In the Valley

In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, Homer and Marge are declared unfit parents and Bart, Lisa and Maggie are put into foster care and placed with the Flanders family next door. The Flanders are devout Christians and when they find out that the children haven’t been baptized, they grab their baptizing kit and head out to the river.

Meanwhile Homer and Marge take a parenting course, get themselves declared fit and race back home to be reunited with their children. But when they go to the Flanders house, they find the house empty and a sign on the door that says “Gone Baptizin’.”

Out at the river, the Flanders have the children in the water. Ned Flanders is about to baptize Bart, when Homer emerges from the trees, throws himself into the river and dives for Bart just as Ned begins to pour the water over Bart's head.  The water hits Homer instead.  Baptism averted.

Both Lisa and Bart run to Homer and embrace him ... and embrace what seems to be a rather anti-Christian message.

Except that Maggie, the youngest Simpson child does not run back to her father. Maggie, just a baby, looks at her father and siblings and sees them sitting in the mud, dirty and grimy. Frogs are croaking and jumping around them. And then she looks at Ned and Maude Flanders and sees them bathed in bright sunlight. They are heavenly and divine. In the days she has lived with them, they have shown her love and kindness, tucking her in bed at night. So when it comes time for Maggie to choose, she chooses the Flanders family.

She turns to go to them, but at that very moment Marge, her mother, appears at the river. Maggie sees her mother and she doesn't even have to think about it. She goes to her mother, who lifts her up and holds her.

I can’t tell you how many times these past few years, I have looked at one part of my life and seen the Simpsons, grimy and uncouth and looked at another part and seen the Flanders family, full of light and love. For example, every Tuesday night I go to seminary to take a class that is all about the call. I leave there feeling spiritually full and filled with goodwill and love. And then I wake up Wednesday morning and know I have to go to work, a place that seems to take more often than it gives. And it makes me bitter.

But in The Simpsons, Maggie reminds me that there is love and wonder and fulfillment even in the parts of our lives that seem less than perfect.

Yesterday God gave me an opportunity to see those things in a spontaneous prayer with a coworker, in a spontaneous hug from the two-year-old son of a friend, in the spontaneous suggestion of a student that we play a real life game of Angry Birds instead of doing our assignment. There is joy and love even in places that sometimes drain the life out of us.

We may want to live on the mountaintops, but perhaps our best work is done in the valleys.

Finding the Path

At first the story of Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark seems like just another one of Jesus’ healing miracles. Bartimaeus is blind. He calls out to Jesus. Jesus heals him. Bartimaeus becomes a follower of Jesus. It’s not an uncommon story in the gospels. Someone calls to Jesus for help and Jesus heals them.

But the story of Bartimaeus is different and that difference is in the details. Mark’s Gospel says that Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus “loudly.” Mark 10:47 says that Bartimaeus “began to shout.” And when he is told to be quiet by the people around him, Mark 10:48 says that “he cried out even more loudly.”

Here’s where the details begin to make the story interesting. Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus. We think we know what’s going to happen next. We always think we know Jesus. We fully expect him to walk right over to Bartimaeus and heal him—but he doesn’t. Instead he sends the disciples over to Bartimaeus to fetch him.

Why? Why doesn’t Jesus go over to Bartimaeus himself?

When the disciples approach Bartimaeus in Mark 10:49, they say to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”

In other words, they are saying, “Hey, be quiet for a second. He hears you. He’s calling to you. Let’s go.”

The implication here is that Bartimaeus is so loud with his pleas, that he cannot hear Jesus call to him. That is why Jesus sends the disciples.

It was Os Guinness in his book The Call that got me thinking about Bartimaeus. Guinness focuses on the words, “Take heart … he is calling to you,” and that made me wonder how often we pray to God in the same way Bartimaeus prayed.

Have I been praying so loudly that I can't hear God’s response?

Lately, I have not been a good listener. If I were still in Kindergarten, there would be no gold star next to my name for listening skills. I have missed the last two weeks of Centering Prayer and I have not been walking the labyrinth as often as I should.

So after reading about Bartimaeus, I hopped in the car last Saturday and headed to the church to walk the labyrinth. As I stood at the entrance, I made a promise to God. “God,” I said, “I don’t know what it is that I need. You know that better than me, so I promise to be quiet and listen for a while and please show me what it is that I need to be doing.”

And I started walking.

I walked and I noticed all the things I normally do. I saw how several of the Simpson Stoppers no longer needed the green metal brace to hold them up straight. I noticed for the thousandth time how the path always seems to be headed right to the center but then swings out back around for a bit before heading in. I heard the water lapping at the shore. I heard something, probably a lizard, drop through the branches of the tree.

I heard a lot of things.

What I didn’t hear was God.

Nothing profound happened, I’m sad to report. It was just another walk in the labyrinth, just another reminder, if anything, about the point of paths—to get us to where we’re going. But nothing earth shattering.

That was Saturday afternoon.

The dream came early this morning.

In my dream I was driving along AIA, a stretch where I had a clear view of the ocean. A hurricane had brushed the coast and the water had swelled to ghastly heights, twenty-thirty foot high waves churned and rocked the shore. Some of the water had spilled across the highway and before me loomed a slightly smaller version of Niagara Falls.

Ahead of me, a friend of mine began to drive her car to the water. I knew she could navigate it. I wasn’t afraid for her, but I was absolutely terrified for myself. Navigating those waters was beyond me.

So I turned the car around.

But I didn’t head home. Instead, I turned down Berkeley and headed for South Patrick Drive. I would still get to where I was going. I was just going to take a different road. No worries.

When I woke up, I knew exactly what the dream meant. You don’t have to take the same path everyone else takes. Sometimes it takes more courage to realize when it’s time to turn around and find another way, as long as you don’t lose sight of the destination.

What I still don’t know is how this applies to my own life. Is there another path I’m supposed to take? Should I take a different route to work tomorrow? Is it time to call a lawyer about my still broken air conditioning? Or am I missing something in regards to seminary and the fulfilling of my dream to go fulltime?

Take heart … he is calling you.

I feel as blind as Bartimaeus. I can only hope for someone to take my hand and show me the way.

Angels of God

A few days ago, we gathered in the gym at school for a 9/11 assembly and showed a video of that day to more than six hundred students who were too young to remember what happened.

For me, the tears started as soon as the second plane hit.

Five minutes later, I backed up against a far wall, out of sight of my students.

A few minutes after that, I walked out. It was simply too much to bear. I wasn’t the first teacher to have to step outside and I wasn’t the last either.

Walking out was something none of us had had the luxury to do ten years ago.

By the time the school day had started ten years ago, two planes had struck the Twin Towers. We knew we were under attack. We had no idea when the attack would end. I struggled with whether or not to leave the TV on for my eighth graders and in the end, decided that knowing was better than not knowing at that point and so I left the TV on.

I still made my students do their assignment that day. I kept with my lesson plans which ironically had them writing an essay about the most important day of their life.

I remember the few tentative hands that raised.  "Can we write about today?"

I don’t remember sitting down that day. I remember standing off to the side or in the back of the room and watching my kids. More than anything I wanted to crawl under my desk, curl up in a fetal position, and sob.

But I couldn’t.

Every now and then I would turn my back to the kids, to gather myself, but I didn’t break down in front of them. I couldn’t. I remembered how upsetting it was when I was a kid and I saw my teacher crying when the Challenger exploded. Teachers, parents—you need them to be rocks sometimes.

So I stayed strong because I wanted my kids to know they were safe.

Even if I couldn’t be sure that any of us were.

In Exodus, Chapter 14, the Israelites are fleeing Egypt. The Egyptian army is hot on their heels. There is absolutely no way they’re going to make it. The army is behind them. The sea is in front of them.

But the Israelites have something that the Egyptian army can’t handle.

The Israelites have the angel of God. Exodus 14:19-20 reads: “The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.”

What follows in one of the most spectacular scenes from the Bible. Moses stretches out his hand and God parts the waters, driving the sea back so that the Israelites may cross. And after they cross, the water returns, drowning and carrying away the Egyptian army.

But it is this mysterious angel of God who appears as a pillar of cloud separating the Egyptians and Israelites through the night that interests me. This mysterious presence that keeps them safe, this mysterious presence that lights up the night gets lost in the wake of the parting of the Red Sea, but is just as incredible.

The angel of God. A light in the darkness. A light to keep us safe.

Sometimes in this cynical world, we lose sight of that light. We lose faith in God and angels. We don’t believe in miracles anymore. We think we’re on our own. There is no mysterious presence to keep us safe at night.

And whenever you think like that, I want you to think back to 9/11 because the angels of God were with us that day.

And in many cases, we were those angels.

Sometimes the angel of God moves mountains, sometimes the angel of God settles in our souls and a group of people destined to die can gather together to save hundreds as they did on Flight 93 on 9/11.

Every fireman, every police officer, every Port Authority officer, every person who helped someone live that day, every person who gave their life, every person who risked their life, every person who took the hand of someone else and just squeezed, every one of those people was an angel of God.

And every parent that night, who tucked their child into bed, and stayed maybe a moment longer than normal, every parent who held their child so that they would know they were safe in the darkness, every one of them was an angel too.

God bless America. And God bless its angels.

Dreaming

There is a young woman at church who is beginning her first year of teaching. It’s about a month into the school year and I keep meaning to ask her if she’s had the dream yet—the dreaded teacher dream. I’ve known teachers who have left the profession and years later still have the teacher dream.

The teacher dream is always a variation of this: you’re the teacher, standing in front of the class and none of the kids are listening. They won’t stop talking. They’re being belligerent. I had one dream where my kids didn’t even show up to class. I found them in the library with another teacher who had given them cookies.

The teacher dream is always a lack of control dream.

Lately it seems I’ve been having ten teacher dreams a night.

Except now, thrown into the mix, is the dreaded church dream. And every one of my church dreams seems to follow this pattern: I’m late to church. I have responsibilities. I’m the LEM or the Lector. I have to be at church on time and the world is conspiring to keep me away. In the church dream, something is always keeping me from doing what needs to be done.

I’m clearly at a transitional point in my life, a time when I am beginning to make the transition from the profession of teaching to the profession of pastoring. That transition is apparent in my dreams. (Though as I said previous, I’m sure the teaching dream will stay with me the rest of my life.)

I was reminded of that transitional period yesterday when I started reading one of the books for my first seminary class. It’s called Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer. And interestingly enough, Palmer is an author I’m familiar with. When I first started teaching, I read his book The Courage to Teach. It is a must read for any teacher.

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Palmer’s books should appear in the two professions that have marked my adult life. Both teaching and pastoring are vocations. And without a doubt, the skills that I have learned as a teacher will carry with me when I become a priest.

But while I have at times loved teaching, it has not been a vocation for me. Palmer writes that a vocation is “something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.”

It’s “something I can’t not do.”

Really these words are what boil down the call to me. There have been a lot of things in my life that I have wanted to do. When I was little I wanted to be a paleontologist and a fireman and a lawyer and an aeronautical engineer. Even in college, I switched majors time and time again from social studies education, to journalism, to linguistics and then finally to creative writing and literature.

But there is no hole in my heart from failing to become a paleontologist. There is no sense of loss from not becoming an astronaut. There was never any compulsion to be those things.

There is a compulsion to be a priest. It is something that I can’t ignore. The only other thing in my life that I have ever felt the same way about is writing and the Lord know that I will be writing up a storm when I am priest.

I know that when I first told my friends and family that I was going to be a priest that they didn’t fully understand it. And that’s all right because they’ve still been very supportive. Even now, a year later, I can only still tell them Palmer’s words.

In the end it’s something that I can’t not do.

Testify to Love

I’ve been listening to a lot of Christian radio lately.

So much so that it’s not even a conscious decision anymore. In the same way I used to flip between channels looking for eighties music, now my fingers seem to have a mind of their own, seeking out Gospel, Praise, Rock, Inspirational or any variation of Christian music.

Most of the music is new to me. Some is familiar from church, but most is new and a treat in its newness. But the other day, I heard a song that was not new to me. Before I recognized it as something I had heard before, my heart was already stirring. This peace fell over me.

Where had I heard this song before?

And then I remembered. Wynonna Judd sang “Testify to Love” on an episode of Touched by an Angel.

I was a huge Touched by an Angel fan in college. It definitely spoke to me, definitely reached a part of me that was aching for some good news. It was a show that was unapologetically joyful and optimistic about the world.

And in virtually every episode, the angel Monica spoke these words, “God loves you.”

And it was those words that brought me to tears every Sunday night that I watched it.

God loves you.

Those words filled a very deep hole in my heart.

It’s a hole that each and every one of us has. It is a hole that has been dug out and beaten into us all our lives. Every time we’ve felt rejection. Every time the world has seemed dead set against us. Every failure. Every tear. Every word said in anger makes that hole a tiny bit bigger.

It is a hole that can only be filled with these words.

God loves you.

Everything else—it doesn’t matter, because God—loves—you.

The other day in my blog, I wrote about that first meeting between Peter and Jesus. I wrote about how Peter must have felt when Jesus first looked at him because when Jesus looks at you, he sees everything you were, are and ever will be.

I wrote how I had seen that look in others over the course of my life, but when I thought about it, really thought about, I realized I had seen that look more than just a few times.

That look that Jesus gave his disciples—it was love, pure love.

And we can witness this same love—we can see Jesus’ love—when a mother holds her new baby, when a couple says their wedding vows, when a child plays with a puppy.

It is unconditional love. It is the essence of who God is.

God loves you.

And like the song says, “For as long as I shall live, I will testify to love. I’ll be a witness in the silences when words are not enough.”

Through the Wardrobe

Of the four Pevensie children who make their way through the wardrobe into Narnia, it is Susan whose life ends tragically. It’s not that she dies, but she doesn’t return to Narnia with her siblings years later. She never makes it to Aslan’s country.

The other three children we can identify with. We want to be Peter, brave to a fault, ready to rush in to any situation regardless of the risk. We give thanks for Edmund, the redeemed traitor because we know we have all been Edmund. And we love Lucy because she is always faithful.

But Susan we abandon. She’s vain for starters. And then she commits the ultimate sin. She turns her back on Narnia. She grows up too fast. So we abandon her. We follow Lucy, Peter and Edmund into Aslan’s country and we never give Susan another moment’s thought.

There’s a problem with doing that though, because out of all the Pevensie children, we are most like Susan.

Think about this for a moment. What does it take to walk through the wardrobe? What does it take to embrace Narnia? The first thing we must do is believe in magical things. We have to believe in white witches and talking animals. We have to believe in fauns who want to have tea with us and beavers who will risk everything to get us to the Stone Table.

Those are the stories of children you say. We’re not meant to believe in those things.

Really? How about this? In order to believe in Narnia you have to believe in an all powerful, omniscient being who will sacrifice his life to save others. We have to believe in resurrection. We have to believe that death is not the end. We have to believe in prayer. We have to believe in miracles. We have to believe in stars that fall to earth and become human.

Do you see what Jesus meant when he said we must be like little children?

Every time we pray, every time we worship, every time we take a leap of faith, we are walking through those wardrobe doors and agreeing to believe in a world beyond our understanding. We’re agreeing to live in a world that is sometimes frightening and confusing, but also amazing and beautiful and surprising.

More often than not we’re afraid to do that. We become Susan because it is easier to only believe in things we can touch and see.

It is easier.

But if we had a choice, if we sat down and really looked at our options, who would we choose to be, Susan or faithful Lucy? Because we all know that Susan was never happy. And we all know that Lucy was the happiest of all even when she had no idea what would happen next.

Losing Heart

In one of her sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of her granddaughter’s seventh birthday. As her granddaughter, Madeline, watches her candles burn, her family encourages her to make a wish.

Why? Madeline wants to know. Every year she makes a wish and it never comes true, so why keep wishing?

When I first read that story, my first thought was that seven was a very young age to become jaded with the world. Usually that happens around thirteen and peaks sometime around our quarter-life crisis in our mid-twenties. But seven? That’s early.

Taylor’s concern was that her granddaughter’s lack of faith in the power of wishing would turn into a lack of faith in the power of prayer. Because, like wishes, prayers are not always answered in the way we hope.

I can think of many unanswered prayers and wishes in my life. I’ve forgotten more than I can remember, but to the scooter I wanted in sixth grade—I’m still bitter I didn’t get you. And closet door, I’m still angry that no matter how many times I opened you, you didn’t lead to Narnia.

Other prayers were answered—just not in the time frame I would have preferred. It took eleven years for God to answer one of my prayers and during that time, I prayed almost nightly. And I didn’t pray for something I wanted, I prayed for something I needed and when the prayer wasn’t answered right away I kept on praying.

Why?

Because it was a prayer that had to be answered. To live a life where it wasn’t would have been unbearable.

And then I still have prayers I’m waiting on. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, I’m sure you can name two. Yes, I’m still waiting for the miracle that will fix my air conditioner (I’m going to start living in the bedroom with the portable air and wait for summer to be over) and yes I’m still waiting for the miracle that will send me to seminary fulltime.

These days, I pray so much for fulltime seminary that I sometimes worry my head will explode. It is an agonizing wait. Not being able to fulfill my call in the way I need is like waiting at the airport for a loved one you haven’t seen in a while. You search the crowds. You watch the clock. And then you finally see them and you want desperately to run to them and give them a bone crushing hug, but you’re stopped by security, or by more crowds or by whatever—joy is delayed.

It’s horrible. And I wonder sometimes if God will ever answer my prayer.

But Barbara Brown Taylor says something interesting about whether prayer works. She says that one day she will tell her granddaughter this, “It [prayer] keeps our hearts chasing after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers us back.”

So here’s what I know—I don’t know when, if ever, I will get to seminary fulltime, but I do know that as long as I keep praying about it, as long as I keep on God about it, then I am headed in the right direction. As long as I am praying, I have my eyes set on the right thing.