Dislocations of Faith

The Apostle Peter’s first letter was written to believers in what is now Asia Minor, or Turkey. We don’t precisely know what they were experiencing, but the sense is that they were suffering persecution for their faith. Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire ran the full gamut—from mild, to torture and death. Most persecutions tended to be regional or local, like the one Peter is referring to.

No matter how mild or severe, what persecutions did then, and what they do today, is to disconnect Christians from the familiar environment and culture they live in. 

To continue reading, please see my Daily Reflection today at The High Calling.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The spirit said

The spirit said

to the bride come

to those who hear, come

to those who suffer, come

to those who lack, come

to those who show mercy, come

to the meek, come

to the hungry, come

to the pure in heart, come

to the persecuted, come

to the peacemakers, come

to the mourning, come

to the poor in spirit, come

to the sick, come

Come, the spirit said

come, to the tree

the tree of life

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ten Books, Sort Of

It’s easier than the Ice Bucket Challenge, that’s for sure. Less wet, anyway. And less cold.

Sandra Heska King tagged me on Facebook. And it’s clearly one of those Facebook things. The question: What 10 books have most influenced you?

The easy answer (and the most Christian-ly correct one) would be to start the list with the Bible. And in my case, I would say that’s true. 

After the Bible, one book immediately – and I mean immediately – came to mind.

Although I think it would be more correct for me to list the authors who influenced rather than individual books (ask my wife; I tend to read clusters of books by authors I like).

Here’s my list, in no particular order. And I’ll stick to books. I’ll note at the end which one of them first popped into my head. (And the number of the books in the list are actually slightly more than 10.)

 

The Hobbit / The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

October Light by John Gardner.

The Source by James Michener.

David Copperfield / Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes.

 

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Conner, edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.

The Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

 

Conversation in the Cathedral / The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa.

And the one that immediately popped into my head when I read Sandra’s Facebook post?

Don Quixote.

What about you? What 10 books would you say have most influenced you?

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Where the text goes 2

No words for years

decades, no statement

no explanation the texts

left behind for years

decades, destroyed, buried

transmitted by mouth

imperfectly, parts omitted

forgotten, seeping

into the ground,

spilled blood.

The winds blows foe years,

decades, eons, the texts

forgotten, a few locked

in cupboards and chests,

covered with dust, waiting

for light.

One day

the sun rises.

Where the text goes

He wrote a poem

words on a page

words in a journal

he carried with him

always

a few words

scattered over weeks

disparate thoughts

varied inspirations

but falling together

in a pattern of birth

unexpected, unanticipated

pieces fitting together

lines adhering

to one another

forming coherence.

Photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ambushed by “The Cure”

I didn’t expect to find myself in a book about theology, even one written in a popular accessible style. In a sense, I was ambushed.

Here’s how the story begins.

You’re walking down a road, and you see ahead that the road forks. Fortunately, each fork has a sign.

One sign, pointing to the left, says “Pleasing God.”

And the other sign, pointing to the right, says “Trusting God.”

You didn’t necessarily have a specific destination in mind, but you surely didn’t expect the choice before you. What you don’t know is where either will take you.

So begins The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, by John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall.

The story takes on both roads; you’re not left wondering what you might have missed on the other road.

I suspected that “Pleasing God” was not the way to go. I was right, but not for the reason I thought. “Pleasing God” is the road to man-made religion, which is likely the most common form of religion in the world today, Christianity included. It’s the road that leads you to a room full of those famous paving stones; we all know what the road to hell is paved with. And the people in that room may seem familiar.

“The Room of Good Intentions broke and jaded their hearts, robbing them of hope,” the authors write. “It made them so sick they’re nearly anesthetized to believing life can ever be different. Man-made religion has beaten them down. Many are oozing with apathy. They can think of no good reason to try, they simply don’t care. Some of God’s most passionate, gifted, and dedicated servants are despondent along that road.”

And for me, it was so far, so good. I was cool. I understood what was happening, and what the point was.

Then this:

“These wounded express themselves in many forms. Some are cynical and smug, but it’s a cover. They’re self-protecting from vulnerability. They’re still articulate and insightful—they just now speak from the fringes of the arena. They’re bleeding from having risked vulnerability in a community that didn’t know what to do with it” (emphasis added).

Smack between the eyes. I thought I had been on that other road, “Trusting God,” the one that leads to the Room of Grace. Initially, it’s the harder, more difficult road. But it has a destination that matters. The other road doesn’t, with predictable results.

I pondered this. I chewed on it. Or perhaps it chewed on me. They’re bleeding from having risked vulnerability in a community that didn’t know what to do with it.

That could sum up a good part of my career.

That could sum up a good part of my experience with church.

I’m still pondering. Or being chewed upon. And this is only the first chapter.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re just beginning to read The Cure. To see more posts on this chapter, “Two Roads,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Photograph by Bobby Mikul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Meeting Edgar Allen Poe

A drunkard. A poet. An editor. A reporter. A military man. An orphan. A lecturer. The father of the detective novel. The Shakespeare of America. A slanderer and libeler. The husband of a 13-year-old bride.

And a writer. Above all, a writer.

We associate Edgar Allen Poe with 19^th century gothic. His stories – “Fall of the House of Usher,” “Twice-Told Tales,” “Masque of the Red Death,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” among many others – are full of mystery, passion, horror, violence, death, and the supernatural. And yet his poems, especially “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” made him famous in pre-Civil War America and established his literary reputation.

Questions and mystery surrounded Poe’s own life and death and continue even today – we may never know who left three roses and a bottle of cognac on his grave in Baltimore for decades until 2011 (alas, the “Poe Toaster” disappeared or died, to be seen nevermore).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Geography of Church

I grew up in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. Churches were expanding in the western suburbs of New Orleans, and we’re began attending our church when I was 4. The church as brand new; it didn’t have a kindergarten so I attended an older Lutheran church closer to the city. In fact, my going to kindergarten was the reason my mother learned to drive.

There were no Lutheran churches within walking distance of our house. In fact, there were no churches at all within walking distance. The closet church was a Catholic one about three miles away.

I grew up associating church with automobiles.

When my wife and I were first married and living in Houston, our first church was six miles away, right in downtown. When we moved to the northwest part of town, we attended a different church, but it was still six or eight miles from our home. In St. Louis, it has been much the same: we’ve attended churches six miles, 21 miles, and five miles from where we lived. Our current church is about six miles, situated in one of the wealthiest communities in the state of Missouri. One family in the immediate neighborhood actually attends our church.

Our experience is not atypical. As a country, we are church-nomadic people. It is not unusual for people to attend churches miles and miles from where they live. “Neighborhood” and “church” are not necessarily connected. For most of us, they aren’t connected at all.

The question is, should they be?

Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, say this: “God is redeeming creation place by place by gathering communities of people who, like the ancient apple tree, mature, flourish and livingly engage their neighbors. But in order for the good, joyous and freeing reign of God to leaven creation, there must be a commitment to rootedness, a virtue the Benedictines have long called stability.”

Stability. It’s a word I would not necessarily ascribe to my own church experience. We’ve tried. We’ve been members of four churches here in St. Louis over the past 35 years. At one the politics became overwhelming. One was some 21 miles from our house – one-way. We loved the church, but Sunday and Wednesday programs and children’s activities became problematic. And we were plugged into a community church that had connection to where we lived.

Another church was closer. We were members for 15 years. By any definition it was a flourishing church, and for the right reasons. That is, it was flourishing until a small group quietly decided that our church should be the next Willow Creek. The church almost wrecked itself.

We’ve been members of our current church for 10 years. It’s a long-established church, with a history stretching to the 1840s. It took a while for us to get plugged in, but we did. We found a good Sunday School class. We got involved. I became a deacon. And then the signs of change, eerily similar to our previous experience, began to blow. They’ve ceased blowing, but it’s been a very, very difficult time, for us and for the church.

The closest churches to our home – one a mile to the north and the other a mile to the south – are Lutheran and Episcopal. The denominational theology of the Lutheran church isn’t so different from our church; that of the Episcopal church is quite a bit different. Perhaps that’s the issue – denominations. The early church didn’t have them, although it certainly experienced any number of theological differences and issues.

I wonder if, in the context of community, how much do theological differences actually matter? I believe they do matter, but should I find out? Neither of the close-by churches may draw from the community, either.

But are we missing something important by commuting to church, driving past our neighbors each Sunday, just as they drive past us? And is rootedeness important? 

I suspect the answer to both questions is yes.

I’ve been reading Slow Church, and I’ve been devoting Monday posts to some of the things the book has to say. It’s well worth reading.

Photograph by Bobby Mikul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ferguson: A cycle

Ferguson 1: The wedding

The wedding: I hear

voices , not bells

voices rising in song

joined in song

joined in rejoicing

Outside: war, armies

clashing, wearing

armor, not linen,

linen saved

for afterward

The wedding: ends,

we walk outside

into the destruction

of the darkness. We step

over the slain.

Ferguson 2: The wedding

We step over the slain

as we walk the streets

of iron rusting in moonlight

We hear the music

the music of voices, raised

the music of voices, raged

the shattering of bottles, alight

rubber ping of bullets in flight

the music of shattering glass

scant protection against the burning

the music of alarms splitting

the night

shuffling feet, running past

the slain

The bride and groom gone

the wedding party gone

Ferguson 3: The fusion of narratives

One: walking in the middle of the street

Two: racist police

Three: blood in the middle of the street

Four: police protecting

Five: convenience store robbed

Six: the media, just the media

Seven: Molotov cocktail in memory of the slain

Eight: tear gas

Nine: the out-of-towners

Ten: the pastors speak

Eleven: the media, just the media becomes

             its own narrative

             as always

Ferguson 4: He walks the streets

He walks the streets

of concrete and stone

singing in his words,

the words only he can speak,

understood by all

who can’t speak the words.

He carries a staff of gold

taps it on the street

keeps time to the song.

Wherever he taps on the street

becomes gold on the street

golden street

He looks for the temple

the temple in the city,

to stand in its courts

to hear the cacophony

of its halls and rooms

He looks to see the priests

and servants walking

ban and forth talking

back and forth  watching

the temple’s business.

He looks for the sellers

of sacrificial offerings,

baaing, lowing, chirping

in fear and anticipation.

He finds no temple

only silence in the streets

only silence in the lanes

only silence in the grand boulevards

and avenues

only empty courts

of the temple that isn’t there

He walks down the streets

to see boarded windows

empty sidewalks

burned remnants

signs and bottles left

for trash collectors

to gather

he hears no birds

a rat scurries in the gutter.

The white dove comes

hovers above the madness

He smiles as a white dove

settles in a tree by the street

Ferguson 5: Hope shimmers

Hope shimmers on the horizon

or perhaps hope is the horizon

there, visible a song flying

across the plain stretching

toward hope, the plain that

is not the desert but a promise

a promised land

hope is there

in the promised land

always there

A Fun Day with Nancy

Nancy Rosback, my online friendship with whom goes back to when, well, we were a lot younger, has been in St. Louis for the past couple of days. Last night, Janet I met her and her childhood friend Faye Fullerton for dinner at the Tavern of Fine Arts. And virtual friendship became face-to-face friendship.

Nancy in person is exactly alike Nancy online.

She and Faye visited the St. Louis Art Museum today, and then Janet I picked her up at her hotel. And we did what we call in St. Louis "the Central West End thing."

First, we went to the World Chess Hall of Fame. It's been in St. Louis for three or so years, and it occupies a former house / former business on Maryland Avenue in the Central West End. (The photo above is the exterior of the museum, with what is believed to be the largest chess playing piece int he world.)

The museum has three floors, and three changing exhibits. On the first floor is an exhibit combining composer John Cage and artist Glenn Kaino. The focus of the exhibit is a performance of Cage's Reunion in Toronto on March 5, 1968, in which 16 chess players (masters and novices alike) literally performed music each time they moved a piece on the chess board.

On the second floor was "Strategy by Design," an exhibit of the games and household items designed by Michael Graves. Graves designed a number of chess sets (among other games) for Target for several years running in the 2000s. Especially cool was a chess set whose pieces were designed to look like how the pieces can be moved on the chess board.

On the third floor was an an exhibit devoted to chess master Bobby Fisher, who wrested enough world titles from Russian players to break the monopoly Russia had long held on the game.

A small part of the Fisher exhibit

We checked out the hall of fame's gift shop. It's considered one of the best small museum gift shops in St. Louis, and with good reason.

After the chess museum we walked three short blocks to Left Banks Books, one of few traditional bookshops left in St. Louis. It's a local institution, and likely a labor of love on the part of its owners. It's managed to survive big box bookstores and Amazon, but it can't be easy. (Yes, I bought a few books. Janet wandered around the store. Nancy sat on the floor and read poetry.)

Left Bank Books has one of those St. Louis 250th birthday cakes sitting outside the store. Someone deemed it one of the 250 most important sites in St. Louis (others being Grant's Trail, Busch Stadium, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the art museum, and so on).

Then it was time to eat, which we combined with the plan for the evening. It was back to the Tavern of Fine Arts, for dinner and a poetry reading by Richard Newman, editor of River Styx Magazine. He read from his just-published collection All the Wasted Beauty of the World.

It was a great afternoon and evening, and it was great to spend it with Nancy.

Not good biking weather

I sit near the door

man in tights

black Lycra shorts

my favorite jersey

six-years-old

yellow helmet tucked

under my arm

I sit near the door

waiting out the rain

my mind on the asphalt

I should be biking but

I’m not so instead I read

a poem or think I read

a poem or imagine I read

a poem, Luci Shaw perhaps

hiking a rocky seashore

or Wendell Berry walking

the woods and keeping

the Sabbath especially

in the rain

I don’t need trails

in the woods or rocky climbs

by the seashore, not today

anyway instead just a ribbon

of asphalt that replaced

the railroad tracks that

carried dreams then

but now the dreams

are carried only

on two inflatable tires.

It’s still raining.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Laurie Kolp’s “Upon the Blue Couch: Poems”

Write what you know, the experts say.

As I sat reading the poems that comprise Upon the Blue Couch by Laurie Kolp, the thought kept recurring: She writes what she knows. These are the poems about a life. These are the poems about a life being lived.

And where is life lived? Where most of us live it. The car wash. The doctor’s office. On vacation. Working. Seasonally. Who is it lived with? Spouses. Children. Relatives. The people at church. And how is it lived? With joy and zest and fear and depression and laughter and tears.

Kolp’s poems address all of these subjects and themes, and more. But whatever she turns her eye to, you can be sure it’s where life is lived. Like in the title poem – upon the blue couch.

Upon the Blue Couch

 

Maybe I didn’t write a thing today.

Maybe I sat on this twenty-year-old

muted blue couch and did nothing

but think about the wear and tear

from move after move we’ve been through,

with washed over mars, the scars

of cigarettes and vomit,

having been passed out upon and puked upon,

a shoulder when I needed one

to cry my eyes out upon.

Maybe I remembered all the lovers

who have lied

sprawled upon its pillows

with hungry lips I’ve kissed,

hands upon thighs, breasts upon chest,

all to feel something better than

what was missing in my heart.

Maybe I dreamed about my husband

and all the time we’ve rued upon

blue obsequious fabric,

worrying about the economy we’ve fallen upon—

with curse words or whispers

sometime sat opposite ends,

sometimes hand in hand,

but always with a love

never to be crashed upon.

Maybe I recalled my babies

sleeping upon their daddy

sleeping upon the cushions

as they sought solace in colicky times

and I was too tired to stay awake,

my nipples having been sucked upon

and sipped upon one too many times,

their cracks a small sacrifice

for a lifetime of nourishment.

Maybe I didn’t write a thing today,

but this twenty-year-old blue couch did.

The blue couch is an artifact, and over the course of a life and its own life becomes a repository of memory. But more is happening here then memory. And it has to do with the one word that’s the single most repeated word in the entire poem. (See if you can find it without reading on.)

It’s the preposition, upon. It implies relationship, a physical presence, almost a kind of platform. And that’s what the blue couch becomes – a platform for memory, and memories, both good and bad.

Kolp has published poetry in a number of literary magazines, and is also an accomplished photographer. She’s also a wife, mother of three children, manager of two dogs, and the vice president of the Texas Gulf Coast Writers. She blogs under her own name.

Because Kolp writes of the everyday, she writes of the familiar. These poems and the life they paint are recognizable. We see ourselves in the poems; we share the emotions they evoke; and the life and lives they represent become our lives.

And we, too, find ourselves sitting upon the blue couch, sharing the laughter, the anger and the tears. It is our blue couch, too.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.