2025-07-10T21:00:44+00:00

Sprawling

July 10, 2025/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

The hosting site wants to know when I go to bed and when I wake up, and that seems kind of personal, doesn’t it? Early. I go to bed and wake up early. Anyway.

I’m reading a book called A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, which is the sequel to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, both written by Hank Green. I bought the first one on vacation last year, but only read it a few weeks ago, on this year’s beach trip. It looked & sounded good, but (and I recognize this is going to sound ridiculous) Hank Green is the author of very-popular young adult novels, the most famous, well known being The Fault In Our Stars, and I didn’t really want to read young adult fiction. See, ridiculous, right? Even more so when you find out…

I’ll tell you what I found out, but first let me tell you that, once I started Absolutely Remarkable Thing, I could not put it down. It’s so great. And the moment I finished it, on a quick Google search, I discovered there was a sequel and ordered it that second. I also discovered that JOHN Green is the young adult author who wrote Fault In Our Stars! HANK Green is his brother!!! I waited a year on a faulty conclusion of a wildly silly artificial obstacle.

Who cares if it was a young adult book??? Sheesh. Nobody. And if there is such a person, can you imagine the depressing lack of interest or engagement in his/her own life? Judgment is so dumb and boring.

The books are awesome, assuming this Endeavor sticks the ending. Even if it doesn’t, the last 100 pages can’t undo the brilliance of the previous 600. If I’d meet this Hank Green, I’d tell him. Maybe I’ll direct message him or something. Maybe I should also apologize to his brother for my foolish hang-up.

The books are about fame, social media, virtual reality, aliens, progress & scientific discovery, but mostly they’re about human connection and relationships. The books make me think of that ‘Bowling Alone’ idea that we explored months ago – more people bowl but less are in leagues. More of us bowl alone. At this particular part of the book, a new totally immersive virtual program has so thoroughly captured humanity, the economy is crashing because the businesses are suffering, also the churches (let’s not be so cynical for a little, and differentiate business from church) and parks. People are staying home, plugged into their headsets.

I know the internet is wonderful, full of promise and beauty. But there is a cost. There is a cost to everything. The only question is what we’re willing to pay. I think the scariest part of this is when we no longer see that question – either we don’t think we have a choice or we are so blind the avalanche of consequences. I can use my Amazon Music, and looove that they know me as well as they do. The mixes they choose for me are always right on. I get all sorts of new, cool songs that I would not otherwise find. But how do they know me so well? Because I’ve given my shopping history, search bar, emails, texts, instagram posts, these blogs, locations, social security and credit card numbers, mother’s maiden name, “my list” on Netflix, and birthdate in exchange. How could they not know me so well? And is it worth it for the Discovery Mix?

I guess it is, but the books ask, what if they (whoever ‘they’ are) want more and more? Will I know? Will I be able to say no?

A comic book villain named Mephisto was recently introduced in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), who is based on the devil or Mephistopheles from “Faust.” He offers what a person wants the most in exchange for their soul. They almost never know he’s a villain. We might not even need a demon to tempt us, we might be only too willing to give our soul away to the next shiny technology. We might not be able to tell if it’s a villain, either.

The Josh Lucas Situation

April 8, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

2 weeks ago, the Angel and I watched a movie called Life As We Know It, starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. It falls squarely in the often disrespectful and dismissive rom-com genre. To trash an entire genre is pretty unfair, some romantic comedies are solid, well written, and deep. This is not one of those. This is one that deserves to be dismissed. This is a great example of why rom-coms are not taken seriously. But it’s something else, maybe something that’s not entirely harmless.

But to get there, we have to talk about Josh Lucas. In the movie Sweet Home Alabama, Reese Witherspoon is engaged to marry McDreamy, but was previously, secretly married to Josh Lucas. She goes home to find him and secure the divorce papers to re-marry. The movie is mostly unremarkable, except for the fact that McDreamy is awesome. He’s full of class and grace, even when she leaves him at the altar, saying “So this is what this feels like,” loving her by letting her go. She leaves him to return to Josh Lucas, who is a not a nice person. His love for her is so great he treats her terribly.

In Life As We Know It, Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel are the best friends of the individuals in a married couple. When that couple is killed in an accident, the 2 leads have to assume the parenting of their baby. Duhamel is an overgrown boy, using and disposing of hordes of women (this is somehow played as charm), and is desperately trying to avoid the responsibility of fatherhood. Heigl is cold and focused, being chased by local pediatrician Josh Lucas, who is (in a nice reversal) a great dude. Like Reese, Heigl also chooses poorly, choosing the selfish boy who expresses his love through disrespect and being super nasty.

It seems to me that, for a woman, romance should be marked by a mean emotionally stunted child who “loves” so much they just can’t possibly be expected to be kind. Swoon!

My friends and I, in middle & high school

[Incidentally, the solar eclipse is happening RIGHT NOW, as I write this]

Anyway, my friends and I used to lament the fact that all of the girls seemed to not be able to get enough of the boys who treated them the worst, in direct correlation. And we, who did not act as if the girls were something we stepped in or only for meeting our physical teenage desires, were alone. As I got a little older, I realized that maybe this scientific theory was more anecdotal than scientific, and only felt like the horrible people always had dates while we watched Point Break on repeat together.

But what we can learn from Josh Lucas is that we were right. He is beautiful in both movies, the only difference is that he’s a heel in Sweet Home Alabama. The other difference, of course, is that he also gets the girl in Sweet Home Alabama. Holding doors and listening are a direct road to nowhere, while pouting and shouting down at your date like a jackass is the only way to mutually fulfilling relationships.

In the brilliant Nick Hornby novel High Fidelity, our hero wonders whether we liked the music we did because we were a certain way, or if we were a certain way because of the music we liked. Did the movies follow reality, or did they create it? Do women love jerks because they loved rom-coms first, or do they love jerks and the rom-coms that described their lives followed?

Life As We Know It was, honestly, pretty offensive, but maybe that’s just because I have been trying to love the sweet Angel through soft words and doing the dishes, telling her how much I appreciate her and proving it in my actions, believing she is someone to be valued and cherished, as we lean into her independence and great strength. Maybe this has been my problem, maybe she’s left crying herself to sleep, after we lay like spoons and I fall asleep always next to her, wishing I would drink too much and cheat just enough to assert my sharp-edged machismo. Maybe she has been dreaming I’d berate her with long strings of curse words, turn the table over and throw the plates of the dinner she made against the wall. Will she then run into my arms in the rain like in The Notebook??

My message to the Angel is that I guess I can try for her. But maybe it’s those last 2 words that show how predictable my failure is. Nothing is “for her” in these movies. Hm. Now I don’t know what to do. Maybe I’ll watch a few more to find out how to do romance. Wish me luck.

This Book

February 23, 2024February 23, 2024/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I wrote a book called Be Very Careful Who You Marry, released just before the Christmas of 2023. It is my second book. The first, called Chronicles, Nehemiah, and Other Books Nobody Reads, is a collection of many different subjects and ideas. Be Very Careful is just one: marriage – in theory and in practice. This isn’t to say it’s only for married people, any more than Marvel movies are only for superheroes or Britpop is only for the English.

As I write on the back cover, “…but it’s not only a marriage book. It’s about Jesus, the Angel, spirituality, sex, money, words, Mr & Mrs Rupert Holmes and their affinity for pina coladas, but mostly, it’s about you and me and what we choose to build.”

The image on the cover (and this post) is of 2 tiny metal figures that the Angel & I bought on our honeymoon in Aruba. Their arms are in position to embrace each other, but we didn’t always feel like embracing each other, and in those cases, we’d separate them. So many marriage relationships are victims of silent erosion, beaten down by the unrealistic expectations of “how it’s supposed to be.” We are sold a faulty premise that, when we say “I do,” we will always feeeeeeel in love, hearts in our eyes and tingly butterflies in our bellies, forever and ever. And if we don’t, even for a moment, we figure we are broken, we made a terrible decision, and there are only 2 options from here: divorce, or a life of abject misery. What we’d quickly find, if we’d only give this fear a voice, is that sometimes the figures aren’t holding each other. They are driving each other crazy, far apart on the TV stand. Nothing is broken, we haven’t “fallen out of love,” we’re simply, wonderfully married. There are times of brilliant, sweet, wonderful roses and there are times of old, dead, dried petals. The question is, what do we do then?

That’s what the book is about. What we do then is keep having dinner together, listening, talking, holding hands, having sex, opening the door for each other, and doing the dishes. We keep loving each other, even when we don’t necessarily feel like it. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails. (I read that somewhere.) We won’t always feel hope, but that’s not what it says at all. We hope anyway.

In a marriage, we become Always and Even If people.

The exhilarating dance of creation is complicated. What makes me think I have anything new to say about marriage or relationships? What makes me think anyone will want to read anything I write (or think or say) anyway? Is it unbridled arrogance? Where do these mean, nasty voices in our heads come from when we are inspired to build? The truth is that maybe I don’t have anything new to say, maybe no one will want to read it, maybe it is arrogance. But that’s not the point at all, is it? We are creative beings, made in the image of a wildly creative God, and we have been called to offer ourselves and our hearts to each other. So, yes, maybe nobody will care. OR maybe one person will read it at precisely the right time, they’ll lean into their spouse (instead of away from), re-commit to each other, and this new connection will bless their children and neighbors and you and me and everybody everywhere. That’s how the world changes. Of course, I’m dreaming. But anything/everything significant begins as unrestrained imagination. All dreams start as an impossibility.

Maybe a billion people will read this book. Or maybe just the Angel and my mom. I want you, and I want all of your friends, to read it. I want you to love it, too. Not to make me the next big thing, but so that you can love your wives and husbands, and be loved by your wives and husbands. We were given this amazing gift of marriage, a person with whom to truly share our every part of our lives (what could be more lovely??), and I’m not convinced we’ve even scratched the surface of it’s depth and beauty.

You can get it from me (I have enough copies and can get more, just come to my home, message me, or come to the Bridge on Sunday morning). Or you can go to the Books, Etc page on my blog, lovewithacapitall.com, where you can click a link that will take you to a store to buy it and get it shipped to your home.

Chuck Palahniuk writes, in his novel Choke, “It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos… Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”

What we build could be anything, we just need to start.

Dreams

April 18, 2023/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I just finished reading My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman. This isn’t my first time reading it and I cried just like I did each of the others. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s inspiring and hopeful, and reminds us all why we don’t just give up when the news gets so bad and the searing pain of engagement gets so intense.

I turn down corners of pages that contain words, sentences, and/or passages that move me. When I re-read books, I look forward to those pages and sometimes I read the page several times and have no idea why I turned down that particular corner. Others, I know immediately. One of those turned down corners held this peach: “Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”

I’m thinking about the things we like and why we like the things we like. Maybe we choose the books/songs/movies, for whatever reasons (we like the cover art or it’s cheap or our friend gives us a gift). Or maybe those books/songs/films choose us (and we’d find them in our path somehow, over and over, until we finally pick it up when we’re exactly ready and explode). Do we like those things because we’re a certain way, or are we a certain way because we like them? Or a wonderful dance between the two? Maybe we are predisposed, open to the impact of a book about an 8 year-old girl, her grandmother, wurses, and monsters born of sorrow, and when we find each other, we join this dance.

On another page: “And probably a lot of people think Maud and Lennart shouldn’t do that, and that types of people like Sam shoudln’t even be allowed to live, let alone eat cookies. And those people are probably right. And they’re probably wrong too. But Maud says she’s firstly a grandmother and secondly a mother-in-law and thirdly a mother, and this is what grandmothers and mothers-in-law and mothers do. They fight for the good. And Lennart drinks coffee and agrees. And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.”

I hope we’re all fighting for the good. In fact, I believe we’re all fighting for the good, in the way we fight for the good. (Well, mostly all – some people are selfish psychos who want to cause damage, but there are so few of them… Well, it’s like this. Bad pizza exists, but pizza is so rarely bad that it’s hardly worth ordering our lives around. Most bad pizzas aren’t psychos, they’re bad pizzas born of sorrow and loneliness and despair, and that sort of pizza doesn’t want to be awful at all.) So we’re fighting for the good, trying to find what weapons are ours to use.

Dreams are a Swedish cookie, that’s what Backman and Maud and Lennart are referring to. But when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been frozen in too many ways, maybe the other kind of dream is necessary, as well. (Actually, Maud and Lennart are the only ones referring to the cookie. Backman is obviously referring to both.) We get our imaginations drummed out of us very early, until we believe this is simply “how it is,” that people are untrustworthy, and all pizza is inherently bad. Reclaiming the truth requires, first, a dream. A dream that things can be better than they are, that we are worth fighting for, and that holding hands is still the best way to remember that all isn’t lost, that we are alive and that we are together.

Maybe amazing art like this is what made me so naive and awesome. Or maybe these books affirm my naïveté. It’s fun to think about but, in the end, who really cares? We have dreams to bake, people to love, and fighting to do.

This Book I Just Read

September 13, 2021/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I just finished I’ll Give You The Sun, by Jandy Nelson. I’m not going to tell you much about it. After all, this isn’t a review. What I will tell you is that I spent much of the last chapter on my knees, reading through red watery eyes. That is, of course, if I could read at all. The rest I spent totally flat face down on my living room carpet leaving discolored circles behind.

I know, I know. But as you are well aware, I am a man who gets down on his knees and weeps from time to time. I cry far more often when things are beautiful than when things are not, and this was no different. It was gorgeous and heartbreaking, joyful and crushing. It was absolutely devastating.

The cover has a quote from the inside, “We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.” Yes, that’s what kind of book it is. It’s a family who has webs and webs of lies and secrets that have kept them sick for years (like lies and secrets do) and come out in an avalanche of meaning all at once (like they do in books). What will each of them do with these? With overwhelming betrayal? With love and longing and loss and everything else? Well, I’m not telling you, but great art pierces because as these characters answer those questions, we are invited to ask the same ones and to answer, what will we?

What will we do?

You’ve been broken by another you trusted, just as I have. We’ve been in love and had our hearts utterly smashed to pieces, we’ve lost (one of the characters says, “No one tells you how gone gone really is, or how long it lasts,” and you feel that in your bones), we’ve missed, we’ve screamed. And now what? What will we do with those?

So then I also just finished another book I was reading at the same time, a very different book, and it has this: “What if it was less important that anything ever gets fixed than that nothing has to be hidden?” And at first that doesn’t make sense (we all really want it fixed), until we think about guilt and shame and the weight of pretending and in that instant, it does.

I don’t think we need tidy, happy endings. We don’t need overproduced songs and engineered foods crafted in a lab. What we do need is flesh, authenticity, tears, blood, laughter, dirt, skin, sweat. We don’t need more lies or secrets or fake plastic images, we need real, pulsing, dynamic, beautiful life. We need grace and love. And we need them right now.

How To

March 23, 2021/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Several years ago, I was working full-time delivering medical equipment, pastoring a new local church, a full-time husband & daddy, and working far more than full-time discovering and becoming who I was/am. Even though I loved all of it, individually, I was teetering on the precipice of a complete breakdown nearly every moment of every day. The illustration that makes sense is of trying to fit a gallon of water into a shot glass.

Eventually, I scaled back the medical delivery to part-time (while still juggling the unholy on call responsibilities, which years later, cause me to shudder. No kidding. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the nightmare of thinking my phone is ringing.) which helped a little, though not as much as was necessary. My life was still a gallon and I was still a shot glass.

Many of my friends have greater capacities than mine, like a tumbler or a Big Gulp. The Angel does, too. Maybe you do. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about this. We all are created differently, different gifts, talents, passions, and different capacities.

It’s entirely probable that my capacity was reduced by the sheer number of should’s inside, like ice cubes filling a glass before one drop of liquid could find room. Wildly important should’s like responsibilities in providing for this family, safety, security, and on and on…then stepping outside, less important should’s like ‘what will people think?!??’ When you devote so much energy and space to the negative loops of b.s. in your head, it leaves very little for elements like purpose, meaning, and life. I needed a push, either out of the boat or back into the cabin, straddling both was tearing me apart.

Then the book How To Be Here, written by Rob Bell, was released. How To Be Here was about quitting your job delivering medical equipment and taking your shot at all of those things that make you feel alive. Among other things, of course.

“Your Ikigai is your reason for being. If you’re like a lot of people, the moment the words path and vocation and calling come into the conversation, let alone a new word like Ikigai, a thousand questions come to mind. Questions about paychecks and responsibility and passion and what you wish you could do if only you didn’t have those bills to pay.”

Maybe the book wasn’t about medical equipment delivery at all, but as I picked it up to reread it today, it sure sounds like it. Books can be like anything, tied to a certain time or event. Like how if you’re a certain age, it’s impossible to hear “Stairway To Heaven” without thinking of school dances full of butterflies and self-consciousness. This book is a very good friend who walked into my life when I was in desperate need like a hurricane, gently rested both hands on my back, whispered in my ear that I could, and then shoved me into a brand new life.

Hardly anything has been easy in the transition, but it has been awesome and I just wanted to thank Rob Bell and my very good friend How To Be Here.

In Working Order

February 1, 2021/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Throughout the months of COVID isolation, like so many others, we have been swimming in screens. We binge watched the entire The Office and fell hopelessly in love with Jim and Pam. All 23 MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movies, even The Incredible Hulk, which almost nobody watches. Now, we’re moving slowly through the Star Wars saga, including the extras like Solo and The Mandalorian. Our commitment to wholeness required us to suffer through the prequels, disappointing then and only marginally less so now. I do love the new ones, especially The Last Jedi. It’s actually my favorite of the films.

As you know, I’m reading, too. I read another Fredrik Backman novella called “And Every Day The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer.” This tiny gem is set inside the head of a man who is suffering from dementia, and losing his memories. Every day the way home to himself and his memories gets longer and longer. Obviously, it’s heartbreaking, but it’s the sort of ache that we need to have form time to time to keep our hearts soft and in working order.

I shouldn’t have read it, not now. You see, there is an unreasonable amount of death and suffering in the circles around me. I could write forever about any of them, but this is the one I will. A man lost his wife, a lovely woman, to cancer a few days ago.

I took him some bread and a card yesterday morning, half hoping he wouldn’t answer the door. (I know that sounds awful, but you know just what I mean.) He didn’t so I left it at the door and left. As I drove away, he passed me in his car. There are certain moments in your life where you see who you were, who you are, and who you are becoming. Usually these transformations happen so slowly we don’t notice. But sometimes we are able to see clearly. I wanted to keep driving. He didn’t see me, I could’ve let my card and bread be enough. I wanted to keep driving even as I was making a u-turn in the street to chase him.

He pulled into his driveway and I followed. We hugged each other, he talked, and when I could stand it no more, we both cried in the front yard.

Some things hit you harder than others. I think I know why this one leveled me the way it did. It was that it was his wife. In the book, he speaks to his deceased wife in his fading mind. And as I sat in that sadness, tears soaking my cheeks, I realized that every love story is our love story. Every lovely wife is my lovely wife. Art is of course about it’s creator but it’s also about everyone else.

Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader matter because fathers and sons matter, specifically, your father, your son, my dad, my son. My dad wasn’t an evil oppressor of galaxies, but we did have issues where I might have wanted him to be something other than what he was, I might have wanted him to see me as who I was, rather than trying to make me into what he wanted, or seduce me to the dark side of the force. As these things tell us a new story, they’re also reading the story of us to us in language we can understand.

My friend and his wife weren’t art, they were real life and real death. But what’s the difference, really? We’re all telling stories with our lives, finding connections in the dark, noticing hidden relationships, and it is in discovering the things that tie us together that real life truly becomes artwork.

Trash

January 28, 2021/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I read a book early this week. I’m not sure I’ll give you the name because it was absolutely awful and I try not to make this a space where I tear anything down. Maybe I will.

It was written by an author I love, who wrote one of my Top 3 books of all time which was made into my favorite movie. I’ve read much of his other work and loved most of that, too. This book I found in the bargain section back when bookstores were still a thing for $5.97. I was pretty ecstatic because once, my house was swallowed by a flood where I lost everything I owned, including the books.

Not the books! I collected lots of different genres. Different translations of the Bible, some very old and with stunning old famous paintings of the stories (like Daniel in the lions den, the sermon on the mount, and David & Goliath.) They were the sort that you would keep forever and pass down through generations. I have 2 now, one a large print that I received as a gift this Christmas. I also had everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote that I could find. You can tell a lot about yourself and the journey you’re on (and if it’s the journey you think you’re on) by the books you read 10 years ago and now, similar to a map or the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation.

This $5.97 discovery sat on a shelf for years. After finishing Bear Town, Us Against You (its sequel) hadn’t yet arrived, so now was a perfect time for this treasure. I devoured it hungrily and, when I was finished, asked the same question I always do when I finish: What was that? It’s asked in various tones and sometimes in different words. Now what do I do with this thing that is now a part of me? I sat, then I walked through the house and to the kitchen, where I threw this book right into the trash.

I don’t think I’d ever done that before. I’d usually take it to the library or a thrift shop to donate or put it on my shelf, but this one is different. I don’t want anyone else to read it, ever.

Maybe putting it in the trash was wrong. It doesn’t feel that good. It feels like I’ve been disrespectful of the time & effort, of his talent and discipline, of his craft, of his creativity, carelessly casting it aside into the garbage heap of history.

You know why I didn’t like it? A major theme of his work is connection. The characters are misfits in a culture that regards them as less than human. They are alone, isolated, lonely, weird, sometimes schizophrenic, and take wildly drastic measures to find others to break those categories and create new tribes or families. Obviously I find beauty in that. Obviously. I am weird, too, often depressed & lonely, looking for connection and belonging.

This book, though, was the inverse. In the beginning, characters were together, in relationships, and the plot separated them. It was super sad. Everybody lost everything and everyone that mattered to them. I expected a shift at the end where we realized how far off track we had gotten, but there was no shift. No redemption. I don’t need a happy ending, but I do need a sliver of hope that all is not lost.

Now that I write that last paragraph, I can see why I had such a visceral reaction. The country I live in is isolated and alone, divided, and I keep waiting for the shift where we all see how far off track we’ve gotten, but there’s just more hate and rage and space between us.

I guess I threw it away because I simply can’t abide a hopeless narrative, either here in real life or on the page, and I don’t want you to, either.

Bears

January 19, 2021/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Last weekend I finished Beartown, a novel written by my new favorite person in the world, Fredrik Backman. It’s difficult to know if you need to post about everything, and you probably shouldn’t, but I can’t seem to tell the difference and we’re friends, so here we go.

Here’s something to know about me: I love depth, complex themes, ambiguity, and don’t mind violence (mostly, I’ll explain in a second) or salty language at all in art. Fight Club and Pulp Fiction are my favorite movies. I’ve relatively recently started drawing lines at sex on screen and that’s simply because I squarely believe it’s not for me. We can talk about that another time, because it’s too big and complicated to drive by. But the violence I mind very much is of the sexual type. I cannot stomach rape or assault in any case or any context. There is a scene in 300 where a person manipulates, coerces someone else’s wife into a nauseating act and now I can never watch that movie (which I liked a lot) ever again. I barely got through it once. With my growing intolerance for this sort of plot device, I’m noticing that it is not an unusual subject in films I now have to avoid.

A possible exception: Carey Mulligan stars in a new film called Promising Young Woman, where she avenges the rape of her best friend and from there goes on to exact retribution on any similar feeling male she happens to find. At least I think it’s about that, and if it is, I’m in. I’m concerned that the initial act would be too much and that there would be a moral at the end where she gets punished. I don’t want her to be punished.

This is the thing about Beartown, the central points the story revolves around are a hockey game and the rape of a 15 year old girl. Once I realized the latter was coming, I cringed and contemplated leaving it unfinished. He’s such a masterful writer, I continued. I still don’t know if I’m sorry that I did.

If you have read anything here before, you’ve probably heard me write about destroying the walls that separate the imaginary divisions of us and them. We’re all just us. I’m empathetic to a fault, can see every side of every move, which makes me very non-judgy, forgiving and accepting. But I just wrote 2 paragraphs earlier that “I don’t want her to be punished.” I want this revenge fantasy to be consequence-free.

Now, of course it’s not. The best friend will endure consequences forever, will probably always be afraid of the dark. But the violators (I recognize that violators are not all male, but the proportions are so skewed, that’s what we’re concerned with) should absolutely face Carey Mulligan’s brand of justice. They should suffer consequences, too, in addition to the hell of being the kind of someone who would steal from another like that.

Now. Last time I wrote that I could be a CIA executioner or capitol rioter. We’re all us, isn’t that what I said? But here, there’s got to be a line here, right? I guess we all have blind spots. This is mine. Maybe I’m not as non-judgy, forgiving, and accepting as I thought.

Where is that line supposed to be, where we can start to scream for justice? In the Psalms, (in the Holy Bible!), writers asked God to bash the babies of their enemies on rocks, among lots of other awful things. Does that mean I can, too? Is that a holy position to take, this bashing on rocks?

I know, I know. It doesn’t mean I can, and it is most certainly not a holy position just because it’s in a holy book. And apparently, as far as I can tell, that line isn’t ideally supposed to be anywhere in our hearts. (That is not to be confused with political/social justice. Sometimes animals… um… sometimes we belong in cages.) I think it’s in that beautiful holy book because we need to acknowledge & examine each honest human emotion. If we are always hiding our trash in basements or corners, we can’t ever take it out.

The reason racism, sexism, nationalism, and any other -ism persists is because we’re too busy pretending there isn’t a monster under the bed. Who knows why my stomach turns at this particular atrocity more than others (that’s probably for a psychologist to figure out), but it does. Sure, it makes me want to do all sorts of things that would land me in prison, but it does make me want to act and as the oft repeated (and oft ignored) Edmund Burke quote goes: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

So. I want to throw up every time any woman is dishonored and something is violently taken that should only be carefully given. I want to completely rework the system in their mercy and favor. I also want to castrate with rusty pliers those that would do the taking. And I also hope & pray to one day (maybe not today, but one day) love the perpetrators like I do the victims. All of these things can be true, and maybe all of these things are holy.

We’re Here

December 22, 2020December 22, 2020/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

“I want someone to know I’m here.” That is the heartache expressed by the title character in the book Britt-Marie Was Here. This is another novel written by Fredrik Backman, which may be a poor choice as I’m still recovering from My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry and The Deal Of A Lifetime.

I read once that if you take LSD, you are never the same as you were before. If you were a 5, you’re not a 5 anymore. That’s how I feel about those books. Like I was cracked wide open and now I’m a permanently different Chad.

Anyway. It’s Christmas in 2020 and on the one hand, we desperately need the hope of Christmas and the birth. On the other, I can’t imagine the despair of another holiday in isolation. This season is usually among the most depressed, presumably because the cold gray short days spent alone against the backdrop of other families gathered around a warm fire. What if I don’t have a family? What if the family I do have is broken? What if there’s 1 less around that fire? What if I don’t have a home, much less a fire? It’s no wonder the depression we barely keep at bay all year gets amplified in November & December.

This Britt-Marie book is about a woman newly single, alone because the husband she has pretended was faithful has been publicly exposed as what she knew he was. She’s kind of awful, but as Backman slowly peels back curtain after curtain, she’s all of us. She wants to be seen, wants to matter to someone.

We’re a culture that largely walks with our heads down, on our way to the next thing, saying “How are you?” as a greeting, but not at all interested in the answer. Even without a global pandemic and quarantine, we had been increasingly disconnected for years. This leaves us like those copper pans where nothing sticks. And we call it survival.

But it’s not. It’s killing us. We’re invisible and we are not meant to be invisible. We are meant to be together, sharing the moments of our lives. We are meant to ask how you are and to wait for the honest answer. We are meant to cry together, to celebrate together.

As I read, the thing that kills me is that I know how many Britt-Marie’s must be in my town, neighborhood, on my street, invisible. And this is a fact that is simply unacceptable. My dream is that we are all seen, accepted. That we all belong. That we are all loved. That the reality of Christmas become a reality in practice, that it’s not just a story of fairy-tale hope we tell in churches on Christmas Eve.

I want someone to know we’re here.

Love With A Capital L

A journey towards living an inspired life of love in the modern world

Tag: books