.

Bringing Our Secrets Into the Light: Lent Reflection Day 10

2012-03-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Jesus answered: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Luke 10:27)

It is easy to remember this first and middle clause of this statement, they are easy to contextualize in many ways. However, as a friend recently reminded me, we often choose to skip over the “as yourself” portion of Jesus’ statement. What does this mean “as yourself.”

It is hard for many to realize their worthiness. Often our pain entangles with shame throwing us into an inward spiral of self rejection. Society tells us to keep pushing forward, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and anything is possible if you never give up. When we fail to meet societies false doctrines, and we all do, we face more pain and it is in those moments of perceived failure that shame reaches out and grabs us like ivy left alone for far too long. The shame ties itself to our souls with viscous knots. Shame can encase our pain and hurt giving the impression that we are weak and unworthy of love and acceptance. Yet, pain is healthy, a necessary process, especially in the spiritual journey. Shame, however, is largely useless--useless and one of the most harmful of emotions.

Before we can live lives of wholeness we must work to relinquish this shame, to cut away the knots that bind us. We must replace our shame and self degradation with a view of ourselves from God's heart. We must replace our shame with our adoption as God's beloved children.

And part of relinquishing this shame is sharing that pain with others, sharing these secret pains of our soul and breaking the cycle of our society which requires achievement to gain worth.

Henri Nouwen says, in Bread For the Journey:

“We all have our secrets: thoughts, memories, feelings that we keep to ourselves.

Often we think, "If people knew what I feel or think, they would not love me."

These carefully kept secrets can do us much harm. They can make us feel guilty or ashamed and may lead us to self-rejection, depression, and even suicidal thoughts and actions.”

As we ponder the deepest recesses of our souls during this Lent season, let us remember to allow others to walk along with us. Though we resist and say “if people knew...” often, and to our surprise, those around us are yearning too for someone to walk through their pain with them, many people would step into our own pain with us as well. But it takes an initial jump to share. A scary jump, but an important jump and a jump that helps untangle our pain (which is a healthy emotion) with shame ( a useless and harmful emotion).

Response to OneGeorgeFox Open Letter Concerning LGBT Students at George Fox University

2012-03-01T10:56:00.001-08:00

To my brothers and sisters in Christ,

When I was invited to join a new group called OneGeorgeFox, an alumni group aiming to show support for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered (LGBT) students at George Fox University, I found myself surprisingly taken back. Fox was my home for four years, I was involved intensely in leadership, especially with Spiritual Life. I saw the less than ideal atmosphere Fox created for LGBT students and felt the pain with them. I was not ignorant about and I had friendships with students who are LGBT.

I was taken back because I truly believe that the heart of the George Fox campus overall, is one aiming at love. The administration, those in leadership and professors, I believe are all truly trying to better the lives of the students at Fox and help bring them closer to the face of God. So, at first I found myself taken back; some of the administration/staff/professors were/are my friends it felt like a grassroots attack.

Yet even though the heart of actions (or no actions) may be aiming at love, small nuanced comments or no comments at all can be very hurtful, emotionally/spiritually damaging, and socially tiring.

To be silent when others are suffering is oppression. Love without freeing-justice (not to be confused with condemning justice) can never be true love. Paul Louis Metzger says: “Only as we despair of ourselves and cling to Jesus can we participate in his work of restoring lives, the church, and the world by the Spirit of the Lord. We, the church, are to live now in light of Jesus' restoration of all things.”

But often our own ideas of what justice and restoration should look like. When we first look inward at our own mishaps, when we truly live into our own need of grace, it becomes hard to continue deciding what others need to restore and change about themselves.

We often move issues of spirituality into rational and academic arenas. It is easier that way. When we have the answer it is easy to focus on that answer, regurgitate it on others while rarely turning it back on ourselves.

We can no longer deny there are LGBT students currently making Fox their home;likewise, we can not deny there are LGBT individuals within the overall Church. And fro many of them, this is a life of hurt. Hurt, not necessarily because they feel they are sinning, drifting from God, or choosing the wrong lifestyle but because of you, because of me, because of the people that surround them. For those who feel different, their deepest hurt often comes from fearing what others will say: will they still talk to me--will they ever TRY to understand--will I be shunned--does God hate me?

Most still view sexuality in warped and twisted ways, especially in the church. Our views of normalcy are narrow. Yet everyone, I think, just wants to know they are normal, that they aren’t freaks and that they wont go to hell for an odd quirk. Finding wholeness in God entails joining all the parts of us together under one identity of Beloved Child. And I cant help but think, God has room for all of the parts. All of them even if some of them include LGBT identities.

We all yearn to be told we are normal, we are not freaks, and sadly many agonize over whether they will go to hell or not because of who they feel they were born to be. We all yearn to feel as if we truly belong.

God is constantly inviting us. God did not ask the guests at the Great Banquet to dress in their finest clothes before they could come, he just invited them, they came as they were and were thrown into the celebration. Jesus did not say to the bleeding women, you must go clean yourself before you can find renewal. Jesus did not make the fisherman who would become his closest friends erase the fish smell from there bodies. Jesus, instead, through his acts of inclusion and embrace hummed a different note. Jesus sang: You will dance with the Divine-Mother and Son-Christ and Lively-Spirit at the feast of the Banquet, regardless of what you have done, who you are, who you have sex with, or what sex you love. You will dance.You belong with me.

One can back-up each side of the issue with theological debates until they are blue. I don’t know the answer to please everyone, but I know all people are humans and all humans are created and loved by Jesus. I know all humans were made for wholeness, happiness, and love. I know the hardest thing in life is carrying around our deepest fears, because sharing them feels like releasing a hurricane upon the poorest nation in the world. Fear becomes heavy, unless we share it, unless we surrender.

So I signed the OneGeorgeFox letter, because the voices of love and grace need to drown out the voices that force changing of beings, shame, hurt, and ostracism. I know grace can never be spread to much. I would rather preach grace from the mountaintop, than wonder if I judged someone wrongly on such a delicate, complex and powerful issue.

So, in the breathe of OneGF, I write this statement for you: straight, male, female, LGBT. I write this for everyone, because no one is exempt.

I write this for those who are despised and feared in society: it seems the despised must always live trying to figure out what everyone else thinks. They must learn how to act normal, how to answer correctly, how to assimilate, because if they don’t, they fall. No, they are tackled to the ground and must fight with all their strength to get back up.

I know not what to do in a world so narrow at times, but I know something must be done. Something must be done so all of God’s children know they are worthy of love. Something must be done, so everyone receives opportunities to grasp the hope of a life of wholeness, security, families, and love, regardless of sexual orientation. I highly doubt God’s attention is as directed on defining what is right and wrong concerning this issue as we make it seem. God’s attention, perhaps is more focused on unity within the body and everyone being invited to the Banquet.

I know something must be done to welcome those who lie in bed at night praying God will change their very beings away because no one will give them answers, no one will listen, names are thrown in their faces, or categories and boxes are plastered around them. This goes beyond LGBT “issues,” it relates to nationality, race, worship style, and gender expression.

I know masculinity is not synonymous with sports, talking about women as objects to attain, rationality, and strength. I know that femininity is not defined by working in the kitchen, showing emotion, or expressing one’s self. Yet the church often makes it seem like those are the only options.

So, to women, to girls, to mothers and to grandmothers: allow the men in your lives to express themselves, allow them to show their strength and masculinity through their compassion as well as there ability to mow the lawn or fix a car, if that in fact is what they do.

To men, to fathers, to brothers, to grandfathers and friends: tear down the boxes the world has put you in. Express the deepest longings and very human urges of your hearts. Stop mocking those who show their masculinity different then you or others. Put on a dance shoe. Pick up a recipe book. Love someone with compassion and humility and perhaps you will find that all of these things require so much more strength then yelling fag, tackling over a football, or suppressing tears.

To the Church, to pastors, and to theologians: may God be with you and bless you as you ponder our world more closely. May you be a safe place amongst thorns, where someone can share their story. May you see lives and not simply lifestyles. May you realize that you cannot “love the person and hate the sin,” while still pushing people you “love” away from the church. May you hold those stories close as you form your systematic theologies. And if you haven't, I pray you would seek these stories, hear LGBT experiences and not write them off right off the bat.

Finally, to those who feel as though they don’t fit anywhere, I write this for you. To the nerds, the fat kids, the bullies, the addicts, the queer, for the issue of belonging and acceptance is at the core here. To those who are scoffed at, labeled, mocked, and humiliated for your feelings or the way you were born. To those punished for emotions you don’t know anymore about than the ones who mock you: hold strong.

It will get better.

The Divine is bigger than the Church. The Divine is bigger than the person who told you to change every fabric of your existence, though you knew in your heart even if you didn’t change Jesus would still love and accept you. You are human; never let them tell you different. Splinters of darkness are invitations to grasp more intimately our Belovedness.

To you courageous “others” striving to make sense of life: share your story, teach the world, and maybe someday soon the light will break through in this very dark time. You are worthy. You are human. You are Beloved.

And something must be done.

peace and grace,

Andrew

To find out more about OneGeorgeFox and read the open letter, click below.

http://www.onegeorgefox.org/

Emerging From the Fog (Lent Reflection Day 6)

2012-02-27T11:23:00.004-08:00

The LORD bless you

and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you

and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you

and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-26)

An ice-fog blanketed the city a couple days ago. Fog gets a bad rap, but it perhaps is one of my favorite things on this earth. One time my grandma and me took a day trip to San Francisco to visit museums and the wharf, I was young, but I remember as we rolled up and over one of the many hilly roads I saw part of the city below us embraced by fog. Its ethereal really, the fog; it seems to come from another world, bridging the gap between potential and reality. Clouds of mist hover softly, tickling skin and waking me up.

As I walked past blushing leaves on the trees and into the fog, I started thinking of Shalom and of grace and of forgiveness. These often come upon us like fog; we wake up after a night of darkness to find a sweet cloud of hope and potential blanketing everything around us.

God does bless us and keep us. God’s face is always shining upon us-- yet often we forget what it looks like and often we forget to look all together. We are distracted, full of sorrow, sinking in utter pain, apathy, anger or other scenarios, so we forget to look for the blessings emerging from the foggy mystery of the universe.

Thomas Merton says, “Every moment and every event of every mans life plants something in his soul... For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.” This seems to be the mantra of my life fro some time.

Before we can experience grace, shalom, and forgiveness we must learn to recognize that same grace, shalom and forgiveness emerging from the darkness of the world.

The LORD is blessing you
   and keeping you;
the LORD makes his face shine on you
   and the LORD is gracious to you;
the LORD turns his face toward you
   and gives you peace.

We must recognize it first--we must look for it, because it resides around us like a beautiful fog beaconing us into a world of mystery behind the mist.

Celebration Whispers (Lent Reflection: Day 5)

2012-02-26T12:17:00.001-08:00

Today is the first Sunday of the Lenten season. In this season, every Sunday represents the resurrection of Christ in anticipation of Easter. In a way, these Lenten Sundays leading up to Easter become a whisper of hope in the darkness of the cross and passion that the other days of the week symbolize. If the other days of the week are to be times of deep inner reflection with God, then Sundays are to be celebrations. Eat a feast, watch a comedy, have a dinner party, for the whispers of hope are swirling around us. The voice of God is awakening a new era.

There is this voice that echoes in and through our imaginations, through our sub-consciousness, and it tells us that the world should be some other way.

It’s an echo of a voice many of us have heard before, sometimes its loud, sometimes soft, sometimes barely audible, and sometimes you can only feel the vibrations of the noise, but it is always there. Always flowing.

The voice cries out

I am here.

It sings

Take refuge.

It hums

See I am doing a new thing! I will take the wilderness and through it I will make a path! Where there is nothing but bareness, drought and wasteland I will make streams of living water.

The voice continues…

If you are thirsty I will quench your thirst.

If you run away I will pursue you.

Those you don’t love me I will call my beloved anyways.

Echoes the voice.

If you hunger I will sustain you.

If you are blind I shall bring you sight. If paralyzed you shall walk.

There is a voice calling to each of us, and it echoes through our lives how things should be.

It is the spirit voice, the kingdom voice, the voice of God the father and God the mother, of Jesus Christ. It is the echoes of a message that has been lived by countless others before us.

From a bush the voice commissioned moses

In the stars the voice echoed a promise to Abram.

The voice manifested in the dreams of joseph and in the

In the womb of mary.

While flames licked the feet of the martyr the voice sang out to them.

The voice flowed out of MLK jr in a vision and in a dream.

The voice echoes throughout the seats of churches across the world during worship services.

Where there is hope the voice echoes.

Where there is light the voice echoes.

Where there is peace the voice echoes.

Where there is love, and mercy, sacrifice, suffering, joy, beauty,or holiness the voice echoes.

The voice we hear is the lords and it is calling us to join in Her pursuit to make things right. To transform what should not be into what it should be. To take God's will and make it a reality on earth. That is what the Kingdom of God is it is the reality, the realm, the place where God’s perfect will is actually what happens.

The Journey As Destination (Lent Reflections: Day 4)

2012-02-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

Romans 12:2 says, "...be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect."

So how do we discern what the “good and acceptable” will of God is in our lives amongst all this darkness. Well, what if this perfect will of God in our lives did not look like going to this school or that school, moving here or there, giving this amount of tithing over this other amount. What if, instead, the perfect will of God in our lives is the journey toward God. The goal is the journey. Clarity of appropriate action should not be the focus, but instead the journey toward God is most important.

When we are centered on God, when we are journeying toward God, all other things will fall in place: the right school or job, the right amount of money to tithe, the right relationships to pursuer. If we focus first on the journey toward God and commit ourselves to that journey, the stress and anxiety of discerning the difference between "right" and "wrong" choices or actions ceases to be the starting point.

Centering on God is part of this journey. Centering allows us to come closer to God and become better adept as recognizing the places God has planted grace in our lives. This transformative journey though, looks less like hiking a mountain and more like wading in a pond. We cannot force the movements, we must surrender our hearts so that the movements have space to work themselves out within us.

As Richard Rohr says in the book Everything Belongs:

“We do not find our own center; it finds us. Our own mind will not be able to figure it out. We collapse back into the Truth only when we are naked and free- which is probably not very often. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking. In other words, our journeys around and through our realities, or ‘circumferences,’ lead us to the core reality, where we meet both our truest self and our truest God. We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.”

Eye of the Hurricane (Lent Reflection: Day 3)

2012-02-24T09:14:00.000-08:00

When Jesus learns of his friend Lazarus’ death, the scripture says he weeped. His friend was dead, yet all hope was not lost.

“…he [Jesus] cried with a loud voice,
Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth…
Then many of the Jews which came to Mary,
and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed in him.”
(John 1:43-46)

The Kingdom of God does not erase the pain, the sorrow, or the darkness. The Kingdom does not clear the slate and start over, but the Kingdom of God invites us to walk through the muck, to slop through the pig sty before we realize the ever waiting open arms of our Lord. We do not get the luxury of jumping over the pigs tie or walking round it. We must recognize our previous residence of death as a bridge to our new lives of light.

As I live and learn and am taught by others, I am realizing we can only experience our salvation or spirituality to the same extent that we have experienced pain or suffering. And in turn we can only give gifts of love to the extend we have recognized our own worthiness of that same love.

Before you can get to the calm ironic peace in the center of the hurricane you must endure the rain, the winds, and the destruction.

After you have endured the hurricane the center comes over you and there is redeeming peace.

The good news of the Kingdom is, although God does not necessarily take the suffering away, although we must journey through the pain, although at times we may think in shame, but “God where are you really?”-- the Good News is that God is making all things new. In every moment-- in the past, in the future, in the present--God is working to make all things right. In every moment, God is renewing all things into the light of the Kingdom.

Invitation to Light (Lent Reflection: Day 2)

2012-02-23T09:13:00.001-08:00

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything....

Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of all he created.” (James 1:2-18)

So is God some masochistic deity, playing a chess game with His/Her creations to bring them to the state God wants? No. The world may seem as if it was overtaken by darkness, yet God permeates that darkness with glimpses of light. God loved us to the extent God gave us free will to choose love or darkness; the power of that loving freedom is so great, God allows us this freedom of choice a majority of the time. Therefore, when we do not chose love we create darkness, for others and for ourselves. Yet God is there. Murmurs of God encircle us no matter where we are, urging us to chose love.

We too often push these murmurs away with our own stubbornness: it is much simpler to rest in the darkness--it is hard-work to pull our way out of it. “They hurt me,” “It’s not fair,” “I screwed up,” we say to ourselves with crossed arms and heavy hearts. We chose to sulk in the darkness; we close our eyes tight and imagine another world, when all it would take was standing up and remembering the light switch on the wall before us. This does not mean running from the darkness--we must give pain and hurt its space, yet we must not do so without simultaneously searching for seeds of Divine Grace in our lives.

And while God resides in the darkness with us, this darkness, becomes ironically a beautiful invitation to join in the light of God. We live in a culture of denial, therefore our dark rumblings rarely make the way to the surface to be healed by God. We live in a culture of “I can do it!” therefore we rarely open our hands and hearts in surrender.

I wonder what it would be like--instead of living in a culture of pride, of happy endings before the journey and of success through the denial of our pain--what it would be like if on that checklist created by society was a box that said suffer, strain, cry, grow. Because how can we wrap ourselves in the light, if we have never been scared by the darkness? How can we appreciate life, if we have never touched death? How can we know the power of sight, if we have never felt blinded? How can we find peace if we have not given up the war within our own hearts.

"Why Are We Here?" (Lent Reflection: Day 1)

2012-02-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

Why are we here? Why do we go to church on Sundays or choose to come to an extra chapel; I think we are here because somewhere deep inside we are hopeless. Or for some it’s not even deep inside; their hopelessness clings to there clothes and hangs on their shoulders like a menacing burden. Yet somewhere within each of us is a place, a space, a void, where our hopelessness is recognized, there is a hopeless void of space where we can’t feel the presence of God. We fear it. We don’t like to talk about it but we all have that place where the void, the darkness, the lack of God (or at least lack of noticing God) takes over. And so we all find ourselves here. Sitting by ouselves, hoping to hear a word, feel a feeling, or taste the taste, of God in those places of void.

Some try to step into faith, yet all they can think of is how at home their closest relationship is falling into darkness and so it becomes their darkness, their void, they wonder where God is in that, though they never would admit it. Maybe some find themselves in a new place where nothing seems the same as it was before and so they worry “but God, even though I hear you are, are you really here.” Many are longing for relationships to be restored, for loved ones to come back, or for friends who are gone to be sitting right next to them. So silently many wonder, “but God where are you?”

We don’t like to ask that question; God where are you? My lord why have you forsaken me (Mark 15:34)? Or after one of his friends tells him the Lord is always present Job says “ya but If only I knew where to find Him?!... I go to the east; he is not there. If I go to the west, I do not find him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of Him” (Job 23). We don’t like to sit in that place, we don’t even like to glance, skip, or run over it. We deny it. We ignore the state of lamentation, of pain, of sorrow, of tragedy, because something inside each of us screams “be careful! Remember the void inside you, remember the place that you don’t see God, don’t feel God, don’t sense God, remember that place and don’t you dare stay there? Remember and then quickly pass over it. Remember it, just long enough for you to push it away into even more darkness.” But there is something about the void, about the darkness, about the struggle.

As the season of Lent begins, let us ponder this question: why are we here? Why do we seek our faith and strive to step deeper into the heart of God?

We have all been created by the Divine Creator: God formed us from the dust and each other, and to the dust we shall return. We all spend our fair share of time in the darkness. This would be a dismal fact if it were not for the second half of the spiritual reality. Adam and Eve were born and overtaken by spiritual death, yet they are given life again by Jesus’ birth-life-death -resurrection just as we are. From the dust to the dust. From death to resurrection. From dark to light. I’ll be pondering these themes today, the beginning of Lent.

Solstice

2012-01-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

The sun shone crisp as I placed each foot in front of me down the coastal trail. Clouds cowered from the sun, so I could distinguish between the salty water and the hovering sky, between the ancient mountains and rest of the city at their feet. It is a rare thing this time of year, to see with such clarity. It is a luck game really: a chance encounter with the perfect moment at the perfect time, when the sun reflects off the water and the water reflects onto the jutting towers of earth.

I encountered that moment. Luck—chance—grace. The winter solstice was the next day, so hope seemed to flutter all around, for the dark days of winter would soon give way to longer days of light. And today was like a procession of days to come, the earth soaked in the warmth and life arose if only for a small moment.

As I walked, drops of snow melted from the tree limbs and fell to the ground, faintly murmuring like a classroom of whispering children. The birds came out that day. A flock of sparrows was chased from a tree by a grumpy raven and the sparrows flew like a scarf in the wind, looping around in escape, yet returning to their tree of safety, their foundation, their home. I felt like the sparrows that day—pushed away for a moment—but the steps in front of me and the trail before me eased my spirit and centered my heart.

As I walked, I crossed a bridge over a creek. As if flash frozen, the ripples of the once strong water stuck in place as icy shells. Yet in this day of hope, like the birds, like the whispers of dropping snow and like me, the water came out for the procession. In the center of the creek bed a small stream formed again. The water fought its way through the blue hued ice. Pushing—flowing—fighting to make it to its destination of ocean. Pushing—flowing—fighting to return home. I felt like the water that day, as the inner wrestling of my spirit began to work through my own icy shell.

Antiqued Birch--Reaching Spruce--Noble Pines

2011-12-13T13:54:00.000-08:00

I let Riley off of the dog leash. She hopped through the snow like a white hare. I followed several feet behind, dodging the flung snow from her path and watching her play. I admired her freedom, her liveliness, and her excitement about every new scent and every unexpected murmur in the woods.

I could see my breath in front of me. I had been in cold before, but not like the cold in Alaska. As the air chilled, the wet breath frosted onto my beard like the pray “snow” my grandma

used to spray around the edges of her windows during Christmas time. Moving to Anchorage created a whirlwind of my once familiar life; I love Anchorage, but packing boxes, unpacking boxes, looking for jobs, looking for a place to live, all of this can take its toll

The dog and I played: running in circles, pawing each other, taking a break and then starting back again. And then, amongst our commotion, it started. The snow— it began to fall again. I first paused at the wet tickles on my skin. Riley followed the intermission of play at my queue, looking up at me. And there I was, in the forest, amongst the antiqued birch, the reaching spruce, and the noble pines; there I was, amongst them and their kingdom. They spoke no words, but the falling snow spoke, in fact it sang sweet arias of pleading passion: “Pause—rest—breath” Said the silent trees and the falling snow.

So I stood. Riley, not sure what was going on sat beside me, nuzzling her chin against my leg, so I bent down beside her and I wrapped my arms around her.

“Listen,” I said. “Silence.” I couldn’t remember the last time I encountered silence. It is a rare thing these days. The snow fell and the world around me reached out to receive the billowy white. By now, the setting sun tinted the snow like mangoes and grapes, and I couldn’t believe I was amongst this: this silence—this peace—this beauty—these colors.

I continued through the woods, which acted as my own prayer labyrinth. And I found peace in breathing. The world will pass us by if we do not pause for it and breathe in its sweet aromas. The trees will sing to us and we will miss their melodies if we do not listen for them. The colors of the earth will present themselves to us, yet we will miss them if we live in chaos.

Riley began to paw me; this is her sign she wants attention. “Come on girl,” I urged, running forward so she would follow.

Advent Reflection #2: The Mechanics of Breathing

2011-12-05T10:26:00.001-08:00

Breathing: it’s something we all must do. Yet, it is amazing how such a simple concept can sometimes be difficult. Asthma, allergies, dust, and sickness, all of these things complicate the rythym.

****

I sat in the waiting room of Greatclips, one of those $15 dollar haircut places that always manage to make your hair worse. As I moved up the 5 person waiting list, a man was just finishing up with his cut. The exuberantly obnoxious hair “stylist” brushed the loose hair off his shoulders and flung the oversized bib off his chest.

“Thank you,” he said. Standing up, he pressed his hands against the armrests of the chair, releasing a slight tremor in his elbow. Once up, he reached down by his feet and picked up his portable oxygen tank. The machine pumped. I could hear it now: woooo—whoosh—woooo—whoosh.

“What will you be doing with the rest of your evening?” asked the hair “stylist.”

“Well (woooo—whoosh) I think I’m gonna go get a Kaladi.” Kaladi Bros. is the hip place to get coffee in Anchorage. I watched him walk out the door. I listened as well. Woooo—whoosh—woooo—whoosh.

“Andrew?!” It was my turn for a haircut.

****

Riley jumped onto the bed in the middle of the night. She nuzzled her whiskery chin by my cheek, wagging her tail briefly before falling to sleep again. I wish I had the ability to fall asleep as easily as dogs do.

I have been in the process of moving and it has put a toll on Riley. She looks up at me

with her brown eyes as if she were saying: “What the hell is going on here!” My heart melts and I pet her and she goes back to chewing up the corner of all my packing boxes.

Yet, now she lay beside me in bed, as if she needed some body to lie against, some presence to know she wasn’t alone amongst the moving chaos. I didn’t mind it. It was cute.

Then I heard her breathe. Her breathing was like a walrus. She bellowed in and out, snoring like a grandpa. I moved her neck down so she could breathe easier. The breathing sounds became normal. Yet, as I started to close my eyes, Riley stuck her chin back by my neck, nuzzling me. The bellows ensued. All through the night—bellows.

****

Breathing: it’s something we all must do. Yet, it is amazing how such a simple concept can sometimes be difficult. Asthma, allergies, dust, and sickness, all of these things complicate the rythym.

As the Advent season unfolds around me I have been thinking a lot about breathing. I never knew of Advent until my first year at George Fox University; it quickly became one of my favorite times of year. When I learned about Advent I also learned about the Church Calendar, which is a concept I adore.

Throughout ages the Church has entertained a rhythm: Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Easter, and so forth. One might say the Church’s rhythm has been an exercise in breathing.

It is easy to forget what the inner murmur of the heart sounds like. It is even easier to ignore the whispers of the Divine in our lives. That is, unless we breathe. That is, unless we find a rhythm.

We must learn how to breathe, for breath is not only a physical lifeline but a spiritual lifeline.

For the man at Greatclips, breathing reminds him of his mortality. If this man does not breathe intently and with his machine, he will fall. In the same way, our breathing must be intentional. We must find a rhythm and then train our hearts to beat to it and teach our lungs to dance to it. Our spiritual breathes should take on fervor.

For Riley, my dog, breath (even though clogged) was a sign of comfort— she was safe from the chaos, lying beside her keeper. In the same way our breathing should remind us of the presence of the Divine in and around us. You are not alone. The Divine is near.

Woooo-Whoosh. In-Out. Breath.

Remember.

Advent Reflection #1: Unexpected Healings

2011-11-29T15:12:00.001-08:00

Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues during the Sabbath, an act prohibited by the authorities; no work was to be done on the Sabbath and healing, so it seemed, was "work." As Jesus taught, many listened, yet some also looked at him with scorn for his breaking of the ancient system.

Then, in the middle of a sentence someone caught his eye. He stopped his train of thought and called out to the women. The women before him stood out amongst the crowd. People gawked at her with looks of scorn and contempt just as some looked at Jesus. The crowds left perimeters of empty space around the women so as not to come in contact with her. The women, you see, was twisted to a ninety degree angle. Bent forward at her waist, crippled, in-pain, and barely able to walk, she was forced to stare at the ground for 18 years of her life. 18 years of the ground--of limited vision--of the fear that came with not knowing who was in front of you or behind you except by the shape of their feet. Years of being avoided and unnoticed.

Yet Jesus noticed her. As he called out to her, others had to nudge her attention as she couldn't see Jesus was referring to her. Surprised, she began to walk forward. The ground moved underneath her as she approached Jesus in nervous anticipation, not sure what he wanted with her. When she finally made it to Jesus, he said to her: “You are set free from your infirmity.” The crowds chuckled. Is he insane? They muttered to themselves.

Despite the crowds scepticism and the rage of the authorities over Jesus doing "work", he rested his hands upon the back of the woman. Like a flower, once wilted and now alive, the woman's body straightened miraculously before the crowd. As each vertebrae straightened it cracked into the air. The cracks echoed through the synagogue like a bugle after war, announcing freedom and pain-no-more.

"You are healed," said Jesus. "You are free." ( Luke Chapter 13)

***

There are several ways this story applies to the Advent season.

Advent is about waiting with hope for the Divine to make the world as it ought to be, yet advent is also about discovering, remembering, and basking in the glimpses of hope that already glitter the world. Here we have a women, who for 18 years was forced to live life from a disadvantaged position--face toward the ground, limited vision, metaphorically in the darkness. As Advent begins, we are in this place too.

The mega-narrative of God is mimicked in the story of this women: like the woman, humanity finds itself in troubling circumstances and out of God's mercy and grace things change. The Divine guides us from the darkness to the light, from running away to abiding in God's embrace, from being stuck into darkness to seeing the light, and from being bent over and crippled to being free to move with exuberance.

But the woman was crippled for 18 years; there was waiting, lots of waiting, and all of the trappings that go along with waiting, I am sure: doubt, frustration, finding hope, losing hope, apathy, etc. We are this woman and we wait with hope for the Kingdom of God to blanked the whole world like fresh snow in winter.

Advent is about waiting with hope for the Divine to make the world as it ought to be, yet advent is also about discovering, remembering, and basking in the glimpses of hope that already glitter the world.

Amongst the waiting, her healing comes unexpectedly. Jesus heals her on a day when, according to the religious authorities, no healing is supposed to take place. In a world that seems dark and twisted and in a world where the established norms say nothing can and/or will change, the Divine says IT CAN. The Divine waters the seeds of hope waiting for us to notice them and remember them and re-plant them.

Advent is about waiting with hope for the Divine to make the world as it ought to be, yet advent is also about discovering, remembering, and basking in the glimpses of hope that already glitter the world.

Gender

2011-06-16T19:00:00.001-07:00

For Every Woman By Nancy R. Smith, copyright 1973

For every woman who is tired of acting weak when she knows she is strong, there is a man who is tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.

For every woman who is tired of acting dumb, there is a man who is burdened with the constant expectation of "knowing everything."

For every woman who is tired of being called "an emotional female," there is a man who is denied the right to weep and to be gentle.

For every woman who is called unfeminine when she competes, there is a man for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity.

For every woman who is tired of being a sex object, there is a man who must worry about his potency.

For every woman who feels "tied down" by her children, there is a man who is denied the full pleasures of shared parenthood.

For every woman who is denied meaningful employment or equal pay, there is a man who must bear full financial responsibility for another human being.

For every woman who was not taught the intricacies of an automobile, there is a man who was not taught the satisfactions of cooking.

For every woman who takes a step toward her own liberation, there is a man who finds the way to freedom has been made a little easier.

Folksy Rifts

2011-05-26T20:41:00.001-07:00

Birch, like leaves of grass

Dance in the wind to

Folksy rifts of breeze and

Sliding strings of spring

They sway.

Changing-times climb up

The stripped paper-clothes

Sheltering trunks.

Like jack and his beanstalk,

Potential waits like a giant.

Unknown births announce themselves

Emerging amongst reaching branches,

Upon which buds deliver peace.

Yet, is it selfish to reside,

In peace, to reside? Away,

And Anew—though people

Urged “not to.”

Still, the birch calls to me—

Like mom announcing dinner

To the neighborhood clamor—

They call.

The paper-bark

Sings lullabies. Casting

Doubt to beds of rest.

And I reside, in the sun,

Climbing the stripped

Rungs of dancing trees.

I climb, reaching for

Giants of hope and grace.

I climb, breathing in’

The folksy rifts and

Sliding strings.

A honey-stream of sound

Coursing through my soul,

Echoes who I am and

Who I yet will be.

I sit. Selfishness?

Avoidance? Adventure?

I will not name, for peace

Emerges in fleeting moments.

To name is to risk.

I dare not say, so I reside.

I allow the base-hums and

The whistling fiddle

Crawl up and down my

Flesh like the

Hands of a lover.

So, I remain.

So, I listen.

And the buds birth.

And the folksy rifts sing

“This is who you are—

This is who you yet will be.”

Catching Bees

2011-05-26T20:24:00.001-07:00

I knew it was summer

When eucalyptus leaves burst forth

Aromatic therapies through the

Half-moon bay air and

When the washed branches let out

Their silent prayers: those monarchs,

Huddled, wings gently flapping

Like infant eyelashes. Their

Reach reflecting light like

Stained glass portals.

I knew it was summer when the

Salmon hatched amongst

Water-massaged stones. Grey pillars

In a miniature watery-world, they

Guided the fish to the sea.

Then Uncle Bob reached for

The fishing poles and we tied

Lures in the cooling air of dusk.

We cast our lines and weeks of

Practice brought

Celebration to the table.

I knew it was summer when

Dad--though working all day--

Smiled, toiling willingly.

When he turned the soil

Gently tucking seeds into

Nests of earth as if they were

Extra children cuddled for dreams.

When he strung twine from ground to

Top of cedar fence--stretching spine-timelines

Upon which beans would

Reach towards rays of sun--

I knew it was summer.

I knew it was summer when

The purple bursts of flower

Danced amongst the green

Leaves of that special plant.

Then the bees returned, like

Children coming home.

I would run outside,

Mason-jar in hand

Looking about to catch

The tiny buzzers within the glass.

Contained within the glass shell,

They hummed whirls of yellow-black.

All around us potential

Sings like the bees—

Intimidating, angsty

And dangerous.

Yet we can catch it—

The morning. We can
Harness the new day,

Though viscous nights

Before may seem.

We must catch it

And when we do, our

Souls release in

Vibrant colors of hope.

The universe tucks us into

Its warm soil-embrace.

Perseverance gives way to

Celebration and

Stained glass saints

Emerge, beckoning

Our despair, guiding

The dark into

Fields of hope.

A Conversation with Anne Lamott 2007

2011-03-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

LOVE WINS - Rob Bell

2011-03-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

God is Like a Chiropractor

2011-03-18T13:20:00.001-07:00

They say Jesus is like a physician but I’m not sure if they have it right.

When I was dancing every day in middle and high school, I would lift girls and throw them in the air to big band swing. I twisted my back, threw out my spine, grinded my knees and warped my shoulders, but it was worth it.

My parents always said chiropractors were dangerous. “ You will never be able to not go, they just make you worse—blah blah blah.”

Next to the coffee shop I spend way too much time at, there is a chiropractors office. I’ve past it so many times the count would be in the thousands or higher. One day, after five years of tense muscles and slipped discs, I walked into the office and made an appointment.

In the first moments of my visit, my chiropractor asked me what was hurting. She looked at me nodding in understanding. “That is a lot of hurt,” she said.

Next she said: “So you will need to take of your shirt and loosen your belt and lay down on the massage table.” I did.

She placed warm packs along my back and on my neck. “I’ll be back in ten minutes or so,” she said. “Just relax, these will loosen up the muscles so I can work on them.”

The packs started warming my skin and slowly soaked into the rest of me. Like bread soaking up syrup to make pudding, my body remained in stillness as the warmth allowed me to breathe. Breathe—breath. Sometimes we go and go. Sometimes we are so tense we forget to breathe.

“Alright, I’m going to work on the muscles now.” With my face down on the bed I heard her grabbing a bottle from the drawer. I tensed up momentarily awaiting the chill of lotion upon my skin. But as she drizzled the lotion upon my bare skin like icing on a cake, it was warm. She had been heating it. I was surprised that it didn’t abruptly chill my bones.

She ran her forearm up my back and massaged my shoulder muscles with her strong touch. At times it was soothing and at times, as she met one of my knots, it hurt like shit.

Next, she wiped me dry. “Alright Andrew, if you could turn on your side for me. Cross your arms and bring your leg up.” I did. She placed her hands on me and she placed her weight on me and she pushed down with force. CRACK. My spine sent cries of freedom into the universe, releasing the pent up air that caused discomfort.

They say Jesus is like a physician, I’m not sure if they have it right because I think instead, God is like a chiropractor.

Jesus looks into your eyes and asks you were you hurt.

The Spirit warms your muscles, soaking into the deepest flesh and the hardest tissue.

When you fear the touch will send chills, God lathers your soul with grace, warm grace, unexpected grace.

God massages the tension, the pain, and the calices. At times it is soothing, peaceful even. At times, as God hovers over the deepest pain His/Her touch hurts like shit, but a good hurt, a necessary hurt.

And then, once the pain subsides a bit, God realigns your spine, your soul, your spirit. God puts pressure; pressure which is soft and firm at the same time. God holds the roots of our being weaves them into His/Hers.

They say Jesus is like a physician, I’m not sure if they have it right because God is like a chiropractor. We are realigned; our roots are woven in to Divine’s. We are lathered in grace. We are massaged. We are listened to. We are understood.

Language

2011-03-07T17:39:00.001-08:00

I have been refreshed by stepping a bit into the original language of the scripture and studying the Greek first hand as led in class.

Lacan, the prodigy of Freud, says we all begin at a stage of "oceanic feeling," where we experience our world without the limited confines of language. As we mature and are socialized we began to learn those names which signify the things in our world. And instead of having a sense of oceanic feeling where everything is connected and one, we began to see the differentiation in all things so that we can begin to identify who we are. Language, therefore, requires one to differentiate the ocean ( objects, people, etc) into categories that can never adequately stand in for the actual essence of the things in our world. Instead of recognizing oneness we function in a "presence made of absence" as Lacan says.

This presence of absence is how our society has come to define the female. And in our interpretation of scripture, especially in traditional studies of Pauline theology, we perpetuate this language of differentiation and a drive to identify ourselves against another.

If we didn't think of language and the world in this way, i wonder if our conversations would even question the legitimacy, the roles, and the appropriate actions of women in the Church. What, I wonder, would happen if we returned to a state of oceanic feeling, where the world was an endless sea of God's presence and Grace. A mindset, where we defined ourselves not through difference but through the revelation that God's presence and Grace flows eternally through all, man and woman, therefore how could one even delve into the realm of specialized, hierarchical, or subjective roles for one group of people or another.

I think the change in the Church will be centered around our redeeming of language: when we redefine the system by which we label and identify. As i begin to discover more about these truths of language and reality, I feel deeply connected to God and know or at least feel strongly that the way forward in the Church is the re-working of language. What if our very language, the system that forms our relaities, was one that proclaimed the hesed of God that "sets captives free, breaks chains, and brings sight to the blind" the hesed that makes it possible for the Kingdom to transcend cultural differences so that whether you are gentile/jew, man/woman, etc etc God is open to you. What if our language, at least in the Church was formed around this drive.

Because, while I see great hope in the possibility of language redemption I simultaneously know the God of mainstream evangelical Christianity seems at times so vastly different from the Divine in my heart or the deconstruction i see Jesus performing on earth as he tore down the conceptions we humans had of the earth in order to reverse them into the Kingdom way. The Divine presence in me cannot understand hierarchies, or oppression disguised as complementarianism. I just dont get it, not because i am something but because God has spoken into my being. And I know certain truths as fundamental, not dogmas or doctrines but truths that flow like an ocean within me and throughout the Universe.

I know that God wants to redeem every person and perhaps God's love will do just that, I know God does not care about the darkness of peoples hearts or at least this darkness does not stop God's hesed from moving in desperation and if the former is the case why would someones biology be a hindrance either? why are there young girls who have heard God say: "I want you to speak for me, to pastor my people for me, to heal the Church." Yet these girls remain silent because they know and they have been told that no because they are a girl this could never be so. I mourn over this and hope soon light will break through overwhelmingly in this still very dim stream of the Church.

Sometimes we are...

2011-03-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

I once heard a story about a situation that happened at a young life camp. It was the last night of the camp and there was a dance at a lower level of the camp, which all the kids ahs to climb down steps to get to the party.

Charles took longer to get ready than the other campers since he was in a wheelchair. The others didn’t notice he was still in the bathroom getting dressed as they left in excitement to the lower levels of camp for the dance.

Charlie finally came out of the bathroom to discover all of his cabin mates had left already. So Charlie started towards the dance, he didn’t want to miss anything. He rolled the wheels as fast as he could to join the party but when he got to the stairs he had to stop. He looked around for a ramp, but there was none. His shoulders slumped in sadness: there was no way he would be able to get down to the dance. He saw the lights from atop the hill and he heard the music echoing off of the camp’s scenery and he saw from a far distance his friends dancing and shouting and rejoicing.

He reversed his chair and headed back to the cabin.

When all the students had made it dressed in eighties attire two of the high school kids said to themselves: “where is Charlie?” The two friends asked around but no one had seen him at the dance. “ We thought he was right behind us,” every said.

So the two friends left the crowd and ran up the steps with three other people they had recruited to find their friend Charlie. The climb up the many steep steps to the top of the hill.

“ How could we have forgotten about him,” they say, panting from the running.

As they make their way to the cabin to the cabin to get Charlie, the find him on the path wheeling his chair defeated.

“Charlie! Come on what are doing?” his friends shout from a distance still running towards him.

“I couldn’t make it down there— I cant dance anyway, I’m just going to go sit in the cabin— ill see you guys when you get back, go on have fun!” Charlie smiled, but on the inside he felt as if life would never have any semblance of normalcy.

“Hell no your not!” And the five friends rushed around Charlie and still running, pushed him to the edge of the steps.

“Guys, I cant get down, I told you.”

Without words they circled around Charlie and his chair, and they reached their hands underneath the metal frame, lifting Charlie into the air. Balancing him between the five of them they carried Charlie down the steep steps—-step—step. They carried him all the way to the party.

And as they approached the crowd he rode like a king in a parade, carried and important.

“Hey there you are Charlie,” said the DJ through the microphone, “ we were wondering where you were! Welcome!”

Everyone cheered and Charlie’s friends wheeled him into the middle of the dance circle where he joined in the party. Now Charlie’s smile on the outside matched his insides as well.

****

Jesus was in a house, packed with people who gathered to hear him speak and be healed. The crowd was so dense no one was left untouched by the others around them. People overflowed, out through the doorway. People peered through the open windows to get a glimpse of this person who had come to “set captives free and bring sight to the blind—to proclaim the year of the Lords favor catapulting to earth.”

Three friends had carried their friend from across town to be healed. Their friend had been paralyzed his whole life, never able to walk, subject to the care of others, never truly accepted, an outcast, an invalid. But his three friends thought they would at least try to see if this Jesus guy could heal their friend. They approached the house and saw the crowd.

“Guys,” said the paralyzed man, “its too crowded there is no way I can get to him. It’s okay lets just go back—this is how I am— he probably cant heal me anyway, I’m helpless.”

The friends all stood in silence for a moment, laying their paralyzed friend on the ground. And they rushed the house. And they climbed on the roof. And they began to tear away the thatched ceiling creating a whole right above Jesus. The voices of the crows rose not knowing what was happening.

The friends jumped off the roof and grabbed their friend and together pulled him on top of the house and brought hi to the edge of the whole they had made.

Jesus looked up as the friends lowered their paralyzed companion at the feet of Jesus. Jesus looked into the mans eyes, full of tears, overwhelmed with unbelief at the situation unfolding before him.

“You have some miraculous friends,” Jesus said to the man. “ Be healed.”

And the man braced his arm behind him and placed his foot underneath him and shaking with fear stood up for the first time in his entire life. Step—step.

****

We play all of these parts: the crowd, the friends and the paralyzed.

At times we are part of the Christian mob. We follow blindly. We sing the songs we know to well. We say the prayers that are shallowly words. We say “God is all I need,” when in reality we are falling apart and know we need more, because that is how we were created.

God said this in Amos 5:21-23

“I can't stand your religious meetings.

I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.

I want nothing to do with your religion projects,

your pretentious slogans and goals.

I'm sick of your fund-raising schemes,

your public relations and image making.

I've had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.

When was the last time you sang to me?

Do you know what I want?

I want justice—oceans of it.

I want fairness—rivers of it.

That's what I want. That's all I want.”

So sometimes we are the crowd, we miss the point, we live on Jesus highs crowding and mobbing each other to get what WE need and what WE need only.

At other times, we recognize our call and we become the friends for someone. We carry our paralyzed companions and lower them to the feet of Jesus. Because it is us who are called to bring justice, to issue in healing, to carry each other to Jesus and feed the voice of grace in those around us until they grasp their belovedness.

But most of the time, if not all the time, we are the paralyzed. We are Charlie. We cannot make it to the party. We cannot make it any longer on our own. We are paralyzed in darkness and hopelessly in pain.

We are paralyzed by our guilt, our sin, our failure, our sadness, our past, our uncontrollable circumstances. So we need friends. We need people who will carry us to the feet of Jesus. We need people who will not allow us to stand on the sidelines and miss the party.

We need people who will invite us to the Great Banquet, the Kingdom on Earth, the celebration of the year of the Lords favor. And after we have been invited we need friends who will not rest until we stand in the center of the crowd, until we know without a doubt we are and worthy of love.

We need friends who will carry us until our heart beat sings the words of God:

“There you are!”

Ba-bump-ba-bump

“ I wondered where you were.”

Ba-bump.

“You are beloved—“

Ba-bump.

“I have been waiting for you. Oh how I am glad you are here!”

The True Self

2011-02-23T19:57:00.000-08:00

The True Self

Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks

2011-02-23T13:57:00.000-08:00

In the book Fanon is commenting on the relation between colonized peoples of black skin and the white colonized. He states that neither "white" nor "black" exist but are fabricated realities, used to alienate and conversely express power over another.

As i was reading i couldn't help but think of Jesus' teachings:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed." Luke 4:18

And Galatians 3:28: " There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Perhaps some of this could be read as prophetic vision for the Evangelical Mainstream Church as well, especially when Fanon defines the Bourgeois

"There is a dramatic conflict in what is commonly called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an ever-changing light?"

" ON this subject, i shall remark on something I have found in many writers: intellectual alienation is a creation of bourgeois society. And do me bourgeois society is any society that becomes ossified in a predetermined mold, stifling any development, progress, or discovery. For me bourgeois society is a closed society where it's not good to be alive, where the air is rotten and ideas and people are putrefying. And i believe that a man who takes a stand against this living death is in a way a revolutionary."

" Some men want to whole world to know who they are."

"Every time a man has brought victory to the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to enslave his fellow man, I have felt a sense of solidarity with his act.

In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color.
In no way do i have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future."

"There are from one end of the world to the other men who are searching.

I am not a prisoner of History. I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.

I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life.

In the world i am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.
I show solidarity with humanity provided i can go one step further."

"May man never be instrumentalized. May the subjugation of man by man-- that is to say, of me by another--crease. May i be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be.

The black man is not. No more than the white man.

Both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born. Before embarking of a positive coiuce, freedom needs to make an effort at disalientation. At the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in contingency. The misfortune of man is that he once was a child.

It is through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension of his freedom, that a man can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.

Superiority? Inferiority?

Why not to simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?
Was my freedom not given to me to build the world of you, man?...

My final prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!"

A Powerful Yet Contained Light

2011-02-17T12:34:00.003-08:00

The first time it happened it scared me. I wondered about the status of my mind. Yet, some things, circumstances, ideas and visions carry with them showers of peace so intense, it seems their genesis can only be in grace and truth.

The first time I was laying in bed, curled in fetal agony. Hope slipped away like a lathered bar of soap and so I writhed, sobbed, screamed silent-screams of anger to the Divine.

Then it happened. At first

I thought a person had crawled into bed with me so

I looked over my shoulder. It was

not a person. A powerful and contained light

held the form of a human; just an outline,

like the ash left after the Hiroshima bomb. It possessed the same haunting essence too, for it seemed in one glance

I felt all the limited reality of humanity,

our ability to kill abandon belittle sow bitterness

lose faith. Then in the same instance

I felt the ever-persistent embrace of God massaging my painful soul-sores into health.

The spiritual manifestation of Grace in the form of a body laid beside me, wrapped its arm around me. It whispered a sort of spiritual vitality into my heart, yet the whisper flowed without words.

It danced

in a language no human concepts could explain in words;

the poetic language of the Divine the language that birthed

substance form chaos life from dust.

The language soured through my veins like IV fluids, re-hydrating, chilling my insides initially then settling through my veins as a warm breath of shalom.

The being follows me now. Like my shadow it appears and disappears,

it can be vibrant and faint

it feels like a person behind me urging me forward or someone in front of me guiding my way.

If I let my hand to the side, open, welcoming. The being places its hand in mine.

It is solid, yet vapor.

It is warm and cold, both at the same time.

Goosebumps stream down my skin. The warmth flows through me. I float for a moment, at first touch. It is as if I am in one microscopic moment being lifted into heaven. Then I ground again, but the hand never lets go. It clutches around my palm.

“I am here.” The language whispers. “I am here— you can go on.”

Wading Through The Hard Spaces

2011-02-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

I was asked to write a non-biased news story for the Crescent regarding the chapel controversy from a last week....this is what came out...:/

Ive been asked to not be biased in my article regarding the Theology of the Land chapels; however, the former concept of objectivity is impossible and in large part what has led to the issues that arose from the chapels.

I am a person with biases. I cannot help it; they seep from being as they abound in

every person. Each one of us carries our own miniaturized worlds and realities, formed

since birth by our families, our parents, our schools, our cultures, our media, etc.

Being highly involved in the Spiritual Life programs on campus, as Prayer Chaplain, Student Chaplain and now Chapel Producer, I hear about the many complaints about chapel. All of these complaints are different and contradictory to each other.

“Scripture says it should look like this.”

“Why aren’t you teaching like this.”

“Why are there candles.”

“Why aren’t there candles.”

“Why isn’t there more silence.”

“Why isn’t their more music.”

Sometimes I even get emails about things as trivial as the lighting in chapel: “Today it was too bright, I couldn’t worship,” or “today the lights were too dark I couldn’t worship.” The list goes on and on and on.

The enlightenment era catapulted into culture (and not really before that time) and humankind began coursing on a trajectory towards an absolute truth of some sort. Rationalism began dominating the processes of human thought and reality formation, claiming that one truth existed and that it could be discovered.

The Scientific Method convinced many that the entire Universe could be catalogued, eventually. If one tried hard enough, long enough, conducted enough experiments, then truth could and would, always be reached.

Yet, as Wendell Berry states: “When we consider how often and how recently our most advanced experts have been wrong about the future, and how often the future has shown up sooner than expected with bad news about our past…our ability to know is revealed as a superstition of the most primitive sort.”

What once appeared to be a world easily decipherable through empirical data, experiments, etc. suddenly exploded into the recesses of mystery. With events such as the atomic bombs dropping, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Holocaust, and the rising-acceptance of psychology (to name a few), the communal consciousness of the world began to find voids in a strictly cause-and-effect definition of the world.

In fact, as theologian and author Peter Rollins states: “Such perceptive thinkers as Feuerbach, Nietzche, Marx and Freud explored the extent to which our supposedly objective understanding of the world or God is always already affected by such factors as our education, upbringing, economic position and psychological make-up.”

Consequently, how one knows what one knows, believes what one believes, acts as one acts, cannot be traced in an outlined, linear, cause-and-effect pattern. Instead, a complex and interconnected web of nuanced impacts, influences, experiences, thoughts, environments, etc form the very essence of who one is, what one believes, and how one chooses to act in response to the world.

Consequently, it is impossible to “just look at scripture.” Though many would say, “ Scripture is clear, just listen to it,” the truth is we all interpret, everytime we open the Bible and process the words in our head. I’m not sure what Bible the former people are reading, but my Bible does not look like a textbook, it is not simple. My Bible is the story of God throughout history and that story is contradictory, paradoxical. Within the Bible’s covers is both murder and mercy, grace and punishment, fear and love, dark and light, depravity and renewal.

It doesn’t take much research to realize the relationship between the Western mindset and First Nation people has been tumultuous ever since the Westerners stepped onto the truly first Americans land. Apparently, the hostile take oppression of the First Nation people by Westerners has not halted completely.

This is a sad reality for me to realize. I would argue the objections to chapels content were not about any prayer or miscommunication, but instead about something deeper. We all search for a place were we can be free from anxiety, many use their faith as this place. If God is black and white they do not have to wrestle, their world is not shaken. Yet is this how we should approach our faith journey? I don’t think so, and most every major theologian throughout history, included scripture, claim the complexity and ultimately ungraspable nature of God.

I will not venture into a theological debate here, at least in the way that it is commonly understand in mainstream Evangelical circles. The reality is, however, every time I process, I think, I dream, I walk, and I breathe, I am acting as a theologian. I am working through my rational concepts of God in the best way I can as I see God in the world around me, recognizing that I will never grasp fully the vastness and mystery that is our Lord.

I find it problematic that members of our campus would out rightly reject an understanding of Christianity that looks different from our Western view. The chapel speakers presented Christ as he was and is revealed to them; of course it will look different.

It is different just as God has manifested to me in different ways then God has to you. Yet, I’ve heard people say and write in emails statements like the following: “ How is teaching us about a new culture relevant to us? If they were just going to teach us why didn’t they just do it in the classroom.”

After the opening prayer (which was the catalyst to much of the turmoil during the week) members of the community simply got up and left, forming their opinions on what and who God is and how God is working and moving. Amazing to think they can do that in 10 minutes.

The website for Spiritual Life at George Fox states the following: “Our mission is to encourage you to find your identity, passion and calling in relationship with Jesus Christ in order to engage you in the work of God in the world.

“Our hope is that your relationship with Christ will grow deep at George Fox University, rooted in Scripture, and through holy friendship, life-changing worship, challenging teaching, and frontline ministry opportunities.”

This is the mission of the administration, many professors, student leaders, and spiritual life staff. Their hearts are good. Their hearts are sorting through the same human-muck we all sort through, trying to see the face of God more clearly. Their hearts are deeply and fully committed to Jesus and the stories of redemption he declared. I know, I have worked closely with Sarah Baldwin, Rusty St. Cyr, Kayin Griffith, Andrea Crenshaw and everyone else who is involved in the Spiritual Life program at Fox.

Perhaps our campus needs to trust this fact. The administration and staff are not going to present you with anything that denounces God for their hearts and minds are deeply interwoven with that of our Creator.

Boycotts of chapel, emails of staff to their students rejecting anything that comes from Spiritual life, meeting with Student Life during Chapel, walking out and divisive debates are not the answer to wholeness, reconciliation and oneness. So what is the answer?

We must continue to engage in conversation even though it may feel like walking through fire, because at the most basic level we are ALL beloved children of God, who God reveals himself/herself in different ways.

Must most importantly, we must examine our own darkness. We must step head-on into our own shadows, ugliness, and fear. For most of the time, fear is what drives us. Fear that our understandings of God might not expand but fall apart, fear of difference, fear of rejection. The fear that we are unworthy and therefore we must constantly prove our worthiness through unshakeable opinions.

Martin Luther King Jr. said in his last speech, before he was executed: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

And brothers, sisters, First Nation Kingdom family, let us have our eye on the mountain top. Let us not splinter our ties, but let us stand in union hoping fervently for a day when we can all stand hand-in-hand and bask in the presence of God regardless of our ethnicity, theological views, sexual orientation, and sins.

“Jesus is the way, the truth and the light.” I live in this truth. But I am convinced my light will not look like yours, your way may not look exactly like mine, and our truths may not line up 100%, but that is okay with me. God is larger than my understanding, God is more active then I can ever imagine, and “God is reconciling all things into the Kingdom.”

Howard Stern

2011-02-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

Love him or hate him, Howard Stern has something to say here:

Sweet Words

2011-02-11T13:40:00.001-08:00

You whisper me sweet words of how I’m Yours and You are mine;

I arise from the waters and You declare.

I find myself not grasping who I am You say I am,

But I know your voice is calling me to try.

I am yours and you are mine; beloved you call me.

Beloved I, I’m am Yours and You are mine.

I’ll wait for You, Ill remain in You.

Ill wait for you to teach me who I am.

In the Beginning Was the Language...

2011-02-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

My mom came home from the store one day. She was picking out chicken from the fridges. A man came up to her, a sweet skinned man, a Mexican man. He began to speak to her in Spanish. At first she laughed inside of herself; Grandpa spoke to her in Spanish as a child, when she only cooed, when she was dependent on everything around her for everything she needed. Yet, she hadn’t spoken Spanish except perhaps as a child, she never learned it in school. Her laughter was in response to the irony. My mom is dark skinned, she has straight chocolate hair and deep brown eyes, at first glance her ethnicity is apparent, yet my mom is also as American as they come, so, she laughed inwardly.

My mom didn’t stop the man from his speech and he kept talking. After her inner laughter subsided, she found herself amazed. She could understand him, at least in fragments. Something within her remembered the language my Grandpa spoke to her when she was an infant. My three-year-old mom momentarily resurfaced from her being, and told my mom how she recognized the language.

****

When I was ten, my grandpa died. I laid in bed one night and tried to talk to him, the dead him. I had no intention of talking to a god or God, but I knew my grandpa was somewhere, at least his being, and I knew somehow he was being taken care of and loved. And so, after some time, I started talking not only to my grandpa, but to the being who loved him after his physical death too. I knew there had to be someone. Later, I found out the being I was conversing with, that my grandpa now rested with, was the One God, the “Christian” God, Jesus. I didn’t have a language for my intuitional feeling of a being that comforted and protected at ten-years-old, Nonetheless, I recognized the quite whispers of truth amongst me.

****

Einstein's famous formula from1905, E = mc2, explains the relationship between Energy and matter. Einstein speculated that Energy and matter are interchangeable: they waltz together with no lead; they shift back and forth exchanging and forming the Universe between them. Everything is Energy. Everything dances: the chair you sit in, the floor you stand on, the sky, the ground, and your body. Everything is fluid.

New understandings of physics claim that an accurate understanding of the Universe is through a physics of possibility. Western-mindset tells us the inner-Universe is untrustworthy, less authentic, “unreal.” The same mindset has ingrained into us that the world outside of us, the external world, and things that can be held and tested are more real. The new physics claims the opposite, claiming that what's happening on the inside determines what's happening on the outside. Nothing is fixed and everything is in a state of potential.

Though objects may appear solid, at the most microscopic levels their components dance, they ripple, and they flow. The whole Universe vibrates, hums; nothing stays and nothing truly sits.

****

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Word was with God in the beginning. Through Word all things were made; without Word nothing was made that has been made. In Word was life, and that life was the light of all humankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

—Gospel According to John: Chapter One

Perhaps Word is more similar to “language.”

In the beginning was the Language; the Language without words, the language that vibrates through all. The Language was with God in the beginning. Through the Language all things were made; nothing was made without the Language embedded within it.

Perhaps we are born knowing the language to some extent.

Like my mom, we are spoken the language by the Divine as infants, but over time, after fear cements itself within our beings, we lose our ability to speak in our first Divine language.

Though I did not have words when I was ten, I was miraculously able to hear the language and recognize its origins in the Divine and in Truth.

God is the language that hums in everything, it is the reason nothing is solitary but that everything is fluid. It is the reason we can recognize grace amongst us, even when we have no place to hold it, no church to share it, no scripture to interpret it, and no label to name it.

Genesis...again

2011-02-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

The first words of Ish (the first human God created.) are spoken in regards to the second dust-creature. " Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” says Ish, “we have been taken from the same substance… The two of them, the Ish and Ishsha, were naked, but they felt no shame " (Gen 2.23-25). Ish (now differentiated into two separate-entities/beings) is commenting on the oneness if the two earth creatures. Ish immediately recognized the new creature as one who has originated from the same substance. Ish names the new creature Ishsha, which means " from Ish."

In these first words of humanity, Ish is expounding on the creatures' deep connectedness: they are from the same dust (since Ish is made from dust, so then must Ishsha) and they are from the same breath from the Divine Creator. They are also complementary in that both earth creature reflect the image of the Creator separately and together. In relationship these first humans now reflect the image of God to each other, becoming a mirror to the Divine-face.

However, after the humans consume the fruit, their language and actions towards one another shifts significantly. Ish blames Ishsha for their folly and they run from each other, ashamed ( in comparison to Gen 2.25 as noted previously). It is in this moment that the first humans recognize their difference in terms of something other than wholeness., Think, for instance, of the posters composed of smaller images, the small images tonally create the larger picture. In this way, Ish and Ishsha existed as individual images of the Divine, yet also in communion with each other while representing a more holistic and vast image of the Divine.

After the Fall, the humans’ positive differentiation with each other, differentiation applied only in symbiosis with wholeness, becomes and exclusively sexuate difference ( not only sexual in terms of penis/vagina, but referring to how the body is sexed); only the sexualized is used to represent their identities. The former is evident by the humans’ sudden realization of their sexual identities: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden” (Gen 3.7-8). Previously, Ish and Ishsha existed in “nakedness”, yet it was not defined in terms of nakedness, for it was their only state of reference.

Luce Irigaray, a French feminist/linguist/psychoanalysist, comments on the formation of this sexuate difference throughout history. In essence, all sexuate difference is defined in relation to the male or phallic. All that does not fit into this male one is displaced and pushed aside; it is in this displacement Woman is formed. Additionally, in this stream of thought, Woman is a concept that has never been “thought”, the Woman is solely a conflation of all things not male, and Woman is the void, the vacuum. Irigaray states: “Woman remains this nothing at all, this whole of nothing yet, where each (male) one comes to seek the means to replenish resemblance to self (as) to same. And so she is displaced, yet until now it was not she who displaced herself” (“Volume Without Contours”). Woman is “never here and now” because she is the culmination of everything different from the male; she must remain as an un-thought entity so that in her representation and subjection she becomes the fuel with which the Male is defined. Consequently, the concept of the Woman does not exist; all that exists is the substance that is not Male, the substance that is defined with the linguistic signifier of “woman”.

I find this same dynamic in the Genesis account. At the end of chapter 3, the now sexually differentiated humans solidify their difference. Adam (the male) names the woman Eve; in this act Adam is taking dominion over the woman and identifying her once again as function, to be a mother. In chapter 4, “Adam sleeps with his wife” (Gen 4.1, emphasis added). Note how the verb belongs to Adam, Eve is his wife, not a separate identity or person. Eve, instead, exists as an object, a purpose, and a function. This same concept continues in verse 2. Eve says after the birth of her first son, “ I have acquired a man through the help of the Lord.” Not only does she now identify her child as man, she seems to rejoice in the fact that the child is male. Consequently, Eve’s identity is continued in displacement.

beautiful article/story

2011-02-02T20:17:00.001-08:00

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/02/george_fox_graduation_ceremony.html

All Is Vapor Yet God is Soverign

2011-01-31T17:16:00.000-08:00

[Inspired by Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, 14]

The world spins wild:
Spinning always. Time
Swirls its possibilities into the Universe.
Spinning—swirling—spinning, always.

There is a time for everything.
Every event, every breathe, every circumstance,
All are held under the sun.

Why evil? Why pain? Why guilt? Why shame?

No things are new.
The world spins, time holds
Holding—spinning—holding.

Death happens. Suddenly. After suffering, in the sleep, through war. Yet,
Infants still catapult into the earth, pushing, first screams of joy,
First breathes of air, freedom through pain.
A time to be born and a time to die

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will stand in awe of God, awe—awe.

Season come and go:
Winter washes upon the earth stripping leaves,
We leave the soil subject to time.
Spring blossoms into the air
Sending its sweet scents and new buds.
We have sewed, we have planted, we wait.
Yet, soon we must uproot.
Tearing—pulling, from the dust to the earth
A time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to kill and a time to heal.

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will stand in awe of God.

The house grew and gave for a hundred years,
But development must go on
Progression, pragmatism, economy.
The windows, generations of growing children
Curiously watched the earth through,
Shatter in heaps of rubble. Yet still,
A child pulls out the basket of blocks from underneath the bed.
Potential, holy imagination, building
Future dreams, block upon block, future hopes.
A time to tear down and a time to build,

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will stand in awe of God. Awe-awe.

Her husband takes his last breath, hand limp, she clenches
Tears began, weeps, audible pain.
We must surrender to the circumstances.
Wobbling though his son may be, the father lets go of his son’s hand
Step—springs of joy—step— a new beginning, beginning
Laughter-step-joy-step.
A time to weep and a time to laugh,

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will stand in awe of God.

Funerals, all dressed in black, coffins lower into the dust.
Mourners stand motionless, hopeless, imagining how times without will follow. Then,
A bride and a groom enter the dance hall, cheers, union, new life
Cheers, toasts, dancing—oh dancing, circles, feet-over-feet
Freedom and electricity.
A time to mourn and a time to dance.

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will stand in awe of God.
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.
A time to embrace and a time to refrain.
A time to search and a time to give up.
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will stand in awe of God.
A time to tear and a time to mend.
A time to be silent and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate.
A time for war and a time for peace.

The world spins wild,
Spinning always: time
Swirls its possibilities into the universe
Spinning—swirling—spinning, always.

So, there is a time for everything
And we are subject to that which happens
Sometimes we kneel helpless.
Sometimes we can affect.

Every event, every breathe, every circumstance,
All are held under the sun.
No things are new
The world spins, time holds;
Holding—spinning—holding,

And we stand in awe, awe, awe.

Drink the Water: Tearing Down Our Walls, Conceptions, and Limited Views

2011-01-30T19:41:00.003-08:00

So, in John four, Jesus makes an interesting shift in his ministry. Previously, he has only spoke to those in the official confines of Judaism. Yet in chapter four Jesus steps outside of these boundaries: in Jesus’ time, the Samaritans and the Jews were bitter enemies because of an ongoing debate about where worship should take place. The Jews worshiped at the temple in Jerusalem and the Samaritans had built a place of worship comparative to the temple at a mountain, that the women references.

I think it is interesting that if you look at other interaction Jesus has with people, for example his interaction with Nicodemus, a Jew, he is named: Nicodemus. When Jesus however, steps into Samaria and encounters the “woman at the well” she is essentially nameless, she is only identified by being an outsider to the Jews. She is a Samaritan, she is a woman. Therefore, Jesus’ conversation with the woman is scandalous, unheard of, something the Jewish religious leaders would have defiantly added to their list of things to gripe about in concern to Jesus.

So Jesus has been journeying quite some time, he is need of a drink. He enters a town while passing through Samaria, and in the town is a well. He sat down by the well, exhausted, and the disciples went off into the town to find provisions.

A moment passes and then a woman comes to draw water from the well.

Jesus begins to speak to her: “Will you give me a drink?”

“But you are Jew,” says the woman, “ how can I serve you water.” For as I mentioned Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.

“ If you only knew who is asking for water.” Says Jesus. “ If you would have recognized God’s gift you would be asking God for a drink, and God would have given you living water.”

She challenges Jesus: “ Well then, you don’t have bucket and this well is very deep, where do you expect to get this “living water”? Surely you are not claiming to be greater then the ancestors Leah, Rachel, and Jacob who gave us this well, who drank from it with their own mouths with their descendants and flocks?”

A moment of silence. Jesus accepts her challenge and perhaps smiles a bit at the woman’s strength amidst adversity, despite her marginalized status as both a despised people (Samaritans) and a despised human ( a woman).

Jesus begins: “ Everyone who drinks this water, from this well we sit at, will be thirsty again. But those who drink of the water I speak of will never be thirsty…no, the water I give will become fountains within those who drink it, the water will spring out and provide eternal life.”

Her challenging spirit diminishes. Sometimes hope comes when we think it never will. “I want this water.” Says the woman, desperately. “I am tired from walking all this way to fetch water daily.”

“Go get your husband,” Jesus says.

Silence. The woman’s momentary spark of hope is stifled by Jesus’ request.

“I don’t have a husband.” She states, embarrassed, all of her guilt, and shame, and isolation coming back to haunt her.

“I know.” Says Jesus. “You’ve had five, I know— and the man you live with now is not your husband.”

Perhaps the woman has been subject to the laws of marriage in her culture. Husbands died, leaving the woman hopeless. Perhaps, in the custom of the husbands brother marrying the wife when the husband dies, the brother refused to marry the woman, so she was forced to live with a man not her husband to survive, to eat, to have a roof.

“I can see you’re a prophet,” says the woman. She begins the first theological debate in the Gospel of John. “ So if we worship on the mountain and you in the temple where is the proper place of worship?”

“Believe me, the time will come when worship will originate in either place. Instead the hour is coming, it is already here, when real worshipers will worship Abba God in Spirit and in truth. For it is just worshipers Abba God seeks, God is Spirit and those who worship God must worship in Spirit and truth.”

Understanding Jesus’ point, she askes another question. “ Man, I know the messiah is coming, the anointed one who will tell us everything.”

Jesus replies: “ I who speak to you am the Messiah.”

At this moment the disciple run up to the well and they are astonished that Jesus is speaking to this Samaritan and on top of it all a woman. Yet none of them dare ask why, for as with everything else, Jesus has stripped away all that they knew previously.

The woman drops her Jar, says goodbye to Jesus, and runs into the town proclaiming the story of how she has just encountered the Messiah.

****

Jesus breaks down so many boundaries—walls— in this story.

He breaks down the walls of bitterness between the Jews and Samaritans, demonstrating that even the Samaritans are worthy of Abba God, even they can worship in their understanding and God will rejoice.

Jesus breaks down the gender barrier. He speaks to a woman, and nonetheless a woman who is deemed a whore in her society, a woman subject to the objectifying laws of her culture.

Jesus breaks down the conception of what worship is. Showing it does not matter necessarily where you worship or all the details of how you worship but he states that the Spirit flows through us, so we can worship anywhere anytime any circumstance.

He breaks down the barrier of the concept of salvation: the time is coming, and it is here. We are saved in the future and saved in the moment, continuously, perpetually, invited into grace.

Jesus teaches his disciples the significance of every human; he teaches them that nations, borders, and gender, cannot keep any one person from the Kingdom.

And I think most significantly of all, Jesus breaks down the walls of darkness within the woman. He gives her worth by sitting with her, asking her to serve him water, engaging in a philosophical and theological discussion. His actions say to the woman: you are worthy, you are wanted, and you are invited.

And then, he breaks down her conception of herself; the identity that has been perpetuated by her guilt and by those around her.

“I know you story,” says Jesus, “ and you know—the past doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you drink the water. And oh, how I want you to drink the water.

Oh, how I want you to feel the spring of renewal bubbling inside of you and fountains of grace to flow from your being.

Oh how I wish you knew you true identity: how you belong to the spirit to Abba God, how you are beloved.

That is your identity, beloved. Not whore, not merely woman, not leavable, one who is only abandoned, or one who’s only purpose is to fetch water: no you are beloved, drink the water” says Jesus. “ live at last—drink— live eternal—drink—bath in the Spirit and the truth.”

Bearing Witness To Hope

2011-01-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

Bearing Witness To Hope

Creation

2011-01-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about the accounts of creation in Genesis lately and was moved to write out a re-imagining of the accounts. I have looked at the original uses of names for God and for Adam and Eve. Enjoy.

A Narrative of How YHWH Created

Part 1

After speaking order into chaos, planting seeds, illuminating the sky, adorning the waters with living creatures and the lands with breathing animals YHWH realized the goodness of all these things.

YHWH breathed deep and the Universe soaked into the Divine; YHWH became one with all created. Yet something was missing; YHWH spoke yet again.

"Let us make humans in Our image; from the nature of our community let us form them."

Humankind was breathed into being; in the Divine womb they grew as a reflection of Elohim, in the Divine image God created them; with the essence of maleness and femaleness, God made them.

" Remain in us and the earth; reign with stewardship and caretaking, for you "earth creatures" were created in Our image, the image of the One.

Part 2

The heavens, the earth, in every array were created. After countless work, speaking actions, and breathing life, Elohhim rested. This is the family history.

YHWH fashioned from the dust of the earth a creature; first a hollow shell it entered the earth, yet YHWH breathed deep into the nostrils, into the shell and life sparked.

The earth creature walked through the garden teeming with other Divine creations, yet soon the soil-birthed creature sensed the breath of YHWH overwhelming inside of it.

YHWH spoke: "It is not good for my earth creature to be alone, Elohim will create other creatures to walk the soil. Yet, none of these seemed to give a space for the overwhelming breath of Elohim to be shared.

So YHWH put the earth creature into a deep sleep. For YHWH knew that the breath of the Divine could not be kept to oneself, but must be shared in community. So They, the One Elohim, took a side of the earth creature and closed the flesh back up. As before, YHWH formed the seperated flesh into form and shared the breath of Elohim with both earth creatures. Between the two of them, YHWH fashioned two essences which would later come to be known as maleness and femaleness; only together and with YHWH, could the two earth creatures find completion; only through holding both essences in their soil-birthed beings could they be whole.

Shaking The Dust

2011-01-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Shake the Dust by Anis Mojgani

(Mat 9:20-22; Mar 5:25-34; Luk 8:43-47)

" Jesus went down into the dust of death in order that the power of his resurrection might be manifest in our own lives. This power is seen, not in our natural gifts, not in talents or human wisdom or in [hu]man's strength. It is made evident only in the contest between what appears in us-- what is human and our own-- and by what does not appear: the secret power of grace." - Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

This is a story about a woman. In her time she had a condition that made her worse off than many of the marginalized in our culture today: the fat girls, the wimpy picked on boys, the addict. This woman had bled continuously for twelve years. Blood, most things bodily in fact, are deemed in her culture unclean and therefore pushed aside. So I imagine this woman’s life was one of deep loneliness, abandonment, and pain. Just like the poem we heard: the woman became subject to the many things, people, systems etc., that cast individuals, groups of people, whole nations even, into the abyss of darkness. Like the “school-yard wimps, and childhood bullies who tormented them…Like the former prom queen, and the gym class wall flowers and the twelve-year-olds afraid of taking public showers,” this woman is all to familiar with the dark and limiting identities we are given and take on in this world.

The woman lived in a world of dust, hazy, dark, the dust seems to fall around her as she lives; the dust traps her in her own internal apocalypse.

She was unworthy. She was cast away. No doctors could fix her; no one could shake off her dust. So it piled around her, it covered her in sooty bitterness, it clung to her body and she could not shake it.

And so after twelve years of misery, after twelve years of hopelessness, after twelve years of failed medicine, she heard about a man. She heard the town talking about what the neighbor town talked about and that town heard talked about: a man who performed miracles. Some said he raised people from the dead, some said he once transformed water into wine, some said he walked on water.

And from the talk about the talk about the talk, she found out he was coming to her very city. That day, crowds of people gathered in the streets. Like overbearing mothers dragging their leashed-children at Disneyland to get the best spot for the parade, the city gathered along the dirt streets.

The dust flew in ankle deep clouds from all of their commotion, from their pushing, from their desperation.

The man’s name was Yeshua. He was not beautiful; he was dirty, skinny even as if he ate little. Yet, regardless, he was followed by friends. Though his feet were crusted in dirt, the dust did not stop the crowd from gathering to see if the talk about the talk about the talk, was really true.

As Yeshua entered the town square, crowds pushed around him, mobbing him from every side, while his close friends tried to protect him.

The woman, the bleeder, the one who lost hope of a healer and gave up to darkness and mud, stood up. From her stasis under a store awning, she rose. She ran next: running— pushing—running. Parting the crowd aside as if she were an NFL linebacker. Yet they overcame her.

She fell to her knees.

The mob stomped her, stepped on her hands. She’s not more than one who bleeds: stompable—disposable—less than human.

Yet with a bruised eye and scratched up knees, she claws her way through the legs and past the feet of the layers and layers and layers, pushing through the crowd to reach the man she heard about.

With each hand forward she thought, desperately, “he is my only hope, my last hope….if a don’t make it to him then….”

After an adrenalin surge of clawing and crawling the woman looked up.

Though one row of people stood in front of her, she could see through their legs and arms and in between their morphing-wall-bodies, the man.

She reached her hand out through the legs of a spectator. Her middle finger brushed the heel of the man, Yeshua. He took more steps: step-stepping-step.

“I have failed she thinks, I failed.”

“Who touched me?” A voice cried out: Yeshua, the man. Everyone stopped; the mobbing, the stomping, the desperate glances to see a miracle, they halted.

“What do you mean? Everyone is touching you!” Said on of Yeshua’s friends.

Jesus took a step forward. Silence. The first layer of people cleared his path, stumbling backward as if a great light had blinded them.

There before him, before Yeshua, the woman kneeled. Our story’s woman, the bleeding woman: defeated, hopeless, in a dusty inner-apocalypse.

“Did you touch me?” He said, looking down at her.

She was terrified she could not speak. He kneels down.

“Master, I am sorry, I just thought if I could touch you then I- well you see…”

The scripture says Jesus stayed and listened to the woman’s story. I imagine that wasn’t a flash of time either; twelve years; twelve years of pain, darkness, and dust caking onto her soul like cement, yet Yeshua looked her in the eyes and heard it all.

“Your faith has healed you- shake the dust- shake the darkness- you are healed- you are loved- you are not a bleeder and a bleeder only. Shake—shake—-shake the dust.

Making It To The Mountain

2011-01-21T13:10:00.000-08:00

I was reading yesterday about MLK Jr.'s life. Often we mythologize people so that they take on almost supernatural qualities, as if nothing phased them, as if they were never afraid, as if they never doubted, as if they had unshakable faith. It makes us ponder their great achievements, yet afterward settle, because we know we will never have all of their super qualities. Yet MLK Jr. was an alcoholic and had many affairs during his lifetime, he spoke of his doubts and fear. Mother Theresa doubted the very God she served. Jesus asked for the cup to be taken away and wondered why God forsake him.

It brings me solace to know a man who was an important step in change suffered, yet was still able to change the world and give hope to millions of people who were oppressed, marginalized, ignored, misunderstood and silenced. I wonder also why we don't focus on what is next when talking about King; issues in our world still abound today. Here are just a few examples of people who need help, who need to see the promised land or at least have hope for it (as King says, below, in the last speech he ever gave).

MLK Jr. Last speech

LGBT Rights

Human ( Sex) Trafficking

Issues of Immigration

Seismic Change

2011-01-11T17:17:00.000-08:00

You are often what I wake for.

Drips- drips of transformed water

Filling the pot and expanding robust

Scents into the air.

My coffee pot is Jesus at the

Wedding; tap water shifts deep

Shades of enticement and

People gather filling mugs.

Cream sinks to the bottom at

First yet surely, like reverse raindrops,

White floats to the surface and

Swirls its Milky Way tendencies

Into the coffee mug atmosphere.

Gems of sugar

Sweeten, as crystals dissolve,

Spreading their rich

Embrace into the cup.

Forget ulcers, forget jitters; my drink

Awaits my awakening

Transforming potential

Filter-rests, remaining.

Darkness slumbers through the night.

Yet, with dawn’s first light

Aromas birth water into sweet elixir and

Monotony is redeemed

Into miracle-birthing

Echoes of two thousand year old

Wedding celebrations.

All mornings should start with renewal,

Transformation, celebration; perhaps

They do. It happens all around us,

The seismic change: during weddings,

And during cleansing baptisms as family

Cheer and cry.

It happens too during coffee pot drips,

The redeeming of the morning. It happens

In coffee filled mugs, when water is

Transformed into deep, robust, sips of energy.

As morning chirps your aroma stretches.

All mornings should start with renewal.

Greenhouse Love

2010-12-14T13:10:00.000-08:00

When my family moved into our new neighborhood in Springfield Oregon, within days he came knocking at our door.

“ Hey there,” he said, holding a cooler of Cokes in his hands. “ You all can call me Uncle Bill.”

It wasn’t long before Bill took me under his wing: he taught me how to fish, how to track deer while hunting, and how to cut starts from flowers to grow them in a greenhouse.

It was nice to be taught; my own father was never much of a teacher or talker really and my grandfather died when I was in the fourth grade. Bill always talked about how much he wanted grandchildren, yet for some reason he didn’t have any. Fate, however, seemed to bring us together, and our needs pushed us to adopt one another.

When my family and I drove off to church every Sunday, Bill walked outside, cross the street, and meet us at the car window. He’d peer through the window as my Mom rolled it down.

“Here’s the Sunday paper. I put a treat in it for the boys.” We couldn’t afford the paper. “Off to church? — Well, say a prayer for me.” We’d drive off.

I always assumed he wasn’t religious, that he believed more in the Louis L'Amour westerns he read and the nature he frequented than anything else. I always assumed his “prayer requests” were subtle jokes from a man who grew up in North Dakota, on a farm, with no great mind expanding experiences under his belt.

****

Bill and I started fighting: I was fourteen and dealing with depression, and he thought I was sleeping around with girls without protection; ironically I am still a virgin. It all happened after I screwed up edging his lawn (he used to pay me to do yard work). He thought I was being irresponsible and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about the inner conflicts saturating every part of me.

We stopped talking, mostly. I avoided his gazes, as he stood in his living room window, scratching his bald head, looking into our cul-de-sac for his disappeared and adopted-grandson.

Years later I met Bill’s son. I suddenly saw what Bill must have looked like in his thirties. John seemed to appear out of nowhere. I only heard before then, ambiguous and brief references to the youngest son in the family.

I heard my Mom on the phone as Bill asked her to feed the dog for the weekend. Bill and his wife, Emily, were going away for John’s wedding. No mention of the kid, and then he is suddenly getting married. It seemed odd.

A couple months later, John pulled into his father’s driveway, got out of the car and walked around to the passenger seat to open the door for his spouse. A man stepped out and closed the door. They grabbed hands and on their way to the porch kissed fondly, just like newly weds.

The pieces started weaving together.

****

I haven’t talked to Bill in awhile, but John and I are friends online and oddly enough speak often. John did theater as a kid. So did I. Perhaps that’s why I reminded Bill so much of him. Our similarity and connection to Bill seemed to bond us. Yet, every time John and his spouse drove in to the cul-de-sac, my father and brothers announced: “The gays are here again,” as if they were a spectacle. What did they think, I wonder? Did my family assume John retired his wigs, fishnets, and gay clubs every time he came to visit Bill, his father?

****

John and Michael met in 2000 and in 2003 they became the first gay couple to be married at the Congregation Beth Israel in Portland by Rabbi Kim Rosen and Rabbi Emmanuel Rose. Three-hundred and fifty people attended the wedding, including both families. When it became acceptable, during a brief period, for same-sex couples to marry in Oregon, John and Michael jumped at the opportunity only to have their check returned and marriage invalidated by the electorate. Undeterred, they went to Canada and had a private double wedding with John’s sister Pam and her partner Kathy. Then again in California, 2007, John and Michael married again. Though those rights have since been relinquished, John and Michael are one of the 18,000 couples grandfathered in as legally married couples in California.

John having 350 guests at his first wedding wasn’t always a reality. John says, regarding his sexuality: “ I wouldn’t say it forms the heart of my personal identity. It might with others. I consider myself a spiritual being having a human experience and I happen to be gay. I was attracted to men form the time I was very young instead of women. I never thought anything about it really. I have notes from my 1st and 2nd grade teachers to my mother: they were worried about the fact all my friends were girls. I just enjoyed being around girls more, I identified with them at that stage in my life. As I got older, of course, I realized I liked boys more emotionally; for some reason, I felt more secure and calm around men and I had crushes on guys.”

As John delved into adolescents he began relationships, as most adolescents do. One day Bill opened a letter addressed to the 16-year-old John from his boyfriend. Bill threatened him and the boy. Being the high school vice-principal, Bill didn’t want any anger-birthed reactions to get into the paper, so he never did anything. “He did drive up and down outside Mark’s house one day trying to find me,” said John. “He told me later he had a gun with him. I’m sure he did. He caught me there eventually months later. My parents held the first-ever ‘family meeting’ that night. My sister just freaked out and my brother cried.”

At midnight, when the arguing wouldn’t stop, John left to his room only to be followed by his sister-in-law. She had a gay brother so they sent her to talk to John, while the rest of the family snuck outside his bedroom window to listen.

“It was summer and so my window was open,” said John. “That night passed by okay but a few days later I’d had enough and told my mother to fuck off. My dad came and broke the door down and we got into a fistfight and I bloodied his nose. My uncle came and took me to his house and I spent several months living with relatives after I threatened to sleep in my car instead of coming home.”

John spent about a year with aunts and uncles. On his 18^th birthday he came home to move out and all his possessions were in the garage. His mother left a Bible with all kinds of notes in it on the pile of items. For months and months, she mailed John stories out of the newspapers about pedophiles and gays murdered.

“We didn’t speak for two years,” said John. “And my sister was a complete and total bitch to me. She blamed me for ‘destroying our family.’ But I knew she was a closet case and told my brother and relatives she was a lesbian. I told them that for over fifteen years, then she finally came out of the closet.”

****

The media portrays homosexual men as overly flamboyant, bar dwelling, and immoral people. It is not hard to discover why my brothers and father, though often closed-minded, would think such things about John and his husband. Even the most positive portrayals of gay men tend to be sensationalized, as the character Kurt in the hit TV show Glee. Yet John and Michael fall far from the stereotypes of popular media. Michael is a doctor, voted one of the “Best doctors in America 2010” by his peers. Both have converted to Judaism.

John said, “I think about God every day…I feel a connection there and that’s where my physical, emotional, and spiritual strength come from. I believe that our connection to God is made through our consciousness, our conscious effort to eliminate all worldly thoughts and focus on nothing: to just ‘lean in’ and to come in touch with God.”

Michael and John are like “any old married couple…” said John. “He [Michael ] gets mad at me because I’m not as spontaneous as he is… We do things that still annoy each other but we live with it; he darts out in front of cars that have a green light and I swear I’m going to buy life insurance on him. I don’t say ‘yes’ when he wants to do stuff as often, as he would like, but then he says things to me like he doesn’t know what he would do without me and he would die if I ever left him. How sweet is he?”

John continued: “I think our relationship is exactly like any other relationship. I don’t have very many gay friends actually. Most of my friends are straight men who for some reason don’t mind having a gay guy for a friend. My close friends who are married tell me about the problems in their marriages: substance addiction, infidelity and other sexual issues, medical problems, financial problems, emotional distress, childrearing and school issues – the full cornucopia of issues facing modern families. I work with five other people in my office who are all married and they all have more than one or two major chronic issues.

By comparison, I think we have it pretty easy,” said John. “One reaches a point in life when you just decide I’m in it for the long haul, so if you’re going to be a fuck-up, then you can just go ahead and be one, because I’m not going anywhere.”

****

In the middle of the night, the doorbell rings. John’s best friend Derek, who lives around the corner, rings and knocks violently at the door until John opens it. Derek is homecoming king, a

quarterback and a complete vandal on weekends yet he still threatens to beat the shit out of any of the jocks at school that are mean to John. Derek loves John like a brother, but it isn’t until this night John realized why. Derek bursts into the house sobbing uncontrollably. John has never seen Derek cry before, about anything, not in their whole life together since the first grade. Derek, apparently, has an uncle who was gay. Derek just got the news about his uncle’s suicide earlier that night. Derek knocked and rang violently at the door because he was worried about John. Derek becomes a flicker of light in a period of pain. He’s in jail now: 2^nd felony conviction. John sends him letters and a holiday basket.

****

Where Bill screwed up with John, he redeemed himself in many ways with me. He became a grandfather, a mentor, a teacher, and a safe-place. I think of the horrific turmoil both John and Bill must have endured as a family. I think of the horrible depictions our society creates of GLBT members of society. Yet I find hope too; in John’s story, in his normalcy amongst exaggerated stereotypes, in the positive influence John and Michael have on the Portland community. A flicker of light glows in the dark ignorance.

I now know Bill once attended a Southern Baptist Church in which John was heavily involved. When John came out, church leadership encouraged Bill and his wife to “out” John from the congregation. They did. John never attended church again. As the years passed, Bill stopped attending as well, realizing his son was not as the leadership of the church and miss quoted scripture depicted him.

Bill and John have since made amends. “My dad has apologized to me countless times over the years,” said John. “My mom finally got over it after the wedding I think. She’s not very open-minded but I was always her favorite. It’s hard being the favorite and feeling like you disappointed them, or broke their heart. But I feel like I’m in her life to teach her to love unconditionally, which is something she needed help with. She is that way now with my dad.”

In the last several years Bill, once strong, outspoken, and independent, has lost his vision. He uses a white cane now to get around. He has taken down his greenhouse and retired his garden cutters. Last time home I visited Bill, still across the street from my parents’ house. I sat down in the living room remembering the lessons, scents, and encouragement I once experienced in that very house. As I looked into his eyes that could not look into mine, I finally forgave Bill for his lashing out at me.

As I reflected on the stories John told me, it suddenly all made sense. Bill’s adoption of me was more intense than I ever imagined. I don’t pretend to know anything with surety as I did in high school. All I know is the Divine Creator exists and that He/She is present in all our lives: gay or straight, lesbian or conservative, transsexual or liberal, we have all been created and are loved.

Perhaps we are more similar to John than most would like to think. Perhaps we all yearn to reveal the confusing parts in our life, yet are crippled by fear. Crippled by a fear of disappointing those in our lives who are closest to us. Yet regardless, we break hearts constantly, because we fall subject to the limitations of our human condition. Many try to push to the margins those who are LGBT, we tout their difference, and yet we seldom grasp our similarities; however, aren’t we all seeking truth, acceptance, and grace?

Blowin In the Wind?

2010-12-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

          The island crept into the horizon; I watched from the back of the ferry, through the sea-mist, despite the motor’s hums, with Italian conversation entering my ears. The language was new; I was a lone bird, in the grass and lost from the flock, trying to decipher the sounds around me.
As the ferry trudged onward, the land mass stretched upward, like a child growing and individuating, it stretched; as earth expanded into view, so did the details; wrinkles appeared in the skin with age, the buildings, shops, and people materialized; the earth and structures were almost inseparable; all were monochromatic tones of yellow-curry, pumpkin pie, and fresh rosemary; the buildings hugged the side of the mountainous island, like stair steps leading to the sky.
          It was week three of traveling; the journey started in Rome and then made its way to Sorrento; later we would travel to Syracuse, Palermo, Tunis; now we approached the Island of Capri and it grew before us, the salted wind waking me from exhaustion into intrigue.
Traveling tires me; so much to take in, so much to process and learn; there is the let down, I have learned. Italy is not the exotic European ideal as so often depicted. It is not merely pizzas, pasta, and cappuccinos. Instead, Italy houses real people, in pain, living, journeying, eating, and laughing. They are just as human as I am; this realization de-sensationalized the trip for me. I was grateful; in many ways I connected more with the place.
                                                                            ****
           My choice breakfast used to be fried eggs and salad with ranch dressing. That was when we lived in the apartments. I would get out of bed, put on my miniature apron my Grandma bought me for my third birthday the year before, and insist I be allowed to cook my own eggs.
Cooking has always been a part of me. In the first grade, I had a Jewish teacher, and when it came time for the holidays, we made latkes, or potatoes pancakes. I remember the sweet onion turning translucent in the bubbling oil and how the grated potatoes exuded an earthy aroma as they touched the bubbling. After that, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “ I’m going to be a Latke maker!” I was serious, too.
          When we would go over to my Grandma’s house for dinner, which was often, there were always multitudes of people. She was a harsh woman, her voice rolled like gravel from smoking, but people filled the house, often, despite her harsh demeanor. She would stand behind the counter cursing in Italian, as my grandpa cursed back in Spanish, and create a banquette for people.
           “¿Va a hacer que la cena?” asked Grandpa, in spanish. Grandpa often invited people over for dinner without telling my grandma.
           "Dio Dammit Herb," Grandma yelled in Italian from the kitchen.
           "¿Angie?"
           "Fine; credo che I hanno scelta." Then under her voice: "Fangul...figlio di puttana...E chi se ne frega?” Grandma cursed. She didn’t want to make dinner for the guests, yet she did, she always did.
Despite the gravel and curse words, everyone always gathered at the table; it never took much convincing; they always came to sit, the Italian aunts and uncles flamboyantly waving their hands with each syllable, the Americanized cousins, my family, and myself—we all gathered for food.
                                                                            ****
          I crawled into a corner in the front yard, a corner created by two converging fence-segments. I accepted the harsh gravel as it clawed into my ass and palms. The corner needed to grow, to engulf me, to hide me; it wouldn’t, though I begged. It wouldn’t engulf me.
         My chest convulsed into the air, tight, pushing like slabs of bacon attempting escape from the pan’s villainous heat. My first panic attack.
         Heeew-whee-heeee, I wheezed and the gravel dug; bits stuck my skin like candles shoved into birthday-cake frosting. Smooth, too smooth, digging holes, deep and intrusive.
         My mom’s friend drove by; she must have seen me out of her window. She slowed. She parked; she walked toward me in my corner. Me taking gravel into my flesh in my own process of osmosis; me wreathing as my adolescent world collapsed around me.
                                                                            ****
          “Cio! Come stai?”
          “Bene, grazie! E tu? Che c'è di nuovo?”
          “Bene, ahh, non molto. Come sono i bambini?”
          “Essi sono bene. Che comprano vecchio, che presto saranno andati.”
          “Siete ancora prossimi all'assemblea per la cena domani?”
          “Sì, io vi possa vedere poi! Devo andare. Molto amore amico. Vedere yo più tardi.”
          Though the island of Capri is a tourist destination, I found solace knowing these two people, speaking in Italian before me, lived here amongst the stereotypical shops created for Americans and other Europeans; shops stocked with trinkets made in China.
          They greeted each other.
          They asked how their children were doing.
          Growing old, the one replied, soon they will be gone, the children.
          They reminded each other of their plans to have dinner together the next day, in their home, community.
          They went separate ways.
          The people did not sit in cafés constantly, overweight, shoving gooey mozzarella into their mouths; no, ironically, that was the Americans. Instead they lived, day-to-day, just as I do at home. Their conversation was so uneventful, yet perhaps the greatest pillars of life seem insignificant at first. If I wasn’t across the world from my family and beloved community, I wonder if I would have recognized the deep significance of simple, in-passing conversations with those we neighbor, have dinner with, and journey with.
          I imagined what my Grandma’s life would have been like had her father and mother stayed in Italy, if they didn’t immigrate into the United States, if they held tighter to their roots. Would her personality have drastically changed; would she still have had a smoker’s throat and harsh demeanor? To what extent do our atmospheres shape us, grow us, mold us?
          I put my headphones in, turned on my Ipod and I ventured off a bit, alone; the island was safe. Yes, how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?/ Yes, how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?/ Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?/ The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind./ The answer is blowin' in the wind.
          When you look deeply at a rusted surface you learn things; you taste nuances, history, the complicated speckles tell you stories of past gone, present here, and futures to come; listening to Dylan’s lyrics on the island had the same effect the rust boasts.
          As I walked the road, winding around the front of the island, the Mediterranean Sea came into view; ships bobbed lightly on the brine, tourists walked or rode busses, and locals drove their Vespa motorized scooters into their driveways and stepped into their homes; the answers, though I couldn’t interpret them fully, hummed their presence before me; the answers glided on the wind, seagulls searching for perches to land on.
                                                                                ****
          My mom’s godfather owned a small Italian deli in downtown San Jose. An old converted house, the walls decorated on every inch with authentic retro signs will forever smell of the most tender meat-balls and robust basil-marinara.
          My grandma worked in the deli for years; most of the family did at some point or another; it seemed to be the catch-all for la famiglia who were down and out, needed work, or just needed to be carried for a bit. But you had to do your work; uncle Tony (not really an uncle at all, yet that is what we call him) made everyone work hard.
          So my grandma would cook meals from the deli’s menu at her house. My favorite was the salad; well, the salad dressing. By this time, I didn’t eat it with scrambled eggs anymore, just crisp greens.
                                                                                ****
          The feet of Mom’s friend shuffled in the gravel as she approached. When she sat down, her hands, trying to support her body, tensed as gravel probed her.
          She sat beside me. She placed her hand on my leg. Silence. I didn’t know her really; she was a part of my mom’s familial church group, but I never connected to any of them; I couldn’t allow them to replace my blood family from childhood, the ones I grew up with, the ones who still lived in California. Yet she slowed, my mom’s friend, she parked, and she sat.
          The fence didn’t engulf me, but called out and provided a touch of healing; a presence of sanity and stability, someone willing to sit in the gravel even though it pierced like thorns.
                                                                                ****
          We climbed back on the ferry to head to the mainland; I resumed my position on the back of the vessel; the wind weathered my face and the lyrics washed into my being; I laid down on a coil of massive rope interlocking my hands behind my head. The answer that blanketed me with salty samples was this: perhaps the answer is in the journey, in questioning for answers, in never fully developing into who we want to be and in realizing no one does. Perhaps my grandma would have been different had she grown up in Italy, but the questions would have been the same: where do I belong, what do they cry, why must we die, who will linger, and who will stay?
          Italians, Americans, and everyone on this journey of humanity, is asking, questioning, wondering; we are reaching for answers, we are teased by the wind. We recite our mantra: the answer is blowin in the wind. El soffia nella risposta del vento.
                                                                                ****
          Before we moved, I begged Grandma to teach me how to make the Deli’s Italian dressing; I knew it would be a long time before I tasted it again.
          “Alright mihijo—I will teach you—You take garlic and mash it up,” she said in her gravel. “ You squirt in a little ketchup, sprinkle some kosher salt, grind some pepper in, and a dash of oregano. Mix it all together and while you are mixing slowly drizzle the Extra Virgin Olive Oil into the mixture: it will get frothy, sort of; it will take on a new form as an emulsification. Once it does, as you continue to mix, add some Red-Wine Vinegar until it changes consistency again. About three parts oil to one part vinegar.”
          I will never grasp the multitude of answers our universe supplies, yet I am learning to piece together the fragments: to mix olive oil, vinegar, and spices, turning them into a new whole; to transform an old home into a deli and take in the members of la famiglia who can’t walk on their own anymore; to hold those who’s life may feel like they are sitting in gravel, attempting to free them; to reach for the wind and the fleeting glimpses, to reach, always reach; even when the answers fail to explain, death inevitably captures, and food doesn’t satisfy, to always reach.
          I don’t want to be a latke maker any longer, but when I want salad I make my Grandma’s dressing. As I bite into the crisp greens and vinaigrette, I taste the past. The fried eggs and salad created in my apron haunt me playfully. The Italian cuss words dance upon my tongue. The smell of the deli wafts in my nose. I eat— I taste being taught and passing on recipes. I see grandma sick in the hospital fading fast. I see family gathering, celebrating a life, eating— tasting all of our collective memories once again, together as la famiglia. I will never reach perfection; I am always expanding into the horizon, trying to understand the languages of other’s hearts and stepping into the stories encircling me.
          El soffia nella risposta del vento.
          The answer is blowin in the wind.

Dancing For Shalom

2010-10-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

The Divine Mother/Father is one who waits persistently for us as the father in the story of the prodigal. When we are climbing up the path we want to grovel, express our guilt, make a case for ourselves. Yet when God sees us, before we can do any of the former, the Divine runs to meet us with embracing arms and celebration.

He/ She fights off the world and then joins us in the dance of life replacing the stings and lashes with a promise and a hope for renewal.

This is where Shalom enters our lives, when we are able to live in the reality of this embrace. Part of Shalom is that sense of being known, that sense of being beloved and adopted as someone’s child. Largely shalom is realized, when we realize we are known,adopted, and held in the Family of God and on Earth. Shalom means wholeness, it is peace, it is safety. It is “laying down at night and not feeling afraid” as the scriptures say, not being afraid for the first time in a long time perhaps.

Then, once we come in contact with the peace and wholeness of shalom, once we breathe in the Divine love, we must reciprocate it to someone else. If we are to call ourselves followers of the Divine we must be agents of shalom, creating spaces where shalom is brought about in someone else’s life. A space of shalom where they know without a doubt they are known and they are loved despite what they have done. A space of shalom where God can hold them and look into their eyes. God is working, always and without us, yet God is also inviting us along in the process or renewal for those around us and the World.

Create spaces where humans can dance as they were created, as their heart dictates, and where they can step into the essence of their uniqueness without feeling shame and rejection.

The Divine is wanting to join with us to create these spaces of shalom in peoples lives. To create a space for God to show shalom to someone, when they have no hope of it, that is what the upside down Kingdom of God is all about.

So invite shalom. Humiliate yourself in dance so that someone else does not stand alone. Invite Shalom in your life and help invite it in someone else’s life.

Help someone feel safe, maybe even for the first time, and you are inviting shalom.
Help someone feel like they are worthy of attention and you are inviting shalom.

Take their insults, hold their hand, fight off the cruelty of the world and you are inviting shalom.

Say to someone yes I understand you, I know exactly what you mean, and shalom will hit them like a wave from the sea.

Look in someone’s eyes who is an outcast of society and shalom spreads throughout the body bringing back feeling where there once was numbness, as with the leper.

Forgive others and you are inviting shalom. Forgive yourself and you are inviting shalom.

Wash feet, make food, write a note of encouragement and you are inviting shalom.

Invite shalom and you are inviting Completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfection, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord and the presence of God.

Very Much

2010-10-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

I used to sleep with the stuffed snoopy every night. It was a step up, at least comfortably, from the Mrs. Butterworth glass syrup bottle I used to sleep with. What can I say, I liked syrup. I’m sure the stuffed being was white at one point, but all I can remember is it being gray from love. What once had been an over stuffed body was now two inches flat from me using Snoopy like a pillow. I held him as I slept; his head cushioned mine, and I wrapped my arms around his stuffed torso.

Not only did I sleep with Snoopy, he was also the dearest friend I had. He would play in the mud with me, he would lay in the grass and California sun with me, he was Peter Pan and I was Captain Hook; for all of the experiences a curious 5 year old boy lived for, Snoopy was there.

One time running inside from playing, Snoopy’s ear caught on a branch in our backyard. I kept running, I didn’t notice the tug but I noticed the tear. The sound reverberated; shaking my five-year old world as if thunder and lightening had struck me. I picked up the black ear in my hand, cradling Snoopy in the other, and ran fervently indoors to my Nana. I tried to fight the tears: little boys, after all, do not cry.

“Nana— Snoopy’s ear fell off.”

“Well it looks like Snoopy needs surgery.”

“Oh no—” I sat in terror, like a father whose newborn child had been born with complications.

“Oh don’t worry.” Nana smiled. “Snoopy will be alright, you just sit here, I’ll be right back.” Nana walked to her room down the hall and re-entered the living room with a small basket. She lifted the lid and after searching for a moment presented the situation with a sewing needle and black thread.

“Now don’t you worry, he wont feel a thing.” She reassured as she squinted and held the thread and needle close to her glasses to stick the thin fiber through the needle’s eye. She took Snoopy gently in her hands, as she had so often held me. They were good hands, soft and caring, and so my fear began to fade like fog in the sunlight. She began the “surgery.” I squirmed each time she threaded the black thread through Snoopy, to weave his ear back to his flattened and dirty head.

She bit the end of the thread in her mouth as close she could to the knot she tied. Holding Snoopy out with both hands she nodded an its all over—no more worries nod. I ran my hand along his ear, freshly attached, given new life, born again. I took Snoopy in my arms, embracing him in my body and face. I climbed into my Nana’s lap on her chair: Nana held me, I held Snoopy.

My tears soaked into Snoopy’s fabric skin, and I allowed them to. I guess little boys do cry.

“You love him very much don’t you?” Asked my Nana.

I shook my head yes.

“And I love you,” said Nana, “much and much and much.”

Running Around In Eden

2010-10-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

In honor of Relationship week @ George Fox:

" The miracle of the Christmas isn't the birth of a baby, but the reclaiming of human flesh, the declaration that humanity is an appropriate and honorable abode of almighty God. In the words of Richard Hooker, "God hath defied our nature, though not by turning it into himself, but by making it his own inseparable habitation." As the opening of John;s Gospel proclaims, "The Word became flash and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." That is good news that needs to be preached.
If we acted as if we truly believed the message of Incarnation, the world would be different. If we believed that human flesh was an appropriate and honorable abode for God and for ourselves; if we understood that our sexuality permeates all of who we are, and rejoiced in it; if we saw our souls and bodies as reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice to God; if we pledged and found joy, mutuality, and generativity in our intimate sexual relationships, then people would be beating down the doors of our churches to find out what makes our lives so joyful, our relationships so full of mutual respect, and our outreach to the world so central to who we are. It's time we took off the fig leaves of guilt and ran around the Eden of our relationships with God, forgiven, naked, and free."

Whispers of Warmth

2010-10-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

“We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last drags. But if we have the courage to let almost everything go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us--whatever that may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will most certainly miss even the one thing we need." -Thomas Merton

          It is snowing right now. Gusts of frothy white flakes pulse in and out of intensity. Tiny crinoline wreathed dancers fall with grace unquestioned.
          How can beauty so pure also be so hazardous: slipping, car crashes, school closures, frostbite, uncontrollable-jittery shakes. How in the midst of so much beauty can hardship come? From the chair and through the window it is mesmerizing. But to go into the center of it, to even open the window and feel a whisper of it would be suicidal.
         Why do I go out then? Why do the kids laughing gather all of their friends to play in it, amiss the chaos, amiss the bite of the cold? Why can we not resist? I complain most of the time and my bones whine from achy cold, my nose runs, flakes cloud my eyes. Yet I still go.
          Life seems to be like that often. An idealistic idea, an ungraspable concept, a romantic image through pained glass, life is.

Then I step into the midst of it, this life current, and it at times is unbearable.

****

          Every year, my family has gone out to cut down our Christmas tree. My mom says her and my father started it when they were in high school. My grandparents hadn’t gotten a tree yet and my parents said they would go cut one down for them. When we lived in California we would drive an hour or more to find a place up in the mountains away from the valley. No grocery store or gas station parking lot, pre-cut trees for our family.
          My mom would make hot cocoa from scratch and transfer it into the green-metal thermos, she would make coffee cake, and bring candy canes to put into the cocoa. And we would venture, in what was cold weather for the Bay Area, up in the mountains of Stevens Creek searching for a tree.
          It was always a process then and it still is to this day. My mom searches for the best tree. The problem is, I’m not sure if she actually knows in her mind what the best tree is. Instead, there is a trust in her eyes as she steps into the endless rows of fir trees, hoping that when she sees the one it will speak to her in some way.
          This is how it always goes: my father, my brothers and myself all spread out and when we spot one we think mom will like, when we see one we think is prefect, we stand proud next to it and yell out to her. “Mom.”
          Most times, the tree is not the one. We get inpatient, we try to force the one, but mom walks with trust waiting for the one to speak to her. Just as you can’t force a conversation, apparently you cannot force tree finding.
          After we have wondered for an hour or so, mom stops walking down the isles of trees. “I found it.” She says. “This is the one.”
          My brothers and my father and me would all take turns cutting the tree down at the lowest part of the trunk with the saw. We would stand back as it fell to the floor, needles quivering to the ground. We would pick it up and carry it back to the truck.
          Mom would pour cocoa into our mugs; it would send sweet chocolate mist into the cold air. And we would sit on the lowered flap at the back of the truck, and drink our cocoa, and eat our coffee cake, and savor our candy canes, and make fun of mom for how longs she took to find the tree.
          “Its not perfect, we might have to trim a little here, or take off some of the bottom branches, but it was the one.” She would say, every time. It was never perfect, but it was the tree. It spoke in some way. It called out from the masses of firs and said I am the one for you this year.

****

          I look out the window at the snow. Sometimes the cold cripples me. The soles of my feet freeze to the ground and I contemplate whether to step one more step. I recede in horror filled anticipation of the next moment, of the next gust of wind, or of the unceasing iciness.
          I wait hopeless, paralyzed, pain throbbing and numbing my limbs and core.
          On my own, I wonder how likely it is I will survive if I go on. Can I bare one more punch from the clouds or one more unexpected slip on the stealthy slipperiness of the pavement?
          Alone I am nothing. I need rejuvenating warmth. Should I stay here, stuck to the ground, a martyr in the icy cold?
          Then it comes. Then I feel warmth. I hear the voice calling out to me amongst the frigidity of white crinoline dancers blanketing the earth.
          Sometimes it happens instantly, sometimes it takes weeks or months. Sometimes I beg for it, the warm voice, while other times I sit back and giving-up let the cold overtake me.
          But it comes. It always does. I know that the warmth always comes. Not always at that same instant my feet freeze, not always during the biggest ice or the strongest wind, but it always comes.
          I must walk the isles of monotony; I must search trusting that it will come. When I try to force, when I look for perfection, I miss the faint whispers of the voice calling to me.
          It’s not a magic trick. There is no formula. The warm voice transcends time.
          Yet I still try to battle it. I try to rein it in but the leash burns my hands as it gets away. To wrestle warmth is impossible. To search without trust leaves us wondering for hours, freezing in let down, or forcing a square into a circle.
          I long to hold and to experience, I want to grab the warmth: bar it in time, drown it in predictability. I Fight. I Fight. I Fight.
          I Fight but I cannot fight forever. Soon the rope burn turns to cutting and my flesh cleaves in humble submission to death.
          It is here that true beauty blooms. Out of the cuts, out of the stench of rotting flesh. My dieing is like fertilizer to the beauty and so it blooms.
          The voice comes not out of the current of life but out of humbleness of death.
          I am overwhelmed and kneel before the warmth. My bones chatter, my eyes sting from the icy touch, and my hands turn upward.
          I wait for the warmth to come on its own time, on it’s own transcendent timeline of beauty.
          It defrosts my blood and I will survive. We will survive together, the warmth and I. It fills me, frees me, humbles me, and brings forth the beauty in this white frozen wasteland.
          I will survive if I wait. I will survive if I submit. I will survive if I believe. I will survive if I die. But first I must step out into the snow, first I must surrender and listen for the voice, first I must trust that whatever it is I need most will speak it’s sweet whispers to me.

For Most People Breathing Comes Easy...

2010-10-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

Breathing, for most people is something we don’t think about. Breathing just happens. Not for me. Sometimes I have to concentrate on breathing.

I had my first asthma attack when I was thirteen. Allergies were the culprit, the Bay Area California doesn’t have the same whatevers that make the Willamette valley one of the pollen capitals of the world.

And there I was doing theatre at a old shed turned stage and seats, in rural Pleasant Hill Oregon. Admits hay, and fields, and pollen.

I was painting a set for a musical when it first happened. I was painting pyramids on a canvas backdrop and that is I when the brand new thought streaked across my mind like a too-close hunk of space debris.

Breathe Andrew. I had never thought of it before; I had to tell myself “breathe.” I lay down on the ground, resting my hand on my tightened chest. Breathe. And I did, but it was the first time I had to tell myself to do so.

How odd it was to feel for the first time the limits of my own lungs, to feel them inside my chest hitting the wall of my ribs. To feel the heart pumping-pumping, slower-slowly, as air became a scarcity.

At night, it got worse. I woke up suddenly gasping, tight, and tense. I felt an icy chill slide down my neck and across my forehead, as my lungs tried to lift and expand but were halted almost immediately. What should have been breath-breath-breath, was instead br-b-b.

For most people, breathing comes without thought, it is natural, it is worked into the schedule of our bodies, but not for me, not always for me.

I sat up, dizzy, alone, gasping. It always seemed to happen when alone.

My lungs wheezed symphonically and with all the work that goes into a symphony: all of the pushing, conducting, memorizing. Yet, it seemed that even though my body had practiced it’s whole life, though I had memorized breathing, for now I couldn’t remember.

My body picked up its violin to play and it was as if I had been overcome suddenly and crippled by the most advanced form of Alzheimer’s. Instead of deep vibrations of the bow, harsh rasps came out in unsyncopated lilts.

Br-b-b-breath.

I began to make a rhythm, I began to push, and think. All I could think about was making my chest rise, my life depended on it, literally, in the rawest of ways. I felt my limitations sinking down on top of me, an elephant sitting and shoving my chest deeper into my bed. And as I thought, sometimes, about every fourth or fifth time I could get a breath deep enough to feed my brain and blood with oxygen.

My body, I think, wanted to give up, parts of it, the weak one’s or maybe the strong ones. But some voice inside told me to push, to expand, to suck in the air around me. I fought Breathe. I can’t. Breathe. I can’t. Panic rushes, eyes go hazy as if stepping into the smoke of a campfire.

Breathe. NO. Bre-br-br-breathe. Okay. My hands fell to my side, unclasped, un-tense, I stared up at the ceiling.

The wall broke down, the lungs filled and expanded. More and more air began to flow into the spongy matter and collected in the sacs of my exhausted and asthmatic tissue.

Bre-brea-breathe.

For most people, breathing comes without thought, it is natural, it is worked into the schedule of our bodies, but not for me, not always for me.

Breathe.

Life Is Like A Blues Song

2010-09-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

I’m always mildly ashamed when people look at my music library on Itunes. I am never up to date or recent. Mainstream music made today, well most of it, just doesn’t pierce me. It’s all made after the notion, fabricated on computers, synthesizers, and auto tuners. So, I sometimes feel like I don’t like music, but who doesn’t like music? It is hardwired into our very souls, into the fabric of our human condition. Music is freedom and we drool for it more often then I think we like to admit.

Now that I can drink in public( not while on contract of course ha) I think I understand better the last supper, because every time I drink with friends or family it reminds me of it. Not that drinking solves the world’s problems or should be used as a magical serum, but when you stumble upon it, casually with caution, something happens and the world and the people around you all join into the earth’s rattle and hum.

I imagine Jesus sitting beside us, radiant and dirty, saying drink now because it may be the last drink. Soon, comes death. And, a drink and time spent with friends, good friends, friends you haven’t seen in months or years, that is like heaven. Because, suddenly the awkwardness leaves, the social pressure leaves, the hiding leaves and it is as if everyone is naked to each other, back picking berries and naming creatures in the Garden.

Maybe that is what happened at the wedding, maybe that is why Jesus decided to turn the water into wine. Maybe that freedom is why wine represents his blood. Maybe that is why the here and coming resurrection abides in the sweet fermented juice of crushed grapes.

So, my friends and I all gathered in a bar on the main street of our university town. All accept me and my roommate had graduated, and so it was a bittersweet tone. Goodbyes and hellos are the hard, you never know when either of them are going to happen again, if either of them are going to happen again. So, we gathered, all converging into one point from across the globe or the state, waiting to see how the world would reunite us.

First, we embrace just long enough to remember, just long enough to remember until whenever the next time may be. Then you tell each other about the plights of missing, working, living. Then we reminisce about memories. The time a couple of us drove to the beach and slept in a huddle until the sun rose. The times we spent in Portland together dancing and eating. The pranks we’ve pulled together. The trials we’ve shared.
In those moments the past, the present the future, all mingle together in a light rimmed cloud that hovers around us and dances us all together into community. And in the lighted cloud the things that kept us away from experiencing life vanish, if only for a moment. Or maybe they are still there, the pain moments, but are just pushed aside for a the clouded moment. The pain is covered just enough to lose it’s power over us. Dear friends have a greater power then our trials, guilt, regrets, they have a power that sets us free if only for a moment. With dear friends, it seems, time stands still and the whole spectrum of the universe opens with a great banquet of love. I’d like to think the cancer faded from two of them, if only for a moment. Perhaps it all faded into the background: the heartbreak, the fear of growing up, the thought of moving across the country, addiction, deep loneliness and depression, it was as if for one moment, with one drink (or two), with dear friends, while Jesus invited us to remember through resurrection juice, the veil of our culture lifted. We connected again, completely human, utterly broken, and entirely in need of community.

A few days later we went to the Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland. I feel free in Portland, in cities, I feel less different (as if different were bad). Different, does get tiring and its nice to be around more different people then me to feel less watched, looked at, or mocked. And oh, Portland is different; the city purrs with a song of freedom, asceticism, and in that vibrating tone there dances a tiny thread of grace that anyone can latch onto. Couples of the same sex, dreadlocks, those who live outside. Grungers left over from the nineties mix with then the business people and the young people, clean people and dirty people, and my friends and I. We all huddled together along the Willamette River for the festival.

The boats piled up along the shore, packed with people, almost nudged on top of each other to get a close view of the stages. But there is something special about it all, about the nudging closer, about the crowded grass. The grassy hill rolls down into the bank and that’s were most of the people were, squished together just as densely as the boats were. Blankets, chairs, just plane grass, laying, sitting, dancing, talking. It is an interesting thing to see so many people together in one place, enjoying the same one thing. Music. Not the after-produced, not the soulless mud, but real “umph” the same stuff our souls cry out for and we don’t even know it.

You couldn’t help but move to the rhythm and the harping, large, black lady onstage crowing about loss and hope. Life is like a blues song, more then anyone likes to admit. It is raw, deep, unavoidable. The songs mostly sing of loss, or hum of pasts gone oh too soon, but the fact that they have made it to a song gives hope.

The musician made it through. Everyone sitting, or dancing, or bobbing up and down on a boat had made it through something. We are all survivors of the pain in our lives, always affected, but still chugging along.

So people gathered together, just for the week of the festival, and people drank together on the grassy knoll though they knew nothing of each other and maybe didn’t like each other outside the gates. But for that day, the thread of grace danced along the electric rifts of guitar, partook in the the rashey voice of experience, and hopped on each tribal thump the drums and made. The thread made its way into the ears and the hearts of the people sitting there. For a moment we danced together, all of us, because all had this one thing in common, we were survivors.

As the sun cast raspberry and mango shades into the night sky and over the calm river waters the people came alive. Like the summer’s leaves meeting the wind the people began to shake and sway and vocalize their own faint rustling rhythms. Dancing grew. Its not very often you see old people dance, its not very often you see anyone dance, just dance. Without rigid moves, or grinding a top each other. No, the kind of dancing that opens the heart to the earth and lets that thread of grace seep into your being is a rare sight. It doesn’t happen often, but I saw it that night. With the mismatched people of Portland, on the waterfront, crooned by a large black woman and a blues band, transported by a couple beers and good friends, for a moment everyone seemed connected. For a moment, beneath the changing sky another realm opened; adults let go of their responsibilities, children let go of their fear, liberals danced with conservatives and it was, as if, the Kingdom fell right of top of us. In one raw and magical heap, the Family of God came down and invited us to be free.

And so, we sat there, my friends and I, looking out to the Willamette River. The spectrum of time and experience hovered between, about, and above us. The freed Portlanders swayed before us. A glimpse of The Garden unfolded on the grassy knoll there on the banks of the Willamette River.

Waiting Through The Seasons

2010-09-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

Fall has a certain scent to it; the whole atmosphere takes it on. It is the scent of sweet moisture working its way into the pores of the earth, dry from summer.

A couple of days ago, I was walking to work, I could smell the scent faintly inching its way into the air. Down the sidewalk, past the neighbor kid on the bike, I walked.

“What’s your name?” He says, always, every time I walk past him.

“Andrew.”

“How old are you—my daddy is 36?”

“I’m 21- sweet bike.” I keep walking. I wonder how early I tried to sort out the world: age, gender, happiness, and sorrow.

I step over the cracks of the sidewalk, but then I am stopped. Falling in front of me is a leaf, the first leaf I have seen fall this season. Resisting the wind, the rust stained foilage floats to the floor, wobbling as it drops. Crunch. I step on it, over it, through it. I am on my way to work.

I pull the collar of my pea coat over my neck, hiding from the wind that the leaf fell captive to. Soon leaves will be everywhere, soon they will cover the sidewalk instead of decorate it. Soon the trees will shiver, naked, quaking for their lost friends. I think about how the sun will hibernate for a while soon. Should I unpack my scarves and sweaters?

The leaves, huddle together for warmth, swirled on top of each other by gusts of brisk and changing air. But, when the seasons shift again, whenever that day comes, the leaves wont be crunching any longer under feet hurrying to work. Raspberries, rusts, pumpkins, the colors will soon merge into goopy browns. Soon the once vibrant and green dancers will melt together into a primordial and muddy stench. It seems a waste, to live so shortly only to fall and melt into death. It seems a shame that crunches and water colored shade makers, would so abruptly flail in plummet and sink into the ground.

A week later I found myself laying on a “bed” in a tattoo parlor. My eyes grew wide, pushing their blue lenses into the night as I gazed on all the previous tattoo sketches scotch-taped to the ceiling. I was surprised how little I flinched at the first kiss of the needles. As the tattoo gun hummed up the first of the ink and shaded my arm different colors, I counted the rivets in the ceiling texture. I sank into the story of the image I would now carry forever, regardless the changing seasons.

There is a father who is well respected in the city. He has made a name for himself. People come to the man for advice, for help, for business. One day, the eldest of his sons asks for his inheritance.

“Father, I am ready to make my own name, I am ready to live.”

“Yes son.” With humble reluctance, the father cashes out the savings account for the son. The son leaves, with a wad of cash, and a few belongings packed into his car.

The father sinks into his chair running his time weathered hands along the thinned leather armrests.

You can only teach someone so much. You can only love to your capacity and then life takes over. The chair is a portal pulling the father back to all of his mistakes; if I hadn’t yelled at him that time, if I had simply embraced him that time, if I could only go back and make it all perfect, then my son would not have wished me dead by taking his inheritance before my true death.

With his tired arms and arthritic knuckles tense he drags the old-leather chair. Screeeetche: it carves tracks into the floor of the house as he schlepps it out of the den, across the living room, and through the front door finally resting it on the front porch. And he sits.

The servants come to tell him dinner is ready.

“I will take my meals out here from now on.” Says the man.

The servants come to tell him that another business man is coming to write a deal.

“I will live life out here, in this chair, on this porch. Looking out, whether storms stretch out to me, the sun burns me, or the cold chills me, I will look and watch.

The son drives off into the big city. Like a moth he flutteres into the lights of the progressive drones. He stepps into the lights which welcomed him with open arms: the lights tell him about the dancing girls and how to pay extra in the back rooms for a magic time. The lights tell him how to inhale the lines of sweet- white powder and the lights swirl around him as he wipes the excess powder form his nose.

And soon, the lights collect all of his money, all of his inheritance, the lights drain his fathers name from the son’s pocket as if it were an endless power source.

The son wakes up. As he rubs his eyes, the blurry world comes into focus. The lights sit twinkling, miles away, without him. He sits in the dark. Creatures begin to stir from the mud he sits in. Howling grunts and snarls into the night, the creatures liven. He has waken the beasts with his own awakening. They rage towards him, the beasts, and he stumbles to back away towards the fence, hands behind him pulling and ass dragging in the mess. Over the fence: panting, crying, hungry. He watches the pigs helpless to attain him behind the fence. He watches them fold back into the puddles of rotting corn and steamy mud. He wishes for security as theirs, anything besides his itchy jonesing and acidic gulilt.

Into the 3^rd hour, the image continued to shape on my arm. The needles continued to pierce and prod at my flesh, a self-inflicted surgery of sorts.

“What is the dumbest tattoo you have ever done?” I asked Spalt my tattoo artist.

“It depends what you think is dumb,” said Splat. He adjusted a dreadlock behind his ear, being careful not to taint his gloves. “I mean, you can see them, on the walls, on the ceiling, the drawings. All of these are peoples’ stories. From the damn jiminy cricket, to the bullet-knife-grenade some dude put on himself, to the flowers and naked women: they all are someone’s story. So it depends what you think is dumb, because to the people, those drawings up on the wall are a part of stories they have decided to carry with them the rest of their lives. They are stories they have decided to share every time someone asks what their art means. They’ve decided to go through the fuckin pain to plaster art and manifest this memory or whatever to their bodies. ”

I gripped the bed with my free hand. The blood squeezed out of my knuckles and my wrinkles flushed white as I channeled the pain up my arm, down to the opposite hand and into the bed.

The father sits on his porch, running his hands upon the aged-leather chair.

“Age has a way of sucking the vibrancy of color from your flesh,” he thinks to himself.” He adjusts the color on his coat to fend of the cold, he tightens his wool scarf around his neck, pushing his shoulders up to his ears to reduce exposure to the world. Except for using the bathroom he hasn’t left his chair and the chair hasn’t halted its transporting tendencies; it pulls the man into his regrets, guilt, confusion as he watches out on the horizon. He picks up the quilt next to him and drapes its upon his knees as the world swirls bitterly around the porch.

Then as if a ghost suddenly appeared from the darkest recesses of eternity, the father spots the son crawling, flailing, and toppling up the path. Emaciated, dirty, and unshaven the son stumbles.

The quilt flies into the air as the father jumps to his feet, plummeting down the steps of the porch. He knows that if others from the city see his son first they will attack him, stone him, kill him, for betraying his father, for wishing him dead, for blemishing the name of their business partner and friend. The father gallops towards the son, who hasn’t even noticed the force raging towards him. As the father’s tired lungs tighten from the excursion, he takes the coat from his back and kneeling down by his son lays it over his shoulders.

“Thank you sir,” the son quakes, nauseated by his own stench.

“Don’t you recognize me? Its your father.” The son digs his eyes into the dirt, unworthy, flawed, ashamed of his exploitations with the lights.

Cupping his hands, the father blows into them delivering warmth. He reaches down towards his son, placing a warm hand on either side of his cheeks.

“You will never be low enough that you can longer look me in the eyes.” The father assures.

Servants from the house, noticing that their master’s absence from the chair could mean only one thing, begin to surround the scene.

“Should we call the authorities?”

“Should we tie him up?”

“Should we gather stones?” The peanut-crunching crowd asks.

“No.” Says the father lifting his son to his feet. You see, I have dressed him in my robes.” He wiggles the gold ring off his finger. “Do you not see me here placing my ring upon his hand? This is my son. He was gone, but he has returned. He was prideful but now is humbled. He fell but he will re-grow. Gather the town for a celebration. Prepare the best meal we can afford. I have been waiting on my porch for the light to break through and it finally has.”

Hour four. Splat rubs the arm down with one of his disinfecting goos, firmly, gently; he clears the droplets of blood from the newly tinted flesh. The image is complete; the flesh raised slightly from four hours of prodding, the arm swollen and weak.

The road washes underneath me as I drive home a couple of days later. My tattooed arm rests on my leg as I fight the urge to pick at the flaking flesh and scratch away the brightly colored scabs. The outermost layer of skin dies in the process, it looses life from the trauma. Tiny flakes with mirrored images of the art flake off preparing the way for the new.

A steady mist surrounds my car from the rain. The windows are down, the mist caresses my cheeks and I lift in my seat a little, embraced by the universe. The heater warms, cranked on the highest notch. I do this often, roll down the windows, and force the heat upon me to bear the outside.

The Willamette valley, is changing from a chorus of green to a melody of autumn. The dried out pores of the earth begin to soak up the sweet scent of fall. The leaves swirl in the mist and land upon my windshield only to slide off and onto the street. Eventually they all make it to the ground, the leaves. Sooner or later, the leaves all gather together in swirling gusts and start to melt into their death form.

I peel a flake off my arm, I can’t resist.

I think of the first leaf that fell before me weeks ago.

The leaves die, but then I suppose they really don’t. They gel together as a muddy mess and soak into the spongy earth, but it is those same leaves that provide the nutrients for the trees they came from. The mud is drunk by the outstretched roots and into the bark and out to the tips of the branches. Then the sun comes out again, and sprouts begin to bloom from the thin-wooden fingers of the trees. From the death of one leaf another leaf is born.

From behind the flaking skin of my tattoo, another layer of skin peaks through completing the image even more vividly then the layer peeling away before it.

Fall sends sweet smells about the earth, but it only stays for moments. Just as quickly as it came, fall leaves and the sweet smells of spring blossom into the atmosphere birthing new blooms to grace the glances of our souls.

Though lights may draw us in, it seems we must sit in the stench of darkness before we can truly find the embrace of the light.

Though we may find ourselves paralyzed in our guilt and regret wishing with all fervency to fix the past, eventually we are given a chance to renew it all. If we sit long enough, if we watch long enough, if we bundle ourselves up and bear through the winter. Sooner or later, the in-between muck is soaked up into the universe and life blooms from its once dead state.

Learning From Icarus

2010-09-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

This place is prison

Dark and gloomy

Foreboding the death sentence of luck upon me

Truth finds me

Black lung truth it

Keeps hacking up though I try to suppress it

Yellow mucus of a life

You pile up and collect.

Semi-solid mass am I.

A hollow shell of a man

Who swings in and out of light and dark,

In and out of life and death

Aren’t we all just parts of wholes

Always seeking always searching

Always clawing for the one moment to breath a full breath

Or make love until we collapse in arms of sweaty, warm musk?

Aren’t we all but tiny droplets of a typhoon or

The acid of coffee burning bloody holes into the lining

Of parts inside? The pill that doesn’t quite work or, the

Second, or maybe the third.

There is always more. Always

something that cannot fill the gap or cross the tracks

Or build the bridge.

Our wings are always just a bit too waxy. They

Melt as we try to reach burning perfection.

So we fall, plummeting,

Despite those who tried to halt us,

Or love us. We fall,

Though they tried to give you their all. They failed?

We plummet always, eventually, at least once.

All the parts of one whole plummet

Together, until we reach the

Final and only eternal

Wholeness of the universe.

They try to stop us, our lovers,

Our dear-ones, our blood-ones,

Yet we make choices in pride,

We make choices and our wax melts,

We make choices and we learn.

We learn what being complete really means.

We learn what love really sings and

We learn what pain can grow,

As the wax and feathers form into

Something new, complete, and

Created from anew.

Scrambled Eggs and La Famiglia

2010-09-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

My choice breakfast used to be scrambled eggs and salad with ranch dressing. That was when we lived in the apartments. My mom says I would get out of bed and put on my miniature apron my Grandma bought me for my 3^rd birthday the year before and insist that I be allowed to cook my own eggs.

Cooking has always been a part of me. In the 1^st grade, I had a Jewish teacher, and when it came time for the holidays, we made latkes, or potatoes pancakes. I remember the sweet onion turning translucent in the bubbling oil and how the grated potatoes let off an earthy aroma as they touched the bubbling. After that, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said “ I’m going to be a Latke maker!” I was serious too.

When we would go over to my Grandma’s house for dinner, which was often, there were always multitudes of people. She was a harsh woman, her voice rolled like gravel from smoking, but she always had lots of people over for dinner. She would stand behind the counter cursing in Italian, as my grandpa cursed back in Spanish, and create a banquette for people.

Despite the gravel and curse words, everyone always gathered at the table. It never took much convincing. They always came to sit, the Italian aunts and uncles flamboyantly waving there hands with each syllable, the Americanized cousins, and my family, and myself—we all gathered for food.

My mom’s godfather owned a small Italian Deli in downtown San Jose. An old converted house, the walls decorated on every inch with retro signs (that are actually from whenever they look like they are from) will forever smell of the most tender meat-balls and deep basil-marinara.

My grandma worked in the deli for years, most of the family did at some point or another. It seemed to be the catch all for la famiglia who were down in out, needed work, or just needed to be carried for a bit. But you had to do your work, Uncle Tony ( my mom’s godfather: that is what we call him) made you work hard.

Uncle Tony and Mom @ the Deli

So my grandma would cook meals from the deli’s menu at her house. My favorite, was the salad, well the salad dressing. By this time though, I didn’t eat it with scrambled eggs, just crisp greens.

Before we moved I begged her to teach me how to make it; I knew it would possibly be a long time before I could have tasted it again.

“Alright miho—I will teach you—You take garlic and mash it up,” she said in her gravel. “ You squirt in a little ketchup, sprinkle some kosher salt, grind some pepper in, and a dash of oregano. Mix it all together and while you are mixing slowly drizzle the Extra Virgin Olive Oil into the mixture: it will get frothy, sort of, it will take on a new form as an emulsification. Once it does, as you continue to mix, add some Red-Wine Vinegar until it changes consistency again. About 3 parts oil to one part vinegar.”

And that’s it. I don’t want to be a latke maker any longer, but when I want salad I make my Grandmas dressing. And as I bite into the crisp greens and vinaigrette I taste the past. The scrambled eggs and salad all created in my apron haunt me playfully. The Italian cuss words dance upon my tongue. The smell of the deli wafts in my nose. I eat— I taste being taught and passing on recipes. I see grandma sick in the hospital fading fast. I see family gathering, celebrating a life, eating— tasting all of our collective memories once again, together as la famiglia.

The Family ( whats left of it)

2010-09-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

"We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us. And only when we realize, not intellectually but actually, as actually as we would recognize that we are hungry or in pain, that you and I are responsible for all this existing chaos, for all the misery throughout the entire world, because we have contributed to it in our daily lives, and are a part of this monstrous society with its wars, divisions, its ugliness, brutality and greed--only then will we act." Krishna-murti, quoted in The Different Drum by M. Scott Peck

Tangled Cords and Swear Words

2010-09-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

Why is it that cords always tangle? You think you coil them, or set them, or tuck them away so that they don’t, but they do. They always do. The headphones wind together with my computer charger and if I have my i-pod charger in my bag too, well then it is pretty much impossible to unwind the tangley mess without a lot of swearing and too much time, that I don’t have.

My freshman year of college I needed some money and decided to get a job. However, at this time in the semester all of the jobs were taken except the ones that no one else really wanted. So, I applied to do custodial at six in the mornings Monday through Friday. I’m not a morning person. It usually takes me till about noon to wake up and that is with 3 cups of coffee. But money often drives us to do absurd things, so I signed the papers, filled out my W4, and started working at the ungodly hour.

If you’ve ever lived with 20 other first year students in college, you know that quiet hours, well they are relative, so to speak. And so, though I attempted to be in bed by 10 to wake up by 5:30 to make my coffee, it never happened. Pranks happened instead, long boarding down the hall happened instead, procrastinated homework happened instead and needless to say I began to hate mornings even more then I already had.

I would wake up, walk the ten feet from my dorm building to the building I was supposed to clean. And in the dark, before the birds even started chirping, I would begin my day.

How would I begin it? Untangling cords. Vacuum cords. Now cords, like I said, always tangle. You could make the best loop of that line of power and set it gently upon the little hook at the crook of the handle, but always, without fail, it would be tangled the next morning. I would balance my cup of coffee in my left hand as I attempted to untangle the mess, spilling coffee, swearing, and cursing the rising sun for bringing the morning again.

Then after time I didn’t have, not enough coffee, and not enough sleep, I would start to vacuum the cafeteria where everyone eats. Now I have been in my share of food fights in the cafeteria, but the crap people drop on the floor and just leave is disgusting. Ham, noodles, salad, napkins. And I, of course, with my pristine attitude got to clean it all up.

To make matters worse, someone else worked in the same building that I despised at the time. I’m usually not one to have “arch nemesis” but when love and loss are concerned… well this guy had attributed to my pain and so I loathed him. I wanted to pounce on him and pummel him to the ground. I wanted to swear till his ears bled and cripple him for life. You know, something evil like that.

But, No. Instead, I vacuumed. Instead, I gleaned ham from the teal 70’s carpet. Instead of standing up for the girl I thought I loved, I looked like the idiot, like the one who couldn’t get the better job, like the one who looked like hell because I had barely had time to get dressed before I was late to work. And so, the pouncing and blood and crippling never happened.

I did get to listen to my I-pod though during work though. A minor advantage amongst a sea of set-backs. I wouldn’t necessarily say I am musically literate, I buy music maybe twice a year, most other times I just acquire music from others, which creates quite the mottled arrangement of tunes. So I tend to find a song I like and listen to it on repeat. I listen to it until I cant anymore, until I know the song entirely, until it has given me all I can get out of it.

And what song was I listening to on my custodial adventures. One by Phill Whickham, Holy, Holy, Holy:

“Lightning breaks around Your throne

Streams of Glory bursting from your robe

You are the God in Heaven

Voices sing Your endless praise

All who see you bow for countless days

You are the God in heaven

Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord, God almighty

Worthy Worthy, Worthy is the Lamb

The only one who was, and is, and will come.”

This was not the melody of my heart at the time. But, for some reason I pressed repeat. I think I liked the sound of it first, coursing piano chords and his smooth voice. Then, on about day three of working and listening to the song, I started to hear the words. By week two, I was humming along, by the middle of that week the words coursed through my heart as they had the headphones.

Soon I started changing. I smiled as I vacuumed and I danced as I cleaned the toilets and urinals.

“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord, God almighty

Worthy Worthy, Worthy is the Lamb

The only one who was and is and will come.”

Sponge. Toilet scrubber. Rubber gloves. Vacuum cord…

Shit. The cords were still tangled as always. The cords are always tangled. One day I took the vacuum into the cafeteria and started untangling the cord. I was surprised what the song had done to me, how the song had begun to untangle me. But even the cords were no match for the power of the song.

But “Shit. Shit. Shit…I hate cords and mornings” slowly (but surely) shifted to “Holy, Holy, Holy. God was. God is. God is to come.”

And then the guy, the enemy, the love thief, the relationship murderer, walked in front of me. Shit. Shit. Shi---Holy, Holy, Holy. Was. Is. Is to come.

“Hey. How are you?” He spoke. Great, he spoke. And he had the nerve to smile too, as if he knew me, as if to flaunt his happiness with my ex in front of me.

“Hey. I’m good—Thanks.” I don’t get nervous often. Well that is a lie, I think I’m perpetually nervous, especially with new social interaction, but I don’t show it often, well at least I like to think that. But, I showed it then.

I slammed my eyes down towards the cord and finished unraveling it. Breathe. Breathe. I plugged in the power. I felt air in my lungs.

Suddenly, I couldn’t think about lighting the guy on fire anymore, I realized as I picked up a chunk of crusty macaroni and cheese. For some reason, my bitterness felt as if it was hitting a wall and could no longer manifest itself fully in my body. The vacuum glided across the carpet in my hand. Forward—back, making its own droll heartbeat.

And slowly I felt my own heartbeat. Ba-beat. Ba-beat. Ba-beat. Slowly, I began to unwind like the cords. I felt as if someone was singing the strands of my life into harmony again. The strand of hatred for the guy. The strands of abandonment from the girl. The strands of bitterness from the morning and life.

“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord, God almighty

Worthy Worthy, Worthy is the Lamb

The only one who was, and is, and will come.”

And as the strands untwined, amongst them, hidden in the nest of wires and cord, I felt other strands arising. I suddenly felt the intense privilege I had in cleaning up after everyone and renewing a space to beauty again. I suddenly recognized the humanity in the enemy, perhaps his smile was genuine (maybe not though). And as I was unraveled, I could see all things just a bit clearer.

I could remember my childhood and its joys and sorrows. I re-lived abandonment and loneliness. Yet, I lived.

God was.

I could see the present. I could feel my bitter state, my hurt, my pain, my fear. But I was alive.

God is.

And then, I saw a light, as I listened to the vacuum’s heart beat on the carpet. Then I saw a future of more life. Of pain, oh yes. Of intense sorrow, certainly. But—amongst it all: reconciliation, hope, brilliant light. Now life begins, I thought.

God is coming.

The Taste of Goodness

2010-09-01T21:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a simple thing like food can make life so much more enjoyable. It is amazing to me what I give up in order to live a more efficient life, rather then a life exploding with beauty. Food has a direct tie to my emotional and spiritual well being, so I have learned. Therefore, I have hated the Bon (the company who caters the food at my school). I have tried to be thankful for what I am given, but when things don’t taste good, well as I said, it appears as though my spirit soaks in the awful taste like everything in the fridge does when you leave an uncovered, half-used, onion out.

So I decided to get student food-stamps this year. Ive filled out the pain-in-the-ass app, I have scheduled an interview, and now I wait for food. Its good for me I think. To wait, to give thanks, to be creative, to cook.

I inherited from my mom, the intense need to cook as well. Maybe it’s genetics, maybe it was learned: nurture vs. nature, you know the concepts. But, there is just something about the act of cooking. With each chop of the knife I feel a bit of my bitterness falling away and with each dash of salt or flip of the pan in my hand I feel grace creeping up upon me. Creeping, most likely, so I don’t push it away, the grace. Because isn’t that we do more often then not, maybe not consciously, but we rarely let ourselves bask in grace.

I want to share my last two meals with you.

For my committee meeting on Tue night I have ventured out to make dinner every week. We will see how this goes, hopefully it remains cathartic and not a burden. I’m not sure if it will. Cooking is an art of process: you have to see where you are going before you can begin, and that just so happens to be one thing in this world that gets my juices flowing (well there are a lot of things, but that is one ha).

Tuesday night, last night, I made Barbeque Chicken Pizza. It was someone else’s idea, but by the time I had picked out all of the ingredients, I was pretty hungry for it. Actually, the cilantro did me in. You have to pick the right bunch with cilantro and as I lifted that misted bush of leaves to my nose it was time for some eating.

What you nee

1 bunch cilantro
1 red onion

1 Jalapeño

Rotisserie Chicken

BBQ Sauce: Sweet Baby Rays is without a doubt the best of the common store brands.

Mozzarella Cheese

But first, you need to make the dough. I took out the packet of yeast. Such a unique smell is yeast; if potential-life is embodied in a smell, then it is the smell of yeast. Then I dumped the yeast in 1 cup of warm water. The yeast blooms like a cherry tree full of blossoms in the spring. And that smell wafts up into the air sending that potential for life to attach to every air-particle.

Then 2 ½ cups of flour into a bowl. A pinch of salt. You stick your hand into the flour-filled crater and make a indent in the center. Like hands held together in surrender to the Divine, the flour is ready for the life-filled water. Add 2 tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil and 1 tablespoon honey. Add the yeast blooming water.

Mix with your hands, always the hands. Making dough is like raising children. Well, I haven’t raised children, but I imagine it would be like making dough. You never know, though you may have the perfect recipe, how the dough will form. You never know until you start mixing all of the ingredients together what the forming dough will need, but you try as hard to guess what you think will be right. Sometimes it is too wet, well most times, and you have to add a tiny bit of flour at a time. So you add a sprinkle over the top of the sticky mess until it firms just a bit. Then as you mix more, as you intimately massage the flour and water and thick honey into one whole. It sticks to the sides of the bowl and needs more flour. Sprinkle—Sprinkle. You turn the bowl over onto the floured cutting board and you kneed.

Palms push into the warm dough, push. You fold it back on top of itself, push. Sprinkle---Sprinkle. Push—fold. Just like a child growing, forming, individuating. Then you pick it up, gently. It is a huddled mass of potential. You hold onto one edge of the ball between your fingers and thumb and let it drop, softly, timidly. You have to let it pull itself into the right shape and thickness, but if you let go too soon it will tear or fall to the ground.

The dough is ready. It bubbles in the oven on the pizza stone kept from sticking by a thin bed of cornmeal.

Cut the through its center and into thin circles, same with the Jalapeños.

Cut the cilantro. Oh what enticing confetti.

Pull the chicken apart, and mix it with some BBQ sauce and the confetti (cilantro).

On the pizza spread some sauce, add the confettied chicken, add onions, add jalapeños.

Add cheese. Watch it sizzle, and bubble, and form. The process is done the potential has been birthed.

Meal Two:
I took the carcass from the rotisserie chicken and the left over meat home with me. I found some carrots and celery from a veggie platter left over from orientation that didn’t get used. I had some rice. God is good, especially when food is free.

Onions, celery, and carrots taste and smell as if they are a cooking classic. Because they are, it’s amazing what sears into our societal subconscious. Together they make a sweetly rich flavor. A depth comes from them that you can only get from those three vegetables together, what a miracle. So you cook the onions first until they are translucent, then add the carrots because they take a gaudy amount of time to cook, then the celery when the carrots are still a little al dente.

Then throw in the carcass and cover with water. Add garlic, a little. Thyme. And let it boil for an hour or so. Then you have a stock. A homemade, sickness-curing, sensation-stirring, liquid of goodness. Well after you drain it and skim off all of the fat.

Do the same thing you did before with the magic trio: carrots, celery, and onions. Then you add the broth back in with the chicken, and some rice. Add salt and pepper to taste and cook until the rice is plumped, stirring occasionally.

Why is it that soup brings joy. Why is it that those three vegetables are simple and ordinary alone but added together with some heat and fat and they become rich and deep.

How glorious is it, that we have such a variety with which to fill our stomachs, souls, and taste-buds with. Our God is good. Food is good.

Cooking is an art of process, like raising a child, or stepping into grace. You have to be aware, you have to be looking and watching, sprinkling and stirring, cutting and tasting. Much like life. Much like spirituality.

So, may I always be one who watches for grace. May I be one who sprinkles stability when needed and stirs the questions of Mystery. May I be one who is able to cut that which needs to be let go or broken down. May I be one who tastes the goodness and beauty of this God-filled universe all around me.

Hello! My name is...

2010-09-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life seems unbearable. The universe can appear saturated with darkness, our frail human condition, and the stark reality of our brokenness and ability to hurt others (or be hurt by others) because of that brokenness.

Other times, the world seems just a bit brighter than before. Sometimes, even the most simple of things seem to be pointing to the Divine. Sometimes, everything seems to be nestled amongst a brilliant frosting of lightness. In those moments seeds are everywhere. Seeds of grace plant themselves in even the most unexpected of places: a leaf that we trample on the sidewalk, someone giving you a day-old donut, a warm cup of coffee, rain on an august night, dinner with community.

We live constantly in-between those two universes, or perhaps the two universes co-exist around us and we, as small as we are, have to but be aware.

A couple nights ago was the Worship at the Amphitheatre, this has come to be one of my favorite times at George Fox University. Perhaps it is the excitement that seems to hum in the air from the first-years. I know I hummed a bit my first year. But more so, it is hearing the resounding hum of another reality; the reality that we are all broken, scared, anxious, and uncertain. These notes seem to prominently dance in the atmosphere, because after all, those vibrations are the feelings of every emerging-adult today. If any, my age group feels the tugging of the two universes, sits on the edge of darkness and lightness, of certainty and uncertainty, of future and stressfully-shaky present.

And that is why I love this service at the beginning of every year. It becomes sort of a proclamation of perseverance to come, of hope to birth, of prayer to flow. Five-hundred students attended this year. To think that Jesus has a plan for each student, knows each students deepest fears and anxieties, mourns as they all mourn, rejoices as they all rejoice. The Divine is vast. The Divine is good. The Divine fills every crevice of our souls and atom of our swirling universe.

Now a story:

Every year during orientation time I am reminded of this image out of Mathew 5.

There is this crowd gathering around Jesus, as the crowds often did. Bunches of people who had heard about all of the miraculous things Jesus had done, the healings and teachings, all pressed in around him and his dearest twelve friends.

And so Jesus climbs up the side of a mountain and I imagine he finds a steady boulder and I imagine he sits. I imagine he breathes deep, centers on the Divine Energy flowing throughout him, and then he looks down at the crowd.

There must have been a hum that night too, at the mountain. There must have been vibrations of emotion echoing from the souls of the people in front of Jesus. I just imagine him sizing the people up, you know, inspecting with grand intuition, and trial-birthed wisdom, all of the different people around him.

Then from the crowd a certain tone calls out to him, someone’s heart must have vibrated louder then the others: “Thump-a-Thump.” Perhaps that someone looked down or depressed even. Or perhaps that person had learned the perverted art of hiding our pain, and Jesus simply knew better. Regardless, Jesus spotted that someone. And I imagine, from his steady boulder on the side of the mountain, Jesus looked into that persons eyes

(and of course everyone thought the speaker was looking right at them) and he begun to speak. He began to utter some of the most remembered words of humankind. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for yours is the kingdom of heaven.” He said. I imagine he breathed again with deep patience as he allowed himself to sense the tingling of his lungs at peace.

Then maybe he saw a widow; the women who had been shunned from the community because no one was around to re-marry her. And he said, “blessed are those who mourn for they--for you-- will be comforted.”

Jesus continues spotting people in the crowd and reassuring them. Calling their hurt out of their souls and into the warm middle-east air, letting it slip away into the wind of the mountainside. And he continues: “blessed are the meek” he says “for they shall inherit the earth…

The students at the amphitheatre were invited to partake in an activity, an experience. A board 8 feet long by 4 feet tall had been primed and set at the front of the stage.

Jesus invites us into the Kingdom regardless and perhaps because of what we are experiencing, despite the hums of our heart and the darkness they may relate to at any given moment. And in that invitation comes something even grander, something even deeper. With that invitation comes a new name, a new identity. We are invited into the Family (Kingdom) of God that is full of broken people, we are given the hope of renewal, we are washed with the Spirit, but we are also re-named “Beloved.” Or perhaps more accurately we have always been named Beloved,, we just perhaps never latch onto it.

Life can throw out names at us. Our society throws out identities at us constantly. Our friends and family, no matter the nature or extent of their love, throw out their own names for us. Perfect. Child. Student. Friend. Daughter. Worker. Failure. Fag. Addict. Adulterer. Teacher. Christian.

Yet the one name we need the most—well, it gets lost in the jumble and chaos of the “other” voices.

So we invited the students up to the board to write with Sharpie the names that clamored in the jumble, the names that weren’t “Beloved,” the identities that held them back and cast them into darkness and despair.

I sat right in front of the board in the first row. The students lined up and soon the board began to fill with words in front of me. Soon the off-white plywood spread with sharpie-ink like chalk on a rainy sidewalk.

“Fear.”

“Anxiety.”

“Expectations.”

“Drunk Mother.”

“Unforgivable.”

“Depressed.”

“I get around.”

“Unworthy…

The words swarmed in front of me, on the board. A flock of ravens they swirled into the once blank background.

It was hard not to cry, and so I did (as usual).

It was hard not to feel the utter despair in the presence of these peoples pain, people I walk with, by, and past, all over campus. It was hard not to float into the reality of dark hopelessness.

But then, each person was handed a new name. On a name tag (it sounds cheesy I know). Some people actually laughed when they were handed the “Hello My Name Is” sticker with the word “Beloved” handwritten on it. Others grabbed the sticker quickly and walked as fast as they could away from the swarming flock of names on the board. Yet still, there were some who lingered at the board, as they added their name to the mess and read over the others.

“Fear.”

“Anxiety.”

“Expectations.”

“Drunk Mother.”

“Unforgivable.”

“Depressed.”

“I get around.”

“Unworthy…

…Untouchable.”

And then, once they were handed the sticker, they smothered in their chest as if to consume the identity by osmosis, as if they had waited their whole lives for someone to show them it was okay to cast off the shadows of our world and step into the universe of light.

And then, as the line filtered down and the board reached its maximum capacity, I was able to do something... well id rather not tag it down because some things, well they are too beautiful to tag down.

And it was about time too, because sitting and reading anymore pain might have ruined me. Sometimes we face our own darkness and/or the darkness of others and it is unbearable. Sometimes we can’t fix things, actually most things end up being unfixable. Sometimes tragedy really does happen; things don’t make sense, pain surges, suffering catapults itself upon our lives, but this night, this night I could do something.

I had placed paint in paper bowls and grabbing my brush out of my back pocket I began shooing away the vicious flock of raven-names. First, I painted the “B” then “E” etc… until the word was finished. Then I covered the rest. But Sharpie, well it doesn’t like to be covered by paint, it has a way of peaking through even after being painted over.

But so does life. Yes we are Beloved, oh how we are loved by the Divine. Yes, we simultaneously live amongst light and darkness. Yes, we are invited into the Family of God forever, constantly, and always. But usually, at least on Earth anyway, the clamor always peaks through a little. The names we have been plastered with always linger. Once an experience stains us it is hard to wash it completely away. Once life crashes in we always seem to be brushing off remnants of rubble.

So we fight:

Fear? No I am loved: Strength.

Anxiety? No I am loved: Shalom.

Drunk Mother? No I am loved: redemption.

Unworthy? Yes, but I am still loved. Grace.

Though we live on the edge of the universe of dark and the universe of illuminating light, the Family of God is a reality that transcends and penetrates both of those realities and any other that may exist.

So what is the hum of your soul? What would Jesus say to you from the steady boulder on the landscape? What hurt must be called out of the sorrow of your soul and released into the warm air to slip away into the wind of the mountainside? What ravens peck and swarm at your heart? What would you write on the board?