Being Human

I had one of those weekends that comes along every so often by the grace of God, the ones that make you feel like you've actually had a weekend and that you might have regained a bit of ground in the neverending fight against fatigue. I could think of no better way to finish it than by dragging the laptop outside, lighting up my pipe, and making some space to breathe.

My parents came to visit for the weekend. We didn't really do anything special - we just had a nice time catching up and playing with the boys. Yesterday we went to the park and flew model rockets. I can't recommend model rocketry enough if you have boys in your home. It's really inexpensive to get into, and I have never met a boy who didn't absolutely go nuts the first time he saw a launch. I can't wait for the day my boys are old enough to start building their own. It's an absolutely fantastic father/son hobby, and because so few large retailers carry supplies, it's also often a great way to support local businesses, namely your local hobby shop. But I digress - I spent some wonderful time this weekend with some of the people in my life that mean the most to me, an opportunity that I unfortunately do not always take when it presents itself.

One of the reasons, I think, that Sabbath is such a subversive practice is that it puts limits on some voices in our lives that are often so loud. It says to our work, "This far and no farther!" It refuses to grant privilege to a culture that tries to reduce us to a unit of production and instead makes space where we can be human. It also refuses to be contained by our own rules and regulations that try to tame its subversive nature. Personally, I think that we would do well to begin to pay attention to how and when we rest, because it's in these spaces that we are often most alive.

My pipe is reaching its end, as is my evening. Blessings to you in the week ahead.

FYI...

For any readers of ICTHUS out there, the url has changed, and Vaughn has asked for some help to let folks know. The new url is http://www.vaughnthompson.com/icthus.

Little Resistances

I had thought to write a bit more on my definition of hope, but upon further reflection I think I'll let the discussion continue in the comments. (If you're interested in weighing in, head to this post.) Instead, I want to post some final thoughts on why this topic has gripped me so, why I think it's vital that we recover the language of hope and what it might do for us as the children of God wandering in a land sometimes far from home.

There are really a lot of things that I could say here. Paul writes of faith and love springing from out of the hope that we carry, so perhaps anemic displays of faith and love are symptoms of a hopeless people. Peter says, in that most-often mangled passage that has little to do with apologetics, that we should always be able to tell those who ask of the reasons that we hope - and if we cannot articulate and inhabit our hope, what would ever inspire anyone to ask?

I think, though, that the striking thing about hope for me is its capacity for meaning-making. One thing that I've already mentioned is that hope, by definition, is future-oriented. Hope speaks of the telos of the creation-story, of the end towards which all of existence is rushing. It speaks of the accomplishment of God's purposes and the fulfillment of His Kingdom. Christian hope that cannot speak of the realization of the Kingdom is weak and pitiful at best. Again, I must appeal to the prophets in scripture as the agents of hope, announcing the fall of the powers and the triumph of God's purposes. Like Morpheus in the Matrix, they shake our comfort and stability, undermine our complacency, and recruit us into a venture that looks crazy at the best of times. Theirs is not a candy-coated, artificially sweetened message - but it is one of hope, one that looks reality unflinchingly in the face and states that reality has not the final word.

Hope crafts meaning out of existence. If there is, in fact, an end towards which we are headed, then perhaps redemption has not yet passed us by. This is not some naive cliche about things happening for reasons, but rather a bold statement about the actions of a Redeemer within history - both in its entirety and on a personal level. This is our resource to combat fear and dare great things for the One we love. We hold to the hope that a Word has been spoken that reaches beyond any word of fear or exclusion or trouble or death. These are not the final words.

This is why we must find our hope, inhabit it and speak it and share it. This is our little resistance, our practice of shared meaning, and our family bond as a transient people making our way towards home.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 4)

It feels sort of odd, all clinical and detached, to try to talk about how I now think about hope. For the longest time, I resisted trying to define it, until I conceded that hope is only sometimes described and never really defined in scripture, so to construct a biblical theology of hope without clarifying my understanding of terms was somewhat less than useful. Still, I think it worth noting that I'm sort of backing into my understanding from a combination of what is said and not said on the topic in scripture, and that in truth I don't think there's a way to begin to wrestle with this topic outside of the realm of experience. Let's be honest - we could construct an academic, sterile discussion of faith or of love, and although we could pull all of our concepts from scripture and align them perfectly and cleanly, we still wouldn't know what it is to actually have faith or love.

As I said earlier, I think that hope is something that happens when we reach the end of ourselves. I think it's notable that the two books in the Old Testament that seem to speak most of hope are Job and Psalms - two books where suffering is worn on the sleeve, where desperation is articulated most fiercely and brazenly. I had mentioned earlier that, when we reach one of these crossroads in our lives, we are confronted with a choice. In one sense, this sounds rather detached, as though we weigh our options and throw our lot in with what looks like the best deal, where we weigh our risk tolerance and potential for reward and decide accordingly. Personally, I think it's nothing like this at all. It's rather the sort of choice where we reach an understanding with the voices of despair - we either give them power, or refuse to bend our ear to their siren song. And I'd wager that until we've faced down those voices, we'll never truly know what it is that hope requires of us.

This is why I call hope "arational". In many cases, hope defies all rationality and requires us to instead cast our trust on an unseen, often silent God who is never late but, as someone once said, misses many wonderful opportunities to be early. But I think it would be unfair to call it irrational, as Jared accurately noted in my earlier post - it is no more irrational than faith or love. Hope simply refuses to play by the rules of reason. It sits outside reason's boundaries and categories and is bothered by this not in the least. Hope is the language of the prophets - it is the reason that Jeremiah can buy property in a land that has been conquered and left for dead, that David can continue to sing as he is surrounded by enemies, that Jesus can hang on a Roman cross and speak words of comfort and paradise to the one hanging next to him. Hope is the only language in which we find the words to proclaim that death has not the final word, that a Word more powerful than death has been spoken.

I had hoped to wrap this up tonight, but it seems that a few more posts remain. Tomorrow I'll attempt to round out our working definition, and then I think it only fair to conclude by asking why this matters enough for me to sink this many posts into the topic. For those of you still reading, thanks for coming along for the ride.

Back to the Mines

I'm back - fantastic weekend at the shore, with good friends, spiritual refreshment, and poker for Mentos and Fig Newtons. (I'd have won it all too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids and that dog!) Lots of stuff to think about and write about. Memorable quote of the weekend: "For many of us, our lives are a conflict of stories." (Marilyn Elliott of Asbury Seminary)

More to come. One finding from my Sabbath week - I am seriously sleep deprived. I absolutely have to start changing some patterns, and one of those needs to be my sleeping habits. I can't continue to operate on 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night, so for now I'm choosing bed over blog...

Away, and A Thought

I'm heading out of town for a retreat this weekend with the LEAD program at Biblical. I can't think of a better way to wrap up my sabbath week. I won't have any internet access until Sunday, so I'll respond to comments or emails when I get back.

I did want to leave a thought to ponder until I get my concluding post on hope completed. I think we need a workable definition in order to get the discussion off the ground. Here's my proposal:

Christian hope is the arational, unshakeable belief that redemption always triumphs in the end.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 3)

One thing that strikes me about the thought given to hope (or lack thereof) in contemporary western Christianity is that we are so rarely faced with a situation in which we are actually required to hope. We're incredibly self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-serving. Hope in my context, I think, more accurately resembles market analysis or risk assessment than it does the biblical, spiritual virtue that it truly is. We "hope", for example, that we will be able to have enough income for a comfortable retirement or that we can afford a bigger house someday, and then we set about crafting our lives around strategies designed to bring our desires to pass. I'm not convinced that hope works that way. Hope, I think, is what happens when we reach the end of ourselves, when our self-sufficiency has been reduced to rubble and we sit on the ruins of our plans and designs and try to figure out how we're ever going to clean up the mess. At that point, we are confronted with a choice - and how we respond to that choice is what can begin to germinate a tiny seed of something that can grow into something much larger and more amazing.

I had nearly reached the end of my rope prior to losing my ministry position last year. Spiritually, I was a wreck. God and I still weren't really on speaking terms; I hadn't begun to deal with the issues that I still carried from my first ministry experience. Physically, I was working myself into a coma. I was stressed and exhausted. Emotionally, I wasn't much better - I took an assessment as part of a course for my MDiv and was shocked that I was showing significantly more symptoms of depression than I ever would have identified consciously. (Interestingly, it shows up in my writing from that time, but I wasn't listening to what my heart and spirit were trying to tell me either.) My wife and I were in agreement that, as soon as her massage clientele stabilized, I would resign.

The termination fell into this mess like a match into a container of gasoline. To be honest, I almost walked away. I could have given God the finger and turned my back. I say this not in pride or boasting, but so that you may understand what happened next.

I can't articulate exactly how it happened. In some sense, I think it's more accurate to say that hope happened to me, rather than that I decided to keep believing. Something in me refused to let go. I felt like Jacob wrestling with the Deity, demanding that He respond before I let go. And respond He did, in a surprising way. I had enrolled in an Etrek course at Biblical Seminary. In December, we wrapped up our time together with a two-day gathering at the school. On the afternoon of the second day, we took time to walk a labyrinth at a local church. I wrote about what happened here. Things haven't been the same since.

I can't write any more today. I am still full of emotion as I think back to that cold December day and how I met God between the worn lines of a faded labyrinth. One more stop to go.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 2)

It's interesting, I think, the way that God works. One thing I must say at the outset so that you will understand why ordinary things have significance in my life in ways that might not to others: I have never been hired at a job for which I have applied on my own initiative, with the exception of part-time mall jobs in college. The significant positions, the ones that have shaped me as a person and form what I consider to be my "work history", have always sought me out, and any that I have tried to initiate have never been offered to me. Keeping that in mind, I pay close attention when an offer comes my way - I immediately begin inspecting it for God's fingerprints.

A few days after my initial conversation with the senior pastor in which I was informed of my pending termination, I received a call from a local church that had been meeting for only a few months. They were looking for someone to work with their middle school group and had gotten my number from my friend that I mentioned in my previous post (an odd series of events in and of itself). After a series of interviews, I was asked if I would lead the group on a volunteer basis while the elders made the arrangements to hire me, not a simple process as the church was still operating under the mother church's 501c3 (meaning that the church didn't yet exist as a separate, legal entity). In the meantime, I signed on with a temp agency to pay the bills and took an assignment at the company where I now work. Going to work in the corporate world was a little death every morning - a small piece of my soul withered away every morning as I walked out my front door. I couldn't wait to get back to working with students on a full-time basis. As the months passed, I began to suspect that this would take longer than I (or the elders) had thought, and when I was offered a permanent position at my company (one that I had not applied for), I reluctantly accepted, suspecting that perhaps God was up to something.

Proverbs says that postponed hope makes one's heart sick, but a fulfilled desire is like a tree of life.

It took nearly a year and a half from the time I submitted my resume until I was finally hired. When all was said and done, I was offered a part-time position of ten hours a week. I was happy at the church and excited about what was happening in the student ministry, so I didn't really mind - I thought that eventually things would open up and I'd be offered a full-time position. In the meantime I was doing well in my job and was offered a promotion within the first year. It was somewhat ironic - I prospered at a job I never wanted, but the work that I truly desired was out of my reach. I thought more than once about sending out resumes to look for a full-time position, but something always held me back - I just knew that I was where I was supposed to be.

After nearly four years, in June of 2004 I was told that the church had finally decided to hire a full-time student ministry leader. However, they had also decided that it was not going to be me. I was informed that my employment would be terminated within two weeks of our discussion, but that I was more than welcome to continue to volunteer with the ministry. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed by the prospect - in truth, the church had been undergoing a number of changes that I wasn't comfortable with, and I was preparing to submit my resignation, not out of anger but rather because my stress had reached toxic levels. It's interesting for me to go back now and read what I wrote about the situation - somewhere along the way I had begun to think again about hope, and once again with the subject fresh in my mind I found myself trying to reconstruct pieces of broken dreams.

Along the way, I think God was trying to tell me something, but I hadn't yet learned how to hear it...

Sabbath Week

What a brutal week. This was one of those weeks at work when you think things can't get any worse, but yet they continue to do so. Yesterday, though, a few things happened and a couple of deteriorating situations related to a few projects that I'm leading turned around remarkably - one might even say miraculously, if you believe in the everyday sort of miracles that we frequently refer to as good luck or coincidence. Now, I have a week's vacation with nothing more strenuous planned than a midnight showing of Star Wars and maybe a trip to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences with my boys. Time to catch my breath and be human - there's nothing better.

An Unscripted Lesson in Hope (part 1)

A brief note at the outset - as a writer, sometimes it seems that there are those stories that take on a life of their own, that write themselves without asking your permission or guidance. This was one of those tales. I didn't intend to write any of this when I sat down tonight, and yet perhaps it is good to have been written. I choose to let it stand, and hope that in some small way you might find something of Jesus hiding between the letters and words.

I was reading back through some of what I've written lately and came to something of a surprising discovery. Six of the last ten entries that I've made have commented on hope in some form or another, not to mention the earlier stuff that I've written on the subject. (If you've noticed this trend, it wasn't conscious.) I want to explore this a bit further, because apparently it's something that's on my brain. But in order for you to understand how I approach this topic, I need to tell you a bit of a story about how I arrived at where I am today.

I first started really thinking about biblical hope in the fall of 1999. At the time, I was serving as the youth pastor for a church in the western Philadelphia suburbs, not far from where I currently live. I had developed a great friendship with another local youth pastor, and together we'd spend a fair amount of time meeting to pray for the schools in our area, both by ourselves and with students who attended the schools. We started talking about our dreams for the students that we knew who wanted so badly to live as Christians in ways that made sense and that caused others to want to do the same. In the process, our dreams caused us to turn to the biblical reflections on hope, what it was and how one could grow in it and develop it.

Hope in scripture is surprising - it's not at all what you might expect. Even though it's identified by Paul as one of the "Big Three" virtues, it's rarely preached or taught in western Christianity. (I believe there are reasons for that, which if you read my take on Brand Name Jesus™, you can probably deduce.) Hope is future-oriented, but it has its roots in the past. I believe it to be the counter to doubt, rather than faith as is more commonly understood (faith, I believe, more properly opposes fear). Hope is arational and imaginative. Paul also says that there is a connection between suffering and hope. This is an odd, jarring sort of statement that I'm not going to begin to unpack here - it deserves a full essay of its own. Suffice to say that this particular connection was one that I wrestled with for some time, not really reaching conclusions but struggling nevertheless with its implications. I wanted to understand hope, what it means to be hopeful, and how hope could transform my faith. This was my journey through the winter and into the spring of 2000.

In May of 2000 I was fired without warning from my ministry position. The process took about six weeks, and on July 9, 2000, I walked out of my church, my dreams of serving God vocationally shattered like so much broken glass.

What had been theory transformed in a matter of weeks into cold, hard reality. I tried to pick up the pieces of my dreams but it seemed that I kept getting cut on the sharp edges. Some of this tale I've told before, and most of it I do not desire to relive, so I will spare the details. Suffice to say that I've spent the last five years trying to reconstruct some way of thinking about my story in which I can find hope. I wanted what Paul said to be true, that suffering produces, in the end, hope, but I couldn't see how that was anything more than rhetorical fluff. And yet, through it all, I think there was a part of me that refused to capitulate - and thus was born a tiny seed of what may yet grow into something greater, something hopeful.

But I am getting ahead of myself...

Rethinking Apocalypse

Jared's recent thoughts on preterism have gotten my own wheels turning a bit on the topic of eschatology. I like Jared's well-stated summary, and I'll admit to having leanings in that direction. But in truth I'm not really settled on how I think about it - I have an uneasy relationship with the whole affair, to be honest. Eschatology is one of those topics that I think a lot of normal people who are trying to follow Jesus spend a lot of time avoiding, sort of like an embarrassing uncle at a family reunion. We all know it's part of the family, but none of us wants to admit that we're related. Unless, of course, you buy into the whole Left Behind scam series, in which case you probably have other issues.

Personally, my ambivalence towards the topic goes back to childhood. When I was around four or five years old, someone in the church that my family attended at the time got the bright idea to show the scare-the-hell-out-of-you 70's-era Tribulation movie series - Thief in the Night and all that. First of all, anyone that thinks those movies are appropriate for four year old children needs to be taken out behind the church and slapped - decapitations and whatnot are just not the stuff I plan on showing to my kids in the name of Jayzus. But on top of their generally gruesome perspective, I can in all honesty say that these movies caused some serious damage to me spiritually. It took years, and by years I mean close to twenty, to come to the point where I didn't live in fear of what that perspective represented. Fear is probably not the best way to develop one's spiritual life, at least not when it's at the terror end of the spectrum as opposed to awe.

Somewhere along the line, I think, we in western Christianity forgot the whole point of all of the New Testament apocalyptic language. In reality, it doesn't really matter how you interpret the scriptures in relation to times and fulfillments and all if you miss the whole reason for the talk to begin with. Christian eschatological language should be the language of hope. And this, I think, is what bothers me so much about the LaHayeification of apocalyptic speech in the western church. Christian apocalyptic language is the speech of free people in defiance of a social order that claims absolutism. In the face of Roman domination, John could write of the fall of Babylon and his readers knew that he referred to the oppressive regime that persecuted them, tortured and killed them - that he was speaking of the inevitable fall of Rome and triumph of the Lamb and his people. It shows things for the way they truly are, instead of how the powers would like to portray them. It pulls back the curtain, just for a moment, to let us see the impotence of the wizard and the futility of his attempts at control. It is a language of HOPE, of triumph and victory and celebration. What have we to fear?

But fear is exactly what this sort of approach has engendered, fear and loathing and an avoidance of certain chunks of scripture. Where is the hope? It is difficult, if not impossible, to locate. A fearful people cannot help but view the present age as something destined to pass away and therefore not worth the effort of preserving. Ironically, such a fear only binds one closer to the very reality of death that the language of hope desires to overcome. A hopeful people need have no fear of death - it has already been conquered. We can live boldy, daring much, giving all.

The Cynic's Glossary of Business Terminology

A bit of lighthearted musing designed to keep me sane on the job, in no particular order.

Negotiation - The art of distributing dissatisfaction equitably among interested parties
Win-Win Outcome - A successful negotiation in which each party believes itself to be the least dissatisfied
Information Technology - Two good things that go worse together
Project Team - Group created for the purpose of blame centralization
Teamwork - Common oxymoron used in the process of blame allocation
Networking - Process of establishing contact with future blame recipients
Business Metrics - Statistics used for blame identification and redirection
Pessimist - One with a negative outlook. More commonly referred to as "experienced".

Brand Name Jesus™

I remember in the mid-nineties the short-lived fad of Magic Eye images - posters that presented a pseudo-3D image if you'd stare at it long enough in the right way. It was fascinating just watching people try to get the images to work. They'd stare and stare at this jumbled morass of pixels trying to bring the image into focus. When it happened, when someone "got" the image hidden in the picture, it was quite apparent. You'd watch the confusion and frustration transform into this sense of amusement and a slight puzzlement of why it was so difficult to see in the first place. It was as if they'd discovered oil in their backyard or at least a twenty hidden in a pocket of their newly washed jeans.

I think that if you're a Christian for any length of time and you're at all serious about the gospel stories, about what Jesus said and did in life as well as death, about the way in which he talked to people and loved them and honored them, then I think a time comes in your journey when you start to realize that you've been staring at the image for a long time but not quite seeing the picture. What I mean by this is that we come to Jesus with a perspective that we've inherited, particularly those of us in western Christian contexts, about who he was and what he was all about. And, sure, we think Jesus was radical and that he made the religious people very angry and, if we're feeling especially pious, we'll admit that yes, we too probably would have been somewhat irritated with him. After all, he did spend time with some unsavory characters and he made a big mess of all those nice tables in the temple, and nobody likes a grouch. And in the process we manage to read right past what Jesus was really all about and why the religious leaders really did have to kill him. I think we miss the reasons behind his death, and as a result, we allow something far more insidious to happen to him, participate in it enthusiastically in fact, something that is the worst fate that can befall a prophet.

Prophet I say, and mean in the Old Testament sense, for that is what he was. Today when we think of a prophet we either think of some neo-Pentecostal travelling preacher or some mangy-haired, wild-eyed, bug-eating freak of a man who speaks in riddles and occasionally drools. But to be a prophet is first and foremost to be a person of imagination. It means to be able to imagine past The Way Things Are to see, just a hint perhaps, of how they might be if only we were to follow God for just a bit. Imagination is a dangerous thing, perhaps the most dangerous thing of all to those whose positions, whose lives are built on the structures that are dependent on The Way Things Are. Brueggemann calls this the "royal consciousness," others refer to it as the establishment, The Man, or Microsoft, depending on your particular context. The problem with imagination is that it involves hope, and hope requires one to believe that things are not all fine at this present moment, which is exactly what one cannot believe and remain content with The Way Things Are.

So, if one wants to silence a prophet, how does one go about doing so? For a long time, it seemed that the prevailing method was to simply kill the imaginative one. The problem with this approach is that too often the ideas of the prophet didn't seem to stop with his or her death - they had a disconcerting way of continuing on. So the truly ingenious person who wanted to silence a prophet would not do so by killing him or her - rather, coopt the message. Make it work for you. Turn it into a brand, and sell it on every streetcorner. Prophets are silenced, not through death, but through assimilation.

And this is what we have managed to do with Jesus, I think. Jesus has ceased to be the prophet who calls us to imagine greatly with him what the Kingdom of God might look like if it were unleashed in our lives. Instead, we've fashioned a new Jesus™, one who just wants to live in our hearts and not in our neighborhoods, one who is content with being accepted instead of being followed. It's hard to tell, really, whether we've created Jesus™ in our image or recreated ourselves in his, or perhaps some bizarre mix of the two. But the reality is that the end of this path is a faith that cannot challenge us to sell all that we have and give to the poor, to love our enemies, or to take up our crosses (unless they are gold-plated and coordinate nicely with our watch). We cannot imagine past The Way Things Are; in fact, the dirty truth is that too often we are the ones whose lives depend on maintaining the status quo, the ones who need to have prophets silenced because of the nagging voice of hope that intrudes on our consciences.

But every now and again, someone gets it. Someone stares at the picture long enough to realize that there is something else lurking in the blurred pixels. You can see it in their eyes, in the slight tilting of the head, in the puzzlement that turns to amazement as the image begins to clear and something surprising emerges. And, if you're like me, you begin to wonder why you didn't see it there before...

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

I've been reading David Dark's The Gospel According to America. It's a pretty good read, if somewhat dense at times if you're not familiar with the stuff he's interacting with (everything from Melville to Elvis). One of the images that he uses that I think is just fascinating is Waffle House Conversationalism, which he describes as:

No appeal to the court of fact has more resonance than another, everybody has to let everybody else finish speaking, and nobody's allowed to talk too terribly loud, because people are trying to eat in peace. You're welcome to bring the Bible or the president into it, but if you don't keep your ego at a reasonable volume, you can take your conversation elsewhere.

The main thrust of the book is the loss of Waffle House Conversationalism, at least as it pertains to most of what passes for rhetoric in America today. The end result is entrenchment of views, enthronement of perspectives, and indictment of any voice that doesn't reassure and reinforce our own self-baptized take on The Way Things Ought To Be™. In other words, we look for conversation partners so that we can mutually reassure each other of our own right-ness. (I'm thinking of Virgil's comment on my earlier post as I write this.) We don't approach difference from a healthy place; in fact, we find it unsettling and somewhat frightening.

Juxtaposed with this is the wonderful news that a good friend of mine is regaining health after a very difficult couple of years. My friend owns a comic shop about a mile from my home. It's a place that I've frequented for nearly ten years. I've spent countless hours in his place playing strategy games and discussing everything and nothing, making friends with the oddest of people. (We're all gamers, so odd comes with the territory, I suppose.) Unfortunately, two summers ago complications from a health condition nearly caused him to go blind. While preparing for surgery on his eyes, he also discovered that he was in need of a bypass operation on his heart. It's taken him nearly two years to recover from open heart surgery and work on his eyes. His shop is now open only six hours a week, and only recently did he start to come in himself. Yesterday we had the chance to talk for the first time in over a year. I really miss the place; our gaming community pretty much collapsed along with his health. It was what I referred to as my Cheers - a place where the rules were simple and everyone was welcome, as long as you weren't a jerk. It was somewhere that I could be myself with no fear of judgment or rejection.

This morning as part of the worship service we participated in communion. It was one of those fascinating moments for me when, just for a moment, I stood outside the proceedings and looked on things as though I were disconnected from myself as a participant. I thought of the church community that we enjoy as a family but where we haven't really developed much in the way of relationships. I thought of the comic shop, of the impromptu community that just sort of sprung up there around card games and comic books that I miss terribly at times. And I thought of the symbolism of the ritual, of how through the bread and the cup I am in some mysterious way connected to these people in a way that I never was to my friends at Heroes Universe.

It's an odd sort of community that we have, isn't it? I think the New Testament writers chose a beautiful metaphor when they wrote of the body of Christ as family, brothers and sisters every one of us. Family, when it is healthy, is where I know that I will always be home, where I do not have to fear rejection or shame, where room will always be made at the table for me. But it is often not healthy, and we bring our own dysfunctions with us as well. Family, when it is not healthy, can be the most damaging place on earth, and unfortunately that is often true of us. We don't handle difference well; we sit entrenched and enthroned in our own self-righteousness while lobbing hand grenades at the wounded who stumble to our doors. We don't partake of one loaf and one cup - we're too busy identifying everything wrong with our brothers and sisters at the table.

I hold to the hope that all things will someday be made new, that we will have family, true family, with no empty seats at the table and no food being thrown at our siblings, where there will be no shame or hurt but rather trust, dignity, and love. I confess that I don't really know what that looks like - but I'd like to. Sometimes you want to go...