In the Old City of Jerusalem, the streets are too narrow for cars. The streets stay narrow so they can squeeze through stone archways. Neighbors who live across the street from each other can look up and see the awnings above their doorways almost touch. Sometimes, a narrow street will become a staircase. The stone steps have probably forgotten most of what they once knew about right angles.
On a rainy day in November, I went for a walk down these ancient streets. The rain revealed shallow gutters in the street, and downspouts that I’d never noticed on sunnier days.
How can you prove a case in court when evidence can be faked? How much do I have to exercise to justify eating whatever I want? Where the hell is the last small key in the Water Temple?
So many questions.
Sometimes I’d ask my parents. But while my development was important to them, my adolescent musings on philosophy (and video game strategies) were taxing. Only a handful of the people I knew at church played Legend of Zelda, so I mostly avoided them. Teachers were amused by my vocabulary, but their answers rarely satisfied my curiosity.
A friend and I discussed evangelical Christianity's focus on the inherent sinfulness of humanity, its claim that people, who experience grace, must be changed into something new. But the prospective pitfall of such belief is the realization that perfection (a worthy goal) is always just beyond our reach. So we become a people impatient with impossible standards, who stop looking forward, start looking back, compare ourselves to those who lag behind.
Hi. My name is Ryan, and I’m a Christian who despises contemporary Christian music.
I admit there are people who find contemporary Christian music powerful. Affirming. Good. I am not one of those people.
There is one song – Matt Maher’s “Hold Us Together.” I first encountered this song at a church camp during a considerably more conservative point in my life, and considered independently, the song isn’t really anything remarkable. Maher has a pleasantly inert voice, sings over an acoustic guitar and handclap beat, and in a few places there’s just a touch of twang. What makes “Hold Us Together” really noteworthy is that Maher, a self-defined and explicitly Christian artist, manages to complete the song without a single overt reference to God. Or Jesus. Or the Holy Spirit. He never utters the words “worship” or “glory” or that contemporary Christian standby, “praise.” The song is positive and upbeat but about as religious as anything Taylor Swift sings.
A Quaker I admire is “Comrade” Mary Hughes. Mary was not content with the life of wealth she was born into. Giving up her comfort, but in good stewardship of her wealth and power, she lived on the streets, making people her priority, living with and for the poor.
Mary transformed an old pub into an inn for anyone and everyone who needed a place to stay. The Dew Drop Inn became a shelter and community center for the homeless and a resting place for travelers. It was almost always packed with people.
She was known for greeting everyone she met with a smile and a kind word. Mary’s life of kindness to all initially earned her a reputation for craziness, but over time her reputation changed. People knew her for her trust and for her friendship.
It's essentially a multi-day road trip with stops scheduled intermittently so we can keep our brains on overdrive and stretch our legs. The point of Sankofa is to reconsider how we talk and process race. It's a conversation that is ongoing, and the trip helps it get started. Each year looks different depending on the group of students who participate. Last year we stopped on a plantation, at the location of the Mike Brown Shooting, and at an old Underground Railroad house. Historically the trip has been focused on white-on-black racism, as that narrative is hardly taught and greatly misunderstood. But the trip last year boasted other minorities as well. Students of non-black ethnic backgrounds, of alternative sexual orientation, of non-evangelical religions, and of the mental health community all started raising their voices by the second day saying, "What about my pain?" On Sankofa I learned that when we become afraid of scarcity, things get ugly.
I stumbled across these words awhile ago: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find, in each person’s life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” And I wonder if Longfellow had it right.
There are two perspectives at the scene of the cross.
On one side, we have the crucified God. On the other, we have God’s crucifiers. Who do you tend to identify with in this story? Are you the victim or the murderer?
It’s a hard question.
Members of the early Church probably identified with Christ on the cross, as they were persecuted and murdered by the Romans in the first century. Christ went before them -- the perfect example of non-violence, even to death. But Christianity would become the dominant religion of the West. And here we are today—offspring of an obscure Eastern religious movement now more massive than anybody could have planned.
After seven semesters at a Quaker university, I had decided that it would make sense for me to understand who Friends are and what they believe. And so I gathered with a group to discuss Quaker history and beliefs. After the first session, those of us who were less familiar with Quakerism were encouraged to do some poking around, to see what we could discover about Friends.
I came to the second meeting invigorated by what I had discovered. Having never spent much time looking into Quakers, I was surprised to see the wide range of theological diversity among Friends. In my research I had read about Nonthiest Friends, Orthodox Friends, Evangelical Friends, Neopagan Friends, and Fundamentalist Friends. I was shocked, but pleasantly so. Here was a group of religious folks who could stand to associate with one another despite vast difference in faith and practice. Or, at least I thought they did. As I spoke of my findings, an older Friend cut me off - "Well, Brandon, some of those people you're talking about aren't really Quakers." He didn't specify which group(s) he was ostensibly ready to vote off the Quaker Island, but his meaning was clear: I am not at all comfortable associating with some of those people as Friends.
I have often longed for a different kind of life, imagining joy in the simplicity of communal work, worship and service. But is close-knit community the key to an integrated existence? What if my longing for meaningful connection is a symptom of internal rather than external division? If I have learned anything about myself, it is that I too often seek the easy way out of uncomfortable questions.
One of the banes of growing up in a small private school while playing sports with boys from bigger public schools was tryouts’ day, where, usually, the only people I knew by name were my parents. This past year has been kind of like that. Lots of newness. I moved, I started a new job, I got married. With all of the change, I resorted a lot to the narratives I learned growing up, and all year long, I felt like a rookie at tryouts.
In a recent interview, one of the newest members of my hometown Portland Trail Blazers, Mason Plumlee, reveals how rookies are treated in the NBA, and it reflects what rookies face in all professions.
Even though I hold pretty strongly to the Evangelical side of my Evangelical Friends tradition, I find it difficult to adopt the view, often associated with Evangelicals, of the Inerrancy of Scripture. Having actually read the Bible (like, all of it, more than once) I can admit that there are some stories that seem pretty historically improbable, some parallel accounts that are contradictory, and some descriptions that seem scientifically inaccurate. For the most part, this doesn’t bother me. As a Friend, I see the Bible as a secondary source of revelation. In my experience, it’s the direct, unmediated revelation of Jesus that is central (though, like Robert Barclay, I don’t think the two necessarily contradict).
Not so many years ago, I witnessed with interest a continuing debate in my community over Ten Commandments displays. One incident involved removal of a yellow placard from public land at a local airport. Angry letters flooded the newspaper opinion pages. And in further protest, a group of pilots ordered 150 copies of the sign for the sides of their privately-owned hangars.
It’s the kind of thing that happens again and again. And I wonder, how much of the shouting and fist-shaking really qualifies as righteous indignation and how much might be chalked up to plain, old fear.
I used to believe that romance was a part of human nature. As long as men and women existed in the same place, people would get to know each other and fall in love. But conversations with young people in Rwanda revealed some realities.
First, it was common for young men to reach a point in their lives where they would simply decide that they should be married, find a good candidate, get their parents to arrange things, and settle the deal all in the span of a month or two. Second, divorce is less common. Third, "love" between partners was hard for them to define.
When I was a kid, around 1989 or so, we lived in the Columbia River Gorge in a small town called Goldendale. I was nine-ish and trapped in what felt like the middle of nowhere. My mother had left my sister’s dad and was raising three kids on one income and using every spare dime on a two-year custody battle to keep my sister. It was a dark time of recovery after escaping an abusive situation, and we were very poor.
I remember food stamps and food boxes full of government cheese and canned salmon. I remember Mom always putting the after-Christmas clothing on layaway to lock in discount prices and paying it off slowly for next year’s school clothes. I remember we had this black and white TV hooked up to rabbit ears with tin foil on them. It was a hand-me-down from someone, who, like the rest of the world, had made the switch to color ages ago. I didn’t know anyone else growing up who still had a black and white TV… but it kind of fit with my melancholy world.
On a spiritual retreat this last year, I noticed something about fire. Adding new sticks to already-smoldering logs made a lot of smoke, but it took a long time for flames to appear.
Brought up by parents at opposite poles of the spectrum (my mother a temperance union officer and my father an amateur connoisseur) I’ve wrestled with conflicting ideas about alcohol’s place in the Christian lifestyle. With no definitive bible verse stating whether the consumption of alcohol is right or wrong, we find ourselves sipping from different theological cups. I’ve seen believers turn defensive and hypercritical toward each other at the mere mention of alcohol, breaking into spats that rival the ugliest barroom brawls. But I’ve discovered that instead of outlining a code of judgment, God’s word uses the subject of alcohol to pop the cork on a discussion of how to live a Spirit-filled life.