I received a call yesterday from someone who wanted to interview me regarding emerging forms of Christian and church expression in Canada. It was a nice talk. He asked me about the community I pastor. I told him what I could. But I could appreciate the frustration this guy must feel when trying to get a grip on what’s happening here. I could tell he understood much of what I was saying. We seem to be on the same page.
He’s making a documentary on the issue. So he asked me questions and I gave him answers as best I could. But I told him that there’s really no way to describe what we’re doing. It’s kind of like asking me how we are as a family. It is never the same. There’s no pamphlets or brochures that we can hand out. He would like to come visit us. But again, I’m always nervous about those kind of things. You can come visit us on a Sunday, but there’s no way you’ll catch what we are about. It has to be lived and experienced to be understood. Our community is unpredictable, spontaneous, bi-polar, and often messy. The music can be good. The coffee may be ready. The room may be warm. But then there’s all the people. Sometimes we’re dealing with suicide, sometimes infidelity, sometimes drunkenness, sometimes drugs, sometimes anger, sometimes heresy, sometimes death, sometimes depression, sometimes silliness, sometimes all the good things too…. well, you get the idea. In fact, I never know from one day to the next where I stand.
Sometimes people visit and leave because, they say, they want to feel like they’ve actually been to church. Some leave because they say that our church is too full of pain. Sometimes they leave because they are offended by the crass humanness of our people. But once in a while they’ll stay, and they are usually people who are totally unchurched or people that have been so burnt by the church but aren’t quite ready to totally abandon it altogether. This is its last chance.
I imagine, at the end of our chapter… if we have one… it will say: “They’re just a gathering of pretty f***ed up people! But I found a home.” Maybe.
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It is important to create an atmosphere of honesty, confession and repentance for a community to be healthy. My experience and the experience of many is that even though repentance is encouraged, it is at the same time discouraged because of the possible repercussions that follow.
We have a choice: either encourage honesty and live compassionately in the midst of that; or encourage pretense and live severely in the midst of that. I see no other options. If you choose the first one, guaranteed things will be messy but genuine. If you choose the last one guaranteed things will be tidy but superficial.
Until I become honest with and accepting of myself, I can never become honest with or accepting of others. This is why we must start with ourselves in order to create this community of authenticity, where there is love without fear.
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I cannot change the world and I have no intentions of doing so. I can’t change the world, but I can change! So I don’t expect or ask the people of my community to change the world. I resist all invitations to change our city, to transform our town, to change our society. I always encourage us to work on ourselves. It is urgent! This at first might look like passivity.
At the same time, I feel it is my task to love what is, to love reality. I cannot live in a fantasy world of what could’ve been or should’ve been or what can be. I have determined to forsake fantasy and to love reality. I am convinced that this is where God is truly present. This is extremely challenging because my mind yearns to flee from the harsh realities that are presented to it, including those harsh realities that come in the form of other people. My mind yearns to build a fantasy world where it can pretend it is immune from all danger, weakness and ultimately death, and where it can exalt itself in a dream of invincibility and immortality. But I am pulled by reality to leave behind all my theories, dreams and heavenly theology and become grounded in this reality that I find myself in now.
If I recognize my own fear and frailty, then I can recognize the fear and frailty in others. And this is where true love, true compassion begins. And this is where the apparent passivity is transformed into action… the action of love. It is actually quite subversive and counter-cultural. This is why I think it is of utmost importance that Rothesay Vineyard be a safe place for this to happen. This would explain a great deal of why we are the way we are.
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Is it possible to care for someone without having designs for him or her? Is it possible to love someone without having an agenda, no matter how glorious or noble? Is it possible to respect someone without having dreams or wishes for that person? These are very real questions that I ask. They are not hypothetical either, but real and urgent and necessary.
Jesus got angry with the teachers because they were laying burdens upon the people, burdens no doubt birthed from the teachers’ well-informed and studied dreams, desires, wishes, agendas and plans for the people. I don’t think for a second that their intentions were evil, but good and admirable. Could they love and teach the people without burdening them at all? Could they teach them without their teaching being pregnant with expectations? Could they love them with their desires as a community completely detached?
This is the problem: not that we need to purify our wishes for others, but to crucify them; not that we must make lovelier strings to attach to our love, but to cut them off altogether; not that we must baptize our agendas, but to lay them down once and for all; not that we must passionately make our visions more heavenly, but to forsake them now. What destroys true community is the layers of expectation, agenda, vision and wishes that are pressed upon it. This is why love is very much like death… because in both we must learn to let go. And this is why, my friends, we refuse to love… because it is too much like death… death to ourselves and all our desires.
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I have two fairly prominent inclinations. One is that I want to engage life and challenge it. In the church there’s so much to challenge. I want to take it on. I long for deep and residing change. Transformational! It is something deep and significant. It involves death… the death of what is. The Christian message is all about this: that we must die so that we might live. This is what I am truly interested in and I think passionate about.
But this is what creates the other urge within me, and that is to quit it all and go live in a hermitage way out in the proverbial desert. I am becoming more and more persuaded that the church is only interested in renovations, adjustments and tweaks. But it is because the church is made up of people, and this is all people are interested in. We refuse to die. We reject the cross. I include myself in this. This is why I’m always so tempted to quit and make a meagre living off my art. I won’t settle for rearrangements. But since we resist death, we continue on and on down through the centuries perpetuating the same old cycle of revolution-renewal-ritual, revolution-renewal-ritual, revolution-renewal-ritual… ARGH! And I’m tired of it. This, I think, pretty much defines my struggle.
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When I became a Christian at the age of about 15 (no, I can’t remember the date or my age)… I was immediately… immediately!… infected with a virus. That virus I will call the “LaLa Virus“. The LaLa virus basically makes you think that now that you are a Christian, everything is going to go better for you. You life will be easier and trouble-free, suffering-free, and pain-free, like La-La-Land. I remember our youth group singing along to the tune of the Coke commercial, “Things go better with Christ!” Uh huh!
This virus is impervious to almost all kinds of treatment. It cannot be tolerated at all because even the smallest trace infects your whole system. It must be completely and totally eradicated. I remember questioning this in the past and being rebuked by another youth leader with the verse from Malachi 3:14 where the priests are chastised for saying, “It is vain to serve the Lord!” As I continued to grow up and as I allowed my eyes to actually see what they actually saw, I began to question just exactly what that verse meant. Surely it doesn’t mean that there are tangible advantages to serving the Lord! When I was going through seminary, the alarming statistic was revealed that there was a higher rate of divorce among seminarians than others. Indeed, many of my friends have gone through horrendous pain and suffering in their marriages, jobs, relationships, bodies, and on and on. I look around me now and I have friends who serve the Lord who have cancer, ex-spouses, messed up children, debt, poverty, depression, hardships of all kinds, pain of all sorts. And these are just the people I know. Around the world, those who claim to follow Christ are sick, starving, suicidal, suffering, slowly dying. It isn’t true that the life of a Christian has advantages. There is something else going on. I think seeing that the world is full of suffering and sorrow and admitting it is the first and most crucial step towards any kind of liberation.
Yet still that virus persists! I still unconsciously hold to the wish that things go better with God. I don’t believe it, but it’s still there. I don’t believe we get special favors. Not any more. As a pastor it often requires a brutal honesty with myself and with others to admit this. There’s something else going on. A deeper truth. So even though the nasty virus still clings to me, I do believe it is on its last legs.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Howard Nowlan.
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Years ago, in 1991, I read a short but powerful book by Krishnamurti. It’s a book I visit at least once a year. When I read these lines, I wrote them down in my journal and commented on them. Here’s his quote and my response:
“Only the deep, constant demand of the brain for the physical security of the organism is inherent. Symbols are a device of the brain to protect the psyche; this is the whole process of thought. The ‘me’ is a symbol, not an actuality. Having created the symbol of the ‘me’, thought identifies itself with its conclusion, with the formula, and then defends it: all misery and sorrow come from this.â€
Here’s what I wrote in response to this quote:
I wrote the above entry and felt fear. The horror of realizing that all thought is the attempt of the brain to protect itself psychologically and to perpetuate the ego! I realized that it is this that must die. This fear is a lack of courage to do it. It prevents me from seeing the whole truth of it, because the seeing would be the dying. I’m afraid of ending, or becoming insane. I’m afraid of dying. The doctrine of the resurrection teaches that there is nothing permanent in man. When I die, I die altogether! Nothing lingers. Resurrection means complete mercy for something completely dead. I contain nothing ‘immortal’. No infinite soul.
I still hold this to be profoundly true. And it necessarily must affect all that I am and do. I perceive that almost all of our efforts, personal and religious, are to avoid death. This must end!
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen.
Contributions to nakedpastor are greatly appreciated.
You, my readers, have become familiar with my good friend Sarah who lost her boyfriend, soon-to-be-fiancé to suicide on January 8 this year. Read here and here and here to catch up if you aren’t aware of what’s going on. The other day Lisa and I were visiting with her, having drinks and chatting, when she told a story that I thought you’d all like to hear about. It’s about how she’s felt God guiding her through her grief. I asked if she’d mind writing a post about that for nakedpastor. She sent it to me the other day. She also gave me the accompanying photo which I embellished with words. Nato took the photograph. Those were happier times. I doctored the photograph and received Sarah’s permission to post this creative endeavor of mine. I feel it expresses so many of the things she’s going through. By the way, she appreciates so many of the kind words this online community have given to her. So bless you!
So, here’s her story in her own words:
“My Guidance Through Darkness”
Contributions to nakedpastor are greatly appreciated.Before Nato died, a few days before, I felt I should read psalm 57…”Be gracious to me O God, be gracious to me, for my soul takes refuge under the shadow of your wings. My soul will take refuge under the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed”. It didn’t really mean anything to me at the time. Then he died. He took his own life…’my soul will take refuge under the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed’. When we got home from Ontario, Nato’s funeral, the Lord said, “You’re going to be out for the next three weeks, lie down, but don’t worry, Nato and I are making the plans”. So I laid down. Again, later he said, “the next 4 days are going to be dark’, so I told my mom, “I feel that the next few days are going to be very dark, pray for me and take care of me’. And they were dark.
In March I sat outside one night having a smoke and was overwhelmed by starkness and terror that my love, my beloved, was gone, and that he took his own life. I felt the Lord say ‘ the third month is going to be the worst’. I came inside and told mom, and she told me that statistically the third month is the hardest because there is no shock left to buffer the pain and suffering. I’m glad I didn’t know that before. In that same moment outside with my smoke, I felt, or saw, the words ‘March 21st’, and ‘equinox’. I didn’t know what equinox meant, so I looked it up and the definition said, “When the day is longer than the night”. When the light becomes more than the dark. And March 23rd, I got dressed when I woke up, the first time I have felt like it since Nato died.
Though I may rant and cry through my grief and suffering that God is not faithful, He is.
John, who just lost his wife Kerry last Sunday, just lost a friend of his today. She was a coworker. Died suddenly. People were worried about how he was going to react when he got the news, so I was informed of the tragedy and immediately went to his house. He’s already on bereavement leave so I knew he’d be home. Other coworkers were already there. After they left, John and I just hung out for another hour or so talking about the loss of his wife and the mystery it’s shrouded in.I’m finding this happens quite often: that people who experience a tragedy sometimes get another one fast on its heels. Job comes to mind. I dare anyone to pretend they have any answers in times like these. Humble silence before the mysterious majesty is the only suitable posture.
The photograph is a creation of my friend Amaris.
Contributions to nakedpastor are greatly appreciated.
A friend died Sunday night. I was with her in the hospital room Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Here’s a list of suggestions for those visiting the dying and their loved ones in hospitals. This is mostly for the loved ones in the room, and most of it assumes that the dying is unconscious. Kerry slipped into a coma as the weekend progressed, so even though we were ultimately sensitive to her, their were concerns for the family and friends who were there that this list addresses. I’ll assemble another list of suggestions for being with a dying person who is conscious to the end. Hope this one helps!
- I don’t care what I’m doing, when I get the call that so and so is dying, I drop it and go. I don’t say, “I’ll be there as soon as I’m finished Grey’s Anatomy.” Drop and go! They’ve called you or you’ve been informed probably when they couldn’t possibly wait any longer to let you know. Get there! Everyone will understand. It is an honor that they’ve remembered to tell you and that they want you there or think you should be there. Unless of course you are Jesus… then perhaps you can get there late and raise them from the dead. Read More
David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
