ROBERT : I have been away some . . . .

I have been away some, but I have been listening even so, to you and to others. I was away on the road for a bit, and then away because I have not been as well as I would like. Then away for a rest in the sun.
So I was away when your note came, the one you sent to me at the beginning of this Advent that is upon us. It was the note that reminded me that it was time once again to begin our annual wait for the coming of the Messiah. I was away when the note came, but I heard you.
I began to hear something else as well, in the listening, in the time away. So I wrote it down.

We wait in the dark and the silence of this season

We wait because

it is what those who came before us taught us to do
It is what those who stand beside us do
and we do not want to be left alone or left out

We wait because were taught this Story

by those who loved us well
Our love for them requires that we wait alongside them

even those we love yet no longer see
And we wait because of those who are now given to us to love
The love we were given and are now to give

calls us to keep this vigil

We wait because we believe the Promise will be kept again
That is the part of us that is the most childlike and the most real
We wait in the hope that the Love that we seek may yet be found

We wait because sometimes waiting is all one can do
in the midst of the noise and the clamor of our lives
In the silence and the darkness that is bound to come to us all
even if it is unbidden or unnamed or unacknowledged

God is with us as we watch

for the One Who is to come among us

God is with us in the silence

as we listen for the Hosannas to ring out
God is with us in the dark

while we hope for the Light of the world
God is with us always in our waiting

So we wait in the dark and the silence of this season
The wait will be over soon

ROBERT : This running conversation . . . .

This running conversation has been going through my head lately. ( Relax, I told my doctor about it. )

I have some friends in my neighborhood who do not have any health insurance. I have a lot of friends who do not have health insurance. They are educated people with jobs, people who work very hard and live very frugally, people who pay their tithes and pay their taxes, pay their rent and pay their mortgage, people who are active in their churches and spend more than their fair share of time and resources with and for the poor.

They just cannot afford to get sick or to go to the doctor to keep from getting sick. Neither can their children. They are an accident or illness away from losing everything.

So in my head I have been listening to and talking with various and sundry of my friends up and down the pew about the predicament my friends are in, about how we the people, especially the portion of we the people that claim to be the Body of Christ, might bring some of our collective resources to bear on such circumstances.

Some of my friends on the pew say that they do not want the government to help provide health care for these people because it seems socialist, and socialist is code for communist and communist is code for godless, and helping folks with their health care is a slippery slope we do not want to go down. They seem to suggest the word socialist only applies to the notion of a public option for health care these days. They are reasonably certain that the word does not apply to their Medicare benefits or their veterans' benefits or the health care provided for government employees. It does not seem to apply to schools, road construction, or Pell Grants, for that matter.

Some other of my friends along the pew say that they do no want any of their tax dollars to help pay for health care for people who currently have no health care, no matter how the circumstance came about. They do not know who pays when such folks have to go to the emergency room or stay in a public hospital for an extended period. They seem to think it is some other poor soul whose insurance premiums are increasing and whose taxes are eaten up when such things happen.

Some other friends say we the people cannot afford to do such a thing, the deficits will be too high and our children will have to pay. They do believe in deficits for wars, deficits for road construction, deficits for bank bailouts, aid to Israel but not Africa, and deficits for college tuition assistance, as well as for some other stuff.

In my running conversation I have been going back to my insurance-less friends and telling them it will all be okay.

I tell them that all these people up and down the pew are listening to the same Gospel we are — the one where the second commandment is to love your neighbor, like you love your own soul. The Gospel they may even hear some day, and then do something about.

I also remind them to be careful crossing the street, to wash their hands often, and whatever they do, do not go for a checkup.

BEN : Gratitude is something . . . .

Gratitude is something I am only beginning to learn. When I was young, I was told so often that my life was my own that I believed what they told me and told myself the same thing. “Everything is within your power. Success is in your hands. Failure is your responsibility.” Such a mantra left little room for grace.

I, too, have reflected on the words we have shared when we are together, the words we have pounded out on this blog, the words we have sent to each other on those portable computers we carry in our pockets. I am still thrilled that anyone might be encouraged or, even better, find themselves in the words we have shared. It reminds me that this is not so much a skill we are mastering as it is a gift we are receiving, this ability to occasionally transcend time and space and connect with each other in the midst of our humanity.

I began to learn to be grateful when things began to happen in my life that were so fragile that if it had been up to me, I'm sure I would have messed it up. Things like the birth of our baby boy (now 3 years-old), the gift of marriage to the possible reincarnation of Mother Teresa (if you lived with me you'd understand why she must be one of God's special saints), the discovery of an ability to write words and sentences and paragraphs that people want to read, and the moments here and there when people tell me that something I have done or said or written has inspired them in some way.

Looking back from the lofty perspective of the ripe old age of 29, I can already see the “slender threads” Robert A. Johnson talked about. Even when I was convinced that my destiny or fate or future — whatever your word — was completely in my own hands, the One Who called me into existence was actually shaping me for something else, something so strikingly ordinary I might have overlooked it were it not for a few people, a few special ones who taught me that it is in the ordinary in this world that one most often finds the Holy.

And there is no other appropriate response in the presence of such Holy things than gratitude. Everything I am and everything I am becoming is a gift from above. My calling is to keep saying “yes.”

Since we seem to be ending with prayers lately, here is one from Thomas Merton. It is becoming my own prayer these days.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always. Amen.

ROBERT : I am always nervous . . . .

I am always nervous when the conversation turns to evangelism in some way. Perhaps I am unnerved by my sense of not being worthy enough to have even heard the Good News much less be responsible for telling someone else about it. Perhaps it is just shyness, I do not know for certain.

Three moments from my back pages always come to mind.

One is the memory I have of being fifteen and standing on a street corner in some wild and unevangelized city like Memphis or Louisville with my hands full of Four Spiritual Laws booklets. They were given to me and my fellow members of our youth group in Nashville to hand out to folks in such pagan cities in order to save the city and its residents from eternal damnation. Why we were not so concerned about our own city, I do not know. Perhaps the kids from Louisville had gone to Nashville to cover our backs. I am not sure I did much good.

The second moment has to do with the title of a book I edited back in the nineties, a title that has always stuck with me — A Life That Becomes the Gospel. Which sounds to me like a pretty fair witness to having heard the Gospel, the sort of witness I would like to make some day. I was struck by the double entendre for the word becomes in the title and still am. Does it mean to reflect well on the Gospel or to turn into the Gospel? I thought then and still think now that it means both. And I think I am being called to live that out in some way that affects others, maybe even draws them nearer to the kingdom.

The third is the simplest and most powerful expression of the Good News I ever heard. My friend Russell once said to me that he thought three things were true. The first is that God is love. The second is that that Love got loose here on earth somehow in the person of Jesus Christ. The third is that if you believe the first two, then everything about your life is different — the way you talk, the way you act, the way you work and think and love.

I believe that somewhere in between and around and through and up under and next to ‘becoming the Gospel’ and ‘everything about your life is different’ is the kind of bearing witness and preaching of the Gospel to which we are called.

ROBERT : Come Sunday . . . .

Come Sunday, another sort of building block is upon us, this last day of May in the year of our Lord 2009. It is Whitsunday — The Sunday of Pentecost.
      “I will send you power from above,” said the One Who came to those to whom He first came and to us, and in a couple of days we will mark the day when the Spirit came to them and to us, all of us huddled up with each other with fear and trembling in a room upstairs somewhere, anywhere, even here maybe.

We have observed our Lenten fast as winter moved toward spring. It was the season of confession and repentance, the season when we had our forehead marked with ashes. And as a sign of our humility in the face of the sacrifice He was about to make for us, we gave up saying our Alleluias in our worship. We did so even as we denied Him and clamored for Barabbas. 
      We have kept our Easter vigil and been attendant on the coming of a fair portion of all of the best things in the world that come together at Easter — the exuberance of spring and the greening of the earth, the gentle showers of April and the soft, warm days of May that herald the coming of summer. We proclaimed the triumph of the resurrection and the joy and the mystery and the wonder of the news of it. Hail thee, festival day, we sang as the choir processed through the cathedral aisles, and we got our Alleluias back.
      Easter does not last long but it is better than the mere twelve days we were given to celebrate Christmas if you ask me. Even so the fifty days of Easter seem hardly enough time to take in the Paschal mystery.
      But ready or not, Pentecost comes this Sunday. The name simply means fiftieth, as in the fiftieth day. The day was originally a harvest festival that took place on the fiftieth day after Passover. The notion of “harvest” seems right somehow for the season after Easter. It is a day of great celebration, the celebration of the giving of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, and then to us. And a portion of the harvest will be celebrated in some communities with baptism and confirmation.
      Come Sunday, in the Story that was first told in the pages of the Book and now is told to us by the Church calendar as well, the Spirit is about to be given to us, again. Which begs new versions of the same old question — What is the Holy Spirit up to these days, in our days, yours and mine, these days given to us in our generation? And how are we being called to we help with that work? To what are we being drawn by the Spirit — Lord, have mercy, to what is Robert being drawn by the Spirit — in this next season of the journey home? What new thing is the One Who made us trying to do in us and with us and through us on the other side of Pentecost?
      “Be attendant upon that come Sunday,” I say to myself, “be attendant upon that.”

At the very least, I am drawn to an old prayer for this new season — Grant that we may perceive the ways in which You are calling to us, and then grant us strength and courage to pursue those things and to accomplish them; in the name of the One Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
      For those of you keeping score at home that is the same Spirit whose arrival we celebrate come Sunday.
      “Thanks be to God,’ he said, with a proper fear and trembling. And with a proper hope and joy as well.

ROBERT : Whatever else you fear . . . .

Whatever else you fear on this rainy day here in what is quickly becoming the Seattle of the South, do not fear being the only one who is afraid of being insignificant or destitute. In fact, in my case, you can add in the fears of being irrelevant, unreadable, and unread, just to name a few. Not to mention my fear that the spring rains are never going to end. There are some other things I am afraid of as well but I shall not burden you with the entire list.
      The truth of the matter is that our fear — both rational and irrational, justified and unjustified — is a part of the humanity that was whispered into us when we were whispered into being in the first place. It is as much a part of who we are as is the courage to take our lives apart and examine them. It is as much a part of us as our desire to properly balance our lives around our prayer and work and community and rest, to use Benedict’s Rule as a model. It is a part of our struggle to speak with and hear from the One Who made us, to find and do good work, to love and serve those to whom we have been given, and to live a life of returning and rest, a life in which we may actually be saved from our fears after all.
      To paraphrase the One Who came among us, paraphrasing done with fear and trembling, I might add — ‘Be not afraid. In fact, do not even be afraid to be afraid.’ A life of faith is meant to be lived in the midst of questions and doubts and complexities and fears. We are called to be faithful not correct; to be who we are instead of who we are supposed to be; to be courageous rather than certain.

On his deathbed, Michaelangelo is reported to have said to his assistant who was attending to him, ‘Draw, Antonio, draw. Draw and do not waste time.’
      Make your Rule, do the work, and be not afraid. Remind yourself that one can hardly go wrong choosing between two goods anyway.

BEN : Fear is a powerful thing . . . .

Fear is a powerful thing. 

      I don’t remember when I first time I experienced fear. I’m just now seeing evidence of fear in my two year old, so I must have been very young when I was afraid for the first time. It was long enough ago that what I’m afraid of has become deeply embedded in who I am, yet fear is not part of the equation of who I want to become.
       Part of this business of making a Rule for our life is outlining our lives as they are today into four quadrants: work; prayer; rest; and community. The order of the catagories is of little concern while the four categories themselves are of paramount significance. Once you’ve divided the things you do in your life into the designated quadrant, you rate how faithful you are to each item as well as identify how important each item is. This helps reveal the contrast between what we are faithful at doing and what we believe to be important. The greater the contrast between the two, the more likely what we are doing is in conflict with what we are called to become.
       As I look at my Rule, the next couple of steps seem to paralyze me. I’m being asked to identify what I’m being drawn to and what do I need to eliminate in order to shape a practice for my life that cultivates who I am being called to be. To be completely honest, I’ve been parked here for weeks.
      The hard part is that nothing I’m doing is bad. Nonetheless, I have to let some things go. I wonder to myself why such a simple task seems so difficult. A friend once told me that discernment is never a choice between good or bad; that’s easy. Rather, discernment is always a choice between two goods.
      While I have sat at these steps for weeks, I have been paying particular attention to the fears that seem to be paralying my ability to continue to move forward. If I were to name them, they would be the fear of being insignificant and the fear of being destitute. Both of these fears are very powerful. I have never been able to name them before, but I’m beginning to understand that these fears are the reason I find it nearly impossible to justify taking anything off the list.
      What if I make the wrong decision? What if I choose the eliminate the one thing that will propel me into all that which I have been called to be? What if I make a decision and end up in a place that is unfamiliar or worse — unsatisfying?
      It seems irrational, which is probably true of most fear. Fear is grounded in perception and emotion; therefore, it must be irrational. The catch is that if I separate my emotions from my rational thinking, I separate myself and will surely leave out something important. A Rule is meant to bring our lives in balance not give us another reason to ignore ourselves so that we might then embody the expectations of others.
      I don’t remember the first time I experienced fear, but I know that fear is the silent barrier between the person I am today and who I am being called to become.

ROBERT : Ah, the American Dream . . . .

Ah, the American Dream.
      If you and I could find an abbot, out here in the world where we offer our prayers and oblations at an altar in the midst of the ordinary — nice phrase, by the way, you may live to see it in a book some day; whose book is the question — if we could find an abbot, he would not likely be too terribly concerned with helping us in our pursuit of the American Dream. More likely he would be trying to help us let go of the American Dream so that we might more faithfully seek and attend to the life envisioned for us by the One Who dreamed us into being in the first place.
     That holy dream, the most astonishing of all dreams, is a very different sort of dream than the American one, I suspect. It likely includes more sacrifice than success, more piety than productivity, more compassion than commerce, more being than doing.
      I also think that if we found an abbot, we would be applauded for seeking altars amidst the ordinary in the first place. Such a desire is a sign that we are trying to live one life instead of two, to live a life that is not divided between our spiritual life and our real life. ( There is a joke in there somewhere about two halves not making a holy, but I think I should pass. )
Finally I think an abbot would say to you or any of us to find a trustworthy friend or two, someone who will gently hold you accountable for the Rule that you make for yourself, and get on with it.
      A Rule is not about earning God’s approval, that sounds more like something the American dreamer might come up with.
      A Rule is about becoming the person God dreamed you into being to become. And you are the only one who will know if that is happening anyway.
      ‘Oh, begin,’ says John Wesley.
      ‘Oh, begin,’ says the abbot we cannot find. ‘And, sweet dreams, by the way.’

BEN : It was not so much . . .

It was not so much the falling asleep at the wheel and wrecking my car as it was that my young son was in the back seat at the time. We were both unharmed. And considering the encounter my vehicle had with the concrete running parallel to us, the car was relatively unharmed too. I’m grateful we are all OK.
      By the grace of God, my young son never woke up. To my knowledge he has no recollection of the event. I will never forget the sound of the tires popping and metal scraping that woke me from my inopportune slumber.
      I pulled the car, pulsating between two flat tires and two good tires, into the parking lot of an elementary school. I immediately called my wife who, upon arrival, ensured our child was safe and sound. She then looked at me in that quiet voice and said, “I hope it was worth it.”
      I recently took on an extra project at work. It is one of those projects that when they come, you say yes. They don’t come often, so I gladly embraced the opportunity when it presented itself. What she was referring to was the fact that I had been pushing myself beyond my limits the last two months.
      She had been warning me for weeks; I had simply dismissed her concerns.
      In my usual style, I invested more time and energy than I had to give. I was running on a deficit of sleep, only averaging about three hours a day. As my wife gently picked up our child and carried him over to her car to take him home to finish his afternoon nap in the safety of our home and his bed, it occurred to me that she had been right all along. No project or opportunity was worth this.
      When you talk about becoming all that the One Who whispered me into being wants me to become, I stumble and stutter. I seem to substitute what I do for who I am. It’s strange that as often as I was asked ‘who do I want to be?’ growing up, I never really answered the question. The question I answered was ‘what do I want to do?’
      These are two entirely different questions. One is temporal, pivoting on circumstance; the other is eternal, existing within and beyond time and space.
      In that moment, in that parking lot, I began to know that nothing I did, no title I earned, no project I completed really mattered. I am a husband, father, son, and brother. And to answer my wife’s question, no, it wasn’t worth it.
      So it is in the posture of Lent, with my hands open to let go and to receive, where I hope to find the power of the resurrection in another new beginning. Borrowing from the Benedictine tradition, I will write a Rule for my life, a guide that will help me stay focused on my being and prevent my doing from getting in the way.

ROBERT : There will always be . . .

There will always be some distance between the person we are trying to become and the person we actually are.
      Certainly Lent reveals that gap clearly, perhaps as you said, it even shows that distance more clearly than other seasons do. Though I confess to being able to see the distance between who I am trying to become and who I actually am pretty much the whole year around. It does not take Lent for me to see how poorly I measure up, I can see it on almost any feast or fast day. An Ember Day can remind that I am something less than holy. Thursdays often do the same to me as well.
      ‘Wherever we go there seems to be only one business at hand, writes Annie Dillard, ‘that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.’ She is so right that it makes me want to just lie down. Or fall on my knees. Or giggle at myself and all of us, the way that I suspect the One Who made us does sometimes.
      I have long believed that a fair portion of whatever I write — whether it is about prayer and the contemplative life, about spiritual practice and discipline, about this long pew that we call the Church, about trying to become the person I was dreamed into being to be by the One in Whose image we were all dreamed into being — whatever and whenever I write about those things, I am more often than not putting on paper the things to which I aspire rather than things I have already become. I write out of a sense of hope in the journey rather than out of a sense of arrival at a destination.

Here is what I am hoping just now :
      That as this Lenten journey ends in the next few days and hours, and we join the crowd that follows the One Who Came on his triumphant journey into the city, and we end this coming week in darkness and discouragement at the foot of the cross, having once again chosen the criminal over the Messiah, I hope that we find new life again in the garden two Sundays from now, in the morning light of Easter, and that we are able to go forth and live our lives in astonishment and joy as well as in aspiration and hope.
      Perhaps that is the way to cut down the distance between who we are trying to become and who we are.

ROBERT : Life is not a problem . . . .

'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.’ Thomas Merton wrote that. I wish I had.
      In fact, I just wish I had heard it when I was young and wrestling with what I might be if I ever grew up. I spent a lot of years living in the tension between what I wanted to do with my life and what I thought the One Who made me wanted me to do with my life.
      I assumed, like a lot of Church folks do, that what God really wanted was for me to do or be something that I did not want to do or be. And I figured that the trick was to correctly guess what that was so that God would be happy enough to bless my efforts at least, no matter how unhappy the whole thing made me.
      I knew that I wanted to be a writer when I was thirteen years old. I did not tell anyone though, because I thought God wanted me to be a publisher like my father and his father before him. And like everyone around just assumed that I wanted to be as well.
      The Church folks thought it was what I should be, my folks thought so, the grownups that I counted on for advice thought so too. In the absence of a burning bush or a brother who could make snake out of a rod, I just figured God thought that was the plan as well.
      So for most of my life, I made choices about my career under the assumption that God did not really want me to be what it was that I secretly wanted to be the whole time.

Here is the mystery part —
      For twenty years I spent my hours and days and energy and love trying to do work that I did not like a fair amount of the time.
      I thought I was being a good guy by doing God’s will even though I really wanted to do and be something else altogether. I thought I was at least going to earn a reward in heaven. God thought I was just being prepared to be what it was that I had been intended to be all along.
      That secret wish that no one else knew was not something that I made up on my own. It was whispered into me before I was even born, whispered into me by the One Who made me.
      I stumbled onto this wondrous little mystery while lying flat on my back in a room in a psychiatric hospital. I had gone there to recover from twenty years of depression that in many ways was deeply connected to the wrong assumptions that I made about what God’s dream for me might actually be.
      Living your mystery got you waylaid by a candle and some silence. I got three weeks in a psych ward.
      I would not complain too much if I were you.

BEN : This all started with a candle . . . .

This whole thing started with a candle and silence.
      For the first time in my young adult life, I was faced with myself and the world that exists in the midst of our busyness. Inside was this raging storm of restlessness that almost made me want to jump out of my skin.
      Yet I stayed seated. And quiet. And still. Long enough to feel the rush of my emotions. To hear my own voice scream within myself. And to recognize that I had no idea what I was doing.
      I left for college completely sure of myself. I had been raised in a tradition that believed greatly in God's ability to define someone's career path early in life. And I was told that I better listen closely because if I got it wrong, I would disappoint God.
      So I tried, with everything that was in me, to listen closely. I agonized over this. I prayed — as only I knew how to do at the time — to make this path clear. But in the end my effort seemed fruitless. I ended up doing most of the talking and never got around to listening. I told God what I wanted. And I had decided on a path that seemed reasonable to me.
      I was already learning the skills I would need for this chosen path. In not so many words I told God that I felt like after all this work and investigation on my part that he should at least bless my path.
      I just wanted to get this whole thing over with and decided. Though, I must admit that I was afraid mostly of getting it wrong. Again, my tradition left no room for error. God is perfect and he demands perfection. At least that's what I was told.
      While I was busy lobbying God for my newfound career path, I actually encountered God. No he didn't appear to me in human form. The clouds didn't part and a dove didn't fly down. In fact, the person next to me never knew what happened.
      But I did.
      And this encounter sent me searching for a way to integrate this experience into my story and my own faith tradition. So I tried to borrow words and images that were deeply rooted in my faith. But I never felt like any of them fit. Even though I couldn't express it to others in the same way that I had experienced it, it unleashed a series of events that changed everything.
      I'll have to save some stories for a more appropriate time. For now, all you need to know is that it led to a candle and silence. And me faced, for the first time, with myself. And I realized that I didn't know exactly who I was and the role I played within the Great Story.
      I was left feeling scared and alone.