Easter

After a warm and sunny week in Austin (despite forecasts to the contrary), Easter in Tyler, Texas dawned…rainy and cool! It actually started pouring long before sunrise, and didn’t let up until mid-afternoon—after which showers continued intermittently. But I had a great view out the window at a beautiful state park. Good weather for reflection.

My journey began last Easter—50 weeks ago. A couple people recently asked how the trip has affected me. “In every conceivable way,” would be a fair answer. But an equally honest reply—and the one I gave both times—was that the trip hasn’t changed me. It has softened me. I don’t take myself quite as seriously. Being open is more important than being right. And things that used to mean a lot (both opinions and possessions) are less consequential now.

More than anything, the journey has reinforced a long-held view that people (even the ones with whom I don’t agree) are fundamentally good. I believe that evil actions are generally rooted in ignorance, fear and pain, not malice. What goes around eventually comes around—in this lifetime. And while we could certainly be doing a better job of caring for each other, I continue to find kind hearts beneath even the gruffest human exteriors.

Another common question: What’s the most surprising discovery? That’s easy. Since the earliest weeks, I’ve been astonished by the number of people for whom the name “God” restricts the experience of God. And there are two distinct camps.

In the first group are those such as my friend, Tinker, who struggle not only with the concept of “God,” but who are equally averse to “words like ‘Divine,’ ‘Belief’ and ‘Miracle.’” The terms, as Tinker explained, conjure a disdain for the (often irrational) dogma many were “force-fed” as children. Members of this group frequently characterize themselves as agnostic or atheist. While they shy away from religion, some retain a vigorous spirituality.

Ironically, the second camp is comprised exclusively of avid believers. They are completely at ease with the word, “God.” In fact, they claim to know exactly what God is, looks like, and requires of us. Unfortunately, their definition of God is so narrow that they have a hard time conceiving the Divine’s infinite manifestations. Such rigid clarity sets up a false dichotomy, placing God apart from rather than part of us. More importantly, it stands in the way of encountering God as surprise, as wonder, as mystery. And what is God if not Ultimate Mystery?

I think of Yvonne, a Jamaican woman working at a small café in Long Key, Florida. Raised Catholic and now an Episcopal congregant, she characterized life as an “ongoing battle between God and the devil.” To God, she attributes all the good and seemingly miraculous occurrences (including the time her truck broke down in the Keys and a speeding cab driver got her to the Miami airport just in time to catch a plane for her wedding in the Cayman Islands). I didn’t ask for specifics about the devil’s doings—but the force clearly loomed as one to be reckoned with. How disorienting it must be, I thought, to be bounced back and forth between such fiercely opposing powers on a daily basis. And isn’t it amazing how that construct reduces God to a human creation, rather than vice-versa?

During a phone conversation on Easter Eve, Susanne told me about the annual re-enactment of Good Friday by a Catholic community in the Philippines. What distinguishes the drama is the fact that a number of people are actually crucified. Real people. Real crosses. Real nails. Adherents refer to the gruesome display as a show of faith. I think it’s insane. “Why do people continue to literally carry the cross,” asked Susanne, “when Jesus came to show us how to carry the Light?”

When it comes to shining a light on God, I appreciate a reference made by a Native American jet boat guide in the Everglades. Fabio is a Miccosukee Indian—part of the Seminole nation. At one point during our 90-minute ride, he explained that his people refer to God as the “Breath Maker.” When I asked why, he replied, “We know from evolution how things got here. But we don’t know how breath came.”

Such grace and poetry underscore the potential of Easter. We miss the point if we limit Easter to the celebration of a resurrection that occurred more than 2,000 years ago. The one who was raised asked others to follow his lead. In that light, Easter is an invitation to each of us—to crawl out of our own suffocating tombs, to rise from our own waking stupors, and to set our sights not on some distant heaven, but on this earthly paradise that beckons for our stewardship.

Contrary to its common application, “Christ” is not the surname of a man named Jesus. Rather, it’s a force that Jesus embodied. And it’s also a reference to and reminder of the glowing spark of divinity within—an energy of love—accessible to anyone who embraces it. “Christ” is light. Is it rising in you?

(Eureka Springs, AR)

Humility

One of the more spirited characters I’ve met in the South is “Jacky” Jack White—a songwriter and recording artist who doubles as a Church of Christ minister. We met for dinner at the historic Weidmann’s Restaurant in Meridian, Mississippi on February 23.

How he came to be known as “Jacky Jack” is one of many colorful anecdotes and opinions he shared over the course of our three-hour visit.

“Jacky,” he explained, was a spur-of-the moment inspiration. It came to him more than 30 years ago, seconds before he was to take the stage for his first solo concert.

“How do you want to be introduced?” the emcee asked.

Suddenly cognizant that his musical idol, Jerry Lee Lewis, had three names, he spontaneously added “Jacky” to “Jack White”—and he’s been “Jacky Jack” ever since. Through the years, he’s written hit songs for several country music stars, including Ray Stevens and Charley Pride. He currently directs and hosts the Sucarnochee Revue & Record Company, a monthly musical variety show in Meridian.

“Did you know,” Jacky tested, “What state has the most Grammy awards per capita?” I did not. “Mississippi,” he claimed proudly.

While music pays the bills, Jacky is equally animated about his spiritual calling—as the minister to a small local congregation.

“So, you’re lookin’ fer God?” he asked, amused at the nature of my yearlong quest. “Did you know,” he smiled, “that God’s lookin’ fer you?”

Such light-spirited quips were sprinkled throughout the earnest exploration of faith that consumed both our meal and subsequent walking tour of the town. Though our spiritual dispositions differ, the dialogue was both pleasant and candid.

At one point—wanting to probe his pastoral leanings—I mentioned that, while driving through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, I couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming number of billboards promoting adult superstores. A friend had humorously ventured that “the stores were for Saturday nights and the churches for Sunday mornings!”

Jacky didn’t hide his perception of people—including himself—as inherently “sinful.” But he takes consolation in the Divine’s infinite mercy.

“Ya know what I love about God?” he explained enthusiastically. “He keeps on fergivin’ me. And he keeps on fergettin’! That’s what I love!”

As a “man of God,” Jacky alluded to certain moral “abominations”—a view he likely sensed I didn’t share. Regardless, he didn’t belabor the point. And he quickly qualified it—in a way that caught me pleasantly off guard.

“Do you want to know the greatest abomination?” he reflected. “The greatest abomination is pride.”

Appreciating the implicit tempering of any judgmental tendency, I asked him how he manages to align his values and his faith.

He talked of how, in times of trouble, fasting helps him refocus, and “live in the presence of God.”

“Isn’t it funny,” I responded, “how people always turn to God when things are bad?” Jacky laughed. “What I want to know is how you stay aligned during the good times?”

“There is a key,” he replied, his eyes twinkling. “But I don’t have it,” he added with a self-deprecating grin. “It’s humility!”

If, as Jacky asserts, the greatest abomination is pride—and if, as he likewise suggests, the key to living in alignment is humility, then shouldn’t any conversation about faith be colored by the utmost respect for and appreciation of different beliefs? Shouldn’t our attitude about God be characterized by the ultimate humility? Shouldn’t we be able to acknowledge that—no matter what we’ve been told or taught or read in the Bible—we do not and cannot know the will of God? And consequently, as it relates to our “understanding” of God, wouldn’t we be better off not imposing what we don’t know on others?

What did I learn from Jacky Jack White? I learned that it’s not only possible, but enjoyable to disagree about matters of faith. It’s not only possible, but entertaining to explore different ways and means of approaching God. It’s not only possible, but relatively easy to remain civil, respectful, courteous, and honest, even when your theological orientations might seem irreconcilable. If we stay humble.  

In his book, Taking Flight, Anthony De Mello writes, “It is not the diversity of our dogmas but our dogmatism that does the damage. Thus, if each of us did what we are firmly persuaded is the will of God the result would be utter chaos. Certainty is the culprit. The spiritual person knows uncertainty.”

I like uncertainty. I also like the humble way Jacky summed up the ongoing human search for God. “It’s all about openin’ up,” he concluded. “It’s all about openin’ up.”

What would happen if we all just opened up?

(Austin, TX)

Light

To lead a spiritual life does not mean you are always in the light. – Gay Luce

After an unusually wet, gray winter, the sun has once again returned to the South. And with the recent onset of Daylight Savings Time, I’m really enjoying the added light.

As I’ve journeyed through the country (and through life), I’ve grown more and more grateful for light. And I’m partial to both its literal and figurative glow.

Wanda Battle is one of many people who’ve illumined the South for me. An African-American woman who grew up in the heat of the civil rights era, Wanda now conducts tours of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—where Martin Luther King served as pastor during the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. I visited the church in mid February.

Shepherding a group of a dozen whites (mostly from northern states), Wanda began by asking us to hold hands and join her in singing, “This Little Light of Mine.” An hour later, she concluded with a request that we link hands again, this time for “We Shall Overcome” (during which a guy from Minnesota added amazing harmony). Her final words were both a tribute to God and a challenge to us: “Lord, we are your hands now,” she prayed reverently, “we are your heart, we are your presence in the world…”

That same evening, I encountered—for the first time—what everyone said to expect in the South: the unwavering insistence on a single path to God—through Jesus. “The only way to the Father is through me,” the woman professed, citing her King James Bible.  And because the words were in red, she maintained, they came straight from Jesus.

Sensing the futility of a Biblical debate, yet still wishing to engage the woman, I told her about a Hindu man I met in Bali, and his observation that God has many names and takes many forms.

“God bless him,” she said, with a hint of sarcasm. “But good luck gettin’ to heaven.”

Swallowing hard, but not ready to end what was a genuine and civil dialogue, I asked if she had children. “Two,” she said proudly.

Pointing to a door in the room where we were sitting, I asked, “Would you ever tell your children that the only way they could get to you was through that door? That they couldn’t reach you any other way?”

“No,” she replied, not batting an eye.

“And even though you,” I continued, “a mere human, would offer your children any number of entries to you, you mean to tell me that God would restrict us to but one approach?”

“That’s what I believe,” she repeated, apparently unable to get around the red print. This time, however, her tone was softer—more childlike than smug.

By contrast, I stayed for a night in Opelika with Jennifer and Tyler Monday. I’d met them three years ago, when my daughter, Kate, and son-in-law, Will, were living in Alabama. They attend a non-denominational Christian church—and faith is central to their lives.

As Jennifer shared, “Our faith gives us a sense of being loved unconditionally—that we don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to feel ashamed about slipping; God pursues us harder than we pursue God.”

Like many Southerners, both Jennifer and Tyler speak openly of a “personal relationship with God through Jesus.” Yet they also experience God most vividly in nature. And while they take their Bible studies seriously, they sense that God’s unconditional love isn’t restricted to Christians.

Why, I wondered, do people like Wanda, Jennifer, and Tyler glow so radiantly, while others so confidently assert that our access to “Divine Light” is limited to a single door?

I can’t answer that. I just know what rings true for me. And what doesn’t.

Most people, I’ve found, desire a spiritual practice for life. Unfortunately, what many accept is a prescription for behavior that’s more focused on guaranteeing the after-life. And while such belief systems satisfy an urge for certainty, they make it considerably harder to appreciate the Eternal Light that envelops us right here on earth—whether or not the sun is shining.

I’m savoring a book of daily reflections by Jeff Brown called, Love it Forward.  “Every path,” Brown concludes, “is a path to God. We just have to remember to open our hearts again, and again…”

If one acknowledges God, then God’s light must be perpetual. As Gay Luce so wisely observes, not even the most spiritual among us always abide in its glow. But the opening of our hearts to that light, again and again, remains both an opportunity—and choice—every moment, every day.

(Austin, TX)

Beyond religion

I found myself driving through Plains, Georgia on February 16—President’s Day. So I decided to stop at the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site, which is actually a converted grade school. Turned out I missed the former president and first lady—who spoke and signed books there—by less than two hours.

Even though I didn’t get to meet the town’s famous son, I did enjoy a documentary about his life. I was struck by the observation of a long-time neighbor. “Jimmy Carter,” the man reflected, “ is not a ‘religious’ person—but a person of faith. He lives what he believes.”

If I’ve been surprised by anything in the South, it’s the force with which that distinction—between “religion” and “faith”—has been voiced.

A few weeks earlier, my friend, Stephen and I were chatting with the couple seated next to us in the bar at Michael’s Restaurant in Key West, Florida. I don’t recall what prompted it, but at one point Stephen asked Kelly and Vern if they were religious.

“No, not really,” Kelly replied nonchalantly. “We love everyone and don’t judge anyone. We’re not religious.”

Don’t get me wrong. The sheer number of churches in the region attests to the fact that people aren’t completely abandoning the pews (as has already occurred in Europe and is increasingly being documented by studies of religious practice here). But I’ve stumbled across a number of people who, despite deep spiritual convictions, are distancing themselves from the traditions in which they were raised. The leave-taking crosses denominational lines. And while the reasons are varied, the ones I’ve heard most often fall into the broad categories of politics and relevance.

Joe grew up Catholic in Montgomery, Alabama. A series of family medical crisis increased his sensitivity to the plight of “people in tough circumstances,” and decreased his need for “absolutes.” “But I didn’t leave the church,” he mused. “The church left me.”

Jay, a former Presbyterian minister, gradually tired of the bickering he couldn’t seem to avoid as a pastor. At the same time, he began to find Christianity limiting, especially as it painted the human relationship with God.

When attempting to fathom God, Jay asks three questions: “First comes the ‘What’? Then comes the ‘So what’? But the really important part is the ‘Now what’?”

“Most churches,” in his estimation, “generally address the first question and sometimes the second. But they do a poor job with the third.”

“What do we do with our experience and understanding of God?” Jay challenged. “How do we apply it to our lives?”

I found an interesting answer in the person of Buddy Moody, a cattle rancher in Poplarville, Mississippi who shares Jay’s aversion to church politics.

“A lot of people have had bad experiences with religion,” Buddy volunteered when we met in late February. “They gotta heal up from that.” Then he proceeded to describe the formation of a faith community on his family farm—a community that transcends the institutional constraints he and others can no longer abide.

I come from a traditional Baptist upbringing. But I had friends who didn’t feel welcome in the church. So, I’d just meet up with ‘em. At one point, I decided to start a Bible study in my barn. We’d meet on Sunday nights. We never said we was gonna have church. We just kept meetin’. And more and more people kept coming. That’s been 10 years now… We call it the ‘Barn Church.’ ANYBODY is welcome—and they all know it. We don’t have a checklist—that they gotta get everything right. There’s a wide range of people who come. We have senators and folks in rehab. There are no committees, there’s no order of service, no offering. But some incredible worship happens.

“Worship”—which includes both food and fellowship—takes place in the family’s open-air barn on Sunday mornings and evenings, and at a livestock auction building in a nearby town on Wednesday evenings. It includes music, personal “testimony” (life experiences shared by participants), and spontaneous preaching by a young cattle rancher named Jeff.

I had a chance to see “The Barn Church” in action—on a Tuesday. And while, at one point, I noticed a few people gathered in prayer, what I witnessed over the course of several hours was some incredible service. Emergency food (which is distributed at least once a week) was being handed out by volunteers to dozens of families—because, as Buddy put it, “People need to eat—and not just on Thanksgiving and Christmas!” Donated furniture and appliances stored in another part of the barn go out as quickly as they come in. Buddy’s phone rang about every 15 minutes—alternating almost miraculously between callers needing help and others wishing to lend a hand. And prisoners in the area receive regular visits, as well as weekly postcards that are signed by everyone at the Sunday meetings. Whenever people are having a hard time, Buddy explained,

We just take up a collection and get what’s needed to those in need. Because of some of the things we’ve experienced, we have a real appreciation for the struggles of others. There’s nothin’ special about us. A huge part of what we do is just lovin’ on people—love ‘em and not enable ‘em.

Buddy introduced me to Jeff—the Barn Church preacher—describing him as “a man of God who knows the Word.” Jeff, too, is disappointed by the failure of institutional religion to address the pressing needs of people—and to encourage the direct experience of God. “The further God throwed me from traditional, mundane religion, the better,” he laughed. Then he added seriously, “One of the greatest disconnects in the church is from the front side of the microphone to the back side of the pews.”

Buddy’s wife, Robin, captured the spirit of Barn Church members. “We’re not religious,” she observed thoughtfully, “but we have a relationship with Jesus that makes all the difference in the world. It’s all about relationship.” Then she added an affectionate tribute to Buddy’s role in her spiritual journey.

“At one point,” she said, referring to earlier days in their nearly 40-year marriage, “I was just playin’ by the rulebook. Buddy was livin’ it.”

That sweet, simple acknowledgment underscores a question that can be fairly asked of any faith or spiritual practice: Is it evident through the lives of those who profess it?

If anything can be said of Buddy Moody, it’s that he lives his faith. And if there’s anything to be concluded about the Barn Church—which was born inadvertently on land farmed by the Moody family for three generations—it’s that something beyond religion is emerging in America. Like most cultural phenomena, it’s taking shape quietly, organically, and in a wide variety of forms.

Why? Because people are searching for spiritual paths that start with an understanding of God as love and invite seekers to experience their own divine nature—paths that transcend judgment, condemnation, narrow-mindedness, and mean-spiritedness. And because, as Robin Moody put it, people thrive on relationship—the meaningful connection with others and with something bigger than themselves.

Obviously, this kind of relationship can also occur within church settings—though it requires, as Pope Francis has so eloquently pointed out, a considerable shift in institutional focus away from dogma and toward the kind of direct human engagement I witnessed in Poplarville. “The church,” Francis remarked in a 2013 interview,

has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules…. The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds… And you have to start from the ground up.

I imagine that’s the place where Buddy and Robin Moody, Joe, Jay, and Jeff would stand in solidarity with Pope Francis. When it comes to warming the hearts of the faithful, you have to heal the wounds first. And it’s best to start from the ground up.

“We are not just here together to keep each other company,” writes Jeff Brown in his book, Love it Forward. “We are here together to show each other God.”

I must say, it’s been quite a show down here.

(San Antonio, TX)

PS. If you’re ever in the vicinity of Poplarville, Mississippi, and want to visit the Barn Church, I would encourage you to stay—as I did—in one of the three cozy cabins on Buddy’s ranch. Check it out at www.swallowforklake.com