I had just come from a really uplifting, substantive, nuanced conversation over coffee with a young man who is brimming with ideas and passion to bring God’s love to the poor, underserved and overlooked on our city’s largely minority southeast side, when I came upon the street preacher. But more about him in a minute.

A black man who grew up in the Chicago projects and didn’t expect to live beyond 20, my friend is now nearing 30, with a wonderful wife and young daughter, a thriving college ministry on the local university campus, and a heart to bring God’s message of hope and peace to the people who need it most. He talks of putting tutors in the local elementary school, advocating for people who struggle with housing and getting enough food, and building up local leaders. His zeal is infectious; a tall guy with broad shoulders, he leans forward when he gets excited (which is often), his eyes gleaming bright, and he speaks with the poetry of a born preacher, calling the loose federation of friends and supporters of God’s vision for the city’s poor the “brown and down.” “We’re either brown, or we’re down with our brown brothers and sisters,” he says, smiling widely.

I left the meeting feeling uplifted and buzzing with excitement to see where my friend’s desire to serve God takes him in the coming months and years. I left, dare I say it, feeling proud to be a Christian (though one who tends to run blazing hot and arctic cold) and to see what the Good News—in good hands—might look like.

And then, there was the street preacher.

As a university town, my city is pretty liberal and accepting of all manner of eccentricities and eccentrics. There was the homeless man festooned in a rainbow assortment of clothes, buttons with slogans and a most awesome bowler hat who called himself “Chicago” and wandered downtown one summer making friends with everyone he met. The woman who played the only three songs she apparently knew, and badly, on the xylophone under my office window day in and day out for most of another summer. Another woman a few weeks ago who stood silently, in full geisha regalia, for an entire day, bowing to offer a slip of paper with a fortune in exchange for coins dropped into a wooden box at her feet, never explaining what she was up to.  An attorney who dresses up each day like an early 20th century dandy, as if every day were Halloween.

Occasionally on popular bar-hopping nights for students in the full throes of the school semester, a guy with a Bible will stand on a corner muttering condemnation and hellfire to the bemused passersby. But this was something new, something different.

First, the preacher set up shop in the middle of downtown, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a workweek. An assistant had set up an elaborate sound system in a space used for family-friendly concerts in the summer. Christian music—the bland, forgettable, repetitive, emotionally overwrought variety frequently heard on music stations with “life” or “joy” in the call sign—blared out of large speakers wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect them against steady, gray, autumn drizzle. Love songs about Jesus and heaven pounded out of the amped up speakers, rattling the windows of nearby shops and businesses and prompted people to give the space wide berth to protect their hearing and nerves. After about 30 minutes of this, and without lowering the volume a single decibel, the minister stepped up with a microphone, a heavyset man in a black trench coat and fedora, and in a booming, strained voice began—well, as near as I could tell, began preaching. You couldn’t actually hear many of his words, as he competed with his own music. But the lilt and timber and familiar sing-song cadence of a tent revivalist, the occasional drawn out “yes jay-susssss,” made it clear this guy was out to win souls for the Lord.

It went over about as well as you might expect. Those who didn’t glare at him for disturbing the peace--and I can’t overstate how invasive the blaring music felt in the relatively small space of the pedestrian mall--simply ignored him. Whatever he thought he was accomplishing, whatever fever dreams told him to deliver the message of salvation in this particular way on this particular day, he was really just confirming a caricature of all that’s wrong with modern, Western, polemical Christianity. Unlike my young friend, he was making the Good News sound like bad news: like hate, anger, judgment. Like a threat with a gun to the head.

I mention all this because I’m at a precarious point in my own faith, which after a difficult divorce last year, has felt like so much play-acting and wishful thinking. Somewhat inadvertently, my church played a part in tipping over the first domino that started the end of a 19-year marriage. I prayed to God again and again to keep my wife and me together. But for some very complicated reasons, it wasn’t to be, and I went from bereft, to furious (with the situation, with my ex-wife, with God), to simply not caring anymore. In the span of a few short months I lost a wife and marriage, an intact family, a church community, and my faith.

A spiritual person by nature (and a neurotic one, too), I’ve practiced Buddhist meditation and mindfulness the past few months, and it’s been incredibly beneficial. By sitting in silence for five, fifteen or thirty minutes most mornings, focusing on my in-breaths and out-breaths, and observing thoughts and feelings that arise without attaching narratives to them (my life is awful, I’m a bad person, everyone hates me), I’ve stretched my capacity to be at ease when I begin feeling groundless or the energy in the people around me gets a little weird or trying. A stub toe is a minor pain, but it’s less likely to be proof that I’m a klutz, that I’m uncoordinated, unloveable (believe me, my mind can go to the worst case scenario in the blink of an eye).

And yet, that familiar tug, that beckoning whisper so unlike the ranting of the street preacher, that invitation to come back home. A recent series of “signs” (an invitation to support my friend in his local mission work, to serve on the board of a new non-profit that seeks to serve Africa). Above all, a year after my divorce, the feeling that it’s time to move on, to stand up at last, to figure out how I want to spend what remains of my life, to use what remains of my strength, my mind, my love.

But I know going home won't be easy, and going back to the community where my marriage's deconstruction began may prove, ultimately, impossible. The conflagration of the past year has left me tender, raw, stripped down and with little interest in or capacity for theater, magical thinking, or clap-happy triumphalism. The real good news, when I think about it, is this: that wasn't Jesus' gig, either.

Maybe there's hope after all.

What is faith(fulness)?

Each morning (well, most mornings) I begin my day by reading from Common Prayer, not the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church, but the devotional with a social justice bent by the dreadlock-wearin', Jesus-lovin' Shane Claiborne. Like many devotionals, Common Prayer is a mix of brief refrains repeated throughout the reading, psalms, songs, Scripture and an invitation to pray. Notably, it doesn't just say that -- pray, meaning, ask for whatever you want. It explicitly invites the reader to pray for others.

Selfishly, I have found this to be incredibly difficult, to pray only for the needs of others and not my own. So occasionally I'll sneak in my own requests here and there -- sometimes at the beginning of my devotions, sometimes at the end. This is especially true when the life of whoever I'm praying for is inextricably linked to my own life and behavior, like my wife, my daughters, my coworkers. For instance, my wife was recently diagnosed with a bulging disk low in her spine, and in the weeks that we've been waiting to figure out what's next, I've continually prayed for God to heal her (through divine intervention or through the God-given talents of a neurosurgeon) but also for God to grant me patience, humility and strength as I manage, solo, our household and family (clean, cook, mow, grocery shop, etc.). Yeah, maybe I'm cheating a little from what Common Prayer is asking me to do. But when I pray for things like patience, I really believe I am kinda praying for others, too, because when I get angry, impatient, grumpy, others suffer along with me.

Which leads me to this: our relationship with God is not a binary, either you're being faithful or you're not, kinda thing. In fact, I'm discovering that faith is at best a messy, inexact, often chaotic affair. Things are rarely clearcut. Cause and effect, so central to the process of scientific discovery, don't always follow one another in the Kingdom of God. A prayer for healing "wasted" on a man who proves to be insane may--because the act was witnessed by someone--result in a dozen people giving their lives to Jesus. Because you plant an apple seed in New Jersey, God's creation--via a complex ecosystem, wind currents and the migratory patterns of birds--may provide a hungry child in South America with fruit to eat and live another day. Pure Salvador Dali, baby. Loaves and fishes. Do I mean all this literally? Well, yeah, I guess I do. I believe God's love is a furnace that transforms our mediocrity and selfishness into pure gold, our sins rising like dross to the surface where they are skimmed off and thrown into the darkness.

So faith isn't about believing right things, or never making mistakes. It's about knowing who you belong to, and returning to that source of life again and again. Admitting, along with the disciples, that for all the allure of this world, for all the come-ons and distractions, there is nowhere else to go but the Father's arms. Messy, broken and lost as we are.

The concluding prayer in Common Prayer this morning seems apt:

You hear our prayers whether they are full of thanksgiving or full of complaints. Your mercy is unending. Even in your discipline you restrain yourself in ways we cannot know. May our mumbled words of gratitude and our fleeting praises find crevices where they can grow within your presence, Lord of light and morning. Amen.

Magnolia

Two trees flank the driveway of our house, an ornamental crabapple on one side and a decrepit magnolia on the other. You don’t much notice them the rest of the year. But in the spring, like Plain Janes all gussied up for their very first prom night, they are something to behold. Almost in defiance of nature and seemingly overnight the crabapple bursts forth with thousands of tiny white flowers and the magnolia’s buds, which look a little like alien pods ready to spawn green-tentacled critters, erupt into gorgeous, waxy pink and cream blossoms that are large and delicate as teacups. They don’t give off much perfume, or maybe my middle-aged sniffer has become too inured to delicate scents, but what a visual feast! No matter how bad a day at work I’ve had, my chest swells with pride and my heart uplifts with bliss when I round the corner to our street and take in the spectacle in our front yard.

A few years ago, when some of the cousins were visiting, I cobbled together a swing from some heavy nylon rope and a plank of maple, clambered up the step ladder and tied the two rope ends to one of the magnolia’s thicker limbs with the only knot I know – the half-hitch. Any good sailor or farmer will tell you that except for maybe securing the laces of your tennis shoes or lashing shut a Hefty bag, this knot is useless and utterly unreliable. So I had no illusion this was a permanent fixture and I fully intended to dismantle it after the cousins left. But maybe it was raining, or I got distracted, and I never got around to taking that swing down, and my kids, and my kids’ friends, and the cousins, who have come back a few times since, still love to ride it, screaming with glee, or lost in reverie, under the bobbing, knobby branch of the magnolia. Yeah, I worry that one day those amateur knots will give out and someone will make a hard landing—hopefully nothing worse—and I will berate myself for not taking the deadly contraption down sooner. But when I see a child with the wind in her hair pumping her legs under that canopy of blousy blossoms and laughing, it is like a dream of childhood that I never want to see end.

Sadly, the spectacle is too brief. In late April, barely a day passes without a gentle shower or a brief thunderstorm to wash the road sand and winter grit down the storm drains and make everything bright and clean and fresh, get the earth ready for another chance at Eden. The weather takes a toll on the crabapple and magnolia, though. May is still a day away and already the driveway is littered with fallen petals, turning brown, staining the concrete and giving off a smell my aging nose can detect, the smell of vegetation slowly turning to rot. Melinda says that before the rains the magnolia is like a wedding, and after the rains like the post-celebration, the dance floor littered with confetti and cocktail napkins, the guests all gone home to sleep off the celebration. And the bride and groom in some undisclosed location happily dozing in one another’s arms and dreaming of their future together.

Incredible video using only still photos

Twenty days. Twenty thousand still images. A single message. Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk captures the issue of global warming in a video created entirely by using still images. It's part of the countdown to Earth Hour, March 29.

Click here to view it. It's lovely, and depressing, all at the same time.

Worth a listen

I'm a frequent visitor to the Vineyard Community Church of Iowa City Website. Two big reasons are the church's pastors, Adey and Tom Wassink. They are two of the most dynamic, poignant, smart, funny (funny is very important to me; though it’s not in the Bible, I imagine Jesus laughed quite a bit), eloquent, engaged and real preachers I’ve ever heard. I know this because, every chance I get, I go to the Vineyard site and download and listen to mp3s of their sermons. (Go here, click on Downloads in the left-hand navigation bar, and then on Teachings.)

Adey and Tom spin wonderful stories, drawing from the Bible, of course, and tradition, yes, but also from their own lives, detailing their personal and spiritual travails and the opportunities they encounter for exemplifying Christ, as well as the struggles and joys of members in their congregation, and of their church as a body. Adey's most recent lesson begins with a story about an almost surreal encounter with a severely asthmatic woman and her traveling companions late Christmas Eve night in Chicago's O'Hare airport during a harried attempt to get home in time to be on church Sunday. The story, and intricately woven lesson contained within it about making one's life matter, is incredibly moving.

Trust me: listen to these sermons and you will be transported. You will feel lighter and more substantial at the same time. You will laugh. You will cry. You will yearn to be part of a community like theirs, part of the vision they so vividly and passionately describe. Above all, you will be inspired and challenged to serve Jesus Christ more creatively, more dynamically, more immediately. I am not exaggerating when I say I await the posting of a fresh sermon each week the way a five-year-old child looks forward to Christmas morning.

I read a lot of books. Books on theology, mission, evangelism, social justice. Occasionally I’ll come across a particularly well-turned phrase or anecdote that makes my heart soar with a sense of new possibility. But I don’t retain much of what I read, and in very short order the text, the lessons, the anecdotes begin to sift out of my brainpan like sand through a sieve, leaving little behind. But the stories Adey and Tom tell, their sermons, stay with me for weeks, for months. I’ve shared a few with my wife and we’ve talked about them for days afterward, in particular one of Adey’s teachings about demanding maturity from one's husband or wife. I won't go into why my wife found that topic so fascinating.

Like the best stories, theirs impart lessons but also inspire a certain joyful urgency, an anxiousness to roll up one’s sleeves and get to God’s work. If you have time and courage (because these are more than nice, neat Sunday School lessons), I encourage you to listen. And if there are some sermons/talks out there that have had a big impact you, let me know so I can post links to them here.

Peace

Stephen

Just For the Feng of It

It’s amazing the kind of curiosity you can stir when you do something as seemingly innocuous as clean your office.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a slob. OK. I’m not as bad as my old friend, Fritz. His apartment was perennially strewn with dirty clothes, dinner plates of congealing beef bones from the local Steak-Out restaurant and paychecks he never seemed to get around to cashing. One time he so convinced himself he was going to be fired from the newspaper where we worked as reporters that he stocked his freezer with six months worth of meat. He also bought a pair of pricey Kenneth Cole shoes for future job interviews, and then refused to take them out of the velvet bag they came in and actually wear them for fear of scuffing them up.

But I digress.

Neatness and organizational skills aren’t my strong suits. I like a tidy house just like the next metrosexual husband of the 21st Century. At home, I’m more inclined than not to pick up the stray sock and toss it in the hamper, empty and reload the dishwasher when the sink starts getting full and wipe down the bathroom countertop when it gets a tad too hairy for my liking.

Work, however, is another matter.

A lot of paperwork crosses my desk each day. OK. Not so much crosses as flounders halfway across the channel, gets leg cramps and sinks beneath the undulating waves of languishing press releases, story tips, newspapers, magazines, phone messages and notebooks, settling into a papery pauper’s grave. Dust gathers there too. And crumbs from lunches long digested and forgotten. Sometimes money and plastic toys my girls play with when they visit my office. Now and again I hear the faint howl and moan of a small dog, but I suspect this is rather a trick of acoustics and that the dog is actually outside somewhere or else a complete figment of my imagination.

Well, a week ago I decided to do something about the mess. My computer was being upgraded and could not be used for a couple of hours, so rather than stare out the window I thought it would be a good idea to neaten up the place where I essentially live for forty hours a week. I threw away a forest of paper, actually put files in my big gray file cabinet (so THAT’S what that’s for), wiped down all flat surfaces and a few vertical ones, donated an extra chair to my friend Blaze. My wife, excited at the prospect of no longer needing a tetanus shot when she comes to visit, celebrated my clean sweep by buying for me a small bookcase and a lamp so I wouldn’t have to sit in the glare of overhead fluorescent lights anymore. I had to admit, the lamp provided a nice aesthetic balance to the tabletop fountain I made during a fit of craft-mania one year.

Others seemed to notice, too.

“Looks like you’ve been watching a little too much ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,’” my alleged friend, Blaze, said as he walked by my office one morning. “Trying to put a little more Feng in your Shui?”

I noticed he was carrying a bag full of potting soil and other products for the plants he was nursing in his own office.

“Look who’s calling the kettle black,” I retorted smartly, cranking up my CD of chanting Benedictine Monks to drown out his ridicule.

A couple days later Blaze stopped by again and took a look around my now clean and sparkly office.

“You know, you can get your aura realigned too if you want,” he said. A few minutes later he sent an email proving that he wasn’t fibbing – a university in California (where else?) apparently offers the service to students, faculty and staff through its health clinic. I tried to imagine what an aura realignment entailed exactly. Did they rotate your chakras? Top off your body fluids? Would hot candle wax be involved?

Another coworker used the occasion of my recent office purge to recount her experience at a local spa. After her massage, the masseuse said my colleague still seemed a bit tense and offered to do a "magnetic deruffling" for her, gratis. The masseuse drifted toward the foot-end of the table, but my friend was stomach down and couldn’t tell what the masseuse was up to down there.

“Now,” said the masseuse, sotto voce, “I want you to relax and imagine a blue flame at the bottom of your feet.”

“Oooookay,” my friend responded.

And then – nothing. No sound. No sensation. Curious, my friend craned her neck to take a peak and found the woman making dramatic sweeping motions with her hands, from just behind her feet toward the floor. Needless to say, my friend was not impressed.

Then I got a Feng Shui kit.

It was a gift from Blaze and his wife, Amy, who picked it up at a Starbucks, where they make almost daily pilgrimages for the new Chantico drink, which I’ve been assured tastes like a liquid brownie. Strangely, although I love chocolate, I find the idea of a liquid brownie unappetizing. The Feng Shui kit, on the other hand, is pretty sweet.

This is what it comes with: Tazo tea in three flavors -- Zen, Calm and Awake; a Feng Shui Color Guide, a Legend of Feng Shui, Three Powerful Figures of Fortune, the Feng Shui Guide to Happiness, a list of Nine Perfect Thoughts, a Feng Shui Wind Poem, Three Lucky Coins and One Powerful Dragon Figure.

Imagine, all that wisdom and serenity in a box that weighs in at just 1.4 ounces.

Of course, the figures are little cardboard cutouts, as are the coins. And the Nine Perfect Thoughts, which are to be torn off at the perforations and carried around for good luck, are about as profound as the slips of paper you find in fortune cookies at low-rent Chinese restaurants. They range from banal to painfully unfunny. To wit (or not):

“I possess the luck and the fortune of the dragon.”

“When my furniture is in alignment, I no longer bump my shins.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the stove before I leave to work.”

“Perhaps this is the year I will get new drapes.”

And so on.

In the brief Legend of Feng Shui I learn that the term itself is pronounced foong shway, not like something Garth from Wayne’s World might say when a good-looking woman passes by.

I have to admit, though, I do kind of like the Wind Poem, or “weathergram,” that comes with the kit. It’s basically a tag where you can write down a simple thought, prayer or poem, and then hang it from a tree limb for some stranger to find. Inside the tag it says, “If you are touched by the message on this Wind Poem, please feel free to take it: You might offer the string to a bird for its nest.”

I like the idea of leaving inspirational messages where people you don’t know might find them, the anonymous kindness of it. It seems like a very simple, pure gesture in a world where we’re bombarded by messages and demands and come-ons. There’s no reward for our gesture – or at least none we will know about. If we find the tag missing one day, it could just be that the wind blew it down, or some litter officer stuffed it in his trash bag, or a bird decided to use the whole thing to line its nest. Then again, maybe someone who was on the edge of despair came across it just when she needed it and thought of it has a blessing from an angel, which in a way maybe it was.

So the next time you’re out and about, walking among the budding trees, keep an eye peeled. There might just be a little Wind Poem blowing in the breeze, waiting for you to pluck it from a quivering branch.

How Shui it is.

A Wing and a Prayer

From up here it looks like someone murdered the Holy Spirit.

The pigeon is splayed on its back against the alley’s wet, filthy pavement, its head wreathed in fresh blood. The tail feathers are fanned out, and the smoky blue wings – which are creamy white on the undersides – are half open and akimbo. The head is cocked slightly and a solitary, tangerine eye remains open and fixed on the purple-gray sky as if the pigeon is waiting for someone to descend from the clouds, scoop it up and take it back where it belongs.

I’d heard the soft thump of flesh striking glass, a common enough occurrence in an office building with large picture windows. Usually the bird glances off, tumbles a bit and then claws its way back into the air, no worse for the encounter. But this was different. It sounded different. The flurry of feathers dropped away and down like a diver pitching backwards off the gunwale of a boat. I stood up to look where it had gone.

The pigeon was upright on the ground, two stories below, taking halting steps along the alley and shaking its head, the way people do in cartoons when they’re trying to shake loose some crazy idea. Okay, I thought. It’s disoriented. In a minute or two it’ll flex its wings, scoop up some air and join the thirty or forty of its kin making the mid-afternoon rounds of the downtown sky. Only it didn’t. The head-shaking slowed until the pigeon looked like it was nodding off to sleep.

I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, asking God to fix whatever was hurting in the bird. I tried to will it to fly. But the impact and fall broke something inside it that was beyond repair. Suddenly, the pigeon started flapping violently and flipped itself onto its back. That’s when I saw the splatters of blood on the ground, the red glistening in its beak. It took two or more shuddering breaths and then it died.

Now I feel as though I’m in mourning. Yeah, maybe it’s a little crazy. I mean, lots of people consider pigeons to be nothing more than “flying rats” that carry diseases and crap on statues and fight over breadcrumbs in the public squares, making a general nuisance of themselves. But I’ve never liked to see birds or other animals in peril or suffering. I always brake for squirrels. If there’s a bug in the house, I catch it, open the door and let it loose outside. Once, when I was living in South Carolina, I stopped my car to help a turtle cross the road because I was afraid the next driver might not notice it and smash it to smithereens.

A couple years ago I made the mistake of leaving a door open to my garage a few days too many. A family of sparrows came in and built a nest in a stack of wood I kept on shelves mounted close to the ceiling, which meant that I couldn’t close the door all summer because the mom and dad sparrows wouldn’t be able to go out and look for food for the babies. One morning I saw that a recently hatched chick had fallen from the perch, hit the roof of the van parked in the garage and tumbled to the cement floor. Miraculously it was still alive. So I put on my leather work gloves, gently scooped the frail creature in my hands and climbed a ladder to put the bird back in its nest. All summer I worried about that chick, wondered if it would survive, wondered if it might have picked up my scent and been rejected by the parents. The next summer I got my answer. We had bought a new house and I needed to take down the wood and there, dry as a fig and half as big, were the desiccated remains of the baby bird. I tried to not let it bother me, but it did, and I felt like I shared some of the blame for the bird’s death, though I can’t say why.

In Luke, Jesus says, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Luke 12:6-7). Most folks who read that passage focus on the part about people being really important to God. And while that’s true, it also says that not a single creature on Earth is forgotten by God. Not an ant. Not a flea. Not those annoying bugs that skitter up your nose and buzz in your ear at the height of summer. Not an elephant killed for its ivory, or a bear for its paws. Not the loon that gets caught in a plastic soda can ring carelessly discarded by a boater and drowns. Not the baby sparrow born in my garage. Not the pigeon that, giddy for the gift of flight, mistook a window for the sky and flew straight through death’s open door.

Personally I prefer the other name for pigeons, the one they had before they fell from grace in the eyes of human beings and were relegated to the trash-heap category of pest: Rock Dove. Dove. Symbol of peace.

Symbol of the Holy Spirit.

It’s a little thing, but I’m glad the Rock Dove didn’t die alone. Even though I was two stories up and could do nothing to save it, it wouldn’t seem right for its life to pass without someone noticing. No one, no living creature, should die alone.

Every hair on your head. Every feather. Every first and final breath.