Dissatisfied With a Bland Way of Life

An ebook excerpt—

The trouble started some fifteen years earlier with a very specific event—a vision, though I was then too blind to see it as one.  There was no ecstatic trance, no audible voice of God.  Nor was I knocked off my horse.  Rather a slant of light broke through, for just a fleeting moment, and left something of itself within me that’s kept me restless ever since.

Presbyterians gather regularly as pastors and elders of local congregations to worship and pray, deliberate and decide.  We eat pie and have our after-the-meeting-parking-lot-meetings where the real business gets talked about.  The meetings are mixed with testimonies to the church in mission, periods of haggling over policy matters, arguing the finer points of parliamentary procedure, and all too rarely an honest to goodness theological debate.  Much of these gatherings, as you might imagine, is rather dull and tedious.  It was during a rather tedious moment that, Stan, a pastor of one of our tall-steepled congregations tried to give a little life to his presentation about recent happenings at one of our conference centers.  Our camp and conference centers are often operating on a shoestring budget and in order to keep afloat try all kinds of things to bring in a little revenue.  Stan chaired the board of a one of our Presbyterian conference centers, which had recently rented its facility to a Hindu group for a spiritual retreat.  Stan was clearly aware that some Presbyterians might wonder why one of our mission organizations had opened its doors to welcome a bunch of Hindus.

After describing the Hindu gathering and the money we’d got hosting them, he told us about the moment when the Hindu leader had introduced him to the Hindu community.  “This,” the Hindu had said, “is the Presbyterian holy man.”  Telling the story, Stan burst into laughter and said, “Now there’s an oxymoron for you!”  And we all laughed, including me.  But as I laughed something cut at me, deep within.  In that laughter, that nervous dismissal, I felt a wound sliced open, a pain, a longing, a deep dissatisfaction with the bland state of pastoral life that could make us all laugh at holiness.  In that moment, a holy light pierced me and called out to me.

I think it was at that very moment that I resolved somewhere deep inside to become a saint, though I didn’t have the foggiest idea how.  Sadly, I didn’t know a single person who could show me the way.

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When We Realize Something’s Died

An ebook excerpt—

Late in the second decade of my ministry, I took a long look at myself and wondered at what had become of me.  The same thing comes to many of us who’ve been related to something or someone for going on twenty years.  We wake up one day, look around at ourselves and at the person or career to which we’re yoked, and realize that something’s died.

My trouble had been coming, I suppose, for quite awhile.  Such things usually don’t just show up one day, knocking at the door unannounced.  We get hints along the way.  A whisper that haunts us in the night.  A gnawing in the gut.  An ulcer, high blood pressure, depression.  We get hints, but most of us don’t have a clue what we’re to do with them.  And even if we did, few of us have the time or space or wisdom to do much about them.  And so, we keep on—hoping things will change without us having to rock the boat, praying for a miracle so we don’t have to act, denying resolutely that we’re already living, to some extent, in the midst of a crisis.  But then the knock comes, crisis stands at the door, and we’re faced with a choice.  We can bolt the door and stop our ears against the crisis, or we can let it in.  Neither feels like a good choice.  But I’m learning—largely through the witness of those women and men who’ve lived life best—that embracing crisis is the path of God.  Ignore crisis and we’ve chosen a sure way to end up sidetracked or derailed entirely, maybe even dead.  And if not dead, at least feeling like we might as well be.

I think I knew deep in my gut that were I to ignore the crisis standing at the door, I could avoid some pain in the short term, but I wouldn’t have the muscle to hold off the pain further down the road—and with the freight my crisis was carrying, I feared I’d get buried sooner not later.  It was my desperation then, more than any psychological or spiritual savvy, that got me to open that door.

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The Tale That Points the Way

Everything on this site revolves around a particular story.  It’s the tale of an outer pilgrimage that carried me into the great sand sea of the Egyptian desert and among the craggy peaks and windswept isles of western Scotland, into the streets and halls of Oxford, England and along the rugged coast of California’s Big Sur.  It’s a tale of life lived in an ordinary American city, where I’ve tried to live all that I learned on that great journey.  But it’s also the tale of an inner journey that leads through moments of exquisite happiness and pleasure, but also into periods excruciating pain and bewilderment, unspeakable sorrow and loss.  In all this I was forced, through turns wry and unsparing, to enter the very core of my being, where I found God dwelling in astonishing fullness.  A radiant center that nothing can take away, nothing can destroy.

You’ll find little snippets of that journey here on this blog as a way to help you discern the mischief God may be up to in your own life.

The whole tale is told in my ebook, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World, available as a free download in the Resource section on this site.