Wednesday Words of Wisdom - Henri Nouwen

"Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity."

- Henri Nouwan

In our Biblical Ecology class today we had guest speaker, Rabbi Arthur Green. He described spirituality and sexuality as being very closely tied together - they originate in the same area of the brain and flow from the same sense of libido - both are centers for feelings of attraction and love, for God and for others. Perhaps this is why some religious folks are so suspicious and intolerant of sexuality in any form, and why so many rules have been created to restrict sexual expression - whether it's a need to be chaste (outside of marriage), celibate, monogamous, or to fit into an outdated understanding of a heterosexual norm. With both sexuality and spirituality flowing from the same center, it's easy to confuse the two, or to  have one get in the way of the other. We must ask ourselves: Is it sex that we desire? Or love? Love of another? Or love of God? Which need, which sense of emptiness, are we trying to fill?

These are not easy answers to discern. But it's a shame that we feel we have to deny one side of our humanness in order to fully experience the other. If we allowed ourselves to fully experience both sides, perhaps we'd have a much easier time differentiating between the two.  Just a thought.

Wednesday Words of Wisdom - Star Wars style

I couldn't resist posting this one (although Eileen the Episcopalifem beat me to the punch) cuz it's just too darn cute!
Here it is, the viral video of the week:
Star Wars according to a 3-year-old.





And our Wednesday Words of Wisdom:
"Don't talk back to Darth Vader...he'll getcha!"

Calgon, take me away!

Brazenly stolen from Eileen the Episcopalifem, this Wednesday Words of Wisdom clip goes out to my sisters who are moms, and to all the moms I see in the bookstore everyday...pushing overladen strollers, dragging screaming 4-year-olds away from the pile of Elmo books they've pulled off the shelves, and generally looking like they could use a good night's sleep, some quiet time to themselves, and a giant societal 'thank you' for doing the thank-less job that is motherhood.
Enjoy!

Wednesday Words of Wisdom

"Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Stop the presses! I just got my first paid preaching gig!
A local congregation needs a pulpit fill-in for July 15th and they asked little ol' me to do the filling in....and they're going to pay me $150.00 to do it. As I'm already preaching in my home congregation on July 8th this will be the first time that I've done back to back services.
Two services, two sermons.....two different congregations....hmmmmm...this could also be my first chance to recycle! ;-)

But alas, I will most likely choose the high road and write two different sermons. It's a good opportunity for me to get a taste of the real world where I will soon be expected to come up with the goods week after week, without having the luxury of having months between sermons to prepare.
And the fact that I will be getting paid for the pulpit fill-in raises the "you better give them their money's worth" anxiety stakes.

Preaching Fee: $150.00
Cost of gas to get there: $3.29
Experience gained in my first non-home church preaching gig: Priceless

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

I'm sending this week's Wednesday Words of Wisdom out to myself:

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need"
- Mick Jagger

Have you ever wanted something so bad that you poured all of your heart and soul into getting it, taking all the necessary steps, dotting all the i's crossing all the t's, convincing yourself that it was so much a sure thing that it wasn't worth dwelling on the small chance that it wouldn't happen?

And then it didn't happen?

Last Thursday I heard from the Boston seminary. I was accepted for the Fall semester, but I didn't get the scholarship that I was sure I was going to get. They offered me the "Dean's Award," a one-time award that will pay for two classes (roughly $2,500), and that's it.
That's not even going to put a microscopic dent in the $50,000+ cost of going to seminary.

I'm graduating next month Summa Cum Laude with honors and a 3.97 GPA. I have less than $100 in the bank and $7,000 in credit card debt after depleting my savings paying for my undergrad degree.
So why didn't I qualify for one of the Presidential scholarships that the school offers?
Well, actually I did, according to the admissions department.
But I was too late. They had "just" given out all the scholarship money when my application was reviewed.

How could this have happened?
I blame it on bad information on their website and bad assumptions on my part.
They received my application on Feb 23rd, long before the April 1st admissions deadline.
I didn't send it in sooner because they advertise their full tuition scholarship as being merit AND need based. Thus I assumed that they wouldn't be handing out scholarships until they had the applicants financial aid information.
The website says that financial award letters would go out to new students "beginning" March 1st, but their 2007/08 Financial Aid application wasn't made available until Feb 15th. I filled it out online on that same day.
Unlike other seminaries, their website has nothing that says "all applications must be in by such-and-such date to be considered for a scholarship." They have rolling admissions and with the mid-Feb arrival of the financial aid form and the April 1st admissions deadline, I assumed I was getting in early in the game. I assumed wrong.
I also don't know why it took them 6 weeks to review my application when their admissions office claims that "applicants will be notified in 3-4 weeks."

There is no way that I can go to seminary without a scholarship.
I don't want to leave school carrying $50,000 in student loans.
I may get a few thousand here and there from grants or other scholarship sources while I'm in school but realistically I know the bulk of the cost will have to be paid by me, and that would entail working full-time, going to school part-time and taking out reams of student loans. I know people do this all the time to pay for Grad school. I did it for the past 5 years to pay for college. But I can't justify accepting the $2,500 award and going into serious debt knowing that I would have had a full scholarship had my application been reviewed as little as a week earlier.

I will either have to wait a year and apply again (if they allow that) or apply to a different school. It's too late to apply anywhere else for this Fall as all the financial aid deadlines have passed.
So much for busting my butt last semester earning 22 credits so I could graduate this spring and start seminary in the Fall.

I am so angry.
Angry at the Boston seminary. Angry at myself.
Now everything I've been planning has been thrown up into the air and possibly put on hold for another year.

Yeah I know all the comforting clichés that apply in this situation:
"Humans plan and God laughs."
There may be something else God has in store for me that I can't see right now.
Everything happens for a reason.
I should be grateful for all that I do have - a wonderful wife who supports and loves me, a decent place to live, food on the table, my health, and the opportunity to graduate from college and go on to seminary, regardless as to when it happens.

I know all of that.
But I have to allow myself time to stamp my feet and pout and be pissed off and disappointed because things didn't work out the way I expected them to.
I may want to be a minister, but I'm still human.
In the real world I'll put on my "Que Sera Sera" brave face.
I come here to rant and to rave and to cry.
To cry over the loss of something that meant a lot to me.
The loss of something I truly felt God was leading me to do, right here, right now.
Either God has a different plan in mind or my going to seminary this Fall was the plan and I just screwed it up big time.

The door is still open a crack (a very tiny crack).
The woman in the admissions office was very sympathetic and wants very much for me to be able to attend in the Fall as planned. She told me that she's "going to see what (she) can do" and get back to me sometime this week but I'm not holding my breath. Short of her coming back and offering me close to what the Presidential scholarship is ($10,000 a year) I just don't see how I'm going to be able to go there in the Fall.

I've already started looking at other schools to use as a back-up should my chances for getting a scholarship from the Boston seminary fall through again next year.
There's a school in NYC that I took off my short list years ago that's starting to look pretty good.
In fact, looking at the NYC school has made me doubt whether the Boston seminary should have been my first choice after all.

Perhaps the "things happen for a reason" cliché will ring true once again.

...for Doug

"I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go."
~Abraham Lincoln


This week's Wednesday Words of Wisdom are for my brother-in-law Doug who last week received the one diagnosis we all fear: Cancer, everywhere.
While we await the doctor's prognosis as to how long he has and what treatments if any will buy him some time, all we can do is pray.

Wednesday Words of Wisdom

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
- T.S.Eliot

It's cold and rainy here in southern New England today. I have an Easter Egg Hunt scheduled for this Saturday with the Sunday School kids and the forecast calls for "rain and snow showers" with a temperature in the high 30's.
April is indeed the cruelest month.

It's also one of the ugliest, at least in the beginning. Everything is brown and drab and covered in a layer of mud. We still have a few hold-out mounds of snow tucked into shaded corners but even those are covered in the dirty soot that time and passing cars have laid upon them. Grey skies, cold rain…the only bits of color I spotted on my 25 mile drive to school the other day were the bright blue plastic bins that were tossed haphazardly at the end of driveways after the recycle truck made its weekly rounds.
I'm waiting for the color to come.
The yellow of the Forsythia.
The pink and white blossoms of the Cherry trees.
The brick red of the wood chips scattered by landscapers getting a jump on the season.
The infinite shades of green that spring out from the ground and the twigs of bushes.
The splash of rainbow emanating from flowering plants pushing up on the roadside and in tended gardens alike.

We're at least a few weeks away from all that.
One day the world is brown and grey and the next day, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we awake to color bursting out from every corner of our vision. It's as if God threw a switch lighting up the carousel of nature in all its splendor.

April does indeed mix "memory and desire."
The snow and crisp air of winter are gone, the landmarks of Spring are not yet here. It's an in-between time that like the transition between Fall and Winter is devoid of life. How else do we fill this time but with thoughts of the past and hopes for the future?

During this time of year my mind can't help but drift to memories of Aprils and Easters past…
I am three years old watching my mother button up the front of my new spring coat. It is pink and made of a soft fuzzy fabric and I know that we must be going someplace special because the only other time I was allowed to wear it was on Easter Sunday two weeks before. She is taking me to the hospital to have my third operation in as many years to fix the cleft palate that I was born with. I had no idea where we were going, nor did I know that the operation would once again be unsuccessful. I did not know to be afraid. All I knew, and all I remember, is the excitement of wearing of my new pink coat, and the feeling of love and protection emanating from my mother as she stooped before me pushing the tiny buttons through stitched slots, making sure her youngest daughter was safe and warm.

Fast forward in time and I am 16-years-old. Riding in a car beside my mother watching the bleak landscape of yet another April scroll past the window. We are once again heading to the hospital, this time for my seventh and final operation. It was a new and complicated procedure that the doctor assured us would be successful. It was… but I did not know it at the time.
As I watched the barren trees slide in and out my vision I wrestled with the memory of an operation I had two years prior, one that was not successful….most likely due to the scar tissue that had accumulated from prior operations, but this did not deter the doctor from blaming the negative outcome on "patient attitude" - I did not want it to be successful therefore it was not.
What a horrible thought to put in the mind of child.

Was I scared? Yes - being left alone in a hospital, dealing with pain, uncertainty and the unfamiliar scrutiny of doctors and nurses.
Was I nervous about the outcome? Certainly - I knew the expectations of the doctor, I knew my track record was against me, I knew the medical bills were stacking up on my father's desk, I knew all the worry and upheaval to routine my mother was experiencing having to traipse back and forth to the hospital to visit me.
Did I not want the operation to be successful? There was a part of me that didn't. The part of me that used my speech impediment as a reason not to speak up, not to participate, not to claim a space in the world for myself. Being shy is not a good enough reason to be a mouse in this world. It's not normal to want to be alone, to shun social situations, to prefer to get lost in your own imagination rather than hang out with your peers.
Having a cleft palate gave me a physical reason to be an introvert. How would I exist in the world without it?

What I didn't know as I watched the April trees standing black against the steel grey sky was that I would learn how to exist without it. That not having it to fall back on forced me to rely on what I did have - a sense of humor, a curiosity about life, and a good sense of what made me happy and what made me sad. I learned how to get the words in my head to come out of my mouth, and with the fear of ridicule subsiding, I discovered that I had a voice, and that voice had a place in this world just as any other.

April is a time of "stirring dull roots with spring rain." And I can remember many more Aprils where roots that lied dormant suddenly sprung to life. When I got my first job. When I purchased my first home. When I took my first weekend trips up to CT to be with the woman who is now my wife. When I walked into a United Church of Christ sanctuary for the first time and discovered what had been missing in my spiritual life, and was gifted with a new sense of clarity as to where God was leading me with this call to ministry.

There is part of me that dreads this time of year with all its memories of past hurts and agonizing wait for things to come. And there is part of me that knows that all of it is necessary; we need to till the mud loosened soil to expose the potential for life that lies below. We need to stick our hands in the muck and the messiness that we would rather ignore and root out the bulbs to expose them to the air.
April is all about appreciating the browns and the blacks because without them the reds and the yellows and the greens would not have a canvas to lay upon.

April is all about "breeding lilacs out of the dead land."

A Purr-fect Storm

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein

Our Wednesday Words of Wisdom and our prayers go out to a fellow congregant of mine E. whose kitty cat is ill. Murphy is 17 and she's suffering from kidney problems that may or may not be related to the contaminated cat food recall. Murphy is old and sensitive and has shunned being brushed of late, so when E. dropped her off at the vet to have her kidneys checked they offered to do a "little shaving" to get rid of some of her matted hair. Much to E's surprise Murphy came home as you see her below. E. is asking for prayers (and perhaps a little sweater) to help keep Murphy happy and comfortable as she deals with her illness.

Cats are Wonderful Friends

Gentle eyes that see so much,
paws that have the quiet touch,
Purrs to signal "all is well"
and show more love than words could tell.
Graceful movements touched with pride,
a calming presence by our side
A friendship that takes time to grow
Small wonder why we love them so.
- Author Unknown

Wednesday Wisdom Assisi style

This week's Wednesday Words of Wisdom are from the old standby St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.


I say this prayer every morning.
And I suspect that many of the fine Christian folks over at StandFirm do the same.
We're all trying to live up to this ideal and unfortunately we fall short on too many occasions.

The part I usually stumble over is "grant that I may not seek so much to be understood, as to understand." Often in our zeal to get our point across we lose the ability to see the person we are speaking to as a full and feeling human being.

When we come up against an opposing point of view we immediately begin looking for indications of how the person holding that point of view is not like us. With each differing trait we discover we take one step back until the other person is so far out of sight we no longer see them as being "us" - now they are "them."

We know "them."
If they're liberal Christians they exist in a world of "I'm ok you're ok" relativism - They follow a good-guy, wimpy Jesus who never had a bad word to say about anyone or any behavior. In one breath they claim that scripture is not the inerrant word of God and in the next they quote the same scripture to back up their beliefs. They are illogical, irrational, and they just don't get it.

If they're conservative Christians they exist in a world in which only their version of Christianity is the one, true way to salvation. They alone have been made privy to the true meaning of God's Word and any other humanly interpretation is invalid. They claim that scripture is the inerrant Word of God yet they fail to see that the church, the theology, the beliefs and practices that they have culled from scripture were all formed by human minds, and all are unavoidably influenced by the understanding, culture, and prejudices contained within those minds. They are illogical, irrational, and they just don't get it.


This is what makes it so easy to attack "them."
They don't see God like we do. They don’t "get" Jesus like we do.

They don't live like we do. They don't get up in the morning and go to work, hang out with their friends, or spend time with their families. They don't have laughter, or tears, or joy, or pain. They don't come home at night and kiss their spouse (of whatever gender) and thank God everyday for the love and goodness that He has brought into their lives.
They're not like us. They spend all their time wallowing in sin (liberals) or pointing out the sins of others (conservatives). Their lives are filled with hate and judgment, and they are driven solely by the desire to ruin life for the rest of us.
Can't they see that THEY are the ones who are delaying the arrival of the Kingdom of God?

This is what it comes down to.
If you're conservative, being gay is a sin and until these sinful people repent, God's Kingdom is on hold for the rest of us.
If you're liberal, being gay is just another variation in God's creation, it's not a sin, and as long as there are those who refuse to accept and love these individuals as God created them, God's Kingdom is on hold for the rest of us.

There is no reconciling these two viewpoints.
We both see our position as being a matter of life or death.
There is no way to compromise.
One of the two has to change or none of us is going anywhere.


It is for this reason that I have refrained from responding directly to the folks over at StandFirm. They have lobbed accusations at me in particular and at liberal Christians in general that are both theological and personal in nature. But frankly I don't see the point in addressing any of those accusations. I don't see either side as truly wanting to enter into a "dialogue." We're not trying to understand each other. We're trying to convince each other why we are right and the other is wrong.

It's so much easier to mock each other rather than to try to understand each other.
For those who stumbled upon my little blog and dismissed me as being an immature lightweight who is unworthy of your respect based on what you found here - I'm sorry I haven't lived up to your standards. This blog was never intended to be a hard-hitting, count-counterpoint, fight-for-our-cause site. It's just an extension of my personal diary. I use it to explore my faith, my feelings, and my questionings; and I do it with humor because that's how I feel God intended us to be in this world; and I share these wandering musings with others because I believe these things are best explored in community. My readers are my family and friends.

For the individual who questioned my fitness for ministry based on my reaction to the vote taken in our congregation, I was expressing a feeling that I had in the moment.
I do not fear my fellow congregants nor do I think any less of them for expressing their opinions. I understand the reasoning behind the vote but that doesn't mean it didn't touch me on an emotional level.
You and I are seeing this situation from two different perspectives which is why we can not reconcile the other's point of view.

As I interpret it, conservatives believe homosexuality is a sin and a sin is a behavior that can be changed, therefore those who object to the validation of sin as an acceptable behavior have a right to have their voices heard and to participate in the democratic process.
I believe my sexual orientation is as much a part of me as my eye and skin color. I can not change it. Nor have I ever felt in my life that God wanted me to change it. On the contrary, God came into my life the moment that I came to the realization and acceptance of who I was. So you can see how it would be upsetting to sit amongst my friends and listen to them discuss whether the way God created people like me is valid and worthy of the same treatment as others. It's hard not to take it personally.

I'm not as naïve as some have painted me to be. I know that there are a multitude of ways in which we humans understand God and express theology. That doesn't mean that I can't raise objections when I encounter beliefs, in my denomination or others, that from my understanding of God are based more on fear and lack of understanding than on love and desire for reconciliation.

God speaks to us in many different ways and we're all convinced that we are the ones who have it right. We have to be. We are beings who crave order. We have an aversion to contradiction, ambiguity, uncertainty. We like things to be black and white. We don't feel comfortable with grays. It has to be either / or - it can't be both.
We can't both be right.

We gay Christians wish that those who see us as unrepentant sinners could spend just five minutes walking in our shoes, understanding and hearing God the way that we do, then they would know how much joy and love He give us when we come to be exactly who it is He created us to be.
Just the same, conservative Christians wish that we gays could see and hear the God that speaks to them, then we would know that we have lost our way and are not following the Christ in the manner that was intended.

So what do we do?
The folks at StandFirm may not all behave the way we'd like them to, and the folks at MadPriest don't all behave the way the StandFirm people would like them to.
We all have the ability to be downright nasty and to react with personal attacks and degenerative humor when we feel like our position is being mocked or questioned.
Some folks try to be diplomatic, some thrive on being hurtful and destructive, some use clever jokes to take the edge off the nastiness and/or pain, others have tried to make nice in the past and have thrown up their hands in disgust, choosing to fight fire with fire because while "love thy enemy' is a nice sentiment, it rarely gets you anywhere in the real world, especially in the semi-anonymous world of internet blogs.

"Why can't they just LISTEN!" is the cry that comes from both sides.
"Why are they so ignorant, unyielding, pig-headed, and blinded by their own ideology?"
"Why can't they see God?"

God only knows the answer to that one.
Our only choice is to accept the ambiguity, accept the uncertainty, accept that we have different eyes, and different hearts, and different minds, different life histories and different paths to follow.
We have to accept that while there is ONE God, we can't help but see him in thousands of different ways. It's in our nature to do so. Just as the light streaming through a stained glass window comes from one true source yet is dispersed in a rainbow of colors, the light of God comes into this world and is experienced in many different ways. We may see only one color from our perspective but that doesn't negate the existence of the colors that others are experiencing.
We have to ask ourselves, why would God create us with the ability - the almost compulsive drive - to experience Him in so many different ways if we were not meant to do so?

And I'm fully aware of the irony of these statements.
Those who can't see any other path to God but the one they are on will never accept the existence of ambiguity and contradiction, and will always claim that the color they see is the only color that God emits.
So we're right back at square one lobbing insults at each other across a great divide.

God help us all.

WWW for Eileen

This week's Wednesday Words of Wisdom goes out to fellow blogger Eileen who is discerning a call to the Episcopal priesthood. She's been getting the Godly nudge for some time now and she's finally screwed up the courage to talk to her rector and "out" herself as one who may be called. Her husband is less than thrilled about this path that she is inching towards, and she's struggling with the same schizophrenic "you're called/you're crazy" inner voice that plagues many of us on this road.

So, keep her in your prayers and ponder these words on calling as you do:

"Recently an evangelist told a group of which I was part that if we are not uncomfortable we do not have a call. A call hurts, he said. I don't believe that this is how we are called. I think God gifts us, prepares us to bless others, loves us into reaching out in our own particular ways, and once we know it and experience the freedom and joy of it, we will be willing to endure almost anything to be in that place."

- Mary Albing: Called Into Ministry: To Be a Good and Faithful Pastor

Wednesday Wisdom

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
- Mark Twain


Jesus was a radical who wrote in the sand.
The church that arose in his name carves words into stone.
I want to be a radical like Jesus.