between the click of the light + the start of the dream

The Power

2010-03-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

Early on I learned to carry on as if everything was just fine when everything wasn’t fine at all. This was a definite reversal from my prior habit of carrying on from time to time as if I were the saddest boy in the world. I found as a high school sophomore that sitting conspicuously alone in the cafeteria was generally rewarded by the attention some nice girl who crossed the room to ask, “Are you OK?”

But in my junior year I fell in with people who valued being OK all the time no matter what and seemed to regard the appearance of OK-ness as a spiritual virtue.

I wanted to be spiritually virtuous so I learned to deflect questions about how things were going; I became the sort of listener who gets another person talking to avoid talking about myself. I learned to use vague but high-sounding spiritualized language so I wouldn’t have to be plain about the messiness of my situation. I don’t think I was ever really confused about the dishonesty of this. But I was young; maybe I just don’t remember.

In my mid-20s I faced a moment of truth. Faced it and failed.

The circumstance was a conversation with a good friend who decided at considerable cost to his pride to trust me with a painful secret. He was, he told me, stuck in a compulsive habit that made him feel out of control and awful about himself. I tried not to show it but I was frankly surprised. I thought I knew him pretty well and he seemed like an intelligent, accomplished, well-integrated, spiritually mature person. I didn’t judge him. I listened sympathetically, nodding and vocalizing from time to time so he would know I was there for him.

But I wasn’t there for him. I was trapped in precisely the same behavioral cycle and when he told me, I didn’t tell him. I let him believe he was the only one struggling. I had the power to really support him; the power to say, “I know, me too.” But I didn’t. I listened attentively but when he finished, we both walked away alone.

_____

It would have been better for both of us for me to come clean that day. I was too ashamed. I wimped out. I’m sorry.

Head Games

2010-03-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

I find it easier to criticize than affirm. Perhaps this has something to do with how I process information and experiences. That said, I’m only marginally more comfortable with criticism than affirmation because I'm a people-pleaser at heart. If I criticize, people might not like me. I would so hate that.

So for me, the path of least resistance is keeping both affirmations and criticisms to myself—playing them out in the near-perfect safety of my own mind.

I feel secure in saying I never lost any argument—however complicated—as long as I kept it to myself. When, in the confines of my own head, I lay things on the line, there is no ambiguity and there are no “sides.” The truth is what I say it is; I’m right, everyone else is wrong and that, friends, is that.

Much the same way, the affirmations I offer in the sanctuary of my imagination are always deeply appreciated and richly rewarded. In fact, my make-believe expressions of approval grow in significance until they are more important than the other person’s real achievements. Sometimes...perhaps often...this interior process is so satisfying that I never bother to express it in the real world. No text message, no email, no phone call, no hug… The whole cycle occurs in a closed system that begins and ends with me.

_____

It would be bad enough if I reserved this silent detachment for strangers and those I regard as enemies. The truth is worse. I also play out these fantasies with people close to me—my wife and daughter, my parents and sister, the people with whom I work; my pastor, friends, fellow youth workers and leaders in the Church. I withhold congratulations for their accomplishments and I am slow to show mercy when they fail (or even acknowledge a valiant attempt).

Why do I hesitate to express honest appreciation for people I claim to care about? And why is it difficult to offer useful help when people who matter to me miss the target? What kind of colleague, friend, father and husband does this make me?

Maybe I’m happy living in my own, self-absorbed, little world.

Or perhaps I’m afraid. If I give credit where credit is due, people might think...what? That I couldn’t have done a better job than they did? Preposterous! I can do everything better than anybody!

Am I the only who thinks this is dangerously unbalanced thinking?

_____

I’m not proud of any of this. I know how small and ungenerous it makes me. I confess it now only because I want to do better.

And I am doing a little better. What I described here is my default mode—it’s luggage carried forward from childhood; a particularly stubborn holdover from a time before even God truly mattered to me. But—and I give God credit—I see a trend away from automatically swallowing affirmation and choking back reasonable critique.

Bit by bloody bit I am becoming more honest and open and generous. But the improvement is not yet what you would call second nature. I have an enormous amount of ground to cover on the way to getting out of my own head and treating people the way I want to be treated.

Bygones | Part Two

2010-02-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

I grew up with the distinct impression—and this was the case both before and for a time after my watershed experience at summer camp—that all the true and actual Christians in the world went to a church pretty much exactly like mine. I talk about my Catholic and Episcopalian friends now, but when I was a kid I believed those other churches—I’m not talking about the synagogues or the mosques but the ones with crosses on top—I believed all those other churches were filled with sadly mistaken individuals who were sure as hell not going to heaven because they weren’t members of my particular brand of church.

I doubt anyone ever told me that right out loud, but I came to believe it as naturally as I came to believe white Americans were inherently better than anyone else. It was taken for granted. We never shared a meeting or a meal with people outside our own church. When new members were welcomed to our congregation they were said to have come from “a sister church” only if they were moving from another congregation of the same name. Otherwise, no matter where they came from or when they’d been baptized or what they said about their trust in Jesus, they were assumed to be starting from scratch.
_____
Of course my church had its own denominational publishing house and books published by other so-called Christian publishers were assumed to be riddled with error and quite possibly malicious false teaching.

This was fine by me since I wasn’t reading books of any sort at the time. But then people who didn’t come from my specific spiritual heritage helped me understand the loving mercy God spelled out in Jesus Christ. It was people I always thought were going to hell who showed me I could read the Bible for myself. It was people I had always known as outsiders who helped me learn to pray and encouraged my journey toward intimacy with God. And when I did start reading I found that people from traditions I'd been taught were spiritually deluded wrote books that helped me grapple with things about God which I'd totally missed in the church of my childhood.

I was not yet out of high school and my eyes had not yet adjusted to perceive the subtle colors of the world as it is. So in my black and white way I felt betrayed by the church where I grew up and distrustful of them and frankly angry at them for hiding these wonderful followers of Jesus from me; for arguing so persuasively that we were the only true believers. They raised me to be smug and judgmental, so I became smug and judgmental toward them.

Of course that was a long time ago. It’s all better now; as long as I don’t think about it.

Bygones | Part One

2010-02-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

It took a long time to forgive the church where I was raised.

Starting the year I turned 16, I was mad at my church because I was convinced I never heard the Gospel there. I was indignant that I had to go to summer camp on the other side of the country to hear what they should have been telling me all my life.

Of course this was ridiculous on its face because I grew up in one of the most evangelistically obsessive Christian denominations in the world. I doubt I ever went to a church service that didn’t end with an altar call—we referred to them as invitations—as in, “Every service in our church ends with an invitation to receive Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.”

So of course I heard the Gospel—just as I now see my Catholic friends heard the Gospel every week in the Mass and my Episcopal friends heard the Gospel in the Eucharist every time they went to church.

But that doesn’t really mean we heard the Gospel does it…

I live in a part of Southern California where I watch kids growing up bored and disinterested in a location other families save up all year to visit for a few days of vacation. So yeh, I think it’s possible something can be so familiar that we miss it until we encounter it out of context and that's maybe more or less what happened to me at camp that summer.

So if I didn’t hear the Gospel as a child, maybe that was my problem more than the church’s. Sorry I brought it up.

But there’s this one other thing about my childhood church that I don’t think I imagined. The comedian Emo Philips has a joke about it:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too!

Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!" Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.[1]

('’)

[1] Emo Philips, The Guardian, 29 September, 2005

Out of the Basement | Part Two

2010-01-31T18:35:00.000-08:00

I was never more isolated than a period when I was misbehaving compulsively—committing the same offense, tripping over the same root, falling in the same hole over and over, as if I were powerless to change directions. I made my living as a church-based youth worker but I couldn’t think of a single person to tell about my habitual failure. And that was totally fine by me.

_____

It was the loneliness that eventually got to me. I finally reached such a degree of remoteness from honest human contact that, extroverted as I am, I couldn't take it anymore. I felt—because I was in fact—false. I decided, I have to tell the truth. If I lose my job, I lose my job. But I can’t go on this way.

So, cautiously at first, I started coming clean about my wrongdoing—not the stuff from back in the day; the stuff from earlier the same day. I told the truth and held my breath.

Nobody died.

I didn’t lose my job. In fact, beginning to come clean made me better at my job as a youth worker. It made me more sensitive in the good way; more sympathetic and less judgmental; less standoffish; more approachable.

If I don’t want to live like that ever again—and I really don’t—I can’t afford to isolate myself that way. I need people who tell the truth and expect me to tell the truth. I need to be in a community of folks who practice what the apostle James preached:

...confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. [1]

One of my alcoholic friends told me something he learned at one of those meetings that often take place in church basements: “We’re only as sick as our secrets,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he spoke...

I think I get that. And I want that wisdom hauled out of the church basement and into the sanctuary where it can help more of more of the time.

('’)

[1] James 5:16

Out of the Basement | Part One

2010-01-31T18:27:00.000-08:00

One of the things that appeals to me about the notion of a personal relationship with Christ is that it sounds like I might be able to make it purely personal.

There’s a sneaky part of me that's perfectly willing to pervert the notion that God loves me into the notion that I am accountable to no one but God. Because if I'm accountable to no one but God, I'm pretty much in the clear inasmuch as God is known for long stretches of, shall we say, subtlety about details. Of course this requires that I steer clear of the Bible, but how big a challenge can that be for someone who keeps such a busy schedule, you know, serving God?

The upside of this practical autonomy is obvious, I think. It means an end to prying questions about how I’m “really” doing from well-meaning people who might nevertheless judge me if they knew the truth. It means no one assessing my appetite in books and movies and web content and television; no one watching to see if I treat retail sales associates and telephone customer support representatives and teenagers with dignity and respect. It means nobody close enough to see if I give myself up for my wife like Christ gave himself up for the church.

_____

How can a person who knows what I know even tolerate the idea of autonomy from God and God's people; let alone prefer it? What insanity makes this possible?

I interviewed a former pastor who lost his job because of an adulterous relationship; and when I say former pastor I mean that just barely. The body was still warm; he’d been found out and fired just a few months back. I found out in a brief visit before we turned on the camera that, for years, he'd been in the habit of meeting regularly with a small group of his peers, and that he was still part of that group when his infidelity came to light. When I asked about this in the interview he shook his head, “Oh, yeh, I was in an accountability group with other pastors," he said, "...but my heart is more deceitful than that.”

Mine too. Given enough time to myself, I can turn just about anything into a virtue.

The reference to his deceitful heart comes from the prophet Jeremiah:

The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it? [1]

St. Augustine is supposed to have said, "Love God and do as you please," or something like that (full disclosure: I haven't located that line in Augustine, nor have I found anyone who cites a source for it—this does not keep writers from writing it as if it were true). Wherever the sentence came from, I seized on it and then twisted it to my personal advantage (as distinct from God's advantage...or my neighbor's). My version is something like, "Say you love God, and do whatever you can get away with."

Looking at it now, this seems uncomfortably close to, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

('’)

[1] Jeremiah 17:9

Help | Part Three

2010-01-29T06:08:00.000-08:00

Eventually, the effort to appear obedient, dutiful and committed wore me out.

This is not a bad thing because it has finally, I hope, put me in my place. My failure—despite my best efforts to deliver, or at least seem to deliver the goods on obedience and duty and commitment—keep driving me to Jesus in whom I find mercy, grace, and more grace. As difficult as it is to ask for help, one thing I'm no longer confused about is this: I clearly don’t have what it takes to obey God and fulfill my duties and keep my commitments. Left to my own devices, I'll fail. I feel so bad about that—I truly do—and still sometimes I don't have what it takes to ask God for help. It's embarrassing to admit; I wish it weren't true.

_____

Here's the interesting thing. Every time I admit this unpleasant character flaw—this longing I can’t get rid of to be self-sufficient; this shrinking away from the truth that could not be clearer: the truth that I need help—every time I admit this and ask for help, it seems like I get what I need (not what I want maybe, but I’m in no position to make demands am I…).

I now have a pretty hefty list of behaviors about which I ask for help on a regular basis. Compulsiveness, sarcasm, lying… These are embarrassing behaviors—not the sorts of things likely to get a person thrown in jail for the most part but still unsavory in a person who claims to know something about God. These temptations are persistent too, as if they had their own ugly little personalities; as if they had set up housekeeping in the basement and were not about to be evicted without a fight.

If I were going to get better at avoiding these failures on my own—by self-discipline or willpower—I think I would have by now. So I guess I'm going to need help today; much like yesterday and, I anticipate, tomorrow.

Sometimes I wonder if God allows these moral cockroaches to survive in order to clear up any lingering doubt about my ability to clean house myself. I don’t know if that’s the case but it reminds me that, toward the end of his second letter to the Christians in the city of Corinth, the apostle Paul described something that seems a lot like my experience. He was, he told them, continually struggling with something (he didn’t say what) and he kept asking God to just fix it. But instead of fixing it, Paul said God told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”[1]

God’s power made perfect in weakness. That is so upside-down...a paradox if anything ever was. On the other hand, I do have an abundance of weakness...

('’)

[1] 2 Corinthians 12:9

Help | Part Two

2010-01-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

It's difficult for me to ask for help and I don't know exactly why.

Maybe it's a performance thing: meaning I suspect people like me for what I do rather than who I am. Under that rationale, I believe if I ask for help, thereby admitting there’s something I can't accomplish on my own, nobody will like me, right? OK, not right. But it sure seems right to me and I live as if it were true a lot of the time.

This has a huge effect on my relationship with God.

What if God accepts me for what I do more than who I am? I've gotten mixed messages about this through most of my life. Grace, grace, grace, yes, of course. But also obedience, duty, commitment...

Some of that seeps in from my experience as a high school athlete. We’re a TEAM, right? We’re all in this TOGETHER! But some of us get to play and some of us don’t. Some of us get benched because we don’t deliver or because we get upside-down with a coach or because someone shows up who is just better than we are. Yeh, I know, it’s the way of the world; so suck it up and get it done.

Yeh...or what?

Suck it up and get it done or we’ll find someone who can.

For a long time, pretty much all the folks I listened to in spiritual matters left me with the impression that really following God and truly being the person God created me to be was something like being notified that I’d made the team—even though I didn’t exactly go out for it—and now I alone was responsible for whether I got to play or not. No one in my circle ever suggested I would be kicked off the team; but it was easy to infer they thought I was in danger of being benched. Was I up to the challenge of obeying God’s commands, fulfilling the duties of every team member, and living a life totally committed to God? Well, was I?

I learned I could say I was.

The thing is, nobody can look into my heart to tell if I’m truly obedient, dutiful and committed to God. Folks can observe superficial markers that suggest obedience, duty and commitment but beyond the surface they pretty much have to take my word for it. Under that arrangement there is simply no graceful way to ask for spiritual help. I took it to an extreme; I know that. But I don’t think I made it up from scratch.

('’)

Help | Part One

2010-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

Asking for help is really hard for me.

I once stayed up all night trying to edit videotape on a machine I'd never seen before. I was supposed to be helping a group of high school kids learn to make videos at summer camp and I'd counted on someone else to operate the equipment while I handled the thinking/theoretical/storytelling part. When I realized no one was going to show up to fill that role and for reasons I wasn’t capable of explaining, I couldn't bring myself to admit I didn't know what I was doing and ask for help.

And then it was too late. It was the middle of the night and I knew it was stupid not to ask for help but it was too late and I was so embarrassed that I sent everyone else to bed and set to work all by myself. It was a punishing night. I was exhausted and humiliated and alone and afraid.

There was an early morning deadline to transport the finished video to the duplicator and I had to show up with something. I’m pretty sure what I delivered was terrible—I never looked at it to find out. I swore I'd never make that mistake again. And I never have—because I've never again agreed to edit anything. [1]

But I've made exactly the same mistake in other ways. I've spent untold hours installing and reinstalling software because I was embarrassed to pick up the phone and call for help. Right now I'm sitting in a motorhome in Spokane, Washington wondering how to empty the two holding tanks before they overflow. There are about 30 motorhomes within 50 yards of where I sit. I bet somebody out there knows how to do this. But it's hard for me to ask for help. If you find that ridiculous, I understand. If, instead, you find it...let’s say, familiar; I think I understand even more.

_____

When I was a senior in high school I was invited to speak to a grade school assembly about leadership because I was one of two captains on the football team and thus someone, somewhere assumed I must know something about leadership. Be that as it may, I knew nothing about speaking to grade school children about anything at all. I suppose I could have gotten on pretty well talking with them about Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera cartoons—and Scooby-Doo debuted that year, positioning me as a very early adopter—but I doubt that would have served the school principal (or the school’s principles). No matter; it didn’t occur to me at the time. In fact, nothing occurred to me at the time—not even calling the other football captain to see if he had any bright ideas about communicating with little kids.

In the end, I woke up sick on the morning of the assembly and phoned in my regrets. I remember vividly how shameful it felt to feel relieved about feeling sick; knowing in the pit of my stomach that I would have failed had I shown up. So...I just failed to show up. Today I can’t call to mind the events of that morning to tell you if I was really sick or just sick with fear about facing an auditorium full of grade school children.

And I’ll never know what might have happened if I’d been smart or humble or brave enough to ask for help.

('’)

[1] This is one of those instances where “never” means up to the time I wrote this. It’s no longer the case, but that’s another story. Now, back to this story where I was saying “...I’ve never again agreed to edit anything….”

What I Thought | Part Two

2010-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, the apostle Paul had more to say on the subject of changing from what we were to what we are becoming than I imagined. When he wrote to the Christians at Ephesus, he didn’t write about having been changed, he wrote about growing until we are mature...

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the head, that is, Christ.[1] (emphasis on infants and grow up added by me)

I think there’s a biggish difference between unleashing a new creation on the world like a Christian Godzilla wading full-grown out of the Pacific ocean, and a new creation introduced to the world as an infant who must grow up as infants do, getting to maturity by way of childhood and adolescence. I started out with the first image, more or less, and ended up with the second.

Now that I think back on it, if I needed anything beyond the evidence of my own experience, I had only to look at Jesus—who entered the world as a baby after all, and grew up, increasing in wisdom and in favor with God and people.[2] If it was good enough for Jesus...you know?

_____

I fully expected I would quickly become the sort of person I looked up to in high school—and in an unanticipated way that’s pretty close to what happened. Because, meaning no disrespect, I think those people were damaged stragglers and imperfect strugglers, just like me. The people I looked up to in high school weren’t what I thought. Maybe they didn't know I thought they were perfect. Or maybe they knew and just forgot to mention it wasn't true.

This would all be well and good if my realization had come in the quietness of a life lived in isolation. But this was not the case. I was a card-carrying youth worker for two decades—by which I mean it’s how I made my living, working for churches as a youth pastor. And I was a writer too, and an occasional speaker on topics of Christian spirituality—not famous; but not completely hidden either.

This being my situation in life—even if I meant no harm—my hands were dirtied. For years and years I told lots and lots of kids stories of life as I believed it was supposed to be—not as it truly was. In doing this, I carried forward notions I misunderstood in adolescence—things like click-of-the-light transformation—and passed them on to the next generation of young believers as if they were gospel.

I am really sorry about that.

If there’s one place I wish I could get do-overs it’s for having spent all that energy for so many years persuading people to believe my life was better than it was.

So, to set the record straight, I’m gathering this body of private and public writings, recollections, reflections and projections dating from around the time I woke up and smelled the coffee up to the present day. The stories here are mainly mine but I don’t think they are mainly about me. I think they are about the God who loves us...to borrow a line from the writer Anne Lamott, who borrowed it from a lady in her church...I think these stories are about the God who loves us exactly as we are, and far too much to leave us that way.

('’)

[1] Ephesians 4:14-15
[ 2] Luke 2:52

What I Thought | Part One

2010-01-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

This is what I thought. I thought spiritual maturity was more less like puberty—inevitable, irresistible, unstoppable.

I thought by the time I turned 18 I would be rock solid; and I thought by the time I turned 20 I would be the freakin' Rock of Gibraltar.

In short, I thought by the time I finished college, I would be the sort of person I looked up to in high school.

This is not exactly how things turned out.

I was talking with a new friend today. He is 22. He said, “I’m at that age when I’m thinking I should be growing up and getting more mature, you know?”

“What a coincidence,” I said… “Me too.”

_____

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t act like a kid—haven’t for quite a while. But I have to admit the road to maturity is quite a bit longer than I believed when I believed I could get there well ahead of my 30th birthday.

And why did I believe that? I’m pretty sure it’s an impression I got from adults I knew when I was a teenager. I can’t point to anyone who actually said it in so many words…so let’s say I probably inferred it from the fact that nobody I knew with any spiritual leadership—and I mean nobody—ever talked about weakness or struggle or stumbling one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back unless it was a story anchored firmly in the past tense.

From that I reasoned that a person as smart as me could learn from other people’s mistakes; that I could compress my spiritual journey into a matter of months rather than years—certainly the notion of decades never occurred to me. I synthesized a gospel of automatic change and then propagated it to anyone who would listen. I learned Bible verses that supported this way of seeing the world and I learned to talk about my faith as a before-and-after narrative with a total change inserted between the before and the after: Utter darkness, then BAM! total illumination. One step.

There’s a sense, I suppose, in which I may not have been entirely wrong.

There is a sense in which—as the apostle Paul told the Christians in Corinth—people who are “in Christ” are “new creations.”[1] It’s a new day; everything has changed; the old is gone. Period.

That’s fine and good and true as far as it goes.

Bu it seems to me now that I didn’t follow it far enough. I understood it as a done deal, like turning on a light that takes a room from dark to light with one click. It’s a little like someone saying, “I’m here!” when she lands in New York, meaning she’s arrived in North America from wherever, and in that sense she is here and no longer there. But, depending on her mode of travel, she is still hours, maybe even days, from being here if here for the person who longs to be with her means Vancouver or Seattle or San Francisco.

Saying I was a new creation in Christ was a statement about my condition that was true as far as it went. It simply didn’t go far enough.

I've come to believe that being a new creation is more like a dawning than switching on a light. There may well be a moment before dawn and a moment after dawn, between which lies a moment observers would agree was dawn itself (though I’m not sure I understand how that would be measured, or from where, or why).

The move from darkness to light at dawn is accomplished by a turn of the earth to face the sun. Things on earth don’t glow from within; the glow is reflected light and all things become clearer and sharper as they become fully illumined.

('’)

[1] 2 Corinthians 5:17