Midlife Meditation

Friday a piece of me disappeared. Some background: as I said in my last post, I had a colonoscopy on Friday. The result, succinctly put: I'm not going to die of cancer. Not yet, anyway. This was a huge relief for me and my loved ones--those I told about it, that is. Even though I'm blogging about it, I'm old-fashioned enough that it makes me blush to even type the word "colon." There was another part to this procedure that does not make me blush, but troubles me at the philosophical level. It's something that worried me the first time I had one of these, though I didn't experience it at that time. It's amnesia. Some deep background: prior to my first (blush) colonoscopy, I had never been "under." Every previous medical or dental procedure I'd had involved only local anesthesia. I was conscious through the whole thing, uncomfortably so at times. (I subscribe to the theory that says redheads are anesthesia-resistant, and it's bo...

Yesterday I got a reprieve. To be more specific, a couple of months ago, in preparation for my first physical with my new Kaiser Permanente primary care doctor I submitted a stool sample. It was a minor icky inconvenience, and I thought little of it at the time. But then I got a note on my phone's Kaiser app that there was a message for me: a new test result. Opening the message, I learned that there was blood in the sample. I saw the doctor and talked with her about the test. I'd had a colonoscopy less than two years ago, and while some polyps were removed, they were benign, so she thought there was very little chance I had anything to worry about. Even so, she thought I'd better play it safe, and have another colonoscopy. So the day after Christmas, I did my prep: a liquid diet, massive doses of laxative, and I'll spare you the obvious details of what happened then. Friday morning, Amy drove me to the hospital, and I was speedily checked in, undressed, hooked...

We should've been here a whole movie ago. That's what I kept thinking, couldn't stop thinking, all the way through The Desolation of Smaug:  It was taking entirely too long to get to the dragon. But first it took us too long to get to the giant spiders. These two set pieces, plus the troll scene, are what people remember from the novel, and what they were looking for when they came to see Peter Jackson's version. Here are some things we weren't looking for: Smaug chasing the dwarves all over the mine, shooting flame every minute or so. After waiting so long to see the dragon, now I was growing impatient for him to leave--except when he did, it was to set up the cliff hanger for the third movie. Earlier on, the spiders seemed almost an inconvenience, a trick for introducing us to a superfluous scene involving Legolas, the heroic elf who never appeared in the novel at all. And that's how it was for the entire nearly three hours of this film: wai...

This is the year my tree star burned out. It was just a matter of time. Two of the lights were already out, and it was a cheap thing I picked up at Fred Meyer to begin with, probably seven or eight years ago. I've been looking around for a replacement, but there's nothing tasteful at any of the stores I've visited. Perhaps I'll find something in a post-Christmas clearance sale. There is some powerful symbolism in that dark star, though. This is the first year I'm not at any religious service for Christmas. Instead, we stayed in, had a lovely turkey dinner, then went and saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug , a far-too-long movie that should've concluded the story, rather than padding it to a fare-the-well with extra story lines and characters that were not a part of the novel. But that's another blog post. Until this year, Christmas Eve was almost always a hectic time for me. Growing up in the parsonage, I was always a part of whatever services Da...

You knew it was coming, that I couldn't stay in high dudgeon forever, that at some point my grinchy heart would grow three sizes and I'd be calling out "God bless us, everyone!" to anyone with ears. You knew it, and yet you said nothing. Jerks. But seriously, this happens every year: I start off like Ebeneezer Grinch, and just like said mashed up Christmas-hater, I wind up sledding down Mt. Crumpet to return all the merch, dancing in the streets of Victorian Whoville, carving the roast beast with the Cratchets, won over by the spirit that so often seems buried beneath packages, boxes, and bags. Things that won me over this year: My 500 Children:  One cannot teach and lead holiday singing in an elementary school without having some of their delight rub off on one. And one absolutely cannot do bus duty with kindergartners wearing a Santa hat and maintain a gruff attitude toward the jolly old elf. When they glommed onto me at the door, wrapping their little bodi...

You may have heard the term "cheap grace" before. It was coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a prophetic German theologian executed by the Nazis just before the end of World War II. Here's a brief definition, from his book The Cost of Discipleship: Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. I yesterday became aware of a corollary cheapness in the form of a courageous-sounding open letter from a Bishop. The occasion for the letter was the defrocking three days ago of Frank Schaefer, a Pennsylvania United Methodist pastor convicted of performing a same-gender marriage ceremony for his son. The conference board that administered the punishment was acting as required by the Book of Discipline, a set of laws govern...

It was my third funeral in six months. I attended my first funeral in 1987. I was the preacher. I was 26, and I had never been to a funeral in my life; now a member of the church of which I was student pastor had passed away, and I had to preside at her service. This being southern Illinois, it was an open casket service. It was a macabre experience, and I was extremely nervous going in, but apparently I acquitted myself well. Over the course of the next thirteen years, I performed many more funerals, some of them for parishioners I knew well, but most for strangers with only a tenuous connection to the church I was serving at the time. I became adept at preparing for these services, interviewing the family, selecting hymns, preaching a sermon that was personalized, comforting, and inspiring, setting just the right tone for the liturgy. I believe this was the most effective part of my ministry. And then it stopped. In January 2000, I walked away from ministry, with the help of a...

"And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn." (Luke 2:7) In less than a week, we will celebrate the birth of a homeless savior. To be fair, only Luke's gospel places the birth of Jesus in a borrowed barn, and that only because his parents were traveling in a town with inadequate hotel facilities at the time of the blessed event. It is the life of Jesus once he began his ministry that is rootless, roofless, without any fixed address, a traveling man relying upon the kindness of strangers for shelter. I once got in hot water for describing Jesus as "homeless" at a men's prayer breakfast. It was 22 years ago, and one of the men hearing me speak was deeply offended by the thought. It could just have been that one man; after all, many churches operate soup kitchens, food pantries, and shelters for the homeless, and pastors' emergency funds are freq...

The purpose of this series of essays has been venting a lifetime of pent-up frustrations about how Christmas is celebrated. I've complained about Santa in the manger, carols during Advent, capitalist exploitation of a religious holiday, and my favorite rant of them all, harmonizing the Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke to put both wise men and shepherds in Bethlehem. It's been fun, and I'm probably not done yet; but this morning, home from school with a chest cold, I find myself wondering if maybe I haven't gone a little too far in my curmudgeonly grumbling. Because, quite honestly, Christmas has never been anything but a mash-up. One of the first "shocking" revelations one discovers when delving into the history of Christmas is that Jesus was, if one takes the gospel of Luke seriously, probably born in the spring or summer, because the shepherds were out in the fields with their flocks. (During the winter, they keep them in the barns at night, which...

I finally did it: I took the Autism Spectrum Quotient test. I've heard for most of my life that there's something not quite right about how I relate to other people. I don't pick up on nonverbal cues, I struggle and lose patience with small talk, I'm sensitive to clothing tags and repetitive noises in my environment, and I can have a powerful focus on something that interests me, to the exclusion of everything and everyone around me. And yes, I meant to say "not right," because that is how others around me have presented these personality traits when they've assessed me. I've responded in several different ways to this assessment. At times I've been hurt by it, humiliated to be seen as somehow deficient, lacking in essential survival traits. At other times, I've become angry, insisting that this is who I am, damn it, and I have every right to be myself. Anger like this can lead me to dismiss the person making the assessment: What does he...

Once upon a time, there was a children's novel entitled The Hobbit. It was a whimsical fantasy adventure about a small person, a hobbit, recruited by other small people, dwarves, and one tall person, a wizard, to go on a quest for a lost treasure. Along the way, there were battles with trolls, orcs, goblins, giant spiders and, eventually, a dragon. At the conclusion of this fantasy adventure was an all too realistic war for the treasure. And then the hobbit returned home. The novel works perfectly well as a self-contained work of fiction. The author, JRR Tolkien, drew on a much larger work, the history of Middle Earth, a realm he spent his entire life creating. The Hobbit  and  The Lord of the Rings are all that he ever published from this work, but since his death in 1973 his family has issued volume upon volume of "unfinished tales," gleaned from the mountains of backstory material he had written but never submitted. I've read some of this stuff, and frankly...

Of all the things seminary did to ruin Christianity for me, the worst was teaching me about Advent. To review: in the church calendar, Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas. In its original form, Advent was intended to be a lot like Lent, a season of preparing one's heart for the new life symbolized in the holiday that marks the season's conclusion. Christmas being a lesser holiday than Easter, the Big Daddy of them all, Advent's spiritual prep was more muted, less extreme. There was no "shriving" during Advent. It simply meant hopeful expectation. The lesser status of the Christmas holiday also meant Advent's hope could have a broader focus than the very specific arrival of a baby: one was looking for all sorts of ways for God's saving justice to break through into the world. And then came Dickens. To be fair, Charles Dickens was just one of a host of 19th century influences that caused Christmas to transform from a minor church holiday tha...

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:   “A voice was heard in Ramah,      wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children;      she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:16-18)   Chances are that, even if you're a regular church goer, you've not heard this part of the Christmas story lately.   You probably know of it. It's appeared in a number of biopics of the life of Jesus. You've probably heard the expression "slaughter of the innocents" or "massacre of the innocents." And still, I doubt if you've heard a sermon preached on it.   I may be wrong. I, in fact, preached several sermons on this text during my ye...