Tall Monastic Guy

woodshop theology & seeing hope

Up until a month ago an antique crank phone sat gathering dust in my basement. The phone hung on the wall during the childhood years of Clarence Addington, my wife’s 92 year old grandpa.

Every Friday night for the past month I’ve been in a friend’s wood shop until about midnight loving every minute of the restoration process. I needed to get my hands on something practical and hopeful like this.

As this project was underway, I picked up Rob Bell’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About God.” This was some sweet serendipity as Bell's words provided a perfect soundtrack to jam with my work on this technological relic.

Bell asks, “Is God progressive, with a better, more inspiring vision for our future than we could ever imagine, or is God behind, back there, in the past, endlessly trying to get us to return to how it used to be?”

“Is the best future a return to an imagined pristine era when things were ideal, or is our best future actually in the future?”

I ruminated on Bell’s question as I imagined how progressive this phone was for those who used it nearly 100 years ago. At that time this amazing technological marvel was a major step forward from where they’d been.

Steve's lessons...

Some quick reflections upon experiencing the death of my friend, Steve, today.

We long to satisfy our hunger for meaning… Steve held on as long as he did because his dog, Lacey, gave his life meaning. Friendships are central to our search for meaning like the North Star of our lives.

Life hurts. Some relationships create pain and others create down right trauma difficult to recover from. Layers of deadly bitterness build if we can’t solve the riddle of forgiveness.

The wicked part of traumatic hate-laced relationships is they trick us into hating ourselves. Solving the riddle of forgiving others usually works in tandem with forgiving ourselves. Self-compassion seems to be one of the more over-looked skills of the Christian faith.

Thanks for being one of my teachers, Steve. And enjoy that BIG embrace.

(Steve Kyser lived in The Network house for the past 15 years after spending the previous 20 years on the Denver streets)

holy shit (update)

Who decides what is deemed holy? Only God I suppose. But there are occassions so undeniably transcendent we feel certain God has stamped it as sacred space.

When I imagine a "thin place" my mind goes to old ruins of ancient monasteries or breathing in crisp clean seaside air somewhere off the coast of Ireland.

I encountered the holy with my friend Steve this week in his bedroom amid the stench of feces and the thick fog of cigarette smoke. Steve is holding to the last threads of life. Earlier in the morning he cursed me up and down as I tried to convince him he needed to go to the hospital. Later in the afternoon he asked for my help to change his pants, which were soiled since the strength to get to the bathroom had failed him.