270. a layman's theology

As of late, I've obviously been a very reluctant writer. And while I'd like to feign ignorance, I know exactly why I've been silent. There are ideas I want to write and think about but they're big ideas that will take up a lot of time and words so let me be plain about it: I'm lazy.

But over the past few days, I found a link to an article on Mother Teresa from three different places, and it's this article that has (finally) put me back to working at words. It's a fascinating, challenging article about letters that Mother Teresa wrote to confidants about years of not feeling the presence of God as she ministered to the impoverished in Calcutta - an absence that "seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and -- except for a five-week break in 1959 -- never abated."

This article resonated with me because I'm one who can't really remember any kind of personal experience with God. Well, I take that back. Something about the gospel presentations I heard back when I was a Sophomore in high school touched a fundamental (poor word choice, sorry...if you don't get it, don't worry about it) part of me such that I decided to...well, looking back now, I'm not sure what it was I was deciding to do, but I knew that I felt a calling to something larger than myself and so I signed on.

What followed were years of trying to figure out how to do this thing called Christianity. I joined Christian clubs, I read Christian books, I (unfortunately) listened to Christian music, I went to church where I helped out in whatever ways I could, I did my best to read my Bible and pray in the morning. Basically, I did all the things that the sermons and the books I was reading told me were the things to do to be a good Christian.

But I never found anything that I would call a relationship.

For a long time this troubled me because talk of "relationship with God" was ubiquitous in Christian circles (at least the ones that I found myself in). It seemed like everybody was chatting it up with God, kicking it with Jesus. I kept trying to figure out what it was I wasn't doing, what it was that I didn't get. There were lots of times when I wondered if I wasn't good enough for God or if he didn't converse with me because of some innate character flaw.

Well, after years of feeling this way, wondering about this whole relationship with God thing and why it was that I wasn't in the loop, I finally just accepted that God does indeed commune with some people in an intimate manner and I wasn't one of them. I suppose I could have come to the conclusion that people who talked about their relationship with God were deluding themselves or that they were using a metaphor in a way that seemed far to literal, but I'd been around too many amazing, sincere Christians who really did seem in tune with something of the divine and I refused to discount their experiences just because I wasn't having them.

My coming to grips with the whole relationship bit is just one of the issues with Christianity that I've made my own peace with. Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows that I've asked a lot of questions about Christianity and how I understand it versus the way it was explained to me in the churches I attend years ago. Most of these questions were written in times of great frustration (see blog 179 and blog 201 for examples) but you know, another reason I haven't been writing as much lately is because I've made a kind of peace with all of those old questions.

I don't go so far as to say I have the answers to questions like, "what is the role of the church?" or "what is the Kingdom of God that Jesus keeps refering to?" or even "what is salvation - what are we saved from or saved into?" I mean, there are the shallow, Sunday school answers that go something like, "the role of the church is to worship God," and "the Kingdom of God is what heaven will be like," and "salvation is what keeps us from going to hell," but I was never satisfied with those answers and so I pushed and probed and I blogged and I read books and ever so slowly, I started to find my own answers.

What I hope to do in the coming weeks/months is to share my newfound thoughts on Christianity - how I made peace with the questions that used to plague me. I don't have any format in mind and I don't know what topics I'll cover in which order. Basically I'm going to shoot from the hip and share what comes to mind first and then go from there. It'll probably be a bit wooly and rough around the edges, but I'll do my best.

My hope is that I'll be able to offer some insight for those who are asking the same sorts of questions. I don't claim any kind of authority and I certainly don't have the academic credentials to be taken too seriously but at the same time, I think the gospel that Jesus preached is available to all people - not just those who went to seminary. I guess you could call what I'm trying to do a kind of layman's attempt at constructing a theology that works for him.

Sounds like fun, no?

....don't answer that.

269. it begins with a run

I went for a run yesterday.

A small gesture, but a very important one. See, without even noticing it had happened, a few days ago I realized that I had fallen into a rut - a very comfortable, very unproductive rut. I think the whole work situation greased the slide down into this rut, but it hit me after almost two weeknights straight of playing the most inane online games imaginable (playing them night after night until I was too tired to keep my eyes open) that I realized that I needed to make a change. And the run was a small step out of the rut, but it was an important one and it felt good.

But it's just a first step.

Couple other background items before I can get to what's really on my mind.

A few days ago, I took a long hard look at my budget, comparing income to outgo, and it was a sobering experience. I didn't think I was spending that much but I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to add to my savings account. After running the figures through a basic budgeting program, it became clear to me that I needed to cut way back on my spending if I wanted to purchase some big ticket items I had my eye on.

While working on my budget, I thought about my job and how un-fulfilling (to put it mildly) it was. I thought about quitting and getting a different job and that's when I had another sobering realization.

I don't really know what I want to do after the band thing gets played out. I mean, if I could wave a magic wand and conjure up any career I wanted for myself, I'd make myself a successful writer of short stories and screenplays but I don't have a magic wand and sorcery is generally looked down upon by the church. Now I know I have some regular readers and I'm grateful for their belief in my writing abilities but let's be honest - a writing career is a poor plan B, even if I was as talented as Anne Lamott or as disciplined as Aimee Bender (who writes for "two hours everyday, that's the law"), it would STILL be a poor plan B.

So I started to ask myself, "what am I going to do after the band thing?" And then I went on craigslist to see what kind of jobs were posted and there was absolutely NOTHING I was interested in even trying. I felt like Lloyd Dobler in the movie Say Anything when he says, "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that." And it's not that I'm lazy, I do want to do good work, it's just that I don't know what kind of good work I want to do.

And this seems unrelated, but it leads nicely into what I want to end with. This weekend, I saw the movie Stardust (yes, it was within my budget) with some friends and to be honest, the main reason I saw the movie was not because I thought it was going to be good (I didn't) but because it starred (no pun) Claire Danes (sigh). Turns out, the movie was actually quite delightful - a wonderful story as long as you don't ask too many hard questions at some of the plot turns.

It's a fairy tale, and like many of the genre, it has to do with a boy who stumbles into a situation that is far larger than he is. In this case, Tristan, a humble stableboy, hopes to win the heart of a girl by crossing a wall that leads to a magical kingdom called Stormhold to bring back a falling star but it turns out that the star has turned into a girl named Yvaine. Word gets out around Stormhold that a falling star has landed and two parties set out after it (a prince and a witch) because possessing the heart of a star leads to immortality. Through the course of the movie, Tristan the stableboy becomes Tristan the brave, sword-weilding hero and of course everyone lives happily ever after.

I mention the movie because there's one scene where Tristan and Yvaine are trapped in the brig of a sky pirate. They need to escape but Tristan complains that he's just a regular guy and not up to the task. Yvaine tells him that there are stableboys and then there are people who are only stableboys until they find their true calling and she believes, of course, that Tristan is one of the latter.

Because I was already thinking about my budget and my job and getting myself out of the rut I was in, this bit of the movie really resonated with me. I know there are lots of things I could do after the band, but most of them have to do with "regular" jobs. Way down deep, there's a little mustard seed of hope that believes I can take a bite out of the world, that I can make it better in some fundamental way. And I don't mean playing nice with boxes in a warehouse, I mean Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, Martin Luther King Jr. and his Dream. I mention these two not just because of their related names but also because they made a place for themselves in history by working to make the world a more just and beautiful place - a world more like Eden and less like Babylon. See, I don't want to be great or to be known or famous, but do want to make the world a better place to live and I want to do so in the largest way possible.

And I don't know what that will look like or how I'll get there but yesterday I went for a run.

And that's a manageable start.

268. injury plus insult

Another update on the work situation.

So, um, guess who won the Employee of the Quarter award last week? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't me.

Yeah, so last week Harold was christened Employee of the Quarter. Harold: I'll-do-the-easy-work-first-and-hope-that-someone-else-does-the-hard-bit Harold, take-a-break-whenever-you-can Harold, hoard-a-bunch-of-the-blue-carts-even-though-other-departments-need-them-more-than-we-do Harold.

Speaking of blue carts...no, I'll get to that in a second.

First I just want to make something clear. The thing that grinds me the wrong way isn't the fact that I didn't win Employee of the Quarter. I don't care about the award. It's the fact that HAROLD won because if Harold is an example of what my company considers an employee to be lauded, to be identified as a kind of ideal (because that's what these awards are supposed to do right?) then...then..then I honestly don't know what to say. When Harold told me about it I congratulated him with a smile then walked down one of the rows of boxes where he couldn't see me and then I...well, I didn't know what to do because it all seemed so surreal. I just shook my head and went back to stacking boxes.

The rest of the day went by in a kind of daze but late in the afternoon I got a message saying that people had been noticing a number of blue carts in our department - these are heavy duty blue dollies used to move boxes around the warehouse. Late in the afternoon, all the orders that are due to go out the next day get printed out and get distributed among the workers. If you get your list of orders and can't find a cart for yourself then life sucks for you.

In our department, I'd been noticing that we had a surplus of these carts but Harold guarded them jealously and I wasn't about to risk pissing him off by suggesting that we share them. Well, I guess word finally got out to the other departments and the same afternoon when Harold won the EOQ award,I got the message to give up a couple of our carts. I told them, "no problem, I'll wheel them over myself."

Thankfully, Harold had gone home by the time I got the request so I didn't have to tell him we were getting rid of some of our carts but as I was wheeling them out to the department that was requesting them, I noticed a bunch of people giving me stink eye (a Hawaiian Pigeon English term - I think in the mainland it's called the hairy eyeball or the evil eye). See they probably thought that both Harold AND I were hoarding all the carts for ourselves. Thing is, I've never brought a cart into our department, and while I've never actually seen Harold bring a cart into our department, there's only two of us in our department so who else could it have been? Oh, that and the fact that he's told me on a couple occasions that he's grabbed some carts for our section.

So here I am, wheeling these carts out so other people can use them and people are looking at me with a gaze that says, "hey asshole, thanks for finally sharing those with the rest of us." And I wanted to tell them that I wasn't the one stealing them. I wanted to tell them that Mr. Employee of the Quarter was the one filching them but I bit my tongue and just put the carts back where they belonged.

Injury plus insult makes for a pretty severe test of my spreading-the-Kingdom-in-secret philosophy. Truth be told, I've been noticing this week that it's been harder than usual to keep myself motivated enough to work to the standard I set for myself, and it's usually hard enough as it is.

But I've been thinking about the passage in Matthew 11:28-30 where Jesus tells us that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. I notice that he didn't say, "my hammock is comfortable and my pillow is fluffy." Even though he promises rest for our soul, it still requires a yoke and a burden, easy and light as they are.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though that day last week did its best to upset me, I'm soldiering on as best I can.