Confession

Ironically, I read this once on the Ascension this year (holla at the Catholic liturgical calendar!). Every time I’ve read it, the beginning is way different. I haven’t settled on one, or a title really, but here’s the approximate text from the Ascension Day version, for lack of a video.

Sometimes, strangers preach to me
—best when they don’t intend it.
On this occasion, I’d asked another Christian
what his faith meant to him. He said,
“It’s the reason I haven’t killed a man.”
Now, there’s a lot there.
But here’s the word I heard:
I’ve asked this question of other Christians who’ll say something like,
“It means I’ve been saved by the precious blood of Jesus Christ,”
instead of,
Jesus Christ saved somebody else’s blood from me.

And that’s easier for me to believe.
Because it’s hard to believe Christ’s concerned with saving me
from my privileged private education,
my comfortably heated apartment,
and my relatively friendly neighborhood.

And it’s hard to believe Christ’s concerned with saving me
in a world with sweatshops and slavery,
vets and elders in poverty
and my country flying drones over the Middle East

If any God is doing anything,
it’s probably saving people from my silent violence.
If God’s making miracles in the modern age,
it’s making fools fall in love in a world that learned rage
and any conversation in this era of contagion,
plastic gloves, ATMs and self-checkout stations.

I know some things are broken
—our hearts and homes have loudly spoken,
but some of them broke open
remembering true religion is for widows and orphans

It hasn’t all failed

even when our idealistic plans and dreams derailed
even when I saw the facts and faces and I bailed
even when all I think I can do is just whine and wail
It hasn’t all failed

But we are
the most dangerous things in this world
and it’s a miracle more casualties haven’t come
from my casual apathy

I wanted to ask that man
if hearing “love your neighbor” might save me
from putting on my headphones on bus 48
or arguing with the guy who asked me for change
Because I can’t talk sin nature
until I get off my armchair
and exorcise my bank account
and clean the demons from my cup of coffee
and call my sister with an honest apology

And I can’t Alleluia! on Easter
until I roll the stone away from my cold heart
and resurrect the child in me who once believed
that things were possible
and had an easier time remembering
people are good.

I want to stop asking questions
of how we get to Heaven
and what it costs—in blood or deeds—for a picket-fenced plot in North Eternity

Some better questions:
Have I learned to live in miracles with the eight billion plus connected to me?
Am I open to all of you correcting my stupidity?
The crucifixion I believe in looks like open arms and humility,
So does that look like me?
Or am I waiting for someone else’s suffering to save me?

Here are some things I know to be true:

1. Art has the power to transform people, or rather, to stir part of the odyssey of transforming and realizing ourselves.
2. Most people have heard most of what they need to hear. All anyone really wants is to be listened to.
   2b.  Nobody needs to be relentlessly preached at or converted in a world that is Good (and painful, and nonsensical, and complex). We all know what it’s like to live, regardless of what names we give our lives and experiences.
3. Food and sex were both meant to bring people together, and humans were not meant to be alone. These things have been broken, but they don’t always have to be.

Friends and strangers, I’d like to know what you’re certain of, even if it’s what you had for breakfast.

(a simple list spurred by the Sarah Kay TED Talk)

Michael: A Story about Vomit from My Summer Vacation (which is far less debaucherous than it sounds)

I had just crossed the midpoint of my journey, about six weeks in. I was leaving Charlotte, North Carolina for Washington, DC. But as was always the case, it was much more than place I was leaving and much more than place I was moving toward. It was a ten-hour bus ride between love and death, or between death and love; which is which, I am not sure.

These are stories for another day, but the very short of it is that in Charlotte I madly fell for a fellow, fully knowing the entire time that the whole matter had to be unbearably, impossibly temporary. And in DC, I didn’t know any of this was going to happen of course, but I arrived in town the same day as a member of the community I was visiting passed away and sat with strangers in their grieving.

Between those things was still another overnight Greyhound bus ride and still another morning of waking up upright, stiff of body from the awkward seating, languid otherwise from the lameness of heartbreak. And not too long after I woke up, somewhere about 25 minutes outside of Richmond, a woman vomited on her way out the bus. Putrid barf, right in the middle of the aisle.

Tired Old Revelations [updated]

“I keep running into this question: why did I leave to learn about community? It’s a little ironic, no? I am at this point now where I am tired and not sure what I’m doing. I recognize that a week (or less) is no time at all to get to know people or a place, and it is emotionally exhausting to go through the cycle of meeting them, awkwardly getting to know them, finally feeling warm and at home, and then leaving indefinitely. There’s a good chance I’ve spent the summer living with people I’ll mostly never see again and possibly never talk to again. And yet when I think back on those things about Seattle, the places I bid my hasta luegos to, I do not feel homesick for them. Not exactly. I feel, if anything, more homesick for myself, mourning that I don’t love Seattle enough to miss it. It’s like this: almost everyone wants to be in love. You can’t make yourself be in love, even with a place you know very well.

I don’t dislike Seattle, but I don’t know that I’m ready to go back to it. At the same time, I kind of long to be in one place and retreat and sit down and write for awhile and not be afraid I’m wasting my time just sitting.

I will get there.”

—from a letter I sent from Philadelphia

I think this will always be about more than Seattle. 

beside a yucca in new mexico, july 14th

I am
finally letting myself hear
that God
in the quiet.
It is like two friends sitting
in silence
yet still
sharing heart.
The greatest teachers have tried to tell me
that God
is in the still small voice, in the wind,
yet crying,
“Wind, where are you?“
the only wind I heard
was my own.
It is good to watch your breath
blow through the trees,
but where does
that breath
come from?
Today I heard the wind
say what she has been saying
all her life:

“Here I am.”

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Chapter Two

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You may or may not be here because you’re still curious about my summer journeys. So now that it’s autumn, let me explain a different way.

Speaking of explaining a different way, if you know what this blog and this pilgrimage were all about, you’ll know that there are a lot of stories left untold and unposted. For instance, I’ve hardly described the communities I visited; most of these entries focus on my internal murmurings. But what is also untold, what I find most strange and beautiful, are the lessons and whispers from this summer that keep revealing themselves and popping up in my life as I carry on in Seattle, stories haven’t even been told to me. I am still trying to figure out how to tell both types of stories and where I should keep them. In the meantime, I’ll explain what this hubbub’s about in the first place.

Möbius and Miracles

The truth is, this trip is less about going somewhere and gaining something than it is about leaving and letting go. So to come back to a place, to attempt to settle in, has itself been a practice of letting go, and that’s at least as terrifying as the last three months of it. I am no longer on my pilgrimage, but I am no less a pilgrim. I am leaving my leavings, only to find that everything is still as temporary as they were at the beginning, as temporary as they were the moment I was conceived. I’m just as fragile as I was that moment, and so are you. But here we are, a few thousand days lived past an idea and an emotion and a messy escape.

I wanted to post this sort of “closing” post once I settled in, figured out something somewhat conclusive and round and warm to say. But I have come out of this trip with fewer conclusions and more frayed ends. I don’t even know if I have the questions yet, I just know I don’t have the conclusions. Surprise, surprise. But if you ever read any of the posts before this trip, you might recall Benji sharing at church that, as much as you think you’ll need to prepare and take care of things and tie those knots before you go, God will provide what is needed. It’s cheesy and it’s humbling and it’s hard to believe, but this summer my itinerary changed literally every week and on a couple occasions I didn’t even know what city I’d be sleeping in until a few hours before. Nevertheless, I realized that in Seattle, I’m still guaranteed nothing. Anything could happen at any time, and these past 12 days have been just as unpredictable as 12 weeks on the road. But I am blessed to be taken care of and to get to help take care of myself.

Many people have joked(?) that I should write a book. But I am still listening for the narrative. I am trying to hear and see how it all connects. Sometimes I feel like my life is a galaxy of constellations, well-ordered puzzles of light aglow. Sometimes it’s all confetti to me. And that’s okay too. I’ve been thinking, some people believe that when you die, you’ll finally know all the answers and understand everything, and you’ll finally reach peace. But sometimes I think that when we die, we’ll just realized that not knowing was okay too, that it wouldn’t have made a difference, and we’ll still reach peace.

I want to close with a story about a story, and then I’ll read from that story. Donald Miller is responsible for two of my favorite chapters in any books I’ve ever read. One of them is from Through Painted Deserts, his own story of a cross-country road trip spiritual exploration bonanza. He was 21. I’m 20. I feel up and down about the way Donald Miller writes his life, much as I feel ups and down about mine, but regardless this story has a great deal of significance to me. A few years ago I gave this book away to one of my friends as he embarked on his own leaving, never having read the book myself. I started it, and stopped, I started and stopped, and I finally read through it this summer. I read it on the light rail to the airport, on my way to visit my family at the very beginning of the summer, and I talked about it with a couple from Minnesota during that light rail ride. I finished it as I was leaving Portland, Oregon, which is actually where the author arrives in the end. I gave it away, with all of my penciled notes and exclamations, to a friend at the halfway point of my journey this summer. I mailed a page of it away in Chicago, and I read the following page of it over the phone in Detroit. And during one of my last stops before Seattle, I met up with that couple from Minnesota.

Anyway, I want to close my story with a piece of his story, partly because one of the things that has fascinated me the summer is the way people tell other people’s stories…and partly because it fits. The introduction ends like this:

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

Audio Post

Stumbling Upon a Garden

I was walking around the neighborhood after checking out the MLK stuff and saw this garden from a block or two up. Intrigued, I went toward it.

“You in the wrong place,” a passerby in a beat up t-shirt and shorts or something said. “You want to be over there.”

“Oh no, I just saw this and was curious,” I said.

“You in the wrong place. You lookin’ for Ebenezer? It’s that way,” he said. “Auburn. That’s where everything’s happening.”

“Yeah, I actually just came from there. I was just looking around the rest of the area,” I said.

Folks on the street in Atlanta are kind of funny. At the hostel one guy said he was offered unsolicited restaurant recommendations by a homeless man, and another guy said another man tried to sell him a tour map. People also sell bottles of ice water there, which is smart.

I finally asked the man what he knew about the garden or who operates it.

It used to be an apartment building. After it was demolished, the lot was actually empty for a few years until the garden began five months ago. He didn’t know who owned it or anything, just that they sell flowers sometimes.

Flashes of Hope

Along I-75 in Georgia a sign reads:

PEACHES EXIT NOW

- / / -

I had no peaches in Atlanta, nor pecans (yet), nor sweet tea, but something magical happened in Atlanta. I wasn’t entirely expecting to come to Atlanta just yet, and in fact the only full day I spent there was Sunday, which was exactly the day I wanted to come.

The one thing I knew I wanted to do in Atlanta was go to a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both Martin Luther Kings preached. In many ways, the 1960′s Civil Rights Movement was born out of churches – after all, blacks didn’t have many other places to gather. Thus, praying in Ebenezer was more important to me than actually visiting King Jr.’s birth home, or tomb, or the memorial museum, or really anything in Atlanta.

Fortunately I can tell you that I really felt the social Gospel is still alive at Ebenezer’s pulpit. The pastor addressed homelessness and immigration policy in his sermon obviously and compassionately without making it a political speech or a breast-beating ideological bludgeoning. And though the church is large and renowned and welcomes many visitors, there still seemed to be a closeness of community, a healthy pre-service chatter. The reverend invited us to hug five people at the beginning of the service…and then there more. In how many churches are people wary of even shaking hands with their neighbor?

Worship took place at a somewhat newer building, but the old building across the street had been restored to its 1960′s appearance, and they play King Jr.’s old sermons and the hymns and songs overhead on surround sound. Surreal. What would it have been like to be in that kind of space, that kind of energy, when it wasn’t camera flashes and posing in front of the altar, but altar calls and flashes of hope and rows of “Amen’s” rocked by the witness of eyes that have seen the mountaintop. I think we visit not only because we owe much to that, but because we still long.

I did visit the rest of the King historic site anyway – birth home, tomb, museum, neighborhood, and even the first SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) headquarters at the Mason’s temple. All in all, it was a young still-idealist’s pilgrimage and pinnacle moment. What can I say? I still have dreams.

I did try to take note of the neighborhood around today, though it is hard to understand much in a few hours. Auburn Avenue is still predominately black. Two blocks out of the historic area, it’s not in great shape, but it’s not the worst part of town either (but after all, it’s kind of a tourist destination). There’s this peculiar mix of charming old buildings and sad oldish buildings. There was also this large plot of urban gardens.

I think of the “Eternal Flame” across from King Jr. and Coretta Scott King’s tombs. The flame is supposed to represent the ongoing fire for justice and community, but when I visited there was no flame behind the plaque.

“This used to be burning all the time,” said one woman, whose husband was posing a photograph in front of the tomb, “but homeless people used to sit by it to warm themselves, so I think the city put it out.”

On the door of the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site Visitor Center (operated by the National Parks Service), a sign reads something like (I wish I had taken a picture):

GIVE CHANGE THAT MAKES SENSE. STOP PANHANDLING.

• Giving money to panhandlers is a lose-lose situation.
• Your money may be used to buy alcohol and continue addictions.
• If you care about homelessness consider volunteering in person with a soup kitchen or other organizations.

(something to that effect)

Much as people fabricated that Martin Luther King Jr. quote after Osama Bin Laden was killed (granted the misquote came out of fine intentions), people have oft claimed his next plan was to fight global warming. King was actually working on what was called the Poor People’s Campaign. When he was killed he was in the middle of organizing a march, which somebody else led later. I don’t know where it went past that.

- / / -

Perhaps a 30- or 40- minute walk away in midtown, I went to church again that night at 910 Ponce De Leon, or, The Open Door Community, a Catholic Worker made up of mostly Presbyterians.

Worship starts at 4 on Sundays, but they like people to come in at 3:45. I showed up on their door steps at 4:15 because I had written down the address incorrectly.

By that point I was already stressed. I knew I was cutting it close, but freaked out even more when I discovered a parking lot between a pizza place and a drugstore right where I expected my number to be. At 4ish I sucked it up and walked toward the library to look it up. I literally ran from there to 910.

But nobody answered the door when I rang. I looked around and couldn’t tell if there were people or not. I went on the side of the house and saw that there were and I tried knocking, to no avail. Then drumming inside began.

Candidly I must admit I was also PMSing, so at that point I was on the verge of tears. Feeling defeated, and perhaps even ashamed, I turned around and walked toward the hostel I’d stayed in the night before.

Then a man walked out from beside the house.

“Excuse me!” I called out, trying to compose myself. “Were you just inside there?”

“Oh, no,” he said, and my face fell. “I was just coming around the side.”

So I kept walking, then realized I hadn’t eaten and turned around toward a restaurant. Then something told me to knock a third time.

Like something out of a parable, this time the door was answered.

“Is it…too late…to come to worship?”

“We are just getting started.”

When I sat down, they were doing introductions, so I gave my spiel to a few hums and smiles.

“Do you have a place to stay? We’ve got a bed!”

During the service itself, residents shared concern about a recently executed friend and other friends they’ve met on Death Row, where The Open Door’s community makes regular trips to visit. I received the Blood of Christ from a lay minister many ignorant people would fear on the street based on his appearance and dress. And many people reminded me there was always an extra bed.

Everyone shared supper together after worship – bread and green beans and corn on the cob and redbeanandrice (one word) and…southern dinner is always magical. But I was so aglow someone beside me even remarked, “She’s got good spirits,” which is especially something for what’s usually the Awkward Night One. I even found out that Quiana, who let me in the door, was not only at Ebenezer in the morning too, but used to be at Koinonia Farm, where I was headed next.

“I feel like this means something,” she said. “I don’t know what, but something.”

- / / -

The reading at The Open Door was the Road to Emmaus, a favorite of mine. The reading at Ebenezer was Acts 3, which I had just been reading on the Greyhound and got to see in a much richer way Sunday morning. Both readings are stories of Jesus appearing to ordinary believers, ordinary people, in unexpected places. And most of them didn’t recognize him at first, though they believed. In Acts, two ordinary people (one of whom is completely unnamed and ungendered) are headed toward Emmaus, only mentioned once elsewhere in the Bible (or never, depending on your translation) as the site of massive victory for the Maccabees. It’s a place people visited as kind of a last resort pilgrimage, or if nothing else, to restore their pride. This is where they expected to find Jesus, but instead he appeared along the way. And they didn’t get it until he left.

In Acts 3, Peter heals a crippled beggar (who I’ll go ahead and call Jesus – see Matthew 25) who is sitting right outside the temple. At the gate. At the “Beautiful Gate.” And though many believers walk past him to go into the temple, Peter recognizes that the Church is outside that gate. And when people react, he doesn’t just tell everyone, “Yeah, you got me – and I don’t regret it.” He practically says, “I’m glad you asked, and I’d do it again,” and he goes right ahead and professes his creed for a good fourteen-and-a-half verses (Acts 3:12-26).

That’s Gospel I believe in. And that’s something I inexplicably felt come alive, yet come to question, in a single day in Atlanta. I hope that hope lasts.

I am thinking about going back.