I haven’t written much here on my blog lately. The teaching I do at Grace Baptist Church, and the courses I take at ACTS Seminary haven’t left a lot of free space in my head for writing. But I had to post this today. As many of you know I am a dual citizen, American and Canadian. That means that I can vote in the November US election. I mailed my ballot in today.
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“The Sonnet of the Death of the Man who Invented the Plastic Rose” was required reading in Dr. Bonnie Lundblad’s English Literature class my first year at Montreat-Anderson College. There was a lot of other required reading that semester I am sure, but this is the only one that I remember.
Something about the poem connected with me.
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One of the challenges of the spiritual life is that our natural tendencies often don’t seem to help us navigate the journey. This is often most visible in our typical patterns of thinking. We grow up in the world learning to think dualistically, leading us to categorize the things and situations around us as “either/or”. The car is either red or blue. The answer is either right or wrong. My friend is either tall or short. We embrace these categories because we know what “red” is and what “blue” is. We rest in the fact that something is either “wrong” or “right”. “Tall” and “short” are words that we can pin down and understand. This way of viewing the world serves us well, enabling us to navigate the complexities of life by providing a structure that helps us to feel grounded. The problem is that when we come to the spiritual life we don’t grasp the fullness of all the concepts.
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It’s a controversial phrase. One that we all know is true, yet there is so much tension around it. “Black Lives Matter.” I understand the problem. I felt it the first time I heard it said.
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It’s confusing to know where to start in a world rocked by a pandemic (globally) and racial unrest (in North America). Do we post on Facebook, Instagram, or Tweet out information? Do we lock ourselves in a room to wade through all of the messages and articles coming our way like a stampede of buffalo? Does what we say (or post) even make a difference? We feel anger (people on all sides of the issue feel this) and we don’t know what to do with it. Rage seems to bubble to the top looking for a way to be expressed, but will that do any good? Will it expose the problem or merely exacerbate it?
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I am a firm believer in the power of poetry. Not because I can write it, but because it takes time to read it. In fact, the reality is that when you sit with a poem long enough it begins to read you.
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It’s the same question that we always come back to. Why? Why is it that even though we know it’s wrong, even though we’ve seen this over and over, we have another experience of a black person dying in a horrifically unjust way?
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There’s a well known post-resurrection Biblical story that takes place on the road to a village called Emmaus. It’s found in Luke 24:13-35. I was reading it again this morning in a great little prayerbook called Seeking God’s Face. As can often be the case when you slow down and try to read thoughtfully through passages you’ve read before you see things that you had never seen. Two phrases jumped out at me today.
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Many people never “grow up” in regards to their faith and embrace the complexity that living in the world requires. They either accept unquestioningly a faith that settles for easy answers and sound bites, or they walk away from Jesus, convinced that Sunday school lessons have little to offer the challenges they face daily in their work, relationships, and their own inner struggle for meaning in the world.
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This week I came across a quote I underlined a few years ago from an amazing essay by Annie Dillard called “An Expedition to the Pole.” To say that I love the essay and think it is profound would be an understatement. In it she compares the practice of communal worship (which I speak about here) to an expedition to the North Pole. Suffice it to say that her writing is brilliant and incisive and that she takes what people might see as two very different actions and helps you understand both in a deeper way.
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Far too often we jump to conclusion based on what we think we are seeing and miss what God is doing in a given situation.
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As is often the case in my life, ideas converge in ways that remind me that God has a lot to teach me. This week while perusing through a thrift store I came across a great $1 find, a collection of poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
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When Breath Becomes Air, by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, was recommended to me by a good friend. Although I currently have way too much on the go reading wise because of upcoming classes this fall, I found myself drawn to this book so I requested it from the local library. I’m so glad I did.
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The older I get the more I realize the power and importance of stories. The stories we tell shape us. They help us to understand the world. We teach our children using stories. It’s their first exposure to understanding concepts like good and evil, love and sacrifice, loss and contentment. As we get older the stories get more and more complicated, but they still give us words to express and understand the world around us.
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We’ve all said it at some point, “That wasn’t what I was expecting.” It may happen at the movies, at the end of a novel, in a restaurant, or after meeting someone new. Sometimes we are’t even aware that we had expectations about a given situation until they go unmet.
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Sometimes I’m late to notice things. That happened recently as I finally listened to the lyrics of a song I’ve heard hundreds of times. Both Sides Now, written by Joni Mitchell, is a song that has floated through my head off and on for years. My friend Matt Auten used to sing some Joni Mitchell stuff and that’s where I first heard it.
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One lesson that I have learned from coaching basketball is that the habits we develop in our lives during the moments of relative ease and comfort will shape how we react in moments of challenge and difficulty. Time after time I have seen the players who spend time practicing certain skills and movements outside of games naturally excel in games because they have trained themselves to do the necessary action without thinking. There are tremendous parallels with this in the spiritual journey as well.
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t’s been a while since I’ve posted here on this blog. I find that my time for writing and creative thought tends to go in phases, and the least couple of months have been slower in that regard. But as is usually the case, something comes along that stirs up ideas in me, and the train gets back on the track. That “something” most recently was reading a book called Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
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