God is not a terrorist (reflections on Scripture & terrible love)

When we see acts of terror perpetrated in the name of religion, we (rightly) have a visceral response.  The idea of people using violence, threat, intimidation and coercion in the name of promoting their beliefs is inherently offensive to us.  When we see people use religion in this way, we see in them the image of the god who shaped them, and shudder.

This whole enterprise is precarious for Christians that are still ambiguous as to whether or not they serve a God of terror themselves.  We may in fact leave vengeance in the hands of God, which is pragmatically much better for the world than using violent means to promote our faith system now.  But what does it all mean if God’s ultimate invitation to humankind is nothing more than a kindly worded threat?   "Come follow me, worship me, love me…because it really is in your best interest-aaand because I’d hate to have to throw you into a literal fire for billions of years, roasting alongside your gay neighbor, and Jews killed in the holocaust who never prayed 'the sinner’s prayer.'"  One might be tempted to call such a God a monster, except you better not say such a thing out loud—a capricious, angry deity would certainly not tolerate such blasphemy.  One swath of Christian tradition basically takes that out with one magic word, “sovereignty." End of conversation.  Oh, and "his ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts higher than our thoughts" (a text that is actually about the unfathomable mercy of God, but never mind).  Now shut up. 

So you do.  You don’t articulate out loud the deep suspicions that linger in your mind when the lights go out.  Your heart says that if this is true, this god you are told is so good is still a monster trying to lure you into the bed.  At the heart of the universe as you understand it is not a force of benevolence and beauty, but a malicious being who will send the vast majority of humans who have lived over the last 200,000 years into unending torment.  In your head, there is a voice that reminds you, “but God sent me Jesus so I would not have to go through all of that.” But your heart is still uncertain how to interpret this.  If God had to come up with a legal loophole allowing Him to beat His own son to death, doing all the things to Him that He ought to do to you for your own misconduct—does that really make you feel that much better about him?

For many of us, God is still a terrorist.  He will take hostages, maim, kill and destroy to accomplish His desires in the world.  And when that doesn’t ring true in the depths of the soul he gave you when he created you in his own image, the voice in your head tells you that doesn’t matter.  Clearly there is something wrong with you—maybe if you prayed more, read the Bible more, and especially if you sinned less, you would feel more comfortable with this terrorist God than you do right now?  So you stuff it all down.   And like the elder son,  you remain in the Father’s house, while quiet suspicion of his purposes eats away your external shows of piety from the inside.  A God that powerful can be respected or admired—but cannot be loved, no matter how many times you are told that you are supposed to.

That God is more a projection of our own guilt and fear, perhaps.  But there are real reasons we have to harbor such suspicions.  After all, we are given a violent, messy holy book that often seems to give us contradictory images of this God.  As Phyllis Tribble appropriately called them years ago, we do have these “texts of terror.” And we can’t just pick and choose which parts of the Bible we like, can we?

Truly if we are going to allow Scripture to be our authoritative guide to a life with God, we can’t throw parts of it out.  We have to read reverently and carefully…but also read violently.  We have to engage our heart, our emotions, our affections.  In the Hebrew tradition, those who engage God on such dangerous, heart-first terms are not demoted, but rewarded.  These are the classic Jewish examples of true piety—Abraham, Moses, Job, those with the chutzpah to go one-on-one with the holy one, to plead their case, to make their argument—unflinching.  Loving God, in Old Testament terms, is not to bury your questions, fears, concerns and accusations of the divine, but to bring them out in the open. 

No matter how many textual gymnastics we perform, there are still texts that will trouble us, disturb us, frighten us.  There are conservatives who will tell you to suck it up and take it on the chin, that’s why He’s God and you’re not (again, just shut up and believe!).  There are liberals who tell you those texts weren’t supposed to be there to begin with, it is after all a very human, imperfect collection.  So if there are parts you don’t like, feel free to avoid them altogether. 

It seems fairly rare even now that you find people who accept that these texts do carry authority—and yet grant that the texts are in fact there to trouble us, to disturb us.  What if offense, outrage and discomfort is what you were intended to feel?  What if the communities that came up around those texts were not as primitive or unsophisticated as we assume, but were aware that these texts would produce this kind of wrestling in us?  What if this kind of struggle was intended? 

The wisdom of the Jewish tradition is found precisely in this profound capacity for self-criticism.  It is all over the texts themselves, this back and forth--Israel wrestling with its maker in the dark like their patriarch, Jacob.  And often in the light, for us all to see.  One of my favorite examples of this is the contrast between how God introduces Himself to Moses in Exodus 34.6, when He says, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.  Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” 

In the later, more obscure book of Jonah, the accidental prophet is in a huff that this God would want to show mercy to the Ninevites.  He is blinded by his prejudice, and perhaps by the real memory of atrocities committed by these people against his own.  In a moment of anger, the prophet Jonah remembers God’s famous introduction to Moses, and delivers it back to the Holy One, sarcastically.  “Isn’t that what I said, Lord, when I was still at home?  That is what I tried to forestall to Tarnish.  I knew that you are a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in love…”  Can you hear it?  He’s quoting Exodus back to God word for word, until this turn, when you are expecting to read, "yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished." Instead, we get “a God who relents from sending calamity.  Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”  Wow.  In other words, “this is why I tried to stay home to begin with.  Because in my heart of hearts, no matter what my teachers told me, I always knew you were really about this mercy business more than you were the punishing.  I always suspected you weren’t going to follow through on punishing my enemies and their children’s children.”  How very much like God and the unique character of these chosen people, that the revelation that runs like a current beneath all these stories that come before leaps into life through the words of a prophet who is not even happy about it. 

It is precisely in this way that the story of Scripture moves forward—through the back and forth, rough and tumble of these texts, covered in the dirt from the long night of wrestling—that a consistent narrative of grace and mercy emerges.  This motif is most clear in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth himself.  To be certain, Jesus talks about judgment.  There are many warnings of judgment in Scripture, and indeed to face the intrinsic consequences of our actions is a fearsome thing.  "The wages of sin is death."  We do, in fact, "reap what we sow."  But the extraordinary picture of God that develops through the teaching of Jesus Himself is not of a God who enforces this cycle of cause and effect, but a God who is constantly interrupting it with grace.  Jesus’ own warnings of judgment are not used as an evangelistic tool to tell the outsiders to get right—this is not the kind of thing he does with the woman at the well, for example, or with Zacchaeus.

Rather, he keeps turning the way the Pharisees understand judgment on its ear in surprising ways, as he does with us.  Most people who have grown up in evangelical churches have heard sermons threatening eternal hell if they don’t invite Jesus into their heart in the crusade, for example. But I have yet to meet a single person who has a story of hearing a sermon based on the separation of the sheep and goats, determined on how we treat those who are marginalized and poor.  We are still just as squeamish with the teachings of Jesus as the Pharisees were. 

And then in Jesus’ own use of the Hebrew Bible, he is notoriously selective in what texts he chooses to highlight.  One can imagine the incredulity of  his critics when Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.  In the famous, beloved words of Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  Now everyone hearing this knows that Jesus has only read half of that clause—forget anachronistic verse numbers in our Bibles, Jesus stops MID-SENTENCE instead of reading the rest of the clause, “and the day of vengeance of our God.”  Luke puts this dramatically: “Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.”  This is the ancient version of the mic drop.  I wish I were a black preacher even now, so I could preach a sermon the way I’d like to called “Jesus shut the book!”  The trouble with grace preachers, then and now, is that they are always leaving stuff out. 

Jesus "does not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it," as we read in Matthew’s gospel. But His reading of the text, his enfleshment of the text, is surprising, subversive and disruptive.   The trouble with Jesus is that He is also retroactive.  Everything we thought we understood about the Hebrew Scriptures now must be re-interpreted and informed in light of him.  This is why Paul and the other New Testament writers are notoriously unconcerned with “reading the Bible in context” the way people understand such things now.  For them, every text is read through the lens of Jesus.  The Christ event exploded every jot and tittle of the Bible they read, and they followed their Lord in reading their Scriptures in surprising, creative, often subversive ways. 

The gospels are the texts that answer definitively for us the question of “what is God like?”   The answer, resoundingly, is JESUS (also the answer to all questions ever asked in Sunday School).  Jesus is “the image of the invisible of the God” in Paul’s phrase, “the one in whom all the fullness of the godhead dwells.”  Jesus is “the exact representation of God” in the words of Hebrews. 

How does the revelation of Jesus inform how we read the Hebrew Bible then?  For one, the fact that the definitive revelation of God comes in the form of the advocate and the intercessor, the one who reconciles the world to Himself on His cross, shows us the surprising ways God had been revealing Himself all along.  In a flat, western approach to Scripture, God in the Hebrew texts is only revealed through the actions of the God character in the ancient narratives.  We have not understood there is a more intuitive, Spirit-led way of reading those God-breathed texts—texts that were wiser and more revelatory than we gave them credit for.  Those texts work on us on an affective level, engaging the heart and the emotions in ways that, over against our dismissal of their human writers as primitives, demonstrate an astonishing self-awareness. 

So when we read, say, the stories of Abraham or of Moses pleading with God for the people to be saved from divine wrath, our sympathies are with those people.  We recognize ourselves in their stubbornness, disobedience and outright sin.  If we read with our souls open, we are horrified at the idea that they would be wiped out.  We never consider that this is perhaps how God intended for those texts to be read, that the outrage that we feel is not a mark of unfaithfulness, but fidelity to the Spirit that inspired them.  As it turns out, the way God is most clearly revealed in such texts is not through the God character in the texts—but through Abraham and Moses.  God is revealed in their pleading, their desperate, heartsick intercession.  These human intercessors paved the way for us for the ultimate revelation our hearts were longing for—the revelation of Jesus.  Those texts were never meant to go down easy, but to force the kind of anguish and soul-struggle that would make us like Moses, too—with the ultimate end that the struggle with them would produce nothing less than Christ-likeness. (my friend Dr. Chris Green has greatly shaped my reading of Scripture on this point, though he would express this part better-and further should by no means be held responsible for everything in this essay!)

Jesus is not the foil to God the Father, but the revelation of His heart for us all along.  I remember being shaken to my core when I read the New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham’s work, and he gave this simple rubric to understand God’s activity in the book of Revelation: “Whatever you see the lamb doing, that’s what God is doing.”  I believe that to be true not only for Revelation, but for all of Scripture—whatever you see the lamb doing, that's what God is doing.  

This is not a parlor trick.  This does not trivialize how we read our Old Testament, but rather emboldens those “texts of terror” to speak life into us again.  It is a kind of reading that requires tenacity, disciplined engagement, and nothing less than the Spirit of God herself to reveal them to us.  It is, in short, a way of reading Scripture that requires Jesus to teach us, to instruct us.  Over and against much of the project of textual criticism in the 20th century, I am not looking for way of understanding the Bible that does not require God.  I want a way of reading Scripture that requires God in order to work. 

We read texts that we struggled with, thinking we somehow weren’t doing it right—failing to realize that these passages were never intended to console us to begin with.   The texts do not exist to comfort us, but to bring the kind of discomfort and disruption that makes revelation possible—that makes revelation necessary.  There is no “common sense” way to interpret the Bible.  We are given inspired, enchanted texts that churn in our bellies—"sweet to the taste, but bitter to the stomach.”  They churn and they churn until Christ is formed in us.  If they are not read with heart, mind and soul engaged, if they do not have access to our affections—they can only offend us.  Only when the word is ingested can it come to life in us in a way that reveals Jesus.  This is precisely how Scripture is “the word of God” at all—it is the word of God insofar that it reveals “THE Word” that is Jesus of Nazareth.

The God revealed to us in Jesus is not a terrorist.  But he does reveal to us, in the words of my favorite song by The National, a “terrible love.”  This love is terrible, in the ways that the tenderness of God always feels when it is resisted.  It is the terrible tenderness of Jesus when the soldiers come to seize him in the garden, and calls the man who betrayed him “friend.”  It is the terrible tenderness of the God who loves us to the end, despite ourselves, undeterred by our fickle hearts and weak flesh.  This relentless tenderness, experienced as wrath to those who reject it, carries the holy story forward, through all of the wrestling.   It is ultimately the story of how mercy triumphs over judgment and how perfect love casts out fear. 

The world is full of terror.  The news is full of terrible stories of how humans harm each other.  When we run from them into the ancient story, we hear good news—these texts speak a better word than what we have heard seen and heard in the terror of the world.  The God revealed to us in Jesus is no terrorist—he is not a deity who accomplishes his purposes through threat, intimidation and coercion.  Rather than using his great power to overwhelm us, he lays down his power and allows himself to be killed on the cross.  That is the definitive revelation of God to the world, the One who then overcomes not through acts of terror, but through terrible love.  Against the backdrop of all the horrors of the world—which we inflicted even on the Son of Love himself--the resurrection reveals a love that is more terrible still. 

the foolishness of the cross (in the days of terror)

            You can turn off the news, but you cannot turn off the images from lingering, from burning in your dreams: The youthful optimism in the eyes of three Muslim students before being gunned down in idyllic Chapel Hill, NC at 5:15pm on a Wednesday afternoon.  The haunting image of masked men brandishing swords, seconds away from slicing off the heads of 21 Coptic Christians, some of them yet praying.  Entering into Lent this year, we enter into the rhythms of the earth’s own travail, of her loss and of her longing.  There are no words.  There is only grief…then rage.  We know Craig Hicks was responsible for the Chapel Hill slayings, and that ISIS is responsible for massacring the Christians.  But the weight of so much pain is greater than we can place on such a small group of people, much less ourselves.  The grief is too searing to just sit with for long.  Restless, we hunt for more people to blame.

            How did we get here?  Is all of this because of violence somehow intrinsic to Islam?  Are Christians reaping what they have sown in their own historic injustices to Jews, Muslims, perceived heretics, Native Americans, and African Americans?  Is religion itself the problem?  Is this because of something President Obama did, or did not do?   Where did it all begin, and when will it ever end?  Tell me now, Billy Joel—who exactly did start the fire?  Feeling the outrage swell within us, there is only one thing we know for sure: it’s not my fault.  I didn’t kill a Muslim in a crusade.  I didn’t kill Jews or Anabaptists like the Reformers.  I didn’t set a black man on fire like our great-grandfathers did.  I didn’t drive nails into a cross.  My hands are not soiled with the blood of my sisters and brothers.  Someone else must take the blame for this.

            As Lent takes us on the slow climb that ends at Golgotha, the radical edge of the cross of Jesus can be easily lost—perhaps especially among those use it as a name brand.  When Peter got up to preach on the Day of Pentecost to preach, he said “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.” The Son of love entered into the creation, but you despised him, you rejected him.  Beauty itself came to you in human skin, and your response was to maim, torture and kill him.  The “you” here is not, as famously misunderstood in a dark time in church history, the Jews—it is inclusive of all of us.  The you is both individual and corporate. The scandal of the cross is the scandal of our own complicity in a love-denying, God-crucifying world.  We have all played a role in the violence and injustice of the world.  We look in the mirror, and in our own eyes we see the kind of person that killed Love.  As the one who denied Jesus, Peter preached this message knowing that he, too, was complicit in the murder of God.

            Hyper-conservative political ideology cannot tolerate authentic Christianity, because its radical individualism cannot tolerate the gospel message of corporate complicity. Pseudo-Christian folk religion says, “I’m not the one who killed Jesus—I wasn’t even alive back then.  Whatever is wrong with the world cannot be my fault.”  We do not want to identify with any particular tradition, because we do not want the baggage of any particular tradition’s sins.  We do not want to take the responsibility that context would demand of us.  And for those evangelicals who want the world to burn down to expedite some kind of rapture, there is no future for us to take responsibility for, either.  The functional church history taught in such a climate can be summarized in a single sentence, “Nothing important happened here before us, nothing important will happen after us.” 

            There is no corporate responsibility for anything, because there is no “we.”  There is an “us,” but only insofar that there are others who blame the proper “them” alongside of us.  In the nationalistic folk religion we are making up as we go, the differences between good guys and the bad guys are not theological, but political.  Our identity is not in the Eucharist, in the broken body and shed blood of the rejected one, but in current political ideology.  We have no history, so we have no hymns—only a shared chorus of “lions and Muslims and homosexuals, oh my!”  There are then no corporate prayers of confession, and no corporate pronouncement of the forgiveness of sins.  It is not just health care and education that we want to privatize anymore, but salvation itself.  Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?

            Like Pilate, we have washed our hands of responsibility for the murder of God.  It is not yet the “second Adam” (as Paul calls Jesus) that we follow, but the first Adam—who when confronted with his sin in the garden pointed at Eve and said, “it wasn’t my fault—it was all her fault.” 

            Yet over and against this pietized, de-historicized faith is the witness of the prophets, from Jeremiah to Isaiah to Martin Luther King, Jr.: you are complicit in the brokenness of the world.  Over and against the allure of contextless Christianity is the voice of Peter that says, “You killed the author of life, but God has raised him from the dead.”  Lent sets us again on a collision course with the horror of the cross, which is the terror both of our complicity in the violence of the world and of God’s unflinching love hanging over us in the midst of it.  The violence that burned in Cain to kill his brother Abel burns in us too, as did the violence that burned in the hearts of the mob that killed Jesus.  In the torture and crucifixion of the innocent One, the very mechanisms of blame are exposed before us—and defeated by the love that speaks a better word than all of our curses. 

            Like the images we have seen in recent days, the cross burns in our imagination, if we behold it long enough.  The cross burns away our cartoonish notions of us and them, melts away our childish games of cowboys and Indians.  We can no longer demonize; we can no longer vilify.  We proclaim the cross with the humility of Peter, who knew all too well his own dark role in the crucifixion of Love.  No wonder the cross can be so easily obscured, even by those who preach it.  It is still foolishness to the wisdom of this present age; it is still a stumbling block to Jew and Greek alike. 

            We enter into Lent again, so that the cross may once again ruin every idea we once had about the world we thought we knew.  We do not allow the suffering we see in the world to goad us into blame and outrage.  We instead bear her sorrow, letting the sword pierce our own hearts.  We rebel against the spirit of the age, not with rhetoric, but with repentance.  We take our place with our ancestors, with Judas, with Peter, and the terrorist Saul of Tarsus.  The spectacle of the cross hovers over us, victims and perpetrators, accusers and accused, and envelops us underneath its shadow.  We gather underneath, as the enemies of God, where the tender voice of the crucified one calls us “friends.”  Giving up the idolatry of personal identity, we join the multitude of guilty forgiven ones—the multitude that no man can number.    Humbled, we join the church across the ages to bow and pray a treasonous prayer:

Most merciful God,

we confess that we have sinned against thee

in thought, word, and deed,

by what we have done,and by what we have left undone.

We have not loved thee with our whole heart;

we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

We are truly sorry and we earnestly repent.

For the sake of thy Son Jesus Christ,

have mercy on us and forgive us;

that we may delight in thy will,

and walk in thy ways,

to the glory of thy Name.

Amen.

soul animal.

she will not make a home, on the surface of things. 

she stays out of sight, and out of reach.

neither god nor human (though made from the stuff of both of them) 

she lives, solitary (in hiding)—bowed head and quiet eyes, a nun in a convent. 

she is trained (she says muzzled)--into long, unnatural quiet. 

she comes late to the party—when she comes to the party at all. 

she makes an appearance, (a cameo)—in moments of joy, and of ecstasy.

then slinks back into the hole in the bottom of you, sleeping through her days, a creature of shadows. 

until that day comes, when you fall (or jump) off the wall, the sick sound of your outside’s undoing, your insides spilling.

it is then—and only then—you know who and what she is:

your soul is an animal. 

you know this (because you hear her scream)

you know this (because you feel her bleed)

you didn’t know she was alive, until you felt her life slip through you.

she howls through your wounds, as breakable as your skin—

she is after all, only an animal.

she has no reasons.  

she was no creature of reason, to begin with.

until out of nowhere, you feel her rattle in your belly. 

she starts her slow rising, grit and bone and instinct. 

she needs no reasons (to go on). 

She needs no logic (to fight back). 

She needs no will (to survive).

she may yet go (but not go quietly).

she is mortal—she can be killed.

but she’s not dead yet, because she decided not to be.

she claws her way back, without your consent.  

she was what she was and she is what she is.

she is, after all--an animal.  

a prayer for daily bread.

I do not ask

for some future bread.

I do not ask

for some lofty thing.

I ask for nothing more

I ask for nothing less

than primal provision.

For this, and this—only this.

I do not ask for then.

I do not ask for there.

I do not ask for that.

only this meal—this moment.

for this day, only

for this, and this—only this.  

preaching to mr. bergman

I saw my first Ingmar Bergman film when I was 21 years old, and I never got over it.

The film was Winter Light, one of the three films in Bergman’s so-called faith trilogy (with Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence). Taken as a whole, the trilogy isn’t really about finding faith so much as losing it, seemingly mirroring the Swedish director’s own doubt—and ultimate disillusionment—with the faith he had known. And yet it is hard even now to remember a more spiritual experience than watching that film.

In Winter Light, Gunnar Bjornstrand plays a priest whose own soul had become hollow. When a fisherman, played by Max Von Sydow, comes to him on the brink of suicide, he comes looking for the priest to give him a reason not to kill himself. But the priest is all out of his own reasons, and can’t think of anything to say to dissuade his parishioner. So the man goes through with it. The lonely priest, who had isolated himself from the handful of people that loved him, continues to slowly unravel until the powerful final scene. It’s time for the Sunday morning worship service to begin, and there are only three people in his tiny church. The priest seems undone. It is the moment where you expect him to strip off his collar, and finally abandon the crime scene of his long-dead faith. But in the last moment of the film, he comes to the pulpit to begin the liturgy — and then the credits roll.

I think many people interpret the priest’s final action as an act of cowardice. You could say he does not have the strength to follow through on his convictions, or his lack thereof, and falls on the sword of convention instead. I am not certain that faith and cowardice are distinct to begin with, or even if they would need to be. I do think that when he retreats into the liturgy, he is doing the only thing he knows how to do. Perhaps faith is always a kind of resignation—faith is Simon Peter saying to Jesus, “Lord, where else would we go?” The 21-year old version of me found the final scene inspiring. I did not see what was so bad about retreating into the liturgy as your only way of not giving in to the night entirely, or what was so bad about preaching as “whistling in the dark,” in Frederick Buechner’s phrase—to keep your own spirits up as much as anyone else’s. I don’t know that faith is somehow faith no longer just because you return to it when you have no other place to go.

Bergman’s perspective on his protagonist’s choice is unclear in the film, but he later said it was not until filming Winter Light that he realized he had lost his faith. The son of a Lutheran minister, he was always ill at ease at the answers he was given as a child. But the big soul questions burned in him, and he could spin their fire into us from his reels. If his own questions didn’t precisely lead him back to God, at least in the ways he understood Him before, they can’t help but take us into the divine presence on sheer force of their fearless, painful honesty.

For all angst-ridden souls who dare to live the hard questions, whether we aim them toward God or into the great beyond, Bermgan was a kind of priest; his films, sacrament. They were both more visceral and more tactile than movies are supposed to be—as marked by taste and texture as a look or a style. You cannot just watch Bergman films, you have to feel them go down in you, like the bread and wine. And when you are done consuming, the images burn in you still, in a place beyond words—in a place past prophecy.

My visit to “Bergman Island”

It was in the middle of my own season of unraveling that I arrived on Fårö, the island Bergman would call home for the second half of his life, filming many of his greatest works there.

It was the last weekend that the small Swedish island, only inhabited by around 500 residents even in the summer, would still be dotted by people. The wind was turning cold. Soon, only a handful of farmers and a parish of livestock would be left here on Ingmar Bergman’s church. The harshness of the weather in the cold months demands that most inhabitants have a place on the mainland, so they migrate to Wisby or Stockholm.

Standing outside in my topcoat, I could feel the jutting rocks call to me like sirens, the way they called out to Bergman. I could feel everything about the landscape of that enchanted place pulsing with beauty and heartbreak simultaneously. Lost in the splendor of the windy, rocky shoreline, I could drink the cocktail of my own loneliness and aliveness all the way down. It is the sort of place that seems to have very old ghosts, but is also the right place for you even if you’ve already packed your own.

I walked the jagged coast in the evening until the sun sunk slowly back into the ocean, and again early in the mornings, only seen by the black eyes of the sheep and a few horses—without judgment. In the cold beauty of Fårö, my outer world could reflect the starkness of my inner one.

I was thrilled to be in the creative haunt of my film patron saint, hoping to bring him my questions, or at least interview his muses. There was a group of about 30 of us there to pay tribute for Bergman weekend, and I was the only American. I landed there feeling like a refugee, the day after arriving in Sweden and promptly getting my rental car stuck in a small alley in nearby Wisby (an incident which, hilariously, made the local paper!), and subsequently misplacing my cell phone. Seemingly unable to perform the most basic tasks in this beautiful country, I felt more like a ten-year old boy lost at sea that an adult man finding new adventure.

The day I arrived, the silver-haired lady with small spectacles, soft eyes, and a fashionable scarf—the film professor who runs the Bergman Center—greeted me warmly. But my heart sunk when she told me her friend saw the picture in the local paper of me stuck in the alley, and called her that morning: “Your American seems to be having great difficulty getting to you,” she repeated. The trip was already having the same effect that Bergman’s films have on me internally—stripping the soul completely of its ego pretensions, until you’re naked as a skeleton. I was able to laugh at all my mishaps so far.

Bergman could do a hell of a lot of things from behind the camera, but comedy was never really one of them. I had brought the comedy with my slapstick strand of errors, and they continued even after I got to the Center. The Center Director had asked a sweet retired art professor to translate for me, but he didn’t feel quite comfortable enough to do so. Thus I went to all the sessions on that first day unable to understand a word. Yet the sense of isolation, of being a stranger in a strange land, may have been the best way to experience the bleak terrain of Bergman’s films all over again. After walking the shore where Through a Glass Darkly was filmed during the day, we watched the film together that night in a small room. Predictably at this point, the remote wasn’t working properly, so they could not activate the english subtitles for me.

I had re-watched Through a Glass Darkly a few months before, and it strikes me as an awfully bleak-ass film even by Bergman canon standards. There is a lot going on in the film thematically, but the premise is basically this: A novelist, played by the same actor who starred in Winter Light, is with his son, daughter and son-in-law on holiday on an island. The daughter, recently released from an asylum, is there to recover from a mental breakdown. One evening, she accidentally discovers a manuscript where her father had been callously recording the details of her breakdown, and through it discovers that she is incurable. Along the way, she believes she has visions of God. The film climaxes when she sees what she believes to be God revealed as a spider, crawling out of a crack in the wall, coming to penetrate her. It is not exactly the feel-good hit of the year even in the best of times—but watching it without subtitles, unable to understand the words yet feeling my face pressed against the glass to behold these characters, was in its own category of desolation.

The next day my luck shifted when a kind, sixty-ish lady (who fortunately had once taught Swedish in an American university) offered to translate for me, just in time for our trip to Bergman’s former home. It seemed almost allegorical of my whole life then—to be the one lost in translation, dependent on the kindness of strangers to help me find a sense of place again. Drinking coffee on Bergman’s back porch, still feeling the chill underneath my skin, this gentle new friend spoke my language and warmed my spirit again.

She was there with her best friend since college, with whom she watched her first Bergman film when she was 20. On the bus, I asked her what her favorite Bergman film was. She said it was Persona. Her and her friend have apparently had a 40-year long debate over whether or not the two lead female characters in the film were intended to be two distinct people, or are in fact two sides of the same personality. I loved this detail especially, because it illuminated the side of Bergman’s filmmaking that had taught me so much about preaching: I had learned that bad sermons, like popcorn action movies, are forgotten the moment after you’ve watched them. But the great sermons echo the quality of Scripture itself, and won’t answer all of the questions for you. They linger long past their welcome, the way Bergman’s films do. Every once in a while, you may even hear one you could argue about with your friend for the next 40 years.

Mr. Bergman’s church

From Bergman’s house to the film locations themselves, the weekend felt like as much an immersion into the director himself than it did the island.

He was a famously tortured soul. On one hand, Bergman was beloved by the residents of his tiny island home, and the stories of his generosity are endless among the people on Fårö. But the brilliant director was notoriously difficult to get along with in his own closest relationships—with his five wives, scattered nine children and sometimes with close friends. By some accounts, his directorial genius seemed to almost plauge his personal life, with him too often trying to over “direct” the cast of friends and family.

Since Bergman was so often able to set my own soul on course through his work, I always wondered where he landed in his own experience of faith through his later years. Based on some of the fiction he wrote in the 90's, I assumed he had continued down the path he began earlier of abandoning his faith, at least in the form it was given to him, until his death in 2007.

But then we finally got to the little church—the only one on the island— where Bergman lies in the cemetery just outside. It was our last stop of the day. The lady giving us the tour was a retired math teacher and lifelong Fårö resident who had known Bergman well. As we walked through the church into the graveyard, she dazzled us with the story of his funeral—which like so much of his life, was scripted in meticulous detail. I was almost surprised that Bergman had his funeral in a church at all given his ambiguity about institutional religion. So when we finished the tour, I asked her about his relationship to the church.

Her answer surprised me. In the years after Bergman’s fifth and final wife died of stomach cancer, he went into deep depression. He stopped making films in 2003. He had a difficult hip sugery he never fully recovered from, affecting his mobility. Without his work and his companions, he felt increasingly alone. So for the last few years of his life, our guide said, he returned to the church of his childhood, attending service every Sunday. She told a beautiful story of a visiting children’s choir coming to do a concert one evening at the church, and of Bergman being moved to tears—giving them an enormous donation immediately following the performance.

Whatever judgments the younger Bergman may have once had on his priest in Winter Light, the priest’s journey became Bergman’s own. When he felt his own life fading, he went back to the only liturgy he knew. He returned to the Church and to the tradition of his father. Whether you call it an act of faith or cowardice is as open-ended as the conclusion of the film— and just as irrelevant, if faith and resignation are in fact indistinguishable.

I could not shake the image of the 89-year old director hobbling down the center aisle and taking his seat, nursing a lifetime’s worth of heartache. I imagined him sitting on the pew, just like anybody else, hoping something of the music or the sermon would fill something of the void in him, hoping for something that might alleviate his infinite loneliness. I pictured him there, watching the robed preacher climb the steps. And I wondered—did he sit on this pew just the way the same way I do at St. Peter’s Episcopal, hoping against the dark that the sermon might strike new life in him? Did he feel the anticipation start to shimmer in his stomach, hoping he could yet get lost in something outside himself again?

And then I wondered about the preacher. Did he speak tenderly into all the ache that enveloped him? What Bible stories did he tell to this master storyteller? I was seized by what struck me as a ridiculous but warm thought—that I would have loved to have preached to Mr. Bergman. It wasn’t that I was sanctimonious enough to think there was something in me that my favorite director would have needed. It was just that he had been a kind of companion to me in my own dark, lonely moments, and I would have loved to have been there for him in kind. I would have loved to massage the rough places on his heart the way he had mine. I would have loved to have spoken to him from my own heart, the way his films helped teach me to—proclaiming his belovedness to him. I would have loved to have placed the chalice in the old man’s frail hands.

Not knowing if I would ever come back to Fårö again, I lingered another moment alone in the graveyard after everyone else had boarded the bus. I imagined Mr. Bergman returning to his native wonder, the old man as bright-eyed as the boy in Fanny and Alexander—or like a boy in the children’s choir he loved so much that day. I imagined the tortured, beautiful soul melting completely at last into the sweet embrace of love Himself.

I smiled softly, thinking that the man who so studiously peered through the glass darkly of his camera had finally fallen straight into the wonder, and now sees face-to-face.

on going to (an episcopal) church

When I left the pastorate, I wasted no time finding another place to go to church.

There is no piety in that. I would not have had the time nor energy to think about “setting an example” to the people to whom I had taught the value of community. I would not have had the will to go out of a sense of duty or obligation—anything that ever rested on those pitiful pillars had already crumbled (as those twin terrors always should; they are far too weak to hold up a soul). I went out of sheer, bold-faced desperation for someone to preach the gospel to me, someone to lay hands on me, and someone to offer me the Lord’s Supper. There was no motivation more noble than hoping to not starve. I was not over Renovatus—I don’t think I ever will be. I had no idea what sort of new life I might have, just that I had to somehow clear space for any kind of life at all. I needed a place where I could learn how tobe again.

I was not aspiring to go to an Episcopal church in particular. But in my own journey, my belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist had long become the center of my faith. I was aching to find a place where I could receive the body and blood of Jesus every single week. So that narrowed the field considerably. As a Pentecostal who has been largely shaped by women in pastoral work, I wanted to find a place where women would not be excluded from serving that holy meal. That narrowed the field even further. I was also craving a place in my town where ideally I could be a regular person for awhile, where most nobody would know who I was. Okay so I’m not sure if this is still even exactly a “field” now, maybe just enough grass or concrete to find a land where I’d be safe enough to land. But thanks be to God, I landed at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.

I shuffled into the big red doors of St. Peter’s in uptown Charlotte a little awkwardly, a self-proclaimed hillbilly Pentecostal. The aesthetics of the place were foreign to me. Yet in a way, the simple artistry of the space made room for a sense of wonder, reverence and otherness that made me feel at home in a place I did not precisely know, but had longed for. I don’t remember how long it took for me not to cry all the way through every service. I could close my eyes when the choir was singing behind us, and actually felt like angels were singing over me. For all the ways some people may think of Episcopal churches in North America as rest homes for progressive white people, I can only tell you that St. Peter’s is as ethnically diverse church as I’ve been in. From the African-American male rector and white female associate rector, to the revolving door of beautiful faces on the pews around me, the church seems as integrated socio-economically and culturally as it does ethnically.

Ollie Rencher, our rector, and Joslyn Ogden Schaefer, our associate rector, trade off on preaching duties frequently. The sermons are shorter that I’m used to, but I love the focus, clarity and precision of them. Father Ollie speaks with a gentleness—a wise and weathered soulfulness—that breaks me open, effortlessly. Joslyn has something I would only know how to describe as the presence of God leaking through her eyes; a bright, sharp theological imagination; and an unforced poetry to her speech. The sermons are never overly adorned, not laden with academic or hyper-spiritual jargon—they are both authentic and artful.

I loved the warmth and compassion that seemed to radiate off the walls in there, and I loved being stone-cold anonymous. Off the grid from my Pentecostal and evangelical circles, I felt completely safe to come as I was, to receive, to just be. I loved that it never felt like the church was trying to sell me anything. I loved that really, nobody is fussed over at all—there is just is not that kind of VIP treatment for anybody. The vibe is, “this is the kind of worship we do here, and you are welcome to come and do this with us…or not.” The liturgy there does not try to coerce everyone into the same emotional experience, but in its corporate unity strangely creates space for us all to have a very personal experience of God. I have commented to friends that I have never actually prayed this much in church before.

With my own world feeling disordered and untethered, I am quite happy to be told when to kneel and when to sit and when to stand. I love that there is almost no space in the worship experience to spectate, because almost every moment invites (but not demands) participation. I have been in no position to tell my heart what to do. But because the Church told my body what to do in worship, my heart has been able to follow—sometimes. And that is enough for now.

It’s never felt like a tragedy there to not be up the guy up front speaking—I’ve been preaching since I was 19 years old. That part is only gift. Ironically, as long-winded of a preacher as I am, I love investing in a way of being and doing church where preaching really isn’t all that central to begin with. In the Anglican tradition, preaching is never the main event. Preaching is only foreplay at most. All the weight of the liturgy lands on the Eucharist—preparing for it, receiving it, reflecting on it. I love being part of a worship experience where so much emphasis is placed on the broken body and shed blood of Christ. I love that I get to come and actually kneel at the altar, where someone will look me in the eye (when I hold my head up high enough for them to do so) and give the elements to me. I’ve cried around that altar week after week. When my heart is too overwhelmed, I slip out the side door after I receive the Eucharist, where a sweet older man and woman lay their hands on me and pray for me. After years of being in healing lines down at the front of the church waiting for evangelists to lay hands on me, I surely don’t feel any shame or self-consciousness about just sliding into that back room for prayer. I go as often as I need to, without reservation.

I don’t feel any less Pentecostal than I ever have. In fact, in ways I don’t have the space to develop here, I have had some of my most mystical church experiences in the holy silence of that place. I have not disowned or detached from anything in my past that has come before. I love the Pentecostal church of my grandparents. I want to “include and expand” in my experience of God and Church, not replace anything.

The things that oriented my pastoral concerns theologically when I pastored Renovatus are still very much in tact. I still feel that the liturgy and the shout by no means need to be segregated, or for that matter, the head and the heart. I’m still crazy about the experience I had at Renovatus, however clumsy I was as a facilitator, of exploring those intersections—putting all the combustible stuff in the lab out and seeing what could explode. When I’m in churches like Sanctuary Church in Tulsa with Ed Gungor, or Word of Life in St. Joseph, Missouri with Brian Zahnd, I feel something of the same thing we had at Renovatus. For that matter, I know that she is only going deeper in her own experience of that kind of integrated worship under the leadership of Jon Stone, a wise old soul with an enormous pastoral heart, who is taking her all the places she needed to go, but I could not have taken her.

But as much as I loved my life planting and growing a church, that is simply not my life anymore, though it will mark me forever. In the meantime, my own experience of liturgy has been pretty impoverished historically. And in response to my hunger, the deep-rooted, whole-hearted worship at St. Peter’s has been beyond anything I could have hoped for. I love not being the kid with his father’s keys to a big car you don’t yet know how to drive, trying to feel my way around the city. I love being in the hands of compassionate leaders and a rich tradition that make me feel safe. By the way…I get to go to my pastors and openly tell them all of my business without shame or fear of judgment, and let them speak into my life. Who knew?! All this love and beauty, and they give the body and blood of Jesus away for free every week to anybody who wants it. I want everybody in the world to experience it, and yet to bury it as a secret from the world at the same time.

In short, I love going to church—maybe more than ever, even when I feel like I limp in and out the big red doors. I feel like I come up for air every time I walk through them, no matter how I might feel in the hours in between. I feel like I can love and be loved as a human being, without my gifts or my life being commodified in anyway.

I don’t know what any of that means for my future. Getting out of bed takes a surprising amount of discipline and focus sometimes these days. Trying to decide what I will have for lunch today alone sounds intimidating in this moment, much less how to make long-term decisions about ecclesial life. I can tell you that performing the liturgy every week is shaping me, very slowly, in ways that are subtle but deeper than my comprehension, and that there is something about this Anglican way of life that orients me when I have no other orientation.

One week a few months ago, I felt strangely compelled to visit an Episcopal Church closer to my house instead of going to St. Peter’s. It was a nice little brick church with about 60 or 70 people adults in the sanctuary, but didn’t have any of the beauty of St. Peter’s—their extraordinary choir, the architecture that in and of itself tells your soul to bow when you walk in the door. I very much liked that I could go into this very different church and know that I would just as connected to the exact same liturgy that is shaping and growing me every week. But the experience, at least within the first few minutes, frankly felt much more pedestrian by comparison.

But you know, it was funny—just a few minutes into the service, two things happened that made me feel like I understood “why” I was there. One was in the hymn before the Scriptures would be read. There was a middle-aged interracial couple sitting in front of me, and while everyone was singing the hymn with a kind of austerity, the African American woman gently lifted her hands in worship. I am not quite sure even now why that simple gesture, in that particular hymn, in that particular environment, had the effect of breaking me open so much, and making me feel so much more at home. It was just a moment that slid in between my ribs. I was irritated to once again be unable to make it through a service without crying.

The rector got up to preach. I liked the sermon just fine, but found myself wishing I could be listening to Ollie or Joslyn instead. And then he said something toward the end of the short message that just smacked me in the face like some kind of wave. He did not claim this originated with him, and I’m not sure where it came from. But he told us that in other parts of Christian tradition, when people think of worship they think of God as the director, the choir or band as the actors, and the congregation as the audience. “In the Episcopal church,” he said, “we think of the priest as the director, the entire congregation as the actors, and God as the audience.”

The air was suddenly still. It felt like I was in a sci-fi movie where time freezes for a moment, and every movement in the room was on pause. The analogy started slowly clicking through all my gears on the inside as it went down. I marveled at just how much, on a soul level, this way of thinking about church made sense to me now—how much more resonant it is to understand Christian worship not as much as being for people as it for God. I was surprised that my heart could agree with such a statement so quickly and easily. It was evidence of how sneaky liturgy can be, and how much it had messed with my insides—while I was just going to St. Peter’s ostensibly just trying not to drown outright. Sometimes you don’t know you are on the boat until you wake up already out in the middle of the ocean.

reflecting on the broad story so far

To be clear, I don’t feel like I’m Columbus discovering America over here. I always think it must be funny to friends in the Catholic and Anglican traditions when people like me say are saying things like, “Hey guys — whenever you practice the sacraments, God shows up EVERY SINGLE time! Can you believe it?!” This is just telling about finding a church that means a lot to me. I am just a guy who quite imperfectly loves Jesus and thus loves the Church, and does not know how to not talk about either. I’m an ecclesial mutt with no particular point to prove, and no particular claim to authority or credibility.

But given the context of my own story so far, I can’t help but reflect on my own experience, and how it fits into my broader understanding of Church. For all the ways I’ve lost my naivety and childlikeness, and often misplaced hope altogether, I am just as hopeful about the Church in all her diverse expressions as I’ve ever been. I don’t know how much longer Charlotte will be my city, but as long as I am here I will be happy to cheer on the kingdom wherever it may be found. I love to go to Elevation Church to amen Steven Furtick, one of my best friends. I love to go to my adopted big brother John P. Kee’s church, New Life Fellowship Center, and get down with surely the best gospel music you could find in America on any given Sunday. I see, hear and feel God in all of those places and in all of those people. And yet I am thankful for my particular place in this very particular moment of my life.

People still talk to me a lot about their own experience of trying to find their place within the Church, and it is always a conversation I am interested in. I have always thought that when you can, it’s ideal to find a way to integrate things that you need from other parts of Christian tradition into your own—while staying where you are. But there are other times where you need to go a little bit more directly to a stream that is different from your own in order to get the nourishment you need. This is such a time for me right now, though I still feel very much invested in the life-long project of trying to learn to live at the intersections of the traditions that are shaping me in some way.

Truth be told, I think it is good to stand within most any sort of Christian tradition and be nourished by it. I think it’s not so good to stand outside of any and all forms of Christian tradition, and make yourself a judge over all them. I know there are a lot of people these days coming from evangelical and Pentecostal backgrounds who, like me, are looking to connect their experience with the rootedness and ground-beneath-your-feetness of more ancient liturgy. In and of itself, I think that’s a good thing. I am sometimes concerned though about how we can be attracted to the ascetics of liturgical worship, but not allow ourselves to invest in the content and form of it. Liturgy then becomes little more than an exotic fashion statement, when we aren’t really willing to wear the clothes.

Those of us from evangelical traditions often end up going more or less outside of it when it starts to feel too constricting, without exactly going inside another tradition either. We can stubbornly refuse to reflect seriously enough on the Church in her diverse forms to have to contextualize ourselves—which is a tradition in and of itself, but only an American one. We can spend our days being outraged by fundamentalists for being fundamentalists, and feeling very good about ourselves for not being like the people we don’t like. You know—like fundamentalists. Sometimes I think it is far too easy to get used to being the smart ass kids at the back of the class complaining about all the Church is not, without ever taking the initiative to come into a tradition and humbly learn from it. And yet, we may be equally critical then if we don’t find our experience of church to be entertaining enough. “I want the aesthetics of liturgy, without the tedium of all that actual liturgy.” It’s a way of being the guy who doesn’t really want to read the great book, but wants to be able to say they read the great book. But I digress.

Whatever respective traditions we do find ourselves in and however we get there, I become only more convinced that the practice of coming to the Table together in the Eucharist is the only hope we have for any sort of unity, cohesion, and renewal in the Church as a whole. The problem in Protestantism in general, historically but much more profoundly now, is that have we far too much emphasis on getting the beliefs right. No wonder we now have over 40,000 denominations—the search for perfect doctrine is endless, and thus so are the schisms. It is one schism after another, in search of perfect belief. The thing I love about Catholic, Anglican and Pentecostal tradition (when it is rightly understood), is that they are based on shared practices rather than shared beliefs. At St. Peter’s, we recite the Nicene creed every week. But the practice of the liturgy from The Book of Common Prayer in general, and the shared experience of the Eucharist in particular, is what holds us together. Beyond that, there is plenty of room for difference. The emphasis is not on sharing dogma so much as it is sharing the cup.

I believe this is the great hope for the unity of the Church: that though we may hold almost nothing else in common we, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, know that somehow Christ is revealed to us around the table, and have burning hearts afterward to prove it. The experience of God in and through this meal gives us the resources to transcend the temporal boundaries that might otherwise divide us.

I know that across church traditions, we can all fall too easily along existing cultural fault lines—skewing too much toward garden variety conservative or liberal politics. But perhaps there is actually far less difference between competing conservative and progressive ideologies within the Church than we once thought. The divisions are not just about how we interpret Scripture and tradition. They may be less about what we believe, than what we have failed to believe about the Eucharist. When we don’t believe that God is revealed to us in the bread and wine, something else will be more determinative for our understanding of church—music, politics, ideology, culture, popular current conversations about sexuality and gender. Yet being the Church can never be about being on the “right” side of these lines, but rather the abolition of these lines through the blood of Jesus. Without an over-arching belief that the love of God expressed around Christ’s table is bigger than any and all such things, we damn ourselves to a temporal tribal identity based on belief, rather than a transformational identity located in the cross of Christ.

I suspect that sounds the worst to those who find such a sentiment to be broad and oversimplified. But I would not know how to nuance it more. I want to be part of a church where the practice of coming to the table is more determinative than anything else. I find St. Peter’s to be blissfully free of bland cultural rhetoric of “tolerance”—but I’m sure it would be too inclusive for many of my evangelical friends. I am okay with that. And if you think I favor a more inclusive church experience because I fear I would not otherwise be myself included—BOOM. YOU GOT ME. That’s absolutely true. Being in great need of grace does in fact radically alter your experience of church.

I can tell you this: I have never heard less talk about passing ideological battles and culture wars in all of my life than I have at St. Peter’s, in one direction or the other. There are no secret litmus tests or cultural shibboleths. There is less of the rhetorical tumult I find in popular culture because there is too much talk of the gospel; and less time for debate because there is too much time devoted to feasting at Christ’s table. There is just the prayer book and the table spread for whosoever will.

Between those Eucharistic meals, some of these days are better than others, and some days worse. But it always does my heart good to remember that I am never more than a week away from no longer bearing the sole responsibility for my own sins. In the corporate confession, my brothers and sisters will share mine, and I will share theirs, and we will hand them over to Christ together—then hear words of absolution. I do not always know how to keep my heart open and my desires known. I feel like a secret even unto myself as often as not. But on Sunday when I walk through the red doors, the clouds will part again when Father Ollie begins:

“Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

run away from me, bunny (runaway)

When we simply ignore all that is in the depths of us, duty and obligation will often be the only things that keep us afloat. But staying afloat is not the same thing as living from our depths. When we are not living from the depths, we are not living from our souls — we aren’t living out of our deepest desires. We develop an entire religion out of a system of “shoulds and oughts.” At our earliest stages of development, this is normal and even necessary. It’s the classic exchange between parents and children — “Why can’t I do that?” “Because I said so!”

But we aren’t built to live in this stage forever. If we do not deal with what lives in our depths, we will live as fragmented, repressed, and often secretly angry people. This is why bad religion often turns out to be more toxic for people than no religion. We cannot live our lives with no sense of order. But to replace a life without boundaries with a slavish system of “shoulds and oughts” will actually leave us worse off than we were before. Fear-based religion always leaves us worse off. It is exactly what Jesus describes in Matthew 23.15 when he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

It’s heartbreaking when people feel they are forced or coerced into knowing God, or trying to love God — “you must love God…or else!” In the very act of saying “you must,” we virtually ensure that the person will never feel like they actually choose God for themselves. When we are not truly given a choice to know God, then choosing God is not truly possible. And when we cannot live from a place of authentic desire, we cannot live from our depths—thus ultimately, we live cut off from our very selves.

Saving the cable repairman

When I was a kid, I spent my summer days at my Grandmother’s house on the Church of God State Campground. Those were the most magical times of my life. She was a sweet, southern grandmother who made Tang and fried cornbread for me every day. We would sit on the couch and watch the Price is Right and play Scrabble. My grandmother was a woman who deeply loved me, and deeply loved Jesus. I still feel like a lot of the most important things I’ve learned about God I learned from her, though she’s been gone for 18 years now.

I remember one morning in particular when the cable went out. She called the company, and they sent a repairman. When the friendly cable guy knocked on the door, a thought seized me: I am supposed to witness to this man. I had been hearing so much about how I needed to tell people about Jesus. Surely this was my opportunity. And then the terror came. I was eight years old. How am I going to share my faith with an adult man?

I was suddenly paralyzed. I was terrified to talk to him, but even more terrified to not talk to him — because I did not want to be held responsible for his eternal soul. If I didn’t witness to him, then he would not hear the gospel. And he could get in a car wreck on his way to his next job, and would have to go to hell for eternity. And because he didn’t hear the gospel, he would not become the missionary he was supposed to become. Which would mean some kid in tribal Africa would not hear the gospel because the cable repairman did not hear the gospel, and I would be responsible for an entire village going to hell. After agonizing deliberation, I walked into the living room awkwardly where he was trying to work, and I asked him a handful of questions about his life. But I could not muster up the courage to ask him “if he knew Jesus as his personal Lord and savior.” I just couldn’t do it.

So when he left, I burst into tears. My grandmother came into the living room and asked me what was wrong. I could barely even answer her through my tears. Finally I sputtered out, using words formed from the prophet Ezekiel, “I didn’t share the Lord with the cable repair man — and now I know his blood is going to be on my hands!” It was intense for an eight-year old, but that is how I lived every moment of my life — always afraid of Jesus coming over the horizon at any second to call me into account for my sins. My grandmother was, as always, tender and wise. “Oh, Jonathan. That’s not how God works! The way I see it, when I get an opportunity to tell someone the good things the Lord has done in my life, it’s always a blessing. And when I don’t do it, sometimes I feel like I miss out on the blessing of telling my testimony. But that is all — God is not mad at you for not sharing your testimony with the cable repairman!”

But that was the system I internalized, and that is how I always interpreted anything I thought God might be calling me to do. It wasn’t an invitation, but a threat. I grew up feeling sure that God was holding a gun to my head, saying do this or else. Everything I did for God, even when I grew much older, was still out of a sense of duty and obligation. No wonder I was so stuck in my head. When you are living in constant fear, there is no way you can choose to live out of your depths.

pancakes and epiphanies

One of the beautiful things I picked up in my Pentecostal upbringing was an openness to hear or see the Spirit at work in all times and all places. It made me into a kind of accidental mystic. This has especially played out in my life through my love of reading somehow; it’s made me attentive to the possibility that the Spirit could show up through most any kind of text. There have been key moments where I felt like God somehow led me to just the right words in the right book at the right moment. I know this all might sound kind of tenuous. I’m aware “confirmation bias”, that we tend to go looking for things that will support what we already believe. And I certainly don’t think every coincidence in my life equates to some full conspiracy of the angels. But there is a kind of synchronicity at work sometimes in life I have just decided to trust.

So during the middle of my own descent, I had an especially strange moment in church. It was early during the 10:45am service at St. Peter’s Episcopal. There are four readings every week — one from the Old Testament, one from the Psalms, one from the New Testament, then climaxing with a reading from the Gospels. That morning when the Old Testament text was read, it was about Joseph being thrown into the well by his brothers. This was before I had come to understand that the journey I was now on was a journey of descent. But somehow when the verse about him being thrown into the bottom of the well was read, I felt a kind of electricity in my soul. It was odd. The only way I knew how to recognize the Spirit in the text in a church service was if the preacher read one louder than the others! But this verse was read just as gently as the verses before and after it. Our rector didn’t even mention Joseph in his sermon — he preached from the Gospel text. But the image of Joseph being thrown into the well lingered.

The next morning, I went to the Cracker Barrel for pancakes. That is what I do when I’m depressed (and also when I’m very, very happy, incidentally) — I medicate with pancakes. On my way out the door, I grabbed a book almost arbitrarily off the nightstand by the poet Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men. It is an artful, elegantly written book about masculinity that at that point, I knew next to nothing about. Feeling somehow mysteriously drawn, I opened the book at random, near the middle of the book. I know this not a fool-proof method: hence the old joke about the guy who opens up his Bible and asks God to talk to him, and the first passage he opens to is where it says “Judas hung himself.” Then he flips a few more pages and reads where Jesus says, “Go therefore, and do ye likewise.” I don’t have an imitable formula, just an odd story of grace, in the way that all stories of grace surely are.

The page I flipped to was in a chapter called “The Road of Ashes, Descent and Grief.” And these were the first words I read on that page: “We remember that Joseph’s brothers put him down into a gravel pit — the Arab version says into a ‘deep, dry well.’” That is one of Bly’s images for the necessary path of descent men must go through. Remembering what I felt in my soul when that text was read the day before, the way the image of Joseph’s descent had haunted me—I freaked out in the middle of the Cracker Barrel. Every hair on my body stood up. It was not a place I would choose for a spiritual experience.

I still had no idea just how profoundly the book was going to affect me. The premise is roughly as follows: Bly draws from a Grimm fairy tale about a prince who finds a wild man in a cage. Inside the cage with the hairy man is a golden ball the prince wants, but he is afraid to unlock the cage and thus let the wild man out. The only way he could unlock the cage would be to steal the key hidden beneath his mother’s pillow. For Bly, it is crucial that the key has to be stolen. If the boy never passes through this part of the journey, he grows into a man who represses his zest for living under layers of shame, anger, and unfelt grief. He emphasizes:

The key has to be stolen. I recall talking to an audience of men and women once about this problem of stealing the key. A young man said…’Robert, I’m disturbed by this idea of stealing the key. Stealing isn’t right. Couldn’t a group of us just go to the other mother and say, ‘Mom, could I have the key back?’…No mother worth her salt would give the key anyway. If a son can’t steal it, he doesn’t deserve it. Mothers are intuitively aware of what would happen if he got the key: they would lose their boys. The possessiveness that mothers typically exercise on sons — not to mention the possessiveness that fathers typically exercise on daughters — can never be underestimated.

Bly brilliantly exegetes this myth as a way of understanding the plight of many contemporary men. There is a natural rite of passage that takes place when a boy differentiates from his parents, when the key is stolen. The boy has to become in touch with the wild man if he is going to grow and develop. In other words, he is going to have to integrate the wildness — and that is not going to happen without making some choices of his own, and having to deal with his own consequences.

The deeper I got into the book, the bigger my eyes got. I’m reading this as a 36-year old man with my life in crisis, feeling like I’m finally dealing with the deepest issues of identity for the first time. And sure enough, Bly says that if a man does not have this kind of process when he’s young—if he tries too hard to mind his manners and keep all the rules and not disappoint any of his authority figures— then he has to go through this stage later in life. By the time he is 35, Bly contends, there is already a deep fracture in his true self that is going to come to the surface in a dramatic way. But the split just now happening on the top layer has already been years in the making. Dear God, I thought. I am reading about my life. It made me think of the moment inThe Neverending Story when the young boy, Bastian, realizes that he himself is a character in the magic book he’s been reading, and he hurls the book across the room. It was both holy and frightening, as I suppose most holy moments are.

But there was also great comfort in coming to understand something of what was going on within me. I had been the boy who lived his whole life out of fear of failure or rejection, the boy who always kept the rules. I had kept the wild man in the cage at all costs. I had lost touch with myself. There were rites of passage I had neglected that I was having to undergo now, at great cost. It was my moment of illumination.

Understanding something of the journey I was on did not precisely make itfeel any easier, then or now. That path of “ashes, grief and descent” is a long and often lonely one, however necessary it might be. So I was feeling especially low again a few months later, when the pain of the journey was landing heavy on me. Once again, I was in a restaurant eating alone. Once again, I had picked up a book on the way out the door I had been meaning to start but had not got around to. This time, it was Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser. Once again, I casually flipped the book open.

This time, I opened immediately to a chapter where Lesser is talking about her own experience with Margaret Wise Brown’s famous children’s book,The Runaway Bunny. She tells how different it was to read it to her two sons. The sweet little tale begins like this: “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’ ‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’” So from there, the little bunny keeps coming up with wild schemes to get away from his mother. But no matter where he chooses to go or what he chooses to become, his mother changes into whatever she needs to be to get back to him.

One of her sons loved the book, and was comforted by the image of the mother who would not let her little bunny get away, no matter what. But her son Daniel didn’t like it. He was frustrated that the little bunny could not make his escape, and would cheer for him to actually get away from the mother, shouting “Run away, bunny!” He would even come up with new schemes of his own for the little bunny to use that might actually enable him to get away.

I don’t have children, so I don’t know children’s books—it was the first time I had heard of The Runaway Bunny. It was meaningful for me in a way I find hard to explain now, because (and I’m swallowing anxiously here—this is not a very masculine admission), I have always had a thing about bunnies. I love them. I think bunnies are somehow kind of superfluously beautiful. They always make me think of grace. They have kind of been my totem. At different times and places in my life, I will see a bunny, and be reminded in just the right moment of God’s beauty and faithfulness to me. (There. I said it.)

I was moved that night because I felt like a runaway bunny who could not find his way back home. I loved the image of God pursuing me at all costs, going wherever He had to go and becoming whatever He had to become in order to get to me. It made me think of David saying in the Psalms, “even if I take up the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, you are there.” And indeed I do think there is a beautiful picture of God inThe Runaway Bunny. I do believe that there is a way that the love of God pursues us no matter where we go, a love that will not leave us alone. I am humbled by that love, and ever grateful for that love.

But that was not the central message Broken Open had for me. Feeling the open wound of my own heart, I kept reading. And as Lesser goes on, she goes in a direction I could not have expected — she writes about her later experience with…Iron John!? She came to know Bly through her work, and fell in love with the book. But she said she choked on the part about the boy having to steal the key from underneath his mother’s pillow. That is until her own sons grew up, and their process of individuation meant they too had to have seasons of distance from their mother. Today she is extremely close to both of her sons. But she does not believe this would be possible now if she had not been willing to grant them the necessary space to make their own choices. She ends the section this way:

If you find yourself holding tight to your children long past appropriateness or helpfulness, perhaps it would help if you took down an old copy of The Runaway Bunny. Sit on the couch next to your stunned son or daughter, and read the book aloud. Only this time, change the words. Read it like this: Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’ ‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will let you go. For you are grown now. I trust you to find your way in the world. Run away, bunny!’

I was stunned. I just assumed that the message I needed to hear—as it is one I have always struggled to internalize—was the message of God’s relentless, unconditional love. And in way it was, but not in the way that I presumed. God loved me enough to not hold the gun to my head, to not tell me what I should or must do from here. God loved me enough not to say, do this or else. God loved me enough to say, now you are at a place in your life where you are going to have to make some choices of your own. God did not want me to live in the shallows of duty and obligation anymore. It was time to learn to live from my true self, it was time to learn to live from my depths. And there was going to be no way to do that without the love that grants us terrible freedom.

Choosing one’s self

On the other side of that moment, I understand many things I had read in Scriptures much differently than I once did. In the Genesis story, when God tells Adam and Eve they can eat from any tree of the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit glistens with inevitability. How could they choose anything else? In order for them to live awake, for them to become fully human, they would have to make their own choice — even the wrong choice. Strangely enough, it is only in making the wrong choice that they will be able to return to their native state of dependence again—the only place from which we can know God. Partaking of the fruit is a necessary part of the universal human journey.

Rollo May articulated this brilliantly in Man’s Search for Himself. For May, the goal of human development is that we all, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, come to ultimately “choose one’s self.” There is no way this can happen unless we are given a real choice:

It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose his own existence, until he has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that he could wipe out his existence but chooses not to. Since one is free to die, he is free also to live. The mass patterns of routine are broken: he no longer exists as an accidental result of his parents having conceived him, of his growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, begetting new children, growing old and dying. Since he could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its own special element of freedom.

This is why moralistic religion actually becomes dangerous for us, how it makes “double sons of hell.” As May demonstrates, those who have been taught that happiness and success would follow their ‘being good,’ and understand being good merely as a kind of external obedience, are not able to develop their own ethical awareness and strength: “By being obedient over a long period of time, he loses his real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished.”

Like Bly in Iron John, May understands many social problems as the end result of a culture where people do not have necessary rites of passage that enable them to really take responsibility for their own lives. When people continue to live out of duty and obligation, keeping the rules only so that others will tell them they are good, they end up with contempt for themselves. Living contingent on the approval of others means we never develop our own sense of self:

The compulsive needs to be admired and praised — undermine one’s own courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own…when one acts to gain someone else’s praise, furthermore, the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness; otherwise there would be no need to prostitute one’s attitudes. This often leads to the cowardly feeling of having co-operated knowingly in one’s own vanquishment.

It was by no means a happy discovery at 36 to see just how much I had operated largely from those “compulsive needs to be admired and praised,” and thus how much I often felt like I had “vanquished myself.” I had not, in some very fundamental ways, really grown up yet. I was being plunged into the depths of my own soul and my own life, and the sea was raging. I would have given anything to make the churning stop. And yet the more I came to see the necessity of this phase of the journey—even though it seemed to mean my unraveling—the more I started to experience fleeting moments of peace. I was starting to understand that being thrown into the ocean is not God’s way of abandoning us, but of saving us.

Love leaves the cage door open

I am not nearly far enough in any of these soul discoveries to claim to understand them well or clearly. But here is what I do know:

Love does not lock us in.

Love always leaves the cage door open.

If we don’t feel like we have a choice, then we don’t truly choose.

I lived so much of my life afraid God would punish me for doing the wrong thing. But what I’ve come to believe is that the consequences of our actions are intrinsic — thus “the wages of sin are death.” In that sense no one ever gets off easy, because we all live out the natural course of our choices, our own consequences. We do, in fact, reap what we sow. But God is not the cosmic enforcer of karma, making sure we get what we deserve. God is the One who interrupts this cycle with grace.

Sin does not keep God away from us — we cannot outrun His everlasting love. But what our own choices can do is blind us so that our vision of God becomes a distortion. The God we see through the lens of duty and obligation, through the lens of bad religion, is not the God we are actually given in Jesus of Nazareth. So many of the teachings of Jesus gesture toward this — that God is not who we have always presumed him to be from our place of guilt. In the story of the prodigal son, the wayward boy squanders his father’s inheritance, and thus has to live out the consequences of his actions — thus he finds himself working in a hog pen. Significantly, it is only when he “comes to himself” that he starts to remember his father for who he really is, and has in fact always been.

Even then, he sees through a glass darkly. He thinks the only way his father would allow him to come home is as a hired hand. He does not know yet that his father only wants to tackle him with his ferocious love, embrace him, and celebrate his return. But as much as the father wants his son home, the one thing he will not do is force him to stay there. Even though he knows his son will have to learn some hard lessons through his choices, they are yet very much his own choices to make. So the father did give his son the inheritance willingly, knowing it would be squandered.

The truth of this parable, and of the love that will not coerce us, is most clearly demonstrated to us in the cross of Jesus. The cross says to us there is nothing God won’t do to bring us home — except force us into choose Him. The cross is God laying down His great power, so that we might be compelled by the beauty of His heart. He will not coerce us, only woo us. But so long as we see Jesus through the distorted lens of bad religion, every invitation is perceived as a threat.

That night sitting in the restaurant after I read that section in Broken Open, I had a revelation that I don’t think I’ll ever get over: up until that point in my life, I had never really chosen God. I was still in so many ways the boy who thought the cable repair man’s blood was going to be on my hands if I didn’t share my testimony. I was still living a life motivated by fear rather than love. It was not God that was coercing me, but my own terror of God — which ironically enough, kept me from being able to truly love God. Because again when we feel like we do not have a choice — choosing God is not yet possible. I heard the whisper of the Holy Spirit, a scandal to my own ears: “You don’t have to choose me — but I would sure love for you to.”

By that point, I had preached countless sermons about the love, grace and beauty of God that is revealed in Jesus. And yet in my own deepest self, I still saw him as a punitive ogre. I still had not yet learned that my own choices did not change God’s heart for me, but my perception of God. Hell would be to remain forever caught in such a delusion, unable to see God for who and how He really is.

“When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things,” the apostle Paul writes. As long as we are caught in childish, infantile delusions of God, we remain trapped in the most primitive level of consciousness — that of law and fear: “Don’t do that, because I told you not to.” That is a life lived in the shallows, if it can be called a life at all—certainly not the kind of life where “deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls,” in the words of Psalm 42.7. This is why it’s often only when we are at the end of ourselves that knowing God is truly made possible. Only there is the prospect of a relationship that is born out of desire—and thus out of the depths of us.

the books that most shaped me in 2014.

I will spare you the tedium of an apologetic for publishing this list, of saying that it’s all in good fun or I don’t mean it to be pretentious or whatever. I assume if you clicked the link, you like lists too. These are wildly subjective, and were not even all published in the last year—of the many books I’ve experienced, these are just the ones that have marked me most (in non-fiction). Since this has been an intense, emotional, roller-coaster ride of a year, they are all pieces of art I’ve felt special kinship with, because in one way or another they have ligthened the dark just a little. So it feels a bit less sterile and more intimate than these have felt when I’ve done them in the past. It feels like I am introducing you to my friends. It’s very nice to have you and them all at the same dinner party. I hope you get all get along, but if you don’t like any of these guests, I won’t hold it against you.

1. Falling Upward by Richard Rohr

When somebody says something like, “this book has saved my life,” generally it is hyperbole. It’s not an expression here. It is a book that has kept me alive, sustained me when all else was lost. It has been my companion in bed in the darkest of nights, sometimes the only thing that could subdue the shivers. I was at Rohr’s conference in New Mexico this fall, and I thought from afar that if I could, I would like to kiss this little monk on the top of his head (I’m 6'5,” Rohr is a fairly slight man). I read it while on a personal spiritual retreat in San Diego back in March, and every word bathed me, bandaged me, soothed me, sang to me. It was holy reading. I want everyone that I love to read it.

Falling Upward is about the two halves of life—not so much in terms of biological age, though the two are often tangentially related. It’s about life before and after failure. There are 1,000 ways I could commend it to you, but the truth is that Falling Upward is a book that will feel like it dropped out of heaven if you are in the right season in life for it, and probably feel like reading math if you aren’t. You are either ready for it or you are not, and if you are not ready, or the time just isn’t right, I doubt it would be particularly helpful if I explained it to you. I’ll put it this way: it will make all the sense in the world to you after the crash. We go crashing into the second half of life, not waltzing into it, and you probably won’t need anybody to tell you that you’ve got there. In the meantime, if anybody reading this sees Father Rohr, please kiss him on the head for me.

It’s nearly impossible to pick an excerpt since I highlighted most of the book. But here goes: “Some kind of falling, what I will soon call ‘necessary suffering,’ is programmed into the journey. All the sources seem to say it, starting with Adam and Eve and all they represent. Yes, they ‘sinned’ and were cast out of the Garden of Eden, but from those very acts came ‘consciousness,’ conscience, and their own further journey. But it all started with transgression. Only people unfamiliar with sacred story are surprised that they ate the apple. As soon as God told them specifically not to, you know they will! It creates the whole story line inside of which we can find ourselves. It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to this unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences—all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey. As my favorite mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich, put it in Middle English, ‘Sin is behovely!’”

And since I’ve already got you to the dinner party, let’s not rush. Here’s one more: “The genius of the Gospel was that it included the problem inside the solution. The falling became the standing. The stumbling became the finding. The dying became the rising. The raft became the shore. The small self cannot see this very easily, because it doubts itself too much, is still too fragile, and is caught up in the tragedy of it all. It has not lived long enough to see the big patterns.” Sweet Jesus, yes.

2) The Grace in Dying by Kathleen Dowling Singh

Books like The Grace in Dying do not come along very often. It is so comprehensive in scope, so bold in its vision, and runs across so many disciplines—it truly is a book of particular genius. Not only is it wise, but tender, warm, compassionate, and most of all unbearably human. A PhD who has spent her life walking with hundreds of people through the dying process, Dowling Singh’s bold thesis is that no matter where people come from, what their culture or background, religious or otherwise—the dying process is remarkably similar when people actually have time to die (as opposed to sudden, traumatic death). In the same way that Rohr sees the “answer” in Christianity as already being programmed into the problem (through failure, sin and stumbling, we fall into resurrection), Dowling Singh sees divine grace as hardwired into the dying process itself.

The argument runs something like this: We spend most of our lives building our ego, making judgements around our likes, dislikes, and preferences. The ego is not evil—ego-building is necessary in human growth and development. But the ego is not the true self, only our image or perception of ourselves. So we spend most of our lives living from that ego rather than living from our depths, living from the soul. In the process of dying, all of those ego mechanisms are slowly taken from us as the body becomes weak, frail, and dependent. And yet it is precisely in this letting go of the ego self, even against our wills, that we are liberated. While the process inevitably entails seasons of chaos, anger, and denial, before death there is generally a time of unparalleled acceptance and peace, however long or short—the last burst of a soul finally living beyond the constraints of the ego. Grace indeed, however harsh it may come.

Dowling Singh herself is Buddhist, but the book is chock full of insights from Jesus and great Christian thinkers and mystics. In fact, I think the book at its core level is about nothing more or less than “losing your life to find it,” and Dowling Singh quite understands the essence of Christian theology from the outside infinitely better than most of us insiders. If it doesn’t move you, you don’t have a pulse. And if there is not Spirit and life all over this book, I don’t know where the Spirit is. I dare you to make it through this book without both blowing a few mental circuits and shedding some hot tears.

“We will discover for ourselves that the tragedy is not in dying, the tragedy is in living disconnected from Life. I have heard it said that our culture suffers not so much from the forces of darkness but the forces of shallowness. We will experience grace the moment we experience our connection with Spirit, the transcendent Reality, the Center to our periphery. We will experience grace the moment we experience Life beyond our cramped self-definition, the moment we take off the blinders and glory in all that is beyond ‘me.’”

And later, “The path home could be easily traced, much like a mother following her child’s path to bed. She sees what has been dropped on the way. If we were the mother following an enlightened being or the consciousness of one who has entered the Near Death experience, we would see the toys left behind and the shoes that had been dropped, the socks, the pants, the shirt, and the underwear; the body, the emotions, and the thoughts; and last, before the bed, just discarded on the floor, all separate sense of self.” Mercy.

Dowling Singh’s visionary, monumental work reframes the challenge of Jesus’ own teaching in an evocative, potentially life-altering way: if these are in fact the qualities of death and dying, what it would like if a person were able to experience the grace of dying while they are still alive?

3) Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly

Unfortunately, we are not given a manual on manhood when we are born. It’s a pity, but ultimately a problem that could be corrected: I propose that every human being that comes into the world with a penis be given a copy of Iron John at birth, and begin being taught bite-size pieces from it by the time they start elementary school. Don’t even think I’m kidding. And this is from a guy who has generally stayed away from books on masculinity, finding most of them to be cliched, one-dimensional, and sentimental. But you won’t find an ounce of that within a country mile of Iron John.

Drawing from a Grimm fairy tale, the poet Bly illumines the plight of the contemporary male with unparalleled brilliance. I cannot do this justice here. In short, he begins with the myth of the young boy who finds a wild man locked in a cage in the woods. Inside the cage is a golden ball the boy wants. But he cannot get it unless he steals the key to the cage from underneath his mother’s pillow, and thus lets the wild man out. If he does not have this experience, if he keeps the wild man locked in the cage and does not undergo the necessary rites of male initiation, he must experience the lessons of this transition in mid-life in a much harsher way.

It would take a few pages to share the story of how I felt like I was almost mystically guided to this book, how a Scripture about Joseph being thrown into the well led me like a dove into it. I have a forthcoming essay where I share this experience at length, but for now I will simply say that it was one of the most explicitly divinely ordered experiences of my life. I especially wish every man I know could read Chapter four, “The Road of Ashes, Descent and Grief,” which was literally life-changing for me. I can tell you it was as uncomfortable as comforting, because it felt like I had stumbled intoThe Neverending Story. It was almost too true too my life. The process Bly describes for a man at roughly 35 who has not yet been initiated was eerie in its relevance for me. I saw things in this book I cannot now unsee. Read at your own peril.

Very little of Bly’s book works well to quote in some ways without full context, but here is a section I especially loved:

“If a lover lacks the Wild Man, he may not give enough wild flowers. He may make love indoors to much, be too respectable, lack what Yeats called ‘the folly,’ the willingness to throw away house and land for a woman…A king without enough Wild Man will be a king for human beings, but animals, ocean, and trees will have no representation in his Senate. We sense that was true of President Truman. And Reagan, we recall, ‘If you’ve seen one Redwood, you’ve seen them all.’ Bishops and Popes have traditionally been lacking in the Wild Man; they take church doctrine too seriously but not the ecology of the earth.”

4) A Farewell to Mars by Brian Zahnd

I consider Brian one of my closest friends. But that is not why this book made my list. I’ll just repeat what I wrote in my endorsement of it, cause this is still what I think: “A Farewell to Mars is the best, most lucid, prophetic book written by a pastor in our time. It is peerless. Zahnd channels Dylan, Girard, Yoder, Hauerwas, Peterson and Von Balthasar. It’s a brash, bold, pastoral synthesis; so prophetic to the forces of empire as to be a work of pastoral treason. It’s deliciously traitorous. A Farewell to Mars builds the peaceable kingdom up and burns most everything else down. It’s delightful. I could not love it more.” Hey, and if you think I’m just too biased, Eugene Peterson’s endorsement is just as glowing. So if you will not receive my witness, listen to one higher than I.

5) The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart

Here’s my big claim about the Eastern Orthodox David Bentley Hart. I think he may well be our finest living theologian (Stanley Hauerwas has been the most influential on me, and Rowan Williams would be a rival). But there just simply aren’t many people on earth that match his blinding brilliance, artistry, beauty or grandiosity as a writer and thinker. Granted, in books likeThe Beauty of the Infinite, which I mostly enjoyed, the writing can be so ornate as to be over-adorned, and you can get lost in the avalanche of words. But more often than not, there is a laser-like precision to his words—even when Hart is addressing the biggest topic of them all, the nature and character of God Himself, as he does here.

Yeah, so basically this is kind of God’s biography. I don’t know if God gave David Bentley Hart permission or not, so I can’t say for sure wheter it’s the authorized or unauthorized biography. But based on the prose in this book, I’d put money down on God sending His notes straight over to Brother Hart.

I’ll tell you this just for fun: man, I would not want to be insulted by Hart. When he took on the “new atheists” in Athiest Delusions: The Christian Revolution and It’s Fashionable Enemies, it was the most awe-inspiring verbal punk-down I had ever read. But the great thing about Hart, an equal opportunity dismantler of any form of intellectual dishonesty, is that in this beautiful book about God, he gives intelligent design folks as much holy hell as he did the atheists.

Let’s watch as he actually brings all of that full circle: “It is certainly the demiurge about whom Stenger and Dawkins write; neither has actually ever written a word about God…The recent Intelligent Design movement represents the demiurge’s boldest adventure in some considerable time” (ow!)…As either a scientific or a philisophical project, Intelligent Design theory is a deeply problematic undertaking; and from a theological or metaphysical perspective, it is a massive distraction…Anyway, at this point I shall largely leave the new atheists, fundamentalists of every adherence, and Intelligent Design theorists all to their own devices, and perhaps to one another, and wish them all well, and hope that they do not waste too much time chasing after one another in circles. If I mention them below, it will only be in passing. From here onward, it is God—not gods, not the demiurge—of whom I wish to speak.” And OW.

Footnote: please remind me not to ever piss off David Bentley Hart.

6) Man’s Search for Himself by Rollo May

Sigh…I’ll file this under books I wish I had read earlier in my life. Then again, I’ve become a big proponent of the notion that we see what we are able to see when we are ready to see it, and not before. But if Robert Bly gave us a manual on maleness, Rollo May gave us an awfully good manual on plain ole being human here.

For May, the goal of human development is that we all, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, come to ultimately “choose one’s self.” There is no way this can happen unless we are given a real choice:

It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose his own existence, until he has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that he could wipe out his existence but chooses not to. Since one is free to die, he is free also to live. The mass patterns of routine are broken: he no longer exists as an accidental result of his parents having conceived him, of his growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, begetting new children, growing old and dying. Since he could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its own special element of freedom.

As May demonstrates, those who have been taught that happiness and success would follow their ‘being good,’ and understand being good merely as a kind of external obedience, are not able to develop their own interior awareness and strength. Thus, “By being obedient over a long period of time, he loses his real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished.”

Like Bly in Iron John, May sees many problems in human society as results of a culture where people do not have the rites of passage that enable them to really take responsibility for their own lives. When people continue to live out of duty and obligation, keeping the rules only so that others will tell them they are good, they end up with contempt for themselves. Living contingent on the approval of others means we never develop our own sense of dignity and self-esteem…really our own sense of self.

The compulsive needs to be admired and praised — undermine one’s own courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own…when one acts to gain someone else’s praise, furthermore, the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness; otherwise there would be no need to prostitute one’s attitudes. This often leads to the cowardly feeling of having co-operated knowingly in one’s own vanquishment.

It is not been happy to learn this much about growing up at 36, but May is quite the tutor. I definitely have to go back and catch up on more of his catalog now.

7) Just Kids by Patti Smith

I only know Patti Smith’s hits. I did not come to this book as a fan of her music. But I walked away from it spellbound by her writing. I mean this as a very large compliment, as I’ve read some great memoirs in recent years—but I don’t think I’ve read one to rival Smith’s. It’s so alive, so earthy, so elegant, just teeming with life. There is no explicit faith message in this book, but you don’t write this honestly about human experience without getting into spirituality, and Smith traverses sacred ground over and over through the streets of New York City. Chronicling her on-again/off-again romance/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, beauty and heartbreak shimmer through every page.

And then you get writing like this: “Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. We were taught by rote, Bible verses and the words of Jesus. Afterward, we stood in line and were rewarded with a spoonful of comb honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swifly accepted the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in perpetual motion, like liquid stars.”

Or how about this section, when she introduces Mapplethorpe: “His young eyes stored away each play of light, the sparkle of a jewel, the rich dressing of an altar, the burnish of a gold-toned saxophone or a field of blue stars. he was gracious and shy with a precise nature. He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and a desire to stir.”

Thank you, Patti Smith—I don’t think I even want to try to write at all anymore.

8) Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara, oh Barbara. She just keeps cranking out these beautiful books, with such elegant (and occasionally deceitful) simplicity. Surely she is on the short list of our best spiritual writers before Learning to Walk in the Dark, but this accessible, lyrical meditation on all we can only see and learn when the sun goes down only cements her legacy more. I heard her preach on themes from the book this year, and she is of course just as much a force of nature as a preacher as she is a writer. What a gift her words are to us.

This year, I was especially grateful that Taylor told me what she saw in the dark, as I read it in moments when I could not see a thing. She challenges the dualisms so often held in religious circles, the way that Christian teaching often “thrives on dividing reality into opposed pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Even if you are not Christian, it should be easy to tell which half of each pair is ‘higher’ and which is ‘lower.’ In every case, the language of opposition works by placing the other half farther away. This not only simplifies life for people who do not want to spend a lot of time thinking about whether the divisions really hold; it also offers them a strong sense of purpose by giving them daily battles to engage in. The more they win out over the world of the flesh, the better. The more they beat back the powers of darkness, the closer they get to God. The ultimate goal is to live with that God forever, in a bright heaven where the bottom half of every earthly equation has finally returned to dust.” If that section scares you off, or you aren’t willing to consider the prospect that God may actually have treasures buried for us in the dark, don’t read this book. On second thought—read it anyway. BBT will probably change your mind.

9) Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year by Tavis Smiley

There is nothing especially lyrical about this book. The writing is fairly unadorned; it will not knock you out. But the narrative absolutely will. There is something appropriately sparse about Smiley’s account of King’s final year, in which he takes us into the angst, anguish, and torment of MLK behind the curtain, before his martyrdom forever changed the world. LikeFalling Upward, The Grace in Dying, and Learning to Walk in the Dark, it illuminates the ways that unraveling, losing, and dying yield to the miracle of new life. But this is shown to us through narrative rather than told to us through theology or philosophy.

Smiley won’t let us skip ahead into resurrection. He takes us deep into King’s own descent, self-doubt, infidelity, and the constant in-fighting within the civil rights movement. He reminds us of a time when King was not a universally heralded hero, but a star who was fading, written off even by his most ardent supporters for fighting the Vietnam war with as much energy as he fought racial injustice. King was accused of watering down the message by not staying quiet on issues of war and poverty. Both the prophetic edge of King’s voice, as well as his most human brokenness, are brought back into the story for us here.

10) Broken Open: How Difficult Times Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser

What sets Lesser apart as a writer is her uncommon honesty. She is unafraid to shed light on her own soul and story, even the parts we might deem unattractive, and her courage gives this book a tremendous kind of authenticity and spiritual power. Lesser powerfully demonstrates the way that failure and loss of any and all kinds can transform us into wiser, more compassionate, more human creatures, capable of living with a depth of purpose and empathy we could not have known before the fall.

This is also a book that stumbles naturally in and out of Christian language, though it is not by any means a “Christian book” and is decisively non-preachy: “The journey from Once-born to Twice-Born brings us to a crossroads where the old ways of doing things are no longer working but a better way lies somewhere at the far edge of the woods. We are afraid to step into those woods but even more afraid to turn back. To turn back is one kind of death: to go forward is another. The first kind of death ends in ashes: the second leads toward rebirth. For some of us, the day arrives when we step willingly into the woods. A longing to wake up, to feel more alive, to feel something spurs us beyond our fear. Some of us resist like hell until the forces of fate deliver a crisis. Some of us get sick and tired of filling an inner emptiness with drugs or drink or food, and we turn to face our real hunger: our soul hunger.

Twice-born people trade the safety for the power of the unknown. Something calls them into the woods, where the straight path vanishes and there is no turning back, only going through. This is not easy. It is not a made-up fairy tale. It is very real and very difficult. To face our shadow—the dragons and hags that we have spent a lifetime running away from—is perhaps the most difficult journey we will ever take. But it is there, in the shadows, that we retrieve our hidden parts, learn our lessons, and give birth to the wise and mature self…If there is only one thing that has made a difference in my life, it is the courage to turn and face what wants to change in me.”

It strikes me by the end of this little piece, that talking candidly about the books I’ve read gives kind of road map of my own soul. Then again, maybe that is what the best books always do. If they don’t give us exact directions, at the very least they draw a giant red star on whatever road we’re walking, and say to us, “You are HERE.”

in defense of words, and the people who write them.

I have spent all my adult life trafficking in the language of words to one degree or another. It is a bittersweet business, because words are of course just half the equation for the mystery that is incarnation—everybody needs flesh as much as they need words. There are plenty of things words cannot do for you, places in you where they cannot go, nights where they cannot keep you warm; experiences of grief and ecstasy where they brazenly, flagrantly fail you.

But there are plenty of places they can go, plenty of nights they can shave the chill off if not quite keep you warm. And for all the experiences that words cannot translate, perhaps there just as many experiences that they can yet create. Words can get under your skin, get caught in the back of your throat, burn in the hearth at the center of you. God’s word called creation into existence; Jesus Himself is the Word made flesh. The epistle of James warns that the tongue can be set ablaze with the fire of hell—but another way of framing it may be that words have a hell of a lot of power, constructive or destructive. To play with them is to play with matches and with magic, and so the words demand their due reverence. But are there not some among us, that are born to make fire?

I have long lamented the impotence and inefficacy of words, as least as they pertain to me and come from within me. I love writers and I love writing, but there is still a bit part of me that feels like it is not respectable work. That it is a hobby, not a real job. That some time you’ve got to quit the trifling business of pounding at keys, and pound something with a hammer instead. And I think there is a kind of truth to that, insofar that words are insufficient to get you out of your head and into your body, or get you outside where creation is still happening, whether or not you pay attention. I am indeed learning the value of “kitchen work” as a man moves into the second half of his life, in the words of the poet Robert Bly.

But I am also getting awfully far past the self-loathing and self-flagellation that would make me bury my birthright, and hide the holy marks the words gave me. They make me who I am; they say where I am from. They are in part mother and father, and yet my offspring too—they are where I am from and where I am heading. I will not hide them in the trunk, or treat them like some bastard children.

You get a few moments in your life, when the words won’t serve you at all; and there is peanut butter in the back of your throat, and you are too overcome by the beauty of a thing, to utter any words you’ve learned. And the silence, the wordlessness, the redness that comes to your cheeks while the language vacates you, is in fact it’s own kind of sacrament. There must be space for the wordless, and for the wild words too. I am Pentecostal enough that I will always hold the space for unknown tongues. But even when the joy or agony is no longer intelligible, unintelligible speech is a kind of speaking still. The words don’t stop being words, just because nobody around you understands them.

If you doubt the power of words, I could tell you a story—of walking up a mountain, feeling like I was dying, while I listened to Martin Luther King’s “I’ve been to the mountain top” sermon. And there was the moment listening, when I knew I would not live forever, like the Reverend’s words, but that I was going to live beyond that day—that the words would be enough, to at least carry me into tomorrow. I could tell you of the evenings, where I did not know where else to go or who else to go to, but the words stayed up all night. I will not act as if some are holier than others, because the novels were as faithful of companions as the Bible verses.

It is well and good I am sure, for the rest of the world to go out dancing, or to go to the movies. But you’ve got your friends, honey, and I’ve got mine. And if the words could not take me everywhere I would want to be, they have always taken me more places than I had a right to go, and they still do.

I could tell you too about going out to my father’s utility building, in the little spot beside the trains he collects, where I set up the folding card table, and opened up the laptop. Utterly disoriented, disheveled, and out of my head, I would start striking the keys, like I always did—striking blindly, flailing words like a blindfolded boxer. I struck until something took over, something familiar. It reminded me of my great grandmother, years after Alzheimer’s stole all her names and dates and memories, sitting down at the piano, and playing the hymns she played as a girl. The quiet clicks of the keys on the macbook are the only notes I know, the only kind of music I ever learned to play. And when the other functions did not work, somehow the words still did, even when they were words I did not know I knew, that came as distant strangers. The quiet clicks were the sounds of the words, and the sound of me, not dying.

Don’t think I don’t ever wish that I could be a carpenter, or maybe even a lumberjack, or that I wish my big hands were gifted at something other than making those droning, pitter-pat sounds. I would love to be stronger; I would love to be faster. I wish that when I played basketball, I had more than that one drop step in the paint I started doing when I was in the ninth grade. There are so many gifts I do not have. But the words that are given to me, when I am reading them or writing them, are a gift I cannot ever again take for granted.

When all the other strength is all gone, they are still stronger than you think they could be. They are stronger than the rest of me, and can get into places that the rest of me may not have the capacity to go. I think of the poet Mark O’Brien, after polio had taken the ability to use his hands or feet, writing “a love poem to no one in particular”:

Let me touch you with my words
For my hands lie limp as empty gloves
Let my words stroke your hair
Slide down your back and tickle your belly
Ignore my wishes and stubbornly refuse to carry out my quietest desires
Let my words enter your mind bearing torches

admit them willingly into your being
so they may caress you gently
within.

“Let me touch you with my words…” I know perfectly well that the words are not everything — the making of them, the feeling of them, the sound of them. But they are something.

There are plenty of things that I know how to be sorry about. But this is not one of them: I am a writer.

God Loves Monsters.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

There are sea creatures that would strike terror in us if we encountered them in the deep. Hence the director James Cameron, famous for science-fiction films like Aliens and Avatar, made a documentary on deep sea life called Aliens of the Deep. These beings are the closest thing to our imagination of aliens in outer space we could ever find.

After the tsunami that swept through the Indian ocean in 2004, there were all sorts of freakish looking sea creatures captured on photos and on film. These really were the sort of beings we have only envisioned in fantasies about life on Mars. But they were not the product of Hollywood special effects. All of our strangest, most beautiful, exotic life forms live deep beneath the surface, and God knows how many human beings have yet to see. Some are so deep into the shadows, perhaps they will never be discovered.

In antiquity, images of dragons were drawn on the far end of sea maps. The places off the edge of the world we knew were where the sea monsters lived. People have always been afraid of what creatures may lurk in the deep, which is why so many of us choose a life where we stay on the surface of things. The problem with this is that whatever we fear, we empower. The monsters we repress are the ones that control us.

Repressing that which lives in the chaos beneath us is a perfectly good way to live an ordered life, but not a way to live a full one. We cannot simply always do what we feel, but on some level, we can only do what we truly want — at least if we want to live as whole, integrated people. We have to come to terms with the desires that live in the depths of us, and not just ignore them. The monsters can’t be eliminated — only tamed (by something beyond ourselves) and integrated. When we attempt to live as if the sea monsters do not exist, the dive into the depths is a dive into uncharted waters. Yet to not acknowledge the truth of their existence is to not ignore the truth of ourselves, which is the greatest form of deception. Counter intuitively, the monsters are most likely to eat us if we attempt to ignore them. Simply put — sea monsters need loving too.

God’s rubber ducky

There are monsters in the depths of the ocean, and there are monsters in the depths of us. Any religion that fails to take into account the reality of sea monsters should never be taken seriously. Thankfully, ancient Judaism takes sea monsters very seriously. There are many references through our Old Testament to the ancient sea monster Leviathan. Some have contended that these descriptions were intended to be chronicle the existence of alligators, but I find that unlikely. Leviathan in the ancient world generally had a mythic quality, like our Loch Ness monster.

My favorite description of God in the Scriptures involves this mythic being. In Psalm 104.26, He is celebrated in this way: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. 25 Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. 26 There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.” I am not sure which is more fascinating here — the depiction of Leviathan, or the depiction of God. We are talking about the mysterious, primordial sea creature that terrorized the depths. Leviathan represented everything about the world that is disordered, disorienting and frightening to human sensibilities. In a word, Leviathan represented chaos — the primal forces at work in the cosmos that we cannot know nor understand, much less domesticate or control.

We can imagine the dominant role such a being played in the consciousness of an ancient seaman, a strange being that summed up the volatile nature of the sea itself — unfathomably large, powerful, and utterly indifferent to human expectations or demands. The Leviathan then has a long and prestigious history in world literature. When Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, the aweful, terrifying descriptions of the fearsome whale are peppered with biblical allusions to Leviathan — the whale seems to somehow personify this ancient terror.

And yet in the Psalmist’s powerful imagination, this being is for God a household pet. If God were Sesame Street’s Ernie, the sea is his bathtub, and Leviathan his rubber ducky. People say our choice in pets says something about us, whether or not you are a dog person, a cat person, a bird person, whatever. But what exactly does it say about God that He has the chaos monster for his pet?

uncharted waters

Sea monsters are too big and too powerful to be caged. The mysteries we attempt to cage are the ones most likely to eat us. We can first only invite God into our depths, knowing that He is more comfortable in these depths than we are, and begin to see these creatures through His light. We cannot be captivated by a murderous desire to destroy them. This is the blasphemous plight of Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick — he is obsessed with conquering and killing the mystery, a pursuit always tantamount to madness. We cannot kill the monsters, only behold them in ways we once refused to, and allow them to be exposed before the only One with the credentials to handle them. Killing monsters is above our pay grade, no matter who you are.

I had read the Bible all of my life, and desperately needed some guide to help me name the monsters. I found an unlikely map in the book of Job, one of the most enigmatic and poetically gorgeous entries of Scripture. It is not a place I would have previously thought to look, because Job is famously a tale about a blameless man. Suffice it to say for now that we are by no means blameless, and in my case I had never been more cognizant of just how non-blameless I really was. I had longed blamed myself for various global crises most of my life, of the “I didn’t share my faith with this person who was going to become a missionary, therefore entire tribes did not hear the gospel” variety. You can also see how large of an ego there was in me to deconstruct, even if it was a self-flagellating, monstrous one. So now how was I going to manage actual blame rather than the artificial kind I had always been so proficient at generating within myself?

Thankfully, blamelessness is not necessary for Job to come to life within us. In fact, there is nothing particularly moralistic about this ancient poem, at least not as we have come to think of such things. Job is the book of the Bible perhaps most chock full of all the big mysteries, of all the depth questions. It is the book most articulate in teaching us how to wrestle (or in some cases again just reverently behold) the monsters that come from the deep.

Here are the basic contours of the story: Job is the book that introduces the idea of a satan to us. Later traditions will collapse different images into a patchwork theology of this figure, including the serpent in the garden of Eden, for example. But of course Genesis never comes close to using language of “satan” or a “devil,” the identity of the serpent is shadowy at best. Even in Job, this Satan is not introduced with some kind of proper name, much less a backstory. The personification of evil in Job is translated from Hebrew as “the satan.” He occupies an office, rather than being say, a guy named satan. The word simply means “the accuser.” This figure is literally the embodiment of accusation. And if Job’s account is taken seriously, accusation is not just what this figure does, but who he is. Accusation is as intrinsic to what this being is as love is intrinsic to who God is. In the Hebrew imagination, accusation is the very essence of evil.

The accuser, the prosecuting attorney, comes to the courts of heaven doing his job — filing accusations. But in this case, he accuses God’s seeming pet human, Job. The accusation is a simple one — the satan says that this being does not have a “disinterested” love for God. In other words, he does not love God on his own terms — he only loves God because God had made him healthy, wealthy and wise. Take all these things away from him, the accuser says, and this man you love so much will curse you.

Through the epic poetry of the book of Job, we see the trial take place. Job is afflicted beyond measure. Within days, he loses his children, his land, his livestock, his health. Everything about his external world was shattered. The figure of the satan is not mentioned again in the book —there is not a great deal of speculation or interest in how evil may be personified. He exits early, but the heavenly prosecutor is not needed to carry out the case against Job. He is not needed, because Job’s friends do such an excellent job of taking care of it for him.

Here Job is, the portrait of a man undone, and all he wants now is the consolation and empathy of his friends. But Job’s friends are precisely the kind of friends that we often are to others if we ourselves have not suffered — they are more interested in explaining Job’s plight to him than sitting with him in it long term. They cannot sit with him too long, because Job’s story had become a threat to them. These were rule-abiding men who did everything within their power to be upright according to the law. And the popular understanding of the law — even seemingly underwritten in say, a book like Proverbs — is that so long as you do the right thing, good things will happen to you as a reward for your obedience. Only the wicked suffer, and it is because of their misdeeds.

So when they give their long, in the Job character’s phrase, “windy speeches,” it is less a commentary Job’s plight than it is their own. These were men, who like so many of us, desperately needed the world to be ordered. And if the world did not operate according to a system of merit, then the chaos could touch them too. And that was unthinkable. Rather than entertaining the possibility that the kind of terror that befell Job could ever come upon them too, they do what religious communities often do when their sense of order and control is somehow threatened — they label the monster and cast him out. And for these men, the monster is unequivocally Job.

This is what we do when we do not understand someone else’s story. Their story disrupts our sense of order, so we have no choice but to accuse and blame them. Accusation is always an attempt to expel a threat by turning another human being into a monster. As Rene Girard puts it, Job was the “victim of his people,” the victim of the system of sacrifice and scapegoating that is almost universal both in mythology and in history. If we look to Job’s own words, the labeling and rejection he experienced from his religious community was even more painful to him than all that he actually lost. We want a sense of order and control, and we will gladly turn someone else into a monster in order to have it.

Unlike Job, I have been far from blameless in my life. But like Job, even while he refuted the charges against him, I began to internalize monstrous names. Job began to think perhaps he really was a monster. So often when we see something in us that frightens us, we think we are monstrous — and thus, outside the love of God.

The God who celebrates the chaos monster

If Job was in fact a monster, he assumed he was on the wrong side of God. Like his friends, he lived in a world where people thought of God as the karma police, the one who enforces “what goes around comes around.” So he presumed God’s job was to kill the monsters. He presumed that God and monsters have an adversarial relationship. Early on in his complaint, he decides to let the feelings in the depths of him go free in the form of his words. In Job 7.11–12: 11 ‘Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. 12 Am I the Sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me?” Note the movement: Job sees his own inarticulate feelings as the monster. Finally he decides he will not restrain these monstrous feelings any longer. So he calls out to God, “Am I the Sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me?” Do you see what lies behind Job’s petition here? He thinks it is God’s job to serve as Leviathan’s parole officer. He thinks God is the one who keeps Leviathan from getting off of his leash, that God is the one who keeps Leviathan from roaming free.

Job believes God is the one who crushes the monsters. And now that his life has gone all to pieces, he believes himself to be the monster. How could not God also crush him? From Job 9.16–19: 16 If I summoned him and he answered me, I do not believe that he would listen to my voice. 17 For he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause; 18 he will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness. 19 If it is a contest of strength, he is the strong one! If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him? For Job, God is the one who uses the storm and the sea to crush the monsters. He is the one who will “not let me get my breath.” If we have a showdown, how could I ever overpower the dragon-slayer?

God is the one who, in Job 26.12–13, “12 By his power stilled the Sea; by his understanding he struck down Rahab (“the monster of the sea and purveyor of chaos”). 13 By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.” He stills the sea where the sea monster lives, he pierces the bizarre creatures as they slither away from him.

Job though, unlike most of us, has the courage to continue to stare into the abyss long enough until a voice calls out to him from the whirlwind. He stares into the storm until he finally finds the gaze staring back at him. The storm addresses him by name. The speeches of God are short in Job compared to the speeches of Job and his friends — another way we see the wisdom of Job, for in real life we proportionality do a lot more of the talking than God!

But finally God does speak. When He does, He doesn’t offer Job any explanations. Instead, He does a rather shocking thing: He begins to talk to Job about Leviathan, the sea monster. He begins by teasing Job, who has been pontificating so long, asking him whether or not Job was there when he actually shut in the doors to the sea of chaos and put boundaries around it, if Job was there when he put a boundary around the waves. And that’s when He really goes after it, celebrating the sea monster:

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook, or press down its tongue with a cord? 2 Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? 3 Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? 4 Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant for ever? 5 Will you play with it as with a bird, or will you put it on a leash for your girls? 6 Will traders bargain over it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? 7 Can you fill its skin with harpoons, or its head with fishing-spears? 8 Lay hands on it; think of the battle; you will not do it again! 9 Any hope of capturing it will be disappointed; were not even the gods overwhelmed at the sight of it? 10 No one is so fierce as to dare to stir it up. Who can stand before it? 11 Who can confront it and be safe? — under the whole heaven, who?

12 ‘I will not keep silence concerning its limbs, or its mighty strength, or its splendid frame. 13 Who can strip off its outer garment? Who can penetrate its double coat of mail? 14 Who can open the doors of its face? There is terror all around its teeth. 15 Its back is made of shields in rows, shut up closely as with a seal. 16 One is so near to another that no air can come between them. 17 They are joined one to another; they clasp each other and cannot be separated. 18 Its sneezes flash forth light, and its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. 19 From its mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap out. 20 Out of its nostrils comes smoke, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. 21 Its breath kindles coals, and a flame comes out of its mouth. 22 In its neck abides strength, and terror dances before it. 23 The folds of its flesh cling together; it is firmly cast and immovable. 24 Its heart is as hard as stone, as hard as the lower millstone. 25 When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves. 26 Though the sword reaches it, it does not avail, nor does the spear, the dart, or the javelin. 27 It counts iron as straw, and bronze as rotten wood. 28 The arrow cannot make it flee; slingstones, for it, are turned to chaff. 29 Clubs are counted as chaff; it laughs at the rattle of javelins. 30 Its underparts are like sharp potsherds; it spreads itself like a threshing-sledge on the mire. 31 It makes the deep boil like a pot; it makes the sea like a pot of ointment. 32 It leaves a shining wake behind it; one would think the deep to be white-haired. 33 On earth it has no equal, a creature without fear. 34 It surveys everything that is lofty; it is king over all that are proud.’

God’s speech is more playful than harsh. “Tell me Job, could you bring Leviathan home as a pet for your girls? Could you have Leviathan whisper sweet nothings in your ear?” And of course the right answer is, “NO.” But the implicit idea is that God absolutely could do those things. God is at home in the chaos — it is the place from which He started the universe. God is at home with the chaos monster. He does not threaten nor intimidate Him. For us to attempt to subdue and defeat Leviathan somehow would be madness, just as it was for Ahab to think he could kill Moby Dick.

The monster was not a threat to God. And while Job had become a threat to his friends, he wasn’t a threat to God either. The creature that the world called “monster,” God called “friend.” The beautiful part then is that thepeople the world calls “monster” (because their appearance, their story, their otherness feels monstrous to those around them) are the ones that God calls friend. All the things that made Leviathan so frightening to everyone else were what made Leviathan delightful to God. God celebrated all the wild things about Leviathan that made everyone else recoil in horror.

In fact, in an especially strange turn of the poem, in some translations God not only celebrates Leviathan — but identifies with Leviathan. Watch how God seems to casually move between how people respond to Leviathan and how they actually respond to Him in Job 41.9–11:

See! Any expectation of it will be disappointed.

One is overwhelmed even at the sight of it.

There is no one fierce enough to rouse it.

Who can take a stand before me?

Who will confront me? I will repay him!

Under all the heavens, it is mine.

God is at home with the wildness in Leviathan, because Leviathan is a product of the wildness in God. Genesis 1.21, “So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves…” Leviathan is not a dragon for God to slay, but a pet who reflects the unpredictability of her creator. Here we see “a spectacle not of a God who sits enthroned over chaos, not of a God who subdues chaos, but of a God who rouses it, who stirs it up, who revels in it.”

Bringing Leviathan into the light

What if God does not have the adversarial relationship with the monsters we once assumed? God is not scandalized, shocked, or frightened by anything within us. Properly speaking, the monsters are not nearly so dangerous to us as our fear of them, the fear which pushes us in hiding away from the safety of God and community.

Do you feel like you are monstrous? The good news is that God loves monsters. God is the only one who can tame them. A full frontal assault on the monsters, a la Captain Ahab, is only going to rile them up, and put us in over our head in a battle we cannot win with a flimsy harpoon in our hands. Since there is nothing we can do to tame the monster, the only recourse we have is to welcome God into the depths that are His natural habitat, inviting the beautiful Spirit back into the place where she has always belonged.

“Even the darkness is light to you,” David says. The first and largest step towards wholeness is always to invite the light of God into our depths, and invite a few friends along who we know we can trust to hold the light us when needed (preferably not friends like Job’s).

What we absolutely cannot do is attempt to wage a quiet war against Leviathan. That is inevitably going to be an unwinnable war against our very selves, a war that will cost our health, our sanity, our well-being. It is a life of quiet desperation.

I am too inexperienced in this business of inviting God into my depths to be an expert on any of this. I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all answer as to how God will deal with the monsters within. What I do know is that all true desire has its origin in God and can open us up to God. Even if the desire gets misplaced or misappropriated, even if we attempt to fulfill the desire where it cannot be fulfilled-the desire itself, the primal energy, originates in God Himself. Even the chaotic ones.

If there is any hope to harness their power, to put a hook through their noses, to do something constructive or hopeful with them — that is far above our very limited capacities. We cannot expect to master them, but to open them up to light and air, where God and others can help us to see them with a sense of scale and perspective. When we come to glimpse something of the transcendent love of God, that is when we realize we have nothing to fear from the monsters anymore. Because there is nothing in the universe that can outrun God’s love, nothing that will not get smaller underneath the heat of His burning affection.

I wish I could have known this earlier in my life, because I think there could have been less traumatic ways of dealing with my own monsters. But I’m grateful for the God I’ve come to know from navigating the waters of my own chaos. He doesn’t orchestrate the chaos to teach us a lesson. We don’t live in a tightly-ordered universe where God is moving us around in an intergalactic game of chess. Rather we live in a world where somehow far beyond our own limited capacity to understand the world or the way it works, God is always working to bring something beautiful in and through the chaos.

the descent of grace

But that is not the only thing I learned through my immersion in the world of Job, my immersion into the sea with the sea monsters. Walking around assuming God was angry with me, and that I could thus only expect dreadful things in whatever life I might eek out on the other side of the abyss, I assumed I was marked. I assumed I was cursed for getting on the wrong side of this God. I was still in so many ways still living in that primitive world of retribution, that sad land yet to be enchanted by grace. In the new world I was going to have to now inhabit, I was dead in the water if I tried to live by the religion of Job’s “friends.”

One of the things that makes the Book of Job so profound is that it shatters that world of merit and demerit altogether. It is the book in the Old Testament that most clearly paves the way for how Jesus would describe God His Father in the New Testament, as the One who “makes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” As Gustavo J. Gutierrez brilliantly summarizes in On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, Job criticizes the theology of temporal retribution expounded by his friends. And

“…He was right to do so. But his challenge stopped halfway and, as a result, except at moments when his deep faith and trust in God broke through, he could not escape the dilemma so cogently presented by his friends: if he was innocent, then God was guilty. God subsequently rebuked Job for remaining prisoner of this either-or mentality. What he should have done was to leap the fence set up around him by this sclerotic theology that is so dangerously close to idolatry, run free in the fields of God’s love, and breathe an unrestricted air like the animals described in God’s argument — animals that humans cannot domesticate. The world outside the fence is the world of gratuitousness; it is there that God dwells and there that God’s friends find a joyous welcome…The Lord is not prisoner of the “give to me and I will give to you” mentality. Nothing, no human work however valuable, merits grace, for if it did, grace would cease to be grace. This is the heart of the message of the book of Job.”

There is no escaping the fact that we will have to deal with the intrinsic consequences of our own actions — I have learned that all too well. But God is not the one who enforces the laws of gravity, of cause and effect, as some sort of extra punishment. God is the one who interrupts that natural cycle with grace. He is the One who “enables us to run free in the fields of God’s love, and breath an unrestricted air like the animals.” Whatever reasons we seem to have to fear ourselves or our monsters, God is decisively not the One we have to be afraid of. He brings the grace that can engineer beauty out of our chaos. He opens up new possibilities beyond simply living out the consequences of our choices. That may be part of our story, but it need not be the whole story — not in a universe where a God like that exists.

For if God is the One who brings creation out of chaos and turns chaos monsters into house pets, what do we ultimately have to be afraid of? It does not mean that we will not experience, or be the cause of, deep brokenness in the world. It does mean that there are no dead ends. We can behold the world in its beauty and ugliness, as well as ourselves — and as well as our monsters — without fear. “Here is the world,” Frederick Buechner writes, “beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

The message of Job is not just that “bad things happen to good people.” In a world of chaos, that is often the case. But the broader revelation is that none of us get what we deserve. There is grace and beauty extended to us all, even in the depths of whatever hell we might be currently occupying. The love of God, like the Son of God who “descends into hell” in the words of the apostles’ creed, is always bent downward. It is its nature to plumb the depths — of the earth, of our lives, of ourselves. It spirals downward into the very core of us.

In his story, “The Dead,” James Joyce depicts the reality of grace more poignantly and more beautifully than I have ever read anywhere else. It is the kind of beauty that haunts you, the kind of beauty that could only originate in God. It is the world that God makes possible, and that Job makes possible, for you and for me, for the guilty as well as the innocent:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Grace falls faintly. It descends on everything and everyone, no matter who we are or where we come from. Even on the monsters. What else could grace do, but like the snow and the Son of Love who created it, descend?

learning to breathe.

Several months after leaving Renovatus, I was slowly starting to engage the world again. It was the second long block I had taken where I did not attempt to speak or teach at all. I still did not really want to. I did not know if I had the heart for it. But however broken I felt, the fire in my bones to speak good news about God flickered in me somewhere still, and I knew I had to wade back out sometime. I was both excited and terrified. So much had been shifting in my head and heart over that time, that I wasn’t even sure who this person was that was about to step behind a pulpit again. I was as intrigued as anybody else to find out.

My first time back out felt like some kind of chemistry experiment. With all my preaching muscles rusty, I was flying to Sweden to speak ten times in less than a week. As out of rhythm as I was, the prospect of speaking in a country I had not visited to people I did not know sounded daunting; and yet there was a sense of adventure to it to. That trip was also significant in that it was the first time I had attempted to do a major international speaking trip alone. To put it mildly, I am challenged at finding my way around new places (as well as old ones, really…I have no sense of direction). But I had steeled myself for this trip. Sure, I felt fragile, like my bones were all glass—but I still had the fire in my belly, and that had served me well enough before.

I had planned to do some sightseeing around Sweden for a few days before my first speaking gig. As it turned out, I was going to be there over “Ingmar Bergman weekend,” a whole weekend of festivities built around the life and work of the famous Swedish director on the tiny island of Fårö, where Bergman lived the second half of his life. Entering the second half of my own, stumbling not strutting, I was ecstatic about the opportunity. I’ve been a huge fan of Bergman’s bleak, spiritually and intellectually provocative films all my adult life. The prospect of visiting the locations where his films were shot, the places he lived and played—as well as the Bergman Center itself—was intoxicating. It was good to feel really excited about anything in my life again…it felt like it had been such a long time.

There were a number of issues surrounding the flight, and I slept very little on the way to Stockholm. But my excitement was undeterred. By the time I boarded the tiny plane in Stockholm to the medieval town of Wisby, where I would then rent a car to take to Faro, I had been awake for over 24 hours. But I was in high spirits, however discombobulated I felt. When I got the rental car, I noted it was a manual—I drive an automatic back home. I had not driven one in a few years, but I figured I could get the hang of it. Besides, I was ready to be on my way.

So using my phone GPS to guide me, I set out in the little Volkswagen, bright and eager, like it was my first day of school. You could practically hear Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” in your head even with the radio off. It felt like I was in a movie about starting your life over and finding hope again. I was ready for a taste of resurrection, and hoping this trip might be my first. As I got into the little town of Wisby, the roads got tinier — these were cobblestone streets built in the 1100’s. Most everything was one way. But my Spidey sense was too tired to be tingling. I kept following the GPS.

Siri guided me down an especially tiny side street that went through an alley, down a hill. The further I got down, the more it felt like the walls were closing in on me, like I was in a scene from Alice in Wonderland. Jet lag is a very real thing, and I thought it explained my little mini-head trip. I was near the bottom of the hill when it became painfully clear that this was not an optical illusion — the street was actually getting more narrow. You could barely get a bicycle through the outlet at the bottom.

That’s when I knew I was in trouble. I had not yet had to put the car in reverse, and I couldn’t figure out how. So whenever I tried to back the car up, I would slowly inch even further…and further…down the hill. But of course I had to let up on the clutch to try it at all, so I just kept going further down—until I was completely wedged between the two stone walls.WEDGED. As in, the side mirrors were collapsed in, and there was literally no way to even crack my door open. I was completely stuck. I could not back up, and there was no way out of the car for the time being except breaking the front windshield. I can’t believe this is happening, I thought.

Along with a string of really innovative, fatigue-induced obscenities.

You have to understand — my greatest fear traveling anywhere internationally is playing the role of “the stupid American.” I am not going to be the obnoxious, demanding American — I do have control over that. But I’m terrified of looking foolish in another culture. As I’m sitting there, big guy in a little Volkswagen, some people walked out of the pub on the corner and saw me. I was paralyzed. What should I do? Should I try to get their attention? How would I even know exactly what to ask for at this point? My brain and body were tired — I couldn’t think straight. As I’m feeling my cheeks shade deeper hues of red from embarrassment, trying to figure out how I might escape, they pull out their Iphones — and start taking pictures of me. While laughing. They went back into the pub and got more friends — who also took pictures. As the minutes passed, a whole crowd of onlookers gathered. And I am not making this up (why would I?) — by the time it was all said and done, at least 30 people had taken pictures of the stupid American trapped in his car with their cell phones.

By the time I was done with my two weeks in Sweden, I could say honestly they were the gentlest, sweetest people on earth. In fact, I would go as far as to call it my favorite country I’ve ever visited. The people I met were delightful, like they were out of a storybook. I was all but ready to become a citizen by the time I left. I want to LIVE in Stockholm, with all its old world charm and new world fashions. But in that moment, on no sleep, mostly incredulous at myself for not being able to even get to the hotel without my first mishap—I hated everyone in that god-forsaken country. I cursed IKEA, Swedish meatballs, their fabulous healthcare, and even that @#$*ing Swedish chef. I decided I would sell my white Volvo when I got home. I’m a staunch believer in Christian non-violence, but I cursed them for abstaining from wars I did not believe in. It was the one and only moment of my life I ever wanted to wear camouflage, join the NRA, and drink beer while listening to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American.” Of all the transformations/mutations this season has brought me, that one was the scariest—it was like something out of The Fly. God help me, for five minutes I became a Texas Republican. That felt a lot worse than anything else I had done or experienced.

Finally, a really nice man came out from the pub who tried to help me. Unable to tell me how to get the car in reverse, he called a tow truck. About 80 minutes later, the tow truck came, and I was back to loving Ingmar Bergman art films, streamlined modern furniture, Scandinavian luxury in automobiles, and universal health care—even for animals. I was back to wanting to marry the country of Sweden.

But here is the kicker: while he was hooking the cable up to the car, another man came around the corner with a large, professional camera with a really long lens. He was from the local paper. I saw a copy the next morning, and sure enough — there was a picture of me trapped in the car in the alley on the front page. Translated from Swedish, “Oh no, not again: American tourist stuck in Alley.” That’s right. Less than 24 hours into my trip, and I made the front page for being the stupid American. The reporter asked me why I was in Sweden — and I was not about to tell him I was there to preach in churches and lecture in seminaries. “I’m here for Ingmar Bergman weekend,” I said. The last line of the article read, “Martin, a Bergman enthusiast, says, ‘I got my own drama.’” If they only knew.

That scene felt like an allegory for my whole life in this season: feeling helpless, exposed, foolish, dependent, unable to move at all on my own — having to rely on other people to come and pull me out of where I was. It was that line from Jesus to Peter again: “Someone else will dress you, and lead you where you do not wish to go.” I had never felt more incompetent. I was no longer the guy calling shots, giving advice, saving the day — I was the one in need of saving. If I could not find some people who could come along and pull me, I was hopeless. I got myself stuck. I had no way out.

I was no longer bringing people to Jesus by the carload. I was the lame man on the mat, in need of someone else to carry me to Jesus.

Blake’s vision

Anybody who read my book Prototype has already met my friend Blake. She is one of my best friends. She is the Anne Lamott in residence in my life-salty, contrary, and deeply good…also the best storyteller that I know, which is saying something. (Aside/plug: she has written an absolutely gorgeous memoir that I’ll be plugging hard in a few months when it comes out) When I first met Blake, she was living in a lot of hurt, anger and bitterness over the hand her life had dealt her. She credits me largely with leading her into faith. Eight years later, her friend and pastor was exiting the bubble of pastoral ministry, and was as clueless about dealing with the underside of life as she had once felt clueless about living as a Christian. This time, I was in need of her help. I needed somebody to tell me, you are going to survive, one way or another. I needed to hear there could still be life on the other side of things like this, from someone who actually had lived enough from the underside of life enough to convince me. Blake was that person in my life—and still is.

It was mid-June, and I was just six weeks into whatever kind of life I had on the other side of pastoring. I felt pretty useless to the world and to myself. I’ll never forget, though, that Wednesday afternoon when she called, wanting to tell me all about this experience she just had. Blake is open to the Spirit in ways that make her a kind of reluctant, accidental mystic, in ways she never goes looking for. A couple of nights before, she had been invited to go to this class at a yoga studio, where apparently all you do for an hour is breathe, deeply and intentionally, while there is some gentle instruction and evocative music in the background. It opened her up in ways she did not expect. And to her surprise, she felt like she got caught up in a vision from God.

First, she saw a giant tree with a pea pod, and she could tell that Zyler, the one-year old son she lost years ago, was inside of it, safe and warm and protected in the presence of God. She had this sense that he had always been there, even before his birth. Then all of a sudden, she was in a garden paradise, like she would have imagined the Garden of Eden to be. As she looked around at all the beautiful plants, she was seized by this sense that God was somehow in all of this, that all the life, all the beauty was an extension of God Himself. In the garden, she saw Zyler again, twice: once as a toddler, and once as a nine or ten year old kid. To see him happy and at peace, she felt comforted by the image at first. But within a moment, the comfort gave way to rage at having to be apart from him still. But why can’t I be with him NOW?, she screamed. And the voice kept telling her gently, you already know the answer, you already know the answer, you already know the answer.

She was overwhelmed with grief, but she knew her son was safe. A few minutes later, she had this strange sense that the garden paradise and her own real life were merging, as if they had been two sides of the same reality all along. The garden world slowly started to disappear, and a light started coming to her—carrying her 16-year old son, Noah. Ever since she lost Zyler, Blake has always felt that her love for Noah has been laced with fear that one day she would lose him too. It had made her afraid of the depth of her love for him, feeling that would inevitably end in another hearbreak too great for her soul to bear. But before the garden faded, she saw a glimpse of Noah as an adult, also safe. Somewhere deep she knew that God was giving her permission to love him without fear and without reserve, to know that he would be protected and cared for. Thus she did not have to protect her heart. And because she knew Zyler was safe in God’s presence too, it was like God was saying, I’ve got him, I’m taking care of him—it’s okay…now you can take care of the people I’ve given you to take care of.

There was a kind of peace in her vision, but also a kind of searing grief. She could feel all the ways she had unwittingly bottled up guilt for Zyler’s death within her very own body, as if somehow she was responsible for the genetic defects that led to his death. To have all of that pain come rushing through her at one time felt like more than she could stand. In the middle of the breathing class, she sobbed. By the time she got done telling me the story, I was crying too. Even in my own deep darkness, there was still this strange way of being able to see into someone’s else’s heart and life, when called upon. And for the next 15 minutes, through tears, I shared all the things I felt like God was allowing me to see about her vision. She felt traumatized by the experience of seeing and feeling so much, so intensely. But it was clear that the only reason God was pressing in on her pain was to reveal it, to bring it into the light, where He could attend to her, love her, heal her. It was emotional for us both.

There was so much in Blake’s experience that both revealed the God I needed to see and know in my dark place, and yet a way that God gave me to feel like I could be useful in someone else’s real life again, too. I felt like I had nothing to offer anyone. I wanted to hide under a rock. That was the first moment after leaving the church, in what had been for me an especially tumultuous six weeks where I felt like my life was unraveling even further, that I knew without a doubt that everything God had placed in me to be and to do was still present and accounted for. In fact, I felt like I was somehow far better at being present in such a moment than I ever could have beenwhen I was a pastor. It was like I was awake in a way I could not have been before, alert in ways I had never been before. Maybe in a way it was my whole self that was finally present and accounted for.

a wild goose chase

It is from here that the story gets, if you can imagine such a thing, even stranger. For anybody looking to arm themselves against the experiential, heart-first way of Pentecostals, congratulations: you are walking into an empty gun store the day after the apocalypse, and you can get all the ammunition you want—to use on me, in particular. If you like, I can supply you with a list of pejoratives you can use. But it’s my story, the only one I’ve got, and I’ve come a bit too far at this point in my life to play any of this politically.

Two nights after my conversation with Blake, Amanda and I, very much in our own broken places, respectively, went to the Wild Goose Festival, three and a half hours away in the little town of Hot Springs, NC. I had been invited to come and be part of a small musical set with a friend of mine, where he was going to be mixing dance music while I loosely preached/exhorted/prayed over the beats. I was completely awkward with it, but I jumped into it like it was the most perfectly normal thing in the world, doing a little sermon/spoken word something around an idea that had been lingering in some corner of my mind: The Trinity doesn’t have a dance, the Trinity is the dance.

But that skips too far ahead. We got to the campground a few minutes early, and went walking around just to get a feel for the place. I had been there for about 10 minutes, not yet having spoken to a single soul, when I heard someone shout out my name from across the woods. It was my old friend Steve. from my hometown. I was glad to see him, and we exchanged pleasantries. He immediately introduced me to his friend James, who’s eyes got big when he realized who I was. Apparently, James’ best friend (who lived in Portland, Oregon) had listened to my sermon podcast for years. He had been trying to get James to listen forever, but James said he just wasn’t interested in listening to sermons. Until a few months ago, when his friend insisted that he had to listen to this one sermon—the one I described in “The Death Chapter.”

That would be the sermon after I felt like the Holy Spirit came crashing in on me while reading John Irving’s novel, In One Person. That was the sermon where I talked candidly that I felt like God had gently leveraged my own angst about the state of my own heart and life back onto me in reading this novel about sexual identity and the AIDS crisis among gay men in New York City in the early 1980's. It was in that sermon that I recounted through tears the way God spoke to me about keeping certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of people at arm’s length, because deep down I knew “they would lead me where I did not wish to go.”

That week I was preaching from John 9 via the lectionary, which is all about seeing. And I felt like God tenderly but firmly showed me that my repressed, insulated life in vocational Christian ministry had kept me from truly seeing a lot of people where they are; that He was using this situation in my life to make me see that which I would not have let myself see before. I was now going to have to see through the prism of my own heartbreak, anguish, and sin. I was going to have to see the world as as a participant in all of her brokenness, instead of an objective onlooker keeping clinical distance from a few feet above it.

He said it was the most powerful sermon he had ever heard. He said he had distributed it broadly in the LGBT community in Charlotte, where James also lived. He proceeded to tell me more of his own story, working for years behind and in front of the camera in Christian television, most of his career with Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. He told me about the books he published with a major evangelical publisher, trying to live on the straight and narrow as he understood it, while struggling violently with his own sexuality. He told the painful story of coming out a few years ago, as he chronicled in his last book, Gay Conversations with God. The transparency of my sermon moved him, and he apparently tried to send an e-mail to our office thaking me for it, that I never received. There was so much holiness to that moment, my heart could barely take it in.

But you’ve heard nothing yet. We were wrapping up the conversation so I could go and do the set, when James somehow casually mentioned the breathing class he led at the yoga studio on Monday nights back in Charlotte. I felt all the blood drain out of my face. I just stood there, stunned, almost too flustered to ask the natural next question I somehow already knew the answer to. “Um, and you were leading this class last Monday night? At Okra in Charlotte? Did you meet someone named Blake Blackman there on Monday?” And of course it was the same guy, and he had met Blake on Monday, and he remembered her (as people generally do).

Slow down for just a minute, okay? That conversation with Blake two days prior was the first time after leaving the pastorate that I felt like the calling side of me, maybe even the human side of me, wake up again. I would have described the conversation about her experience itself to be a kind of turning point for me, even though at the time I did not exactly how or what for. So now two days later, I’m meeting the man who led the class she was in a little town three and a half hours away. A man who, mind you, had listened to exactly one sermon of mine, which was the sermon in which I confessed that I felt I had unintentionally kept people on the margins of my life so I would not have wrestle too deeply with the implications of their stories in my own. I confessed that I had navigated those waters politically because I did not want to get in trouble.

I don’t believe every coincidence has to indicate some kind of divine synchronicity. And I’m aware that I’ve got at least a few Pentecostal and Charismatic brothers and sisters who are already thinking almost out loud, “yeah son, but that could be the devil orchestrating all of that, too!” I can only tell you that for me, if I’ve got any authentic belief in a God that is still moving and speaking by His Spirit in the world—in any way at all—this kind of experience is nearly impossible to deny. And especially when it is accompanied by tears, conviction, empathy, compassion, and new openness to God and others, why would I want to?

I awkwardly made it through our little music/preaching experience. (I’ve always been awkward dancing, but I suppose for all the losses, maybe that was something I was supposed to be learning how to do in this season yet still) Afterward (and I’m having a hard time keeping my composure as I write this), we went back to James’ room in a little lodge across the street from the campground, and talked to him for several hours. He gave me a copy of his book, and I devoured it through the night before I ever went to sleep. And in an act that now seems almost ceremonial to me, James, knowing we would be wandering into a town 40 minutes away to crash at a hotel, was absolutely insistent that we stay in his room, while he sleep in the little rooftop tent he brought with him. He absolutely would not take no for an answer. When I had no space, he made space for me.

holy breath

The encounter hung with me. I knew that whatever else that weekend meant for my own story, at the very least it meant that James was somehow supposed to be a part of it. So the next week, we had lunch. And the week after that, I went to do the whole breathing thing. It was the first time I had ever stepped foot into a yoga studio. I’m smelling the incense as a person raised to be suspect even of people who use incense in church. The class is open to people of all kinds, and is not explicitly Christian in its approach. But because James is a Christian, he very much understands it in those terms, and during the intro subtly makes the connection between spirit and breath in Greek and Hebrew. We are inviting God to fill us with His holy breath, to be open to wherever that breath might lead us.

I’m broken open so far at this point, and for that matter, my own life felt so entirely unmanageable—I’m open to get to God anyhow, anyway these days. I had already been going to an Episcopal Church on Sundays, where God kept meeting me in the eucharist every Sunday, where I couldn’t believe all over again that people would give the body and blood of Jesus away for free. I cried through the entire Eucharistic liturgy every Sunday, even less able to believe that such a meal could be offered to me in such a terrible state. It was funny too, because I guess I had a lot of my most “Pentecostal” experiences just opening up my heart in that liturgical worship. I don’t think I had ever prayed so much in church before! I know for people who are raised in that way, the traditions can get stale in the same way a person raised Charismatic can get bored with all the hoopla. I just know that it in the foreign, exotic land of that sacred space, it had been the only plot of land on earth where I didn’t have to feel like a stranger anymore.

But now I’m in a yoga studio, laying on a mat, with an EYE-MASK ON. Being taught how to do something as basic as BREATHING all over again…by a gay man. (I can’t even imagine how much some of my friends reading this are going to want to travel back in time, to stage an intervention) I can’t speak for anybody else, but I know that for me, like it was for Blake, the God revealed in Jesus is the only one I know anything about. And good grief—did He meet me with me in that space. The deeper in I went, the more immersed I felt in the love of God. I had never experienced anything like it before.

For one thing, I felt astonishingly safe. So when all the grief pent up in me came out, I didn’t just cry—I wailed. I lost all track of myself. I’m glad they play the music loud, but then again I was probably too far past myself to care what anybody else would have said. Every ounce of grief, guilt, came out in what felt like an eternal kind of travail. And yet I felt so completely loved, somehow beheld so tenderly by the presence of love Himself.

I knew in my head that “in Him we live and move and have our being.” I remembered Sister Anne, when I was on spiritual retreat, asking me to be mindful of God at work holding together the dirt and rocks and sand and sky all around me when I walked the cliffs. But I don’t think I ever KNEW experientially before that moment that God is not just a being, God is being itself. I don’t think I ever really knew experientially the way David described God in the Psalms, “even if I make my bed in hell…even if I take on the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, you are there.” I don’t think I ever really comprehended that this God literally could not be outrun, no matter where I fled or what I did. The very fact that I exist means I exist in God and am sustained by God, literally with every single breath. The inescapable presence is the only reason I am able tobe…anywhere, anytime, at all.

And because I have not yet successfully alienated enough people—there was a consistent image the last few minutes of the new puppy my parents had bought, Gabi. While staying at their house, a 36-year old man feeling like a complete loser, mind you—them getting that sweet little dog had helped keep me alive. She didn’t judge anything about my life or my heart. She just loved to see me come home to this place that was not my home, and just wanted to be with me and play. The love of God was being manifest in the face of that dog, who never takes her eyes off of me, never wants me to leave, and always wants to draw me into life, laughter, and the wonder of the present moment.

I cried. Then I laughed. Then I cried-laughed, and laughed-cried. You know, it was the experience I always wanted to find in the Pentecostal altar services. And to be clear, I believe in all of that, and think there was in fact an encounter with the Spirit to be had in those places. It wasn’t God who wasn’t ready, but me. Before I was broken open by my own suffering, my own pain, even the pain I caused, I couldn’t have dropped far enough from my head into my heart and body to enter fully into such a moment. Only in the experience of feeling bankrupt in every conceivable way, an absurd man living an absurd alternate version of my own life, that I had no choice but to let go. How could there be any holding off that Presence now, when I couldn’t even hold myself together?

Oh, but it gets better. I’m drunk and near delirious on the love of God, laying on the mat in a yoga studio, in an environment where there are no explicit markers of Christian worship at all. I had been lost in all the ways I never wanted, and thus finally in a posture where I could get lost in all the ways I always did want, but couldn’t. James does little to direct the experience—he lets the Spirit work through us in the breathing. But a few moments later, I felt like God revealed to me an aspect of my life that I was carrying in a way that was positively crushing me, consuming me…killing me. While it was deep, quiet, and entirely interior in the way I understand the voice of God to most often be, it was perhaps as clearly as I felt like I had ever heard the Spirit inside me. Echoing in the deepest chambers of my being, I heard the simple words, “you don’t have to carry it anymore.” Almost as soon as the phrase formed inside me, James bent down and gently whispered in my ear, out loud: “You don’t have to carry it anymore, my brother.”

Towards the end of the session, James bent down one more time and gently laid his hand on me. He was close enough to my head to where I could hear his voice softly above the music behind us.

He was speaking in tongues.

homemade tarts

James has become one of my closest friends. These have not been easy times, and already there have been many opportunities for us to be care for each other in the trenches of our lives. It has been one of the great gifts of this season of my life that he is always there to talk, pray, and struggle out loud with me in my own attempt to follow Jesus somehow in my most desolate places. And I think I have been able to be there for him in some of his desolate places, too—such grace.

A few months later, I was getting ready to spend Thanksgiving day alone. It was just the way it worked out. I was going to have a meal with my Dad’s family the next day, but that day I had no real place to be. Like so much of my life these days, the day was going to quiet. I didn’t begrudge anyone else for being places where music or games would be playing or where children would be laughing—I think a lot of what I have been learning in this season is how to live in the quiet, where the phone seldom rings and the e-mail box rarely dings…and being more or less okay with that. But when James called and invited me over for Thanksgiving lunch, I have to admit—I was thrilled. Perhaps I was not as okay with the idea of being alone on Thanksgiving as I thought I was.

So I come over to the beautiful house James shares with his friend Greg. Strangely symbolic of my life these days, I didn’t have a dish to bring, I was just there to be fed from their table. I sat down around the table with James, Greg, Greg’s boyfriend Kai, their three doting mothers, and a young couple, a man and woman from the UK James is friends with (the young man is apparently 244th from the throne in England—who knew?). So there you have it—three gay guys, the former Pentecostal pastor trying to get his life together, three sweet southern moms in their 60's, and some vague British royalty. What kind of jokes could you make out of us all walking into a bar?

Sitting around the table that day, I had two thoughts: one, all the people in my former life who would, if they saw the scene, say some version of, “look how far he is fallen.” I could think of more than a few who would be sneering when they said it. And alternately I thought, there is no place on God’s green earth I would rather be on this Thanksgiving day than right here, right now.

No longer sitting at the head of Christ’s table with the people who decide who is or is not worthy to receive from it, I was the one in need to be loved and accepted. I was given a place at a table that was not my own. I was the wounded one, being offered bread and wine I did not deserve. There was no hope or expectation that my new friends would see Jesus in me—only an opportunity to see Jesus animated in the faces of my friends, these icons of grace.

James asked me to pray over the meal—”since we do have a pastor with us today…” “Um…former pastor,” I said, laughing. Truthfully, I think James and his friends were precisely the people I always longed to be in community with, but I would not have known then how to get to them, or them to me. So if I could be “pastor” enough for the ceremonial prayer for that Thanksgiving meal, I would take it. When we bowed our heads, it took me a full minute to compose myself enough to pray. There had never been in a place, a moment or a meal I had been more thankful for than I was thatplace, that moment, that meal. The Thanksgiving I had most dreaded was the most beautiful one I had ever had. I felt the same tremble in my lips I get when I take the chalice each Sunday, while kneeling to receive communion.

As we filled our plates with casseroles, the table was filling up with stories. Greg’s Dad had a paralyzing stroke recently, so me and his mom had a beautiful conversation about all that she was coming to see and know through her suffering. Everybody was comfortable talking about their brokenness and pain, but comfortable sharing their joys, too.

You can imagine how many jokes were made after dinner when Kai served his famous homemade tarts.

hold on, let go.

While my world was imploding, I went by myself one Wednesday afternoon to see the film All is Lost. I didn’t go into a movie theater; I went into a metaphor.

Everywhere I turned, there was language and images of sea — symbolic in Hebrew mythology of chaos, of the abyss. I knew no other way to describe the way I felt except lost at sea, adrift and alone. Which is of course precisely what the film is about. In it, 77-year old Robert Redford plays a man whose boat is torn open at sea. His communications system is beyond repair.

The weathered Redford is by himself against the elements, a speck of a human against the unending mystery of the sea. There were two shots in that film that sliced through me. In one, the camera pans up slowly from the tiny raft he now occupied, and just keeps going up, until the perspective crawls over you of just how small he is against the expanse of ocean. But there is a second shot I loved even more — essentially the same shot, but from the bottom of the raft. The camera descends lower and lower, slowly, until not only do you see the tiny raft from the opposite depth, but you see a school of sharks swimming beneath him, undetected by the protagonist.

Months later, I was sitting downstairs in a tiny little makeshift chapel on the bottom floor of a simple condo in San Diego, California. Across from me in the unadorned sanctuary was Sister Anne, a nun in her late 60’s. There were no vestments, no ceremonial attire, just a simple black track jacket. She had a dark, natural tan in the easy way people do in Southern California, her face framed by short, soft white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Her voice soothed the storm in me. Her eyes, bright and blue and young and curious, peered into the abyss that had swallowed me whole, unflinching. I knew little except there was no judgment in this tiny woman, that love seemed to follow her in like a song. For three days she had been taking me apart, touching all my pressure points gently — I called her the Ignatian ninja.

Sister Anne was also the extremely cultured nun who apparently sees all the credible new art films. She said to me, “Jonathan, I don’t know if you have seen the film All is Lost with Robert Redford? But it makes me think of you. It is about a man who had read all these books about the sea, and had all these wonderful instruments. But it was not until he was an old man caught in a terrible storm that he finally had to learn how to use them for himself.” I could not help but laugh. Sister Anne was apparently an extremely charismatic nun too, because she prophesied over my dry bones better than a thousand faith healers.

Even before Sister Anne used the film to speak into my life, I had just enough sense even in my shattered self to know I was watching my life unfold on the screen of that little theater several months before. I was in fact a man well educated in the realm of books and instruments, but I had not yet survived my own storms. My knowledge was more theoretical than experiential. This was the season of on-the-job, in-the-storm training of the life-or-death variety. This was the divinity school with no roof, no bottom, no boundaries, and no end in sight.

I was a man out of his depth, dealing with the sea that had always been within me. But I never had the scale and perspective to see either my smallness, nor the infinite varieties of creatures that dwelled within my own depths. Of course I did not want to look at them.

hold on

When a storm breaks in the sea of your life, whether it blows in from the world outside you or cycles up from the world within you — the first response is to grasp desperately for something, or someone to hold you. It is not calculated, but instinctive — a mad, almost flailing attempt to find something to grip. There may be little left to hold onto, but there has to be at least some kind of holding on — even if it is just a tacit agreement within yourself to simply survive. In this case, it is not a holding on is not a metaphor or an abstraction. It is a way of finding a reason, however strong or flimsy it might be, to survive.

Looking for something to hold onto, I remembered the first time I could recall being told to “hold on.” It wasn’t in the context of a storm at sea, but the storm that is God and within God, the whirlwind that talks in the book of Job. It was in the beautiful but choppy waters of the Pentecostal altar call, full of hope and violence. In the kinds of churches I grew up in, the invitation for prayer down front was the main event, even more so than the sermon. There was room to dance, room to shout, room for the men in their nicest suits and the women in their finest dresses to be set free into the liturgy of burying your nose into the carpet. Many of those altar calls were in order to receive the Holy Ghost. How desperately I wanted to be haunted by love’s apparition. But I was mostly a little too cerebral for it, too bound up by own fears of God and of freedom and of my true self.

Sometimes when I came down to seek the Holy Ghost, the old saints would be yelling in my ear. The event they were waiting for was for me to speak in tongues — we placed a lot of stock in that experience in particular. But this isn’t about any of the doctrine, this isn’t even about my experience or in some cases lack thereof, but of the instructions I was given. I’d be down front with my eyes slammed shut and my hands stretched up like awkward lightning rods. And some dear sweet old sister would be in one ear shouting, “HOLD ON, BROTHER!” And there would be some dear old sister in the other ear that would shout, “LET GO, BROTHER!”

That, friends, is the Pentecostal version of paradox. I wasn’t ready to explore many others, but that was one I got baptized into early. How is it possible to simultaneously hold on…and let go at the same time? I don’t know that I can even answer that question now, but I do know that life with God exists somewhere at that intersection. That somewhere between holding on and letting go is where you are liable to stumble or perhaps even collide into resurrection. The old-time Pentecostals may have been even more right than they knew.

During my own season, there were many moments where I thought I could not hold on any longer. Somewhere between my aching and hurting and deep shame, I could not envision a life worth living. It felt like desire was dead, that hope was dead. I would check my pockets over and over again to find I was all out of reasons. Once all of the things that propped up your ego are removed, and you begin the long fall, what is there left to hold on to? And who? Even if you could hold on to God, why would you even want to? Whether or not I held on, I’m not sure — I think somehow it may be more apt to say I was held, even if kicking and screaming, by life itself, and therefore by God. I’m sure I’m still holding onto things I shouldn’t be holding onto, and maybe letting go of things I don’t need to let go of too—it is hard to say.

Survival, according to the old version of me, the prodigy preacher, would not be good enough! Our goal in life should not be to just SURVIVE, but to THRIVE. It is the fodder of a thousand sermons. But of course once the ship has run aground, survival is a pretty big deal. There is no more rhetoric about thriving, being your best you, refusing to settle for mediocrity. It takes every ounce of energy and focus you have just to do the small things you have to do in order to simply stay alive. In that kind of fog of disorientation, you easily fall of out step with your body’s most basic needs. You can forget to eat; you can forget to sleep; you certainly forget how to breathe. You forget how to be. There is so much that can change in your life so quickly, or at least there was in mine, that you actually forget how to function. My own body was in such revolt against me, those words brought me back to the most primal realities of being alive in it: of eating and drinking and resting and being. I had to remember on a gut level the things that I normally would never bother to think about consciously — what do I have to do right now to take care of my body enough just to keep it moving without full-on collapse?

If there is any of hope of getting to the shore, there will have to be a kind of holding on. But in my own experience, many of the boards you try to grasp for initially that you think may not hold you up. There are few things I think are safe to universalize here, to say this is what everyone should hold onto. As a Christian, it is tempting to say “well at least you can hold on to Jesus.” But I don’t even know how to say that without qualification.

Holding on to Jesus sounds like it would always be the right thing to do…unless you are Mary Magdalene, when Jesus appears to her first just after rising from the dead. Her world has been eclipsed by the storm. Days before, she watched the man her heart burned for be tortured and killed. Now, the dead man is standing before her. Which is more disorienting? What is for certain is that her world is upside down. Desperately, instinctively, she lunges for what is familiar — the body of Jesus, impossibly standing in front of her now, only a few feet away. “Don’t embrace me, Mary. I have not yet ascended to the Father,” Jesus says. It is not that Jesus was no longer there for her. It is that Jesus cannot be there for her in the ways that he was there for her before; she would have to come to know him in a different way.

Resurrection had not yet finished working out its terrible implications yet. There would be no time to cling to a form of Jesus, an idea of Jesus, a vision of Jesus that she used to have. She would have to know him now on the other side of the trauma that is resurrection, so that even “clinging to Jesus” was not going to work in the ways it had worked already.

You can’t even cling on to the God you knew, only the God you can know now.

Let go

So for Mary, as it is for most of us, the hardest part is not the holding on, but the letting go. That was the part I really didn’t know how to do. Because I never let go. I kept such a tight grasp on anything or anyone I claimed to love, and the more I hurt, dug my talons into anything that would seem to keep me alive. I was so afraid of letting go.

One of the main reasons I could not let go was because I knew I was propping other people up. If I let go, what would happen to the people leaning on to me? My heart was in tatters, but I stood there quivering, still clinging on to the twin pillars of duty and obligation. I was not standing strong, but I was not laying down. Besides, this was a church I had helped bring into the world. What would the church do? I was trying to stay even though everything in me said my time was over, that the only hope for me was to pull the plug and, like Herman’s family did, put real weight down on the hope of resurrection. But I had convinced myself I could not, because too many people and too many things were dependent on me.

It is fascinating to me now to see how there was something that felt pious and noble about that sentiment—it sounds like God and gospel to me, to stay in at all costs because it for someone else’s sake. It is hard to hear the whisper of the ego underneath all of that, the soft chant of demons saying, “You are TOO IMPORTANT,” their eyes full of blood-but wearing the white robes of a priest.

seeing my smallness

I was not going to be able to let go so long as I thought the world was going to collapse if I did so. What I did know was that I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown if I stayed where I was. As bad as I was at listening to my body or integrating it into my spirituality, I could not ignore it this time. So I gathered the pieces of myself that were left to be gathered and headed to that little Catholic retreat center in San Diego on just a few days notice.

That is where I met Sister Anne, the Ignatian ninja. Each day, she sent me out into the place I most tended to avoid in the indoor sport that was my life — into the wild. Sometimes to the cliffs, sometimes to the pier, sometimes up a mountain. She said I needed to clear space for myself, that I needed to get to places where I could see and feel myself from God’s point of view.

She told me to feel the energy of the waves and water and wind — to let the Spirit blow through me and enter me through them. All week, I kept thinking about the verse in Acts where Paul says, “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” I would walk the cliffs, and could not shake my consciousness that the Spirit was actually in the wind. Never before in my life had I been so aware that when I did look at the rocks or at the waves or at the sky, that God was in all of that, was holding all of it. Sometimes I would stop and lay down on the rocks, and I just couldn’t escape the truth of it — “The Spirit is in the wind, the Spirit is in the wind, the Spirit is in the wind.” The inescapability of God’s love stalked me. Whether I made my bed in the hell, whether I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea — there is no escape from love. It fills all things. The Spirit of God — she fills all things. And I could feel her filling me, fractured and leaking vessel that I was.

I grew up thinking written liturgy was the enemy of the Spirit. I was wrong-it was actually air conditioning. No religion could help me now that insulated me from the essential wildness of things. Cut off from creation, I no longer knew how to be creature. Climate-controlled rooms delude us into thinking we can control God and the world. In reality, the thermostat is about all we can change. I needed to be away from the technology that says “you are really BIG!” Nature says, “you are really, really small.”

I was getting away from my delusions of control. I was getting back in touch with my own breath again. Sister Anne directed me to slow down my breathing, to breathe deeply, to let God set my breathing right again. In the evenings, I would go down to the little library at the center and wrap myself up in a blanket, and imagine that the blanket was the love of God itself. Sitting in the little rocker, I would let myself be held. I would tell God how afraid I was.

“The conversion moment in us is when we see from a new perspective,” Sister Anne said. “Sometimes all we can see is that this is not working for us anymore. That is all you can see, until you are ready to see from that new perspective.” Everything she asked me to do that week was about perspective. To walk along the shore and pick up small rocks, allowing them to become stand-ins for all my troubles — then fling them into the expanse of the ocean. As I did, I grasped their smallness, I heard the small plunk against the backdrop of the roar of the waves.

God looks at us and sees us the way we see ants,” Sister Anne told me one day. “We see them working so hard to build their little structures, and we think it is cute or even admirable. We enjoy their beauty for a moment. But we know the next day, someone will come along and step on their little ant colony, and all that they worked so hard to build will be gone.”

“God sees us as parents would see a two-year old child,” she continued. “They are sorry when they make a mess, but they are not surprised by it. They hate to see them hurt themselves in some way, but they are not angry at them for it. It is also true that our grandest successes, our biggest accomplishments, are like the drawings of a two-year old. He delights in them only because He delights in us, but they are no more impressive. He just likes that we drew it. But they are still very small and simple to such a great God,” she said. “That’s how God sees the book you wrote,” she added, smiling.

Slowly but surely, I was being delivered from my own sense of importance. As I now know, it is possible to devote yourself to a life of piety, keep all the rules, and even engage in the spiritual disciplines — but leave the ego largely untouched. We have developed ways that we can “be a good Christian” without ever embracing the descent into death and resurrection that would actually turn us into good human beings. I think a lot of this has to do with the project that the Church often sanctions every bit as much as the rest of the world — the life of working hard to be a “success.” In the words of Thomas Merton, “If I had a message to my contemporaries, it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, be drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but all costs avoid one thing: success…if you are too obsessed with success, you will forget how to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”

The years prior to all of this had been my most “successful” in ministry. And not just successful in the sense of climbing some ladder of temporal gain — it was the most effective preaching and teaching I had ever done. My own inner angst had driven me deeper into God in many ways, and I had never been more capable of finding insights into others or for others when needed. But there was so much of myself I had kept at bay. Sister Anne helped me to see that I was like the young surgeon she heard lecturing about suffering when she was in medical school (she was a very smart nun) — I knew all about the tools and instruments, but had not known about grief and pain before now, had not had to really wrestle with the mysteries for myself.

I don’t think I had deeply come to know love yet either. In recent years, I had repeated revelation of the love of God, whether through Scripture or books or things I would see in other people. But I had yet to really allow the love of God to settle over me in all my broken places, to come to really know divine love in the parts of me that seemed the most unlovable. My theory is that all of us elder sons of the church, the ones who spend all our lives trying to keep the rules, have a deep suspicion that if we do feel loved and accepted, it is because we are working so hard to get it right. Sister Anne said it takes some people their whole lives to come to really believe that God loves them. But that it had to be learned in a deep, experiential way — as it is the key to existence. She said that no matter how long it took, God was relentlessly determined for me to really KNOW this for myself. Sister Anne said the whole trauma I was experiencing — of going through hell, of falling apart, of death and resurrection, was for my good — so I could really know.

I went on that retreat with very particular questions, looking for very particular answers. They were all about ministry and relationships, trying to figure out what to do next. Per usual, God did not answer any of the questions I went to San Diego asking. But I did feel like God spoke to me, again in that way when you feel things in inside of you shift, and it is as if some new word has been planted in the topsoil of you — small and green and hopeful. I tried to pray a lot that week, often in its most primal forms of letting my very breath become prayer. Mindful, attentive, at peace for the first time in months, I would stand on the pier at night and watch the waves roll in and out, knowing that they were coming in and out long before I got there, and would continue to long after I was gone. Walking through a graveyard on a mountain, I tasted my smallness in a world where so many people are being born and dying, and do so with or without me. Looking out over the ocean, I saw my smallness against the horizon.

I was starting to see more. I was finally seeing the bigness of the world again, and the smallness of myself. The search for “meaning” was a quest for power I was not designed to bear, an obstacle to the grace of insignificance. What could prepare me for the breath of God (Spirit) that hums all life into being, except I be emptied of our pretensions of significance? Divine perspective most of all relativizes our importance. We are each very small creatures. Very little is contingent on us. Knowing our smallness puts us in touch with the essential lightness of created things-transitory, ephemeral creatures. Splendid irrelevance. All lives are small lives, all epic struggles are skirmishes, because we are weightless creations-deceived by an illusory sense of gravity. Inside the movie inside our head, we all feel like we are stars. It’s an illusion. We’re all extras.

The gospel doesn’t fulfill our quest for significance, but exposes its essential folly. It gives us something better than meaning: love. The love of God gives us unfathomable value despite our objective smallness. But still leaves us blissfully unimportant.

As the week unfolded, the two central exchanges in my own time with God, as best as I could discern them, went something like this:

“God, I can’t take this. I honestly think I’m falling apart.

“What would be so wrong with you falling apart?”

“Well…I mean, I’ve got this thing you gave me to do. And I don’t think I can do it anymore. I think I’m going to have to go sell french fries at McDonald’s?’

“Who told you that you couldn’t work at McDonald’s?”

I was starting to see: I am a creature: made, dependent, small. I know less than I think I do. I think more rides on my existence than it ever does. I was coming to see that wisdom is not having the right answers, but having a proper sense of scale and perspective. Wisdom is embracing our blissful smallness. If we think the world needs us too much, we can’t receive life as gift. And if we can’t receive life as gift, we can’t receive it at all. The tides keep coming in and out; the flowers keep growing, people keep being born and dying. It all keeps running, not contingent on us.

Destinies do not rest on our shoulders. We are given choices, but the cosmos runs with or without us. And it’s all grace.

Ask not for whom the Bell tolls…

I didn’t tell almost anyone about the last part of this story at the time. But looking back, there was one more moment at the end of that week that was actually really pivotal for me. The day before I flew home, at the end of my retreat, I spent a couple of hours with Rob Bell. That is not an attempt to name drop. I do not know Rob well. We have a mutual friend who, when she found out I was going to be in Southern California, offered to connect us simply because she thought the two of us would have a lot in common and would hit it off. I know she felt like somehow the Spirit prompted her to put us together at the time—but I don’t think she could have had any idea just how much that time would really mean to me.

So I drove from San Diego to Laguna Beach, where Rob lives, for a long lunch. I know Rob has been polarizing to a lot of evangelicals (the details of any of that are too tedious to me to even summarize here-I get bored just thinking about those conversations). I’m going to tell you this: I have met a lot of well known Christians writers and thinkers, in the Church and in the academy, and very few have made the kind of impression on me Rob did in that afternoon we spent together. I found him to be gentle, authentic, very much at home in his own skin. He deeply believes in his work and his art. He struck me as a guy who really has learned to live deeply from his soul, and the time with him did so much for my heart. There is no way he could have known what that time would mean for me—for that matter, I don’t guess I could have discerned what it meant for me either.

Through the afternoon, I felt very safe to talk openly about the storm of my life in candid terms, and he could not have been more caring or generous. But the electrifying moment for me came early in our time together. I was asking him about his journey out of the pastorate into the life he is leading now—writing, speaking, doing tv, all kinds of creative projects. I asked him if he missed being a pastor. He said he missed the people of his church, but not pastoring itself, per se—that there were so many ways that the role has come to be defined in corporate terms in North American culture that he never felt at home with. He always had a lot ambiguity about all of that. He talked about how difficult it was to leave the church he had started, and yet how much he believed it was ultimately best both in terms of him fulfilling his own calling, and the church fulfilling her own.

And then came the part that hit me between the eyes: he was talking about how difficult it was to navigate the tension of doing what he genuinely felt most built to do—in terms of shaping culture and speaking into broader culture creatively, artistically, and theologically—while wanting the church he led to be an authentic Christian community that was not overly contingent on him. I had always struggled violently with those issues, wanting to fulfill this broader call I felt on my life that seemed, in a way, prophetic (in that it involved movement building and speaking to larger matters), and yet feeling that was at odds with what I believed ideologically about pastoral work for myself.

During my sabbatical, one of the things that kept filtering back to me was this sentiment of, “we don’t want the church to be a one-man show anymore.” I took any and every personal criticism in that season without resistance (and had worse things to say about myself than anyone else would have, anyway)—except for that one. After all, I did believe in community. I was the last person who wanted our church to feel like a one-man show. I tried to always be forward about my own humanity, deflect any attempts to put me on a pedestal, and leverage any influence to point people to Jesus and others. Without judgment any other direction, we just didn’t have a bright lights, big production kinds of approach to church to begin with, because it didn’t suit the kind of community we wanted to build. I had been as accessible as I knew how to be for the size church we were (I would even go so far as to say that trying to “be there” for too many people, too much of the time, was a lot of my trouble). A lot of that sounds naive and childish to me now—there are plenty of ways to order church life liturgically in a way that would address all of these concerns constructively, but I didn’t actually know how to do any of that then. I did church in the only ways I knew how.

So then comes the line. Rob said, casually, “I got tired of having to get up and make the disclaimer every week that ‘this is not the Rob Bell show.’ Finally I had to own up to the fact that, if this many people are coming because of podcasts or Nooma videos or whatever, and there is this much is built on my teaching, maybe this actually has become Rob Bell show.” Ultimately, he came to believe that for him to do what he was most called to do, and for the church yet to become what it needed to become as a particular community, he would have to disentangle all of those ways that his platform as a leader became inextricably bound up in the platform of the church. He was humble enough to see and internalize the truth in those kinds of critiques, and not resist them.

Of course all of this was on an exponentially larger scale for him than it was for me—I had no delusions of grandeur. I was by no means on my way to “bigger and better things.”I was also well aware that his perspective on these things did not have to come for him with all of the complexities of my personal life at the time. But I knew the whisper of the Spirit was in those words for me. It was like a rope in me snapped. For all the things I had come to own about myself, that was the last untouched area of resistance.

I know that when there is an inner click like that, something in me has changed, but rarely in the moment do I know exactly what it means. I certainly didn’t walk away from that week or that conversation knowing I was going to leave the church, and to some extent, ministry for a time. But looking back, the progression is so clear. All week long, the Holy Spirit had been giving me a sense of scale and perspective to my life again, a slow, steady clarity where I could see my smallness, without resentment. Now things were starting to come full circle. Now in matters larger than my immediate crisis, I was able to accept the truth about other things too—i.e., “just because you don’t want to be this guy, doesn’t mean you are not this guy.” During so much of this season, I am only able to see what the little swath of the path just under my feet, if I’m able to see anything. I see things right when I come upon them, and sometimes while I’m actually half-past them. But I am grateful to be able to see anything at all.

It would still be a while before I came to terms with the necessity of me leaving. I knew that when a church has been built that much around teaching, around a particular leader, my leaving would be as violent for them as it would be for me. I did not want them to have to figure out their journey without me anymore than I wanted to figure out my journey without them. But I had always believed that the Church (any church, but this one in particular) was a work of God’s Spirit and not my own, that it was part of something bigger, stronger, more ancient and more eternal than anyone of us. No matter how much self-loathing I had, I had come to know enough about God that I had to believe He still had good work for all of us, somewhere, somehow—no matter how much I messed up the script. And if God in His generosity was yet going to complete His work in me—surely that had to be true of these beautiful people that I loved. I had to trust both that God was going to somehow provide for me in this terrible task of actually learning how to be a human being all over again, and that he would provide for the Church in learning how to reinvent themselves without their founder.

It was only the fear in me, for my security and for the security of the church, that was screaming, “HOLD ON! HOLD ON!” The still, small voice was much softer, but no less clear: “let go…you have to let go.”

I feel ridiculous writing this even now, because there is so much I have not figured out how to let go of. I still have a death grip on the steering wheel in some ways—things, matters, people—I can’t bear to let go of. It feels like one finger is being pried off at a time, and each time I think it’s going to break from all my built-in resistance. I’m still hanging on in more ways than I would like. But I’m glad for the wind of the Spirit that keeps blowing in my life, even when it feels like a hurricane, until I’m finally grasping on to nothing.

into the abyss.

Even as is was becoming increasingly clear there would no be chance for any kind of wholeness without leaving the church, there were many moments I wasn’t sure if I was ready to step into the void—into the deep black unknowing. The last few chords of any sense of control over my life were snapping all around me, but I still didn’t know quite how to walk away. I think somewhere deep within I knew that leaving the church I planted eight years before would not just be leaving a job, but in many ways leaving the first half of my life.

I remember thinking about my childhood favorite film, The Neverending Story, especially the scenes where you could see “the nothing,” the shadowy void, consuming the land of Fantasia. I couldn’t quite tell if I was watching the Nothing slowly eat away everything I had loved about my old life, or if I myself was the Nothing — if I myself was the hungry abyss. I had kept the rules all my life until now, and been reasonably successful at everything I had ever tried to do. But now everything I touched wasn’t turning to gold, but to ashes.

I had always harbored a secret, irrational fear that I was somehow uniquely wicked, and somehow destined for damnation. And that when I basically had not known what it was to do anything seriously wrong! I wondered if there was a kind of inevitability to watching my world burn while holding the matches. I kept thinking about Johnny Cash’s haunting rendition of “Hurt,” especially hearing the man in black sing, “What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end. You can have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down, I will make you hurt.” I wondered if I’d have anybody left if I survived the storm at all. I certainly did not know if God would be there for me, if God could be there.

For all the ways I had preached a gospel of grace, and was genuinely convinced of the truth of it for others, my own relationship with God had always been a kind of uneasy one. It was always easier for me to speak about God than to speak to Him — maybe that is true for most of us? I don’t know. I just know that it was a very different thing to try to cling to the lifeline rope in the high seas that were drowning me than it had been to be the one holding out the rope.

the friend of sinners

Christians often speak casually about “friendship with God.” One day I was sitting in the little condo I had temporarily, shriveled away from everything and everyone I cared about — often going three days at a time without seeing anyone I knew. And out of nowhere, I thought about the phrase used in the gospels to describe Jesus, sometimes derisively from his critics — “the friend of sinners.” And somehow the word “friend” just broke me in two.

For me there is always something sweet, almost childlike about the word “friend.” “Friend” was a word that somehow put me in mind of things I thought of as gentle as a child, things I thought of as purely good. I was a soft-hearted kid. I thought of all puppies as “friends.” I loved puppets in general and muppets in particular — I thought of Kermit and Miss Piggy and Gonzo as friends, and as my friends. When I was six, they showed a movie at youth camp about this sweet guy who had a puppet ministry. Some mean teenagers broke into his workshop at night, and vandalized the puppets. The point of the little movie was the mean kids felt bad later and asked Jesus into their hearts, and became good kids. But I never got past the idea that there was anybody out there who could stand to hurt a puppet, and had nightmares about it. Now I was the mean kid who hurt the puppets, who hurt all the friends, and I didn’t know how to live with it.

I was old enough now to know that friendship was a holy thing too, especially when I read descriptions of it in antiquity, from the likes of Thomas Aquinas. I knew it too as a terrible word, especially when offered as an unlimited, irrevocable love and loyalty all the way up into the end. It is Jesus in the garden, eyes full of tenderness, not a taste of sarcasm on his tongue when he says to Judas, “Friend, do what you came here to do.”

Despite my ability to think about God and write about God and speak about God in intimate ways, I never quite knew how to relate to that God as “friend.” With hot tears rolling in waves down my cheeks, I remember saying out loud, “Jesus, I hear that you are the friend of sinners. I’ve never been good at being with friends with much of anyone it seems, and I sure enough don’t know how to be friends with you. But if it’s the sinners that you are friends with, I know now for a fact that is what I am, and I sure you could use a friend like you right now if you would have me.” I needed to know friend Jesus. I needed to know I had not run him off. I hoped I wasn’t big enough to run him off.

Some of the worst moments were the ones where I somehow knew he was still around, maybe that if anything the wreckage of my heart had pulled him deeper into it. I see now the folly of people thinking God is punitive ogre who is out to get sinners for their misdeeds, that wrath is the “other side” of God that somehow balances out the love that is what God actually is. That god is a deity with a personality disorder — he’s the Batman villain “Two-face,” where one side is pretty and one side a horror show. Christians are only supposed to only focus on the beautiful side and not look at the ugly one, because of course if we saw Him for the monster that He might actually be, there is no way we could worship a being like that. I know now that is all wrong. The God who is fully revealed in Jesus Christ is love and only love. But to look at that divine gaze from a place of guilt, the love is experienced as wrath. The love has not changed, but our perspective on it has changed — we now see through a glass darkly, not face-to-face.

I never will forget reading the Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s astonishing sermon “forgiveness” on the prodigal son, where he says that is what sin does to us — it does not change God, but it changes our view of him, so that we cannot help but see him through a distorted lens. Hell then would be to be stuck in that horrible view of God as ogre, not allowing him to heal our eyes so we could see him rightly, and unable to snap out of our heart’s drunken haze. These were things that I knew, things that I believed, that I had preached and taught.

But looking up from my own place of desolation, I didn’t know how to see Him at all, and I could only see myself as “the nothing.” What we see when we see God always determines how we will see ourselves. We are always made in the image of the God that we see.

One day I was sitting on the bed, and began to pray for everyone else in my life that I loved, including the ones I felt estranged from. As I prayed the things that came up inside me, I could not seem to help but pray specifically for God’s hand to be on each one of them. And then came an unexpected river of lava, coming from somewhere even deeper, moving from praying to screaming. “But whatever you do, please take your hand off of me. Please just LEAVE ME ALONE. Please let go of me. Please, please, please just let me go. Please let me be.”

standing over the edge

There was another day while still on my kamikaze mission to repair my heart and life in the context of pastoral ministry where I was in a series of back-to-back meetings, and I kept feeling I was running out of breath. I kept smiling and nodding politely, but I was getting more scared with each new episode. The last meeting of my day was with a girl from Iowa who had come into town just to visit our church. I talked with her for a few minutes, and then excused myself. I ran outside, hoping somehow there was more oxygen out there than there was inside, and still didn’t feel like I could fill my lungs. I went to the emergency room, thinking surely there was something medically wrong with me. They did all the tests — nothing wrong so far as they could see, certainly not a heart attack. I wished there were at the time, just so I could know that there was something wrong with me that a doctor or medication could fix. Or maybe even not be fixed at all, so long as I could check into a hospital and out of my life.

The next morning, I had another terribly difficult conversation with someone close, and I was right back in the same state of anxiety. I was tired of being out of breath, feeling dizzy, having a high-pitched, squealing ring in my ears as much as I was. Stupidly, I got in my car and drove to nearby Crowder’s mountain, out of my mind with guilt and grief. I climbed the mountain, as I had done hundreds of times before. I went to the edge of the rock at the top, and I stared into the gorge — unmoved by the beauty of any of the things around me. In my head, I thought there was no way I could jump off that mountain. I knew it was a selfish act that would only punish the people I loved, and I would never want that. But I also was not in my right mind. Like never before in my life, I did not feel fully in control of my faculties. It was like hot pain was animating me, moving my limbs. I was consumed by it. I could not see hope, I could not see a future — which is a way of saying I could not see God. I was staring into the abyss, and all I wanted in that moment was let the darkness overtake me. Anything to just not feel anymore.

I looked at my phone, thought about who I’d text or call to say goodbye if that was what I ever had to do. Amanda texted to check on me, which I will be forever grateful for. At first I did not respond; I could not respond. But slowly I started to come out of the fog, started to come back to my senses.

There was no explicit experience with God. But I do think that day there was an experience of something God placed within us, though I’m not sure if it is more human or animal. Somehow when I walked down the mountain, I knew I was going to live, even though I did not know how to live anymore. I knew I had to live. I knew I would fight to live. I knew that no matter where the fuel came from, whether the substance was light or dark, there was still some kind of coal being shoveled into my engine, and that one way or the other the train still runs — into heaven, into hell, or more of this no man’s land in-between. I had no better idea of where my life was going or what I was going to become. Just that I had to stay in the game, and that I wasn’t bowing out for anybody.

That would have been one way of jumping into the void, not into the ambiguity but just the darkness. From somewhere in me, the animal defiance came up that says “I may feel like dying, but I actually don’t want to die.” But that did not mean the void would not have to be crossed, or that there was not a yet a kind of void I was going to have to take a dive into.

The abyss I would have to plunge into was a kind of unknowing. It was a loss of control, it was “someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” There was going to be no going around that abyss, and to jump into the other one would just be cheating. The gambler in me still wanted to play the hand, win or lose.

into the pool

A few weeks later, I took the dive I did have to take. It was a terrible thing to meet with our leaders and friends in the Church to tell them what we were doing. Some were encouraging, some were hurt, some were angry. I was more or less impervious to any of that by then, because I knew that even there was hell left ahead of me it would be better than the one I was leaving behind. I could not be a damn ghost haunting the halls of that building anymore. The animal in me had put his foot down.

My last few sermons were probably my best — they were full of heart and passion and truth. They were not noble — nobility was not an option from anywhere that I was, they just were what they had to be under the circumstances. But the rawness of them was killing me too. It is one thing to try to make your pain available to God and others in a vulnerable way as a wound for God to heal others, and I do believe that is how God works. But it is another thing to become an exhibition, to feel like people are watching you like a science experiment. Like when I put my G.I.Joe’s in the microwave when I was a kid as the ultimate torture chamber, just to see what would happen to them (spoiler alert: they caught on fire and melted into a red plastic pool of goo). I loved our people, but I didn’t care about doing any of that anymore. Another reason I had to go.

I had especially dreaded telling my parents that I was leaving. I was a third- generation Church of God preacher. The church was ten minutes away from my Dad’s house where he would soon retire, and he had an office there down the hall from mine. All along, he had wanted me so desperately to find a way to stay. I felt like leaving would be extinguishing his dream, and didn’t want to feel like more of a disappointment. But to my surprise my Mom and Dad were very supportive. They had seen me bleeding out, and they didn’t want that for me. If it would take leaving the church to find wholeness, then that is what they wanted for me.

It all felt so strange. I had been in full-time ministry since I was 22 years old. I had been thrust immediately into the role of expert on God before I knew anything about God or life or how the world worked, really. Some people thought I was some kind of prodigy as a speaker, but whether or not I was a prodigy, I had not had the time or space to develop my own soul. I didn’t care anymore about whether or not I was good at any of the things I had set out to do, I just wanted to figure out how to be a human being. I wanted to figure out how to live out of my soul rather than out of my head. I did not want to be separate from anybody else, set apart from anybody else by virtue of what I did for a living. I wanted to be a real boy.

Barbara Brown Taylor is one of my favorite writers, and I read her lovely, lyrical Leaving Church years before. But knowing that I must leave, I reread it, and this time it was like ingesting fire. They spoke so hot into my soul, it was like they came down from Sinai. There is this one section in particular where Taylor writes about being at a pool party hosted by someone in the church, and feeling the ache of being other than the people there in ways she could not bear. She tells about sitting down with a couple in adjacent rocking chairs that she was never able to enjoy, because her priority was always to be the people who were in crisis. She tells about laughing with them, while corn is stuck in her teeth. And then the section that made life bubble up in my veins, the section that felt like salvation:

After my supper had settled I wandered down to the pool, where I watched swimming children splitting beams of underwater light with their bodies. I had baptized many of them, and I loved seeing them all shrieking and paddling around together in one big pool. Suddenly to my right there was a deeper yell, the sound of scrabbling feet on cement, and then a large plop as a fully clothed adult landed in the water.

I stood back and watched the mayhem that ensued. All around me, people were grabbing people and wrestling them toward the water. The dark night air was full of pool spray and laughter. The kids were going crazy. Several people hunting for potential victims turned toward me, their faces lit with smiles. When they saw who I was they turned away again so that I felt sad instead of glad. Whatever changes were occurring inside of me, I still looked waterproof to them. Like the sick man in John’s gospel, who lay by the pool of Beth-zatha for thirty-eight years because he had no one to put him in when the water stirred up, I watched others plunging in ahead of me. Then two strong hands grabbed my upper arms from behind, and before I knew it I was in the water, fully immersed and swimming in light.

I never found out who my savior was, but when I broke the surface, I looked around at all of those shining people with makeup running down their cheeks, with hair plastered to their heads, and I was so happy to be one of them. If being ordained meant being set apart from them, then I did not want to be ordained anymore. I wanted to be human. I wanted to spit food and let snot run down my chin. I wanted to confess being as lost and found as anyone else without caring that my underwear showed through my wet clothes. Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed beings of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. The long wait had come to an end. I was in the water at last.

I love that section for so many reasons. One of the things that moved me most at the time was the way that Taylor, a literary genius, subtly plays with the motif of baptism here. Water is integral to life, to new birth. There has always been a mysterious connection between the sea, in antiquity the place of chaos and mystery, and the void of Genesis 1. There is no new life without passing through the waters, like the Hebrews marching through the Red Sea as God parted them. In the New Testament, there is no new life without joining Jesus in the watery grave. Once again, Christianity is the religion of going-through-and-not-around. I had talked about it for so long. Now it was my turn to jump into the pool.

into the watery grave

It was Easter Sunday at Renovatus. I preached on the first words of Jesus when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection: “do not be afraid.” I said that I thought you could sum up the whole of God’s message to human throughout Scripture and throughout history — do not be afraid. I told them these are words that are spoken when it would seem to us that we have every reason in the world to be afraid. That God speaks them when He is about to do something new. And in the midst of this sermon on death and resurrection…I announced that I was leaving. Only our leaders knew we were leaving before that service. Like “The Grinch who Stole Christmas,” I felt like I was the pastor who stole Easter.

Of course I felt ridiculous announcing my departure on the Sunday with the biggest attendance of the year, when everybody has dressed up and brought their friends. But I was not going to keep grabbing every rung of the ladder on the way down, trying to salvage the unsalvageable. I was not going to stay plugged into the ventilator. The only message that I could preach was the only message my life could be at that point, and was the message of death and resurrection.

I knew that even though I would be there one more week, it had to be my last sermon. It just had to be. I could not drag the ending out any further. I was in every sense of the word done. I was Pharaoh not letting my true self go, and in doing so feeling every plague in my body. I said I would be there the next Sunday for a transition service, but I would not preach again. The message of death and resurrection had finally grabbed a hold of me, not in the way it grabs a hold of a preacher but in the way it grabs a hold of a man. I had no idea what I was walking into. I was stepping into a starless night. I only knew it was time to cash in all my chips on the hope that resurrection could be a better existence than the one I was sort of maintaining. I knew it was time.

At the end of both services, I baptized people for the last time at this church I had founded and given my life too. I felt the holiness of each of them as I gently handled wet bodies, the tour guide for their own descent. In the 9am service, I was almost done baptizing people, when Heather Shelton came out of her pew as if she was in a trance. Her lips were quivering, her face contorted in anguish. It was her father Herman who we had buried just a few weeks before, and everything about his early departure was filled with ambiguity. It had been a torturous ride for Heather, the ordeal of her father’s fall, the many hours in the hospital, the celebration that he was better and resuming normal life, the second tragic turn that led to his death, the weight of the decision to pull the plug.

Heather kicked her flip-flops off when she got down front, and practically threw her cell phone onto the stage. As she took off her glasses and I helped her into the pool, it was not the cherubic look of a new convert on her face, excited about new faith in Jesus. It was a mix of resignation, heartbreak, an almost angry determination, and yet a kind of hope too that if she could jump into the river that carries us toward death, there could be new life for her too. Already, my nerves were jangled and my heart tender, the day being what it was. But baptizing Heather that day was something other entirely — I can’t bear to not capitalize that. It was something Other.

It was my last opportunity to perform one of the sacraments I most held dear, to wash my hands in the holiness of God’s sons and daughters. Heaven was skidding into the ground, and the people just kept coming and coming.

By the time I finally got done baptizing people at the second service, I looked to my right at Teddy Hart. Teddy was our staff pastor. He was protégé and one of my closest friends. He had been with me since year one, transitioning from a life more or less biding his time in Cleveland, TN to becoming an extraordinary preacher, pastor and friend. A sensitive soul, Teddy’s eyes were already red from all the tears he shed that morning.

“Teddy…do we have time for one more?”

Since it was Easter, I was wearing a suit and tie. I did not bother to change, I only took off my shoes. And I joined my people in the abyss. I loved them, and I didn’t want to miss my one and only remaining opportunity to jump into the pool with them. I didn’t have anybody else to baptize. My last official act as a pastor was already done. I was going to the pool not as anybody’s priest, but as one of them.

The water was cold. My heart was hot. Baptism has a celebratory aspect, but I had no delusions that those moments were anything less than my own little funeral. I did not yet know what kind of man I would become when I got out of the water. I had no idea what my life would become. Like the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, I only knew that angels had been in this water, and wanted my broken down body in the pool, in the wake of them.

The life I had built was over. Everything I had been, I was no longer. I had no sense that the water of baptism would make me something more, like they’d turn me from Clark Kent into Superman. But could they turn me into something human? Like Barbara Brown Taylor, I wanted in the water because I wanted to embrace my full humanity in the company of my friends, vaguely aware that becoming more human is to have the image of God in us renewed.

Teddy held his hand over my nose. I felt his tears on my head. He could barely get out the words: “Pastor…I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.” I took the plunge. When I came up, I clutched him like I was drowning rather than being baptized. I suppose in a sense I actually was, maybe they were always the same thing anyway.

I heard my friends weeping all around me. We all knew this was goodbye

the death chapter.

“I saw Satan fall like lightning,” Jesus said. If only we could be so lucky. Only Satan fell like lightning, the rest of us fall much more slowly, hitting every step on the way down.

My first conversion

Walking into the pale yellow forest that was the hospital, I thought the fluorescent lights turned them into the color of tobacco-stained teeth. I felt my stomach contort unnaturally, like a circus act. I was twenty-one, just married, and suffering was an exotic land I had no reason to visit as of yet. I was a tourist, a first-time guest, and this was the first stamp on my passport. Nothing about the place felt familiar to me.

An hour before, I had listened to the breathless voicemail from Angela, one of my best friends in high school. I knew her father, Henry (not their real names), had HIV for years. In recent months, his body gave way to full-blown AIDS, and he was dying. So I left my home country for the first time for the sake of my friend. Just before I knocked on the door, I took a deep breath to let my nerves settle.

Angela opened the door and embraced me, tightly. To me, the middle class product of conservative, tent revival religion, she was the epitome of cool. Her mom was a playwright. Even when we were in high school, she was on a first name basis with all the local black politicians. She had introduced me to people like former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, who ran unsuccessfully against our infamous Senator Jesse Helms, and congressman Mel Watt. When she graduated from college, she got her picture taken at the after party with Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Maya Angelou. She had helped open me up to radical new ideas, like that democrats were not necessarily going to roast in a low-level of Dante’s inferno. We had lived through some things, but I had never seen her hurt like this.

Releasing her, I took Henry in slowly, his dark black skin stretched thin over brittle bones. The healthy forty-something I saw the last time I was with him had been replaced with a skeleton man.

Angela quickly introduced me to Diane, the social worker who had been helping him. We exchanged pleasantries, and they caught me up on Harold’s decline in the last few days. He was unconscious and pumped full of morphine. It was only a matter of time, the doctor had said. They were just trying to keep him “comfortable.” The farewell vigil was crawling forward, and there was nothing to do but keep watch until his body gave up its long protest with death.

A few minutes later, Diane said she needed to go outside for a smoke, and Angela and I followed her out. Not for a smoke, mind you. I had never tasted alcohol or tobacco, and might not have cussed if I had smashed my thumb with a hammer. Angela was my progressive friend, but I was all old-time religion. Diane found out I was planning to go into the ministry, and she was elated. Because as it turned out, this chain-smoking angel with the short hair and crooked teeth loved some Jesus.

If I barely passed through customs into the land of pain, I was equally unfamiliar with the territory Diane inhabited. She was irreverent, bawdy, and funny as hell. During the next three days while the three of us kept watch in the little island of pain, I was utterly delighted by her. Diane’s ease with profanity was matched by her ease with talking Bible, and I equally impressed with both. She talked about that story where Jesus “whipped everybody’s asses in the temple.” And the story where Jesus forgives the woman caught in adultery, and in her words, “wrote every single last one of those motherfuckers’ sins in the dirt.”

I didn’t judge Diane, but I felt under a kind of gentle judgment being with her. Not because she was anything less than loving — Diane’s profane language was baptized in unconditional love you could feel all around her. I just felt self-conscious about my one-night stand with suffering, around a woman who’d been in such a long, monogamous relationship with it. Diane spent her life with people like Henry for very little pay. She was with people who hurt because it was the life she chose on purpose. Her life more resembled the kind of selfless life I read about in the gospels than that of people like me, and my sheltered little brain just didn’t know exactly what to do with that.

For three days, we laughed together, cried together, and held each other like three little Eskimos, keeping the cold of the night at bay. There were moments of terror as Henry’s body rebelled against him, breaking into convulsions like I had only seen on the pale blue carpet at campmeeting, hillbilly Pentecostal that I was. There was no resurrection on the third day, just the sweet release of man in great pain finally letting go of his runaway body.

***

The Catholic funeral was a sea of black faces. It was equal parts liturgy and shout. I had never witnessed anything like it — the ancient rhythms of the old words with the thumping rhythm of our bodies in the church. It felt alive, authentic, sensual. I don’t know how much I recognized of the Spirit in those days, my senses yet a lump of clay not yet by the strong hands of pain or the warm hands of joy. But I recognized the Spirit that day — she moved through us like a dance, her steps both heavy and light.

I didn’t have the ecclesial stripes to officiate such a service, and wouldn’t have been ready for the holiness of such a thing anyway. But Angela was kind enough to ask me to do the New Testament reading in the service. I felt their dance lilting through me when I read the words. I got done, closed my Bible, and took three steps toward my seat, before I turned around and went back to the podium — remembering what the guy who did the Old Testament reading did at the end. Leaning into the microphone tentatively, I said “The word of the Lord.”

“THE WORD OF THE LORD,” they thundered back.

I never saw Diane again after the graveside service. She hugged me tightly, and I couldn’t believe how much the smell of her cigarettes felt like home to me after just those three days we spent together. She told me what a fine young man I was, that if I ever started a church in the area, it would be a church she felt like she could actually attend. I felt the sincerity in her words, but they undid me. I went back to the little apartment in rural Kings Mountain, NC where Amanda and I lived, the renovated barn loft over so far as I know the town’s only porn studio (these were humble times). I buried my nose into the covers on our bed and sobbed. The time in the hospital and at the funeral had been holy as an Easter mass, but it was the first time I knew I didn’t have any business leading anybody’s church yet.

I was 21 years old, and had prayed to ask Jesus into my heart in the altar of at least half of the thousands of church services I had already been to. But that was the moment of my first conversion.

Go tell it on the mountain

There are moments in life holy enough to brand us, the angels pressing the iron of love into us like holy cattle. Such moments don’t so much give us new belief systems, per se — those are less permanent, more like temporary tattoos. When the divine touches us, we aren’t given a new way of thinking so much as a new way of seeing. That is of course what Christianity has always been — not a fragile belief system to compete with the others, but a different way of seeing God and others, that, once glimpsed, is hard to un-see.

But that is not to say it can’t be done. Holy experiences are hard, dense, substantive — they don’t evaporate because we get around the common or the profane. They are waterproof and bulletproof, and will survive almost anything…except to speak of them too much. Talking too much about them will erode them the way the elements of life, of wind and sun and rain, never could.

Reluctantly, the call that took hold of my father and grandfather fell on me, and I inherited the family business. I was talking about Jesus full-time for a living, without Diane’s profanity, and maybe without her orientation in real-life, too. When you’re peddling religion like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, what else should you talk about if not your conversion?

I told about Henry and Diane every where I went, in the little rural Church of God congregations where I learned to preach, and in the mid-sized church in Gastonia, NC where I soon after went to work. I was a youth pastor. I had lunch with students at their high schools, organized the occasional lock-in, and when given the microphone, talked about Jesus like nobody’s business.

Soon after my experience with Henry, I read the story in Acts where Philip, an orthodox Jew who became a leading man in the fledgling Jesus movement, was taken by the Spirit from preaching to the crowds, into the desert. There he meets an Ethiopian eunuch, a man ethnically and religiously very much unlike him. According to Levitical law, this foreigner who mutilated himself for a place in his Queen’s high court would have been ceremonially unclean. According to Philip’s religious culture, the man’s sex organ was mutilated, but he could not deny the purity of the foreigner’s heart. Riding in his chariot, the man had been reading the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, his heart as hot as the desert road they had been traveling. When Philip explained that the figure in the ancient texts was Jesus of Nazareth, the eunuch received it as happily as Philip once had. As soon as they saw found a little water off the road, the eunuch insisted being baptized.

I felt like a young Philip, having all my preconceptions about who God should act upon shattered on my own desert road. Like Philip, I took a detour from the fire of the revival service, and found the fire on a dark-skinned foreigner — and found the Spirit to be more powerfully present there than under the tent where we had campmeeting. I never had the convulsions other people had on the ground beneath me in the altar services, but I saw God in Harold’s shaking body, and I was determined to tell the people in my world what I saw and heard.

In the sermon, I didn’t just talk about Philip and the eunuch — I talked about Jesus. Jesus, the friend of tax collectors and whores. Jesus, the friend of the outcasts and the misfits. The Jesus who defied the purity codes, refusing to acquiesce to the idea that anybody or anything he would ever touch could somehow make him less holy, instead infusing holiness into everything and everybody he ever touched. There was something in me that burst into flame every time I preached that sermon.

There was a rage in me too, because I knew that what I encountered in the text and in Harold’s heaving body rebelled against the kind of fundamentalism that often became entrenched in the circles I ran in. But I was smart enough not to make any of the particular points clear enough to get myself kicked out of the synagogue, and nobody felt like they could argue with the Bible. Especially since that sermon brought out an anger and an edge in me that was generally synonymous in our tradition with “the anointing.” If you were confident and a little bit pissed, then the Spirit was surely on you. I had passion if nothing else, and the “the anointing” turned me from Clark Kent into Superman — at least for 45 minutes a week.

My heart felt soft in those days. Even before the experience with Henry, I had enough friends of different cultures and backgrounds that I had long thought of even my most different friends as “my people.” I would not have hurt any of them. But in my own church context, I had to be careful how I spoke of them. It’s a fine line trying to proclaim the Jesus who is the friend of sinners, and trying to claw out your place in an institution that is often scared to death of them. I couldn’t laugh when other ministers told jokes about people I loved, but I managed an awkward smile. I remember a moment in particular when a minister I had once admired, around the table with a group of pastors, gave his reaction to a minister who had been recently defrocked after being caught in a gay affair. “It’s a good thing I’m not God,” he said. “Because if I were, I’d have frozen that man’s mouth while he had his mouth around that other man’s penis, and I’d have turned him to stone.” He was smiling when he said it, but he was not kidding. Inside, I trembled, but I wasn’t going to make the mistake of the man in question, and open my mouth at the wrong time.

A song of ascent

A few years later, I preached my signature a sermon again on a Sunday night. This time, it was in a sanctuary packed tight with 2200 people. I was wearing my best suit. It was my first service preaching back at the mega church where I had just been hired, and this was my moment. Until it was time to preach, my nerves were runaway horses. I was sweating profusely. The choir was singing the house down, and it was the last song. The last thing I wanted to do was miss my cue, so when they finished the belting out the last chorus, I bolted to the stage. And in doing so, unwittingly jumped the gun. I made it up the steps and got two steps from the podium — when they jumped back into the chorus. The lights were hot on me, and I was already all the way up there. So I did what any good Pentecostal boy would do when you blow your cue — I lifted up my hands and said, “Hallelujah!,” and praised my way through the reprise.

It was an awkward way to start. But when the choir got done and everybody clapped, I got down to business, and as it always was when the moment to deliver the word, the jell-o of my insides turned to steel, and I preached like a burning man, a fire and brimstone preacher of love. I believed every word. I told Henry’s story, like I always did. I talked about eunuchs and AIDS and proclaimed Jesus as the friend of sinners. I didn’t know how the sermon would go over in that environment. But a few minutes later, my pastor, who was my favorite preacher in the world (and the preacher who-to this day- has most shaped my own preaching with his vulnerable, heart-first approach), stood to his feet and said amen. A few minutes later, everybody was on their feet, and broke into wild applause only 75% into the message. It was without question the best night of my young life. When Amanda and I ate cheesecake in the upscale bistro after the service, I thought I had arrived.

In the years that followed, I learned to navigate the complicated un-parallel universes of the denomination, church culture at large, and my growing compassionate convictions. I was a 25-year old kid with a full-time staff underneath me in my department, and a five-million dollar outreach center to work with — while my own theology was still in an adolescent phase of development. There were wonderful people there I loved very much, and still do, from leadership on down. There were also the typical kinds of random “controversies” that are just par for the course when you’re working at a big church in the south—the guy on staff who said I shouldn’t quote C.S. Lewis (from that first sermon!) because he read online he was a closet universalist, the couple who tried to get me fired for saying “crap” and quoting an old song from the Police in the same sermon (“secular” music & all), and the parents who were on a crusade to keep our outreach center from being defiled by students with tattoos and body piercings. I slowly learned how to navigate the politics that go along with that kind of ecclesial life—perhaps too well? But in any case, I was on the perfect career path within my tradition — young, upwardly mobile, a capable preacher, even picking up some degrees along the way.

I never exactly stopped caring about the Harold’s of the world, I was just wasn’t in a position to be around them anymore. Wasn’t it just like a suburban white kid to feel like he won a gold medal for going into a moment of real suffering for five minutes and letting his heartbreak over it a little? I got banged up a little in the culture wars everybody in my world ambled into. I had my one holy story tucked inside me enough to keep my heart tender, but I talked it out of my system just enough to keep it from getting me into trouble.

Looking back, I think the storm of my second conversion was rising in me even then, but it was going to be much more painful than my first.

Opening the big tent

I do not want to be too hard on the 25-year old young man. There was a bright, naïve kind of goodness in him. That version of me was sincere — a true believer. I could only see what he could see, and could not see what I could not see, as it is for each of us. In the decade following that night, we went on to found a church called Renovatus: A Church for People Under Renovation. We said we were a church for liars, dreamers and misfits. And I can assure you, I thought about Diane a lot in those early days. She said she had a hard time finding a church in our bible-belt town of Charlotte, NC where she felt at home. And I planned to make sure the church I founded would be the kind of church where she did feel at home, if I ever saw her again. And hopefully a church that could have been a good home for Harold — God, I wanted that.

It became a beautiful community with many beautiful people. Along the way, the tent of my big tent revival religion got considerably larger than it used to be. I came to reject the idea that my native Pentecostalism was supposed to be a fiery form of fundamentalism, set apart just because people spoke in tongues. I came to believe that Pentecostalism was misfit religion, spirituality on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. I believed that when people who couldn’t find any other place to belong elsewhere came together and shared a combustible experience of the Spirit, Pentecost would happen.

The Spirit after all is the ultimate non-conformist, the archenemy of the efficiency so much contemporary church culture prizes above all else. To be clear, there are many deeply Pentecostal people that are not in Pentecostal churches. The Spirit people — the subversive people — are in all parts of the Church. But we had more than our fair share there.

We were coming to see that Pentecost was big tent religion, an open tent with no sides to it. Everyone is welcome. That was what was so shocking about the Pentecostal movement in its origins — women were preaching, blacks and whites and Hispanics were worshipping together in the same rooms all the way back in 1906. Pentecost is scandal. You can’t get more progressive than the Spirit of God, because the Spirit brings the future reign of God into the present, disrupting all our existing categories of left and right and Jew and Gentile and male and female and slave and free, makingall things new.

It was a grand experiment, and there are all kinds of wonderful stories I could tell you about. But I won’t. I told many of those stories in my first book, a book that started by revisiting those native moments of innocence and wonder that call us back to primal memories of a garden paradise. These experiences maybe even more universal than our shared experiences of naïve bliss — the story of paradise lost, of falling, losing, and having to find yourself again.

I was still the fire and brimstone preacher of love, maybe even more so. And had even had experiences in more recent years that awakened my own understanding of God’s love for me in ways that I could not have imagined. But I was also still the young idealist who lived too much in his head. I didn’t know how to fall out of my head and into my heart. I didn’t know how to fall, period. I was preaching, teaching, enlightening, and like I was in my days at the mega-church, still entrenched enough in Bible-belt culture to be dodging bullets. I was still sincere, still a true believer. I believed in grace for everyone else I knew, and may have thought I believed it for myself, theoretically. But it had never been tested. By then, I had been the guy dispensing the information through preaching and writing and podcasts, still basically living out the script I fell into without significant deviation. I was still living up to the expectations assigned to me by others and by myself from early in my life.

my terrible Augustinian moment

It was eleven years after that Sunday night sermon, now two am on a Saturday night. Once again, I could not sleep. In a few hours, it would be time to preach twice in my own pulpit. Tired of laying awake alone in the guest bedroom, I finally turned on the lamp beside my bed. It had been five months since the world I had built had gone up in flames, and it was all my fault. It was like a Hollywood make-up artist had transformed me during those long months — I saw the shadows underneath my eyes getting larger, watched the white hairs in my beard turn into wildfire, and picked a big clump of my once thick dark brown hair out of the drain in the shower every morning. I didn’t know how I was going to get up and face them again, much less my own face in the mirror.

I picked up the John Irving novel off of the bedside table, the one with the black and white cover showing a woman’s back as she unlatched her bra. Only when I read the novel, In One Person, I found out it was actually a man. I picked up the paperback in an airport a few months ago when I was on my way out of town to speak at another conference. At the time, I knew next to nothing about the story. I only knew that I loved John Irving ever since I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. Before the storm, I read about half of it. And to my shame, I put it down because I quite honestly did not know how to deal with the graphic descriptions of gay sex. The story of the young boy growing up in an all-boys school in New England trying to sort his sexual identity moved me. But it was the first novel I’d ever read where the protagonist was gay or bi-sexual. I was no Puritan — the book did not offendme. It was not intentionally lurid, like a romance novel, just frank. I just didn’t know quite how to handle such bodily frankness, especially in a context so completely foreign to mine.

So now I picked it back up that night, in a very different place in my life then. The church we planted was eight years old, and my life had still fairly upwardly mobile. I wasn’t pretentious; I didn’t think I was special because more people liked my sermons. But after living my whole life until then on the straight and narrow, never straying outside any of the parameters of the life I was born into, for the first time I felt like my life had gone out to sea.

Unlike the protagonist in Irving’s novel, I was not a homosexual. Like the protagonist in novel, I had “fallen in love with the wrong person,” and did not know how to fix any of it from where I was. I was trying to sort out my life and my marriage while still in the pastorate, going into the office and shutting the door to cry behind my desk every day, full of guilt and pain and ache. I didn’t want to be there anymore, or at least didn’t know how to be there anymore, but felt responsible to the people and to this thing we had built. I didn’t know how to leave, but I didn’t know how to stay. I was still trying to find a way to be vulnerable in the sermons without being indiscrete about all the things we were trying to work through. I felt like I was slowly bleeding out in front of everybody.

It was an odd rendition of Augustine’s conversion story, when He heard a voice say “take it, read it,” and found a section of Scripture that upended his life of youthful lust. I picked up a book about conflicting passions instead of the Bible, but was no less upended. As usual for Irving, this fiction is grounded in very real historical events — in the case of In One Person, the AIDS epidemic among gay men in New York City in the 1980’s. As the lead character loses friend after friend to the plague, the heartbreak of the book overwhelmed me. I grieved over the deaths I read about. I grieved over the pain of rejection he and his friends endured. Three hours later, I had finished the novel — and was just sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, sobbing.

I cried for many reasons. I cried because after being extended the grace to take four months off to try and sort our lives out, I was nowhere close to resolution. I cried because the angst in the novel both massaged and stirred up all the angst in me.

Somehow though, I knew God was speaking to me through it all, even so. Being a Pentecostal, I was raised somewhat of a mystic — I have always believed that God was speaking, not to me in particular but to all of us, and that there were moments when my antenna was up when I could hear something. Ironically, the reception seemed to be clearer in a storm, even in one of my own making. It is difficult to qualify how it is I think I hear from God, but it is like words settle within me that, for lack of a better way of putting it — just feel altogether other. It is a deep, interior way of knowing, perceiving, listening, that I fade in and out of. When the familiar voice comes, it is marked by tenderness — there is something sweet about it, and yet almost something that breaks my heart too, in all the ways that pure love does.

Somewhat to my surprise, I did not feel judged by God. I did not feel that the voice was angry, or that I was somehow disqualified for my humanity. Yet as the breeze filled the windowless room within me on my dark Pentecost, I knew something I did want to know. I saw something I did not want to see. I saw that the only way in my life I would ever have cause for such tears anymore was in the pages of fiction. Because for as much as my experience with Henry drove me into my early years of ministry, these were not the stories I was living into now. I was too busy with safe Christian work, vaguely caring but too clinically detached, and had an impervious bedside manner. I was too cautious navigating the complicated politics of ecclesial life, still very much a voice for love and compassion generally, but avoiding any particulars that could get me into trouble. That meant a kind of loving people from a distance.

I was broken open now simply because I now had my own pain, my own unresolved inner conflict, neck-deep in my own angst. And finally I saw the world again. I finally saw people. I finally was starting to see God again in the only way people ever really can — from the underside of things. I was no longer in a place of power, deciding what was up or down or in or out; no longer at the head of the table, participating in a lively discussion about who else should or should not be there. I was now hoping I was still in a place to get a few scraps from it — but I was not sure.

That was more than a metaphor. In recent years, my own theological vision had been shaped by my understanding of the Lord’s table through the Eucharist. We celebrated weekly communion at the church, and the idea that Jesus was tangibly present in the celebration of this meal became our dominant narrative — though that is historically uncommon in a North American Pentecostal church. The week after my world exploded, we went to a Catholic mass, knowing that the sacred meal would be offered, and would be the climax of the service. I went there entirely because I wanted to be in a service where I could come to the table.

I came down with my head bowed, my very bones aching for the body and blood of Christ, hoping it could nourish me even in my wasteland. The person in front of me drunk from the common cup…and when I approached, the lady with the chalice offered me an apologetic shrug. They had run out of wine. I’m sure she saw the mix of incredulity and pain on my face. It was a moment that named everything dark that I feared — that the blood of Christ was not available to me here now, that it could not reach to the depths of darkness to which I had descended. I was now seeing the world as the helpless sinner who did not know where to go or what to do with my own pain and my own guilt. I don’t know if I how found I could have ever been before, because this was the first time I was truly and utterly lost.

I wept when I finished the novel, because I knew I had held a lot of people and a lot of pain at an arm’s length before my own slow-motion fall, the long descent that was not at all like lightning. And I heard the words of Jesus spoken to Peter, gently naming the reality of my own heart — I had been the one who knew what it was to be in charge, to take care of myself, to take care of others. But now was the time when others would have to “dress me and take me where I did not want to go.” I now had the terrible gift of sight. I could not avoid real-life stories anymore just because I was afraid of where they might take me.

starting to see

The next Sunday, I was preaching the assigned lectionary text for the week — and it was John 9, a chapter that is all about seeing. It is about a blind man who is healed by Jesus, finally able to see. Since John is the most mystical of the four gospels, it is dense with allegory. The text is brimming with details about the scribes and Pharisees, the religious leaders who are not able to see, in contrast to the lowly man who now sees all too well. His sight is a threat to their sense of propriety and religious order. They don’t know what to do with him. Their world was more well-ordered when the blind man had his proper place in it.

When Saul encounters Jesus on the road to Damascus, the light strikes him blind for three days. And if I was coming to see anything at all, I think that was what was happening to me — I had to go blind first. I did not feel like Moses coming down of the mountain to deliver the word of God — I did not feel like delivering a word at all. I only knew that in my broken place, I could only speak of what I was actually seeing, even if my eyes were squinting and I could only see a little. Even if I could only see “men like trees” like the blind man in the gospels that Jesus touches, who can’t see with clarity until Jesus touches him a second time. The hour was far too late in my fading former life to talk about anything abstract or theoretical. There would be no escaping into my head, into my world of theological ideas. I could only speak of what I saw, nothing more, and nothing less.

It was a painful sermon to preach. I told about Henry, and all the things that happened that got me started. I told about reading the Irving novel all night the Saturday night before. I told about how I saw how my own lack of suffering had made me relatively aloof to any real suffering in the world, until my own pain and trauma, and the pain I felt for hurting others, forced me to see. That now I was heartbroken enough to see God from the underside, and the hurt in the world from eye level. I told about how desperately I wanted to see and continue to see, how I did not want to continue living with my head in the sand.

I wasn’t composed like I was when I preached about Henry at 25. My insides were blistering, and hot tears ran down my face. I was embarrassed for all the things I did not see before, ashamed to acknowledge the lack in my own heart now. I was ashamed that I had not owned the people who had always been my people, ashamed for working so hard to navigate all such matters politically.

In the days and weeks ahead, I finally began to learn what it meant to lose my life to find it. It was a long, slow dying. I was a man who had fallen off the top of a ladder, and had still been trying to grab every rung on the way now. I did not yet know that the spiritual life, like Jacob’s ladder in the Old Testament, was not just ascent but descent. I only knew I did not want to continue to the long fall back to earth.

On Sundays, I preached the assigned lectionary texts, but there was no way to detach the sermons from the pain that was simultaneously killing me and slowly bringing me to life in the way that all new life comes into the world — with a blood-curling scream, and many tears.

resuscitation or resurrection

Several weeks later, I was in a different hospital room. Once again, it was an African-American man that was dying. This time, it wasn’t a fragile, skeleton of a man whose skin was stretched tightly over his bones, but a man who looked impossibly alive. To see his 6’4 frame, the color in his cheeks — to feel the warmth in his large hands — it was hard to believe this strong looking man could be dying.

But he was. Two months prior, he fell at work and suffered serious head trauma. The doctors didn’t know if he would survive, but after several serious and complex surgeries, he was finally on the mend. In fact, he wasn’t even in the regular hospital anymore, but in a rehabilitation ward — days from going home. Until out of nowhere, he had a heart attack in his hospital bed. They were able to resuscitate him, but the oxygen had been deprived from him for too long — he was completely brain dead. The part of Herman where all the memories and motor functions resided was not going to come back. He was only breathing because of a ventilator, and this precious family was trying to make the terrible, necessary decision to pull the plug on the artificial life that was sustaining him.

I held his enormous hand as the family pressed in behind me. The holiness of the ground itself was almost unbearable. The spiritual transition that was taking place was palpable, and everyone in the room could feel it. Harold’s life was oozing out, and it was time for the people he loved to send him off. I closed my eyes to lead the family in prayer, feeling the hot tears roll quietly down my face as we felt the beauty and sorrow of the moment pressing in on us. The more I prayed, the more the family begin to lean into the prayer — with tears, with soft amens, with resolved “yes Lord’s.”

Hours later in my home, I felt the familiar presence again, and I knew there was something I was supposed to see while still saturated in the holiness of Herman’s departure. Once again, the presence was tender. Once again, the words while gentle, were also hard. I was once again seeing what I did not want to see. In the twinkling of an eye, I saw that in my life back at the church, I was choosing resuscitation. I saw that my chest was still heaving with air, I was still warm to the touch, and I could still hold someone else’s hand in my own — but there was no life for me there anymore. I was a ghost, refusing to depart from my old life. I was a dead man insisting he was not dead.

It struck me that night what a terribly courageous thing the family had to do. They did not know any better than the rest of us that Herman would be resurrected if they let him go — they had not been on the other side of that transition anymore than the rest of us have. But they chose to believe it. They chose to put their weight down on the hope of resurrection. They chose to say goodbye to a semblance of life, the form of life, in the hope of Herman experiencing the substance of life on the other side. They did not choose resuscitation. They chose resurrection. I knew I did not possess their bravery, and that I doubted myself as much as they believed for Herman. I did know that I trusted the God of resurrection, and had no problems placing weight down on that hope with them for Herman. But I did not know if I could trust it for myself. I only knew that I was being faced with the same choice.

Two days later, I had one more moment when I felt strangely inclined to pull a book off the shelf. This time, it was my own. I don’t normally do that — I’m not that narcissistic (except when I am). But it felt like there was something I was supposed to see there. I will always love that first book, because it came from some deep places. It was honest to where I was — it was true to the first half of my life. I would stand by everything in it. But those were things then I knew much more with my head than with my heart, uplifting information that was still turning into revelation inside of me.

I gave each chapter of the book one-word titles, and there was a somewhat linear movement and progression to them, a kind of flow. From identity…to beloved…to wilderness…to calling…to wounds…to resurrection…to…I stopped myself. I was looking at the pages, and was overcome with that terrible knowing, the kind that comes when the Spirit enters the room. The kind that comes from being shown what you do not want to see. The kind that “flesh and blood cannot reveal to you, only the Father in heaven.” My eyes filled again with tears, but it was so perfectly obvious now I could not help but smile at my own ignorance, however disastrous it might feel now. I had written a book on Christian spirituality, of which death and resurrection is its central motif and defining characteristic — and had moved straight from wounds to resurrection. There was nothing in that book about death, because I did not yet know what it would mean to die.

That was the chapter of my life finally being written.

the city beneath the sea (a song of descent).

I remember the first time I came to New Orleans in the distant way you remember some near forgotten dream. I remember her like a ghost, like a shadow. I remember the feel of her in my body more than any particular image of her in my head. I was 14 years old, and the occasion, ironically enough, was our the bi-annual meeting of our conservative Pentecostal denomination. Even now it’s hard to imagine the people who populated my childhood walking those dreamy, steamy streets.

The air felt full of sex and saltwater. Church of God preachers in their suits and ties and ladies in their long Sunday dresses were walking down Bourbon Street on their way to worship at the Superdome. Pentecostals, historically, are misfit people, products of the kind of sweaty spirituality that could only be given birth on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. But I would have never known how to put the bodily, ecstatic worship of the Pentecostals with the kind of sensuous delight offered on Bourbon Street. The churches I grew up in, like New Orleans, had a penchant for colorful characters that seemed to walk out of a Flannery O’Connor short story, the fluid, free-flowing improvisation of jazz music, loud clothes and a carny atmosphere. But the sacred and the secular were not on speaking terms; they were as distant as Jerry Lee Lewis from his infamous cousin, Jimmy Swaggart.

I still remember watching the pack of preachers in front of me walk past a stand on the right selling novelty ties made to look like penises (which instinctively seems like it should read “peni”). There was a store on the left where the maniquens were decked out in an assortment of vinyl, leather and lace. Walking past the seedy club across the street advertising women and men performing “love acts” with each other, I felt the sea in me stir — here in the city beneath the sea. Hot damn…it was exciting! And terrifying. I cut my eyes away quickly to the dirty concrete beneath my feet, scared to death by the city and my own longing. I walked the French quarter as a stranger, just a pilgrim passing through, on my way to the Superdome, where the saints were marching in, a little awkwardly — and hopefully one day to heaven. I walked the street as I walked the world so much of my life — as a bystander, a spectator, not a citizen of the parade.

Looking back, I never really learned how to be at home in either world, because I never learned how to be at home in my own skin. I longed for the ecstasy around me in the tent revival every bit as much as I longed for the ecstasy around me on Bourbon Street, but lived too much in my head to get down into my soul and my body. I was stuck in my mind and on the surface of things. In both places, I was too afraid and too self-conscious to get lost in the music. I believed in all of the Pentecostal business. I wanted the jazz in me, the dance in me, the life in me. The life Jesus talked about when He said that “out of your belly will come streams of living water.” God have mercy, I wanted the life that could only be lived from my belly. Then and now, I want to howl; I want to crackle, I want to rumble. I want to talk in tongues.

But then, I walked the streets of my own longing, an insulated boy. Twenty-two years later, I walk down Bourbon Street on a clear December morning. I taste the boozy, swampy smell in the back of my throat. The daylight settles in the French Quarter like a hangover, it feels less like today than the morning after. The city is coming awake like a slow storm rising. There’s a jazz band setting up on the sidewalk just ahead, and from a distance I hear a trombone playing outside the St. Louis cathedral. A man in a suit smoking a slim cigarette approaches when I walk past the strip club: “Come on in…we’ve got cold beers and warm nipples inside!”

I cut up St. Peter St. to get to the cathedral. There are folding tables set up just outside offering palm readings from voodoo spirit guides. As I step through the heavy doors, the smell of sex gives way to Spirit, and I effortlessly slip into the wonder. I walk, trance-like, to the third row on the right, feeling my soul already finding sanctuary in the reverence. Kneeling, I begin to pray through my beads, taking slow, deep breaths in between the Psalm I’m meditating on. St. Louis Cathedral is in the middle of the carnival, the way God always is.

Melting into the presence, awareness creeps through my very bones, and I know God is not only in this place, but all the places I walked past to get here. God in the St. Charles street car I rode in on, in the old black man in the gold and black Saints toboggan sitting beside me; God in the white man with beady eyes in the polyester suit, summoning the tourists into the cathedral with no windows, on their own search for transcendence. God in the lady with the dreads reading Tarot cards just outside the entrance to the church; God in the dazzling art that climbs all the way onto the roof of the cathedral. In the decadence and in the piety, Love itself is sustaining us, making us exist. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” the apostle Paul said. In the breathing, my soul knows again there is nowhere God is not. Pressing softly into the divine, all the dualisms are dissolved. There is no us and them, no sacred and profane. There is the Love that exists at the center of things, and we, like sheep, stumbling into or out of awareness of the One who calls us into existence.

What better place to learn this than the city beneath the sea? New Orleans knows that sex and spirituality, voodoo and Catholicism, are two sides of the same mystery. She knows that these little humans all want to get lost more than get found, to drift into a mystery larger than themselves. “Every man knocking on the door of a brothel goes looking for God,” G.K. Chesterton said. She knows that the ordered world is an illusion, so the things we keep under the surface she puts out on the street. She knows that whatever cathedrals we wonder into pay homage to, whether the gods on the wall are Jack Daniels or Jesus Christ, we are all looking to let go. We’re all looking to lose ourselves, into the night and into the wonder. Deep down, we all want to be all in, somewhere — anywhere — so long as we are in over our heads.

The first time I came to New Orleans, everything in my world was sharply divided. The dualisms of head and heart, body and spirit, light and dark, good guys and bad guys were already bone deep. My world was divided into “us” and “them.” That’s the floor beneath us when we are walking above sea level. The world cannot change until we fall into the ocean, or the rain comes and floods us where we are. New Orleans, a saucer twenty feet below sea level, wears these secrets like a scar. She knows that in reality, a flood is always around the corner, we just didn’t know it until we had one of our own. But the saints and sinners march on here without fear. She knows, on a cellular level, that there is life after the flood. The nightmare of Katrina had its way with the city of dreams; the levees broke. The waters were merciless and the losses unfathomable. But she dances still because she knows the secret of death and resurrection. She knows that crisis brings all her misfits together. She knows that after the flood, you make new life the same way she has always made music — by trusting the people around you enough to improvise. She knows there is life on the long side of dying.

In the old New Orleans tradition, even a funeral is followed by a kind of parade. The first line of participants are the friends and family escorting the casket. The “second line” is comprised of the crowd, any passers by who want to join the processional. She is not afraid of death, because she knows even dying is an invitation to a deeper, more authentic way of living, an invitation to join the parade.

When I came back to New Orleans, I came back after my own flood. The life that felt so safe, comfortable and familiar was under the sea, and everything I once loved was underwater. I had lost heart, lost hope, and lost myself in the depths. In other words, I was finally ready to understand the city beneath the sea. It’s no wonder, then, sitting in that open air café, watching the people outside St. Louis Cathedral, there was no more “us” and “them.” I could be kin with the Asian tourists and the grizzly bearded palm reader and the children on the field trip, more happy with each other than impressed by the austere beauty of the church. I felt like I belonged on New Orleans’ island of drunken misfit toys. Instead of judging her, I came longing that this city of second chances might make room for me around her table too. Nobody’s past is counted against them here.

New Orleans doesn’t just smell like sex and saltwater to me anymore. She smells like the gospel.