Afterlife Lotto

I admit it.  I bought 4 Mega Millions tickets.  I got 2 for the Wednesday drawing and 2 for the Friday.  “But Ben, why would you throw away 4 perfectly good dollars.”  Two reasons:

1. There is not much risk on the front end.  I will not miss $4.

2. The potential rewards are freakishly out of proportion to the risk.

The equation is slightly altered if there is an office pool.  The basic math is the same, but there is an additional component of pain avoidance.  Nobody wants to be the poor sucker left to manage the office after the pool of recipients has quit without notice.

I know that the odds are astronomical that my $4 will have any impact.  But my lizard brain tells me, “Go for it.”

I wonder if this scenario has application in the religious realm.  Specifically, I wonder how many people cling to a faith, not because they believe it, but because the potential rewards/punishments are also “freakishly out of proportion to the risk.”

I could easily turn the question back on myself.  Am I taking a huge risk by not towing the evangelical line my four score and seven?  I am laughing to myself as I write this.  Because while the odds are astronomical, I believe there IS a lottery.  I can make no such claim on any of many religious lines.

Hmmmmmm…

Legacy Code

I had my Imagine meeting this morning.  It was our second to the last meeting.  Not sure what comes next, but I’m open to possibilities.

We are reading the book Naked Spirituality by Brian McLaren.  I had procrastinated all week and as of noon yesterday, I had not read the second half of the book that was being covered this morning.  My Kindle mocked me showing that I had only read 48% of the book.

The book compares the spiritual life to the seasons of the year.  The book is broken into four sections starting with spring and ending in winter.  Somehow I had slogged through the first half of the book.  Normally if a book does not catch me in the first couple of chapters, I toss it and move on.  This book was teetering on the edge of oblivion.  It is not that it is a bad book, but the spring and summer chapters did not really resonate.  My faith is not new, like spring.  Nor am I in the active season of summer.  I claim the name of Christian only by heritage and not by practice.  The first half of the book was full of really helpful practices for active Christians.  For what it was, it was good.  But since I had no interest revisiting that part of my life, it was a bit dry.

Last night I had to finish the book for today’s meeting.  I thought about blowing it off, but I wanted to honor the commitment to my group.  So I did the lazy thing.  I turned on the text-to-speech feature on my old Kindle and listed to the last bits of the first half of the book.  I was only halfheartedly listening and was about to drift off into a nap.  But then I hit autumn.  Bang!  To borrow from a tired old sermon illustration, McLaren came into my living room and started moving all the furniture around.  Hell he was tossing it from one side of the room to the other.  This guy had walked in my shoes.  He knew the desolation of faith lost.  I pretty much read the rest of the book in one sitting.

We discussed autumn and winter in our group.  While I was listening to everyone’s very personal stories of faith and loss a metaphor came to me.

For those of you who do not know, I work in software development.  The particular application I work on is old code…like parts of it were written 20 years ago.  That is an eternity in software.  When you are working on someone else’s old code, you call it legacy code.  It is extremely challenging working on legacy code because all of the original requirements are sitting in landfills or have been recycled into Starbucks heat sleeves.

So the business describes a new feature that they want and it is your job to incorporate it into the legacy app.  Problem is: every time you add new code, you end up breaking old code.  It is an endless cycle of changing one thing and breaking two others.  It can drive you nutty.

At a certain point, the code becomes completely unmanageable and you have to completely refactor the old stuff.  Typically, you toss out all of the section and start from scratch…green field development.  If you are lucky, when you enter a green field, you have new requirements and completely ignore the legacy stuff.

That is my life in a nutshell.  I grew up in the church.  Faith was core to my being.  But over the years, my theology became extremely complex.  I desperately tried to cling to the Christian faith of my childhood.  But when the overarching theme of my life became watching the suffering of a child, the “code” stopped working.  I tried ever more elaborate spiritual practices, desperately trying to make sense of what was completely senseless.

After the suicide of one of my mentors, the whole program collapsed.  Faith was dead.  God was dead.  Heck he was never alive.  Religion, faith and God had failed me.  It was an Atheist.  There was not; and never had been a god.

It was autumn in Benland.  I watch as a lifetime of faith died an agonizing death.

Once everything was finally dead, I was in winter.  But by letting it all die, I had cleared the field.  I claimed the name Atheist.  Only when the landscape was completely barren did I realize that there was a void.  I had severed my connection to god.  But I had also lost the connection to me.  I was a void.  I was empty.  I was powerless.

Only when I surveyed the blank snowy landscape of winter did I notice that I needed something.  I still cannot completely explain what I need.  But I need.  I need.  I am needy.

Gone is the faith of my childhood.  The old legacy software is nonfunctional, inert.  But now there is space.  I can begin again.  I can help write the new program.

I am not sure what is next.  I do not know what will pass for faith in the next phase of my life.  But there is desire and there is space.  I am not in a rush.  I am taking my time.  It would be easy to flip the switch on for the old code.  But it would collapse under its own weight in short order.  This time I am not taking the easy answers.  This time I will not blindly accept the platitudes of others.  This time I will imagine.

Resistance is Futile

Bad metaphor #43282.5

When I was a kid, I used to go camping several times a year.  We would always camp near a lake or a river.  I loved the water.  I am a confident swimmer and it was a great way to cool off in the summer.

I also loved to fish.  I was not a fly fisherman.  That is probably why my face is largely intact to this day.  I would be dangerous with a sharp object whizzing back and forth over my head.  I was purely a side caster.

If I was fishing in the river and it was a hot day, I would sometime stand in the middle of the river cast upstream and let my bait float back past me.  Oddly enough, this was a fairly decent strategy.  I caught many a fish in my day.  On a side note, I have not gone fishing since my grandfather died, but that is another story.

Now in the Rockies, streams run fast.  When you are in the current, you have to brace yourself to stand in place.  If you want to move, you kind of take deliberate plodding spaceman steps so that you don’t lose your footing.  Moving and standing still required constant muscle tension.

But if you wanted to move directly ahead, you had two choices.  You could take use the same spaceman walk strategy that required great effort.  Alternatively, you could just sit in the river and let the current take you forward.  The later was a lot more fun.

Looking at my approach to spirituality, I think I have done a lot of spacewalking over the course of my life.  In the past I have put a great deal of effort into taking small steps forward.  Then I chucked the whole thing.  I almost got out of the river all together.

Now I am just going with the flow.  Granted, I am not fully in control and I am not sure where this will lead.  But I am enjoying the ride a whole lot more.

Chuck out the fishing rods and break out the inner tubes.

Imagine, part 7

Thud!

I start this posting with a quote from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.  It is written from the perspective of a husband to his wife.  But I use it here to describe the next phase of my faith journey.

Day after day, love turns grey
Like the skin of a dying man.
Night after night, we pretend it’s all right
But I have grown older and
You have grown colder and
Nothing is very much fun anymore.
And I can feel one of my turns coming on.
I feel cold as a razor blade,
Tight as a tourniquet,
Dry as a funeral drum.

–One of my Turns, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd

Before it began, my ministry career was over.  Try as I might, I could only find two paths.

1.  This was a test of my faith.  God would provide if I would step out in faith.

2.  I was full of shit.  There was no God.  There was no calling.  My relationship with god was just a foolish self-delusion.

I did not have the faith to pursue option #1.  Regardless of whether or not it was true, I did not believe enough.  Over time, I began to embrace option #2.

As if to confirm my choice, my Emmaus sponsor, my spiritual mentor, the man whose faith I modeled my own after, committed suicide.

Dead

I continued to go to church.  At first out of habit, then because my wife got a job at a new church.  I went through the motions.  But it meant nothing.

Dead

I read a lot of books.  I am an atheist.

I am.

No really.

OK, I could be wrong.

I am an agnostic.  Maybe there is a god.

Damn it.  There is something that connects us.  I am not sure what it is.  But there IS something.

All of my old tricks no longer work.  I need to try something new.

Buddhism?

Nah.

Hinduism?

Nah.

What I need, is to rethink everything.

What I need, is to imagine.

Imagine, part 6

Crash!

I preface this post with a couple of thoughts.  It is impossible for me to put into words how much I love my son.  He inspires me daily.  Let me be clear I do not in any way, shape or form blame him for what happened to me.  What follows is purely the result of my ego and a lifetime of bad theology.

My last posting ended with Jenn and me on the road to the hospital to have our son.  We were practically giddy with excitement.  This was the big day.

We got to the hospital and were put in the pre-surgical ward.  Our son was breach and had to be delivered by c-section.  We had to wait for a couple of hours because there were some emergencies in front of us.  But finally they wheeled her back.  I had to wait in the hall until she had the epidural and was prepped.

When they called me into the room, things happened very quickly but I recall them in slow motion.  Jenn was draped so that she could not see the incision point.  They had me sit in a chair right by her head.  I had a greater vantage point, but I could not see the incision either.  They started almost the second I took my seat.  The first thing that caught my attention was the smell of burning flesh (as they cauterized the wound).  I almost hurled because I was not expecting smells.  I kind of chuckled to myself and regained my composure.

It took about a minute to free Ethan from the womb.  What happened next put me in a state of panic.  They silently lifted him into my field of view.  I noticed that one leg had no tone and was significantly smaller than the other.  He was not breathing and was pale blue.  They took him to a nearby table and started CPR.  Time stopped.  “God let him breath.  Please let him breath.”  Eternity passed.

…

…

…

And finally he cried.  The nurses and doctors examined him.  They splayed his butt cheeks and gave each other knowing glances.

My mind was reeling.

They wrapped him (Jenn knew nothing at this point) and brought him for her to see.  They congratulated us and said nothing.  Ethan and were moved into recovery while Jenn was stitched up.

I robotically called my family.  “It’s a boy.  Yes, everything was fine.  Gotta go.”

They wheeled Jenn back and handed her the baby.

“Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, problem.  Blah blah blah blah no anus.   Blah blah blah blah blah Nonnative Intensive Care.  Blah blah…can’t come until she can sit in a wheel chair…Blah…sir, follow us.

Tubes…IVs…Monitors…What in the hell just happened.  “Dear God, I have the faith.  Heal him now…Now…NOW!!!

“Sir we need to do a procedure…come back later…call family…go to wife.”

Dial home.  “Mom.”  I lost it and cried uncontrollably.  This was the first of many loses of composure.

The rest of the story is well documented in the rest of this blog.  Fast forward…two weeks.

I met with my mentor.  I lost it again.  He consoled me.  It would be OK.  This was our last meeting before I went before the district superintendent.  My mentor told me he had met with many candidates over the course of his ministry.  Never had he worked with a candidate with so clear a calling.  He looked forward to great things.

Fast forward…several weeks later.

I got the hospital bill.  It was over $100,000.  My insurance had not paid anything.  Panic.

Fast forward…weeks.

I got the bill cleared up.  Insurance covered it all.  I wondered what the Methodist Church’s insurance would have covered.  Called my mentor.  “Oh, it is a standard 80/20% policy.”

Hmmmm…

So if I was a pastor.  I would be on the hook for $20,000.  This is the first of many many many bills.  First year, my salary would be capped at $28,000.  What would have happened?  What will happen?  This is the first of many bills.  How will I pay for this?

HOW AM I GOING TO SUPPORT MY FAMILY?

More to come…

Imagine, part 2

On three:  One, Three, Two…

I know, I know, I already published part 3.  I winged part 2 at the meeting, but I want a complete set so here goes

Paradise Lost

So purely from a faith standpoint, I had a pretty great early childhood.  But unfortunately as I got older, the adults around me felt the need to teach me theology and religious polity.

But in addition to my wholesome religious education, they threw in some crazy wing nut theology.  Looking back, some of this was the religious equivalent of pornography.  It was designed to scare the bejeebus out of me, so that I would not stray far from the straight and narrow.  Worked like a charm.

I have dozens of examples of religious abuse, but here are two that forever scarred my psyche.  In 1972 a movie took the evangelical movement by storm.  The name of that movie was “A Thief in the Night.”  This little cinematic gem was shown in my home church shortly after it was released.  I would have been the ripe age of 5-6.  And for reasons that are unclear to me to this day, my parents thought it was a good idea for me to see the film.

Here is the basic premise of the flick:  Jesus has returned to Earth in the “rapture” and taken all the good Christians to heaven.  Those who were left had to endure the “tribulation.”  Worst of all, in order to function in the tribulation economy, everyone had to be ID’d with “The Mark of the Beast” (represented with a barcode tattoo).  Here is the thing, if you took the mark; it was a one way ticket to hell.  There was no chance of redemption once a person took the mark.  At the end of the movie, the main protagonist is forced to jump off a damn in order to avoid damnation (genius!).

Now let’s break this down in the mind of a six year old.  My best friend, who I carried on a constant dialogue with, Jesus, was going to come back to Earth some day and take all the good people away.  But if I sinned, which at age 6 could be as simple as a lie or stealing a cookie before dinner, my friend Jesus would leave me…an orphan…I would face starvation or taking the mark…in either case, I would most likely go to hell where I would burn for all eternity.  I am sure I was not quite as succinct at age 6, but I did ask questions.  The basic answer was yes, if I sinned and had not had the opportunity to tell Jesus that I was sorry, then I would be left behind and possibly burn for all eternity.  Good to know!…thanks!

As if this message was not clear enough, my church did a little drama for my benefit.  The “drama” was a skit/play about judgment day.  I was really excited because my friend Todd was in the production.  Todd and his mother were at the “judgment seat.”  I don’t remember any of the dialogue, again I was 7 or 8 at the time.  The bottom line, Todd got to go to heaven, his mother went to hell.  Nice!

So as it turns out, my friend the son of God was kind of a dick!  A couple of things changed about my faith.  First, I was afraid of God.  On numerous occasions, I came home to an empty house and my first thought was that God had rejected me.  Second, I started having reoccurring nightmares involving Jesus and the Devil.  I will save those little nuggets for a future post.

In spite of all this, I remained a committed Christian.  The relationship had changed from innocent love to Stockholm syndrome, but I still “loved” god.  I also developed two separate lives.  There was the sinful Ben who drank, smoked and shoplifted.  And there was the Ben who was a devout little follower of Jesus.

I think I would have gone crazy were it not for the friendships I developed in church.  To my knowledge, NONE of them are still members of the Assemblies of God (AG).  And only a couple of them would still call themselves Christians.

I wish I could close this posting by saying this kind of abuse no longer occurs.  But sadly, it still goes on.  My parents to this day attend the church of Keenan Roberts who is best known for his “Hell House” and the “Hell House” kits. 

 

http://www.godestiny.org/hell_house/HH_kit.cfm

Imagine, part 3

Four Years in the Desert

Young adulthood kicked off with the end of college.  By some miracle, I graduated from Bethany on time with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.  I wanted to go to grad school to become a therapist, but my student loan dept (modest by today’s standards) freaked me out.  I needed a job.  As luck would have it, my best friend at the time worked in the schools administration and told me about a job in the financial aid office.  I did not realize it at the time, but he had just chosen my career.

Over the next couple of years, I would learn a valuable skill and make some of the best friends of my life.  My faith walk varied wildly during this time.  I no longer felt strong ties to the denomination of my youth, even though it saturated my life.  All of my friends were either connected to the college or the local AG churches.  I lived in a bubble of sorts.  And though I was thoroughly encased, I found a small niche of friends that liked challenging the rules.  I was AG, but one if its biggest critics.

When I turned 25, I decided that I wanted to move home.  Home meant Arvada, Colorado.  I had a plan.  I would quit my job, move in with my parents, bet another job and then reestablish myself.  I drove the 1000 miles from Scotts Valley to Colorado in two days.  I was excited to be going home and living with my family.

I got home and immediately started looking for a job.  One week became two weeks and then a month…then three months.  It was Christmas and I was going into month 4 of no employment.  I started to panic.  Then I got a call from that friend of mine that helped me find my first job.  He was working at another school in Washington State and as fate would have it, they had an opening in financial aid.

This was not the plan.  But I needed work and I was excited to go to a new city.  I found myself working just outside of Seattle in Kirkland, Washington at another AG college.  This time, I did not drink the Kool-Aid.  While I worked at an AG school, I was a perfect heathen.  I did not go to church and I did not mix with the locals at work.  The only friends I had were friends from my school days at Bethany.  It was a very lonely time.  With no church and no social life from work, I was very lonely.  I came home to an empty house most nights, ate fast food and either watched TV or read until I fell asleep.

Seattle was a beautiful place to live.  But ultimately, it was not for me.  Nine months after I got hired, I got my dream job.

I got a job at a software company in San Jose, California, just 35 miles away from my old school.  It paid twice as much as my old job at Bethany.  I had friends.  I had secular employment and I was making more money than I knew what to do with.  This was the beginning of the best year of my life.

I started off in an apartment in San Jose.  I worked just a couple of miles away, near the airport.  My job was to give phone support for software that I knew inside and out.  From very early on in my career there, I was a rock star.  I got to wear jeans and a tee shirt to work.  I got to speak to people from all over the country and I got to help them solve interesting problems.  On top of that, I got to travel and give workshops all over the US with a generous expense account.

Life was good.  I even started attending church again.  Out of habit, I attended the local AG mega-church, 4000 members strong.  I liked going there because they had excellent music but it was so big that I could be completely anonymous.  One of my old professors attended the church and during the sermon, I would play my own version of Where’s Waldo, only I looked for Rich.

Everything was falling into place, with one notable exception.  I was alone.  I had plenty of friends, but I had not found that special someone.

On Memorial Day weekend, I went on a road trip with a group of buddies.  Before we left town, we stopped to eat.  There were four of us.  Two of them wanted to go to Burger King.  One of them wanted to go to Taco Bell.  I am normally a Burger King kind of guy, but I did not want my one friend to be alone.  So I went with her to Taco Bell.  As we were walking in, I was complaining about my lack of a love life.  The words were just coming out of my mouth, “I just can’t meet any nice girls.”  And there she was.  Standing behind the counter at Taco Bell was my wife.  She just did not know it at the time.  I leaned over to my friend and said to her, “I am going to marry her.”  A little over one year later, I did exactly that.

Git Off My Lawn

Git Off My Lawn!!!

Yes, I am becoming that guy, the old man shaking his cane at the neighborhood kids for playing in his yard.  It hit me yesterday when I reread my own posting.  There is a core of white hot anger at my core that has to do with the way that organized religion #$@#%!! (made sweet love) to my brain.

I do not want to buy that guy.  In my small group we have been talking about heaven and hell and the idea that they are both so much a destination, but a state of mind.  You can live your life in either place…now.  I have been hanging out in hell for the last decade.  I am tired.  It is time to move on.

…easier said than done.  I have a lot of baggage that I need to jettison.  So today I am metaphorically saying goodbye to the following:

• Hell
• The Devil
• The Rapture
• “A Thief in the Night” & “Distant Thunder”
• Us and them
• Fire
• Brimstone
• Hate
• Gossip
• Afterglows
• Tongues
• Interpretation
• Slain in the spirit
• Jericho Marches
• Laying hands on broken down cars
• Hell Houses
• demons
• Demon Possession
• The sins of makeup, cards, social dancing, mixed swimming, movies, darn, shoot, shucks and flip
• Raising of hands
• Alter Calls
• Dramatic presentations of final judgment (where your friend and his mother are actors…spoiler alert…he goes to heaven and she goes to hell)
• Revivals
• Tent meetings
• KFC buckets for offering
• The word Fellowship
• The spirits of rock, sex, alcoholism, anger & heaviness
• Four Spiritual Laws
• Sinners Prayer
• End times timelines
• The Anti Christ(s):  Henry Kissinger, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Madonna
• Backward masking
• Stryper
• The word Secular
• Etcetera
• Etcetera

Goodbye and good riddance.  Spleen vented…

Now on to happier topics…

Gimme that Ole Time Religion?

There is an old song called “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”  It goes as follows:

Give me that old-time religion,

Give me that old-time religion,

Give me that old-time religion,

It’s good enough for me.

Here is my question:  To which religion does the writer refer?

The religion where humanity was cursed for wanting to be like their creator?

The religion where all but a handful of humans and animals are drowned?

The religion that prescribed animal sacrifice for assuaging the God’s anger?

The religion that prescribed genocide as the solution for settling an already populated area?

The religion that will condemn the vast majority of humanity to eternal suffering if they do not utter the magic sinner’s prayer?

The religion that condoned conversion by sword?

The religion that burned people at the stake?

The religion that scarred countless generations?

Is that the one?

Maybe, just maybe it is NOT good enough.

Maybe the institutions that were charge with facilitating spirituality have utterly and completely failed us.

Maybe it is time to reexamine.

Maybe it is time to rethink.

Maybe it is time to imagine.

All is Relevant, None is True

The final hours of 2011 are ticking away.  And my thoughts in these waning hours, as is often the case, revolve around faith.

I guess the title of this entry pretty well sums up my recent train of thought.  I have been pondering the words of John Lennon in the song Imagine and reading some works of Joseph Campbell.  What if none of what I was brought up to believe is true, but that all of it is relevant?  Perhaps I have been focusing too much on the how and not enough on the why.

I do not, as yet, have a coherent conclusion.  But my mind is on alight.