doubt

Posted: June 6, 2011 in thriving
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Doubters asks the questions believers have already answered — unsuccessfully. Is there God?  Can we trust our leaders? Is it okay to have doubts? The world is still exploring these questions, and we should certainly keep asking such questions, and answering the best we can without acting arrogantly on either side of the answers, doubt or faith.

Doubt is useful. By it we test our theories, disbelieve liars and discover more truth. I doubt that a fomer friend of my is capable of receiving the truth that his style of relating is harmful, to himself and others. He simply won’t or  can’t go there. I doubt he ever will.

For centuries people thought the earth was the center of the universe. But by observation Galileo, with his telescope and his questions, attacked the old geocentrism and led the way to a more accurate view of reality, heliocentrism. But interestingly enough, most people still live like  they are the center of the universe.  Heliocentrism is taught in school, but geocentrism reigns in our personal choices. Two-year olds and adults have the same problem — decentering. Proof. They do nothing about injustice.

People usually don’t live according to their beliefs. People also do not usually live according to their doubts. Doubters are notorious for not doubting their own doubts. People of faith and people of science are famous for holding on to their theories in the face of contrary evidence.

I’m a doubter. I doubt most conspiracy theories I hear. I doubt what I hear from most political and religious leaders.  I doubt that people have pure motives. I doubt that we exercise anything like pure reason. I doubt that there are space ships visiting the earth from other planets, and I doubt that the next President of the United States will do much to improve international relations, bringing peace to our own planet.

I have at one time doubted everything I have believe, and I have even doubted my own doubts. But this has been good for me, because by means of doubt I have come to more certainty about what I do believe. And I have come to believe some things that I formerly doubted by testing them and proving them in my own experience. I doubted that french fries tasted good dipped in ice cream. Then I tried it.

Test everything, but don’t be afraid to believe something. And you do, sometimes.

For more thoughts on doubt, check out www.modernproverbs.net    Click on the tab “doubt.”

“Despicable Me,” Charlie Sheen and “August: Osage County”

Posted: May 23, 2011 in news
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The June, 2011 issue of Vanity Fair wrote up a juicy, detailed piece on Charlie Sheen’s media meltdown. All the drugging and prostituting and money wasting  is now chic-yuck. “Two and a Half Men” is over for Charlie,  but  Charlie himself is not over yet. Are we jealous pf Charlie, as he thinks, are we disgusted, or  just voyeuristic?  When Charlie went public with his special brand of insanity, he sucked up  a million followers on Twitter. Crazy money, high-priced prostitutes and extreme drug use tweets well in America.

It interesting.  Universal’s 2010  animated film Despicable Me has grossed something like $540 million worldwide.  In Despicable, love and loyalty win.  Gru, a lonely single-guy, lets his love for three little orphan girls win over his super-villianous selfishness. Charlie Sheen and Gru are both despicable, but Charlie is not the kind of despicable in this movie.  Audiences paid to see Gru’s transformation into a loving father and wiped a tear. Do we hark toward Gru or Charlie?  

Last night I saw Tracy Letts’  “August: Osage County” at the Globe.   It played 18 previews and 648 regular performances on Broadway. It’s the comic-tragic American family come unglued. At the core, the patriarch, Beverly cheats on his wife Violet with her sister and alcoholism, drug-addiction and pain ensue for the next two generations. The play ends with T.S. Eliot’s “This is the way the world ends…”  but this  screwed-up  family doesn’t end with a “bang” or  a “whimper,” but with silence —  empty, dark, alone silence.

American’s are increasingly bipolar in our entertainment preferences.

We alternate, between extremes. We go for Charlie then Gru,  back to Osage County, then on to Sesame Street. We love Lady Gaga. We love Taylor Swift.

We  seem to want safe, loving, kind, sane and loyal.

We are fascinated by cruel, hateful, mean and cheated.

Why? We are both. We contain both, all of us. We lust, we loyalify. We hate, we repent.

What wins? Both seem to.

Strong, opposing forces take turns in us, winning, losing, fighting to win again. Become a Charlie Sheen and you self-destruct. Pretend to be a saint and you are a liar. Make good choices or make bad choice, both end up as family entertainment, and grief.  

Charlie, Beverly or Gru?

It’s all so very interesting, but Gru strikes me as just a bit more fun over the long run.

a new and more fully texturized spiritual reality

Posted: May 6, 2011 in beautiful
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We missed the gorgeous streak of jalousied light on the texturized white wall in the front room, just above the couch,  blazing with glory from the roiling, radiant sun because we were thinking about how he had “umhed” and “rrrhed” two years ago, backstabbing us in full daylight with people watching apathetically.

And so right there, in full sight of the devine, we dispossessed the present with the raging despotism of the past. If not that, something else is always getting in, between us and beauty.

We are, and I do not hesitate to say this anymore, aesthetically marginalized by our own myopic distortions of present tense reality,  lost in the gap that exists between our pathetic squints and blinks and the blazing, glancing, whipping spiritualized light of shockingly full-tint, full-throttle reality.

We are tyrannized by our habitual, paranoic, self-limiting, psychic-poor, observationless ways. We gunk and sputter to a stop, short of it and late, epistemic hat in hand stuttering excuses.

Enough has been wasted. Enough reality has been squandered. It is time to slow time, to dawdle with the second-hand and to fiddle and twiddle and muddle with duration and intensity and lengthification.

Today I sat out in the backyard with two young friends and talked about their upcoming marriage. Beautiful!  They, the approaching night, the cool ocean breeze, the nasturtiums lurking slyly along the sidelines — all breath-stopping gorgeous. Then the evening tiptoed in on our words,  drop-dead, wow-you-down, baptized in splendor gorgeous. The water fall in the pond fell glancing behind our thoughts and danced into the lovely idea of a more focused future.

We sipped strawberry lemonade on ice, sucking the sugary red nectar inside our mouths, sucking up the symbiotic ambrosia of the together-now.

We poked and prodded several and various globes of seeing and imagining and believing.

I enjoyed it, the ambience of my friends; I relaxed into it, the extruded presence of my spiritual children — our fully mutualized sentience,  the rise and fall of our texturized voices,  the splashing water, the yellow flowers beyond her hair, the shade tree arching above his dark eyebrows, the possibility of a different future flowing into the air and swirling in the breeze around our cheeks.

The question is more obvious to me lately. What does it mean to live wisely, fully, meaningfully?

I  always feel a little cheated, a little out of it, a bit of a distance between myself and what is, and what is beautiful and what is perfect and pure and falling down softly day-to-day on the walls and heads and minds of the righteous and the evil ones too.

I haven’t got it, but I am beginning to grab a few broken bits and pieces of it.

I want to fully embrace the now. I need to acutely and astutely and even savagely engage the present, activate the awareness of the flow of life that is immediate to the moment, to the space close and at hand and nearer than even that, the only spaces that actually exist and that I can touch with my heat-prints in the ever and  now, the water and flowers and air and presence of my people.

I’m telling you and myself now, that I need and want to look into people’s eyes longer than I am accustomed to. To look, to see, to love, to love again because I haven’t looked, and we haven’t and we don’t really see each other, but we can and must and can again as we age and become a million years old in the seeing experience by the power of him who made the blind eyes to see and the seeing eyes to see again.

I confess it; I desperately need to savor my food and drink longer in my mouth than I have before. It is good! It is better than I have given it credit for. It is the gift, of life, the bread of life, and I love it,  stawberry life, lemon life, hazelnut life waterfalling down my tongue and into my throat.

And I need so much, and may I be so bold as to say to you too that you need so much to pick up the child reaching up to us for a hug. I need that child and that child needs me and I need to carry her and take him by the hand and pat his head and affirm the reality and value of the presence person,  of that little, fragile, precious being.

I must and do and want to  reel up that thought again, each thought again, each and every brilliantly-faced thought,  and hold it like a diamond and stare at it and ruminate over it, and polish itwith my mind, like a stone tumbling across the fast flowing stream of my hypothalamic electrifications.

And I need, need, need God, and I now know that I want, want, want the divine, more than anything. I must get clear on this, everything is from him and to him and for him forever, and I will, to thrive, wrap everything up in the him of the him of him.

And I need my dear ones, my family and my friends, and I must pull them around me and have that time and that talk and that presence in the room even when there is no talk. I cannot and will not, I absolutely refuse, to be alone for very long, because this is wise and there is no wise away from my precious ones that have been given to me.

Listen, I don’t have it, but I’m crudely gesturing toward it; I’m psycholingustically guessing about it; I am sociolinguistically posturing it its direction. I’m spirituologically sponsoring, for you and for me, its very essence.

I command you now, in the name of all that is good and holy, run after ontological joy that looks something like what I have tried to show you here.

This is what the proverb makers and the psalm mongers have always meant by being the wisdom-sage scholar.

fear

Posted: April 26, 2011 in difficulty

What was this?

Water was running down the driveway, lots of water, hard, out of the house and down the drive!

 I hurried into the garage, turned the water shut off value; the water kept running. I rushed to my tool bench to grab a wrench. I had to  turn off the water at the street. What? My tools were gone, all of them, stolen!

A man grabbed me from behind. He had been hiding, behind the side garage door. I wrestled with him for a moment. It was the thief. He broke away and escape around the side of the house.

Running back out to the driveway, I could see that the water was beginning the undermine the whole driveway; the drive had begun to sink, several inches into the ground. This was serious. The house was next! I ran back inside to try to discover where the water was coming from. It seem to be running right out of the slab, in a corner,  as if a water pipe in the concrete had broken.

I ran back out in the street.  My neighbor was there.  I asked him if he would loan me a  crescent wrench. He seemed confused. He didn’t know what this was. He went away and came back with something. It was a breaker bar for a socket. Worthless!

I ran to the  concrete lid covering the water shut off valve in the sidewalk.   No shut off valve there, only a  a tangle of wires and plastic handles.

I could hear the water running, running, running.  I was in a panic.  

 I  sat up. Someone was in the shower; it was  morning.

Then I remembered that in the night I had gotten up because I had heard water running. One of the values on my sprinkler system had gotten stuck on, and I had used a screw driver to shut it off, and had gone back to bed, and the incident had morphed, in my mind, fueled by fear, into a major dream sequence.

Fear! It drives the mind, and behavior and my dreams.

I don’t like it.

It makes me want to unravel its tangle, move beyond it, triumph over it.

Fear is the worse motivator in the world. It drives the worst machinery of mankind forward — arguments, wars, greedy take overs, crime. Fear wastes huge amounts of resources — time, money, sleep,  people.

One of the main goals of the maturing person is to learn to understand and control fear, to use it, to milk it, to dominate it, to move beyond it to the higher motivation for life — love.

What does it take to not live in fear? How would it feel to not be afraid? What would you do if you were not afraid?

For starters, do this.

Get right up next to God, very close to God, trust God, trust his perfect love, a love so powerful it can cast down fear.

Get so excited and passionate about what you want to do that you drive your ramped-up desire right over the top of fear and do what you want to do even though you are  afraid to do it while you are doing it.

Get your butt kicked so badly by life that you end up so  familiar with hard stuff and so angry about it that you are too mad to let your fear dominate you anymore.

If you need therapy, counseling, medication, treatment go get it. Fear is not something beaten  alone. Go get what you need to get so that you can start doing what you need and want to do.

Force yourself to get out of the house, into life, interacting with people, going places and being with people. Action cures anxiety.

Fear and anxiety are treatable. They are something we all struggle with.

Got it? Do it.

For more thoughts and insights on fear, visit www.modernproverbs.net and click on the tab fear or record your own thoughts by bloging a response below.

see

Posted: April 18, 2011 in beautiful
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I went to San Francisco last week to see as much as I could see.

I had that crazy good feeling, that so many of us feel, that makes us want to get up and go out and see it! So I did.

Standing in a narrow alley in Chinatown by the “Delicious Dim Sum” restaurant, I heard the noisy Mahjong tiles in the apartment above.

It was a moment of awareness, just as I had experienced shortly before, when I had seen the Chinese men in the park, talking over the newspaper together, gesturing and commenting and laughing. I saw them, and they seemed so perfectly typical to me, old men hanging out together in the morning, but I didn’t know what they were saying, or thinking or reading.

And standing in the alley, I couldn’t see the Mahjong game above, the players, the stories of the players, their lives and loves and their wins and losses, but I saw the alley, and the underware drying just outside of one window, and I heard the slap of the tiles on the table above.

I saw it, and I didn’t. It’s always this way, for all of us, but the thing is to keep on looking, and to take a second look.

Earlier, we had riden up Hyde Street in a cable car,  clanking and vibrating along up the hill. It felt good. The view of the street and bay out of the back of the old wood and metal was a perfect San Francisco scene, bright, and watery and sloped and lovely and charming. But when we rode the Powell line down to Market Street, and I stopped a moment and talked to the operator as I got off, the view changed.

“They’re screwing us!” he said. “We get no respect from the people who own the company. The police and firemen are treated better than us. But they just keep cutting us. We’re probably going to go on strike. It isn’t right.”

He was angry, frustrated,  embittered. His losses surfaced, and I saw them. The view from his car was different from the view from mine.

Interesting, reality, changes, according to the point of view.

One day in the city, we rode the ferry out to Alcatraz island. Everyone says to do this, so we did. They were right. Interesting, again. Here we saw another reality — prison life. I was particularly engaged by men that we met from the peeks we got between the bars.

The men’s stories, on the audio tour, brought the prison back to life. We heard from the prisoners themselves,  how dark the cell block was at night, but also how the sun would come in one end of the cell block in the early evening, and light the place with life and warmth and beauty in an ugly place, and  how at Christmas, the children of the guards would come sing Christmas carols to the prisoners that they never saw, and how on a summer evening, the prisoners could hear the sounds drifting across the bay from the city, a woman’s laugh, a snatch of music. 

The life they had before, for them, was out of reach here, but it was so very close. This is a  feeling that I too have known, close but so far too.

I was particularly struck by one snatch of story we heard on the audio tour of Alcatraz, how one prisoner was released from the prison, but free and on the street, he said he was lost because,  “the world was moving differently than I was used to, and I didn’t know how to move with it, and everyone had some place to go, but I didn’t have any place to go.”

He saw a different San Francisco that a tourist with a map and a friend and a destination and a place to go home to when the sites had been seen and enjoyed and marked off the must-see list. He had no map, and no list and no home to go to.

In the San Francisco Museum of Modern art, we stood and stared at Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It is wildly colored picture, although we were told that the model, his wife, was dressed in black when she posed for the painting. Matisse saw it differently. When Woman with a Hat was exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, it caused and uproar and gave rise to the avant-garde movement Fauvism, from the French  fauves or “wild beasts.”

Matisse saw it differently, than he had before, life, wildly splashed and staring right at you with emotions bared.

I want to see, like Matisse, like the prisoners, like the cable car operators, like the Chinese families, see it all, know it all,  the stories within the stories, to really see and understand the world.

On Sunday, after we had returned from San Francisco to San Diego, I got to pray with Ishmael. He had never prayed before, never. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to, because he didn’t know how, but then he said he did want to. I prayed a short prayer, to help him, and he repeated it after me.  He wanted to do this, to know this, to have this experience, of God, of life, of all of life.

When we looked up, I asked Ishmael, who’s name means, “God hears,” how he felt. He said he felt good. Just an hour later, he was baptized. His choice, ten years old, his choice and no one elses, to stand up in front of the church and admit to being a God follower.

Stepping up half way out of the baptistery, he paused, and then he flipped his head down under the water again, one more time, a second look around, I guess.

He was learning, how to move, with the movements around and within him, and to pause, and to see, and to make the choice to take a second look around.

And this, I think,  is how it is done, and how one begins to begin to see more.

i never knew you

Posted: April 11, 2011 in difficulty
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Someone came to my office last Saturday and said, “He’s fallen off the wagon again,  and he’s asking for you. Can you come see him?”

So I went out to the lawn in front of the church to see him, where people were gathered to receive the food that we were handing out, but I couldn’t see him right away.

He was there, and I was looking straight into his eyes from about 18 inches distance, but I couldn’t see him. Of course I could see his face, but I couldn’t see the person I had seen when I saw him last. An opaque grey film, like a death shroud, lay on the surface of his eyes.

But it was him, I reconized the face as his. He was in there, like a mad man at home, hiding in the back of the house, lurking insanely in the back closet, looking through the crack in the door, but not coming to answer the friendly knock.

His head weaved in an unstable, drunken way, and he staggered back a little from me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

I put my hand on him to steady him and  leaned in toward him trying to connect with him, trying to look into him, to see the man I had seen last time I had seen him at church. There was little of that now, mostly just thick fog, lying on the surface of his pupils,  locking down his soul like a lid on a casket.   

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can see that you’re in a lot of pain.”

“Oh,  the pain,” he cried out, and reached out toward me with an open hand.

 I knew this part of him; I’ve been in psychological, spiritual pain too.

“Oh,” he groaned in complete anguish. “I just came to see you today,” he said, “to get a little love. Because I knew you guys would give me a little love.”

I remembered when he had told me with such confidence a few months earlier, “I’m done. I’m done with the drinking.”

But he wasn’t done, drinking, self-medicating, trying to kill the pain, trying to kill himself just to kill the pain.

And so I gave him a little love,  by sitting down with him on the retaining wall, by taking his hand, by praying for him, by telling him he could stop, again, and by telling him that we all loved him. I told him that I wanted to see him again.

“I can’t stop,” he said.

 “You can stop,” I told him, “You’ve done it before.”

But I knew what he meant. For forty years he hasn’t been able to stop after he has stopped, again and again and again he hasn’t stopped.  

Then, in totally anguish he looked at me and said, “I know that Jesus loves me.”

 I knew him then, because he was so much like me, a residing faith all mixed with brain numbing pain. There was the faith,  the real faith, leaking out from behind the opaque eyes, hovering in front of us on the lawn, his faith and mine, the faith that makes us brothers, that has always bonded us together as brothers, two incompletely healed men in front of each other, both in need of Jesus.

“Yes, Jesus does love you,” I said. “You’ve told me this before, and I believe that it is true. He loves you, even when you are like this.” 

He left after a while — to go get another beer, which begs the question: What to do?

                                                                         ***********

 In Matthw 25 we find the following teaching of Jesus:

  31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

   34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

   37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

   40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

   41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

   44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

   45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

   46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”


Jesus told his followers that when they saw the sick and broken and needy, that they saw him. It is interesting that he didn’t say that when they saw the good, the strong and the successful that they saw him.

 Jesus’s words about needy people are actually quite unsettling.  Jesus said that those who do not care for the lonely, sick, hungry and incarcerated, will not be invited into the kingdom, but instead will be punished.  He didn’t teach that we had to fix them, but he did make it clear that we were to care for them.

This is kind of sobering to me, the implications  of what Jesus taught, the teaching that we will not be judged, as we are so often taught in our safe, intellectualized, sanitized Christian churches, by our faith alone, but that we will be judged by whether or not our faith caused us to love and care for sick, hungry, cold, imprisoned, lonely people of the earth, regardless of whether they changed or not.

Jesus taught that if  we love him, then we will love people,and that if we do not love them, he will not recognize us as his own in the final judgment. That’s unsettling too.

I know a lot of very spiritual people. I try to be one myself, God-following, praying, helping people in a good way, but Jesus actually taught that some powerfully spiritual people, who do great acts of spirituality in his name, will not be a part of his kingdom. 

Look at Matthew 7: 21.  

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

 They knew him. They claimed him. They did great things in his name. That will not be disputed. They will tell you that. Jesus will buy that, “They knew me,” he will say sadly; then he will add, “but I didn’t know them.”

What will make that true?  It will be, I believe, because as these mighty ones lived out their lives, they didn’t do the will of God which is to love people the way Jesus commanded them to, and so they were very clearly not of his kind.

Jesus doesn’t know those who claim him but don’t know love.  He doesn’t know them because they refuse to love  and because they refused to let Jesus know them and love them.  We all are at risk, I think, in this way. We do this, remain unknown to Jesus, so to speak, whenever we do not admit our brokenness, our  weakness, our loneliness, our addictive habits, our spiritual famine. And when we do this, when we act like we are okay, when we aren’t okay,  this has terrible consequences.

Not knowing the weakness in ourselves, we don’t know the weak in our communities, and so we don’t welcome the weak or care for them and in doing this we don’t welcome Jesus and so we don’t know him! Crazy, fascinating, the mistake, this train of mistakes, beginning in ourselves and following on in tragic fashion to our community and to God.

To deny our own humanity, our own broken, impoverished, addicted, imprisoned selves, causes us to also separate from those like this in our community, and this distances us from God.

“I never knew you,” cries Jesus, “because you hid from me behind the reinforced gates and walls of wealth and accomplishment and self-interest. You denied your pain, and you hid from the pain of the world, and in doing so you hid from me, and I couldn’t find you to know you!”

Jesus does not know us when we do not know the drunk man staggering up to the church door. He does not know us when we do not know the hungry family living three blocks away from the church. He does not know us, when we do not go sit with the old woman, living alone, and eating dinner at night alone and wondering why she is still alive. Jesus does not know us when we do not know the child who is absent a parent,  or both parents or a grandma, the inadequately loved, hurting, at risk child in our neighborhood, school or church.

We may cross the globe on a well-financed and well-intentioned mission of mercy to bring the truth to people in another country, we may minister powerfully in our church by leading worship or teaching classes or sitting on boards or praying for the weak, and yet if we will not even cross the streets and sidewalks in our own cities and commuities to know the people living in need in our own backyards, we may find it someday said by God himself, “I don’t know you.”

Jesus does not know us when we hide from him by hiding from our own  hopeless, hurting, needy flesh and blood lying sprawled out on the church lawn drunk.

Flat out: Jesus doesn’t know the indifferent, the selfish and the uninvolved in all of us. 

His love can forgive even our lack of love, but Jesus himself warned us very strongly about this matter.

We must cry out for mercy and help in this business of loving people. The best cry we can make to Jesus is, “Know me! Know every weak, hungry, addicted, broken, imprisoned, naked, drunken part of me.”

And when see the other fallen and broken creatures of the world, the best thing that we can  cry out to them is, “I know you! I know you because you are me! And I know you because you are Christ to me.”

 ‘I tell you the truth,” said Jesus, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”  Matthew 25:45

What should we do? We should know them!

 

sex

Posted: April 5, 2011 in people
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Two weeks before he was to be married,  the student chaplain at the university where my daughter goes to school  told the girl he was about to marry that he was gay.

And so, ended, the dream, they had together; they dropped  the wedding plans, the marriage and then shortly afterwards, the young man resigned from his leadership role at the school. He graduates from college this spring — in pain. And he’s not the only one.

My wife and I, talking over coffee this morning, wondered, about the conversations, behind the scenes, between the couple, with the parents,with friends and with the school leaders —  painful, excruciating, gut wrenching. The words said to this young man will be remembered by him, for life. And some of the words will have to be recovered from.

Sexual identity is no small issues; our reactions to it are so powerful and so life changing. I really suffer for this young man, and his fiancée and their parents and friends and the school’s students and leaders. This is hard, and I can see that the pain of it has not be adequately acknowledged by the school, by those involed and  by the students. But it is there, and it will not just go away. There will be a painful, ongoing conversation, and it will last much longer than some people  want it to.

I know pain.  So do so many people. A girl told me a while back that she was being pressured by an older guy to have sex with him, even though he is married. This isn’t new for her. Sex has been a huge factor in shaping the last ten years of her life.  She’s pained by it and marked by it. What to do? I have told her again and again, “God loves you.”  He does.

As my wife and I talked this morning, on the TV news, operating background to our dialogue, their was a blub about college guys voting on girls, “hot or not.” My wife remarked, “So, is that considered fun or  is it harassment?” The conversation about that and all things sexual  is being had, at the most public level, but much of it will be a report and a few people’s opinions not the much needed exposé of the pain, within the story. The news doesn’t often deal with the pain of men and women who are or who feel or who are made to feel unattactive. Not many people publically talk about the massive, universal insecurity young people have over “how I look,” or with the brutal question some young people pose to themselves, “Am I hot enough to be loved?”  That is not even a healthy question, but it is out there, and we all know it, but we won’t often hear it put that straight.

Too often, when it comes to sexual issues, we don’t have the conversation that is within the conversation, that really matters. Christians, for instance, are known to talk a lot about sexual morality, and of course, morality is very real, and good, and Biblical morality is from God and very important,  but the converstation about what is right must be combined with talk about what has already gone wrong.  Young people need to be able to talk to older people about what is currently happening. They need to talk about  birth control, about STD’s, about sex and marriage and about homosexuality. They are talking about these things with their friends in their dorm rooms but not as much with their parents or grandparents. Why? Sometimes the older people simply will not have this conversation. They may not even know how. But young people still need to talk, to someone who is open and wise and  who has lived for a while and failed and learned to be gentle and forgiving.

The conversation  about sex must include the forgiveness and grace that need to follow failure. We need to talk about how our society and the church and schools have responsed to sexual issues in the past and whether those ways of responding are ways we want to keep using.  There has been a lot of judgment in the past that ignores our universal failure in this area. When it comes to issues of sexual morality, we all fail, actually quite similarly, and that is precisely what is too often ignored. The things to talk about are “our” sexual issues, not “their” sexual issues and we all we need to confess more and pronounce less.

Why confess about this more? Because others  are confessing, openly.  The confessional conversation is  already  going on, in public, in private, in everywhere. Proof? Just go to the movies.

Two nights ago my wife and daughters and I went to see the movie “Lincoln Lawyer.”  It’s a fairly fun movie. Matthew McConaughey actually gets a chance to act, and he does pretty well, at being cool, and fun. In the story, sex is for sale, and  murder after. It’s interesting, what entertains us. Are sex and murder entertaining? Of course they are.  Why? Because sex and violence have a powerful grip on all of us.

Sex is in the conversation that people are having, and if we want to be part of the conversation we must openly talk about sex. And if we don’t talk about sex, well, then we don’t, but that won’t stop everyone else from talking and interpreting it in ways that may not be honest or real. Sex is on the docket, and won’t be taken off, and if we don’t say anything,  we’ll be left out, without weighing in on one of life’s most significant issues.

Weigh in. I will.  Intepret or it will be interpreted for you. Sex is good, normal, fun, exciting, healing, and don’t plan on it stopping anytime  soon. And sexual issues can also be terribly and profoundly painful, because sex is not just a physical act, but a deeply ontological, psychological, social and spiritual part of all of us. It is wonderful and makes a wonderful life, and not.

A friend  sent me a text yesterday, “It’s a boy!”

“Cool!” I texted back, “Congrats!” This will be this young couples’ first baby. Lots of fun ahead for them.

A bit later, my daughter just texted me from her dorm room. “A girl on my hall just told us she’s engaged. Sorry I didn’t get back to you after you texted me, but I was yelling with everybody.”

“Whoohoo!” I texted back. “I guess.”

Of course its “whoohoo!” and I’m sure it will be fine, I guess, but I don’t know.  But it  will have a chance, I think, of being more fine if this young couple has people to talk to before they marry about sex and career and babies and fidelity and about times  coming when life won’t be “Whohoo!”

A happy marriage and happy babies after the wedding is absolutely fantastic, but it isn’t what some people end up as a result of romance, and love and sex. For many, the  relational and sexual stuff, as life goes along,  gets just plain excruciating —  a woman I know who was sexually abused as a child and then cheated on in her marriage as an adult, the  young man at the university who came out as gay, his fiancée, several of my conflicted gay friends, a woman I know who regrets not getting the degrees she always wanted to have before she had  babies. I love them, but they hurt, over choices they have made or others have made, and I know this because they tell me.

This morning my wife and I talked about a couple of people we know who are gay. One of them is in so much obvious pain that I worry about him. His sister just had a baby, made the family proud. He didn’t. I suffer for him. He needs to talk to someone, who is safe, and can understand. If he doesn’t find places to be heard, and understood, then he will really, really suffer, like he is right now. I know that God loves him and wants to enter into this struggle with him, but is this young man hearing this, enough, and does he understand this? I don’t know.

Here is the deal. I’m not shutting up about this, and I don’t think the rest of us should either.

We need to talk. And it needs to be talk that is first of all without judgment regarding people who are outside the norm and people who have made mistakes, and people who are in pain. And we need to talk more to young people who have questions and have never had honest answers from parents or leaders who have the wisdom that comes from experience and thought and morality and God and love.

In my house sex is a common topic. We laugh about it, make jokes about it, answer serious questions about it, have moral standards that we discuss, and yet we are open about our weaknesses and failures to be all we want to be.   We treat sex as a normal part of life, and we take it very seriously when there is ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery,  pain, beauty or love surrounding it. And there is, all this and so much more hovering at the edges of our sexuality.

Sex is a complex issue, and it needs some complex thinking and a complex dialogue. The people with the easy answers are fooling themselves and so they will be fooled, as life unfolds. The main thing is to  be open with ourselves and others and to get to know both ourselves and other people,  especially people who are different from us, and who have had different experiences, and to hear them, and feel with them and understand them and their pain so that we can better understand ourselves and our pain.

We need to have a conversation about sex, that doesn’t stop, with sex, but extends on into morality and God and pain and grace and unconditional love too.

Let’s keep talking.

For more of my thoughts on this, you are invited to visit www.modernproverbs.net  Click on the topic button, “Sex.”

details

Posted: March 28, 2011 in beautiful
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“Have you even lived on your own?” I asked.

“Not really,” she replied. “Even last year, when I moved out, I kept going back over to his house, even though I knew he didn’t really love me. He said he did, but I know he didn’t.”

I turned her words over in my mind, like stones, looking at each side of each of them.”

“Perhaps it would be good,” I suggested, “for you to figure out your core, to become a strong independent woman, with known boundaries,” before you go back into any close relationships.”

“I think it would,” she said.

                                                                                          *****

I pushed the camera down in tall grass, pointed it up into the sunlit blades, and snapped a shot, blind.

Then I extracted the camera from the grassy mess, flipped on the LCD screen and peered into the shiny glass.  

Thatched, crossed, beautifully sunlit blades — captured in detail was a pure ribbed and vaulted glory.

                                                                                          *****

I pulled off the cover and glanced down at the tops of the valves, damp and webby and spidery. The manifold linked the valves together and then sent three-quarter inch pipes plunging into the ground. It didn’t make complete sence. I sat down on the low wall and looked harder. The one inch pipe was the supply line, the three-quarter inch  pipes fed each zone. Looking more closely, I could see that some of the pipes on the manifold were threaded. Then I knew. This beast could be screwed apart and another valve easily added.  By means of a few intricacies, I could yet turn my backyard into Eden.

                                                                                           ******

I’ve noticed of late that both the beauty and the way forward are often found right in front of us, within the peculiarity of the details.

imagination

Posted: March 21, 2011 in beautiful
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 “We’re all just trash waiting to be thrown away! That’s all a toy is!” screams Lotso, the stuffed bear,  in  in Toy Story 3.

“You’re terrific as far as I am concerned,” Charlotte tells Wilber the pig in Charlotte’s Web.

Talking toys, spiders, and pigs —  fun, fascinating and entertaining.

How?

How do toys and spiders come by parts, lines, and fame, in fact more fame than most humans. How do such characters enter and dominate the thinking, talking and emoting world of humans?

By means of imagination, the happy(although not always) fun-loving gift given to humans. 

Imagine it, and it lives. Imagine it and it is real, at least in our minds, and maybe in the next reality that we construct.

Perhaps, many of us have played it way to safe, mentally. Perhaps we have thought that we have had to remain safely within the boundaries of our previous thoughts, but we don’t, have to, retain such constrictions.  

We can jump, mentally, and run around the rooms of our brains and find a door and break out. We can stride, gallop, and break into a flat-out mental romp.

Through imagination can come a new invention, solution and creation. Through the imagined image we can bring a new story, poem, play, song and artwork. Clever, cute, fun, sad, touching, entertaining, fascinating, shocking, disturbing — this is the power of the imagination.

Think it out, flesh it out, and give it away. And this is not merely the privilege of writers, musicians and actors. Imagination is the gift of the scientist. And it is the gift of the mom, the housewife, the plumber and the office manager. It is the gift of anyone who wants it, who will risk it.

We all have an imagination.  We all can think of a possibility not yet thought of. We can all take off the mental restraints and fly into unthought realms to solve any problem, to animate any thought, to explore any question.

So.

Think freely. Fly faster. See further.

 If you were to imagine something better, more fun, more healing, more constructive than you have yesterday, what would it be today?

friends

Posted: March 16, 2011 in friends
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Having different kinds of friends — so very interesting.

I have a bounce-off-of friend. I bounce stuff off him to see what it looks like coming back toward me with his spin on it. It’s helpful, the curve my ideas take on the rebound.  Yesterday we spent an hour on the phone debating the growth curve of organizations. Fascinating.

I have a never-let-go friend. She is my stick-tight friend. We have waded through years and yards of stuff, and she is still there. I love the safety of such a friend.  This week we reflect on a relational train wreck we both witnessed and survived. I totally adore, her loyalty — to me.

I have a calls-when-he needs-help friend. I don’t mind. I like being the go-to-guy for him. I like how he trust that what I say, or that what I don’t say,  is good. It’s good for me to be there for him,  in the sacred moment, when the masks come off. This week he told me that when he drove away from the house, after the fight, it was as if he was moving through a dream. “I couldn’t believe that I was doing,” he told me, “what  I could see myself doing, leaving, like that.” It was good, to deconstruct the dream, that was really — reality.

I have a conceptual friend. When we meet, ideas meet. We talk insights, theories, axioms, intellectual constructs. We discourse on aesthetics, theology, history, sociality. Recently we explored the kind of creativity that can arise out of devastation. Our friendship exists within the universe of our ideations. I love an abstraction, that we invent and then that we event. It  becomes other people’s reality. Fine, so very fine!

The other day I thought about a friend who is not longer a friend. We went through something hard and this friend didn’t understand what was to be understood within the thin and quickly ripping fabric of possible understanding and so we went on down the road with the clothing that had previously covered us, ripped completely off, and I found myself traveling alone. It happens. I recovered myself with the warm embrace of new friends.

It’s very interesting, the variation of sociality.

It is very interesting, the morph, the seed, the stalk, the bloom, and the sometimes surprisingly quick wilt of togetherness, the amazing sustainability of real love.

What to do?

Enjoy, the sweet ones you have been  given.

Grieve, the once dear ones, occasionally lost.

Look forward to the precious ones still to come.

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