A Prayer for Super Bowl Sunday

Today is the day on which people in the U.S. consume more food and alcohol than on any day except Thanksgiving.  Celebration.  Getting together with friends.  Being reminded of all that unites us and draws us together...  Embracing commercials and commercialism.  Bread and circuses are entertaining, and fill you for a little while.

And yet...

Today in Syria the bombs still fall.

And today in Guatemala...  the maras.

And today in Yemen...  drone strikes.

And today in Nigeria...  Boko Haram.

And today in New York City...  #blacklivesmatter

And today in Paris...  the 19th arrondissement.

And today in Englewood...  Hamilton Park.

And today in Kolkata...  Songachi.

And today in Rio...  Complexo do Alemao.

And today in Freetown...  Kroo Bay.

And today in my neighborhood...  

Alcohol abuse.  Violence against women.  Isolation.  Systemic violence.  Oppression.  Marginalization.  Oppression.  Depression.  The search for meaning.  Hopelessness.  Apathy.  Exhaustion.

And into this world we wade - committed to doing the hard work of love, of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of listening, of sharing, of connecting, of reaching out, of listening to those we want to ignore, of avoiding simplistic narratives and attempts to other...  

"There is something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies." ~ Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We look for beauty.  We notice the image of God in all people.  And we search for God in all things.  In the darkness...  and in the spotlights...  with trust that if we keep looking for God, God will find us.  And maybe we will find that God has already found us, even before the looking began.

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A Prayer for Super Bowl Sunday
~ Walter Brueggemann

The world of fast money,
and loud talk,
and much hype is upon us.
We praise huge men whose names will linger only briefly.
We will eat and drink,
and gamble and laugh,
and cheer and hiss,
and marvel and then yawn.

We show up, most of us, for such a circus,
and such an indulgence.
Loud clashing bodies,
violence within rules,
and money and merchandise and music.

And you - today like every day -
you govern and watch and summon;
you glad when there is joy in the earth,
But you notice our liturgies of disregard and
our litanies of selves made too big,
our fascination with machismo power,
and lust for bodies and for big bucks.

And around you gather today, as every day,
elsewhere uninvited, but noticed by you,
those disabled and gone feeble,
those alone and failed,
those uninvited and shamed.
And you whose gift is more than "super,"
overflowing, abundant, adequate, all sufficient.

The day of preoccupation with creature comforts writ large.
We pause to be mindful of our creatureliness,
our commonality with all that is small and vulnerable exposed,
your creatures called to obedience and praise.

Give us some distance from the noise,
some reserve about the loud success of the day,
that we may remember that our life consists
not in things we consume
but in neighbors we embrace.

Be our good neighbor that we may practice
your neighborly generosity all through our needy neighborhood.

Salt and light

Ipsissimia Verba?
(by Muriel McNair)

You are the salt of the earth.
Gather it together in heaps lest it be polluted;
keep it in the jar.
Let society rot in its sin and be redolent in its putrefaction
the saints pristine in their whiteness shall be gathered together as a memorial pillar to me.
You are the light of the world.
Guard it carefully lest the darkness puts it out.
Build a beautiful shrine for the lamp of God
where it may be kept safe for you to admire.
Do not take it out into the storm to look for the lost:
the wind might blow it out.
Let the lost look out for themselves
– if they are lucky they will see the chinks of light through the shutters and try to come in.
You shall be my witnesses,
so witness faithfully, on Sundays, come what may, and at as many meetings as you can
give money, make long prayers, sing hymns, and listen to sound sermons.
Teach my lambs, in particular, to get their priorities right
and keep the fold nice and tidy:
then it will be easy to find you when I come back, already gathered
from the rest
and glorifying God in your holiness.
You are my body.
Treat it gently, keep it warm,
make sure it gets enough to eat and lives respectably.
Keep it out of politics of course and the crush of the common people.
Avoid confrontation with the realities of evil.
One crucifixion was enough.

The texture of trees

As I was walking home last night, listening to music and enjoying a leisurely walk home on a perfectly warm summer night, I cut through one of the boulevard parks up the road from my house.  It was wide, and shaded from the street lights, and there were clearings in the middle that let you look up and see the stars.  

Gungor's "This is not the end" was playing on repeat.  "We will open our eyes wide... wider.  We will open our mouths wide...  wider."  And as I climbed a tree, feeling the textured bark under my fingertips and on the pads of my feet, I was reminded of the beauty of this world.  The bumps and ripples of the bark, swirling and eddying around knots and branches, waves of texture that called me to stop and notice the wonder that is all around us.  

Jesus said, "You are the light of the world..."  but the purpose of light is not to blind people, to shine into their eyes and dazzle them with purity and brilliance so that they cannot see.  Light exists that we might see other things - see the world around us, in all its beauty and wonder and horror and pain - and to know it as it was meant to be known.  

So, my part of being light today is simply this...  

Slow down.  Find a moment to step away from the distractions of your phone, your job, the clamoring call of everything that demands attention from you NOW...  

Breathe deeply.  Notice the air flowing in your lungs - the rise and fall of your chest - the wonder of breath through wide open mouths.  

Feel a tree.  Or a leaf.  The bumps, whorls, ridges, patterns that are there.  Practice seeing - truly seeing - what surrounds you.  Be amazed.

Look at your beloved - your son - your daughter - your lover - truly see them...  and rejoice.

I suppose if we were to go around like this all the time, we wouldn't ever get anything done.  We would be like Dostoevsky's Prince Mishkin, always so completely wonderstruck with awe at the beauty all around us that dishes would pile up, reports would go unwritten, facebook statuses unupdated.  

That sounds pretty nice actually...

On constructing a narrative of your life

I was listening to a podcast last week (NPR's On Being).  In it, Krista Tippet (the host) and Bessel van der Kolk (a psychiatrist and expert on trauma) were discussing trauma in the context of "Restoring the Body."  It was fascinating to hear them delve into the mind-body connection, but I was brought to a complete mental halt as he talked about how memories are formed.  All people will experience trauma.  It is a fact of life.  Some will experience trauma in horrific amounts, while others will only have "small-t" traumas that haunt their life.  Some people get stuck in the trauma, reliving it, unable to process and make sense of their memories.  In a very real way, they are unable to in-corporate (deal with in their corporeal selves) their traumatic experiences.  These are the people who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).  It can be horrific.

On the other hand, there are those who experience trauma and in some way they are able to make sense of it.  They process the trauma, deal with it, and in a very real way, are no longer haunted by this memory.  Upon further study, Kolk discovered the primary difference between these two groups.  On the one hand, those who felt deeply their unresolved trauma, and were still in the grip of the event (or person) that had traumatized them remembered the event quite clearly.  In fact, they remembered the event as it happened to them.  In discussing events with the other group of people (those who were not suffering from PTSD), Kolk made a surprising discovery:  those who were able to deal with trauma had done so by constructing a narrative of their life, and fitting the traumatic event into their story.

It didn't matter if it was actually true.  Kolk found that, objectively, those who suffered from PTSD had clearer, more accurate recollections of their trauma.  They remembered it as it actually happened.  And this remembering of pain and horror as it had happened was what left them stuck and unable to break free from their trauma.

Kolk and Tippet go on to talk about how actually in-corporating those memories (through yoga, mindfulness, EMDR, and other therapies) can help break that cycle, but I was struck with the tension between remembering accurately and being stuck in your trauma.

That's what this space is.  Hopefully, it is a space to make meaning of the traumas (big-T and little-t) in life, to find the truth, but in some ways to transcend it, and find the deeper meaning in what has happened.  I want to be healthy.  I don't want to be someone who is so caught up in being 100% factually accurate that I miss the truth of the narrative, the meaning in the poetry, and leave myself caught spinning in the wounds of long-ago.

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I don't want to live in the past.  The future is unexplored territory.  I want my heart to be captivated by the present.

A client shared today, "We spend so much time with one leg in the past and the other leg in the future that we just end up pissing all over the present."

I don't want to piss my life away.  I don't want to piss your life away either.  The only value that comes of these ramblings is how it impacts our presents - what we choose to do - how we choose to be - whom we choose to love.  I want to choose better.  I want us all to choose again.  I want to see us choosing life.  Here.  Now.  This moment.

Adventures in Missing the Point

Here's the deal - I am a fearful, fearful person.  There is much I'm afraid of, and the times that it looks like I'm acting out of a place of courage, I am often acting out of fear.  Fear of failure.  Fear of being hurt.  Fear of being rejected.  Fear of being alone.  Fear of loss of control.  Fear of meaninglessness.  Fear of complacency.  Fear of regret.  Fear of being normal.  Fear of selling out.  Fear of giving in.  Fear of not being enough...

Fear is powerful.

And fear is exhausting.

When you grow up learning about a God who loves you, but will send you to hell if you don't pray the right words at the right time, it breeds fear.

When you grow up in a country in the middle of a civil war, with bombs going off up and down the valley, extortion letters sent to your family threatening kidnapping and murder if you don't pay the ransom, car bombs going off down the street, and regularly hearing about friends, community members, people we knew who were kidnapped, assaulted, or just disappeared, it leaves psychic wounds.

When your first two years of life are spent in four countries, never being in one place for more than a few months, you learn to expect things to shift, change, the bottom to drop out, people to leave you (or you to leave them).  The only thing remotely constant is relationship, and even that is ephemeral and fleeting.

When you grow up aware of your privilege - being white, American, male, access to resources - it is infuriating to run into those who have no clue what that privilege entails.  Conversely, it can make you feel guilty and responsible for trying to save the world (which leads many to running off and joining the Peace Corps, or in my case moving into a slum in Rio de Janeiro to "save the children"), and then when you can't save the world, you feel guilty, burnt out, a failure...

When you grow up learning that sex is bad (unless you're married, then have at it), and that the body isn't really something to be celebrated but is more tolerated at best, and actively trying to lead you into sin and hell and damnation at worst, you develop a skewed perception of your own body.  A fixation on purity (as defined by not having sex) led me to the place where, in order to avoid having sex, I avoided being known and loved by people.  I took my purity standards and wielded them like a bludgeon, prideful in my superiority that because holding hands led to kisssing, and kissing led to sex, I would just avoid all of that slippery slope nonsense and just step out of the whole game.

My pride told me I was being pure by not dating, by not making out with girls, by "just being friends" with girls, by not leading them on, by not sleeping around.  In actuality, I was terrified of being known, of being vulnerable, of placing myself in the terrifying position of wanting and needing another person, and not having any control over how they would respond to me.  I was super cautious about physical intimacy, but was emotionally and spiritually promiscuous.  I was a mess.

When you grow up in the shadow of death - aware of death, conscious of death, afraid of death - you try to sidestep the fear by control, by performance, or by escape.  And I did all those things.  I would escape through passivity, through fantasy, through stories and books and movies and imagination.  I would hide.  That pattern of hiding can be traced back to the proverbial Adam and Eve story in the Bible, where they became aware that they were naked and ashamed, so they hid.  I became really good at hiding.

And I thought that if I pretended to not be a mess, people would love me.  If I hid my vulnerability, maybe people would see me the way I thought I was supposed to be, the way I wanted to be - my ideal, perfect self that I could achieve if only I worked and pretended and faked it.

That worked for a while.  But eventually, the fear becomes overpowering.  The powerlessness becomes overwhelming.  Burnout, grief, heartbreak, and pain were the things that eventually broke through my protective walls, my illusions of control, and opened my heart in raw and wonderful ways to the joys, the despairs, the delights and the heartache of being human, of living this one short, wild and precious life we've been given.

I've missed the point a lot in my life.

I want to do it less.

I want to remember where I came from, understand where I am, and wholeheartedly dive into where I'm going.

As far as what to expect (and also to keep me on task):  I'll talk about fear, and love.  I'll talk about brokenness, and beauty.  I'll talk about doubt, and faith.  I'll talk about the exterior global spaces, and the interior frontiers of my own heart.  I'll delve into the past, and I'll explore what's going on today.  I'll be honest...

And hopefully, my aim will get a little better.  I'm tired of missing the point...






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a small disclaimer - I love my family - I love how I grew up, and I wouldn't change hardly anything - and much of what I learned may not have been what they were teaching me...  but as Anne Lamott said, "You own everything that happened to you.  Tell your stories."  This is me trying to tell my stories with honesty and grace.  This is me trying to make sense of my life - to not miss the point anymore...  and to live a life that is whole, that is centered, that relates to God in healthy ways, and that is above all honest and truthful about reality as I see it - the beautiful and the ugly - and ultimately will be a love-song of hope for those who hunger for redemption and all things new...  This is the story I hunger for, and this is the story I want to tell.  Thanks for joining for the ride...