Existentialism and Theology, c. 1996

Here's a thing I wrote in what I think is 1996. I found it on a pile of papers after we moved and I realized that I don't need to keep it in paper form any more.

I learned this from my college philosophy professor, Dr. Sansom. Like an interesting piece of coral someone gave me, I take the idea out sometimes and look at it again.

Existentialism asks questions. Theology provides answers. But the answers are worthless until the questions are asked. The fact that Jesus loves you does not answer anything for you until you care enough to ask about it.

Cry Havok

My eyes water a lot more in my 40s.

I'm fleetingly aware that my emotions have been out of whack for most of my life. I'm still not sure what emotional health really looks like; without a model, I'm unclear that I'm doing it "right."  But the depressions are shallower and briefer, and I like to think the mood swings have improved as I age. (Although they started surfacing again a few months before Player 3 was born. Maybe they were more untriggered than resolved.)

Another sign that the terrain is shifting though, is how much more frequently I tear up at music—compared to the "never" of my youth.

I have a long-standing love of Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love music. A few years ago, I noticed that just the opening chords of his song, Nothing Like a Train, make me moisten around the eyeballs. When I hear them, I relax. It feels like everything will be OK.

"Irrational" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and feelings are almost by definition irrational. But there's no reason for me to feel "OK" about this song. It's a sad song. I just do. A couple of Dar Williams ditties do it to me too, and a tune by the Weakerthans. Something in the folk/rock makeup that turns the spigot, somehow.

Most recently, I've noticed it at church. The community we're settling into in Austin, Servant Church, does hymn standards much more often than my beloved Circle of Hope.

Circle's DIY ethos extended all the way to worship music. They wrote a lot of their own songs, and cribbed a few others. That was fine.

But hymns have been winnowed. You don't generally hear crap hymns. Since most hymns are more than 20 years old, there's a clear consensus on what the good ones are, and there's a nice catalog of them. You can sing the good ones on a rotation, and it takes a long time to repeat.

These old, tested songs, I did not know how deeply they had burrowed into the masonry of my heart. "Immortal, Invisible" is not what you'd call a tearjerker, but that thing unpacks majesty. Somewhere in the second or third verse, once it's good and warmed up, I need a tissue.

Will this phenomenon intensify? I imagine embarrassing myself as I get older, turning weepy every Sunday, more frequently dashing to hit skip on a shuffle play because I don't want to cry right now dammit.

I don't like that I've become this way. But also, I love it. I spent a bunch of years in a Cold War with emotion. Like an arm slept on, I can expect some prickle as this limb awakes.

Lent 2015: time-wasting

This Lent I have set myself the quixotic sacrifice of time-wasting.

It's sort of hard to know what's wasting time and what's fiddling. Sometimes reading a comic book is wasting time, and sometimes it's productive stimulation and sometimes it's research.

But as a concrete expression, I have barred myself from my ipad. No dinky time waster games for 40+ days. No reddit on the tablet.

I can still waste time on my desktop, and I do. Or even on a couple of analog time wasters I've got here. But when I find myself wandering that direction, I am at least aware of it and try to veer back in the direction of doing something instead of nothing.

At the Ash Wednesday worship we went to, it was impressed on me that the vice, the thing you give up for Lent, is not the point. You walk around and you're like "I'm giving up hooch for Lent." But that's not the deal.

The deal is that when your vice is gone, you've kicked your own crutch away. The vice was covering over a hole and now you have an obvious hole in you. 

Depending on how long you've had that cover-up there, you might not even know what's living in that hole these days. Maybe it's just an emptiness. Or maybe it contains things you put in there because you didn't want to have to look at them any more. And now you're looking at them. For 40 days.

But that's not the point either! The real point is that God is there to help you fill up the hole. The point is more God. And the by-product is a wholer, holier you when you two are done with that.

For me, living in a brand new city strips even more away, because I have a lot of free time. Which means a lot of opportunity to waste time. Which means a lot of opportunity to stare into the hole and asking God what kind of spackle this thing is going to take.

Restless and deprived of my usual consciousness salves, it's been grim so far. I've been reading a book on the Holy Spirit which isn't grabbing me. Tonight I finished a book of Robert Howard's Solomon Kane stories, which has actually been more productive. (Solomon Kane—worst Puritan ever or pure psychotic?)

But I'm hopeful about what things will look like come resurrection day. The antsier I feel now, the more I hope for an epiphanic payout. A lasting change instead of the returning tide of mild hedonism.

Lent reflections 2013

Lent again, and I'm running at it with the usual half-hearted enthusiasm. I keep wanting religion to mean things. Sometimes it does! But other times it unrolls like a rug and then lies very still like a rug.

This year I wanted to give something up, but I didn't want to give up something that would be, like, hard.

Last year for Lent, M and I tried over the top -- all juice. It was too crazy too much too fast, skipping straight from Burger King to beet juice. We would up retreating to "no processed foods" by Easter.

This year I just didn't want so much work in my suffering. So I found a thing I do a lot, that I like a lot, but that I can stop without pangs.

I'm not eating out. This Lent, everything has to come from the grocery store and be prepared by someone I didn't pay to cook for me.

It's just the right amount of sacrifice. I hope. It requires me to think about food, reflect on my choices, but doesn't seriously deprive me. (Now that I've written that down, it sounds like the biggest softball I could find. Sacrifice without deprivation? Balls to the motherfuckin' walls, Quick!)

Still, it is having an effect. With a serendipity I'll call grace, I started tracking what I eat on an app (myfitnesspal, available for download on your fancyphone of choice). I don't do it every day, and I don't do a crack job of tracking when I do. But the crux is that it creates pauses to think about what I'm shoving in my Doritos-hole all day long and to have different thoughts besides, "More horsemeat."

I'll probably be a few pounds lighter come Easter 2013, but weight loss is a pleasant side effect. What I really want is a religious observance that doesn't lie like a rug, but flies like a carpet. I want God to show me something amazing that irrevocably cuts through fear and complacency.

It sounds like I'm asking for a lot in exchange for not much. If I was serious about this shit, I'd go get imprisoned or beaten, right? But God's economy is not tit for tat. God is always operating on a different scale than humans. We're commemorating a messiah back from the dead! That's kind of a big deal. I've got to come to the table, but I can't be expected to bet real money there, you know?

Given that state of things, I think I can ask for fireworks even if my chief contribution is a wet match. But I'm afraid I won't get them. Or I'm afraid I'll be too stupid to know how to follow up even if I do. Those are the two main outcomes of religion in my life thus far: disappointed or dumbfounded.

I keep showing up though. Trying is better than not trying. 

Observing Lent 2012

It's Lent again. M and I are eating whole foods and no meat for the discipline this year. And we're taking Sundays off, because that's the Sabbath.

Which is interesting because every Sunday for the past 3 weeks has been a day to eat meat, and not have to think so hard about what I eat.

Except that thinking about not thinking about eating is still thinking about eating.

Yesterday, I ate a lot. A burrito from my favorite burrito place, and then a half-pound burger at Wendy's, and then a Geno's cheesesteak after church meeting, and about a liter of Mello Yello after all that.

You might think I'd have some gastrointestinal trouble, but no. Even though I've been eating somewhere around 1500 calories a day for the last three weeks, mainly in fruits and vegetables, a day of gluttony does not upset my stomach at all. It doesn't even upset my conscience.

What it upsets is my taste. Cheap meat used to be a big part of my diet. Now, with this discipline going on, I think wistfully sometimes of eating at crap food places again because they're cheap and easy.

But what I noticed yesterday was that the food didn't even taste that good. It wasn't bad. But if I'm going to look forward to food, I want it to taste good when I get there.

Today, I'm back to the usual. All I've had today is some fruit and yogurt (which is processed, I know, but too bad). I'll probably have some cheese and whole wheat bread before I go to bed. That's kind of how I eat this Lent. Not much. Mostly plant-based. I don't know yet what I keep and what I eject after Easter.

Epiphany

At cell before Christmas, one of our hosts, Rachel, prepared a thoughtful activity for us about hope.

She had purchased glass ball Christmas ornaments and decorative strands. Then she printed out strips of green and red paper with hopes on them.

There were a variety of different ones, at different levels of thought and inclusion. It was hard to fill out. It's work to think about and name your hopes. I spent most of the evening on it, off and on.

After I got home, I dropped my ornament on the floor, and the glass ball broke. I was left with a loose handful of hopes.

So I won't be hanging that on our tree next year. Instead, I'm going to put them here at QT so they'll be visible all year long.

These are the strips:

• This Christmas season, I hope... to shake this low-grade depression sooner rather than later.
• For myself, I hope... to have the same job this time next year. To become the person I was made to be.
• For my family, I hope... for wisdom and care about money and things.
• For my neighborhood, I hope... for fewer helicopter flyovers. For more community.
• For this world, I hope... that the protests of 2011 effect real, permanent change for the better, and don't spin out, run out, or get bought out.
• May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. Romans 15:13

Blue Like Jazz movie: the hail mary works

A few months ago, I posted about Steve Taylor doing a Blue Like Jazz movie. Gonna do some sudden follow-up on this.

Today, while procrastinating on a freelance gig, I found this article at the Atlantic, Blue Like Jazz: The Quest to Get Christians to Laugh at Themselves. The article compares the Evangelical Christian community's pugilistically earnest film attempts with Jewish and Catholic films, and portrayals in said films. So, ok, interesting.

It also tipped me off to the late breaking news on the Blue Like Jazz movie. I don't really have the time to build this up like this story deserves, but it's a good story, so I'll just cut and paste from the Atlantic article:

After a year of fundraising, Miller—who's written a total of five Christian-themed books and is part of an Obama task force on absentee fathers—was still $125,000 short. He decided to give up. Last month, he wrote a post on his blog declaring the project dead. Blue Like Jazz would not be made into a movie.

But it didn't stay dead for long. Two 24-year-old Miller fans launched a page on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to solicit donations, and within a week and a half, they'd raised enough money to make the movie. Miller and his supporters then set a new fundraising goal: $200,642, so the film would beat wannabe Facebook-killer Diaspora as the highest-grossing project in the history of Kickstarter. Late this week, with just three days to go before fundraising ends and filming begins, the movie surpassed this milestone—as of Friday morning, backers had given a total of more than $203,000.

Holy shit. $200k isn't a huge number in movie-making terms, but the solid gold nugget in the middle of this interesting bit comes later in the article:

The movie's inability to fit into a pre-existing category helps explain why Miller and his collaborators had so much trouble coming up with the money to make the film. "You're sort of pissing off both sides," Miller says. "Hollywood hates it because we don't have our head up our ass, and the church hates it because we don't have our head up our ass."

200k+ worth of Christian-owned dollars said they're tired of movies made by people with heads in asses. That's news, friend. The real test will be how many Christian-owned dollars show up at the theater/DVD outlet. But this is a fine score for a pre-test.

Reminds me that there's an audience for my projects too.

There's one day left to donate at this point. You can still get in on the fun. Only $3000 gets you dinner with Steve Taylor and Don Miller. As a lifelong cheapass, I'd fork out that money if I had it.

Also, just go visit Don Miller's blog because there's some interesting stuff there.

Vatican astronomer speaks out

This has been making the rounds recently. I usually avoid that, but I like this one.

The pope's astronomer, Brother Guy J. Consolmagno (wikipedia), made statements lately revealing once again that he is basically a cool dude. (In support, observe that the man looks like a cross between Stephen King and Jason Blood.)

Brother Consolmagno drops a smattering of choice ideas and statements in this short Guardian article which I will let you read on your own time.

The clever soundbite, which is seriously not even the lede, concerned Stephen Hawking's recent pronouncements regarding God's role in creation:

"Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist."

Where smart fails

Why Intelligent People Fail is a succint catalog of failure.

As Kottke points out, it's pretty much the same reasons everyone else fails.

Intelligence is wildly overrated. Smart is great. But smart has practically no correlation with success, however you define it.

Smart people need to be told this, and they need to continue to see the statistics that back this truth. Because smart people think they're super-special by virtue of an inborn trait. And everyone wants to be smart, and to be considered smart, to the point of self-deception. That's cultish behavior centered around a trait that has recently decided to look down on religion.

I find it personally galling when people use intelligence as a bulwark against theism. Although no one has ever said to me, "I thought you were too smart to believe in God," the surprised looks I've received when I talk about Jesus say it just fine. (On the flip side, a woman once assumed I was an atheist because I "looked so smart.")

Malcontent intelligentsia for the last 150 years or so have tried to con us into thinking that intelligence implies humanism. As in so many other instances though, intelligence corresponds with one thing: Intelligence. MENSA is a disappointing epicenter of this self-congratulatory canard.

You can mix and match intelligence with any other human trait. Anxious. Beautiful. Racist. Musical. Spiritual. Good, bad, silly, it doesn't matter. Intelligence doesn't make you better or worse. It just makes you smart.

The crux of the problem is that people confuse intelligence with wisdom. Wisdom takes you to good and lofty places. Smart just knows how to read the map. It don't know nothing about picking a good route or a good destination.

The continued work of awakening

I dreamed last night that I heard Steve Taylor died, so I Googled him to find out if it was true, and to my horror -- surprise twist! -- there was no mention of Roland Steven Taylor on the Internet at all.

Now that I'm up, I don't know why that was horrific, but in dreamworld, this was like taking the final exam for the class you forgot you signed up for. OMG serious.

On awaking, I immediately went downstairs and let the dog out and checked my email. Sometime later in the morning, I checked on Steve. Nobody panic.

If you knew me well in college, you knew I was pretty into Steve Taylor. He was funny, clever, pro-Jesus, and he could do it all in song. My personal ambition sleepwalked through college... I couldn't say I wanted to do what he did. But Steve Taylor was a noise the direction of wakefulness.

Around the time I graduated, he released his best album, Squint, and then traded performing for producing. It was the mid-90s, we were all becoming different people at that point. I started working on Dungeons & Dragons for a living then. We've all been there.

In the mid-aughts I checked in on Steve again, and found he'd gone to movie making. He made a flick starring Michael W. Smith of all people, called The Second Chance. It's a buddy movie about a white suburban pastor and a black inner-city pastor. It's in my Netflix queue now, I'll let you know what I think at the end of the month after I watch it.

And today? Now? He's in Portland working on a Blue Like Jazz movie.

BLJ's author, Donald Miller, is someone else I would have wanted to emulate if his books had been around in college. I'm sort of glad they weren't. They could have misled a sleepwalker.

These days, I get a prickly feeling on my neck when I consider trying to create some piece of art for an explicitly Christian audience. It seems as though it would be easy for me. And financially rewarding. I could do funny, touching memoir for the saved set. I could do a passable Don Miller.

But as I start down that road, I think of Jesus talking:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

A whole chunk of text there, Matthew 5:43-48, has kept me up nights. That bite's got a lot of hard-to-swallow. Jesus tells you to be "perfect" in there. He tells you the rough truth that God makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. And to me, he says that writing books for my brothers and sisters is not particularly what I'm called to do.

Look, God has a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people to be doing. I still love Steve Taylor's music and wit, and Don Miller is a decent writer. Don't hear me saying that what they've chosen to do is wrong or subpar or Not In God's Will.

But as my personal ambition rubs away eye boogers and stares into the bathroom mirror wondering when it shaved last, those noises... they're not for me to follow. I don't want to greet my brothers for a living. There's too many other people out there who need introductions.

I am glad Steve is alive, though. Check out his movie blog.

The Michael Bay of the Gospels

We've been reading the Gospel of Mark in cell meeting lately. Mark is like the Michael Bay* of the Gospel writers, all action, quick cuts, and immediacy.

Verse 13 through 20 are where Jesus explains his parable of the sower:

¹³Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? ¹⁴The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. ¹⁶Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. ¹⁷But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ¹⁸Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; ¹⁹but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. ²⁰Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown."

Lots of my brothers and sisters in Christ like to blame Satan for the things that go wrong in he world. I prefer to avoid such talk. I'm not too "modern" to buy into the idea that evil spirits exist and want to fuck me up. But I don't like giving credit to the Devil for two reasons:

1. God is infinitely more powerful than any evil spirit. So while spirits may have some power over my life, they are ultimately non-issues. I prefer to treat them that way.
2. I don't have a reliable way to differentiate among acts of the Adversary, self-inflicted problems, and unaccountable crap in life. So I don't try.

Tonight I found some Biblical reinforcement for reason #2.

Sometimes Satan eats the word. Sometimes things outside your control do you in. Sometimes you're weak and shallow and you kill yourself. And sometimes your soil is ready to take the seed in.




*Also like a Michael Bay joint, sometimes it's a little disjointed.

Closing my eyes

I'm done using the words "see" and "listen" to describe attempts to interact with God. I get mad that God won't participate in the literal, empirical senses of those words, and that Christendom bent them for me through careless overuse.

God doesn't "talk" to me. I suspect God communicates with me, but he's never said a word to me in the common, concrete understanding of what "words" are. So I'm taking time off from that particular metaphor.

I've long been a reader of Real Live Preacher, a pastor at a small Baptist church nearabouts San Antonio, Texas. (His blog link is also in my sidebar.) Very recently, RLP left the pastorate. He's never been an orthodox pastor, but he wrote something that I'm not sure he could say occupying the pulpit. Goes like this:

I’m 48 years old. I have been a Christian since I was 9. I’ve been to seminary. I’ve been a conservative, then a liberal, then kind of a conservative again, then even more of a liberal, and finally I don’t know if there’s a label that even fits me. I’ve been all over the map. I’ve been looking for God in the scriptures, in the heavens, in the world, in my mind, and in thousands of conversations with as many people.
And I don’t know anything about God.
I don’t mean that in the good way, like when people say that someone is wise because he admits that he doesn’t know something. No. Seriously. I just don’t know shit about God. Period.
I don’t know if God exists or not.
I don’t know what the Bible says about God. The more I read and study those books, the more confused I become.
I don’t know how much God cares about how we live our lives.
I don’t know if God answers prayers or what it would even mean for a prayer to be answered.
I don’t know how we should worship God. I don’t know if sticking to ancient traditions is good because they have survived some kind of religious natural selection process, or if we should just sit in silence like the Quakers. Maybe we should get guitars and cookies and sing prayers that 5-year-olds can understand. I don’t know.
I just don’t know.

I've been down a less rigorous road than his, and he's farther along. But I can see him from here. And I mean "see" in a metaphorical sense.

I've recently signed on for a pretty advanced leadership gig in my church, Circle of Hope. I'm on the Compassion Core Team, which is part of the higher leadership function of our whole group. I was chosen because I've been around for a while, and keep showing up, and, at just the right time, demonstrated a bias for action over slacking.

I'm also about to become a cell leader in the next few months. My leader, Brian, picked me because of what he called my "flirtations with atheism." He's done the reading and the thinking and the reasoning and the guesswork just like me. And he says that the thinking is good, but that in spiritual matters, you learn by doing. I think I believe him.

It seems propitious for my investment in my church to crank up as my skepticism waxes. I'm expectantly interested in seeing what happens. In the literal and figurative senses.

Yuletide Existentialism

I've just finished the checklist, and now I'm certain that we have every physical object we need in this household. Everything necessary for a full and healthy life is contained in this building. We also have many of the things we want and enjoy on top of that.

Now what?

If I can't answer that question, what was I collecting shit for in the first place? Why have a thing if you have no purpose for the thing?

Why does everyone else roll their eyes when I start talking like this? Am I missing something obvious? I'm willing to be the dumbass if someone will just explain it to me slowly.

I don't want to go all Charlie Brown Christmas Special here, but if it's about Jesus, then where the fuck is Jesus? I didn't see a lot of him on December 25. I saw a bunch of people open boxes of crap they didn't need or even want all that badly and act delighted about it. And I participated. And I felt dirty about it.

I'm a pretty miserable Jesus follower. But it's funny that I seldom feel like a miserable Jesus follower when I really am being miserable at it.

I'm done with this mealy-mouthed Christmas shit. I always feel a little sick and disconnected going into Christmas, and I'm not doing that any more. I'm not going to play along next year. I don't know what I'm going to do, and I hope I don't alienate my wife in the process, but I don't have the stomach for make-nice any more.

Anticipating Advent

Advent is coming up again in a couple weeks. Last year, as you may recall, I decided I didn't have much faith, and that Jesus didn't seem to be doing much for me. Not that it's Jesus's job to "do things" for me, but I hit that same old wall of feeling fine, but essentially alone, footprints in the sand be damned.

I decided not to stress out about it, and just keep showing up. As a result, this year has been pretty unspiritual, but not wracking. I've gone to church events and participated, sometimes wholeheartedly, sometimes skeptically. But there was still the nag in my head that I didn't get it. And I didn't feel like banging my head to try.

So I didn't. I didn't even think about it most of the time. I just kept showing up, but I'd drop out of things that felt false.

I don't think anything has been resolved, as such. However, I do find myself rested, willing to try again.

Sort of. Once or twice, I've been tempted to think along worn lines, and it's interesting how quickly I recoil, like I found a snake in my bedroll. That gives me the most confidence that I'm headed somewhere real. My built-in bullshit detector is firing.

There is a divine aspect to detecting and rejecting bullshit. God is the arbiter of reality; bullshit is not of God. When something feels fake, it is good and right to find it and excise it.

I've been reading a book by David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself, which addresses some of the same ideas.

Here's another idea in the book I've been playing with: Benner recommends a meditation where you imagine things about Jesus. You read a passage from the Bible where Jesus is doing something, and you just imagine details into the scene. Details about Jesus. The point is to imagine some personality and life into guy who is supposed to be the incarnation of God, but often comes up as a cryptic weirdo.

Since you can only imagine what you already know, I 'm wary of the line where that you start imposing your own limitations on Jesus. But I can trust that the Holy Spirit is riding herd on the exercise, and keeps me from wandering off.

So I did that every day last week. Some days more vividly that others. No epiphanies, but it did help me to feel like Jesus was realer, closer, and that's what I'm after. Intellectually, I'll continue to have questions, but if I can find a feeling of trust, of humanity... well, that's what I've been missing, isn't it?

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when Advent trundles by this year. I'm hoping for something imaginative.

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

To do: Stay busy

I've got some freelance I need to be finishing, and I'm coming off a cold, but goddammit, today was the day my professional-painter next-door-neighbor had an open spot, and it wasn't raining, and it wasn't too cold, so today was the day he and I waterproofed the stucco on the side of our house.

Tonight I was seriously going to get something done, but tonight is the night that my friend with the new house and the brand new 2-weeks-early baby needs staples pulled because the floor sander comes on Friday and he doesn't have as much time to pull staples as he thought he would, and man, listen, regular Wednesday night Bible study is just going to get done later. My wife is taking them dinner, and I am about to go help pull staples out of the floor.

Other friends and acquaintances of mine are having problems which I will not go into here, and to the best of my limited ability, I am helping. I am being helped and I am helping.

Being busy is ok business. I like sloth, but basically busy is better. Jeff out.

Two Gen Con stories

When Gen Con was still in Milwaukee, the local Christian evangelists took to the streets to save souls through signs and pointed questions and pestering. I never scorned them -- they're brothers in Christ, even if they're from a branch of the family I don't talk to much. But as a gamer, I could see their tactics were poor.

I felt bad just ignoring them, so I would acknowledge them when I passed, which was usually the opening they wanted.

Except I don't need re-saving. I was exactly the person they didn't want to talk to. Yet somehow, that never seemed acceptable to them. I got into some strange conversations with evangelicals looking for something to convert rather than someone to love.
Story 1
A guy with long, stringy hair a beard, a baseball cap. Pictures and scripture painted on his truck. A sign condemning sinners stands in the street, next to the sidewalk. It was the day before the con started; all of us were still getting warmed up. A friend and I were walking back from Kinko's to the convention center.

"Do you know what you have to do to be saved?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?" I asked him, confused.
"I do, I want to know if you do."
"What do you say it is?" (Jesus judo ends theological arguments way faster.)
"Don't you know?"
"Yeah, but I want to know what you say."

We did that routine two more times before he revealed,

"Read the Bible every day!"
"That's not it," I said. "You have to believe in Jesus to be saved. That's what the Bible says."

He was indignant. My friend was already half a block ahead of me, so I left to catch up. I saw the dude later in the convention, but I crossed the street because I didn't want to talk to him again.

Story 2
As I walked by a man with a sign and a Christian t-shirt, I said hello.

He asked me if I knew what would happen to me if I died that night. A classic hard-sell evangelical opener, one I've never used myself, because it's such a theological crotch kick.

I actually had somewhere to be, and was with friends again, so I didn't stop to talk. We had this whole conversation while I was on the move.

"Yes," I said, walking by him. "I'll go to Heaven."

"Well let me ask you something else," he said as I walked on, looking back. "Will you go to Heaven if you commit suicide?"

This is the Catholic test. If you think Catholics aren't real, true Christians, you can sometimes lure the confused (I mean, open) ones into a conversation this way.

"Yes." I said louder, because I was farther down the block now.

That's right!" he shouted.

"I know!" I shouted back.

Jesus and D&D

Every once in a while someone in my extended circle puts together the idea that I'm a Christian and a professional D&D writer and asks my advice on how I resolve conflict in those two things. The true, but uninformative answer is that there is no conflict, and now would you like some pie?

I don't usually give that answer, because it's not really the question being asked. The real question is, "I'm intellectually stuck between my religion and my joy. Can you get me unstuck?"

I usually can't, because that's between you and God, friend. But sometimes I can offer some helpful ideas the person hasn't come up with on his own. (It's always a dude.) Here are anonymized excerpts from what I wrote the other night to a friend who asked me that question:

Whenever I've talked with people about this kind of stuff, one of the primary things I try to get across is that God is the main thing. There's nothing particularly satanic about D&D/fantasy/speculative thinking, but if it's getting in the way of God, then God gets to win. I've talked to people who have a lot personally invested in D&D, and who, in conversations with family members, try to "win" their point. That's a tenuous place to even start, much less finish. God must be the main thing you're trying to get to, or else you're going to spin out on some useless tangent.

I find this to be true for me, and I suspect for you as well: There is something true and deep that fantasy sparks in you. Like pretty much everything in a world bent with original sin, it isn't inherently evil. Football, sailing, welding, D&D -- anything can be twisted toward evil if you go that way with it. It can also be straightened to bring out love and truth.

But since fantasy has particular meaning to you, it's more likely to do you good or ill than say, welding. Especially if it's affected you deeply enough that you've ever struggled with it.

Therefore, removing it from your life might protect you from harm. But it also walls off the potential good that could come. Which is more important to you? To God?

These are not rhetorical questions, and you might find they have different answers at different times. God might want you to back off from something at some point to protect you, but that doesn't mean God always wants that. That's why we have a new covenant. Jesus lets us replace law with relationship.

As a result, categorically eliminating things that have potential to be spiritually destructive becomes problematic. It creates a religion that forces you into a tiny, contorted shape.

Instead, look to a living, interactive God for answers, rather than a set of principles designed to protect you from evil. From this perspective, the way forward becomes: Spend as much time as you can going toward God, and as little time as you can trying to get away from evil.

The essential problem I have with the sorts of ideas concerned Christians typically espouse here is that they focus on the evil. That's not an inherently bad goal, but evil is a vanishingly small blot in the infinite light of God. If you're spending much energy on evil -- sensing it, fighting it, escaping it, protecting others from it -- you've started in the wrong place. You start from God. Then you depend on God to tell you if evil is going to be a problem. You don't need to suss it out yourself. God is the one in charge. Your job is to love on God.

God makes all things good. God will pull truth and love out of whatever you're in. There is nothing too "evil" for God to redeem; even genuinely evil things (without the irony quotes) can be redeemed.

If what you're doing wanders into sin territory, the Spirit will convict you about that. In the meantime, ferreting out sin is not your job.Your job is to love on God. Wherever you are, whatever you're into, count on God to make it good. Because He will. He does. All the time.

I'll end with scripture, since that's one of the means we're supposed to use to make sure we're not kidding ourselves with trumped up ideas. Philippians 4:8 says, "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

If D&D points you toward true, noble, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy things, then think about D&D. If it does not, follow the thing that does point you toward those. Do not spend any more time on Satan than you must. God is sovereign, and knows what you need. Pay attention to God, and you will be steered well.

Interestingly, the real problem between Jesus and D&D -- which no one has ever asked me about -- is the idea that you solve problems and advance in the world by slaying your opposition. That methodology is wildly unChristlike. Killing your enemy is exactly the opposite of what Jesus said to do. It has no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. A major premise of the game is a lie.

But it's a fun lie, so I keep playing.

Kiva.org microlending

My sister-in-law, Alison, gave me a gift certificate to Kiva last Christmas, and I've enjoyed it a lot. If you haven't heard of Kiva, here's my plug.

Kiva is a charitable microfinance organization. You put, say, $25 into the system, and choose a borrower to lend it to. A bunch of other people throw in some money too, until together you reach the amount the borrower asks for. A few months later, the borrower has invested the money, seen a return, and pays you and your co-lenders back. Sweet!

I've been doing this all year, and it seems to work great. I've already made 3 loans, mostly with the initial gift certificate moolah. In fact, it works so great, that I decided to start a lending team! And you can join!

If I were to send you an email inviting you to join, this is what it would say:

I want to recruit you to my lending team, Quickstart, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you're a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team's impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team's collective portfolio, so our team's overall impact will grow!

I wouldn't try to replace conventional giving with this (some people don't have the wherewithal to pay you back, even though they still need help), but I love being part of it. Join Team Quickstart, and start loaning money today! Like, now!

A Philadelphia overture

Seattle is experiencing 100+ degree heat (That's 38 to you metric weirdos). Meanwhile, Philly's having a cool-ish, wet summer.

We were seriously looking at moving to Seattle for a couple of months this year, but things (as they do) changed, and barring freak circumstance, Philly has become our point of medium-range residency.

I've been here almost 5 years. That was never in the plan. Yet, as I review my reasons for moving to Philadelphia, I realize nothing was in the plan. I never had a plan.

Vaguer than a plan, my expectation was to be somewhere else by now. California. Seattle. New York City. Dallas. Austin.

However, not only am I not somewhere else, I am more here than ever. I guess it's time to start liking Philadelphia.

My ambivalence re Philadelphia is on record. The place has good points, but oh so many bad ones.

But since it seems I'll be here a while longer, it's time to start liking the burg. I've already spent too long on the fence; I won't compound the mistake. Philly, I've kept you at arm's length, and that's only hurt us both. You're shockingly violent, too ethnic for my immediate comfort, your roads frankly suck, and you're nearer New Jersey than I'd ever hoped to be. But you have kick-ass museums, and a decent film festival. The gaming here is robust, and the cry for Jesus is almost too loud for my weak ears. You're not perfect, but Lord knows neither am I. There's plenty for us to do and become. Let's love like brothers.