dialogue as art

This past monday night I did my first Open Forum. 20 people. some good beer. Some good but cheep wine. 59 minutus of discussion. I felt like I was sipping wine from a local Italian vineyard, even though it was $3/bottle charles shaw. I felt like we were changing the world with our words, even though we were just changing ourselves. I felt like an ancient greek hosting a symposium —pontificating about issues that will change the course of history, even though we only dialogued about the types of things that go through all our minds. I felt like we were engaging in something that we were always meant to engage in. It seemed as though we were living something out of The Great Gadsby—or some story about the 20 of us who talked for 59 minutes as leaders of the future world working through the issues of culture and society in order to embark on a fuller existence. Maybe we were doing all those things.

Someone commented to me that they wished they could have recorded the conversation. I think my initial response was a nod of approval at the idea, but as I have thought about it some more—I can’t help but think it’s better to have not captured something that was so free-form and organic, better to let it live and re-create in the minds and souls of those who attended than to digitize it for all. We are growing so accustomed to having our thoughts and life so “out-there” for all to see—I wonder sometimes whether we hesitate to live in a situation if we are at the same time wondering how we will record the experience later. Perhaps this is a has something to do with the hesitant blogger that I can be at times.

As far as dialogue goes—it’s beginning to feel like art to me. Forgive me, artists who paint…and sing…and dance…who strum…and hum…and quatrain away…I’m not sure if it was the glass of wine that was pulsing through me or something else…but I sensed that what we were creating that night was as much as symphony and unplugged melody as anything I have heard. If music touches something deep inside your soul in a way that you can’t explain, or, if you see a painting at the Louvre and can’t seem to walk away…we call it the mystery of the aesthetic. I couldn’t help but notice how our dialogue about life and culture, about world-view and stories into which we have immersed ourselves, seemed to captivate people in ways they couldn’t explain and planted them firmly there sipping two buck chuck as though they couldn’t bring themselves to walk away from those 59 minutes and go back to the mundanity of life that awaits us all.

Tagged by John

four jobs i’ve had in my life:
* waiter
* ESL Intructor
* Coffee Shop Manager
* non-profit

four movies i can watch o’er and o’er:
* Shawshank Redemption
* Dead Poets Society
* Good Will Hunting
* Tommy Boy

four places i have lived:
* Cincinnati, OH
* Columbus, Ohio
* Baku, Azerbaijan
*
four tv shows i love to watch:
* Alias (DVD Set)
* Seinfeld (DVD Set)
* ….haven’t owned a TV since 1998

four tops: (I don’t know what this is, but I’ll give it a shot)
* The Chosen, Chaim Potak
* Great Lakes Brewing Co. Christmas Ale
* North Star Cafe
* Lake Tahoe…Desolation Wilderness

four places i have been on vacation:
* Lake Tahoe…Desolation Wilderness
* Pataya, Thailand
* Dubai, U.A.E.
* Cancun, Mexico

four of my favorite dishes:
* Veggie queso’s (Jaime)
* Black Bean Nachos (whole world bakery)
* Asian Slaw (John McCollum
* Aunt Mary’s Home Made Ice Cream

two websites i visit daily:
* universalis.com
* NT WRIGHT page
*
*

four places i would rather be:
* Italy
* Spain
* Backpacking in South America
* Iceland

Brown County Indiana

Jaime and I spent a day and a half in brown county indiana over the weekend. My parents took the kids…and we drove a few hours to wintered-in ghost-town that I am sure is full of people and popcorn and candy and antique-shoppers when the whether permits—-but alas, we were the only ones there. Perfect. I found a deal on a place ($50/night) and we didn’t care that the antique stores were all closed, the ice-cream stores were thawed through to the core, and the Marionette show was closed for the season…we had fun walking through the ghost-town and being alone again. We drove another 15 miles for some civilization, a Starbucks and an organic CO-OP grocery store and cafe where we ate both lunch and dinner later that evening. Jaime tried on 45 pair of pants at the local goodwill (she bought two pair) and it didn’t matter that it was 10pm when we headed down to the indoor pool to swim and talk till 11pm. We laughed so hard. And hugged so tightly.

Jaime and I were only engaged for 3 months before we got married. Engagement was hard: You’ve committed your life to this person and at the end of the night they get in their car and drive away across town. Once we got engaged I moved into our first apartment while Jaime stayed in the basement apartment of some family friends. I remember as the night came to a close, wanting her so badly to stay there on the couch—yet wisely forcing her to the door. We lingered on the street in front of her car for another 30 minutes saying the mushy gushy stuff you say when you are so in love and so thankful to be together.

I felt that thankful again this weekend and I wanted to linger even more.
Thank you Jaime for being my bride.

…content

winter blues…

Had a case of the blues today. THe “no-reason, can’t figure out why my heart is dead today”, kind of blues. Thankfully this hasn’t been as frequent as other years and other winters and other cold february days. This is winter for me. Random days of feeling the unamendable discontent…which for me is a reminder, of how unsatisfying this life can be. Please…don’t get me wrong. I’m as thankful for the blessing that my life is as I have ever been, constantly aware of how fortunate I am, almost embarrassed at times with how little of my life involves the suffering that I read about all over the world and brush past at the grocery store. The unamendable discontent has something to do with the reality that all the suffering can’t just go away, can’t be loved away, can’t be hugged away. The emptiness in the world can’t be filled with the beauty. That’s the discontent. The fact that it won’t go away this side of a new heaven or the making of a new earth.

Today is a reminder of my own brokenness..and the pleasing type of suffering that says from somewhere deep beneath my skin that I don’t belong here, or rather, I belong fully someplace else. The unamendable discontent is something I embrace, knowing that if I ever grow toward full contentment—that I will have lost the great blessing of knowing and feeling “displaced.” This “lostness” can be, and often is for me, a sweet aroma of sadness that really is the longing that we often sense in our deepest prayers, and sing in our most expressive worship…the prayers and worship that say, “I want more than this…”
I’m reminded of a quote by Malcom Muggeride:

“…the only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland.”

I didn’t watch the superbowl

We had planned, albeit without much gusto, to go to John’s house for some football watching. But by 6pm Rayli (2-years old) was going through melt-down, I was trying to finish up the trim on the kitchen floor, (a project I started 3 months ago as an anniversary present to Jaime), and both Jaime and I were tired…

I haven’t seen a professional football game in about 4 years. For some, this seems out of touch, lost in some world between my thoughts and my books. I guess I’m just not that interested.

We watched the WALMART movie over the weekend. Traditionally I have been fairly high on the “keep strict capitalism alive” side of the coin. If the movie was made to get me thinking about the dangers of the powers of such capitalism…it has worked. I’ve been to Walmart once in the past 5 years to develop some pictures. I stayed away, not because I was aware of the devastation it has caused and the greed that powers it…but because I always got a weird, almost closterphobic feeling every time I went in there and generally left with a sense of anger at all the cheep stuff, most of which none of us really needs.
If you haven’t seen this movie…you must. The love of Money really is the root of all evil.

READING:
The New Testament & the People of God—NT WRIGHT
Porn Generation—???
Subversive Spirituality—Eugene Peterson
The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society—-Leslie Newbigin
The Nihilism of a Birch Tree— (an unpublished novel by a friend of mine)

Thinking about….

Money. Generosity. America.
I just got back one of those “year-end-receipts” from a non-profit organization that we gave $ to last year. I was a little disappointed. I guess I thought I had been more generous….but then I began to really think about the concept of generosity.
For some reason, along the way I have picked up a mentality that judges my own generosity by what the number ends up being at the end of the year. I’m trying to give more away each year than the year before and wondering how a second child who showed up in the middle of it all works in the midst of it.
I think this is faulty thinking and I am trying to explore how to remedy my misconceptions of what it means to be generous.
My heart felt generous all year. I lived in tension about what I buy: do I need this? Is this good for me? Can I give more away? Jesus talked about those who worshipped God with their lips but whose heart was far from engaging in the kind of worship he was hoping they would possess deep inside somewhere. I think I just struggle with being an American sometimes. I’ve lived overseas where you can buy fresh bread every morning for $.25 and lunch for $2.00 and it gets confusing when I begin to look at the culture we have built up around ourselves; knowing this is the culture in which I live, lunch costs $8.00, and I am trying to learn how to live here. It’s all a constant tension. A mystery somewhere between living aesthetically, and ascetically. Between foxes having holes and birds having nests…and having no where to lay one’s head. Somewhere between extravagant giving and sacrifice, and enjoying the extravagant beauty of God’s blessing. Somewhere between the water that provides life and quenches thirst..necessary, and the wine that celebrates life, and love, and creation…and is peripheral.

trying to be vigilant

“Spirituality is always in danger of self-absorption, of becoming so intrigued with matters of soul that God is treated as a mere accessory to my experience. This requires vigilance. Spiritual Theology is, among other things, the exercise of this vigilance. Spiritual Theology is the discipline and art of training us into a full and mature participation in Jesus’ story while at the same time preventing us from taking over the story.”
Eugene Peterson
Subversive Spirituality