Someone once said that old wine skins can’t handle new wine. They’ll burst. It is a picture of convention’s inability to endure change.
Once in a while I notice that I’m feeling more tired than usual, sad, bored, unmotivated, and easily distracted. It takes something like a two-by-four over the head for me to realize what’s going on.
Almost always, it’s because I’ve begun serving the system rather than the people. It’s because the machine has asserted its supremacy and priority over my life. And this always numbs my heart, stuns my mind and kills my passion. There is no single person to blame. It is the subtle yet insidious domination of the powers, so beautifully embodied in our thought systems, networks, institutions and traditions. It is the gravitational pull of all powers and authorities toward the death of the human spirit. It is when, because of my inattention, these powers begin to hold sway in my life that I fall into a debilitating hopelessness. My work, as a result, becomes mundane, boring, spiritless, monotonous and lifeless.
At this point I realize: I must change! Be transformed! My number one job is for personal transformation. Change is urgent! A new creature! I must become new wine again. Then the dry, old, oppressive and constricting systems can’t contain me. They will burst. I must avoid their traps. And if I unwisely fall into one of their traps, then I must be changed to break those chains that would imprison me. The key is not to wait for the new wine, but to become the new wine! Only then will I live in the freedom I’ve been promised.
Check out my tees HERE. I’m growing my inventory all the time. And check out my art HERE.
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I’m feeling kind of quiet these days… again! I’m lying low. Or trying to. In spite of my attempts to be quiet, the is the never ending suffering of those around me. And I, to a degree, suffer myself.
Marriages of my friends are breaking up at an alarming rate. It is epidemic, shall we say. And, as usual, our own marriage is being stretched as Lisa and I try to learn to grow as individuals while staying in love and in close proximity. You see, this is always the problem: how to grow personally with complete liberty in the context of community. I read an excellent book and always recommend it to anyone interested in this complex dynamic. It is by David Schnarch and is called Passionate Marriage. His basic point is that when a couple enters into a relationship like marriage, they are entering a crucible of change. When one person grows, it automatically forces the other person to grow, and vice versa. I read it not only with my own marriage in mind, or the marriages of my friends, but for our community. It is dynamic and very intense, this process of moving into our own freedom while others move into theirs.
I don’t care about liturgy, sacraments, weddings, funerals, propriety, services, the organization… and all the order that comes with these. These aren’t the issue. They aren’t the point. Do them, fix them, reform them, change them, stop them… whatever. We are always and only left with ourselves and our own personal urgency of transformation. And this is why I am so silent these days.
The fine art photo is a cropped version of a photo of my UK friend Howard Nowlan
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It isn’t how you do church. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter what tradition you follow. Your church expression can be anything from none to house-church to the highest liturgical expression. The fact is, none of these matter. Well, in fact, they all do matter. None of them are the solution. None of them are the problem. This is what I mean by “none of these matter”. I do not think that rearranging the order is going to change the root problem… that is the human mind. I am convinced that it is only by working energetically on the mind and its transformation that the structure is transformed genuinely and authentically.
Revolutions come and revolutions go. One revolution overturns one regime only to set up another which only sponsors the next revolution. This never ceases and endlessly fascinates humanity. But it leads nowhere. I don’t believe, in this context, in progress. It is only dolling up the corpse. Of course, any changes which further liberates the human being must occur. But to think that the appearance of liberty is actual liberty is foolish.
This is why I like things to be kept as simple as possible. Gather. Sing. Give. Study. Pray. Disperse. Keep in touch. Something like that. I don’t for a minute think that our community is any more advanced than the next one, or that our community is any more New Testamentish than the next one. This doesn’t concern me anymore. What concerns me is the freedom, the real freedom, of each individual person in the context of community. I think this is what provokes the transformation of the world that we desire.
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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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I was trying to explain something to someone the other day. He was upset that I seem to keep trashing the church. I’d told a story during my sermon last week that happened at a church conference years ago. He felt it was unfair to bring up the incident, that it puts the church in a bad light, and the church is getting trashed enough as it is. It gives the impression, he thought, that I believe our own church and my style of ministry has got it right and everyone else has got it wrong. I apologized and said that I wasn’t meaning to criticize that one incident, nor the Vineyard movement, nor conferences, nor Christianity, nor religion, but humanity in general. I may not have been clear enough on that.
I happen to believe that every little thing we think, say and do reveals something about our deepest selves. They are all little windows into our secret identities and darkest urges. So when I choose one incident and grab onto it and gnaw on it and won’t let it go, I’m like a dog with a bone. But it’s not the bone I really care about, but the larger issue it’s connected to. I ultimately don’t care about the bone, but the beast it’s attached to.
I do think politics, family, education, art, religion and so on, can be particularly pretentious manifestations of our darkest selves. I think it is important to dissect and analyze all that we think, say and do. It ought to expose our pretentions. It ought to reveal our hypocrisy. It ought to reveal the urgency of change. How else can we expect to be humble, to be transformed, or to find the love to help others?
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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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I seriously question the whole religious enterprise. If you’ve read my blog at all you should know that by now. Once in a while the realization that the human religious enterprise is seriously flawed comes crashing in on me. It doesn’t just come from a suspicion of institutions, but from a suspicion of the human heart and mind that contribute to the flourishing life of religion.
I hope I can honestly say I love people and want to pastor them. I care about the spiritual community aspect of human life. But I don’t for a second believe that if the individual human heart is deceptive and the individual human mind is blind, then it is better if we form a committee of these same hearts and minds to ensure that everything will be okay. In fact, it gets worse!
There is no getting around it. It is inevitable. It is also hopelessly necessary, this religious endeavor. What I’m insisting is that we admit it. I don’t think we can escape our religious impulses or the communal expression of these impulses. But we have to confess that for the most part we are the gathering of hypocrites. I sound severe, but I am only saying this because I know myself well enough to say it.
During this Christmas season it is good to applaud expressions of good will. However, we all know (please, don’t we?) that we only need to lightly scratch the righteous surface to find the dirt. We are prize specimens of the art of veneer. This can’t be helped. But let’s admit it! It’s like I told someone years ago who had committed a horrible, shall we say, “sin”. It wasn’t days after his confession and repentance that he was already back on his feet and ready to go again. I said he was like a cat! But we are all like cats. We all have learned how to land on our feet. It’s uncanny! Maybe it should be so. But can we at least admit it? That’s what I’m asking.
I truly think that if we could just admit our inevitable tendency towards hypocrisy and our finely-honed skill at readjusting that it would take the religious pretension out of our personal and corporate lives. Yesterday I came home from church reassured again that we are not interested in the renewal of the mind, but only in the rearranging of its thoughts. We will acquire new thoughts and toss old ones, only if it will serve our unconscious and hidden selfish agendas. We are only interested in renovation, not re-creation. Again, this is our human and religious tragedy. But can we at least admit it?
Merry Christmas!
This painting is a whimsical one I did a little while ago. Get the picture?
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I had joined adsense I think last spring. That is what explained all the ads on my site. I thought I might make it rich through advertising on my site. Adsense doesn’t send you a check until you’ve reached $100. The pennies started trickling in. Like Chinese water torture. I decided that as soon as I reach my first $100 I’m going to quit adsense advertising and get back to being totally naked again… to be reflected in the nakedness of my site. Finally, this morning, I woke up to find $100.03 in my adsense account, and keeping my promise to myself, I stripped off all the ads on my site. Now nakedpastor is completely naked. I only have my own art advertised on here now, which I think is fair… since I am an artist trapped in a pastor’s body!
Which got me thinking about something I’ve been thinking about: I’m hearing some people lately saying, “I don’t know if I can stay committed to this marriage!” Several, in fact. My reaction is: Okay. But can you stay committed to Jack? Or, can you stay committed to Jill? Or if someone says, “I don’t want to be committed to this friendship!” What? Do you mean that you don’t want to be my friend anymore? Or when someone says, “I’m no longer committed to this church!” What do you mean by that? Do you mean that you are no longer committed to me? Or Sally? Or Bill? Ever since I was young, I find these terms or labels disabling. They are often facades to the real. We use them as ways of avoiding relationship and withholding love. I don’t find them helpful, but hindering. Let’s strip the realities of the facades and call them what they are. You don’t want to love her anymore? You don’t want to love this group of people anymore? If that’s what it is, let’s be honest about it? To be honest, I’m not committed to marriage. I’m not committed to family. I’m not committed to church. But I am committed to Lisa. I am committed to our children and the benefits of us being in love together. I am committed to this strange and wonderful group of people that some call “church”.
This can be radical because if we are not living according to the label, then what does the time-honored and time-proven label mean anymore? If I refuse to act like a normal husband, or Lisa refuses to act like a wife is supposed to act, or if we refuse to look like a traditional family, or if we refuse to behave like an orthodox church, then we’ve found ourselves in a dangerous but necessary place. Why? Because the labels came along after the realities. They were created to define something that already existed. That’s why I refuse to agree with what conservationists would call “wife”, “husband”, “family”, or “church”. That’s why I endeavor to create contexts of liberty that explode labels and definitions. This is why I enjoy watching others obsessively trying to define who I am or what we are. Our clothes aren’t recognizable. In fact, do we even have clothes? Ah, there’s the rub!
This fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Mark Hemmings and is from his Mannequin series. Let’ s not be fake dummies.
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David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
