praying for others weakness in the face of our actions

I went upstairs last night because I could hear that Addison and Jaelyn were playing upstairs an hour past bedtime.

I told them to give each other a hug and say goodnight before I took Addison back to his room. They exchanged a heartfelt embrace, and just before I lifted Addison away, Jaelyn said: “Wait a minute, Daddy, I want to say a prayer.”

I paused, she folded her hands old-school style.

“Dear Jesus. Please help me make good decisions with my toys and not bring them into bed. And please help Addison stay in bed when I call him to come over. Amen.”
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current obsessions

this artist:



this children's book author:



this book:



a possibility of a date with this woman:



to celebrate 12 years of partnership...

BTW ~

i won't say i'm *renouncing* my obsession with the Center for Progressive Christianity, but reading further in -- i'm disappointed to find that they're operating from a really different place then I am.

Why am I such a bandwagon jumper? Too many years in church makes it hard to stay in the interstices...

patience

bumped into this fragment:

Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen

and it SO reminded me of the point that i was talking about from the parable of the stewards. I've rarely felt such convergence around my spiritual life and its connection to the rest of my life...

and the wierd thing is how its been sustained in so many small and seemingly unconnected ways for the past few weeks.

But on patience for a moment.

last friday Jaelyn, Addison and I went garage saling. For like four hours. They were even more into it than I was.

I made them chant the four things we were looking for before and after each sale:

1. balls
2. bats
3. mitts
4. helmets

that way if they saw other stuff - i could say -- enh. its not on the list.

in the end we bought:

1. a toy bow and arrow
2. two frog puppets
3. a pottery mug.

but when it was time to go home for lunch, Addison was desperate. We couldn't stop! he insisted. We hadn't found a helmet.

We have to be patient, I reminded him. It's so hard to be patient isn't it?

We should go to a store. He said.

But I reminded him that waiting for the universe to unfold karma in her time would be much better for us. We would learn about waiting, we would remember that good things take time. We would *earn* the helmet.

Ok so i didn't say the stuff about karma. but i thought it.

And later Jaelyn was feeling impatient for dinner. She was persevorating on the point. Daddy, I'm hungry. When is it going to be ready!?

And so we talked about how it had been hard for Addison, because he was only thinking about that helmet.

Being patient means that we choose to let go of the future possibility. The thing we want but don't have and focus on something RIGHT HERE.

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i have, historically, referred to myself as a gypsy. but suddenly find that i may just be developing some place-roots. which is freaky and not completely comfortable.

the UTNE reader had an article two issues ago about how long it takes to really see something...

and this idea that patience is a prerequisite to seeing is one that I learned a hundred years ago at the Cabin sitting on a rock in the lagoon. And one that I tried to learn while I researched my dissertation at a hundred garage sales, but suddenly it feels so big...

such a vast invitation...

turns out i *am* a christian

or at least thats how i feel today when i accidentally bump into the center for progressive christianity....

while i saw at least one name floating around who thinks quite differently than i do (Marcaus Borg and I disagree (in a parasocial way -- since he doesn't know me) about reading the Bible as "truth")...

the core teachings they articulate *really* resonate with me -- much more fully even than the articulations of "emergent church" that i've encountered.

so in case you've been wondering whether andrew *really* believed anything at all (since he's more likely than not to raise one eyebrow at a good deal of evangelical christianity) -- the answer, today is -- i believe!

dreaming of the good old days

i had a girlfriend named shannon in high school. We "went together" for two years.

During tenth grade we talked on the phone every night sometimes for close to an hour. I hate talking on the telephone as a rule, but these conversations were worse. We bickered. Sat silently. And she told me how terrible her family was. I told her how much I hated our high school.

i'm sure there were happy memories, but i don't remember that part of the relationship.

she broke up with me at Dennys after church one sunday. we were sitting at a table that went in a circle with another table. at the other table four senior citizens ate, not speaking, listening to all the gory details.

i don't remember the gory details; i just remember that high school seemed much worse now.

one day my mom came and picked me up in the middle of the day and took me out of my classes. i was horribly depressed. we had lunch at the brownstone, my favorite restaurant which was in the airport and then sat in our station wagon at the beach in the middle of the winter. The waves were huge. I cried and couldn't talk about much and then eventually we were laughing about something ridiculous. that's the Lampiris (my mom's family) way.

last night Shannon and her entire family showed up in my dream. They were being feted at my dad's church for 25 years of faithful attendance. They all have blond hair and were smiling like it was a promotional for a new talk show. People just looked at them in awe. They opened a few presents, but mostly just laughed like they were on stage.

back when i went over to their house they yelled at each other like i had never heard a family yell. One of them sat in a chair and didn't talk at all, just watched tv. He didn't go to church either. but he was on the wednesday night prayer list as a result....

we liked going to their house, though, because the were allowed to rent VCRs and Video Cassette Tapes from the local video store. That was still too close to Hollywood for the rest of our families.

Ahh the good old days.

in retrospect

my brother raises a question on his blog which has buzzed around in my head for more than 24 hours, so I thought I’d simmer on it for awhile.

He mentions our friend Chad who had one of his most formative experiences in a trip to Australia…he (cryptically) mentions a week in October of 1994 as being formative for him, and then he invites us in:

What week has been most formative in your life?

I commented that I haven’t had any such weeks – but I have had seasons of life which I identify as transformative and revelatory, but ultimately, even in retrospect, they lack a cumulative property.

Instead such months / cycles / seasons / (and frequently) semesters – seem to reform previous insights and directions into wholly other experiences. Directions I had not expected. I don’t want to say that these bursts of discovery and meaning have rendered my life more discontinuous than continuous, but on the other hand…were you to try to turn my life journey into a map, it’d be hard to see a unified direction…

And for me that’s the why the question keeps BUZZING.

When you use a metaphor like “formative” (the original title for this post) – it automatically renders past experiences meaningful in a sort of entelechial way.

In the best scenario – such experiences also render the present eminently more meaningful, congruent and whole.

This is not something just my brother does. I do it. You do it. We do it. I’m convinced that the human capacity to tell-stories-in-order-to-survive…is a quite basic phenomenon – maybe even the MOST basic (sociological) human phenomenon.

I guess its those moments when you find yourself WITHOUT A STORY – that you feel most precarious.

I’m not feeling liminoid right now. David’s question actually provoked me to start thinking about a whole set of stories that render my current life meaningful – but it also provoked me to think about the insufficiencies and partiality of those stories.

Hope today is formative - transformative - revelatory and/or (since it is the Christian Sabbath) full of …

peace~