February 9, 2010

Another Thanks

Every once in awhile, I am reminded to be grateful.  In the midst of devastating earthquakes,  the loss of children, the despair of loved ones, and the slow slipping away of life and vitality that waits for all of us, there is still so much of life.   It is all grace to begin with, from our unexpected and unasked-for birth, through our blink-of-an-eye youth and the long middle years of responsibility, all the way to the last slow walk to the deathbed.    Perhaps it’s a good idea to let a bit of our lives “flash before our eyes” before we face a moment of impending death.

For the early life, being born into a family that believed in God and the story of the Christ so hidden for all those centuries.  For the strands of history held up by small moments lived out by faithful and pressured members of generations past, each of them not realizing how the simple choice here and there would change everything for me and my children.   For the few days of tennis with my Dad, which I recalled in Leaving Ruin, days when he ran around the court in work clothes and heavy black shoes.  For his study of the Bible, and his devotion to servanthood, broken as he was.  For the hard work of my mother, and her ongoing willingness to push against some of the harder things of her own life, struggling to do the best she knew how for her children, though the results were far from perfect.  For the church in which I grew up, all the friends I looked so forward to seeing each Sunday and Wednesday.   Too many of them gone now, the threads they wove in me remain strong, stronger than I would have thought.   For the years of schooling, and the adventures of football and track, cars and dating, mistakes and glories, all of it working on me, God working on me, building and breaking as I needed.   I should write a book about those days, but it would frighten me, so many memories tinged with my own stupidity and pride.   And for music, performance, and the moments wherein I woke up to the presence of art, theatre, and beauty.   God did not have to wake me.  In fact, everything I’ve been given need not have been given at all.  There were no guarantees when I started this race, and there are none now.

Grace.   All grace.

For the day I first saw my sweet wife, though I don’t remember it with any exactitude.   For her smile, her gracious turn of smile, her unwillingness to put up with that side of me best labeled “jerk”, and for her stunning beauty as she turned up the aisle on our wedding day.  For the 25 years that passed until she tried on that wedding dress again, and looked much like she did all those years before.  For the delighted smiles of her children as they saw her in that wedding dress, and for the joy that memory brings me.   For the hard years of beginning adulthood, learning what it meant to grow up, to be a man and a couple and a worker.   God taught me depression, and how to get through it, and I’m thankful that it doesn’t derail me anymore, that it’s a lighter set of clothes than it used to be.    Back to those children:  no words, no words for what they are in the world.  All children change everything for the mother and father, and my heart could not be more full.   I won’t wax on, but God knows I cherish every moment of those little faces that live on my refrigerator, faces long transformed into older versions of themselves.   But those little faces and bodies live on, they are not gone, but perhaps only hiding.   They come out and play whenever I ask them to, and what’s best is that the larger versions are just as fine.   Claim I any credit?  None.

Grace.  All grace.

For the work of my life.   There’s no fame it, no riches, just the day to day figuring out what’s next.   But goodness, what things I get to see on the way.   Churches around the country and the world, people with shining eyes everywhere, letting their pain and joy bleed all over the people around them, and all of us the better for it.   The theatres, the movie houses, the concert halls, the gilded chamber in Austria (why can’t I remember the name of this famous town?  Will I ever be thankful for loss of memory?)…all filled with moments of human presence and works of revelation, the call of God sweeping into all these gatherings on the backs of moments of confrontation between actor and audience, violinist and bow, director and film.    Make a list of your favorite moments in film, theatre, TV, music, ballet… And then, thank God you saw them.  You didn’t have to.  Most people never will.    Oh yes, for all the actors I’ve been allowed to teach through the years.  I have seen many academy award winning moments, and they break my heart every time.    For that, too, I am thankful.

Time’s up, and I should be doing all this secretly (according to yesterday).   Okay, so I’m chastising myself.  But by analogy, who knows, maybe you’ll stop for a second and take an inventory, and just say thank you.   If you can get through your own list and memory without getting a bit misty and thick of chest with all that air and life rushing through, then you’re tougher than me.

On to more of this adventure.  Let today be a day I remember in ten years, found again in a list begetting gratitude.

“Merci”…sounds like grace…

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February 8, 2010

In Secret

I’m plowing back through Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount.  It never gets old.  In Matthew 6, Jesus says (essentially)  to be careful about what you do in public.  Dallas Willard calls this this principle of secrecy.   Pride is insidious, and even as we make a move to be generous or kind or prayerful, pride slides in alongside, even as Paul said it would.   So when we do our “acts of righteousness,”  when we give, when we pray, when we do anything for God, Jesus warns us to be careful about how it plays in public, and how we care about whether it plays in public at all.   Give, fast, and pray in secret, and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

A new thought about this came to me this morning, crystal clear.

God likes secrecy.

We often moan about all that we don’t understand about God.  We don’t get why He does or doesn’t answer prayer.   We tell ourselves stories about His movement in the world, and criticize each other for not agreeing with the way we tell the story.  Things happen to us for seemingly no reason, and our left brains go to work to assign all kinds of intent and reason to God’s action in our lives that would produce the very circumstance that appears so random, perhaps cruel, perhaps glorious.   “Why, why, why?” we cry.  “Show us Your Glory,” we tell Him, just as Moses did.   Make things clear, cut away the ambiguity, give us proof, speak a plain word we can take to the bank.

And God slips into the mist, leaving traces and clues, little more than perpetual potential for doubt.

He kept the secret of the Christ hidden for centuries, and even when He decided to tell it plainly, the telling was swift, outrageous, and frankly, almost too much, too hard to believe.   Miracles and blood, and  suddenly, the Christ was gone, nothing left but reports of unbelievable events never seen before or since, and humanity went on, pushing and pulling at God, demanding that things be plainer, that He come back out of hiding.  Stop leaving things up to the people, we say.  Show Your face.

If You are truly God, tell us so.   Vibrate sound waves with Your holy Vocal Cords, and strike my eardrums with undeniable proof, proof that can be empirically measured, recorded, and never forgotten.

God smiles, and slips back into the mist, calling us to follow him, like a playful child who knows something the adults don’t, and dares them to give chase.

We are designed for faith.

God-held secrets demand little else.

Who can tell where the wind blows…

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February 3, 2010

Thinking about The Placebo Effect

I don’t know much about this, really, but in reading about the brain, science, and belief, it seems clear that somehow human beings are made to be people of faith.   I don’t necessarily mean people of religious faith (although I think were made for that, too…the imago dei, and all that).  I mean that we are made so that what we believe about the smallest of things–the stories we tell ourselves about the world, our relationships, and even our selves in all its various components–matters to how things unfold in the material world.   Faith changes things.

It’s easy to run off the deep end here, but I’m thinking of a couple of things I’ve read recently.  Just this week, Newsweek published an article by Sharon Begley called “The Depressing News About Antidepressants” in which Begley reports that scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that the various drugs people have been taking for over a decade to combat the very real disease of depression don’t work quite like people think.   “Antidepressants work” is the mantra, but studies are showing that as much as 82% of the effectiveness of the drugs can be attributed to the so-called “placebo effect.”   It’s not that these drugs don’t work–what’s coming into question is why.   Is it because they deliver a precise chemical change to the brain, thereby lifting the symptoms related to mood, etc., to acceptable levels?  Or do they work because their patients think they will, thereby causing the body to “do it’s own thing” driven not by the pills, but by the faith in the pills.

Begley’s article is obviously of concern to those who are taking these meds, and Irving Kirsch, one of the scientists driving the increasingly controversial conversation, urges those on these meds not to stop.   Again, antidepressants work.    But again, why?

Then there’s the case of Mr. A, reported in Robert Burton’s interesting book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.   Mr. A was a seventy-six-year old World War II vet who had a five year history of “disabling knee pain.”  To make a long story short, Mr. A was part of a Houston study of 180 people who underwent surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee in which some of the patients received real corrective surgery, and others received “sham” surgery.   “General anesthesia was given”, Burton writes, and “superficial incisions were made in the skin over the knee, but no actual surgical repair was made.”  Mr. A received the “sham” surgery, but somehow, it healed his knee.   He threw away his cane, and became relatively pain free for at least two years following.

There are many stories like this.   What do you make of it?

What I am most interested in is the work of the human mind and brain, the power of story, and the faith design that seems to be a deep part of the imago Dei in each of us.   What does this say about the care with which we must use and build our imaginations?    The placebo effect is, in some fashion, a result of story-telling, and the belief we bring to those stories.

I am not suggesting anything in particular here, as much as simply sharing my ongoing fascination with this human journey, wondering what it means in terms of how best to live, work, and love each day.

Feeling better already…

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February 1, 2010

Water: Exhaustive vs. Substantial

Water.  What do I know of it?  Do I know much?  Is what I know enough to thought of as real knowledge?   And what are the implications of me not knowing as much as can be known?  Can a simple glass of water give me true knowledge about water’s nature?

It’s an image that came to me this morning as I thought about what I know of God as compared with what I don’t.

My working assumption is that God’s scale of being is unimaginable even for the best of saints, theologians, artists, and philosophers.   The wielders of metaphor, geniuses and dullards alike, all spit in the wind when it comes to presenting what I’m simply calling “scale of being.”   Pick your word:  immense, gigantic, colossal, universal, enormous…whatever.   They are pin-pricks in the ocean.   I heard the story of God imagined as a large man looking at a small ball in his hand, and in the story-teller’s dream the man was God, contemplating all He had made.   C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, juxtaposes a sprawling, gray, depression-filled hell with a world so “real” as to be impossible for the “ghosts” from hell to exist there in the simplest of ways.  But the scale of being in Lewis’ heaven becomes shockingly apparent when it’s revealed that the bus on which the ghosts arrived for their tour of heaven slipped in through a crack in Heaven’s ground no thicker than a blade of grass.   Now hell is the pin-prick in not just one ocean, but a universe of oceans.

Pile them on, metaphor on metaphor, ever-expanding, and God’s scale of being is more, greater, further, and more encompassing.

No scientist, I revert to Wikipedia and other sources when I dare to wonder about something in science.   There is a universe of knowledge about water out there, and the assumption is that we have not yet begun to crack the deeper mysteries of all its worlds.    Water’s life in the chemical world is lost on me, as is all the implications of its existence on other planets, other parts of the universe.   The life of the oceans is largely unknown to me, except perhaps for the occasional PBS special.

But here’s the thing: what I know of water is good information, and frankly, keeps me alive in bankable ways.  What I know of water is not exhaustive, but it’s true.   And I can live on it.

Sometimes, the temptation arrives in the form of this thought: what we don’t know of God is far greater than what we do.   And the sheer volume of what we don’t know calls the credibility of what we think we know into question.   Could it be that our knowledge is so small that were we to discover the true “scale of being” of God, we would immediately toss everything we know, striking our heads in the proverbial gesture of “A-ha!”?   It is both a comforting and terrifying thought.

But then I remember two things:  first, Francis Schaeffer used to argue that true knowledge doesn’t have to be exhaustive.   Substantial knowledge is enough to live on, as long as the substantial knowledge is true knowledge.

Secondly, I remember water.

I frankly know little about it.   But I know enough to know that without it, I’ll die.

God, teach me what I need to live, and give me patience with the rest…

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January 30, 2010

Late Night Writing


My skin temperature seems a little high, just a bit hotter than usual.   My microwaved coffee may be the cause.   Since my espresso machine died, I’ve been going through regular pots.   Regular coffee affects me differently than espresso shots.   Maybe that’s why I’m sweating a bit.  Or maybe it’s hot in my office because the heater may be on.   I don’t remember, and I can’t see the dial from here.  Or I could be sick, but I doubt it.

Perception.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot in recent days.   Sensory perception, then the filters of various parts of the brain involved in the deciphering of the raw visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustative information, then cognition, then story-telling.  Or something like that.

I had a counselor ask me once why I thought thoughts were so much more trustworthy than feelings.   He wasn’t arguing that feelings should be trusted–he was challenging why I gave reason a pass when it came to trust.   As if reason were, by definition, trustworthy.   I explained that more than once I’d followed my “gut”, listened to my “intuition”, and I’d gotten burned, in fact, nearly thrown my life away.   “Emotion can’t be trusted” I told him.   Undeterred, he wondered something that went like this:  what if reason was just as likely to lead us astray, especially if we build the foundations of reason on wrong assumptions and incoherent processes?   What if highly attuned emotional intelligence could be just as trustworthy as reasoned thought?  Or better yet, what if reasoned thought might be just as likely to be misleading as emotional flooding?

Perception.   Yesterday morning, I drove east across the bridge and met a friend at Belle Pastry in Old Bellevue.   Easily the best pastry I’ve had in years, the croissant was light, flaky, buttery, and the conversation was just as good.   I was going on about my interest in the notion that we all have to make sense of things, that we each are stuck with making up a story of some kind, a narrative tale that can get us through the decades in one piece.  My friend, animated and lively, said that yes, this was exactly what we had to do.  It was our God-given responsibility to do just that, to make a story of how the world is, and live and tell that story.

A big truck is idling outside.  It drops into gear, and heads on.  I infer the light must have turned green at the intersection.   Now it’s gone.

I got some news a few minutes that could have a major impact on my bank account.

Tomorrow is my last day of full-time employment, and it’s by choice, and not by layoff.  Perhaps I’ve lost my mind.

Last night, I saw a play that reminded me again that the great unknown is coming, headed our way.   None of us will escape.

I asked the following question this afternoon:  “What parent would make a world for their child in which the rules were this: if anything good happened in the child’s life, the parent would always get the credit.   And if anything bad happened in the child’s life, the child would get the blame.”

Tomorrow, house guests arrive.   We welcome them even though we’ve never met them.

Even now, you’re wondering about the last five or six sentences.   They seem a bit random, and you’re trying to make sense of them.   Trying to put together a narrative, using the title of blog post, and perhaps the word “perception” to lace together the story, the meaning, the point.   And if you fail to make the connections that create that narrative, it’s me that’s failed.

As I often say, the burden of communication is on the communicator.    May not be fair, but…

Perception, process, imagination, cognition, narrative, meaning…

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January 23, 2010

Regret Over Missed Colleagues

I was thinking about Arthur Koestler’s work today, The Act of Creation.   The Act of Creation was the major text in my Directing Seminar 681 (I think that was the number) back in graduate school.   Then I thought of my very smart postmodern professor from back then, and googled his name.   Then another name came up alongside his, a former professor who was thoughtful, tough, challenging, and ultimately, one of the more encouraging people in the program.   I did a search of her name, wondering what she was up to, and I discovered that she’s gone to a distinguished career in both professional and academic worlds, and then I laughed a bit, because I noticed that she is the associate artistic director for a theatre to which my daughter recently sent her headshot.   A tiny part of me thought “connection.” But I let that go, choosing instead to simply think how cool it would be for this distinguished former mentor of mine to meet my fine and courageous daughter.

And then I felt the old regret.

I’m not sure why, but I didn’t carry any of my relationships from those years forward.   They were hard years for me, years of fear and discovery of who I was and who I was going to be.  My faith was under constant pressure intellectually and personally, and though I managed to get through it (I was the only person to graduate from the directing program over the three years I was there), I was often fearful and afraid that someone would finally discover I did not belong in this very talented world and show me the door. I’ve since discovered that we all pretty much feel that way.  (About six months after I left grad school, I showed myself the door as far as theatre went, but that’s another story.)  I was young, naïve, and foolish.  Little did I know how much I would someday miss many of these good people, regret the fact that today, I have none of them in my life.

Why did I turn away from them?  Maybe I didn’t turn away as much as never turned toward.  Never sent a thank you, never called them up to just say hi, how are you doing, or even, could you help me find a job?   Classmates I cared about I let slip away.    People I’m sure that had interesting, challenging lives, with whom it would be fun to just chat, laugh—maybe even argue.   I’ve watched the careers of some.   I was thrilled to see the young man who played the lead in my thesis show in first in an issue of American Theatre playing George in Our Town at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and then later in the TV version of The Music Man with Matthew Broderick.   Then another fine actor I worked with there has done well in film and television and theatre, and this next summer will be playing a leading role at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.   The man I would call my best friend during those few years left UT and went to another program, and though we talked once or twice after that (we spent a couple of days together at the 1984 Arts Olympics in Los Angeles, and then spent another day in Vancouver B.C. later that year), we lost track of each other.   A couple of years ago, I found him online, and sent him an email.   He wondered what happened to me, and frankly, remained somewhat offended that I’d never bothered to keep up the relationship.

I didn’t blame him.

Today, thankfully, I’m not as neglectful as I used to be.   I have more friends and colleagues than I deserve.  Friends I keep up with and pour myself into, friends who I pray will be near for the rest of my life.  But sometimes, I feel the old restlessness, and I know that I still have the distorted ability to walk into the future alone with my family.  That same old distance I sometimes put between myself and others hovers.   God knows I’ve been thinking about friendships and what it means to cultivate and nurture them, and maybe He brings me these thoughts today just to remind me of how precious friends truly are.

I sent the former professor from the Shakespeare Festival an email, just to say thank you.  She was good to me, encouraged me, even let me do crazy projects that courageous actors took part in.   I should have said “I really appreciate you” a long time ago.

Let 2010 be a year of friendship…

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January 21, 2010

Meaning: Find It? Make It?

Eric Maisel, in his book Coaching the Artist Within, declares that one of the primary skills in living successfully is to “passionately make meaning.”   I’ve read a couple of Maisel’s books.  Maisel’s a family therapist and creativity coach, with a Phd in psychology.  He may not believe in God, but he’s a good writer, and a helpful one, atheist or not.   I’ve gotten inspiration from several of his ideas over the years (all you have to do to get the inner “I suck” voices to shut up is tell them to “hush!” and mean it…it works pretty well) and I’ll take inspiration wherever I can get it.  (Well, maybe not wherever…you know what I mean.)

In reading the chapter of Coaching the Artist Within about making meaning, Maisel says you have to decide to make meaning, that your life is yours to decide about, and no one’s is going to decide it for you.  In fact, there will be many who will try to derail you from whatever it is you decide is the work and meaning of your life.

So do we find meaning or do we make it?   This morning, as I was driving into the church office, I was mulling this, and I remembered that I used to tell students that they could stop looking for meaning, because meaning had already been given.  What did I mean?  It had to do with God, of course, and ideas of origin, identity, and destiny, and being loved.   However, it makes total sense to me that if there is no God, no personal source of origin, identity, and destiny, then of course, as Maisel declares, we have to make it up.   We have to decide, and yes, passion will be needed to bring any meaning into the world, especially when there’s really not any fundamentally other than the processes of natural selection, reproduction, and survival.

But then, a metaphor came to me.   It made me smile.   What if meaning were like a material?   And what if we didn’t have to find it, because it is all around us, like water is all around the world of fish.   What if meaning is like air, and we move through it constantly, but really forget it’s there?   And what if, as a material, it’s malleable, and can take various shapes and forms, and it’s not that we have to make it so much as we get to shape it, form it, make beauty with it, discover what’s possible with it?   What if we’re not making meaning, we’re making life, and meaning is one of the materials by which we make it?

The Christian faith makes the straightforward claim that meaning has already been given.   Worth, value, purpose, meaning, love…these are gifts of God that are there from the get-go.    We forget, true enough, and have to figure it all out again, remind each other, help each other, shore each other up.  And yes, I can even say I agree with Maisel, that there is a sense in which we must make our meaning, and make it with passion.  But for me, making meaning is closer to painting a canvas than it is to making paint or color from scratch.

I’m not sure I know what I mean, exactly.   Far too abstract.   Maybe what I mean is buried in this:  Children are far too busy playing to wonder about the meaning of playing.   When they begin to wonder about the meaning of their play, they’ve stopped playing.

Playing is good…

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January 20, 2010

Making Worlds

We encounter the world through our senses.   Light hits the eye’s photoreceptors and the optical information starts its split-second journey toward the visual cortex in the occipital lobe, then on to the frontal cortex, and perception begins.   Same with sound, smell, taste, and touch; the various systems involved in each leap into action as stimuli enter our field of experience.

What in the world do we do with all that information?

We “make” a world.

I have questions.   Anyone who knows me knows that I am constantly in a state of questioning, and because of that, am also constantly hovering near crisis.   That’s overstating the discomfort I cause myself with all these questions, but questions are, without a doubt, bothersome.   While they may be doorways to new understanding, opening all manner of new possibilities, they may also be uncomfortable because new answers, or even the suggestion of new answers, can lead to a re-telling of the stories on which we base our lives.   And new tellings of stories call the old tellings into question, and what in the world do we do if the story we thought we were in isn’t the story after all?

What if we’ve been telling it wrong?  Or maybe not wrongly, but poorly?

For over 25 years, I’ve been thinking about Christian faith and the odd activity we call art making.  My thoughts began with experiences in theatre and music, moved on to include painting, sculpture, and other plastic arts, then expanded to include all craft-making, and finally, expanded by implication to the making of anything at all.   The fact that we are “making” creatures (beings that constantly reshape material and spiritual reality to meet ongoing desire and need) is, in my mind, profound.   The expression of the self, the flow of market economies, the connecting of cultures through the study of artifact, the theoretical (as in, built on hypothesis and testing) chase for knowledge in science—all of these are the result of the “making” function of the human.

At least, that’s the story I tell.

We encounter life through experience and perception, and we must make something of it.   Hence we replay the move of Genesis 1, discovering the chaos of this onslaught of information that comes at us each day, and we hover over it, and work with all our heart and mind and body and spirit to might sense of it all, to bring it to light, in some way that causes us to finally exhale and say, “It is good.”

In recent years, “beauty” has risen to the surface of this conversation, catching my attention like a late blooming flower.  I have a vague notion of what I mean when I say the word, but “beauty” too is a confusion, an invitation to all kinds of misunderstanding, perhaps even destruction, depending on who’s calling what beautiful.   But still, the word keeps after me, and I think it’s time to begin to chase it down with more clarity, more heart, and more commitment.   But not just “beauty” but the whole conversation.

I often tell people this is the book I have to write before I die, so I’d better get started.

Maybe I should open-source the whole thing.

Here’s a question:  if you were to pick up a book about Christian faith, art, beauty, cosmos, and any number of other words you can supply here, what would that book have to contain?  I have my own ideas and biases, but I’m sure I’m missing some things. Fields of study that have to be explored, ideas that I ignore to my own peril, and non-negotiable disciplines that must be given their due.  If you’d like to weigh in, please do so.

I’ve got a pretty extensive bibliography (I’m really thankful for all the work that’s gone on over the past 25 years), but I’m sure there are books out there I don’t know about.  If you’ve read a good one, one that maybe even changed everything you thought about this stuff, let me know.

I’ll be blogging about all of this off and on all year, and we’ll see what comes of it.

We’ll see what we “make” of it.   What story will be told.

I like the phrase “original glory”…

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January 19, 2010

Vacation Adventures

So there I am, standing at the railing of a catamaran, bobbing up and down in the Pacific Ocean at the base of the great, plunging cliffs of the NaPali Coast on the north shores of Kauai.  The morning sun has just crested over the top of these mountains, and the sea mists have caught the light, scattering shafts of light down through the impressive gorges into the sea.   Waves hurl white foam onto the rocks, which then fingers its way back down to the water.   Behind us, a humpback whale roles over a few times, and even breaches to the delighted shouts of the passengers.   I raise my head to see the magnificent view and take it in.   I know I will never forget this moment.

Sick as a dog, I’m throwing up over the railing even as creation in its majesty offers me the best view in the house.

Actually, I did pretty well the first couple of hours of the tour.  This was Friday of our week in Kauai, and both Anjie and I were excited to be out in the water, circling the island in search of whales, dolphins, turtles, and perhaps even a bit of snorkeling.   The waves were in the ten-foot range, said the captain, and I even got out on the very tip of one of the hulls.   When my feet started leaving the deck as the boat shot up and down, Anjie and I figured we’d better head for the back, where the ride might be a little easier.

Too late.  Not long after that, the world tilted, my stomach freaked out, and I wondered how in the world I was going to get through the next four to five hours of sailing.

This will be a funny, funny story for a long time.

Obviously, that’s really not my greatest or most memorable moment of our trip to Hawaii, but it just seems like an appropriate metaphor that I’ll leave for you to unpack.  As you think about it, don’t forget the grandeur and the throwing up, and don’t forget the laughing at the end.

Hanging on for dear life…

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January 18, 2010

2010 Questions

A list of questions to work on in 2010:

  • What is the essence of friendship? What are ten exercises you could conduct today to move toward the personal discovery of that essence?
  • To what degree can “felt” religious experiences be trusted as evidence for any particular viewpoint concerning God, the Holy Spirit, or the miraculous?
  • Which is more likely to be reliable:  a) a one-time overwhelming visceral and emotional experience?  b) an overwhelming “ah-ha” at the end of a long series of inquiries?  c) a simple thought that seems to drop in from elsewhere?  d) an understanding born of long habit and practice?
  • How do my prayers for more frugality and economic wisdom interact with my prayers for job creation?
  • How do markets actually work?
  • What would be the best course of study to better understand the morality of market economics?
  • What is the difference in material prosperity “built on the backs” of the poor and unprosperous and material prosperity that’s not?
  • In discussing the root causes of poverty, which slice of the causal pie is bigger, the spiritual, intellectual, and physical malaise of the individual caught in the cycle, or the surrounding environment in which the poor collectively find themselves?
  • What in the world does “better” mean?
  • What might be the purposes of writing a piece of fiction when people are dying around the world?  (Today, Haiti…tomorrow, who knows where?)
  • Does fiction need a purpose?
  • Was Hans Rookmaaker right when he asserted “Art Needs No Justification?”
  • What are the possible reasons God would give us “His Word” in such an unwieldy text, a text that invites multiple and conflicting interpretations, especially given increasingly apparent cultural biases that shutter and focus our regional and denominational understandings down dangerously narrow paths?
  • Is it necessary that so few find the “straight and narrow?”
  • Do we find meaning, or do we make it?   Argue both sides.
  • Why is it so difficult for me to dance, and what am I going to do about it?
  • What do I have to say that any audience will need or care to hear?
  • What can be done on a practical level to unbind people from the cacophony of fearful voices inside their hearts?
  • What are ten ways to attack depression besides therapy, addictions, and meds?
  • Why metaphor?
  • What is served by the elevation of fact over metaphor, as if the facts themselves were not metaphors, and as if metaphors were not carriers of truth?
  • How do we live the things Jesus knew that we don’t know?
  • Why is beauty so important to me, and what does it mean that I often neglect it in order to serve in a more practical religious way?
  • Are there truly whole swaths of the human enterprise, each written deeply on someone’s heart by seeming divinity, circumstance, DNA, and the entire perceptual process, that God simply doesn’t care about, because he cares only for widows, orphans, the afterlife, and the proper divisions of sheep and goats?
  • What is the essence of love?
  • Could it be that all this is far too serious, and that to go deep is not about answering the unanswerable, but rather to dive in the great, heaving ocean, and in trust, hanging on for dear life?
  • What are ten strategies (or twenty or thirty) by which Jeff could lighten up…?

Finally, where might these six words take a person?

  • Possibility.
  • Journey.
  • Questions.
  • Presence.
  • Beauty.
  • Trust.

We’ll have to see…

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