'Pray Away': initial reactions

I just watched "Pray Away," a documentary on Netflix about the faith-based ex-gay movement.

So-called "reparative therapy," which intends to make gay people straight, has been deemed abusive and unsound practice by every major mental health organization in the country. The documentary chronicles the growth and collapse of Exodus Ministries, one of the biggest purveyors of this lie. It chronicles the cost in human lives and personal integrity that this organization accrued. 

It's deeply disturbing.

Christianity is supposed to be a religion that sets people free. It gets twisted instead into a means of control: control through shame, control through peer pressure, control through fear of hell and disapproval, and control through deceit.

Someone's going to say it's about right and wrong, and they're absolutely right. Is God someone who safeguards human dignity, or is he someone who consigns people to being second-class human beings or lower? Where's the moral high ground in telling gays that they can't be with someone they love, that they can't have children, that the God who pursues, the God who won't snuff out a smoldering wick, demands that they change their fundamental identity before they're worth his effort? LGBTQ teens who go through conversion therapy are twice as likely to commit suicide as those who do not.

How appropriate it is in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats that it's we religious folk whom Jesus sends to everlasting fire.

A couple years ago I was working with a faith-based nonprofit organization in which upper management decided to take an official stand on The Gay and communicate it to everyone in a position of responsibility. The position? God loves gay people, but gay relationships are a sin, and we need to support them in a lifetime of celibacy.

Opportunities came for comment. I took them, 

"This can be a deeply hurtful message."

"There are other ways to understand those passages of Scripture, based on context and language."

I'm not sure what I expected would happen, I expressed my view, and there was no response. No discussion. To this day, I have no idea if anyone listened to me with anything deeper than polite deference. 

The Rutgers School of Social Work has a number of staff who work with its interns out in the field. There's your task supervisor, who works in the organization where you're assigned; and there's your field instructor who helps you to make the connections between what you're doing "in the field" and what you're learning in the classroom.

I talked with my field instructor about that meeting our next talk.

"We have a conflict in values," I said.

I was already 48 by this point, so I won't pretend this was a learning moment for me. I've had plenty of opportunities over the years to disagree with people. I was confident I'd expressed my viewpoint clearly and respectfully, and that I had no reason to budge from it.

You know what the good news is? It's not that God can change you, or that he will. It's really simple, even simpler than that.

It's that God loves you the way you are, no exceptions; and he wants a relationship with you.

And I do too.

Good Friday in the age of George Floyd

 He was a man who had done nothing to deserve death, yet here he was: dying in front of a crowd, another in a constant stream of victims of state violence, his death justified by the danger his executioners believed he posed.

I am, of course, talking about Jesus Christ, whose death some two billion Christians remember today with solemn Good Friday observances. But I could just as easily be talking about George Floyd, a black man whose life was slowly crushed from him by the weight of a police officer's knee on his neck. Floyd allegedly had passed a counterfeit $20 bill in a store minutes earlier. And for that he died. 

Pilate would have been proud of Derek Chauvin, the officer who found it necessary to kneel on Floyd's neck while Floyd grew still and the crowd begged for mercy. Like Chauvin, Pilate knew the value that a show of force had in maintaining control. 

It doesn't even matter if the accused has done anything wrong. Just make an example of him, and the people will stay in line. 

Black deaths at the hands of police have been a matter of routine horror for years, compounded by our rush to assure ourselves that, while unfortunate, there's really nothing we can do about it. It's just part of the cost of having a safe society.  Sometimes people get killed, but it's their fault anyway, because they didn't follow orders, because they acted aggressively, or because police felt threatened. 

And besides he had a rap sheet.

That reaction should chill the very marrow in our bones. There is no reaction further from the heart of Christ and the heart of the Good Friday story that we celebrated in our churches today.

Even those outside the Christian faith know the Good Friday story. Jesus Christ, an innocent man, was arrested under cover of night. Denied the due process of law, he was deprived of his basic human rights, brutally tortured and finally executed.

Preachers often play up the story of Jesus' trials and execution for the moral affront that they were. To convict, all the priests needed was for two witnesses to agree on a charge. The gospels note that they couldn't even manage that. For his part, Pilate, the Roman governor, couldn't find any basis for a charge at all. Neither could Herod.

So why was he executed? The chief priest was afraid that Jesus was disturbing the peace and getting people riled up. Pilate wanted to maintain order. Herod just didn't care.

Christianity used to be a religion of the powerless, but after 1,700 years of holding the reins of imperial power, we've become far too comfortable with the way those reins feel here in the West. We treat the execution of Jesus as though it's an aberration, a once-in-history occasion when the justice system failed in its duty and killed an innocent man. The effect is that we treat the Crucifixion as a one-time failure, an especially heinous act of evil. We always stress the innocence of Jesus to stress how shockingly unjust his death was.

I wonder, if we were to survey his contemporaries, how unusual they found it that Rome would kill an innocent man. I wonder how many peasants, carpenters and bricklayers there were who felt they couldn’t get a fair shake either. I wonder how many people could point to the mountaintop of Jerusalem, to Mount Gerzim in Samaria or to the rolling hills of Galilee and tell the story of family members, neighbors and friends who had been unjustly executed by the state.

I wonder how many people knew what it is like to struggle for breath beneath the crushing weight of a Roman soldier's knee.

They wouldn’t have been hard to find. After the riots that followed the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, when rioters burned the city of Sephoris, the Roman legions restored order through the process of decimation. One man in every 10 was pulled from the crowd, taken outside the city, and crucified as a warning against unrest, without benefit of trial.

The message is the same that police like Chauvin like to send. See our power. Be afraid. Stay in line.

Good Friday wasn't a once-in-history event for the people whom Jesus lived with and walked among. It happened all the time.

It's the same in America now. Remember the names of those who have been denied justice by the authorities and killed without a trial. 

Can you remember them all? Can you remember just all the big names?

Unarmed. Killed by police, their murders justified just as the execution of Christ was. They were disturbing the peace. They were resisting arrest. They were failing to comply. They had a history. There were extenuating circumstances.

We were afraid.

To allow or to approve their deaths is take the reins of Caesar in our hands, give them a familiar grip, and say to ourselves, “This isn't so bad.” When we give approval to their deaths, let us remember the words of Jesus:

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”

Copyright 2021 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Maundy Thursday; time for dinner

 Thursday may be my favorite day in Holy Week. Thursday was the day we remember for a meal Jesus ate with his friends.

Formally known as Maundy Thursday, today is the day Jesus and his disciples shared the Last Supper. On Sunday they threw Jesus a parade. On Holy Tuesday and Holy Wednesday, he mixed it up all over town, sparring in the Temple and winning accolades for his quick wit and sharp words. Good Friday will be set aside for horror and grief, Saturday is for despair, and Sunday is for celebrating the impossible, but tonight is about good food, good drink and good conversation with the people you love.

Dinner with friends. What could be more mundane, more ordinary and more profoundly human than that? We always wonder what we would do if we knew we only had 24 hours to live. The gospels show us what Jesus did. He ate dinner and spent a quiet evening with the people who mattered most to him.

We often think of the Last Supper as a fairly staid affair. The disciples had their little dustup, of course, they always did; but Jesus reclined at the table, serene and above the fray, absolutely stoic and unaffected as he drew the errant children back into good behavior.

I can't see it that way, try as I might. Amid the jokes about Simon and his flatulence and the comments about how Thomas would lose his head if it weren't attached; and for all the comments about families they missed, and the endless hand-wringing over this and that, Jesus knew what was coming tomorrow, after all. 

How could he not? For the past three years he'd been defying social conventions and crossing lines to heal, honor and befriend outcasts in ways that scandalized decent society: welfare cheats, sex workers, immigrants, gays and lesbians, the transgender, adulterers, trained killers and religious people. Even before he looked at Jerusalem from the vantage of the Mount of Olives that past Sunday Jesus already had been predicting his death.

When, I wonder, did he know that hammerfall was imminent? Maybe it came to him amid the heightened scrutiny. Verbal traps that masqueraded as friendly questions or as mere arguments had been ratcheting up the tension all week, the nets and spears of his opponents drawing closer all the time. Something was going to give, and soon.

Jesus had been on the road with his disciples for three years, and he knew them intimately. When did he first sense that Judas had started to pull back, moving first from all-in support to mixed feelings, and then onward to skepticism and finally to outright rejection? It must have happened quickly; none of the other disciples noticed it. When Judas left partway through dinner to betray their teacher, everyone else assumed that he was running out to get something they had forgotten for the meal.

When did Jesus realize that Peter was about to fail? For three years, Peter had been part of the inner circle of Jesus' intimates. Along with the brothers John and James, Peter had been there with Jesus when he raised the daughter of Jairus up from the dead. He'd also been one of the three to witness the Transfiguration.

Peter was someone Jesus clearly had been impressed with. Originally he'd been named Simon, but Jesus had likened him to a rock and renamed him Peter. Over the past week, Jesus had watched as a crack had formed in that rock, one that now threatened to split it down the middle. He'd started praying that the rock would be strong enough to hold together.

Moments of terrible clarity come to all of us at one time or another. We realize that things are about to take a turn for the south and there's nothing we can do about it. The marriage has died, and divorce is now inevitable. Child Protective Services wants simply to close the case, and the girl you love like your own is headed back to the people who abused her. The boss has made his decision, and you're about to be fired. The mob has you at its mercy, and you're going to die.

People who survive such moments often report after it's all over that during the moment of crisis, there was a supernatural calm that fell over them and held them upright and aloft long after they would have given out on their own steam. Their situation hadn't changed any. It just didn't matter right then. These moments of serenity stretch across the surface of simmering trouble. From time to time that calm shakes from the tension of what is happening beneath, but it holds.

Did Jesus' voice tremble when he told Judas to go take care of what he had to do? Did the words catch in his throat when he predicted Peter would deny knowing him, and he described the prayers he had made for his friend's sake? Were there tears in his eyes as he held the Passover cup aloft after dinner and promised to drink it with them again in the Kingdom of Heaven?

All possible. Jesus was human, after all, and he stands squarely with us in our weakness, in our fears and in those secret places where we tremble for what we see coming for ourselves, our loved ones, for our nation and for our world.

The next moment may bring ruin, or it may bring death. Right now that doesn't matter. At this moment, there is only this moment. 

Right now, friends are gathered around, and it's time for dinner.

Lent: Word

The world is empty and void, and looking out over it are Steve Burns and his dog.

There is nothing there but the two of them, and Blue's "Big Bag of Words." As Blue brings out the words, one by one, the empty world begins to change. Tracks appear with a car big enough to carry Steve and Blue. They begin to ride, and as Blue pulls out a new word, a rock blocks their way. Another word, and the rock becomes too small to impede them, and the journey continues.

Such power in a word. It can fire passions and inspire loyalty, heal injury, tickle the soul, inflict pain beyond measure or create an unbreakable bond. 

Many words create space to equivocate and evade, but a single word provides such clarity that it demands a response. Dance. Eat. See. Love. 

An abandoned baby lay kicking by the road, unwanted and left in a ditch to die. Then someone came by and heard her crying. He picked her up and cradled her in his arms, and said one word.

"Live."

All it takes is the power of words, and everything can change. 

(I wrote about this before.)

Lent: Celebrate

Celebrate the routine wonders and they will dazzle you. 

It's cold outside, but there is a warm bed with blankets waiting in here.

There are friends who hear, friends who listen, and friends who care. Some of them you even know their names.

The evening is filled with rain, but the food is hot and it goes down easily, with family gathered round. 

There are children whose feet itch to take them new places, and like birds preparing to spread their wings, they are lacing their shoes and getting ready to grow.

Feel the magic of touch. There are fingers that brush your arm, a hand that holds your own.

Listen to the music. It can sing with a choir, strum a banjo, or call like an archangel with a trumpet. The familiar tune becomes surprising and strange with a new arrangement.

 Tell stories. They entertain and entice, they inform and they intervene. Cinderella comes to the ball a hundred years late, after an unfortunate accident with her carriage. Azaka shows up at the party and is horrified when he sees what's become of his beautiful garden.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.

Lent: Rise

There's a story they used to tell about a bird with an unfortunate habit of bursting into flame. They called it the phoenix.

I've burnt myself before, with a match. I was trying to light a candle, but it took too long and the flame reached the part of the match where my fingers were, and you know the drill.

A different time I pulled a metal sheet from the oven carelessly and was left with a blister on my finger that ached and made it a challenge to hold things.

Other times I've burned in slow motion as my brother and I horsed around on  a rug, and the friction of being dragged across the floor left a brush burn across my back.

The worst came when I burnt myself all over under the sun during a family vacation at the beach. Arms, legs, feet, back all. It was agony to touch or be touched, and that night I woke in a feverish delirium with no idea where I was. (I was lucky. The next day I began to peel, which I did, vigorously.)

It didn't matter how I burned, or where. It was awful.

For the phoenix, the experience was far worse and far more all-encompassing. Its temperature would spike and it would begin to cook in its heat. Imagine the pain as the process got under way. Its  ears would fill with a sizzling noise as its body fat began to melt, its flesh would come loose from its bones. Pain and terror would overthrow executive function, then flames would appear, searing the flesh as feathers burned away amid an acrid smell as the dying creature would emit one final, terrified squawk.

Then, wonder of wonders, from its own ashes, the phoenix would rise, renewed and filled with vigor.

And to think I have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning after a full night's sleep.

A wise man once said "Life is pain. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something," and it's true. There are a thousand injustices that most of us are too fortunate to need to worry about, and yet they happen. The day may be filled with a thousand casual cruelties, and the lacerating indifference of friends and strangers alike.

Know them for what they are. Face them on behalf of others so they don't have to. And when they beat you and say "Stay down," there's only thing to do.

Rise.

In so doing, you will upend the world.

Lent: Bless

Let me share with you three of my oldest and most golden memories.

The first is framed with the excited glow of anticipation. I was sitting in the back seat of the car and probably had been for years, but my long wait was about to end. My father had just turned the car down a country road with trees on each sides and a distant gray house on the right. That was where my Grandmother Learn was, and my two brothers and I were going to visit.

The second memory is suffused with joy. I was climbing a set of stairs made from a metal grill that you could see through to the people below. I'd never seen stairs like that before. They were wondrous, strange and new. But this was the engineering plant where my father worked, and I'd never been there before. It was a rare public tour, and my mother had taken the three of us.

The third memory comes a few months after the other two. I mostly remember a sense of wonder. It was a summer day, and I was in the upstairs of our house. My older brothers' room was off to the right, and my room was directly in front of me.

Someone had placed a crib just inside the open door, and my mother was standing up after just laying my new roommate down for a nap. Steve's been in my space ever since. (Jerk.)

We gather a lot of debris in our lives, and some of it is even fun or useful to have around for a while. But when God really wants us to bless us for this journey we're on, he sends people.

Lent: Call

All his life Rourke wanted to hear the call of God the way others did.

He heard about them in church or in Sunday school; and Rourke understood from the hushed reverential tones their names were whispered in that these were men and women who heard the call of God on their lives. They answered it unreservedly, and blazed a path in service to heaven, that glowed years after they had trod it. For that reason their names were remembered and held up for inspiration. George Fox. Clara Barton. Jim Elliot. Cate Blanchett. Hudson Taylor. Melvin Fenwick. Keith Green. 

It must be something to hear the call of God. Rourke imagined himself on a gray and dreary day, laboring away at the tedium when the world would split with a trumpet blast and it would happen. He would hear God's calling.

The call of God! Rourke shook at the very thought of it. When he heard it, Rourke would leave the ordinary world behind and embrace a life of faith and daring, like a spiritual Indiana Jones bringing the good news to the Jabberwalkies and the Hottentoads, standing alone against the hordes of darkness.

But the call didn't come, and as he got older, Rourke entered art school. He began a career as an artist. drawing pictures for children's books, teaching art to elementary students, and making watercolors of the animals people often missed, like the red foxes that lived in the city's parks, or the coyotes that migrated along .the railroad tracks.

Then one day the phone rang. An old friend needed help. The friend talked, and Rourke listened. They passed the hours in conversation, and as days turned into weeks, Rourke called his friend regularly to check in and see how he was doing.

Rourke got older. He published a few books of his photography through a niche publisher; and donated the money to a local watershed conservation group, to protect the fields and waterways in the area where he lived. Someone noticed that, and he was invited to address a few civic organizations about the importance of the local environment and ensuring that everyone had access to nature.

God never called. 

One day Rourke woke to find himself alone. His wife was gone, their sons were gone, and he realized he was entirely on his own, standing at the brink in a place of unbearable darkness. In desperation he called a friend he knew.

He spoke. She listened, and before they hung up, she made him promise to call her in the morning so she would know he was all right.

Years passed and Rourke mended.

When he died at the age of 72, Rourke had never heard that trumpet he had hoped one day to hear. He never preached good news to the Hottentoads, and he never carried a lit torch over his head to show crowds of Jabberwalkies the way. 

The call of God is strange and wondrous, and easy not to see.

Perhaps it was in the care he showed for the earth and its inhabitants as he drew attention to the gifts of nature all around and asked to preserve them for everyone to enjoy. Perhaps it was the night someone called and he picked up the phone and was present in a way they needed; or perhaps it was even when he called someone else.

But Rourke's legacy was no greater nor less than any other man's, yet none doubted he had answered his calling.

Lent: Everlasting

Many years ago an artist went to see Leonardo da Vinci for help with his paintings.

Although he made a decent living with the support of his patrons, the artist was frustrated with the quality of the paintings he made. They were detailed, they were accurate, they were marvels of composition. So when he came to the master artist for guidance, da Vinci was surprised.

"What is wrong with them?" da Vinci asked.

"They are completely forgettable," the artist said. "They are pleasant to look at, but they are forgettable. I made one for my patron that took me six months to create, and he lavished me with praise for it, then he had it hung in his privy and even I can't remember what it looked like."

"Ah," said da Vinci at last. "I understand. They are not for everlasting."

The younger artist looked confused, so da Vinci held up his hand for the other man to see. The hair on its back was gray, and the skin itself was so thin that the younger artist could see the veins within. The hand was frail and weary with years, and the younger man understood  that the master artist had only a few winters left. 

"The body is weak and decays," da Vinci said, "but the soul endures. The eyes dim, but the heart is made for eternity and longs to walk there. It yearns not for a different world, nor even a better one; but for this one to be realized properly, so that love ages gracefully and does not grow cold, so the mind remains as keen in old age as it was in youth, and so tears bring deliverance and healing. and conflict begets understanding and reconciliation rather than fighting. The spirit understand that redemption is coming, but the flesh cannot conceive it, and so life becomes fleeting and ephemeral."

He looked at his young acquaintance.

"Let your art reveal the longing of the soul and its faith that the world's redemption will one day be complete," he said, "and your work will be for everlasting."

Lent: Name

Eighteen years and change ago, I called my younger brother to let him know that he had a new niece.

"What did you name her?" he asked. (We'd made a point of not telling anyone the names we were considering after discovering with Oldest Daughter that some people felt they had a license to be rude about prospective names.)

"Spock," I said. Somehow I kept my voice even but earnest, the tone you might expect from a second-time father.

"Spock?" He was incredulous. He was outraged. He was exemplifying precisely we had kept lipper number two's name quiet for nine months. "You named your daughter Spock?"

"I think it's a lovely name," I said simply. "Don't you?"

Names are funny things. Often they're ordinary words from another language, that someone one day decided to slap onto some unsuspecting kid and suddenly the word gained a whole new significance no one had expected. "Alondra" is Spanish and "Zipporah" is Hebrew. They both mean bird, but those girls are nothing like one another.

We pick the names we do for our children because of the sort of people we want them to become: logical and reasoned, loyal and strong, devoted and caring, or whatever other quality we associate with their names.

Our names gain value and meaning as we get older and build a reputation. People who have never met you but who have heard your name usually have some sort of idea what to expect when they hear your name, and it may not be the meaning your parents had when they picked that name out for you.

In the end we're choosing our own names, in secret even from ourselves. It's a lifelong act of discovery that reveals itself in how we treat others when we have more than we need, and how we treat them when we don't have enough.

Friend.
Helper.
Good Counsel.|
Wanderer.
Indifferent.
Cruel.
Murderer.

They say on the final day, all will be revealed. The books will be opened, and the Judge of all the earth will call us all forth, one at a time, by name.

I wonder if any of us really knows the name we will have chosen to answer to. Be wise, and be sure that it is one you will not be ashamed to hear.

Lent: Walk

It was my father who taught me the value of going for a walk.

It started. I think, my senior year of high school. Knowing my father it was something he was content to let grow rather than a campaign he had planned from the get-go, but there came a night he asked me to walk the dog with him and I agreed.

Our dog was a cockapoo, a polite way of saying he was a mutt who weighed 30 pounds when he needed a haircut but only 15 pounds afterward. Some nights we just walked Fonzi down to Colbaugh Avenue, sometimes we walked him all the way around the block, and sometimes we'd go for a walk that seemed reach the upper limits of infinity.

Those walks became one of the most sacred rituals we ever performed. I'd only recently returned from living for a year in New Zealand as an exchange student, and now I was getting ready to go away to college for the next four years. I was the third of four sons, and I think my father realized time was not on his side, so he wanted to spend time with me while he could.

So we walked together in weather so cold that our breath burned on its way out of our mouths, then turned to ice and shattered on the ground. We walked on spring evenings as choirs of katydids sang in the trees above, We walked on summer evenings when the murderous heat of the day had broken and the moon whispered peace.

And while we walked, we talked with one another.

I told dad about what I hoped to study at college, and somehow he agreed that it sounded reasonable, even though I changed my mind after less than one semester and studied something else instead. We talked about books we'd read and the authors we loved, and together we fanned on the latest episodes of Star Trek.

Sometimes we talked about other things in the news that probably seemed important at the time, but mostly not. It was a time I was getting ready to set sail; and as he stood on the wharf getting ready to watch me leave, he tried to decide if he was proud of the man I was becoming, or if he should go file a formal complaint with management and disavow the whole thing.

That was more than 30 years ago.

In the years since, I've walked many miles with my children. With my foster son, I filled those miles with the affection his birth parents had never given him and taught him not only how to use his legs, but his ears and his mouth as well. We walked our dog Sandy together almost every day he was here, while I filled his ears with nonstop words in a bid to lift him out of the neglect he'd been left to languish in.

I've walked all over this city with my girls. Together we've trekked our way to school, to softball and to soccer; we've stomped to friends' houses, to the library, to the parks and to summer camp. On foot we've hunted Pokemon wherever they hide, we've marched in parades, and we've even crossed the river to lose ourselves in the woods.

And as we've walked the upper limits of infinity, I've filled their ears with stories I knew, stories I made up, and stories that will never be told again. I've poured myself into them with every step I took as they poured themselves into me; and always I've prayed that it will be enough.

The girls, I think, have found the value of a good walk. The second is getting ready in a few short weeks to begin the journey her sister started a few years ago and that I once took over half a lifetime past. Her feet itch and her eyes are set on college in California.

It's a long walk, but as I watch her lacing up her shoes, I can't help but think how proud I am of the young woman she has become and is becoming.

And I can't wait for when her path leads her back home, so I can hear her stories from the road and all the wonderful things she's seen. 

Lent: Celebrate

It's been a rough year for celebration.

Senior proms. Fourth of July cookouts. Bat mitzvahs. Graduation parties. Thanksgiving dinner. Weddings. They've been all delayed, scaled back  to virtual events or outright canceled in the shadow of the pandemic. 

When some have insisted from a misguided sense of entitlement on gathering together and celebrating anyway, too often the pandemic also has attended, and left its mark as guests start to fall sick and die a few weeks later.

Today remains a day of celebration.

Lent is a season for introspection and repentance. For Catholics and Protestants who observe a formal liturgy, it's often a season for penitence and doing without. But Sundays in the church calendar have always celebrated the Resurrection, and Lent is no exception to that. 

The challenge this year is that celebrations always require other people, and gathering with people remains a way to spread the virus and add to the death toll.. (The Resurrection is a matter of faith for the Christian, but it's no call to be reckless before our time is through. Be wise.) It's a hard thing when even our celebrations must be Lenten.

So the party is muted, and we wait another week, two, or more before we can see our friends properly. But a vaccine is here, and a promised end to disease is coming. 

Once the all-clear sounds, prepare to celebrate.

Lent: Remember

Victor was a football star when he was in high school.

His skill on the field made him a celebrity off. Girls wanted to date him. Guys wanted to be seen with him. Teachers deferred to him when the grade was close and to his schedule if there were a conflict with assignments. Even ill behavior was excused or brushed aside. Boys will be boys, people said. After all, he was a hero!

When Victor graduated high school in 1968 and announced he had caught a football scholarship to college, heads nodded. Victor was good, one of the best players his school had ever seen. It made sense. He was going places.

And then he didn't. Scouts from one team after another looked at Victor and then moved on without offering him a position. Before Victor knew what had happened, the football train had pulled out of the station without him. All he had to show for the experience was a signed photo from a new friend who got picked up by the Eagles.

Now some people are big enough to bet everything on a single turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, then start all over again and never breathe another word about it. Their glory days become another memory, like a spectacular ride on a rollercoaster, a glorious time at the senior prom, or an Eagle Scout project that consumed the summer. Those memories become a source of pride that fuels further success and provides stories to entertain friends and strangers alike in the years to come.

Victor was not a big enough for that.

Life forced him to move on, but that was all it could do. He took up a job teaching middle school gym and made his office a shrine not to sports legends his students would recognize or draw inspiration from like Roberto Clemente, Yogi Berra or Jim Thorpe, but to his own high school career. His football jersey. News clippings of when he dominated the field. And of course that signed picture from his friend who did the majors, so the students could appreciate how big Victor was, that he was friends with an actual football star. 

Memory was a trap and Victor was caught. Rather than encouraging the next generation of athletes, he became bitter and angry, and took one opportunity after another to make students feel small. In the end he was caught stealing from the school and was fired, and then whispers of physical and sexual abuse left the edges and moved into the open.

But if memory can become a prison, it can also be release. You see this especially in the psalms of lament when David, or another writer, complains to God about how unjustly he is being made to suffer. 

"My enemies circle me like jackals, saying 'We've got him now,'" he writes. "My limbs are all out of joint, and you can count my bones." Then the coup-de-grace: "All this is because you abandoned me, O Lord. You sure suck,"

There's a pause, and in that pause so loud that you can hear it in translation 3,000 years later there comes the word "but."

In the midst of grief and suffering too great to express, the psalmist remembers times gone by when things looked bad, or even worse, but they still worked out all right. He recalls the stories of Moses leading the people to freedom from slavery in Egypt, how the army of Pharaoh was routed when the Red Sea closed on them after letting the Hebrews through. He recalls times things looked bad for him personally, like when the previous king led the entire army to hunt him like a dog and he had to hide in a cave, or the time his own son tried to kill him and an aging David was forced to flee his home while people spat at him and told him he was getting what he deserved.

His bones remain out of joint. His friends still want to kill him. There are still no yellow ZIngers in the snack machine. But the memory of what happened in the past for his people and for him lead David to hope in his season of Lent that good times remain.

"My accusers will be silenced, and I will make my offering in the House of the Lord," he wrote. "My days will be long once more  and I will join in the assembly in worshiping you."

Selah. 

Lent: Sign

About thirty years ago, in 1991, when my church was hiring a new pastor, one of the lead candidates asked for a salary that was substantially higher than what the elder board had been prepared to offer.

It was, he explained, a "fleece" he had placed before God. If the church would commit to a higher salary, he would know that God was calling him to take the position, uproot his family and move across the state. He just wanted a sign.

Signs can be great at clearing things up. If the sign says "Louie's Used Pet Store" then I am definitely not in the right place to get my car's oil changed. "No Loitering" communicates expectations for my behavior, and "Low Clearance 10 Feet" is a good advisory if I'm driving a truck that is 12 feet high . If I'm on my way to Pittsburgh from Trenton, a sign that says "Los Angeles, next three exits" is a pretty good indicator that I've lost my way. Signs are probably most helpful when direct and to the point. "Bridge Out" and "Do Not Enter" are two that come to mind. 

That church of mine used to love signs. A message delivered in tongues was a sign that God was in our midst, even though the message usually made no more sense after it was interpreted than when it was just ecstatic utterances. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the lead pastor always cautioned against armchair eschatology, but everyone knew it was a clear sign that the Second Coming was at hand.

Signs can feel more helpful than they really are. Kuwait was liberated during Operation Desert Storm and Saddam Hussein has been dead 15 years, but Christ still hasn't returned. Signs like that "fleece" often excuse us from taking responsibility for the decisions we're about to make, when there are so many ways to read them and a little more effort would lead to a better outcome. 

Sure, maybe the elders' willingness to pay another $20,000 a year for a new lead pastor is a sign that he should take the job. On the other hand, maybe that he would ask that of a church in an economically depressed area was a sign for the elders that he adhered to the prosperity gospel and the elders should interview more candidates.

Lent is a season when the ragged people of God are hungry once more to hear the Word of God clearly, and so we look for signs. When they come, it's reassuring to know that even Jesus wasn't always clear on what the signs meant.

There was a man in the desert who may have been a prophet, or who may have just been another headcase. Jesus felt something stir, and when the call came to be baptized he answered it. When he climbed up from the water a voice spoke; or it may have just been thunder. It was a sign, clearly, but what did it mean? 

Was it a sign that spring rains were coming and the people should plant their seed so the crops would grow? Or was it a sign of something deeper and more personal that would set the world on its ear?

Jesus didn't know. So he went into the desert to find out.

Lent: Living

The view from my window is as bleak as it gets. 

There are no flowers lining the driveway that we may marvel at, no red-breasted robins sitting astride the branches that we may espy as they sing. No butterflies flitter past on wings of bluest gossamer. Even the feral cats that slink after their prey in deadly poetry are missing. There's just snow, endless fields of it. All I can see sticking out of it is this brown stick.

I'm on a spaceship 3 million years in the future, lost deep in space, and the computer is talking to me. "They're all dead, Dave," the computer says as it tries to get through to me. "Dave, they're all dead."

Myth tells us that when the god Hades abducted Persephone and took her away to be his wife, will she or no, Persephone's mother went mad. For six months Demeter walked the earth, filled with a parent's grief and fear as she sought her daughter, and during that time nothing grew.

This myth is one of the crueler mystery stories the ancients told about the cyclical passage of the seasons. Even children's versions of the story can't fully paper over what happened when they say Hades fell in love with Persephone and carried her away to marry him.

Because of what Hades did, for six months every year Persephone is found not in golden fields but within the halls of the dead. For six months of the year, no flower blooms, no stalk of wheat grows, no trees bud.

Dave. they're all dead. They're all dead, Dave.

Or are they?

The mystery is cyclical and the story continues. Demeter finds her daughter who is returned to her. In the world of mortals, seeds germinate, and with a sleepy yawn new shoots stretch their way upward while roots reach down into the soil in search of nutrients and water.

So it is with us. In the Lenten season we wait and watch for the first signs of a spring that will heal the wounds brought by Hades. And that old brown stick? Green oak leaves will appear in the spring and we'll find that we numbered it among the dead like Persephone, but it was living all the time.

 

Lent: Covenant

What can be said about covenants that hasn't been said already?

We all know what they are. They're formal, binding agreements between two people, without all the boring language that lawyers love to attach to lesser contracts about the party of the first part, and the party of the second, hereafter, heretofore, ex post facto, e pluribus unum, it's all there in black and white, you stole fizzy lifting drink, I said good day sir.

Tribes used to make covenants with one another: If you let us use your well, then we will live among you and share our wealth and be as one people with you; and when enemies attack you, we will fight at your side.

A couple years ago, I shared a graphic rendering I had seen of Ruth 1:16-17. This is probably one of the most beautiful expressions of commitment ever written from one person to another. People recite it at their weddings; they embroider it to hang on the wall; they recall it at funerals.

"On no account will I turn away from you," Ruth swears to Naomi. "Where you go I will go, where you stay I will lay my head. Your people shall be my people, and your God will be my God; and where you die I will be buried. May God deal harshly with me if anything but death separates us."

It's beautiful, and even my old sinner's heart catches in my throat to hear it. I tell my daughters to set a life goal, and find someone who loves them the way Ruth loved Naomi.

A friend of mine read it, and said, only partly ironically "Ouch." Her wife had made that same pledge to her when my friend had begun to transition from male to female, and it had made her cry to be so loved.

The promise didn't last. The same woman filed for divorce not many months later.

Another friend saw the graphic and had a similar reaction. Despite the vows they had shared years earlier, his wife had divorced him too.

Sometimes we only know the value of the covenant when it's been riven. If we feel anything at all, it's devastation not just at what has ended, but at what that loss has done to us. It's a revocation of trust, of identity, of security. What was, is gone; what is left, is ashes.

Today is Ash Wednesday. The old covenant was meant to bring us life but it has brought us only death. It inspired hope, but gave us disappointment.

Today is Ash Wednesday. There's a new covenant coming, one that reaches deeper and promises to overthrow death. 

Today is Ash Wednesday, and it comes with a promise. Those ashes will smolder once more and burst into flame. The phoenix is on its way.

The Night We Beheld the Holy Grail

 It was on a summer evening about 17 years ago, when a congregation that no longer existed had gathered in the American Legion Hall.

Why that congregation no longer met doesn't matter. And the circumstances that brought us there that evening aren't particularly important either. But there were forty of us, fifty of us, sixty of us, maybe more. We had scattered like the knights of Camelot, chasing wild fires in pursuit of the Holy Grail, but unlike King Arthur's knights, of whom but a tithe returned, many if not most of us were there.

It was time for worship.

It's been years, and memory plays tricks. I like to think Janice Gengenbach was leading, while Robert Hamrick accompanied on his trusty keyboard. I'm pretty sure Marcus Eiland was playing his guitar. Mark was there. So, I think, were Brian and his family.

Churches have a wide range of music to draw on, from the Phos Hilarion down to the latest pop gospel release by Casting Sunbeams, but often they have a repertoire of familiar songs they draw on that gives each congregation its own flavor. Community Gospel Church was no exception.

The songs favored by the church worship team were upbeat and often came from Willow Creek, by songwriters like the unfortunately named Brian Doerkson. They included calls to worship like the fittingly titled "Come Now is the Time to Worship" and the interminable "I Can Sing of Your Love Forever," as well as the occasional rollicking dud like "Waves of Mercy."

My oldest daughter was 3, or perhaps 4, at the time. She spent the entire service dancing at the front of the church, lost in worship as only a child can be.

A third of my life so far has passed since that evening. I no longer remember which songs we sang.

Except one.

Written in 1992 by Gary Sadler and Jamie Harvil, "Ancient of Days" is a song that feels like it could have come straight out of the book of Revelation. The first verse began with a steady beat to stomp the feet to. Voices and instruments alike were subdued but determined, as like Four Living Creatures, the congregation pronounced blessing and honor, glory and power upon the Ancient of Days.

And then, just like that, the second verse began, the volume turned up, and the congregation took it to seven.

"Every tongue in heaven and earth shall declare your glory,
Every knee shall bow at your throne in worship,
You will be exalted, O God, and your kingdom
Shall not pass away, O Ancient of Days."

The third verse began a beat later, and the singing hit 11. Hands went up, eyes closed and every throat opened wide.

"Your kingdom shall reign over all the earth!
Sing unto the Ancient of Days.
For who can compare to your matchless worth?
Sing unto the Ancient of Days."

Congregational worship can be a difficult thing to lead. People respond to songs that they know but they hate music that's stale and familiar. They want something traditional with a contemporary sound, with lyrics that are meaningful but not ponderous. Ditch the organ for guitars and drums, please; but remember that this is church, not a set at a nightclub.

That night, that song, none of those concerns was a problem. Whether it was forty throats or twice that, the voices joined together, and incense rose from the altar. The walls and the ceiling of the hall were made of music and every singer there lost themselves in the choir. For one night at least a congregation that had scattered a dozen different directions was restored to life.

And if those assembled there saw a vision of an arm clad in purest samite holding aloft a cup; well then, it was a true vision, one that still has kept hearts warm all the years since.