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Posts from the ‘Doubt’ Category

May 24

Magnificent Worms

I attended a funeral on Sunday afternoon. No, not a “funeral.” A “memorial.” Or a “celebration of life.” Or an “open house,” of sorts. The deceased had been gone for months, but a gathering had been planned (which itself is by no means a given these days). It was held in a museum atrium, overlooking the hills and river that he had loved to explore. There were lovely tributes and memories and photos and videos shared. There was coffee and snacks. There was a beautiful view. Read more

Apr 19

8 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

A morning tour through the news left a few itches that seemed to need scratching. And it’s been a while since a Miscellany post, so…

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Let’s begin in with the latest instalment of the “We’re losing our religion in the west but we still seem to weirdly miss it” category (surely R.E.M. must be getting tired of their song title being used for articles like this?). The image of a Gothic-style Catholic Church being turned into a skate-park pretty much sums it up. Six thousand to ten thousand churches close and/or are repurposed along these lines every year in America (it would likely be similar story in Canada). Church membership and attendance is falling off a cliff. We still like the idea of God or the divine or some kind of cosmic energy or… something. We can’t really tolerate the idea that there’s nothing beyond. We’re spiritual but not religious. So we like to tell ourselves, at any rate. Read more

Apr 5

5 Comments

Bleed into One

People sometimes ask me what I would have been if not a pastor. A number of options leap to mind, but I often joke that my first choice would have been “rock star.” I have always loved the energy and the emotion, the raw driving power of music, the euphoria of the crowd. It transports me. It always has. Alas, I have no real musical talent, which I’m guessing would have proved a difficult obstacle to overcome. I picked up the bass guitar a bit in my twenties and blundered uninspiringly along for a while, but that was the extent of it. Also, I probably would have needed hair to be a decent rock star. So, you know, the odds were always against me. Read more

Mar 29

6 Comments

Hang On, Judas

Judas was on the agenda at the jail this week. We’ve been working our way through John’s gospel over the past few months, paying special attention to Jesus’ encounters with real people. We’ve been trying to locate ourselves in these stories and to see what they might teach us about ourselves and about God. We’ve looked at Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the blind beggar, Lazarus, etc. Good stories, each one, and not too difficult to locate ourselves in these characters. But Judas? Well, Judas is a different animal. Especially at the jail. Read more

Mar 28

37 Comments

On the Banishing of Shadows

I have had a number of conversations recently about the deep sadness that seems to have settled over many in the West, particularly the young. These conversations have been with people who would represent the full breadth of the racial, socioeconomic, political and ideological spectrum. Often, they are parents of teenagers and/or young adults. It’s a familiar litany by now. Anxiety, depression, addiction, mental illness, suicidal ideation and self-harm, deaths of despair. A general rootlessness and purposeless drifting. Listless scrolling and binging on junk entertainment rather than engaging with the world. It’s a well-worn road by now. Read more

Mar 7

5 Comments

The Rubble

Once there was a great building. Mighty with towers, spiky with spires, a-bubble with domes. Inside it opened into gallery after gallery, vault after echoing vault, so high that human beings who set off across its marble pavements sometimes mistook its roof for the sky and the building for the world itself. And though it showed signs of many styles, and had been built by many different architects over many centuries, it had been standing so long than no one could remember when it wasn’t there, or suspected that it could ever fall. But it did…

Some of the rubble was gathered up by those who had particularly loved the building and assembled back into a much smaller structure—somewhere in size, say, between a cottage and a garden shed. The rest, however, lay where it had fallen; and the grass grew over it, and creepers disguised the biggest pieces of the ruin till they looked almost like outcrops of rock; and with a speed just as astonishing as the collapse had been, those who walked there forgot there had ever been a building, and took the bumpy hill beneath them for the plain and natural ground.

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Jan 11

2 Comments

Our Loneliness Has a Secular Shape

The topic of loneliness came up at a breakfast meeting this morning. This is the devastating norm for Western cultures these days. Anxiety, depression, addiction, bitter cynicism, yes, all these things are rampant. But loneliness and social isolation seem to be the common thread that runs through the despair of our cultural moment. I see this nearly every day in my work as a pastor and as a prison chaplain. Read more

Jan 5

5 Comments

On “Jesus Smuggling,” Impatience with Window Shopping, and a World That Can’t Help Being Beautiful

I’ve started reading Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope, and Carnage, which is basically a memoir-ish extended interview with journalist Seán O’Hagan. I have to say that so far, it’s pretty awesome. Nearly every other page, I’m thinking, “Oh, that’s good, I need to use that in a sermon or an essay or something.” You may have to tolerate a bunch of quotes around here for a while. Read more

Jan 3

3 Comments

God is Love. And We Must Love Each Other

A month or so ago, I became aware (I forget how) of Nick Cave. I had never heard of the Australian singer, songwriter, poet, and author before this, nor had I ever listened to his band (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Actually, scratch that. His song Red Right Hand is the theme song for Peaky Blinders. And apparently a song called O Children made an appearance in a Harry Potter movie. So, I guess I’ve heard him before, but only accidentally. It wasn’t his music that grabbed my attention a month ago, but the title of his new book: Faith, Hope, and Carnage. Quite a title, that one. The kind of title that might incline someone to do a bit of digging around. Read more

Nov 24

In Extremis

To be a pastor is to regularly find oneself in extremis. Pastors are expected to bring consolation and hope into extreme situations: contexts of depression, addiction, suicidal ideation, crushing poverty, relational breakdown, violence, existential despair, intellectual doubt, debilitating illness, and ultimately, of course, death. Or, more precisely, to point to the One who promises these things in (and beyond) the fractured and chaotic world of human experience. But what happens to the possibility of consolation when you don’t believe in this One anymore? Read more

Nov 3

Death’s Diminishments

I’ve had a few hard conversations over the last week or so. Conversations about death and dying and despair, about the absence of God, the uselessness of God, the silence of God, the bleakness of the post-Christian landscape where hope, like every other good thing, must be manufactured by us if it is to be found at all. There are days when I would rather not be in God’s PR department. Read more

Jul 4

4 Comments

Know God, Know Peace?

There was a picture on the wall, barely visible, through the half-opened door. It looked faded and neglected and kitschy in all kinds of ways. There was an orangey sunset, maybe a lake or a river. I can’t remember, so instantly forgettable was the scene. It was the words on the top of the picture that grabbed my attention: “No God, No Peace; Know God, Know Peace.” A clever slogan, that one. Read more

Jun 17

9 Comments

Choosing Vinyl in a Digital Age

There’s a term that has gained wide traction over the last number of years to describe our unique cultural moment. Disenchantment. It’s a term used mainly by philosophers and historians and theologians to describe the fact that faith feels different in the twenty first century west than at most other parts of Christian history and even human history, more generally. Read more

May 25

6 Comments

On Demons, Soul-Sucking Disillusionment, and Keeping Christianity Strange

Over breakfast with friends today, the conversation inevitably turned to the latest murderous school shooting in America (yes, the second half of that sentence is truly insane; as if there should or could ever be a “latest” in such a grotesque category). “What would possess someone to do such a thing,” someone asked? “Maybe the word ‘possession’ is an apt one,” I almost offhandedly opined. Maybe there was something demonic going on. How else to explain such evil? We reach for extreme explanations for things that seem unexplainable. There was an awkward pause before we moved on to safer explanatory terrain. Drugs. Mental health. Social isolation. Violent video games. Yeah, probably. Read more

May 3

6 Comments

Jesus Doesn’t Stop (Where We Wish He Would)

I’ve probably preached half a dozen sermons on “Doubting Thomas” over the last decade or so. Thomas and his doubt show up faithfully in the lectionary readings each year after Easter Sunday. Thomas and his stubborn needing to see to believe. Thomas and his demanding what his fellow disciples received as a gift and the surprise of a lifetime. Thomas, the recalcitrant empiricist. Read more

Apr 15

4 Comments

On Resonance: A Good Friday Reflection

I was not in the mood for an “I’m spiritual but not religious” conversation this week. I had just buried one of our church’s saints. I had been planning a vigil in honour of a young man who took his own life and processing it with those most affected by this. There was the usual fatigue of Holy Week with its multiple services to prepare. All in all, my appetite was very low for another critique of religion or the church from an earnest and painfully certain twenty-something. Read more

Dec 1

12 Comments

The Only One

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read! This was my decidedly uncharitable and exasperated reaction to a sentence that I read over my toast and coffee morning. The offending sentence was a wildly enthusiastic recommendation on the cover of Kate Bowler’s new book No Cure for Being Human. The writer of the sentence that so aggravated me was a certain Glennon Doyle who had this to say about the book and its author: “Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.” Right. The only one. I tried (and failed) to resist the temptation of saying (audibly), “I guess that means I shouldn’t pay attention to your stupid book recommendation because I can’t trust you to tell me the truth.” Read more

Oct 13

8 Comments

On Deciding in Advance

In her marvelous book Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren tells the story of her friend Julie, whose infant son had to undergo surgery. As the nurses were about to wheel him into the operating room, Julie looked at her husband and said, “We have to decide right now whether or not God is good, because if we wait to determine that by the results of this surgery, we will always keep God on trial.” Read more

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