WRITING IN ANOTHER ROOM

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The Price of Love

Prostitution & the Pastoral Life

Thomas Merton, 20th century monk, poet, social critic, and spiritual writer, had a theophany, a sudden awareness of the presence and light of God in his life. He was standing on the corner of 4th & Walnut in Downtown Louisville when he was overwhelmed with a sudden insight that caused him to delve even more deeply into a pursuit of social justice for all humanity. The insight, he exclaimed, had to do with this not-so-subtle reality: "I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people." He saw them, as it were, walking around shining like the sun.

The transfiguration of the community around him. A renewed and reconciling experience of the people of God.

And the word Merton used to articulate such an experience?

Love.

My 4th & Walnut moment has been a bit more like a slow, dull, subtle ache than an acute, overwhelming pang. I have, in a sense, marinated in it for a while rather than flashing as if in a pan. Nevertheless, the experience has been similar to that which Merton speaks of as a life-transforming moment.

It occurs to me every now and then, though here lately, it's been more often than not. It is, mind you, a daring act of risk and vulnerability to even name it, for doing so increases the odds (infinitesimally, I might add!) that the experience (and I with it) will be despairingly, tragically, and grossly misunderstood. Alas, it is high time I give voice to what is often-times an overwhelming facet of the life I live.

Love.

I love.

I love the congregation I serve. I love them, every one. The ones who are present and near, the ones who are a few paces away but who are nonetheless a living, breathing part of the family of our faith that is First Presbyterian Church of Owensboro. I love the community of which I am a part, with all its strangenesses and idiosyncracies. I love the people who live beside me, around me.

I love them all. I do.

It is increasingly difficult to explain or demonstrate what I mean by such a profession in a world whose language in general is becoming anemic and thin at best. Suffice to say that I have known love before and am the thankful recipient of it a thousand times over. I have been victim of a few things, it's true, but lovelessness has never and will never be one of them. I think I know love when I see it, when I feel it. I could be wrong. That is always a possibility. Ultimately, however, that doesn't matter. Love - and the many splendored ways I have experienced it - is not about what is right and what is wrong. Perhaps one day we all of us will agree to agree on that tiny but world-altering affirmation. Until then, it will remain necessary to say it often. Love is a gift. And that is the long and the short of it. Let us not stand around pointing fingers at it in judgment.

That, though, is another story.

I am a lover of art, good art especially, art in all shapes, sizes, forms, and kinds. One thing I despise greatly is the propensity of some to explain away art - its beauty, mystery, and consequence. Art doesn't need to be explained, only experienced. The art of loving is in many ways also not to be explained, only experienced. As such, it seems prudent that I allow the art that is the loves I've known and the love I now know to stand on its own, without an explanation, without illustration, without anything said about it at all.

You will simply have to trust me on this.

My cup overfloweth. Love abides in me and I in it. I scarce can take it in.

Which is what brings me to what must be my deepest, saddest, most lonely frustration. As is typically the case for me (that is, when I am at my best), I understand it best in a positive bent, and I can access it most easily when it is packaged in the language of my dreams.

Since the 1960s, January brings a day in which we celebrate another kind of dream of another kind of dreamer. I have a dream, too, though, you know?! A dream about freedom.

I have a dream that my life, my life's work, the place I carry out my life's work, and the people I stand beside in the carrying out of it will all be changed by freedom.

I have a dream that I will one day find a group of people - perhaps the very group of people I so love and with whom I serve even now - who will walk up to my front porch one sunny May morning each of them holding a pen, each of them longing to sign on the dotted line saying that they intend never to become an institution. That they never want to have another building, another budget, another business meeting again. That they never want to pay me, because I never want to be paid. That they will still give of their lives, their talents, their treasures, but for the sake of the community around us, and never for the group. That they want simply to gather together some place warm where the acoustics for hearing God are good and where they can simply pray, sometimes in silence, sometimes aloud, but always together. Some place where they can talk freely about the pain and suffering and hunger of those who live nearby. Some place where they can promise again that they will never become an institution. Some place where everyone shares the duties. And, yes, we would be in violation of our polity to do so, but hey, it's a dream, and dreaming is free, even from the polity police. We would gather some place to pray and to talk and someone, anyone, will stand to take her turn to proclaim the gospel; someone else would stand to administer the Eucharist. We would become truly a communion of the saints, where we were all priests, and no one was left outside to wonder how to get in when "getting in" was never an option for them in the first place. NO. Not in this dream. Here, everyone who wants to be there can be there, and if they sense themselves called to baptize a baby, let mine be the first to the font.

Oh, and during the times when we are not gathering as a group of believers in worship and service, I would be honing a skill or a trade marketable enough to earn a living wage so that I could do the work that I do and not get paid for it. That's right. I wouldn't take pay. I'd serve with my life, but in freedom for everyone. No Terms of Call, no salary package, no benefits. Just you. Just me.

You sense now my struggle. I love the people I serve. And while I know (intellectually) that I am not being paid to love them, sometimes it feels like I am. Allow me the indulgence of reiterating myself: I love the men, women, and children of First Presbyterian Church and of Owensboro, Kentucky. I love them. But depositing a check every month with the name of that institution at the top of it feels an awful lot like I'm being paid to be overwhelmed by the grace of God that is alive and present in them.

I don't enjoy feeling like I'm being paid to love. You know what that is, right? When you get paid to love? I know there are people who can keep those two things separated, but I don't know anymore if I am one of those people. I want nothing more than to be able to climb the stairs into that pulpit one day with hands calloused and back sore from a rough-and-tumble job that kept me out too late the night before, and with a voice hoarse from shouting of my gladness, and with a heart so full of love that I can't keep from singing. And then to speak the first word of my first sermon in that first service of the first church that finally understands what it means to be a priesthood of believers, doubters, cynics, and skeptics, which is not much different than that motley crowd that gathers on every Lord's Day as it is. And then I'd like to walk away knowing that those people were able to empty themselves and their wallets for the good of God's hungry, thirsty, tired, and homeless people, rather than to prop me up in comfort.

Then again, it's only a dream. Perhaps now I am left to live with this, the price of love.

WOODSTOVES & WANDERERS

WARMING ONE'S WINTRY SELF BEFORE
THE CLOSE & THAWING PRESENCE OF GOD

...which is, I'm discovering, all that prayer really is...

It is coming close to the woodstove on a cold morning, doing nothing but being there, and feeling the warmth of God cover the whole of who you are. This is, in part, how retired archbishop of South Africa and Nobel Peace Laureate, Desmond Tutu, finally understands prayer in his own life. Tutu has known some cold mornings in his long life. And judging by the looks of the world that has changed because of him, he's known some covering warmths, too.

Prayer is a daily practice. It is is a daily practice of being in the presence of one who loves us deeply, who loves us with a love that will not let us go. More than anything else, prayer is - first and perhaps most importantly - a matter of listening.

Prayer, at least the way we 21st century North Americans do it (and I'm including myself in here!), is generally unattractive to me. Prayer is not an enterprise in which we seek to bargain or negotiate with God. Prayer is not about manipulating the deity toward our program. Prayer is not about peddling our product to God's door when - and only when - we are ready (or are desperate enough) to do so. While I'm hopeful that such approaches to God are at best welcomed by God and at worst amusing to God, I am still uncertain that this is what I, in my darkest most silent nights, honestly experience prayer to be.

I want to learn a new way. Am I alone in my frustration?

I have never believed that prayer has to be something you are uttering, mumbling, or declaring all the time. Instead, prayer is, I think, a way of life. It's a way of being in relationship, in conversation, which sometimes requires good listening and other times requires honest proclamation and petition. But in every sense, prayer is a way of surrendering the illusion of control. It is the subtle but certain letting go that makes for really good prayer.

As mentioned above, prayer is a coming close to a warmth that is beyond us but that welcomes us, and bids us follow.

Perhaps the "new way" I am looking for is in fact a very old way, indeed. To be sure, the practices of the early church, as revealed to us through countless manuscripts and other ancient documents, were simple, really. I would say mine are, too.

Every morning I wake up, and before the rested bottoms of my rested feet hit the hardwood floor beneath me, I etch the sign of the cross in the air just before my chest, and I say, audible perhaps only to God, "I am baptized," which is my way of acknowledging in the quiet of my resting place that I have been born into a family not of my own choosing, which is what we call adoption, and I have been turned over to God. I am, in other words, free now, at least for this day, free to be myself, a child of God. In my adoption - in my being claimed by a love beyond telling and named by one whose own name sounds like the beating of healing's wings - I am liberated, delivered, exiled toward a promised place that is nothing like the cave I carve out for myself to hold all of my insecurities and doubt. The new place is well-lit and lovely.

This way of awakening to a new day marks the start of that day's praying. I have at that moment clothed myself with hope, peace, love, and joy, and I am ready to re-enter the world that is my work, and to conjoin myself again to the community that identifies me.

You see, the disciplines of prayer, for me, are much better understood in the context of community than in the context of individuality. This marks a tremendous shifting of the plates between where I am now as a young pastor/theologian and where I found myself as a child of faith in my youth. Then, it was all about my own pursuit of individual salvation (read: getting out of this wretched place via my one-way ticket to heaven). Now it is about my participation and co-laboring with God and God's people to help bring about the world that we can see but have not yet realized, that we can imagine but not yet feel. Prayer is my quiet hoping for the dawning of the day that brings such a place to a people such as us. Therein lies our desperate need for warmth.

Martin Marty, the Pope of the Protestants for decades and a Lutheran at that, says that he is something of a spiritual hitchhiker, riding in the backseats of the faith of others. I like that. I, too, am a wanderer. Just as in music there are Beethovens and Mozarts, and just as in art there are Vermeers and Michelangelos, so in the spiritual life there are profound people, mystics, visionaries, monastics, and mothers - they are the giants on whose shoulders I stand like Zaccheus wanting nothing more than to catch a glimpse of the one who was coming to bring life. I unashamedly mount the backs of my forebears, so that, even if only by piggyback, I might find myself in a new place, closer and closer to God.

Many of you may feel some tightness in your shoulders mainly due to the fact that I, with my faith in buckets hanging from my hands, have been standing on them. Many of you are the ones whose closeness to Christ has gotten me closer, too. Many of you are the friends who have picked up the corners of my mat and have carried me, have heaved me, have lowered (if not dropped!) me into that presence. And in my chill, I have known the thawing that is the grace of God.

The praying life demands that I know that about myself, about you, and about the God into whose healing presence I most often find warmth.

That is, after all, the only thing many of us really want. To be warm. To be touched. To be real.

And so I've learned not to try to presume a persona when I pray. I speak to God the way I am. I don't try to protect myself. I don't try to protect God. I figure, anything I say God has heard before and can take it. I figure the cost is greater for not having said it in the first place. I figure the Psalmist was a lot more forthright than I will ever be. I figure God welcomes authenticity, and that, scary as that may be, pretending to be someone I am not is scarier still.

Honesty. Authenticity. Reverence. Hope. Lament. Grief-Gone-Public. Thanksgiving.

This is the kind of prayer and the kind of praying I am looking for. This is the kind of home my wandering soul most needs. This is the woodstove that might invite me to come closer and to be covered by the dazzling glow that always is.

LOVE TAX

COUNTING LOSSES

Michigan mortician, undertaker, essayist, and poet, Thomas Lynch, says that grief is the tax we pay on loving people. If so, we are being audited.

Since June, Kendra and I have buried three grandparents. So much about this is beautiful. At least the order is tidy and our grandparents didn't have to bury us. But grandparents, differently so than parents or other beloved ones, evoke a certain kind of sadness in the hole that is left after their death. Grandparents, on the whole, are lovely and loving people; their stories are rich and reminiscent, their homes warm and welcoming, their tables always set with a soda or snack nearby. Grandparents know love and loss, and they teach the one so well that they strengthen our capacity to feel - to really feel - and to experience the other.

Lois died first. She was a very young, spry, and intentional 78. Were it not for the seizing and constricting of veins that caused stroke after stroke to ravage her brain and subsequently her body, she would still be near, straightening, shopping, worrying about the rest of us. June - the laboring of spring in its birthing of summer - found her near death and near us. And she slipped away. My mother's mother. I loved her.

Edward went next. He was quiet, reserved, an observer, though not without opinion. He held his hand close; we still don't know what cards he was holding. He died with them clutched tightly to his chest. We buried him with them. I don't know now whether we really wanted to see them, or if that's what we wanted most in the world to do. Maybe I will never know, just as he will never tell. He was 89, though he seemed old the day I met him, which was somewhere near my birthday, 1975. He was a shipbuilder. He breathed in asbestos for decades. He had acquired a cough to go with the sadness, though he carried the love of my grandmother in his cool heart for 65 years. His heart grew colder still but only because death neared. He loved as he could, and his wife and children made up any deficits. My late father's late father. I loved him.

Ed gave way last. Also 89, Ed was a dutchman, a husband of 65 years, father of five girls, grandfather to a million, great-grandfather to a million more. Conservative, gregarious, thrifty, and hospitable man who drove as badly as the worst of them and gave as well as the most generous of them. Ed Anema, self-made man who gave himself to the world, was not expected to beat his wife to the grave. But he did. My wife's mother's father. I loved him.

Love, love, love now grief, grief, grief. Taxes due of a young couple who apparently had evaded them for a long while. And the auditors came with their suits and their gurneys and their "Drive Slowly: Funeral" placards in our families' front yards. But they didn't come and go like some would expect. They hung around a while and asked to see one more receipt, one more piece of evidence that we had loved like no others and needed to pay the price.

Meg, 25, beautiful, compassionate, and kind, wrestled with depression and the darkest of darkness for most of her life. She made one final decision - pursue peace, even if to death - and a light went out just before dawn one November Tuesday. My Zoe's friend. My church's child. The subject of so many prayers. Dead in the ICU which reeked of urine and stale coffee wafting from a distant nurse's station. Dead before her mother. Dead with her hands in mine. I loved her.

Deep gratitude deserves to find a voice. So let me be the first to say: Thanks be to God for life, love, and the joys we enjoyed together in the moonlight. Thick grief cannot be muted either. So let me lament out loud, which not everyone will be honest or outlandish or careful enough to do.

I know Love. I know Death. Love and Death are all family friends. I met them at 15, when their family and mine camped under a tent in a cemetery one hot July morning, and we have visited one another frequently since. I got a job next door to their home. I sipped whiskey in their backyard on Friday nights in springtime. I dated their daughter, Grief, on and off in high school, though most of our relationship made a story that never got told. Until now. I am exhausted by Grief and by her parents who keep calling. And yet I know that they know me so well, and that I'd be less than myself without their occasional reminders and the annual Christmas card. I am who I am because of my proximity to Love, Death, and Grief in my neighborhood. But I hold out hope that Life will move in and take over the vandalized and vacant shack next to where I lay my daughter down to sleep at night. Our neighborhood could use some new faces.

Grief is the tax we pay on loving people. Don't I know it. And yet, with all its pain in a briefcase, I will welcome my auditors and ask them to come, sit beside me on my mourning bench. Let us get to know each other. Let us sip whiskey together with the family next door.

COMPOSTING

THE DISCIPLINE OF DAILY WRITING

The word "discipline," for many, denotes cruelty - the physical beating of everything in us that makes us lazy. Of course, the word has its origin in the Latin word for "learner of knowledge." Yes, historically "discipline" suggests a giving-in to a corpus of knowledge as a way of being trained for something, as a way of following a certain kind of order: it's about becoming a student.

In her classic work on the writing life, (Writing Down the Bones), Natalie Goldberg (much like Julia Cameron in her The Artist's Way) calls out the inner critic in all of us - you know, the voice whose harsh denigration of every word we have ever hoped to put on paper - and says, "Speak, but only for a little while. Your silence is coming." Goldberg posits that every one of us who dares to write must give time and space to our censor-self, to let his voice ring out and onto paper, so that we can see it, hear it, and experience it for what it is: a lie. Then - and only then- are we ready to write another script, this time a bit less vulnerable to the siren voice that would bid us "Stop!"This one, a bit more like ourselves.

Goldberg advocates strongly for daily "Writing Practice." (Cameron calls this "Morning Pages.") Here is what you do. You get up in the morning, maybe it's still dark, it is almost always eerily quiet. You pick up your pen, you put it to your paper, and you write. You keep writing. You don't stop writing. You don't pick up your pen. You don't cross words or phrases out. You don't give a care to grammatical accuracy, punctuation, or spelling. You don't bother thinking. You throw logic to the wind. You simply write. And when you do it, you go for the jugular, writing everything that is scary, naked, vulnerable. And in so doing you are writing down the bones of who you are, inside and out. You do it every day for either a prescribed period of time or a pre-set number of pages. Every single day. Page after page. Writing it down. Everything. No matter what. Etching every first thing that comes to mind, and the first thing after that.

It is the practice of writing, the weaving of your art. It is the wings your dreams come true on. But...

It is indeed a discipline, in every beautiful and tragic sense of the word.

"First Thoughts," Goldberg calls them, are the shape and substance of the flashing ideas, images, and experiences that come to mind unencumbered by our ego or any other editor. They are the purest, most energetic, deeply authentic expressions of what resides just beneath the surface of things. They are living witnesses to the farce that the world is always logical, immutable, enduring, and permanent. The world is none of these things. And neither are we, most of the time. Which is why, when something comes to mind, no matter how silly or inane, we ought to write it down, letting it marinate in its own juices right there in front of us. We note its fragrance, and rest in it.

In so doing, we are about the business of composting.

Kendra and I live in the city, but we are avid composters. Whatever it might be - onion skins, broccoli stalks, corn cobs, wilted lettuce leaves - we compost it. If neither the thing itself nor what the thing came from ever considered squatting in a field to relieve itself, then we can put it in our tumbler, let it create heat, and wait for the nitrogen-rich material (and its precipitate tea) to serve our little patch of green earth for its own health and ours. We save our scraps, put them away, and let them steam into something new.

Writing, I'm learning, is just like that. It's about composting. It's about collecting ideas, thoughts, experiences, and writing them down, which is akin to walking the long row to the back fence to dump your scraps in the tumbler. It's a cultivation of another kind, and the yield?: patience, less anxiety, perseverance, a letting-go.

The writing life - difficult discipline that it is - is yet another "thing" that we do not control, run, manage, or oversee. We are simply witnesses to these things that appear on our pages. And despite our neurosis that says, "Buy yet another journal and let it sit alone," - a journal that becomes another palette left blank for fear of imperfection - we would do well to pay attention, which is all that writing, living, and loving really are. And then to write it down: What did I see? How did it feel? What am I now because of it?

With pitchfork in hand, I poke around at the steaming pile of debris that is my life, and I cultivate a place where fertility gives birth to new blossoms which yields a new life. And I stand by to watch, point, and smile.

These spaces become my morning pages. Censor inside me beware.

ADVENT

WADING THROUGH THE WAITING

The life lived along the Way of Jesus, that is, the Christian life, is marked by both anticipation and satiation. We live most of our lives in the paradox of both seeing God’s loving presence and saving work in our lives while at the same time longing for God’s presence and action to be more clearly demonstrated. We are at once both completely satisfied yet we wonder why it is God does not do more. We find ourselves in a quandary. You are not alone in the wondering!

In the celebration of Advent we are reminded that none of us is alone in the dual experiences of longing and satisfaction. In this season (and the Christmas season that follows) we both anticipate God’s presence in our yearning for the Messiah and we celebrate his coming. In these celebrations we are reminded that this paradox is not abnormal -- it is in part a reflection of God’s activity in all of human history. It is as if our lives reflect in a small way the very pattern of salvation history – we live lives that assume an Advent-then-Christmas shape to them, and in recalling these seasons we understand God’s work before, among, and beyond us and our time.

In his book, In Joyful Hope: Meditations for Advent, the late Henri Nouwen – priest, scholar, author, activist, and caregiver – writes:

Waiting is essential to the spiritual life. But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting. It is waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for. We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus. We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the Ascension of Jesus we wait for his coming again in glory. We are always waiting in the conviction that we have already seen God’s footsteps.

Waiting for God is an active, alert -- yes, joyful -- waiting. As we wait we remember him for whom we are waiting, and as we remember him, we create a community ready to welcome him when he comes.

It enlivens my soul to know that we join together now in creating a family of faith that is becoming ever ready to welcome the One who came once and who is coming again. May we have our wits about us to notice him and to bid him come!