Confluence Formation

I mowed the lawn on Friday. I was trying to think of the number of lawns I’ve mowed in my day. The number of backyards and front yards that I’ve combed with my feet. The number of maple trees and oak trees and sycamore trees and cedar trees that I’ve high-fived on my way by, back and forth, back and forth.

Mowing the lawn, especially with a push mower, is an intimate process. It’s a good way to get to know a place. Walking back and forth and back and forth, around obstacles, touching base with the trees along the way.

There’s a way in which this is how the story of Abraham reads.

When we meet him here at the beginning of his story his name is Abram. Abram means “exalted father”. Later in the stories God changes his name to Abraham, which means “father of multitudes”. God tells Abram that he will become the father of multitudes. And that he will have a place, a land, to call his own.

So Abram sets out on a long walk—back and forth, back and forth, around obstacles, touching base with a couple of nameworthy oaks along the way—all to get to know this promised land that is new to him.

I’m going to do three things for us here:

* We’re going to get oriented to where we are in the overall flow of the Hebrew bible.

* I’m going to summarize the chapters in Genesis that tell Abraham’s story, and I’m going to summarize them far too fast, hopefully in a way that will entice you to crack the stories open and give them a closer look yourself.

* I’m going to offer three life lessons that we can take away from the legends of Abraham.

At this point on our journey through Genesis we cross a threshold. Up until now in this series we have been in, what we can think of as, mythic time.

There are the myths of creation of Genesis 1 and 2, where we meet the spirit of creation bubbling over with delight. Then our mythical ancestors, Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Eden after an encounter with a talkative snake and an infamous fruit tree. Then their sons, Cain and Abel, who are somehow born into a populated world (mythic time can do things like that) that is established with things like conflict and competition and violence. By the time Noah comes on the stage that violence has gotten out of hand, and Genesis tells of a flood that was already a well known myth in the ancient Near East. And there’s the story of the tower of Babel that we looked at last week, an etiology for the many cultures and languages in the world, while also serving as a subversive corrective to imperial power.

These mythic tales carry us through the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.

Then we’re introduced to Abram, who will become Abraham. And with this introduction we move from mythic time into legendary or historical time.

Myths are sacred symbolic stories that explain the origins of things, and that often explore deep spiritual truths. Legends are traditional tales that are—to various extents—rooted in real history. Mind you, not biographical or journalistic reporting. Rather, they tell of the exaggerated and larger-than-life deeds of real human beings.

That’s what we’ve got when Abraham enters the scene.

Whereas the stories of the myths in the first chunk of Genesis happen in a time-outside-of-time, now we step into the telling of legends that can be mapped out—not with absolute precision, but with some degree of accuracy—on a timeline of history.

Abraham, the larger-than-life figure.

A wanderer and adventurer longing for a place to land. The consummate immigrant. A whole-hearted follower of his particular God. A partner-friend of God. A family man. A protector of kin. One who honors his father, and nevertheless sets off on his own path. A father of many, in his own rite. And one who sends them off on their own. Deceptive at times. Courageous at times. Often deferential to the demands of others. (Namely: God and his wife. Not necessarily in that order.) Even so, he often speaks his mind. He almost always moves decisively. A man not only of belief but of active faith. He worships in the shade of trees. And practices bloody rituals of covenant.

We have about 13 chapters worth of legendary tales about Abraham moving back and forth on the land that God promised him.

Here’s the flyover summary:

Chapter 12 | Abram differentiates from his father and sets off, heeding God’s blessing and call—by way of the Oak of Moreh. He flees to Egypt to feed his family during famine, and lies about Sarai being his sister not his wife. He gets rich.

Chapter 13 | Abram gives his nephew Lot a choice of land. Abram settles the less fertile plot—by the Oaks of Mamre.

Chapter 14 | Abram rescues Lot, and encounters Melchizedek. [Stay tuned for more on Melchizedek next week.]

Chapter 15 | Abram cuts animals in half to make a covenant (berith) with God, and he dreams of the smoking firepot and torch. [More about that whole affair below.]

Chapter 16 | Abram has Ishmael with Hagar.

Chapter 17 | Abram (exalted father) gets a name change to Abraham (father of multitudes). And he doubles down on his confidence in God’s covenant with the practice of ritual circumcision.

Chapter 18 | Abraham entertains God as a house guest—by the Oaks of Mamre—and intercedes for Lot.

Chapter 19 | [Interlude: About Lot, and Sodom and Gomorrah.]

Chapter 20 | Abraham lies again about Sarah (who, at this point, also has a new name).

Chapter 21 | Abraham and Sarah have Isaac, and send Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness.

Chapter 22 | Abraham is called to bind (akedah) and sacrifice Isaac. (Spoiler: He doesn’t go through with it. A ram saves the day.)

Chapter 23 | Abraham buys a burial plot for Sarah.

Chapter 24 | Abraham sends for a wife for Isaac from his homeland.

Chapter 25 | Abraham remarries and has more children with his wife Keturah. He doles out gifts to his children. He privileges Isaac. And he dies happy.

So what might we take away from Abraham’s life and legacy, aside from—you know—three of the most influential religious traditions that have shaped the world, history, and geopolitical relations to this day?

1. Faithfulness is a long walk.

There’s a misconception that goes something like this: If I am truly living with faith then I will not have doubts, and I will not experience uncertainty or confusion.

But that simply is not the case.

A life of good faith is a process of consistently demonstrating the audacity to forge ahead precisely in the presence of the unknown.

A life of good faith is a long and varied walk. And it’s never in a straight line. It’s full of obstacles and the uncertainty of promises that seem like impossibilities.

So, if you have encountered some obstacles along the way, if you’ve turned this way and that, if you’ve found yourself arguing with God*, disagreeing with God, wondering about why it is that you are even aiming your life toward faithfulness: You’re in good company. You’re probably heading in the right direction. Keep on going.

2. God’s promises invite us to make decisions, and our decisions give shape to God’s promises.

One of the most prevalent themes throughout the bible is the theme of covenant.

Covenant with God in the legends of Abraham is an active thing.

The Hebrew word for covenant is berith—the root of which implies cutting. There are two covenant rituals that Abraham engages—1. the ritual of circumcision, which is a cutting off of a not-insignificant part of oneself; 2. the second is an interesting part of Abraham’s story in chapter 15:

Abram said, “God, how am I to know this, [that you will follow through on your promises]?”

God said, “Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, and a dove and a young pigeon.”

Abram brought all these animals to God, split them down the middle, and laid the halves opposite each other… As the sun went down a deep sleep overcame Abram… When the sun was down and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch moved between the split carcasses. That’s when God made a covenant with Abram…

This is an odd story to us, but not out of the ordinary for those doing business in the ancient Near East. …

Today we are going to look at two stories. The first one is about a tower. It’s in the book of Genesis, the eleventh chapter.

Read it here, if you’re not familiar.

The world at the end of this first story is more recognizable to us than the world at the beginning, isn’t it? A world where people have a hard time understanding each other.

Makes you wonder: Has it always been like this? Why is it like this? Does it have to be like this?

Imagine with me, somewhere, sometime before stories were written down. A man sits by a fire after the family meal, and his little child snuggles in next to him. As the child looks out to the west where the sun is setting in the distance she asks: “Papa? Does anybody live on the other side of that horizon?”

“Yes child,” he says.

“Are they like us?” she asks.

“In some ways they are,” he says. “But in many ways they are not.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

And he starts to tell her a story about how everyone in the world used to speak the same language.

But she interrupts him, “You mean some people don’t speak like we do now?”

“That’s right,” he says.

“Then how do they understand each other?”

And he tells her something about understanding that she won’t actually understand for years to come, but she’ll remember how it piqued her curiosity when he said, “If you want to really understand someone you have to learn to understand them regardless of the words that you both are using.”

Eventually, laced through with her many questions, he gets around to telling her the full story that his mother told him when he was a child, and the one that his mother’s father had told her as a child. The story that he told his daughter would have been a version of the story that we read today, though not like it exactly.

Because like every story, it grew as it drifted from generation to generation, and from family to family, and from culture to culture. It shape-shifted to meet the needs of each storyteller and of each of their audiences.

You can imagine, at some point, somewhere, someone wrote down the version of the story that we have today, and it makes you wonder: Who was that storyteller’s audience, when he or she or they wrote down the particular version that we have in our book here today?

As we read the first story: We drop into a scene where everyone in the whole world speaks the same language. And they’ve clustered together to live and build in one place. And presumably they’ve figured out how to feed themselves and cloth themselves and how to meet their other basic needs, because someone has gotten around to the extracurricular activity of inventing bricks.

Up until now they’ve all just built things, supposedly, with stones stacked precariously up on one another. Stones will only stack so high before rolling off of each other. But now they have these well-baked bricks, and they have tar to hold them together.

“Let’s stack these bricks to build a city,” they say. “And to build a tower that reaches to the heavens.”

They’re not just doing this for shelter, or even for protection.

“Let’s do this to make a name for ourselves,” they say.

But God scrambles them up in the story. God makes it so that they can’t understand each other, and can’t cluster together to build their own personal little empires. So they spread out, and they abandon their tower, and the name that they wanted to make for themselves is forgotten.

The first audience for this version of the story was a nation in exile. The Hebrew people had been displaced from their homelands by the mighty Babylonian empire. In that context someone began writing down these ancient stories for their people in exile.

When this exiled audience hears that God confuses the people of Babel and frustrates their endeavor to build a tower, the Hebrew people are hearing a story about their oppressors, the Babylonians, being routed by God. They are hearing a story about how God is against the empire. They love this story.

The more you look for it in stories about the God of the bible, the more you will begin to see that God is always finding ways to poke holes in the persistent human impulse to build an empire, whatever form it takes.

And it does take many forms.

For the Babylonians are long gone by the time we get to our second story, this one is in the book of Acts, chapter two. The Babylonians are gone, but the people are still scrambled up, still talking past each other more so than to each other. They’re still living their lives in the shadows of empire, living against rather than with one another.

Nevertheless, a small group of people has gathered, with hopes and a vision for an alternative way of living and being together. Their vision is inspired by the life, the death, and the subsequent reappearance of a recently executed Palestinian man who had some radical ideas about divine love and about liberation from the ways of empire.

Go ahead and read the second story, here.

The same spirit that hovered over the winds of creation is the spirit that blew in like a gale force and stirred up this small group of people gathered in Jerusalem. It’s the spirit that prompted them to understand one another, each speaking in their mother tongues.

It’s the same spirit that scrambled the efforts of the people of Babel.

This spirit swoops in often to heighten the drama and compel the movement of many stories in the bible, and elsewhere. It’s seldom predictable.

We call it ruah, pneuma, sophia, shekinah.

It’s the same spirit that lingers at the threshold of your own becoming—the thresholds of your growth and your creative contribution to this world.

The creative spirit is lasting and mighty. It is a holy spirit. It moves the world. It shapes the world. And it will not be defeated by any destructive drive. It will not be eclipsed by any ego-driven endeavors.

As you’ll recall, the creative spirit was already there at the beginning. It is always already among us. And it is always already within you.

But when we look around and see the world the way it is we have to acknowledge that the creative spirit is not always present in the ways that we live, in the ways that we treat each other, treat the world, and treat ourselves.

It takes skill and grace to live by the spirit.

What I mean by that is that it is common to live in conflict with the mighty and lasting spirit of creation. But there is a way to live aligned with the power of that spirit.

That’s what Pentecost Sunday is about: Living according to the power of the holy creative spirit, rather than against it.

Though you’ll begin to see—once you’ve tasted what it is to live by the spirit—that underneath everything else, it’s really what every day is meant to be about.

Pentecost Sunday, just invites us to look directly at what it is that compels a life lived by the spirit.

And these two stories—of the tower and the tongues—are the perfect stories for us to be looking at to discern what it is that compels a life lived by the spirit. Because one of them shows us what it looks like when we forget the creative spirit within us. And the other shows us what happens when we remember.

In the story of the tower of Babel I can’t imagine that God is trying to keep the people from their creative impulse, or from the desire to pursue proximity to God, or from the desire to make home for themselves in a particular place with particular people. I don’t imagine that God was preventing or protecting the people of Babel from any of those things in the story.

Yet God scrambles their efforts to build what they were building. Why?

To answer this it helps to remember that God is usually concerned more with a person’s motivation than with their behavior.

Read that again, let it sink in (and don’t get distracted by whether or not you actually believe in God): God is usually concerned more with a person’s motivation than with their behavior.

Which isn’t to say that behavior doesn’t matter, just that there are always distracted and incoherent motivations behind every errant act.

So what was motivating the people of Babel?

The story tel…

As you’ve noticed, no doubt, I’m working through some of the ancient stories in the Hebrew book of Genesis. Gleaning them for wisdom that we might apply to this project of being human, and making things better in the world.

That’s what I’ve been doing the past few weeks. I preach about one of the stories on Sunday, then brush them up a little bit to share with you here on Substack.

I’ve been tackling the stories in order.

Sunday was Mother’s Day.

The story that came up for Mother’s Day was the one about Cain and Abel.

For the biblically uninitiated, that one’s not a conventional choice for a Mother’s Day reflection. It is a tale about the first man to have ever had a human mother, so there’s that. But in the story he ends up murdering his younger brother.

It’s not a feel-good story.

But I love a challenge from the pulpit. So I took a swing. Found my angle. And this is what I preached…

This story doesn’t tell us how Eve responded to the drama and tragedy between her first two sons. We can only speculate about her grief and confusion.

What we are shown are the ways that God mothers Cain through the movements of this story, giving him every chance to become himself—and when he loses himself, to be restored.

Stories are meaning-making devices.

They help us make meaning of the world—as we’ve seen the past couple of weeks.

Two weeks ago, the stories of creation.

Where do we come from? How is it that we live in a world so full of wonder? What is the origin of our experience of delight?

Then, last week, the stories of our first ancestors and their stumbling out of innocence and into the possibilities and challenges of spiritual maturity.

What do we do with this complicated world? Where delight and shame mingle? Where we’re compelled to grow things, birth things, love things—but where it’s also painful, where we must risk harm to grow and birth and love?

These sorts of stories are not only about making meaning, but are also meant to change us.

They are meant to invite us into personal growth and change.

And meant to invite us into making a change in the world, seeing the world as it is and birthing new possibilities.

Today’s story of Eve’s firstborn, Cain—like so many of our ancient stories—has been used and explored to make meaning for thousands of years in as many different ways.

The meaning that we glean, and the change that we make, every time we read a story, hear a story, tell a story is affected by two things:

* It’s affected by the perspective that we bring to the story—how we see the world, our biases and conclusions that we are already holding, affect what we might glean from any given narrative.

* And it’s affected by the need that we bring to the story—this is related to the first, we come to stories seeking solutions to the problems that we face; seeking solutions to the problems that we give the greatest weight and priority to.

So acknowledging that—acknowledging our influence in the task of reading sacred text and heeding what wisdom might be revealed to us there—I invite you, with me, to purposefully bring a particular perspective and expectation to this story.

As we look at this ancient story, let’s look for the mothering ways of God—how the sweet spirit of the divine meets the deep longing of our hearts.

And let’s look for how God invites us to participate in more motherful ways—how She moves us to meet the deep needs of our world.

When I use the word “motherful” I am borrowing the word and its meaning from the queer, Black author, alexis pauline gumbs, who identifies as a ‘love evangelist’ and calls all humans, regardless of gender, into practices of mothering.

A motherful world, she says, is one that is oriented toward ways of being that are most nourishing and lifegiving for the collective, for the common good.

Motherful ways are unrelenting in their hope for life, in their conviction that love and creation are more powerful than any form of violence, sickness, or domination.

And just to be clear—this reflection that I’m offering here is for everyone.

To my brothers specifically—I think one of the most generous responses to Mother’s Day, one of the best ways to honor the mothers of this world would be for all men and male-identified souls everywhere to imbue their masculinity with motherful ways of being.

So let’s crowdsource this a bit: What do you think are the qualities of a motherful world?

Some of what came through from the folks I walk with at a little church in Maine:

Listening. Empathy. To know what it is to be seen. Being present. Accompaniment. Unconditional love. Tenderness and compassion. Touch. Forgiveness. Patience. Hugs. Sacrifice. Joy. Laughter. Hope. Strength. Encouragement. Feeding us. Nurture.

You have a list, too, don’t you?

Funny how envy doesn’t go on the list, isn’t it?

Neither does violence.

Or retribution.

The motherful ways of God, as we’re about to see in the story of Cain, call us back to ourselves as the remedy for envy. They hold us to account when we’re out of line. And they protect us, in order to provide the space that we need to participate in the processes of restoration.

The story begins with Eve becoming the first mother.

“With the help of the spirit of creation,” she says. “With the help of the Mother Hen Spirit that hovered over the waters at the beginning of everything—I’ve made this child. Brewed him into being just beneath my heart, and broke the waters and puffed him with breath and filled him with milk.”

“With God’s help,” she says. “I’ve gained this child.”

So she gives him the name Cain, which means acquired or gained, but we know might also mean learned, developed, grown.

Which is good, because Cain has a lot of growing to do as a man.

And Eve births another boy, and names him Abel, which means vapor or mist. Which is an interesting choice for a name, but makes sense in this story because this story is not about Abel. This story is about Cain. And Abel’s presence in this story is fleeting from the beginning.

Time passes.

And Cain and Abel both set out to do what they’re here to do. Cain is growing food and Abel is raising livestock.

And then there’s this matter of them both making offerings to God, because we all know that God loves a farmer’s market, and delights when you gather for Her bouquets of flowers.

And in the story there is seemingly something about Abel’s offerings that is pure and natural, and there is something about Cain’s offerings that is contrived or forced.

And God can see that Cain is struggling to live with the same sort of authenticity that seems to come so naturally to Abel.

And Cain can sense that God can see this.

And Cain goes into a sulk.

Now that’s relatable, isn’t it?

We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Focusing so much on the gifts and blessings of others that we forget to live our own authentic lives.

We forget that we also have a contribution to make.

Not one that we need to force.

Not something that we have to do, or that we ought to do, or that we should be doing.

Not something that is a responsibility or a duty, even.

But a contribution that it is our privilege and joy to produce.

It can take a lifetime of practice to learn to recognize what it is that is ours to give.

But also, in another way, it becomes clear instantaneously—doesn’t it?—the moment we are doing what we’re here to do. It flows through us as naturally as a river hugging her banks, when we let it flow.

Alas, we all too often dam ourselves up with envy and petty resentments.

But God is a loving mother, calling us back to ourselves, because God knows that living the life that is ours to live—that that is the best remedy for envy.

So God says to Cain, “Why this tantrum? Why the sulking? If you do well, won’t you be accepted?”

As if to say: “As often as you focus on a life that is not yours to live, you will be out of line. You’ll stray from your path. Cain, get back to being you.”

This maternal wisdom doesn’t sink in for Cain. He’s too bent out of shape. And envy festers into resentment, and resentment decomposes into rage, and rage compels him toward violence, and…

You can watch me preach a version of this here.

[First a couple of credits: Annette Garber’s Wandering with the Wild Feminine inspires me. And her Daughters of Eve article inspired in general some good chunks of what I wrote here. Thanks specifically to Annette for the Rachel Held Evans quote. Also bringing significant inspo is the permission-giving work perspective that comes through in the style and content of mythologist Martin Shaw’s writings, especially pertinent this week The Fall & The Underworld.]

As I sit at the coffee shop in town writing this, I look up and see (as if walking straight out of an essay in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights) a stocky-bodied-bearded-beauty just strolling past on the sidewalk outside the window here, with a backpack containing (I’m imagining filled with) a skein of wool. I know this because he was (I might be wrong about the particular modality, but you’ll get the picture) crocheting a small piece of something that had yet to become what it may yet become. He was crocheting as he walked along, tugging at the yarn that draped out of his backpack and trailed like a tail—like a pet on a leash—ten feet behind him on the sidewalk. And the yarn was a bright teal color with (I promise you this) flecks of sparkle in it.

I love us.

Humans, I mean.

I love us.

We are sometimes so entirely ourselves. It delights me. It’s beautiful.

I have a high view of humans. I believe in us.

I believe that we are capable of incredible acts of generosity and creativity and love and courage. I believe that we are incredibly generous and creative and loving and courageous.

And… It is also clear to me that we live well-east of Eden.

You know?

We do not live in the mythic realm of our first ancestors. We do not live always actually embodying and enacting our true nature and potential as image-bearers of a delighted and creative God.

We can still taste it, though—Eden. We still long for it, in a remembering and anticipating sort of way.

Some will tell you that the story of the garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit is where depravity enters the scene and eclipses delight. But I don’t see it that way.

This mythic story—about our ancestors who ate some fruit that changed the way that they saw the world—is not about original sin. Not as far as I can tell. It’s not a fall from grace.

As I’ll point out in a bit, grace actually shows up in a way you might not have seen before.

This story about Eden and the fruit and the decisions that Eve and Adam make is a story about life as it is, and what it looks like to move through this life from a living commitment to spiritual maturity rather than resignation to spiritual infancy.

We’ll come back to all that, though. First, I want to say more about how to read a story like this.

Because there are lots of formative faith traditions with powerful sacred scriptures. And all wisdom texts worthy of the name are full of seeds of good, of liberation, and of healing. But reading scripture—whatever your tradition—is not a passive affair. The seeds of scripture are placed in the hands of those of us who practice the faith. And it’s up to us what we do with them. It’s up to us, and the repercussions are on us.

As a spiritual leader working in one of the streams of the Christian tradition, I encourage my faith-kin to recognize that reading the bible is an active endeavor. Think: Messy. Think: Grit. Think: Bodies digging in the dirt.

When we engage the bible we are gardeners of meaning.

In other words: People of faith are responsible for how their sacred texts play out in our world.

And this story, of Eden, the serpent, Eve and Adam has been used by people of faith—almost endlessly throughout Christian history—to subjugate, repress, dismiss, and demonize every daughter, sister, and mother on the planet.

Let’s just go ahead and tell it how it is: Throughout history, people of faith have poisoned this sacred text with patriarchal perversions of the truth about who Eve, and every daughter of Eve, truly is.

They have said she is untrustworthy. The source of sin. The reason for the fall from grace. The weaker sex.

This story has been misused again and again to justify men lording it over women.

But we don’t have to keep taking the poison. There is a more nourishing and beautiful meaning that we can glean from this story.

What if Eve is, as the story tells us, the life giver and the expander of life?

What if she’s the one who is actually brave enough to be curious about what else this life might hold?

What if she’s the one who is strong enough to accept the consequences of living a full life—to mature beyond the orchard, to make decisions worthy of her wildness?

What if she is the one who is generous enough to extend an invitation to her companion—to invite him too into an expansive life?

Of course, the bible itself carries plenty of patriarchal residue in the words and stories. Like Eve’s curses in this story, and the pronouncement that Adam would lord it over Eve.

Many many stories in the bible convey a time and culture where male supremacy was assumed to be the right way to order the world, along with other forms of hierarchy (like human over earth, like master over slave)—all of which continue to persist in the world today.

Here’s the thing: Many many stories in the bible also contain elements of self-critique and internal cultural corrective. I find that particularly interesting. That if we’re willing to see it, we’ll see how the bible nudges both itself and us away from harmful structures and toward a movement of healing.

That’s why I’m kind of tired of wasting energy on blaming the bible itself.

The bible is an ancient text that begs interpretation. But we are responsible—as individuals, as practitioners or inheritors of our traditions, as communities of faith—for the meaning that we weave from these ancient texts.

As Rachel Held Evans wrote: “If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them… If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”

If you, like me, are someone who reads the bible as a source for gleaning wisdom, please hear me now—this is not a passive endeavor.

We are responsible for actively retelling and recentering the divine delight at the heart of all existence.

We are responsible for looking to our sacred stories and using them to make meaning of our reality.

That’s how it was for the ancient people who wrote these stories down as well.

The God in the story of Eden and the forbidden fruit is a reflection of the theology of an ancient people trying to make sense of their reality.

In the world of literature and mythology these kinds of stories are known as etiological. An etiology is a myth that explains the origin of something.

In other words, this story is not a divine pronouncement of how things should be. It is a human exploration of why things are the way they are.

So the curses that God utters in the tale are not reflections on how things ought to be, they are reflections of our predecessors grappling with how things actually are in the world.

You can almost hear them saying in this story…

“Look around you. The work of growing things is hard and often frustrating, isn’t it? Why might that be? And feel within you. The labor of birthing things into the world is painful and all consuming. How do we make sense of that? And look at the world as it actually is. Men are obsessed with their own power, aren’t they? Childishly passing the blame, claiming superiority, lording it over women. Does it have to be this way?”

You can almost hear them.

We live outside of Eden, in the midst of harsh realities and challenging circumstances, confronted with toxic cultures and harmful ways of being. But we have a glimmer within us of what is poss…

“The God of Genesis is unique in having, not a use, but instead a mysterious benign intention for humans.” —Marilynne Robinson

This week I gave a sermon about the stories of creation that are at the very beginning of the book of Genesis in the bible. Before giving the talk I reflected: What do I want to say about creation? What do I see in these stories? What do I hear?

This is what surfaced: That delight is at the heart of all creation.

I know what comes after these first couple of stories. I know that we’ll get to the death and the shame, the struggle and the judgement, the disappointment, the violence and mistreatment of each other and the earth.

But in the beginning a spirit of delight hovered over the soup of possibility and called good things into being.

Light and dark, good. The air we breath, the atmosphere we live in, good. The earth we move about on, good. The oceans we swim in, good. Seeds and fruit, sun and moon and stars, good good good. And swarms of fish and birds, good. Animals, along with us human animals, good. Very good.

It’s clear from the poem in Genesis chapter 1 that this is so. There is a tone of delight, of joy that imbues the very energy of creation.

And there might be something here for us. We are, after all—so the poem tells us—made up of the same creative stuff. We have the same nature and creative inclination as the Creator in the poem.

If we want to make something good in this world, perhaps we’d do well to look first and foremost to what it is that delights us.

We tend to get bogged down in what we should be doing. And, although there is a good and worthy place for obligation and duty, most of us don’t need to be coached toward obligation, we need a cultural corrective in order to keep from collapsing into an abyss of should’s.

Let that be delight.

This core message in the poem—that the Creator delights over creation, becomes even more pronounced when you understand the context of how and where this poem came to be.

The Hebrew bible is a story of a particular group of people trying to keep their identity and integrity intact in the midst of a world trying to break them apart.

Read that sentence again.

Does that resonate at all? Anything timeless and relatable to that?

The identity of the particular group of people was grounded in the conviction and ancestral memory that they were blessed by the central creative force of the universe, in order to be a blessing to the world.

The Hebrew bible began being compiled—that is, the stories and poems gathered together and written down—at a time when this group of people were in political exile. They had been forced from their homes by an empire called Babylon. In that context of displacement they brought these stories together, to remember who they were, in response to the challenges of their circumstances and the heavy hand of their oppressors.

Much of the bible is a remembering around identity. Which is a pretty good place to start when what you’re wanting to do is to make something good in the world.

Much of the bible is a response to empire theology. Which is pretty important, because empire

theology will have you running around in circles trying to: 1. Appease the oppressive powers of the day; or 2. Expend your energy trying to disprove it.

The best and most useful forms of wisdom literature don’t engage either of these two pulls, but instead finds a third way, putting forth an alternative, something more compelling and creative.

The theological profile of the Babylonian empire was more or less: The gods are indifferent, and we humans are a nuisance.

Here’s an alternative to that: God delights in all of creation like a mother hen gathering her brood, and we humans are called to participate in creating good things.

There is a second story that comes on the heals of the poem about the delighted Creator speaking delightful things into existence. That second story reads like a fable.

Before there ever was rain, God blew breath into a clod of dirt, and rendered a living soul.

Then God took up gardening. Especially fruit trees. It was more of an orchard really. God planted an orchard with trees that produced fruit—the original edible arrangement. And a couple of the trees that God planted had funny fruit. The fruit of one was life. The fruit of the other was knowledge.

And if you know anything about stories then you know this detail is not insignificant.

And if you’re one of those people who is inclined to turn the pages and look at the ending before you’ve even gotten through the beginning, then you will see that there are trees there too, just as there were at the beginning.

And if you know anything about stories then you’ll know that it’s significant that the rivers that God watered the orchards with have names. Pishon. Gihon. Hiddekel. The Euphrates. And that, even if you don’t recognize the names of these rivers, you can imagine someone somewhere once upon a time must have known the names. Just as you know the name of the street you grew up on, and the name of your grade school, and the name of the park where you played little league.

Which is all to say that God gets up to God’s business right in the midst of the most mundane matters and familiar places.

Which is to say that this story about the clod of dirt that became a living soul—that was told long ago by the exiled people who knew these rivers—this story about all of that is somehow also about you and me and the rivers of life that we know.

So. Then God deputized the living soul—whose substance came from the soil, so much so that we could also call this creature Living Soil, which was in fact his name.

Then God enticed Living Soil with unlimited good things and one, only one, prohibited thing.

(And if you know anything about stories—not to mention toddlers—then you know exactly where this one is heading. Or so you think.)

Then God made other animals to keep Living Soil company.

And everyone got a name.

This is where it all begins. A delightful universe. A delighted God. A diverse array of creatures with names, and an inclination to connect, to come to know one another’s names.

Wherever we go from here (or perhaps precisely because we know where we’re going from here—into the grit of the human experience on the other side of innocence) these beginning stories remind us to remember.

Remember that there is a divine heartbeat of delight at the center of everything.

Remember that we are called to re-center that delight one human heartbeat at a time.

In other words: What is the arc of the story that you want your life to tell?

Because you can live looking for ways to appease or disprove angry and vindictive gods? Alternately though, you can live looking for ways to join with a delighted and creative God in making good things?

Which story do you find more compelling?

—

PS - It doesn’t matter so much, by the way, whether or not you believe in God, per se. The question remains: Which story do you want your life to tell?

At my Christian college, during the chapel service one afternoon—I would have been probably 19 or 20 years old—the chapel speaker offered an invitation to all those in attendance to: “Stand up if you have a call on your heart to serve in ministry.”

I did have that sense of call, so I stood up. It felt natural for me to stand.

But once I got to my feet and looked around I remember feeling surprised—or some blend of self-conscious, confused, and upset—that everyone else wasn’t standing up. Plenty of the other religion majors were standing, but most of my friends—biology, pre-med, education, outdoor recreation, literature, art, music, business—were still in their seats.

The extent to which I was upset and confused wasn’t directed toward them, it was directed toward the way that the invitation was framed, the way that “ministry” in that subculture of the Evangelical Christian world was presented.

Why not throw it open a bit, and ask every young person in attendance there: “In what way is the call to serve and minister moving your heart in this moment? In what ways can you imagine responding to that call throughout your life?”

One of the ways that I am heeding my heart and living my call is as a pastor, a sort of “professional” minister.

Both times that I have served as a pastor, I didn’t go looking for it.

I was, of course, involved in the decision, purposeful with my “yes” to the opportunities that I uncovered. But it was just that: A blend of external opportunity and inner urge to walk toward that opportunity, along with the talents and skills that I needed in order to walk toward it in good faith.

That’s kind of how vocation works. Your calling won’t likely force you into compliance. Perhaps you’re one who seeks to forcefully uncover it, but it’s as like as not to surprise you with the particular forms that it takes.

Even with the explicit label that I have—the job title that gives weight to my role as a professional minister—I continue to be surprised by the particular forms that my particular form of service and ministry are taking.

For me, to be a pastor, means that I serve as a spiritual leader and teacher—in a particular location, tradition, and moment.

What makes it interesting and wholly dynamic, is that the moments keep shifting, the tradition is ever living, and my particular location is populated with a mosaic mix of personalities and persuasions.

For example, the community where I am pastoring a small church is blessed to be blended with folks who hold different political perspectives. Several on the left, some on the right, probably plenty who lean libertarian, and many who I suspect would identify as apolitical. And there’s a blend, too, of what the folks in my parish want to receive and experience when they come to church.

The past several weeks have been a veritable dojo of practice for pastoring purple—given the present cultural moment, the compelling through lines of wisdom in my tradition, and the needs, wants, fears, and hopes of my blended church family.

In this context I’ve been listening to the stirrings of my own heart, heeding the conviction I find there, shaping it with truth as best I’m able, and offering it with as much care and skill as I can muster.

A couple things have surfaced as reliable anchor points in the dynamism of my experience pastoring purple:

* We are all called to make the world good, to give ourselves to this world, to make our particular contribution informed by our personal blend of opportunity, urgency, skill, talent, and resources. Whether or not you are willing to respond to that call is up to each of you.

* When you respond in a particular way you’ll probably get some feedback. Here’s my advice for how to engage the feedback you receive: If it’s online and anonymous, ignore it. If it’s encouraging and personal, receive it, let it boost your spirit. It it’s critical and caring, receive that too, let it boost your growth. But regardless of whether it’s encouraging or critical, don’t collapse into it.

At the end of the day, or better yet, at the start of the next—especially if you are feeling disoriented, frustrated, disengaged or over-engaged—it never hurts to go ahead and ask yourself, all over again: “In what way is the call to contribute moving my heart in this moment?”

And find a way—a small way, a today way—to respond to that call.

This is where to go if you want to see me pastoring purple:

This is where to go if you want help responding to the dynamic nature of your call:

I’m feeling kinda partial to babies this year.. anyone with me??

I had a baby this year.

My daughter was born, this year!

Now, technically (literally, spiritually) speaking, it was my wife who had the baby.

What I had was the honor of being there to witness—up close and hands on—the primal miracle of birth.

Emma is preaching this very evening at the church where she’s been serving for the past few years. It’s her last Christmas Eve with them, as we’ll be moving up from Boston in the new year.

Over the past year and a half I’ve been splitting my time between Boston and Midcoast, back and forth a whole bunch. I wore out one Subaru, and got a whole new one.

And I’m so excited to be moving back to Maine after a few years away. And bringing my new family with me.

The sermon that Emma is sharing with her congregation this very evening—she titled: The Risk of Birth.

And it is that, isn’t it? Risky business, birth.

Not only for you mothers who have carried and birthed children. Though certainly there is a special quality to the courageous act of mothering.

But also—for every one of you, every one of us: Being born into this world is both a primal miracle and a radical risk.

Risky because the world is not as we know it could and should be.

Our world is filled to the brim with loneliness and despair, with warfare and violence, with greed and envy, with judgement and hate.

The world we all got born into is not as it could and should be.

And that’s precisely why we do things like this.

We gather to gather what we need in order to steady our hearts, boost our spirits, and ready us to go out and reshape the world.

The past several weeks here at Edgecomb Community Church we have been slowing down each Sunday morning to meditate on the world-changing qualities that this season brings to light..

Hope, Peace, Joy, Love.

We’ve looked at these things considering how—as people of good faith—we are invited to add them to the world, regardless of whether or not we’re feeling them at any particular moment.

I want to point out to you something that you probably already know:

That LOVE is not simply a warm feeling.

And PEACE is different from the mere absence of conflict.

And HOPE is something other than just optimism.

And JOY is different from happiness.

Happiness—as the writer, Frederick Buechner, pointed out to me—comes at us in predictable ways: a happy marriage, a pleasant vacation, a job well done.

But JOY is more surprising than that.

JOY, as often as not, tends to turn up when it’s not being looked for, and in places you’d not necessarily think to look.

HOPE and PEACE and LOVE have the same tendency to turn up in unlikely places.

I can think of one of those unlikely places..

a very particular—smelly, lonely, dark, dank, and frightened—corner of a stable in a small town called Bethlehem, in the hill country of Judea, a place now known as Palestine: Where the JOY of life showed up one starry night a couple of thousand years ago.

I can imagine the primal scream and the final push that resulted that night in an infant child, all gunked up with the goo of birth, lifted with LOVE to his mother’s breast for first communion.

I can feel in my own muscle the HOPE with which that child’s roadweary father scurried around trying to find anything that approximated a clean bundle of cloth to wrap his new child in.

I can look back on this story at the contours of PEACE that took shape in the memories that rippled out from every encounter with the child.

Peace, Hope, Love and Joy are not just sentimental words.

They are the qualities of an active faith.

Faith is often misunderstood as a passive thing. Something that we possess. Something outside of us that we get a hold of, if we’re pious and holy enough.

But that’s not quite right. Faith is active. It’s not something we possess. It’s something that we live. Drawing on the qualities within us, we birth God into the world again and again.

God is often misunderstood as a good luck charm, a sort of totem that we take out from time to time in order to fend off bad feelings or hard realities.

But faith is not passive. And God is not an easy fix.

Faith is active. And God is dynamic—not so much a thing to be believed in as a force to be caught up in—a movement that invites us to participate in the world—as messy as it is—with courageous and illuminating acts of HOPE and PEACE and JOY and LOVE.

The great gift of the Christmas story, in my opinion, is less about who showed up and more about how he did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it was Jesus who showed up.

But he was never not going to show up.

God is too biased toward life to not be in it with us.

The great gift of the Christmas story is not that God showed up in human form but the particular way that God went about showing up in human form.

Jesus could have gotten here any old way. But reflecting every year on the particular way that Jesus did show up—in this unlikely story, in the midst of the mess, the child of immigrants on the move, unhoused, underresourced, in the arms of a teenage mother, under the care of a frightened father, against all odds: Reflecting on this story has got to get us asking questions about where else the divine might be showing up in our world in corners where we haven’t bothered to look?

And where else might we go about putting God in the world?

When I think about faith and God I can think of no better way to sum up both than with these words uttered by the 16th century Saint, John of the Cross: “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”

The same can be said for Hope, Peace, and Joy.

Faith is the act of putting these things where they are not. Making Hope, building Peace, cultivating Joy and putting LOVE into the corners of the world where they are least expected.

Let it be known, dear hearts: When we move through the world in these ways, God moves through the world in us.

AMEN

Spiritual growth is not linear.

It’s better understood—and certainly experienced—in spirals.

It turns back on itself continuously, yet progresses. The new places we land as we grow are always fresh, but usually, somehow, also familiar.

From time to time I thumb through old journals. They’re on the top shelf in my office presently, a space reserved for the finest spirits and indulgences.

The other day I indulged. I stood on a chair by the shelf, pulling down journals, and taking deep thirsty gulps from the years of my life that they represent.

Why do I do this?

When I could be writing new things, or otherwise moving forward, who do I look back?

Sometimes it’s curiosity that moves me. Who was I then? And can I catch glimmers from before of who I’ve become?

Just as often it’s because I want reassurance.

I want to be reassured that I’m making progress. I want to be reassured that I did my best then with what I had.

Something I noticed the other day, standing up there looking back at all those previous versions of myself, was how much creative energy I spent trying to understand and explain myself.

I look back and I see a boy, and then a man, longing for justification and understanding; longing for a final and fixed authoritative voice that says: “You’re good.”

I look back, from time to time, in large part because I want that still: That once and for all reassurance of my goodness.

As I see the previous versions of myself doing, I still succumb to the urge to outsource the answer to that core question, which comes in so many forms: Am I good enough? Am I doing enough? Do I have what it takes? Am I man enough?

I’ve been writing myself in circles about this. (And I’ve written about it before. Likely will again, and again.)

At first I thought the lesson, the wisdom, the growth for me in all of this is that I ought never to outsource the authority to answer so core a question. I ought to draw foremost and primarily on my own inner knowing. I ought to self-assure, that: Yes, of course I’m good.

And there’s something to that.

But what I’m seeing now as I scratch these fresh yet familiar words onto the pages of yet another journal that will one day occupy the top shelf, is this:

That question—the core question in all of its quotidian guises—is going to be there yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Doubts and worries find their way.

So whether through outsourcing or insourcing, my aim isn’t to land on a final fixed answer to the question, never to be bothered by it again.

I recognize that I am alive with questions. My aim is to be fully alive. Not to strive, and not to arrive, but through every reliable source of support that is available to me, outside and in, my aim is to more readily respond to the question when it does arise, in whatever form.

I want to notice that question for what it is—the natural experience of someone who cares a whole hell of a lot. I want to notice it and more readily respond, not with analysis or justification, but with grace and action.

Yeah. That’s what I want. That’s what I’m willing to do.

To put less of my energy toward analyzing whether and how I might be good, and more of my creative energy toward the joy and privilege of being the good that I am.

That. That’s some top shelf s**t right there. I could sit back and sip a while on that.

Thanks to those of you who joined me day-to-day, or from time-to-time, during my 25 days of listening to the loving voice of wisdom. When I set out with that commitment—not only to do the listening, but also to share what I heard here—I did it in part in hopes that a number of the folks who follow my Substack would unsubscribe.

Let me explain.

I am very interested in having hosts of you out there regularly reading what I offer through writing. I am not, however, interested at all in anyone coming along for the ride or cluttering up their inboxes with the things that I’m writing if the things that I’m writing are not the sort of thing that—at least from time-to-time—serves them in their growth.

We all have worlds to explore and worlds to make. No one owes you or me or anyone else their attention. And you sure as hell don’t owe your attention to anybody. That s**t’s yours to dole out as you wish. (The barons of distraction aren’t making that easy on you. But your humanity depends on keeping a good grip on what you lend your curiosity to.)

That’s why, when I say thanks, it’s more than sentimental.

It’s an honor and privilege to have every one of your sets of eyes and/or ears and individual hearts giving me heed here.

With my loving voice of wisdom series it was my hope to allure a few more readers, and it was my goal to lose about 50. (I only got half-way there, but it was worth a shot.) I hoped that, in posting more regularly and having the audacity to take up a bit more space, those who didn’t really want my reflections dropping into their sightline in the first place (or who thought they might at first, but upon inspection decided otherwise) would take the necessary action to filter me out.

When we filter one thing out it makes room for another. Our most enthusiastic “yes’s” are the direct offspring of our most clear-eyed “no thank you’s”. Everything is a tradeoff, dear hearts. That’s the way it is. And it’s glorious, once you truly get a handle on it.

You have my blessing (which you don’t need, by the way, but there you go) to cease, pause, or be sporadically engaging with anything that I write here going forward.

More than I want more readers, I want those who are my readers to be giving themselves to the world in all the ways (and, as close to possible, in only the ways) that are right for them.

Some of the growth and learning for me, in this process, has been letting go of the illusion that the work I do in the world is meant for everyone. I’ve been learning this as much strategically as I have spiritually.

It’s a marketing insight: Better to offer something specific that is carefully designed to provide value for some people, than it is to try and Frankenstein together a supposedly all-pleasing-monster-of-an-offering that doesn’t really end up being for anybody.

I write the things I write hoping that they support you in your growth, which is to say, your journey of becoming ever and more fully who you are. I figure that’s at least somewhat specific. Confounding as it is to me, it seems that not everyone is interested in spiritual growth.

There’s another angle that I aim to play at, too. It’s not just your growth that I’m writing for, but your growth for the sake of your contribution to the common good.

I don’t want to help anyone grow who isn’t already committed to that. I’ll not be expending my energy trying to convince anyone that the common good is a worthy endeavor. (And if you’ve slipped through the cracks somehow, you’re reading this with an eye out only for your own growth and not for bettering the world to boot, then now’s your chance to graciously head for the exit.)

Alright, so it’s decided: You’re interested in your own spiritual growth and you’re committed to making your particular contributions to the common good.

Here’s one more angle, to really tighten up the Venn diagram and be clear about what it is that I’m up to. It’s been sneaking into my posts occasionally, but it’s something that I’m going to focus on for the next little while:

I’m writing for those of you who want to specifically contribute to a vision for a world where men embody a more mature form of masculinity than the one that’s been dominating our culture for far too long.

I’m writing for the men who are scrapping like warriors to break out of the oppressive chokehold that patriarchy has on their lives. I’m writing for the men who, like kings and mages, are alchemizing the chaos of their days into fresh creations and good medicine. I’m writing for the men who, with fire in their bellies and hearts aflame, are sparking deep love.

And I suspect that it will resonate too with those of you who don’t identify as men, but who nevertheless believe in and accompany those of us who are doing the sacred work of striving to embody personal, loving, and liberating forms of masculinity.

This isn’t for everyone. But it’s for all of you who are nodding emphatically right now, who see that such efforts to make such a world will benefit people of all genders, not to mention the other wild creatures with whom we all live and the habitats that we all share.

In the soil of these fresh intentions for my writing, coaching and my personal work, I’m also giving shape to a new offering that will be specifically for men: A coaching and support group for men who give a s**t, that’s focused on spiritual growth and taking action in personal ways to make the change that our relationships and our world needs us to make.

I’ll share more details about that when it’s ready.

In the meantime, it would support me to hear from you:

* If this is something that you personally would like to participate in.

* If there is someone in your life who you would like me to invite into this.

You can send me an email, or set a time to talk with me about maturing masculinity.

And please share this with the men in your life who are willing to change.

Everyday I ask the loving voice of wisdom, which dwells in our hearts and in this world: “What would you have me know today?” And then I listen. This is what I heard one day, not long ago…

From elsewhere:

“Well I’m damned, this is the end.”

“We could probably make it farther if we wanted to.”

(Terry & Renny Russell, On the Loose)

From my heart:

I would go, and have gone, to the end for you.