The Problem of Pain

This afternoon one of my co-workers stood in my office sobbing.  Every few seconds she would catch her breath, sort of gaining composure, only to drift back into tears.  She poured out, between the bursts of sniffles, her gutwrenching story of an inexplicable break up.  The boy she loved claimed to no longer love, or [...]

The Impossible Now–Part Four

This is the final installment of an introductory position paper I’m calling “The Impossible Now” or “Towards a Theology of the Impossible.”  There are three previous parts.  You can find them here, here, and here.  In this final installment I talk about “the religious question.”  Cheers!
…The im/possible is refusing, as it always does, to be [...]

God, rid me of God

I’m on a journey.  Since having left the wild and wacky world of “primitive Christianity” (house church with a splash of new-monasticism and a strong sprinkling of fundamentalism) I have essentially been searching high and low for a place to hang my hat.  It is taking me across some interesting places.  Many of the posts I’ve [...]

Who do I love…

Augustine’s question, “who do I love when I say I love my God?” is an apt one.  It’s honest.  For all of our highly articulated dogma’s or “namings” we must acknowledge, in the end, that a question mark lingers with the person of God.  The face of God, unrevealed to Moses, is still no more [...]

The Impossible Now–Part Three

…we build Emergency Rooms…

Of course this doesn’t stop the im/possible from occurring again. Wildcard futures, the unexpected and unpredicted, keep on happening; but just not in the same way. If we can count on them, they are no longer miraculous; they would have crystallized into just another part of the natural world. The im/possible, [...]

The Impossible Now–Part Two

…There’s another kind of future, one we’re even less equipped to face….
Truthfully, the kind of event I’m envisioning can’t be prepared for. We cannot even begin to imagine or plan ahead for this kind of future—the wildcard future. It’s always out of nowhere. Nobody sees it coming. As post-structuralist philosopher Jaques Derrida said, it [...]

The Truth Shop

There’s a story that I’ve become fond of recently:
A man was wandering through the famous Portobello Street in London taking in all the bizarre shops and sights when, hardly believing his eyes, he saw a sign over a door front that read: “Truth Shop“.  Needless to say he decided it was best to investigate. 
The saleswoman [...]

Flame and (im)possibility

This morning I’ve lit a candle in my office, symbolizing “the Prayer” and the “Divine Presence”.  I keep looking at it, watching it flicker back and forth and dance to and from itself.  It occurs to me that the flame is never stationary–it never stays still, it’s never in the same place it just was.  [...]

The Irony of Commitment

The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating-in work, in play, in love, in faith. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as “rational hesitation”. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.
-Anne [...]

Choosing Faith

People who have been in long term, committed, romantic relationships tend to know something that star crossed lovers don’t.  What love is.  
Someone told me once that they truly realized that they loved their partner in the midst of an intense argument where they distinctly did not LIKE them.  Love, they discovered, was about a commitment. [...]