The Secret of The Barn

There is a church on a hill just outside of my hometown neighborhood that, year after year, sets up a small, wooden barn at the front of their lawn. They fill the floor with hay, but aside from the night in which they use it for a live nativity, this makeshift lean-to of a barn sits empty and dark. However, for the past three seasons of Christmas, I have pulled up into the parking lot late on Christmas Eve night or Christmas night, walked out to this wooden shed, and knelt in the silence of the night. It has become something of a tradition - a ritual if you will - for me at Christmastime. Though seminary has taught me that our traditional religious concepts are slightly incorrect in recognizing what exactly was the poor shelter for the travel-weary Joseph and Mary so many years ago, this small barn that the people of this church have erected serves me well, if not in a scripturally accurate manner, but a metaphorical manner.

This barn has served as a kind of confession booth for me. I kneel - or, when my knees and ankles begin to shudder in discomfort, sit - before this empty space and I speak with God. It is a two-sided conversation, but not in an audible way. God replies with quiet; his reply is in his gracious silence. I poor out my heart, however reluctantly, and describe the tumultuous and joyful emotions that have filled my heart and mind over the past year. Sometimes I am quietly rejoicing when I come to the barn, other times I am wracked with the guilt of familiar sin. I am beginning to understand I am most often, in my day to day life, a measure of both. At the threshold of the barn I rest, with my hands dug into my pockets for warmth and the sounds of the night becoming a non-intrusive cacophony around me - nocturnal birds rustle and occasionally chirp, nearby coyotes bark at each other and the stars, domestic dogs respond in their own words, insects click and go about their own business in the grass. It is a noisy scene that would have terrified me when I was younger; in those years I would have been certain some ghastly creature was slowly slinking toward me in the shadows, intent on devouring me. But, now older, the peacefulness of the empty barn calms me, even when my childhood fears echo in my head as I ponder and pray.

I believe that there has been so very much attached to this "holiday season" that is despicable to God, in the talking points of the Religious Right as they rant and rage about the commercialism of Christmas vs. the complete disregard of the season, nor is it in the recovery fire of their opponents as they growl about the loss of deep tradition and sarcastically attack those who have made Christmas, and what is more, Christianity, into an empty shell of a religion, devoid now of any life-altering significance. (Oh how I so often side with the latter.)

In the quiet of the barn I begin to notice, even as I find peace in my personal confession and request for blessing and direction, that God is revealing his very nature to me, his nature that stands unchanging and unblemished by all of this holiday confusion. He is silent. He is quiet. He is both desperately concerned and transcendently uncommitted with the hub-bub both Christians and non-Christians are making out of this season. His Church is both deeper and grander than such things, and I feel that it is his only desire that we all forget "Christmas" and remember the Savior. That we would do as I feel the very throne room of God does: fall silent before the reality of the Incarnation. It is new every year, yet is historically from of old, and such a truth, when really pondered, silences even the most righteous tongue.

The angels may indeed break into a heavenly chorus, and the coyotes howl back and the insects chatter and the birds warble, but God Most High sits quietly and blesses the Incarnation and communes in powerful silence with all those who would stop and rest with him.
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Here are some photos from my holiday break, in which I have helped Leigh move back to Houston, spent some time with her and her family as well as my own, and enjoyed a good, replenishing rest.

Procrastination and Love

Life is procrastination until death.

That was not meant to be melancholic or morose. It is simply a funny truth I am starting to discover as yet another semester of seminary comes to a close. Granted, I consider myself an expert in procrastination, if only by my large amount of experience, and I have found that some of the greatest acheivements come while delaying and then finally starting an activity (though these acheivements are often coupled with a significant amount of stress).

Right now I sit in a comfortable chair on the second floor of my girlfriend's house, procrastinating. The task at present is to somehow make good on this love of writing that I have and fashion a meaningful framework of a toast for Leigh's best friend, who is getting married this afternoon. Leigh only recently found out she would be expected to give a toast (she is the maid of honor), and with all the other responsibilities she has before her today, mulling over a short toast is not high on the list. She does indeed want it to be good, but is afraid she will not have time to come up with something poignant for the occasion. This is where I come in, and thus, this is where procrastination seizes me and instead of thinking pointedly to the happy couple and, though I hardly know them, considering how to describe and praise their love for each other, I blog, spinning off like an awkward paper airplane into considering the meaning of Love itself. Well, that and the art of procrastination.

What follows will be the strings of some ambitious musings on the nature of Love ...

Love is laughing and finding that someone is already laughing with you, and crying and finding someone already has their hand around your shoulders ...

Love is better construed silently through the five senses than through words. The eyes gaze with wonder upon the one loved. The ears open to everything that person has to say. The nose recognizes the aroma, beyond any perfume or cologne, of that person. The tongue knows immediately and distinctly who it is kissing. The feel of that person, close to you, hand in yours, is not recognized because of any measure of softness or roughness, but how well that person seems to fit with you, arms around each other, heads bowed together, a perfect embrace ...

Love is saying you are sorry, finding out that deep down this could never be necessary, but saying it and meaning it anyway ...

Love is not replacing a best friend for a more intimate one, but discovering that everything your best friends have taught you - loyalty, affection, humor, closeness, devotion, compromise - is finding new depths of truth in this wonderful person beside you ...

Love is not merely "practice for eternity," but finding that eternity has spilled into this present life ...
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We shall see where these take me. Procrastination, be a friend - we have work to do.

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.