The Other Jesus

This morning as I sit in the desert of Northern New Mexico, I’m blogging (or preparing to blog) about a story from my recent trip to Germany while I listen to myself on BBC Radio–an interview I recorded earlier in the summer. A weird sense of being in several places at once. You can listen to that interview the week of August 24 at BBC Two. 

Jon Dee Graham update: Jon Dee will be back performing in his regular Wednesday night residency at the Continental Club in Austin, a little beat up still, but happy, I’m sure, to have the chance to thank folks for the outpouring of support that followed his recent accident. Wish I could be there, but Jon Dee, I hope you know you remain in my prayers and thoughts.

Where am I? This week I’m at the Casa del Sol retreat center at Ghost Ranch working on two books out next fall: a book on U2, and a book of memoir or spiritual autobiography called No Idea, that will be a sort of sequel to my memoir Crossing Myself, a book about depression and faith that came out in 2006.

No Idea grows out of the so-called Merton Prayer, a section from Thought in Solitude that has been very important to me over the past five years. It goes:   

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

 

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think that I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

 

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this

you will lead me by the right road

though I may know nothing about it.

 

Therefore will I trust you always

though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

 I’m working this week on a prologue or first chapter that will bridge the gap between the two books, catch people up on my story, and lay out the central concerns of the new book.  Here’s a first look:

Prologue

It was my last night in Germany. It had been a rushed trip, five days sandwiched in between two weeks of teaching in New Mexico, with public speaking engagements in Munich and Stuttgart talking about religion and film, and a meeting with a Stuttgart writing group to talk about writing and publishing. The organizer of that writing group, Karenne, and I had been walking the streets of Stuttgart, Germany for about thirty minutes that evening. We had lost a couple of members of the group when we emerged from the train and set off toward the theatre where we were going to see a play written by one of the members.

As we walked, Karenne asked personal questions about my life and about my future. This is not as strange as it seems: self-disclosure is an important element of my writing and when I speak, and people often respond to that openness by asking other personal questions, sensing that the door has been thrown open and that perhaps something in my experience might be a help in their own journey.

Two nights earlier, Karenne had been part of the audience in a Stuttgart movie theater for the talk I gave on good and evil in American film. I had concluded with 3:10 to Yuma, a film written by friends of mine,  that focuses on a bad guy played by Russell Crowe who is transformed—at least for a bit—by the good represented by a character played by Christian Bale. I find the movie both entertaining and really inspiring, an authentic spiritual vision of what can happen in this life.

Afterward, during the Q and A period, Karenne had asked me a probing question about whether I could think of any really bad people who had been transformed by grace and their own desire for new life into good people. “It seems the worst people stay bad,” she said. “And go on hurting other people until someone else stops them.”

Well, I was on the spot—standing in front of a group of people in a foreign land, my so-called theological expertise about to be laid bare by this question. At first thought, the only really evil person I could think of was Hitler, and clearly we weren’t going anywhere there. Not the best way to endear myself to my German hosts, and anyway, there wasn’t much of a spiritual ending to that story.

And then, something came to me that felt like an answer. As gently and as honestly as I could, I said, “I think you’re right. History is full of people who never stopped being evil. But I can think of one person who was brought from darkness to light. Myself.”

For although I never murdered the innocents, stole Social Security checks from great-grandmothers, or worked for Exxon, during that long stretch of my life when I was in the throes of deep and life-threatening depression, I hurt other people—often the people I loved most—with my selfishness, my anger, my inability to look outside my own suffering, my conscious decision to pursue my own will. It had been a disastrous life with me at the wheel, and while I hope and pray that I also helped some people along the way, during that time I lost three marriages, I lost the chance to be a part of my sons’ daily lives, and I spread rage, guilt, and shame around me like a water sprinkler turned up high.

But in the early years of this millennium, when it became clear that I was not going to get any better physically, emotionally, or spiritually pursuing my own wisdom, when it seemed that the only path out of the pain I was inflicting and suffering seemed to be to leave this life altogether, I suddenly experienced this momentous and some would say, miraculous, change when I gave up, when I stopped trying to do what I wanted and tried to do what I believe God wanted.

This was a shock to me, because not only had I not been a very religious person for some years, I actually wanted to have very little to do with formal religion

Like most Americans, I believe in God, or something I called God. But I had thought I was probably better off running my life than the God I had known growing up, who was something of an angry bastard, and I didn’t yet have much information about any other idea of God, although thankfully, at last, I had a direct experience of a loving God through a group of loving people in a church in Austin, Texas.

But before that, things went about as wrong as things could go.

“You weren’t so bad,” Karenne said to me that night as we walked through downtown Stuttgart. This is what people often say to me when they hear about my past, because they think the person I am now would be hard pressed to hurt others. But I assured her—and I assure you—that while I may not have been Hitler, I destroyed my family, that I almost destroyed myself, and the minor Holocaust that was my life was plenty of evil for one lifetime.

When I came out on the far side of my depression into new life in the fall of 2003, at first I was stunned and a little bit blinded by all the color and vibrancy of life. The biggest decision of my life had been about whether or not I was going to live, and the life I was discovering was so much bigger and more beautiful than I had ever imagined. But then, as my eyes begin to get used to the light, I felt this ongoing tug that accompanied my gratitude—the idea that I had been saved for a purpose. I hadn’t expected to be alive for long, and now I had what might be years in which I could try and do something worthwhile for others instead of myself.

During that time, the church that saved me had suggested that maybe I was supposed to be a priest in the Episcopal Church, an ordained leader in the tradition that had opened up a new way of life for me, and I was open to that calling. I began fulltime seminary study, served in a church, preached, taught, and wrote, and experienced daily joy, which I had heard was a sign that you were doing what you were supposed to be doing, what Parker Palmer calls “living the life that wants to live in me.”

But that first foray into the ordination process did not lead me to the priesthood; my disastrous past life turned into an issue for the people who make decisions, as perhaps it should have. And yet, I continued to feel that pull to some sort of vocation in the Church, and as I finished seminary, other communities continued to ask that I consider the priesthood.

So there I was—with life ahead of me that I did not expect to have, and a clear vision that somehow, I was supposed to serve others. 

“But why do you think you’re supposed to be a priest?” Karenne asked, after we had at last given up on finding our missing friends and were having a tall glass of good German beer at a biergarten before the play. “Why isn’t it enough to be a human being?”

And of course, it is enough to be a human being, especially if you are the human being you have been called to be. For the past five years, I have done my best to follow that path, and it has been a joyful one. Particularly since I went to seminary, I find my professional life bounded by service: I teach, I write, I do pastoral counseling, I preach, I lead retreats, I lead workshops, I lecture—and it is a life more full than I can say with joy and satisfaction.

I have found love and understanding, I have discovered forgiveness for my badly-mangled past life, and I know that day to day I am doing my best to do the work God has set in front of me.

But I also feel—and others around me feel—that God may have something additional in mind for me. In my tradition, we say that we understand our calling in community, and several communities have lifted me up and said they think that perhaps I am intended to be a priest in the Church.

If you had told me in the years before I came back to faith that I might be called to this, I would have rejected it outright; this is not a lifelong ambition for me that I must pursue with ferocity. I also know that if ordination to the priesthood never happens, my life will continue to be filled with joy and meaningful work, with my family and with love.

But, again, I have now years of my life I never imagined I would have. And perhaps there is a reason I could not once have imagined for my continuing presence here on Planet Earth.

So I say, if God wants me, here I am. Whatever it is, I’m prepared to do it.

And as Thomas Merton said, I hope and pray that this desire will lead me in the right direction.

So far, as circuitous as the route has sometimes been, I have ended up exactly where I was supposed to be.

And I trust, by the time we get to the end of my story, that will still be true.

             

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 1:07 pm and is filed under News of the Spirit, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.