It’s Still Advent
For the last 3 years in a row I have almost missed advent completely, because I am in seminary and I have so much to finish at school, so much work to do in the restaurant, and so little energy left after a long semester, but it’s not over yet, and so now that I am through with school I wanted to share some thoughts on advent.
Groundhog Day
If you remember the film Groundhog Day with Bill Murray you know just about all that you need to know about Advent. Somehow, for no explainable reason, Murray’s character gets stuck on one of the worst days of his life, every morning he wakes up to “I’ve got you babe” on the clock radio, and it’s always Feb. 2 in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. No matter what he does, he is forced to relive the same day, again and again. Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds like my life too, every year, every week, every day, it can be the same old drag. The same old problems and the same old me. Will we ever get out of this reliving of the same tired old story, the same tired old song?
Advent Hope
2 Peter 3:8-15a, is an advent reading, and a favorite of people who are waiting for God to destroy the world and bring them up to heaven. But they have not read closely enough. All that language in the middle sounds like destroying everything with fire, if that’s what one is looking for, but the last verb in v. 12 can only be one kind of melting, blacksmith melting (the verb is τηκω). In a short space I cannot go into all the details that my professor did in class but this passage is not about God destroying the world, it’s about God re-forging the world. So what is the hope of Advent? Not that God will rescue us out of this world someday, but that God will do again on the second advent as he did on the first, come down, into our world, but this time all will be revealed, all will be made new, all will be healed. This passage motivates not by saying the things in this life don’t matter and will be destroyed, but by saying that the things in this life do matter. None of them will be lost in the shuffle, or obscured by what is wrong with the world. Someday God is going to burn away everything wrong, everything painful, and everything that obscures the beauty of this world.
Advent Mission
The question in v. 11 & 12 is what we should be looking at. What sort of lives should you be living? Waiting and hastening the day? Is that your life? I certainly struggle with it. But the things we do, the people we invite, the songs we compose, the noses we wipe, the work we do, it matters, and someday, even if it doesn’t show now, it will be revealed to everyone. Someday, our advent hope is going to be actual advent. He will come back, and someday on December 25th instead of remembering a little baby and some scared, chilly, confused people in Bethlehem worshiping what they could barely understand, all will be made new, and King Jesus will rule the world, so everything works out the way it should. You have 2 more days to particularly focus on and prepare for his coming, what are you gonna do?
(This is a summary of a sermon I preached on Dec. 4th, my first live sermon.)
Failure is par for the course
Failure is par for the course
“If at First…try, try again” It might be so trite that I’ve never really given it any attention. Ryan Bingham from Up in the Air put it, perhaps more beautifully, with a slight twist, “Anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now. And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it.” Not my favorite truism, and I’m sure there are exceptions, there always are, but it has a definite ring of truth, and in the end it’s good truth for all of us. Not least for myself. So I blog failed, weeks with no writing and no posting, and I have a lot I would like to be writing about and posting about, but I’m just SO busy. But I was busy when I was writing too, my hope: writing will change the world. Maybe not in any dramatic ways, but that’s why I do life, it’s why I work at the restaurant I do, why I go to seminary, why I recently became an Episcopalian. I want to change the world, or to put it in a more familiar, orthodox way, I want/wait/hope & pray for the Kingdom of God (short hand for everything being the way it’s supposed to be). It was worth spending time on, but I’m new to the whole blogging and responding to comments thing all in the midst of all the other stuff I need to be doing. But failure doesn’t have to be final.
Seriously, everyone fails
I have a malady, I expect to be good at things when I first try them, if I’m not, I quit. Pretty silly, only savants come out of the womb great at anything, and I don’t want that. If it’s worth doing, if you love it, it’s going to be tough to do. Like waiting tables and being married. Those have both been excruciatingly difficult, and I’ve been at it for years. The only reason I have gained a measure of competence at either of those endeavors is because quitting, in any sort of final sense, has never been an option. I’ve had to keep paying the bills, and restaurants have always been the best/only way I’ve known how to do that, and I have no intention of losing the best thing in my life, Amber. But I’ll tell you, as far as server failures and husband failures go, I’m pretty talented, I am great, at sucking. But after years of it, I suck a little less. Sometimes, I even feel like I’m decent at marriage and waiting (usually not, but that’s for another post). But it’s only because I have not quit. So it seems, that what I need is some sort of help to keep from quitting on the blogging even when I want to quit, someone to pick me up, and brush me off when I blog fail next. Anyone out there? Anyone else feel like failure is final sometimes? What helps you when you fall down to get back up and chase after the thing you love? (And final apologies to those commenters I have not responded to, seriously, it’s part and parcel of the blog fail, will respond soon.)
Drive
DriveHave you seen Drive yet? I caught it yesterday on my Artist Date and it was simply amazing. It was a brilliant piece of art. The story could have been told horribly, but those are the best kinds. Stories that are only good because real people handled them so well. Perfect acting, filming, directing, music. The music was the best; really the whole soundtrack was fabulous. But one song stuck out A Real Hero by College, they played parts of it a couple different times in the movie. And the song was commentary on the movie, it said more clearly what the movie was about that anything else. It’s been stuck in my head non-stop since yesterday…a Pandora station with that song as the seed has yielded delightful results, and I’m listening to A Real Hero right now. The art changed me. The film, greatly aided by the music, got inside me. If you are not turned off by violence and nudity, go check it out, it’s so good.
A real human being and a real hero
The refrain of the song is so delightfully stuck in my head…a real human being and a real hero. The connection of the two ideas is not new, I would love to talk to College about their process for the song, find out who they were reading and listening to. One of my favorite books from back in the day Phantastes by George MacDonald has a line that says about the same thing, “I learned that he that will be a hero will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work is sure of his manhood.” I loved that line 10 years ago, but somehow lost track of it as a guide in my life. I am fairly certain C.S. Lewis talked about this in some of his books too; Screwtape Letters, the demons try to de-humanize the people, that’s their goal. It’s what’s wrong with this world, not humans, but de-humanized humans. Humanizing was what Jesus was all about, he was a real human, the perfect human, the ideal Israelite. He was a hero by being exactly what humans were supposed to be. Of course he had the God part too, but a huge part of His mission was being a real human. We don’t need to be angels, we need to be real humans if we are going to be part of God’s world saving plan.
A real hero
I wrote about it the other day, but that’s what we need, real heroes, real humans. It’s my hope. It’s why I’m writing, why I eat traditional food, sleep a lot, exercise, hang out in the sunshine, and eat Cod Liver Oil. Because I do want to be a hero, but that is going to come by being a real human, by leaning onto my work, my marriage, my community, saying yes to life on planet Earth. Right now real human is priority number one. So what did you think of Drive? Of A Real Hero? Am I off base, is there a larger gulf between real human and real hero? And finally, what can you do today to be more of a real human?
It worked for Hemingway
Why 500 words? Or “It was good enough for Hemingway.”
So, the last few days were busy and I didn’t get a thing written, no time for anything let alone a post, let alone a gathering up of things I have written that need editing etc. But no matter, I expected this thing to begin in fits and starts, and I had to set the bar low. Because for far too long I have not written anything, because I was only interested in writing amazing significant pieces. Well, I have given that up thanks to The Artist’s Way. There are some things that I REALLY should be writing about, like the Resurrection how about, or depression, or primal life…and yet I am talking about art, because that is what has come up. Why 500 words? Why choose this format, basically because it was good enough for Hemingway. I was poisoned against Hemingway early on, so I am not a fan per se but there is no denying that he changed the world, apparently 500 words at a time. 500 is doable, it’s about a page and a half, it takes 10 minutes if I know what I want to say, and it’s short enough. I can read 500 words from anyone anytime without getting too bored, even if it garbage (a charge that could be leveled against my prose). Once I get to more than 500 words it seems necessary to break things up, show pictures, or something to keep interest.
But why 500 words today?
Right? Why talk about my medium when there is so much else to be doing? Well, because I need something to talk about, because my friend Scott Sammons has committed to talking about creativity every day for the month of October. Everyday is much more than I can handle right now, but I was inspired both by his first post of the month and by his goal. This post was particularly helpful in that it nicely illustrates how quantity is more important than quality. I haven’t done anything for a few days, so discussing the why seems worthwhile. I want to change the world, it’s going to start right here, on this blog one 500 word post at a time. And I want you to start doing something like this too.
Do something
That’s what I’m doing today. Something. Today it is not inspired, it is not special, but I’m out to fight The Damnable Lie of the Platonic Dualists. So even though I’m not doing much in this post, it’s something, it’s practice. And I hope that someone out there will practice too. I want you to practice living artfully, I want you to do the things you are called to and feel good about it. Maybe it’s writing, or music, painting, pottery, whatever it is, pick it up, dust it off and do “500 words” today. What’s your 500? What have you been putting off? What do you love and fear? What are you neglecting because you respect it and how can you get back in the game today?
I’m too busy to figure out how to get un-busy
Tyrannical urgency
I’m not the first to write about this, I know. But it’s worth saying something about anyway. Urgent is something we have to fight. Because, if we always take care of the urgent we may perpetually neglect the important. Just about everyone has this problem. So busy with whatever that I can never even stop to figure out how to get less busy. Right now I’m there, I can’t even organize what needs to be done for the semester. So every time I try to sit down and work on school I find myself first spending a decent amount of time just figuring out what I should try to do. I need a time turner, big time. But I know you all do to. I know that you are all busy, busy bees. We all are. There will be a future post (well, a series because it’s gonna take a lot of words) about the impact technology has had on all of that. But I will save that for later.
Let it all come tumbling down
Right now, I am 2+ weeks late on a significant school assignment. It’s terrible. But unlike previous experiences I am refusing to let it drive me crazy. It has no subjective terror. The assignment is beyond my ability to accomplish in the time I’ve had, but I’m not going to feel bad about it. I will either be able to pass the class even with a poor and late assignment, or I won’t. Either way I’m ok. It is not the most important thing. Now don’t get me wrong, all you school slackers out there need to get your ass in gear, but that’s not me. I work, I’m married (and you can’t just put that on cruise control contrary to common practice), I’m an artist, I’m involved in a fairly time consuming treatment plan for depression (running, eating well, sitting in the sunshine, smoking lots of cigarettes…and no I’m not joking), and I want to have a life and be as involved with church as I can. At some point something has to give. I refuse to follow the path of so many other graduate students and sacrifice my physical and mental health, my marriage, and pretty much everything else in my life. I am at the pleasant position of being pretty much as far in school as I intend to go, if I get some crap grades here at the end no one is ever going to really care. I won’t have done poorly because I’m lazy, I’ll have gotten C’s or D’s because I don’t want to fail the rest of life.
Structural Change
Of course as a Post-Enlightenment Individualist (though in recovery) I initially consider this a problem that individuals need to combat, and it is. But it’s also a big structural, societal problem. We (US Americans) value the busy person, we praise the go-getter, and we measure success by how unhealthy, unhappy, and exhausted people are. It doesn’t have to be this way, but I can’t change it myself. We have to see this as a group problem and tackle it as a group. So, what can you drop? What can you neglect? Is there anything you can let go today, anything urgent and unimportant so that you can be more human? Have you mastered rest and being able to get stuff done? Share it with the rest of us. How can we change this as a society?
Help
Help
So, this is a bit of a fake post, I hope to have a real 500 up sometime later today. But I figured this blog world is supposed to be about dialogue, so I need your help. At this point I imagine all of you reading know/care about me, or for some reason have some level of interest in me personally, so what do you want to know? I have a lot I would like to write about, currently I am writing about 3 times as much as I post, some I like and will re-work, others will never go anywhere. But my umbrella of blog topics is large, and my posts are purposefully short. Basically I think that I will be covering 3 interrelated meta-topics, God-stuff, art-stuff, and body-stuff. Of course that means almost everything is fair game. So if you want to help me out, or even if you want to help yourself out, will you enter in the comments the 3 topics you would most like me to blog about in the near term. Feel free to suggest anything, or if you need ideas go to the coming soon page. Right now I have a lot more ideas and thoughts than time to do real posts, I hope to get myself up to 5 or 6 posts a week, but at this point it’s looking like 2-3 a week is the best I’ll pull off, so if you are dying to hear about it let me know, or it could be a long wait. Thanks everyone.
I Need a Hero
I Need a Hero
It’s been a few too many days. I’ve done some writing but little I have liked. I’ve made some chicken liver mousse pâté, run barefoot, sat in the sunshine, drank good wine, slept as much as possible (except for right now, I can’t sleep and it’s 5AM), and been frustrated and depressed with how busy I have been and how behind on school I am. So good things and bad things, lots and lots of thoughts about lots of things. But the best thinking happened after re-watching the movie Kick-Ass on my Artist Date this week. It’s rated R, it’s full of violence and cursing and sex and nudity, but it was amazing, and inspiring. It was about normal people who become super heroes. Movie quotes will help the most.
Dave Lizewski[aka Kick-Ass]: Jesus, guys, doesn’t it bug you? Like thousand of people wanna be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spiderman.
Dave Lizewski: I always wondered why no-one did it before me. I mean, all those comic books, movies, TV shows… you think that one eccentric loner would’ve made himself a costume. I mean, is everyday life really so exciting? Are schools and offices so thrilling that I’m the only one who fantasized about this? Come on, be honest with yourself, at some point in our lives we all wanna be a superhero.
Dave Lizewski: In the world I lived in, heroes only existed in comic books. And I guess that’d be okay, if bad guys were make-believe too, but they’re not.
That last quote is what really got me, probably the first time I watched it last year too. We live in a world without heroes, but we have very real bad guys. So I have been thinking about wanting heroes and wanting to be a hero. Not like Kick-Ass or Big Daddy, because I don’t think martial heroism is what I’m called to, although some folks out there must be, because this world really is full of violence. We need other heroes; we need legit political, economic, business heroes because in all those places the bad guys seem to be in charge and ruining everything, taking advantage of everyone. We need Jesus people who do more than just talk, who are not only interested in going to Heaven. We need people to make this place better, we need God’s will to be done on Earth, as in Heaven.
The only way to become something is to be it
Kick-Ass dressed up and got started long before he ever became a hero, and he failed, hard before he became a hero. Then he saved some random guy from three others and got famous on the internet, the fight ends with one of the thugs pulling a knife.
Diner Fight Guy 1: The fuck is wrong with you, man? You’d rather die for some piece of shit that you don’t even fucking know?
Dave Lizewski[Kick-Ass]: The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what’s wrong with me? Yeah, I’d rather die… so bring it on!
It’s not the same, but that’s me. I’m tired of everybody watching, I’m tired of watching. I am going to get my ass kicked if I have to, to try and make the world a better place. I’m going to be a writer and an artist now, even though I don’t really feel like one, even though I feel like just a regular guy, because I am just a regular guy. But as Kate Harmer recently posted that “The only way to become something is to be it.” I want to engage the ideas of this world through art and writing, as a man of peace and not of war. The ideas of the last few centuries have had consequences as a professor of mine has said. In some ways writing for me right now is just putting on a mask and playing hero. But that’s the only way the real thing is ever going to happen. Will you join me? will you put on a mask, and help me fight the real bad guys? What will your first play steps be?
So Much Better
Something so much better
I have been reading a lot of news blogs lately for a class I’m taking. There is a lot about the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, and as I began God: the Real Superpower by Dr. Nelson Jennings something came to me, before I finished the introduction. It doesn’t have to be this way! I have a feeling that whatever the 20th century seemed to be about back in 1911, whatever seemed like it would have been the main thing, probably the revolution in Russia at that time, it didn’t stay that way. Communist Russia was huge deal in the 20th century; it was by no means the only big deal. No one had computers or the internet on their radar in 1911. Let’s make this century be about something better. We, the people of this world, probably mostly the ones who have only limited influence, can make this century be about something so much more and so much better than war and death. We can make this century have a better legacy than the last, for the boy born in 2084, are things going to be better than they were for me? Or are they just going to be different? We could make it better, we should make it better, and my hope in the Resurrection is that we can in fact make it better.
Thy will be done, on Earth as in Heaven
Governments and business do not have to rule us so harshly, they do not have to be our gods, we do not have to worship them with our time, talents, and treasure. We have a king in Heaven, who has made promises, made signs that this world is going to look like Heaven someday, by Heaven coming down. And right now, we who call ourselves Christian are part of the advance party, part of the settlers of this world, we are foreigners to this world now, but we are not sojourners. We are signs and agents of that coming kingdom. A kingdom of peace and love, a place where things flourish beyond our comprehension, a place where the illustrations are so absurd that they can barely be believed, wolves and lambs together and children over cobra dens. This is why I write, as a small herald of that great King Jesus who is on the move and has been moving. I write to chronicle his acts, his ongoing subtle acts in this world.
Work that lasts
He made water into wine, the best wine ever. Last night I drank some amazing Zinfandel, and there are others out there much better than what I drank. Someday, God is going to come back and help us make even better juice, but he will not throw away the works of Buty, Gaja, Rafanelli, Robert Mondavi, I don’t know how they will improve, but I believe that those cultural gems will make it, transformed, resurrected themselves, but still continuous with what has come before. To borrow a phrase, like oak trees from acorns. Have hope, live a life of glorious creative activity, for we have a sure hope that our work in this world is not for nothing. Our silly words and works will make it. We will not all be as famous as Luther, Cranmer, Seabury, John Paul II, Bono, the Cappadocian Fathers, Athanasius, Clement, Augustine, Paul, or Jesus, but our words are not going to be lost, they are going to be right up there on God’s refrigerator, right next to Sarah’s poem Master Cat, right next to that no name finger painter, right next to the cave bear drawings from those ancient French caverns, right next to Rembrandt’s stuff. What you do matters, believe and live it, so that we who have hope can make something of this world, instead of letting those who do not know hope, ruin this world. Let us make the 21st century about something more and better than 9/11, it was a terrible start, but it does not have to define the next 89 years as it has the last 10.
(I wrote this a few days before 9/11/11)
Sabbath
Time to study Sabbath again, and then to reform
I had a wonderful day today yesterday. We chilled out, and did almost nothing after we finished up at church. We ate delicious food, drank great drinks, and watched a ton of great TV on Hulu, not junky TV, quality art. But somehow I feel I didn’t get what I needed today, which is hard because another difficult week looms ahead. Somehow I need to recapture and consider what Sabbath means again. I need to be one of those people, because I am simply not a go, go, go type, I’m limited, I am not that strong, I can no longer live without sleep and exercise and play, I can only give myself so many hours to work during the week. So those hours have to be awesome, I need to be firing on all cylinders I need to be at the top of my game when I am working. And for that, I am going to have to be whole and healthy…Sabbath is a part of that. No final thoughts on this. I’ve read a couple great books on Sabbath before, and will have to re-look at some of them and find some new ones. No answers for this one, just questions. How do you find rest in the middle of this crazy tech world? How do you make time for relationship, play, and pleasure when you are so run by work during the week? How can there be time and space?
Later
So one concrete thought, time goes to fast in my world. I live in Kronos, normal time, time named after the Greek God that ate his children. I need Kairos, beautiful time, holy time, time that breaks the rules, that tells Kronos to piss off. And as much as I love film I find that the clock spins at a whirling pace while I watch. And so to begin the reform a moratorium on Sunday screen time has begun. This is no easy thing; I watch almost nothing during the week, just no time. So we will just have to see what happens, maybe the blessings of rest will make me so much more awesome I will have all the time in the world to watch things during the week. I’m not counting on it, but at least there are Artist Dates, so I will not be completely without a chance.
Keeping the Sabbath Wholly
Marva J. Dawn, I love this woman. She is truly amazing and her book Keeping the Sabbath Wholly is where it began for us a couple years ago when we first started Sabbath keeping. Sabbath, it’s not legalistic avoidance of things you want to do. It’s structured rest. Her book’s subtitle – ceasing, resting, embracing, feasting. Only 1 of those is about what you don’t do. The rest, the promise of Sabbath includes saying no, but you say no to some things so you can say yes to other, better, otherwise neglected things. A weekly feast, a weekly vacation, a weekly embrace.
500 hundred words to fight A Damnable Lie
500 hundred words to fight A Damnable Lie
For a brief spell I believed Robin Williams when he said, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” And then for far too long I stopped. The world was hard, I was scared, I stopped believing that this world mattered very much; I got depressed and burned out. And sadly, great strands of my faith encouraged me to give up on this world. I believed that god cared about heaven and souls, and didn’t give a damn about this world, at least not really. I bought the lie that Jesus came to save “us” OUT of this world. I believed, and so I believed the Damnable Lie of the Neo-Platonist that there was good that was spiritual and evil that was physical. While I was never quite comfortable in that place, in fact I never was comfortable, I didn’t know what to do, and surviving seemed like the best option. I wasted, away, my gifts, my time, my talents. I’ve got ‘em. I got the eye. I can spot beauty, where no one else sees. I can point to it, and help people who have never seen beauty or truth gasp at life they had never even guessed at. I can get people to do, crazy things, because I am absolutely mad, though I have occasionally come off as sane.
Psychosomatic Unity
Last spring I heard that term in my God and Humanity systematic theology class, it blew my world up. It was the first I’d ever heard, let alone in a Christian setting, that we are whole things. Our body and mind/spirit are not different, they are one thing. Spiritual and physical have more to do with how we live, than our different parts. And thus began a revolution. We (my wife and I) started dealing with and loving our bodies, because they matter, I started sleeping, eating a traditional diet, playing, counseling, and art therapy. And bit by bit, depression became a monster not quite so strong and fierce.
Words and World and God
They intersect. Word and Flesh became one in Jesus. And my body was made whole. And then all kinds of things changed, more than I even feel like going into now. But it has helped me re-evaluate what it means to be a pastor/preacher/priest, or at least what one part of it means. It means that I am called to point to the true, the beautiful, the lovely, the great, and to sing its praise, in hopes that others might see it too, and learn the same song. This blog will not be pietistic, it will be earthy. I am going to do what I used to do 10 years ago mostly, tell you why you should love wonderful things. It’s going to be all this world stuff…Music, books, paintings, persons, nature, food. All that stuff that you like so much already, it’s a gift, it’s for you to love, it’s for you to treasure, Scotch, Sex, Swimming, all there as signs of God’s love, all real world things that are supposed to say, loud and fucking clear, I LOVE YOU!
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