Coming off vacation…

I can not get the mental engine started.  So many loose ends, my life is a frayed web unraveling around me.  I can not concentrate, I have lost interest in making decisions, if interest is the right word.  Capacity.  Willingness. Concentration. “Whatever happens I will live with it,” my philosophy of life right now.

My joints ache.  I feel like I am coming down with something.  Dissertation; forget it.  My books are sitting here, some of them read, but I can’t even remember where I left off.  Finished 2 books on vacation, and should have taken more.

I find myself returning to the web site of the Gulf Resort, choosing new dates in August.  Since I have come back, I picked up 2 baptisms, and a quince anos misa this Sunday.  This place makes its demands and gives back its trickle of satisfaction.  Had to hold my paycheck til today.  Great thing, coming off vacation.  My mobility papers are finished, but need to be redone in the new Internet format the ELCA has developed.  Crap.  Nothing is easy.

The thing to do at times like this is to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and not get too far ahead of myself.  And I am going to try and be easy with myself.  Let things come on their own terms, and in their own time.  Even my own brain.  Take what the day gives, receive it gratefully, whatever it is, and come back tomorrow.

Self Care

I have a pattern.  I will take it easy, follow my creative impulses during the day, and by about 3PM, my religious CEO persona, which I am encouraged to live up to, kicks in and of course, by that time, it is too late to accomplish the things that I need to accomplish, so all the spiritual good that I have done up to that point goes swirling down the drain, and I am actually more stressed than before.

At some point, you need to make a decision and stick with it.  Pick a star and steer by it.  What gives me life, energy and vitality is the creative process, which is by nature, self-indulgent.  It is taking time to unearth the jewels in our daily experience.  The tasks we take on, need to help with the digging, not throw more shit on the site and make the jewels harder to find.

It’s a fine point, and that is the jewel for today.  Now, to head into the spring sunshine and see what else is waiting to be discovered.

After Easter

The resurrection takes awhile.  It’s Tuesday, and I’m still trying to roll away the stone.  Guess I’ll just hang out here awhile longer.  It’s dark, but at least it’s quiet.

Pastor as Poet

Today begins the Triduum, the great three days.  The most sacred time in the Christian calendar.  I am taking stock of my calling today, and I feel fortunate for once, to be where I am, a pastor in a struggling parish.  A struggling pastor in a struggling parish.  I should not be surprised that these two things should go together.

Tonight, I want to tell the story as a poet would.  I want to put off the religious CEO persona I find myself compelled to carry through the streets.  I don’t want to offer my managerial expertise, or my administrative prowess (both rather paltry gifts anyway).  I offer my humanity, lived on the people’s behalf.  I offer the rumblings of passion and emotion that are now slowing seeping into the places where despair, thank God, is now retreating.  My life is again lubricated by the free flow of language.

This is my calling.  Help me Lord, in your gracious mercy, to live up to it today.

Anonymity

Is anonymity simply a means of escaping responsibility?  Is it the pursuit of truth without intimacy?  Or is it simply the attempt to carve out a little space to be.  Is it my burning bush, the period placed after I am….

A place to call my own

I had nowhere to post this, until now.  Even so,  I don’t really know why I spend my time on it.  Self indulgence?  Pity?  It occurs to me I have nowhere I can speak as a man.  Just a man.  I say this like I say that it is cold outside today, or that it is 10:00 in the morning, or my shirt is white.

My being a pastor required this sacrifice.  It was part of my ordination, there in the fine print.  I knelt in my white alb, and a bishop laid hands on my head carried it away, for the good of everyone, for the sake of order, before I ever knew what it was they were taking.  Before I knew there was anything to take (I don’t mean to imply innocence in that, in any sense of the word).  And what did they leave in its place?

What does it matter?   Once the taking begins, the line is endless.  Everyone looks on approvingly.  Father, husband, son, citizen…each come to claim their share.  There is applause and congratulations, photos and tears.

You can’t take it back later.  If they were all to leave now, there would be no one left.  Something else would come and take their place.  Maybe that’s the beginning of joy.  It is certainly the beginning of resignation.

Today is our 14th wedding anniversary, an unfortunate subtext for all of this.  I want to be filled with joy, I expect that I should be filled with joy.  I want to love my wife and nothing more, but the amp in my soul is set on damaged and the music in my heart crunches like broken glass and drowns out everything else.  Damaged riffs with no power to transform playing down so low I can only feel them, the residual from yesterday, a gift from Pastor.  Here’s the worst part.

What eats at me is ordinary and mundane.  My soul is not consumed by grand and fiery dragons, it is nibbled by rats.  Maybe I write this to make the rats more important than they are, to give them and me more dignity.  The truth is that my brothers did not sell me into slavery out of jealousy.  I sold my own birthright for a bowl of lentils, and the bowl is empty.  And it wasn’t for jealousy.  It was out of  fear.

There is no money in the church checking account.  I have a worthless paycheck sitting on my desk.  Holy Week is bearing down and the history of this place is rising up to meet it like bile.  I stand at the point on which it all meets.  I calmly I go about my business, cooking oatmeal for breakfast, pouring coffee, all the while hating this place for what it has taken from me, and myself for what I did not know how to protect.

Lamb of God you take away the sin of the world, but what did you leave in its place?  The spring mud, the uneven days between what was and what is coming that mark the jagged edge between sin and salvation?

So I sit here and take it all down.  That’s all.  No judgment.  Just a hope I can’t keep at bay.  Is that You?  There are clouds outside my window in a cold spring sky, floating through April on leftover March winds.  Such royal blue, such a brilliant white, when they’re seen together.