July 3 -- "The Unlikely Disciple"
This is a great book! A few years ago, 19 year old Kevin Roose, a student at Brown University, decided to study elsewhere for a semester. Fellow students were opting for out of country cross-cultural experiences. Kevin opted for something closer to home, but it might as well have been a different world. He went to study at America's Holiest University, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That's right, Jerry Falwell's university, the founder of the Moral Majority.

His book, "The Unlikely Disciple," tells the story. I have to admit that I expected an attack on conservative evangelicals. Instead, I read an extremely sensitive and thought provoking story from a young man with an open mind and heart. I laughed and cried and learned from a very wise young man how intolerant I can be of people who see things differently than I . Kevin Roose wades right into the middle of the culture wars and teaches the reader sensitivity, grace, and to look beyond easy answers and categories.

Church of the Joyful Healer has ordered several copies to sell and folk will have three opportunities to discuss this book in August. Saturday the 11th in the morning, we will discuss it at Church Family Camp, Sunday August 19th at 12:30pm and August 26 at 12:30. Each time we will take a part of the book, read some paragraphs together and discuss the issues it raises. We will work at ways to bring peace in the midst of the culture wars rather than just keep the war going.

Get this book! I think you will enjoy the read.

June 12 -- "Prayers For Bobby" -- Wow -- one of my Joyful Healer friends gave me this DVD. She said I ought to watch it and keep it to share with others who may be struggling. I did not know what it was about -- my goodness what an emotional ride it was.

This movie is based on a true story about a conservative Christian family in the late 70's and early 80's from Walnut Creek, CA. This is the same area I grew up in a few years earlier. One of the boys in the family, Bobby, reveals to his parents that he is gay. They freak out -- especially mom. He is taken to a Christian support group, a psychiatrist who tries to "heal" him, and his mom tapes intimidating scripture verses all over his bedroom. They even arrange dates for him with the opposite sex.

Bobby is looking for support, love, and acceptance -- but he gets fear and pressure and condemnation. He gets more and more deeply depressed by the prejudice and bigotry of his own family. He violently ends his life and the rest of the movie is about the family's struggle (particularly the mother) to understand homosexuality and the intolerance that led Bobby to such despair.

This is a powerful movie that shows how scripture can be used destructively to reinforce bigotry and prejudice. But it is also about the power to change through experience and forgiveness. You will need lots of tissues to get through it.

We have come a long way toward understanding and acceptance since the late 70's but we still have a long way to go. If you know someone who is struggling to accept a gay son or lesbian daughter, I would be happy to loan you this DVD. Or perhaps you would like to rethink your own feelings and assumptions about this issue. Let me know.

The Summer Day

I love this poem by Mary Oliver. It speaks to me about life, prayer, time, and the preciousness of life. It is called "The Summer Day."

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand.

Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms, thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

How to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll thouhg the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Enjoy your summer days and your one wild and precious life. Pay attention..

Blackberries

I have been reading the absolutely zany 1980 novel by Tom Robbins called "Still Life With Woodpecker." It was a New York Times best seller -- about the difference between criminals and outlaws, the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. Mostly, however, it is about the mystery of love.

How did I miss this book in the early 80's? I must have been too busy reading serious stuff like theology. Oh well, I wouldn't have appreciated it nearly as much in those days. This morning I read this passage from the book:

Blackberries.
  Nothing, not mushrooms, not ferns, not moss, not melancholy, nothing grew more vigorously, more intractably in the Puget Sound rains than blackberries. Farmers had to bulldoze them out of their fields. Homeowners dug and chopped, and still they came. Park attendants with flame throwers held them off at the gates. Even downtown, a lot left untended for a season would be overgrown. In the wet moths, blackberries spread so wildly, so rapidly that dogs and small children were sometimes engulfed and never heard from again. In the peak of the season, even adults dared not go berry picking without a military escort. Blackberry vines pushed up through solid concrete, forced their way into polite society, entwined the legs of virgins, and tried to loop themselves over passing clouds.

To what shall we compare the Kingdom of God? Perhaps it is like blackberries -- obnoxious and invasive and unstoppable.