WWJD revisited

Something recently reminded me of the WWJD bracelet fad.  For a time, you could buy WWJD bracelets in any number of fine retail outlets.  This was not because there had been another great awakening, but because the retailers new a good product when they saw it.  I had one.  It was black with white letters.  I did not often wear it, but when I did, it did not do much for me except help me identify with a certain social group. 

“What Would Jesus Do” was supposed to be a reminder to keep you on the straight and narrow.  But I  wonder about the meaning as it was understood by most people. 

Did it not often have more the connotation of “how would Jesus get out of this one?”

It seems much more fitting to think of other role models if you are trying to escape a sticky situation. 

“What would Chuck Norris do?”

“What would Macgyver do?”

“What would Jack Bauer do?”

"what would Brian Boitano do?"

I had a high school friend and classmate who, one day, wore a bracelet she had made that said WWJND?

“What does that mean,” I asked. 

“What would Jesus NOT do!”

I thought that was hilarious.  Thinking back on it, though I know she meant it for satiric purposes, I think it is much more on the money.  What would Jesus NOT do?  Wait till he is in a pinch and then try to get himself out of it.  What did he do?  Reach out to the sick, the poor, the outcasts, the rejected, and bringing the good news – bring the Kingdom to earth by demonstrating God’s love, compassion, kindness and mercy to others.

Too much of Christianity seems focused on “sin management” (a term introduced to me by a friend).  Like hazardous waste clean-up, you try really, really hard to not sin, but then when you crack and mess up, you promise to not do it again and ask for forgiveness.  Repeat.

Shouldn’t we instead be focused on how to not get into those bad situations in the first place? 

Structure your life around whatever is good, pure, holy, etc.  Fill up your life with the positive things so that there is no time for the negative.

Why is it that...

Why is it that... "a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall...makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears?"  Frederick Buechner

The smell of Grandpa's Mustang in the summer heat, the interior hinting at the years of cigarette smoke mixed with deteriorating industrial adhesives and mildew - but it brought back memories of riding in the car with him while he was still alive.
The music I listened too riding in the car, to and from the hospital to visit my wife, pregnant with our baby who was not supposed to survive. Then driving to visit our baby in the intensive care unit, who was born, alive and well. Not to mention the smell of hospital hand sanitizers and cleaners and medical supplies… 
The story that makes your heart well up with joy, compassion or empathy...
The beauty of love, human triumph, or memories long past, but fresh and strong.  

My monastic experience

Quotes from a great source on modern monasticism: Journeying with the Northumbria Community
"Alone in God we will find ourselves together and know the gift of Community."

"Often it is prophetic people, visionaries who are used by God to pioneer and found these new communities, so that what develops is not only reactive and responsive to current trends, (that is wrong) but it is also proactive and prophetic in pioneering new ways of being Church. (How can we help put it right?) So Community begins, not as Community but as individual pioneers responding in vulnerability and originality to the call of God. Following a vocation but not knowing how it would appear or what it would look like in the future. Their pioneering drew others who shared a similar heart and a common commitment to the values and way of life being forged on the anvil of their experiences.  Often it is a journey without maps, with risk taking and experimentation characterising the early formative years. As they pioneered and explored, a Community emerged around them, unplanned and spontaneous. Then out of a life actually being lived, with shared relationships and common values, a way of life was formed. The Rule becomes the interpretive framework for vocation and vision of all subsequent Companions in Community; a means of handing on the tradition."

My own monastic experience (written spring 2008)

In the Celtic tradition of Christianity there is an idea of monasticism that involves seasons of both isolation and service or community.  The idea of contemplative isolation for days, weeks or months at a time comes from the belief that God does speak to us through our own thoughts, reading scripture and in simply clearing all mental clutter.  This would be done in a cell - a self sentenced prison, only this is not to keep the devout from getting out, but to keep the world from getting in.  But that was only half of the idea - the other half involves the coracle - the little boat-for-one that, having received a vision or a word or a command from the Lord, the devout would take to the seas and go to whatever far-off pagan Isle they felt led. 

The idea of the cell and the coracle is one of the main ideas behind the Northumbrian Community - a group of modern monastics who have turned to the Celtic Christians not as an example of the ideal golden age, but simply as a model for living out the ideas of Christian Faith in a day to day life - private contemplation, community, discipleship and service.

After Molly was hospitalized I stopped going to church - actually, we had been slack in our attendance for a few weeks on account of Sylvie's impatience with sitting and being quiet for long stretches of time.  We could not bear to put her in the nursery and yet we were having a difficult time paying attention to what was going on outside of our own pew.  This only escalated our frustration with the tone of the church’s message. 

But once Molly was in the hospital I could not bring myself to church - it was not a problem with God, nor any problem I had with Christianity - only a problem I had with spending any more time separated from my family than I had to.  I spent my Saturday and Sunday mornings bringing my two and a half year old to the hospital - down Geddes road, around the bend, down the hill to the hospital - and for those few hours we were together again - a family - and our home was that hospital room.  And once Aine was born and Molly was home - we spent our mornings going to see our newborn daughter.  All the while I knew that it was God that had helped Aine beat the odds and survive.  I knew it was God (aided by some remarkable doctors and nurses) that was seeing to her growth.  It was God that was seeing to it that her lungs were strong and her mind was developing.  No - I felt closer to God when I was holding my miracle baby than I had ever felt in church for the previous year.  I was bitter, not towards God, not towards Christianity, but towards some Christians who, it seemed to me, saw church as a social club and saw God as a self-help guru whom was expected to hand out blessings but was to expect no real commitments in the lives of his followers.  So during this time and for the year after Aine's birth, I did not rely on church for my spiritual growth.  I read scripture, I read the inspired words of others, I prayed, I contemplated - in short, I had formed around me my own spiritual cell in which I was working out my own salvation with fear and trembling.  It was about eight months after Aine was born, five after she came home to us that I began to feel the word or command from the Lord - I was given a vision and I began to feel the urge to leave my Cell and take to my metaphorical coracle and go to my mission.  The problem was that it is difficult to leave a metaphorical cell and get into a metaphorical boat and find my mission, when all I had was a distinctive vision of what the Lord wanted me to make of myself, without a clear picture of how I would get there.  It is easier, I think to find your way out of a real cell and into a real dingy and to a real island of real pagans. 


(Upon Further Reflection, 2010)
Two years later, it seems, I have been blessed to see that vision begin to grow into a reality.  In 2009 we began meeting with an old friend with similar yearnings for community, and over time we gathered more friends to join us.  Re-reading the quotes from the Northumbrian Community's webpage, it seems they were prophetic words for our little community.  Together we discuss deep philosophical and theological issues, watch movies, play games, and share meals, worship and our burdens together.  When I re-read these words that I had written for myself two years ago, I was excited to see how far we had come in that time, and I look forward to where God may lead us in the future.  Amen!  

...the beginning...

What, then, was in the beginning???

A Bang?

A void or a vacuum?

A Word?

A Creator?

Like the ancients said, chaos!

The space within the great yawning, gaping mouth of the creator

at the apex of inhaling just two moments before the word was spoken

that hurled forth creation.

And in the moment before,

when the exhaling breath of God rushed forth into the void,

chasing away the vacuum as the heat and moisture, the substance,

the divine phlegm, fills up the space!

The first moment, then, as the first word was spoken and time began,
the clock began

(though faster for us holding still and slower for us moving quickly!),

and a sound like a shock wave set all matter a-thrummin'

as the very sinew of the smallest subatomic particles began to vibrate,

each settling into its own rhythm that makes it all distinctive.

And then the collisions began!

As the atoms clump and cluster and the matter bumps and sticks

and from gases clumping come clouds

and even the clouds began igniting and burned

as new elements formed from the flame, and

new clumps grew

and were slung about the flaming massive centers

of each spinning gravitational top

all dancing and spinning like some mad ball at the creation of the cosmos.

Then cooling clumps of material

and the very ground we walk on

and the cooling gases settled in the low places, very deep.

And the condensation formed above
and the basic building blocks were there
to develop, evolve, resolve into (after some time had passed)
a walking-talking-thinking-thing which was because it thought.

Does it matter how it came to be or only that it is?

Was it like a ball of clay from which the shape was carefully formed?

Or perhaps a ball of matter (all matter) vibrating with the force
of all creations' potential energy waiting to unfurl?

Perhaps merely the wave of a divine magic wand, but that lacks creativity.

And surely a creator
of the sun and moon and earth and stars and all plants and animals and fish in the sea
is more creative than that.

And in the very words
the vibration of creation and
the process of a million years
to enjoy the development of a universe,
so mysterious in its form and all its workings.        

A reluctant Michigander

I am not a Michigander by birth or by choice.  I am a transplant, in much the same way a whirley tree-seed is lifted by the wind and deposited, and there it lays its roots without any say as to its location.  So too, here I have been deposited and my gnarly roots have stretched and now stubbornly hold tight to any number of unseen fast-holds.  I could be pulled up and moved across the way – but first I would have to disentangle myself from Michigan.

I am a transplanted southerner, in the long tradition of transplanted southerners, carried north by opportunity, though not my opportunity, but my father’s.  I am a Louisianan by birth, but my family spent the first few years bouncing back and forth between Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan.  Preschool, kindergarten and first grade were spent up north.  However, those years, and especially the years preceding them, remind me of a flash-back-memory-scene from so many movies.  The type of scene illustrated by photographs, or even better, silent home movies flashing images of family and play and holidays.  All snippets, with a narrative told over the arc of the montage.  Visions of a past life that slowly slip away.  I don’t remember the connecting parts of those memories, the sinew and muscle of the scenes, just the highlights that create more of an atmosphere than a comprehensive tale.

Of Gettysburg I have many fond, but scattered memories.  Perhaps it is because that was the age of discovery.  I was a preschooler and first encountering many things beyond the walls of home.  Everything seemed new and exciting.  Old churches, battlefields, girls, older kids...

Of Louisiana, I had the first feelings of independence and self identity.  I walked to school, independent of parents.  I could go where I wanted (okay, I always went to school).  I rode my bike far and wide: from the movie theater down the street to see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to my friends house a block over, to the Mississippi River a few blocks away.

But of Michigan (after we moved back when I was in fourth grade) the memories that stick out the most are only negative memories of the place (even despite good memories of a good many people).  Being moved away from a good friend down south.  The bitter cold of Michigan winter (compared with mild Louisiana winter – I never got into winter sports, and as a result I was a couch potato most of the frigid, frigid year).  The rough transition of being a new kid.  The awkwardness of middle school.  It was not till high school that I started to feel comfortable in my own skin in a social setting.  By that point, I had nothing but negative feelings about the state.  I admit that they were not rational, but they were firmly entrenched. 

And I kept finding more reasons to dislike living in the state.  I still hated the cold.  I watched too much local news and it made me hate Detroit (I realize now the problem with local news sensationalism).  I did not like living in the suburbs (still true).  I became a teenager, and therefore I did not like living with my family.  And my family lived in Michigan, so…

Then I went to college in Kalamazoo.  I really liked Kalamazoo.  So I made an exception for Kalamazoo and the surrounding environs (later I went to Lake Michigan and later still, Mackinac, and I made exceptions for those places too).

I graduated and moved back to Southeast Michigan.  I still did not like living in the Suburbs, but living near family had its advantages.  Plus, now I was living on my own–-out from under my parent’s roof.  But then I was trying to find a job, and since Michigan was the only state--not hit by a hurricane--to be in a recession in 2005, then I had that to dislike about Michigan!  And still I wanted to move!  And my illogical, passionate disdain for Michigan burned still deep inside me. 

But then we bought a condo (why?), and had another child (oh yeah), and now they are in school and I now I am in school and all my family’s here (after-all), and I do have a job, and we are never gonna be able to sell our condo in this economy... 

...and though I may be a transplanted Southerner, I have been gone nigh-on twenty years and would not likely feel at home in the south anyway.  And though Michigan has not grown on me, I once realized that I have grown in Michigan for nigh-on twenty years.  And so I have become a reluctant Michigander.