Monthly Archives: June 2008

Logging back through the past week or so: a friend of mine came into my office yesterday celebrating a one-year anniversary free from crack-cocaine. Needless to say, hugs and laughs all around. On Sunday at the church picnic, I leapt into a sack race and allowed my competitive streak to push me beyond common sense and I did a face-plant at the finish line, hopelessly behind the winner. My right shoulder is still protesting. Sunday morning, I got to stand in front of 300 people all singing praise to God at top of their lungs, knowing in my bones it had nothing to do with me. My son opens a show in Lincoln, Nebraska today, a performance my wife gets to see, which I’m thankful for. Last night, I sat on my kitchen table in the dark, just me and the guitar, singing really terrible impromptu songs about the multitude of moods and emotions rolling through my world just now. Life, marriage, children, God, extended family, work, ministry, friends, passions, temptations. Good thing no one was around to hear my howling. Singing would be too generous a word.

A church may be an institution, but then again, it’s not. Institutional religion is necessary, I think, at one level, as people organize and try to forge their creative energies into a force greater than the sum of the parts. Linkages of agendas, monies, and hopes all lead to gathering organization, and before you know, institutions arise. Governance, in the loosest sense of the term, becomes essential. Steering is rarely a luxury in a boat constantly being threatened with being swamped by tides and storms. Still, the church is not primarily an institution. From where I sit, which is at the intersection of lives in a community of people gathered around their faith in the Messiah, the church is made of faces telling stories, spirits connecting over those stories. The stories themselves almost always revolve around suffering of some kind. Some suffering is mild–small physical ailments, feelings hurt over cruel words, dreams of material success or possessions dashed momentarily–and some suffering is catastrophic–the surgeries and chemotherapies, the divorces, the betrayals, the crashes and deaths, the losses of faith, the abandonment of hope. We gather around and tell the stories, tell the sufferings, and stand dumbly wondering what to do.

A friend of mine who escaped from Cuba years ago and was severely burned somewhere along the way has struggled with various substance abuses, and on Sunday, we talked of his recent struggles with crippling depression, relapses that cost him his living situation and his meds, his fear of having to go back downtown and living in shelters. His has been a journey the church has been involved in for several years now, a story of ups and downs, victories and nagging defeats, and though he is on a down cycle at the moment, I have great hope for this man, that God will honor his struggle. As his church family, we have committed to being with him and for him in all the ways we know how. This story could be repeated fifty times over with various subplots and additional characters in the life of our church. In the end, the church is people being with and for people in the name and character of Jesus.

But honestly, as I stood with my friend in that peek-a-boo sunshine, his cloudy eyes locked with mine, I had no idea how to help him.  We’ve thrown various resources his way for years, and we love him dearly, but at that moment, I had no answers.  So often as the days roll on, I hear a story, and all I know to do is reach out, hold, stand with them in the moment, pray, tell them a crazy story of my own, and perhaps share a laugh or a smile or a word of encouragement that will somehow land in a non-trite, non-canned way.

Sunday morning, I said we should not forget that God is strange and mysterious, perhaps even terrible in the way storms can be terrible.  No blasphemy there, because scripture is plain about that if about nothing else.  But behind the strangeness is the stranger notion of love that trumps all things.  Strange, terrible, stormy life, and still worship is the only real response, because what is, is, and He is the “I am.”

Please pray for these friends of mine…

Finally, summer comes to Seattle.  This morning is clear sky, cool breeze perfect.  I woke not to an alarm, but because my eyes opened.  I dreamed of wandering old streets in a town that was my hometown, but that wasn’t anywhere I’d lived before.  I caught a bus, and when I got off, I’d left my computer on board, but the bus driver left down the street for me to pick up.  And to describe the dream like that is terribly misleading and conveys really nothing of what I experienced.

Yesterday, I preached.  The words were about the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the Heavens, and the topsy-turvy way it exists and moves in the world.  A old friend was in the congregation, the kind of man that likes to offer vocal support in the old call and answer style, and I preached and he answered, and we danced in the middle of God’s truth spilling over us in a way that I can only describe as delightful and filling.  Sounds strange to say it that way, but meaning and words and energies traded over a crowded room, everyone hoping divinity makes an entrance…makes for a rich moment.

I will never be able to communicate how I feel and think about the richness of life.  I’m reading about brains these days, fighting my coffee urges, adjusting to massive change in my family life, my church life, my inner life.  I drive in the midst of mountain ranges and pacific waters, feasting at ridiculous tables, lapping up flavors most of the world only dreams of.  Art of all kinds, the creative spillings of our time’s most active and fertile imaginations come at me in print, in film, in pixels.  Friends of various relational colorings meet me with handshakes, hugs, nods of head, stories, shared pain, whatever is in their emotional palate at the moment.

What makes it strange is that’s it’s nothing but grace.   I have wasted so much time, wronged so many friends, come up short so often, left so much spirit on the table unspent.   I don’t feel terrible about that just now, though over the years I’ve shoveled up enough guilt to bury myself scores of times.   Frankly, I cannot imagine why any of us receive the rain of good that comes down on us even when life sucks.   And just now, I’m thinking how offensive that sounds to anyone who’s life sucks not in perception, but in fact.  People lost in circumstances they can’t control, fighting poverty or disease or injustice or disaster, perhaps stuck in addictions and abuses and other traps.   Where’s the rain of good for them?  And how shallow to talk of richness of life when disaster splashes over the front pages and homepage portals.

I don’t know where it comes from, this sensation in me that has always reminded me, even in my darkest depressions, and there have been so many, that even through tears, the fact that life is, is nothing short of stunning.  Gurus of all types call us to be grateful, and I think that’s right.  Several friends are either birthing babies or expecting, and as I think of them, I think of my children, who weren’t here once upon a time.  I think of my Dad, and he used to be here, but isn’t anymore.  And my own life is the proverbial stick of grass, planted here by nothing more than a passion of man and woman, and a thought of God.

I am grateful that life streams through me by no good planning of my own.   In the end, for me, God is gracious and good, though I have spent much of my life blind, foolish, and quietly selfish, near cruel in my self-pity.   Grace, we call it.  Unmerited favor.

God is good.  All the time.

That, we call praise.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow…

Tomorrow I head to Chicago to teach some theatre classes at the Willow Creek Arts Conference.  The one I’ve been working on this morning relates to directing, and I am always surprised at the stirrings that happen in me as I consider this kind of work.   I am reminded again of how much I love the theatre.   Theatre moves me because of the physical presence of the actor, the living, breathing entity that takes journeys through both real and imagined space and time, and right before my eyes transforms, often running the gamut of emotional life, giving me permission to do the same.   I am reminded of how powerful a thing emotion is, and the rarity of its appearance on stage.   Over the years, I have been the privileged recipient of so many moments given by actors plying their trade, sometimes in performances, but more often in classes, students opening themselves to the terrifying exploration of the human experience.   Thinking about directing makes me immediately more observant, paying attention again to the way we relate physically across a table, or the cacophony of sounds that surround me in the coffee shop, or the potential of vulnerability that exists in every exchange.  Connectedness, action, story, conflict, imaginative detail…

Central to all this is the actor.  There is a beauty to watching actors open themselves to what I simply call “a moment.”  They fight through the fear and terror of being in front of others, but more importantly, they fight through the fear and terror being in front of themselves, opening the doors of the identities, exploring, learning, failing, recoiling, launching again, all in service of an artistic experience that serves as a catalyst for an audience’s journey into their own identities.

I don’t think about these things as much as I used to, and it’s both refreshing and a bit depressing to come back to them.   Things have changed over the years, but I’m still the guy that loves the moments actors offer up.

Here’s to them, my daughter and son among them…

Action is forever…

There is a danger in thinking across disciplines.  My thoughts range through various subjects from neuroscience to epistemology to art to physics to religion and hermeneutics.   Granted, my thinking is more limited in some areas, but my curiosity just keeps churning.  I am fascinated by the vastness of life, and the way each human being must live our their choices day by day by day, all the time working from the only vantage point they have–inside their own subjective experience.   I am not completely post-modern, but it is hard to argue around this basic post-modern mantra.

If spirituality is about thought-life, then the life of the mind is paramount.   And given that the life of the mind is connected intimately to the life of the body, hence, connected to the life of life,  then my curiosity about the processes of mind and body and spirit make sense.   Lately, brain science has captured my attention.  The physiology of thought and emotion, the limbic system vs. pre-frontal cortex functions, right brain vs. left brain, and the possibility of change due to the plasticity of the brain.   Neurology’s connection with spirituality calls up all kinds of questions.  But I keep thinking that while science offers so many nuanced descriptions of what happens when thought and emotion emerge, it speaks little of the why.

Which brings us back to God.

I haven’t been blogging much partially because of the busyness of schedules.  I just got back from Saskatoon, SK (I like the abbreviation of the province because I can’t spell Saskatchewan) where I did Leaving Ruin.  Next week I head to the Willow Creek Arts Conference to teach four classes on acting and directing (three of which are new material) and frankly, I am feeling a bit rusty because I’ve done so little artistic work of late.  Then there’s the work of the church: preaching, administrative realignment, adult education planning, worship planning (our instrumental worship leader is moving to California after next week), young adult ministry planning (a “missional” church consultant is in town this weekend for a weekend of meetings).  And of course, this is graduation time for Daniel (I’ll write more about that later) with family in and musicals and plans of various kinds.

But the other reason I’ve been loathe to blog is that my thoughts are ranging far and wide across these various fields.  Sometimes it’s hard to synthesize in ways that make much sense, and in those moments, I back off and wait.  The urge is growing in me to do some explicitly artistic, right brain work, and while I’m not sure what it will look like, the inner demand is unmistakable.

Where does the demand come from?  Is it a selfish urge?   In a year where everything is changing, is it the old man just wanting to return to a comfortable place?  Or is it some fundamental thing God has placed inside of me that may or may not have a functional, pragmatic end?  See, this is why I don’t want to blog.  My thoughts come to a place where I’m not comfortable throwing my deep musings to a larger world.  The tensions that are an inherent part of the work of a preaching minister are tensions I want to be frank about, but honestly, there seems to be less permission to be frank the longer I go.  Maybe I’m just a coward…entirely possible.  But it is hard to admit that I speak more from the place of questions than of answers, and that often I am not sure what my Boss is asking of me in any given moment.

Truth is, just now I long to leap into the vastness of creativity and art.  Maybe it’s just temptation, a wanting to pick up a life I’ve let go of.  But it feels more like truth than that.   Feels like part of God’s voice speaking to me, calling to me.   Maybe so, maybe not.  But for this moment, I walk with my heart in the fullness of life, right brain and left, praying that God will grant me grace to keep making beauty on both sides.

New vistas ever opening…