ill of or held in contempt. Even if he was wronged, he may acknowledge the shadiness of the person but he would never gossip or speak ill publicly of them. He wanted peace. He had peace. And he had it because he believed in God.

My prayer this morning, is the prayer of Thomas: Lord, help me be like my father, help my disbelief. In so doing, give me, and those around me, nothing more, or less, than peace.

“Peace” by Mitch Napier

Read John 16:33 : “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

Is there a secret to inner peace? When you think about peace, what do you think the average person thinks about? I believe they think of peace among nations on a global scale, generally speaking. I believe people may also think about peace at home, at work.

One thing that seems definite is that after trouble more trouble follows. (this is why inner peace is the key. If we can attain inner peace all others would fall in HIM. When peace does not abound, trouble is present). Let’s reflect on the past for examples: WW 1, Depression, WW 2, Korean Conflict, Vietnam War, escalating fuel prices, unemployment on the rise, crime on the increase, the bible taken out of schools, Gulf War, Bosnian conflict, Abortion, and most recently 9/11 and the war on terrorism – and it goes on. Look in your local paper daily, read about the troubles, again it only seems the thing we can count on is trouble after trouble.

Yet the thing that keeps us going is the personal Quest for inner peace. Someone writes a book about inner peace and people flock to it. A man stands up and says he found the secret to peace, people flock to him. People have a hunger for peace. There is no natural peace that comes automatically after the storm has been weathered.

Have you ever found something that in your heart when it was over you knew everything would be alright? I have. I was unemployed [with a family to take care of] for 10 months. If only I could have found a job everything would be alright. I got the job to late and lost the house. If I only got that promotion…yet then would follow more debt. If I get through this illness, then we have medical bills.

An example of another family’s situation was Jane Welsh Carlisle, who was working on the 1^st volume of the French Revolution. During his writing, the tension and stress was great in his home (you ever experienced this?) Finally, the manuscript was finished. At last he had peace. He turned it over to John Stewart Mill to read. A few days passed and John Mill showed up at the Carlisle home with a nightmarish expression on his face. Jane thought the worst and asked what was wrong. Mr. Mill stated his maid accidentally burned the manuscript. Trouble.

But Jesus said in the world you’ll have tribulation.

You see, trouble comes to mankind in all forms due to our freedom and sinfulness. Most people look to the world and world leaders for peace. It’s always someone else who can make it better! But the truth is, we must start at home, with ourselves.

There is a story about a family in California that put their house up for sale. They wanted a better neighborhood, better neighbors, more room, a house with no trouble. So they listed it with an agent. Several weeks later they were going through a real estate guide looking for a home. They finally came to a consensus on a home that sounded perfect! They immediately called before someone else purchased it. To their amazement, the home they thought sounded perfect was their own home.

Some will say peace is in nature, look at your surroundings and the animals. Some peace may be in achievement. Peace can be found through psychology: lack of love, trust, selfishness, etc., as obstacles. But sooner or later we find that peace does not come by any rational process! Paul said the peace of God passeth all understanding. Peace sought for through the world is always temporary! That promotion, the accomplishments we make, a new car, anew house, a new dress suit—BUT all these are temporary for sooner or later trouble is back and we are searching again!

Peace comes to us by meeting certain conditions!

1. We must have faith in God. Without seeing we must believe on Jesus that he was sent by the Father and died for our sins on the cross and arose the Third Day victorious over sin!! He overcame the world! & defeated sin!

2. We must worship God. Through daily living we let the trouble and trials of the world affect and irritate us! That’s why worship is so important. When we truly worship God our focus is on God and his Kingdom, on being a servant not being served. Then, and only then, can God meet our inner needs! Worship is vital to a peaceful existence! We stop controlling things and allow God to control us! Worship is the whole that includes the all!!

3. We must be in Gods will. Only by being in his will is their peace. This is the most difficult – discerning his will for our life. But I believe God reveals his will to each of us by his indwelling Spirit- for if we have accepted salvation (and the free gift of God) he dwells within us and directs us. Does this mean we no longer make a wrong decision? No- Jesus knows our weaknesses and will direct his spirit to lead and make correction to our deficiencies. We must be willing to listen and obey and grow.

If we do all this we truly are servants and Jesus promised in him we would have peace for he has overcome the world!! What Jesus has promised he will deliver – we must believe and exercise our faith to have the peace that only Jesus gives!

Inner peace comes as a result of obeying Christs greatest commandment that we love one another. When we obey that commandment we are following his will and in his will is power!!

Do you want that peace? Are your troubles weighing you down? My troubles were Food Lion. I wanted peace back. I called upon Jesus to carry my burden and I claimed his promises that in him I’d have peace because he overcame the world!! Hallelujah!!

Jesus is calling on you. If you have a need, if you need the peace that surpasseth all understanding, please come and let Jesus meet that need!!

*Sing Just as I Am! But without one plea but that they blood was shed for me.

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njnapier

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January 17, 2017

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Autobiography, Christianity, Religions, Spirituality, The Paranormal

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My Confession: God Made Me Do It! Or why I am in a DMin Program

mcafee

It takes very little for many of us to become enamored with intellectualism and knowledge. This shouldn’t surprise us. Knowledge is power and when suddenly one acquires knowledge that seems to give you leverage over others…well, not only do you acquire said knowledge but one begins to sense the power associated therewith. It feels good to know things. It feels good to be able to articulate ideas, think through dilemmas and forge pathways toward answers. Knowledge “unsticks” a person and it feels good to get unstuck, even if one is not terribly sure what this new unstuck place is.

Unstuck is awesome because suddenly the world is larger, your mind is open, things are bigger, meanings are deeper and the things you were raised with don’t seem as constricting. Very literally, knowledge opens the world in a way that was previously closed. It’s remarkable and its impact inestimable on the psyche.

For many of us, this epiphany and shiny new knowledge happens in college.

This is that college kid swagger that T.I. refers to when he raps and the pretentiousness that is often associated with kids who go off to school as student. Somewhere during the process of learning the student becomes a self-promoting expert (usually before graduation). It is amazing how naïve we can be as people who think we know more than we do at the ripe old age of 20, our opinions presumably forged in the dark night of our infantile experiences.

I’ll never forget sitting in one of my professor’s office as a junior in college. I had just been home for the holidays and I was complaining to him about how “closed minded my parents were,” how they “didn’t get it” and how if they were only as smart as me then they’d see the light on a certain issue.

The prof sat there, hands folded across his lap, leaned back, listening. He grinned, nodded and there were not a few “uh huhs.” After I was done, he leaned over and said, “well, did you communicate your concerns as a loving son who has a passion for the church and wants to see them grow spiritually or did you communicate as a smart ass?”

Whelp. He pegged me. The Holy Spirit used my prof to get real. After I got over the fact that my prof had just pulled some Pauline vulgarity on me, I realized he was right. It didn’t quite settle in at that point, but he was right.

The hubris I exhibited in those early years, and in smaller measures through seminary as I began to relax a bit more, set me on a path I was sure ordained by God. My original intent was to take this knowledge, my unstuckness, and be a preacher, but at this point I knew my life would take on an academic trajectory; I wanted to be a religion professor. All the signs seemed to be pointing in that direction.

I had done well in college and seminary. I had earned awards for my work. I had been published during seminary and post-seminary. I had presented papers, contributed to journals and taught some classes. I enjoyed reading and writing; I enjoyed teaching, presenting and challenging others to think deeply about God, world and one another. That is what I wanted to do and more than a few people told me I was right.

To save everyone the details, events had happened in my life that made it clear to me the Spirit had opened these doors and it was my job to walk through them. I could not have written the script of the actors, institutions and friendships that had been pivotal for my academic journey.

My journey as an academic, however, came to a screeching halt February 2014. From 2008-2014 material realities that were seemingly carrying me to the land of academic promise (which doesn’t quite seem to be promised land anymore) ended in a cul de sac.

For a while, I mourned the PhD. I mourned that I did not have the liberty to pursue it at any cost. It was a distant homeland I would never enter. It made sense for me. It made sense for how I thought, the world I liked to engage, and what animated me as a person. In a very strong sense, it felt like a calling.

Have you ever heard your calling only to be wrong?

The PhD would have been one the most arduous journeys I could submit myself to, and in the end, prove to myself who I really was. In my mind, (beginning from the time of my early twenties to just a few years ago) it was the pinnacle of intellectual rigor and I wanted that badge.

Now, that badge would never arrive.

However, I knew what I would never do; I would never take the easy route and get a doctorate as a Doctor of Ministry. I would rather have nothing than have THAT degree.

Early in my college years I began to look with disdain on Doctor of Ministry degrees…thinking that most holders of the degree were complete jokes.

Dmin’s were practical degrees and I hated my practical classes, except preaching class…I always loved that one.

In fact, many of us undergraduates would make fun of the classes we had in praxis, how shallow they were, how useless, how much they wasted our time. The reading was boring, obvious and not challenging in the slightest. We were stuck thinking about Christian education and global missions when we could have been pondering things that really mattered like Barth’s Theology, a proper exegesis of sanctification within a canonical context or the distinctions of Pauline theology between Luther and Calvin.

Why would I want a degree dependent on praxis when there were real degrees worth earning?

Practical classes sucked and seemed too subjective and “touchy feely” for my taste. I even rid myself of most of my library that was praxis driven as if to purge myself of such useless material and make room for things that really mattered like Lacan and Raymond Brown.

The Dmin was something any village idiot could get online via Liberty University. Even places like Vanderbilt quit offering them because the degree had been watered down. One need only pay your money and write a ludicrous thesis to attain such lowly doctoral status. I had heard folks with DMins speak and preach. I was unimpressed. I wanted to create as much distance between myself and them as possible.

These were degrees pursued by pastors not smart enough to do a PhD, so they took the easy way out to get a Doctorate to get the infamous DR. in front of their names.

If I was going to pursue a doctorate it would be the granddaddy of them all, the PhD, or it would be nothing at all. My MDiv would do just fine.

This was my opinion regarding the Doctorate of Ministry Degree for quite a while. Even while in seminary, many of the DMin. thesis written for graduation hadn’t done much to change my opinion.

But life has a funny way of happening. Since the life of King David God has been one who often employs irony.

Who am I if I am not going to be a teacher? What should I do if I cannot do a PhD? Is this my calling or is my calling different? How can I be so good at something yet not have opportunity to pursue it? Am I to be a pastor with an academic tilt or an academic that does church ministry frequently?

These questions animated my thoughts. The thing is though, I was neither going to be a pastor now, or a teacher, both of those occupations never coming to fruition. It seemed my life had become totally disconnected from my calling. Sure, I had done some part time ministry and wore the label “pastor” but I never felt like that was it. Even after 5-6 years of such I never felt like that was “my place.” I had been working toward something and now I’d never get there.

“Here I am, Send me”…and yet all that was happening was me standing still…a simple “here I am.”

The few times I needed a church to want me, they didn’t…and when I needed the Academy to take me, it wouldn’t. Seems I had missed this “calling” thing all along…either as an external voice crying out to Moses or as Parker Palmer would encourage one to “listen within.” I was tone deaf both directions.

About a year and a half after my PhD dreams had been dashed against the rocky ledges of life and the Church I wanted to serve found service from another, a series of texts messages put me back on the path. For about 16 months I had been stalled, sitting on the side of the road, making pizza. It’s ok, it’s a first world problem and I happen to like making pizza.

Into the silence of going nowhere, I hear a voice, “Hey, I am involved with the DMin program here at Mercer. You should apply…we can do some really cool things in ethnography, wedding together theory and praxis.”

It’s wasn’t God text messaging me but it might as well have been.

Have you heard my opinion of a Dmin?

Asking me if I wanted to apply for a DMin was like asking Moses to lead the people out of Egypt: there’s a million reasons why I shouldn’t. For starters, how do I reconcile considering this degree with my opinion of it and will I “fit” with the group of folks pursuing its ends? Is this a “cop out” to earn a doctorate or is this another moving of the Spirit…moving in others and now toward me? I’m not even doing traditional ministry…why would a DMin program want something as unconventional as I have to offer?

As I investigated the program and what type of work I’d be capable of doing within it, I knew within 2 weeks it was something I needed to do. Like all programs this degree would be what I made of it. If I wanted to take the easy road, go lightweight, and just earn a piece of paper by paying for it, then I could of course do that. But that’s not me.

This degree opened a window of opportunity to wed theory and praxis in a way I had never done. It could make me the complete scholar and minister I had never been.

My undergraduate and masters work was all theory. Yeah, I did ministry, but the work never took strong consideration of developing praxis from within, and out of, a rigorous theoretical apparatus.

Anyone can read a Missions book and follow the Roman Road, or preach a deductive salvation sermon that takes 15 minutes and a lot of shallow opinion to write. These are not the questions that inspired me…and if they don’t inspire me I’m sure God must be bored with them.

The questions this degree set my mind upon were deep and wide, like how might the work of anthropology inform our theology and help us traverse culture in order to communicate Christ in meaningful ways? What might Peter Berger have to do with Bible and what might Charles Taylor’s God have to do with the pagans Paul encounters on Mars Hill? Might there be a connection between missiology and Pierre Bourdieu…and how might fieldwork inform our theology? How does the incarnation as contextual theology inform the development of our own contextual missiology…and what potentials have yet to be explored?

These are the sorts of questions I am after and the sorts of questions this degree has invited me to ask. We are not content with letting theology and bible be singular topics that only inform only one another. If we can say that God is sovereign in any capacity then we must also say it is our duty to engage our work within the full realm of theoretical and practical contributions, and across the full spectrum of theological and secular voices.

This pursuit, the engagement of gospel and culture, is where the Spirit has me at this moment. Being here at this moment then precludes me being elsewhere and may explain why I am here and not there. I have wondered many times, and even heard people ask me in church, “surely God hasn’t given you all that knowledge to just sit here.”

Touché friendly lay person, touché.

Since I graduated seminary some interesting things have happened inside of me.

First, I no longer care if people think I am smart. I have nothing to prove to anyone.

Second, I have grown to disdain idle debate, metaphysical queries to which no one can possibly know the answer and in which we are simply theological naval gazers. I simply do not care if God can make a rock that even God cannot pick up. Don’t ask me if God knows the future because I don’t care. I commend Augustine for thinking the Greeks were cray cray with all this perichoresis business.

Third, doctrine has lost most of its importance to me. It is often idle and does nothing to enhance a relationship with God in Christ. It is simply a dividing line that demarcates who is in and out…something the Gospel seems antithetical towards. I am interested in real life, real life with God and real life with others. I will not die on any doctrinal hill.

Fourth, my gift isn’t one that requires me to be stuck in an ivory tower. Why do I know what I know? Why have I learned what I have learned? I believe it is so I can engage the changing demographics of our country, most noticeably having the ability to engage with those who have a strong antipathy toward anything having to do with faith, religion or God.

Fifth, I see a strong need for thoughtful people of faith to be bridges to culture. There are many negative opinions about the church and it is often because many people never meet a thoughtful follower of Jesus.

Sixth, the role of pastor is not singular. I am the only bivocational minister with a secular job, that I know of, pursuing advanced ministerial studies in the DMin program I attend. There is room for a myriad of characters when it comes to living in the new creation. In a real way, I am living out Wesley’s proclamation, “the world is my parish.” That is my case…as I have no parish.

Seventh, I want to be involved in an authentic ministry that, to use the words of Miroslav Volf, is characterized by “inclusion and embrace.” If following Jesus means anything to me nowadays, it means creating a community out of a people who are not supposed to have any place of belonging…or out of people who have been excluded.

Eighth, faith and belief are to be grounded in common human experience and are not things we can ascend to in our understanding. One cannot attain God by an act of the mind, but rather only through the movement of the heart.

Ninth, I am open to creating a community of faith for those who have no home anywhere but would like a home somewhere. There can still be church even when one cannot bring themselves to go to church.

Tenth, I believe that God is at work in the secular, present and at work in people even though God is never a conscious reality to any of them. The vestiges of transcendence are to be disclosed not foreclosed.

Eleventh, for missions to mean anything moving forward, it will mean recreating, reforming and reshaping the institutional church to look less like itself and more like Jesus.

Since finishing seminary my work in the church, academic pursuits and secular job have all persuaded me of these realities. My heart and mind have changed. I am no longer drunk on my own intellectual abilities nor am I fascinated by the ability of others. Life is about more than looking smart and beating into submission all the supposed “ignorant” people around us. When this is our approach we become nothing but asses even as we think we are being prophets. Balaam comes to mind. If my participation in ministry is not more than being right, and more than being knowledgeable, than my ministry is nothing more than nothing.

I once thought large portions of my intellect and ability would be poured into creating a new doctrine of God or creating newer postmodern hermeneutics used to interpret biblical texts. I now believe large portions of my time will be used in a theo-anthropological endeavor as one that seeks to discover the divine that never left instead of convince others of a divine they have never seen. I hope to map the stories of others in the hope that I’ll be mapping nothing less than the incarnation.

Thus, in an ultimate twist of irony I now find myself doing a degree I had once foresworn and thinking about practical things, like missiology, that had at one time been the subject of my scorn.

And God laughs.

I never imagined I could bridge faith, praxis and theory in a way that would deepen myself while also deepening the church and serving others. I never considered I’d be investing into the potential of bridging Gospel and culture. I had never thought I would feel compelled to be a part of the monumental shift that is taking place regarding faith and religion in the West. It is scary but it is full of excitement and opportunity. No one knows what will happen as we continue to lift the veil off Constantinian Christianity but I am exhilarated by the possibilities that lie ahead for followers of Jesus. I am thankful for the possibilities faith and belief can have in a world where these ideas do not represent power or big churches, but rather embody love and salvation for us all.

I had imagined I would stand on the boundary between church and university, but in a world in which both of those institutions are being questioned (and more irrelevant) it seems the boundary I am called toward is the one between faith and culture, institutions and post-institutionalism, ethics and eros. This the boundary for which my education has, and is, preparing me, and its one in which I am comfortable finding myself even as those on either side may continue to wonder why.

Thus, I do this Dmin, a degree I once hated, thinking topics I once loathed, and discovering in it all why God has me here.

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ParanormalChrist

The place where the aporia of the Christ is illusively explicit

Category Archives: Autobiography

Alterations of Death

Considering Books

The Ground Before Me

Leaning Into Death: An Alternative Reading of Acts 2.42-47

My Final Gift to my Father: This Burden

Death asks Questions. Ecclesiastes Answers.

A Prayer of Lament & Forgiveness

NO! You haven’t been here: The Singularity of Grieving Loss

My Fathers Sermon on Peace

My Confession: God Made Me Do It! Or why I am in a DMin Program

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