The Hitching Post

The first few days of life after getting married (not counting the honeymoon, because life certainly isn't running in the normality gear during those whirlwind days) are strange ones. The equilibrium, while intact and maintainable, is certainly confused. In other words, you feel as if you should feel strange, but, strangely, you don't feel strange.

Right now, I'm sitting in my office at the church, and the iTunes playlist from my wedding reception is playing (and Yellowcard's "Only One" has just come on, and while the sentiment seems to fit, I'm wondering why Leigh thought it was a tune appropriate to our laid-back, soft time of dancing), and I'm looking at this blog screen for the first time in almost a month, and I don't feel all that different, but I know that I am different. For one thing, I'm still aware of this ring around my finger. I've never really been a ring-wearing kind of guys, unless you count that ugly, gold pinkie ring sporting my initials that I bought when I was a desperate-to-seem-cool teenager at Six Flags Fiesta Texas (which I thankfully lost soon after), or that silver James Avery promise ring I wore up until college when I gave it to a girlfriend (who, whether I should have taken it as a convenient omen or not, subsequently lost it).

But this ring around my finger is a peculiar thing. It's plain white gold, already becoming scratched, and certainly isn't an attention-drawing accessory, but I do remember that it stands for something sacred, something sacramental (yes, yes, I would be a Catholic if I were only a bit braver and more tolerant). I'm wondering how hard it is going to get to remember what this ring stands for ... or to even maintain the ability to notice this little silver thing at all. I suspect that is one of the things that happens in so many marriages - he or she loses sight of the sacramental - or, for a more ecumenical word, holy - factor of it all. The memory of the vows, the ceremony, the promise, the worship of that day kind of fades away.

Leigh was telling me the other day, while on our way to the airport for our honeymoon, that it is important to recollect out loud to each other all our memories from our wedding: the rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, ceremony, and reception - all of it. She explained to me that two of our friends, who I like to call Jenny Squared (I have to write out "squared" because Blogger doesn't offer superscript), had told her that if you don't continually share your memories of the wedding with each other, soon it will fade from memory, and the loss will hurt. They assured her that it goes by so fast for the bride and the groom that calling moments back to mind, again and again, is imperative. I'm less than two weeks removed from that day, and I could not agree more. It did go by awfully fast.

There's a small, deep anxiety within me that I will not be able to maintain my recognition of both the vows and the beauty of my union with Leigh as time goes on. I look around me at different couples that are struggling, that have called it quits... I watch movie after movie and show after show about fizzled marriages... I read about them, I hear about them, I sometimes can even watch them crumble right in front of me... and I wonder how in the world I will ever be able to succeed where so many others have failed.

But then I remember two things. Number one, it is not about "I," but "we." I cannot succeed, but we just might have a chance. After all, isn't that what bearing with one another and submitting to one another is all about? Number two, we serve a good, loving God, who, as I was reading just yesterday, invites us not only into a relationship with Him, but one marked by providence and provision. Not the popular name-it-and-claim-it, God-wants-me-to-be-successful-and-realize-my-potential crap religion, but a faith that calls me into humility, to realize it is not by any special deed or flowery incantation that God will notice and condescend to me, but simply because I come before Him, admitting that I don't really get it, and can't really do it, but - and, of course, this is the key that even fewer of us turn - I will blindly trust in both His power and desire to do it in my stead.

Yesterday morning, the Liturgy of the Hours (there's me being Catholic-ish again) brought me to Psalm 37. "Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him..." (v. 5-7a). A selfish person would fixate on being made righteous in the eyes of everyone else, especially his or her selected enemies. On the contrary, I suppose a humble person would simply take comfort in being made righteous before God. And, in the end, that is what I want for Leigh and I, and what I believe this centuries-old, prayerful song is promising.

So, let it be. Let it be.

___________________

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the wedding. You can view a lot more by going to www.chasingfeathers.smugmug.com. I've got to quickly plug Rachel, our photographer. She did an amazing job, and if you're in the central Texas area, you should definitely hire her for whatever, weddings, parties, grocery store trips, lynch mobs, whatever... Oh, and Sabrina, my buddy, you did a great job, too.



It was a good day...

This Difficult Sacrament

In the daunting task of understanding the Christian life, most, if not all, of the Desert Fathers would agree that while the goal of life is simple, getting there is certainly not. If there is one truth that the Desert Fathers, the ragtag disciples, grappling clergy, Christian bookstore customers, Benedictine monks, missionaries, and even the Christ himself all recognize, it is that living life can be quite hard.

Why does God make life hard ... or, to stretch the question across more theological perspectives, why does God allow life to be hard?

If someone were to massage my neck or rub my ear, the pleasant feeling would eventually put me to sleep. The sense of a gentle touch is so pleasing, it would not take much to usher me into semi-consciousness and eventually slumber. However, in the same area, if someone were instead to squeeze or pinch, the exact opposite would happen; I would wake up. I would become more alert. My eyelids would open wider rather than become heavier.

When life is hard, we are more apt to realize our need for God. I do not mean to imply that God is codependent and therefore administers hardship in life so that we might place our trust in him. In reality, the identity crisis is ours, not God's. When life seems manageable, we relax in our own good fortune. Then, when struggles come, we have no other course of action but to wallow in our misfortune. If we do call out to God during these times, it is normally for relief, not understanding.

The purpose of the sacraments is to change our perspective, to draw us out of our deep-rooted selfish tendencies and into the honor of God. When someone is baptized, they are putting under the water everything that was their old self, and emerging as one redeemed and cleansed by a holy God. When we partake of the Eucharist, we are taking into our finite selves the selfless sacrifice of our Savior. Perhaps this is why the Catholic church observes seven sacraments instead of the Protestant two. As Frederick Buechner writes, "A sacrament is when something holy happens." Indeed there is a glimpse of the holy and the Holy One when a child is confirmed in the Church, or when a broken sinner scrapes in confession for forgiveness, or when two lovers are joined in mutual devotion to one another in marriage.

Buechner continues, "Church isn't the only place where the holy happens ... If we weren't blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental."

We must learn to live present to the day to day ebb and flow of life; sometimes it is soothing, oftentimes it is churning violently. And through our recognition of the wondrous difficulty of life - the hardships, the worries, the unknowns, the separations - we would take joy that the goal for which we strive is relief and rest.

The end is simple. Getting there is certainly not. But getting there is not devoid of holy glimpses, open windows between high heaven and lowly earth. I have heard it taught that we must learn to live Sunday to Sunday, seamlessly seeking the next moment where we might return to worship our God. While this is a noble strategy, it can cause us to dread the days in between, or at least disregard them.

Live each day. Hear every atom of all that surrounds as they cry out for us to break our allegiance to ourselves and place our allegiance in a wildly loving, passionate God. A God who is unafraid of our frustration, undaunted by our ignorance. A God who will continue to pour himself out like water upon this life, that we might feel the drops through these open windows, this sacramental life. Can you feel it? It is raining even now.



____________________________________

Glimpses of late ...

Dunking and Being Dunked

"Going under symbolizes the end of everything about your life that is less-than-human. Coming up again symbolizes the beginning in you of something strange and new and hopeful. You can breathe again."
- Frederick Buechner on "Baptism"

There we were, a bunch of white-gowned seminary students, sandled or bare-footed, loitering at the main steps of the Student Life Center pool. Our professor, Dr. Price, also clad in the traditional baptizing gown, was preparing to take us carefully through the process of performing what is certainly the strangest sacrament of the Church, though not at all meaningless. In the SLC, the pool is an odd conglomeration of tile and cement. It is no discernable shape, but instead made up of different areas, including a few slightly-less-than-olympic-sized lap lanes, an open area next to a water basketball goal, a higher-set hot tub, a lazy river, and a large, spiraling water slide. As I entered the pool area, I joked that the use of a water slide in baptism might just be what the "church of tomorrow" needs. I could see it all right then: Extreme Baptism: Take the Plunge ... into Jesus! Youth ministers would suddenly have no problem getting kids to join the church. At age fourteen I was baptized, and I definitely would have been open to water-sliding into the sacrament. After all, there is not much else you can do to make Baptism more silly than it already is, at least as it appears on the surface.

It was the oddest of feelings, standing there in the three-foot high water, taking turns dunking my fellow students. We could not help but laugh as we were again and again welcomed into the Church. For the two or three lap swimmers across the pool area, there couldn't have been anything more absurd to behold as they surfaced from the water and removed their goggles. Yet, even as we laughed and made light of this practice, it was inspiring. Most of the students from this class will one day find themselves standing in a baptistry - or a creek or river - reaching out their hand, welcoming a brother or sister into the water. They will watch them tense at the first sensation at the temperature, shrug their shoulders as they descend into the pool as if they need to keep the water from soaking their torso too quickly, nervously fold their arms and hold their nose, and then these fellow students will guide the people under the water. They will raise them up, dripping and wiping their faces, and there is something wonderful in this act for both the baptized and the baptizer - a cleansing of both minister and congregant.

What is the appearance of this act, but the strange, ritualistic dunking of a person underwater? Sometimes they struggle to regain footing, sometimes the water splashes over the side onto the choir, sometimes there is sputtering and coughing - it is the most comic scene the Church regularly enacts. If you, in witnessing a baptism, are not at least quietly chuckling, just a little bit, you're missing something of the wonderful absurdity of the sacraments.

What is the meaning of this act? As Frederick Buechner wrote, that which is less-than-human within us is symbolically being put to death - buried; drowned if you will. When a person rises from the waters, they are, as the pastor in the home church of my childhood used to say, "raised to walk in newness of life." I have taught others the cute phrase that baptism is "an outward expression of an inward decision" and that is true, but there is much more to this. There is something very human and very holy in the practice of it. If it is only a declaration to a church body of the repentance you have professed, it is no more meaningful than if you set up a flannel board in front of the altar and walked the congregation through the steps you took to become a Christian. "First I knelt beside my bed, as you can see here ... then I folded my hands ... then I bowed my head and said, O God ..."
The sacrament of Baptism is a metaphor, and the most meaningful teachings and practices of the Church are done in metaphor. The understanding of God as father, of Christ as king, of the solemnity of the bread as flesh and the wine as blood, of the front of the stage as the "altar" at which to kneel and pray ... It is all wrapped up in metaphor. It is something that holds meaning beyond what our five senses report to us. The life of a Christian is a mess of failings and praisings, of penitence and patience. It is the story of a creature sick with humanity finding rehabilitation in that which is holy. It is as absurd a condition as what we gaze upon when a person is dunked under the water of a baptistry. That does not render it any less true - any less necessary. Baptism is the moment out of our lives when we can, in our limited human minds, recognize in a single, wonderful act this extended experience of redemption.

That old life left behind, you come up sputtering, sniffing, maybe even choking a little bit, but the air is fresh and you can fill your lungs anew and wipe your eyes and see clearly, and there are smiling faces and applause and those gathered before you begin singing a song that, even as your ears unclog, still sounds like touchable grace. There is that inkling that you have never been more home than you are at that moment. You take the loving hand offered you and step out of the water to walk in newness of life.