Midlife Meditation

Having church in Nashville: the Stacy Mitchhart Band performs at the Basin Street Blues and Boogie Bar. Music is my church, teaching is my religion. So I wrote in my last post to this blog . Much of my meditation on this formulation was about how I came to it. This post will unpack the first half of the formulation. Understanding what I mean by "music is my church" will require a discussion of what I mean by "church." My seminary education and my years both growing up in and ministering to churches  freight the word with countless layers of meaning. Let's start with the most obvious, the symbol that leaps to the minds of most Americans when they hear the word "church": a large brick and mortar (or lumber and siding) structure featuring a steeple and cross, and containing a large meeting room in which religious services are held. My early childhood years in New Hampshire predispose me to picture a white building in the town square. If you grew u...

Metanoia Peace Community, 2011--a year before it disbanded, unable to continue without the leadership of its now-retired pastor, John Schwiebert. Big things happened to me in 2000. My second marriage was officially over December 30, 1999. My career as a United Methodist minister ended about two weeks later. The church I was serving as associate pastor and music minister had seen almost from day one that I was damaged goods, that I had suffered far too many defeats and humiliations, and that, at the very least, I needed a break from ministry. They had rolled the dice on me, creating a new position that matched my skill set, but I was only delivering on a portion of my job description. Seeing this, but wanting to honor their commitment to me, they worked out a deal with the conference office to place me on disability leave. The conference would pay the disability portion of my salary, while the church would continue to pay the remainder, as well as my housing, through June 30, with...

Have you seen the light? Yes, that's James Brown in the academic robe favored by African-American preachers, and he's calling out the question to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues brothers. It comes in the midst of a stirring rendition by Brown, a church choir, a backup band, and a company acrobatic fan-waving dancers of "The Old Landmark," a gospel standard that inspires the brothers to put their band back together to raise money to save the orphanage in which they were raised. The movie is The Blues Brothers , and it's a shaggy dog of a film stuffed with amazing R&B performances, car chases, celebrity cameos, and occasional blue language. It manages to respectfully poke fun at Catholicism, full gospel Protestantism, neo-Nazism, soul culture, blindness, prison life, government bureaucracy, law enforcement, homelessness, and probably several other politically dangerous topics more successfully than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. See it....

May 12, 1983: all but one of us were gathered on the steps of our dormitory, Lausanne Hall, on the campus of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. We were dressed for a wedding at which Kathleen (with the flowers) was to be, or had just been, a bridesmaid: our friend Cheryl, who had been more a member of our Group during our freshman year but had drifted away since then, was marrying Tim Kilday (Thirty years is a long time: I don't remember Cheryl's maiden name.). The next day, all but one of us would graduate; that one was Tony Peterson, in the sunglasses and closely-cropped Afro, who had graduated in 1980, but stuck around for our remaining years. I like to think he was keeping an eye on us, as soon after this picture was taken, he went on to other things in other places, first in Richland, Washington, then in Nashville, where he still lives. You may have noticed I capitalized the word "Group." That's how we always thought of ourselves: the Group. We came ...

This is me doing standup. I'm good with microphones. As a preacher, I learned to tell stories from my heart, to invite people into my inner pilgrimage and entice them to accompany me on my quest for awhile. During my second (and ultimately successful) attempt at ordination, several pastors came to observe me preaching a sermon. They took me out to lunch afterward, and one of them told me, "What you do is very powerful. Please use it for good." It gave me pause, made me think about Virgil Howard, one of my preaching models back in seminary, and a sermon he had delivered in the seminary chapel that was so revealing that, even as I was enthralled, I felt my skin crawl. I have wondered ever since if that sermon, however effective it was at delivering its message (I believe it was about overcoming fear), went too far, maybe even committed a kind of emotional assault. I preached revelatory sermons for many years, talking about my inner struggles, fears, inadequacies, using...