Edmund, a gorgeous rug of a cat who loved Jennifer and tolerated the rest of us, died the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2010.  His little sister (and I do mean little.  We affectionately called her “the two ounce kitty”) died on Christmas Eve 2011.  As an only cat Oliver is settling in well.  He is almost what one would call affectionate, even to Jennifer, whom he would simply hiss at in the past after attacking her foot or hand and scampering away. He almost doesn’t need his daily prozac any more.  Yes, prozac.  He’s been getting it daily since our vet recommended it a few years ago.

A few weeks ago I got a phone call from Robert Watson.  Bizz died of cancer in December.  Robert misses Bizz desperately.  That’s a good thing.  (I remember very well when as a rookie pastor I asked a widow how she was doing and her reply was, “Horrible!  And I wouldn’t have it any other way!”)  As we chatted I asked after Simon and Teddy.  They were well, Robert said, ornery but well.  Ornery seemed to run in the family, I told him. He seemed half amused, half embarrassed when he told me that their two cats had been on prozac for two or three years.  I fessed up about Oliver and we laughed about the things we do for our pets.

Leaving King of Glory was difficult.  We still miss our friends there and we don’t stay in touch as well as we should.  Bizz is one of the people I miss the most.  We weren’t personally close, but in many very quiet ways she was a key part of a very loving staff community.  So Oliver is not just Oliver any more.  He’s Simon and Teddy’s brother.  He’s a tie to a wonderful time in my life and one of the people who made it so.  We miss you, Bizz, and we’ll see you on the other side.

And sleep?  Between what should have been done yesterday and absolutely must be done by tomorrow, helping kids with homework and ruminating in the wee hours over the 201K, sleep can be a bear.  I used to just sleep like a baby, but now I get up at least once a night to pee (It’s not age, of course.  I just have a small bladder.) and my shoulders are pretty good during the day, but they ache enough at night occasionally to keep me on the edge of wakefulness.  And when I do sleep as soundly as I used to (and, actually, I usually do), I find that I don’t sleep nearly as long.

As for exercise, we live in a world that moves us from one sedentary active to another.  Conveyor belts, elevators, escalators, cars and every imaginable movable contraption (The segway?  Uggh.) conspire against us to make sure that the 500 daily calories we consume through beverages (Yes, it’s true.  The average American consumes 500 calories daily in pop, juice, etc.  That’s 15,000 calories in a month.  It would take a daily 80 minute run to burn that off, something the average person does NOT do).  The only hunting and gathering we do involves shopping malls and most of us run only at the mouth.

These are three of the reasons I’m starting my sabbatical May 21 with a five week canoe trip.  I will eat not to entertain myself, but because I’m hungry.  I will sleep because I’ll be exhausted.  The five or six hundred miles I will cover will be human powered.  And, God willing, when I return those five weeks will help me change bad habits for the better.

A few days ago one of these friends put up a post that began something like “I’m going to tick some people off here” (I can’t quote it exactly because he “defriended” me during a five minute engagement over his post).  He proceeded to express satisfaction with Missouri and other states that plan to do mandatory drug testing of all ‘welfare” recipients so he won’t be giving money to people to support their drug habits and he encouraged his friends to try and take this initiative nationwide.  This idea is, in my estimation, just more class warfare and political opportunism that will actually expend more public money than it will save.  I ended my brief response to his post by decrying the stupid bigotry of those who sponsor and support such legislation.

My friend responded with shock that a PASTOR (yep, all caps) would use such language.  Another poster expressed disappointment that I hadn’t been more “gentle”.  As I was explaining that it’s not my “job” to be Emily Post I was defriended.  Amazing.  How did we get to the point that we as Christians can throw entire classes of folk under the bus, encourage our “friends” to do the same, and then whimper when we’re bullied by a pastor who uses “bad words” to describe bad behavior?

Now, I need to preface what’s coming next with a few qualifiers.  First, I do not believe that Adam and Eve were actual historical persons.  I do believe, however, that the stories about them tell deep and enduring truths.  And second, I am not a believer in “original sin” as something that as some past misdeed for which we are all guilty.  But I do believe that there are inclinations we give in to that are “original” to us all, i.e. they are not learned behavior.  So.

In the second creation story in Genesis Adam and Eve can’t control their desire to be “like God.”  After that desire gnaws at them for a bit they become ashamed of their nakedness.  What they are ashamed of, I believe, are the parts of them that declare openly and clearly that they are not like God.  They are, instead, like every other creature in the garden.  So what do they do?  They deny their creatureliness by covering those parts.  It seems silly, but from botox and wrinkle cream to Ernst Becker’s posit that civilization itself is a denial of the fact of our mortality, this is indeed a sin and a response that seems to be “original” to all of us.  We are not content with being creatures, because creatures have limitations.  Creatures are bound by their environment.  Creatures die.

The simple reality is that in the most basic sense we are not “dependent upon” creation.  We are not “caretakers of” creation.  We ARE creation!  We are creatures.  Nature is not the arena within which we define our humanity.  Nature IS our humanity.  But the “progress” of civilization has been one long march away from our primary identity.  This is certainly not to say that civilization is all bad, or even mostly bad.  But with the good has come the horrible, and the horrible is that we have lost our way.  We have lost our selves.  We are no longer human.

In the very deepest part of me I know I am a creature.  I know I am finite, mortal.  I can even rejoice in my mortality, and not just because I do not grieve it as do those who have no hope of resurrection.  To me death is a terror not because I myself will die, but because I do not trust God to watch over my wife and my sons after I am gone.  That is a very difficult thing for me to admit, but it is true.

So I know that I am a creature, and I rejoice in being a creature, but it has been so long since I have lived naked before God, and that’s what next summer’s five week canoe trip is about.  I have a desperate need to live under the sky, walk the earth and float on the water, suffer the fickleness and dangers of terrain and weather.  And as a pastor who often doesn’t see seeds grow, or even sprout, till months or years after they have been planted, I crave the simplicity of being presented daily with dozens of challenges, each of them soluble.  I need to renew that Adam relationship with creation, to be a “person of the earth” (Because “Adam” is not actually a proper name.  It is a word that means “person of the earth”).  I need to step away from  being a person twice, thrice, a hundred times removed from the earth by so many of the realities of my modern life.

My canoe trip is about being a creature again.  And as I renew that relationship, as I become a creature again, I will also renew my relationship with God.

It will be a marvelous trip, the kind of trip that surely would not have been possible for us our our church (the Lilly award will also fund staffing while I am gone) without the generosity of the Lilly Endowment and those who support its mission.  I am thankful that Our Savior’s made a commitment to a sabbatical prior to perparing to interview me as a candidate back in 2006, and I am thankful that our present leadership continues to see the wisdom of giving their pastors time to recoup and regenerate.

Reactions to the trip from people has been interesting.  Most are happy for us and look forward to hearing all about the trip once we have returned.  Interestingly, however, some have said something like, “Wow.  I’m in the wrong profession.”  I thought it would be well, then, in this first blog post about prep for the sabbatical to say a bit about our profession as pastors.

First, there is nothing I would rather do with my life.  It is a joy, an honor and a blessing to be a pastor.  We are allowed into people’s lives, and into the life of communities, in unique and meaningful ways.  We often spend time with people at difficult times, but even during those times there is a depth and realness to what we share that is holy and deeply appreciated.  However…  And it is the “however” that is a part of what we do that would not have most folks standing in line to join in with us.

Most people have one boss, two or three if they are unlucky or are part of a particularly dysfunctional organization.  Depending on the size of the church, pastors have a few hundred or a few thousand bosses.  That is sometimes frustrating, often confusing.  Regardless of our advanced degree and in spite of years of experience there is never a shortage of persons who are happy to explain to us that we are always doing the wrong things in the wrong way.  We are often unsure whether we have done a “good” job, because there is seldom tangible “output”, and  sometimes, because of confidentiality issues, we can’t say anything at all when we have done some of our best work.  We work 60 hours in a “slow” week, 80 or more on a somewhat regular basis, yet we are still expected to smile and laugh as if it were a fresh joke we’ve never heard before when someone bloviates about our working only a few hours on Sunday morning.  And to all that add the reality that the smaller the church, the more things a pastor must do well.  I am blessed to be serving in a larger church with colleagues and staff who are very good in areas where I am not.

So, I’m taking a sabbatical.  It will be time spent not doing what I have been doing in order to do what I have been neglecting.  I will be focusing on my relationship with God as a creature and with my family as husband and father without having so much energy and time going to being a pastor.  Make no mistake, I love being a pastor, but it takes its toll on other relationships.  Over the next few months, for anyone who cares to read along, I’ll write some about my preparations and what I’m learning as I prepare to be away.

So what’s up?  It was one of those rushed, foggy mornings.  I usually love mornings and I wake up easily, but I haven’t slept well lately.  Last night was an exception, as I slept deep and long, so for my first hour upright I was less aware than usual.  The first sign of that was when making coffee and I dropped the lid of the pot.  I managed to hacky sack it with my foot before it hit the ground, so the Newco OCS-12 lives on (Our Savior’s members may remember my “pitch” for this coffeemaker in a sermon a few years ago.  It’s been everything I had hoped it would be!  Well, perhaps not everything.).

Anyway.  After two cups of coffee I shaved, showered… and put on my wife’s deodorant.  It smells nice.  Made me think of my wife and then I thought of Natalie Wood twirling through the set of “West Side Story” as she daydreamed about seeing Tony later on.

Back in high school if I had put on my sister’s or my mother’s deodorant by mistake I would have gone out into the woods and rolled like a dog on a carcass.  I would have done anything to cover that pretty scent.  And if after sticking my nose in my armpits I had discovered it was not totally and utterly gone I would have stayed home from school.  Times change.  People change.  I got dressed, ate breakfast, brushed my teeth and went to work.

By now, especially if you arrived at this blog entry through the link at Our Savior’s website, you’re probably wondering why I couldn’t have managed to write about something a bit more (more?) profound.  Truth is the past several weeks have been too full of profundities, most of the negative sort.  That being the case, it was kind of nice to stumble through my morning, make a meaningless mistake and head in to church smelling pretty.  Nice enough to want to write about it.

Exactly twenty years later we (I was part of my own family by then, so the singular had become plural) were sweating our way through our second summer in Texas.  My worst day in the Texas heat occurred that summer.  I went out for a bike ride at 107.  Jennifer, who had more sense than I (and still does, by the way), told me I was stupid to go out.  I patiently explained that I was heading out for only 25 miles and as long as I stayed hydrated I would be fine.  I was not fine.  At the 17 mile point I rolled into the parking lot of a gas station and filled the two water bottles I had already drained.  I called Jennifer, who didn’t gloat, and explained that I needed to spend a bit time in some shade rehydrating before heading home.  I sat in the shade, such as it was, and drank three or four bottles of water.  The final 8 miles were slow and laborious and hot as hell.  I was very happy when we moved back to Minnesota in 2007.  No more heat.

So right now I am suffering.  I am suffering from the physical reality of the blast funace / sauna outside, and I am suffering because of the injustice of it all.  “How long, LORD?”  Yesterday afternoon I was driving back to church from a meeting, wiping the sweat from my brow as the air conditioner in my car made its vain attempt to discharge the damnable heat and moisture.  I was getting close to church, which means I was off the main roads and going more slowly.  As I drove along a squirrel darted out in front of me.  I don’t know why they do this, but you know how squirrels dash out to the middle of the road, stop, twitch a bit, feint left, feint right and then bolt for one side or the other?  This squirrel began that process.  But he didn’t bolt.  He remained immobile a fraction too long on one spot of burning pavement.  Right in front of my eyes he burst into flame, leaving a small pile of squirrel cinders in the middle of the road.  Poor thing.  It’s hot.

This morning on my way in to church I backed out of the driveway and headed west on Nottingham, which turns into Lois Lane (yes, Lois Lane.  And there is no Perry White Blvd. or Jimmie Olson Court.).  I turned left on Sherwood, left on 4th Avenue, right on Lilac and then left on Sunset.  All the same as always.  After cresting the bridge over the highway I looked down the mile long straight shot to the 4-way stop at Pointcross and was more than surprised to see the bright green of a traffic light.

It made no sense at all that a traffic light could have been hung between 11:30 a.m. Sunday and 8:30 a.m. Monday, but as I drove toward the intersection, not only did the light continue to shine, it actually brightened.  I went at least a quarter of a mile before I realized what I was looking at was not a traffic light at all.  It was the sun at just the perfect angle hitting the reflective green of the Pointcross street sign.  I drove to within 100 feet of the sign before the angle changed enough for the street sign to become just another street sign, albeit one that I don’t remember having seen before.

If I had been on the road a few minutes earlier or later, if it had been the 16th or 20th of July instead of the 18th, thereby slightly changing the angle of the sun, I would have had the same drive I’ve always had.  And that made me wonder.  How brightly do things have to be shining for me to see them?  How animatedly does something have to be jumping up and down waving its arms before I notice it’s there?  These are especially important questions when asked concerning a well worn path, and the older I get the more well worn the paths become.

So how do I stop depending on the perfect angle in order to see what’s in front of me?  I put myself in relationship with people who see things from all sorts of different angles.  Their perspectives will broaden and deepen me, my perspective will do the same for them.  This is what people miss who think the goal of diversity is just feel good lefty PC crap (yet, as knee jerk white guilt, it is often exactly that).  Intentional commitment to diversity is what saves us from believing that there is only one perfect angle, that our reality is the only reality.

Most people have a back room, the place where you throw stuff and throw stuff and throw stuff.  To say that my wife “cleaned up” the back room would be far understating reality.  It would be more accurate to say that she turned it upside down, dumped it out, hosed it down and wrestled it round to the kind of normalcy that actually deserves the word “room”.

The funny thing about the cleaning–resurrecting, actually–of the back room is that we have been promising it to our 14-year-old son as his own room since he was 12 so he would not have to share a room with his younger brother.  And now it will finally be his room on August 31, the day after Nicholas leaves.  Why do we do these things?  Why do we go to such lengths to welcome strangers into our homes for a fortnight?  If you’re hoping for wisdom here, it’s not coming.  It’s a real, honest to goodness question.  I don’t have the answer.  Do you?

Nothing is ever simply what it is.  This was not understood by the radical protestants who stripped their sanctuaries of symbol and art only to find that their Bibles got bigger and floppier, and the amplification of their preaching was ratcheted up to 11 because the printed word alone could not convey God’s mystery and wonder.  So, in addition to being what it “is,” nearly everything points to something else, like Whitman’s “scented gift and remembrancer.”

A week ago today I arrived home from a trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern Minnesota.  The first thing I do after a trip is put my gear and clothing away, because I know if I do not do this immediately it will not happen.  I climbed into our crawl space under the dining room and kitchen to stow my thermarest and several other things.  As I looked to my left I saw a meticulously printed and hung sign: “Yo Yo Convention”.  “Charlie,” I thought.  He is away on choir tour and it would be two weeks before his return.  I missed him.

The past week has gone quickly and four days from now we will greet Charlie at the baggage carousel.  We will all be back home and soon it will be like he never left.  But I will remember that sign and the feeling it gave me to have that magic marker remembrancer that assured me he was safe and well and that he would be back home before I knew it.