The Time For Deleting Has Passed

Most of the time when a "political/religious" email that I don't necessarily agree with is forwarded to me I simply hit "delete." However, I have come to understand that this is a mild form of avoidance and maybe even, elitism.
Somewhere in my mind I entertain the thought that I am far too enlightened for this type of thing and that he/she who sent it simply hasn't "arrived." Recently, though, I have come to understand that the sender was probably thinking the same thing as he/she hit the forward button.
So today when this email came, one that suggests some people love the soldiers and some don't and that the defining feature of either group would be based on our acceptance or rejection of crosses in cemeteries....I realized it is wrong to hit delete.
We have got to start talking about these things. An email is easy. A conversation is not. Thanks to the internet, we are a nation divided by spam.
So I hammered out a reply and have pasted it below. I am not going to let up on this kind of thing. This is my crusade. We can not hide behind our computer screens, erroneously harboring disdain for those who do not think like we do. It is time to talk!

Here are my thoughts...
This is a spam email and filled with half-truths according to the verification sites. I pastor a church filled with chaplains from all military backgrounds including the Navy and again, this is not true. What they are not allowed to do is proselytize non-Christian service men and women (and non-Christian chaplains are bound by the same guidelines).
So why is it going around? Why might there be something "not so good" about it?
In my opinion, it is a lie developed to create divisiveness within God's America and world.
Some churches don't allow symbols to be used (ie crosses, statues, paintings) because we humans tend to place more importance on those than on what they represent...have you heard the word "idol"? That's what it means.
Jesus never intended for us to be warring with one another over him, his cross, or gravestones. He said "let the dead bury the dead." In essence..."get with the living, there's work to do!"
We Americans are allowing what divides us to take leadership over what unites us. We are trusting in the idea of America (and what we think we've lost?) more than in the God of America. And emails like this one emphasize that. They are covert "hate mail." They single someone out to be the enemy. And Jesus said "love you enemies" plain and simple.
We must begin to rebuild ourselves as a nation under God and that means do what God said to do! Don't talk about it, war about it, forward emails about it. Do it!
Satan is innovative and clever and uses the words of God to trick, convince, and deceive. If he wants to take our country down, wouldn't the best way be to use God in a way that divides us from within?
Begin talking with those who are different from you. Have dinner parties, coffee dates, work days. Listen and share and begin to understand why they are thinking the way they are. Let them know the same about you....lovingly. I promise, neither of you will walk away the same.
Most of us will share God's Kingdom together after death. What if we decided to begin that Kingdom and that sharing now...in love, rather than indulge our earthly loyalties at the cost of our eternal ones. God is love. And when we love, we are like Him.

And no, I don't want to be dropped from your "forward list." I read your idea. You read mine. And at the end of the day let's pray for one another in love and celebrate that as different as we might be....we are MORE than conquerors, we are lovers.

In The Land of Giants

An amazing man died last week. Okay, lots of amazing men - and women - died last week. But this one was my friend and a member of my church. He was smart and kind and organized and adventurous. He flew airplanes and ran marathons and played the guitar and raised children who grew up to be fine adults and he used his hands to form burled walnut into a lovely jewelry box that he gave his wife on their thirty-fifth anniversary....a box that now holds his ashes.
The brass plate on top of the box reads you are the wind beneath my wings.
Funerals are part and parcel to my work.
Butchers butcher, bakers bake. Candlestick makers make and pastors bury the dead.
There is a place we have learned to go to, a mental and emotional land without feeling where we set ourselves aside in order to do the work at hand. But there is a high toll paid for the journey there -- our ability to grieve.
Today I sat on the podium with two other pastors, credentialed men of high learning and experience beneath whose table I am not worth to gather crumbs....
This was the kind of people who also sat before us, who came to pay tribute, who traveled from near and far to honor the passing of one who lived well and long.
Life is filled with glimpses of the good, sneak peaks of heaven, sacred moments that we can miss if we are not careful. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth is crammed with heaven,
and every common bush is on fire with God;
but only he who sees takes off his shoes;
the rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.

Let it be known that today I stayed in the now and let it all in. I took off my shoes, opened my eyes, and beheld the good fruit of a good tree, the ripples from a rock tossed well, the tracks of a man bound for glory.

Objectify This!

Curious. I spent fifty years of my life with auburn hair...okay, brunette led to auburn. They were in the same general field of the spectrum.
After I passed the half-decade mark I felt that it was time to stop exposing my scalp (and therefore my entire ecosystem) to the extreme toxicity of hair color every six weeks.
So I surrendered to my dominant color: white. But while white is the mode 'o day on the first half of my head, the rest of the follicles did not get the memo. A lot of those guys are still living in the land of the lost. Which means I still have to add some color now and then....and while I'd love to possess the beautiful white mane sported by Emmy Lou Harris, I am forced to live out these days of my life a blonder shade of pale.
It is odd.
Blond jokes just don't register.
I hear them through brunette ears. It takes a minute to realize they are at my expense.
And just recently I was at an event at which a man, a big fat bossy man....made a comment about me via my hair. He had met me before and apparently the meeting was fresher in his mind than mine. And when I asked his name (for the second time...ouch!) he snidely eluded to me as an emissary of my unforgettable ash-blond apogee.
Excuse me!
Remember me for my brains.
Remember me for my wit.
Remember me for my amazing ability to communicate.
But do not objectify me.
I'm not a square on the palette. I'm an amazing human evolving from giddy girl to grounded grandma and I am not going to be put into your tiny mind's pigeon hole labeled women with blond hair.
If I have but one life to live, let me live it as a...woman with her own sense of self. Not as one you have created via your limited ability to grow.
I took feminist studies and thought those girls were a bit radical. But guess what! You, sir, have tilted the scale to their favor
So objectify that, buddy boy. . I am more than the sum of my beautician's ventures into creativity.
I am my own woman.
And you are a jerk.
Oh, and God bless you, Mr. Jerk. I am a pastor, after all.

A Conversation With A Very Smart Guy

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Locke's Classroom. Mr. Locke aka Neal is a Princeton seminarian and we are having a conversation.
Check it out!

Jesus Who?

March 3rd, 2009 by Neal Locke

This post was inspired by Pastor Ellen (one of my last remaining Methodist Pastors) who emailed me the following question as she prepares for a class:

Did Jesus know who he was and what he was going to do on earth? At what point did he know if he did? How does that connect w/fully man and fully God?

It’s a question that we’re dealing with right now in my Systematic Theology class, and one we dealt with last semester in my Early/Medieval Church History Class. And once again, I’m on the verge of throwing up my arms and yelling, “WHO CARES?”........(continue)

To which I answered....
Oh, Neal! We live in the same spiritual neighborhood and so I find myself wrestling with the temptation to simply let it go vs. pursuing the issue! Ultimately, the question becomes...why do we want to know? Is it for the sake of dogma, is it a ruse for justifying faith or the lack thereof? Or is it to know Jesus better, understanding that this could be a side trip on the path to wisdom?
Ever the psychologist, I am using current profiling techniques in my class to get a fix on Jesus as he was in an effort to move my people past the Jesus they've created in their own image. That said, I anticipated this question so I polled you and a few other brainiacs to get a span of opinions (which, we know are like...shall we say belly buttons?).
I love your rant and I agree...what Jesus did is so very important and often gets overlooked by pamphlet-toting Jesus freaks and textbook-toting academics alike.
But to step completely away from the conversation, from the searching, from the pursuit of knowledge is to alter the trajectory of the Kingdom in a most dangerous way. Better, I think, to see that the ingredients of your argument are not mutually exclusive or finite. The argument, in and of itself, points to that truth.

Man, I love this stuff. But I think I better go do some trench work...the Kingdom comes!

Home Again

It was late in my 17th year as I walked through a sorority dorm at ENMU that I caught the soul-searching song of Carole King drifting down the hallway:
Snow is cold, rain is wet, chills my soul right to the marrow.
I won't be happy till I see you alone again, till I'm home again and feeling right.
She had me at Snow.
Those lyrics came back to me yesterday.
A bride and her groom stood before me and I needed somehow to explain to them the amazing power of this thing called love which they were just now professing before God and a great cloud of witnesses.
Just then it began to snow.
This bride's father had died in a snowy car crash years hence and his ashes were interred on the hill above my little church. In our counseling sessions she explained that having the wedding here was the closest she could come to him walking her down the aisle. She told me she would have the photographer snap pictures of her on the hill by his crypt and our wedding coordinator warned her that it might be snowy and if she did such a thing her dress could get stained as she made her way up the trail.
She said she hoped it did snow. Her best memories were of playing with her dad in the Colorado snow....
Snow is cold, rain is wet, chills my soul right to the marrow....
There we stood in the midst of a miracle.
We simply paused, stared out the window, and absorbed the awe of a moment no one could explain.
No explanations were needed.

Finally Made It To Blue

What's blue?
I love Annie's New Mexico sky photo. Has there ever been a bluer shade of blue?
I remember "Love Is Blue" from junior high mixers...oh boy, do I remember! I was the girl stuck to the wall -- praying somebody/anybody would ask me to dance while simultaneously scared to death somebody would.
And something old, new, borrowed, blue at my wedding -- well, that depends on which one we're talking about. Wedding #1, it was my bridesmaid's dresses. I still remember Carolyn and Kim and Debbie in those big floppy hats and their baby blue empire waist/Neru collared granny dresses with fistfuls of daisies...God, I miss the revolution!
Wedding #2 was a simpler event: backyard, justice of the peace, a few family members, our kids. What was blue?
Maybe it was my baby girl's beautiful eyes...so recently returned from almost certain death after a prolonged illness.
It could have been my heart...mourning the loss of my mother, not yet cold in her grave.
Blue was possibly the icing flowers on the cake that honored the start of our first year and the end of my husband's parents' 40th. Who could have known they'd have just three more?
Traditions are meaningful only when we make them so. I can't think that on the day of that second walk down the aisle they held much allure. I was beyond them. I had moved into practical survival mode and there was no room for frills. I had no pennies in my shoe or lace garter on my leg. I know we clinked champagne glasses but not long after that was done I was putting my new children to bed -- drying their tears as they wept for the lost home of their divorced parents.
That was thirty-something years ago and the beat goes on.
I read that psychics who claim the gift of the third eye, the ability to see auras, understand the blue emanations from a person indicate their deep rootedness in spirituality. People with blue auras tend to become social workers, teachers, writers, psychologists.
Or preachers?
I met an old Jewish lady named Gretchen several years ago. During the war her parents fled Germany with her in tow. Her father had been a famous artist there and the one thing he carried with him across the snowy mountains was a cask of cobalt. She explained that his signature etchings were done in the deepest of blue derived from this semi-precious element.
I spent an afternoon with her and when I readied myself to go she ran to her back room and returned with a cobalt blue pottery plate, formed by her own hands on the wheel that sat in the corner and fired in the kiln on her back porch.
It was flawed, she confessed. But she could not bear to throw it out. The blue in the clay was from the last of her father's precious stash.
An imperfect blue plate sits on my shelf and I love its story, its significance, its likeness to me, my days on the planet, my journey through time.

Some Thing Borrowed

It was the kind of world a kid knows isn’t normal but accepts because it’s all he or she has ever known. Yep. That was the world I was born into. And so when things got crazier than normal…(vs. normaler than crazy)…I just left.
Indeed I did.
At the ripe old age of 7, 8, 9, and beyond when other children were fast asleep, you would often find me climbing out the bedroom window and onto the wavy tin basement door to embark on a nocturnal scavenger hunt for hope.
Hope was the commodity I borrowed from those who lived in the houses up and down the streets I walked when I was very near the edge of that wonderful childhood condition called resilience.
Hope emanated from the warm yellow light that streamed from the windows of those homes. Peering in I borrowed the peace, the comfort, the safety, and the fraternity that those inside took for granted.
It was of no consequence whatsoever that most of those homes were filled with strife and anxiety, unrest and fear. The little girl standing on the sidewalk looking in could not have known this nor would she have wanted to.
The borrowing was what kept her life between the lines.

Some Thing New

New is the smell of fresh leather seats in a two door convertible bought off the showroom floor… odometer reading: .0001
New is the crisp resilience of a white cotton shirt still on the rack at Brooks Brothers, never worn and never washed.
New is the sparkle of a brilliant white diamond set in platinum and placed on the well-manicured finger of a June bride.
And new is the idea that these pricy stereotypes are farcical and illegitimate, far from genuine and less than real.
Thirty years into a marriage of inconvenience I think of those early days, the steamy moments, the new-ness of being in love.
And I realize that those feelings of excitement, immediacy, intensity, and heat…were, in a word, biology. Without them, I would not be here.
But somewhere between the then and the now – a more perfect union has come about and I know that new is a concept I had yet to know.
New is my husband every day, every day.
He is a man in motion, moving through his experience of life and becoming a human I could never have anticipated. This sexagenarian sharing my home is funny and cute and creative and cool. He is his own person and my person at once. And he is more of a person than he was at thirty-something.
He is in is element cooking meals, mopping floors, chopping wood, or wiping a grandchild’s tears…mounting a motorcycle, enduring a chick flick, or weeping at the grave of yet another departed friend.
His element is not dependant on the frivolities of life dreamed up by Hollywood or Madison Avenue or other untried amateurs.
His element is far more remarkable and interesting and this is truly new because I did not see it coming. No, not at all.
New is not worrying that my drooping jowls and sagging butt are a liability in my lover’s eyes.
New is understanding that love is not a flash in the pan tryst, but an investment of self whose returns are measured in memories, history, honesty, transparency.
New is in the eyes of the beholder and I behold a new beyond any new I could have created, left to my own devices.

On The Bible:

"It is a signpost and not a hitching post. It points beyond itself, saying, `Pay attention to God, not me.'"
William Sloane Coffin

Some Thing Old

For D
I read about her death.
An accident, they said.
But between the lines were hints
of the unmentioned empties they found in her closet, her cabinets, her trunk, her heart, and the note she left for nobody and everybody….
the silent scream.
She was the girl I wanted to be with the parents I wanted to own me.
She had the life I would have died for….
the one for which she died instead.
Old is the path I trod to her grave.
Old is the resolve of her mother who never gave up, never gives up the key that could have, would have freed her from the chains that bound her to the darkness and wed her to the demons who loved her scars and hated her possibilities.
Old is the voice of her father who finally abandons the code talk of his secret sins and asks for a second chance…. could I please have another chance?
Old is the belief that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, that all things work together for good for those who…blah, blah, blah.
Old is my criteria for measuring the quality of life.
Her children will have to wait to know the answer to the question they can’t stop asking: why?
Their coming of age will be a coming of truth.
And I wonder if the truth will set them free or set them up.

Tuesday's contribution to Lisa's Blog Carnival

Knock Knock Knockin' On Friday's Door

It's been one of those weeks that feels like a year. The inauguration, MLK Day, the sermon, work, lots of sick people this week, lots of bitchy people this week, Vivian goes into the hospital next week, Annie is drowning in life and I can't save her...get the picture?
My last thing of the day today (it's Thursday which is my Friday) I went to visit a little old lady in hospice. I don't know her, don't know her family, haven't got any of her stories in my mind...it's a little awkward.
I really don't want to go but I dig deep and grab the God-stuff that gives me the edge and even though it takes me 45 minutes to find her house because it's on an odd street and the GPS isn't working, I get there.
Her son-in-law has a bad cold and won't shake my hand because he doesn't want to infect me (great, now I'm going to get his freakin' virus). He shows me to her room and leaves us. I sit down and try to make small talk. I notice there's a baby monitor by the bed and realize someone's probably listening to whatever stumbling/mumbling I'm uttering and giving me an "F" in pastoral care.
And then I look out the window and see the trees and the mountains and the sky and I tell her it is beautiful out there and she sort of "tunes in" and begins to tell it all.
She zeroes in on me with these piercing blue eyes that shine like those of a 16 year-old and she speaks in a language I do not comprehend. She is too old and too worn out and too close to heaven and I can not tell what the words are but I can feel the spirit of them and I know that she is going home and telling me about the journey.
All I do is sit and listen and smile and nod and say "uh-huh" now and then. She carries the conversation until she is spent. Instinctively I pull out my vial of sweet oil and make the sign of the cross on her silky white, rice-paper thin brow and I pray that she has an easy transition to the next place. And she smiles. And the darkness departs. And all is well and I am so glad I am right there. And I think she is glad, too.
On the way out her son-in-law asks me to come again soon. She has been more responsive to me than to anyone in weeks. I tell him to up his vitamin C, rest, and get well. And I wonder if she'll be alive tomorrow.
In my car I breathe a prayer....thank God it's Friday...uhhh Thursday, whatever.

Doubt

Jesus put his hand on the plow and faced Jerusalem. Umm, not exactly. He grinded his teeth together and set his jaw and then plowed. I don’t think that’s it either. He set his face and headed to J-town. Yes!*
Interestingly, at some point in the semester most every male at seminary preached this scripture in preaching class. It’s a testosterone-filled verse that says: a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Even if…okay not if but when it isn’t at all what he wants to do.
And maybe the reason so many men get into this concept of Jesus is that for once, they have a picture of Jesus that looks a lot like they feel but can't articulate.
Grit your teeth, dig in, and do the thing you don’t really want to do whether it be 9-5 at a crap job or mowing the grass on Saturday so the HOA stays off your rear or picking up a gun and heading to a foreign land in the name of duty, honor, and country.
Doubt is not a simple word in the manly vernacular.
Think about it. Men can doubt whipped cream stuff like Oprah, acupuncture, or women’s intuition…
But men are not allowed to express doubt about meat and potatoes stuff like….oh, I know! Duty, honor, and country.
Doubt = feet of clay
Doubt = fear
Doubt = lack of commitment
And those equations all point to a plethora of outcomes, none of which matches a man’s idea of integrity.
Doubt ≠ integrity
Think about it. John Wayne, Clark Kent, and John Glenn did not doubt.
And then there’s Jesus who is setting his face and looking to Jerusalem and the operative phrase here is that part about the face. I never set my face before walking in for a massage unless it's the deep-tissue Swedish varietal offered by a body building champion named Sven.
I never set my face before entering a 747 bound for the Caribbean unless I happen to spot the pilot, co-pilot, and flight attendants through foggy cockpit windows laughing hysterically as they enjoy a pre-flight toke and smoke.
Face setting usually precedes something I really don’t want to do and even though these men never got to it in their various sermons, I’m thinking Jesus really didn’t want to go to Jerusalem.
Yuh think?
Jesus had doubts.
Clearly not of God, but of himself, his ability to do what was required, and most importantly…of those around him:
His disciples sticking power
Rome’s leave no prophet behind policy
The synagogue’s peace movement
The crowd’s anti-capital punishment stance
And rightfully so!
None of them held firm.
Jesus doubted absolutely those things he chose not to control.
Even when it came down to the act of being the sacrificial offering, Jesus faltered.
Remember his anger at Lazarus’ tomb? Death pissed him off. The Bible tells us he snorted like a mule and cried tears of regret. Why? Because the trajectory of the world was so off-kilter from the original plan. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be!
There’s a shadow of doubt in that frustrated cursing of the fig tree event….what does a man have to do to get a decent fig around here anyway?
And there were those shaky moments in the garden….is there any other way to do this???
What’s my point?
Doubt isn’t the problem.
Lot’s wife wasn’t turned into a pillar of salt because of doubt. It happened because she couldn’t go forward. She froze up. She shut down. The world around her was erupting. Sulfur and ash were exploding from the ground and raining down in thick and heavy clumps. She failed to grasp the future and move on in spite of her doubts. That’s what caused her instant and eternal mummification.
Stepping into the abyss of uncertainty, crossing the bridge as it is built, believing that the God to whom one prays is working it all out for a communal vs. a singular good and loving the all more than the me….is what that setting of the face was about.
Ultimately, doubt is an introspective and cleansing precursor to serious action. A pause during which one does or does not choose to cauterize the escape route and embrace the path of great resistance.
Ultimately, doubt is a wise man’s tool for discernment, an honest man’s bridge to wisdom, and a discerning man’s lens into honesty.
A set face comes with the territory.
*Reference: Luke 9:51-62

To Be of Use

A Poem by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.