Author

Ben Yosua-Davis

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Stats:

Phone Calls Made: 10
Circular Saws Received as Christmas Gifts: 1
Bell Hooks Bent: 8
Chapters Read In ” “: 2
Septic Systems Planned: .5
Trucks Almost Purchased: 2
Trucks Actually Purchased: 0
Trash Bags Filled: 0.

We are in the dog days of January, where I’d need to do twenty minutes of shoveling to be able to drive our extremely ubiquitous Grey Island Station Wagon up our driveway, and where I have three halfway completed projects waiting on God, the Weather, or Someone Else.

At least I survived the Pre-Christmas Toxic Laundry Invasion of 2019. While working on emptying out the Entryway of Horrors, whose aesthetic leans hard towards 70’s Horror Film Chic, we discovered a closet full of vintage LL Bean jackets and clothing. “Score!” I thought. They could be used, at the very worst, as work jackets, keeping me warm while already being pre-hazed by the house they came from.

I brought a bag of them home, stuck them in the washer, poured in detergent and baking soda, and waited excitedly while I made some cookies. As the they baked in the oven, I began to notice that the cookies, rather than smelling like their dependable chocolate chip selves, were carrying an ominously familiar odor.

Sure enough, rather than me deodorizing the laundry, the laundry was odorizing me, and most of my house along with it. I turned on the oven fan, stopped the wash, and dumped the better part of a box boasting “Odor Neutralizing!” into the washer.

It ate that cleaning agent too, and pretty soon the smell had overwhelmed the valiantly struggling stove fan and was making its way into the living room. After remembering I had a a wife and two small children coming home soon; I ran to the washer and cranked it to the spin cycle. Quickly realizing that the smell seemed to be percolating even more quickly, I decided heck with it, stopped the wash; pulled out approximately seven hundred pounds of reeking LL Bean laundry, stuck it in a trash bag and exiled it to the porch.

My wife arrived to the odor of slightly funky chocolate chip cookies, and thankfully no harm was done; but we also agreed that all fabric things in the first floor would be going to only one place: the dump, where they could find equally odorous companions.

There are several other projects all stalled at the midway point. We have a cabin to renovate, once the weather gets warm enough and the electricity gets hooked up. We have a septic system to price out, once I get answers to the Three Pressing Questions that emerged when Dave Chapman, the affable, knowledgeable God of Island Septic Systems paid us a visit on Tuesday. There’s the question of A Mortgage, which would be easier to answer if my credit union would ever respond to my multiple voicemails.

There was also the sad Search for the Truck, where this Buyer thought had two good options to choose from, if he’d ever make up his Damn Mind, only to have his mind made up for him when the first truck ended up decisively being less truck than they needed; and the second truck, a 1987 GMC that he immediately fell in love with, was pulled from the market by a commendably conscientious seller who was afraid it’d become a money pit.

All of this leaves us looking for generosity from our truck-loving neighbors and sacrificing small carburetors to the Island Small Truck Gods in hopes that the right beater will descend to us from the heavens before the serious work begins.

Thankfully John and I (because John is awesome, slightly crazy, and perhaps also masochistic) will be donning our gas masks and parkas and picking up more crap in the cold on Friday because, if the laundry fails and the truck doesn’t arrive, there’s still trash, odors, and other surprises, just waiting for you.

Statistics:

Rooms Cleaned: .66
Eight Hundred Pound Sofa-Bed Monstrosities Moved: One
Tylenol Taken: 2 (One for me, one for John)
Contractor Bags Filled: Eight
Number of Terrifying Mattresses and/or Box Springs Removed: Also Eight
Number of Loads Of Plague Laundry Unsuccessfully Attempted: One [Wait ‘till next week for this story]
Unintentionally Comic Quote of the Week: “I didn’t notice that mattress has camouflage sheets!”

It is good to be back into our regular routine: holidays completed, family visited, an indeterminate-but-almost-definitely-embarrassing number of pounds gained; much fun had and rest achieved. And so, I joyfully sit in our upstairs bathroom, laptop open, waiting for my boy to fall asleep according to our Pact, gleefully banging out another update.

[Have I told you about The Pact? It has two parties, my boy and myself, in which I, the parent/sleep guardian agree that if the Boy Goes To Sleep On His Own in His Bed(!) then Parent/Sleep Guardian will: sit in the bathroom next door, before checking in to see how he’s doing in “Six Short Minutes”. This is when I get all my blogging done, some of which before editing, has a more than metaphorical connection to the fixture I’m currently sitting on.]

It takes a village to fix a house. At least, it certainly has this last month.

Specs Eaton (recurring character alert!), lumberjack turned teacher turned high school principal turned real estate agent/contractor/tree expert, volunteered to help us take down a couple fifty foot tall trees that had been planted a cushy five feet from the house, including one that was definitely leaning in what could only be described as a domicidal direction.

This involved him bringing his tractor, which is perhaps better described as a high-powered Swiss army on wheels, making a precarious climb up the tree, risking (bad pun alert!) life and limb to tie a rope around the trunk, which we then attached to said tractor. He then gave me a two minute tutorial, and said, “When I start waving frantically, throw the tractor into reverse if you’d still like a house.”

Accessing the perfect trigonometry possessed by every professional lumberjack, he made a bunch of careful cuts around the tree trunk, and began waving frantically. Bucking my long history of mechanical ineptitude, I successfully backed the tractor into reverse, and the tree toppled down perfectly, saving both my house and about a thousand dollars of professional tree work. Afterwards, I had my second lesson on the Usage of the Chainsaw, in which I managed a solid C+, managing to get it pinched twice, before deciding that exhaustion, sharp power tools and a badly overdue lunch were not good for the long-term future of my limbs.

This brings me to the next resident in our village, where my apprenticeship is going far better with Kim Boehm, Master Electrician, whose answering machine message still opens “You’ve reached the intergalactic headquarters of Island Electric…”. I’m now the proud owner of a State of Maine Electrician’s Helper’s License and a bag of tools, which will give me the opportunity to work very slowly under his very careful supervision, with the hope that I’ll soon be roughing out my own lines without posing excessive danger to myself or to others. Kim has been a remarkably patient teacher so far, which is most likely due to the fact that I appear to be a far more naturally talented electrician than I am a lumberjack.

And finally, there are all those online presences which also populate my house-raising village.

A month ago, I went to the Almighty Google to look for a good prayer to start my workdays with. I believe that work like this is holy, although we don’t tend to think of it as such, and at any rate, I find that all good days hauling trash can use some judicious sanctification. I ended up turning to the Facebook for help and received a bunch of great responses, but the one that took the cake was by Wendy Hudson, former guest on my podcast, who volunteered to write me one.

This is what she wrote; and this is what I pray at the beginning of every workday on Firehouse Road.

 

[I originally wrote this as a featured article for the BTS Center’s December issue of Bearings, their online magazine. Many thanks for letting me repost!)

Every resurrection requires death. This is written into the rhythms of creation. Spring is preceded by winter. New forest growth is preceded by forest fires. Sunrise is always preceded by sunset. Rebirth comes after walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Easter Sunday comes after Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Nothing escapes this reality.

I learned this lesson about five years ago, when my church gathered for the last time to say goodbye.

This was not the lesson I thought I was going to learn when I began my work as a pastor. Like most Christians, I believed in immortality, even invincibility, before I believed in resurrection. In this spirit, fresh out of seminary, on fire with passion, captured by a beautiful vision, my wife and I set out to plant an experimental Christian community centered around serving a city, not a building or weekly worship—one of the first mainline-missional churches in the country—bolstered by the assurance that as long as we followed Jesus, nothing could really go wrong.

After all, I had been given this assurance through all my years of spiritual and professional formation. A parade of authors and presenters told us the stories of a hundred rabbits that were pulled out of a hundred ministerial hats by churches that had almost closed until they found just the right program and became vital turn around examples for the rest of us. A hundred plucky little bands of people wandered out into forlorn communities, armed with nothing but their faith, and planted churches that grew with such rapidity that it would have put Paul to shame. A thousand saints-in-the-making with deep love for God’s poor effortlessly developed world-famous programs that changed entire neighborhoods of people. Of course, the same thing would happen to you, if you were truly faithful (and hopefully bought their book as well).

Then my ideals collided headlong with reality.

I discovered in those first few years that much of the work was as beautiful as promised. We threw block parties and free markets, with thousands of people joyfully attending. We gathered for amazing Bible study over potluck food in ratty apartments in dangerous neighborhoods. We cleaned up abandoned parks and defiantly celebrated resurrection on Easter Sunday in them, chalking “Christ is risen” on long neglected sidewalks.

But much of it was far harder and far messier than we ever envisioned: filled with disappointments and dead ends, griefs and betrayals, deep hurts and lingering questions; always with the grinding pressure of long hours, and high expectations, and no money, and no end to any of it in sight, even after years of hard labor.

As my joy began to wither, as my body experienced the pain of too many gas station meals and seventy-hour workweeks, as my spirit began to shake under the relentless pressure and the unshakeable conviction that things were not going as planned, I realized two things: this work had broken me, and I didn’t know how to stop.

This is a common tale, especially for people of faith. We think that God has guaranteed our particular story a happy ending. We tell ourselves that we just need to hold on until we reach our promised conclusion. The turnaround is always right around the corner, we insist; we just need to hold on until we get there. And so, what starts as healthy persistence turns into obsession. We become the animated caricature of our own expectations, willing to do anything, try anything, sacrifice anything, just so we can keep going. We become robots in our own lives; so automated by our own habits that we lose any sense of agency, because we fear what will happen if we let go.

And that’s when the good news for us becomes not Easter, but Good Friday.

I remember the Good Friday moment for us. We had taken a month-long sabbatical, my desperate attempt to recover my health and get a break from the nearly ceaseless anxiety attacks I experienced daily. We decided that if six people would sign up for an in-depth spiritual and leadership formation class with us, then we would continue. In the end, only four did, and after receiving the final “no” on our list, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of relief, because it meant that the work could finally just end.

Not that the ending was easy. Death never is. For us, there was no Mr. Holland’s Opus moment—just a sad little death-denying worship service, followed by nine lonely months as we packed our possessions, sold our house, and moved to an island off the coast of Maine to start over again.

In the years that followed, I learned of another grace, one even more ignored than the grace of ending. That was the grace of Holy Saturday, the day of the tomb, of sitting in the ashes.

I had never paid attention to this part of the story before. Authors, when they write books, tend to refer to these moments almost in elision. Five years can pass in a memoir through a mere paragraph: the aftermath of a divorce, of a career ended, of aimless wandering in the wilderness, a long coda where nothing seems to happen before the action begins again.

There is an advent of expectation that comes when you sit in the ashes, and that season can last for a short while or a very long one, as you learn the hard discipline of patience and keep watch for the coming of spring.

There is an advent of expectation that comes when you sit in the ashes, and that season can last for a short while or a very long one, as you learn the hard discipline of patience and keep watch for the coming of spring.

It’s hard not to attach yourself to the next great thing that comes your way. In those first two years after my church ended, I pitched multiple book proposals, started a podcast, got trained as a church planting coach, began a consulting business, developed a workshop called “The Gift of Failure” that was, in the most ironic moment of my career, cancelled due to lack of registration, and became a pastor of a dinner church. Every one of those efforts sank back into nothingness almost as quickly as they began.

And then, my health collapsed; a previously dormant chronic illness swiftly re-emerged. Sitting up in a chair, going to check the mail, or even going up a set of stairs felt like running a marathon. Without a career, without my health, my ego exhausted, I could do nothing but wait, lying in my own tomb, my whole life happening on the other side of a bedroom door.

Endings are not always easy. They’re frequently messy, open-ended, and exceptionally painful. They also don’t happen all at once. Each thread of your story eventually snaps, one after another, sometimes in quick succession, sometimes only after the weathering of the years, until you float again in space.

Space. That’s what I discovered again, sitting in my bed, having been forcibly untethered from everything that had propped my identity up. And within that space—a space that felt like death—I began to experience new life again.

I started treating my body as something other than an enemy. I fell into a community that held me as I faced the lifelong wounds that my long-automatic expectations had silenced for decades. I learned again the beauty of watching my son play, of receiving a note from a friend, of baking cookies for a neighbor; of experiencing life as good, in and of itself, regardless of what happened next.

After a while, the threads started to reknit. The anxiety, once the monster that rode my back every day, became a quiet friend. My health found its own tentative equilibrium and then bloomed again into full life, after a long-delayed visit to a specialist found a treatment that actually worked. I started to discover how calling could be rooted in something other than expectations and dreams.

It is a beginning that is still beginning. I’ve only been healthy for a couple months now, still confused by feeling better than I have in over a decade. My career is still an ambiguous mess, although more connected to a true sense of vocation than ever before. I still feel shadows of sadness whenever I visit a church for worship or gather with a group of people in my home to study scripture.

But, five years after that most beloved story came to an end, Easter has dawned in my life, and only because I accepted the grace of ending and the even greater grace of sitting in the ashes.

Let me give you permission: it is a good thing to end. It is a good thing to give up that much beloved habit that was once helpful but had gone past its season. It’s a good thing for your church to lay down its dead traditions and commend them to the community of the saints. It is good for us to release the unfinished threads of our story and entrust them to the love of God.

And it is good, when you say goodbye, to just stop, and wait, and hold space, for as long as it takes Spirit to work.

And it is good, when you say goodbye, to just stop, and wait, and hold space, for as long as it takes Spirit to work.

Because in that space, sitting in the ashes, like a forest after the fire, we will notice new green shoots starting to sprout up, so filled with life that we can’t help but wonder how they grew out of soil such as us in the first place.

At the end of this year, and at the end of whatever story you find yourself at: here’s to endings, here’s to the ashes, and here’s to a glorious green resurrection.

[Clearly it’s the holidays, and I’m not enough of a masochist to have worked this past week and not enough of a sadist to ask other people to work this week either. Soon enough, we’ll be temporally aligned, but this happened a few weeks ago. Happy holidays!]

Weekly Statistics:

Aggrieved Mice Evicted From their Generational Homes In Broad Daylight: 2
Dog Crates In Front Yard: 6
Bird Feeders: 14 (and counting)
Houses Broken Into: 1
Chain Saws Used: 1
Number of Electric Weed Whackers Discovered: 3 (one is still in its box!)
Contractor Bags Filled: Six (and counting)
Friends: John Flint, Joe Ballard

This property requires, as they say, a lot of sweat equity.

And by sweat equity, they quite literally mean my sweat.

The list of projects for a property like this one is nearly endless, but hopefully there are a few that will separate themselves from the pack and clamor for your attention.

The first task was taking care of the dead trees all around the house: those fallen, those partially-fallen, and those still-up-but-could-be-fallen-quite-soon, to avoid vulnerable roofs and to give us good access to the house in case of an emergency. (In retrospect, I’m not sure what emergency could possibly happen that would require me to obtain quick access to the house. After all, I’m not very likely to yell “Fire at the house! Quick! Let’s run inside!”)

The front yard was an arboreal graveyard and I spent the morning, with help from my good friend John Flint (Recurring character alert!) and Joe Ballard, self-proclaimed maniac chainsaw master, (okay, I paraphrased slightly) in cutting them up and hauling them away.

I even got to use a chainsaw for the very first time. (It was a moment, as I remarked to the J’s, where I’m quite sure that my mother, sitting no doubt at her breakfast table in Wells, suddenly felt very uncomfortable for no discernible reason.) I tentatively hacked off several small branches and had a grand time before the adults decided to take over again.

Afterwards, John and I went over to the little cabin, a little winterized place that may be the archetypal Bachelor Pad on the island, replete with questionably framed pictures of wolves on the wall, towels used hopefully as curtains, and a leather sofa-couch that weighs as much as a small elephant.

The door to the cabin had been locked from the inside by some over-conscious real estate tourists, who must have then found a nearby window to climb out of, as there is no door handle on this door, since apparently Real Men Don’t Need Door Handles. It was at this moment I got my first experience breaking and entering, with the help of a short ladder and trusty crowbar, a procedure that went very well until the window slammed down on my knees while I was halfway through, turning me briefly into a very poor imitation of the Wicked Witch of the East. (John laughed, but in his defense, only for a very short while before opening the window to allow me to escape with my legs, if not my dignity intact.)

It was a long, hard day of manual labor, leavened by a couple friends.

And I loved it.

This is quite surprising, since I have not done anything more physically demanding than sit intently at my desk, banging words into existence for the entirety of my adult career. (But before that, I was the Lead FRIDAY NIGHT Fry Cook at Bonanza Steak House one summer during college, so you know I’ve got some skillz.) For the next few years, about half my working hours will be spent working with my hands (or my back or my knees, as both want me to inform you).

Manual labor, as all the great mystics of all traditions reminds us, is also a great means of contemplation; which is something I’m definitely going to try to remember when shoveling two solid inches of rabbit manure out of my basement this spring.

[Read Chapter One of Reports From the Island Frontier here.]

 

Much to our surprise, we purchased a house about a month ago.

In case you haven’t heard the story yet, let me unpack that statement for you.

First, it was indeed much to our surprise, as we had no particular intention to buy a house, seeing as part-time pastors married to part-time musicians/podcasters don’t generally make enough money to meet the $300-350,000 buy-in that actually owning housing on the island generally requires.

Second, while “purchased” is a rather antiseptic, value-neutral term, this process involved solving the mystery of a rumored gas tank, an epic saga at a cash-only, foreclosure auction on a rather sketchy website, one failed bid process, and a second bidding war where I was so surprised at our success that I literally stared mutely at my laptop for the better part of five minutes, sure that our internet had somehow malfunctioned; before finally getting to the surprisingly complex work of pushing together all the pennies we’ve been meticulously saving since we got married just for an opportunity like this one.

Finally, by house I mean not a “house”, but a sprawling 1.8 cleared acre complex (cleared referring to trees, but certainly not to the 50 abandoned lobster traps and piles of random junk, including six dog crates, fourteen bird feeders, and one cast iron bathtub living merrily outdoors) with a house (more on that in a moment), a cabin, a garage, a horse barn, a horse pasture, and one building that was formerly a clubhouse and/or guesthouse but is now functionally scrap due to a missing back wall.

By house, I also mean a charming old island home, built in the late 19th century, about 1500 square feet; which could only be optimistically described as a “fixer upper”, with broken septic, piles of trash, at least twenty rabbit hutches and two inches of composted rabbit droppings in the basement, and a urine/smoke smell so strong in the front kitchen and living room that if you open the door, you can smell the house from ten feet away. For all of that, also a house with rock solid bones, which, when you’re doing a fixer upper, is all that really matters.

By house, I also mean a story. It’s the story of a well-beloved island family, an old garage and gas station, horses running in a field, a sweet little home that once was kept utterly immaculate, with red geraniums around the driveway during the summer. It’s also the story of a sad spiral downward for an island son and a community that fought hard to keep him in the house, through love and sweat, and couldn’t succeed. It’s the story of a four-year eyesore that stares at you every time you drive down Firehouse Road to the center of town.

All of this spoke to us. It’s the chance to buy in to a community we love at a price we can actually afford. It’s the chance to turn the whole property around and provide good opportunities for other islanders in a way that could also help support us. It’s the chance to reclaim a sweet little house in a sweet little spot on this island. (And yes, we’re full eyes open on the incredible amount of work that’s needed to make that happen. Seriously. You should see my spreadsheets.)

Most importantly for us, it’s a chance to take that story and write a happier one. Melissa and I have always been drawn to taking dead things and bringing them back to life; from throwing block parties in abandoned neighborhoods, to celebrating Easter in run-down city parks, defiantly scrawling “Christ is risen” on the sidewalks, to holding space for grieving youth and giving their spirits room to revive. Believe it or not, buying this house is not the craziest thing we’ve ever done. Stuff like this is pretty much all we’ve ever done.

We’ll be sharing our experiences (and pictures) as we go through this process over the next couple years. So stay tuned here; because coming next week: the stories of my first month at work, which includes some generous neighbors, some judicious breaking and entering, and an adventure with a chainsaw.

Here’s my process for the guaranteed renewal of your church in just two steps.

Step One: Just fucking do something.

What does I mean? In order to explain, I first need to take you to a typical New England church supper to raise money for the light bill. (I’ve been to more than one of these.) People may fight in the kitchen, the meal itself might feel suspiciously like a ripoff to those who come and it generally makes less money than a lemonade stand in January.

Of course, this is celebrated by the pastor during the Sunday morning service as the second coming of the kingdom of God, running maybe a close second to that amazing committee meeting that also happened this week, where the minutes were read with great intention and decisions were not made with equally great intention.

Of course, all of this is a lie. Jesus wanted nothing to do with that stupid light-bill supper; and truth be told, neither did most of the congregation; but the lie (which is generally one with a long generational history) is what keeps the community equilibrium, so people go along with it.

This sort of routine spiritual malpractice, (or non-practice) of Christianity takes all these Biblical words that shook empires, incited crowds to riot, burnt well-constructed lives to the ground in holy fire, turns them upside down and shakes them really hard, until they agree to say whatever you want them to.

There is a downside to this serial theological manipulation, which is that when our words no longer have any experiential reality to meaningfully describe, they hollow out, like a barrel with a leak at the bottom, until they become functionally content-less. The actual Christian experience becomes so foreign that when Jesus speaks about feeding the hungry, befriending the poor, or going to prison, this is so far from the lived community experience that he might as well be talking about taking a day trip to Narnia.

Furthermore, our communities have functioned in this era of intense linguistic meaninglessness for so long that we now sincerely that shaping our words to name a reality that does not exist is what the Christian life is about. (Besides, of course, committee meeting, fundraisers, and funerals.) And so, even when possessing the very best intentions, our initial response to a call from God is to form a committee or study group to talk about it; until the energy is safely drained from the idea and we can go back to living our securely unchanged lives.

Which is why I’d say to any church (or really any faith community) that if you want to experience spiritual transformation, the VERY last thing you should do is hold a meeting, read a book, or form a planning group. Instead, go out and just start doing what Jesus did. Feed some hungry people. Visit some sick people. Make friends with God’s poor. Extend radical generosity to some unlikely targets. All of these things can be done with 20 minutes of planning, a couple hours of time, and less than a hundred dollars, EASY.

After you do this, not just once (once, after all, is just the spiritual equivalent of that annual January 2nd trip to the gym), but several times; then you may proceed to step two of my program:

Step Two: Gather and reflect on what happened.

Open your scriptures, or gather for worship, and say, “What can this tell us about how God was working through us?” and watch how all those pleasantly inoffensive, utterly nonthreatening words spring to life with startling urgency; how your dusty theology starts to suddenly grow new green sprouts and begins to change in disconcerting ways, and how the Spirit will start speaking to you in all the inconvenient, closed off places of your life.

Kenda Creasy-Dean talks about about leading youth in reflection after a service project. (Hear her whole conversation with me here.) She says,

When the youth showed up, they knew they were going to do something good and important for this family…but what the mom said to the teenagers was ‘You are an answer to prayer. We have been praying since February that we could hang on until you could show up.’ It ratcheted what they were doing up a notch…they didn’t see this just as a good thing..but that somehow, God was in the midst of this and that they’d been part of a story of redemption, not just a story of doing good things…turning good action into holy action.”

When that reflection starts (and your leader’s prized theological education starts coming in handy), I guarantee that all the transformation that everyone wants for their churches, will just HAPPEN, no consultants, planning committees, or book studies required, because the Spirit flows with remarkable alacrity through cooperative channels.

Congratulations, I just saved you thousands of dollars on a consultant and hundreds of hours of meetings.

All you have to do is:

1) Just fucking do something.
2) Gather and reflect on what happened.

Wash, rinse, repeat; and you’ll be surprised how transformational this Jesus life actually is.

The farther you progress in the spiritual life, the lonelier it gets.

The topics that used to consume you may now only arouse faint interest. (How many books did I read about “the future of the church” in my late twenties and early thirties? Hundreds. How many have I read since we moved to the island three years ago? None.)

The dichotomies that used to agonize you now all seem like artificial constructions that obscure a deeper Truth. (Is this an outward work? An inward work? Is this love of God or love of neighbor? How do you balance work with rest? Anger with forgiveness?)

The conversations that used to energize you all deflate like sad little balloons, without enough hot air to keep them afloat anymore. (In my case, denominational politics, theological esoterica, and the over-earnest discussion of “what does it mean to be the church?”)

Instead, you find that your gaze turns inwards: to the places of deepest unspoken hurt, to the deeper comprehension of self, to the wrenching, painful work of giving up all those external attachments that you thought were You.

In the process, you also discover loneliness.

I’ve discovered that there are precious few people who are able to have those conversations about matters like this, much less engage in this work with the necessary degree of maniacal consistency.

After all, it is a journey that their friends will not encourage them to take, because it can strip them of the unspoken tribal prejudices and previously energizing interests upon which friendships are based.

After all, it is a journey which our society, built upon superficial urgency and the frantic pursuit of novelty, is designed to prevent. (Don’t believe me? How many times did you check your smartphone today? And how many of times did you check it because you grew uncomfortable, bored, upset, or disturbed with something which you would prefer be left unnamed?)

After all, it is a journey which their churches, which institutionally depend on busy people highly invested in externals, simply do not have the capacity to imagine.

And the journey is hard, because the road is terrifying. From the comfortable ruts of life, you emerge into a dangerous, dark wilderness of spirit, filled with monsters of your own making. The road ahead seems like no more than a vague trail (pray to God for something as clear as a vague trail!) with the road behind always clear as day, beckoning for you to come back to safer ground.

My experience? Most people, if they don’t have journey companions, will take a few steps on that terrifying trail, and then retreat back to the comfortable territory of their familiar existence, filled with friends and jobs, religious observances and books, momentary bursts of passion brought on by the novelty of a new spiritual idea, and the steady, familiar rhythm of prejudices and interests that were formed in childhood.

The problem is that God (and by God I most specifically the Love that birthed the universe, that birthed each of us, and that lies at the truest center of our being,) can only be encountered fully in that dark wilderness of spirit.

Ideally, our spiritual communities exist so that people can find companions and guides for exactly this journey; but maintaining that communal ethos requires spiritual vigilance and produces very few institutional returns. This is why the communities that call themselves churches have turned instead to peddling a hyper-commodified mass market version of themselves, so that people may learn to possess God rather than learning to let God possess them. (This may be true for other religious and a-religious traditions, but I’ll let them speak for themselves on this count.)

I’m thankful that I’ve found a community, albeit a temporary one, that has helped me take my first full steps into the wilderness of my own soul. I also hear an echo of loneliness, sometimes even terror, knowing that soon that community will come to an end, and it is not a given that I will find other people to journey with me.

I don’t have any reassurances for me, but I do have advice for you if who have heard God’s call to walk a deeper path, even if that call is heard only in whispers.

First, step out the door on that new road, even if all you have is a backpack full of questions.

Second, find some people. Be wary of the good church people. Look for the pones hovering around the edges (or the comfortably self-differentiated ones in the middle.) Look for the ones who talk more about God and about people and less about “church”. Look for the ones who have a smiling, self-deprecatory honesty. Look for the ones who seem like actual humans, not religious facsimiles of themselves.

Finally, ask them to join you on the journey. Some will look at you oddly. Some will say “no”; or say “yes” but actually mean “no” when they realize what is involved. But remember, God is gracious, and if God is pulling you into the wilderness, then God will send you a couple of people who might dare to say “yes” along with you: people who will pick you up when you stumble, or get lost, and point you back into the darkness and say “keep going”.

Because, in the end, this is really the only journey ultimately worth taking.

It is just as the great Quaker mystic, Thomas Kelly, says,

Out in front of us is the drama of [people] and of nations, struggling, laboring, dying. Upon this tragic drama in these days our eyes are all set in anxious watchfulness and in prayer. But within the silences of the souls of [people] an eternal drama is ever being enacted, in these days as well as in others. And on the outcome of this inner drama rests, ultimately, the outer pageant of history.

It is the drama of the Hound of Heaven baying relentlessly upon the track of [humans]. Is the drama of the lost sheep wandering in the wilderness, restless and lonely, feebly searching, while over the hill comes the wiser Shepherd. For His is a shepherd’s heart, and He is restless until He holds His sheep in His arms. it is the drama of the Eternal Father drawing the prodigal home unto Himself, where there is bread enough and to spare…And always its chief is – the Eternal God of Love.

Thomas Kelly. A Testament of Devotion. 1941.

Hi Friends –

I’m working right now to make the season four of my podcast a reality; and I’d like your help. Help get our 2019 season of the podcast off the ground, and to thank you for your support, I’ll shout your name on an episode, you can get exclusive access to rough-cut episodes before they come out, be part of an annual Reports-insider group chat where you can ask me questions, or even get a one hour Skype conversation with me.

We will be running this campaign for only *two* weeks, so if you’re interested in hearing more from us next year, now is the time to step up. Pledges start at only $1/month and you can find us at the link below!

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