And on the lighter side…

To help take the taste of that last post out of your mouth, how about some kiddo cuteness? I promised a friend a month ago I would post these and I’m woefully late. It is so hard to believe that these photos are almost 3 months old now! Behold, 10 month old peanut and monster, in all of their terrifyingly cute glory!

I haven’t looked at these photos in a while. I had to laugh as I uploaded them. Nearly every time the camera came out, Monster stopped to mug for the camera. Total ham! Peanut, on the other hand, almost never showed the camera her face because she was too busy actually doing stuff. Yep! Sounds about right.

Melancholy

“I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is
emulation, nor the musician’s, which is fantastical,
nor the courtier’s, which is proud, nor the
soldier’s, which is ambitious, nor the lawyer’s,
which is politic, nor the lady’s, which is nice, nor
the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a
melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,
extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry’s
contemplation of my
travels, in which my often
rumination wraps me m a most
humorous sadness.”

- The Melancholy Jacques (As You Like It)

I have a melancholy all of my own today: One born of many things but composed of no single thing. As I’ve often said, I am a truly blessed person. I have material blessings – a house, a car, a job and nice things. I have a great family, loving wife and beautiful son. I am lucky in love and friendship, with strong relationships that have endured. I am blessed with some responsibility but not more than I can handle, and with a purpose I can articulate.  i have everything one could hope for in life. And yet I fret. I stumble.  I feel lost in a deep wood with no clear path out. I long for deeper things.

Despite my blessings, I increasingly feel dissatisfied. Call it an expanding sense of call or rather, a return to an understading of call I have long suppressed, but the inequality and the injustice I see in the world around me have impacted me dramatically. I feel called to serve the world in ways that cannot be contained to a single parish. Perhaps I feel that everything I have is fragile in a way I’ve never perceived before. My grasp on the middle class American dream is tenuous at best as my spending power continues to decrease and my wages stay stagnant even as the costs around continue to spike. My palms are sweaty and I am aware that the slightest slip will break my hold on the privileges and security I now know. This has moved my sense of righteous indignation for the injustices of the world from the realm of the academic into the world of the oh-too-very-real. For the first time in my entire life, I have begun to believe that, despite my best efforts and beyond my own natural abilities, I could actually be poor and without the  influence and privilege that being middle class comes. This is terrifying. It pisses me off. It re-awakens the sense of indignation and passion I felt in my college days of heady idealism but this time that idealism has an angry, experienced edge to it.

I look at those people gathering in Zucotti park in New York and on Lasalle and Jackson in Chicago or in Piatt Park in Cincinnati…or any of the other 92 cities with an occupy movement…and I feel their anger and pain in a personal way. We live in a country in which the very very rich have coopted the system and broken it at the expense of the poor.  We live in a country in which a few men and women, in order to grow even more stinking rich, have effectively bought the votes to block healthcare reform, block any kind of jobs bill, ravaged social safety nets and put millions of Americans at risk of falling through the cracks. It is mean, it is cruel, it is unjust and it is un-christian.

As a Christian and a pastor, I feel as though the church should be at the forefront of this argument, arguing the moral imperative. And yet, where are we? When was the last time we spoke with conviction and passion and power to the very nature of our system? When was the last time we engaged in collective witness to address that system? Sure, there are pockets of the church doing what they can and I deeply appreciate their efforts. There are men and women of faith who have dedicated their very lives to changing the system – and yet, is the larger church aware of what they do and why? Does the church universal make the connections between our faith and our economics, our justice system, the way in which we care for the least? What do we spend our time on in the church? It seems to me that we spend a disproportionate amount of time arguing about stationary, and whether to sing the old hymns or the older hymns; we gossip about who is sleeping with whom, we worry that the American flag is not presented prominently in the sanctuary…we worry about the buildings in which we worship and in making sure we keep things the way they’ve always been. We worry about the drapes while the city around us burns down. We are a miserable failure as far as The Good News goes. Some individual congregations do better than others and certainly some individuals get it but as a force in the world, we serve more as a distraction  than a leader.

Part of my melancholy has to do with my own rle in that domestication  of the church of Jesus Christ. I spend 90% of my time working on bulletins, sermons, hospital calls, newsletter articles and other “internal” forms of communication. I spend less than 10% of my time out in the world and less than 1% of my time doing anything to tackle the real sources of evil and suffering in the world. Most of my time is concentrated on convincing people to come to my church and become insiders. When do we actually focus on the things for which Christ came and died? You know, dismantling the structures that hold us in thrall, waging war on the power of sin, tearing down the domination system and rooting out the inequalities and injustices that separate us from God? Or does that fit in our job descriptions, as pastors?

I think this melancholy has been with me for a long time, gnawing at the edges of my work at the church. It’s not that I don’t love everything there is to being a pastor. To be sure, I’m excited about the progress we’ve made and I’m excited about the work we are doing to make our church a more hospitable place. It’s just that I’ve also been painfully aware that at some point, we need to transition from the dressings of the faith to the heart of the matter and I’m feeling more and more these days that we live in a country in which people have no desire to go deeper in their faith lives, in their partisan political lives or even in the way in which they know their neighbors. I find myself loving my congregation, my friends, my families…the individuals in my life, even as I find myself hating this venture we call America. I hate it for its potential un-tapped, I hate it for the ways in which it grinds up its children and rewards the wicked, I hate it for the way in which it co-ops the loyal dissenters and lures me into complacency and comfort. I hate it in the way that only someone in love with another can hate that other. And the fact that so few people get that tension just makes it worse.

What to do with this spirit of dissatisfaction? That is the question I go to bed with tonight.

Occupy Everything.

Oh friends, I’ve been stretched thin lately. It feels like the older I get, the more I have to worry about and the busier I become. I look back at the countless all-nighters for which I was famous in college and think – man, so much energy and stamina so utterly wasted! If only I could have a fraction of that energy back to deal with the endless nights when Monster refuses to sleep! If only I could time travel back and use those wasted nights to finish my sermon, pay my bills, plan a session retreat or develop a strategic plan! If only I could have a few of those hours to just think! And the great irony of getting old is that, the more you have to bitch about, the less you feel like you can bitch. My nights are consumed by a monster that I created and love more than breath itself. My job stresses are evidence that I, in fact, have a job in this terrible economy: and what’s more, a job that fulfills my greatest calling and desire in this world too boot! In fact, most of the things that make me stressed and overwhelmed are things by which and for which I am blessed! Damnit.

As I grow up, I am learning that the stress I feel (kept to healthy levels) comes from being responsible for the blessings I’ve received. I reap all the benefits of being a father and for that I bear tremendous responsibility to monster and to his upraising and even to society for how I raise him. Seems fair. I reap the benefits of my job, of being a pastor, of being a member of the Hesed Community, from the friends and family I love and from being a member of this great social experiment called the middle class – and so I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for those blessings and have a responsibility to nurture those blessings. And it is knowing how to nurture them and balancing the time it requires to nurture all of them that create much of the stress in my life.

This understanding of gratitude and responsibility is what has led me to be somewhat obsessed with our political system over the years. I’ve never missed a vote since I was 18. I’ve called senators and representatives hundreds of times. I’ve been involved in school levy campaigns and presidential campaigns and everything in between. I speak my mind and I lobby for decisions that I think are in the best interest of all, but especially in the best interest of those who need the most help in our society. I (and my entire family) have benefited from the New Deal policies and ethos that have dominated American politics for the last half century in tremendous ways. And I have watched in horror as that understanding of who we are as a country and as those safety networks have been unraveled by a concerted and shadowy effort of the far right in American politics. I have watched the rise of the neo-Robber Barons have swept aside regulations designed to protect us little folks – from the economy to the environment to work place safety and beyond – and accrued unimaginable fortunes along the way – even as my families wages have dipped and our prospects for the future have flagged. As a pastor, I’ve watched people who worked hard their entire life lose their pensions , have their benefits ridiculed and vilified on the nightly news and whose jobs have been RIF’ed at the drop of a hat by a corporation whose CEO was raking in record bonuses.

A big part of my stress comes from living in country in which things just aren’t fair. And sure, no system is perfect and no economic system ever imagined can end human suffering; I’m not naive. But this America we are becoming, with its Tea Parties and Citizen United is an America in which we are moving farther and farther from our ideals with every passing hour. Justice is for sale in this country. And when money transplants truth in the system, things get messy. Truth is for sale. There is no such thing as fact anymore – everything is presented as one side of an argument, equally valid – so those who deny climate change or evolution or make ridiculous arguments about the stimulus bill or Obama’s birth certificate (despite the overwhelming scientific evidence in the one case and overwhelming legal evidence in the other) are somehow equally valid public authorities as the scientists who do actual research. This is a country in which Bank of America posts a 6.2 billion dollar PROFIT but still claims that federal regulations literally drove it to charging it’s poor schlub account holders 5 dollars a month for using a debit card in order to stay profitable. And no one calls them out on their bullshit. No one cares that they frauded hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure using robosigners or that that their corrupt lending practices lured thousands of homeowners into ruin. And their money makes sure that no politician will ever move against them for their sins. America continues this bizarre drift to the extreme right and for what? For the profit of a few; a few who have never had it so good as this and yet are so adept at convincing us that they are the actual victims.

I’ve about had it. I spend obscene amounts of time considering the occupy Wall Street protests. They offend my more centrist’s tendencies in some ways because they move beyond talk of reform and into talk of revolution. But on second thought, maybe that’s not so far from what we need after all.

Post-Easter Hangover

This has been a week. Today is only Tuesday.  Holy Week was full of services but also full of hospital visits; full of resurrection conversations but also funeral conversations.  Easter morning was as beautiful as one could hope for and we had 167(!) in our house for worship on Easter morning, which is a record for us!  But the very next day I had to help my church secretary say goodbye to her 50-year-old son as we celebrated the resurrection in a very different way.  His funeral also packed the sanctuary and it was humbling to hear his friends and family talk about this man as they knew him, before he became sick.  I never met him when he was well but the portrait they painted with their words was of someone who I frankly wish I had known.  And I can’t help but put myself in the mother’s shoes: what if that was my boy everyone was talking about? My boy who had become so sick, such a shadow of his former self? Heartbreaking.

And then this morning, Monster decided to have one his “off days” and I found myself forgetting the warm and loving thoughts from the night before and instead wanting to sell him to the Roma. 

The highs and the lows of the last month, so intense and so packed together, have me feeling a little hung over this afternoon.  Emotionally, spiritually, mentally, I think I’m just all over the place today.  I feel like there isn’t much left in the pastor-tank and it’s still early in the week!  I have session tonight and a packed schedule for the rest of the week.  I wish pastors could call in substitutes or pinch batters or something!

I wonder if every post Easter will feel like this so long as I serve as a pastor?

Its become dark and gloomy in here.  I can’t leave it like this: so how about one more picture?

I don’t generally plug stuff on my blog, but I can’t say enough about Emi’s work and she has been amazingly generous to Amelia and I when we didn’t have much to offer her in return.  She has been a good friend to Amelia for years and she is really coming into her own as an artist.  I don’t know even know how much work she wants or can handle at this point but I still recommend her to all of my friends in the Chicagoland area.  If you need photography, she is the bomb!  I’ve posted her blog, her facebook and her business site all up on my blog roll, on the sidebar.  definitely check her out!

Photo Dump: What the People Want Edition

It blows my mind that Easter has already come and gone.  I didn’t blog much during Lent and most of what I did write ended up over at my work blog.  I really had to blow the cobwebs of this place this morning!  I realized that my last posts here had pictures of Monster at 4, 41/2 months old.  He turned 7 months old this week!  It was great to look at the photos from my last post and see just how much he has changed.  Amelia and I see him every day and so the changes seem a little more subtle…to look at the difference three months make though is to look at an entirely different child.  He looks more and more like a little boy these days and that is a very bitter-sweet proposition indeed.  My how the time flies when you are having fun and even when you aren’t!

My parents and grandmother came to visit for Easter.  It is the first time my grandmother has ever traveled to see me in all of the years I’ve been on my own.  It was great to have her here and to see her hold Monster (her 8th great-grandchild, according to her).  It was also strange because she has turned into a pretty cranky old lady who makes me cringe quite a bit.  Time has changed her as much as it changes Monster, month to month.  I think its good to keep our Elders close, to remind us of what we are becoming and why it is essential we continue to go to the gym, try new foods and embrace new experiences!

Grandma did buy Monster an incredibly cute sailor suite for Easter.  What is it with that generation and sailor suites?  Anyway, next post will include some Easter photos, complete with Navy Blues! 

On to what you actually came for.  Some of my favorite photos from month six:

 

And finally, this one was taken by our friend Emi Clark, who just happens to be a fabulous photographer!  She managed to capture this one on her cell phone, which tells you how good she really is!  You should check out her website to see more of her work!