Temple Building Emotions

Posted: October 13, 2015 in beautiful, god
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All Solomon’s work was carried out, from the day the foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid until its completion. So the temple of the LORD was finished.

2 Chronicles 8:16

One of the privileges I have had over the last few years is to restore and build  the REFINERY Church in Chula Vista, California. It’s been a lot of team work, a lot of stress and a lot of fun. It has also provided me some interesting emotions.

I think that I have a  sense of what Solomon must have felt when he built the temple. My team and I are building the temple, and we are building a courtyard not so different in size from what Solomon and the Jewish people constructed.

Our stone layers recently finished putting down  pavers in the walkways in our new courtyard. For an outstanding price, given because this is a church, they laid down stone pavers and stone walls with stone caps in lovely earth tones of dark brown and charcoal gray.  It’s gorgeous work, fitting for a king. We paid about $13,000. The work is worth more like $18,000, but the contractor donated to the project. Afterall, it was for God. When I stand back and look at it, I feel satisfied.

At the front ot the courtyard are two beautiful iron gates, each worth over $4000. We paid $1250 for each. The metal worker made them far beyond our expectations and beyond his too. As he began the work, using some light iron pieces, he felt that God said to him, “This isn’t good enough. For my house the metal should be the best.”

And so he put asside the iron, and selected the best he had, and built out of that. Our God is a God who calls us to art and beauty and when we create he comes along side of us and inspires greatness. I stand back and look at the gates in our church courtyard. I am very pleasantly surprised.

A friend who sells electrical lighting came by to see our work in the courtyard recently. He was thrilled, so much so that the said he wanted to help light the courtyard. He asked us to pick out the decorative lighting we wanted. We have expensive tastes. It cost almost $1,000. He picked out the LED floodlights to light it at night. He selected the best for the applicaton, then he had all the lights installed. The bill for everything came to $3,200. He paid it. I feel grateful.

Satisfied, suprised, grateful — these are temple building emotions. Solomon must have felt them. I do. So also the builders who contributed to the poject. They are good feelings.

If you want to feel these things too, then I suggest that you go build something for God.

It’s Complicated

Posted: September 26, 2015 in leadership
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It’s complicated; it’s not.

These days a lot of us live complicated lives; we put a lot on the to-do plate.

Currently at the nonprofit I lead I am overseeing a fund drive for the construction of a courtyard, leading a water saving measure that taps into a California State trust fund, managing an electricity-saving project that exchanges the fluorescent at our site for LED lighting. In addition, our nonprofit recently rolled out a name change, managing all the politics, costs and relational subtleties that required.

Besides that there is my speaking schedule, my meeting schedule, the overseeing of staff and the overseeing of myself. In addition there is the good, the relational, the everyday personal, the loving of my sweet wife, the relating to my adorable daughters, the cats, the bills, the vacuuming and the toilets — they need to be cleaned.

How to stay sane? That is the question, especially smack in the middle of the visionary-mundane, the unfinished, uncertain and unexpected.

A couple of ideas come to mind.

Compartmentalize the projects. Work on something, then leave it, completely — out of sight out of mind — and don’t let it eat at you until you block out a time to work on it again.

Create processes and timelines that are realistic. Decide: these are the steps we must take, these are the processes we will use, this is a realistic time frame in which to accomplish this objective — then add three months to that.

Ask for help. To live a complicated life, to be a high-energy person, to be a high-output person — this requires comrades, friends, teams, a group of leaders and collaboration. Nothing great ever gets accomplished alone.

These approaches aren’t clean, perfect, categorical solutions to the challenges of a complicated life.

Of course we can’t forget that snarly problem and of course the solution will come to us in the shower. Of course we won’t anticipate all the obstacles. and of course our timeline and processes will need revisions. And of course we will sometime do something we should have asked someone else to do.

But to live well while accomplishing a lot, to keep from dying of stress in a high-stress lifestyle, do these things: Create boundaries, lay plans, don’t go it alone.

It’s not that complicated.

The Value of Memory

Posted: September 22, 2015 in animals
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Some memories flood us without being invited, especially the memories of difficulty, hurt, or loss.

Other memories must be sought after, spelunked from the earthy past, coaxed from memory’s sky. Those are the ones I’m interested in now.

There is a going back, a kind of search through childhood, that we can make, and with a specific memory focus and an intent we can encourage ourselves. Remembering, we can warm our minds up, sit by the fire of good times, have a chat with the past and drink up the sweetness of our lives.

I remember holding the head of my childhood dog Patches, and telling her some sorrow and being comforted by her friendship. I remember carrying my big, scroungy cat Red home with me —  a found cat  — and my mom letting me keep him. He became my fur buddy. I remember kittens born in my closet, the soft cries of the new presences, the surprise a few weeks later when their bright blue eyes popped open. I remember puppies born under the foundation of the nearby building, me crawling under there, bringing them out, so we could make sure they grew up safe, and tame and loved.

I remember baby jay birds, found on the ground, fallen from the nest. We fed one of the little guys dog food from the wrong end of a spoon and he survived and became our airy friend, even after he learned to fly. I remember going outside and him landing on my shoulder, to greet me. I was Saint Francis; he was my congregant; we had holy communion with each other, but I never preached to him.

These are good memories, my memories of my childhood animal friends. The house cats that live with me now — Megan and Shanaynay — are members of a long line of animals that have warmed and encougaged my life. I grew up with fur; I still like fur. Life is better, lived near a purr.

Perhaps God gave us the animals, to help us recover from the humans.

Memory — it’s fascinating. The memory scientists tells us that our memories are malleable; they change over time; often they aren’t very accurate, and yet they are reality’s storehouse from which we can constantly draw the wealth of our lives. Those furry friends from my past, they were real, and our friendships — they mattered to me.

I’m for it, for a gentle looking back, for remembering the good, for warming up our minds with all the safety, love, relationship, fun and wonder of the past. We have all experienced hard things, most certainly within memory there is pain — I easily remember the surprising treachery of a once close friend — but most certainly we all have had many good, healing things happen to us also.

There, waiting in the past, are sweet, good memories to be discovered again — and savored.

All Praise For What Is Small!

Posted: September 15, 2015 in beautiful
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Someone once said to me, “It’s the little things that drive you crazy!”

It’s not.

It’s the little things that drive you sane — pills, pats and pets.

All praise for what is small: dollops and gobs and dabs, the edges of pie crusts, chocolate shavings.

Hail micro-sacredness of life, tiny flotsam and mini-jetsam — veins, mists, creeks, fogs.

Is it not life’s micro-detail, womp and woof of wondrous world, that moves us to gratitude?

Drops, pinches, dashes, rain, cinnamon, lotion; fermions, flounces, hadrons, hats, bosons, bacon bits, antiquarks — there is a breath-taking thereness in the smallest things.

And then at last there is the weight and force of slivered, severed time.

The massive power of one, tiny, single “was.”

The mighty microsity of one “will be.”

And the astonishing force of this quickly, quarky, snarky second’s “is.”

……

More of my soliloquies may be found a www.http://modernsoliloquies.com

Being Successful at Success

Posted: September 5, 2015 in Uncategorized
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Success — we want it, maybe we don’t, maybe we shouldn’t, maybe we can handle it really well, maybe we can’t.

It’s complex.

Consider modern abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, 1912-1956. He became one of the major artists of his generation. He had shows. He sold. Life wrote him up. Collectors bought his paintings. Museums bought his work. His image paintings and his completely abstract drip paintings were controversial, but they didn’t go unnoticed. Jackson entered art history. He advance abstractionism beyond Picasso. But Jackson’s success didn’t satisfy him; in some ways it brought out the worst in him.

In a long alcoholic, manic, depressed, codependent, psychotic, abusive downward spiral he descended into addiction, mental illness and an early, tragic death. He wanted to be loved, by his family, by fellow artists, by the world, but his life was one long, horrible experience of rejection. By means of alcoholism, abusivenes and egotism he ruined all his relationships. His sucesses brought him accolades and some money, but they also distanced him from his brothers, his wife, his critics and the artists of his time.

Success can  be a mess. In ourselves it may invite pride, excess, superiority, abusiveness, selfishness and addiction. In others it often openly invites jealousy and resentment.

But it need not be so.

A couple of things can help us be successful at success.

Stay humble. We can do that in our successes by facing the fact that all of what we are and do is a gift, a gift of genetics, and gift of timing, a gift of personality, a gift from God. Success is always also a gift from our community, a gift from the many others who love, teach, nuture and support us.

Be grateful. Our success is not something owed to us. It is not a given. We are not entitled to it. It could have gone the other way, and we know it. For any moment of solution, of creativity, of honor, of recognition, of success,  be grateful.

To succeed at success we must also face our demons  — and back them down. Most all of us come out of our families tweaked, incomplete, wounded, somewhat-loved-still-needy. We must think that all through, recover, forgive, individuate, mature through good decisions, take responsibility for our stuff. We must, or our demons  will crush us and the people who love us.

Lastly love, we must always love. Love can keep even the most successful of us from becoming tyrannical, dominating, selfish, horrible. If we love others, more than ourselves, if we  give, serve and care for others success will become an extention of love.  Love, love love, social eloquence thereof. Love is the antidote for all the dangers of success.

When I visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2o10 I was taken by Renoir’s “Girls at the Piano,” 1892. It is full of love. Like Jackson Pollock, Renoir was a successful painter during his life,  (he got to see his paintings hung in the Louvre with the old masters) and yet he loved his children, and painted them often. In Jackson’s paintings of family we feel the tension, the conflict between the members. In his paintings, family members appear separated from each other, sometimes threatening each other. In Renoir’s “Girls at the Piano” the girls are close,  connected to each other, safe with each other. With Renoir, love ruled, and able to love he died an old respected artist.

Many people avoid success like the plague. It’s too bad. Think of what they fail to accomplish. A few seek it dysfunctionally; some of them, like Jackson, are crushed by it. Most survive it, after some fashion, but it doesn’t always survive them. Some excel at excellence and thrive.

The bottom line, maybe the top line too, for artists and for us all — there are ways, low, thankful and loving, to be successful with success.

Living Within Institutions

Posted: August 29, 2015 in church, leadership, relationships
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When I got up this morning, I went outside. It was still dark. Venus glowed in the east. It was cool; the sky was blue-black, with a slight lightening in the east where the earth turned toward the sun.

Looking at Venus, I thought of Jesus, who has been called the bright morning star. I paused, refreshed, not alone, enmeshed in Christianity, in an kind of metaphoric, historical, institutionalized beauty.

I came back in the house and sat and talked to my wife. When we talk, we  usually connect, very smoothly, very deeply, very satisfyingly. My identity and her’s merge, we easily understand each other’s abreviations, the rhetoric of love, our freshly invented eloquences. With these we work out the subliminal deep structure of our relationship, the one that exists within the institution of marriage.

Later in the morning, I drove into work, opened the door to my office, and walked into a third institution.

My office manager came to work too. We are both well-individuated, but as we talked, worked out the plan for the day, sampled the pastry we would later serve to guests, laughed at ourselves, played our separate roles, made progress, we became a useful institutional team.

What is my life? It is a life of living and moving and having my being within institutions.

What are institutions?

Institutions are not places, they are not buildings. Institutions are the rules that structure the interactions we have with the people we know.  Institutions define the way we relate.

The national government, our church, our marriage, our school system, our economic system, even our language — all are institutions, that is, all structure rules for our relationships.

A woman told me last week that our church hurt her feelings.

I apologized. I hated that she was hurt. The protocol, the unwritten rules, the tendancy of a church to favor certain people — the unexamined structure of our interactions — these can damage. Institutions can brutalize people.

I have been harmed by institutions. You probably have too. But we have also been helped by them — medicine, art, family.

What can we do to make our institutions healthy, even good?

First, in institutions, make exceptions, regarding the rules.

Once a person didn’t meet a requriement of our church for leadership. In this case, we overlooked that one institutional requirement. We kept the requirement in general —  it’s a good one — but we made an exception in this one case. It wasn’t a slippery slope. It was just plain smart, right, fair. And it worked well. The person has proven to be an excellent leader.

This is one way we kept our institution from harming the individual — we value the individual more than the general rule.

What else can be done?

We can keep changing. A healthy person keeps changing.  Healthy institutions also keep changing. They change the rules, to address problems, to find creative solutions.

Our church is currently becoming more economically and racially diverse. So we are including more types of people in leadership. Women, ethnic minorities, young people, older people, introverts, highly spiritual people, practical ones too. We are opening the doors to a different look, to different kinds of relational structures. Some of the rules are changing, and so the institution is changing in a good way.

Today as I sat writing this in Starbucks — a major institution — two strangers got into a conversation about how to cool their houses in the current heat wave. One gave the other a new idea. This “third place” within our culture, this public office, creates a space for people to relate to each other in ways of their own choosing, and come to solutions of their own choosing.

The bottom line?

Love your institutions, use them to connect to others, to solve problems; make them work for you and others.

Not Alone

Posted: August 24, 2015 in becoming, beginnings
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The myth of the alone, insane, artistic genius runs deep in Western culture.

Vincent Van Gogh.

It isn’t so.

I just finished reading Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s fascinating, well-researched, thought-provoking biography of Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent fought with everyone he knew, sabotaged every close relationship, longed for family, but lived alone even when he had house companions like Gauguin. And yet not.

He suffered deep social pain, rejection and abandonment, and at times he was isolated by mental illness,  but he was not unconnected from other people.

His art, his letters, his paintings all reveal a profound link to others. They reveal the wars with his parents, the parasitic relationship with his brother Theo, his attempts at pastoring, his efforts to build family with with his prostitutes, his effort to create family with his fellow artists.

Gauguin, Pissarro, Monet, Bernard, Rembrandt, Millet, Delacroix  — all these and many others influenced Vincent.  He lived inside his own inner dialogue with them.

Vincent’s art was a product of his relationships.

Even when Vincent was an island, cut off from others in a locked room at St. Remy, struggling with his mental demons, he was in reality connected by great techtonic plates — below the surface of  deep water — to those he knew on the mainland of rationality. They were always in his head, his heart, his paint.

Anyone of us, with our various versions of insanity, can retreat from others because of relational pain and hurt, and yet even there we will not be alone. We will always bring with us the voices of our community, our critics, our family, our friends, and our self.

What is insanity? What was Vincent’s mental illness? I’m not at all sure. But perhaps insanity has something to do with us not being able to work out our relationships with our community, family and sweet ones.

We are connected, and we are all a bit whacked; the issue of life seems to lie in how we mangage to come to terms with that.

That struggle, that deep longing for connection, that is one of the great forces of life that results in great art, in great pain, and in great love.

“Love,” commanded Jesus.

All beauty comes from that.

Variations of Gratitude

Posted: August 12, 2015 in god
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“Say, “Thank you.'”

We have all been told or said that, or some variation of it, “You could a least say, ‘Thank you,'” or “Aren’t you going to say “Thank you?””

In modern American culture, such “Thank you’s” are protocol; they are our appreciation cliches. They are ubiquitous, often perfunctory.

Yesterday at the store the checkout my clerk thanked me for shopping at her store. I thanked her for serving me.

Verbal ettiquite is rote, a tote, a quick vote, but that’s okay. Our light-weight apprreciations are perhaps tributes to our aspirations for cultural nobility, perhaps small island-hops in our perpetual flight from selfishness.

But there is present in life a deeper gratefulness, a profonde gratitude, a heart-felt appreciation, which arises from within, which comes out of surprising places and has a substantial mooring in our souls.

Lately I have experienced deep gratitude.

I am at loss for words.

Repayment is impossible. The words “Thank you!” are in no way adequate. I have no eloquence for this, I have no thank you gift for this. I suffer gratitude paralysis; I can do nothing to properly say, “Thank you.”  I will never have anything that can adequately convey appropriate gratitude.

For what?

For God!

God has been so good to me and my family. He has approached us with such gentleness. He has lavished us with such love. And He has softly redeemed our personal brokenness, saved our self-inflicted and our others-inflicted lostness, gentled our unique brand of fragility.

You have no idea.

Many are offended by God, his allowance of suffering, his seeming distance from us in times of need, his standards, his judgments, his absence.

I am not. Certainly I get it. I too suffer over the many unexplained injustices of life, the horrible suffering, the mysteries of our failures and successes, and yet in God’s own way, in his own time, as he has seen fit, He has very uniquely proven his love for me lately, and for my family and my friends again and again and again.

Things have happened to work things out, to create new realities, to take care of old needs, to give us new peace, to bond us to each other and to others, to create hope.

I am dumbstruck. I have no gratitude cliches. This is very personal, between God and me, a very, very deep gratitude.

Wow!

What?

Ahhh …

Amazing!

Posted: July 18, 2015 in beautiful
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                                Amazing is your presence — after your absence.

This week NASA showed us close up images of Pluto — astonishing! I’m in love. The high ice mountains — incredible!

Last night my wife came home from a archivist conference that had her away from home for three weeks. She spent the evening unpacking, singing and humming, sitting and catching up,  surrounded by her family and her cats. This is more astonishing than Pluto.

Amazing is a presence, after an absence. It is good to come home, to Pluto, and to each other.

The cosmos is boffo ergo Io and Pluto. My wife Linda is more so.

Until recently in history, it has been rare to peek in on our solar system wonders. All hail to Galileo, Kepler, Cassini, Tombaugh.

But the rings of Saturn have been there all along.  It is not so much that they are newly astonishing as much as that we have been oldly unaware. The truth is that the extraordinary is found everywhere, in what is seen and unseen, in  a presence after an absence, in the wonder of small conveniences, in the profundity of reunions, in solar system extraordinarosities and in  the comforts of home..

Normal, ordinary, everyday, common place — these are amazing; this is known by the very sick after they recover. This is known by the traveler and by the colonizer  and by the traumatized and by the at peace. Amazing is the new normal for the newly aware. The astonishing is what is right in front of us in the gorgeously articulated super-now.

The stunning twin wonders of the body are its bright eyes. The triple gorgeousness of the person — mind, soul, body. The glory of the immediate second — that I am communicating with you.

Look up from your computer!

Behold — the amazing present!

Squinting At The Future

Posted: July 4, 2015 in thriving
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Yesterday morning I sat on the beach at Half Moon Bay, in Northern California and watched the waves. I looked out to sea. I was squinting —  at the future. What did I see? I saw a future in which I reflect, learn, write, think and speak about what is true.

In other words, I see a future that extends and expands on what my whole life has been about — figuring out what is true and sharing that with other people.  The path ahead for me looks like the path behind.

Later in the day I hiked the little creek trail at Butano State Park near Pescadero, hoofing it lazily through sword ferns and sorrel with my wife Linda, weaving through the giant redwoods, following the little stream thorugh patches of gorgeous green sunlight and shade. We paused, sat on a log, took it in and I did a little more squinting, again, trying to see the future — my future adventuring through the divine sunshine, shadow and splendor of the known universe.

What is the future? It is a vast ocean,  seen and unseen, known a bit by exploration, not nearly all known yet. The future is a redwood forest, mostly unknown, except the trail, the one taken out, and then taken back again.

It is said that sixty percent of the planet is covered by water more than a mile deep. Seventy-nine percent of the entire volume of the earth’s biosphere consists of waters with depths greater than 1,000 meters. We lilve on a deep planet that we have not nearly explored.

There is so  much that is yet unknown.  Neuroscientists estimate that we are conscious of only about five percent of our own cognitive activity. We have depths, inside of us, unchartered waters, operating in sync with our organs, our emotions  and our actions. It isn’t that we aren’t using all of our brain  power; we are always using a good deal of it, without being aware of it.  We are oceans,  we are forests, yet waiting to be discovered.

And so I am squinting,  along with many other people,  at the future, because I want to see what is coming, and I want to control it a little bit, if that is possible, by the wise choices I make.

What is out there?

One way to cxplore our own human consciousness and its tie to the future is through paying attention.

How?

By paying attention to our own consciousness, and by exploring our unconsciousness, by getting  below the surface of the self. To do that, it looks to me like we must stop, pause, rest, rest deep, reflect, pay attention, consider options, choose.  This means looking back along the path we have come from, and then looking forward along the path that goes back to where we came from.

I don’t do too much of this kind of looking, becuase I stay busy, with work and play. Many moderns do. It’s good, it’s healthy, but what is needed to grow in self-awareness and meta-awareness and to see further into what can yet be. This will require some deep rest, long time outs, extended inactivity, a cessation of activity, a time for looking, just looking and listening to self, past, present, future and God.

I recommend more of this. We need to stop, take stock, consider the possibilities, explore options, listen to the future, watch for the flow of time in a given direction, make plans.

Some might counter, but you just can’t know, and you certainly can’t control the future. I disagree. We can know possibilites, we can see potential, we can see options and we may — if health doesn’t fail and people intrude —  even choose some of what will be. If God is willing, we may travel the same path twice, going in different directions, foward and back and begin to see a bit ahead a different angle on what we have seen before.

I give you deep rest, I recommend deep consideration, deep planning, hoping, thinking, brooding, listening,  acting. I suggest moving with the flow of the divine, moving with the rhythms of liffe, looking out to sea, looking up the trail, looking, looking, looking.

In front of you,  your future.

Will you take it?

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