Stuckness isn’t really fear. It’s more like inertia. You convince yourself that you’ll hurt someone irreparably, or that you’ll never earn a living again, or that This is your Last Chance at happiness, and so you simply don’t move.
Stuckness is that voice that walks you up to an imaginary canyon, has you look across, and when you see nothing but fog shouts, “See! You have NO IDEA what will happen!!”
I wear that STRONGER bracelet every day. I've knotted it on so I can't lose it easily. Every day I look at it, once, twice, constantly. It reminds me that I'm stronger than I think I am. It reminds me that I'm not alone. And every day at some point I need reminding.
The first wedding I ever performed took place in Chicago in an art gallery, in 1997.
The two consenting adults were barred from legal union, so it wasn’t a wedding in the “render unto Caesar” sense. It was holy, and it was a union of two lives that created a new identity: a family. So it was, in fact, a wedding.
The God of contemporary evangelicalism looks a lot like a caricature of YHWH (God as portrayed in their Old Testament).
The God of contemporary evangelicalism is petty. Self-defensive. Angry.
That God is a conspiracy theorist: He is in pitched battle with an unseen enemy who has secret control over everybody.
That God is misunderstood: He must be defended and promoted at every turn.
That God’s brutality and viciousness is righteous: He is merely responding to the betrayal and lies of His lessers.
20 years ago my husband Bran and I were united in the bonds of holy matrimony.
This was our second wedding.
Our first had been in San Francisco City Hall, on July 2. At the first one, our attendant was one of the lawyers in the publishing firm at which I was an editor. She brought red roses. I brought a license.
We got married on July 2 because I was a United Methodist pastor, starting a new call and moving into the parsonage (the house for the pastor, owned by the church) on July 4. My District Superintendent (that was my United Methodist boss) would not allow my husband-minus-six-weeks to move into the parsonage with me, and I wasn't going to pay first, last, and two months' rent for an apartment for him. So, two days before we loaded up the back of Bran's pickup truck, the San Francisco County Clerk pronounced us legally married. The irony was not lost on Bran and me. We were officially forbidden from living together because our relationship hadn’t been consecrated in a church…which was solved by a legal, and very unchurchy, execution of a marriage contract.
As I told my supervisor: we had rendered unto Caesar and were moving in.
That District Superintendent turned out to not like me very much.
So on August 15, Bran and I got really married, in front of God and two pastors and 60 people or so.
Most of the arrangements--flowers, altar, photography, cakes, handmade wood communion set--were done by friends or acquaintances. We had two cakes. One was white--rose, white chocolate, and raspberry--at the church. The other was chocolate, with shards of chocolate sticking out all over. They were made by the soccer-playing baker who had lived in my apartment building a few years earlier.She later became The Elizabeth Falkner, but then she was just "hot baker Elizabeth." Hot did not refer to her rising popularity.
Big days become a collection of mental snapshots. Here is my favorite: I peeked out of the church library, where I was sequestered and bored (and a little panicked), and saw my fiance doing one of the tasks I had anticipated a friend doing: adding rose water to each of the champagne flutes. I'd purchased medicine droppers to make it go quickly, but Bran hadn't seen those, and was carefully measuring out and dripping those liquid flowers into each of eighty narrow glasses with a tablespoon.
Our two decades together haven't been easy. No one's are. But two things have made them possible: God, and Bran's deep desire to please me. When things get hard, I remember that tablespoon, and the drip drip of rose water into narrow glasses, just to make me happy.
Even when I was ordained into professional ministry, twenty years ago last month, I was far more comfortable with pastor than with Christian.
Where I come from, the noun Christian has always been an epithet, spat rather than stated. As an adjective, used to describe kindness in action, it's been a fine word, though charitable, compassionate, or loving work as well, because most of those kind actions weren't performed because of a belief in Christ.
The other day, my School For Seekers partner (musical artist Benton Stokes) and I recorded an episode of our podcast, Cocktail Theology, asking: Is Christianity doing any good?
Benton comes from Nashville, where Christianity is in the water, like spiritual chlorination. As an #exangelical, in recent years he's shied away from saying he's a Christian because of all the truly awful people proudly declaring their Christianity.
Your deep beliefs motivate your actions. Your core ideas shape the way you perceive reality. If you think that you believe one idea but you really believe another, your actions will almost never get you the result you think you want.
Like, if you have the idea that God is all-loving and all-powerful, but really believe, deep down, that God is watching for you to mess up, you won't fully experience God's love.
It takes a certain kind of drive, determination and desire to build empires, whether they’re churches or production companies or campaigns.
The dirty secret is that it's the same drive that destroys others. You don't have to destroy others if you have a passionate will to power, I expect, but I'm not sure how exactly that works.
Hundred of thousands of sermons later, we are no closer to mechanism than the women were two thousand years ago. Resurrection remains a happy mystery: a good thing, lest we come to think that we are able to raise ourselves out of our own tombs.
When we face mystery, art is more effective than science, poetry more provocative than prose. Here are a few Easter poems, for illumination, if not explanation.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
“The Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus” by Diego Valázquez c.1620
By Denise Levertov
She listens, listens, holding her breath.
Surely that voice
is his—the one
who had looked at her, once,
across the crowd, as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her?
Had spoken as if to her?
Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well?
Surely that face—?
The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning,
alive?
Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don’t recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen,
absently touching the wine jug she’s to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,
swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.
Yesterday morning I had to do a hard reset of my phone to correct a mess of nonfunctionality. I backed up everything first, except, as it turned out, my text messages. Thousands of them. Reminders. Phone numbers. Photos. Early morning theological musings. And, most important, the daily trivial proof that I have friends and am valuable to them.... I felt unmoored, utterly adrift and alone.
Bibliolatry may be the most dangerous idolatry. It deifies words over the Living Word, prefers memorization to revelation, and deliberately places a 5000 year old stumbling block between God and God's little ones.
If you come to the Bible sincerely seeking to know God, intimately and lovingly, you will. If you come to the Bible to prove your doctrine and dogma (including atheism) right, you will. But the latter is neither salvation nor relationship. Which are, of course, what actually matter, and why the Bible was written in the first place.
#metoo went viral, because harassment, assault, attack, and rape are deadly. They kill spirits, self-image, courage, relationships, and bodies, not to mention the souls of the perpetrators as well as of the victims.
Nothing is off-limits. School For Seekers is about building sandboxes (to play in) and safe spaces (to risk in) for communion with God and community with others.
That #nofilter part means that we will speak honestly about what we know, admit what we don't, and recognize that no topic is outside life and God. Not sex, not physics, not Arkham Asylum. It's all part of the glorious reality.
