Midlife Meditation

An ancient juniper at Oregon Badlands Wilderness. This is my third post in a row that has the word "church" in its title. I've been wrestling with religion for most of my life. Faith never came easily for me--and, as it turned out, it didn't come the hard way, either. I tried for years to follow the advice Peter Boehler, a friend of John Wesley, gave him during one of his own many crises of faith: "Preach faith until you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith." I tried, and failed: the faith that is Methodism and, much more than that, Christianity, simply would not take root in me. And yet, even as the faith I strained to possess eluded my grasp, I found myself experiencing a gradual warming of the heart from unexpected sources: mountaintops, finish lines, friendships, concerts, novels, workouts, intimate moments. It took me three decades of such epiphanies to put them all together and realize just what I was being tol...

Paul Simon slip-slid his way into my musical vocabulary right alongside gospel music. By the time I graduated from seminary, I had acquired the complete Simon & Garfunkel collection and was well on my way to a full set of Paul Simon's solo outings. With these influences in place, I was primed for the final revelation. In the summer of 1991, I returned to Oregon, and picked up a pile of cassettes from my brother Jon's garage sale. They sat in my car, unplayed, until one day a few months later I was driving between Medford and Talent, the two United Methodist churches that made up my first Oregon appointment. Things were not going well in Medford: I was constantly butting heads with my senior pastor; he was triangulating his anger at me through my wife, who was also on staff at Medford; and there were a number of extended family conflicts that were heating up. Add to this the loss of my best tension relief, running, due to my first attack of plantar fasciitis, and...

   I am a snob. There. I admitted it. Happy? There's no getting around it: I go for the better things. I prefer the original Star Trek to the JJ Abrams remix, microbrews to BudMillCoors, Hondas to Fords, Steinways to Kimballs, iPhones to Galaxies, Dick's Kitchen to McDonalds, HBO to NBC... I could go on for several more paragraphs, but you've got the general idea. These are not just mild preferences. Some of them have been developing for decades. I'm not, in general, given to quick judgment, and lacking adequate knowledge and experience, I will not jump to conclusions about the relative superiority of one variety of a thing to all other iterations of that same thing. One bad experience does not necessarily eliminate an item from my favorites list, though it does result in a warning tag. My experience with Japanese cars, for instance, has been almost universally excellent, with one exception: an Acura that, in the three years I owned it, had two major breakd...