captive to memory

"You remind me of home: the paint cracks when the water leaks
from the rusty pipes that are just beneath my feet
You remind me of home: the heater's warm but fills the room with a
potpourri of dust and gas fumes"
-Ben Gibbard


i haven't thought of you in years
a punk rock skater with a mohawk
two teens in college
we banned together against the world
against the seriousness that crept in on us
against the depth of reality
against the impending fade of childhood dreams


driving to work i saw you today
in a memory of happy rebellion
before responsibility crept into your world
before the mohawk went with the buffalo
before seriousness and melancholy took me captive
before the depth of reality broke me
back when childhood dreams were vivid as a fresh painting

you took me captive
for a moment, i smiled

then you flew off in a family sudan
speeding to work
against traffic

god loves me?

one of my youth told me this weekend, "God loves you. I just had to say it. You say it to everyone, but does anyone say it to you?"

i had to face the reality that no one says it to me...and i'm not sure anymore if, in my heart, i believe it though my head knows the truth of the statement.

gcts would tell me this is why head knowledge is more important than emotions.

hmmm.

it just seems a sad excuse not to meet the sad reality that i don't feel loved by the only one who fully loves me.

...or maybe i need to spend sometime downtown and at kerry park and remember that God gave me the most beautiful city in the world!

the ocean breathes salty won't you carry it in

blue eyes
bluer than any sky
bluer than your name sake
giving new meaning to the word blue

stretching smile
more joyous than holidays
more natural than breath
giving new meaning to the word smile

tromping in tiny leap-like steps
arms waving, informing the world you don't yet care what she thinks of you

you say my name
and though it sounds less like becky than "bucky"
it is more my name than any other collection of syllables has ever been
i am more proud to be "bucky,"
the one to whom you bound and toddle
than ever to be becky
...the theologian
...the minister
...the student
...the one of whom much is expected

as you continue to bound my way
my heart wonders if her hope is ill founded
have i wondered onto a movie set
...where people pretend to love each other
...where one is over joyed to see another
...where hope seems possible especially on the darkest day
...where time stills until standing still as two meet, embrace, and dance in a brief moment of encounter

still you come as hope begins to shine as only in fiction
your arms spread expectantly as you near me
and you never think to slow - fully trusting, hoping, expecting my response

as though compelled
as my new name is shouted again and again
i lean and mimic your open-armed way of being

you reach me and my arms fold around you
i lift you to the sky who pails in your eyes

we laugh

in your laugh
in your eyes
in my laugh
and in what my eyes hold so tightly to
eternity spreads
...though only for seconds

letting go of god to meet God

"the problem is not that you don't beleivein God, it's that you beleive in a stupid God."
someone my brother quoted

"i pray God to rid me of God."
-meister eckhart

"to all outward appearances, persons who continue properly in their pious practices are holy. inwardly, however, they are asses for they know about God but do not know God."
-meister eckhart

may we let go of the stupid gods we have made in our image and of the propositions we attmpt to form into a one dimensional mosaic of the face of an infinate God in order to recieve a God much larger, more brilliant, more true, and less idolatrous God.

quotes out of context

“Drink a beer; get a life; don’t worry about it.”
“The work of counseling is the work of criminals.”
“Go back to 8th grade and be weird. Just be on the edge and wear fringe.”

“You have become a hemorrhoid.”

“You will likely be stoned often.”

“You are a hemorrhoid to the body of Christ.”


-Dan Allender 9/19/2005

transperancy for the journey

Yesterday I told my youth that I sometimes yell at, rebel against, hate, question, turn away from, ignore etc. God.

The response:
They listened. They thought. They engaged material, and each other. WE engaged each other. Encounter.

If lives are to be changed and if journeys are to be trekked, the shepherds and journey leaders along the way must emphasize that they are on a journey as well and that the perspective changes, grows, overwhelms, surprises, and differs. The perspective along the way takes the many things we know, such as God’s goodness, love, perfection and sovereignty and cultivates feeling and experience that appear to negate this knowledge. If we hold to our knowledge without encountering our experience, we lose relationship. God’s known love and goodness, then become the impassable block between our I and God’s Thou because we can never bring to Thou an I that experiences doubt over Thou’s goodness. Additionally, God becomes a list of attributes that cannot be denied and a person we refuse to meet if a step seems outside of these attributes. A list – and therefore, the God of list is a thing, an “it” and never a “thou.”

My anger at God when I watch my family suddenly decompose, whether founded or not, whether indicating a flaw in God’s goodness or not, must be brought to a God who is real and relational or else, by action, God’s personhood is denied in my hiding.

So what was the affect of my honesty with my youth?

First, I became a human being and not a position title.
Second, the mandate to meet God, even with filth in hand, is made.
Third, as the youth glanced around the room, their eyes revealed an interpersonal connection – they, we, must come to each other also with our perceptions that seem to negate each other’s goodness and promise to break our smiles and oddly heal our hearts.

elders strike again

after a summer full of exhausting and self-sacrificial service, full of learning and expereince for youth and children, full of beauty and growth, we launched a new year with my friend jamie's youth group visiting. we transformed the fellowship hall to create an expereince. one elder, not ratman or mrs.ratman, but a close aquaintence, we'll call her miss mouse happened in. she investigated and seemed happy with things. at the close of the night, i spent three hours returining the fellowship hall to its original state and making sure everything was clean.

the note i recieved in my box the next day read as follows (interlinear commentary included):
if the food on the shelves in the kitched belongs o the youth (who else would 24 bags of cheetos belong to?), we (who is we, or is this the royal we?) are asking if it could boxed and stored elsewhere (and, if you wouldn't mind, please also plastic wrap and store the youth only bringing them out to sit quietly during the 11:00 traditional service). it (and the youth)is not only unsightly from the fellowship hall, but it attracts ants and mice (how does individually packaged cheetos attract mice? i've never seen a single mouse or even an ant in the church). sally would provide a plastic bin with a tight lid (no, we'd perfer not to treat the youth like legitimate people who might want a cupboard and we'd rather not make things easy for you but instead have a bog box for you to search through to find things each week).

thanks for your help in this,
(crotchety old) miss mouse

luckily no one was here when i found this because i was unable to stop myself from saying, "what the fuck? fuck you!"

on sunday, i'm going to try to talk to her about it with love but still drawing attention to how the youth are being swept under a rug with no room to meet in and not even one shelf to store cheetos on.

why does no one care that the gospel is being taught and lived? why do unsightly cheetos bags mean more than changed lives? as i said, what the fuck!

my new home

as of october, i will live here - a few blocks from greenlake and a few more from whole foods and ten thousand villages.

i get a reading cove and a corner of the basement for art.

at mhgs the mdiv group is called "eagle and child" all the mdiv chics i've met paint so we might chill in my basement and be "easel and child."

good times!

two possible answers: i have no fucking clue or incarnation and maybe both are true

Does God exist?
How do you know?
What difference does it make?

Well, the obvious and honest answer is I don’t have a fucking clue.

If I dare to assume that what might be pride and stubbornness might actually be faith and claim that God does exist, I have to at least cling to the honesty that I don’t know this because of arguments, definitive experiences, I don’t know this because Dr. Davis told me so. I don’t know this because Jesus told me so. I know this because of relationship.

I have seen holiness in others that cannot be anything more or less that the face of God inhabiting the face of the other in a gleaming way like in the tabernacle of the Old Testament.

I have felt holiness saturate the once frigid, breathless separation and death stagnating the room between I and thou suddenly filled with a presence of glory that I know I did not bring to thou and doubt thou brought to me.

I have sat alone at 30,000 feet and felt thou address me though no visible thou lent a presence to me.

I know, if I know, that God exists because of incarnation.

What difference does this make?

One unexpectedly frigid October morning, the Indian summer, who I had fallen clingingly in-love with, fled Boston. Counting on at least another week of warmth before the white witch banished the aslant of summer and drenched my world in six months of winter, I awoke to a broken dream: snow falling gently with softness birthing a lethal blow to my false hope. When I glimpse the snow, I wished I hadn’t. I struggle to believe it had intruded on October. It was incomprehensible. However, once I glimpsed it, I knew it was there and could no longer avoid it.

My way of being in Boston changed. The sheet on my bed found a companion in a faux-down blanket. My scarves jumped out of their storage boxes and clung to my neck. Wool coats once seen as dorky and odd became the newest fashion in my eyes. Where I loved to wear skirts, I now found them repulsive.

As I said, my way of being and seeing was utterly transformed.

Once I have seen God’s face incarnating its uncontainable self in my world, that indescribable word, “incarnation” invades every corner of my life lifting a flag of transformation. I now live and see as though every corner, every face, every encounter, every institution, everything, is, to some degree, an incarnation and as though, even I am an incarnation and am somehow covenanted to the benevolent responsibility of incarnation.

So, other than “I don’t have a fucking clue,” i can supply a mustard seed "yes", and respond to the other two with this transcendent and immanent word, “incarnation.”

notes from class last night

as i sat in class recieving this message (at the end of the post), i tried not to cry because a) i like to pretend i'm tough and b) a friend had told me earlier that she doesn't handle others crying in her presence well...she's a counseling student. she'll get over it. but, i didn't feel the need to make her get over it last night.

then, after class, a man asked me - and i think meant it:
so, how are you

eh.

-long pause waiting for elaboration-

yeah. eh. eh sums it up pretty well.

-more long pause as i begin to understand that he might seriously want the real answer-

basically, i'm sort of a prohet type - always reaching for things to be better - redeemed. i'm tired and broken. i don't want to dream anymore.

i simply don't have the energy for hope but have ample cynicism to avoid faith and even the thought of loving and being loved makes me feel so lonely i don't even know how to anticipate the next breath and the moment it ushers in.

couldn't i have a day off? couldn't i have a gentle walk in a sunny park

he interrupted - a nice flower to brighten the dark night

yeah!

silence with twinges of awkward sauce.

-insert the difference between gcts and mhgs. he neither squirmed nor moaned or sighed in falsified sympathy.

yeah...i'm glad i have my flower

- he pointed as his pregnant wife came.

i have my wife and soon i'll have a baby!

the conversation continued but it was over at that point.

i was ecstatic for him, but broken even more than when he gently, kindly walked my way and offered to encounter my dispairing face.

here's the notes on faith, hope, and love that make me too tired for any of the words tattooed on my left shoulder blade:
What is faith:
A series of convictions of beliefs, which you claim to be true and if you believe them, you have faith. If you do not believe them, you do not have faith.

Faith is soooo much more than this.

There are many people who hold to the core set of beliefs but abuse others – these are not men and women of faith

Faith is confidence in the powerful presence of a God who redeems.
The odd component of faith is that the more confidence you have, the more you will doubt.
For most, faith and doubt are antonyms.
If you believe so much that you don’t have doubt, you do not have faith; you have dogmatic belief.
Nothing is more lethal to faith than dogmatism.

You enter faith through memory.
Faith has content.
Faith does have proposition.
But, one comes to faith as one enters into story.
You don’t remember facts. You remember stories.

The dilemma is that we have more stories that do not have endings.
We have more jagged stories than we have that we can hold with confidence.

We are all in story wars.

There are few stories where the presence of God is the most true thing of the story.

Faith is remembrance of redemptive acts of God where he moves to redeems his people

Can we ask in our unresolved stories, “Is God good?”

Faith creates foundation.
Faith creates identity.
Faith creates a foundation to stand on that is an anchor to your story.


My story opens the door to consider God’s story.

No one has a right to their own story because your story is written by God and it is his story.

What is hope:
The confidence that a certain ending is certain and so you can live with certainty.
It is positive. “Are you a hopeful person?” “Yeah, I’m pretty positive.”

Hope is faith for the future.

You cannot change the facts of the past, you can change the meaning of your past.

You meant it for evil. God meant it for good.

Hope is faith that tomorrow, redemption may show.

What is hope? As he has shown himself before, he will show himself again.

Hope opens the door to dreaming. You become what you are dreaming.

Always ask yourself, what I dream for – what is the dream about?
Whatever you dream, what the dream is about is probably good.

Chesterton, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

Every desire reflects something about God.

We invite people to dream about reconciliation.
About what it will be like for the lion to lay down with the lamb.
About what it will be like when power is no longer abused to hurt.

Faith without hope will bind you to your comfort.

Hope births holy discontent.

Hope gets you in trouble. The more hope you have the more you live on the edge of doubt.

Do you want hope?

What is love:
Getting along – being nice

Giving and receiving pleasure for the glory of God
Having a heart to give to another what will please them – bring them light and joy
The dilemma for most is that they are good givers.
You cannot love others unless you can receive from them the glory of what they have for you.
To the degree you cannot receive, you cannot let others love.

When you live by faith, hope, and love, you become alive.
You laugh more than you have ever laughed and weep more than you have ever wept.

As faith, hope, and love ground you, they give you a reason to live.

They dissipate those things which should not have a hold on your life.
“I know no other good but you.”

To be a person of faith, hope, and love, it leads to life – to passion.
It also leads to an end of those attachments that have no right to hold you.
This is freedom.

With faith, hope, and love, I have reason – the result of my life will bring difference. My life matters eternally.
There are people on earth that will never be the same because of my engagement in their lives.

The blessing to be invited into another person’s story.

Three words:
FREEDOM, LIFE, PURPOSE

Faith has been bitten hard by betrayal.
Facing betrayal opens the door to grappling where you have been orphaned by God
The odd root to faith is entering into the types of betrayal that have brought you to doubt

You will only enter into hope by entering to powerlessness
It is where you have felt powerlessness that you have felt hopelessness
It is where you have felt powerlessness that you have felt estranged
The art you create out of a desire to fit is not art
A true artist tells what others don’t.
When you refuse to fit – when you agree to be an alien.
When you are an alien, you can dream of redemption – call people back to it

Invitation to be a widow – someone who has lost intimacy.

When you enter the door to tragedy and heart ache, you enter into faith, hope, and love.

Your life is meant to portray God and betray evil.


We are priests – storytellers
We are prophets – trouble-makers, arousing change, truth tellers
We are kings – ones who leads and engages others in the battle for love

Who are you and how are you written to reveal the glory of God?

church

last night at the mhgs retreat, we did a labyrinth.

on the way out, you're supposed to be joining in with what God is doing.

i kept thinking about how i had to get up at 5 to catch a ferry and get to the church early enough to get all these petty last minute things done and all i could ask is "God, why is it that working at a church feels so antithetical to 'joining' you?"

this isn't burn out speaking anymore. it's honesty. how do i get out of this trap?

hipster hopes (steeped in sarcasm mind you)

i haven't been a hipster for years...though my aunt thinks i'm "hep" and that's about the coolest thing ever.

anyway, hopefully i'll be living in greenlake this time next month and driving one of these.

maybe my hipster days are resurrecting...though, i'm still an uber nerd.

an emo thought

---- i woke up this morning with the sober thought of erasing this uber emo post. i think it was posted out of too much mango rum last night (not frat boy or english professor too much, just emo too much...ok, two drinks)

...but if its touching and encourages the quest for community, then i'll bear the weight of emo, rum-drinking overly-emotional posts.

suffice to say, i miss sinners and saints. ----



rain has never sounded so beautiful, washing away the remains of a drowning deam i've kindled too long.
i feel like an emo kid as i lay on my bed with only my sleeping dog for company.

the rain begins to feel more like terential tears for a community i don't have.
i feel like an out-dated lower step of the ivory tower as i ramble theologically but spend days and nights alone.

the rain stopped and abandoned the dreams i had for it for me, for the life-giving spirit between i and the storm.
even wet drops abandon me like the dreams i had of community and closeness shy of the atlantic.
i feel like a country song as i wonder how long my old, tired dog can continue breathing in beat with lonely hours passing by,
one by one dying of disappointment.

will community sweep in like a storm and bath me with what i am longing for?
will incarnation find me?
i want to scream but only constrain forming tears.

as the rain begins again to beat like a metranome, this song plays softly in the wind:
"if all that's left is duty, then i'm falling on my sword.
atleast then, i would not serve an unseen distant lord.
can someone please tell me the stories of sinnerss ransomed from the fall.
i still have never seen you, and some days,
i don't love you at all."

and again, my pitter-patter friends flee somewhere in the dark night.

in honesty, like the moon, i know you are here tonight, like the sun you will be here tomorrow, like both, you saturate every day and night with radient light.
in honesty, that's no longer enough.
it never was.
if you won't give me more, i don't want to see that you are there at all.

too many candles

my 24th birthday is coming up. it's the last one i'm celebrating for a while, so i'd like to have a rockin' party.

saturday september 24th
meet in post alley (email for directions) for improv at 9pm
bring gum to put on the wall. if there's enough of us, i want to make a shape or something.
after improv, go to kells irish pub for drinks

neither the date nor the events are solid. it's more important to me that you come than that it's on the 24th or that it's improv and drinks. so, if that doesn't work for you, think of some different ideas.

make suggestions!

thanks,
becky

one of three options

how do we, who have a faith in an omnipotent and supposedly loving God encounter this?


from the heavens, it seems so beautiful, so perfect, so God-ordained, as though God dipped his finger in the sky and created a picture and a reality.




from the ground, it is devastation. it devastates more than even the people, it devastates faith. it draws me to look at God’s “thou” or “i” and de-vast-ate God by categorizing God as judge, absent, or one to whom I no longer exist.

i went to a weekly church service twice while in boston. both times, two different men named jeff preached in some capacity – one about prayer and another through prayer

one proclaimed that the tragedy is God’s judgment of the wicked. my jaw dropped and I struggled to see him as a part of “we” without categorizing him as “them.” I was afraid that my religion, my God was insensitive, unloving, and deceptive when God claims to love the poor.

I found a “we”, but still stewed.

the other confessed anger, rawness, questions of a God who claims to be loving and to care for the poor. my jaw clenched – if he is uncomfortable with God, if he doesn’t have answers, is my God real? is my God love? is my God true? is my God for the poor?

when I ask those questions of my God, I ask them about God – God is an it. God is already lost to me as i assess God in this historical moment rather than encountering God, being fully present with full sorrow, full fear, full anger and receiving God’s presence as God bestows in that moment – allowing the interchange, the air, the moment between God and me, between God and the world, between the world and me, to be the very spirit by which I live.

I retreat and hide in the objectivity of categorization and, though, the loss of the God I thought I held to, the God it turns out I might not hold to, the God I may not want to hold to is a scary reality, the scarier reality is bringing this fear, openly, undefendedly, bleedingly to God, a “thou” I’m not currently positive that I trust.

I felt “we” with the latter jeff and that scared me, I tried valiantly to run from the suffering, to medicate with philosophy, to escape encounter, ironically, in the pages of a book about counter, and in the circles I can run in my mind without venturing into the world.

I found a “we,” and for that reason, stewed.

it’s tempting to join the one jeff and explain the suffering making God the victim and those that are other than myself the offender. It is tempting to dig your feet into an answer and an ideal that explains the suffering – that justifies it.

it is not tempting to join the other jeff as he sits in ashes and sack cloth morning, tearing his metaphorical clothes in the face of God, proclaiming the injustice, facing how this seems to counter act our faith in a God who is for and with the poor, being openly angry, inviting our community into our suffering.

our choices are three: entrenchment, with the one jeff, encounter with the other, or, the great american way, numbness, ignorance, sitcoms instead of news, diving into a philosophical book, naval gazing, spiritualization: doing everything possible to distract myself from the pain - a path which, though I know it not, like leprosy, leads to death.

i do love God.
i do know that God is good that that God is for the poor.
but as these facts do not answer the questions, the fear, the pain, i must bring all of these to God and to the community of God for encounter, meeting, being present to one another, wounds and all.

thank you, latter preacher jeff, for a calling and a prophetic action to honest, sorriful encounter.

sad departure

a couple of hours ago, i said good bye to brooke - the last of sinners and saints that i will see for many months and possibily a year or so.

the last few days have been amazing - a community truly living life together.

i already miss sinners and saints and don't know how to return to lake city after this true expereince of church.

i don't want to universalize, but i don't know that any form of christianity other than house churches out-lives the unity Christ calls us to - or, at least i know now that once my current position is exhausted, house church is where i will be.

free money cause i'm smart

i just found out that i am recieving the stan grenz memorial scholarship from my school - 5,000 a year for three years!

is buddy jesus i, thou, or it?

as kaufmann discusses the jewishness of i and thou, he makes this daunting (as a believer in Jesus) statement:

"the hebrews did not visualize their god and expressly forbade attempts to make [god] an object - a visual object, a concrete object, any object. their god was not to be seen. [god] was to be heard and listened to. [god] was not an it but an i - or a you."

note: in this and my previous post, i edited the quotes not to refer to god as he. last week in sunday school one of the kids got really mad at me when i said god isn't a man...so i guess it's on my mind - also, when we talk about a god who cannot be contained, this seems an appropriate time to remove god from the container of human understanding of gender.