Category: Faith

Generous engagement: The two things you’re not supposed to talk about (part 1)

Published on by Adam Thomas3 Comments

With a mere eight days left before the presidential election and with a friend to whom I really can’t say no coaxing me to step into this quagmire, I find my thoughts turning to the intersection between faith and politics. This is not just any intersection — this is the intellectual version of what my seminary friends call “dysfunction junction,” which I imagine gives 1 in 10 drivers in Alexandria, Virginia symptoms of PTSD. At that intersection, Braddock Road, Quaker Lane, and King Street all cross, and many vehicles trying to brave the passage do not make it out unscathed.

With the image of dysfunction junction planted firmly in my mind, I turn it to faith and politics, while the collective cry of grandparents everywhere echoes that those are the two things one is not supposed to talk about. I plan to talk about the political dimension of Jesus’ message in the next installments of this series, but first I must clear something up from a political science perspective, and here it is:

The phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in our official political documents. Media Pundits and Joes Six-Pack alike invoke these five words everyday, but all they serve to do is reduce a much more complicated relationship into a morass of error and misunderstanding. Religion is mentioned exactly once in the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” That’s it. That’s all we’ve got. First things first: the amendment deals specifically with congress. Churches can seek to impact the government all they want; the amendment concerns the power of congress, not the curtailment of the voice of the church.

Now, over the years, the Supreme Court has decided myriad cases by interpreting these two clauses of the First Amendment. The court gets involved simply because there is no complete wall of separation between church and state, as much as Thomas Jefferson wanted one. In 1963, the Court set a standard by which the government can indeed infringe on someone’s free exercise of religion as long as the government has a “compelling interest” and the resultant action is the “least restrictive” it can be (Sherbert v. Verner). My constitutional law notes from college have 33 religious cases cited, and those are just the important ones. The court has looked at issues such as school prayer, expulsion for religious motivations for failing to salute the flag, blue laws, drug use in religious ceremonies, wearing of religious symbols on military uniforms, displaying religious imagery on government property, polygamy, school vouchers, tax exemptions…*

All this to say that the government entangles itself in the religious establishment, no matter how much it tries not to. And the religious establishment, especially in the decades since the rise of the religious right, is unafraid to wade into the waters of politics. So, while the “separation of church and state” may be a nice shorthand for keeping us out of the messy business of theocracy, the phrase does not describe how our system functions.

People of faith should not fear to let their religious beliefs guide their political decisions. Rather, inviting God to be a part of your political decisions can lead to a more generous, sensitive engagment among those with whom you disagree. Of course, if invitation is corrupted by a toxic expectation that God is going to rubber stamp everything you decide is right, then this generosity and sensitivity will disappear. A prayerful reflection of the values Jesus teaches and the life he calls us to lead, along with a prayer for a discerning heart, help us to act responsibly and effectively in the political sphere.

With that sticky business about the separation of church and state cleared up, we can turn to the political message of Jesus’ teaching. Stay tuned for the second installment of “The two things you’re not supposed to talk about.”

Footnotes

*It would make for an extra boring post if I went into the actual legal stuff in here, and I’m not qualified to do so anyway. I have a Polical Science degree, not a JD. Suffice to say, the government (usually) tries hard not to break its own rules, but sometimes it does. Most of us just don’t notice most of the time.

For once I didn’t disengage

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Detachment. Recently, I’ve been giving in to the feelings of this my most famous and well-documented coping mechanism. Friends will tell you that I barely left my room during my second year of seminary except to go to classes and meals. Some days were better than others. I could stomach watching a football game in the common room or going to a birthday dinner at the Mexican restaurant. But on the worst nights — ones in which I had been invited out and had even made a vague commitment to going — I got dressed in going out clothes, laced up my going out shoes, paced the room, argued with myself, grasped the door handle half a dozen times, manufactured some phantom nausea, and put my pajamas back on. I hated myself for those nights. Back then I was coping with the loss of a long-term relationship; I dealt with the decoupling by detaching myself from everyone else, too. I know — not the healthiest of coping mechanisms. Indeed, I needed a coping mechanism for my coping mechanism. But more on that in a moment.

Before you start calling in a crack squad of psychotherapists, this recent bout with detachment is nowhere near as severe. Like Spinal Tap’s amps, the detachment a few years ago went up to eleven. This time, the severity is at about a two or three. But enough of the shadow of that previous time hovers in my memory, making me all too aware of the dangers of detachment. Back then, a loss of relationship made me pull away. Ironically, a similar set of responses is happening as I form new relationships at my new parish. Of course, with the new relationships come the ending or transforming of other relationships. Suffice to say, the constellation of relationships in my night sky is changing, and something in that change is causing me to fall back on my erstwhile coping mechanism.

Enter this week’s lesson from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. Paul discusses various practices that some find objectionable and others find completely acceptable. Each group thinks they are the ones who are truly honoring God. Paul tells them that both sides are giving thanks to God by different actions, so neither has a right to pass judgment on the other. In this context, Paul writes a verse of surpassing beauty and profundity: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

As I contemplate my recent relapse into old patterns of detachment, I realize that these words have been with me from my first week at my new parish. Since the beginning of August, I have been a part of three memorial services — liturgies during which people come together to mourn and laugh and grieve and celebrate the life of a loved one who has died, and in so doing, celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the beginning of each service, the priest intoned these same words from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Each time I heard these words in the last month, I got that spine-tingling feeling that happens when God drops an ice cube down your back to remind you that God’s still there.

These words of Paul speak the beautiful and profound truth that we belong to God, or as the Episcopal burial office puts it: “We are the Lord’s possession.” This reminds me that however much I may feel the need to detach, to disentangle myself from life or friends or responsibilty, God never severs the relationship with me. Hearing Paul’s words during those special memorial services kept me from disengaging in the midst of all the changes and chances my life had been through in recent months.

This is why “church” is so important. In the context of the community of faith, the Lord spoke words of renewed invitation to me. I’m sure you’ve heard the popular epithet that describes someone as “spiritual, but not religious.” I think I understand some of the cultural and sociological forces that have contributed to the emergence of this category. One of these forces, sadly, is a misunderstanding on the societal level of what “religion” means. In the modern era, the terms “religion” and “church” took on the connotation of “edifice” — of imposing structure and immutable establishment.

But “church” has very little to do with a building and much to do with a people gathered. While structure and doctrine have their necessity, “religion” does not mean structure and doctrine. When you get right down to it, “religion” means “reconnection.” Re-ligio. Just look at the word and think of all the football players (most recently Tom Brady of my beloved Patriots) who have had surgery for torn ACLs.  An ACL tear is repaired by reconnecting the torn ligaments to the muscle and bones of the knee. Likewise, “religion” is all about reconnecting us to the One who holds us all in possession. And “church” is all about celebrating that reconnection with one another.

The musical Rent offers a stark view of the reality of our society and shows the utter need for these resources of connection and relationship. Near the end of the show, after the characters have dispersed and gone their separate ways, Roger and Mark sing about that special Christmas Eve last year when their group of friends came together to celebrate life and love. They sing: “What was it about that night? Connection in an isolating age. For once the shadows gave way to light. For once I didn’t disengage.” Opening themselves up to that connection with others leads them to joy and pain and life and death and the grittiness of a love that has survived all the assassination attempts by the forces of isolation.

When I begin to let myself detach from those around me, I must remember that God has already repaired the torn ligament and banished the shadows of isolation. I am the Lord’s possession. I am the Lord’s when I die. And I am the Lord’s while I live. I just need to make sure I’m living while I am alive, to make sure that I stay connected to those around me and celebrate the love of the God who knits us all together.

The county fair

Published on by Adam Thomas7 Comments

The smells of sweat and fried dough hung in the air, mixing with the burned oil of the tractor pull. He was sitting with hands clasped, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a challenge on his deeply lined, leathery face. She was standing, looking all the world like a Grant Wood painting, and thrusting matchbook-sized pamphlets into the hands of passersby. I walked by out of reach, but I couldn’t help looking at the booth, one of many at the county fair. “How sure are you of going to heaven? Are you 50% 75% 100% sure?” read the banner. My friend wondered aloud about how one arrives at a 75% surety of heaven. I chuckled, but I was unable to keep walking by the booth. On the table, a wooden contraption with three small doors read: “Do you know the three things God CANNOT do?”

I stopped. The Grant Wood painting saw my furrowed brow and handed me a pamphlet. It looked like a doll’s magazine. A smiley face decorated the cover along with the words: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” I closed my hand around the pamphlet and pointed to the three doors. I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice, but I failed miserably: “So, what are the three things God can’t do?” I said.

She opened the first door: “God CANNOT lie.” She opened the second door: “God CANNOT change.” She opened the third door: “God CANNOT let people into heaven who have not been born again.”

We talked for fifteen minutes. I told them I did not disagree with the first door, but that I preferred to state the sentiment in positive terms: “God always tell the truth” or “God is trustworthy and faithful.” I said that a “lie” is the absence of the “truth,” and that I’d rather talk about God’s goodness shown in God’s truthfulness than to try to hook people with the trappings of sensationalism. After five minutes, the man commented that I was very intelligent. I took that as a compliment, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was not meant as such.

As our conversation continued, I realized we weren’t conversing. We were sparring. I’ve never had a taste for theological pugilism, but I was already three rounds deep, so I kept jabbing and blocking. I’ve had this same conversation with county fair proselytizers, but never as an ordained person. After the man commented on my intelligence, he asked me what I did. I said, “I’m a priest.” Without another word, he thrust another pamphlet in my hand. It was about how Roman Catholics aren’t real Christians and are going to hell.The same thought kept jumping to the front of my mind: “People like these, no matter how pure and ardent their intentions, make my job harder.”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Roman Catholic. It didn’t matter that I agreed with the man and woman several times during our bout. The only thing that mattered was that I didn’t buy into the way they framed the Christian faith–as a bottom-line venture whose only goal is to “save souls” by following the instructions in the smiley-face doll-sized magazine. Surely, there’s more than that. Surely, the abundance of what God has done and is doing is more important than a “what’s behind door number 3” marketing scheme concerned with what God CANNOT do.

As I walked away, I wondered what had been accomplished during our boxing match. In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus says that when two or three are gathered in his name, he will be in the midst of them. Were we gathered “in his name” or in our own names, intent on KOing the other’s theological stance? Was Jesus there? Was I 50% 75% 100% sure of his presence? Looking back, Jesus was there, but he was not in my corner and he was not in their corner. He was there trying to get us to leave the ring.

For the sake of ten (part 3 of 3)

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This relationship which God has extravagantly blessed us with challenges the understanding of God’s immutability. Indeed, in the story, it seems (at first glance at least) that Abraham is swaying God’s mind. Many, if not most, ancient and medieval Christian thinkers assert that a facet of the divine is changelessness. This makes sense because the perfect cannot be changed; if it could, it would not be perfect. However, I think that assigning platonic categories of perfection to God is a silly exercise because God is beyond our concept of perfection.* God is more than perfect because God subsumes the category of perfection into God’s being. That is why God can send a son to earth against all the rules of fashionable Greek philosophical discourse of the time. God is other, but God is present at the same time. What we call Providence, as theologian Paul Tillich says, is the intermingling of our actions and inactions with God’s directing creativity. Part of this directing creativity is responsiveness to prayer. Tillich says that “every serious prayer contains power, not because of the intensity of desire expressed in it, but because of the faith the person has in God’s directing activity—a faith which transforms the existential situation”  When Abraham says “Far be it from you to do such a thing” (which might more expressively be translated: “How dare you!”), he is engaging in this kind of prayer. The relationship he has with God, more than the words, is the important factor in the exchange.

While it might seem that Abraham is using his close connection with God to sway God’s mind, God seems to let the exercise go on to expand Abraham’s mind concerning justice, righteousness, and sin. Abraham’s thought experiment is flawed to begin with because there is no way to separate the righteous and sinful.  Even in generations to come when it was possible to be “righteous under the law,” people kept the temple in business by sacrificing to restore their righteousness. Later, Paul reflects this reality when he says, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10). But Abraham’s seems to say, “For argument’s sake, let’s say there’s a clear distinction between the righteous and the sinful.” God humors him thus far.

Next, Abraham makes an outrageous claim that would make any level-headed person cry foul. He says, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Abraham is outraged that the righteous would be swept away with the wicked. However, he is perfectly content with the wicked remaining unpunished if even ten righteous people are found in the city. Surely, this is not justice—the wicked go unpunished for the sake of the righteous, the wicked don’t get what they deserve! Now, we all know the end of the story—Sodom gets utterly destroyed. But leaving that aside for a moment, let us pause and reflect on God’s mercy as this story elucidates it. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. It seems that as Abraham lessens the number of righteous needed to save the city, the mercy (rather than the justice) of God expands to greater and greater levels. If only ten are found, you won’t destroy the city? Heck, what about one? We never get that far, but it is not unimaginable. By the end of the story, it seems that the ten righteous are on vacation, and the city is destroyed anyway. But the extravagant claim about God’s mercy still stands, though Abraham can’t see it because of his preoccupation with justice.

This story is finally about two things that relate to each other. The first is the human inability to comprehend God and God’s action in the world. The second is the realization that humans are always in the presence of God, participating in that same action. C.S. Lewis says: “The freedom of God consists of the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower”  Our incomprehension stems from the actions of God having God’s freedom as their basis and warrant. We are in God’s presence because of God’s goodness. We participate in God’s freedom even when (or especially when) we question God as Abraham does. We participate in God’s goodness when our actions bring about the justice, mercy, and grace of God. And we participate in God’s omnipotence when we are blessed with those briefest of glimpses of God’s directing creativity, which spur us to greater action and greater love.

Footnotes

* A fair number of 20th century theologians say something similar, though I doubt they use the word “silly.”

For the sake of ten (part 2 of 3)

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Thinking we understand the ways of the world, and of God, for that matter, is a major cause of all kinds of unrest. I have been a student for nineteen years and one piece of learning that has quietly crept up on me as the years rolled by is this: there sure is a heck of a lot I don’t know. Most of my personal failings come from me thinking I know things that I don’t know. Recognizing that I do not know something is, I believe, one of God’s repetitious lessons in humility. I know so little about the world that I can see and feel and touch. If I know so little about what is actually knowable, how could I ever presume to know anything about God? About why God does what God does? And for that matter, whether or not why is even an appropriate question when God is involved?

These musings stray into the territory of an apophatic* understanding of God, but I assure you, I will not quite get there. One needs only to look at the story this reflection concerns to know that God, while supremely unknowable from our end, makes God known to us in both ordinary and mysterious ways. Indeed, Abraham talks to God!  The simple fact that there are two characters in the scene—Abraham and God—illustrates the immanence of God in our midst. It is when we turn this around and realize that it is really we who are in God’s midst that the transcendence of God smacks us square in the forehead. God is beyond our knowledge, but because of God’s grace we are not beyond glimpses of the recognition that we think, move, act, love, live in the presence of God. This is revelation, of which Jesus Christ is the most perfect example.

We live in the presence of God whether we recognize it or not. However, as our eyes adjust to the holiness around us, the injustice of the world becomes more apparent and more intolerable. Questions such as why do we suffer? and why are the good punished and the evil rewarded? and why does the world seem to be in inexorable decline socially and environmentally? abound when we link our experience of our Creator with our moral compasses. C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, begins with a discussion of religion in general. He says that the roots of religion are two-fold: the universal, uncanny, dreadful, unexplainable something that he calls experiencing the “numinous”; and the emergence of morality. The Jewish people, he continues, were the first to combine these two things when they discerned that their God both prompted them to live a life of good morals and helped them along the way. As the understanding of God as a necessarily “good” being grew, the aforementioned questions became more prevalent. Indeed, if we were without our understanding of God as a beneficent Creator, then there would be no problem associated with injustice or pain. They would simply be neutral facts, as indistinguishable from their natural counterparts as colors in the dark. However, we are blessed with the revelation that our God is good. This is both a comforting and a vexing thought. Abraham takes the vexation head on. In doing so, he accuses God of premeditated capriciousness and also shows just how poorly he, Abraham, understands the concept of justice.

“Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” says Abraham. Here Abraham wrestles with what might be termed “Divine inscrutability.”** What looks like capriciousness to humans, goes one interpretation, is God fulfilling God’s inscrutable plan. This quickly becomes the “It’s God’s will” argument. However, this progression is inherently flawed. There is obviously a paradox happening somewhere when inscrutability and knowledge of God’s will are mentioned in the same breath. These two approaches seek to answer the “why” question (why did God let this happen? etc). Inscrutability says, “I don’t know why.” The God’s will argument says just that—“It’s God’s will,” no matter what happens. The latter is a very limited understanding of our relationship with God. While the “will” of God certainly exists, it is not the organizing principle by which we live. That is, instead, reserved for the “Word” of God, which is both the foundation of existence and the incarnate being of Jesus Christ. Affirming this premise does not answer the “why” question, but supersedes it with the person of Christ, who is present with us in our pain and suffering. The inscrutability of God is maintained because we can never fully know God, but our questions are answered by a relationship with Jesus Christ (rather than an explanation).

…to be concluded.

Footnotes

* This is a five dollar seminary word that means something like: “You can never know anything about God, so quit asking.”

** Inscrutability is a funny word. You can be inscrutable, but can you just be scrutable? In think you can in Europe.

For the sake of ten (part 1 of 3)

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Abraham stares after them as they make their dusty way down into the valley. They are men to his eyes, and yet, in the shadow-stretched twilight they appear indistinct, almost shadows themselves. But not shadows; for these beings shine. They shine with the borrowed light of the one who remains with Abraham on the hilltop overlooking the candlelit city of Sodom. Abraham watches them until their shadows mingle with those of the scrub and gorse bushes. He stands there, mystified—for they have just predicted that Sarah (his Sarah!) would get pregnant. Ha. She’s far too old, her joints too arthritic, her bones too brittle to stand the strains of pregnancy. And yet. And yet they had seemed so certain. She had laughed, but it was no joke. I thought I understood the ways of the world, ponders Abraham, as the shining beings melt into the candlelight of the city.

I thought I understood the ways of the world. Perhaps not, if it is true that Sarah can still bear children. Confusion. Abraham shakes his head, as if this act would jostle loose such a silly, irrational thought as Sarah becoming pregnant. He looks down at Sodom again. And here’s another example of irrationality, he thinks. Anger kindles in his chest as he remembers the abuses that have reached his ears, the abuses committed by the people of that city. But yet—how could God destroy that place if there were righteous people there. Surely God could not be that unjust.

Abraham shakes his head again, this time with suppressed incredulity, and lifts his eyes from the twinkling lights below. He turns and approaches the third being, the one who has remained with him on the hill when the others ventured down to the city. Seen peripherally, the being is generally man-shaped. But as Abraham moves near, he perceives how inadequate a container the man-shaped body is for such an abundance of light, harmony, and awe. Abraham suppresses a shudder. He opens his mouth, but closes it again, unsure whether he wants to question or accuse. The being knows the confusion in Abraham’s mind, knows that such cognitive dissonance is the birthplace of revelation.

All at once, Abraham finds his words: question and accusation combine into indictment tinged with desperate plea for understanding. “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” He presses on, not waiting for the LORD (for, of course, this is who the luminous being on the hilltop is) to respond. “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked!” Abraham points a quivering, accusatory finger, and his pitch rises as the cause of his mental distress tumbles from him: “Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?” Tears form at the corners of his eyes; he slumps over, chest heaving with the exertion of voicing the thoughts that have been building ever since the three men approached his tent.

The LORD waits for Abraham to recover and then responds quietly, certainly: “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham hears these words and is mollified—almost. What about 45? 40? 30? 20? What about—and here Abraham raises both hands, fingers splayed—ten? “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it,” says the LORD. And then the LORD leaves Abraham with his thoughts. Abraham returns to his place to find Sarah, her deep eyes reflecting dancing firelight, lost in the same thought: I thought I understood the ways of the world.*

…to be continued.

Footnotes

* This and the upcoming two posts are pieces of a reflection on Genesis 18.

Musings upon the occasion of a sprained ankle

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

One day in April, I sprained my ankle, and in the process remembered I’m not finished being created:

The disc cut through the breeze and rose steadily into the air as the ground beneath my racing feet sloped away. I leapt for the Frisbee, it eluded my grasp, and I began falling. However, my leap had carried me farther down the sloping field than I anticipated, and my left foot connected with the turf a split-second later than it intended to. Within the next three or four split-seconds, my ankle collapsed under the weight of the rest of my body, which quite naturally followed my foot back to earth. My first thought (as my foot and calf played tug-of-war with my ankle’s ligaments) was: “Not again.” But this fatalism was short-lived, for it dissolved into much anguished rolling around, grass-pulling, and sobbing.

Ultimate Frisbee has now joined soccer, racquetball, and basketball on the list of sports that have put out contracts on my left ankle over the last nine years. Each time, my ankle swelled so I couldn’t see those two knobby protrusions of bone that everyone has, and each time, as the ankle healed, the bruise filtered down my foot, making my toes look like grapes. As I write this, my foot is wrapped in ice, and I long for the days of purple toes. And they will come in time, next week perhaps, if I keep icing and popping Ibuprofen. They will come because the body heals. And the body heals because I’m not finished being created.

The cells divide, the tissues repair, the ligaments rebound. The swelling dwindles, the toes un-purple, the strength returns. This process happened the first three times, and it has begun again. I am being created as I sit here, just breathing and sitting. I breathe in and the air floods my lungs and my lungs separate the oxygen and the oxygen feeds my heart and my heart pumps my blood and my blood carries energy to my ankle where the cells are busy dividing. Each cell division begins with breath, which is the mark of the One who continues to speak creation into existence.

It is the same with the trees, whose canopies I can see from my prone position: last week they proclaimed their constant creation as new buds reached for the sun. It is the same with the birds, whose gossip I can hear past my window: this morning they proclaimed their constant creation as they rummaged for supplies for expectant nests. It is the same with each human being, who refuses to remain exactly the same as she was yesterday or he was the day before that. The One who creates me, who (surely knowing I’d have a knack for spraining my ankle) gave my body the ability to heal, is creating still with the simple ingredients of life and light and love. I’m not finished yet. The world isn’t finished yet. This I believe.

Competing for spots in my imagination

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The day before I returned to VTS for my senior year, I went searching for something in the cupboard under the stairs. The light flickered and hiccupped, casting faint shadows on the cramped, box-strewn floor. The winter coats and old military uniforms brushed me heavily like a gas station carwash. I pulled and pushed boxes of books and elementary school projects out of the way. With a dozen or so boxes disgorged from the closet, I found what I was looking for. Three plastic tubs. Three dusty plastic tubs, each nearly two decades old. I carried them into the living room and lined them up. I slit the packing tape off the first one, opened it, and was met with piles of my childhood.

I began sifting through the legos, pulling out flat black and grey pieces and every human figurine I could lay my hands on. After several hours of collecting, lego pieces littered my living room floor like an abstract mosaic. I fitted the black and grey pieces into a grid and sorted the figurines into groups—knights and pirates, naval personnel and more knights. Another hour and my creation was finished: a lego chess set, complete with knights on horseback and kings in mail and helm.

I spent every rainy day of my childhood and some of the sunny ones building with legos. For many years, I followed the instructions meticulously: each piece went in its place, and when I was finished, I had duplicated the image on the box in three dimensions. At some unidentified point after I had hit double-digits in age, I began straying from the directions. Eventually, the sets I kept prison-like in their own boxes began to mingle. Soon, I had three plastic tubs (they were neither old nor dusty yet) piled high with anachronistic castle legos and futuristic space legos and realistic city legos, all together, all competing for spots in my imagination. I put the directions away and just began to build, to create.

Until the day before returning to seminary, I had not created anything with legos in nearly a decade. But the act of creating infused me with joy. I created videos in high school. I created music in college. And as I began to contemplate God’s movement in my life, I accepted God’s invitation to enter more fully into God’s creation.

Thinking about the call to serve God might prompt one to ask the question: why was I created? But I think this is a faulty question. To reach a better understanding of call, the question should be asked in the present tense: for what am I being created? God’s call in my life is a continuously present reality, always pushing my self-defined limits of possibility. The very act of calling assumes an act of creation, for accepting a call is simply the acknowledgment that God is already at work molding me into a better servant, a better giver, a better lover. I think this is why Paul says that whoever is in Christ is a new creation—new creations that are ever new because of constant and continual creating.

I believe that God has barely begun to create me. This thought comforts me when I realize how much I still have to learn and chastens me when I think I have everything figured out. I have perceived enough of the edge of the expanse that is the life with which God has challenged and blessed me to know that only with God’s help can I respond to God’s call. This call in me is nascent; I am still being formed, still being created. But God has known me since I was in my mother’s womb. Christ is with me until the end of the age. And the Holy Spirit moves my life, always pushing those limits of possibility. I hope that through God’s love and grace, the work God has begun in me is a good one. I hope I can respond to God with a reflection of that love and grace. I hope I continue to catch glimpses of God’s creating movement in my life.

God has invited me to participate in God’s creation. I can comprehend nothing so joyful, nothing so humbling as this. Those three old dusty plastic tubs are back in the cupboard under the stairs. The flickering light is off and the winter coats hang undisturbed. But I am still creating because God is creating me.

(This post originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of “The Call” newsletter of the Society for the Increase of the Ministry (SIM), a not-for-profit group that supports Episcopal Seminarians as they move from lay to ordained leadership in the Church. I thank God for this organization, and I thank SIM for generously supporting me, both in prayer and scholarships. Check out SIM’s website.)

What size straightjacket?

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I have had quite a bit of downtime in this month between graduation from seminary and ordination to the priesthood. While this has been a happy occasion to catch up on sleep and Law & Order:SVU, it has also produced a surplus of mental energy that is no longer being poured into my thesis and papers. Any of my friends could tell you that I think too much, especially about relationships. And when I have the time to think too much, my mind develops every choice, every scenario, every possible combination of what could go right and will go wrong to every logical and illogical conclusion.

In the last two years of seminary, I had few opportunities and even less time for my brain to engage in such frivolous and ultimately useless exercises. But now that formal studies have concluded, my mind wondered what to do with the extra horsepower. Without a relationship with a woman to examine, deconstruct, extrapolate, and fret about, my mind turned to my relationship with God.

As such, in the last month, I have had a few minor anxiety attacks, a couple small bouts of existential dread, and even a dark afternoon of the soul.* Am I ready? Is this really what I want to devote my life to? What about all the other things I could do? How huge is this commitment? Am I committed? Should I be committed? I wonder what size straightjacket I’d wear? My mind climbed the ladders to these lofty questions, and then it found a chute and jumped headfirst. The lofty questions mingled with the old set of relationship questions, and my mind ventured down all the well worn paths it has trod before, all the parallel universes in which I didn’t say this or did recognize that warning sign or missed an opportunity or or or…

Then I realized that all my dread and neuroses were misplaced. When did my relationship with God start mirroring my relationships with women? Now, this is nothing new: the great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures often compared God’s relationship with Israel to a marriage, sometimes favorably, sometimes not so much. But, in those comparisons, God was always faithful–it was the people of Israel who broke the covenant and went after false gods. My dread came from confusing mine and God’s parts in the story. In my neurotic imaginings, God played the part of the leaver in the relationship. I was the faithful one, the stalwart. But that’s not how it is. The only thing that keeps me going in a world that seems full of leavings, full of broken relationships, is the faith that God will never leave, will never break a relationship. What a revelation.

My ordination is in five days. You might think it strange that someone about to be ordained to the priesthood seems just to be figuring out that God is here to stay. Well, it’s not the first time I’ve realized it, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time I need to. But faith is about remembering to remember. It’s easy to lose sight of God’s promises because life is built on those promises. Over time, they blend into the landscape. Small bouts of existential dread and dark afternoons of the soul jar me into remembering to remember those promises.

At the end of the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Lord, help me remember that you are in this relationship for good. Help me remember that my neuroses aren’t going to scare you away. Help me be in this relationship with you.