Faith and Doubt

September 7, 2015September 7, 2015

A Peek Inside My Office (or, The Case of the Broken Prayer Beads)

Go ahead, open the door to my study. The room is messy. My small desk is covered in books written by friends. There are more stacks of books on the floor. On the door hangs a framed saying that my friend Bryan Allain gave me. It’s a John Irving quote from one of my favorite books, A Prayer For Owen Meany:

“If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

Look to the left – there’s a seven foot high bookshelf. On one of the shelves is a small glass bowl, and in the bowl lies a mound of beads, a string, some decorative silver pieces. These are the remnants of the prayer beads I bought in Istanbul when I was writing the life story of a man named Stan Steward. He was dying of cancer, he became my friend, and he passed away about six months after I finished writing the book. Now he’s buried somewhere along the Euphrates River.

The thread snapped one day while I carried the beads in my pocket, and now they are there in that bowl, waiting for me to restring them. But it’s not time yet. I don’t know why not. For now, I look at them and sometimes I pick a few of them up and stare into their cloudy whiteness, and they remind me that I will not be here forever. They remind me that my friend Stan is gone. They remind me that there is more to life than the books I want to write, the audience I try to please, the platform I try to build.

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about things like perseverance, fear, and the power of time. I’ve examined my willingness to stick with something for the long haul. I wonder if my past failures (or non-successes) have affected my ability to start new things with passion and commitment. Maybe the last five things haven’t taken off the way I’ve wanted them to – does this mean I should lessen my hope, have “more realistic expectations”?

I’m not sure. These are all questions I mull over.

* * * * *

I was watching a show recently where two men tried to climb a mesa in Utah, one of those steep, rocky plateaus. They had to go sideways along the cliffs for a long, long time before they found a way to the top.

Are we willing to climb, not up, but sideways, for months, years, decades even? Are we willing to do the hard work, the regular everyday work, the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other work?

We need to spend more time celebrating the fact that we are HERE – wherever HERE is. Because we have all arrived HERE with great effort, along trails fraught with danger, the summit constantly in view but for most of us, for now, inaccessible. For once, let’s not worry about THERE. Let’s celebrate HERE.

And if you’ve found a way of life you love, for goodness sake, find the courage to live it.

What aspects of your life right now do you need courage in order to live?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

September 1, 2015

The Secret to a Happy Marriage

Can it really have taken me
sixteen years to realize you can
live in the same house with someone
and still lose track of them?

It’s true.

We occasionally lose
each other, somewhere among
discarded Legos and Everest piles
of laundry, too many words to be written
or deciding the best way to teach
dangling participles
or the size of the solar system. Our words
cross and mismatch and fall,
seeds on parched August ground, hard
as pavement. Is
there a more complicated maze
than the everyday household routine?
Is there anywhere easier to lose someone
than in the daily humdrum of a life?

The two of us
we go from found to lost
in the time it takes to zombie-walk
to the baby’s bed at 2am and fall
asleep on the scratchy carpet, in the time
it takes to nurse a child’s hurt feelings on
the third floor, coming back to bed
only to find the
other has already fallen asleep.

Maybe the key to this thing called
marriage
isn’t remaining in love
(Lord knows I love you)
or sticking to those vows
(rules parch and crack and can’t
keep a meaningful thing together)
but maybe
the key is finding the energy
the courage
to keep finding each other again
and again.

They leave us after dinner, all
five children, and we’re staring
the vast distance from one end of the table
to the other, because a family this size
requires a large table, and the distance
from one end to the other
can feel like the span of the Sahara. Lost
and found.

But then one of us moves closer
and we talk quietly while the sound
of their steps rains down from above.
Or we walk this city in which I love you,
holding hands
breathing in the lights
remembering the sweet feeling
that casual ecstasy
of being found again
by someone you have loved for so long.

Maybe the key to finding each other
is discovering ways
every day
that we can get lost
together
all over again. Maybe the seeds
that fall on pavement can still
find the winding crack
burrow deep
and sprout green life
in this city.

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

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August 31, 2015August 31, 2015

The Toughest Thing To Do

I sat across the small table from a good friend in Prince Street Cafe and I held the mug of coffee in both hands. I stared into its dark depths and I told him it still feels like a year of waiting, a year of not-quite-yet. I can’t say it’s an ache but it feels like things are holding their breathe. I’m not naturally patient. I’ve never found it easy to wait.

“That’s your word for the year,” my friend said. “You talk about that every time we meet. Wait.”

Then he smiled and said he gets upset when people are praying for him and ask God that he’ll have patience. He doesn’t want patience! He wants to move forward! He wants to take the bull by the horns! He laughed.

“I want to tell them they can hang on to their prayers, if they’re going to pray that I have patience.”

I know that feeling.

Waiting involves embracing the silence, something I’ve been trying to get better at. Sit in the present, and for just a moment let go of my hopes and dreams, my plans and strategies, the web I’m weaving in my mind. Let the wind of this present moment clear all those cobwebs. I want to turn down the volume on this noisy world, recapture my own senses, let them find life again.

Is that, I wonder, the essence of waiting? Finding life again?

August 25, 2015

The Value of Doing Things That Don’t Make Sense

I have to admit, I’m struggling to write on here these days. Not that the words aren’t coming – they are. But ever since I left social media two months ago, the traffic here at my blog has been a fraction of what it once was. It turns out that if you aren’t as noisy in this world, you just don’t get the same amount of attention. And it also turns out that my self-confidence is often akin to a soap bubble; low traffic is the happy child chasing the bubble, swinging wildly, popping it.

Go figure.

It helps me to write about this because at first my reaction was, “Well, I guess I need to get back on Facebook and Twitter.” But I don’t feel that my time away from those noisy forums has run its course. I don’t feel that I’ve learned everything there is to learn in this silence, and I know that if I jumped back into social media right now, it would simply be me acting on the same old things I’ve been trying to overcome. Insecurity. A desire to be accepted and praised. A need for some kind of validation.

Those aren’t all bad things. Of course not. But I don’t want them to be the foundation of who I am. I’d like the primary sustenance of my soul to be something more than the acceptance and praise of others. That’s a fickle food source, and one that will, more often than not, leave you high and dry when you least expect it.

I’ve been thinking a lot during the last two months about the value of doing things that don’t make sense, the value of listening to the small voice leading you into new places. It’s a hard voice to follow. But I read this by Richard Rohr and it encouraged me in that regard:

I will continue to encourage you to try something new: change sides, move outside your comfort zone, make some new contacts, let go of your usual role and attractive self-image, walk instead of drive, make a friend from another race or class, visit new neighborhoods, go to the jail or to the border, attend another church service, etc. Then you can live yourself into new ways of thinking, which then seem so right and necessary that you wonder how you could have ever thought in any other way. Without new experiences, new thinking is difficult and rare. After a new experience, new thinking and behavior comes naturally and even becomes necessary.

There is so much to be learned in this life simply by trying something new, even if only for a short time. New thinking requires new experiences, and making a decision about whether or not to try something new isn’t as easy as compiling a list of pros and cons because what we’re talking about is a new experience – one you can’t yet see all the pros and cons for!

So for now I’ll forge ahead in the silence. Thanks for hanging around and journeying through it with me. I hope you’re learning as much as I am.

What new thing are you thinking of trying? Where would you consider making room for silence in your life?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

Finally, I am back on Instagram. Connect with me at shawnsmucker.

Thanks!

August 21, 2015

What We Found in the Church’s Basement

We walked into the basement of the church, all seven of us, and I couldn’t help but think that there’s something about the basement fellowship halls of churches that all smell the same. It’s not a bad smell. It’s just that as soon as we walked into that basement I was nine years old again going to Wednesday night church in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

It was our first night at Circles, and we stood on the edge of the crowd.

Circles exists to “address poverty by increasing the capacity of communities…to inspire and equip families and communities to thrive and resolve poverty.” It’s a system of circle leaders (participants) being surrounded by allies who help them to set and attain simple goals. Being there felt, in some ways, like an AA meeting. Acceptance and support dripped off the walls. The allies didn’t feel superior to the circle leaders. We were all there in our shared poverty, everyone offering support and love.

Last night was both the graduation of a handful of circle leaders as well as a time for new allies (my wife Maile was one of them) to begin the process of matching up with circle leaders for the coming year.

A young man there told his story. He had been in a rough spot, but this fall he’s starting college. A single mom talked about how she always made time for the Circles meetings even though she had to squeeze it in between raising her daughter and working two jobs. “Without Circles,” she said, “I have trouble sticking to the goals I set for myself. But now I have a better job, with benefits, and a nice apartment.”

I have to admit – it was an emotional experience, listening to the circle leaders as they described the progress they had made during the previous 20 weeks. I could tell it had been difficult. A long hard road to the top. But I could also see the pride in their eyes, and a determination to keep going, the kind of determination you only see in people who have recently experienced crucial victories.

They inspired me.

* * * * *

My friend Erika Morrison, in her book Bandersnatch, shares an experience where a homeless drug addict spontaneously joins her family for her son’s birthday party.

Is befriending a homeless, child-abandoning druggie and showing love to her without insisting she change first a radical notion?

Shouldn’t you be putting your own children’s safety first?

Aren’t you just enabling her lifestyle?

She’s made her own bed; you should have left her to lie in it.

People like her are a waste of good, honest taxpayers’ money.

Make her get her act together and then be her friend.

These are some of the voices I have heard from a society that bolsters the assumption that people like Diamond are a boil on the butt of the general public, that she drags the rest of us down.

But what if we really believed that Diamond isn’t a deficit, but a necessary and vital link to the interlocking circle of contribution – not when she finally gets her act together (which might be never), but just as she is? Diamond didn’t need to be anyone or anything else than what she was in order to touch my actual soul and bring change to my heart.

Recently I’ve been challenged, both by Erika’s writing and then by going to Circles last night, to recognize my own poverty first. It’s too easy to see people who are obviously struggling and let barriers grow between me and them. But when I recognize my own poverty, it allows me to say, “Me, too” when I see poverty in someone else. and then we can move forward together.

Over and over I find myself praying the Jesus Prayer, not as a practice in self-deprecation, but as a reminder of my connectedness to everyone around me.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I decided to close down my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

June 24, 2015July 2, 2015

When God Doesn’t Care That We Are Perishing

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

* * * * *

I cannot fault those who look at the pain and ugliness of this world and doubt the existence of God. How can I fault them, when I have the same doubts? Look around. Every day, more human beings drown in the Mediterranean, fleeing cruelties and nightmares I can barely imagine. Every day, more people, trying to live a simple life, lose everything. Every day, people of color in this country !the land of the free and home of the brave! suffer under racism, sometimes unto death.

Even in my own small patch of life, it too often feels like the storms will consume me along with those I love. Cancer, finances, divorce, failure, sickness.

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

Too often, it doesn’t seem like he does.

* * * * *

Jesus on land? I would have loved to follow that Jesus. On land he preached beautiful sermons and climbed mountains and turned water into wine. Yes, please. Party on and pass the Merlot.

On land, Jesus fed 5,000 people with a little boy’s lunch box. On land, Jesus overturned tables of injustice and put self-righteous religious leaders in their place. I especially would have loved following him while he did that, when he told those judgmental old roosters where they could shove their rules. You whitewashed tombs! You maggoty graves!

I would have been right there behind him, nodding my head, maybe even giving him an “Amen!”

But Jesus on water?

The Jesus who scared the bejeezus out of his followers by appearing as a ghost on the water, the same Jesus who asked ordinary men to get out of the boat and walk on the swells? The Jesus who suggested, after an entire night of fishing and nothing to show for it, they throw their nets on the other side?

The Jesus who fell asleep while at sea, a storm threatening to destroy them all?

If I would have been a disciple of Jesus in those days, at some point I would have stopped following him into the water. Jesus is heading for a boat? So long, guys. I’ll be the one over here giving up everything I own as long as I can stay on dry land.

But they did follow him out onto the water, time and time again. And, surprise surprise, he was sleeping when the storm arrived. Which led to the disciples asking that poignant question, the one I want to ask so many times:

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

* * * * *

Those of you who visit this tiny part of the blogosphere know better than to expect any easy answers from me. But this week at church, Father David challenged us to sit with that verse, and that’s what I’ve been doing.

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

And no answers have come.

Except I did notice something. When the disciples woke Jesus up from what was probably a perfectly good nap, he did not rebuke them – he rebuked the wind and the waves. And while their question struck right at the heart of his identity, calling into question his very love for them, he did not get upset. He didn’t even answer the question. Instead, as he so often does, he replied to their question with two of his own.

“Why are you so afraid?” he asked them. “Why do you still have no faith?”

My focus shifts, and I sit with those questions, the kind nature in which they were asked. When I ask the question the disciples asked, I suddenly realize Jesus is asking me the questions he asked them in return.

Why am I so afraid? Where is my faith?

These are not questions I can answer easily, but they are worth pondering.

Why am I so afraid? Where is my faith?