Winn Collier's Blog, page 37

Not Feeling Faith

Some of us have, for the moment at least, sufficiently made our point. We can not abide a robotic faith where difficult questions or deep anxieties are met with silence, rebuke or prayer-circle interventions. We have been worn to the existential bone with the hypocrisy we believe others demand of us when we are expected to apply our happy face and chirp a few cliches, often set to peppy tunes. We will not play the game. We will be (as we repeatedly remind ourselves and others) authentic.

The difficulty is that, in our move toward being real (whatever that means), we’ve often merely traded one false self for another false self. In our previous world, we felt there was no space for our humanness, our individuality, our emotions and inner life. To whatever degree this was the reality hoisted upon us, we are right to resist. We are whole beings, and our whole self matters. In the new world where we’ve shed these shackles, however, we are often ruled by what we feel, by whether our prayers feel vibrant or our worship feels truthful. We sit immobilized when we hear the Psalmist’s invitation to “praise the Lord all [our] life.” Praise is not an emotion; it is a declaration.

There are many days when I don’t feel the electricity of love for Miska (or she for me), but I announce my love to her, live my love toward her, nonetheless. And I’m not being inauthentic. Quite the opposite, I’m demonstrating that my love runs far deeper than my whims or confusions. I have promised fidelity. This is the ground of truth. When I don’t feel love’s energy, I should pay attention in order to keep a check on the state of my heart toward her, but this poverty doesn’t define what is true. Some days, my feelings are simply going to have to figure out how to keep up.

Our feelings, all the complexities of our story and our interior selves, are affirmed in the Psalms, honored in the prayers of the prophets and apostles, and blessed in the Incarnation where Divinity became fully human. However, our feelings are not God. Only God is God. As Barth said, “Let us set aside our investigation of God. God searches us. Our mind is never right.” To give no heed to what we feel or think or the many ways we struggle and plod along is to dishonor the God who created us. However, to give ultimate authority to these realities is to bow at the feet of another god.

Feelings are important in judging the condition of our heart or how we are engaging God and others. However, they don’t always tell us the truth about ourselves, God or others. Attentiveness to our feelings is essential to tell us where our heart is, but they are not always trustworthy to tell us where God is. Only God can do that.

This is why we pray with the Church. This is why we surrender to the stories of our God’s actions across history and geography. This is why we break bread with friends and laugh and dance under the moon and become peacemakers and feast with the poor. This is why we hope for good and commit ourselves to joy and why we have plenty of space for our tears. We do all this because God has come to us in Jesus Christ, and Jesus has taught us that this life is the life God has for us. Whether we feel it or not.

Addendum

I have another bit I could have shared, adding another mercy to my story about the balls we juggle and the balls we drop. This snippet’s too good to miss.

Several weeks ago, a couple days after my conversation with Ken, I received an email from another friend. Only this fellow’s also in my parish. I’m (as he likes to say) his reverend. This means that he’s one of those we pastor-types imagine we are spinning and juggling and dashing about to impress, the ones who’ll rush off in a huff if we blow up any of our ecclesiastical chores. This fellow, thank God, lives outside that circle. “I’ve had you in mind lately,” he wrote, “and hoping that you’re managing to hold everything together these days. You certainly won’t hear anything from us if you miss a few things, intentionally or not.”

Intentional. Or not. If a goof or mishap is what’s needed, blunder away, he said.

A few days later, the two of us took a walk in the rain. More like a monsoon, we were drenched down to our skivvies. I don’t know where such a thing lands on the productive management grid. But it surely felt good to be human, a very wet human.

My friend, in the email assuring me it was mighty fine to roll a gutter ball, concluded with Garrison Keillor’s sign off: Be well, do good work, and stay in touch. I pass those words to you, as they were passed to me. 

 

Addendum on Balls

I have another bit I could have shared, adding another mercy to my story about the balls we juggle and the balls we drop. This snippet’s too good to miss.

Several weeks ago, a couple days after my conversation with Ken, I received an email from another friend. Only this fellow’s also in my parish. I’m (as he likes to say) his reverend. This means that he’s one of those we pastor-types imagine we are spinning and juggling and dashing about to impress, the ones who’ll rush off in a huff if we blow up any of our ecclesiastical chores. This fellow, thank God, lives outside that circle. “I’ve had you in mind lately,” he wrote, “and hoping that you’re managing to hold everything together these days. You certainly won’t hear anything from us if you miss a few things, intentionally or not.”

Intentional. Or not. If a goof or mishap is what’s needed, blunder away, he said.

A few days later, the two of us took a walk in the rain. More like a monsoon, we were drenched down to our skivvies. I don’t know where such a thing lands on the productive management grid. But it surely felt good to be human, a very wet human.

My friend, in the email assuring me it was mighty fine to roll a gutter ball, concluded with Garrison Keillor’s sign off: Be well, do good work, and stay in touch. I pass those words to you, as they were passed to me. 

 

Balls Go Round and Round

My friend Ken asked me how I was doing, and I answered with the worn-out juggling metaphor. The last few weeks, I’ve been tossing so many balls I’m teetering, breathless. One miscue, and we’re sure to have a jangled collision. This works against my desire for simplicity, and I feel like a class-A hypocrite. Of course, that guilt becomes simply another ball I toss into the furious loop.

I explained to Ken my fear that I would drop one of my whirling balls and that those I love or those I’m responsible for would suffer. My family would not receive all they need from me. My church would endure a lackluster pastor. Maybe my coursework would pay the price. Or my writing would be dull and empty. So much at stake. So many possibilities for ruin. I must keep the blurring circle flawlessly spinning.

The phone sat silent for a moment. Then Ken, with a carefree voice, asked “Why don’t you just let a ball drop every now and then?”

Why don’t I just drop a ball? It’s easy when someone else says it. Why do I believe I’m so crucial to the universe that my misstep carries such drastic consequences? I do the best I can, which means I bumble my way most of the time. I have trouble keeping track of my keys most days, much less all the whizzing parts of my world. Juggling belongs in a circus anyway, where there’s laughter and popcorn and everyone expects someone to get a pie in the face and to be left with a big mess after the fat lady sings.

Last night, All Souls had a Healing Eucharist. When Miska prayed for me, she placed her hand on my heart and prayed that I’d know there is nothing to fear, that I’d know that – truly – nothing is at stake. Her prayer said, drop a ball if you need to, grace will pick it up.

Upon the Birthday of T.S. Eliot

I once had a professor offer a course consisting of nothing but a semester of Wednesdays reading Eliot and Dostoevsky. A strange pairing perhaps, but this professor noticed wonder and delight in all sorts of strange places. He described the course as an indulgence, and that one word slashed the overblown tires of scholastic rigor. I was invited to revel and play, to laugh and ponder. I need not critique from afar, with appropriate analytical distance. The invite was to stick my face in the cake and come up only when I needed air or needed to wipe icing from my nose.

Of course – how else would one read poetry, how else would one read a fine story?

The sad portion is that, due to financial and administrative issues, I had to drop the class. However, I stuck around long enough to read T.S. Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night where he gave me the indelible picture of “a madman shaking a dead geranium.” I couldn’t tell you exactly what that line taught me, exactly how it proved profitable in future studies or vocation. However, it gave me pause. I saw anew the madness in my world and my heart. I’m still watching for those limp, lifeless geraniums.

Thomas Stearns Eliot celebrates his birthday today. I toast him, this man of good words. This man of indulgence.

Of Waffles and Belonging

Last Thursday morning, the day Miska and I celebrated fifteen years of gritty love, I sang Seth a tune while he pulled on his sneakers for school: Dad’s taking mom to breakfast to celebrate / Dad’s taking mom to breakfast to celebrate / Oh yeah, Dad’s taking mom to breakfast to celebrate (it’s best if you snap along).

Seth exhaled an agonizing groan. “Nooooo fair, Dad. You get to go to Waffle House!”

Of course, Waffle House hadn’t crossed our mind. We did consider The Pigeon Hole, a little house in the University district where, if you like, you can sit in the cobblestoned courtyard underneath a massive oak tree and order red-eye grave laced with Shenandoah Joe’s coffee grounds. We did consider Blue Moon on Main Street where your first move upon arrival is to look up at the blackboard in the corner by the fireplace to see which gourmet thick-sliced bacon they’re offering (the Moon is where you’re likely to see a person order, all at once, an apple omelete, griddle cakes and a shot of jack daniels). The Nook downtown was an option, where you can enjoy French Toast while watching the town walk by. Of course, we could always pick the Bluegrass Grill, where you endure their kitsch garage sale mugs in order to lock your lips on the most astounding home fries. We did not think Waffle House.

Every month or two, however, we’ll pass by the House of the Waffle, and Wyatt will say, “Dad, you’ve really got to take us there again.”

“Yeah,” I say. “We’ll do that…Sometime.”

My boys like the waitresses who call you “honey” and the short order cooks with the yellow hats who yell out orders like a minor league umpire. They like the hash browns, the pancakes, the sticky syrup at the table. However, I believe they like Waffle House mainly because several years ago, in Clemson, I took them for a guy’s Saturday morning. We sat at the bar next to a guy from New England wearing his Boston College jersey and in town for the game with the Tigers. The atmosphere was crowded and rowdy. We chatted game day and drank coffee — and the boys were included in the ritual.

I also believe Wyatt and Seth like Waffle House because two years ago, when my dad was in town, he wanted to take all the guys to breakfast. We had three generations lined up at those counter seats. The boys filled their bellies and joked with Pa and were inaugurated, amid maple syrup and OJ, to a family of men.

Every place in this world of ours, every place, can be a space of holy memory, of love, of belonging.

Fifteen

You learn much about a woman over fifteen years. You learn even more if you add another four on top, the stretch of time it took me to buckle up my courage and stop acting the fool. When the time was right though, the courage rushed with a fury. I’ve been grabbing straight shots of 80-proof love ever since.

In those fifteen years, you learn that a woman needs you to clean up your pancake disarray as you go along, not after dinner’s done. You learn that when we’re in bed reading and she asks if I’m hungry, what she really means is: would you take your cute little self downstairs and make me some of your stovetop popcorn? You learn that asking her what she thinks of Schleiermacher’s pneumatology or Barth’s “strange world” after 9 p.m. is likely to get you nothing but a big ol’ roll of the eyes.

But you also learn that you’re welcome to quote poetry at any hour. You learn that tears cost her much but have a mighty power to heal those who receive them. You learn that true artists simply make beauty everywhere and half the time don’t even know they’re doing it. You learn that whenever she pulls out that orange-striped apron, watch out. She may start with paint and canvas, but when she’s done, all you’ll be able to say is my, my…

In fifteen years, you learn what it is to give yourself to a woman, to know that she is your truest joy and truest pleasure. You also know, as much as you know a thing in this world, that you’ve only begun to scratch at her mystery, her allure.

 

Shine

We hadn’t even moved into our townhouse, and I’d already lost my bid for the third-story room, the one with the big window facing Carter’s Mountain. It would have been a great little studio, a tucked-away corner for my books and graphite pencils and framed Berry poetry which serves as my credo, until the day I build my writing hut. The words were waiting to spill from that perch; but we have two boys who, I guess, need a place to sleep and a floor on which to toss their clothes. I’m convinced the loss of these few square feet is the reason I’ve yet to write the Great American Novel, but such is life.

I’ve landed down the stairs, just below the cranny that slipped away. It’s half-time office, half-time guest suite. I still have a window, and the window still faces Carter’s. Standing there, watching east, I watch the fog burrow into the ridge, until the sun arrives and licks the fog away. A few mornings ago, I found myself reading to the mountain. I don’t believe the mountain was listening, but I’m used to reading while no one’s paying me any attention. The text was one of the day’s Psalms, and I didn’t realize until mid-sentence that I was recounting to the sun and the mountain their own story:

The Mighty One, God, the Lord,

   speaks and summons the earth

   from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.

God summons the earth. God coaxes the sun from its slumber. Like Jesus woke Lazarus, like I woke (and woke again) my sons early this morning, like those many times God nudges me from lethargy, weariness or fear – God says, “Rise and shine.”

Whatever your place this day, God summons you, as he summons the earth, as he summons all the fair creatures of this world. Arise. Shine. We’re all waiting to see your splendor.

 

Why the Mourning?

If you pray the Psalms long enough, you find they force you to put language to the nagging questions, the brooding anger and the unseemly exuberance that often goes unspoken.

Several of the Psalms ask God: “Why must I go about mourning?” Is it really necessary, God? Why all the gloom? And I’m not even talking about the behemoth philosophical conundrum: the existence of evil – I haven’t worked my way to that yet. I’m just asking why lovers hurt and bills pile up, why so many, near the end, look back with such regret? Why is friendship so hard to come by? Why does raising kids inevitably take me on this insane trip from joy to fury to boredom to anxiety back to joy, all before breakfast? Why do I get caught on this loop of anxiety or shame or addiction?

There’s goodness everywhere too, I know this; but at the moment, I’m wondering why are things so often so hard? Why all the mourning? Some might say it’s a fruit of our age, our self-absorbed, therapeutic idiosyncrasies trapping us in a small, obsessive circle. However, I’m reading the Psalms, not Psychology Today. Our foremothers asked these same questions. This is a human dilemma, not a modern dilemma.

When we seek to follow the kind God offered to us in the Bible and when we long to live a life awake to our own selves and to the world God has given us, at some point we find ourselves asking: God, why all the mourning?

And, perhaps annoyingly, the Psalmist doesn’t do much to answer the question. The Psalmist doesn’t break into a metaphysical soliloquy or chide the query. So far as I’ve found, there is no tight, logical response to the repeated request for clarification. The Psalmist simply, with songs and prayers, says: “Put your hope in God.”

Be Easy

Straining on the toilet

we learn how

the lightning bug feels. {Kooser and Harrison}

 

Wyatt, our ten-year-old, has moved into the big leagues, the upper elementary school where they move from class to class through cavernous halls and (because apparently the place was built before the advent of lockers) lug pounds of massive textbooks. The poor kids look like Notre Dame’s hunchback. The foreboding buildings can be a bit of a zoo because every 5th and 6th grader in the city calls this home for two years. It is a good school and Wyatt was eager, but there is an intimidation factor. He doesn’t know many kids, and the transition includes a period where you flounder. Just wait, I keep thinking, middle school is a whole other level of awkward.

Today, Wyatt has his first presentation. Wyatt has to stand in front of his class and tell a few strands of his story and explain his “artifact box.” The box contains several of his favorite things: a book (Hunger Games), a video game (NCAA football, 2006 – because his dad’s too cheap to get anything up to date) and a piece eluding to Greek gods because this boy loves an epic tale, particularly if swords and intrigue are involved.

Wyatt has been nervous since Friday. He’s told us multiple times his vision of a best case scenario: I hope I don’t go first and I hope the person before me does a bad job – but no one laughs at them — and then I won’t feel so much pressure. Not exactly generous, but I see where he’s coming from.

I explained the trick every father since Methuselah has passed down to their son, the one about imagining everyone in their underwear. That only messed him up more. I took a a second swipe. “Wyatt, all your friends in your class are in the same boat you’re in.”

“But dad,” he answered. “I don’t have many friends in my class. Only two.”

The year will go well for Wyatt, as will the presentation I’m sure. He’ll have more friends at the end than he has now at the beginning. Still, he has to walk this path. We all do. It’s hard to move into new places. It’s hard to carry the loneliness and the fear, the anxiety about who you are and whether you belong. And my experience tells me you can be forty and still live these questions.

This morning, we read (from The Message) Jesus’ words in Luke 7: Be easy on people. I love that. We have no idea what the person we’re meeting today carries with them, but we do know (if we’ve paid attention) what we have carried — and what we sometimes carry even now. We know what it is to strain at our life. We know what it is to be alone or misplaced or fearful. We know that there are times (many) when we need someone to pause for friendship, someone to simply go easy on us.

Today, I find myself praying for Wyatt, Let someone be easy. And I’m praying the same for you. Why don’t we all just lower our guard and open our ears, drop our sarcasm and our critique. Why don’t we all just go easy on each other.