Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.

Power and Pride

Pride month began this last Sunday, as Rache and I went to see a revival of HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, a fiercely brazen 90s rock musical about a trans woman's journey.  I'd seen the film, back in the day when I imagined myself edgy and progressive, but the musical itself?  Never.

The show was well worth seeing, with excellent performances from the two gifted actors playing Hedwig and her lover Yitzak, and a tight and kickin' backup band playing the Angry Inch.

Hedwig's tale is a rough one.  

Her character is...complex.  She's fierce and fabulous and talented, of course.  But there are strong intimations of sexual abuse in Hedwig's nascent queer boyhood, coupled with a relationship with an American G.I. that's blatantly predatory.  Her transition is botched by an East German back-alley doctor, leaving her with a residual male stump...the eponymous "angry inch."  Her one great love...a geeky army brat who's into D&D...abandons her upon being forced to confront the fact that she's not biologically female.

Darkly funny, relentlessly profane, and unquestionably fabulous, Hedwig is also kind of a horrible person.  She's carrying so many scars, both figurative and literal, that she spreads her damage around.  In particular, she's gleefully abusive to her lover Yitzak, a beaten-down drag queen who she berates, belittles, and oppresses with a performative and casual cruelty.  It's a show with emotional depth, and for all of the rock-and-roll sturm und drang, remarkable subtlety.

Which made this a pungent show to begin a Pride month.  

"Pride," glower Christians who have beef with Queer folk, "is a sin.  Pride goes before the destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall, Proverbs 16:18, right there in the Bible."  Which, on one level, is true.  

But on another level, it's completely and willfully missing the point.  Being Queer isn't itself evil, brothers and sisters.  It's a person's nature.  It's morally neutral, and has no bearing on a human being's decency, compassion, or capacity to live according to the teachings of Jesus. 

"Only if you're in power," comes the progressive reply, "because the First law of Intersectionality is that those without power cannot sin."  Which, on one level, is true.  If you are utterly powerless and have no agency, you cannot sin, because you can neither intend nor act.  

But all human persons have agency.  We are gifted at finding those weaker than themselves, and as hurt people, we hurt people.  Queer folk are persons, not flawless magical fairyland creatures.  All of us are beautifully gifted and a hot mess, all at the same time.  And Lord have mercy, do we hunger hunger hunger for power.  

Hedwig, as a character, is just such a soul.  She finds power in her performances, power in creating desire in others, power in the attention her musical giftness creates, power in her charismatic forwardness.  She's filled with pride, and it is from that pride...her sense of her own dominance, her power of role and place...that she dehumanizes and demeans Yitzak.  Pride as sin needs inferiors, needs dominance, needs to belittle and oppress.

Like Mister sins against Celie in THE COLOR PURPLE, so does Hedwig misuse her place of agency.  It's only when the hold of power is broken that Hedwig's tale takes a turn towards healing and a willingness to let go of her hunger for dominance and let others thrive.  Humbled, Hedwig makes space for her lover to express their gifts...which only pride imagines diminish her own.

Better to be lowly in spirit along with the oppressed than to share plunder with the proud, and that we Christians so easily forget.  

Proverbs 16:19, eh?

Blueberries and Catbirds

As the first wave of summer heat spools up, my little garden is almost ready for the second wave of harvest.

Asparagus is the tip of the spear, rising when spring first whispers at warmth.  Those delectable first fern shoots are now long gone, allowed to grow to their natural man-height, a riot of delicate whiskers and poisonous berries.

This week, I'll be gently digging out my overwintered garlic.  Their great-great-grandmother bulbs were Trader Joes organics, which I bought five years ago to plant rather than eat.  They're an indeterminate softneck variety, which I plant copiously in early fall.  Last year I got 25 bulbs, and as I'm of the "triple the garlic" persuasion in any recipe, they go to good use.  This year, I'm hoping for thirty out of two four-by-eight beds.  It's the most I've ever grown, and I may even try intercropping this year, as Nosferatu's Bane seems to ward off early season deer depredations. 

While the garlic hangs dangling in the shade of our carport to cure, I'm also turning my attention to the blueberry bushes in front of my house.  They're a twelve year old planting, and at this point every year they're fat with bunches of ripening blueberries.  Hundreds of berries hang heavy on the bush, and as they blush green to pink to lavender, I'm always convinced we'll maybe this year have enough for a pie.

Until the grey catbirds arrive, that is.  Unlike the local mockers that have taken up regular residence in one of our boxwoods, catbirds aren't seen much around my garden most of the year.  But when the blueberries arrive, it's a catbird feeding frenzy.

Now, I don't mind sharing.  Setting aside something for our avian friends is a fine Mary Poppins thing to do.  For a few years, I'd tried putting "bird netting" over the bushes.  But "bird netting" required building a frame, without which the mockingbirds and catbirds just ate the berries right through the mesh.  Then I tried putting small fine mesh bags around individual bunches of berries, leaving others for the birds.  This worked for one half of one season.

But unlike our fractious, combative, disposable sparrows, who'll also feast upon the berries but were clueless about how to circumvent the bags, catbirds aren't morons.  Like their mockingbird cousins, they're inquisitive and adaptable creatures, and they quickly figured out how to pull those mesh bags off. 

For the last few years, I've gotten no more than a couple of handfuls of berries, and the catbirds have feasted.

So this year, I tried a new tack.  I covered three quarters of my plants with some drawstring fine mesh bags large enough for me to stand in.   But not all, never all.  

Do not harvest to the edge of your fields, as the Law puts it, and that applies to humans and catbirds alike.   That, I thought, will surely do it.  They'll go for the easy pickings, and we'll be copacetic.

After putting the nets on, the very first thing that happened?  

I netted a catbird.  Glancing up from my laptop "office" by the kitchen window, I saw a wild fluttering of grey wings inside the netting.  Rather than eating some of the dozens of ripening berries I'd left easily available, it set hungry eyes on the portion I'd set aside for myself.

The net being fine mesh, the persistent little critter wasn't tangled up at all.  It had just figured out a way to nose through the inadequately tightened drawstring opening, at which point it realized that getting out was going to be a little more challenging.  It flapped around in a panic, the berries forgotten.

I wandered out, and after opening up the netting, with some encouragement got it to fly away, meowing anxiously.

Don't get greedy, little birds.  Don't get greedy.

Prayer and Preparation

Growing up, personal prayer disciplines weren't really a thing I learned in church.

I did pray, but it was primarily something I did at home.  There was a simple grace before meals, an offering of thanks for food and fellowship.  At night, as a small child, I'd pray with Mom before bed, after which we'd tell each other "Sillies," meaning the silliest thing we could think of.  That usually got me giggling, which may or may not have been the most efficacious thing to get me to sleep.

But in church?  Not that I can recall.  I mean, of course there were prayers in worship, which my preteen and adolescent brain mostly tuned out.  In Sunday school, we learned Bible stories, talked about helping people, and did actually service work.  All of that was lovely.  There was much progressive activism, and some marvelous opportunities to serve.  The life of the spirit wasn't really front and center.  My Presbyterian denomination being of a strongly intellectual and liberal bent, the point and the purpose of the practice of prayer wasn't really presented.  

In my late teens, I can't really recall praying at all, and when my home church split in one of those tempest-in-a-teapot ego-pissing-contest fractures that so often happen in congregational life, that was that.  Prayer didn't seem to change the arc of anything in the world, and church?  It was just precisely the same human mess you found everywhere else.  Church folks who thought otherwise were, or so my late adolescent thinking went, either earnestly naive or hypocritical.  At best, church was unnecessary, so I went with the naturally solitary tendencies of my introversion, and just stopped going.  

But the yearning for meaning didn't fade.  

In college, I found myself praying infrequently and clumsily, usually in the form of calling out to the heavens in the wee hours of the morning when God's presence seemed close. 

That deepened and became more pressing, and as I returned to church seeking meaning, I was drawn powerfully to service ministries.  But I also found I hungered for prayer.  Again, I didn't have deeply ingrained personal rituals of invocation and supplication.  It just wasn't taught, because what mattered was justice and equity and service.  The spiritual thing was your own journey, utterly idiosyncratic, do-whatever-floats-yer-ark-if-ya-feel-like-it kinda way.  Or you can just not, because, again, it's all about your unique journey.

This is, I am now convinced, one of the primary reasons the progressive church has withered.  A disciple of Jesus who does not pray is like a Buddhist who scoffs at meditation, a Muslim who thinks alms-giving is for suckers, or a Wiccan who turns up their noses at incantation.  You've neglected the roots, and if the root dies, so goes the plant.

Prayer shapes us, both individually and collectively.  It deepens our sense of God's presence, enriches our connectedness as a Christ-centered spiritual community, and refines and reinforces our integrity as persons.   When we neglect it, over-intellectualize it, use critique to distance ourselves ontologically from it, or generally fail to make it a vital part of our practice of the Way, we fragment and fail.

Even just the rote practice can shift the way we conceive of the world, as described years ago by writer/journalist AJ Jacobs in his entertaining THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY.  

Jacobs noted, as urbane-liberal-he committed to adhering to biblical injunctions for twelve months, that the regular practices of the faith had an unanticipated effect.  The more he prayed and kept the rules of Torah...even as a stunt intended only to provide grist for a manuscript...the more he felt that something was at work in the world.  He'd notice odd resonances, and had a stronger sense of purpose   He'd temporarily tuned his mind to the frequency of faith, and it changed him...temporarily.

That change is the goal of prayer.  

It's not about control, or about getting what we want.  

It's about opening up our perception of the world.  It's about priming us to see the workings of God's grace.

Being in on the Grift

One of the more peculiar things about our recent road-trip through the American South was the presence of Trump Stores.  

Generally speaking, I appreciate the South.  The pace of life, the easy sociability, and the use of the second person plural?  There's something to be said for Y'all Country.  But there's weirdness, too.  There's the juxtaposition of faith and decadence, of extreme wealth and poverty.  And, of course, the lingering racism.  The Trump Store is definitely a bit of Southern Weird.  We passed two of them in our travels, one in Western North Carolina and one in Tennessee, and both were just plain odd.

There they were, festooned with MAGA flags and images of the current president, looking for all the world like a far-right Spirit Halloween.  I was tempted to stop and check it out as we passed, just to go in and immerse the oddness, in the same way that I enjoy now and again dining at a local restaurant run by cultists.  But I didn't even suggest it to my wife, mostly because I knew she couldn't stomach the experience. 

If we were still in the lead up to an election, there'd have been a sense to 'em.  But we're not.  Trump merch just a fixture now, a permanent and peculiar part of our I'd-buy-that-for-a-dollar zeitgeist.  There's not ever been anything like this in my lifetime, this brazen embrace of politician as brand.  It's the teensiest bit pornographic.

Folks know there's money to be made off of the Trump name, and American neofascism has a healthy dollop of PT Barnum profiteering woven into its flag-festooned snake-oil DNA.

At the apex of the brand, a family business makes money hand over fist, selling access and power like never before.  It's not just cheaply made Bibles branded and sold for three times the going retail price.  Now that they're in power, it's $TRUMPcoin, a cryptocurrency that allows the wealthy to buy into the brand and get access and favors in return.  It's a $400,000,000 aircraft, offered up as a gift...not to the nation, but the president directly.   It's private clubs for the oligarchs, where just getting in the door will set you back $500,000.  Emoluments Shmemoluments!  There's money to be made!

And at the bottom of the food chain, folks buying shirts and hats and flags wholesale, which they then hawk online and at Trump stores.  

It's all just so danged crass and venal, pure 100% uncut American Mammonism injected straight into the veins of our Trump addiction.

I thought these things as I drove by, but I thought something else.  Don't be a hypocrite, I thought.

I, too, have been making money off of the Trump name.  I've self-pubbed a whole bunch of my manuscripts through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service over the years.   Of them, only one has sold in even modest numbers.  Since the election, a book I wrote back in 2022 has moved a couple of copies a day, every day.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, and it's written in the voice of Satan himself.  It goes for $6.66 a copy, a low, low price selected more for symbolic value than for profit margin.  Amazon gets most of that, and I get about a buck.  Still, that's money.

Though I had to write the book to exorcise Trump-hatred from my soul, I've always felt a little weird about making even modest bank on it.  Those royalty checks ain't a livin', but they're not nothin', either.  How, I mused as we drove, am I different from that Trump Store owner?

Thankfully, Jeff Bezos has solved that problem for me.  

On demand printing costs have risen, and so I recently got a message from Amazon noting a rejiggering of their royalty payment policy.  Come June 10, every self-pubbed paperback on Kindle Direct Publishing that's selling for less than ten bucks will yield no royalties at all.  Not one thin dime.  So every penny of that Six Dollars and Sixty Six cents will go right into Amazon's pocket.  

In a little under two weeks, I'll get nothing from the Great Grift at all.

It feels liberating.

An Unexpectedly Fine Prayer

Rache and I have, for the last few months, been watching our way through The Righteous Gemstones.  As a lampoon of American prosperity religion, it checks a whole bunch of buttons for me.  The cast is excellent, the writing mostly tart, and it blends drama and comedy in ways that work most of the time.  It can be a little tonally jarring, and it gets a wee bit too willfully profane at times, but I enjoy it.

What's...odd...about it is that, as much as it mocks the quarrelsome, shallow, wealth-and-success obsessed Gemstone family?  Every once in a while, a bit of faith slips through.  In season one, the megachurch spectacle was juxtaposed with a genuinely earnest presentation of mission work.  

In season two?  Well, beyond a murderous band of neon motorcycle ninjas, there was a single sublime moment that still sticks with me.

It came as the patriarch of the Gemstone clan, played by John Goodman, was renewing an old acquaintance.  Eli Gemstone was sitting in a restaurant with Junior, a friend from his former life as a professional wrestler.  Junior was reminiscing about his manipulative, distant, and unloving father, and was clearly nursing some significant emotional wounds.

Seeing an old friend struggling, Eli says, "Let's pray, Junior."

He replies, apologetically, that he's not religious.

Eli returns, "Well, it's a good thing I am.  I'll show you what to do."

And then they hold hands, and they pray together.  Now, prayer in the Gemstone world is often crassly self-interested, or presented as comedy.  But not this time.

The prayer that's offered up is heartfelt, personal, and deeply steeped in grace.  It acknowledged pain endured, the strangeness of God's purposes, and the trust that God's mercy always holds out the possibility of redemption.  It was short, simple, and meaningful.

"Damn.  Kinda nice," said Junior, surprised at how moving he found such good words.

"Dang," I thought as I watched, equally surprised.  "That was genuinely a fine prayer."

Every once in a while, the light and purpose of prayer makes itself known through the absurdity of it all.

Auto Start/Stop

I have a thing about wasting fuel.

As often as I can, I get around on my 300cc Yamaha scooter, a blatty little buzzbomb of a thing that gets me almost anywhere I'd like to go.  Generally speaking, it's rated at 75 miles to the gallon, which isn't half bad.

But I get in the low to mid 80s.  My last three tanks came in at 84 mpg, in a mix of highway droning and suburban errand-running.  There are reasons for this, but the primary one is that once the engine is warmed up, I turn it off whenever I stop.  As I pull up to a red light, I hit the engine kill switch, and coast in slowly.  I'll then sit there for a bit.  Ten seconds, maybe twenty.  Thirty, at some of the more annoying ones.   Then, as the light changes and before the drivers around me look away from their phones, I'll blip the starter button.  Off I go.  No muss.  No fuss.

I began this habit three rides ago, when my aging Yamaha YZF600R sportbike was struggling with a cooling system issue.  I'd kill the motor at stops, because if I didn't, the poor ol' thing would overheat.  I noticed then that I got a notable improvement in range as a collateral benefit of having to kludge a ratbike.  I've done it ever since, and increasingly, so have our cars.

Once we bought our first hybrid, our trusty fuel-sipping Prius did that as part of its design.  If you weren't on the gas, the internal combustion engine would just cut out, and you'd be either coasting or running on battery.  Our current Accord Hybrid does exactly the same thing.  The manual transmission Opel I drove on a trip to Ireland did it. The big V8-powered Mercedes Benz S-Class I recently rented for a road trip to Dollywood and Nashville?  Same deal.  

Auto start/stop generally gets you about 7% more range, all things being equal.  On my scooter, it's more like 12%.  I spend less money.  I use less fuel.  I go farther.   In the instruction manual for the scoot, Yamaha straight up tells you to do it.  "Want to save money?  Just turn the engine off every time you stop," says the manufacturer.  Starter motors are sturdy things, over engineered for countless use-cycles, or so I recall when talking to the mechanics at the alternator and starter dealer where I worked for a summer. 

There's no downside at all, way I see it.  I'm no fan of things that don't work.  But if you can improve a product so gets the job done and saves me money, I'm there.  

Apparently, some loudmouthed online influencers think saving money is a problem.  "It's annoying," they'll say, because being reminded that you're getting 5% more range every time the car fires up again is apparently something they dislike.  "It slows me down," they'll say, even though it does not.  "It wears out your engine," they'll say, showing that they don't know a danged thing about modern internal combustion engines.  

This regime being what it is, auto start/stop has now been targeted by Lee Zeldin, a fossil-fuel-use enthusiast who was appointed to be current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.  "We're going to fix that," he said.  "Everyone hates it."  Everyone, eh?  Golly, I better go along with the herd, then.

The EPA, encouraging us to be less efficient, less thrifty, and less practical?  The EPA, celebrating pointless waste? Lord have mercy, we're in Htrae.

It's like wanting less efficient toilets, lightbulbs that produce more heat than light, wasteful showerheads, and going back to dishwashers that guzzle water and don't get your dishes clean.  It's just one part foolishness, two parts cussedness, and a little pinch of mean-crazy.

I mean, you can already turn it off if you're such a sensitive soul.  Every pretty pretty Princess can deactivate that pea if they're so inclined.  That's what the button is for.  

It ain't broke.  Something else is going on.  What might that be?  When presented with an odd course of action being aggressively presented, is to ask this question: Who benefits?

Who benefits from our using five percent more gas?  I mean, we don't.  

But our new best friends in Qatar and Saudi Arabia sure do. 

Tearing Down Memories

One of the things about living in the same area for fifty years is that your memories are of a different place, inhabited by different people.

Most of the folks I know who once lived in and around my corner of Northern Virginia are now gone.  They're either elsewhere or very very elsewhere, as moves and mortality take their toll.  I'll drive past the street where a high school girlfriend once lived, or the cul de sac that a now-deceased friend from middle school called home, and encountering those physical locations will stir my creaky neurons to remembrance.

So much isn't what it was.  Where familiar haunts once stood, there are now new developments, as the endless American cycle of diaspora, destruction, and regrowth grinds memory to dust.

Like, say, the multiplex theater where I went with my wife on our very first date.  It had, itself, replaced a drive-in theater, and it was a bustling thriving nexus of the local film-going experience...back when human beings went places to see films.  It's long gone now, replaced by a thrumming insta-city.

Before we went to see Dead Poets Society on that date night years ago, I'd taken her to dinner at a little Vietnamese place where my family were regulars.  I'd sussed that she was vegetarian, and I knew there was a solid tofu option on the menu, so there we went.  Cha Gio closed decades ago now, replaced by another restaurant under different management.  

But the tiny, slightly dumpy strip mall it inhabited remained, awkwardly sited at the crossroads of Graham and Route 50.  It housed pupuserias and bodegas and a beauty supply store, but it was clearly not thriving.  The pandemic had killed off the largest tenant, a sprawling Chinese place that my parents would take the boys to when they were little.  Harvest Moon...or "The Rice House," as the boys called it...had itself taken the place of my parents steakhouse of choice.  Back in the 1970s, that box of a building housed one of their prime Friday night date-night locales.  "We'll be at the Black Angus," or so Dad would announce portentously to the sitter, because calling the restaurant landline would be the only way to reach them in an emergency.  The place had a dance floor, where Dad and Mom would spend a wide-lapeled seventies evening of dinner and dancing. 

For special occasions, we'd get to go there too.  I remember once, when both sets of grandparents were visiting, getting out on the floor and dancing with my grandmother.  It's an old sepia memory, more a series of sense impressions than a full recollection.  But when I drive to see Mom, that memory returns regularly when I pass the long-closed building.

The other night, as I drove her back from an evening at our place, we noticed that the whole strip mall was suddenly closed.  In between my picking Mom up and returning her, construction fences had been erected.  The parking lot was now empty.  Every storefront, boarded up.  The Latino food truck that's done business there for years had decamped across the way to the parking lot of a laundromat.

At some point, I'll come up over the rise to approach the intersection, and there'll be nothing there but rubble.

So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

Difficult Weeding

As my garden stirs to life in the burgeoning warmth of early summer, I find myself engaged in some difficult weeding.

Weeding is something I enjoy.  It's primal and satisfying, as I carefully root out plants that are encroaching on the growth I'm trying to encourage.  Grasses and chickweed, clover and creeping violets?  They're all welcome to the rest of my yard, which is a flower-speckled natural smorgasbord for pollinators.  But in the 272 square feet I've got set aside as raised beds, I've got other plans.

So I take the time to root about and remove all of the growth that doesn't match my intent for that space.  It's a constant effort, but well worth it for the health of my vegetables.

Where it gets peculiar?  Volunteers.  

As most of my soil now comes from the compost piles in my shaded back yard, the last few years I've noted an ever-growing number of desirable plants rising from my compost-amended beds.  The seeds that make their way into the compost bin have a tendency to want to grow.

The familiar forms of squash seedlings rise in the middle of a bed I've got set aside for okra.  The usually welcome leaves of young tomatoes spring up where butternuts and 'lopes are intended.  This year, I counted over thirty 'maters popping up their distinctively complex first leafings.  Thirty.  That's a whole lot of unanticipated offering.

In some places, I'll leave them.  Several of the Providential tomatoes are welcome to stay in my tomato plots.  Last year, when a cantaloupe unexpectedly presented itself, I just let it run, and man, it was delicious.  I look forward to planting the progeny of those 'lopes this year.  

But in most of my garden, they're just not part of the plan.

Here, my pastoral predilections come into conflict with my gardening awareness.  As a small church pastor, unexpected volunteer energies are as welcome as manna from heaven.  Where human beings of their own free will make the choice to serve and put in effort, it's a marker of something afoot that needs to be encouraged and enthusiastically supported.  Those blessings are a vital part of God's work in the world, and the primary pastoral task is to nurture, resource, and celebrate them.  

Sometimes, a gentle nudge of the pastoral crook is necessary to keep things on track, to assuage the mutual misunderstandings that we humans are so good at, or to keep limited energies from scattering.  But mostly, it's a question of not letting my ALL-SHALL-LOVE-ME-AND-DESPAIR ego-desire to be in control become a stumbling block to what the Holy Spirit is doing.  

It's remarkable how much of pastoring is simply not getting in the way. 

But an actual garden?  It needs a bit more focusing than the metaphorical garden of the faithful.  It only takes the form and shape we give it, as herbs and vegetables aren't capable of sharing our intent for their growth or placement, no matter how many planning meetings and visioning exercises we inflict on them.

Weeding must be done.

So, with muttered words of apology and promises to tend well to their kin, I'll dig fingers into the ground, and pluck tiny tomatoes and seedling squash from the living soil.  

The Joys of Sleeplessness

One of the great and paradoxical joys of my deepening middle age is the absence of sleep.

I remember, when I was twenty or thirty, that sleep  once filled an entire night.  I'd lie down, close my eyes, and when I awoke, it would be morning.  

Technically, this is still true, but by "morning" I now mean "one in the morning" or "four in the morning."  Some of this is a factor of my fifty six year old bladder.  Some is a factor of my tendency to go to sleep waaaay earlier.  By ten thirty in the PM, I'm typically all tuckered out.

But much of it is just me gettin' old.  I'll wake, and be fully awake, with the night still stretching out ahead of me.

There've been times, when I was younger, when I've experienced insomnia.  Typically, they were times of intense disruption and anxiety, when I'd wake with my mind churning and a knot in my gut.  In such circumstances, the absence of sleep can become a self-reinforcing waking nightmare, as you rouse, get stressed about the fact that you aren't sleeping, and then the stress of not sleeping itself is enough to keep you tossing and fitful.

For the last few years, though, I've come at those times differently.  I began using the time to pray, and now, that's become my default.  

When I open my eyes to the depth of night, it's a blessing, because that's a great time to pray.  I do pray to begin the day, and during the day, but sometimes there's so much going on that those daytime prayers just don't come.  

Lying there in bed?  It's not like there's anything else I need to be doing.  So I pray.  I'll offer a word of gratitude for sleeplessness itself, and the space it provides to tend to my soul's needs. 

I'll offer thanksgiving for whatever goodness the day served up.  I'll remember folks who are on the church prayer list, and offer words over their struggles.  I'll set the names of friends and family before the Creator of the Universe, and express my yearnings for their wholeness and health.  I'll recall the mess of our world, and those in need.

Eventually, sleep returns to me in its own time.  As I feel myself gently fading, I'll pray the Lord's Prayer, bridging my way back into dreams.

Benedictine Matins it ain't.  It's a far softer and more organic cousin to that monastic prayer.  

Yet it lends me an appreciation for that ancient tradition, one that find gracious purpose in the deep of the night.

Sleek Economies

I've got a thing for nice cars.  I always have.  I was the kid doodling jacked-up Mustangs and Barracudas on the margins of my geometry notebooks when I should have been paying attention in class.  I subscribed to Car and Driver when I was fourteen.  I went with my dad to help haggle for his new car when I was 15.

The vehicles I've owned in  my adult life haven't reflected that hankering.  They've been practical and inexpensive, because my Scots blood can't abide with the thought of spending more money than absolutely necessary.  I also prefer efficient cars, because...well...the planet isn't exactly cooling.  Still, the desire remains, and where my day-to-day is functional, every once in a while, I'll rent something that scratches my itch for power and comfort.

So when the wife said, "hey, let's rent a car for our upcoming road trip to Nashville," I knew exactly what I wanted.  We were travelling just under two thousand miles total over nine days in a rambling VA-NC-TN-KY-WV-PA-WV-MD-VA loop, serving up a mix of mountains and long stretches of superslab, and nothing but nothing is better at devouring miles than a Benz.  

The best of the Benzes is their flagship S Class, particularly in its W222 form, which was produced from 2014 to 2020.  Big, luxe, comfy, and powerful, it was a land-yacht designed for the Autobahn.  With a standard four -liter twin-turbo V8 putting out a nudge over four hundred and sixty horsepower from beneath that long hood, it's serenely capable of humming along all day at 110 while your seat gives you a hot stone massage and lightly perfumed air wafts through the cabin.  It's the sort of car driven by old-money patricians and Russian oligarchs.

Back when people bought cars, that is.

Americans don't really drive cars all that much these days, preferring Compact Utility Vehicles, SUVs, and light trucks.  We like to ride high, and the long low sleekness 1980s-me had always assumed would be the norm for future cars in the 2020s never came to pass.  That means taller and blockier profiles, which means aerodynamic inefficiency, which bites deep into our national fuel use.

That comes at a cost as we travel the wide open spaces of our nation, and I was reminded of this as I reviewed the fuel consumption data at the end of the trip.  

That big ol' Benz, with which we...er..."made good time"...over mountains and plains, as state after state whisked on by?  

Over the whole trip, it averaged just a notch over 27 miles to the gallon.  That means, excessive and powerful though the car was, it was more efficient than the average American light vehicle, which...according to the EPA in 2022...got 26.4 miles to the gallon.  

With two of us in the car, we got more Person-Miles-to-the-Gallon than had I taken the same trip alone in a Prius.  It was nearly twice as efficient as flying.

Not, of course, that being ecologically minded was the point of our trip, but it was a peculiar truth to encounter.

A Little Mammon Ruins the Whole Loaf

It only takes the slightest change to make a very, very large difference.

For example, there's the human genome.  My genetic material, the basic information written into our DNA?  It's what makes us human, and what makes each human being different from every other human being.  The tiniest tweak, and we're a different person.

Larger variances make us not human at all.

Eighty percent of our fundamental genetic makeup is identical to that of cattle.  Eighty five percent, we share with mice.  So only a fifteen percent variance, and we're scuttering around beneath the floorboards and leaving little rice-sized poop pellets on the kitchen counter.

We become something categorically different.  A cow is not a human is not a mouse, eh?

I've been meditating on difference and Christian faith lately, as I lead the adult ed class of my little church through reflections on race, difference, and what binds us together as Jesus folk.  One of the great strengths of Christian faith, as I see it, is its ability to exist polyculturally.  The Gospel speaks in every language, and can adapt to the forms and norms of every human culture.

Not that we haven't squabbled over everything and anything, including a single vowel in a single Greek word in one statement of faith.  But Christian unity is formed and shaped by the grace of the Spirit, and our willingness to care for one another despite our manifold differences.  I see Jesus in Methodist and Mennonite, in Catholic and Charismatic, in Orthodoxies both Slavic and Amhara.  We're progressive and conservative, plain and erudite, and all of it can be truly Christian.

Still, there are areas where I'll admit I have always struggled, particularly where the Gospel becomes focused on wealth and prosperity.  

That's kind of a problem right now.

The Prosperity Gospel is ascendant in our culture, the dominant form of the faith, to the point where it's really the closest thing America has to a state religion.  As acolytes of Kenneth Copeland's Word of Faith movement now sit at the heart of power, there's never been a moment when this movement has been as prominent as a form of Christian expression. 

The language of Prosperity Preachin', as I've noted numerous times over the years, about 80 percent comprised of recognizable Christian theology.  Read through the writings of Creflo A. Dollar, or endure one of Paula White's surprisingly listless sermons, and you'll find most of it almost kinda sorta works.  

But that twenty percent variance makes a difference, enough so that it is no longer reflective of the teachings of Jesus.

Money money money, gain gain gain, ever bigger ever more?  There's no version of Jesus who pointed us towards material wealth and social influence. There's no version of the Jesus we know from the Gospels that tolerated venality and indulgence as a marker of spiritual blessing.   You can bowlderize him into a shambling FrankenChrist golem that makes that case, sure, but a plain reading of the Nazarene's intent just won't get you there.  It's uncanny valley Jesus, Jesus shifted and warped to serve the demands of our endless capitalist avarices.

Wealth, as Jesus taught about it, is a dangerous thing for the soul.  The wealthier you are, the more likely it is that you're in some serious spiritual mess.  You have built your house on the sand of human imaginings.  Our material gain is, at best, a dishonorable thing that must be bent to the use of grace with cunning and intention.  

You cannot, said my Lord and Savior in a very declarative way, serve God and wealth. 

The Good Ache of Labor

I ache this morning, and it's a good thing.

Yesterday, the echoes of Easter still in my soul, I spent most of the day engaged in strenuous physical activity.  It began with a brisk three and a half mile walk, as I dropped off our old minivan to get a failed repair redone.  "Do you need a ride home," asked the apologetic manager.  "Nah," I said.  "It's a nice day, and the walk'll be good for me."

The morning was cool and pleasant, the clouds high and solid, and the crispness of the air felt good against my bare arms for the hour I spent putting one foot in front of the other.

For much of the rest of the morning, I was moving mattresses and disassembling beds, as every single bedroom in our house got a new bed.  Well, not "new," not technically.  But newer, as the mattresses that used to grace two rooms in the house of my son and daughter in law found their way to us.

The wife has been agitating for a larger bed in our room for some time, as the joys of perimenopause and the general creakiness of our mutual aging have made sleep an occasionally uncertain thing.  Particularly if you've got a husband who twitches and snorts and fidgets in his sleep.  

So a queen replaced our full, which was moved to our upstairs guest room, along with a beautiful but hefty handcrafted hardwood bedframe.  The downstairs guest room got another queen.  It was a day long bedding do-si-do.

And then the van was ready, and...as Rache was busy in meetings all day...I walked the three and a half miles back to pick it up.  That walk was more leisurely, as I was feeling a little spent.   As I have observed many times in such jaunts, so few other human beings are actually out on foot in the 'burbs.  The flow of our machines is endless, as we rush from place to place, and our bodies sit idle, their energies fermenting into agitation and anxiety.

I can feel yesterday in my flesh today.  Again, it's a good feeling, a feeling I appreciate.  I know, being the throes of middle age, that this sort of day will not always be possible.  That systems will fail.  Knees will go.  Hips will go.  Stamina will fade. 

So even as I walked that return trip, feeling the warmth of the late spring sun on my back, I was grateful for it.  Grateful for each step.  Grateful for another season when my body is able.  

And Lord, did I sleep well.

Jorge Bergoglio Changes Again

The first thing I learned from Jorge Bergoglio was that people can change.

He was, back when he took the reins of the Catholic church, someone that I'll admit to watching with a bit of wariness.  

Before he chose his nom de Papa, Jorge was something of a culture warrior.  He was active on the newly minted Twitter, and back in 2013 I observed that most of his pre-Francis tweets weren't the most gracious and welcoming things I'd ever seen.

On social media in his native Argentina, he learned in heavily against gay adoption, to the point where that seemed...if all you looked at was Twitter at the time...to be his primary schtick as an archbishop.  He was conservative, eh?  

But even at that point in the social media era, I'd realized that Twitter was a poisonous and unreliable thing.  "Microblogging" was already bringing out the worst in human beings, or so I'd observed in myself.  It made us prone to shallow, shortsighted, reactive thinking.  It critically sabotaged attention spans, obliterated subtlety, and caused pathological self-promotion.

And it caused us to blindly attack one another, as online mobs yearning for a daily dose of self-indulgent self-righteousness swarmed anyone for any perceived infraction.

So I committed myself to reserving judgment.  Let's see who he becomes, I reminded myself, not who he was.

In his role as Francis, Jorge was quite different.  His seeming commitment to ideological purity over grace evaporated in the light of his responsibility to minister to billions.  

At the time, Jorge/Francis described taking that mantle as a moment of real epiphany, an awareness that the conflicts that had animated him were below the role Providence had called him to play.  Like Saul of Tarsus, the man before the call wasn't the same as the man after the call.  In becoming Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was transformed.  Instead of invective, words of reconciliation and kindness.  He chose his ground, and that ground was solid rock.  Love for neighbor.  Care for the poor and the stranger.  A willingness to push back against power and falsehood.

This change infuriated those of a legalistic or Pharisaic temperament, in the same way that the actual teachings of Jesus infuriate such souls.  Not that Francis was "progressive."   He understood the task set before him by our mutual Master.

Francis did his job ably, and with integrity.  He presented the central teachings of Jesus effectively and personally.  As did Benedict before him, honestly, and John Paul II as well.

Euge, serve bone et fidelis.

  

Eating Together

For twenty years, I've led Maundy Thursday services, ever since I started down the pastoring path.

It was never a thing for me growing up in church, as my home church was a big downtown congregation at the heart of the nation's capital.  Even if there'd been a service there, it'd have been such a pain navigating traffic that my parents wouldn't have tolerated it.

As I've spent my ministry career in small congregations, I've always run the service in the simplest of ways.  No complex liturgies or innovations, just a good ol' potluck, framed by the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup.  It's as simple a way as possible to mark the Last Supper, and the command to celebrate communion with one another.

As a creature that takes deep comfort in habit and ritual, I've always brought both bread (challah, typically, because it's way tastier than matzoh, and the Lord's Supper ain't a Seder) and soup.  The soup is always the same soup, several boxes worth of Trader Joe's Tomato and Red Pepper.  It's pretty tasty.

This year, I started out to do the same thing.  But three things changed the arc of the evening.  

First, there was already going to be plenty of soup for everyone, a tasty homemade vegetable stew.  My contribution wouldn't be necessary, and if prior years were any guide, I'd end up taking it home.  Despite my best efforts to consume it, most of it would go bad, and then get dumped into my compost.  Composting meant that at least it returns to the earth, but it still felt like a waste.

Second, earlier in the day I'd chatted with church volunteers about the ever expanding demand for food in the town.  Our tiny Little Free Pantry pushed through twenty five tons of food last year, and with more and more economic pressure on the DC area, that seems to be increasing.  The stream of souls coming to our door in search of sustenance is swelling.  Across the way at the town's food bank, the shelves are increasingly bare.  Wasting food in that context seems even less tolerable.

And third, well, there were the words of the Apostle Paul from his letter to the endlessly frustrating Corinthians.  In preparation for the service, I'd re-read the section where he challenges them over the mess they'd made of the Lord's Supper.  They'd modeled their communion after the cultural expectations of the Greco-Roman feast.  There, the important and influential guests ate first and abundantly, and the poor and unknown were served last, getting scraps or nothing.

This annoyed the bejabbers out of Paul.  As The Message puts it:

I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.

With Paul's words echoing in my soul, I set those boxes of soup into the donation crate.  Afterwards, church folk ate and drank together, partaking of bread and cup and remembering Christ's call to love and serve.  It was a gracious time of fellowship, and there was more than enough for all.

And for those who come to us in need today, that soup will be there waiting for them.  

It's pretty tasty.

 

The Dreams in Which I'm Flying

On a recent night, I couldn't fly.  It was most frustrating.

When I was a kid, I didn't have flying dreams.  I regularly dreamed I was falling.  There'd be a yawning abyss, a great terrible drop, and I'd lose my balance.  Down I'd go, and I'd wake in terror.  If you died hitting the ground in a falling dream, or so I understood, you'd actually die in real life.  So my friends had told me.  It was common knowledge among children. 

Then...it was in early adolescence...that changed.  I had a falling dream, just pure stock standard plummeting to my inevitable demise, only with one major difference.  I was annoyed at the dream, irritated that it was yet again going to ruin a night of sleep.  I refused to wake up.

I fell, the ground came up real fast, but I didn't wake.  I felt the impact, and I died.   

Only the dream kept going, and I was elsewhere, as another character in a new part of the dream.   This upended one of the primary tenets of children's dream folklore, but so it goes.  

Upon waking, I wasn't afraid of falling dreams.  I still had them, though.  I'd crash to the ground, and just keep on going.  I started trying to figure out if there was any way to change my downward trajectory.  I could, spreading my arms and pulling up into a long glide.  It was really kind of fun.

For a while, I'd flap my arms, which felt goofy, but worked.

Eventually, I learned that arm waggling wasn't necessary, that I could fly by simply *intending* in a particular direction.  The feeling was, and still is, completely unlike anything I feel in waking life.  I remember it right now, as I write this, but I can't *feel* it.  It's a bit like pushing with my arms, and at the same time like pulling, but the tension is evenly distributed across my entire body.  It's like no other feeling but flying.  Up I'll soar, and it's delightful.

I'll swoop about with only the very slightest bit of effort, shouting gleefully down to those on the ground, often hoping that finally, finally, it's not just a dream.  But it always is.

Flying usually comes so very easily.  

But not always.  Sometimes, I ascend, but only weakly, rising for just a moment and with great effort.  

Or...like that recent night...I'll try to find that sense of intention, and it's just not there, like I'm attempting to move an arm that's completely numb.  Oh, c'mon, I'll grumble, reaching about in myself, but ain't nothin' doing.  I remain as earthbound as I am in waking life.

The ability is fickle, and not simply mine to command at will.

Christian Men and the Manosphere

I loathe the "manosphere."

It's a dismal manifestation of our internet age, as stunted examples of human maleness parade themselves around as exemplars.  I've not been around folks like that for a while, not since undergrad, when I watched aggressive males acting out towards one another, and towards women.  It was the University of Virginia, so those Alpha-Hoos were wealthy, driven, and smart, which made them even more insufferable when they were drunk.  I found social circles that kept me as far away from that mess as I could.

Have stuff!  Treat women like meat!  Dominate those around you!  Bluster and preen!  It's been around forever, but here it is again, all of a sudden, pressing out into the world, supercharged by soulless algorithms.

The "men" who now pitch their stunted ethos over social media never made it through adolescence.  The vision of male self-understanding they present is the same vision held by the middle school boys who used to hit me up for lunch money back in the early 1980s.  They prattled on about girls and their anatomies in a way that showed they had no idea what they were talking about.

Or, more importantly, who they were talking about.   

Men who don't honor women as human persons...as friends, as family, as colleagues, as distinct, complex, and unique souls?  They don't understand what it means to be a person, let alone a man.  And those who treat women in a predatory way, who manipulate and objectify?  They're "lower than dogs," as my Grandfather used to say. 

Nothing is weaker, lazier, and less demanding than the indulgent, reactive, infantile vision of the "manosphere."  In the face of a deformed "maleness" defined by lust and self-promotion, greed and dominance, by the Andrew Tates and Donald Trumps of the world, there's another vision of what it means to be a man.

It's a much, much harder path.  It makes more demands.  It's a path of virtue, honor, and integrity.  It requires self-control and discipline.  It requires strength, courage, and sustained attention.

It's the path we learn from Jesus, and from a sacred tradition that goes back to the dawn of human history.

The Way is more challenging, and infinitely more rewarding, and it looks completely different.  

Here, for your convenience, are five distinct features of a male identity shaped by discipleship:

1) A Christian man is calm. There's a fundamental stillness to the authentically Christian man, a placidity that is not inert, but rather unswayed and unbowed by the endless churn of the world. The ideal among Christian men is not one who gets agitated, not one who is easily riled, not angry all the time about every last thing. He doesn't feel that it's his task in life to shout down everyone he disagrees with.

In that, there's a remarkable functional similarity between our ethos and that of the ancient Stoics, those philosophers of the Greco-Roman era who saw that being unfazed by anything was a significant virtue. In our hyper-emotive era, when we are expected to rage and weep and howl at the least input, this is profoundly countercultural.  

The roots of an ethos of measured calmness are also fundamentally biblical, with a deep foundation in Wisdom literature. The wise soul does not allow anger or lust, panic or anxiety to rule a life. Wisdom does not bellow or shout down. It remains unflappable, and sticks to what it knows is true.

That's true if your day is just an average day. It's equally true if planes are falling from the sky and the world as you know it has come crashing down.

In our reactive, ranting, overstimulated, hyperagitated #tweetstorm era, that's something worth remembering. It's also a fundamental principle for every Christian man.

2) A Christian man is humble. Yes, I know, we're all supposed to be constantly one-upping each other in Trump's America, posturing in an endless display of higher-primate alpha-male dominance. We're told to be brash and bold and loud. We're supposed to build our brands, and self-promote, and claw our way up over the bodies of those weaker than us, while indulging in all of those delightful mortal sins that popular consumer culture reinforces in us.

But that's not the path of Jesus. It just isn't. It has never been. There is no legitimate reading of the Gospel that says otherwise. If you want to be proud and feel powerful, you're welcome to go hang out with with Anton LaVey or Ayn Rand.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

For disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, humility is a fundamental virtue. The Christian man, first and foremost, sees himself as a servant to those around him. Though he is resourceful, competent, and able, he sees all of those strengths as existing primarily to be a bulwark to friends and family. Not to dominate or control them, or to advance himself, but to give aid and help bear the burdens of others.

When his community is threatened...by storms, by violence, by discord, he simply does what needs be done. We do our duty, no matter what that might entail, even up to the point of exposing ourselves to suffering and death.

This is, again, a fundamental dynamic of the the teaching of Jesus. It's the cross in a nutshell. And it is utterly alien to the culture of self-absorbed "manhood" taught in our society.

3) A Christian man is diligent. Popular culture presents us with an image of men as eternal man-children, permanent adolescents who like nothing more than to loaf about and can't manage to do much of anything. Golly, Dad just put the diaper on the baby's head again! Men are so witless! Hah! Hah! Better get back to the mancave to yell at the sportsball!

Christian manhood isn't like that. We're not called to be shallow, not flighty, not driven by appetite. Christian men remember what it was to be a boy, the playful energy and creativity of it. We are allowed to still enjoy those things. We're allowed to be childlike.

Childish? Not so much.

Oh, sure one can enjoy life. But we are also no longer boys, and we should know it. There comes a time when we must set aside childish ways, as the Apostle Paul reminds us.

That means attending to duty. It means pursuing labors even when they aren't what we feel like doing right at this very moment. It means not giving up, simply because we're feeling, like, so bored. It means pursuing competence at those things we know we need to accomplish.

Men are called to be pragmatic and results-oriented, who committing ourselves to crafts that require attention and focus.

It means we must be patient, and willing to do what we know Christ demands of us, while letting God do God's work at God's own pace. In this Veruca Salt I-want-it-now age, that requires being intentionally countercultural.

It is also the essence of what it means to be a disciple.

4) A Christian man is reflective. This one is tough.  It means we've got to be willing to look hard at our own lives and admit that we can be wrong. If you err, and you realize there's a possibility that the thing you just did or the thing you just said is incorrect, you correct yourself.

This is hard. It stabs at our pride, at our sense of self and sense of strength. We would rather double down. We would rather be defiant in our correctness.

But the process of growing and developing as a disciple requires that we constantly check ourselves against our primary commitment, which is following Jesus of Nazareth. If we act in ways that don't measure up, we've got to be willing to admit we're on the wrong path.

The operative word here is repentance. Yes, repentance. If you never allow for your being wrong, you won't ever repent. We've got to be willing to let repentance...that turning away from our brokenness that is every day of the Way...actually be what we do.

Truly Christian men are profoundly serious about that form of self-discipline, continually checking their own actions and thoughts against the standards of the Gospel. We must continually check ourselves against what we know our faith requires, and even then, we'll sometimes be surprised to discover that our assumptions about others are completely wrong.

And then we admit it. Then we correct ourselves.

When was the last time you reconsidered something about yourself? Or told someone, hey, you know, I completely messed that up?

That's not being weak. It's called repenting, and if all you do is double down, you do not have the discipline to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

5) A Christian man is peaceful. In this peculiar, benighted age, there's a relentless hostility, one that seethes and burns in so much of our communication with one another. Insults and conflict rage, as we take opposition and difference to mean we've got to prove ourselves dominant in every exchange.

That's not the path of Jesus. Never has been. We like to turn to those times Jesus felt and articulated anger to justify our own acting out in rage...and ignore the ethic that is clearly taught in the Gospels. Overturn the tables! Turn out the moneychangers! Booyah!

But when Jesus taught us what to do and how to act, that wasn't what he said. When the Apostle Paul taught how to approach the World, that wasn't what he said.

When interacting with peers and colleagues, we are to be peacemakers. When faced with those who oppose or oppress us, the centurions and jailers? We nonetheless act and speak with honesty, decency, and respect for their persons.

It's how we convince others. It's also how we show that we are who we say we are.

Again, this is immensely challenging. Men are aggressive. It's one of the reasons we do well in the world. Aggression...and the focused energy it creates...is part of our nature, and it can be useful, particularly where large predators are involved.

But the easy embrace of self-serving violence is not and has never been the Christian path. Christians have engaged in violence, sure. Wherever Christianity has subsumed itself into state power, it has become warped into an instrument to justify violent action. Occasionally, there have been Christians faced with demonic, dehumanizing powers so destructive that violence seemed the only option. Faithful men such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or John Brown took up arms against the brutal demons of their culture, and it's impossible to reject their witness out of hand.

But Christ presents us with a different path.

Christian men must be willing to both speak truth and resist, if our way of life is threatened. But we will never strike out, because to do so would violate our integrity as Christians.

When faced with the choice of using violence, even in self-defense, we don't. This is not because we are weak. Nor is it because we water down our Christianity with dreamy idealism.  There is nothing harder than setting down the sword. Looking at the saints of the church, those who have chosen to give their lives rather than yield to the siren song of violence, it can seem impossible. But it is not.

It's because they're better disciples of Jesus Christ than you or I.

As a lifelong Christian who prays daily, studies the bible, has three theological degrees under my belt, and pastors a church, I can say this. In their radical nonviolence, there is a purity of faith among those who will not take up the sword that I still struggle with.

This was the path of the early church, after all. Complete nonviolence, even unto death. Protestants in particular have forgotten this, as the stories of the martyrs are set by the wayside, replaced by tales of success and prowess and material prosperity.

Despite this, it is What Jesus Did, and What He Told Us To Do.

I wrestle with this, particularly when I see injustices inflicted on the weak. I struggle with this more deeply still, when I feel my loved ones are threatened.  I feel rage that is hard to contain.

But those who have had the strength to stand firm are more authentically Christian...more like Jesus and the first Spirit-fired churches...than I am. They didn't punch back. They didn't attack. They avoid violence, no matter what, because that is what Jesus did. Period.

We don't want to hear this. From our pricked pride and our innate, male aggression we resist it. We come up with rationalizations. We proof text. We wave our flags. It feels good.

But if we do not allow ourselves to see the deeper strength of their nonviolent path, we are being willfully blind, and we are not allowing ourselves to learn from those whose faith is stronger.  In our shallow, violent, hyperkinetic time, it's easy for men who've claimed Jesus as their primary life commitment to wander from his path.

Calmness. Humility. Diligence. Reflection. And a soul turned fiercely and defiantly towards peace.

These virtues are fundamental to every man's Christian journey. They are also, as much as I struggle with pride and aggression, the demands Jesus makes of us.

They aren't easy. But good things rarely are.

The Van of Theseus

It was decision time this last week, as our aging Honda Odyssey sat in the shop.   

After buying it used in late 2013, we've had it for twelve years, and it showed every one of those.  There are minor scrapes and dings and divots on the exterior from our now grown boys bumping into things during the process of learning how to drive.  Inside, it's still functional.  No Nav.  No Carplay or Android Auto.  Just Bluetooth for audio.  Cloth seats, still fine but careworn.  It's gone from being our primary family truckster to our secondary vehicle, our utility people-schlepper, mulch carrier, and furniture mover.  At just under 90,000 miles on it, could go another 90K.  Hondas roll that way.

But not without major work.

The front axle was the reason I'd taken it in, grinding  more and more audibly as bearings and other internals failed.  Driveline losses meant we were seeing about a 20% decrease in fuel efficiency.   The rear suspension had been shot for a while, pogoing about and thunking as both springs and rubber mounts had given way.  But now the head gasket was leaking visibly. The timing belt was fraying. 

To be reliably drivable, it was going to need what amounted to an overhaul.  Thousands and thousands of dollars of work, getting perilously close to the value of the vehicle.  The shop where we've had it repaired before was not even faintly pushy about proceeding.  "This is a lot," they said.  We'd be replacing so much of the vehicle it would barely even be the same van when they were done.  A "Van of Theseus," so to speak, and that comes at a nontrivial price.  

But replacing it with a new-used van would be tens of thousands of dollars.  And it would add to our insurance bill.  And it would quadruple our county property tax.  

All around us, the local economy is beginning to fray.   The tens of thousands of jobs vanishing from the DC job market wasn't going to have an instantaneous impact.  But now, as those who've been jobless for months are starting to burn through their emergency reserves?  Now things are shifting.  More houses on the market.  More people preparing to move to greener pastures in search of work.

The markets, in which our retirement savings are invested?  They're not lookin' so hot.

We're fiercely conservative financially, and so could afford either, right now.  But keeping that cash around for the famine years approaching seemed like a prudent idea.  Dropping thirty two grand on a used van that we'd only infrequently use seemed unwise.

So the choice was to repair and restore, and to take the less expensive course.

The Ones Who Are To Blame

If any one thinker has captured the brokenness of our uniquely blighted era, it's Jonathan Haidt. 

He's a social psychologist and researcher whose focus, of late, is the sudden collapse of a generation's mental health.  Young people right now are a mess.  The kids are not OK, as rates of mental illness and social dysfunction have spiked over the last decade and a half.

For years, this trendline has been notable, as literacy, the capacity to focus, and a sense of cohesive identity and purpose have slipped away from our kids.  

The gut-level answer to this, and the Occam's Razor reason:  the rewiring of young minds by semi-sentient corporate "social" media.   At first, it was considered Luddite to suggest this, and folks would cluck about correlation not being causation.  But we've got the data now, after decades, and in study after study, the toxic influence of algorithm-driven always-on 24/7 dopamine bumps is clear.

I feel it, whenever I'm on too much of a doomscrolling jag.  But my kids feel it, too.  My sons have both bailed on social media entirely, and both feel it had a uniformly negative impact on their minds and their creativity.

The evolved systems of human sociality that shaped our minds for millennia are being short-circuited by profit-driven social media and tech.  Constant, immediate gratification stunts our souls.

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Haidt names this as a fundamental cultural failure.  From the perspective of a social psychologist and anthropologist, he compellingly argues that a society that fails to inculcate healthy adult sociality into the young does critical damage to itself.  It destroys our moral core, and without that sense of purpose, we decay and rot.  Such a culture becomes neither progressive nor conservative, but indulgently decadent and mindlessly reactive.

Anxious overparenting and a childhood entirely managed by adults from infancy through adolescence is also a factor, but even that seems to have risen in parallel to new media.  

Long and short of it: thirty years of internet hasn't gone as we'd hoped.  Unmoored from our ethical frameworks, it's done critical damage to our individual and collective psyches.  

So.  How do we reverse this process?  How do we hold the corporate powers responsible to account, understanding that they're kinda sorta in control right now?  It's not just that they've inserted themselves into our minds and shaped the minds of our children.  

They've taken control of our economy.  They've seized and reframed our social relationships.  They manage what we see, and when we see it.  They've been the mechanism that gave the propaganda machines of tyrants access to our people.  And now, they've bought their way into the venal heart of American political power.  

There they were, lined up neatly, celebrating the government that they purchased.  

Meta. Alphabet. Amazon.  X.

Their bright ideas have crippled a generation.  They've subverted both our minds, our economy, and our Republic.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we trust these people to rule us.

Faith, Purpose, and Identity

Faith, as I understand it, is that which defines every other thing that you do.

It provides the answer to the question, "Why?"  It provides the overarching and unifying purpose, the moral measure of every action.   It is, in evangelical Christian terms, the thing that makes life "purpose-driven," or so Rick Warren once described it.

I share that essential understanding, although I came to it via a quite different route.  When I began my return to faith, it was through the writings of 20th century Christian existentialists.  Kierkegaard, of course, but also Tillich.  Tillich's understanding of faith was that it was our "ultimate concern," meaning it was that goal that defined all other goals, that was not "contingent," but defining.

I've not taught Tillich over the years, or preached explicitly from Tillich, for two reasons.  One, people just don't get him, and I see why.  His big thinky theology tended to be a wee bit abstracted from the day-to-day choices that define our moral lives.  Second, his form of Christian faith has no purchase in contemporary Christian debates.  His philosophizing ain't gonna fly if you're conservative and evangelical, nor does he...as a dead white man...have any lingering voice amongst the progressive oldline.

But still, that basic truth about faith remains, and it's the plumb line against which I measure both my actions and my inactions.  If I'm committed to following Jesus, which I am, then that commitment defines all other commitments.  It's how you operationalize the Great Commandment.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind," said Jesus, and if that's not a clear indicator of Ultimate Concern in the Gospel, I don't know what is.

I was meditating on this reality yesterday, after I bumped into one of those peculiar little faith factoids that regularly drop from the table of Ryan Burge.  Burge is an American Baptist Convention pastor and a professor, who gathers and discusses the state of religion in the United States.  

The data point that caught my eye tracked the responses of Americans to this survey question:  

How important are your views about religion to your identity and how you think of yourself?  

The possible responses were: 1) Not at all, 2) A little, 3) Somewhat, and 4) Very much.  Now, I'd prefer a Likert approach to this data, myself.  Four possible responses doesn't provide a meaningful midpoint, eh?  That, and I don't quite like the phrasing, which modifies importance.  "Very much important?"  That's kinda clumsy sounding.  

But the replies, broken down by forms of faith, showed a striking outlier.  

Self-identified evangelicals responded to the question with a resounding supermajority going with the highest category.  As Burge noted, this is a strong signal, twice that of every other group.  Non-evangelicals, which presumably includes the oldline denominations?  Seventy percent replied with an answer ranging from Not at all to Somewhat.

Having bumped into this data point on very progressive BlueSky, the responses I encountered there were all from progressive folks who inhabit the non-evangelical category.  All equated the evangelical response with extremism and oppression.

But I took this another way.  

The Gospel and the teachings of Jesus aren't secondary, or one input among many.  There is nothing in them that would suggest that's an option.  They define all other categories.  They are more important than my race and my gender.  They define my moral actions as a father and a husband, as a neighbor and a citizen.

Why do I stand for the rights of the last, the least, and the lost?  Because it's what Jesus did and taught.  Why do I reject the politics of dominance, resentment, and ethnonationalism?  Because Jesus demands that his disciples set down that sword.  Why do I reject crass mammonism?  Because resisting the corruption of greed is a core theme in Christ's teachings.  Why do I press back against willful cruelty to the stranger and the foreigner in our land?  'Cause Jesus makes it real clear that's a non-negotiable.

If religion does not shape identity, does not form our souls at the most fundamental level, then what is it?  Faith that does not clearly give us both purpose and Ultimate Concern has buried the lede.

It is salt without saltiness, as a friend once put it.