Monthly Archives: December 2009

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What we are willing to do

I recently finished the book “Conversations with the Mann” by John Ridley and it brought up a lot of questions for me about how much we are willing to do to get where we want and what is perhaps more important; how we decide what we want. The story is about the life of a “negro, I mean black, I mean colored”(you will get the joke if you read it) African American comic; how he got where he got and the choices he made even when at the time he didn’t see them as choices. The story weaves it’s way through the perils of fame, the struggles of civil rights and integration, the quest we go on to find our own voice, the whole idea that when you get where you think you want to get you will finally be happy and the relationships you make and break on your way there. Over and over Jackie Mann is asked what he wants and his answer is simple, “Sullivan;” he wants to be on the Ed Sullivan show so he can really be famous. As a kid he used to watch the show and it defined every choice he would make. I don’t want to give away the story because it is worth reading, but my point is that what drove him, his singular purpose defined him and there is much to be learned from that kind of pursuit.

It is a rare gift to know what you want to be when you are young and for that one thing to bring you joy for a lifetime to come, but it does happen. It can get so easy to be stuck on a path because it’s the one we started out on that we sometimes never even look another direction and our greatest fear is that we might have to turn around and start over. We say we are going to do something and pretty soon we can’t do anything else. Even when it is the right path we can get so comfortable on it that we actually aren’t moving at all. Who we are and that thing which brings us our truest joy can be lost in the life we think we always wanted, but which we can’t even remember the reasons for wanting in the first place. None of this is to say that we can’t find that right path and stay on it into happiness, but the story of Jackie Mann reminds us that we need to be open to other roads that may turn out to be the true journey we are called to travel. If we are not open to any possibility but the one we start out with, we risk cutting off the people and the opportunities that surround us and in the end we may loose the chance to discover ourselves because of what we think we must be.
I suppose in the end the questions we must ask are: How much are you willing to give up to get what you think you want? How do we decide what we need to be? Who are you willing to hurt for your own ambitions? What about you is truly who you are? And the hope of it all is that somewhere along the way we find our voice.
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Why?-an old poem remembered

Why?

The crowds gather from all walks of life

Filled with their hatred, ignorance and strife.

They carry signs for their own cause,

but so often it’s more about seeking others flaws.

Down with those of a different race!

Down with those who walk a slower pace!

Down with those who appose our cause!

Down with those whose religion is not ours!

Down with those who don’t agree!

Down with those who aren’t like me!

These are the chants of the many,

But into the din of “down withs” a voice calls out

Not much more than a whisper, but heard like a shout-

Why?

What’s the difference but pigment in skin?

Is your cause a cause or are you just following to win?

Is your God really so small?

Do you really think you know it all?

Have you even tried to understand?

Have ever even been to a distant land?

Are you really so fragile you won’t even open your eyes?

What are you so afraid of? That what you think you know is really lies?

It didn’t take long for the whisper to grow

For the many to quiet and for their doubts to show

A chant that began as one voice becomes the voice of the many

People are looking for answers where there simply aren’t any.

Why?

I wrote a version of this poem more than ten years ago ( I remember the old version as being better than this one, but I can’t find it so this is as close as I could remember it). I was reminded of it a few months ago when I walked by a planned parenthood abortion clinic and was accosted by protesters who sit outside in an ongoing rotation to make sure the people walking by or walking in know that if you use birth control or get an abortion, they hate you and you are condemned with no chance of forgiveness. They don’t care what your reasons might be or how hard a decision it might be and if you read their signs they don’t really make a distinction between the use of birth control and an abortion. The part that bothers me most isn’t about whether I agree with them or not about abortion and birth control, it’s about their method of sharing their opinion that leaves no room for anything else and their’s isn’t just a form of disagreement, they are condemning and offering only hate. They call themselves pro-life, but they seem to be only pro your life if you agree with them. Like I said though it isn’t the cause that bothers me the most, it’s how they are choosing to promote it. I was re-reminded of this just a few days ago when a man who came up to me to tell me how cute my baby is turned his compliment into a commentary on abortion using church language and creating a box where he believes all Christians must live with no room for disagreement. Why do people do that? Why do we create such narrow worlds for ourselves that we leave no room to question and what gives us the right to impose our opinion on others without at least listening to theirs? We do we seek reasons to hate instead of giving ourselves reasons to love? I don’t have a problem with protest and I believe strongly in civil disobedience and justice, but I also believe that if your message is about putting someone else down then you have lost sight of justice and likely lost sight of your own goal that you began with as well.

I guess I wish more people would be willing to ask why; including and maybe even most importantly about our own decisions. There are lots of good causes out there and plenty of injustice that needs to be protested, but those protests should start with why too and even when there is no answer (like in the cases of racism and apartheid which have no legitimate reasoning behind them), having no answer is perhaps one the best arguments against them. The point is that we must question and that they reason for doing anything should never be hate. Even my two year old understand the importance of asking “why?”

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Prerogative

I hadn’t heard this word since Bobby Brown sang about it in 1988 (I hear that Brittany Spears did a version more recently, but it’s always hard to top the original). I was listening to a book, there it was and all I could hear was Bobby Brown singing “My Prerogative”. Prerogative is about a person’s right, a person’s privilege and the power you have to decide. It also speaks of “a distinctive excellence” according to Merriam- Webster and it made me think about the things which we actually have control over. The original term has to do with voting in the Roman Senate, but I am not talking about the things for which you have a vote, rather I am talking about the things which are truly yours to decide.

On my most cynical of days I am not sure this includes anything, because even decisions about the furnishings of ones own home (which was the subject mentioned in the book I was listening too) while yours to make are dictated by both your means and the space. Then there are times when you make a decision and you are sure about it, but it can’t happen right now for any number of reasons. I suppose that doesn’t change your prerogative in making the decision, but is does steal some of your thunder in its implementation. Luckily for me, though I can be quite cynical, I am in general an optimist and I believe that we actually have much more power to choose in this life than we usually think we do. There are the little everyday choices like how we dress, what we eat (I have no problem with picky eaters, you may as well enjoy what you eat), and for the most part how we fill our time (yes there are things we “must do,” but we have some control there as well) and I think you do establish your own, “distinctive excellence,” your own prerogative in these things. You also have slightly bigger choices and for the most part control over what to be, how to live, and who to be with. You can talk all you want about fate, and it is there, I believe we are placed in certain situations and we meet certain people for a reason, but you still have to take the opportunities that are placed in front of you; you make a choice. Like I said before though, you can make an argument about all the external factors involved and reduce these choices to a kind of limited prerogative, but it’s still yours.

Perhaps the one thing that we truly have power over though and which is for me most important to us, is our mind. We choose what we think. We may be influenced by any number of things, from our families, to our education, to the situation at hand, but it is still our choice. No one can make our mind up for us unless we choose to let them. No one can make us feel bad or sad or happy unless we let them. No one can take away our hope unless we let them. In some ways prerogative has the connotation of being the thing which we take control of, not which we are given control of. When we decide that we will be in control of our own fate, our own decisions, when we decide to own what is distinctive and excellent for ourselves and about ourselves; that is our prerogative. When we say (to quote Bobby Brown), “I don’t need permission, make my own decisions, that’s the way I want to live. I can do just what I feel. No one can tell me what to do. That’s my prerogative.”
If we have no prerogative we have no self and we simply let the world dictate everything for us. We need to take control sometimes. We need prerogative.
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Thoughts on Solitude

I have perhaps been reacquainting myself too much with Thoreau and Merton and watching too many movies like “Into the Wild,” or maybe I am drawn to them because of my own inner need, but I am feeling constantly driven to seek solitude. This is not new, but I am somehow thinking of it in a different way. As I wander the streets of Seattle with my headphones on listening to book after book (currently it’s “Conversations with the Mann”) I close off and I manage to be alone in a city filled with people and noises, sites and smells. I am both a part of it and yet removed voluntarily from it. As I sit in a hospital room holding my infant daughter asleep in my arms, there are other babies, nurses, parents, alarms and a cacophony of other noises all around us, but somehow the rest of the world melts away and it’s just the two of us. Late at night I stay awake and it’s like I can’t sleep unless I have had my dose of solitude. There are days when I feel I could disappear “into the wild” and I think that for myself it could be incredible, but the problem is I care too much about people and about what’s going on in the world to leave it in that way. Instead I steal my time. I sometimes feel the need to slink off to my cabin in the woods, but for now there are more important places for me to be. Even Thoreau realized the need for friends and society and the balance of things social and solitary (he did have three chairs). I feel in some ways I am becoming more efficient in making moments count for more, but the trick I suppose is to take what each moment has to offer and let it feed you in whatever way it will.

When I was in high school I befriended the chief custodian/maintenance person and amongst the many interesting conversations that we had there is one that I have never forgotten because what he said was so profound and it’s always amazing how he saw something in me that I had never really thought about. This was a man nearing retirement who had spent most of his working life in solitude. He worked in the schools for 30 plus years, but to most of the students he was invisible, a servant to clean up after them if they even gave it that much thought, but he actually liked it that way. He appreciated the solitude. It was my senior year and he asked what I was planning to do with my life. I told him I was planning on going into the ministry and though to that point we had never talked about faith or anything like it, he laughed and said, “it figures.” I couldn’t leave it at that, so I asked him to explain and he told me about his best friend who became a monk. He said that he had never met someone so thoughtful, intelligent and comfortable with them self as this friend and that I had always reminded him of that friend so it seemed only natural that I would be going that way too. He talked about the ability to be present in every moment so that if you were with him you always felt like you were the most important thing to him, and when he was alone he understood that was a way to be important to himself in the same way he made other people feel when he was with them. This deep understanding of the need for solitude and the way it can feed you along with the desire to offer a sense of importance to others resonated with me completely. I won’t say that I am as good at it as he was trying to give me credit for, but I will say it’s a goal that I have been conscious of ever since.

I guess the point is that appreciating solitude doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate being with people too; in fact it can make you better at really being with people. I don’t like crowds or large groups, but I care about people. I need solitude and it is where I perhaps thrive the most, but sometimes it’s nice to have someone to walk with and talk with too.

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Sunrise sunset

I am in general a sunset person, but that probably has to do with my aversion to mornings and the fact that I live in the west where the sun sets over the water with a backdrop of the Olympic mountains. This morning however I was out for an early morning run and the glimpse of a buck scampering across a parking lot in the predawn light made running that early worth it. His silhouette against the trees as the sun was still just thinking about making an appearance and the full majesty of his proud antlers was something magical to start the day. It occurred to me as I watched the sun peek out over the trees that perhaps I am missing out by not seeing many sunrises (though admittedly I have seen more lately catching early morning ferries or trying to squeeze in a run on a day that is far too full).

As a metaphor I suppose both have their place, but I have to admit that the rising of the sun to greet a new day and to chase away the darkness has a certain motivational quality while the sun setting has instead a sense of something ending and invites a rest and a seeming closure to things. There is a constancy to the sunrise that you put your trust in and while clearly just as constant, the sunset just doesn’t project that same feeling. In reality there is beauty in both. The ending and the beginning, the beginning and the ending. The opportunities and possibilities of each new day and the invitation to let things go and rest at the close of the day. One can’t help but see the touch of God in the hues of gold, pink and purple as they shine through the clouds, shimmering across the waters like a road calling you to chase along after that glowing orb as it descends around the curve of the world or the coming of the dawn and the light that marches towards you, first kissing your skin and then enfolding you in its warm embrace. With each sunrise and each sunset I feel like I am being given a gift and I owe it to myself to appreciate each one for the beauty and the inspiration they offer. Perhaps we should all be more intentional about seeking the sun and respecting its gifts.
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Walking the world smaller

Hastings, Washington DC, Geneva, Rome, Paris in each of these cities I spent time this summer exploring on foot the things you miss when you travel any other way. Much of the time without a map or a guide (which is the only way to explore when on a voyage of self discovery) I wandered around these big cities and they really didn’t seem all that big. When Henry David Thoreau was asked why he walked instead of riding he put into perspective the scope of the universe and the reality that no two points on earth are really all that distant when you consider the vastness of the universe. With this philosophy the whole world seems much smaller, and infinitely more explorable. The true color of a place lives not in the center where all the tourists go, but in the the side streets where the locals hang out. I realized the other day that though I have walked these places all over the world I have never really done the same in my home town of Seattle…until now. With my daughter in the hospital and my trips into the city becoming a regular occasion, I have been spending hours each day walking my city and in some ways reacquainting myself with things and in other ways learning the city from a whole new perspective. I probably couldn’t drive the city any better than I did when I first learned, but I am learning all the ways to walk and it’s made me appreciate the place of my birth more than ever. The touristy places like the pike place market have a local flare that makes them less touristy and more just what we are, but the thing about walking is that you see the people more and a place becomes less about the places in it and more about who lives there.

I realized today that even in the pouring rain I would rather take the passenger ferry than drive into the city because it allows me my walk. Most people might think that you have more freedom when you can drive your own car where ever you want, but I think freedom is more about how you see the world than how you travel in it. When you walk the world smaller, you can think the world smaller too and perhaps those things which seem out of reach won’t really seem so far. It’s funny to think that after having taken planes, trains and automobiles all over the world, it was on my own two feet that the world opened up and invited me to explore it.
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The Photo book

The other day my daughter was sitting on my lap for something like 45 minutes to an hour looking at pictures in her digital photo album. It’s one of her favorite things to do and she seems to think that’s all a computer is for. She also has a photo book that tells the story of her entire life so far (all two and a half years of it) which she sometimes carries around and often demands that we go through together. You could argue that she likes looking at pictures of herself, but I think it is more about wanting to remember things that have already become blurred in her mind or about which she is still just beginning to understand. Our ability to record things has come a long way in just the past few years, but there is something about those printed pictures, whether in a box or a book, which makes the memories so much more real than anything else. It’s as if somehow touching the picture is like reaching into the past and we can almost feel as if we are physically transported to that time and place. When I graduated from high school my mom made a book of pictures and achievements and I suppose it was a lot like that book my daughter has with just a few more years of life to it.

I can remember as a child my parents bought a video camera and every Christmas we would sit with my whole extended family and watch the videos of the years before. The thing was, those videos didn’t speak at all to the people who weren’t there, they are somehow more intimate because of the detail and yet more limiting too. It was fun to watch them as a family and share the stories of all that you can’t see in the video, but it’s also like there was too much there and it took away some our ability to share what was behind the images on the screen. When you share a photograph it invites people in in a different way and the story becomes yours to tell in all the richness of the memories it invokes.
When I left the first church I served the youth made me a collage picture book and even though it has been more than six years, when I looked at the book the other day while moving some things around a shelf it was like it was just yesterday. When I walk through the halls at my parent’s house they are still filled with pictures of my brother and I as kids and while a part of me says that there is a time to take them down and move on, they remain a tangible reminder of some special times that otherwise might be forgotten. It would be nice if we could recapture the joy that is so evident in those adorable early childhood photos. Perhaps that is their greatest gift to us in reminding of us how much joy is possible when we refuse to allow it to be diminished by the pressures of life.
With every new experience our photo book grows and so does our chance to remember the things worth taking photos of.
Addendum- After I originally posted this I went for a run (in the falling snow which was beautiful despite the cold) and I was knocked right back into my nostalgia, because as I rounded a corner I was confronted by an old Ford truck painted fluorescent yellow. When I was in high school one of my closest friends, Aidan Kennedy (the “laughing loser” featured in the movie “10 things I hate about you) had a great big old Ford truck painted that same shade of yellow. It’s amazing how that one image called to mind all the adventures we had in that old truck. I don’t have any pictures of the the truck, but seeing one reminded me of drive in movies, late night adventures and a dislocated shoulder, plus lots of other things. I was struck by how powerful the flood of memories was from that one image, but I guess that was kind of my point anyway. It’s true what they say, “a picture (or a fluorescent yellow truck) is worth a thousand words.”
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Expectations

We are all waiting for something. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for our prayers to be answered. Waiting for the next book in the series we really like to come out (I know it seems a little more trivial than the first two, but it is waiting). We are waiting for something to happen. Waiting for that thing, the thing which tells us what we are supposed to do, who we are supposed to be, where we are supposed to go. We sit with our expectations both great and small, good and bad and eventually we feel like we need to do something. The thing is, it’s the things we can’t control that eat away at us the most and sometimes we don’t know where to place our trust or where to look for answers. Hours, days, weeks, months, even years can go by in the waiting time and just when we feel like we can’t wait any longer something gives us hope, or maybe we even get our answer, the answer.

The struggle is that while we wait we often don’t know what we are really waiting for and yet we try to prepare in our expectational way for every eventuality. We need our expectations. They drive us; they keep us going, they give us something to look forward too, to work towards. We like to think that it’s not a matter of if, but when and perhaps how. The reality is we have to think that way because otherwise we end by giving up. Things don’t always end the way we expect them to, but that should never dampen our expectations.

How long are we willing to wait? How long is too long? Do we get to a point when the waiting has consumed us and we just want the rollercoaster to stop and let us out? Or do we persevere because the chance of something great is worth whatever we have to go through to get there and we want it to be great. Do bad days get us down or do they instead make us that much more thankful for the good ones. If days come when we can’t handle it and we just break down or want to lie in bed all day does that make us weak, or does it simply mean that we are human and that a part of us understands the need to take care of our self because if we don’t we won’t be ready, we won’t be able to enjoy it when (notice the when) great comes.

There is a point at which we must adjust our expectations, but only we ourselves get to decide when that point comes. The thing is, when we adjust we don’t loose our sense of expectation, we allow one thing to be what it is and we open ourselves to other possibilities and the creation of new expectations.

We are all waiting for something. How we wait can define us or break us. We need our expectations. We need hope.

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Perspective

William Blake: “To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower,

hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.”
It’s all a question of perspective. We have to expand our perception and begin to consider, maybe even to understand the relationship between that grain of sand and the world, between that flower and heaven, to believe in our ability to hold the infinite and to make that one moment last an eternity. At the same time we have to understand the opposite. The sand is the world and yet is in the world and just a part of the world. The flower is heaven, but at the same time is not heaven and is rather a glimpse at what could be or of the unfathomable which is so much better, so much more beautiful and incredible. When we grasp the infinite we become limitless and at the same time we limit it and often find we need to let it go. A moment, an hour, a week, a year, a lifetime is an eternity in the moment and yet only a moment in eternity.
When we fail to see both perspectives we become truly blind. When we miss the world in that grain of sand we loose the significance of that single grain and when we see it all in that single grain we can loose everything else. If we fail to see heaven in the flower we may loose hope and if we see heaven as the flower we may miss the heaven in all that surrounds us. If we hold infinity and become limitless we may loose direction, but if we limit ourselves we have no need for direction because we aren’t going anywhere. If our eternity is wrapped up in a moment we may become stuck, but if we don’t live as if each moment could be the most important in our lifetime, we fail to live.
To see the world and heaven we have to have our eyes open, to hold infinity and eternity we have to be willing to grasp at them.
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What makes an expert?

Is it some degree, or title? Is it an experience? If you have done something does that make you an expert? How many times do you have to do it? When you become one does that mean you have nothing left to learn? If your source material is from 20 and 30 years ago are you still an expert or just an expert on how thing used to work (admittedly there is much to be learned from the way things used to work and we often wish it still did)?

A few months ago I was teaching a class on preaching to a group of people who had all been preaching longer than I have, but who were eager to get better and wanted to hear a different perspective. I am not a well recognized or published expert on preaching, but I was asked to share how I prepare and how I preach and I think we all (including of course me) got something out of the experience. I guess that’s the thing that separates the person who sees themselves as a teacher and the person who thinks of themselves as an expert. Good teachers are often experts in their field, but more than that they are those who know that they don’t know everything and are excited about the process of learning together by bringing collective knowledge into a form so that it can be both useful and insightful.
I was sitting the other day and listening to an “expert” say a lot of things that seemed really obvious and I would have much rather spent the time talking to the other people around the table about what they were doing (this may have something to do with my learning style, but I was not the only one who felt this way). The person talking certainly knew the subject and had great things to share, but there were disconnects for the way it had worked for him and the way it might work in our contexts. Sometimes we try really hard to listen to the right consultant, to take the right class or read the right book so that we will know what to do, but the problem is you never really know until you have tried it. I love teaching and I love learning, so I am certainly not saying we shouldn’t take classes, read books and attend lectures. I know that sometimes we do benefit from the “expert” and their experience and knowledge, but sometimes I also think we sell ourselves too short. The “non-expert” who has tried something will often have insights that an expert for whom everything worked (they are an expert after all) would never have noticed. There is so much which can be learned from the person who is experiencing something for the first time, that the person who has done it a hundred times has already forgotten.
I believe that there is something to be learned in every situation and that everyone is an expert on their own experience. We have to be open to every opportunity, every experience that’s presents itself. The person who doesn’t understand something is most significant to anyone who seeks to reduce the amount of misunderstanding and ignorance in this world. If we ignore the “non-expert” we loose an opportunity. If we leave behind the person who wants to understand, but doesn’t we have failed. When something seems perfectly clear to you, but doesn’t to someone else it should force you to think about it in a different way. If you want to be an expert, teach and never stop learning. If you want to be an expert become an expert in helping people erase their misunderstandings. All that is wrong with our world has at its very core the seeds of misunderstanding and ignorance and an unwillingness to learn or to try.