This is not be the deep, existential pondering you may be used to from me, but it’s what’s on my mind today, as I bounce up and down like a ping-pong ball between table and stove, babysitting that sizzling, never-finished mess in the greasy pan.  Bacon is an exacting taskmaster!  -Rummage through the cupboards, find the right skillet, heat it just so on the stove.  Open the package – an adventure in itself, sometimes – peel that cold, rubbery-slimy stuff apart piece by long stringy piece, put it on a plate lined with paper towel, put the first few pieces into the skillet.  The first satisfying sizzle and that glorious smell are muted by the overwhelming need to IMMEDIATELY scrub all the skin off my hands as my mother’s warnings ring between my ears:  “Don’t touch anything! Don’t leave that on your hands for a minute! Scrub everywhere, under your nails especially! use the hottest water you can stand! use half the soap bottle! scrub more! more! you’ll get worms and die!”  

most of my mother’s admonitions seemed to end in “…and die.”  But I digress.  Back to the bacon, sizzling in the pan.  Now I embark on a delicate process:  watching over it until it’s cooked to that exact, oh-so-thin middle ground between “you’ll-get-worms-and-die,” and “blackened, thermonuclear, inedible little piles of tooth-breaking soot.”  Sometimes I get it right; most times I end up with an end product that is somewhere slightly on one side or the other of the spectrum.  Sometimes on the same piece of bacon.  And then there is the grease.  Bacon smells wonderful; bacon grease does not.  Rummage again in the cupboard under the sink, pull out the current grease jar, put it in the sink.  Carefully, so as not to get third-degree burns (“…and die”), I bring the greasy skillet from stovetop to sink and pour out the grease into the jar.  Wipe the edge of the skillet quickly with a paper towel.  Then back to the stove for the next few pieces and the next frantic handwashing and the next delicate babysitting.  Lather, rinse, repeat, until the package is all cooked.  All this just so Son and I (and the Young Man, whom Daughter has lately drawn to us) can each have a couple of pieces.  The rest goes in the fridge for later microwaving as desired.

At this point, someone might sensibly ask:  “Well, Einstein, why dontcha just buy microwave bacon in the first place?”  -I have.  And it is much easier – faster, less messy.  If I have to feed a small army quickly, it’s definitely the way to go.  But it just doesn’t taste REAL to me.  Too hard, too flat, too same in taste and texture.  There are no bumps or ridges, no crannies for that delicious drop of melted fat to go.  There is no…personality.  Even going to a decent restaurant for breakfast and enjoying their yummy, non-microwaved bacon isn’t quite the same as going through the effort to cook it myself.  Restaurant bacon is usually close to perfect, but I don’t make perfect; I make real. 

Real tastes good.

Now comes the time when the theory is tested.  Husband and I have tried to raise both of them to think carefully and ‘want what they get’.  Yes, substances can make you feel very good, but they can also kill you.  Yes, you can prevent pregnancy and STDs, but you can’t prevent the emotional fallout.  Yes, unchaperoned parties are a lot of fun, but police station holding cells are not, and date rape drugs are real.  In a world where infinite choices exist, together with infinite possibilities of consequence ranging from ‘none’ to ‘death’, we have done our best and are still doing our best to help them think for themselves…and to let them know that, if they choose poorly, we will still love them and work it through with them as best we can.   I don’t buy into a religion of blind obedience and fear, so I guess it’s natural that I wouldn’t parent that way either.  But it’s difficult not to second-guess myself now that the theory is at the testing point.  Should I have held the reins tighter all along?

My instincts are right 98 percent of the time; the other 2 percent I don’t like to talk about; and in this, especially, God, let this be within the 98.  The garden gate is open and the angel with the flaming sword, whose name is Adulthood, is moving in fast.   May we have given them what they need to walk in the world beyond.

Be clear here:   I don’t mean modern-day identified Pagans.  I respect them as I respect the followers of any other religion.  No, by ‘heathens’ I mean morons like these, who have turned this season into an excuse for an all-out disgusting greedfest.  Or morons like these, who, not content with asking Christians to reasonably shove over a bit and share, feel the need to cross-check Jesus out of the picture entirely.  Nothing says “celebrate the light in the darkness” like lawsuits and fistfights, right? 

Christians aren’t off the hook, either.  This season’s  ’heathens’ include a horde of self-identified Christians who will scream ‘Merry CHRISTMAS!!!‘ at anyone who wishes them happy holidays.  Not helping, folks, not helping.

Either I’m getting grumpier or this season’s getting uglier.  Maybe both.  In any event, I have decided that this is the year I’m Taking It Back.  Avoiding the retail madness and bombardier advertising as much as humanly possible, I’m taking it back 2000 years – letting the heathens have the modern season, and moving to more ancient rhythms.    Night, Star.  Wind, Song.  Despair, Hope.   Past, Present, Future.   Holy.  Baby. 

As poet Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “This is all there is and this is everything.”  The mess and the madness are still there when I open my eyes, but somehow, they’re a whole lot less There than they were. 

Blessed Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Kwanzaa, Enjoy Your Holidays, or insert your own greeting here.  For me, it’s a blessed and blessing Advent.

November.  In a cold rain.  I don’t like it.  Today I grump and slump through my have-to’s like a sullen child:  “I don’ wanna get up, I don’ wanna go to work, I don’ wanna do this stuff, I don’ wanna go to my appointment, I don’ wanna go home, I don’ wanna take out the garbage, I don’ wanna go to sleep, I don’ wanna do anything, go away, leave me alone!”  Yet this is the appointed season for Thanksgiving.   And in some odd, inexpressible way, it seems like the right season.  After Halloween, before Christmas, as the growing season winds down and the resting season begins. 

In two days’ time I will attempt my first solo Thanksgiving dinner, including a turkey breast.  (I refuse, just refuse, to stick my hand in an actual, somewhat-recognizable turkey).  I will gather with my small little family around my rickety old table in my funky old house, and I will give thanks.    For surviving the previous twelve months, I will give thanks.  For friends and family who’ve come through in stunning and humbling ways, I will give thanks.  For having enough, I will give thanks.  For a God who hears what’s wanted and instead grants what’s needed, I will give thanks.   For healing begun and wholeness ahead, I will give thanks. 

Even in November.  In a cold rain. 

Well, last time I’d sketched out the two schools of theodicy most often heard in Christian circles:  the ‘tapestry’ model, which says that everything good and bad is a part of God’s plan, and the ‘loving-parent’ model, which says that God means for the bad things in our lives to make us better and holier people.  Both work, to an extent, and many people take great comfort in one or the other or both.  There are other schools of thought on the matter:  one says that if bad things happen to you it’s because you have sinned somehow, whether you realize it or not.  (Correlationally, I suppose, good things happen to you because you have been righteous, so I must have done something righteous to deserve this unusually good cup of coffee here beside me!)  Other Christians step outside the bounds of traditional thought and quietly harbor the belief either that God is either all-loving but not quite all-powerful, or all-powerful but not quite always all-loving.  Doesn’t have the official stamp of approval on it, but for many, it works. 

Like I said, in the end we each need to find something that works for us and go with it.  Me, I don’t believe God deliberately sends bad things our way.   We live in a somewhat chaotic and violent Creation where death and life are inextricably linked and primal forces without and within us are always crashing and colliding and, harsh but true, it just isn’t always about us and we can’t expect to go through life in a small sunny bubble of eternal May when nothing and no one else in the universe does.  We can wish it so, but as I often said to my kids when they were younger and wanted the whole toy department for Christmas:  “you can WANT anything you want, but don’t expect to get it all.” 

For me, when bad things come (and boy do they ever), I react.  I cry; I rage; I withdraw; I ask “Why, God, why?”  …but I don’t do that forever.  Because, ultimately, I find it less useful to ask God, “Why?”, and more useful to ask God, “What do I do with this? What can I learn? Where do I go from here?” 

In the end, there’s really no one-size-fits-all answer to the problem of evil.  When it comes to us, and come it will, we simply have to sit in the ruins and weep for awhile – an hour, a week, several years, it all depends.  some evils hit us harder than others.  but eventually, the time will come when we will have to choose:  do we stay there, weeping in the ruins? do we take the advice of Job’s wife, “curse God and die?” -or do we get up, take what we need, leave the rest, and move forward?

Why do bad things happen?  -Thanks be to God for giving us the option of living out our own answer.

I never meant to have such an American, Type-A life.  When younger, I’d watch people running running running like this – always on the go to that next appointment, unable to sit for two minutes in their house without jumping up to clean something, playing the role of Rabbit in their own little Hundred Acre Wood.  I’d think to myself:  “I don’t want to live like that!”  -It creeps in, insidious like mold and just as hard to get rid of.  By the time I realize I’m in it, it’s hard to get out.   There are things I have to do.  There are things I like to do.  There is rest I need to have.  There is a balance to it all that I have yet to strike, entirely. 

Today I woke up with a desire to blog a bit.  I sat down and fired up the laptop.  Behind me, a faint rose-gold glow.  If I got up to open the curtains I’d see the town and the far-off hills, painted in blues and violets, with the river running rainbow through it.  “No time,” I thought at first, “I’m busy relaxing!”  With my back to the rising sun, I kept on clicking.  Then my wiser, older voice spoke up:  Dumbass, you’re missing the point.  I got up.  I looked out the window.  I saw the town and the far-off hills, painted in blues and violets, with the river running rainbow through it.  I saw the sky turning rose and light blue and soft gold.  I heard the deep silence and sensed my plants thanking me for opening the darned curtains for once, already.  Thanking my wiser older voice, I smiled and returned to the laptop.  Thought about it a minute.  Pulled Son’s surprisingly-comfortable computer-gaming floor-rocking-chair thingie over and around.  Took the laptop and sat down in it so that my face, not back, was to the rising sun.  And I’m seeing my living room in, literally, a whole new light, as the sun comes through windows and light plays with shadow and the ailing plants shine and rejoice, full sun! full sun at last!  and the books on the coffee table and the skein of rainbow yarn on the endtable, the candles, the scattered blankets,  pillows, rugs, the Critters sleeping and padding silently through rooms and chattering at birds outside…all these little things that make home Home, all these little things I run so hard to keep but don’t take nearly enough time to truly enjoy.

Of course, I see dust on the windowsill, and a smudge on the window, and a white cat hair sticking up off the back of the couch, and walls still only half-painted and a floor that needs refinished, eventually, eventually.   But somehow, these things don’t matter so much to me today.  Thanks be to God for turning me around with my face to the rising sun.

If you can manage to dig through the rhetoric, you’ll read that some people did tell, and told early.  The initial witness.   A few people up the chain of command, including – possibly, it depends which reports you believe – the famous guy who just lost his job over this.  And, in at least one case, it’s reported that the mother of one of the victims reported it to police. 

And still, still nothing was done.  For years and years and years, nothing was done.   Same as nothing was done in the clergy sex abuse scandal.  Same as nothing was or is done in neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood, family after family after family.  And it’s that fact, lost in the firestorm of the current public scandal, that drags at my soul today and drives my need to speak. 

In my four-and-change decades on Earth and my dozen-and-change years in ministry, I’ve heard a lot of stories from the neighborhood and family level.  I’ve been amazed by the courage of survivors.  I’ve been horrified by what they’ve survived.  I’ve read literature on the subject – some of it helped, much of it angered, and some of it just plain depressed me – as in the book that basically said abused boys were doomed to have miserable lives and most likely become abusers themselves.  Not one I’d recommend to the mother referenced above. 

And, in nearly every single story, I’ve learned another answer to the broadly-asked question,  “Why doesn’t anybody tell?”  Let me give you a mash-up – culled and generalized beyond all individual recognition, because I obviously can’t and won’t break confidences – of what happens when an ordinary kid gets molested. 

First, someone molests the child.  Sometimes it’s a stranger, usually it’s someone the child at least knows in passing, but most times it’s someone the child has come to know and trust.  The line is crossed, the act is committed.  Maybe violently, causing the child tremendous shock and fear and pain.  Or maybe subtly, progressing from normal and natural affection into territory the child feels is not quite right but can’t be sure.  Either way, when the line is crossed, the adult will inevitably command the child:  Don’t Tell.  “Let this be our little secret, okay?”  “Don’t tell your Mommy or Daddy, or they’ll be mad at you.”  “You don’t have anyone, nobody cares about you.”  ”If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you, and your little sister too.”    There are powerful reasons why a child doesn’t tell.

Sometimes, though, the child does tell.  Or an adult happens to witness.  Somehow, the parent or parents find out.  Many parents will drop it right then and there:  they won’t want to believe it, or their own shock and denial kick in – “we’ll just make sure you don’t play over there again, and it’ll be okay”.  Or their situation makes them fear reprisal, and in many situations that fear is founded.  There are powerful reasons why parents don’t tell.

But sometimes, the parent – or a teacher, or a counselor, or some other mandated reporter – does tell.  They go to the police or to the local child welfare agencies, which is what good citizens are supposed to do.   And sometimes…sometimes…the authorities get it right.  But, as will surprise no one who’s actually attempted to do this, usually they don’t.  They’ll question the child right in front of the abuser.  They’ll take the children into protective custody but later return them to the abuser’s care.  They’ll hand the accused court documents with the mandated reporter’s name and even address right on them, despite assurances of anonymity.   (There are powerful reasons why even mandated reporters don’t tell.)  They’ll even send child welfare workers to inspect the reporting parent’s home and question the other children in the house:  “Do your parents beat you?”  “Do you get enough to eat?”   You think it couldn’t happen, but I assure you, it can and it does. 

And don’t even get me started on the media, who, for all their stated efforts to “protect the anonymity of the victims”, still blow the victims’ and reporters’ cover ninety-nine times out of a hundred by naming the accused.  The accused don’t live in a vacuum.  People live in community, know who interacts with whom, and know how to put two and two together.   I tell you, there are powerful reasons why victims and their adults don’t tell.

But, despite all the pressure not to tell, somebody tells.  Authorities act.  And even if they do manage to avoid the abovementioned blunders and get it right, the reprisals begin.  The accuser is questioned, the case is built.  If there isn’t enough to go on – as there often is not, being word vs. word, no witnesses and no physical evidence – the authorities will refuse to prosecute.  If there is enough to go on and a prosecution begins, the child and family are thrust into the bewildering world of ‘court’, where the lights are too bright and the seats are too hard and a lot of strangers ask embarrassing questions and they start to feel like they’ve caused a lot of people a lot of trouble and maybe if no one had told, they could be home playing video games now instead of going through all this and having everybody mad at them. 

Because, outside the bewildering world of court, that’s exactly what’s happening.  They have told, and somebody is mad at them.   Those not in the know might say:  “Who in the world would be mad at an innocent victim for bringing a monster to justice?”   Let’s see… well, first, there’d be the accused.  Frightened, embarrassed, exposed, they will do anything at all in their power to discredit and intimidate the accuser.  Second, and this flies in the face of our culture’s stereotypical idea of child molesters as dirty old lone-wolf men in trenchcoats, there’d be the accused’s family and friends and colleagues.  Remember this well:  most abusers are known to teh child.  They come from within the child’s own family, or neighborhood, or church, or school, or parent’s workplace.  Many are powerful, well-loved, well-connected people.  And which is easier for most people to believe:  that this irreproachable person whom they love and respect  could have actually done such a hideous thing?  -or that the child/parent is making things up?   What if one of the urchins from that disreputable house down the street was accusing your beloved former English teacher? Which would you rather believe? 

Whether the case ever goes to trial or not, whether the abuser is convicted or not, and if convicted jailed or not, in each case the genie is out of the bottle, and the consequences rain down on just and unjust alike.  For the accused, stern consequences if convicted and a lifelong cloud of suspicion even if not convicted.  I’m not saying they get off scot-free.  I’m also not saying that the victim and family receive no support whatsoever; they do.  But, no matter how loved, believed, or supported, the victim and family will still, inevitably, and always carry a stigma of their own, because they are the ones who Broke The Peace.  They are the ones who told… and it’s not the abuse itself  but the tellingof it that Broke That Peace, divided that church, disrupted that neighborhood, disgraced that school, devasted that family.  And even after the firestorm dies down and life returns to something resembling normal, they will spend a lifetime looking over their shoulders.  What isn’t known only hurts one person; what is known, still hurts them, and everybody else as well.

The human animal seems wired to desire justice, yet prefer the absence-of-conflict that we call peace.  To desire the right thing, yet prefer the easy path.  To sympathize with the victimized, yet prefer to do so in past rather than present tense.  “So sorry that happened to you (and thank goodness it happened thirty years ago and the abuser is dead now so I don’t have to report anything)”.  And so, without even realizing it, we create a culture where victims are told not to tell and punished if they do.  This the secondary violation, and for many it’s worse than the first; because it’s not carried out by one or a few sick individuals.  It’s carried out by people who are doing their jobs, standing by friends and family, being loyal to their community, and abiding by the current laws of the land – in short, people who are doing the things we consider normal and acceptable and right. 

“Why didn’t anybody tell?”  Better to ask ourselves, in light of all this, Why does anybody tell?!?

-Because they’re brave as heaven.  That’s why.  Thanks be to God for folks who’ve had the courage to tell.

Earlier this evening, however, Dog was especially anxious to get outside.  “Gottago Gottago Gottago Gottago RIGHT NOW!” -she begged and waggled.  And in her eagerness, after the whoooshh, she forgot to wait for the shhhnick before charging toward the backyard.  Whumpff! -boioioinnngg…Dog rebounded off the screen which she had tried to run through.  She looked up at me, shaking her head a little.  What just happened??? something was in her way that never was there before! Rather bewildered, she made her way through the doorway after the shhhnick and did her business. 

And then, because Dog is really quite smart as dogs go, she came back to the doorway…but refused to come back in.  Even though both doors were wide open and waiting, even though I was standing right there cajoling and encouraging her -  “Come on, it’s okay, come on! Geeze, Dog, come on!” – she took her good sweet time coming back through that open door.  Prancing.  Tail half-wagging, nervous, apologetic.  Sniffing all around the door frame.  Finally putting one cautious paw through the opening.  She wanted to go through.  Needed to.  Hundreds and hundreds of times she’d gone through just fine, so why the fear?  -but it took her some time to overcome that fear, as strong as it was new.  Something unexpected had smacked her in the face, you see, and she wasn’t about to get fooled twice.  Even if it meant standing out in the dark and the cold. 

Laugh as we might, in our own way we do the same thing.

Like I said, I have a taste for the occasional bad movie.  What I don’t have a taste for is bad theodicy, and there was plenty of that in the movie too.  Theodicy, according to dictionary.com, is defined as  “a vindication of the divine attributes, particularly holiness and justice, in establishing or allowing the existence of physical and moral evil.”  Or, in plainer terms, “trying to explain why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.”  Christianity, and evangelical Christianity in particular, has an especially tough dance with theodicy because of the twin belief that God is both all-powerful and all-loving.  This belief sounds great on paper (so did Communism), but quickly takes a few hits in a world that has no lack of both natural and human-made disasters.  “If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then why did my loved one die of cancer? why do 29,000 children die every day of preventable causes? why did that earthquake collapse the school but spare the sweatshop?”

Christian-flavored theodicy, as a typical believer hears/understands it, generally falls into two broad categories.   One, sometimes called the ‘tapestry’ model, claims that all the good and bad in our lives/world weave together with everything else to form a perfect Big Picture too vast for us to comprehend.  “It’s all a part of God’s Plan.”  The other, sometimes called the ‘loving parent’ model, claims that God knows what is truly good for us and sometimes sends bad stuff as an unpalatable but necessary ingredient in our overall growth toward spiritual perfection.  This model can quickly evolve (or devolve) into a Divine-Judgement model, i.e., “God let 9/11 happen because we are a Wicked, Wicked Nation.” 

Both models work in some cases - most of us can recall any number of times when a bad thing turned out to be the best thing – and neither model works in all cases.   The same can be said for other, lesser-known theodicies such as process theology and the theology of the intentionally-self-limiting God.  In the end, every one of us has to find an answer we can live with.  More on this next post…

And then…then comes After.  It hits a lot of people, After does.  Some break down and cry, some get very anxious or angry, some have trouble concentrating or sleeping, and some even develop full-blown PTSD.  Me, I go into a long, shadowy depression.  Leaving a well-developed autopilot to function in my place – since I don’t want anyone to follow me where I’m going – I step alone onto a lonely raft and let my own underground rivers take me deep down into myself.  To the chambers where silence and darkness are both absolute, nothing and no one can bother me, and even God is kind enough to wait outside the entrance until I’m ready to come back out.  

Weirdly enough, my times of After don’t just come after times of crisis; sometimes, they come after extreme high points in my life as well.  I remember quite clearly the summer of 2002, when I graduated seminary with honors (and with totally-unexpected awards for preaching and scholarship), and was subsequently ordained and called to serve a shining jewel of a church.  Heady stuff for an eight-week time period! And yet, to my dismayed surprise, I found myself trapped for months in that shadowland of After, while my autopilot ministered and mothered in my place. 

As my ministry progressed, I learned that the same basic cycle even happened in same-day miniature:  the letdown after a particularly good worship service, the long nap needed after a morning funeral, the brief-but-strong melancholy after a wedding or a baptism.   And now that I minister in other ways, I find that the basic cycle holds true.  Engagement, disengagement.   Involvement, detachment.  Achievement, exhaustion.  “You ebb and flow – it’s in your nature,” my therapist once remarked.  Like Elijah, who ran like hell from an angry queen – and, perhaps, from his own terrifying success – I hit that point where I’m just done, and I have to stop, and the boat and the river block my path, and there’s nothing to do but get on and go into After. 

It’s not an entirely bad place to be, though.  The darkness and silence comfort after all that frenetic Doing.  Angels brush through, bringing what’s needed.  There’s a still small voice that’s easier to hear.  And when the falling-apart inevitably happens, there’s a subtle, windless wind that nudges the pieces back together – usually, stronger and more whole than they were before.