500 Years of Martin Luther

Today many of my theologian and Christian friends are posting thoughts and quotes about Martin Luther since the Reformation officially began on this day, according to church historians, five hundred years ago when Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle.  Now I'm no Luther expert, but I have found some of his ideas really intriguing and I continue to wrestle with the implications of what he came to believe and teach.  

Two short quotes of Luther have proved to be a guiding light for me this year as I deal with the fallout from my divorce and the unending waves of grief I feel day after day:

1) "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong ("sin boldly"), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world."  

When I hear these words I am only able to "hear" them as a child of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition.  Wesley, when he encountered the work of Luther, found it to be deeply disturbing and too mystical.  In fact, he found the idea so completely confusing as to arouse anger.  In 1781 Wesley described Luther's work as "shallow … muddy and confused … deeply tinctured with mysticism throughout, and hence often dangerously wrong."  How can a true Christian sin boldly, Wesley reasoned?  Doesn't such an idea lead into the darkness of anti-nomianism and anarchy?  I think Wesley never fully resolved some of these tensions in his own mind because, after all, his conversion experience took place while hearing Luther's reflections on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.  What can possibly be more Protestant than that kind of a conversion!?!

Yet the good news behind what Luther is writing beckons to me too.  It's like a faint glimmer of hope that God is so profoundly big and good and in utter control of history that our own human free will almost seems to fade in importance.  Sure, we do bad things and we do them all the time and these harmful choices we make hurt others around us and even hurt ourselves.  Yet what if the mystics are correct when they insist that God is love and that love wins and that in some very mysterious way that we don't yet fully understand we will -- all of us, according to some! -- come to rest within the arms of a loving God who is far bigger than we can even think or imagine?  Such is the logic of grace.  It is the logic behind old hymns that I grew up singing in camp-meeting tabernacles with words like "Jesus paid it all / All to Him I owe / Sin had left a guilty stain / He washed it white as snow." In other words, salvation is a work of God and not something we ever earn.  As a dysfunctional Wesleyan, I find that very, very hard to believe for any serious length of time.  

The doubting Thomas in me cries out, "But how can God use addiction?" I've wrestled with this theologically for at least fifteen years:  can God really love an addict?  After all, I can hear Wesley saying, "a child of God does not sin."  And what is addiction if not utter slavery to sin and self? (Some would say it is a brain disorder, but I'm not completely sold on that idea yet).  So, anyway, that's why I am intrigued by Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, yet am not entirely sure if I can believe it.

2) The second quote from Luther that has been with me all year was posted by my friend Ken Brewer at Spring Arbor University:  “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.”  

Of course, I find tremendous hope in this idea because it means that even a story as seemingly tragic as my own can be redeemed.  All of my life I have longed to be a theologian.  It has bordered at times on an obsessive-compulsive tendency, as the history of this blog demonstrates.  Try as I might, I have simply not been able to understand my recent divorce and my bouts with addiction.  In many moments my uncertainty has led me into profound despair of life itself and, as I have written elsewhere, throughout this year I have often asked myself the perennial human question: "To be or not to be?"  

Yet what an irony it would be if this path in life that I have taken (did I chose it or not?  I cannot decide) could be redeemed in such a way that through the suffering and damnation I am currently experiencing I might one day come to a better understanding of God.  God, after all, has always been my Ultimate Concern, even when I haven't always acted like it.  Indeed, I think this may have been the fundamental problem with my marriage:  I allowed Courtney to replace God in my life and, when she inevitably let me down as all humans must do, then I grew resentful and angry.  Even now I often feel the temptation to give in to bitterness, yet I know that to do so would be to walk a path toward destruction and death.  I hear St. Paul whispering in my ear, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  I'm not always sure what that means, but I want to do my best to follow in that Way.

Christian thinkers and mystics since Pseudo-Dionysius have pointed to a three-fold spiritual path for believers: a trail that leads from purgation through illumination to unification.  Luther's statement above echoes this ancient teaching about purgation.  We must be refined in a furnace of pain for, otherwise, some of us would simply never learn and we would be condemned to a hell of our own making for eternity.  This is a deep mystery:  even Jesus Christ had to enter into death and damnation.  Regardless of whether or not one takes it literally, the church has also always taught that Jesus Christ descended into hell itself prior to his resurrection by the Father.  

At this point in my life that idea brings me deep existential comfort.  It isn't just a "head knowledge," but a "heart reality."  When I can do nothing at all except to pray Psalm 6 or Psalm 77, even in the midst of the agony and tears I cling to this insane Christian idea that God herself/himself is present with us in the pain.  Thus we are called, as my uncle once told me, not to "go around" the pain, but to go "through" it.  I don't really pretend to understand what that means, but it seems wise.  

--

God Almighty, thank you for the slightly insane, profane, racist bigot Martin Luther because if you can save a dude like that, you can probably save anyone.  That's the offensiveness of grace.  I believe, but help now my unbelief.  Amen.

The Kalbeliya, Pluralism, and Intellectual Humility

Recently to feed my mind and soul, I've been watching the occasional documentary on Youtube.  Today Raphael Treza's film Cobra Gypsies struck me as deeply profound and beautiful.  The film is his record of three months spent among some nomadic tribes of Rajasthan in northwestern India.  Some of the footage of ceremonies, eating rituals, dances, funerals, etc. have apparently never before been seen by modern western eyes.

Though I could write much more about the documentary itself, that isn't my reason for writing today.  The burning question in my own mind while confronting such a foreign culture through film is this:  how are these nomadic peoples so happy and content with their lives?  Though they have very little in the way of material possessions and by western standards live an extremely harsh life in which they regularly confront death, disease, snakebites, and other natural disasters, yet they are always smiling and dancing and celebrating.  What is it that provides them with this deep peace?  Of course, I don't want to fall into the old trap of lionizing the "noble savage" or of elevating them to a mythical status, yet they do seem from the film to embody a deep, spiritual peace which is largely absent from my own life and the lives of many other busybody, lonely, technology-addicted North Americans that I know.

Kalbelia Snake Charmers

At one point in the film they show a man who, according to the translator, has never before showered or bathed.  He's an elderly man who looks to be in his sixties, yet the people claim not to be bothered by his smell since they understand what he is doing to be an act of worship to God.  The filmmaker then points out that "radical forms of worship" are deeply respected by many nomadic groups like the Kalbeliyas.  Some Christians will insist that such an ascetic act of piety to a false god is mere paganism and darkness.  Yet others like C.S. Lewis often seem to suspect that the sincere worship of another god, albeit a god with the "wrong" name, is in fact worship of the One True God.  Perhaps the most classic example of this in Lewis' thinking can be found in his Chronicles of Narnia in which the worship of the false god Tash turns out to be an offering acceptable to Aslan.

For years I have wrestled with questions surrounding soteriological exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism.  Raised within the exclusivist tradition, I began rebelling against it intellectually at the age of seventeen when it became impossible for me to worship a God who would necessarily condemn huge numbers of people to eternal hell simply because they were born in the wrong time or place.  At Asbury I confronted the work of my friend Jerry Walls and, through him, his mentor Alvin Plantinga who seem to argue for a "generous" inclusivism in which Christ is understood as the only way to salvation, but this is to be held in distinction from the "knowledge of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth."  Also influential in my thinking during those days was Gerald McDermott's Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (recommended to me by Rick McPeak at Greenville).  At Asbury I dove deep into the thinking of John Hick, a representative of the pluralist perspective on world religions, through his book God Has Many Names.  Of course all such questions are deeply complicated within Christian theology by their ties to larger doctrines of Christology, divine providence, and so on.  They are explored carefully in many wonderful books and I cannot rehash that huge debate here.

However, all these questions are in my mind this morning as I learn about the "gypsy" peoples of northern India.  Ironically, the whole reason I'm watching such a documentary is because I have befriended a brilliant Christian man from Ahmedabad, India (the fifth largest city in India with a population of six million people, a city which I had never even heard of being the ethnocentric American that I am).  My friend was raised in a culturally Christian home, which makes sense since Christianity has existed in India for basically as long as it has anywhere else in the world.  He immigrated to the United States in the hopes of finding a new life and helping his family back home, which he has done quite successfully.  However, in a very dark chapter of his life Richard nearly rejected the faith of his parents until he decided that he should, in his words, "investigate what it is that I might be rejecting."  Through an intellectual quest that took him through the works of Tim Keller, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, G. K. Chesterton, Ravi Zacharias, and especially the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, he came to a robust understanding of his own faith and through many long, long conversations I sometimes think that this odd Indian stranger is going to save my own faith too.

But here's the point:  God is everywhere.  The Christian Church has no monopoly on God.  The Holy Spirit blows where it pleases and, though we may try to bottle it up, we simply cannot contain God in any meaningful sense.  Our metaphors are too weak, our language too frail.  As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once pointed out, if we are not able linguistically to describe the aroma of coffee, what on earth makes us think that we could ever describe with words the ineffable nature of the Holy God?  It's a fair question and one that perhaps ought to keep us a bit more intellectually humble than most of us in the Christian academy tend to be.

Politics and the Other

2017 has been a year that has made me less political in general.  As a teenager I was a staunch conservative; since at least 2004, however, I have proudly called myself a liberal.  These days even though I still am a bleeding-heart liberal deep down, I have mostly been lamenting the inability of people within our culture to talk to one another.  I myself am extremely poor at this because, like all of us, I tend to gravitate toward my own echo chambers, a destructive tendency which has only been exacerbated by the rise of social media.

Anyway, this is my experience this morning:  Feeling pretty down and not knowing what to do after my morning prayers I turned on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" only to hear the talking heads screaming at each other about the Russia Investigation, the #MeToo campaign, and every other trending topic under the sun.  My first reaction was to think, "What are we all squabbling about?  I know that this stuff matters immensely, but is this really what life is all about?"  The things I had read in the Psalms and in Thomas Merton seemed far more profound and important than what they were so angry about.  Now I say this with plenty of hesitation because I am an intensely political person.  History/Political Science was my major in college.  Politics fascinates me because I believe that it matters and that it matters on a grand scale for lots and lots of people.

But what if all real, genuine political action is local?  I think this is an intellectual option that most on both the right and the left today do not consider.  It is so very easy for us to hate-watch certain TV shows, get pissed off at how screwed up Washington is, and vent our rage out into the internet ether.  It is like we are all collectively screaming at each other and no one is listening.  But what if the most faithful political action that we can engage in as Christians is to feed the local hungry, befriend the lonely, and share a peaceful life together in small, organic faith communities?  The very alluring alternative is what my professor Luke Bretherton at Duke called "Fabianism": the notion that if we could only fix the "out there" then everything would be all right "in here."

I'm going to be hard on my fellow liberals for a minute.  Liberals are really smug.  Their views of the world emerge from privilege (a fact that many of them cannot help).  Liberals fall into a pharisaical judgmentalism every ounce as harsh and counterproductive as that on the right. And then when someone dissents from liberal orthodoxy -- however anyone wants to define it at the time -- they are shouted down as "racist," "sexist," "violent," and "evil."  I have confronted such venom personally in the classroom up on Chicago's north shore.  The guilt produced by such confrontations can be crushing:  am I supposed to be ashamed for being a male?  for being white? for being born into a Christian home?  for being straight? for being a simple midwestern boy?  I can't help it!  Of course I can strive to learn and stay open minded and listen to varying perspectives, but what if I one day have a perspective that is not in conformity with one particular tyrannical liberal's personal orthodoxy?  When we all go around with a chip on our shoulder saying "I have the right to not get offended by you and I have the right to shut you up if you do offend me," then dialog and free speech disappear.  This is how totalitarian regimes are born.  (I write this right around the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; we would do well to examine that chapter of the 20th century very seriously to see what exactly went wrong).  Two of my newest friends, a Christian man from India and a Muslim man from Turkey, both tell me the same things:  "Stop feeling guilty for being white!  You white people can't help it and the guilt of it is driving you all insane!"  I often suspect they might actually just possibly be right.

I type this on my MacBook (likely the product of South-East Asian slave labor) in a McDonald's (oh how my orthodox liberal friends would hate me for eating here, but it is all I can afford) with some old farmers sitting in a corner shooting the breeze and sipping coffee.  We are, all of us, helplessly enmeshed in structural evils.  We sin in thought, word, and deed all of the time.  Yet these good farm folk are talking about the World Series, problems with their boats and with diesel motors, how the workers at this McDonald's are related to each other, and so on.  It sounds like they've probably been coming to this place at 9am on Sunday mornings for years.

So do I judge them?  Do I look down on these good, sincere, salt-of-the-earth people?  Do I hate them because they don't have any black or gay friends?  Do I snidely judge them for using a word like "retarded" in their private conversation?  Now I certainly would not use such a word, but are these hard-working, uneducated old white men bad people because they don't use all the proper nomenclature?  They probably have no knowledge of the non-binary, gender-neutral pronouns "zim" or "zey."  Are they evil for that reason?  I think not.

It seems to me to be very important to look at people's intentions.  This was key to the ethical thinking of John Wesley.  Whereas man looks at the outside, God looks at the heart.  Whereas we often look at the actions of "the Other" and attribute it to their own malicious and evil nature, it might often be far more accurate to attribute their words or actions to ignorance.  Yes, it might at times be a willful ignorance, but we do not know when it is willful or not.  Only God knows such things which is why only God is granted the right to judge and redeem.

I know this blog entry covers lots of territory.  I tend to write in a stream of consciousness mode these days.  But I suppose here is my primary admonition today:  Can we all just try to stop screaming for a few seconds and try to listen?  Can we "shut the hell up" for a minute as a veteran in AA recently said to a first-timer in the program?  That takes deep humility to respond with a "yes" to such a question!  Can we actually swallow our damn pride for long enough to gain "ears to hear"?  It seems to me like our collective salvation might be at stake.

Psalm

I believe in what I can’t change
in a hard lesson learned
and the strength from my pain
and I believe
in what I can’t prove
in the joy of not knowing
and the misunderstood

let go of my past
let go of my future
one cloud at a time
yes I’m dreaming

- JJ Grey

Sometimes when our own soul cannot sing, another soul sings for us.

Thoughts from the Woods

I cannot even understand a single tree.  I cannot count the leaves. I cannot count the triangles of light as the sun dances through the leaves and is blown by the wind.  I could never count that fast nor could I even comprehend the number once it was spoken. It is very difficult for my petty mind to comprehend the number 100, let alone the number of atoms within a tree or my hand. So how the hell am I supposed to be able to know anything about God?!? The distance between myself and God is certainly smaller than the distance between myself and a tree or a deer or an Other Human Being (which is its own universe entirely).  We are knit together as individuals but we do not build or think or destroy as individuals solely but also as communities.  This is how humans are and it is mysterious.  We think together.  We cannot think alone; those who do are (rightly? wrongly?) called “insane.” We take on the form of the environment around us; we are lemmings.  

Yet is it just the blind leading the blind? I don’t think so.  We have leaders or a Leader, an enlightened one who points the Way to the rest of us. “Follow me,” he insists “because I’ll show you how we get to the kingdom of God where shalom reigns.”  It isn’t the way of the world which worships other gods like money, sex, power, pleasure, etc. It is the Path of God and the Way is narrow.  Few walk it because doing so hurts; it hurts terribly. But as you walk it, just remember: 

Trust. 

Believe.
Repent.

Persevere. 

Overcome evil with good. 

Yield. 

Surrender. 

Hold on, let go. 

Accept.

Do not fear.
Love.
Hope.
Trust!

These principles are a light for us.

McDonald’s in Greenville

I’m up before dawn this morning, driven by either God or anxiety (or both) to prayer. Coming to this little McDonald’s in Greenville brings back so many memories, quite a few of which are now painful.  But I’m thinking about how many good people, including my grandfather, have sat in these chairs, sipped coffee, shared life, and prayed.  I’m thankful to pray today on such “holy ground.”

Psalm 6
LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath.
Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint;
heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony.
My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, LORD, how long?

Turn, LORD, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love.
Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
Who praises you from the grave?
I am worn out from my groaning.
All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.
My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes.

Away from me, all you who do evil, for the LORD has heard my weeping.
The LORD has heard my cry for mercy;
the LORD accepts my prayer.
All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish;
they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame.

Goddess of Wal-Mart

Dear Ma’am,

You don’t know me. I’m just the guy who helped you switch out the Diet RC Cola you accidentally dropped  at Wal-Mart today at 3:54 pm on October 18, 2017.  I confess I was following you, but not in a weird way.  I was praying for you and thinking about what your life must have been like.  I can’t even imagine it.  It’s like you are a whole universe unto yourself.  You look about eighty years old so let’s say you were born in 1937.  Then there’s the fact you are black.  What in God’s name must that have been like to grow up black and female in 20th century America?!?  I'm imagining you may have been a little girl during WWII. Your daddy may have been drafted into the war but assigned to a “colored division.”  I mean he could’ve been a hero like one of those Tuskegee Airmen! And you may have had to watch your father fight for this country only then to discriminate against him in horrific ways upon his return.  God, that would have turned me into such a bitter person, yet you aren’t! You are kind; I can tell from our brief interaction.  I can see it in your eyes. I would have hated this country though. How is it that you don’t?  There are some other things I can’t even imagine that may have happened to you. Of course, I don’t know because you are a total mystery to me, but if you grew up here in Illinois and came of age here in the '60s or '70s, you must’ve faced monumental mental challenges as a black female -- challenges I could never dream of.  Being mistreated at restaurants, being denied service at a small gas station, having uppity university students assume you’re poor trash because you shop at Wal-Mart and buy Diet RC Cola. People like me.  People who automatically assume because we are “white liberals” that only poor trash shops at Wal-Mart.  We have no damn clue.  We are so snide and judgmental of so many people unlike us.  We can’t help it: we are human and therefore petty, fearful, and distant from the Other.  But you are not distant from it.  How is that? May I sit at your feet and learn from you, ma’am?

Then there is your female-ness.  God, I cannot even understand that!  You likely, it seems to me right now in light of my Facebook feed, were attacked or abused at some point. How the hell does anyone recover EVER from such a thing?!  Is that why you are alone? Or did you have a loving husband who just died recently? I don’t know.  Either way, you are kind. In fact, you’re a goddess, an angel walking among us in disguise.  Most of us just pass you by.  

Almighty God, thank you for this angel walking alone in the aisles of Wal-Mart. The beauty, humility, and grace within her might save us all if You would only give us eyes to see.  

Amen.

Free Grace and Toxic Masculinity

Back in late June during some extremely difficult days in my life a theologian friend and professor at my current seminary wrote me a lengthy email covering many important topics.  I’ve read it and reread it several times because I found great wisdom in her words.  Two things she wrote to me have especially stayed with me and I’d like to pass her words to me along here:

1) “According to the Markan version of the crucifixion, Jesus died hearing only the ‘silence’ of God’s apparent abandonment. But God did not abandon him, and lifted him up in the resurrection. God can and will do the same for you, as a gift of grace (not as a result of your efforts).” 

2) “...take a good hard look at what elements of your faith and theology have served to cover up or even promote toxic masculinity. This is not to earn God’s grace and love, but as an important part of ‘finding yourself’ in God’s image with the help of the Spirit.”

In some very real ways these words have become something of a divine gift in my life.  Like all good preaching, her words to me bring both comfort and affliction.  They are both hope-giving and fear-inducing. Now it would be very easy for me to “listen” only to the first of those two points because, after all, free grace is very comforting.  However, to just cherry pick what I like hearing would be a sacrilege; it is what the stiff-necked and stubborn and unyielding people of God do all the time and always have. So I need to lean into the pain of embracing her second point.  Otherwise, the first point just becomes Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace.”

Tonight as I scrolled through Facebook I saw many women that I know and love writing “me too” as a way of indicating that they were once sexually abused in one way or another.  It was truly painful to bear witness to their testimonies and I could feel the hot anger rising in my heart against the men who had done these things.  But then... then I turned my firey righteous indignation inward to examine the monster that lives within me too.

I have never sexually assaulted a woman, and I thank God for preserving me from such evil for it certainly lurks within.  There is almost no end to the darkness inside a human heart, mine included.  I have, however, been guilty of verbal abuse. In my lost and dark moments while caught in addiction, I verbally lashed out against the woman I loved the most. It was wrong and evil and I knew it. She divorced me for its and was right in doing so.  And so I cry out with Paul, “What a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of death?”

Sometimes I think we need to learn to dwell in Romans 7 before easily moving on to the “good news” of chapter eight.  We need to stare at who we are as humans and use both our brains and our hearts to admit we are profoundly fallen creatures. I have toxic masculinity within me.  It is still there and I have not been sanctified from it.  

I’m part of the problem. I say this to my great shame.  I am the Roman guard nailing Christ to the cross. And as Miroslav Volf taught me years ago, the scandal of the Christian message is that Christ died for the Roman oppressors too.  Now that is offensive!  I want the oppressors to burn in hell, but then I remember who I’d be condemning. Thankfully our Mother God is more gracious than I am. She is, I often suspect, more gracious than any of us can even imagine.

Paying Attention to Dreams

For years I was very dismissive of the meaning of dreams.  They seemed so chaotic and random to me that, I argued, any attempt to interpret them was surely just an act of the worst eisegesis.  Yet friends, family, and intellectual influences from all walks of life have cautioned me against such casual dismissal.  The primary person speaking this truth to me was my ex-wife Courtney.  She loved talking about dreams and trying to think together about what they could mean.  Sadly, I was often far too arrogant and dismissive to take her speculations seriously, but now others in my life keep telling me to pay attention to my dreams and I'm starting to suspect they might be right.  Friends like my former professor at Greenville Rick McPeak, my little sister Rachel, the psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson that I have been listening to recently, my mother, and even the old-time Methodists that I study for my doctoral work:  they are all saying, "Take these things seriously!  We don't know where they come from!  In fact, they might even come somehow from 'God.'" Not all these influences would state it quite that way, but the message is the same: reflect on dreams.  So that's what I intend to do in this post.

I had a nightmare three nights ago that hasn't left me and it still haunts me.  Those who know a little about my life this year will perhaps not at all be surprised by the nature of the dream.  It was actually very simple and very short, but also quite compelling and realistic.  I was trying to bridge a deep, endless black abyss between myself and my ex-wife, Courtney.  I wanted so desperately to reach her, but I had no way of crossing the divide.  I tried to start building a bridge to get to her, but I didn't have the skills to make a bridge out of sticks and trees and rocks.  Yet I did the best that I could do.  After I had built the bridge out over the canyon/abyss by about ten feet (which was still a small fraction of how far I had to go), it all collapsed while I was on it.  As I tumbled into the abyss which seemed to be endless, I simply yelled up, "I'm sorry, Courtney.  I tried and I failed."  I woke up horrified by the feeling of endless descent into nothingness.

So what does this dream mean?  On one level it seems rather obvious, right?  My unconscious mind is trying to somehow cope with the tragedy of my divorce.  Now in the dream I seem to be more of a "victim of circumstance" than I actually believe is true because, when I am honest, I realize that frequently within my marriage, I was the lazy one who did nothing and, especially near the end, Courtney was the one trying to build a bridge to me.  Perhaps most accurately I could say that we both made efforts and both of us did rather pitiful jobs at it too, yet our efforts were sincere.

But is the dream also about more than just my marriage?  Could this also be a dream about my deep anxieties regarding death?  After all "the abyss" is the other major character in this little narrative.  The endless blackness and the fear that it evokes within me has been a constant companion my entire life. Into the abyss I have always yelled, "Are you down there God or is it just death all the way down?  Can I trust myself to fall into your hands or am I just imagining you are down there for my own comfort and peace of mind?"  I can hear Freud's voice making me feel shame for my pitiful and weak desire to believe in a God (likely because I have unresolved parental issues).  I can hear Marx calling religion the opiate of the masses.  I can hear Ayn Rand saying that life is chaotic and you simply have to will yourself to power.  Nietzsche seems to sing a similar tune sometimes.  And then the Buddhists seem to keep insisting, "Don't worry; it's all in your mind anyway," which is a message I sometimes find to be good news and other times find horrifying. And, all the while, Ivan Karamazov keeps persistently reminding me of the almost infinite capacity that humans have for evil.  Thank God for Alyosha... and for Dorothy Day and Jane Addams and John Woolman and Dr. King and B. T. Roberts and my maternal grandfather.  Without people like that, I would be lost in the abyss for good.

Sometimes I also wonder if perhaps I am the abyss or that the abyss is within me.  Am I confronting my own sinful, evil nature when looking into the blackness?  I remember going camping by myself once in Kentucky and a mighty thunderstorm came up (I later learned a tornado had touched down nearby).  The fury of the wind and lightning and rain petrified me.  When lightning hit a nearby tree, I wanted to pack up my tent and run away to safety, though something in that moment whispered to me, "Stay.  Face the fear."  I realized why Martin Luther was converted in a thunderstorm; everything within me wanted to cry out to my own St. Anne.  So I did stay the night, but pitifully and within the safety of my dad's old '92 Honda Accord.

I know on an intellectual level that I am in a very dark and difficult chapter of life.  I can conjecture what people must be saying about me.  I am cognitively aware that my friends and former friends must be saying, "Poor Greg!  Look at his life!  I cannot image losing what he has lost."  But then a part of me -- at least during my strongest moments -- just doesn't give a damn any longer what people think about me.  Am I a lost cause?  Maybe.  I don't know.  Am I part of a story that is a comedy or a tragedy?  Only time will tell.  Am I Cain or Abel?  Am I a good son who offers an honorable sacrifice before God and then gets killed for it?  Or am I the evil brother who envies how the Other's sacrifice is honored by God and who then turns into darkness and evil and becomes consumed by the Shakespearean green-eyed monster?  These are all questions that are as mysterious to me as the abyss in my dream.  I fear them, yet I cannot seem to be able to avert my eyes.

In any case, I know this: I lament the ending of my marriage and I would not wish this experience on my worst enemy (by the way, I don't think I have a worst enemy unless I maybe count myself). In the meantime, I will try to keep sacrificing and surrendering more deeply to the One who is in control and has the answers. I will myself to believe in that One.

Seventeen Octobers: A Lament

Seventeen Octobers ago I had just asked her to be my girlfriend in the lobby of Burritt Hall at Greenville College.  We were falling head over heels for each other.

Sixteen Octobers ago my girlfriend was my world and I was hers.  We were just kids.

Fifteen Octobers ago we were newlyweds living in our first apartment on Locust Street.  We were both in college and held down several part-time jobs.

Fourteen Octobers ago we lived by Bond Lake while she finished up college and I made money as an Individual Care Aide for a first grade boy who suffered from severe cerebral palsy.

Thirteen Octobers ago we were living in Tianjin, China together on our first great adventure.  We hosted a Halloween party for some of our favorite students and taught them about apple bobbing, costumes, and trick or treating.

Twelve Octobers ago we shared the world's smallest and cheapest apartment ($290/month rent) by a train track in Wilmore, KY.  The housing was built of cinder blocks and I liked the fact I could vacuum our entire apartment without unplugging the vacuum cleaner. They were happy days.

Eleven Octobers ago she had just given birth to our first child and we struggled together to become good parents to our precious colicky baby.

Ten Octobers ago we were wrestling every day with questions about our future as I worked to complete my final year of seminary.

Nine Octobers ago I was just a few months into my first pastorate at Indianapolis First Free Methodist Church, she was about to give birth to our second daughter, and I was sinking into my deepest encounter with real despair/depression in my twenty-seven years of life.

Eight Octobers ago our little family of four raked up the leaves on the church parking lot and jumped in them together.  I remember the spot.

Seven Octobers ago I knew that I had developed an addiction to Tramadol, unable to cope with the stresses of urban ministry, fatherhood, depression, etc.  Our family went on a cheap vacation to a campground outside of Clay City, IN and, to the sheer delight of our girls, we adopted a stray cat we named Colt.

Six Octobers ago I knew my days as a pastor were numbered and that my life was unsustainable, yet I desperately wanted a way to support my family so I applied to return to school.

Five Octobers ago my family was living in Durham, NC where I was attending Duke Divinity School.  It was a year of partial healing, but of inward desperation and confusion over our retreat from Indy.

Four Octobers ago we had moved to Evanston, started attending church together at Reba Place, and my faith was almost non-existent.  She began dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder and, to my great shame, I largely failed to support her through it.

Three Octobers ago I was buried in coursework while she kept working to put me through school.  The pressure and shame over my inability to provide for my family was more than I could bear.

Two Octobers ago I passed my Latin exam for my Ph. D program, but I was running out of steam and started retreating too often into video games.  The sense of failure in life was crushing.

Last October we all just worried about who our nation's next president might be. I clung to a stubborn belief that my marriage and family were going to be just fine in the long run, but I could not have been more wrong.

This October I am divorced and alone.  I pray Psalm 6 often.

Theological Reflections on Cannabis (Part 1)

I have debated with myself for a long time about whether or not I should start blogging or talking publicly about my recent use of cannabis.  In some ways speaking out about this subject poses certain risks, especially as one rooted in Christianity and an institutional church structure that has always been very distrustful of hallucinogenics.  (Aside: However, as a former professor friend recently reminded me, "Even the Eucharist is half composed of mind altering substances," referring obviously to the alcohol in wine.  And according to Dr. Jordan Peterson, even food (i.e. bread) changes our level of consciousness in ways we often ignore.  What was the Eucharist originally but feasting and drinking with friends?!?)

Back to pot though.  My own relationship with it is itself an interesting case study that I submit to the open examination of anyone who cares to read about my experience.

As a good evangelical Christian and Free Methodist, I avoided drugs and alcohol throughout high school and college.  I was as clean and straight-laced as one could be on the issue.  In fact, I remember a moment in high school when a girl handed me a flyer for a party at her house. No sooner was it in my hand than her friend snatched it back and scolded her friend, "Don't give one of these to Greg.  He would never come to a party like this."  So that was me in high school: square, stuck up, judgmental (I was a bible quizzer for God's sake!), and certainly not the kind of guy one would invite to a house party.

My first experience with pot came YEARS later while I was living in Durham, NC and attending Duke Divinity School in 2013.  I had just turned 32 years old and -- wow! -- had my life changed!  Skipping all the details about how I got married at age 21, lived in China for a year, attended seminary in Kentucky, pastored in urban Indianapolis for four years (during which time I really, truly lost my faith), and then returned to academia after admitting defeat in my attempts to serve as a spiritual guide for hurting people... skipping all of that, I found myself one morning with a pot brownie in my hand that I had ordered off of a shady website.  I had no knowledge at all of marijuana other than what I'd seen depicted in films.  No friend had ever introduced me to it or "coached" me through my first "high."

So one day when I was terribly depressed I took a huge bite out of the pot brownie and waited.  Nearly an hour later (just when I thought that nothing was going to happen), I collapsed on the couch for what would turn out to be a long, lonely, and horrifying first trip into the world of hallucinogenics.  I was deeply overwhelmed with a profound fear -- almost a "fear of God," I would say -- and I found myself repeatedly praying what I could recall of The Lord's Prayer.  I spent nearly the entire day in sincere prayer, asking God to forgive me for toying with something I didn't understand.  "Lord, forgive me" became a kind of mantra for me and I swore I'd never play around with pot ever again.

Fast forwarding to 2016 and I'm in another deep, dark depression.  My long-time battle with opiates seemed to be losing, I still felt a deep and abiding failure over the abrupt ending to my pastoral tenure, my marriage seemed to be increasingly strained and unhappy, I was experiencing deep discontentment with my research and academic life, I played way too many video games, and my life generally felt quite devoid of hope.  Without realizing it, I was a nihilist and was living within a hell of my own creation.  I held other people at arm's length, not quite even knowing why I was doing it.  Of course, ultimately, this "self curved in upon the self" led to my wife making the (courageous? foolhardy?) decision to insist on a separation in February of this year.  As my life unravelled before my eyes, my marriage and church and home and career seemed to be all slipping from my grasp and the tighter I tried to cling to it, the faster it escaped from me.  Though I had dabbled in pot a couple of times -- once with a friend around a bonfire in the summer of 2016 -- I didn't really try to get "stoned" because I was too scared of the stuff.  I feared the paranoia that had overwhelmed me back in Durham.

Then came a night of severe, deep despair in early April.  Courtney and I had been separated for six or seven weeks, we'd had a horrible counseling session that revealed to me how deeply she wanted to divorce me, and I was crashing at a friend's apartment (as I had been off and on for weeks).  I bought some pot from a friend of a friend and decided that, because I had nothing left to lose and because I no longer cared whether or not I lived or died, I would say a prayer to God and get very, very stoned.

Now that juxtaposition struck me even then.  The idea that I would pray and cry out to "God" that he would "bless" my use of marijuana -- this was an insane idea for a born-and-raised midwestern good evangelical such as myself.  But I was in "screw it" mode and, since I didn't really believe in God anyway, I figured, "What the hell?"

What happened next changed (and saved) my life.  I deliberately smoked a LOT of weed, and did so with a very low tolerance, knowing full well that I might be asking for trouble.  Yet my desperation for God or comfort or for ANY DAMN THING other than what I was experiencing in my "real" life led me to seek getting really stoned.  And that's precisely what happened.  Yet I did not -- and still do not -- really have the language to describe the experience.  Words fail sometimes to really capture reality.  Yet I will try to describe the "trip" that night:

I went and lay down on the bed my friend had provided for me and almost immediately felt the fear and paranoia rush in.  I could feel my body and mind beginning to enter into a full-blown panic.  It was all I could do not to call 911 and ask them to rush me to the hospital.  Yet I was able to push through to my left-brained reasoning mind and to remind myself, "OK.  Don't worry.  No one dies from this.  You've read the news stories and you know that people do not die from marijuana overdose.  So try to relax."  But as soon as this comforting thought entered my mind, it would be snatched away from my memory.

Many people experience this when stoned: a loss of short term memory function.  So what ensued felt like a sort of spiritual or mental warfare between different parts of my mind.  One side was saying, "Be afraid.  Be horrified.  You are in hell." But then the other side of my mind (or what it an angel?) would say, "DO NOT BE AFRAID.  You are safe.  Have no worries."  This battle raged for... I have no idea.  I had lost all sense of time's passage or importance.  All moments were NOW and I had to decide which voice in my head to feed.  So I opted, of course, to believe the voice in my mind that kept saying, "Do not fear.  Trust.  Believe.  You are safe."  (Can you already hear how this was a spiritual experience even though I certainly didn't intend for it to be so!?) And so in order to hold within my mind the truth that I would survive the night, I began to repeat to myself over and over and over like a mantra the words that the angel had spoken to me, "You're safe."  But as time passed my mantra took on a double meaning:  not only did it mean "You're safe.  You don't need to call an ambulance or go to a hospital;" it started to mean instead "You're safe. Your life is within the hands of an all-powerful and all-good God.  You should not worry or be afraid about anything in life because you are in God's hands whether you want to be or not."  By this point, I obviously could not interpret my experience as anything but fundamentally spiritual. I believed and still believe today that I was having a kind of "prayer moment" or "communion" with the divine that I simply cannot explain.  Of course some will make a joke of it and say, "Dang, Greg was trippin'!" or some foolishness like that, but I will insist that my experience was fundamentally spiritual and healing in its nature... and that it was real to me.  That night I proceeded to watch some meditative and prayerful videos send to me by my little sister.  (I still regularly meditate to the videos produced by these guys.)  The next several hours were pure peace and rest and bliss; I was experiencing a deep healing and in a way that I would have least expected it.  Could it be that at this lowest of my low moments, God had met me through this strange plant?  I still don't know what to make of it, but I believe it is what happened.

The experience I had that night got me through the days and weeks to come:  rehab, detox from opiates (and I haven't relapsed!), being served divorce papers by a sheriff while sick in rehab, losing my daughters in a nasty legal battle, and the almost complete "death" of my former life.  As rehab in May turned into a June and July and August lived at my parents' home, the despair continued creeping in.  What I had lost was staggering to my mind and I often did not wish to continue living.  Not only had I lost my wife and kids and church, but I also lost my faith (again) to despair.  I began to doubt the validity of the "weed" experience in April as the memory of it began to fade (isn't this one of our fundamental problems as humans: we always keep forgetting).  That's when in mid-August I decided to turn once again to marijuana for help, especially since I seemed to have very little left to lose...

To be continued. 

Sunday Mornings

My Sanctuary

I had the very odd experience this morning of walking around my parents' neighborhood and bumping into "the damned."  You see, it's a Sunday morning and all of the "saved" are at church because this is considered to be a sacred time of the week among the faithful.  Now lest it sounds like I'm picking on the church, I want to be clear: we all need sacred spaces and sacred times.  It is part of what makes us human.  Without that which is "set apart," we collapse in upon ourselves.  This was Augustine's definition of sin, by the way:  the self curved in upon the self.  It's also the way that C. S. Lewis describes hell in The Great Divorce or Sir Edwin Abbott in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.  But I digress...

But here's the odd thing about this morning's experience.  As I realized that I was "among the damned" on this Sunday morning, I had a memory come back to me of when I preached behind a pulpit in Indianapolis (in what now seems like another life) and declared with boldness: "The church does not have a monopoly on God!  We think that because we are here within these 'sacred' walls, we are the 'saved' and they are the 'damned,' but that is not so!  The church itself is a mixture of good and evil, just as the rest of the world is, just as our own individual selves are."  I suspect that I remembered it so well this morning (isn't memory such an odd thing?!?) because I really believed it when I proclaimed it from the pulpit.  I still believe it, yet I oddly perceive the truth of it a bit better now.