Reading a delightful little book for chapter a day at work. “The Secret Garden”, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Lots of good stuff in there worth thinking about. Story about a girl, Mary, who goes to live with her depressed uncle in his depressing mansion after her parents die. Mary is the most irritable child in a miserable environment surrounded by miserable people with miserable lives until the garden works its “magic” on her. The quote that stopped me today:

“Of course there must be lots of magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I’m going to try an experiment”. pg 248

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow” 295

I was having a conversation at work with the other chaplains and student chaplains the other day that got me pondering on my evening walk about the decline of religion.

The conversation we had was about an article written by a pastor who was talking about a recent personal tragedy in his life and how they article seemed to be filled with pious platitudes and lacked authenticity of what a real struggle with tragedy looked like. One of the other chaplains remarked that it doesn’t do the church any favors when a pastor doesn’t admit they struggle with life life just like everybody else.

it was this conversation that sent me down the worm hole thinking about why religion is in decline. Now, this is my more cynical side, but it seems to be what I’m best at so here goes…

If religion is a business, which it is, what are the products it has been peddling all these millennia? I would say two — eternal life and inner peace. Now, one of these products sold a lot better than they other one. Eternal life was the real money maker for most of the history of religion. The promise of heaven and the threat of hell sure built a lot of temples, mosques, churches and CAREERRS. But that product isn’t selling so well nowadays for lots of reasons I imagine. So, religion as of late has really doubled down on its secondary product, inner peace. But this doesn’t sell as well, because it can be more easily verified than heaven and hell. Ask any religious person, “So, how’s that search for inner peace going? Do you still need to see the therapist you’ve been seeing? Still taking the anti-psychotics?” You may not get an honest answer to those questions because religious people seem to be well trained in putting on a good face and making everything look all hunky-dory on the outside like the pastor in the article that spurred my thinking about this topic in the first place. I mean, if they are selling inner peace, they think that vulnerability is a lack of confidence in their product. But, in fact, this backfires. Whatever inner peace we experience in life seems to come from the knowledge that we are not in this alone, that our struggles are everyone’s struggles.

Inner peace has always been a tough sell for religions and even more so today. Back in the old days, you could use peoples restlessness to redirect them back to the primary money maker, eternal salvation. At least this had the positive outcome of acknowledging honestly that this life was rough for everyone. Saint Augustine used to say that we weren’t supposed to have inner peace in this life because this wasn’t our true home, that we are basically living in exile at the moment. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God”, he said. And the prayers of the rosary that I say reflect this mentality….”to thee do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in this valley of tears, to thee to we cry….and after this our exile…” I find some comfort in knowing that life is hard for everyone. But people don’t buy the whole, “just wait till you get to heaven and things will be better” anymore and promising religion as the path to inner peace in this life doesn’t seem to work either.

I am not consoled by the promise of eternal life. I am not consoled by the promise of inner peace in the hear and now. The only consolation seems to be the fact I’m not alone in the suffering.

So, the washing machine has been running non-stop ever since the corona’s been flying around and it finally gave up the ghost.  I put in a load and went for a jog only to come home and find water all over the floor. Of course, I had to do another load because A) I had another load to do and b) I didn’t exactly know where the leak was since it had stopped before I returned.  I had twice the mess when finished but all the laundry was done for the week.  I called Kendra to tell her the problem and she said it was certainly the washer as it came with the place and was no doubt just finished.  So,she ordered another one from Lowes to be delivered the next week.  It was a more expensive washer, but it was what they had in stock and could deliver in a shorter time. Kendra gives them my phone number, the condo landline number, to coordinate the delivery details. Fine.

A week later, the day before the delivery, I get a robocall from Lowes on the condo landline saying the deliver will be “tomorrow between 2:30 and 6:30 pm.” Fine. So the next day I’m gone in the morning because the delivery wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon.  At noon I come home to a message on the landline (that I didn’t get because I wasn’t home) that says they were already here and I wasn’t so they continued on their way.  I called the number they left and it was some automated service line and eventually after pushing what seemed like an endless number of buttons connected me to a person who assured me they would come back if they didn’t come within the agreed upon timeline. Fine.   Later that afternoon I get a call from the delivery guys who seem irritated that I wasn’t there before and were on their way back.  When they show up they seem very curt with me and not saying much.  They seem irritated.  I point to where the old washer is that they are supposed to take and put the new washer in its place.  I go in the other room so as not to disturb them as they bring the washer up 17 stairs to the second floor.  Finally they push a clipboard in my face and tell me where to sign.  I ask,

Me:  “is the new washer installed…..?

Delivery guy: “No its not.  You don’t have the ACCESSORIES.” 

Me: (inside myself: What you talking bout Willis?”) outside: “So you’re dropping off a washer I can’t use?”

Delivery guy: “They should have told you that at the store.  Everything on this order is messed up.  It says we are supposed to deliver a washer and pick up a stove and the delivery time is messed up too.  You’ll just have to call the store and order the accessories and have some one come out to install them” 

Now you would think all the years I’ve been studying mindfulness, Zen meditation, deep breathing and pacifism would come in handy here. Nope.  None of it worth a crap.  Somebody gonna die today.  I don’t know why I signed for it, but I did.  When they were gone I called Kendra and related the fiasco.  Keep in mind Kendra and I have not done laundry in a week so I’m down to second string pair of swimming trunks for clean laundry.  I figured something like this would happen though so I took the next couple days off work just in case.  Kendra suggested I call Lowes to complain which I did. I relate the fiasco to a service rep and she seems like she is reading a customer service script, completely void of any empathy or emotional involvement in my situation.

Customer service rep: “I’m sorry your experience was unsatisfactory.  At lowes we try to please.  Would you like to speak to a manager?”

Me: (inside myself: “Lady, if I got to come in there….”) Outside: “Yes, and then I guess put me through to whoever deals in ACCESSORIES” because apparently I need that too”.

She puts me through to another phone that rings about 20 times before I hear a click followed by dial tone. I swear, somebody gonna die today.

I slam the phone down – one of the few perks of still having a landline.  And then I call Kendra to relate the experience.  She asked me, “did it come with a manual?”

One of those things that sounds obvious once someone says it, but not until.

Me: “No, its just the machine with the invoice taped to the lid…wait….maybe its inside.”

I lift the lid and there staring me in the face is a pamphlet titled “manual” and a plastic bag filled with what I can only assume are…..ACCESSORIES?

Holy crap! We are back in business!

But not out of the woods yet.  I turn to the “installment” section of the manual. The first thing it says makes my heart sink back to where it was…”The tools you will need…”  There is a 99% chance that if they are not on a swiss army knife, I don’t have them.  But, turns out all I need are plyers.  The rubber washers it said were also not included were already on the old inlet hose Mike had installed years earlier (Thanks Mike).  And thanks to a little youtube instructional video Kendra sent, I was able to install it, I thought. 

When all was finished, I decided to try a sample load of laundry.  Now, this is supposedly  a newfangled complicated machine with a bunch of this “smart” technology BS.  I push the start button and I get a green light.  That’s all.  It sounds like a Prius. Silence.   When you turned the other washer on, you knew that sucker was ON!.  Because the neighbors complained and the windows rattled.  Not this one.  I’m ABSOLUTELY convinced I screwed something up or Lowes sent us a busted machine.  Before pushing it off the second floor porch, I call Kendra and she says its supposed to be that way and to just give it some time.  There is also no button on it, like the  older one had, to say how much water you want to use.  Kendra says it doesn’t need that button because it knows automatically how much water to use.  Well, no shit – the things the kids come up with these days.  I did a couple loads laundry and there is no water on the floor and all seems well. Well, I’ll be damned. 

Next day….

I notice in the morning there is some water on the kitchen floor.  Not a lot – maybe I spilled some when I was making tea but, I thought, that would be a lot for tea and a lot not to remember.  Whatever, it was a stressful day, and I wasn’t’ thinking straight.  Besides, the water is not coming from the laundry room so its good.  Then around lunchtime I saw a puddle of water in the kitchen again….now it dawns on me to look under the kitchen sink.  There is about two inches of water coming from what looks like the disposal with the electrical cords running through the water. 

Somehow, I screwed up the washer installment so bad I broke the kitchen sink in the other room.  Shit!

I call Kendra. Again.  To tell her my plan which is to email the other members of our condo association and ask who they would recommend as a plumber.  This is not the best plan.  The other condo members are about as handy as I am — we have 3 lawyers, one police detective, one accountant and a retired couple that I’m not sure what they did but it wasn’t plumbing.  Not one of us could cut the grass if our life depended on it.  Kendra says she will call the local ace hardware to see who they recommend locally.  But first she asked if I put a bucket under the disposal to stop the leaking.  Again, something that seems obvious once somebody says it.  So I put the bucket underneath.  Kendra calls back with the name of a plumber.  Ace hardware guy says they get that question all the time.

All is well enough for now.  Plumber comes tomorrow.   

Say a prayer.

I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast recently that has my brain spinning in a good way. maybe just what I needed….

So this guy, Dave Goggins, is a 24 yr old out of shape man who has a full time job as an insect exterminator.  Life is not fulfilling for him and he sees a program on TV about the Navy SEALs. 

“…I had two options; to either be that 300 pound guy who sprayed for cockroaches and made $1000 a month and at 24 years old knowing when I’m 50 fucking years old, I can reflect on this and think about what guy I never became…or I can totally just suck it up and fail and fail until I succeed. I started recruiters up.I said I’m going to be a fucking navy SEAL.”In that restaurant, I quit my job, left my canister in that restaurant, my spray canister, got back in my Eco-lab truck and I went home and I started working out… I became the most obsessed person on the planet earth…I had to invent a guy that didn’t exist. I had to invent a guy that can take any pain, any suffering, any kind of judgment be called nigger be called whatever the fuck in the world and be able to stand in the fucking room and say, ‘go fuck yourself.’

Fast forward a number of years after he is a navy SEAL and winning all these super endurance contests, and he meets this entrepreneur, Jesse Itzler,  who seems to be stuck in his life.  After a lunch meeting, Jesse says to David “why don’t you come live with me for a month?”  Every day they would do crazy physical and mental workouts.  Once David said, we are going to run 4 miles every 4 hours for 2 days straight.  When Jesse said, “I can’t do this, I have to go to work”.  David responds, “No you don’t, you can work when we are done in two days”. In other words….. What David learned when he quit his job to work out full time as a 24yr old,  and what he was trying to communicate to the entrepreneur was that your primary work should always be self-transformation.  If you are always focused on self transformation, everything else falls into place.So….I quit my gym membership because of carona.  But for the last 4 days, I’ve been doing 1000 pushups a day.  I’m sure im going to get asked why my door at work is closed.  🙂

So Jesse Itzler eventually publishes a book that becomes a bestseller called “Living with a SEAL”. The story of how this book came to be is as fascinating. And funny.

We are continuing our Lenten book series Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton and the theme I will be exploring with you today is the theme of scripture.  Now, I am very familiar with preaching on Scripture but I have never preached about scripture as a whole and its importance in the sacred rhythm of the life of faith.  It’s a little bit hard to know where to start because the topic is so broad.  After all the Bible is not just a book – it is a library of books.  It contains, poems, songs, psalms, proverbs, history, myth etc.  So I started thinking about my own journey with the bible, where it started and how it progressed.

I suppose my journey with sacred scripture started a lot like yours.  Most of us started learning bits and pieces of the Bible long before we could ever read it.  I have a vague memory of the first time I noticed a rainbow in the sky and my mom using that occasion to tell me about Noah’s ark and the great flood and how a rainbow was a sign of God’s promise to never again cover the earth in a flood.  This is not unlike how the very first people who heard these stories heard them for the first time.  The stories were told to explain the phenomena they saw in the physical world, to make meaning out of the events they experienced in life.  They were used to help them remember the positions of the stars, used to tell them where they came from and where they were going, used to explain why there is evil and the world and why we die and what happens when we do.  The questions that people have had since the beginning of time are much the same as they are today and that is why scripture remains relevant I suppose.

The first time I had a real encounter with scripture as a whole was when I was 15 years old.  We had a family Bible that was kept in a drawer but nobody ever read it much.  Mostly because it was hard to read.  But then when I was 15 I came across a copy of “The Good news” Bible.  Are you familiar with “the Good News Bible”?    It’s a paraphrase (not a translation I was taught later) of the gospels in very simple language with stick –figure illustrations to boot!  It was a very easy read and I was able to get through it in short order.  I remember being very moved by the stories, by the parables, teachings, and compassion of Jesus.  And then fascinated by the Acts of the Apostles and the Story of Paul.  And there was something about all of that that my soul immediately recognized as true.  I don’t mean true in the sense that something actually happened – like there was actually a Noah’s ark and a great flood and all that. I mean true in the sense that the stories, parables, teaching and compassion of Jesus was resonating with the truth that was already inside me – like when you are singing a note and another person matches your pitch and you have this experience of being in tune. The truth in my soul had found its matching pitch in the scriptures.  I felt like the Ancient Greek scholar Archimedes who was baking his brain for weeks trying to figure out how to find the volume of irregular object and one day when he stepped into the bathtub and saw the water rise, the solution became self-evident.  They say that Archimedes was so excited he jumped out of the tub and ran through the town naked yelling, Eureka! Eureka! “Eureka” is Greek for “I found it”.  Encountering the scriptures for the first time was my Eureka moment, my “I found it” even if I didn’t run through the streets naked as a Jay bird.

What was it that I found? Well, I suppose I didn’t even know at the time exactly what I was looking for, but do you remember what it was like being a teenager?  I suppose that some people have very fond memories of their teenage years, but mine were hard.  And I know they are hard for a lot of people.  You are in the process of becoming and it is a very scary time.  You are no longer a child but you’re are not an adult yet either and the place in-between is painful.  It’s the time where you fall in love for the first time and have your heart broken for the first time.  You start experiencing the real hardships of life but you haven’t developed the strategies yet for how do deal with them. The trick of the teenage years is that you have to survive long enough to learn how to survive.  It’s the time in your life that you first start asking those existentially painful questions: what does it all mean? What is the purpose of life? Why is there suffering? Is there a way out?  And it was at this time that the easy-to-read version of the New Testament fell into my lap – complete with stick-figure illustrations and all.

Now that path from that 15 yr. old boy who had found all the answers to life’s persistent questions to the person I am today wasn’t exactly a straight line and based on that I don’t expect my future to be a straight and predictable line either.  There is a funny Mark Twain saying that I’m reminded of at the moment.  Mark Twain said, “When I was 15 my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to be in his presence.  When I was 25 I was amazed at how much he had learned in such a short time.”

When I encountered the scriptures for the first time, I thought I had all the answers.  And I became hyper-religious and judgmental, which is what happens when you think you know it all.  Little did I know the scriptures would open up a lot a more questions than they provided answers.  And my search lead me to other religious traditions and their scriptures as well as other books on philosophy and interesting people who liked to discuss the deeper questions of life.  The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. But I keep coming back to the Christian Scriptures.  Not because I think that it is the best religion out there and the Christians have the market cornered on truth.  I come back to them because they are my Native language.  Religion is a language through which we speak to God and God speaks to us.  And Christianity is my native tongue – the language I will always speak the best no matter what other languages I might learn.  If Religion is the language, the scripture is what keeps me engaged in the conversation. 

Have you ever heard the saying, “you are what you eat?”  Well, that is not just true for the body but it is true for the mind and the soul as well.  I heard someone say once that you are the sum total of the 5 people you spend the most time with.  But it’s not just the people we hang around – it’s the programs we watch on tv, the books we read, the news we listened to.  We are what we eat mentally and spiritually.  I was thinking about this when I made a new year’s resolution to read 100 books this year.  I have a feeling that if I’m going to make good on this a lot of those book are going to have to be small.  So, I’ve been reading the Harry Potter series.  In the Harry Potter world of wizards and magic, everything is alive.  When the kids play chess, the chess players are alive and they don’t always do what you want them to do.  That’s what makes wizard chess harder than regular chess.  The people in photographs are alive and will wave at you.  The books are alive.  So you when you read a book, you are entering into a dialogue with a living being.  And I thought, you know, that is kind of what the Bible is like.  The call it the living Word for a reason.  Every time I open the bible, it is different.  Of course the bible isn’t really different, but it seems so because I am different every time I read it.  It’s kind of like Mark Twin saying that he was amazed his father had changed so much in such a short time.  Really it was the boy who changed, not the father.  

But what I find fascinating about scripture is that there is something there for whatever stage of spiritual maturity you are at. It’s kind of like the crowd of people who go to watch a symphony.  Everyone in the audience appreciates the symphony at a different level.  Some people may not have musical appreciation at all and just like to go to see everyone dress up in fancy clothes, whereas others may be very highly educated in music theory and history and can appreciate it on a very different level.  Yet, they all get something out of it.  The bible is like that.   There is something there for young children and there is something there for the scholar.  Or it’s kind of like a Disney movie. Disney movies are like that.  There is a story there for the children but always a deeper message for the adults too.

Speaking of Disney movies.  One of my favorite is the “Never Ending story”.  It’s a story about a boy reading a story.  The main character in the story the boy is reading about is on a quest to save both a princess and magical world the lives in called Fantasia.  The hero of the story is told that in order to save fantasia, the hero must find a human child who lives beyond the boundaries of fantasia to keep Fantasia from disappearing. This human boy must give the princess a new name.  It’s only near the end of the book when all hope seems to be lost that the boy reading the book realizes he is the human boy they are speaking about – that he is part of the story not as a reader but as a character. The story becomes alive for him the moment he realizes he is part of it.

And that is what scripture is for us.  It is not just a story from long ago that we are reading about.  But it is an encounter with the living God and the person of Christ who is at work in our world as much now as then.  And the moment we realize we are characters in a truly never-ending story, it is only then that the words on the page become the living word in our hearts.

Once upon a time I used to be a high school teacher.  That’s right, I did four years hard time as a high school teacher.  That is how I know I’m going straight to heaven when I die – whatever mistakes I made, I have paid for them and then some.  Just kidding. There was a lot about teaching high school that I liked, but it was truly one of the hardest jobs I had ever had.  The principle at the school was a godsend to me during my teaching years, especially the early years.  She was a seasoned teacher with many years of experience and many pithy sayings that I find so very true and helpful even to this day.  One of the things she said to me was, “The students will not always remember the things you say, but they will always remember how you made them feel”.  From that moment on I tried to be less concerned about what I said to them and more concerned about how I said it.  Because it’s the how that makes all the difference.

Every little girl that gets her hair brushed by her mom doesn’t’ want her hair brushed when mom is in a bad mood right?  Right, because it’s not just about what you do, but how you do it that matters.  This is especially true in caregiving of any kind.  If somebody puts a glass of water in front of you when you’re thirsty, you can tell if they’re doing it with love or without.  If somebody is giving you your medicine, you can tell if they are doing it with love or without.  If they are helping you brush your teeth or comb your hair or take a shower, you can tell if they are doing it with love or without.  If somebody is going to stick a needle in you to take blood, you can tell if they are doing it with love or without and it sure makes a difference doesn’t it?

I once watched a video of this young boy being dragged into the doctor’s office by his mother.  He didn’t want to be there because he had had bad experiences with being at the doctor’s office before.  In particular, he did not like needles.  This doctor was different, though.  She got the young boy talking about something he was really interested in, she put him at ease and gave him the shot without him hardly even noticing it.  Hopefully this little boy learned a very valuable lesson from this doctor – that it’s not what you do but how you do it that makes all the difference.

I was recently listening to an ex-con describe the years he spent in prison.  He was saying the worst thing about prison is that the guards, the people who provide you with your basic needs – food, clothing, medicine – are trained not to like you even as they care for you.  Wow.  Can you imagine?  In Prison, the have to care for you, but they are not supposed to like you. They are actually trained to dislike you even as they care for you.

I tried to pass on to my students the same lesson that my principle had taught me – that their words were powerful and how something is said is more important than what is said.  Teenagers can be very cruel sometimes, especially with their words.  And when you call them on it, one of the things they like to say is “Well, I was just being honest”. And they think that will get them off the hook because we teach them that honesty is important.  One thing I tried to convey to them is that not all virtues are created equal.  Like the apostle Paul said, “In the end three things remain, faith hope and love and the greatest of these is love.”  In the end, love is the most important virtue.  It is far more important than honesty and truth even.  So I would tell the students that honesty was important, but Love and kindness were more important.  Honesty is strong medicine.  Truth can hurt.  If you are going to be honest and truthful with someone, you better be like that doctor who was able to give the little boy a shot without him even knowing it.  You only have the right to tell someone the truth if you can do it with love.

Today’s Gospel is a good example of Jesus telling the truth in love.  It’s not what Jesus says but how he says it that turns this woman’s life around.

The story is about a woman who is coming to draw water from the well at noontime – the hottest part of the day. Very peculiar. Nobody draws water during the hottest part of the day and so nobody else is at the well either, except Jesus.  Jesus comes to this woman as Jesus often appears to us, as a person in need.  And when we respond to Jesus as a person in need, we realize that Jesus also has something to offer us.  The same is true for this woman.  When Jesus starts speaking to her, she is a bit put off by him because Jesus is breaking all kinds of social rules simply by asking her for a drink.  For one, she is a Samaritan, one of the arch-enemies of the Jewish people, and for another, she is a woman.  She challenges him on it and says, “Who are you to ask me for a drink”, to which Jesus replies, “If only you knew who was asking you, you would ask him for a drink of living water…Whoever drinks of the water I give will never thirst”.  “Give me this water so that I don’t have to keep coming back to the well”, she says. 

And this is where it gets interesting.  Jesus tells her to go get her husband and come back to which she replies that she has no husband.  And Jesus says, “You are right in saying you have no husband.  You have had fives husbands and the man you have now is not your husband.”

Now everything in the story becomes clear.  She was what some people would call a “loose” woman.  She would have been despised among the other women in her community.  And it now makes sense why she is drawing water at the well in the hottest part of the day.  All of the other women would have come to the well together early in the morning, but she was not welcome.  Drawing water wasn’t just a chore but it was a social event, and she was not welcome in their social circle.   This was a time and place where community and social bonds were everything.  To be cast out from the community was a fate worse than death. This woman must have truly suffered.

The part of the Gospel that really strikes me this time around is when Jesus says, “You are right in saying that you have no husband.  You have had five husbands and the man you are with now is not your husband.”  There are two ways you can say this statement – with love or without.  You could say it in a “gotcha” kind of way.  You could say, “You are not fooling me. I know what kind of sinful person you really are!”  Or you could say it like this,  “I know who you are. I know what suffering you have gone though at the hands of 5 husbands.  I know the longings of your heart having spendt your whole life looking for love and not finding it. I know how you have been excluded from the only family you know and how deeply your loneliness hurts. I know how it feels to be you and how hard it is. I know who you are. And I love you.”

Can you see the difference? How do you think Jesus said it, the first way or the second?  You can’t hear the inflection in Jesus’ voice simply by reading it, but we know that Jesus’ words were backed by love and compassion not condemnation and judgement.  We know this because of how the woman reacted.  If she would have felt condemned and Judged by Jesus she would have slinked away with her head bowed in shame just as she did when she was judged and condemned by everyone else.  But how does the scripture say she responded to Jesus exposing her for who she was?  This woman who normally avoided all people leaves her water jar at the well and runs back to the town proclaiming to everyone that she met a man who told her everything she had ever done – and she was happy about that!  If somebody had reminded me of all the times I have fallen short I sure wouldn’t be proclaiming it from the housetops. But here she was doing just that.  She felt she had been finally set free, not because of the knowledge that Jesus had about her, but because of the love that he had for her.  The truth he said to her was backed with such great love that the painful truth was not only no longer painful but was actually the source now of her great joy.

It’s not what you say but how you say it that makes all the difference.

Mother Teresa used to say, “We do no great things.  Only small things with great love”. 

Like my old principle used to say, “The kids will forget what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel”.  It’s hard to imagine the level of joy the woman at the well must have felt, but it’s easy to imagine how she would never forget it.

Can you name all four of your grandparents? What about your great-grandparents? What about your grandmother’s maiden name?  How quickly we are forgotten.  How quickly our life, that we think is so important, is erased from the memory of the living after we are gone.

“Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return”

Well now, there is a pleasant thought. 

Lately I have been riding along with somebody who is learning how to drive.  We have been going to a lot of cemeteries to practice.  Cemeteries are a good place to practice driving when you’re first starting.  There are lots of winding roads and turns to make, and you don’t have to worry about killing anybody because they are already dead.  So we’ve been spending hours just driving around and around different cemeteries.

I’m surprised at how peaceful and reflective I find that experience.  One of the places we’ve been going is Forest Home cemetery which is one of the biggest and most historic of the cemeteries in the city, and there is much there to reflect on.  Lots of famous people and lots of not so famous people. Some people have very simple obscure headstones that you would be hard pressed to find even if you knew what you were looking for.  Others have great big monuments to themselves that look like pyramids, like a king was buried there or something.  I confess it’s hard to look at these large crypts that must have cost a gazillion dollars and not think, “Well, somebody sure thought highly of himself”.  I know, I have to get better about not judging people.  I’m working on it.  You see graves of people who lived long lives and you see graves of infants who lived only a few days.  You might see a series of graves of people who all died the same year and you wonder what was going on that that time – famine, war, flu epidemic.  You see people buried off on a hillside by themselves and you see entire families buried together.  Husbands and wives who share the same plot.

The thing that I always come back to in the midst of my ponderings is that everybody in the graveyard is the same.  They are all dead.  The rich, the poor, the young, the old, the smart, the dumb, the accomplished, the disciplined, the lazy, The people who followed the rules and the rebels who broke them, the risk takers and the people who played it safe — all share the same fate.  We all go back to the earth from which we came.  And for reasons I can’t fully understand, I find a lot of peace in that. 

When I was a kid taking swimming lessons I once dove into the pool and lost my trunks much to my great horror and to my swim classmates’ great amusement.  They were all sitting on the side of the pool waiting for their turn to dive. So, they all saw. Everything. I thought I would die of embarrassment.  I thought the rest of my life was ruined.  My mom said something to the effect of, “in a hundred years nobody will even remember”.  Gee, Thanks mom. I didn’t find a lot of comfort in that then, but I often use that phrase to comfort myself when I feel similarly today.  In a hundred years nobody will even remember. There is some sadness in being forgotten, but it has its advantages.  For one, it takes the pressure off.  When you realize that things are not nearly as important in the big picture as they appear in the moment, there is a certain liberation in that which allows you to let go and be the best you can be. When I ponder death, I come away feeling a little more relaxed about life.  It’s all just one big board game and at the end of the night all the pieces just get shoved back into the box from which they came and put back on the shelf. 

As Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”  Some people I suppose would find that depressing, and catch me on a bad day, I probably would too.  But most times when I reflect on our temporary existence, I come away feeling more freedom to live the life I was meant to live it.

One of my favorite books is “The Alchemist”.  You can usually find this book listed among any search of “top 10 spiritual books”.  The alchemists is about a shepherd boy who has a dream about a hidden treasure.  As he goes off in search of his treasure, he is instructed by omens and wise people he meets along the way.  He travels around the world and back only to find the treasure underneath the same tree where he fell asleep and dreamed about it.  The main and recurring theme of the book is that the boy must constantly choose to either follow his calling or abandon it in exchange for the promise of safety and security.  And isn’t that the choice we all constantly face – to follow our vocation, our passion, which is no less than the voice of God himself, or to play it safe and take the path of least resistance.   One of the things the boy learns is that there really is only one option.  Choosing the safe path does not guarantee safety, but choosing to deny one’s calling in favor of safety leads to a slow death where you die from the inside out because our vocation is the essence of life itself and to deny it is to deny one’s own life force.

This theme is a deeply spiritual theme that has been around a long time and is core to many religious teachings. The Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, the main text of the Hindu faith is about this very thing from what I understand.  The Bhagavad Gita is an allegorical conversation between the soul and God.  The main and recurring theme of which, like in the Alchemist, is the importance of following your Dharma – the thing that you were put on this earth to do.  Of all the acts of betrayal, to deny your own Dharma, your own calling, is the worst because you deny the very essence of life within you.

Or as Jesus said, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if only to lose himself in the process”.

But following ones calling, daily, is no easy thing.  God rarely shows us the whole path, but usually just gives us enough light to take the next step.  To follow ones calling daily requires a daily leap of faith and an act of courage.  I’ve felt butterflies in my stomach whenever I’ve made the small leaps of faith and I’ve felt outright dread when I’ve made the larger ones.  But one of the pleasant surprises of my life is that whenever I’ve made a leap of faith in the service of what I knew to be my innermost calling, I’ve landed squarely on my feet in a richer and fuller expression of life every time.  And because of that, it becomes a little easier to do each time.

The temptation to play it safe is always a strong one though.  And one of the things that helps me get over it is the thought of all the headstones I’ve seen.  The people who took leaps of faith and the people who played it safe – both ended up the same in the end.  Playing it safe doesn’t save you – it just takes the essence of life from you while you are still alive.

And so one of the things Ash Wednesday calls us to reflect on is our own mortality.  Why? Only with our death in mind, do we really know how to live our lives. We begin our spiritual journey with our ultimate end in mind.  After all, if you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there. In light of the fact that I will one day die, how do I want to live? 

Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.

I will be giving a presentation on stress at work next Friday so I was re-watching a documentary from years ago I found very insightful then and even more so after watching it recently.  Its called “Stress: Portrait of a Killer”.

I find the material so different the second time around not because the material has changed but because I have.  I stumbled across a particularly valuable insight to me personally in this documentary from 2008 that I can’t believe I missed before. 

So, there is two kinds of stress – acute and chronic.  Acute stress is a zebra running away from a lion on the Savannah.  In 30 seconds the stress is over, one way or the other. Chronic stress is having to pay the rent every month.  Our bodies were never designed to deal with chronic stress, just acute stress. Since the body doesn’t know the difference, it treats having to pay the rent the same way as having to run from the lion, releasing the same chemicals.  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But treating a chronic problem with an acute solution always creates more problems.

Its not just our bodies that can’t tell the difference between chronic and acute pain.  Neither can our culture.  People who suffer from acute pain – either physically, mentally, or spiritually are very well served by our culture.  There are no shortage of therapists, doctors, specialists, treatments or pills. Acute pain is something you can “do” something about.  Acute pain is something you can “fix”.  But when we dole out the “doing” and “fixing” pill to people who are in chronic pain, we usually end up making them feel worse in the long run. This is particularly true if the person has CHOSEN their pain. 

How many of us are in situations of chronic pain that we are choosing to be in?  And how painful is it to listen to the acute problem solutions of well-meaning professionals as well as friends?

The part of the documentary that fuels this post was the coverage of a support group for parents of children with special needs.  This group of parents suffer from chronic stress.  One of the members of the group said something to the effect of “somebody told me the other day I should consider putting my child in a home.  What I like about this group is that no one here would ever say anything like that.”  In our “let’s do something about it already!” society, there is an over-abundance of therapists and precious few support groups.  Therapists deal with acute solutions and then judge you if you don’t take the actions necessary to alleviate your pain.  Only support groups, formal and informal, have the ability to be with us over the long haul standing beside us as we face our pain daily, even and especially if it is chosen pain.

This parent was choosing to suffer, choosing the path of pain on a daily basis.   Choosing to stay in pain is not always because we lack the courage or will to face the alternative as our culture will have us believe.  Sometimes the alternative just doesn’t work for us.  Maybe even for reasons we can’t explain. But that doesn’t make our pain less real and our need to express it less valid.Such a shortage of people who will empathize with you, listening to the same story of pain day after day and never offer a single solution.  These are the precious ones.Here is the documentary if your interested. The part about the support group occurs at minute 39:40 https

So, I had a new years resolution to read one hundred books this year.  Like most of my new years resolutions I’m finding now that maybe it was a little to ambitious as it is now well into February and I’m quite a bit behind.  But I will say that I have read more books than I have read more books because of the resolution than I would have without it so the net gain is still positive. 

I spent the month of December compiling my list of books to read. I wanted to avoid the temptation of reading just the books that fit with the ideas I already ascribe too though it is much more enjoyable to read if you are stopping only to say, “Ah yes, it is so!”.  I also wanted diversity in the types of books and genres – novels, classics, modern, science fiction, spirituality, science, self-help, leadership, etc.  To research books for spirituality I think I googled “best spiritual books” to begin my search.  Now that is really casting a wide net because what is spiritual to one person is absolutely not to another. Some books on the list I would indeed say are great books – like “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coehlo.  Others I had heard enough about to know that they were not really my cup of tea but I wanted to be fair and at least see what all of the fuss was about.  One of the latter such books for me was “The Shack.”

If you don’t have anything good to say don’t say anything at all.  Except that I can’t help it, I guess.  And I feel like I need to process the discomfort I feel as I’m still trying to plow my way through this book that is almost unreadable for me. 

So the book begins with the story of a murder.  The main character goes on a camping trip with his family and his youngest daughter is kidnapped by a serial killer who leaves a calling card to let the authorities know it was him.  They never do find the girls body – only her bloody dress in an abandoned shack.  The main character suffers for quite some time with the “great sadness” when he receives a letter from God in his mailbox to meet him at the shack.  When he gets to the shack he meets God in the form of three people, the Holy Trinity, who take turns spending time with him showing him the nature of the universe and such.

Here’s my problem.  The first part of the book is so dark, depressing and sad and leaves you with a sickness in your stomach.  And the response to that is this very straightforward, superficial, fundamentalist, atonement theology encapsulated in some real cheesy imagery – like Jesus shows up wearing a carpenters toolbelt carrying a fishing pole. Cheesy.   The response to the tragedy and discomfort the author leaves you with in the first part of the story is grossly insufficient. 

Then it dawned on me – this s not just the problem with the book.  This is the problem with this kind of Christianity in general.  This straightforward, simplistic atonement theology – you know, the Jesus died for your sins so you can go to heaven stuff – is a grossly insufficient response to the real difficulties and tragedies of life.  Most people don’t believe the Christian myth as history anymore given what we know about the universe these days and as a myth, this version of the myth just doesn’t work for people anymore. 

Except there is a subset of the population it does work for.  This book that was almost unreadable to me sold a gazillion copies. So, it must work for somebody?

I have met a lot of people, usually parents of the boomer generation but also some of the boomers, who seem deeply troubled that there kids don’t go to church.  Oftentimes I have been asked to do a memorial service for someone who was a person of faith and the kids thought they should do something religious for mom in terms of a religious funeral even though they themselves were really luke-warm about the whole idea.  It seems to be a generational thing.  It’s not like just one of the kids went astray so to speak.  My take is that the religious story that worked for previous generations just doesn’t work for people today anymore because of how much we have learned about the universe in such a short time.  We live in the in-between times where the old myth doesn’t work and the new myth hasn’t come into being.

We don’t’ need a new story, one that integrates what we know about the cosmos today and leaves behind all of that atonement stuff.  Or maybe we don’t’ need a new story so much as a deeper understanding of the old.

Matthew 17:1-9 The Transfiguration

When I was a teenager I went to spend a summer with my aunt who lived in Marshfield Wisconsin.  My Aunt was a public school teacher by profession but she was also a great artist and had a lot of little side jobs painting murals on garage doors for people.  I took lessons from my aunt for a while.  I would send her some drawings through the mail and she would send them back to me with encouragement and some pointers and how to make them better.  I never became an artist, but I did get to work with her one summer helping her paint a mural on a garage door.  Now, I wasn’t very good as an artist but since SHE was and exceptional artist, it didn’t matter.  If I made a mistake, no matter how bad it seemed, she could correct it by adding something else to the picture.  She was able to turn my limitations into beautiful art, not by painting over it, but by utilizing it somehow as a basis for a new creation.  I’ve often thought this is often how God works in our lives.  God uses everything for the greater good, even our mistakes, insufficiencies, and limitations.  

Another thing my aunt did was that she would give me specific things to paint – very easy shapes or squiggly lines that were easy to do so I couldn’t mess them up and she would use those shapes and squiggly lines to flesh out the big picture.  Having to paint the same things over and over was sometimes very tedious and frustrating.  It was only when I stepped back from the garage door and looked at the big picture that I could see how those shapes and squiggly lines actually made up the ripples in the river that she was painting all around me.  I didn’t know what the purpose of all those little lines were until I was able to step back from my narrow, myopic view.

It kind of reminded me of that old movie “The Karate Kid” where, if you remember, this young man named Daniel was getting beaten up at school, and he goes to the local handyman, Mr. Miyagi to learn karate.  At first Daniel is very frustrated because Mr. Miyagi is not teaching Daniel karate but is instead having him do all kinds of maintenance projects for him.  He’s having him wax cars, and sand floors and paint fences.  One day Daniel is fed up and tells Mr. Miyagi he is going to quit because Mr. Miyagi isn’t teaching him karate but just having him do all his work for him.  Then, as Daniel is about to leave, he has Daniel show him all of the motions he was using to do the chores – wax on wax off, sand the floor, paint the fence.  And in what is probably the most iconic moment in the film, Daniel’s eyes grow wide in with astonishment as he realizes that imbedded in the chores he was doing, were all of these karate techniques he was learning without even knowing it. 

How frustrating it is sometimes not to be able to see the big picture.  Not to be able to see the purpose of a seemingly laborious task in the pattern of the grand design.          

That is one of the things today’s gospel is about. The context of this story occurs is important.  The disciples have spent quite a bit of time with Jesus by now and are starting to realize that the more they learn about Jesus, the less they really seem to know.  Jesus is starting to explain to them how the messiah must suffer and die.  This didn’t fit with the image of the messiah they were expecting.  And he was also telling them things like “take up your cross and follow me” indicating that they too were going to have suffer.  None of this fit with their preconceived ideas about who Jesus was.  They were following him as a way to improve their lives and everything Jesus seemed to indicate was that the rode ahead would be difficult before it would be glorious.  So the disciples were confused frustrated.  And Jesus could tell.  So Jesus and the disciples have a Daniel and Mr. Miyagi moment where Jesus gives them a glimpse of the big picture and how everything they have been learning fits together.

First he leads them up the mountain.  Mountains have traditionally been the holy places for many people in the world where people would go to encounter God.  Abraham went up the mountain to offer sacrifice, Moses went up the mountain to experience God in the burning bush and to receive the ten commandments, Elijah went up the mountain and where he encountered God not in the earthquake or the mighty wind, but in the gentlest of breezes.  It was high up on the mountain that they encountered God.  What else happens high on a mountaintop?  You see the big picture.  You see for miles, you see patterns, you see how things are connected and make sense.  And so just like Abraham, Moses, Elijah and many other prophets of old, Jesus leads the disciples up the mountain in the midst of their frustration so they can encounter the glory of God and get a glimpse the big picture.

The first thing they notice is a change in Jesus’ appearance.  His face shines like the sun and his clothes become dazzling as light.  Then they see appearing before them Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus. 

Could it be that Jesus was showing them how all of the pieces of their religious tradition fit together – that all the prophets of old were part of one great big masterpiece God was creating?  That Moses and Elijah and Jesus were all part of one long string of communication between God and people?

And then what? The disciples get it right? Not quite.  The big picture is still too much for them to take in and they miss the point.  Peter says to Jesus, “Lord it is good that we are here.  If you wish I will put up three shelters – one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” At that moment a cloud covered them and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”  That is another one of the temptations we experience as human beings – whenever we have one of these peak experiences we want to capture it and control like a kid putting a butterfly in a jar.  Or we want to build a monument to it – like naming a street after a brave and courageous activist so we can mark their place in the past where they are safe and controllable instead of letting their life-giving words inform our present.

So Peter says, Let’s build a monument to you and the others – three shelters – so that we can honor and worship you from a position of emotional safety.

But God is not safe.  In The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, there is a character called Aslan.  Aslan is talking Lion who allegorically represents God.  When the children who encounter Aslan ask if he is safe, they are told that he is not safe. But he is good. God is good and God is holy but God is not safe or controllable.  You can’t put Gods transformative power in a jar like a butterfly.  Nor can you quarantine Gods power to the past.  Our God is a God of right now.  He has always been a God of the present moment.  When Moses once asked God who he was speaking to do you remember Gods answer? He said, “I am”.  Not “I was”. Not “I will be”. But “I am.”  So when Peter wanted to build three little shelters, little monuments, to Moses, Elijah and Jesus, the disciples are immediately enveloped in a cloud and from the cloud they hear a voice that says “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!” And when they looked up, they saw no one but Jesus. 

God’s word came to the people of the past through Moses and Elijah but God was coming to the disciples now in the present in the form of Jesus, and he was the one they should be paying attention to.  Learning about the prophets and holy people in the past benefits us only if it gives us clues to where God is working right now, because our God is not a God of the past.  “I am” is a God of the present.  And so the million dollar question for today’s gospel is, “Where is God at work in my life right now?”

One other thing I learned from my aunt that summer I worked with her painting garage door murals.  Every now and then she had to step back from the garage door to get a glimpse of the big picture and how it was all fitting together.  But then she had to hold that picture in her mind because she couldn’t paint the garage door from that far away.  In order to do the work of painting she had to get up close and personal temporarily letting go of the big picture in order to do the nitty gritty.  Building the kingdom of God is like that.  Sometimes we have to go up the mountain to see how everything fits together, but we can’t stay there, because we can’t work from there.  Tempting as it is, we can’t set up little houses like Peter wanted to do.  The work we need to do is at the bottom of the mountain.  To do the nitty gritty of building the kingdom of God, we need to get up close and personal and it doesn’t always make sense from up close.  So, life is a constant moving back and forth between going to the mountaintop to refresh our vision, and letting go of the vision to go down the mountain and do the work.