Inconvenient

I didn't know who Kobe Bryant was. 

I'm sorry. 

I haven't really paid attention to sports or celebrities since the 80s, but multiple people I love were pained greatly by his death so I'm learning.

I found myself choked up reading about all those lost in the helicopter crash and seeing pictures of Bryant with his arm around his daughter. My heart broke for all those who lost loved ones and all those who lost a hero.

And then my mind wandered to Stevie Ray Vaughan's death in a helicopter. It was years ago, but I had just seen him in concert and he was so alive and amazing and pulling his life together that it seemed unfair for him to be snatched in the prime of his life. That's when I remembered some wise words an imam once told me:

Death is inconvenient.

We were on a tour of the mosque in Dearborn, in the embalming room next to the nursery, and the imam was describing how a body needed to be buried within 24 hours. I asked about family that couldn't get there in time and he said, "Death is inconvenient." 

Amen. 

So I've been practicing being inconvenienced and uncomfortable hoping I'll be a bit more prepared. I'm not sure there is any way to be prepared for death pulling the rug out of the life you imagined, but it never hurts to practice.

I hike on Mondays as part of my day off and today it was definitely inconvenient and uncomfortable. It took a long time for me to get motivated to leave my cup of coffee and head out into the sideways precipitation and slush. The great gift of ritual is that I always hike on Monday whether I feel like it or not and the dog knows it. 

We headed out expecting to be miserable, but then surprise! The sun popped out, the temperature dropped a little so the slush was ice, and an eagle posed so we could get a good look at how beautiful she was. 
It's good practice to do the hard and inconvenient thing with some dread trusting that life and joy surprise us. 

I've had enough experiences like that to help me keep going when I'd rather curl up.

Then we turned a corner and the sleet and wind scoured my face. It was tempting to turn around, but we kept pushing because I knew around the next corner there could be a totally different experience. (It was different - we went from wind to post-holing in deep snow). I'm not going to say it was particularly fun, but it was a good reminder that sometimes you have to put your head down and keep pushing until you round the next bend.

I know none of that is helpful when people are in the throes of grief, but doing uncomfortable and inconvenient things might be good practice if you aren't. 

Fixing

I passed a snowman with serious issues today on my hike. Cassie barked at him and I considered fixing him. 

And then I asked the obvious question, "Why?" 
Why do I feel like I know the way things should be? 

Then I started laughing and Cassie barked more because I'm weird, but the snowman reminded me of the Jesus fresco in Spain that a parishioner tried to "fix" and Jesus ended up resembling a messed up monkey.

Here is my resolution on Martin Luther King Jr. Day:
I will not approach people as projects in need of fixing.

I think one of the first steps in violence and in racism is the dehumanization of the other and then the decision to either destroy or fix them. 

I will engage in relationships outside of my culture, age, gender, and all the other little boxes so my blind spots are revealed and my world becomes bigger. I miss our little interfaith group because this was one of the gifts we offered each other; we opened new perspectives and removed blinders. 

We didn't have to agree about beliefs or perspectives, but we could honor that folks were seeking to figure out salvation faithfully. I might find some things inaccurate or wrong, but I can only speak about what gives my life hope and meaning. 

I'm not in charge of fixing and we can look back at church history and see the many times the church tried to fix things and Jesus ended up defaced.

Real

I like writing on Mondays. It keeps me from thinking about my lists or getting one line from an addictive song stuck in my head.
Shot through the heart and you're to blame . . . 
On a train bound to nowhere . . . 
If you like pina coladas . . . 

I've come to realize that writing on Mondays gives me something to think about that doesn't cause me stress on my day off. I've also come to realize that the work of trying to publish something might be a bit too ambitious for me.

Today, I bundled up in the 3 degree weather and went for an amazing hike. It was so stunningly beautiful it didn't seem real. There are days when Alaska is crazy beautiful and I feel like I'm living in a post card, or with  a painted backdrop, or in a Cecil B. DeMille  drama. But then I realize I have snotcicles and it is all so very real.

I'm not sure if any other parents of teenagers struggle with the time spent on Fortnite, but I'm slowly figuring out how to compromise. Our basic guideline is that you have to experience as much real reality as you do virtual reality. You need as much time experiencing the aches of climbing, a frozen face, and the reward of a beautiful view as you do gathering axes, blowing things up and the other weird things that compromise the game I'm trying not to judge too harshly.

I enter virtual reality through books and my dear son enters it through games. We both need reality checks. Instead of delving too deeply into what is real, I tend to think that something is real if it involves a certain amount of discomfort or suffering. 

That's not masochism, but a recognition that reality takes an investment and risk; it means an openness to the elements and facing them on their terms. Reality is encountering the world as it is instead of a world designed and manipulated to keep us comfortable and spending money. 

The first thing I tell people when they are thinking of visiting us in Alaska is that it's not Disney. This isn't a catered experience sure to leave you mildly amused without leaving your comfort zone; this is real - sweat, snot, and some tired legs kind of real. 

Maybe Swearing Will Help

I'm going to take a break from blogging for a while and work on editing. 

I've decided to work on a daily devotion based on blogs, newsletters, and sermons and I would like to title it Maybe Swearing Will Help. I think that will go over as well as A Waste of Time.

There is a random mix of quotes and poems on my desk, but I keep a little sign that says "Maybe swearing will help." It is not meant to be offensive, but sometimes swearing does help me.

Swearing and singing come from a different part of the brain than regular speech. Singing has never been my gift, but I learned to swear well when I was young. I'm going to blame it on my speech impediment. When I was unable to enunciate s, z, r or l, I could say shit and damn until the cows came home. When so much of language was work for me, I loved swearing for the break it gave my tongue and brain.

Swearing also often helps people feel comfortable. I'm a pastor and my very presence at a gathering brings guilt. People walk up to me and start to tell me why they aren't in church. I write it all down and pass it on to Jesus for them. Not really. It's just slightly awkward, but if I swear then people end the lame excuses and say something like, "it's good to know you are human." I hope they thought I was a cyborg before I started swearing.

Humanity and profanity so often go together.

Sometimes we look at our humanity as lacking sacredness, but I would like to focus a daily devotion on God's work transforming the profane into the sacred. Jesus continually takes the ordinary stuff of life and encourages us to see God at work redeeming and loving.

If humanity is living with our impiety and limits, then I would say divinity is imagining the creative power of eternal love.  I see this stab as a devotion as an attempt to make connections between humanity and divinity. How do we pay attention to our profane moments and see how God is making them sacred?

Termination Dust

Termination dust makes me happy. 

The fresh snow on the mountains marks the end of one season and the beginning of another (I'd say we only have two seasons - light and dark). And now it's time to terminate things. I get to chop down all the plants I haven't already killed, put my garden to sleep, and clean out the coop before the poop freezes. I'm not sure why these things make me happy, but I love the process of cutting everything back so we all can rest and renew over the winter. 

I'm kind of feeling the same way with my faith tradition. I've been thinking about getting rid of the labels "God" and "Christian." I feel like these labels need chopped down to the roots and allowed to rest because they have lost meaning, or more appropriately they are overflowing with too many contradictory meanings.

I think the word "god" is dull and worthless. The word simply means "supreme being" and what the heck does that mean? It's hard to hear the word "god" and not think of a big white guy in the sky. I don't believe in a big white guy sitting in a cloud somewhere far away ruling over us. 

So I've been trying to come up with a more appropriate word to describe the God we worship. Christian orthodoxy describes God as a trinity so I would argue that the best name is "Eternal Communion of Love." That's a grand theological solution in case you were wondering, but the logistics get messy. Eternal Communion of Love is a lot of words to write every time we talk about God and the acronym is way too much like E. coli and that does not evoke worship and praise. 

How about E.C.? Eternal Communion and it makes me think of E.T. who is more appealing than the big white guy in the sky or diarrhea. Come on. There's something holy about E.T. - he's a terrifying and fascinating mystery that draws people in.

Anyway, I'm going to try and let the word "god" rest because it's been invoked for way too many horrible things and talk about E.C. for a bit. At least for the rest of today.

I'd love to stop calling myself a Christian too. I feel like that label has been hijacked across the spectrum to equate to certain social agendas. I do think our trust in the Eternal Communion of Love may drive us to speak out on issues, but I also think it is probably best not to say our agenda comes from God.  If your social agenda leaves you hating brothers and sisters, then it probably isn't grounded in the love we see in Jesus.

How about "Lovers"? We get rid of the name Christian and replace it with Lovers. It's a way more dynamic name than Christian. And think about all fun new signs and songs. "The First Lover's Church", "Onward Lovers", "Good Lover Friends, Rejoice" . . . 

I know it's goofy, but there are times that it's helpful to cut back our assumptions, give our overused words a break, and try to look anew at our faith and world around us. 

Sacred

I've been trying to figure out why the recent Flying Spaghetti Monster prayer at the Homer assembly meeting bugged me. I'm not easily offended and I don't know if I'm a supporter of prayers at civic meetings, but I  found the publicity and the prayer itself offensive. 

"So, I’m called to invoke the power of the true inebriated creator of the universe, the drunken tolerator (sic) of the all lesser and more recent gods, and maintainer of gravity here on earth. May the great Flying Spaghetti Monster rouse himself from his stupor and let his noodly appendages ground each assembly member in their seats.”

I am currently traveling reconnecting with family and friends. I'm also doing some continuing education on grief, life coaching, and how the church talks about sex. All of this has given me a chance to reflect on what is sacred.

The word "sacred" comes from the word "holy" and the word "holy" doesn't mean you're super well-behaved. Holy means to be set apart for a specific purpose. To mark something as holy or sacred means to recognize the significance of that time, place and the people there.

Prayer is a way of marking sacred space and people. It's a way of recognizing that meeting or moment as significant; the decisions made by leaders (and all of us) have eternal ripples. What we do and decide matters. 

I get anxious when we go speeding into a sense that nothing matters. There is so much absurdity on a regular basis that I want to defend a few moments and words to mark the sacred and let the absurd take a break for at least a few minutes. It loses some humor and fun when every moment has an edge of ridiculousness. 

I am also offended by prayers that have an agenda of god the great wish granter or god on my side or believe what I do. They have no place in public gatherings, but I appreciate hearing from a variety of faith expressions about how we make this time and space set apart as significant. Prayer isn't about inviting a magic god in to fix things, but it invites us out of ourselves into a greater purpose; it reminds us to be compassionate, wise, and gracious (those tend to be qualities that stretch across faiths). 

The Wall

What three major events impacted your life?

That was Elijah's homework question for me the other day. It got me thinking.

9/11 was definitely top of the list as well as the genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. These events destroyed any sense of naivete about humanity's capacity for cruelty. The killings in Rwanda felt very close because we were in seminary in Tanzania not long after and the stories of normal life turning into slaughter were chilling.

But, the one that was fun to talk about was the fall of the Berlin Wall. I got to tell him all about going to Germany as an exchange student when I was a Junior and being one of the last classes to go through Checkpoint Charlie. I was obsessed with McDonald's toys and I can still remember the East German guard going through my huge white purse. He first pulled out all these strange toys I insisted on carrying with me and then my rubber chicken key chain. He held that up and smiled, but that was about the only smile.

Since this was long before 9/11, we hadn't experienced much security before so this all felt really intimidating and then East Berlin was so gray and quiet. That's all I remember. There were lots of gray buildings, except there were some buildings that were mostly destroyed and had a giant painted drop cloth over them. Our money was worth a lot in East Berlin, but there was nothing to buy.

One of the highlights from our last trip to Germany two years ago was getting to explore the history of the GDR and  study how something that looks so reasonable on paper destroyed the human spirit. The constant suspicion and intimidation exhausted people. The alcohol consumption in the GDR was eight times higher than in West Germany.

We never imagined standing in line at Checkpoint Charlie in 1988 that within a year the wall would come down. There were many things that led up to that day in November, but the peaceful protests are close to my heart.

The pastor of a church in Leipzig held regular Monday prayers for peace until October 9, when the numbers were too great for the church. As the Deutsche Welle reported,

Around 6,000 to 8,000 people were crammed in to the churches in central Leipzig, and a total of 70,000 people had gathered in the city. Everyone was holding a candle, a symbol of non-violence - you need to hold a candle with both hands to keep it from going out, which makes it impossible to throw stones. 

This was four months after Tiananmen Square massacre and I think we all held our breath wondering if  tanks would roll into Leipzig and Berlin. I had a t-shirt around this time with the quote, "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." It was one of my favorites, but I don't think any of us imagined that candles would help bring down the wall.

I didn't take any pictures of the Wall, but I kind of love this one
in one of the bathrooms

Yes, my life was impacted by the tragedy of terrorism and genocide, but it has also been impacted by the power of hope and non-violence. Tyrannies and empires do not last forever, but I'm willing to stake my life and my strength on the hope that love and peace do.