The Land of Rejected Christmas Cookies

I have a post up on Elizabeth Sands Wise’s blog Texas Schmexas about trying to build community in Northern New Jersey. It’s called “The Land of Rejected Christmas Cookies.” Here’s an excerpt:

It took us three years to be accepted into our suburban community. We were not only the new kids on the block, we were literally the kids on the block―yes, we were newlyweds, but we were also the youngest couple on a block of middle-aged couples whose kids had gone off to college and senior citizens who were retired. The first year we lived there not a single child came to our door on Halloween.

Read the rest of the post here and take a few minutes to poke around Elizabeth’s blog, it’s well worth it!

The Church of Freaks & Geeks

Halfway through our viewing of the show Freaks & Geeks‘s lone single season of television, I really don’t understand how a show this funny, with a cast of James Franco, Jason Segel, Seth Rogan, and Linda Cardellini, and produced by Judd Apatow, could be canceled. I suppose when it came out in 1999 it was just ahead of its time. It certainly fits NBC’s mold of critically acclaimed, yet under-viewed comedies (like 30 Rock).

Without divulging too much of the plot, the show follows the Weir family as they attempt to navigate the treacherous social waters of high school as a family. Lindsay Weir is a boring, academic girl that begins to craze some meaning in her life, even if it comes from bad influences, after her grandmother dies. Sam Weir, her younger brother, is a high school freshman who hasn’t hit puberty yet. Not talented in much of anything, Sam is a geek who quotes Star Wars in order to win arguments with his other geek friends.

One of the themes in Freaks & Geeks is the universal nature of “freak” and “geek.” None of us can escape it. The jocks are “freaks” to the freaks and vice versa. What resonates with me about the social world of Freaks & Geeks is that we should be reaching out to the freaks and geeks among us in our complex post-high school world. What starts in high school never really ends, when you think about it, and in our post-Christian, secular society morality is no longer one of the arbiters of social hierarchy, but ”cool” still is. In a world where it’s okay to be a lavishly blatant sinner, it’s pretty easy to hang out with the sinners like Jesus did. But Jesus also spent time with the freaks and geeks around him, and we need to keep in mind that there are so many people in our churches today that we don’t spend time with because they’re not “cool.” So next time you see a bunch of wallflowers at small group or church, invite them over to your house or have a chat with them, because part of serving the body of Christ is recognizing that as a peculiar people we are all freaks and geeks in Christ.

The Tale of the Backslider and Other Stories

Every expecting parent has been through the ringer. We hear so many stories, each competing with one another to make us fear and tremble: more pain, more crying, more screaming, more excrement, more sleepless nights, more sickness, more coughing, more flu, more nervous breakdowns, more insanity, more exasperation beyond all else. There is one thing in common between all these stories: they all end in the following two parenting cliches: “Yet, I wouldn’t trade any of this for the world” or “But, this will be the best time of your life.”

We’ve been through the ringer and come out unscathed, much in thanks to a few rational, knowledgeable, and helpful friends as well as a birthing class. While I am grateful for the comfort I now feel going into parenthood, I am deeply upset annoyed by what seems to be a pattern of hazing that, while not isolated to the church, is certainly very present within it. It’s hazing through emotional scare tactics, and it happens most often with young adults, newly weds and expecting parents.[1] Right at the point when a couple is in most need of reassurance, community, and support, they are barraged by their “loving” community with a ritualized cadence of “how your life is now over and gone for ever and you can never go back at all any time so just resign yourself to a life that will never be as good as it was right now, but in the end you’ll think it’s the best and never trade it for the world.” It’s worse for my wife, who has to sit through maternal war stories of labor that lasted for two weeks, unending pain, the loss of all identity and the utter end of life as you know it. That is a very different narrative than the one we learned in our birthing class which is: people have done this for thousands of years, here is all you need to know for the weeks, days, and hours leading up to birth, here are techniques to help you as a couple during labor, and have a positive you-can-do-it attitude. It makes me wonder why not so many in our family and our Christian circles have given us that kind of advice.

Too often we use hazing by scare tactics instead of genuine discipleship. Like scaring new moms instead of coaching them, it’s just easier to scare a bunch of eighth graders with tales of backsliding into meth addiction and uncontrolled prostitution than it is to train them up in the way they should go. Because, you know, training means work for us as the teachers, and it’s a whole lot easier to just tell scary stories and initiate the disciple into fear than it is to coach them through life.

What are the aspects of hazing you have participated in or been presented with in a faith community?

What horror stories are told within the church? How does this affect the faith community?

There is a better way, and that involves the work of discipleship as training. It means we teach other people to run the race with us and not just sit on the sideline scared to death to ever step out on the road with us. Each time we use scare tactics we are hampering someone on their spiritual journey through life, whether it’s with prayer or parenthood. Providentially, we can cure this by taking a holistic view of discipleship. Why can’t more older Christian women come alongside expecting moms and give them sound counsel and advice instead of scaring them and throwing them through the ringer (like they were). It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be stopped, and it can be, but it will require work and a view of discipleship that looks at life within the church community as sacramental from birth to death and looks to disciple with compassion, conviction and community.

[1] – I think part of this might be the collective fundamental Christian subconscious reacting to sex within Christian marriage, mainly the gambit from “sex is WRONG PERIOD” to “you’re getting married and get to have sex, but your life is now over, dude!” to “you thought you could get away with all that sex within wedlock as a good, safe, sinless thing, but now you’re going to have a kid, so your life is now over, dude!”–but the sex ruins everything meme is for another discussion.

An Artifact of Marriage

One of the consequences of publication in a more formal journal is that I needed a head shot that did not include me wearing a hat or a beanie. I don’t have many of those. In fact, it was hard for me to find any picture of me by myself. Over the past five years, pretty much every good picture of me dressed up and formal has included me with my arm around my wife.

That’s pretty cool, when you think about it. It’s an artifact of marriage, the togetherness we share at each memorable event. We are always together, always sharing, always in community and communion. At the same time, it was a bit scary to realize that so much of my life has been invested in togetherness with another person that I don’t remember how life was before hand (except that I had a lot of bad habits).

The church is called to the same type of marriage. It’s beautiful that we are always together with Christ. We who become followers and journey through discipleship no longer conform to the patterns of this world and slowly begin to forget what life was like before our togetherness (except that we had a lot of bad habits).

What About Almsgiving?

I’ve been reading up on fasting a lot recently and so much of the early church writers connected almsgiving to fasting, something many of us miss the connection on today. Throughout church history people who fasted gave the food they did not eat during the fast away to those who need it as alms. I’ve been convicted about almsgiving and fasting before, but haven’t ever done anything with that conviction.

I think the disconnect between fasting and almsgiving today is because of the decentralization of food from the neighborhood and community. The democratization of food purchasing in our country, when you can use food stamps at Aldi’s, Whole Foods, Costco or the farmer’s market stands in stark contrast to the corporate overtaking of our food systems by the industrial oligarchy of corporate food profiteers (watch Food, Inc.).  The democratization of food purchasing and the corporate overtaking of our food system has led to people on food stamps blending in at supermarkets when purchasing and to receiving over-preserved, high fructose corn syrup laced chemical equivalents of foods in donations (there is a growing movement of soup kitchens and food pantries getting local produce; let this continue to blossom!). The bottom line is that those that need food do not stand out in society. That’s a good thing when it means you’ve eliminated the problem, but a not so good thing if you haven’t. People just aren’t aware of the problem anymore. It’s hidden.

What do you think the disconnect between fasting and almsgiving stems from in our culture?

Is Our Community Any Different?

I used to have a lot of “conference envy.”  That feeling when you were jealous anytime someone went to a conference.  I used to think conferences were the end all be all, the place to pass out business cards and network and become instantly cooler than all the people you left behind in their normal lives while you attended a conference.

Eventually, I got tired of conferences.  I kind of hated the retreat crash, that feeling of numbness that youth pastor’s warn their young people about, the emptiness of real life after the ecstasy of an otherworldly event.  For a while I bought into the sentiment that you should try to continue the “retreat high” for as long as possible, and not loose the fire.  It worked for a bit, but real life always happened.  It seemed conferences and retreats were trying to take the place of real life and creating this feeling of dread upon coming down from the mountain.  So, after much thought, I decided to just stop chasing conferences and retreats and enjoy real life.

We Christians are not the only ones to share this sentiment.  Kevin Larimer writes in the Editor’s Note to the latest issue of Poets & Writers (Mar./Apr. 2010):

“I left my first writers conference feeling not only elated…but also a little disappointed that I hadn’t connected with any of them on a substantial level….I have since been to conferences and festivals that offered the nourishment I craved, but not before coming to the realization that community…is not so effortlessly attained.”

If community is hard for writers (born communicators mind you) to obtain, how are our communities any different?  Do we have communities that chase the church high, the retreat high, the conference high?  Or do we have communities that chose to abstain from the roller coaster of spirituality and instead participate in the long haul of shared life together?  We must have the latter, or we will continue to experience the dread of real life.

The monks of old called the dread of real life acedia.  Right on cue, our modern culture has dropped this word from our vocabularies, but it is making a comeback.  Our conferences, our technology, our frantic lives, our kids’ sports schedules, our church committee meetings—these have all become the dread of real life.  But they aren’t real life.

It may be hard to think about it (it was for me), but real life cannot be defined as “right now.”  Real life is experienced as a long view down the scenes of life and a glimpse into the future.  Real life is not singular or static.  It is dynamic and kinetic.  It cannot be isolated but only experienced.

We feel this awful need to live in the present, to always ride the wave of the life’s highs from one to the other.  We were not built for lives such as these.  We were built for slowness, tedium, and reflection.  We were built for weeks, months, and years, not days.  We were built for real life, the long haul.

Our real life is the lifeblood of our community.  It is the whole connection of real lives into one life: the local church.  And it is a connection that must span the long haul, not just skip from high to high and wander aimlessly in between.  We may experience a “church service high” together some times.  But most of the time we just talk and eat each other’s food.  And that’s okay.  That’s what we were built for.  That’s real community.