Chapter four in A Room Called Remember (Buechner, read more here) is written on hope and the role the church plays in a rather hope-forlorn culture. As God told Moses, the ground he was standing on was holy, set apart. The general premise of the chapter was that awkward, unsure and faithless as we western church-goers are, there are reasons that we continue to go back on Sunday mornings: in hope that we will see, hear, taste, feel or smell God in that place set apart.

I thought of the service we attended yesterday. A few rows in front of us sat a woman with special needs. That’s how ignorant I am: I can only say that she had needs others sitting around her didn’t have. I would guess her to have been 35 years old, and it appeared that her mother or a caregiver sat in the pew behind her.

It was confirmation Sunday, and unless you think high school kids great, which by great fortune I do, you might have thought yesterday at church to be one of few during the year God doesn’t take roll call.

The service, led by the youth pastor, was a barrage of contemporary music, kids sharing their testimonies about how their beloved pastor pointed them in the way of God and they can’t now fathom how they would ever have become a Christian if not for the youth guy and confirmation.

And as it often unfolds for me, the message wasn’t spoken from the pulpit. It was communicated in disruption.

The woman a few rows in front of us was swaying a lot during the music. Her right leg seemed to want to walk out of her socket, but she wasn’t going anywhere. She was clapping, if I remember it right. When it was time to sit down, she sat like everyone else. But she was jittery. At a couple of, what most in the church would have deemed inopportune times, she clapped, sort of like someone trying to start a clap, or the wave, except that she could have cared less if anyone joined. She started clapping, almost wildly, as if she might even stand and start bucking her arms wildly.

A nanosecond into the inappropriate clap, the woman in the row behind her put her hand on the clapper’s shoulder. She diligently obeyed, and the service went relatively uninterrupted. The younger woman’s enthusiasm didn’t wane, though. I could see that she wanted to clap again and again and then another time during the service. She was almost beside herself with something like giddiness. It was an enthusiasm that was contagious, at least in my head.

I found myself wishing I was more like her. And maybe that’s something the church in my town is missing: more of us with special needs, clapping wildly for our God simply because we can. Because we have beheld Him in a sanctuary, or heard him in a cool new song led by a hip youth pastor, or felt Him brushing against us in a too-packed pew. There are more reasons than breaths to sway our hips, clap our hands and cheer for our Creator.

We don’t need reasons really, to clap for God, to get excited, to show a little enthusiasm. Acknowledging my past and embracing my future and new name should be enough to get me going. And maybe watching this woman clap for God moved others to look for God not only on confirmation Sunday, but in other holy places.

The Shopping Cart

It doesn’t take long, really, for man to recognize the stark difference in the way we think from that of our female counterparts. A clear example shone its revealing glory at Target the other day. On these trips, the ones I would rather forego to sweep the garage or plunge a toilet, I am given a mission. It’s a small mission I’m trusted with, one that doesn’t require a lot of responsibility, but a mission nonetheless. During the few months I’ve been married, the mission usually means gathering two or three peripheral items from the grocery department. These are the ones that, if forgotten, won’t force meal rescheduling. Gatorade, coffee creamer and chips are peripheral items.

It was in my mission-minded state that I returned, beaming, with my items collected and deposited into the cart. Looking at the cart, in horror, my wife began hastily rearranging the fruit in the shopping cart then the bread and the vegetables. Why wouldn’t you put the fruit together and the boxed and heavy things toward the back? She wasn’t making a lot of sense to me at that moment, because, didn’t you see, honey, I just completed my mission? I got each of the three items you requested. And I didn’t break a thing. Seeeeaahh?

The next week I thought I would live out some of my own personal creativity. We both had the oil changed in our cars late in the afternoon. It was a one-man operation, so changing both of our cars out took no less than 6 hours. After filling my wife’s car with gas, I brought it around the side of the station for a wash. It was automated and still open despite the closed service station. Pulling out of the wash and driving home, I called Mary in a panic. Honey, I said with anxiety in my voice. Honey, I’m stuck in the car wash. They closed the station while I was in the middle of the wash, and the doors are locked! What? What?! Her puzzled and concerned response was moving. I said again I was stuck and needed her to call the police and get someone over. Are you serious? She always asks that. Well, no. Ha ha, honey, I’ll be home in five minutes. I laughed hysterically the whole way home.

Rearranging the shopping cart. Could anything be more clear and straightforward? Why would anyone in their right mind put a box of graham crackers on top of a bag of pears as I did that day? Men just don’t get it sometimes. We two sexes are different. Gifted in different ways and very different.

That is the artistry and wonder of God’s creative sixth day.

Layers

It seems I build my life in layers. I’m looking out the window at two of mine in the parking lot: a Jeep and a bike rack. Both define a little of who I am, I suppose, and both nag, in our society of images, that I keep up with what it means to tote a bike rack on the back of an SUV.

The SUV connotes several things. First, that I am a rugged outdoorsman whose demanding lifestyle requires a demandable car. Yeah. I could be a wildlife photographer and need to drive through impassable terrain that I could not possibly traverse with a Hyundai or Ford Fiesta. It might mean that I am a diehard off-road enthusiast, my life existing as a non-stop mudding adventure. Um-hmm. The self-conscious dude in the equally appropriate Cadillac SUV at the stoplight next to me might think I live on a dirt road that winds through overgrown forest with the tendency to morph into watery muck after a hard rain. Nope, nope and nope. And the one time I took my Jeep off of the road, to turn around, I was afraid of scratching the paint.

The bike rack brings a whole different set of expectations. I am a Lance Armstrong wanna-be, have a hidden desire to ride in a Tour de Something, or actually might, just might, intentionally tote my bike to ride it somewhere, because the road across town is better than the one in front of my house.

These are two of scores of ‘layers’ in my life. Consider a hand full of cards in a spoons game. The more of them I have in my hand, the farther I am from winning and yes, grabbing the spoon.

What is the point in our colossal game of spoons? I think it is to grab hold of the Eternal Spoon, God. It is to grab hold of Life and dance wildly. If my hand is full of these layers, these cards carelessly fumbling around in these uncoordinated hands, picking up spoons and dancing with them is not an option.

In 2 Samuel 6, David danced naked before God. He wasn’t carrying a bike rack, or listening to an i-Pod or wearing Nike Air sneakers. He was just naked. Raw. In the buff. He didn’t try to manage a hand of cards, or an elaborate portfolio or an all-star athlete image. He wanted to know and be known, to praise Jehovah with his full self.

The layers are just so addictive! The more I have surrounding my true heart, the less time I have to look at what my soul has become, or is becoming. It is simply easier to fix a boat or home theatre system or tile a bathroom than it is to sit down and have a long, intimate visit with God and my soul.

Layers. Call them distractions, barriers, even separation. Stripped bare, of all that this delusional world has to offer, how about following in David's footsteps? Not dancing naked in a perverted way, but in a desire to know and be fully known by our Creator. We were created to be naked, right?

What do you say to letting go of a layer? Dance. Dance wild and naked in honor of the One who loves your soul.

On Writing

But I (write) about my life anyway because, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually. (Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets)

You can check out a long clip of a new documentary on Buechner here

I write with a story in mind. Mine is the autobiography of a selfish, occasionally selfless, thinking, analyzing, sometimes secure, sometimes terribly insecure, self-proclaimed observer of life, hopeless romantic, searching man of meager faith. I have a story to tell, and it is the one borrowed to me. On this side of a life as writer, I don’t know if my story will jolt anyone but me-and it has done that if I quit today-but I know that I need to scribble my part, nevertheless. It’s a strange place to be: energized by the clicking of a keyboard, watching letters dance onto the screen in such a way as to make any good sense to the reader that they would continue reading and even, even take from it a morsel to eat. And so in the only way I yet know how, this is the answer to the question that has plagued what I would call my rookie writing year: what is left to write? If there is nothing, then there is my story. And, it’s not important because it is mine, but maybe you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

For me, writing has a direct correlation to reading. Engaging with a book is opening to a safe vulnerability with its author, sopping the drops of wisdom wine with my soul bread. Excellent writing bridles my heart nearer to the flame of God, closer to the life I was meant to live, a deeper, richer experience of earthly years. Both reading and writing give me the opportunity to commune with the church in marvelously unique ways.

The writer of Hebrews says that the word of God is living and active, and I believe the writing of men and women God-seekers is similar. In this silent community where voices are loud and soft, weak and strong, we (writers and readers alike) offer fragile thoughts and faulty pretenses and one-sided opinions to another faithful or faithless for a sitting, bantering in that conscience place where daydreaming and decisions are made, a place made welcome to the warmth of God's Spirit. We commune in this place where it is safe to poke around with intellectual sticks at the profound.

Reading and writing opens doors. A hypnotizing novel offers a place of fantastic living, a place other than ours to live if only for hours. Reading gives us solace and comfort and sanity in recognizing a heart that has gone astray, a way for us to fully grasp that we are not alone in this marathon. Both reading and writing are a great source of laughter as we prod our own memories and share others’ in a step back to look at lighter living. It is a community of interaction.

I have excavated profound wisdom from books on the writing life. Enamored by the practices and habits and patterns of writers, these lives seem to leap off the pages at me and usher my nonsense to sense. I seem to have found my way into a fraternity to which I’m only now rushing. A giddy schoolboy, I gobble the wisdom and insight, snarfing the clues to successful writing. My back straightens, my eyes wide, I sit on the edge of my seat for a hushed voice to give me holy wisdom on the writing life. Sssh, the author is about to reveal hidden secrets! Read and write. Read and write. Read and write. Some say it with eloquent reverence, and others, like Anne Lamott, say it with a raw spiritualism, “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” This is actually the third draft of this piece, Lamott would be proud.

It is in the third and fourth draft, searching for the right words, throwing and retracting thoughts and phrases that the writer is the ringmaster in a circus of word acrobats. Again, Buechner,

You sit down at your desk in front of your typewriter, or if, like me, you don’t use a desk and a typewriter, you sit down wherever you sit down with a pad of paper in your lap and a pen in your hand. Is it a book you are going to write, or a letter to a friend, or a diary, if you keep one? Or are you sitting down not to write anything at all, maybe, but just to think, to remember, or just to pray, maybe which is another kind of thinking, another way of remembering? Whichever it is you sit down to, the process is much the same. Writing, thinking, remembering, praying-you need words for all of them. Words are put together from letters, all twenty-six of them. So the alphabet is your instrument. Everything you have it in you to say must be said by means of A’s and B’s and C’s and D’s. By means of vowels and consonants, you must put together the best words you can-words that, if possible, not only mean something but evoke something, call something forth from the person you address with your words. Christ himself both spoke such a word and was such a word.

Using words as acrobats, we fling them to, toss them at, the screen, the pad of paper, and see if their choreography elicits a response. Do the limber and elusive and tumbling words chosen form a cohesive production to draw us one step further? Is the formation molded in such a way as to wrap our understanding around it, fingering the grooves, recognizing its shape, holding it in the very palms that we thrust to the sky in misunderstanding? If so, I have done my job, I have succeeded. If it is Tom Foolery, I will scrap it. I will try again.

There is limitation in writing. Take the word ‘blessing.’ A thesaurus might suggest the following as appropriate synonyms: absolution, baptism, benediction, benison, commendation, consecration, dedication, divine sanction, grace, invocation, thanks, thanksgiving, unction. Still, can we truly fathom the astounding value and significance of a blessing from God? We are limited to 26 letters of an alphabet to piece together what we can of the concept of blessing. There will come a time, however, when the experience will no longer be limited. True recognition of God’s blessing will burst our hearts in a way words have never done.

Until then, I will try to be faithful. I will write as I know and learn and practice. I will get better and closer to the real meanings of things. Still, I won’t reach that place where words are rendered useless, though I long for that time.

The Big Game

The big game. A bunch of oversized men on illegal muscle stimulants. Bats cracking and helmets smashing. A gaggle of mid-twenties guys in tight pants, spitting and packing chew. The big game is approaching. It’s still weeks away, but you can tell it is getting closer. The grocery stores tell us: a spinnable tower of useless sports rousers grace each entry. Every radio and television station gives countless hours of coverage to everyone from the coach to the guy who cleans up that spat and packed chew.

The questions are always the same, Who’s dominating this year? How do you guys feel going into the big game? What are you doing to prepare? And the answers are just as high and philosophic: 1.) we are 2.) confident and 3.) focusing on the game. Same answers every single time. There is no change in the way they answer the same monotonous inquiries. It is simply a different player in a different jersey on a different day.

The frenzied hysteria approaching the big game is worth millions and millions of dollars in advertising, television airtime, big game paraphernalia, not to mention the tickets themselves. Which, of course, depends on the tickets you are referring to: the pre-game, game or post-game festivities.

Just think how much better off we are investing so much into the big game. I cannot remember which teams played last year. But I can tell you what I ate that night. I cannot tell you if T.O. was reinjured, but I could tell you at who’s house we were watching him. I will not be able to recall the score, but I will jump up and exclaim it was ME! who scored a triple Yahtzee during halftime.

It is not so much the big game that we crave, rather the anticipation buried beneath the drone of computers and too-long workdays and our own boredom. In the anticipation, we find others also gathered helplessly hoping for camaraderie, community and connectedness. It is refreshing to have a delicate pat on the bottom in the spirit of anticipation.

Hey Mr. Overpaid sports guy? It does not matter who wins. The world does not depend on the spread. We forget the scores tomorrow. We only care that there is a game. The significant event comes in laughing around a bowl of chips, sending e-mails to the gang about Chris falling into the coffee table while re-enacting the big catch and the heart-to-heart in the other room that had nothing to do with any game anywhere.

The big game simply reveals our natural need to be together. If it were not the big game, it would have to be something. All kinds of people, some with criminal backgrounds, some with sordid sexual histories, they all gather around the big game. Perhaps a birth or a wedding or an out-of-this-world baby in a manger. Something.

It stirs us to rally. It gets us to stand behind something. It gets some to just stand.