Sunday Morning Coming Down July 17, 2009

Well, I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.

Sigh, Kris and Johnny.   Always knowing just how a soul is feeling.  A ugly headache that came on like a freight train round 11:00 last night,refused to be ignored, sent me to Sheetz at midnight scrambling for the miraculous release of Excedrin, and then reluctantly parted company at about 4:00 this morning, derailed my best-laid plans for church this morning.  It also left me with the odd semblance of a hangover and removed the filter that I usually cling to like a life-preserver. (Sunday)

(Friday) I’ve been working up to this post for almost a week now, looking at it, jotting down a few sentences, discarding them, and then abandoning the whole enterprise all together.  So here goes:

My faith is a shaky creature, tremulous and timid.  I never seem to have a firm grasp on it when I need it most.  I spend probably as much time running from God as I do running to Him.  I imagine I’m not alone in this, but it feels lonely. As a rule, most Christians are not very good at admitting weakness and to admit that sometimes you’re just not sure how the whole thing works seems like a mighty big weakness.  I envy people who proclaim to have never had a doubt, who never seem to experience that darkness where all we think we know seems on the verge of unraveling if we pull the thread that bedevils us.  I guess I’m a thread-puller. Even if it leaves me perplexed, holding one end of what used to be a gorgeous cashmere sweater, you can bet I’m gonna pull that damn thread.  I have a compulsive need to know things, to figure it all out, to get a definitive answer.  And therein lies the rub.  Faith is not an exercise in the absolute.  You would think that after 33 years, I would be better at accepting this.  I’m not there just yet.  For a girl who prides herself on independence, on being able to go it alone, reliance on a supernatural father is a hard hard thing to grasp.

So what’s a girl to do?  Read, pray, seek, go to church, open up to those you trust.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Being a Christian is a process.  I will never be a finished product in the here and now.  Thank God for the process.

Right now, I’m on my 4th or 5th read-through of Brian McLaren’s Finding Our Way Again.  Have you ever read something, and had the eerie feeling that somehow the author read your mind, scooped out your innermost thoughts, and then oh-so-eloquently put them to page?  That’s this book for me.  Thus the compulsive re-reading.   It’s passages like the following that send me reaching for this book over and over again.

“If you’ve lost your way to the desired destination, you’re in shallow trouble.  But if in the process you’ve also lost the address you were supposed to visit,  your trouble just got deep.  If you don’t realize you’ve forgotten what your desired destination is, you’re in the bottomless pit…namely, to be in a hopeless situation but not realize it or feel bad about it.”

I hope I’m never so complacent that I fail to realize when I’m lost.  I hope I never get so consumed with my shortcomings that I fail to realize that Jesus loves me nonetheless.  That he accepts that I’m human so I might accept it too.

And since it’s been over a week since we’ve mentioned Kings of Leon here, let me  remedy that right now:

“I talk to Jesus.  Jesus says I’m okay.”

The Runner

I should probably listen to Jesus more than I do.

Gimme That Old-time Religion June 3, 2009

So our buddies Dave & Tony over at Muddied Waters are currently in the midst of a weeklong experiment/challenge in which they are only consuming Christian pop culture.  Godspeed, little men.

Anywho, it has been an endless source of entertainment for the rest of us as we witness Dave suffer from the lack of competitive sports viewing and Tony from the dearth of good music.  Their efforts to spiritualize Twitter has led to the invention of  handy new phrases (thanks to Jen for most of these) such as  twestify, twitnessing, and my personal favorite twongues.  Hey we’re all Pentecostal in some shape or fashion around here and twongues is funny!

So mosey over to their blog and read about the boys’ adventure in the land of all that is holy.  And in their honor, here are the top 5 spiritual (to me) songs on my i-pod.

Holy Roller Novocaine May 14, 2009

yes, this is where i grew up

A friend (Hi Tony!) sent this pic to me this morning.  Oddly, it fell on the heels of a oft-repeated, never-resolved conversation my husband & I had last night regarding our Pentecostal background.  This is the marquee from the church I grew up in.  Honestly, I am pretty much a lapsed Pentecostal at this point.  Though I spent twenty-odd years attending a Church of God, and even worked for the church itself, it’s mostly been an uneasy fit.  But to paraphrase Tim O’Brien, it’s one of the things I carry-a huge chunk of my personal DNA.

To be Pentecostal is to be fluent in a language that is something of a mystery to the outer world.  Last month, Rolling Stone profiled Kings of Leon, and I couldn’t help but laugh to see the music industry bible attempt to explain the culture of the band’s childhood:  mixed bathing, traveling evangelists, youth camp, camp meeting, prayer lines, hymns, no shorts, no secular anything.  Strange to your average Rolling Stone reader I’m sure, but  par for the course to any Pentecostal.  Personally, my parents were not very strict.  I think they just liked certain things too much to let them go, so I cut my teeth on the movies and music of their youth-namely the Vietnam era.  Every year my aunt had to sew culottes for my cousins and myself so we could be properly kitted up for youth camp.  Our usual summer uniform of shorts & tanks was not allowed, so for one week out of the year we looked the part of modest Church of God girls.  The culottes were then relegated to the back of the drawer never to be looked at again.

My husband is the son of a Church of God preacher.  We met at the fore-mentioned camp.  I don’t think Eric saw a movie until he was a teenager.  When he & I stopped attending a Church of God, he was informed that he was breaking a family tradition of generations.  And while Pentecostalism can make for an exuberant and warm environment,  it can also leave you with the sense that you can never ever measure up.  It’s part of our shared DNA-one that’s oddly made for a pretty strong alliance between the two of us.

I guess that’s one reason I do adore Kings Of Leon.  In the midst of the sex and the drugs and the absolutely lethal rock-n-roll, you can hear the echoes and vibrations of countless Sunday nights spent squirming in a church pew absorbing things that are mysterious and wonderful and terrifying.  You can’t really amputate any part of your childhood, can you?  It stays with you in one form or another.  The things we carry…