nakedpastor

I want to tell you a story about this painting. A woman who has previously purchased my art on eBay emailed me recently asking about a painting I had on eBay called “Separated Friends“. She wanted it, but it had already sold. We made an arrangement for me to paint a similar one on commission. The painting above is the finished product, called “Separated Son”. Here’s why I named it that. She told me why she wanted it. I quote:

“I had a son who vanished without a trace here on his 23rd birthday, November 4, 2000. When I saw that picture, it tugged at my spirit. It was like what has happened in my heart with my son. His name was… is Joshua. I loved it, and I love how looking at your work makes me feel in my soul.”

I can’t tell you how deeply her story moved me. My oldest son’s name is Joshua, and I couldn’t imagine the pain she must have and must still be enduring. We emailed back and forth, discussing the painting, and she confided even more:

“Joshua left us beside the ocean in the nighttime. It’s a long, strange story… one that could take hours of sharing. I am a believer. I have survived through faith. Some people said: “Oh, God would never make you have to live with the not knowing. He will let you know what has become of your son.” He didn’t. And we have learned the true meaning of faith, not on a day filled with sunshine and fulfilled dreams, but in the trenches where it would be oh so easy to throw up the hands and stomp away in anger… for lack of answers… in anger over the loss… in the trenches… the hurt… the disbelief… the agony of the hunt unreconciled with the child we sought so frantically…”

She is one of my heroes. I commend her faith. She’s running a good race. She’s fighting a good fight. She’s keeping the faith. Click here to read the news stories about Joshua Smith.

copywrite hayward

This may be my last comment on Jack Good’s book, The Dishonest Church. In it, he quotes at length from a book I had to rigorously study during my seminary days, Fowler’s book Stages of Faith. Fowler’s conjunctive stage is the final stage:
“In the transition to the Conjunctive stage one begins to make peace with the tension arising from the realization that truth must be approached from a number of different directions and angles of vision. Faith must learn to maintain the tensions between these multiple perspectives, refusing to collapse them in one direction or another. In this sense, faith must begin to come to terms with indissoluble paradoxes: the strength found in apparent weakness; the leadership that is possible from the margins of society… the immanence and the transcendence of God… In what Paul Ricoeur has called a second or willed naivete, persons of the Conjunctive stage manifest a readiness to enter into the rich dwellings of meaning that true symbols, ritual, and myth offer. As a correlate of these qualities, this stage exhibits a principled openness to the truths of other religious and faith traditions”.

In this context, Good talks about “cognitive dissonance” that exists in the minds of believers, that on the one hand they believe in an almighty God who is good, but on the other hand experience a perplexing world of pain that they can never understand. At some point one side of this contradiction has to give. Good admits on that he and his wife “had given up belief in an omnipotent God” (p. 44) because of this tension. An omnipotent God and a world of suffering: this, in my mind, is one of the indissoluble paradoxes Fowler speaks of, and not necessarily a contradiction.

How To Waste Your Money On Ebay!

How To Survive the Marine Corps When You Are a Wimp!

How To Shrink Your Church in 30 Days or Less!

How To Make a Short Film For Tropfest!

How To Visit a Sick Friend!

These are my top 5 favorite “how-to” lists out 343! that were entered in Darren Rowse’s how-to contest over at Problogger! Check them out, and have fun.

Hey everybody! Just a little note that the argument between my very good friend Jeff and I under the post Is Jesus Really Laughing?, well… we’re taking it outside, as you can see here. May the best cat win! But whoever wins the fight… just remember I was right. Thus spoke churchpundit!

A weary parent, who runs a blog called Weary Parent, found my “how to” list on How To Live With Teenagers, and posted a link to it on her site. I checked out her site and found it quite fascinating and informative. She has posted books related to parenting and kids, most of which Lisa and I have read and found helpful. Colorful site too. If you are a parent, you might like to check it out: wearyparent.com.

Reverend Spokes was right! Lip-enhancement did draw more attention to his mouth.

Here’s something I’ve been delinquent with, so it’s about time I got to it. Lisa and I had to travel down to Louisiana this spring to close up her granny’s home. She had died a few years ago but it had taken things this long to develop to the point where we could finally take care of things. On my way down there I bought the marvelous book, Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, written by Barbara Ehrenreich. It is a good book. I swallowed it whole. The best summary can be found on the back cover:

“Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the ‘lowliest’ occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.”

My favorite quote of the book comes from a passage where she relates going to a Christian tent revival meeting somewhere in Maine just to escape her cramped apartment on a Saturday night, and to her it “sounds like the perfect entertainment for an atheist out on her own.” Here’s the quote:

“The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful ‘amens.’ It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full-scale attack. I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole” (p. 69).

I found it a sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes fascinating but always shocking book. I think we need to hear her scathing critique on popular forms of Christianity that neglect the issues of justice. You’ve got to read it.