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I pray all the time. I don’t get down on my knees; I don’t make the sign of the cross; I don’t light candles to demonstrate my faith to the world. I pray, and sometimes my prayers must seem like attacks, tirades even- the kind of rant that happens at drunken family reunions. Sometimes my prayers must seem like the anxious queries of a child afraid of nightmares, desperately trying not to fall asleep in her father’s arms. Whatever the length or tenor of my prayers, I must do it. I need God. I crave him. I am stubborn in my love and dependence on him. But I will not attend church.

Growing up, religion seemed to be a kind of spiritual extortion. People did not go to church simply to practice the giving and receiving of love from something mysterious but powerfully real, it was a way of hedging their bets, of making sure their cosmic pool of luck did not run out. It felt, eerily, as if God was a bully on a playground and all the people who attended church were the schoolyard sycophants tiptoeing around him, making sure they weren’t the ones who pissed him off. At the same time, it seemed as if the people in these churches were in collective denial about how you can’t really love something that you fear because love, if one thinks of it as an action and not a state, requires that you have enough self-agency to choose. In turn, if God punished or rejected you because you thought or acted in a way that displeased him, that would itself clearly demonstrate his own inability to truly love you because the desire to dominate someone’s life and will is not reflective of a loving heart but of a covetous one. In other words, if God withholds love because you’ve challenged him, God doesn’t love you; he just wants you to love him.

However, the fact remains that today I am in conflict. I believe and trust in a loving God, but I do not believe or trust the institutions that insist they are the only conduit to him. Today, I can take a walk in the woods or by the river, pray, reflect, and feel deeply loved, my doubts profoundly answered. But if I go to a sermon in a church, I feel mentally and spiritually immobilized. I trust God but distrust churches, and I believe I can pinpoint the exact moment where that disconnect happened.

When I was eight years old, my mother moved our family to a small Kentucky town.  We had only been in this town for a few days when my sister Sheri and I took a walk with my mother along a relatively quiet highway at night. Suddenly, a speeding car swerved onto the shoulder of the road and hit my mother. She flew into the air, struck the car again as she came down, and landed at an odd angle which caused a bone to break through the skin of her leg. The driver of the car did not slow down or stop but left her bleeding and semiconscious on the side of the road. I am still not sure if the driver was even aware that he had almost killed someone.

There are two things that I remember most vividly about that night. The first thing is the complete terror I felt as I ran with my sister in the dark searching for someone who would help us. The second is the overwhelming relief and gratitude I felt as I lay sobbing in a roadside waitress’s arms as paramedics worked on my mother. My ambivalence about God could probably be summed up by these two opposing experiences. On the one hand, God seemed to be the intentional arbiter of cruel and vicious punishment, or at least a passive and indifferent observer to the outrageous brutality of random luck. On the other hand, God could also be perceived as a merciful and loving protector. After all, my mother not only survived a blunt trauma that could have instantly killed her, but my sister and I were also lucky enough to get timely help from the staff of a closing restaurant. If the accident had happened just half an hour later, my mother might have bled to death.

I believe that many of us come across this paradoxical experience of God at some point in our lives and it is at this moment that we get to choose whether God exists for us or not. I believe that it was at this moment that I chose God. I say this knowing that this statement may not sit well with either fundamentalist Christians or atheists. Fundamentalist Christians might take offense that I would presume to have the power to choose God. To them, I am merely a speck in the universe. I do not get to choose God, he chooses me. Atheists might disparage my naiveté. To them, I am merely demonstrating my fear based dependence on traditionally created hocus pocus. But when I listen to their rhetoric, I am left equally cold and dissatisfied. Ultimately, I believe our faith is a personal expression of our choice to love and believe in something higher than ourselves. If it is arrogant to love God in the way that I do, then the God I love will forgive me. If it is naïve to believe in God at all, then I hurt no one but myself by doing so.

But the fact remains that my personal understanding and relationship to God does not explain my aversion to churches. The bottom line is that when I am in a church, I feel completely disconnected to God, and this feeling can be at least indirectly attributed to my mother’s accident.  The day after the accident, Sheri and I ran into a woman in the trailer park we were living in. She was looking for children to attend bible study at her church’s youth group. When she found out about what had happened to my mother, she volunteered to take me and Sheri in while my mother was in the hospital. The woman and her husband were incredibly loving and kind. Looking back, I realize what a gift this woman’s generosity was for me and my sister not only because she gave us a safe place to live while my mother recuperated, but because the normalcy of her household offset the trauma of my mother’s accident.

However, the church that she took us to was a Kentucky Southern Baptist church that taught that everyone in the world who did not receive Jesus Christ as their one and only savior was a vicious sinner who was doomed to burn in the fires of hell. According to this church, everything was a sin. If you smoked, you were going to hell. If you cussed, you were going to hell. If you listened to rock and roll, you were going to hell. If you roller skated and listened to rock and roll, you were going to go to hell twice. I still remember the self-congratulatory nature of certain church members. They were delighted that they had been “saved” because it meant that they were going to heaven and their enemies were not. They would mill around after the services, their eyes lit up with fanatical delight, as they gossiped about their neighbor who was having an affair and wasn’t saved. Oh, he was definitely going to hell! Once again, religion felt like a kind of horrible power play. People were simply happy to be on the winning team. There was no compassion. There was no love.

What I also remember about this particular church, was how the people in this congregation always seemed restless and on edge and how their anxiety would often manifest itself through hypocrisy and rebellion. My favorite memory is of the bible study teachers secretly lighting up cigarettes behind the church school bus. My friends and I would hide, giggling hysterically, behind a row of parked cars to spy on grown women furtively but doggedly smoking a succession of cigarettes down to a tiny nub, their faces guilty but glowing with ecstasy. Today, I am still struck by the ridiculousness of grown women fearfully hiding behind a bus to smoke cigarettes, but I am also saddened by it. One of these women was the woman who had taken us in. Here was a woman who was truly loving and good but who could not trust that the love that she had within her, and that she gave so freely, was enough to “save” her from eternal damnation. Instead, she lived in a perpetual state of anxiety so stultifying and horrible, that even committing a comically insignificant act such as smoking a cigarette frightened her so much she literally crouched in fear.

I do not mean to suggest that all churches, or all congregants, promote or practice neurotic obedience or self-defeating hypocrisy. However, I will say that in my personal experience both neuroses and hypocrisy has been a staple of most of the churches I have attended. Throughout my life, I have gravitated towards religions that endorse qualities such as loving kindness, mercy, forgiveness, and tolerance. Intellectually, I understand that these same values can be found within the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Yet too often I have been in churches that overlook teaching love and kindness in favor of teaching fear and intolerance. I have encountered too many people from fundamentalist Christian faiths who insist that those who do not think or believe, feel or live, exactly the way they do will go to hell. These “good” Christian people will lie, cheat, steal, and commit all manner of immoral acts, but they have somehow convinced themselves that not only are they superior to everyone else, they are exempt from living the very values they push so stridently. The idea that certain religions insist that sincerely good people who commit themselves body and soul to the service of others can go to hell simply because they happen to love someone of the same gender or read the Koran instead of the bible is completely repugnant to me. Perhaps, I am naïve, but I feel that a unifying thread in our human lives is that we are vulnerable beings who need love. God is supposed to be the most unadulterated and powerful source of this love, and I believe that it is possible to find him everywhere. I have often found God in the loving words of a friend, in the reflection of light on the surface of a lake, and in the passages of a beautifully written book… But I have rarely found him inside the walls of a church.

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Back to the chaos…so many questions, so much to do, and all that chaos culminated on Friday-the day before the event. As some of us showed up five hours prior to the volunteer training that would happen that evening we discovered that the tables and chairs were not delivered. Try hosting a health care event without 60 tables and 150 chairs. As the school district tried to figure out what to do and what happened, and as I started counting in my head how many tables I could gather from local churches, up drove the truck–only a few hours after we discovered its absence. As we began setting up the event, constant adjustments were made as each group (dental, medical, social service agencies, etc.) began to see the reality of their needs for space and materials. We setup bounce houses for the kids, carried in mobile dental chairs, wheelchairs, boxes of medical equipment, etc. Essentially what we were creating was a mix between a M.A.S.H. unit, a mess hall, and a preschool all in one! And whether we were ready or not, come 7pm in flooded hundreds of volunteers. I nearly teared up as I looked out from the stage at a gymnasium filled with individuals who gave up their whole summer weekend to serve at Compassion Vancouver. It was breathtaking. (skipping forward a bit…I remember in an one hour stretch of time on Saturday around 11am I had to start turning away additional volunteers because we were already overstaffed. What a problem to have!)

On Saturday my day started at 5am as I got up, showered, printed some last minute documents that we’d need, and headed out to the school at five ’till six. At 6:45 we had our first guests in line waiting to get dental treatment. By 7:00 a line had begun. By 7:30 the first wave of guests had been triaged and shuttled to an off site clinic for dental work. While the event did not technically open until 9am, by 8:00 the social service fair was filled with people (though all the social service were not there yet) and both haircuts and chair massages started. Our six stylists and our massage therapist worked with only a handful of short breaks from 8:00 until 3:00. I truly consider their manual labor one of the greatest gifts that was offered at Compassion Vancouver. And even though I tried to elicit it, I heard zero complaints about cramping hands, arms, or sore feet from any of these dedicated technicians!

The social service fair, which functioned as the central hub of the whole event, was filled with thirty different social service agencies from our neighborhoods. It was a beautiful blend of addiction recovery groups, Christian ministries, services for women and for children, gardening opportunities, mentoring programs, marriage enrichment opportunities, legal aid, and more. Not only do the social service that were present already do so much and offer so much to our neighborhoods but at Compassion Vancouver they were gracious, kind, and thorough in their presentation and conversation.

I will do my best to post and forward on the stories that begin to emerge from the event. I have been out of commission over the last week and have therefore not worked to solicit stories from participants. Because my work was with the social service fair I cannot speak to what happened with those who were working in the onsite dental clinics, the onsite medical clinics, the shuttling to off site dental clinics and optometrists, those working with the children, the team of wonderful hospitality people who brought trays and trays of food to volunteers, people waiting in lines, and doctors working. Let me close by giving some of the numbers. Some of these are estimates at this point while others are more solid. But they all help to give a picture of what happened on August 7th at our first Compassion Vancouver event:

• 250 volunteers
• 128 guests received dental work
• 125 guests received medical treatment
• 300 Danner boots were given away (via custom personal fittings)
• 30 social service agencies present in the social service fair
• 700 meals served
• 100+ haircuts given away
• 130 kids went through the children’s program
• 50 custom fit prescription glasses were given away
• Estimated 400 guests were a part of Compassion Vancouver

This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Good stuff. Thank you to everyone who dedicated time and energy at the event itself, before the event, and those who are currently serving in follow up services. You are an amazing bunch of people.

If you still need treatment there are additional Compassion events happening. Visit www.compassionconnect.com and get in line at 6:30 and get your work done!

peace.

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Check Basil’s website out, notice some of the following quotes (I have left spelling and grammar as the author wrote it):

Make sure that if national insurance is put in place, I will make sure the roots of such bill with not inclued any type measuring of the waist like other counties.

Vote for me and if I win I will immune you from all state crimes for the rest of you life!

I believe we must hate the U.S. Flag because we fly the wrong one and when we fly the right one we and the government fly it wrong.

The right too bear arms against our government and not burglars must be protected

I find it hard to take a campaign fund from anyone because if they give me money they expect something and then they seal it with a hand shack . I think this is bribery
so to keep everybody honest lets put all funds in one bucket, then divide the bucket by cities, counties and state ,then divide those buckets among who ever once want to run and nobody owes anybody.

People Called to stop Slavery at traffic stop they all say county court can not overrule supreme court ,but no-one will help while 1.8 billion is stole by false arrest

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Sunday– fresh picked blackberries from the field behind our house translated into homemade blackberry soda.

Monday– for dinner we ate a salad with lettuce from our garden. It was toped with yellow carrots and yellow tomatoes from our garden. The side dish was sautéed potatoes (dug up that morning from a local farm), yellow squash from our garden, fresh garlic (dug up that morning), purple bush beans from our garden (that strangely turn green when you cook them), and onions from the farm.

Tuesday– for breakfast we ate gluten free blackberry pancakes topped with maple syrup that was sucked from a maple tree in Virginia this morning…ok, that’s not true.

Tomorrow…who knows what the garden will bring!

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In Christianity we have become inebriated with our understanding of belief. We have defined belief as cognitive in nature, as right thinking, pertaining to head knowledge, and relegated to the realm of logic. We have come to agree that Jesus died so that we might believe with this understanding of belief. I believe that our definition of grace supports this fact. Grace, as we speak about it, is available to those who cognitively agree that Jesus is who he said he was etc. etc. In our general teaching if you agree with this fact you can then proclaim that you are saved by grace even though your lifestyle might not look it (the caveat always added in is that if you REALLY ARE saved then you’ll want to follow it up with right actions…but this is nearly always relegated to an asterisk). The assumption here is that cognition is of more value than action. Not equal. The assumption is that belief is a matter of logic, not lifestyle.

I would suggest that the belief that the Bible speaks of is often more focused around the Benjamin Button model. Rarely (Luke’s writings?) does the Bible try to prove itself. Rarely does it try to give evidences in order to support a cognitive centered approach to belief. Instead the focus seems to be on an experience with Jesus/God/Holy Spirit, there seems to be an emphasis on a relational narrative that creates meaning for its participants and observers. Like in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the Bible often assumes or ignores trying to prove that the story is believable (based on our western definition of belief). Instead its focus is on knowledge of God/Jesus that occurs THROUGH relationship…in other words, experience.

In a very real way it is not one or the other. It is not right action OR right thinking–it is right action AND right thinking. With that said however, I just wonder if Christianity would make a better movie, a better narrative if we spent less efforts trying to be provable and more effort on creating meaning and experience. I can define Biblical love or I can demonstrate it. And while I wish that demonstrating Godly love necessitated biblical knowledge the reality is that at different times I have seen stronger examples of Jesus-love in pools of biblical ignorance than I have in seminaries filled with biblical scholars. If I’m not mistaken, the Old Testament gave us a great system of belief and a black and white system of how to act…and it was hugely incomplete. Instead God decided that intimate experience and relationship is where its at. My guess, however, is that right living will not sustain itself for very long, or stay on track very well without its pairing with right thinking.

I’ve been holding this post in “draft” purgatory for nearly  a week now trying to figure out how to end it. If our ways of defining grace only builds off of right thinking then we’re not creating balance, we’re not being honest about our commitment to both right thinking and right living. But swinging completely the other direction will not sustain itself, nor will it keep its focus on the right thing.

In the end I think we are invited to experience God holistically. We are invited to experience his grace and mercy with our whole selves. With our minds, our hands, our hearts, our…everything. If our foundation is Matrix-like, trying to prove believability then I think we’re missing something. Knowing about God does us little good if it does not translate into knowing God. Movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or Encino Man create an experience that has little to do with cognitive believability and everything to do with experience.

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