The Christian Monist

GERMFASK XXII - Finale

2012-02-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

Greg was the first at the table the following Wednesday. Michael arrived soon after. Debra and Father Randy rode in together and came in at the same time. There was an eerie silence that morning as each one gave Sharon their orders. She asked, "Is Mr. Hans coming?"

Greg gave a quick and confident, "Oh, he'll be here . . . he is usually late you know."

Silence continued to dominate with just the sound of metal forks hitting ceramic plates and the occasional slurping of coffee. Greg looked at his watch. It was a quarter past eight and Tom had never been this late. He looked out the window and the snow, which had been falling softy, was now coming down more steadily. "Maybe the weather is slowing him down." Mumbled Greg.

Michael spoke up, "I don't think so. Arnie said that even on the morning of that terrible ice storm, Tom was the only one who made it, walking the 15 miles round trip to get here."

Greg was getting restless as he finished off his flat-jacks covered with syrup, distilled by Arnie during the previous spring from the maple trees just across the road. Greg laid down his fork and announced, "I'm going to look for the man . . . any takers?" He jumped up and put on his coat. He walked towards the door.

The rest of the group just looked at one another. Debra jumped up, with her plate in hand and whispered, "I'm in." She passed Sharon on the way out the door, with her plate of eggs still in her hand, "I'll be right back with the plate."

In a moment, Father Randy and Michael followed in suite.

As the three of them gathered in the parking lot, Greg was in his 1975 VW camper van, the engine running and him leaning out the window scrapping off the windshield. "Jump in!"

The father, Michael and Debra climbed in. The mini bar table was put to good use to set their plates on. Greg pulled out on the highway. "Hang on back there!" shouted Greg. "It's getting a little slippery and I have rear-wheel drive."

Debra, sitting with her back to Greg, twisted around and said, "I've got my Subaru."

"That's Okay. My Tin Lizzy has never let me down."

They drove south on 77 past the GERMFASK Cemetery on the left, where many of the early settlers were burred. They turned left on Lustila Road until they got to Needle Pointe. Another left took them by the shore of Manistique Lake. The road narrowed after they passed the Needle Pointe curve and the snow grew deeper. The Tin Lizzy started to fish tail and then just spin.

"I'm confident that his place is at the very end. It's only about a 1/4 mile, so is it okay if we hoof it from
here?"

No one answered but they just bailed out. Debra still had her Jolly Inn plate in her hand as they continued walking. Their caps were becoming white with snow. Before long they came to the end of the road the last cabin on the lake.

Greg led the troops like a General in the trenches of World War I. Over the snow drifts and up to the porch. He knocked on the door. There was no response. Father Randy walked around to the picture window that looked out on the lake. He wiped off the window and looked in. "Hey," he called. This place looks completely empty. They stood side by side peering through the glass.

Greg walked around to the back door and knocked. "Tom! Hey Tom, it's Greg!" Still there was silence, save the wind in the Aspens and Birches and the crunching of the ice beneath the Sorels of Father Randy.

The kind priest put his arm around Greg's shoulders. "He's gone. The mystery man has left us."

Greg mumbled almost beneath and audible decibel, "But we weren't finished. I had so many things to ask him."

Back at the Jolly Inn, Greg collected the empty plates and coffee cups and carried them back inside. He waved farewell to his breakfast friends. He motioned to Debra and she rolled down her window with the power button. "Yeah?"

Greg asked, "Will you be coming back? I mean, you said that you were coming just to meet this interesting stranger . . . now that he's gone?"

Debra nodded. "Sure, I'll be back. It is quite a drive for me, so I may not be here every Wednesday, especially in the winter, but I'll be back. I think Mr. Hans opened several cans of worms that would be worth discussing." With that, she rolled up her window and pulled out on to 77 and headed north. Greg looked around and the others were already gone.

When Greg got back to his cabin, he found an envelope and a parcel. He opened the letter and read it out loud, "To my Earthing friend, thanks so much for patience with me, and your imaginative trust. In the package you will find the complete, what you would call 'Encyclopedia' of our people and our planet, which I have translated into my imperfect command of English. Enjoy."

GERMFASK XXI

2012-02-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

Debra seemed to come alive after appearing quite subdued formost of the morning. She looked like she wanted to speak, yet the words didn’tcome at first. She looked up at Tom andback down at the papers in front of her. She wasn’t reading them but playfullyrolling them up and then unrolling them. “Mr. Hans, I’ve remained quiet here because, like I’ve said before, Idon’t have a dog in this fight. I was invited here by my good Friend Randalbecause by nature I’m a courious woman. However, having sat here for a few weeks and listened to you making thesame points over and over, I felt like it was time I spoke.”

Tom smiled and sat back in his chair, “Of course . . .please do!”

“Well, maybe saying I feel hurt is an over statement.However, I do feel that I must defend all those sincere people in mycongregation, the ones who come each Sunday morning and worship God from a pureplace in their hearts. I think most ofthem have grasped His mercy correctly and they don’t come as some futileexercise in trying to win their own salvation. I don’t think you've give usenough credit. We aren’t that dumb herd of sheep, as you portray us. Secondly,it was my understanding that you were here to learn from us . . . but instead,week after week we have endured some pretty sharp lectures from you. I guess those are my main points.”

Tom stared out the window and up into the bare trees as ifhe was expecting line of crows to fly in . . . bringing him the appropriatewords in which to respond to Debra, one by one. Eventually finding the wordsinside his own head, he spoke, “Debra, I am sorry that my language was harsh.If you know my intent and my perspective you would know that most of my motiveswere as a scientist, not an arrogant buffoon. It may be hard for you to believe, but I actually have a tender spot inmy heart even for David and I deeply regret driving him away. I guess I under-estimated the Earthlings' preoccupation with shame. However, weHanserians speak rather frankly to each other and I’m sure I’ve been wrong inmy lacking of cultural sensitivity. Forthis I do ask your, as we as Randy’s, Greg’s and Michael’s forgiveness.” He paused to look around the group and hesmiled at each member until thy nodded a subliminal notion of forgiveness backin his direction.

Tom continued, “I will have to say that motives in general have ahodgepodge of origins. For example,while I have a deep passion and fascination with this mission, I also amlooking forward to the limelight of success when I return home. On my planet, Iwill be esteemed, at least for a short time by my peers, as your Jane Goodall,Gandhi, Neil Armstrong and Billy Graham all rolled up as one person. There is nothing a man longs more for than tobe seen as a hero by the woman he admires. My wife, while missing me terribly, will welcome me like your sportshero . . . and nothing can be better than that. With that I seek my own revaluation and I admit it. With that out of the way,I willreturn to speak about the dear people of your congregations. I wasn’t attempting to demonize them. I wasjust pointing out the fundamental basis of human nature, and it doesn’t matterif the humans were reared here on Earth or on my planet. So, while I understand that I came across . .. as you say . . . judgmental, I didn’t mean it that way. It was an exercise inhonesty and logic. People, Earthlingsand Hanserians, are hopelessly (or near hopelessly) addicted to selfrevaluation. It is futile of course. I am confident that 90% of the people who attend your Sunday morning church services do it out of 'ought.' To miss a service, makes them feel less value in God's eyes as well as their Christian peers. The real meaning of it was lost a long time ago. So,I will stand by the words which I’ve said.”

Father Randy looked had his wristwatch and responded, “It isgetting quite late and I’ve observed the beginnings of the lunch crowdfiltering in. Maybe we should adjourn until next week.”

Tom had a wave of panic sweep across his face, “Oh damn!”

Michael always flinched with a look of disgust when Tom usedwords which he thought were inappropriate.

Tom continued, “Friends, I ask for your patience as I thinkI’m near a breakthrough in my searching and if you would give me thirty moreminutes I will try to wrap this up.”

Greg looked alarmed, “You don’t mean wrapping up this whole journeydo you?”

Tom didn’t say anything but shrug his shoulders. Then helooked sad and seemed to have difficulty making eye contact with the group fora second or two. He played in his tomatoseeds on his plate with the tip of his fork. He then took a deep breath and continued, “Let me rephrase things abit.”

The group listened in silence.

“Imagine that on my planet if we took a very different approachto the Gospel and the Church. First ofall, we would see the Gospel as God’s act of complete purification, open toeveryone who wants it. This means imagining that whenever God thinks of us, Hejumps into the air and clicks His heels with a big grin on His face not lookingangry at us, and always watching us for screw ups. Then, to keep our focus on this severe mercy, we get together wheneverwe want, to share the joys of our humanness, art, music, food, drink. But partof that getting together would be watching each other closely, looking forsigns of doubts about other's absolute forgiveness. If we see those signs, we would stronglyencourage that person to refocus on God’s satisfied ledger and thus encouragingthem and helping them to live the enriched lives God wants us to have.

Additionally, we would have no buildings to support, nomemberships to define us, no order of activities for us to demonstrate toothers how good we are, no schedule for which we become enslaved, no grandministries or crusades, no collection of money, but the sharing of food andshelter. We would listen to the olderpeople who have had much more life experiences and maturity, but no charters,no doctrinal statements that dice up the scriptures and glue them back togetherinto complex configurations for which they were never intended. We would have no organizational charts, no namefor the group, no efforts of a pastor to control or manipulate us to pump uphis futile efforts at gaining self revaluation, Do any of you seen any problem with that?”

Greg was smiling, “All I can say is it reminds of a JohnLennon song . . . but with a Heaven . . . and a Hell.”

Michael shook his head, “It sounds incredibly dangerous. It also sounds like another sorrow excuse not to go to church."

Father Randy asked, “What about the sacraments?”

Tom sat up straight revealing his tall, slender frame (whichseemed to have become taller . . . andmore slender since starting this breakfast ritual five months earlier), “Michael,it seems that the greatest danger of all . . . is ending up like you earthlingshave. And Father Randy, baptizing one another would be a useful illustration ofthe great spiritual cathartic. When we ate our meals and thought how Jesus gaveup his body and his blood for our lives, it would be a good thing . . . but nota routine or a ritual. Jesus and His disciples were eating a full, regular mealwhen Jesus said, ‘When you do this remember me.’ It wasn’t a religious ritualneither to them, nor for the Church for a couple hundred years.”

Michael stood up, “On that insulting note, I mustdepart. I have a lot going on and Ireally need to get going.”

Tom also stood up and walked around the table. In a move,which was out of character for him, he shook Michael’s hand and then gave him abig hug. “Tell that daughter of yours .. . that she’s a smart girl, she is loved dearly by her father. Tell her too that her father is a decent man . . . and both she and him are totallyaccepted by their Heavenly Father.”

Michael gave him a strange look and walked towards the cashregister.

Tom looked back around and Father Randy was putting on hissheep-shearers jacket and Debra was stuffing the crown of her head into aNorwegian wool cap. They parted as Tomhugged them each.

Greg was still sitting and watching. Tom sat back downbeside him and started to gather his things. Greg spoke, “You’re leaving usaren’t you?”

Tom smiled, “We each have a home and there comes a time whenthe calling of it becomes irresistible.”

Greg’s eyes filled with tears. “But we must get together . .. uh, do you like beer?”

Tom smiled, “It’s the only thing I’ve found more disgustingthan coffee.”

Greg reached out and grabbed Tom’s sleeve, “Is this reallythe end? I have so many questions foryou. I’ve got to ask them or I will go mad.”

Tom smiled again, “I’m not the decider about my leaving. I hope, in a way . . . but not in every way .. . to see you next week.” Tom huggedthe man with a bear hug, did an about face and was out the door.

GERMFASK XX

2012-02-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

Michael paused for a moment . . . then he picked up the book. As he thumbed through the pages he looked at Tom, "You see, the scriptures are so full of descriptions of the Church, how to organize, how to meet that it is hard to pick out just one passage."

Tom was focused with his hands resting on the table. "I think it is quite the contrary. Stepping in from outside of your culture, I see virtually no mandates for the parameters of the Church. There's a word here or there, but even if you sew them together on the threads of magical thinking, you still can't create any kind of mandate that is anywhere close to the complexities that you call the Church."

Michael seemed to ignore him as he stopped the flipping of pages and was reading in one place. "Okay, let me read from Hebrews chapter 10."

¹⁹ Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, ²⁰ by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, ²¹ and since we have a great priest over the house of God, ²² let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. ²³ Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. ²⁴ And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, ²⁵ not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Michael looked up from the book and smiled, "So this is the mandate for us to meet on a regular basis. That meeting, by tradition, is Sunday morning. It is logical that if we follow the other passages that we have a time of teaching, thus Sunday school, a time of preaching, the sermon, worship and the sacraments. You sew them together, as you say, with careful thought and you arrive at the church we have today."

Tom was shaking his head again, "But pastor Monroe, listen to what you are saying. You are making the 'we are in Paris' argument again. We don't want your culture . . . we want the essence of the scriptures. You are a generous giver, always wanting to give me your culture . . . but we don't want it! It wouldn't work with my people. We must make a clear line of demarcation between the scriptural mandates and your culture and traditions." Tom thought for a moment and when he noticed, written on their faces, that no one was following him, he added. "Let me paraphrase that same passage so that you can dislodge it from your cultural connotations.

Hey, my fellow selected ones, since we are totally saturated with this overwhelming cleansing, we should be very confident that God accepts us just as we are and that we have a perfect validation in Christ. Therefore, we should be confident and stop trying to make ourselves feel valuable by the things we do, nor should we feel any shame when we approach God in all His glory. With that in mind, we have tremendous hope that in the end we will live with God forever and in his perfect acceptance. Now that we can set aside all our efforts to make ourselves pleasing to God, each other and ourselves, we can move on. We should then encourage one another and remind one another that we are perfectly clean and we can stop all these efforts for self-revaluation and focus on loving each other, and all of God's creation. I know that some of you see no point in getting together with other selected people, while I understand that (now that the yoke of religion has been broken) I think it would be good for you to get together, to remind each other that we are completely forgiven, so that we can continue on in that fulfillment. As the end of your physical life on this earth and our cooperative lives on this earth draws near, we shouldn't become more isolated, which is tempting to do, but hang out with one another even more. We need to be constantly reminded that we are good people, perfect . . . because of the Gospel. When we are alone, we start to feel devalued. That, my dear fellow selected ones, is the Church.

I know that was a bit long and maybe I got carried away, but nowhere in that passage do I see a mandate to meet every Sunday morning at 10 AM, to endure a Sunday school teaching session, a sermon, a worship exercise and on and on. If a mandate resides in those verses it is simply, don't avoid each other, you need to remind each other of the great benefit we have in forgiveness."

Father Randy spoke up, "Tom, I think one big difference between my Church tradition is that we do accept scriptures as God's word, but we also accept our traditions as being from God, as our forefathers and Church father's have interpreted them. So, I recognize what you are saying, that you can't come up with our system just from scriptures alone, but we relay heavily on the wisdom of our forefathers. Truth comes via them as well. So I stand as a bulwark in defense of our Christian traditions and the great men of faith who went before us."

Tom smiled and sipped his coffer, which of course was followed by the bitter frown. "Dear Father, I apologize if I have offended you in anyway. I have the utmost respect of the great men and women of courage and deep thought which sprinkles the path of your Church's long history. I'm sure in the Protestant traditions there are many great men and women of faith. I don't mean to criticize your culture . . . but simply to point out that it is culture we are talking about and not mandates from God Himself. While you have these great people to look up to, you and I both know that your history is also filled with much evil."

Tom then looked across the table at Michael, "I'm sure that your traditions are also littered with men and women who have done horrible things in the name of God. My point in saying this isn't to make you feel bad out of cruelty. It isn't to put your culture down. But to demonstrate that culture is not pure. Because things are a certain way, doesn't mean that it should be that way and, by hell, it doesn't mean that we need to import it into other cultures as mandates from God."

Tom took his last drink of coffee and sloshed it around in his mouth and swallowed. "I don't see how you people grow to like this stuff. I've tried. I still don't like coffee but I have gotten myself a caffeine dependency."

Tom paused then continued, "So, after studying your history and knowing human nature, I think what happens in the context of what you call Church, isn't what it should be. My metaphor would have people arriving at the doors of the church with outstretched hands and empty cups. They're not just hungry, they are starving to death . . . starving for righteousness. In the same way we were created for the oxygen that fills Earth's atmosphere, we were also created to be righteous, meaning having the acceptance of God's good favor. The Church has the opportunity . . . rather the obligation . . . to fill those cups so that the people are satisfied to an infinite degree. But instead, the Church has often seized on the pilgrims' vulnerability. They draw the people in with the scent of good food, but then put a ring in their snouts instead of a meal in their mouths. We hold the food, the prize, at the end of a stick to entice them. You tell them, 'just do this and that, THEN you will be fed with righteousness.'"

Tom looked around the group and saw that they were listening carefully so he continued, "For your Church, Father, it was the evils of the Medici Popes, their longing was for wealth and power not to pour God's righteousness on the masses. The longing was in their personal passion to have value. The indulgences were the apogee of that mis-directed longing." Tom quickly rotated to his left and looked at David, "In your churches, pastor Monroe, it is the myth of godliness or godly living that is the ring in the snout. It's the books of how-to Christianity, how to be the perfect Christian wife, the perfect Christian son, the perfect Christian business owner, or perfect pastor. Those books are written by people who believe in perfection in the same way that the children believe in pixie dust."

Tom was quiet for a moment and everyone was speechless, but he wasn't finished. "I've visited your worship services. You teach that this is what God wants for His people, to worship him Sunday after Sunday, singing your songs, rolling your eyes, raising your hands. But don't you see the truth in this?"

Greg and Michael both shook their heads slowly and Tom answered his own rhetorical question, "It is really an exercise in futility for the pilgrims with the empty cups. It isn't about God. It isn't about us telling God how much we love Him. It is all about us, telling ourselves, that we are pretty good people because we are good at worshiping God. I challenge you to do an honest word study of 'worship' in the New Testament. To God, our worship is a stench. It is a stench because we replace the simple, free purity, which a loving God wants us to relish in . . . with exercises, in which we hope that our own skill will redeem us."

Tom sat back in his chair and there was nothing but silence . . . except for Greg's sigh and his whisper, "Makes sense to me."

GERMFASK XIX

2012-01-31T07:13:00.000-08:00

"Where is he?" Asked Tom

Mike flashed a kind smile, "Actually, at this moment he is meeting with his discipleship team. David felt that he heard the voice of God and God was calling him to reach this whole area of Michigan with the Gospel. He's selected six or seven of his best men. They are committing themselves to discipline and total obedience to God and they think that God is going to do something amazing through them." He paused to sip his coffee while witnessing the doubt written on Tom's face. So he added in David's defense, "I have a good feeling about this. I think God is about to do something big here and it might be through David and his men."

"Won't work." said Tom, shaking his head.

Mike seemed more irritated than ever before, "How do you know it won't work? We serve a big God and the right people, humbled in submission to that God can change the world . . . I just find it unspiritual to dismiss such acts of faith out of hand. You don't know what God can and can't do!"

Tom shook his head, "Michael. This isn't about God, this is about David. It won't work. He can't fill that hole in his soul by doing some great campaign for God. That's what doesn't work. It is always about the man . . . or woman. The campaigns, ministries, movements, crusades are all the same. God is the bystander in the feeble attempts for one person or a group of them, to try and patch up those huge, gospel-shaped, cracks in their soul . . . using the innocent as chinking. It is emotional reasoning at work again."

There was standoff of silence as the rest of them ate their breakfasts. In a moment Tom spoke again, "So he's never coming back?"

Mike smiled again, "Apparently not. He and his men are spending the first hour of everyday in prayer over this. They are laying the groundwork, through prayer for the coming revival."

Tom shook his head again. "It's all my fault and I regret being too sharp with the man."

Greg spoke up, "Tom, I don't think this has anything to do with you."

"Certainly it has everything to do with me," said Tom. "It was something I said . . . and as quickly as the words were out of my mouth . . . did I realize that I had gone too far."

Michael added a word of agreement with Greg's words, "No, it wasn't about you. I spoke to David yesterday and he really felt that God was speaking to him. He didn't say anything about you."

"Of course he didn't bring it up. He is trying to put as much space between himself and reality as he can. To say it was connected to what I said would be far too close to reality." Everyone was silent and looked confused. "So, I'm the only one who sees what's going on here?" Tom sipped his coffee again and made that bitter frown, the one he always makes after coffee. "I will miss David . . . but I still have a mission to fulfill and my time is drawing short."

Debra, Greg and Mike all looked at Father Randy. He cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Tom, we were talking this morning before your arrival. We don't see the point in going forward. It seems that you are not satisfied with the answers we give. So why don't we move on. Maybe you want to tell us more about where you're from."

Greg smile, "I would love to hear more about your world and what you know, which we don't, about ours."

Tom shook his head. "You have taught me far more than you realize. I'm really here for one purpose and we have only scratched the surface on that. So, please, I beg of you, let's continue our discussion."

Disappointed looks bounced between the earthlings, like wayward balls on a billiard table. Finally Father Randy spoke in a subdued voice, "Okay, if we must."

Tom's eyes lit up, "Okay, so moving on beyond a written charter and doctrinal statement, what is the Church?"

Michael was realizing that the only way to put this to rest was to complete it. So with earnest, he moved into the topic with a full intent. "I can only speak from the Protestant traditions, but the next step is to define the congregation and that is done through a membership roll. We must clearly define who is with our church and who is not. Then we must move on to order of service. Since the early Christians met on the first day of the week, it is ours, as well as our Catholic friends' tradition to meet on Sunday mornings for our key meeting or worship service. The worship service must encompass all Biblical aspects for the Church, including teaching, preaching, singing of hymns, prayer and praise. There must be opportunities for each of the gifts to be manifest, including the gifts of being a deacon. The sacraments must be practiced, including the breaking of bread and the sharing of the wine. The church structure is the decisive body being the elders, and the pastors is one of the elders. The purpose of the elder board is to give the church and to apply the discipline of God onto those of the body who are in sin or teaching false teachings. Then there are . . ."

"Hold on!" shouted Tom with his hands raised in the air. He then grabbed his Bible and slid it across the table in Michael's direction. "Show me!"

GERMFASK XVIII

2012-01-28T17:52:00.000-08:00

Tom took his reading glasses off and stuck the temple piecein his mouth and looked out the window. Everyone sat quietly not knowing whatwas coming next. The stranger lookedserious, so serious that “distraught” might be a better adjective. Finally the strangerspoke. He put his glasses back on andpointing at Mike he said, “So you, pastor Monroe, do you agree with David herethat the fundamental starting place for the selected is a written,organizational charter and a doctrinal statement?”

Mike thought for just a moment then started to nod, “Sure.”

Turning counter clockwise Tom then looked at Father Randy,“How about you father?”

The priest nodded as well, “I think I could agree with Mikeon that.”

“Debra?” Tom asked.

She responded, “Sure. I think this is one point where wemight all agree.” Then she looked to her right, “But I don’t want to speak forGreg.”

Greg smiled, “No, I think you’re right. Even David and I areon the same page here. I did once planta Methodist church down in Petoskey and the very first thing I had to do, withthe area Bishop’s supervision, was to write an organizational charter anddoctrinal statement. The character dealtwith not only the business structure, but the exact roles of deacons, even whocould use the copy machine and who couldn’t. It gave guidelines for the hymnals that we were to use and thetranslation of the Bible.”

Tom’s distraught look melted back over his thin, darkface. He took his glasses off again andrubbed his eyes and looked back at the group . . . his eyes following thecircle back counter clockwise. When he got back to Greg, he spoke, “I’m afraidthis is going to be much more complicated that I had anticipated. First of all, if you did a detailed search ofscriptures you would find absolutely no mention of a written charter or adoctrinal statement . . . even if you studied the original languages and usedyour imagination.” Looking to his right, “David, those passages you shared haveabsolutely nothing to do with charters and statements.”

A look of skepticism moved around the group like "The Wave" at a football stadium.

Tom continued, “For you to read those verses and concludethat we must start at that point would be the same if you said we were sittingin Paris, France right now. You wouldsay, ‘There's a river down the road, Paris is on a river. There're trees inthe forest, Paris has trees. There'rebuildings around here, and there are buildings in Paris. There’re people sitting here . . . and Paris haspeople. There are even towns with Frenchnames around here, like Marquette and Sault Ste. Marie, so there's no otherexplanation but that we are in Paris.’”

David was shaking his head. “That isn’t at all like what wewere saying. We take true Biblical principles, which are expressed in thoseverses, and we use logic to reach the conclusion that the starting point of achurch must be those two items.”

Tom smiled, “I’m sorry to lecture you Earth dwellers again,because I know I rub you the wrong way, or I guess the other phrase is ‘pissesyou off,’ although I’ve understood what that means. But please bear with me.

Imagine that you were one of the Spanish conquerors of theAztecs. You arrive and observe that they do human sacrifices of their children in order to produce better crops of maze. You see the great sadness of the families, which are giving up theirchildren. You scream, ‘Stop! Killing your babies has nothing to do withthe weather and rain. It is a totalwaste of human life.’ Well, that is theseat I’m in. I don’t mean to offend you,but the Earth Dwellers logic is just as flawed and you can’t see it because ithas become so much of your culture.”

Greg didn’t seem offended but actually interested. “Mr.Hans, I’m all ears. I'would find your perspective fascinating.”

That statement gave Tom a bit more consent to continuetalking. “As I’ve said many times, youEarth Dwellers reason emotionally, not from logic. You see, God has given usthe sense of logic in order to find truth. It isn’t perfect anymore so we arenever intellectually satisfied with absolute certainty. We are given emotions, however, for ourpersonal enjoyment and enrichment.”

Tom grabbed Greg’s half-eaten omelet. “I’ve noticed that Greg here splatters thisred, Cajun sauce all over his omelet each week. I tasted it on the tip of myfinger. While the rich tomato taste is wonderful, the hot pepper burn is notappealing to me or anyone from where I’m from. But I understand that Greg hasdeveloped a taste for it. Now the eggs’protein gives Greg the nourishment he needs for the day, it is the sauce, thebutter and the salt that makes it palatable . . . even enjoyable. So it is with finding truth.It is the protein, meaning logic, that leads us to truth and the spice of it,the thing that makes it enjoyable, are the emotions.”

Debra looked puzzled, “But not all emotions are enjoyable.Sadness, depression and fear are some that aren't.”

Tom smiled, “But they are! They make us human. I’m so gladthat I get, as you say, ‘damned depressed’ at times. I would rather feel these uncomfortablefeelings and know that I’m alive and I’m not a flesh-based robot which is pre-programmed to act. Just like the red sauce hurts Greg’s mouth .. . and I’m sure of that, some emotions sting badly. But this is a tangentthat’s going to take us too far from discovering what the church really is. So,back to my omelet metaphor, you Earth Dwellers sit and eat bowls of the redsauce with just a sprinkle of protein on it. You reason from your emotions, and attempt to find pleasure from yourlogic! Don’t you get it?”

Father Randy spoke up, “Tom, with all due respect, I wouldhave to speak for myself that I’m not sure how what you are saying is relatedto the simple response that David made about the essence of the Church. I, personally, am lost in this."

David added, “Without due respect Tom, as I’ve said before,I am offended that you keep harping about us being emotional. We are notemotional! We are very logical, probably more so than you or your kind, whoeverthey are.”

Tom took off his glasses and looked David in the eye, “Myfriend, and I say this out of empathy and not arrogance, at least I think so. As I said weeks ago, on my planet there hasn't been a war in two thousandyears. It isn’t because we are goodpeople. It is because we learned to reason with logic rather thanemotions. War makes no sense. Those whogo to war are all insane! Everyone looses in all wars. No one gains. All warswere started with emotionally reasoning, not logic. Logic would never lead towar. It is the most illogical thing and the most anti-God. God is the God ofcreation. War’s main mission is destruction.”

David was shaking his head even harder, “You are wrong.There're just wars and unjust wars. Iam proud to be an American, and we only go to war when we have to. There'sreal evil in this world, which we must fight. In scriptures, especially the OldTestament, God honored the warrior and the hero. He used wars for His purpose.”

Tom added in a quick response, “You just don’t get it. Godallowed wars because He knew the people He created were very stupid and reasonedfrom emotions. So, He let their actions play out in the cruelty that theiremotions begot.”

Greg had a happy look on his face and was noddingrapidly. “Tom, I think I’m starting tosee exactly what you are saying. I’ve never looked at it from that direction,but it makes perfect sense. But to wrap this up (pausing to look at the time onhis cell phone) please relate this back to how this applies to the characterand the doctrinal statement.”

“Good idea, so I will. So, here’s my point. The reason thatall of you agree with David’s statement, that a church must begin with a charterand a doctrinal statement, is because you are reasoning from emotions. Theemotional part is the fact that you, each, are deeply invested in your churches’culture. Your paychecks come from them. Your identity comes from your churchpositions. It would be huge problem ifanyone of you chooses to differ from your own church’s dogma . . . with maybeGreg being the only exception. So your culture, your church’s dogma is that youmust have a charter and a doctrinal statement to form a church. I bet if youstudied church planting, this would be in the very first course taught.”

Mike spoke up, “But why would our churches teach us that ifit wasn’t true?”

Tom set back in his chair and gave a sigh. “I really wantedto keep this simple but I see us entering more and more complexities of humannature. Realize that where I come from, I am what you would consider ananthropologist. I’ve spent my life studying humans, the way we think andbehave. That is why I was chosen for this mission. So let me try to explain ina way that I hope won’t offend you.”

Tom finished off his coffee and he noticed, for maybe thefirst time, his little audience was spell-bound, each and everyone, so he continued, “The essence of all human behavior is rooted the deep-seateddesire to be of value. There are no exceptions to this. Your philosophers have danced around thistruth for millennium, because it is so simple. This disruption in our sense ofsignificance came with the fall of Adam. This was actually part of God’s complex strategy, but that’s anotherstory. But you see, this is the beautyof the Gospel. This is why we have come one and half light years to get here .. . and maybe to discover tomatoes (then he smiled). But the Gospel is God’ssimple statement that due to Christ’s work, we are extremely forgiven and ourinfinite value has been completely, I should add COMPLETELY, restored. But you Earth Dwellers, because you reasonemotionally, don’t feel valuable so you don’t get it. Instead, all of yourbehavior has one goal, to seek value here in this life and on your terms. Thatis the exact reason that all of you became pastors . . . because of the cravingfor value.

Now, I’m not saying that the Hansians are perfect in this.But we have moved much further along this path. So as we got the scriptures and started to reintroduce them to ourpeople, they immediately fell in love with the Gospel because they understoodhow it applied to the central problem of value or meaning. But here, on Earth, you have wrapped theGospel in so many layers of complexity that it is not palatable to anyoneanymore. That's why you, the bearers of the Gospel, are not loved like thelone doctor in the slum, but you are hated as the taskmasters of the slaves.Your Gospel, so it seems, is a yoke. It is a mustard seed wrapped in the hullof a coconut.”

Mike interrupted him, “But Tom, I’m sorry but I feel thatyour little sermonette has taken us far off the topic and I frankly don’t seehow we will ever discuss what the essence of the Church.”

Tom smiled and shook his head, “But it is related and inclosing I will, as you say ‘connect the dots’ to these points.”

Tom had a moment to collect his thoughts has Sharon showedup and wrote out their checks for breakfast. In a kind gesture, Father Randy quickly grabbed them all, saying, “Thismorning is on me.” There was a brief, friendly protest but they succumbed tothe inevitable.

“Okay, so you see,” lifting up his worn copy of thescriptures, “here is your charter and your doctrinal statement. However, throughout your history, yourforefathers said this was too vague. It really was too vague to them becauseGod is not the master manipulator we want Him to be. As Hebrews points out, the Levitical law inthe Old Testament wasn’t given to be taken seriously as law. It was satirical,to show how ridiculous it is to try and manipulate behavior on a, as you say,‘micro-manager’ level. But you people don’t get this. You, reason emotionally,from that pit in your souls where you feel worthless, you have this insatiabledesire to manipulate others to make yourselves feel more worthy. When youmanipulate others, you push up your own emotional position from part of theworthless herd, to a master level, the one who controls others. So, in thatspirit, you create layers and layers of regulations and micro-managing ofothers. From what I’ve studied, more than 90% of the Church’s efforts inhistory have been towards this useless cause. Now, to come back to our original point, to control people you set up acharter and doctrinal statements. It goes like this, ‘We will meet at thispalace at this time, use these hymnals, the person of this position can use thecopier but this person can't.’ Then wemove on to doctrines, ‘you must believe this precise doctrine and not that one,because if you do . . . or don’t . . . you are not a real Christian, I need thepower to determine if you are a good Christian or not . . . or maybe not aChristian at all . . . because that power makes me feel a little better aboutmyself and helps to plug that back hole in the center of my soul, the hole offeeling worthless.'”

Michael was shaking his head. “It sounds to me like areceipt for disaster. If we have norules to live by, Christianity becomes anarchical and we are no different fromthe non-Christians. We need to live a godly live to demonstrate who we are. Weneed rules and order.”

Tom seemed a bit sad, “Michael, my dear friend Michael, yousee, our people have only had the Gospel for months and we have already figuredit out far better than you who has had it for two thousand years. ‘Rules,’ as you describe them, are tools ofmanipulation. The true Gospel is healingand doesn’t yield to chaos or anarchy. You see, virtually all sin is the resultof humans trying to fill that bottomless pit. We want money, because money—and all that comes with it, nice cars, nicehouses and nice clothes—all represent our attempts to feel valuable. So, if wedon’t need to fill valuable, we stop stealing and we stop walking on people toget advancements in our careers. Lying is 100% tied up in this process oftrying to give ourselves value. Even sexual sins are tide to it.” Tom did the strangest thing and reached overand grabbed David’s hand and looked at him. “Even downloading pornography onyour church's computer late at night is tied up on this longing.”

David’s face turned a bright red and he avoided eye contactwith anyone . . . but he didn’t speak a word.

Tom continued, “So you see, if you really, really understandthe Gospel and that the bottomless pit has found a bottom . . . and a lid . . . anda complete filling, the need for sin goes away. If your really grasped the factthat we are extremely forgiven, that we have an absurd value and that we nowplease God with unquenchable pleasure . . . the need for sin becomesextraneous. You guys have it all wrong.You see it as God having set up a bunch of rules. To obey them, in your eyes,you are godly. To not do them, it is sin. But what I’m trying to tell you, sinis simply God’s name for our attempts for revaluing ourselves on our own. He says ‘stopit! I’ve done it for you. That's why I hate sin.’”

“Hoooooooly Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!” Came the whisper fromGreg’s mouth. His eyes were watery with tears.

No one noticed that David had quietly gotten up and put onhis jacket and was at the cash register paying.

Father Randy spoke up, “So, you believe that all our richhistory and Church traditions are a bad thing?”

Tom smiled, “Oh no! I don’t mean it that way. It’s yourculture. You can wallow in it all you want. Culture is amoral by itself. But mypoint is, I have no desire to import your culture to my planet. We want thesimple and pure meaning of the Church. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

Tom stood and smiled, “Okay folks, thanks so much for yourtime. Think about it some more and I’ll see you in a week.”

They were left with these puzzling and disturbing things. It became their krytonite, each feeling weaker as the days shortened towards winter's solstice.

GERMFASK XVII

2012-01-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

Tom turned slowly to his right. He put a hand on David's shoulder and said, "Why don't start here with pastor Smith. So, what is the essence of the Church . . . what do we need to know?"

David thought for a moment, "Well, if you boil it down to very simple concepts, those that apply to all cultures, I would say that the Church is the bride of Christ, and His body."

Tom smiled. "I'm sorry but that won't do. Those are artistic metaphors, things of beauty, but not material or practical concepts. We need the nuts and bolts, as you folks say, to know where to begin."

David seemed irritated. "Well, you must start with that spiritual concept and it isn't vague to us. Ask anyone in my church and they would know exactly what we mean by those ideas."

Tom said nothing but sipped his bitter coffee and made a sour face and sat in silence looking at David.

David continued, "If you want nuts and bolts then you must start with a group of true believers and a structure or organization, which means a well-defined church charter and doctrine."

Tom was thumbing through the pages of his church scripture paraphrase. "Hmm, where is that?" Then he looks back up at David. "The other thing, David, is that term true believers is loaded or as you say, pregnant with meaning. This is why exploring the idea of the Gospel was so important, as the first step. But you couldn't do it without conflict so we had to move on. So we did. So here we are. So once again, where is it?"

"Where is it? Do mean where is what I just said in those papers that you put together?

"No, I mean where is it in those verses. If you prefer, use your own Bible . . . but just tell me which verses say what you just said."

David looked around the table and gave a smirk as if everyone else would be seeing things from his same angle. "This is somewhat of a no-brainier. Christians must have some structure to have a Church. They must have a well-defined doctrine and hierarchy of authority and leadership."

Tom was sincerely thumbing through the pages of verses and looked up again, "I can't find it."

David gave a sigh, "Oh good grief, I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make but somethings are so obvious that it goes without saying."

Tom stared at David . . . in a quiet but respectful stare. Eventually David pulled out his own Bible and flipped it open. He thumbed threw several passages and came to Acts and then he read, "'Paul and Barnabas appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put their trust.' That's from Acts 14:23."

Tom started to speak, "Hmmm . . . "

"Wait a minute! There's more." spoke David as he continued looking through his Bible. "Now back in the previous chapter, verse 1, it says 'Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul.'"

Tom had a confused look on his face, confused enough that David knew that wouldn't satisfy him . . . so he started flipping through more pages of his Bible. "Now look here at I Corinthians chapter 14, 'What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.' Then in verse 27, 'If anyone speaks in a tongue, two--or at the most three--should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God' then in the next verse, 'two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weight carefully what is said. And if a revelation comes to someone who is sitting down, the first speaker should stop. For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged. The spirits of prophets are subject to the control of the prophets. For God is not a God of disorder but of peace--as in all the congregations of the Lord's people.'"

Tom put up his hand to stop David, "Okay, that's enough for a minute. Honestly, you've completely lost me. You told me that the church must have a charter and a doctrinal statement. I heard neither of those mentioned the the scriptures you just read."

"Dammit Tom!" Shouted David and three jaws dropped around the table. "I'm sorry, but I didn't mean that. What I meant was Tom, it is so clear from those passages. You will have chaos without a charter, a hierarchy and a doctrinal statement . . . total chaos. It is clear from those passages that the church must have some form, some type of order."

GERMFASK XVI

2012-01-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

Two weeks had passed since Tom passed around his unofficial rewriteof church-related scriptures. The previous Wednesday, the area had experienceda rare ice storm. Not only were the roads a skating rink but the Jollly Inn waswithout power. Sharon had called Father Randy that morning to let him know thatbreakfast wasn’t possible. The roadswere so bad that none of the crew ventured out . . . except Tom. He walked in to find a closed inn . . . except for Arnie out chipping away ice fromtheir steps.

Tom had never had a serious conversation with the manbefore, but he didn’t want to pass the opportunity. Tom gave him a hand with an old Ice Axe,which Arnie had saved from his more adventurous college days. Arnie continuedto Sweep away the crumbled pieces with a broom.

Arnie looked at him, “So what’s your story? What are you up to here? These men are myfriends and if you trying to swindle them out of anything, well for one, youwill have me to answer to.”

Tom engaged in a lengthy conversation trying his best toassure the inn proprietor of his innocent intent. His words were a bit more palatable, beingframed by the fact that Tom was giving a good effort of helping the man clearice. Little did Arnie know that part of Toms drive with the task was hisfascination with naturally occurring ice. He has never seen it before coming toearth.

But the next Wednesday, despite being far behind the linesof autumn, with October deeply entrenched, they had a warm sunny day. It musthave been sixty by the time the morning group had dispersed . . .at 1 PM.

Tom had started the conversation that morning with someground rules. “I’ve thought about thisvery carefully and before we start down this path, I want to clarify someprinciples. Please realize that mypurpose here is to discover and understand what you have learned about theselected. We now have the scriptures, which I’m taking back with me, but wehave no history with them. I want to be able to take back the knowledge thatyour cultures have accrued over the past two millenniums. However, as you well know, there are two partsto this. There’s the clear mandate from the scriptures, and there are the human institutions. The way I mean human institution is that . .. I guess you would say amoral . . . natural adaptation to an idea. I want to fillet away your culturally-based,human institution from the scriptural mandate. Simply, we have our own cultureand we will create our own way of doing things. While I respect your traditionsand culture, I have no desire to import that to my planet your culture anymorethat I want to import some of your viruses . . . which we don’t have.”

Tom smiled at the group and waited for a response.

Father Randy spoke first, “Tom, I think that we might needto define even that statement more clearly. You see, in my church, we believethat God works through His inspired word but also through the working out ofhistory, the wisdom of church leaders, namely our dear church fathers. So toseparate our culture from the scriptures would be as complex as trying tounscramble this omelet” (pointing down has his 3/4s eaten smoked salmonomelet).

David cleared his throat. “This is one area I would differvery much from the father. We are aBible church, as is Pastor Monroe’s church. We don’t believe that God speaks through men in the same way that Godspeaks through scriptures. We are pure Bible and nothing else. So it is easyfor us to define the Church based on scripture alone.”

Tom paused for a moment while he stared out the window atthe brilliant blue skies over the leafless trees. “But David, I’ve heard youmany times say that God told you so and so or showed you so and so. Are you not referring to the same thing asthe father? That God speaks throughscriptures and through people or at least people’s interpretation ofexperiences.”

While David studied his own words carefully, Mike spoke up. “Tom,I think what David is trying to say is that we put the scriptures on a muchhigher position than maybe the father, Greg or Debra would. We believe that thescriptures are without flaw and are the only absolute source of truth. Theindividual experiences are the spice of the Holy Spirit, which clarifiesscripture, but it must agree with scripture. It doesn’t add whole new concepts thatwere never there before . . . like the deification of the Virgin Mary.”

Father Randy was quiet so Debra spoke for him. She seemed abit upset. “Now Mike, I think I’m a bit offended by that. I mean, I take scriptures very seriously,although I may not take this as literally as you do. You must also acknowledge thatit was Father Randy’s church which gave us the scriptures.”

David let out a grunt, “Or rehabilitated them into their own,new religion.”

Tom seeing the conversation breaching the walls of hisintent and just beginning to chase offinto the wilderness he immediately took back control. “Gentlemen . . . andlady, I must insist that we pursue the topic at hand. With the parameters,which I’ve laid out, let’s step forward and pursue a clear understanding of thesimple truth of how the scriptures teach us, the selected, to live together andnothing more.”

Beauty in the Midst of Darkness

2012-01-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

I'm deviating from GERMFASK, obviously. I'm not sure if anyone is reading it anyway. But before I take a more complex turn in that story, I wanted to take this detour into my thoughts of the week.

Two things have put me in is frame of mind, the book Lolitha by Valdimir Nabokov and the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm almost to the end of the book . . . and I just saw the movie.

There's several issues at stake here . . . so many I don't know where to begin.

The first question to raise, is there a limit to art? Is there a boundary line over which Christians should not pass when it comes to art? I think there probably is, but it is more of a dotted line than a solid one, meaning the line is in one place for one individual and somewhere else for someone else. No one can judge what is good or not good for someone else, not unless they know that person very well.

In my Evangelical days, we had a solid line. It was not only solid, but thick, 27 pt, line that was universal. In my Navigator days, our rep had the view that we shouldn't (nor anyone for that matter) watch a movie that is not rated G, nor read a book that has any sex in it period and certainly not sex between unmarried (and Godly) people.

But that's on the extreme edge of self-censorship. It also reflects a very poor understanding of art and the belief in a Satan that is more powerful than God. I say that last part because we literally believed that if someone saw The Exorcist, they would immediately be demon oppressed.

I don't want waste anymore time on that issue, although it deserves it. I want to talk about the specific art that I mentioned.

If you don't know, Lolitha is a very graphic story about a man in his forties obsessed, sexually, with teenybopper girls . . . ages 12-14. Indeed his obsession leads him on a narcissistic journey to marry a women, in order to get his hands on her 12-year-old daughter. Fortunately (for him) his wife dies and the girl is all his to manipulate, rape and possess to his dark heart's content. Could this book be edifying?

So why am I reading it? I've mentioned before, since being turned on to good fiction by my sons, I've been reading the top 100 English novels and Lolitha is number four. I hesitated at first. I didn't really know the subject matter for sure. Here are my thoughts why it is a good read.

First of all, the reason it is number four, because Nabokov is a literary genius. The book is written with incredible layers of meaning and richness . . . despite the dark content. Yes, you can admire the beauty of an artist, who is created in God's imagine, and reflects God's creativity, even though the content is dark. But Nabokov didn't just pull the story from some dark place in his evil mind. I'm known hundreds of people (if you include my patients) who have lived the life of Lolitha. They were sexually molested, raped and possessed by their fathers, stepfathers, mom's boyfriends or, in some cases, complete strangers. Nabokov enters that world and more than that, the deep chambers of the mind of the perpetrator.

I could write 20 posts about that book, but the thing that sticks out to me the most is the complex rationalization that we all are capable of. The perpetrator weaves this mental narrative that makes himself out to be the victim. But it is an insight to the human condition that is worth exploring. It comes back to the parable of the log and the speck. Mentally, we judge others more harshly than they deserve and ourselves more lightly. The thinking goes like this, "Yes, I did bad thing X, but you have to understand why. I'm not a bad person, but I did X because of these circumstances." Then we look at the other person who did X and we have the notion that they did it simply because they are evil.

Reading the book did not tempt me to become obsessed with teeny boppers. Now, if that was a weakness in someone, then maybe that's where the dotted line falls down. Maybe they shouldn't read it. Maybe I shouldn't read books that try to convince me to stop working and to sit in a coffee shop all day reading and writing.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can be appreciated as well for its artistry. If I were to pick the highlight of the art, it would be in the acting ability of Rooney Mara, who plays the key role Lisbeth Salander. I don't have any clue what Rooney is like in her real life, but unless she is really like Lisbeth, she is a remarkable actress.

It is a dark movie. My wife, who is an addict of Hallmark movies, hated it. She closed her eyes during much of it. It does though teach us about the human condition and that fine line between brilliance and insanity. I don't have time to say much more, but that I was swept away by the talent. It was so intense that I would only want to see a movie like that no more than once a month.

GERMFASK XV

2012-01-19T19:53:00.000-08:00

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the demarcation between Autumnand Winter is crisp. One day the leavesare at their peak and suddenly a heavy, wet snow brings them down . . . all ofthem. In some years, the first snow isthe prelude to the last, meaning the ground is never clear in between. Inbetter years, the early snows act as a teaser with a brief Indian summer wedged in before the real snows engulf them.

It was such an early, wet snow that occurred on thefollowing Wednesday. It was the kind ofsnow that forms to the soles of your shoes that you can clearly read “Vibram”in the bottom of each step. Oddly, Debra,who had the furthest to drive on icy roads, arrived first. She had to choose a new table as a snowboundfamily were sitting at their usual window table. Actually they weren’t as muchsnowbound as what Debra called flake-phobic. These are usually people frombelow the Mason-Dixie Line, who have come up to see the leaves not believing itcould possibly snow on them in late September. She could tell from the accents as they ordered their breakfast that wasthe case.

But soon Father Randy, Mike and David arrived. Greg was helping an elderly neighbor shovelher sidewalk and had texted Father Randy that he would be late.

The tall stranger seemed to always arrive last and so hedid.

Mike pulled up a second, small, round table to accommodatethe five . . . soon to be six . . . of them. Tom started with his big, brightsmile, “Okay gentlemen . . . and lady . . . I hope you’ve had a fair week” (hestill didn’t have command of the American colloquial enough to understand that“fair” had not been used in that context for at least a hundred years).

After a moment of chatter about their weeks, orders takenand Greg in his place, Tom moved into his more somber mode. “Friends, I will be candid and tell you thatI am growing homesick and tired of this whole matter. I feel that I have barely scratched thesurface of my intentions and I really want to see this through. So, I wasthinking, that is time that we get down to business.”

Mike broke his month-long quiet mood, “I totally agree. Whydon’t we see if we can’t answer your questions today and resolve this once andfor all (Mike was growing tired of the stranger and his uncanny ability to readthem all. Mike’s personal life was becoming more unraveled and he really didn’twant it brought up again).

Tom reached into his briefcase and pulled out papers. Helaid them on the table. Then he put on, what looked like cheap, reader glasses,and started to pass the papers around the table counter-clockwise, startingwith David.

When each breakfasteer had their papers in hand, Tom spoke,“I came here to learn from you, a proper understanding of two deeply relatedissues. What is the Gospel and what is the Church. I think I see the Church asa balloon and the Gospel as the air which suspends its sides against the lowerpressure of the atmosphere. So, while I grasp the point that the Gospel isGod’s blanket of snow covering the brokenness of the world, with not onlysmoothness, but real and extreme purity, the only remaining question is who arethe ones covered? I think I could arrive at four, if not six possible answersfrom the sources around this table. So, I will put that question on . . . whatI’ve heard you say . . . the back burner.“

Father Randy shook his head, “I think that’s a good idea.It’s hard for me to imagine how we could define it any better without creatingconflict where there was none before.”

Tom took off his glasses and shook his head, “That’s whatseems so strange to us, it is beyond our comprehension that searching for truthand conflict should reside together on the same thought, but that is the onlyway you people think. One really has nothing to do with the other. If you folks could dislodge your beliefsystems from your sense of self-value, you would have total freedom to discussthings. But it is what it is and I can’tchange your culture in one simple blow.”

He sat back and put his glasses back on. He looked at thepapers in his hand. Then he pushed theglasses down on his nose and looked above them at the group, “So, what I havehere is the bulk of the New Testament verses about the Church. I’m sure I’vemissed a couple here or there. I want touse this as our basis and then explore what you’ve learned about the Churchbeyond what is obvious.”

Tom looked back down at his papers and then up again, “WhatI’ve taken the liberty to do here is to replace your English word ‘Church’ witha more simple word so we can try and shed your cultural connotations. Since the original, Greek word was ‘Ekklesia’I wanted to find an equivalent. The word means of course 'called out.' The bestpicture in Greek times would be someone walking down the street and stopping ateach home and calling out a couple of names. Those individuals would come outof their house, to the outside, and follow the crowd down the street. These ‘called-out’ ones, would be a mixture ofall kinds of people. I first thought of the word ‘volunteer’ but that didn’tfit, because it was more deliberate by the caller. I could say the ‘elect’ buteven that word has too many connotations. So the word I chose to replace ‘Church’is ‘selected.’ I’ve also taken furtherliberties of replacing the word “Elder” for the more simple and appropriateword, ‘senior’ or ‘older person.’ Lastly, I’ve replaced the word Deacon, which is proper and seems to bean office here, with a word more closely to the original, ‘assistant.’ So now that I’ve changed those words, tryingto find the pure meaning and description of the Church, please read theseverses, let’s start at that point, then you teach me how we should constructour Church.”

The pastors looked down and skimmed the paper. David looked up and commented, "This is a huge amount of reading. We can't cover all of this in one morning."

Tom responded, "Let's do this. Take this home and study it. Then next week we will start our discussion. So this morning, we will enjoy our breakfast and talk about our private lives." The group looked in horror.

Here is what was written on the strangers' papers.

Matthew16:18And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my selectedgroup, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.

Matthew 18:17If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the selected; and if theyrefuse to listen even to the selected, treat them as you would a pagan ora tax collector.

Acts5:11Great fear seized the all the selected and all who heard about theseevents.

Acts8:1And Saul approved of their killing him. On that day a great persecution brokeout against the selected in Jerusalem, and all except the apostleswere scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.

Acts 8:3But Saul began to destroy the selected group. Going from house to house,he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.

Acts 9:31Then the selected throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed atime of peace and was strengthened. Living in the fear of the Lord andencouraged by the Holy Spirit, the group increased in numbers.

Acts11:19Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephenwas killed traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, spreading the wordonly among Jews.

Acts11:22News of this reached the selected in Jerusalem, and they sentBarnabas to Antioch.

Acts11:26and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabasand Saul met with the selected and taught great numbers of people.The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

Acts12:1It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the selected,intending to persecute them. So Peter was kept in prison, but the selected wasearnestly praying to God for him.

Acts13:1Now in the selected at Antioch there were prophets and teachers:Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been broughtup with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul.

Acts14:23Paul and Barnabas appointed seniors for them in each selected and,with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put theirtrust.

Acts14:27On arriving there, they gathered the selected together and reportedall that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to theGentiles.

Acts 15:3The selected sent them on their way, and as they traveled throughPhoenicia and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This newsmade all the believers very glad.

Acts 15:4When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the selected andthe apostles and seniors, to whom they reported everything God had done throughthem.

Acts15:22Then the apostles and seniors, with the whole selected, decided to choose someof their own men and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They choseJudas (called Barsabbas) and Silas, men who were leaders among the believers.

Acts15:30So the men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gatheredthe selected together and delivered the letter. He went through Syriaand Cilicia, strengthening the selected.

Acts16:5So the selected were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.

Acts18:22When he landed at Caesarea, he went up to Jerusalem and greeted the selected andthen went down to Antioch. From Miletus, Paul sent to Ephesus for the seniorsof the selected.

Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has madeyou overseers. Be shepherds of the selected of God, which he boughtwith his own blood.

Romans16:1I commend to you our sister Phoebe, an assistant of the selected inCenchreae.

Romans16:5Greet also the selected that meets at their house. Greet my dearfriend Epenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia.

1Corinthians 1:2 To the selected of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in ChristJesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere whocall on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours:

1Corinthians 1:10I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be nodivisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

1Corinthians 3:1Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spiritbut as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ.

1Corinthians 4:17For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, my son whom I love, who is faithfulin the Lord. He will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agreeswith what I teach everywhere in every selected. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the selected? Are younot to judge those inside?

1Corinthians 6:4Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a rulingfrom those whose way of life is scorned in the selected?

1Corinthians 7:17Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation theLord has assigned to them, just as God has called them. This is the rule I laydown in all the selected.

1Corinthians 10:32Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the selected ofGod—

1Corinthians 11:16If anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice—nor dothe selected of God.

1Corinthians 11:18In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a selected,there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it.

1Corinthians 11:22Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the selected ofGod by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall Ipraise you? Certainly not in this matter!

1Corinthians 12:28And God has placed in the selected first of all apostles, secondprophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, ofguidance, and of different kinds of tongues.

1Corinthians 14:4Anyone who speaks in a tongue edifies themselves, but the one who prophesiesedifies the selected.

1Corinthians 14:5I would like every one of you to speak in tongues, but I would rather have youprophesy. The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues,unless someone interprets, so that the selected may be edified.

1Corinthians 14:12So it is with you. Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel inthose that build up the selected.

1Corinthians 14:19But in the selected I would rather speak five intelligible words toinstruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.

1Corinthians 14:23So if the whole selected group comes together and everyone speaks intongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you areout of your mind?

1Corinthians 14:26What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each ofyou has a song, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.Everything must be done so that the selected may be built up.

1Corinthians 14:28If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the selected andspeak to himself and to God.

1Corinthians 14:34Women should remain silent in the selected. They are not allowed to speak,but must be in submission, as the law says.

1Corinthians 14:35If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands athome; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the selected.

1Corinthians 15:9For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called anapostle, because I persecuted the selected of God.

1Corinthians 16:1Now about the collection for the Lord’s people: Do what I told theGalatian selected to do. The selected in the province of Asia sendyou greetings. Aquila and Priscilla greet you warmly in the Lord, and so doesthe selected that meets at their house.

2Corinthians 1:1Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, Tothe selected of God in Corinth, together with all his holy peoplethroughout Achaia:

2Corinthians 7:2Makeroom for us in your hearts. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one,we have exploited no one.

2Corinthians 8:1And now, brothers and sisters, we want you to know about the grace that God hasgiven the Macedonian selected.

2Corinthians 8:18And we are sending along with him the brother who is praised by all the selectedfor his service to the gospel.

2Corinthians 8:19What is more, he was chosen by the selected to accompany us as we carrythe offering, which we administer in order to honor the Lord himself and toshow our eagerness to help.

2Corinthians 8:23As for Titus, he is my partner and co-worker among you; as for our brothers,they are representatives of the selected and an honor to Christ.

2Corinthians 8:24Therefore show these men the proof of your love and the reason for our pride inyou, so that the selected can see it.

2Corinthians 11:8I robbed other selected by receiving support from them so as to serve you.

2Corinthians 11:28Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for allthe selected.

2Corinthians 12:13How were you inferior to the other selected, except that I was never aburden to you? Forgive me this wrong!

Galatians1:2and all the brothers and sisters with me, To the selected in Galatia:

Galatians1:13For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely Ipersecuted the selected of God and tried to destroy it.

Galatians1:22I was personally unknown to the selected of Judea that are in Christ.

Ephesians1:22And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head overeverything for the selected.

Ephesians3:10His intent was that now, through the selected, the manifold wisdom of Godshould be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians3:21to him be glory in the selected and in Christ Jesus throughout allgenerations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians5:23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the selected,his body, of which he is the Savior.

Ephesians5:24Now as the selected submits to Christ, so also wives should submit totheir husbands in everything.

Ephesians5:25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the selected and gavehimself up for her.

Ephesians5:27.. and to present her to himself as aradiant selected, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holyand blameless.

Ephesians5:29After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for theirbody, just as Christ does the selected.

Ephesians5:32This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the selected.

Colossians1:24Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what isstill lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body,which is the selected.

Colossians4:15Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters at Laodicea, and to Nympha andthe selected in her house.

Colossians4:16After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the selected ofthe Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea.

1Thessalonians 1:1Paul, Silas and Timothy, To the selected of the Thessalonians in Godthe Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you.

1Thessalonians 2:14For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s selected inJudea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the samethings those selected suffered from the Jews.

2Thessalonians 1:1Paul, Silas and Timothy, To the selected of the Thessalonians in Godour Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

2Thessalonians 1:4Therefore, among God’s selected we boast about your perseverance and faithin all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.

1Timothy 3:5(If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care ofGod’s selected?)

1Timothy 3:15if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household,which is the selected of the living God, the pillar and foundation ofthe truth.

1Timothy 5:16If any woman who is a believer has widows in her care, she should continue tohelp them and not let the selected be burdened with them, so thatthe selected can help those widows who are really in need.

1Timothy 5:17The seniors who direct the affairs of the selected well are worthy ofdouble honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.

Philemon1:2also to Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier—and to the selected thatmeets in your home.

Hebrews12:23to the selected of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven.You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous madeperfect.

James5:14Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the seniors of the selected topray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.

3John 1:6They have told the selected about your love. Please send them ontheir way in a manner that honors God.

3John 1:9I wrote to the selected, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will notwelcome us.

3John 1:10So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading maliciousnonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he even refuses to welcome otherbelievers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the selected.

Revelation1:4 John, To the seven selected in theprovince of Asia: Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and whois to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne,

Revelation1:11whichsaid: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven selected:to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.”

Revelation1:20The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the sevengolden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven selected,and the seven lampstands are the seven selected.

Revelation2:1 “To the angel of the selected inEphesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in hisright hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands.

Revelation2:7Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected. Tothe one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life,which is in the paradise of God.

Revelation2:8“To the angel of the selected in Smyrna write: These are the words ofhim who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.

Revelation2:11Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected. Theone who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death.

Revelation2:12“To the angel of the selected in Pergamum write: These are the wordsof him who has the sharp, double-edged sword.

Revelation2:17Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected. Tothe one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will alsogive that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to theone who receives it.

Revelation2:18 “To the angel of the selected inThyatira write: These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are likeblazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze.

Revelation2:23I will strike her children dead. Then all the selected will know that I amhe who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according toyour deeds.

Revelation2:29Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected.

Revelation3:1“To the angel of the selected in Sardis write: These are the words ofhim who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds;you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.

Revelation3:6Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected.

Revelation3:7“To the angel of the selected in Philadelphia write: These are thewords of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens noone can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.

Revelation3:13Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected.

Revelation3:14“To the angel of the selected in Laodicea write: These are the wordsof the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation.

Revelation3:22Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the selected.”

Revelation22:16“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the selected.I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

GERMFASK XIV

2012-01-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

After quickly devouring his fried, green tomatoes, thestranger reached his long, slender arm beneath his chair and pulled a bigleather-bound Bible from his briefcase and laid it on the table with a thud. It was much more worn since they last timethey had seen it. Bookmarks made from bright yellow and orange aspen leaves juttedfrom the bottom of the book like the wings of giant locusts being pressedbetween the pages.

Tom looked around the table at his extra-stellar friends.“Okay, are we ready? Is it time that you explain to me what the Church is?”

David wiped his mouth with his napkin and looked up at him,“I thought you knew everything?” He satup straight and stared with anticipation to make it clear this was not a joke.

Tom put his hand on David’s shoulder, “I never said I knoweverything. We know a lot, but there are gaping holes in our knowledge. We havea detailed history of humanity that you don’t have, but we have never had thescriptures to explain the gospel.”

David picked up Tom’s Bible and flipped through the pagesuntil one of the leaves fell out. “Sorry,” he said as he picked it off thefloor and stuck it back between the pages. “So now you have the scriptures andyou people are so smart—a lot smarter than us emotional-thinkers—what then doyou want from us?”

Tom smiled, “But you see, we have no tradition of thescriptures to draw from. We want to learn from you. After all, you’ve had thechance to study the scriptures for over two thousand years. I guess we just don’t want to start fromscratch . . . so please teach us.”

Greg was to Tom’s left and scratching his head. His mind waspondering something and the pondering was written all over his face like boldprint. “Say, Tom. Before we go down that path, trying to explain the Church . .. well, I’m intrigued. What do you know about us that we don’t? I mean abouthuman history?”

Tom had wished that he had never mentioned that point,because he really came there that morning to learn about the Church. He rubbed his face. “Okay, I will do this. Iwill indulge in some history but I won't answer any follow up questions . . .at least not until you answer my question about the nature of the Church.”

Tom looked at Greg, who was all ears, and smiled. Then hecontinued, “Hmm, ok we know that the earth really is very, very old and the earthscientists are not that far off. It is about four and a half billion years old.”

David was shaking his head . . . but remaining quiet. So Tom continued, “The dinosaurs died offbecause of a pandemic of the bird flu . . . as they were in the bird familyafter all. The pandemic spread quicklyand that’s why you have the piles of dead animals. It wasn’t due to an asteroid hitting theearth. Actually the huge crater, beneath the water off Yucatan, is a hugevolcanic caldera. There was no asteroid. It did erupt a few times, creating acouple of the ice ages. Let me see, we also know what happened to the Neanderthals. They were genetically different from humans,but not completely different. Actually,the homo-sapiens didn’t kill them off . . . but they were cursed bybeauty. You see, the Neanderthals werein Europe and other areas first. When the homo-sapiens arrived, theNeanderthals dominated them by not only mightier physique but bigger brains.The Neanderthal men had one downfall and that was that they found homo-sapienwomen irresistible. They were as Venusto them. They left their own kind and bred only with the homo-sapien women.This led, like in the case of the Mule, a sterile off-spring. So, in themeantime the homo-sapien men were continuing to multiply with their naturalmates and the Neanderthal linage came to an end.” Tom noticed the totally uninterested looks oneveryone’s face but Greg’s. “So that’sthat. Now to the topic at hand.”

Tom turned to David and slid his Bible in hisdirection. David didn’t pick it up butlooked at the group. “This is easy. The Church is the Bride of Christ. She isthe organization of His people.”

Tom smiled again, “But David, you have to do much betterthan that. Those are only poetic words. We are serious about this. Thisinformation is crucial for an entire planet of people.” Tom slid the Bible evencloser to David until it was touching his belly, “So, David, what really is theChurch? How would you define it? Are we(pointing to the group around the table) a church?”

David had a little frown, “No, I wouldn’t call this group achurch. That would be somewhat of a sacrilege to the true church.”

Tom saw sifting in the seats of Father Randy and Debra outof the corner of his left eye. Then he asked David, “So how is that?”

“Well, for one, we have different beliefs here. I think Greg and I have profoundly differentviews of what it means to be a Christian and we covered that before. The sameis true with the Father here . . . and Debra. So we can’t be part of the same Church.”

“So there is more than one? Christ has two bodies? So He isa polygamist?” asked Tom.

Father Randy seized the opportunity, “That would be one areaof historical disagreement. The positionof my church is that indeed there is only one Church and hopefully, one dayChrist will restore the Church to one body. But for now it is divided.”

Tom looked at David, “So do you agree with that?”

David thought for a moment, “I don’t agree that the Father’schurch is the one Church. His churchtook a powerful detour hundreds of years ago and there are plenty of people inmy church that would say that his Church is not real, or they are not even realChristians.”

Tom looked cautiously at him, “Do you believe that yourself?”

There was a minute of awkward silence then Mike spoke up, “Yousee Tom, before you came here we would never have these type of dividingdiscussions . . . and that was a good thing. I think you are going to stir up trouble and people are going to gettheir feelings hurt if you’re not careful.”

Tom shook his head. “But this is insanity! What is the Church is a very serious topic.It should be discussed by a group of people, each with a passion for the truth.But you people of the earth—and don’t forget that we are people of the earthtoo—only have emotional reasoning. Youwrap your discussion in layers of emotional factors and it is because of that,you get easily offended. Where I come from, we have these discussions all daylong and no one would ever dream of getting offended because we each areobliged to the truth and not to just maintaining our own personal systems offeeling valuable.”

Mike seemed lost, and then he spoke again, “All I’m tryingto say is that Jesus was the Prince of Peace. It is wonderful that four or five people, with very differentperspectives, can enjoy each other’s company once a week for breakfast. That isa breakthrough. That is all we really want.”

Tom, still shaking his head, “But the way you people do itis by pretending that all is well. You bury your disagreements because yourlonging isn’t for truth but for maintaining your own belief system at all cost.This fellowship of breakfast is what you call a farce. The only time you debate a topic, or it seemslike the only time, is to try and prove yourself right and the others wrong soyou can feel better about yourself. It has nothing to do with finding the truth.I’m really surprise that you are not still in your Dark Ages.”

As soon as the word “farce” had come out of Tom’s mouth,Mike’s mind instantly turned to his daughter Ashley’s tough words the weekbefore, what were they, “fucking charade?” He felt a pain in the pit of hisstomach and it wasn’t the Tabasco on his Cowboy Omelet.

There was a tense feeling around the table. Tom lookedaround the restaurant. It was almost empty with its low point at eleven AM, toolate for breakfast and too early for lunch. Sharon was in the corner watching carefully.

Tom, turned back to David, “So where were we? Please be openand honest . . . what is the Church?”

David thumbed through the Bible in front of him. “As I wassaying it is the body of Christ. God set up the church for a system of worship,fellowship, the sacraments, accountability and the Great Commission of takingthe Gospel to the world.”

Tom shook his head, “You’re being a poet again. Pick up the book and show me! This is very important. I’ve read your scriptures over and overduring the past six months and I know it doesn’t use any of those words.Roughly there are about one hundred and ten times that the term, translated toEnglish as ‘church,’ is used in the scriptures. It only refers to the church asa movement, group, congress, collection of people, loose association. I just don’t see this highly structured thingwith such clear cut marching orders as you describe.”

Father Randy, looking at his watch and obviously wanting tomove things along, spoke up. “God has spoken to us in His scriptures, but sometimes,giving us more details through our traditions and history. It is in thosetraditions that we have created more of the structure of the Church . . .according to God’s will and good pleasure.”

Tom sat back in his chair and put his chin on his hand. Hecould see David’s disapproval to his right. He turned and looked at him, “SoDavid, do you have trouble with that?”

“I wouldn’t put traditions and church history on the samelevel of the Bible. I pastor a Bible-centered church and everything we do isbased on the Bible.”

Tom started laughing, “David, I’ve almost pushed thescriptures here into your lap and you’ve never looked at it once, at least notseriously. Your beliefs seem to be totallybased on your traditions more so than the Father’s. So, do we put the samevalue on traditions as scriptures?”

“No,” came Mike’s quick response. “We don’t ignore our church’s traditions, butwe don’t base our beliefs on this . . . say like the Catholic Church would.”

Tom said, “I have to disagree. I think you base yourknowledge far more on your traditions than even Father Randy, and he admitsthat he bases his truth on traditions and church history.”

David stood up, “Folks, it is eleven thirty and I have amillion things to do.”

Father Randy said, in an accommodating way, “Tom, I thinkyour discussion deserves more time . . . so, next week?” He then looked around the table to severalnods.

David spoke up, “I’m not sure. This is my busy season andour church has a fall ministry campaign that I’m in the middle of. I may or maynot be back.”

Tom stood up and reached out to shake David’s hand (Davidwas assuming it was a goodbye shake) but then the stranger said to him, “David,this topic seems to be as essential for you as it is for us. So, please be backnext week. How can you have a churchfall campaign if you are not even sure what the church really is?”

As they walked away, Greg caught up to Tom and said to him, “Hey,could I have a word with you?”

Tom looked at him and gave a positive nod.

“Hey man, I want to hear more about the unknown humanhistory. Are there other people on otherplanets . . . oh, apart from your people?”

GERMFASK XIII

2012-01-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

With the first frost under their belts, the quiet people of the upper peninsula had Autumn pulled up tight around their waists like a favorite pair of trousers. In just one week the gold of the hills had descended to the very edge of the creeks and convoluted lake shores. The season is short here, and the flakes of winter were floating, being suspended on simple imaginations that would quickly yield to realizations.

David Smith was seated with his cup of coffee. Debra, who was often late, was already there as was Mike and Father Randy. Greg had mentioned the previous week that he might be late, something about picking up another load of firewood on the way through GERMFASK. There was no sign of the stranger.

Once they were seated and Sharon had done her duty to to collect their appetites on a paper pad and the pencil back behind her ear, David spoke, "I don't know about the rest of you, but our little experiment with the stranger should be drawing to a close soon."

Debra looked puzzled, "Is he leaving?"

David frowned, "One should only hope."

Debra gave one of those crock-eyed smiles that communicate more puzzlement than good humor, "What's your problem with the man? I personally find him intriguing."

"The man is an enigma, and I don't mean that in any kind of positive way. He is obscure and he is arrogant. I have bad feelings about him. I think he could even have something demonic."

Randy spoke briefly to Sharon who had come back to the table to inform him that they had some fresh-picked, wild morel mushrooms in and would he rather have those in his omelet. "Would I?" came his bright response. Then he turned to the table, "Brother David, I really don't think the man means to be arrogant, but he is just factual, at least the way he sees things."

"If I hear him say one more time that his people make decisions from logic and we, so-called, earthlings do it from emotions, I think I will excuse myself and leave and never come back. I frankly find that insulting."

"Who's insulting?" came Greg's voice as he walked up from behind them, shaking sawdust off his jacket.

Mike answered, "David here thinks that Tom is a bit arrogant, and I would have to agree . . . at least to a degree."

As Greg sat down, he smiled big and said in whisper, "I find the man incredible! I for one am taking him serious about his claims of being an alien."

Debra elbowed him, "Remember Greg, he would correct you, he is not an alien but a pilgrim, a displaced earthling." She paused to sip her coffee but then halted and whispered, "And he is coming in the door."

Tom walked up and stood by the table looking leaner than usual, "Good Morning Lady and gentlemen." He took off his Indiana Jones-hat and stuck it under his chair with his briefcase. He took a seat and pulled up to the table and looked around. He turned and looked directly at Father Randy, "So how's the ole heart doing?"

Father Randy's jaw literally dropped to the point that coffee ran down his chin. He turned and looked at Debra. She began shaking her head as to say, "I didn't tell him."

Father Randy then looked back at the stranger, "Uh, what are you talking about?"

"Father, it is clear to me that you've had some health issues lately and I assume it is your heart."

"Who told you this?"

"It is simply logic, logic without emotion." (David to his right let out a sigh)

"What logic?"

"What you call deductive reasoning. I observed last week that you didn't look well. You lower eyelids were of a lighter pink than normal, telling me you've a touch of anemia from possible blood loss, maybe a surgery or a procedure. Then I noticed how Debra gave you a little caress when she greeted you last week. She has never done that before. I heard the two of you talking about a trip down the Grand Canyon. You are a man of sixty. You told me that your father died from a heart attack when he was forty eight. You have a thin white arc around your irises, a sign of elevated cholesterol. I heard you order your omelet made with Egg Beaters last week, you had never done that before. By the way, I had to look that one up in my dictionary. Debra had quite a bit more sun after your trip. That tells me that she was outdoors more than you. The only reason that she would separate from her dear friend was if he was in bed sick or in a hospital . . . should I go on?"

"Holy shit!" came Greg's response. "Father, is he right?"

"He is. Yeah, I had a little coronary mishap in Arizona."

"Are you okay?" asked Mike.

"Fit as a fiddle. I do need to take better care of myself. It was God's wake up call, but I didn't want to bother anyone with this."

Tom looked puzzled, "So you literally think that God caused you to have a heart attack, just to get you to do something. My-o-my . . . you must think that God is mighty manipulative, somewhat like a spoiled child."

No one spoke a word as Tom gave Sharon his order, or actually just approved her recommendation . . . as always some new tomato concoction. Finally Tom turned to his right a bit, in almost a robotic manner, and spoke, "Michael, tell us what is going on in your life. I sense that there is a disturbance close to home for you."

Greg leaned over the table and looked Mike in the eyes with great a expectation, "Did he nail you too?"

Mike blushed. "Okay, I do have some things I'm working on in my personal life, but it isn't something I want to talk about with this group."

They all sat in silence until Mike spoke again. "So I'm curious. What gave me away?"

"Over the past few months I've seen you discouraged or concerned about things in your church. But this time its different. I notice how quiet you were last week . . . except to take two phone calls. Normally you just turn your phone off during breakfast. After each call, you seemed more worried than before. But your look of worry is deeper than when it was been over one of your church members. This must be personal. I know that you have a daughter, as you told me the first time I met you. So, I suspect that there's something difficult going on with either your wife, your daughter . . . or both."

Greg was looking at Mike, "So, tell us what's going on?"

Mike's eyes filled with tears, "Nothing. What I mean is this is personal, something I do not wish to discuss here."

"Leave him alone," came David's plea. "Leave the man alone. He said it's personal so let it be."

Tom rotated to his direct right, "David, I wish I could share with you what I know about you, but you're a closed book. I do know that you have something to hide and I haven't figured it out yet."

David chuckled with an angry laugh, like a dare, "So share your great insight, I'm all ears."

Tom smiled and looked around the group, "You, David, are a rigid man. You see the world through a rule book. Those who do such, use rules as runs of a ladder. They grab them and pull up hard, trying to escape the murky guilt that is wrapped, like an octopus, around their ankles.You also use those rules to push others down, in order to give yourself leverage to get above the haunting guilt."

David burst out laughing. "You are so far off the mark that it isn't funny." He took a drink of coffee and continued, "It's my turn to dissect your heart. You are an arrogant man, judging everyone around your, because you are a con artist and don't know the Lord at all. I don't know what your game is, but the spirit is telling me that you are up to no good. Figuring out Father Randy and Mike is a Satanic power, not from the Spirit. The Spirit's works are always loving, warm and nurturing."

"Just like when the Spirit of God slaughtered the Philistines . . . or the Egyptians." Tom said with a somber smile on his face.

Father Randy, the perpetual peacemaker spoke up, "Gentlemen, the topic this morning was suppose to be about the nature of the Church of Christ. I think we should go around the table and each of us share our traditional or personal views of the topic. Speaking of which, I think we have gotten way off topic for the morning."

Tom smiled, "Actually Father, and I say this with the utmost respect, that I was dead-center with the topic. The point being, is not the Church, the essence that surrounds the people of God when they are together? If so, I was exploring this notion that you earthlings, as you would call yourselves, sit behind these towers of stone. You can't talk about the realities of your life because you are entombed in fear, a fear based on the emotion of feeling insecure in your self-esteem. To me, and I'm here to learn, it would seem that the Church is a place where the Gospel has penetrated fully, thus the communication is pure and open and safe. Not layers of not being able talk about the essentials, leaving only the trivial as the only permissible subjects."

Oddly, they all focused on eating while the words of Tom were being slowly digested.

GERMFASK CHAPTER XII

2012-01-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

Michael Monroe was a quiet man in his original demeanor . .. yet, he had been quieter and moredistracted than usual. No one, save hiswife Beth, knew about the chaos percolating up in his personal life and sheonly knew part of it.

Everything in his sphere of influence seemed to be inperfect balance, when suddenly they began to unravel like an un-fused rope endin a hurricane. The tincture that turnedthe wine into vinegar was a young man, who went by the name of “Rude,” apreferred shortened form of Ruddy or was it Rodney?

Rude was a transfer from Detroit. He was rough around theedges, into the grunge scene, so it seems. The first time that Mike had seenhim was at Ashley's, his sixteen year old daughter’s, volleyball game. He saw the boy at the corner of the gym withhis long, jet-black dyed hair, a chrome chain going from his billfold to hisbelt and combat boots. He didn’t like him. He had no clue at the time that Rudewas there—precisely—to watch Ashley play.

Ashley had had a boyfriend who had Mike and Beth’s perfectapproval. He was a member of theirchurch. He was clean-cut. He played on the basketball team and he worked at theHardware store. They knew that Ashley wasn’t talking much of Jonathan as oflate but they didn’t realize that they had broken up. But Mike and Beth alsohad no idea that she was now becoming total obsessed with Rude.

It wasn’t until Beth herd from Jonathan’s mother in Sunday schoolthat Ashley was dating this new, bad kid named Jude. Jonathan’s mother whispered to Beth at churcha couple of Sunday’s later, “How do you feel about Ashley’s smoking?”

“Smoking?” asked Beth with a puzzled look. Jonathan’s momjust nodded. Of course, she was saying those things to make sure it was clearthat Ashley was the villain in the breakup with her son. It would be assumedthat the Preacher’s kid was always the one in the white hat.

This led to a confrontation that afternoon. Mike and Bethsat in the parsonage living room and demanded to hear it all . . . which theywould later regret.

Ashley was stone-wallingat first, but she knew this day of reckoning was eventually coming, so shefinally caved in and told them everything. She poured the details on them sofast that Mike and Beth clutched the arms of the overstuffed chairs for dearlife, like they were riding them down a class five rapids or a whirly ride atthe state fair.

Ashley stated that she was deeply in love, her words, andRude is the man she has always dreamt of. She wants to marry him as soon as shegraduates, or maybe move in with him. He has helped her see truth in the worldfor the first time. He writes music. He is a poet. He taught her to smoke pot,which does more for her than church ever did. She only smokes tobacco to trainher lungs to inhale pot.

Being disoriented on the whirly ride, Beth finally shoutedSTOP! SHUT YOUR MOUTH!! Michael, say something!

None of Mike’s pastoral counseling classes had prepared himfor this moment. Maybe he was prepared to help other parents deal with thesituation with an emotional detachment, but not in his own family. He was totally lost for words. He prayed in his silent places. He felt so scared. Ashley was sixteen and shehad the power to trump anything he could say . . . by simply walking out thedoor . . . which she would eventually do.

Beth had demanded that Mike do something, at least about thepop-smoking. Ashley didn’t have a car to take away. Mike did ground her, butthose were empty words to Ashley. Mike,taking the best position that he could as a parent of a sixteen-year-old, butstill a weak position, told her that she could never bring pot or even tobaccointo their house or, or . . . “Or what?” Ashley demanded.

Mike was trembling on the inside. Beth was staring at Mikefrom the other side of Ashley, her eyes demanding that he man up. He spoke asif programed words were coming out . . . “Or you can’t live here.”

“That’s fine. I didn’t want to live here anymore anyway. I’msick and tired of playing Christian . . . so sick I want to puke all over yourlittle church.”

Beth was sobbing uncontrollably. Ashley packed up her Britney Spears overnightbag (which her non-Christian grand pa had given her when she turned ten). It was a strange paradox a girl doing a grownup thing like leaving home but with a little girl’s suitcase. Apparently shehad phoned Rude because the moment she walked the door he pulled up in is rattlyand rusty Subaru. They pulled out and upthe street and they could hear his broken muffler echoing through theneighborhood.

Up until the threshold of their door, Beth had beenscreaming, “Where are you going? Youhave to tell us where’re you going? Wewill call the police if you don’t tell us.”

Ashley replied, “Don’t worry about it. I will be safe. But Ican’t live here in pretend anymore. I just can’t stand this fucking Charade.”

Beth looked with horror, “Ashley don’t ever use those wordsin this house! I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

Ashley smiled, “You just don’t get it. I won’t be using any words in this house anymore! That’s why the hell I’m leaving!” She thenpaused and turned around, “And another thing dear mom, you have never known me!”

Mike and Beth both stopped at the threshold of their door.They didn’t want to take the family fight out into the yard where people couldsee them. Mike had been evangelizingClifford across the street for years. It would ruin their wittiness. The Jorgensen’s lived just down the street.Stephen was an elder at their church.

In the silent, cultured stone split-level was empty andquiet . . . quiet except for the sounds of Beth’s sobbing. Mike tried to hold her, but she seemed angryat him and pushed him away. Finally shegave vent to the emotions building up in side of her, “Why didn’t you dosomething? Why didn’t you stop her? Mike. . . what are we going to do?”

Mike was silent and numb on the outside. Inside he feltterrified. His whole life had just beenturned upside down. He felt like he hadjust watched a horror movie, but when the lights came on, then he exited into thestreet from the theater, the monsters were still there. You couldn’t put the genie back into thebottle. Their family would never, ever be the family they were just a weekearlier.

They did call the police. The police treated it as a simplerunaway, but the officer knew Mike and Beth personally. Beth demanded that hekeep quiet about their problem. Heassured them he would. He went beyond what he was required to do. He looked for the kids until he found therusty car sitting in front of one of Ashley’s friend’s house. He went in and talked with them. Her friend’smother was offering Ashley a place to stay until this blew over.

As bad as things had become, it wasn’t the worse of thingsfor Mike. That came a week later. Duringtheir intensive and more personal than typical conversations, Beth saidsomething that shook Mike’s world more that Ashley’s leaving had.

They were sitting in bed talking and Beth said, “Ashley needsto grow up and realize, like I did, that she needs to pick the good man to bewith, not the one you are in love with.” As soon as she said those words, she realized in her lapse of vigilanceshe spoke much more honestly than she intended.

“What does that mean?” Mike asked. “Are you saying youmarried me, not out of love, but out of discipline?”

“Of course not! I do love you. I was just saying that I wasmature enough to know that you were a good man and that you would make a goodhusband and father and that’s why I married you.”

Mike sat in a cold, dark silence as he pondered where totake the conversation. He was totally infatuated with Beth when they married.He assumed that she was about him.

Beth hit the remote hoping to distract the conversation. Shehad always avoided speaking her heart to anyone, especially Mike. But now theywere in her inner world and she wanted them to exit, so she could close thatdoor, which she had inadvertently opened.

Finally Mike spoke again, “Beth, you weren’t in love with mewere you? I always had that sense, butfor now the pieces seem to fit.”

“Mike, I love you and that is what counts. Who even knows what being in love really is.It is a word children use.”

“Beth, I have no doubts I was deeply in love with you.”

But Mike started putting pieces together. When he met Beth, she was a new convertcoming to their campus ministry. She was dating a tall, handsome guy, Lew, whoplayed tennis for the state college and was a fraternity president. Mike remembered how hard it was for Beth tobreak up with him, but she knew that she had to leave that partyinglifestyle.

Mike barely knew her at the time. But looking back, he knew that Beth had beenin love with Lew. Now, he realized that she had never been in love with him in the same way. He was the safe, quiet man. Right now, that is not what he wanted to be. Strangely, he would rather have been Beth's Rude.

In a span of a week, he realized that he was a failure as afather, a pastor and the knight he always wanted to be, winning the love andadmiration for the woman he loved. He was terrified that his sweet, little princess daughter was being sexually active and doing so with a man . . . a boy . . . who didn't love her the way that he did. His heart was breaking.

The avalanche of insecurities where overwhelming for MichaelMonroe. On the surface, for the sake of the Gospel, for the sake of his church,he had to pretend that all was well. However, he felt like a Russian Matryoshkadoll, where layer by layer he was being consumed from the inside out bywood-eating piranha. Layer by layer his inner man was dying, and he felt asjust a shell . . . a smiling and shellacked pastor Mike. He could let no one know . . . for the sake of the Gospel, he had to man up.

GERMFASK CHAPTER XI

2011-12-31T18:37:00.000-08:00

Debra pulled out of Munising in her little, black Jetta,going up the steep hill to the top of the Peninsula plateau. She turned out and left onto M28 for herdrive to GERMFASK. It was a lovely earlyautumn day. The sky was a deep, sapphiric blue. Far below the Pictured RocksCliffs she saw glimpses of Lake Superior in all her glory, a paler blue thanthe sky but stretching out to meet it at the northern horizon with a featherededge. Debra noticed for the first time that the golden Autumn-fairy had lightlytouched her magic wand to the tips of the maples, aspens and birches on thehigher hills. Soon, from these points oforigins, gold would melt down across the hillcrests and then the valleys withsuch intensity that a prolonged look could make you go blind. Even Vermont’s mountains of October revert to greenness in envy of this remote and obscure Autumndelight.

Debra was feeling stable on her feet once again after ascare just a week earlier. She was huddled in the ICU of the Flagstaff MedicalCenter, praying for her dear friend Father Randy. The two of them had a wonderful, andlong-planned, mule ride to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. However, in themiddle of the night, in the bottom of the abyss, Father Randy awakened withcrushing chest pains. It seemed like hours before the rescue helicopter couldmake its landing at clearing to pick him up. Since there was only room for the patient and the medics, Debra had thetorturous task of waiting until daybreak, without any cell tower coverage, tomake her way back up the canyon wall to civilization. By the time she reachedthe hospital, Randy had already been evaluated, diagnosed and treated . . .with a stent to keep his circumflex artery open.

But now they were both back in the Upper Peninsula. This morning’s breakfast would be the firsttime she had seen or talked to Randy since they left each other at theMarquette airport four days earlier. He did ask her not to share his story withanyone. It was his sense that a priest has the calling to be the caregiver . .. and not the cared-for.

Pulling into the graveled parking lot outside the inn withthe sound of cracking limestone under her rubber tires, Debra noticed that allthe cars of her fellow breakfasteers were there, including the mysteriousstranger. During her hour drive, she hadmeditated on how to pigeon-hole her views on the Gospel. She felt torn betweenwhat she questioned in her heart and what her church expected.

She also felt thisgreat uneasiness about the fact that she wasn’t prepared to answer thestranger. Even after a BA degree from aChristian college and a Masters in theology and ministry. Even after havingprepared for and delivered a thousand sermons in her career; too many Biblestudies, funerals, weddings and other extraneous Christian ceremonies to count,she still wasn’t sure what the Gospel really was.

She would soon find out that it didn’t really matter. Debra said her hellos around the table and tookher usual spot between Father Randy and Greg Landis. Everyone else were in their traditional seats,with Tom Hans just to the right of Greg, going counter-clockwise was followedby David Smith, then Mike Monroe and back to Father Randy to complete thecircle.

As Debra slipped off her jacket and reached to her left andgave Randy a little hug, Sharon appeared and took her order . . . “I’ll tryyour mushroom and spinach omelet. That’s new isn’t it?” asked Debra. Sharon smiled and nodded.

Debra looked around the table and saw the faces of each ofthe men for the first time with consideration. Mr. Han’s cheeks were quite red, like sunburned, if not that, then windburned. The stranger then spoke whileshe was still studying his form . . . as if to help her made a judgment if hereally could be extra-terrestrial.

“Friends, I hope you had a wonderful summer vacation. I’ve spent the time in study andcontemplation. I know on our last meeting I was trying to get you to define theGospel. This is very important to my people and a clear definition is imperative.However, and I shouldn’t have been surprised, that we got nowhere fast. There was a spectrum around the table as whatconstitutes a ‘true believer.’”

Tom continued, “I think, that despite my years of study froma distance, I under-estimated to what extend that you earth-dwellers reasonfrom emotion than logic.That emotion, of course, is deeply fused with your sense of value. As I told you before,and I don’t want to offend you in any way (reaching out and touching David onhis left arm and smiling at him) but our people discovered a long time ago toseparate those two parts of our brain’s processing. We reason and makedecisions from logic. We save the emotions simply for personal enjoyment.”

David looked almost angry, “I have to disagree withyou. I think we are very logical.”

Tom smiled with a kind smile, “Hmm . . . I know that youthink that, but it isn’t true. Here ismy point. We couldn’t have a logical discussion around this table about what isthe Gospel, because each person’s position on the topic has been set inconcrete . . . or at least a thick mud. That setting has to do with yourpersonal up-bringing and your social context and not about logic. You can't speak against what your group thinks, or it would take away your sense of value . . . and emotional issue.

Tom paused for a minute and then continued, "You would like to think it was through alogical process, but it wasn’t. Therefore, when it is set in hardened emotional-congregateall you have left to do is to defend that position to the bitter end. So, to save a lot of time, I simply searchedthe electronosphere . . . woops . . . I mean what you call the Internet, andread what your churches teach. I readboth your denominational views and in some cases, such as Debra’s here, I readyou actual church’s web site for that information. So, now it is a moot pointbecause I know that none of you will sway from those positions.”

David spoke again, “I still disagree with you and am a bitoffended that you think that we reason from emotions. If I didn’t believe exactlywhat the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee to be exact, believed, I would beout the door tomorrow. But it is my personal study of scriptures that has ledme to my position, using logic and inspiration from the Holy Spirit.”

Tom smiled again, “Nope, it isn’t true. You wouldn’t changeyour position no matter what someone else said or what you read in scripturebecause to do so would have tremendous emotional consequences to you. You wouldhave to leave your church. You would be unemployed. You would lose yourinsurance. You would have to find a job or new denomination that would accept youas a pastor and lastly, and where most of the rigidity comes from in yourconcrete, you would lose your friends. They would think less of you if you didn’tbelieve like they do. So the consequences are just too great for you to changeyour mind.”

Sharon showed up with three plates, two of omelets and oneof an assortment of tomatoes, fresh ones, fried ones and even a special tomatopudding that she made just for Tom. He smiled and thanked her.

Then he continued, “This is very different among my people.We figured this out a long time ago. We reach our positions of thought, ourdecisions of life, based on the logic God has given us . . . then we enjoy theemotions that come later. We never put emotional pressure on others to thinklike we do. It is not political or emotional. We do not feel threatened when someone doesn’t think like we do. Weenjoy logical dialog and that dialog has real consequences. If there is enoughlogic presented, we do change our minds. This is why we have never had a Dark Age. This is why we stopped thevery illogical thing called war a long time ago. But don’t be offended, all your societythinks from emotions. Your atheists are just as bad or worse about it. They conformto those they study and work with on an emotional level, not on a logicallevel. You could not thrive very well emotionally if you had a deep convictionabout Christianity being true and getting a higher degree in a program where atheismis highly esteemed.”

Tom slipped two freshly cut tomatoes into his mouth andsmiled.

“So, back to what I was saying, Uh . . .”

A voice came from Tom’s left, “I think this is one area thatI might side with David on,” said Greg. "I started out a long time ago as a Baptist, then I became a Methodistminister and now I’m attending a Unitarian congregation as a retired Methodistminister. So, we can change our minds.”

Tom answered, “Oh, I never said that you don’t change yourminds, but you earth dwellers convince yourselves that you reach certainpositions because of logic, or as David was saying, that God speaks directly toyou with certain facts, which are not evident through the senses. But that isn’t true most of the time. Greg, Ichallenge you to go back and review your changes in course. I suspect thatthose changes happened on emotional factors. You met people who you liked andwho thought differently. You wanted to be their friend, so you started to thinkmore like them. I suspect you left the Baptist church when you figured out youwere gay and that might be why you like the Unitarians so much. Once you peoplemake a decision on an emotional level, you go back and support that decisionwith some logic to continue the illusion.”

Father Randy spoke, “I’m not sure that is so bad. God worksthough society and teaches us from one another and sometimes that teachingcomes through conformity to those whom we love.”

Tom seemed to me more confrontation than before their Augustbreak as he looked intensely at Father Randy, “Father all due respect, but as aman of the Catholic cloth, you are closely bound by your church’s teaching. Youcould not publically say that the Protestants are right in their view of theGospel because to do so, you would have to step down from your position, maybebe excommunicated and it would have a profound change in your life. Your viewson the Gospel are strictly limited by the concrete restraints of your church.So, I don’t need to put you in the position of trying to explain to me what you think the Gospel really is, I just will take one of your church’s manuals on the Gospel.”

There was an uneasy silence around the table. No one noticed that Mike had left to take aphone call on his cell and had returned.

Tom spoke once more after downing a teaspoon of his pinkpudding. “So I will end this topic bysummarizing that there are two views of the Gospel. One is that God gave it asa gift to completely cleanse us from our guilt and allow us to stand boldly inHis presence. However some of you, such as you Father and you, David, believe thatthe Gospel is not enough in itself but must be combined with other rituals.”

“I do not believe such things!” said David in almost ashout.

“David,” said Tom, “Did you not define the true believer bymany terms of rituals? They are the oneswho watch certain TV, read certain books, aren’t gay, aren’t Democrats andetc.?”

David just stared in silence.

Tom continued, “So here is the question I really want you tothink about for next week. This is very, very important to my people. What is theChurch? What is required of us for beinga Church? I would love to hear yourhonest opinions and base it as much as possible on logic and what you read inscripture. I give you permission to saythings that your church or your Christian friends don’t believe. “

Tom cleared his throat and continued, “You see, our peopledon’t have any type of meeting that you would call church. We are in some sensea theocracy because we don’t separate our government from our belief in God. Sowhen we meet to do the business of our society, well, that is as close as wecome to what might look like a church. But now that I will be taking thescriptures back with us, we want to know what they really say about church.”

It is New Year's Eve and I had to type in a rush without proofing. I hope to come back and fix the errors, bare with me please.

GERMFASK PART II, A REINTRODUCTION

2011-12-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

I will begin with a quick review. You may also do a site search on this blog for "GERMFASK" and all previous chapters will appear.

Synopsis: GERMFASK, is the name of a tiny, isolated village in the eastern end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The major town business is the Jolly Inn, which is a restaurant and inn with two rooms for let. The proprietors are Arnie and his wife Sharon, transplants from Chicago.

In this restaurant an impromptu ecumenical discussion group formed when the local Catholic priest, Father Randy, and Mike Monroe, the pastor of Manistique Community Church, bonded over a dying perisher. Later two additional pastors had joined the group including David Smith, a Church of God minister and Gregory Landis, a retired Methodist minster from Grand Rapids. The men met each Wednesday morning over cups of coffee and Sharon's famous omelets. They didn't meet to discuss theological issues. To do so, they knew would quickly drive them apart. Instead they met just to be friends, friends who share a common experience of leading (or had led in the case of Rev. Landis) congregations.

One Monday morning a new, odd stranger (who went by the name Tom Hans) came into the restaurant. Not only was his face new, but he seemed strange in many other ways . . . in both behavior and looks. He was tall and very thin. Sharon was totally engulfed in curiosity about the man. When he started asking theological questions, Sharon invited him to be part of the Wednesday morning discussion group.

The traditional members were somewhat hesitant to allow the stranger to join them . . . at least they didn't share Sharon's enthusiasm. The main reason that the breakfast was at time of peace for the me and trying to answer someone's theological questions they knew would dig up some controversy.

Mr. Hans did join the group. While the usual members expressed great curiosity about him, Mr. Hans tired to redirect the attention to his own questions. Finally, at an impasse, Mr. Hans revealed that he was from another planet. He was a descendant of a lost tribe from Babel. His tribe was made up of the engineers of the tower, so when God dispersed them, as Tom's story goes, he sent the actual tower designers to a different planet, Teyvat (meaning ark in old Hebrew). Tom's people are called Hanserians, meaning the engineer tribe.

While the Hanserians had their traditional history, and knew their origins well, they didn't have scriptures to teach them specifics of human history and God's interactions with people. They were a far more advanced civilization than earthlings. They based their great advancement on the fact that they had learned to rightly divide reason and emotions to their proper places . . . decisions come from reason, emotions are for personal enjoyment. Humans, on the other, make most of their decisions from emotions. In their advancement, Hanserians figured out how to travel long distances and including visiting earth.

Their tribal history told them that they were from earth and that is where they would find the answers to their destiny. For this reason, they had studied earth, from afar, for decades. Tom Hans was one of the "spies" sent to study humans on a more personal level and to learn what they know of God and His Gospel.

Debra, a good friend of Father Randy and a Presbyterian pastor from the town of Munising. Because she too became intriged with the stranger, she, by Father Randy's invitation, drove the 100 mile round trip to join the Wednesday morning round table discussions.

By the time Part I ended, most of the people were still skeptical of Tom Hans. Some thought he was crazy, a con man or someone with a wild imagination. However, because of Tom's uncanny ability to read people, Greg was starting to believe him.

It was the beginning of August and several of the group's members were taking trips so they adjourned until after Labor Day. It is now September 7th and the group is being reunited.

Scriptures Revisited

2011-12-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

One of you said the other day that they don't even read the Bible anymore . . . nor do I. I do read our passages in church, but that is about it.

For the twenty years I sought to be a disciple, I read scriptures daily, usually for at least an hour. I believed . . . and was led to believe . . . that if I missed one day of reading, then God would be mad at me plus I would probably be in the ditch with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a hooker by the next day. We were taught that the Bible is the bread of life, so miss it one day and you starve to death spiritually.

But I disagree with that. Sometimes I think it is even healthy to get away from scriptures, for a while. The reason is, we can become so indoctrinated into what scriptures mean that what we are really doing is looking at words on a page and our minds are "reading" what we have been told it means . . . if that makes sense.

I remember years ago when I was in the thick of Arabic school in Cairo. It was the hardest think I had ever done. It was called "Intensive Arabic Studies" and it was. My mind was so overloaded that I couldn't even remember English grammar anymore. So, the first year ended. We ( my wife and our three small sons, ages 1-5) flew to Switzerland and lived in a pup tent for a month . . . because my wife and I were both near an emotional breakdown (things you can't say in a missionary news letter). It was soooooooooo refreshing. Backpacking down to the village below us once a week to buy groceries, then back up on the mountain. I never gave Arabic one thought during that month.

It was the most amazing thing that when we landed back in Cairo, I came out of the airport, into the busy streets . . . and I could speak Arabic . . . for the first time. I wasn't fluent, but I could speak, put together sentences with proper syntax and conjugated verbs.

So, I actually think it is a good thing to get away from scriptures for awhile. But I feel poised to go back. Our pastor asked for volunteers to read through the Bible in 90 days. I was tempted to sign up. But, like Johan said, I am so busy right now. I'm still trying to get a business off the ground and keep itt afloat. I did make a financial pledge to my new church and am failing that badly so I don't want to make a pledge to read the Bible in 90 days.

The thing is, I'm looking forward, now that my mind has been emptied from all the Evangelical socialization, to try and see what it really says.

I'm also poised to get back to my GERMFASK story, which I promised to finish.

Lackadaisical Spirituality

2011-12-20T21:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, this thought will be a little hard to follow . . . yet I will try.

A long time ago in a university far away, I had a roommate that had a brief obsession with miniature furniture. I never figured it out. But he sanded, glued, even nailed with nails smaller than a stick pin, for hours. Maybe, years later, when I was trying to restore a real piece of antique furniture did I get it. At least the miniature version would have taken a lot less time and money to complete.

But I was thinking today how we come up with hobbies, interests and obsessions and sometimes loose them. Maybe I've lost a few. I used to be an avid backpacker. But I haven't been since . . . oh, that's right I went last summer. Hmmm . . . and the year before that I backpacked in Nepal for three weeks. But it doesn't obsess me like before. I think part of the reason is that I now live in the woods.

So this is the season of Christmas . . . and the Republican primary. Because of the two aforementioned things, one theme keep showing up on the news . . . the life of Christians and Evangelicals in particular. So it is really strange, hard to put into words, but I have virtually no interest in the things I once thought were the essence of being spiritual.

Sometimes I find it scary. Am I spiritually dead? That would have been my conclusion if me from 15 years ago was to judge me from today.

But, one way to look at it, is that evangelicalism use to be my hobby and obsession. Now, I have zero (with a big Z) interest in going to a Bible conference, a Christian concert ("contemporary Christian music"), or anything that smelled of religion. I don't even feel motivated to visit Imonk any more. I do rush over now and then to check out the topics. Some of the more philosophical or cultural issues interest me. But I have no interest in the more "religious" conversations, even Advent. I think Mike Spencer use to deal with more of the non-religious issues of Christianity. But I still like that community.

So, I'm not sure what's wrong with me. But, I have a sense that it is not spiritual dead-ness, but the typical loss of interest in the hobby of churchianity or whatever you want to call it. What gives me this assurance (that I'm not spiritually dead) is my great interest still in topics of real philosophy (what I mean by "real" is not just the history of philosophy, who said what, but the real questions of life). While I would not want to go to a Christian concert, I would love deeply to go to Handel's Messiah, with a full orchestra and wonderful choir and we swept away by its (actually pointing to God's) grandeur.

I have also never been more sure of God, the Christian God that is, being there . . . but, like I said a few post ago, I still don't have certainty. But fifteen years ago, when I did have surface certainty, I had deep and dark doubts in my private world.

So, just like when you were in a miniature furniture making club and then loose interest, it is hard to strike up a conversation with those who were once part of that club. I feel out of place when I run into my Evangelical friends. The things they want to talk about, "God blessing the Denver Broncos with wins because of Tim Tebow's faithfulness to the Lord." doesn't interest me. However, I could sit, spell bound, for hours discussing a good book, a great film or piece of art . . . and how it relates to us being human, and God being God.

I have the feeling that others are in my shoes. Loss of the hobby of Christianity, but wrapped up in the essence of it.

In conclusion, I wanted to watch a very interesting film on PBS last night . . . Lord Save Us From Ourselves, by Don Merchant. I wanted so much to follow it, but I kept falling asleep. But it seemed to me that Mr. Merchant also had this strange outsider view of people of his faith.

Okay, I'll shut up for now.

I Really Do Like My Church

2011-12-18T10:57:00.000-08:00

I know that it may be strange hearing this coming from me, but I thought it was time I made such a statement While I know that not everyone who comes here is a "post-evangelical," for those who are, I do respect the variety of ways you have come to terms with it.

I know a couple who just simply don't darken the doors of any organized church anymore, and I respect that. I know where you are coming from and I came close to choosing that path. I also know that 99.9% of evangelicals would scream how un-biblical it is to not go to church. But I believe that has nothing to do with the Bible, but much more to do with the centuries that the various church organizations have used guilt as a tool of social coercion to force people to go to church, organized church that is. What the Bible simply says is that it is not good to be a Christian and to be alone. It is good to meet with other Christians. That could be in a bar. For me, my best church has happened in a coffee shop.

I also respect the choice that some of my good Evangelical friends have made, like David, one of my best friends from my Navigator days, to join a old church ( meaning Catholic or Orthodox). I could easily have seen myself joining an Orthodox church if one was in town.

But a year and half ago, I joined the big, old Presbyterian church. It is in a smaller version of a cathedral and no that isn't it pictured. I wrote very candidly about the process of making the switch. It was very, very ugly. The pastor of my old Evangelical church was mad as hell about it, but he puts on the front that he only opposed me leaving his church because he sees it as me leaving God. He came to my house and chewed my ass out like it had never been chewed . . . in a very long time. I still have bite marks on my buttocks.

So with that said, I am SOOOOOOOOoooooooo happy I made the switch. I enjoy going to church service on Sunday mornings, the first time in a decade or more. I love sitting in the brick cathedral (I know that Protestant churches aren't "cathedrals") and listening to the pipe organ. But the thing I like the most is the space. The geographic space inside the church is one thing. I mean, if you wanted you could have a pew to yourself even though two hundred people were there.

But what I really mean is the spiritual, intellectual and emotional space. In my Evangelical churches, I was constantly being told what to do, what to think and how to act . . . to be a good Christian. Not so here. When I met with the pastor, before I joined, I asked her about this freedom. This church is theologically conservative, however, she pointed out that there is a complete rainbow of people who come.

There are probably (I don't know of any but they certainly would feel comfortable) open gays who attend. There were plenty of cars with Obama stickers on the bumper. On the other side, I have met a couple of people who are extreme right-fundamentalist types. One I felt sure was an escapee from a mental institution. He made Jerry Falwell look like a New Ager.

But I have freedom to think. I can raise questions, as I do here, and find that others have raised the same questions. I couldn't imagine an entire Sunday school class, like in my old church, suggesting that I wasn't even a Christian because I believed that the earth was very, very old.

But I will let it rest here. I just wanted to point out, as critical as I often am, how much I enjoy my church. I must end because I'm late for the 11 AM service.

The Blessing of Holiday Depression

2011-12-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

Most of us feel depressed, at least at times, during the holidays. There is a good reason for that. Thanksgiving and Christmas are time capsules. They carry vivid memories of holidays past. For some of us, those memories are of childhood. I've always said that childhood is the most idealized time of life, and for many of us the happiest. As children (unless we were abused) we see the world as a place of wonder, a place to explore and learn. We had not yet tasted the disappointments of life, sickness, death and betrayal.

There are also memories for some of us, of our own children during their wonder years.

Then those are memories of those we loved and are gone. The holidays seems to have a special place for those we've lost.

Time is the great thief, stealing our wonder years, those we've loved and our own health. The holidays are a great reminder of that which was stolen.

The blessing of feeling depressed, is the glory of being human. There is a time for laughing . . . and a time for crying. All are on the spectrum of being human and in that we are blessed.

I haven't decided yet if time is a result of the fall of Adam, or a twisted gift from God. After all, time also steals our sorrows. There is no doubt that it hurts much more right after the loss, than after the passage of a lot of time.

The false Christian message is that we must always smile, always look at the bright side, and feel guilty about having moments of sadness. But sadness is part of being human, of being real. The grief testifies to the value of the person we lost, or the value of those special times when we were small, or our kids were. The loss is real and deserves real sadness in its wake.

Of course I'm not talking about clinical depression. That is piece of hell on earth. I'm speaking here of garden variety sadness. The sadness in the back ground, or of that which overwhelms you for a few minutes, or an entire morning. But enjoy your grief, for a brief season and feel no guilt about it. It is living in reality.

The Art of Shadow Boxing

2011-12-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

The first time I ever heard this term . . . I'm sorry to say . . . was being applied to myself (regrettably). To be honest, I didn't know what it meant for two reasons.

The first reason is simply I didn't understand what the term was referring to in general. Secondly, I didn't know what it was referring to in my own personal life.

This line "Mike you go though life shadowboxing" I eventually realized, was spot-on. I've said before, the only thing that is more disturbing than someone criticizing you falsely . . . is someone criticizing you correctly.

This letter was written by my previous missionary boss, Curt. It was in the middle of an extremely difficult time in our lives, living in a slum in Cairo, alone and cut off our our missionary group and with some sick children.

What led to this statement, was that I had just exploded at the boss, via letter. He was like the Wizard of Oz, never seen face to face and I couldn't talk to him. But he was dead right about me. This was at the event horizon, that thin line between what once was, but to never to be again.

Up until that point, I was the ideal evangelical, even more so than my boss. I had just finished ten years in a Navigator training center. I wanted to be perfect, and I thought I was almost there. Part of perfection facade was the belief that I was never angry, smiled all the time and thanked Jesus all the time.

But I had just exploded at my boss. How do you go from no anger to instant rage? You don't. I had been pissed at him for a couple of years . . . and the piss-y-ness had been growing and growing. I hated the man in the deep places of my real heart. But on the surface, I was shadow-boxing . . . smiles, thanking Jesus, talking about my wonderful boss.

This was at the very start of my journey for honesty. I was a very dishonest person. I'm still not completely honest but I strive to be. The striving is what is different, not the arriving. Honestly is not well received in Evangelical circles. My old pastor would have loved the old Mike, smiles and praises to Jesus constantly.

I may have told this story before, but a few years ago a old college friend was corresponding with me. She was the campus president of a Christian ministry. He husband was leader of the Evangelical community. They, like us, have five children, all seemingly perfect on the surface. Star athletes, in all kinds of Christian ministries and etc. But one day, completely out of context, I got this strange letter from her. She voiced how much she hated her husband. That in their private world they fight all the time about money. She despised him for his porn addiction, she hated him for his womanizing and the list went on and on. But what concerned me the most that she finished that e-mail by saying that she is in a constant thought about either trying to murder him or kill herself.

Okay, this isn't about her, but the principle. I was very concerned. I didn't know what to say, but I e-mailed her about it . . . that e-mail was met with silence. I e-mailed again . . . silence. I begged her to respond, to get into therapy. She was so silent, that I thought her e-mail wasn't working. But then, one day, she picked up e-mailing me and our other college friends just like nothing had happened. She would say things about how happy she was, that her husband was her hero and a real man of God and etc.

I always feel puzzled by these things. It seems to be all around me. I know of terrible things going on in people's lives, yet, you have to pretend you don't know. You have to live in the Platonic (on the cave wall) type of shadows. You have to pretend goodness and smile. Oh, if only I could be the shadow boxer I once was, how well life would be. The avoidance of conflict. The life of peace, even though that peace would be only shadow thick. But once again I'm faced with this dilemma of the fact if God is really there, then He is a God of truth. If truth is good, then pretending is false. I should seek truth. But that doesn't work out in reality.

Knowing Part VI - Finale

2011-12-10T12:45:00.000-08:00

If I had a philosophical motivation, it would be towards total honesty, meaning honesty on an intellectual and emotional level. The reason that I pick honesty as a philosophical centerpiece is that, if God is there, and I believe He is, then He is the essence of truth. Therefore the more we see truth at all levels, including the emotional level, then the closer we are to Him. It is that simple.

Secondly, and this is somewhat of a no-brainer, as a Christian, I believe that God speaks truth through His historical narrative (scripture) and through created reality. If there are inconsistencies between the two, then one of my interpretations must be wrong. If the Bible clearly said that the earth was six thousand years old (which it does not) and the geographical record screamed of a much older earth, then my interpretations of at least one must be wrong.

For decades, as an Evangelical, I also sought "truth." I put the quotes there intentionally because that "truth" was not honest truth, but dogma. It is were I was taught the "right" way to think. My process of seeking truth was opposing all that was inconsistent with that teaching of my Evangelical sub-culture. So in some ways, it wasn't seeking truth at all.

Okay, now back to knowing, which is much more fundamental than Christian dogma vs honest truth.

I've established that in my humble opinion there can be no certainty in the minds of fallen people. Those who profess certainty, such as the Evangelicals or the absolute Atheists-Materialist, are the ones most dishonest.

So, and I think I've said this before, there is no single, easy path. All possible paths have built in absurdity at some point and that includes the Christian path. My answer for this is easy . . . once again, I blame it all the Fall of Adam. In this Christian paradigm, if we were not fallen, our senses could be fully trusted as could our brain's reasoning and interpretation of those senses. But that's not the case.

So, because all roads have absurdity, then it isn't like most of the paths are uphill except for the one true path and it is clear and smooth. All paths are uphill. So that puts your starting point in the bottom of a crater.

But first you must have the starting point. I spoke about this two posts ago. You can make the argument that we are not here . . . such as we are a butterflies dream, or that we are not here for other reasons. Even some of the materialist are starting to make this argument through the notions of string theory that we are not really here. We are at least points of energy (strings) rather than mass . . . or, the most bizarre, we are holographic projections from the ancient contents of black holes. But I won't even waste anymore time with that thought.

So then, we move from the far left one notch to Descartes. At the nadir of the crater, rest the position we are here because we have consciousnesses. If you take the path up, along the materialists' paradigm, some of the path is easy, flat and smooth. You can explain the old age of the universe and many strictly scientific facts about the universe. But then you come to the steep sides of being human. The only position that a materialist can have is that we are protein and carbohydrate constructed robots, that self-constructed through enormous periods of time with only chance being the guide. Therefore, you suddenly loose all meaning, all sense of ethics, all hope and etc. The steepest part of the wall is that no human can live this way. Even the greatest of the materialists can't live this way.

Now, the fact that we can't live this way doesn't prove that it is not true, but it creates a conflict that we would be a certain way (having consciousnesses, a longing for meaning) but where there is none. I became a Christian as a teenager afer laying in my bed for months thinking about the fact that I am real, inside my head. I could touch my face and feel it. Everyone else could be a bio-robot, but I knew that I wasn't. The late Francis Schaeffer said it is an evolutionary failure. It would be as if fish evolved lungs on a planet where there is no free oxygen, only water. That is the point of absurdity.

The other great absurdity of the strictly materialists is the "prime mover" issue. How can all that there is, come from nothing, without a prime force? I beg you to meditate on this for days and you will find the absurdity. But you do have to start from nothing. You can't start with some laws of physics or quantum mechanics. If matter and anti-matter suddenly split (or energy and anti or even dark energy) making the universe . . . there HAD to be a process to cause the enormous divide or big Bang. Honest scientists know that this is a point of absurdity and they escape it by trying not to think about it.

I won't talk about my views about pantheism because I'm running out of time. I will just briefly mention that their major point of absurdity comes in some of the same areas. There is no personal God, but god is everything and everything is god. So the steep parts of the crater is that there can be no real meaning and no morals. Now a good Hindu, Buddhist or New Ager (and I think of Gandhi as one example) can have great personal morals . . . but they are build on tissue paper philosophically. That same system has created the greatest racism on the planet, in the caste system.

I will differ from my personal idol Schaeffer on this next point, and this the absurdity of Christianity. As an Evangelical I was taught that it is the only smooth and rational path. But it has it's problems too. I will pick one, which the atheists point to all the time, and that is the fact that God IS silent. I know that one of Schaeffer's greatest books was He is There and He is Not Silent . . . but us be honest about it folks, He is silent in the present age. This is not a theological position. It is not a truth I've gleamed from scripture, but a simple observation of reality.

Now you can twist the issue. You can say that God is not silent because we see His beauty all around us. That is true and I think an un-fallen mind could full appreciate that. But, it is not a strong argument that God is behind it rather than chance.

Most Christians say that God is not silent because they can "hear" his voice, or "feel Him" in their hearts. Some claim they have seen His supernatural miracles. It is extremely unpopular (and the main reason that many of my Evangelical friends no longer like me very much) to doubt these things. But I'm just being honest that all of these can be explained away through psychological factors. I've witnessed as many "miracles' as any Evangelical and I can now, that I'm more honest, attest that none of them seem more than psychological wishful thinking.

As a side bar, I do think Christian apologetics are helpful . . . when they don't exaggerate. Christian apologists are notorious (just like their materialist counterparts) for exaggerations. Josh McDowel is an example. But I am helped by archaeological finds that support scriptures. I am helped by historical and philosophical arguments So they certainly do have their place. But we can never reach certainty by them.

But, in my final statement, I personally believe that the Christian path up the steep crater is a little less steep than some of the others and that is why I am a Christian. My point of this entire series is that Christians should be given the freedom to doubt, to be less than certain, to explore and think . . . yet have a dynamic relationship with the God . . . who we feel pretty sure is there.

I also have something to say in support of us "Uncertains." If Biblical faith is the act of the will, to step out and trust God in something He has said (think of Abraham here), then who exhibits that most admirable faith? Is the person who abstains from sexual relationship with their girlfriend (I pick this example not because I'm obsessed with the topic, but because sexual abstinence is one of the most difficult test of faith I can think of) because they are certain that God is there and sex is sin that will make God angry at them. Or is it the person who is not absolutely certain God is there but abstains because they think that He is there enough that they are willing to discipline themselves not to, because if God is there, then his design of total commitment between two people makes sex much better and in its proper place? Okay, maybe that wasn't clear to you, but I think the second person exhibits the greatest faith. Because in their 10% area of uncertainty, they could easily rationalize away and say, okay if God isn't there, it doesn't matter . . . so I might as well do it. Did I loose you?

Knowing Part V - So?

2011-12-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

So the teens get back from their regional youth conference. They are invited to lead the next Sunday morning service. Some sang. A few do a skit. Two are lined up to give testimonies, and one preached.

James it the first to speak during testimony time.

"Thank you for letting me come. I really had a good time at the conference. We got to hang out a lot, play paint ball and do some rock climbing. It was a lot of fun. I got to hear some interesting talks which got me thinking a lot. I love God and I am so thankful for the Good News of the Gospel. I'm quite confident that the whole Christian story is true and that gives me great hope and I'm ready to live consistent with those beliefs."

He hardly notices the extreme quiet in the room and how many of the congregation were even starting to squirm in their seats a bit.

Britney comes up next. She starts to cry (she doesn't realize why she is crying. She is crying out of nervousness and performance anxiety). In her weepy voice she says, "God is sooooo real to me! I feel the Spirit of God on me." The tears flow. "I knew the day I met Him the first time that he was there and I've never doubted that for a second." Amen's break out. Her self-confidence grows. "Jesus was there at the retreat. I could feel his arms around me and they were as real as any real arms I've ever felt . . . even more real than my mom's arms and I know my mom loves me a lot." She continues to cry as bright smiles are everywhere in the church. She goes on, "I saw so many miracles and people these days don't say miracles still happen but they do!" Amens continue. "I watched as Amanda, who could never swim before, swim across the deep end of the pool. It was just like the water was holding her up . . . but we all knew it was Jesus." Amen! "One boy said he actually saw the arms of Jesus beneath the water." The people are smiling.

As tears continue down her face she adds, "I don't understand why James just THINKS God is there, I know He is. I feel him in my soul in a very real way. I know exactly what He is saying to me in His Bible. When I read it the Spirit tells me exactly what God wants me to know. I just know that God said it, I believe it and that settles it!" Cheers break out.

Later the senior pastor approached the youth pastor and asked, "I think James was a poor choice for a testimony. However, I think the Spirit moved the whole congregation through Britney. She is a tremendous gal. It sounds like James went just to have fun." The youth pastor felt bad.

So, down on the honest level, James took the conference very seriously. He spent a lot of his time studying the scriptures between the meetings to check the validity of what the speakers were saying. He did enjoy the games and hanging out with his friends too

Britney had as much fun as James. She did all the games and even cut out a couple of the talks (which was against the rules) to hang out with her friends. During one of the afternoon sessions, she sneaked out to meet her boyfriend, Nate. While everyone was in the big auditorium, Britney and Nate found a cabin that was closed up for the winter. They got a window open, sneaked in and . . . as Nate had been strategizing for a while, to close the deal and have sex. That was the real highlight of her weekend.

Discussion:

I don't mean any disrespect in the above, fictional, story . . . but I have been a youth and have been around many youth (raising five kids) and I wanted to tell the story, and the irony of the story in graphic, honest detail . . . consistent with reality.

The point is, we Christians value certainty (not certainly as I mis-typed before) above all else. This puts tremendous pressure on lifting up the kids who are certain and demishing the value kids who think and ponder, but are never certain.

The great error in certainty is that, in my humble opinion, it is never possible for fallen brains to reach true certainty. Therefore, two groups, the Christians and the confident materialists both claim certainty.

I must explain how I'm using the term "materialists" here. I mean the atheists who are atheists because they believe that they have reached certainty through logic, however, they ignore the fact that logic starts with the premise that if it can't be examined empirically, then it doesn't exist . . . which defiles logic. So both those groups, who express great certainty . . . are really like two peas in a pod rather than totally opposites.

Often I've seen kids who were brought up in Evangelical worlds and taught that intellectual certainty is the only moral position to have. So, when they start to learn in college that some of the things that they learned in Sunday School, were lies, then pitch all of Christianity and flee to the materialist position because the two are so similar. This was especially true decades ago.

Now, it may be more common to them to take the other extreme of total ambivalence to truth. They give up their search for certainty altogether because when you become a materialists and you are honest about it, you MUST give up all hope, all morals and all meaning. Most materialists don't give up these things because they are dishonest and allow cracks in their seams for meaning to sneak in. Carl Sagan did this all the time. Even his TV show set looked very similar to a TV evangelist's set . . . screaming meaning. This ambivalence is translated into the new (or what we use to call New Age) spiritualism or a twist on eastern mysticism.

I will do one more posting describing where I personally stand in this area and my final conclusions.

Knowing Part IV

2011-12-07T21:11:00.000-08:00

The strictly empiricist-materialist (what I mean by this are those who only believe in the visible world and only believe that truth can be reached by observable research) start to snicker at this point. After all, their truth is based purely on observation of reality and processed through logic . . . or is it? That, they think, puts them intellectually, if not morally, above those of faith. But even their world starts to soften if they are honest with themselves.

The problem with these empiricist-materialists is that their observations are completely dependent on their human sensory input and deductive processes of those senses.

At one point I thought that they had the safest position. But then as I matured and started seeing more of the world I met the paranoid schizophrenics, who—based on their observations of the world and deductive logic—concluded with absolute certainty, that they were radishes in Mr. McGregor’s garden.

Without going to that extreme of mental illness (schiz or split from reality), you start to find people who were almost normal, but paranoid. They function in society but believe that their scientific research was sabotaged by a competitor . . . when it just failed on its own. You will find others, such as us who suffer from social anxiety, who believe that we are un-liked by others when actually we are not. All of the above are examples of either defective senses or, more likely, defective processors in our brains.

Then to really play it safe, you try to avoid all dependency on either the senses or the brain’s logic. That is exactly what Descartes did when eventually reached the point where he made the most famous quote in philosophy, “Cogito ergo sum.” That, in some ways, was like the bumper-post on the very end of a railroad track. It represents the dead end of pure empiricism. He fortunately used that as a starting point rather than an end point.

If you push beyond empiricism where you have no trust in the senses or thoughts, you can enter the “Matrix” type of doubt of all perception. Are we in comas and what we perceive is being sent to our brains via a complex network of input cables? Taking the same idea into the more philosophical route you reach the thinking of the Chinese philosopher/writer Zhuangzi, who shared this story;

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a fluttering butterfly. What fun he had, doing as he pleased! He did not know he was Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and found himself to be Zhou. He did not know whether Zhou had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly had dreamed he was Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is meant by the transformation of things.

My point is the act of knowing is not categorical, meaning a group A (faith only) vs a B (empirical), but is more of a continuum. On one end, say to the far right, you have the notion that knowledge is somewhat Gnostic. What I mean by that, is that the “knowing” is purely subjective. God is there because I feel Him and you can’t argue against that statement. They are the only ones who claim absolute certainty but that certainty is built on tissue-paper mâché. It is the same mentality that allows a Taliban to chop someone’s head off because they have absolute certainty that the person deserves to have their head chopped off and that is what God wants. This type of certainty is often touted as the Christian ideal . . . but is it?

If you keep going on this continuum you pass through the partial mixture of the empirical and gnostic. As you move further to the left, you move into pure empiricism, where you trust only your sensory (physical) perceptions. Then if you continue moving to the left, you seek an even greater certainty of knowledge, so you start to doubt even the empirical observations. Eventually you reach the Cogito ergo sum point. If you introduce even more doubt and you move on to the complete uncertainty and absurdity of the Zhuang Zhou position.

In a simpler labeling of the spectrum, you start on the right with certainty in all you know because it is Gnostic in nature. You end on the left with complete uncertainty in all things.

I think my point in this post is two-fold. First of all, it is to understand that in the process of knowing, we must reject the categorical model of some of the materialists (and some Christians), that you are either a strict empiricist or you are a complete anti-rational, Gnostic (or pick your terms; New Ager, Existentialist).

Secondly, it is to point out that there are no safe places along this continuum. It is a farce to believe that we can reach certainty. I can say this, not because I'm not a good Christian, but because I do believe scriptures when they reveal the fallen nature of humanity. A fallen person can not have intellectual certainty . . . but that doesn't mean that all that is left on the table is the despair of uncertainty. You can have a choice in what you believe to be true and you can have hope . . . even in the absence of certainty. The problem has been, we have required certainly of our kids' faith . . . thus we force them to the extreme right of the spectrum where the foundations are made of mâché.

Knowing Part III

2011-12-06T21:23:00.000-08:00

When you are a little kid, the process of knowing isn’t even visible or self-evident. You just know some things, but mostly you live in a state of complete wonder about the world around you. It is a unique time in your life. I suspect we are most happy before puberty . . . except for those, of course, who have grown up in abusive homes.

But as you step out of your shell of a life you start to discover that other people live in different universes . . . philosophically. My earliest remembrance of this was Amanda, the little girl in third grade who didn’t celebrate Christmas because she was a Jehovah’s Witness.

It was easy to resolve this at first, as my father and mother explained that they reason they believed differently from us was . . . because Amanda’s whole family were very stupid people. I accepted that . . . for a while . . . until Amanda aced all our classes.

As you get older, such challenges to your own world view gets tougher. Within our little Baptist culture (and I expect it was the same for most Evangelical groups) we were taught that the process of “Knowing” was a spiritual issue. God revealed Himself to us and spoke deeply into our spirits. That gave some comfort.

We could bypass the complex process of logical discovery . . . just knowing that God (that is the Christian God) was there because there was this “God-shaped (that is Christian God) vacuum in the middle of your heart” which proves that He is really there. It was a lazy way to know anything . . . although the concept could fit on a Hallmark card, or in the Billy Graham movie Time to Run.

That works for a while. The longer you isolate yourself from deep friendships with Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Atheists, the longer this can work for you. However, as soon as you really get to know one of the above mentioned folks, and a nice person at that . . . then your paradigm starts to soften like a ice cream cone on the fourth of July.

You meet wonderful Muslim people who are at least as sincere as you are. They too, believe that there is an Allah-shaped vacuum in the middle of their heart. That’s when you start to sweat.

Besides this very personal threat to your beliefs on an emotional level, you are exposed to answers from the scientific community, which sub-plant your more simple and supernatural answers. The really tough part, is that if you spend any time within that scientific community, you will quickly find that, in many ways, they are more honest and have more of a hunger for truth than their Christian counter-parts.

Then you are left without any framework for "knowing." You consider the pure logical approach. It depends on which rules of logic that you apply, but if you apply those of pure empiricism, then by default you become a materialist. The only other option left on your table is the existential projection of faith built on faith.

So how do we know with any certainty? This is why I think our kids are lost in the sea in a shroud of fog.

Knowing Part II

2011-12-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

What They Teach You About Knowing In Sunday School

The other main reason I was thinking about this lately was something my wife said. A good friend of hers, an Evangelical Pastor's wife, said that she and her husband were somewhat distraught over their (22 year old) daughter saying she is having some doubts about her Christian faith.

I was having coffee with my daughter at Thanksgiving. She is the same age and a good friend of this girl. I told my daughter, "Amy, if you came to me and told me that you were having doubts about Christianity, I would say that is a good thing. It is good for two reasons. The main reason, is that it means that you are thinking. The second reason is that you felt safe enough with me to tell me."

I've observed in my own rearing in the Bible belt, and how my kids were taught in the various evangelical churches we attended over the years, that it is believed that thinking is a bad thing. That it is much better to submit to brainwashing, smile and go through your life not making any trouble for anyone.

So here are some of the messages I've heard (and I don't have to read between the lines very far).

1) Faith is in opposition to reason. Faith is of God and reason is of the "flesh." This implies the dualistic view that anything from the physical, such as the mind, is in opposition to God. The more irrational we behaved, but imagining it was spiritual, the more highly esteemed we were.

2) Doubt is a sign of spiritual immaturity. This social pressure is a cornerstone to any cult. It goes like this, Believe everything we tell you without question . . . and if you don't . . . you are a bad person and we will not like you."

I remember it as clear as yesterday a conversation I had with Tom, the Navigator who led me to the Lord when I was 18. I was struggling with tremendous doubts about issues of science, why is there pain and etc. (the typical questions). I remember him putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, "It is all about maturity. As you grow spiritually, you will never doubt God again. I haven't doubted God since the day I gave my life to Him."

When you have honest, intellectual questions and they are forced to go underground, they will come back to haunt you. They usually raise their scary heads (like prairie dogs) the moment something bad happens to you. It could your girlfriend dumping you. It could be your wife leaving you. It could be one of your children being diagnosed with cancer. It could be loosing your job. But those old questions will start to come up.

Tom, and the most of evangelicalism delights in the young person who embraces Christianity and turns off their brains. They smile, they sing, they talk about miracles left and right. That is the model that we have pushed our kids towards.

For me, now, I would much rather have kids who struggle with the big questions of life . . . and wrestle with the meanings.

So, if this is my introduction, I will just say that we were never taught, objectively, about knowing, reason, logic, choices and finding resolutions. We were taught to give it all up, and then just step out in "Faith" and be the Christian that everyone wanted us to be.

I will share one more candid bit. I tread cautiously because some have seem me as being critical of my wife when I talk about her. But you see, she is normal . . . I am not. She is loved . . . my friends are few. Her (my old) church, see her as saint . . . me as the devil. But I was talking to Denise when we were on a hike about this whole situation of the pastor's daughter's doubts and etc. (once I get something on my mind I think about it for weeks). I told her what I said to Amy. She remarked that she would much better not know if any of her kids were having doubts. She says life is much better when you pretend that things are the way you want them.

She is right. Life is much better when you pretend. I have this terrible habit of wanting to take the red pill. I would rather know that I'm dying of cancer and spend my last weeks in depression and wrestling with my thoughts . . . than to be lied to, and only find out I'm dying a moment before it happens.

So, I see the church as wanting to avoid these tough questions, about knowing and doubts, because they would much rather have their teens up front, smiling, doing a skit . . . and us pretending that all is well. So we don't want them to know about the process of finding truth. It is TOO DANGEROUS!

Terrence Malick, And What they Didn't Teach About Epistemology in Sunday School

2011-12-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

There is something I want to say here that is really important, but I don't know if I can be clear about it. The problem isn't with the "listener" but with me, the speaker. I want to talk deeply about philosophical matters. The bottle-neck of getting my ideas from my head into your head is my limited ability to use language. I don't have a degree in Philosophy. My vocabulary of expression is limited. It reminds me of going shopping in Cairo (for a lot of different things) and having an Arabic vocabulary of just a couple hundred words.

First I will state my premises and define my terms. Next I will describe how I got here (talking about this topic) and then dive into the actual discussion.

My premises are; 1) That epistemology is a very important topic, 2) We (Christians) make many wrong assumptions about knowing and we minimize it as a subject and 3) We do a very poor job of teaching our kids about epistemology. Now if you will patient while I talk in theoretical terms, I will get down to the nuts and bolts of the practical in the end.

I must start by defining "epistemology" in the way I'm using it here. I am using it as strictly a philosophical term, not a theological term. Epistemology is of course the study or science of knowing. When it is used in theological settings, it usually means the science of knowing what the Bible is really saying. That isn't what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is the fundamental philosophical study of knowing the very basics about reality and how we know or the process of searching for truth.

Okay, why am I talking about this? It has to do with my movie club. I've started a movie club and my new church, enthusiastically, signed on to "sponsor" it. That's a good thing. My old Evangelical church was very doubtful about my movies clubs . . . seemed secular to the pastor at least. Our first movie, last month, was The Adjustment Bureau. Our film this Friday is The Tree of Life.

Before I show a movie I spend some time researching the writers and director. For The Tree of Life, it is one in the same, Terrence Malick (pictured above). As I was just starting to do my homework I came across this article by R. Greg Grooms (an old LAbri guy whom I had met years ago) about the movie. At my club, we always have a time of discussion about the movie afterwards and that is the whole point, to understand it at a very deep level.

The thing that caught my attention in the Grooms article was the statement about the writer/director Terrence Malick, "He is a philosopher who makes movies." That was profound . . . and it sent me on a journey to find out more about the man. I'm not going to waste a lot of time here discussing Malick, but, I do want to explain how he is related to how I started thinking about this topic of knowing.

The other reason I want to take on this topic in my blog, is that I want to get away from talking about Evangelicals misbehaving in a sexual context. I know that Trevor was asking me why I see so much misbehaving and he hasn't (my words not his). I don't know. I think it is common. If you google "Pastor arrested" you come upon page after page of either A. Christian pastors arrested in the Muslim world for proselytizing or B. An American pastor arrested for sexual crimes. But it starts to seem like I want to continuously beat up on Evangelicals for being frauds. So I want to talk about something else for a while.

Malick is a brilliant man. He graduated (per Wikipedia) summa cum laude from Harvard in Philosophy in 1965. He went on t study philosophy at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. However he never finished his PhD because he had a strong disagreement with his professors at Oxford over their understanding of the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein.

I know it sounds a bit strange that you couldn't finish your PhD because you didn't agree with the dean or professor. But I know it is true. I studied psychology before I moved into medicine. My psychology program has greatly influenced by B. F Skinner. There was (ironically) tremendous social coercion to agree with Skinner. I know that I was Bs instead of As at times simply because I didn't agree with Skinner. So I can see how Malick could have been limited by his personal views.

So I'm almost at my point. You see, as Greg Grooms describes, Wittgenstein was a Logical Positivist. My simple definition of this philosophical movement is taking epistemology and putting it under the same rules as natural sciences (empirical science). So, you end up with a situation that it is complete nonsense to ask any question about reality that can not be answered definitively with empirical data. So they would see the old, basic philosophical questions such as; 1) What is reality? 2) What is the meaning of life? 3) Does God exist? 4) What is right or wrong? as complete silliness.

Malick, while raised as an Orthodox Christian, certainly has no claims of being a Christian now. But his view was that these non-answerable questions were worthwhile to ask. To to arrive at definitive answers but asking them, contemplating them and living by what you think the answers are, does add significance to life.

Now I must add in closing, that I read somewhere that Malick saw this process of asking and answering as cyclic. He would work through, say a ethical question, and arrive at an answer. But years later, he may cycle through that same question and arrive at a totally different answer.

So now you know, how I got on this topic of knowing. But here is where I want to go next time. I want to talk about this whole issue as it applies to the Christian. We are taught that we can know with certainty all the basic Christian truths. I oppose that view. My point will be, that if you teach that you must know with certainty, but in reality you can not, then it because a farce. You learn to smile and say the cliches about how "I've never doubted God for a second, because He revealed Himself to me, " while, in the middle of the night, when you wake up a lone in your bed . . . you know in your most secret places, you do doubt. I just think it is much healthier to be honest about it.

I'm at the coffee shop and I was just told that I have to go. So, once again, no proof reading. Sorry about the typos.

"Epilex", the Psychological Concept of Being Above the Law

2011-12-03T21:52:00.000-08:00

I was thinking today as I was in the gym running on the treadmill while the cold rain was coming down outside. I was trying to watch Kentucky (my old Alma mater) play North Carolina in basketball when it was interrupted with Herman Cain announcing that he was dropping out of the race. I will state right now, I wasn't there with Herman, so I have no idea if he sexually harassed women or had a long affair with one. If he didn't then surely it is scary how the truth could be distorted in the press.

I know that I switched my channel to Fox for a minute or two and did hear that opinion expressed by a few. You know, a DNC conspiracy. I guess the way it would work is that they pick an actress and pay her a million to make up the story.

I can still remember during the Bill Clinton-Monica mess, that Hillary was talking about a right wing conspiracy to frame her dear husband. But we know how that ended.

So, when we try to deal in reality, we know where there is that much smoke, there must be fire.

Then there is the view that it doesn't matter. Just like with Bill, Herm the worm could fool around with women left and right and it would matter . . . as long as we have the three 9's.

But it does matter. If he sexually harassed women, then that means that there is something fundamentally wrong with how he values them. If he could shame his wife so much in public (with an affair coming out) then he must not respect his wife either. It also means that he has lied through his teeth to her (the one he suppose to love the most). Women are more than half of our society, so to disrespect them is a huge issue for their president.

But I'm getting off topic. I didn't come here to talk about Herm. I even went to look for a picture of him and stumbled on the one of the original "Cain" as he killed his brother. He was the first to believe that he was above the law. So I posted that "Cain" first.

But connecting the dots again was Bernie Fine. He of course is accused of molesting boys. The thing that really struck me was the secret recording that a victim made of his wife. She seemed to talk about the horrible crime in a nonchalant way. Then she said what I was already thinking . . . "You know, Bernie thinks he is above the law."

Then the previous dot (which I think I already mentioned in another post) is "coach" Sandusky. I heard a little of his most recent interview tonight. Again . . . lots of smoke . . . must be some fire somewhere.

So my main point, and where my thoughts led me, was this psychological phenomenon of feeling immune to the law. For us, who wrestle with guilt on a daily basis, it is hard for us to conceive of that guiltless good night sleep after doing such a horrible thing.

Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that we have it better. Guilt is a horrible way to live. It doesn't protect us from doing bad things either. I've done plenty of bad things in my life. I hope I've never hurt anyone to the level as these men have . . . but I probably have.

It is my original premise that, because of the Fall of Adam, we all have psychological baggage. For some of us it is anxiety, fear and guilt. For some it is the type of arrogance that makes them feel immune to guilt.

I was thinking of a previous close friend who leaned in this other direction. He was this confident type, leader in his church and business. He held a leadership position in a national organization. He had that leadership quality . . . which most people who run for offices carry. This friend confined in me (in the context of me sharing with him some sin in my life and how I was feeling so guilty about it) that he had molested his daughter years ago, and he had been caught. But, while my jaw was still on the floor, and my heart breaking, he added another twist. He was having sexual meetings with other men and his wife didn't know about it.

But before I could say anything, he added the strangest statement, "I know that sexual experimentation is part of who I am and I'm okay with that. I've never felt guilty about it nor has God convicted me." Keep in mind that he was the elder at an Evangelical church at the time. It was the first and only time in my life that I walked away from a friendship. But I didn't walk away thinking I was better than him. I just couldn't get my head around this non-repentant spirit and frankly lack of guilt.

I am always curious about human behavior . . . including my own. This concept of guilt freedom puzzles me. I'm sure to them, someone who wrestles with chronic guilt puzzles them . . . but then again, they probably think I deserve my guilt and they don't theirs.

An Interesting Perspective on Monism . . . at Least the Way I Use it Here

2011-12-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

I've run into a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to my point on this blog about monism. Here is how one Evangelical site, which looks for cults, describes it:

Monism is the view that reality consists of one fundamental, ultimate essence. It comes from the Greek mono, which means one. All is one. Therefore, in monism God and the universe are the same thing. This would mean that energy, motion, matter, thought, consciousness, etc., are all of one substance but are perceived differently.

Monism stands in opposition to the dualism and pluralism but is often defined the same as pantheism, the teaching that God and the universe are the same thing.

Monism is unbiblical because it denies the distinction between God and creation.

While I recognize that one term can have many connotations or distinct meanings, I wanted to make it clear how I use the term here. I get private messages now and then how I'm being un-Biblical. I won't take that bait. If you want to create in your own mind what I'm saying, I can't stop that. But I can try to do my best to explain what I mean.

I absolutely do not believe that God = Creation. That IS clearly a pantheistic view. I certainly believe in the trinity . . . Unitarianism is very, very different then monism. I clearly believe that God is there, He is personal, He created all that what we see . . . outside of his being.

My point is simply this; God created the universe, therefore, unlike the Dualist, I do not believe that the physical universe, the laws of nature and etc. are in opposition to God who made all this stuff. He made it wonderful.

Also, I am not a Christian Rousseauian, meaning that I'm not saying that Nature is intrinsically good the way it is. It is dangerous. It is rough, It is fallen. Nature causes cancer and death and destruction . . . as as part of the Fall of Adam. But, despite that, it is still beautiful. It also still has meaning. You don't have to spiritualize reality to give it meaning.

That's all, just a word of clarification.

Ecclesiastes Revisited --An Epilogue

2011-12-01T08:21:00.000-08:00

So, I went by the big, stone cathedral. I admired the architectural beauty of the building, the deep hums of the pipe organ. I listened careful to the words. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't hearing the empty words of the pantheist dressed up in Christian robes. In this cathedral, I heard the simple words of scriptures and nothing else. I felt it was a safe place to enjoy God without being caught in the webs of a purpose, which usually meant the pastor's personal search for meaning. I still hungered for God, intensely. I felt that this would be a good home.

Pastor Fisher's emails kept coming. "We need to meet. I am giving you this opportunity to be discipled by me. You can't pass this chance up to be the man God wants you to be."

I knew that he had not heard a word I had said, how I had been discipled for a decade by the best. That didn't make me the man God wanted me to be, but a brainwashed puppet . . . which became a disillusioned puppet.

"Thanks pastor for the offer. I've been doing some soul searching and I think I am finally where I need to be and I will pass on the offer."

He responded, "That really grieves me . . . and the Lord. There is nothing that God wants more than for me to disciple you."

"Pastor Fisher, no disrespect, but for the first time in my life I think I am hearing God's words clearly, and He is telling me something very differently. So, I don't think the voice you heard is from God."

He replied, "I am your pastor. God has put me over you in his kingdom. God works through His church and He speaks to his people through his pastors and teachers. I discern that there is something dark in that voice you are hearing."

I decided to drop the argument . . . but I couldn't drop the opportunity to explain my departure. "You see Pastor Fisher, while I'm deeply grateful for this past year at your church and the help that you have given me, I feel led by God to go to the big, stone Cathedral."

"MEET ME!"

"For what?"

"I'm your pastor and I say meet me."

"You sound angry?"

"I'M NOT ANGRY! I'M YOUR PASTOR AND I HAVE DEEEEEEEEEEP CONCERNS ABOUT YOUR SOUL . . . MEET ME!"

"I don't like that tone of voice. I've made my decision and I will go to the stone cathedral."

A week later I came home from the Charles Schwab office and noticed two cars in my mom's driveway. I came in the door and there sat pastor Fisher and two church elders. Mom was in the kitchen whistling and baking cookies.

"Uh . . . hello."

Pastor Fisher spoke, "We called your mother and voiced our deep concern about you. She invited us here for cookies."

I sat in my dad's old chair, loosened my tie. I wanted to walk out and run away. "Pastor, I have nothing to talk about and I don't think you are here for just cookies."

Pastor Fisher looked at the elders and back at me, "This is a matter of serious concern. Once you have had these fine men lay hands on you and welcome you into membership, you can't, out of the flesh, just walk away. What God has done, man can no undo."

I sat and imagined I was laying in the grass somewhere, looking up at the clouds, waiting for this to pass.

"So, we are not releasing you from this church, but we do have a discipline for you. God has spoken loudly to us that you have dined with the devil. Anyone who would want to leave the fellowship of God's people and then turn away and want to go to the big, stone cathedral . . . well, it is a clear sign that Satan is at work."

"Satan?"

"Excuse me! Your pastor has the floor! We will allow you to continue with us be we have serious concerns about your soul. I have a list of 27 sins I've observed in your life. I will read them and then we will discuss repentance. Sin 1 You did not come to our work day when we painted the parsonage. That is a sign you are lazy. Sin 2 You have not been giving 10% of your money to the church. Sin 3 - -- ---- -- - --- --- - -------- --------- --- - ------ ---------- ---------- ---- -- ------- ---- -- -- - ------- -- - ------ - - - --- - ----- ------ - - "

I was feeling a deep pain in my soul when I felt the arm of Sophia around my shoulder. "He's scared. His church is declining and the district leaders are on his case about that. He feels that he has no value when his church is not growing. He is very angry at you for threatening his feeling of value. He will find rest someday. But don't let this discourage you. God is always welcoming when you seek him with a pure heart."

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 8 Conclusions

2011-11-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

The fact that Sophia was actually the Holy Spirit was certainly credible. It seemed to fit. She was there the whole time trying to point me away from mental dangers. So, I decided for once in my life to sit at her feet . . . rather than brushing her off my shoulder.

“So Sophia, how does one find meaning in this world?”

“Hmm. You see meaning is not for the finding . . . it is for the taking. Meaning is not in your doings but in your making.”

That sounds interesting but . . . I didn’t understand the full meaning at that juncture. So I had to ask, “So, what does that mean in practical terms?”

“You, son of Adam, grandson of the earth, you were in breathed with the very essence of God . . . which is alone sufficient for giving you infinite meaning, even in your rest.”

“But God didn’t put us here on this earth just to take up space. We were intended for a purpose.”

“You were?”

“I wasn’t?”

“That’s were the problem is . . . the celestial misunderstanding. That is what the scriptures are about, from the beginning until the very end. That is the Gospel, the complete rest in Christ. Solomon, with my help, figured it out.”

“So it sounds like I suppose to just sit around in my boxers and watch sit-coms.”

“If you like. You still have infinite meaning if you do.”

“But, I thought it was a Christian virtue to avoid becoming a sluggard and to be industrial in all we do.”

“But not to find meaning. Meaning is in a different dimension than doing. There are two different things at stake in being the sluggard.

The first is injustice to other meaningful people. If one doesn’t provide their own subsistence, and they are capable of doing so, then it diminishes the meaning of the others who work to provide that subsistence for them. So doing to find subsistence is different than doing to find meaning.

In the second area, doing is for the doer, to enjoy all that which was made by God for their pleasure. An artist paints for their own fulfillment, not for to find the purpose of their existence, and if they do paint just to fulfill a purpose, they will be miserable. This great universe was created for you and you were created from it. You have an infinite connection to it and to the earth from whose dirt you were conceived. The beauty, the tastes, the smells, the experiences are all given to you by a loving God for you good pleasure.”

I sat in a contemplative trance for . . . a summer. On the other side, I became a new man. I learned to rest in my intrinsic meaning. I learned to savor the taste of a coffee bean, sloshing across my tongue, back and forth until it is spent. I relished the complex tapestry of words so woven by the great novelist. I learned to sit contently at a table for hours, listening to an individual, whom previously I would have considered as insignificant to my life, but now the most important person . . . even be they a complete stranger. I learned to gaze at a work of art for an hour while I breathed in and out softly, being totally enthralled in the emotions—so projected by the artist through the end of a brush. I learned to walk a trail through the mountains, not to buffet my body, to make me a better person, but to inhale the scents of the fir, the loam and to hear the sounds of the wood pecker and the marmot.

I learned to lay on my back on back on the soft grass and watch the clouds move in the troposphere like colliding icebergs of foam and to do this for hours.

I became a student of wines, a disciple of herbs and an apprentice of textures and fibers. I completely immersed myself in the senses, not to over-indulge, but to savor. I finally found my meaning which is to be in that form in which God has created me.

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 7

2011-11-26T17:35:00.000-08:00

I drove for hours without any direction. It seemed to matter little where I would end up. But, eventually, I decided to go home, meaning the home where I grew up. Dad had passed but mom was there. She was only 72 but suffering from Parkinson disease. I had not been close to her in years, part of it--I have to admit--was my anger about her old pastor raping my brother and her doing nothing about it. But my criticism of her had softened. Maybe she was doing the best she could with what she knew.

I moved into my old bedroom, not out of financial need but of emotional convenience. She could use some help on the house, but I never dreamt that I would be sleeping in my old bunk bed when I turned 44.

As I was driving down from New York, I kept catching the glimpse of something ominous in my mirror . . . it was a dense, dark cloud rapidly approaching. I floored the SUV, to outrun it. The cloud was a serious depression and I knew I couldn't let it engulf me. If it caught up to me, then the swam of locusts would devour my flesh down to the bone.

Once I was home I kept running ahead of the cloud but by foot. A mile and a half the first day, then two the second. I focused on running longer and longer. I was tempted to get caught up in physical exercise to, not only escape the depression, but to give me a new sense of meaning. But I had sat on the side lines while Linda attempted to find meaning in the physique. Eventually my body would fail, I will grow older and I will die flabby and out of shape. It was inevitable. So while running, five miles, then ten, was a bridge for meaning, I knew that it too was chasing, almost literally, after the wind.

With my background, I was able to land a commissioned job with the local Charles Schwab office and I settled into a new, maybe old, way of life while I either decided to search for meaning, to to give up.

Mother, being mother, didn't like leaving me at home a lone on Sunday mornings. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I could never darken the doors of her little Baptist church. Even though preacher Taylor had died a long time ago, from a case of hepatitis after mysterious a trip to Bangkok, the memories were just too vivid.

But I did do a long run on Sunday mornings, and the run took me past the Rock Springs Community Church. I had to weave back and forth through people as I passed on the side walk. Most of them smiled. I saw on the marquee that their "Pastor Fisher" had a Ph.D.. I thought that would be a good plus.

So one Sunday, I ran earlier and got home to shower before 10:00 AM. I decided to give God another chance and to enter Pastor Fisher's church. I sat in the back. They were friendly. I came back. They invited me to join. I went through the membership class and I became one of them. Maybe it was done in too much haste, like a rebound relationship after a tough breakup. However, I was one of them before I knew it.

Church seemed very different to me than the decade earlier, when I had attended so faithfully. I think the change was my encounter with Sophia one morning. She spit into the dirt, made balls of mud, pushed them into my ears and covered my eyes. I didn't know what to expect. But when the clay dried out and crumbled, everything looked and sounded different than before.

What I would have consider powerful sermons in my twenties, now seemed like mind games. When the pastor pounded the podium and said that God wanted us to "put our shoulders to the plough and be part of Christ's church" my ears heard him saying, "I want to feel like I have value. To do so, I must succeed as a pastor. To proved to the denomination and to the community that I am successful, I must have big, visible programs. To make these programs successful, every person must pitch in. This is really all about me."

I didn't like this new cynicism. It made me feel dirty. It also made me feel less likely to get involved. I didn't want to put my shoulder to the plough of helping someone else in their useless journey to find meaning. For that too would be chasing after the wind.

The Pastor pulled me aside one day and spoke directly to me, "I see that you've been a member here for six months and you aren't involved with anything. God really spoke to me that I need to invest more in you. I would like to disciple you and help to equip you to be a real church laborer."

This was deja vu. "Pastor," I said, "Do you realize that I was discipled deeply by some of the best in the business for ten years. What are you offering that I have not suffered through?"

"I just don't sense the working of the Holy Spirit in your life. I never see you volunteering for any of our ministries."

I felt perplexed. Sophia was smiling at me, "He is manipulating you. It is a mind game. He needs you to help him feel that he has meaning. You are a cog."

I didn't like what she was saying so I brushed her off my shoulder. I didn't sleep much that night. In the morning I left a message for Sohpia that I wanted to have a heart to heart talk with her. I was feeling that maybe Pastor Fisher was right, that I needed a more spiritual view than the cynical take that I had become accustom to.

The next morning I met Sophia for coffee. I started with a few words of respect, "Sophia, I understand that you are the goddess of knowledge, reason and wisdom. I know that you were there for Solomon . . . and for Socrates and for Einstein. I respect you for not only how you've helped me, but how you've helped our culture. But I think I'm coming to the point that I need to leave you. I need to walk by the spirit, not by reason. I need to step out of reason and into a life of walking by the Holy Spirit. I'm ready to let Pastor Fisher disciple me, if there I can find my place in God's purpose."

Sophia sipped her espresso and flashed a brief bitter expression. Then she smiled big. She reached out and placed a comforting hand on mine. She said nothing at first. I anticipated that she would say, "That's fine. I'm not offended by that." But she totally surprised me. She did speak again but with words I had never anticipated.

"Don't you know?"

"Know what?"

"You see . . . I am the Holy Spirit."

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 6

2011-11-25T12:04:00.000-08:00

I heard once more from Linda. It was an unexpected birthday card. She simply wrote, "Happy Birthday." Then she added, "I'm sorry, but now that this pursuit is over, I want to focus on me."

I was angry. What had the last five years been if it wasn't Linda-centric? She saw the goal of winning the bronze as something separate from herself, like she was doing it for America . . . but of course he was for her self and her own search for meaning. Sophia smiled and nodded in agreement.

So damn her, I thought. I will make the decade my thirties as a decade about me. I wanted to focus with the same level of tenacity, which she had taught me, on what I wanted. But did I want? I wasn't sure.

But I reasoned, that whatever I figured out that I wanted, money could eventually buy it.

I re-enrolled in graduate school, but this time, rather than science, I was working towards an MBA. I had a first cousin who worked in a major investment firm in NYC. I talked to him, and he was confident if I finished a good MBA program, with an interest in investment banking, they he could find me a coveted position in the pit on Wall Street. Once there, it would be left up to my talents . . . but he assured me that the sky was the limit.

Since I was use to waking up early and working hard, I continued the same mindset. Rather than making a hot meal of proper protein and carbs, I was studying. I went to class and studied until I fell asleep at midnight. I wanted to finish first in my class, even if it killed me. I had nothing to loose but my own life, which was meaningless as it stood.

I did much better in reaching my goal than Linda had. I did finish first. My cousin Louis (Lou for short) indeed got me a job as an "trainee" in the pit. I had six months to prove my worth. It was ruthless. The drama on and off the floor was beyond my wildest expectations. It was mentally exhausting, but I was determined that no one would be working harder than me.

When I turned 38, my annual income surpassed one million dollars. The money was in a secure investment, almost every penny. My focus was on earning, not spending . . . yet.

By 39 I had over five million in the bank and my job was secure. I knew that it was time for me to go after the things that would compete me.

Rather than a Lamborghini, I bought myself a brand new, $85,000, Land Rover Defender with all the options. I bought a six million dollar condo that looked down on Central Park. Now my neighbors included Yoko Ono, Bono and John Lithgow. I saw many more big names at parties. They became to me like Joe Smo from down the street.

I still was working almost eighty hours per week but I rewarded myself richly. I bought a beach house on Long Island, another one in the Caymans. I traveled the world, in the short breaks I took.

By the time I was forty, I had any wish I could make. I even put my name on the list for being one of the first space tourists.

My income kept going up. I spent money like a drunken billionaire, but I just couldn't out-spend my income. But I had no time to enjoy my treasures. My Land Rover collected dust. My Condo in Zurich sat empty. My life felt empty.

Each new purchase gave me a euphoric feeling . . . for a while. The "whiles" became shorter and shorter following the laws of diminishing returns. Finally I stopped buying. My things couldn't help any longer.

My money became my chains. My job was too important not to give it eighty hours per week. The responsibilities grew and sucked the oxygen out of my lungs. I had billion dollar accounts, that pivoted on my choices. I could make, or loose a hundred million over night. I was constantly haunted by my call. There was an endless line of men, each ready and eager to take my place, in queue. If I stumbled even one step, I would loose everything.

In the late evenings, just to escape the grind, I would take a stroll in Central Park. I would see couples holding hands and I envied them. They had love. I had all the mistresses that money could buy, but did any of them love me? I was confident that they would be gone within minutes if I lost everything. They loved my worth not me.

My friends were also whores. They "loved me" as long as they were within smelling distance to my money. But where would they be if I had nothing? They would scatter in the wind like dandelion seeds.

I had everything. The decade of "me" was coming to an end. I was exhausted. I was alone, more alone than anytime in my life. I would give all my wealth for one close friend, a soul mate, a child. I realized once again that it was all in want of the wind. Sophia tried to tell me, but I threw her out with all other considerations.

I sat on a park bench and cried. The tears dripped down my $4,000 suit and the water-resistant wool caused them to bounce off as if they were pebbles.

Before I had even the chance to decide what to do, it was decided for me. The market crashed. I lost everything. I could have stayed on and fight for my position, hoping to ride the next bull. But I just walked out of my office one day. I threw my smart phone in the dumpster in the street and climbed into my Land Rover and drove across the Brooklyn Bridge. I felt a pain in my soul like a bottomless black hole . . . a hole so big that all the wads of $100 bills in the world couldn't fill. I looked in my rear-view mirror to see the city fade away. I caught a glimpse of my face. It looked sad, hollow . . . and old. I was now forty three and I had never been more lost. It was all vanity.

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 5

2011-11-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

I then decided that I would find my meaning somewhere else, far away from all religious contexts.

The most obvious choice was the area in which I had been most deprived . . . women. The first choice was between women or woman. There could be fulfillment in quantity, but I took my chance to find one woman who would give me meaning. But would it be a woman known for her beauty? Would it be a woman noted for her brains? It turned out to be a woman noted for her quadriceps.

I met Linda at the tack. I didn't go up to run but to sit in the isolated bleachers and think. A girl ran by. She wasn't of amazing beauty and I hardly noticed her at first. But then she ran by again, then again, then again. I was intrigued by her endurance. I counted 80 laps around the 1/4 mile track. I was amazed. It is hard for anyone to run that far around simple, redundant oval. But she had a cause. I could see the intensity of it in her eyes . . . and in her thighs. They were well-developed, more so than any I had ever seen on a woman . . . or a man . I spoke to her. "What is your great cause?"

She answered, "A disc of metal . . . bronze."

"Are you an Olympic runner?"

"No . . . a skier. Nordic . . . 30 K."

"So are you in training?"

"Have been since I was 4. I'm 25 now. Albertville is my dream . . . and to be first American to metal.

I latched my longing for meaning to her bright star . . . a bronze star. I completely immersed my soul in her dream. I got up at five every morning to make her the perfect breakfast with the proper blend of protein and carbohydrates, as dictated by the manual. I washed her spandex. I cleaned her Solomons with my toothbrush. I dropped out of my graduate studies to get a quick "Ph. D." in waxing, based on precise testing of the individual snowflake shapes, moisture content and temperature. I learned to drive a snowmobile and to groom ski trails. I worked two jobs to support her dream but all were temporary jobs. We moved to West Yellowstone in the winter, Fairbanks in the Spring, Iceland in the late Spring, Chile in the summer, back to Yellowstone in the fall. I got a vasectomy because she couldn't be on hormones because of her training and a pregnancy would destroy her.

Our entire lives revolved around that circular disk of bronze. I felt a purpose. I awaken in the morning for that disk. I went to sleep at night for that disk. I sent her off, after the perfect breakfast, to the track. I went to work to earn money to buy more wax. I brought her the perfect lunch, less protein and more carbs. I brought her dinner at the evening weight room. I went home and did chores. She came home and I would rub down her sculptured muscles with balm. For four years we lived this way. On our bedroom ceiling was a large poster of a bronze metal.

Albertville came. We were full of butterflies. The opening ceremony was surreal. I didn't see Linda for days. Race day came so quickly. During the one and half hours of the the race we met the pinnacle of our lives. Linda was skiing well--just a second behind bronze--the best ever for an American woman.

In a transition place, where the shadow of one lone fir tree met the bright sun, there was a 2 cm wet spot. Her ski slipped 4 mms. She went down on one knee for 1.5 seconds. She ended the race at twenty seventh. I felt the meaning starting to drain from me. I didn't see Linda again in France. I knew she was devastated. She was going to tour the Rivera with friends and "debrief" from the games. I got her telex ten days later. She was in love with her trainer. They want to have children. She will send her mother to get her things.

It could have been worse. Her best friend Ingrid had her eyes set on gold since she was born. Her father had been a great German skier. She only won silver. Three months later . . . she took an overdose of Prozac . . . and died. She was 26.

The depths of the vanity overcame me. I built a huge bonfire in the back yard. I piled up the skis, the waxes and Linda's spandex. I laid the poster from our bedroom ceiling on top. I poured kerosene on them. I finished off a bottle of Jack Daniels and box of Wheaties . . . dry. I threw the empty box into the fire. The box got hotter and hotter until Larry Bird's eyes burst into flames and he melted into ashes.

I hadn't seen Sophie in a while. She came out of the shadows to speak to me. "Competition is a farce," she said. "Trophies are made in China. Metals are polished with paraffin. It is all pretend meaning."

"Vanity. Nothingness. All as complete waste!" I screamed into the dark woods. I loathed the day I saw her run. I was an empty man . . . once again.

Woody . . . I will be back to Ecclesiastes Later

2011-11-23T13:58:00.000-08:00

I watched a 3 hour documentary on Woody Allen, which aired for two nights this week. I have to say, that I have a new appreciation for this man.

Like many Americans, and virtually all Evangelicals, I use to see him with disgust. After all his movies all seemed to be over-sexualized. Then . . . of all things, he did marry his daughter (okay, not really but that's what it looked like).

Of course he is a man of great talent. But what I want to say about him, is that he is a man with the courage to look harshly at reality. He does ask the big questions about life and he ask them over and over.

His candor is exceptional. As a Christian, truth and reality are my highest goals and at all cost.

But it was very poignant that at the end of the interview Woody made a very interesting comment. He said, life has treated him perfectly. He has gotten every thing he has ever dreamed of. A chance to succeed at writing, a chance to succeed as a stand up comedian, a chance to make successful movies, being in love with some of the most wonderful women . . . yet, when it is all said and done, he still feels like he has been screwed big time. Why? He knows that one day he will be old, his friends and family will all die . . . and he will die.

So this brief reprieve fits into my Ecclesiastes story.

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 4

2011-11-22T17:27:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in the university’s cafeteria. I wanted to be alone. I was embarking on a career in science as a responsibility not for meaning. Before me—interrupting my misery—came a smorgasbord of ideas.

The pantheist enticed me with her beautiful culture. I listened, but then Sophia whispered in my ear, “They're the same as the materialists, but decorated with a thousand wonderful narratives. You can get lost in the narratives, thus forgetting the total lack of meaning. But circular lost-ness is nothing more than vanity. Just as the materialists, they have no differentiation between the points, between good and bad, between you and a stone. There is no meaning here, just the chasing after the next narrative . . . don’t be deceived with “personal” verbiage as camouflage over the impersonal universe.”

I motioned them on with a wave of my hand.

The Islamist came by. Once again I was enticed by a beautiful culture. Sophia whispered to me, “Don’t be fooled. There are layers upon layers of façade of legalities, behind which, rest a thousand crescent-shaped hot tubs with gold fixtures and little girls and old men.”

I motioned him on with a nod.

Two men were circling my table from afar. They seemed to have stepped out of the Cold War with their trench coats and beady-surveillance of me. They circled closer. I looked back down to my science text and up again. They were sitting next to me. They pulled fake peanut and butter sandwiches from their black, vinyl attaches.

“Hi.” One of them said with a big smile. “Do you eat here often?”

“Everyday.”

“Really, everyday. That reminds me that Jesus promised to walk with us everyday . . . isn’t that a coincidence?”

I looked back at my science text.

“Speaking of Jesus do you know Him?” asked the other man.

“Been there—done that.”

“You haven’t met the real Jesus or you would still be with Him. No one ever leaves the real Jesus.”

I poured onto their ears my story as if it were molten lead.

The taller thin man replied, “We all knew that TV Preacher Joe was a fraud. It was obvious. We also know that all little country churches are full of hypocrites . . . but we are better. The secret word is PLASTICS . . . oh, I mean DISCIPLESHIP! (or do I wink, wink).”

“Discipleship? Hmm. Maybe that is the answer.” I took the bait. The cellophane sandwiches were returned to their attaches and we sped off.

I chased after the golden ring of being “Godly” for the next . . . decade. I memorized most of the Bible, I shared the Gospel every day just as the two spies had tried to do with me. I aspired to be a good citizen, then a discipleship staff person and then the most inward circle of meaning and commitment . . . a missionary.

I fasted, I prayed for hours each day and I stopped talking to women. I was as sincere as anyone could be. I was chasing after the golden ring, which I was sure to bring meaning, with all my might. I felt myself moving closer and closer to the point of perfection. I attended fifty seven men’s conferences . . . the ring was within my grasp . . . I could touch it with the tip of my middle finger. I just need one more time around the discipleship wheel and I would grab it.

I held up the Godly men, the leaders, as my pinnacle of hope. They were adorned with golden rings around their arms and necks. I would be there some day. I too would be perfect and sinless. Sophia was rolling her eyes and wouldn't even talk to me anymore.

But one day I took the wrong door, I walked in on Godly Man # 1 . . . in bed . . . with a woman. “I felt dazed. What does this mean?”

I confronted him, “You’ve taught me for a decade not to speak to a woman, not to touch a woman to emulate your purity . . . but then I see you in bed with one?”

“Oh,” he says. “I think you have misunderstood the circumstances. We were praying and we fell asleep.”

“Do you always pray naked?”

“That is a personal offense. Of course we weren’t naked. Hey, we weren’t actually in the bed . . . now watch my finger as it moves back and forth very slowly . . . we were kneeling beside the bed praying!”

Sophia, pulled on my shirt and whispered in my ear, “He is lying to you. You saw what you saw. Believe your senses.”

I went to Godly Man # 2, “I saw Godly Man # 1 in bed with a woman.”

“Don’t dare tell anyone this, for the sake of the Church. Let me investigate.”

I was pregnant with anticipation.

I was invited to a circle of the elders. Justice I thought. I'm so glad I rooted out such evil in our midst of holiness. I entered by the correct door . . . or at least I thought. There sat Godly Man # 1 (smiling), Godly Man # 2, Godly Man # 3 and Godly Man # 4. My heroes . . . save the one.

"We have discussed your case. It seems that you have brought terrible accusations against your dear brother. We have ruled that these are lies. You've deeply hurt our dear savior, who bled and died for you. Once again you are the one who hammered the nails . . . blab . . . blab . . . blab. I couldn't make out the words anymore. I was spinning, going downward towards the drain once more. In a counter-clockwise direction, as I circled the golden ring moved further and further away until it vanished in a cloud of smoke.

As circle of wind. Nothing but a decade wasted chasing after a golden ring made from dust, made from dust and wind. Vanity! Nothing but vanity and chasing after the wind.

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 3

2011-11-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

My intentions were to turn Carl off but I turned the channel. The cameras moved across the enormous crowd. I thought it was a basketball game . . . but it wasn't it. It was a church. A church of maybe twenty thousand . . . twenty thousand smiling faces.

The camera switched back to the big smiling face on the stage, which belonged to pastor Joe. Those people seemed to have a purpose, a hope . . . something I longed for.

I had heard of Joe . . . but had never listened to him. He made sense, at least that is what Sophia told me. God really was there and He wanted me to be happy and fulfilled. He also wanted me to be successful and healthy. Yeah, that is what I was looking for, escaping from the cold dark universe that didn't give a damn into the arms of a loving God who's major concern was me being fulfilled.

I ordered Joe's book, Experiencing All of God's Abundance Now! I read it, re-read it and read it again. I ordered his previous book, God Has a Purpose for You. For the first time my life things started making sense and most of all I had hope.

Over the next two years Joe became my hero. I never missed a sermon . . . or a book. The man was a prophet. I felt like he knew me personally . . . although I had never been in his real church . . . but I wanted to go.

I went on his "material fast" where, for six months I deprived myself of all purchases, except for bread and plain water. Every penny I saved I sent to him. He had ministries feeding the poor in Sudan. How dare I eat when they couldn't? But Joe assured me that it was only temporary. I knew that God would pour success on me and I would have far more material things soon. The more I gave, the more God would soon give to me.

For the first time in my life I felt secure.

I turned on the TV to see if I could catch last Sunday's sermon on cable. As I scrolled up the channels my eye did catch Joe . . . but it was on CNN. I was perplexed. I turned up the volume. It seems that Joe was arrested with three under-aged hookers and a bag of cocaine. The foursome were in his a cross-shaped hot tub with the solid gold fixtures. No! It can't be true. It is the worldly people persecuting Joe. Joe always said that you know you are doing God's work when they persecute you.

Sophia was pulling at my shirt tale but I brushed her away. I put her candle of light under a pail.

A few nights latter I saw Joe. He was crying on TV. He was asking people to forgive him and to stand by him. I was numb. I walked into my bedroom and collapsed on the bed and wept. I wept for hours. Once I got up and got my exacto knife . . . thinking that if I had the courage, I would cut my wrists. Fortunately the courage never came.

Vanity! I shouted. How could I have been so gullible? I pulled the pail off of Sophia and she was almost out. It didn't matter anyway. All was in vain, all was chasing after the wind.

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 2

2011-11-20T13:29:00.000-08:00

In the plain of my distress I heard my name being called from the living room. It was that gentle voice of Carl. Softly, he said, “I know the answers . . . the answers for everything. Come with me and we will put Sophia on her throne. Reason will guide us to making senses of all that is.”

I was enticed. I stepped out of my trousers of faith and put Sophia in the picture window . . . she would be my beacon of hope.

Then Carl introduced me to a real beauty, whom I had seen, but I did not know. She was the universe . . . all that is and ever was. He introduced me as well to his friends. We were all materialist. We had the formula to each aspect of reality. Where the stones came from, where the worms came from, where I came from and where we were going. I knew our destiny and within that I hope to find our purpose.

I gave my life to be a man of science. I loved the universe and she loved me . . . or did she. At the height of my new world Sophia stood behind me . . . oh, she can be a nuisance at times. She was pulling on my shirt tale again. She whispered in my ear,

They’re not being honest with you. They’re lying to you but even more, they are lying to themselves. They are injecting meaning where there can be none. If you start with chance and the material, you can’t arrive at meaning. It is illogical. That born of chaos must always reside there. There can be no difference between points. No difference between space and time. No difference between energy and matter, no difference between life and death, no difference between Mother Theresa and Hitler, no difference between you . . . and the stone. No difference between being and never have been. Carl talks of intent. There can be no intent. He speaks of destiny . . . which is an illusion. He speaks of love . . . there can be none. He speaks of purpose . . . which must be empty. He speaks of meaning . . . and meaning is impossible with that born of chaos.

I felt dizzy. The purpose that I had gripped so strongly was now slipping between my fingers like sand. Not even one tiny grain was left behind. I was lost in a universe that didn’t give a damn. All is meaningless I thought. My career of science would be chasing after the wind.

Ecclesiastes Revisited -- A Modern Take on an Old Search for Meaning -- Chap 1

2011-11-19T21:06:00.000-08:00

I've thought about this for a while . . . writing a modern version of Solomon's almost fruitless search for meaning. I've said before that I've seen many parallels between Solomon in Ecclesiastes and Holden Caulfied in A Catcher in the Rye.

This will be a fiction story. I will draw, maybe 10% from my own experiences, about 60% from the experiences that others have had and told me about and 30% pure fiction. So, here goes. A word of warning, in my attempts for candor and dealing with reality, that there may be sensitive subject matter.

Chapter One

I remember the preacher well. He was a large man, seeming bigger than life to a six year old. I was sitting on my mother's lap and I was startled with the man's shouts . . . "Today is the day of reckoning! Get right with God before it is too late! Enjoy his peace . . . or you might wake up in the lake of fire!"

I didn't understand what he was saying, but I could imagine a lake of fire and it scared me. Holding my mother's hand as we walked out of the church and climbed into our old, white station wagon I asked (as soon as the door was closed), "Mommy, could I wake up in a lake of fire?"

She looked back at me with her big curvy back glasses . . . "No sweetie. That lake is for bad people. You're a good kid."

"But mommy, why was people going up to the front of the church?"

"Oh, they were going up to get saved."

"Saved from the lake of fire?"

"Yeah."

"How can I get saved from the lake of fire?"

"Sweetie you're saved now . . . but some day when you are older, you will need to go up front to . . . so that you can be saved forever from the lake of fire and find God's perfect peace."

I never forgot that conversations. A few times in subsequent months I asked my mother again if I was old enough. She told me that when I was twelve I would be old enough. When that magic age came I was so nervous. I hated the thouhts of going forward in front of everyone. What if I said something stupid? What if I fainted!? But I was also afraid I would wake up in the lake of fire.

The preacher would walk across the floor of the church each Sunday, holding his big brown Bible up in his left hand. It looked flaccid, being draped over his hand like a wet rag. He would pound it with his index finger of his right hand and tell us how we could find meaning and purpose in that book. He told us how we could be fulfilled by following the book.

From the earliest days of my existence I had a candle flame in my bosom. I called it Sophia. It was a flame of wisdom or reason. It wanted so much to know truth. The preacher told me that this life was only a flash, and reality was Heaven. Sophia told me that it would make sense that I would give all my focus on Heaven. I not only wanted to walk up front, join the church, get baptized . . . but to be a preacher too. I wanted to preach and bring others to Heaven and out of the lake of fire.

After walking forward, I did feel that supernatural wave go through my body. Sophia was yanking at my shirt tale and whispering in my ear that maybe that euphoric feeling was a sense of relief of getting it over with. But I wanted to believe in the supernatural. I was so pleased to be entering the world where everything would start to make sense, where I would have that persistent peace and meaning.

The day of my baptism came. I met the pastor at his office in the afternoon. The church was warm. The pastor looked heavy without his blazer on. He smiled. I sat in on the sofa in front of his desk. He came and sat beside me. "You, my boy, are embarking on a whole new world. All your problems will fade behind you and you will only know the peace of Jesus. Everything starts to make sense when you are working for the kingdom of God."

He put his arm around my shoulder. "Son let's go over what's going to happen tonight."

He stood up and described how he would walk into the bapistry first. He would say a few words to the congregation and then motion for me to walk down the steps into the cold water. "Okay, boy stand up here." I stood up and faced to the pastor's right as my body was perpendicular to his. He reached out and pulled me close. He put his left hand up between my shoulder blades and his right one over my forehead. "I will have a handkerchief in my hand, which I will place over your mouth and nose."

Then he started pulling me backwards, "Now relax boy, I will support you." He tilted me backwards and pulled me close to him. I felt his privates pushing into my side. I felt so embarrassed. Certainly he didn't realize that his privates were poking me . . . only I noticed it because my mind was so un-spiritual. The pastor was such a spiritual man, that I'm sure that he didn't notice his privates . . . ever. My Sophia flame was confused by this . . . but she was silent.

My Baptism was complete. I reasoned that I should put all my energy in the church, since it held the keys to a life of meaning and peace. I never thought about that night in the Preacher's office until a couple of years later. One day my mother came into my bedroom and spoke to me, "Bobby, you've been helping out so much in the church and I very proud of you." I felt happy to having won her pleasure. "I have something to ask you and this is only between you and me," she said.

I felt confused. "Sure mom."

"Has preacher Taylor ever touched you in an inappropriate way?"

I felt this sense of horror. Immediately the night in his office came back to me. But nothing else had happened. "Of course not mom. He is a man of God. Why would you ask me that?"

My mother looked troubled and she sat down beside me on my bed. She looked down at her hands as they were folded on her lap. "Honey, don't ever say anything about this to anyone, especially your father but a long time ago, pastor Taylor did something very bad to your brother."

"He touched him?"

"More than that. I know it is hard for you to understand right now, but . . . well . . . the preacher raped your brother."

I felt dizzy. Nothing made sense. The feelings rushed across my face so rapidly that I couldn't put words on them, but Sophia could. It was the fact that all I had known to be true and good was now on its head. How could this man of god, whom I was trying so hard to emulate, be doing something so horrible, more horrible than any of the bad things that those who didn't know Jesus were doing. Instantly a thousand sermons came through my ears, in one and out the other, like a endless tread of dental floss. These were sermons about how the Holy Spirit helps us to live godly once we knew Jesus. How things were very different between those who had the Holy Spirit and those who did not. Then, like a huge knot in the floss, a question tore through my brain.

"Mom . . . how could you sit in that church each Sunday and listen to that man if you though he did such a horrible thing?"

"Son, he is a good man. He is the best preacher this little church has ever had. He has brought many people to the Lord. He has raised a lot of money to add on to the church and to expand and pave the parking lot. We have even given a lot of money to missionaries. He just has this one area that is dark and I don't even pretend to understand . . . but Bobby, all the good he has done outweighs the bad."

My world was collapsing around me. There was no meaning any more. Sophia was screaming in my ear, lies, lies lies . . . they have all been lies. The notion of the Holy Spirit making us resistant to sin . . . all of it lies! There is no meaning in the church, in walking with Jesus . . . or with Heaven.

I pulled away from the church after that. I never spoke a word about what I knew about pastor Taylor. I tuned-out his sermons until I was sixteen, then I just didn't go back. It was all vanity, and chasing after the wind. None of it made sense any more . . . all lies.

The Darkness of the Coverup

2011-11-16T19:51:00.000-08:00

Before I get started I wanted to say that I really loved this posting on I monk about Luther's view of how laughter, strong drink, and just plain silliness is a great attack on the devil. I wish I had more time to read some of the posts there.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the horrible sin of the "cover up." Of course, and consistent with the painting, is the story about Penn State's Jerry Sandusky pedophilic behavior and how the whole institution seemed to look the other way.

The second piece to this mental puzzle was a mesmerizing piece on PBS last night about the Nazi hunters. In that story, there were several "cover ups" exposed. The first one was the actual horrors of the holocaust and how an entire society (German) could look the other way and even cover up the most inhumane actions in history. The program was full of graphic images . . . piles of disfigured human corpses . . . discarded like they were bags of garbage. I'm sure the question has been asked over and over how could someone created in God's image do such evil? On top of that, how could people watch and not stop them?

It was stunning when one Jewish man described how he watched as the Nazi's brutally killed his family right before his eyes. He was sixteen years old and luckily escaped. He joined a group of resistant fighters. The first German solider that he caught, and killed (in vengeance) he said he shot him right through his belt buckle, which read "God is With Us."

I ask myself what kind of evil can cause us to be so delusional as to think that God wants us to brutalize people created in His image?

Then I watched as they described how after the war, so many people around the world were ready to cover up and protect the most evil of the mass-murderers. Some of the worse of the Nazis were protected by the Vatican (okay this is not a criticism of the Catholic Church, just one incident which I'm alluding to.) These Nazi murderers fled to Rome and hid as attendees to a seminary at the Vatican. These priests not only hid the Nazis, who had tortured men, women and children to death by the thousands, but they baptized them, so they could get them a new identity and papers. With this new identity they could get a Red Cross passport and flee to South America. How could such evil exist within those who profess a relationship with God?

I think too about other cover ups. When I was a child our youth leader/choir leader was a pedophile. He molested many young boys (including my brother). The entire church looked the other way because they wanted to keep the look of peace on the surface. What is wrong with us?

So I come back to Jerry Sandusky. It certainly appears that he was a pedophile and many people knew it and covered it up. They looked the other way, almost literally, while children were traumatized in ways that they may never recover from.

As Chaplain Mike described (via Luther's voice) how the devil hates laughter and silliness, I say that the devil loves darkness . . . where we hide the hideous crimes of others. The cockroaches grow best when the family is silent about the father who is molesting his children, or mother who is slowly killing herself with pills.

I remember in my Christian life experience, when someone in a great position did something bad, like having an affair, there was a scramble to cover it up. They (The Navigators and churches I've been involved with) will say, "For the sake of the Kingdom of God . . . don't breath a word about what you just witnessed."

I know I seem to ramble but I pray for the light to shine. One of the reasons that I think the world is getting better, in the days of Twitter, it is becoming harder and harder for darkness to reign. Daddy, molest you little girl and she will tell the world on you. Dictator try to brutalize your country, then eventually your people with join together, rise up and chase you out of your throne. God loves light.

I will close with one of Lenard Cohen's songs. I will say, that I want to be one of those people who break things . . . creating the cracks . . . through which the light can shine.

"Anthem"

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

Why Does Utopia Bore Us? – The Adam Syndrome

2011-11-10T10:19:00.000-08:00

For the last two years I’ve been reading the top 100 novels of all time. I read a couple of hard ones (requiring a lot of concentration, like Ulysses) then I throw in a Hemingway novel, which are quite easy to read. Presently, I’m reading Islands in the Stream.

I was introduced to fiction by two sons, Ramsey and Tyler. Both of them are great fans of Hemingway. Tyler in particular seemed to be infatuated with the bohemian lifestyle of Hemingway and his friends (pictured above in a Paris bar). His fictional stories mirrored his real life at that time, living in Paris (or other exotic places) and hanging out with his friends all day long and not working a 9-5 er.

I have found myself now being lured by that mirage of utopia. I mean, if God told me to create a New World (or Heaven if you prefer) it would be a small village on the sea (like I live in now) or in the Alps. In that village, I would have no responsibilities, but to get up and come down to the café and sit and drink coffee. Now Hemingway et al, consumed alcohol . . . but alcohol has never been one of my vices . . . yet.

But that would be my utopia. No meetings that I HAD to attend. No one counting on me to do x, y and z . . . by tonight and if I don't do them, I'm just an asshole. Just good coffee, beautiful views and real, deep, meaningful conversations with true friends. These would be friends that accept me warts and all where I would wear no mask. I have no friends like that right now, but I have had a handful in my life.

But I’ve noticed something; a common theme in all of Hemingway’s books, and in many other areas of life. For example, I just restarted my film club. On our first night we had 13 people. We watched, The Adjustment Bureau. In that film the men in the “bureau” (who worked for the chairman, who may represent God or god) made an interesting comment. They said they controlled (in a fatalistic way) humanity for most of their history. Twice, when things were going really well, they took off the controls. The first time people were in control of their own destiny, people left utopia and created the terrible Dark Ages. The second time they stepped back, humanity created WWI, the Holocaust, WWII, then to the brink of nuclear holocaust . . . so they stepped back in to fix things. Of course that is pure fiction.

But in fiction, and in reality, the Hemingway et al gang couldn’t leave utopia alone. Here they lived on the beach or in Paris and all they have to do is, like Solomon recommended, was to enjoy the fruits of life . . . but they had to screw it up . . . each and every time. In the Hemingway novels, the characters always messed things up by having affairs with each other’s wives, killing someone in a drunken, jealous rage. Then suicides would come. Then in his fictional mirror and in his real life, alcohol washed the beautiful canvas into a blurry mess. What's wrong with us?

I think one of the greatest gifts, and lesson from Solomon, is to learn to accept utopia . . . leave it the hell alone, and enjoy each taste of good coffee, each sentence in a deep conversation with a dear friend.

My children are my best friends because they do know me warts and all. I savor those moments in the coffee shop, which are becoming rarer and rarer these days, as my piece of utopia. But in the life to come, I will spend my days walking in high mountain meadows, listening to beautiful music, sipping coffee with dear friends, and learning to leave utopia alone. If only we could do that now. If only. Crap, I've got to finish my coffee and go catch a plane to Phoenix for a meeting!

Worry

2011-11-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

I know that I've written a lot of late about anxiety and etc. It was timely that our pastor preached on Sunday morning about worry. She preached directly from this passage in Matthew 26:

Do Not Worry ²⁵ “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life^[e]? ²⁸ “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

In her main message she addressed that some people tend to be more worriers than others, without getting into the details of genetic or prior experience predisposition. However, I think she took the angle that most people would take, that worry is a free-will choice.

The pastor gave the example of a man she knows who is under deep distress (long story but about as much stress as you can imagine) and he reported that through it all he and his family slept fine and didn't worry because they trusted in the Lord.

My conclusion about the man is either a. He is one who never had a tendency towards worry to start with, or b. He did have a tendency to worry about the situation, but through discipline he was able to change those thoughts into more positive ones or c. He is lying. I've learned that we Christians are pretty good fabricators when it comes to showing how spiritual we are.

She did share a great illustration. Quoting from someone, and I can't remember who, she said worry is like a stream in your life that, if unchallenged, cuts a deeper and deeper path until all your energy flows into its trough. I do agree. The only point that I would challenge (and she may even agree with me on this point) is that some of us are born with that deep trough and we spend our lives trying to re-channel it. Others have had terrible experiences in their lives that have created that trough.

But like I shared a couple of posts ago, we do have choice and free will when it comes to shaping the role of anxiety or worry in our lives. But I disagree in how easily we can do this.

I'm in the middle of an extremely stressful situation right now with my business. I can not sleep well at night and have to take something to help me sleep. No one on this earth wishes that they could change the way that stress effects me than I do. I would run to the moon and back to change it. I have done all the mind tricks and spiritual exercises (at one time memorizing 1/3 of the Bible), many hours in prayer . . . yet the tendency is still there. But the struggle does bear fruit. If I had not struggled against the worry and anxiety, I would probably be in a mental institution by now.

But my point is, I've live a lot of my Christian life in guilt because of my anxiety. When we are told that it is black or white, either you obey God and stop worrying or you sin and worry, you feel like a creep. This is the point I stand against in this conversation.

I of course agree with the passage in Matthew but I disagree with how it is usually applied. Yes, we must read that passage over and over . . . and even memorizing it like I did at one time. We must meditate on it, but my point is, it will not cure us overnight. It is a life-long struggle and we must be honest with ourselves about our fate in this fallen world. I'm not being a defeatest but a realist.

Dog Gone . . . a Trivial Grief Observed

2011-10-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

This will be one of those posts that I will live to regret. I hesitate for two reasons. For one, once again I'm in a hurry and I have a lot to say to make my point, so there were be typos. But more concerning to me is that I will attempt to talk about something trivial . . . especially trivial in the eyes of someone out there who is feeling the grief of non-trivial loss. I know that there are people who read this who have lost children, spouses and have had romantic loves walk away. I know that others have watched as their world system of thinking . . . such as Christianity . . . seems to have walked away leaving them in a collapsed universe. In the midst of this, I'm going to be talking about my Dog Coco . . . and the fact that I'm loosing her. Yes, this is trivial in comparison.

The reason I'm even sensitive to this situation, where I talk about my dog while other people's worlds are going to hell, is that it reminds me of a personal experience. So here we go . . . the first tangent.

About twenty two years ago, I was in the midst of the greatest crisis of my life. I won't go into details but to say I was deeply depressed, seriously considering suicide as my universe had caved in on me. But I remember while in this state of severe agony I was attempting to attend a church in Marquette, Michigan. One Sunday evening, as usual, we had an "open mic" time to share prayer request. And, as usual, a young girl, Ann, dominated the time. Often she had us praying for twice removed cousins who were contemplating getting an abortion even after Ann had "shared Jesus" with them several times (I really think the point of the prayer requests was to paint herself as the super-Christian). That night Anne shared about her dog having pups . . . eight if I remember right. She wanted prayer for each one, by name. Two of them were fighting over the same teat as the mother only had seven. But she wrapped Jesus around the prayer because she would smile and say, "Isn't Jesus wonderful that he loves us so much, that he cares about our puppies."

At that moment, I felt like the Tin Man. I felt "other" not just from Ann but from all Christians, and people in general. They were made of flesh and bones, with concerns of puppies, rainbows and smiles. I was metal, hollow and different from anyone else in the room. I wanted to open my mouth . . . as it was “open mic” and scream, “I’m living in hell here . . . please someone help me! Please, by the mercy of God help me! I don’t give a damn about puppies . . . God have mercy on my soul . . . please someone help me!” But my mouth was frozen closed as by an ancient rust. And that was a good thing. If I had screamed out for help, in the middle of the puppy story, I’m sure that I would have regretted that until this day. For one, my wife would have been totally embarrassed. But the church would have reacted in horror . . . “truly there sits a lunatic.” Maybe someone would have handed me a Joel Osteen book afterwards, something about God Loves the Smiling Man.

So, my digression is over. My point is . . . now the tide is turned and I’m the one talking about puppies where there are people out there dying like I was. I just want you to know that you deserve this mic much more than I do as I have no real crisis in my life right now.

My best friend, Coco, is dying. She has cancer. Each day, I think might be her last . . . then she peps up and looks almost normal, except for her intense limp on her bone-cancered front leg.

I’ve always been a dog man . . . Saint Bernards to be percise. She is the fourth one I’ve had. But I’ve had her for eleven years and she and I have bonded as much as a inter-species bonding can be. As they say, a dog is a man’s best friend and in this case, it is literal. I look into her brown eyes and I can see her soul. While she only understands about five English words, she and I communicate clearly.

While she would be lying on the floor half a sleep, I would sometimes lay down near her. I would catch her looking at me . . . then she would start sliding in my direction across the hardwood floor until she could stretch and very gently touch my cheek with her huge, clumsy paw. There was no misunderstanding about it. She was saying, “I love you.”

She invented a game where she would run in figure of 8s, with me at the center. With each swing past, she would get closer and closer as I would try to catch her. Then I would tackle her and the two of use (equal in weight) would hit the ground and roll. She loved that game.

This is an especially poignant parting. As I have become an empty nester (after raising 5 kids) and have very little conversation with my wife these days, who works part time, is in graduate school full time and is in the gym two hours a day . . . I talk to Coco more than any human. I will miss her so much and my heart has been hurting for a week.

Each time I mention her plight, having been diagnoses a week ago, people always say coldly, “just put her down.” But I don’t want to take her life from my personal convenience. I pray that she will die peacefully in her sleep. If the time comes and I have to take her life, it must be an act of unselfish love. She would have to suffering. But for now, helping to carry her 100 lb frame (she has lost a lot of weight) down the steps so she can go potty, isn’t a reason to end her life.

She has lived longer than most Saint Bernards. That offers me no comfort. I remember when I was in this exact same circumstances with my father, people would try to comfort us by saying . . . “He survived Normandy . . . so that was a blessing.” Sure it was a blessing. But loosing dad hurt. It hurt badly. I felt like I had to go through that valley alone. I had dreaded that day from the time I first realized that humans died (age 4?).

The time with my dad was more hellish of course. I loved him far more than Coco. It was also a terrible situation where I lived 600 miles from dad. I couldn’t take any time off to be with him as I was the only bread-winner for a family of seven. Even my one flight down for him put us in debt and family strain. It was an awful time watching my dad die by phone. I had wished so much that I had not been the bread winner so I could have gone and been with him for his final eight weeks.

But I’m dragging this on. I had no great point but to share my grief. I will say, that as monist, I do believe that this earth is real and glorious . . . as are all the beast there in. While Coco may not be created exactly in God’s image . . . she was created by God’s good favor . . . and He created her well. I love C. S. Lewis imaginary. I'm looking forward to riding up the water fall on the back of Coco with her big cold nose splitting the falls in half as we fly deeper in . . . into the glorious new earth.

Fearfully Made . . . Celebrating the Gift of Terror Part XIII

2011-10-29T17:43:00.000-07:00

Bending the rebar.

I wanted to mention some habitual wrong ways of thinking, which support a continuing cycle of anxiety. Along with that, I want to present new ways of thinking to apply a constant pressure in the right direction. I'm not talking about Pollyanna-ish, wishful thinking. I'm talking about changing the the way our cognitive interpretation centers produce conclusions. We need to retrain the brain to start interpreting the input more realistically. It takes time. With months of practice, there is a subtle change. Years more moderate. Decades . . . significant.

I must also again state that for many of us, we can never have a fully healthy brain when it comes to anxiety . . . not in this lifetime. For some of us the genetics flaws or early childhood trauma are just too strong. I will also point out that this takes time, years or even decades. But substantial improvement can achieved. The list I'm about to share is taken from the book, Thoughts and Feelings, The Art of Cognitive Stress Management, by M. McKay, M. Davis and P. Fanning (1981).

Fifteen Styles of Distorted Thinking

1.) Filtering: looking at only 1 element of a situation to the exclusion of everything else:

Example: Employer compliments you for quality of project, but ask if you could get it done a little quicker next time. You go home having decided that your boss thinks you're dawdling.

Fix: Think about what you can do to correct your mistakes and to consider what you did right.

2.) Polarized Thinking: All or None/Black or White thinking. Everything is at the extremes and no middle ground, especially when it comes to judging yourself. You are either brilliant or an idiot. There is no room for mistakes.

Example: You are a complete looser because you took the wrong exit. and had to drive several miles out of the way.

Fix: Remember that all behavior and feelings fall along a continuum. Ask yourself, honestly, on a 1-100% scale, how often are you a looser.

3.) Over-generalization: Take a button and sew a button on it. Making broad, generalized conclusions based on 1 specific event.

Example: I'll never be able to be trusted again.

Fix: Avoid using words like all, every, always, nobody. Use words like may, sometimes, often.

4.) Mind Readers: Making snap judgments about others. Jumping to conclusions concerning what other people are thinking. No evidence, but it seems to fit.

Example: My husband only brought me flowers because he must be feeling guilty about something.

Fix: Better off making no inferences at all.Stick to what you know for sure . . . if you down't know, try to find out or forget about it.

5.) Catastrophizing (my favorite): A small leak in the sailboat means that it will surely sink. Usually starts off with "what if."

Example: What if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. What if I don't get into the program.

Fix: As soon as you catch yourself, make honest assessment of situation in therms of odds and a percent of probability -- are the chances 1 in 20, 1 in 19,000 or 1 in a million?

6.) Personalization: Tendency to relate everything around you to yourself. When things go wrong, believe that is was directed to you personally or caused by you. Continually comparing yourself to others.

Example: I'm the slowest person in the office.

Fix: Force yourself to prove what the problem has to do with you.

7.) Control Fallacies: Seeing yourself as helpless and externally controlled or responsible for everyone around you.

Example: You have to right every wrong, fix every problem, take care of every hurt.

Fix: Besides natural disasters, you personally are responsible for what happens in your world. You make day-to-day choices that affect your life.

8.) Fallacy of Fairness: Seldom do people agree about what fairness is. Getting locked into your own point of view.

Example: If he loved me, he would help with the housework. If they really valued my work here, they'd get me a better office.

Fix: Outside a court of law, concept of fairness is too dangerous to use, instead say what you want or prefer.

9.) Emotional Reasoning: Belief that what you feel must be true. Emotions by themselves have no validity. They are products of what you think. If you have distorted thoughts and beliefs, your emotions will reflect that. Always believing your emotions is like always believing everything you read. Don't confuse thoughts with facts.

Example: I feel like a loser, therefore I am a loser. I feel ugly, therefore I am ugly.

Fix: There is nothing sacred or automatically true about what you feel.

10.) Fallacy of Change: The only person you have much hope of changing is yourself. This type of thinking assumes that others will change to suite you if you just pressure them enough. Usual result is that the other person feels attacked or pushed around and doesn't change at all. Underlying assumption here is that your happiness depends on the actions of others, when in fact, it has much more to do with the millions of large and small decisions you make during your life.

Example: If I can get my spouse to go out every other night with me, stop smoking, start wearing better clothes, and learn racquetball . . . our marriage will be much better.

Fix: Your happiness depends on you--you have to decide to stay or leave, say yes or no, continue at your job or not.

11.) Global Labeling: Labels may contain a grain of truth, yet ignores all contrary evidence, making your view of the world stereotyped and one-dimensional.

Example: All republicans are a bunch of money-hungry jerks. The person who refuses to do you a favor is a stupid fool.

Fix: Limit your observations to that particular case.

12.) Blaming: There is much relief in knowing who's to blame (someone else or you). Often involves making someone else responsible for choices and decisions that are actually your own responsibility. In blame systems, somebody is always doing it to you and you have no responsibility to assert your needs, so no, or go elsewhere for what you want.

Example: Blaming your friends for asking you to go to a lousy party.

Fix: It is your responsibility to assert your needs, say no, or gl elsewhere. Thre is a difference between taking responsibility and turning the blame on yourself.

13. Shoulds: Operating from a list of inflexible rules about how you and others should act. Due words: ought, must, should.

Example: I should be the epitome of generosity, unselfishness, courage, strength and dignity. I should be the perfect spouse, lover, parent, friend.

Fix: Think of 3 exceptions. Remind yourself it is impossible to be "perfect."

14. Being Right: Usually on the defensive, continually proving your viewpoint is correct. Having to be right makes you very hard of hearing . . . and lonely.

Example: I know I'm right. Don't you believe me?

Fix: Active listening, communicate by repeating what you think you heard in order to make sure you really understand.

15. Heaven's Reward Fallacy: Always doing the right thing in hopes of a reward. Sacrificing and slaving so you can collect brownie points.

Example: Housewife cooking elaborate meals for the family, keeping an immaculate home and waiting hand and foot on the family while waiting for special appreciation which never comes.

Fix: If doing good means you're doing things you really don't want to or are sacrificing things you resent giving up, you're not likely to reap any benefit at all.

I might come back and finish with another story about B . . . but again, I may have beat this dead horse long enough.

Fearfully Made . . . Celebrating the Gift of Terror Part XII

2011-10-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

I will finish up this series on anxiety disorders in this post and one more.

So . . . in summary, anxiety disorders are caused by either a genetic predisposition or through life (often early life) experiences . . . and often a combination of the two. I differ from Christian counselors because I don't think the sufferer is the main contributor to their anxiety. Sure, they can make some wrong moral choices that aggravate their anxiety. In my fictional account, B could start dropping acid in her twenties to escape her pain . . . or she could become a hooker to try and fill the void of emotional abandonment. But it wasn't like one day she just decided that she was going to make a moral choice of being anxious. It is a real disease and the beginnings were no fault of her own. The way God made us, the way He intended, is for all of us to have perfectly loving parents. It wasn't B's fault that she didn't.

My second main point is that actual brain structure changes (or was developed as a fetus in error) so "repentance" or just choosing to stop worrying doesn't work. The whole issue of prayer can be debated for pages, but in my humble opinion (as I've stated before) the major-league type of answered prayer it takes to heal one from an anxiety disorder is very, very rare.

But God has given us the tools to push against it. In the same way the inner tube pulled a constant pressure in the direction away from the door on the rebar, we can apply a constant pressure on our brains to reform away from anxiety. Yet, I do believe that some of us will never see complete healing in this life time. That is the same reason that I wouldn't let a pedophile, who had since met Jesus and repented, be alone with my kids.

The pressure we apply is in the most malleable part of the brain . . .in the frontal cortex areas of reason and interpretation of sensory input. The complex limbic system is not easily malleable and that's why we can't just stop being depressed and be happy by will.

But before I dive into what is called cognitive re-structuring (what the Bible calls the renewing of the mind) I will mention medications.

A long time ago when I was an evangelical and was studying psychology with the hopes of being a "Christian Psychologist" I went to dinner at one of my friend's houses. His father was the CEO of a regional pharmaceutical company. During dinner, and just to be nice, his father asked me what I was studying. I told him. Then his father (again to be nice to his son's friend) said, "We are working on some exciting medications to help depression and anxiety."

I responded with a very stupid, "Drugs can't solve any of those problems . . . they just cover them up."

There is certainly a place for medications. Some people have such severe disorders that they must be on them for life. The rest of us need them for times of exacerbation. I was never on a daily medication for anxiety, however I should have been. I do have an emergency supply of Ativan (20 per year) if I'm facing a very particular amount of anxiety.

But the best long term solution is changing the brain by changing the way we interpret sensory input and by exposure to the offending situation. I mentioned before that I have acrophobia. In response to that, I took up rock climbing and rappelling. It still can scare the hell out of me, but if I hadn't done it, my universe would start to close in.

In cognitive re-structuring, you start to listen to your erroneous self-talk. "When I get up in front of the church to read scripture, I may choke up. If I choke up, the whole congregation will think I'm a fool and a spiritual wimp. If they think I am a spiritual wimp, then I really am a spiritual wimp. My value of a person will drop. God will like me less and I will have no friends." You have to go back and wrap an inner tube around the end of that though and pull it in the direction of, "I've spoken in front of churches hundreds of times and my voice only cracked once. Even that time, the majority of the people didn't notice. If they did notice, hardly anyone would care. If someone did care, and think less of me because my voice cracked . . . then they are the ones messed up . . . not me."

But it is not a kind of repentance where you replace that thought once then all is well. Because if you replace that thought just like I described, then the very next time you are asked to speak in front of a group . . . not the new thought, but the old thought will pop up. So, you have to once again press against it with the new, inner tube, thought. It is a constant pressure and active rethinking.

I will close next time with common wrong thinking and what new thinking should look like.

But us anxious people are NOT children of a lessor god.

Fearfully Made . . . Celebrating the Gift of Terror Part XI

2011-10-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you built a dream home on a gorgeous but remote Greek island. The setting was magical, on a hill above town of whitewashed houses with pale blue domes clinging to the rocky outcroppings above the grape-juice blue waters of the Mediterranean. It was a dreamer’s fantasy long fulfilled. But there were a few blemishes to threaten an otherwise utopian realization.

While the scenery was world-class the workmanship was a bit third world, or so it seemed to you. After the construction crew had left you noticed that your new whitewashed concrete home overlooking the sea had a few imperfections, some of them that really bugged you. The most noticeable one was a nasty piece of one inch thick rebar sticking out about sixteen inches from one of the supporting post beside the front door. It was more than an eyesore. Because it curved towards the door it was in the way. Each time you entered or left your home, that piece of irritating metal would scrape the door, making it difficult to open or close it. Once you had it open you had had to duck or for certain you would hit your head on the sharp, rough iron.

So you called the builders several times to come and fix it. They promised each time to come “the next morning.” But being a boat ride away, they seemed to have dropped off the ends of the earth once they had been paid for the original construction. Each day as you entered and left your house you would sustain a nasty scrap on your forehead or temple. You finally decide to take matters into your own hands. You search for metal cut off saw to get rid of the rebar once and for all . . . but there were none in your quaint fishing village. So, you decided to find just a simple old hacksaw and use elbow grease to take off the rebar. To your dismay there wasn’t even a hacksaw to be found.

For a while you resorted to just living with the rebar, but it was a constant thorn in your flesh, almost literally, enough so, it was about to ruin your dream. One day in frustration you try your best to bend it out of your way by pushing with all your might . . . but it didn’t budge. Then you beat it with a large rock but it didn’t compromise its stiff resilience. Despite a whole morning’s effort the rebar still stuck out from the post precisely at seventy-five degrees, towards and right in the way of the door.

Next you consider just living with it, as your proverbial albatross but it didn’t take long before you reached the limits of your patience. You picked up a bigger rock and pounded away with all your might and pent-up frustration.

About that time, an old, retired fisherman was making his way up the mountain on his bicycle and paused to watch this strange foreigner beating the side of his house with a small boulder, held in both hands above his head, more like a mad man than Vulcan.

“What do you want?” You yelled out in anguish.

“Oh . . . nothing. Just a bit courious,” replied the old man.

“Well . . . do you have any better ideas?”

The old man stroked his gray chin beard as he paused for a few minutes then answered, “Actually I do.”

“Then show me!” you shout back at him.

He walked up to the house and studied the piece of rebar. He pulled on it a bit. “Hmm . . . that is a sturdy iron. That means your house is built very, very good. It will withstand the earthquakes that we have here. You had very good builders.”

“But the damn thing keeps hitting me in the head! I’ve about broken my door as I have to kick it open to just leave the house.”

“Oh, I see. But we can fix that . . . but you must be patient. This house is built to last for generations, like all of our homes, so it takes a little time to fix its errors because they are equally strong.”

So the old fisherman studied the rebar a bit more. Then he looked at the olive tree which stood just a meter to the side of the door. He scratched his head and walked over to his bike. Meanwhile you just sit on the dusty ground to watch in exasperation. He flipped his bike over and removed one of his wheels. Then he took off the tire. Once the tire is off, he pulled the inner tube out of it and walked back towards the house. He took out his old knife and cut through a two-inch limb of the olive tree just at the right spot. Then he looped the inner tube over the stubbed limb. He walked backwards from the tree, towards the door of the house, pulling and stretching the inner tube with all his might. Then he looped the other end over the very tip of the rebar. “There.”

“There what? That didn’t do a thing. If me pushing it with a hundred pounds of force didn’t move it, certainly a piece of rubber pulling fifty pounds against it isn’t going to move it.”

“Of course it will,” said the old man. He took off his wool, black, Greek fisherman’s hat and wiped his brow. “But you have to be patient. Persistent and patient.”

You grab your protractor and hold it up with the rebar at the center. “Look. It is still at seventy-five degrees!”

“Of course,” said the old man. “I will be back one week from today then you will measure it again. On that day, I will tighten the rubber a little more.”

A week passed and you try to ignore the metal bar, but you still scrape your head a couple of times. You did notice towards the end of the week that the door was a bit easier to open. On Saturday morning, just as he promised, the old sailor climbed the hill on his bike with an apparently mended wheel. He smiled and asked for the protractor. You pulled it out and measured the rebar exactly as you had the week before. Now its lean towards the door was seventy-eight degrees. “Hmm,” you say. “I guess it did move a bit. But that’s still not a lot of difference.”

The fisherman smiles, “Three degrees in one week, that’s pretty darn good. That means in just five weeks the rod will be sticking straight out and not in the way of the door. Give it about thirty weeks and it will point away from your door, clearly out of your way, and at just about the right angle to make a beautiful place to hang a lantern or a basket of flowers from it. Then your problem will be solved. All you have to do is to keep the force against the rod and give it time. This is much better than pound on it for months with nothing to show for it.” He then put a stick in the middle of the stretched out inner tube and tightened it by twisting it a few turns. Then he tied the stick in place with a string. “I will be back in one week.”

When it comes to anxiety disorders, the cure is the same. It involves persistence and a constant pressure away from it’s defective position. The reason is anxiety, depression, OCD and you can name many other mental disorders are based in the concrete structure of the brain. It can be the result of inborn errors, echoes of the great fall, or it can be learned. But learning it, through traumatic experiences or just being taught to be anxious , changes the actual structure of the brain, neurons actually grow new dendrites and axons. The very complex chemical messaging system also changes. These are very real changes, based in the real, three dimensional world. So it is not a spirit that can change on a dime by simple will. Repentance does not change the structure of the brain instantly.

Some of these structural changes can never be fully unraveled in this world save a miracle that works against the way that God has created nature. It would be a miracle on the order of a thirty year old man, who was born without legs, growing both legs over night. Maybe God dose things like this, but it is rare.

But virtually all people can do better than they are. That improvement (or repentance), is a commitment to turn the tube and tighten the force against the disorder day after day after day. The results are not immediate.

So, this is getting long and I will pause. I will come back to describe how this “turning of the tube” works on in anxiety disorders. It can come under the heading of cognitive therapy, or . . . as the Bible says . . . renewing of your mind.

Fearfully Made . . . Celebrating the Gift of Terror Part X

2011-10-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

So what can we do about anxiety? Is there any hope? The hope lies in my parable of the steel rebar rod protruding out of the concrete. I will get back to that later.

First I will say that I do not believe in quick fixes. Some things that present at instantaneous relief include repentance (as mentioned last time), discovering repressed memories and being healed from them, and even as an answer to prayer. I've already talked about repentance so I will move on to repressed memories and other kinds of psychological healings.

Imagine that B was in her thirties and still wrestling with anxiety. Then a "repressed memory" (probably Christian) psychologist takes her back through hypnosis to her childhood. She remembers, vividly, her father's tantrums and his kick in her side. Then the repressed memory theorist, through suggestive manipulation, gets her to remember things that didn't happen (for example sexual abuse). This therapist then leads her in prayer for forgiveness and deliverance. He then assures her she had been delivered and is now free of the bondage of fear.

This is no better than the youth pastor's prayer and laying on of hands for an instantaneous deliverance from demonic oppression. Both of those are cheap and quick like a microwaved dinner. It makes the youth pastor feel better about his value (of finding the problem to a pretty young girl's problems and being her knight in shinny armor) and it helps the psychologist demonstrate his great talents as a mental healer . . . but neither does a thing for B. Indeed, she may eventually be worse off because she discovers that the anxiety is still there and months later, after the euphoria of being "delivered" wears off, she will be more depressed about her anxiety.

What about one more instantaneous relief . . . the simple and humble petition of the sufferer to God . . . in other words, prayer? Someone has already mentioned in the comments of this blog how they have prayed so hard for help and deliverance and none have come. Is God impotent? Is God deaf or doesn't care?

Because anxiety disorders are deeply imprinted into the brain's structure and chemistry, to be instantaneously fixed by prayer would be a SUPERNATURAL event . . . in the same order of someone who was born without a leg, suddenly growing one. It is my confident view, not based on a theological position, but as an honest observer of real life, that true--SUPERNATURAL--miracles are rare. Do you know anyone raised from the dead or grew a new limb? Most of what we use as proofs of answer to prayer are subjective and easily subject to wishful thinking. To even talk like this I am quickly put in my place by Evangelicals as someone of little faith, or who doesn't really know the true God.

This prayer issue is another posting series in itself, but I'm not at all implying that God is not listening nor is He impotent. I'm just saying that Evangelicals (and other Christians) have created a mythology that God is constantly doing supernatural things, when most of that is wishful thinking.

I know that during the years that I was constantly attesting to miracles, that I was self-deceived at best and often I was telling all out lies. In my heart of hearts I knew that they were lies. I decided to come clean. It is a simple observation that God typically works within the wonderful system of nature. This is where this discussion goes back to the point of monist Vs dualism. The dualists see this physical world, the laws of nature, the laws of human philology as being other than God or outside of God's goodness. But I see these as part of God wonderful works. I've quoted Einstein many times where he says that there is only two ways to look at the universe, as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is. I see the universe as all a supernatural miracle, when I use "natural" the same was as the evangelicalism. So when I use "natural" as meaning without God, then the only natural state is complete nothingness. No matter, no energy . . . absolutely nothing. So, as the moment that the big band occurred, everything side of that is supernatural. So, in my opinion, God doesn't have to bend the rules of nature to intervene. The way He has made things is wonderful and most solutions come within that system.

With this view, I don't feel betrayed by God when He does not work instantaneously to change things outside the natural laws which He has created. Now, since I got so far along this tangent, I have run out of time and space. Next time I will talk about what I think is the solution to this problem of having an anxiety disorder. But I will warn, that I do believe that for some of us there is no true hope of complete resolution this side of having new bodies. In the same way I don't believe that there is complete resolution to my friends with spinal cord injuries or amputations in this life. There are big improvements that can be made, but the hope of being normal again awaits the great restoration after this life.

Sorry about typos. I'm with a group and suddenly we have to leave the coffee shop before I had the chance to proof-read.

Fearfully Made . . . Celebrating the Gift of Terror Part IX

2011-10-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

We too often discount worrying as just an annoying habit, when instead it is sin. Jesus plainly tells us not to worry, so when we do anyway, we’re essentially saying, “Lord, I know you care, but I don’t think you can handle this one.”

The above quote form MacArthur's book is in a nutshell the view of Christians towards anxiety for ages. The main point of my posts is that I have a very different view of anxiety and I think this traditional one has caused more harm than good. It leaves the anxious person believing that their anxiety is all their fault, and what is even worse, if they were good Christians they would repent from anxiety today and live a life full of fearless confidence. The fact that fearless confidence doesn't come, is a constant reminder to them that they are failures as Christians . . . which in turn makes the anxiety worse.

I have to agree with the mainstream Evangelical view that anxiety disorders are the result of sin but that is our only common ground. I differ first all, as the point which I've been trying to make, is that anxiety in its raw form is God-given. It is good. God created our biological systems of perceiving danger and avoiding it. The typical Evangelical labels all anxiety as sin and I disagree with that completely. I honestly believe in my title here that we were made, by God, to be creatures of fear and anxiety. That is how we survive. We avoid the cobra when it is ready to strike. We don't walk out on thin ice. The list could go on and on of how anxiety is God given.

The aberration of anxiety is the results of sin in the world. The fall of Adam has cast a handful of sand in all the gears of the beauty of life, rendering it not ugly, but just not working the way it was intended.

There may be better theological terms to describe this, but I see sin on three levels. First is the big, impersonal influence of the fall of Adam on all of us. That is why we get cancer and why our cars don't start. Things just don't work perfectly . . . not necessary due to anything that we have done wrong . . . except to be born in this broken world. So, when we are born with errors in our cognitive interpretation centers, which cause us to mis-read benign sensory input as dangerous, that is no more our fault than being born with blue eyes. The same is true for being born with errors in our limbic system where our emotions don't work right . . . such as anxiety or depression.

The second level of sin is sin directed at us, personally, by others. In my story about B, her father's sin was directed at her. She absolutely did nothing wrong to deserve how her biological father treated her. Leaving her toys in the floor didn't justify her drunken father's physical abuse. Her stepfather's issues, which made him to be a superficial, un-nurturing father didn't help nor did her mothers coping skills (suddenly become superficially religious). B didn't cause the girls at the Christian school to manipulate and bully her. It was their personal sin of jealously that drove them to do that.

None of us grew up with perfect parents because we are in an imperfect world. Some parents are more hellish than others. Those who have been seriously abused as children (and I certainly was not) are often broken deeply in their psyche's.

The last layer of sin is our person choices. We can make choices that make our anxiety worse. I know that I have and I am fully responsible for those choices.

Speaking metaphysically again, I also differ tremendously from the Evangelical mainstream in the remedy for our fears. If, as MacArthur suggest, that all our anxiety is the product of personal sin, and we are all born the same way but some of us choose (because we are just bad people) to sin and be anxious, then the solution is simple . . . repentance. It would be the same if wearing red shirts were considered sin so repentance is where one day you burn all your red shirts and never wear them again. It is solved once and for all. But this goes back to the notion that our souls are fluid and inhabit an empty skull with no relationship to the circuits of the brain. So it is metaphysical.

When you believe the above, you feel worse and anxiety then grows. If you fear people, like many of us do, then you believe that you are a bad person because you are anxious and then you become even more socially anxious because you are fearful that you will not measure up to the standard and they will find out that you are inferior. If your voice trembles in front of the church, they will see that you are a sinful, fearful person . . . thus you become more anxious.

I'm out of time but I will next post about what I think is a healthy way to approach anxiety.