The Floating Lands, a song

And you sweep me off of my unsteady feet
With the rising swell and the falling waves
Of your floating lands
And I can’t see over the coming crest
But you never move as we drift along
On your floating lands

I’m floating on
The ocean of your love for me
While waves of joy
Are washing down and drenching me

And the waves bow down to kiss your holy feet
When you lift your voice to calm the surging surf
Of your floating lands
While the current of your perfect will
Moves me a long as we ride the tide
Of your floating lands

I’m floating on
The ocean of your love for me
While waves of joy
Are washing down and drenching me

I can no longer see
The shore we left behind us
And I still haven’t seen
Just where we’re headed for
But the wake of where we’ve been
It stretches out behind us
And only you can say
When we’ll reach that distant shore

I’m floating on
The ocean of your love for me
While waves of joy
Are washing down and drenching me
I’m floating on
The ocean of your love for me
While waves of joy
Are washing down and drenching me

On Lazy Days, a poem

I don’t do well with lazy days.
The slouching silhouette of guilt
That lurks down the dark alley
Of all that idleness haunts even
My best efforts at languid luxury.
The rarest lazy day of all
Never brought the spender
Gilded, glorious works of art
Or sonorous symphonies celebrated
Or mysteries uncovered
Or any of these deepest longings
Of my heart that only blood and sweat
And unwept tears can buy.
Rather than spend them instead I’d invest
And live a fecund prodigal
Off the burgeoning interest of these
Unspent lazy days.
              And so I have, and do,
Until the Holy Hand of the Uncreated Word
Comes settling to rest
Gentle and warm to still my every striving.
Not even Adam in Paradise, it seems to say,
Had to earn his unproductive Sabbath.
His only duty, on the first day of the rest of his life
Was to enjoy a perfect precious day off.

Batter My Heart (Three Personed God), a song

With gratitude to John Donne

Batter my heart, three personed God,
Break my spirit down and build it up complete
O, Batter my heart

Ravish my heart, Three personed God
Take my life from me I lay it at your feet
O, Ravish my heart

I long to know you Lord, I long to see your face
I long to find peace in the shadow of your grace
Break me bend me mould me mend me make my life anew
Teach me to let go of what holds me back from you

Cleanse my life, O lamb of God
Wash me clean and let your Spirit enter me
O Cleanse my life

Take my life, O Lamb of God
A slave to you that I might finally be free
O, Take my life

I long to know you Lord, I long to see your face
I long to find peace in the shadow of your grace
Break me bend me mould me mend me make my life anew
Teach me to let go of what holds me back from you  

Psyche and Eros, a poem

In the back corner of a cluttered gallery
Of the Louvre’s treasure trove
Stands, or rather swoons in ecstatic recline,
The glorious marble embrace
Of Canova’s Psyche and Eros.
Each arching inward toward the other
Reaching, longing, lingering
For the tenderest of kisses never to touch,
Each gazes mesmerized eternally
Into the stone-still face of their beloved,
While iphone-wielding tourists clatter past,
Hunting for trophied selfies with the smiling Mona Lisa.
Few if any, linger long enough to admire
How close they came to consummation,
Before the knowing of each other
Sent them spiraling apart forever.
    The day I saw it,
Young and longing for my own Psyche
To awaken in the arms of its dear night-shrouded Eros
(To hold her gently in a pose so passionate
As to be almost painful.)
I couldn’t pull myself away.
And though the thought that I was seeing something
Even Psyche ought not have seen
Caught in my throat like shameful fire,
I stood and stared, rapt with wild wonder
And burning holy with desire.

The Lamb Who Stands at the Centre of the Universe

I have a very vivid memory, early on in my life as a Christian, when I encountered some folks from a different faith tradition than mine, who were quite intent on convincing me that the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity was illogical and unbiblical, a conspiratorial heresy of the Catholic Church that was, in fact, an affront to God.

I had never before encountered such animosity to a belief that I had found to be beautiful, compelling, and life giving, and it took me aback. They looked up all the usual references in the Bible that are often marshalled in defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, and presented exegetical arguments—faulty exegetical arguments, I later learned—in an attempt to convince me that God is not, in fact, Three-in-One.

Looking back, it’s curious to me that my non-Trinitarian neighbours that day didn’t ever look up Revelation 5:6 for our little game of proof-text ping pong. It’s Curious, but not surprising. Because, although it’s not often discussed in traditional defenses of the Trinity, I think Revelation 5:6 gives us one of the most profound, mysterious, and compelling visions of God as Three-in-One as I’ve ever come across in the New Testament.

St. John the Divine has just received an awe-inspiring glimpse into the Throne Room of God, where he’s seen 24 Elders (presumably representative of the whole People of God, both the 12 Tribes of Israel and the 12 Apostles of the Church), and he’s seen 4 living creatures (apparently 4 angelic beings, though they also seem representative in some way of the Creation itself, since the number 4 is usually associated with the Creation, and they take the shape of creatures associated with the creation—lions, oxen, eagles, men). There are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, crowns being laid down and rainbows scintillating with glory.

Before discussing Revelation 5:6, we should note that in the heavenly vision of Chapter 4, John sees the Throne of the Almighty, and before the throne are 7 lamps (significantly, the word here is different than the word used in chapters 2-3 to describe the 7 lampstands of the 7 churches). Here, John clearly identifies the seven lamps as the “Sevenold Spirit of God” (4:5).

Although he glimpses someone sitting on the throne, the appearance of whoever it is on the Throne is describes in vague terms: “He had the appearance of jasper and ruby.” The image speaks of God’s beauty, his radiance, his glory, his infinite worth, but notably, it does not tell us much about God’s literal appearance; that is to say, we’re not supposed to imagine a huge piece of red crystal sitting on the throne—a literal ruby. Though John sees the Throne, and glimpses someone sitting there, he cannot truly tell what he saw. It reminds me a bit of Moses, being permitted only to see the back of God’s glory as it passed, in Exodus 33.

But then we come to Revelation 5. Here, after no one has been found worthy to open the scroll of God’s plan for bringing Justice to the earth and bringing human history to its final conclusion, John sees a lamb, looking as though it has been slain from the creation of the world.

Here is where things get interesting, and profoundly Trinitarian. As will become clear by the end of the book, the Lamb is the Lord Jesus Christ, slain for the world through his death on the cross. Notably, though, John tells us that this lamb is “standing in the midst of the throne” that is to say, at its very centre. He does not say the lamb is “sitting on the Throne,” of course, because there is already someone sitting there, but if the Lamb is standing “at the centre of the throne,” then it is impossible to extract his identity from the identity of the one sitting there. One commentor puts it like this: “Jesus Christ, the crucified, stands at the centre of the throne because he stands at the centre of the Almighty. Jesus Christ comes from and lives in the very centre of the living God! The heart of the Almighty is the heart of the Lamb” (Darrell Johnson, Discipleship on the Edge, p. 157).

It gets even more interesting, and more Trinitarian, though. Because in his description of this Lamb, John tells us that he has 7 eyes. The strangeness of a seven-eyed lamb is itself enough to tell us that this must be a symbolic description, but just to be sure, John explains: “the eyes are the Sevenfold Spirit of God.” Most commentors suggest that this reference to the “Seven Spirits of God” is picking up on Isaiah 11:2-3, where we’re told that the Spirit of the Lord will rest on the Messiah in his coming, and then the Lord’s Spirit is described with seven epithets: the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel, the Spirit of Might, the Spirit of Knowledge, and the Fear of the Lord. Earlier in Revelation 1, John greets his readers in the name of Jesus (the one who was and is and is to come), and the “Seven Spirits which are before his throne” (1:1); later, in Chapter 3, its stated even more explicitly, that Jesus is the one who “has the Seven Spirits of God.”

The Sevenfold Spirit of God in Revelation 5, then, seems to be a symbolic way of speaking about the Holy Spirit specifically, the “Spirit of the Lord” that rests on the Messiah, the Spirit that is actively at work in the world (the very eyes of the Lamb himself).

Once you connect all these dots, you can’t help but do the math here: if the Sevenfold Spirit of God—the Holy Spirit—is the “eyes” of the Lamb, and the Lamb is standing at the centre of the throne, one which the Almighty himself is seated, then the Holy Spirit, too, is standing there, at the centre of the Lamb, at the centre of God’s throne.

Revelation 5 has come to be, for me, one of the most goose-bump-inducing passages of the whole Bible. It’s all veiled in the mysterious symbolism of apocalyptic imagery, of course, but here we are offered a glimpse into the life of God himself—as much a glimpse, anyways, as anyone could bear, and what we see when we dare to turn our eyes to his One Single Throne, are three.

But these Three are placed in such a way, in such a place, as there could only ever, truly be One there.

So it is true, in one sense, what my non-Trinitarian neighbours were trying to tell me that day. You cannot find the word “Trinity” anywhere in the Bible. But if there is some better way to explain what John saw that day in the Throne Room of God, some doctrine or conceptualization of the divine that can account for a Throne that has the Almighty seated on it and the Lamb standing at its centre, I’ve not yet come across it.

The Last Ride of Jesus and John Wayne, a song

The warrior was waiting for Billy the Kid
When he rode into town
He started cursading for the quick and the dead
With a Bible and a gun

He said: Calling all you outlaws
With your promises to keep
There's a way to save your souls
If your man enough to believe

That Billy's riding shotgun
For Jesus and John Wayne
With a pose of his lost boys
Holding up the train
Making deals with the devil
And trading pain for gain
And saddling their horses for the last ride
Of Jesus and John Wayne

The kid told the warrior to reach for the sky
When they take their last stand
To be a good soldier and never say die
And fight for the Promised Land

Calling all you outlaws
With your promises to keep
There's a way to save your souls
If your man enough to believe

That Billy's riding shotgun
For Jesus and John Wayne
With a pose of his lost boys
Holding up the train
Making deals with the devil
And trading pain for gain
And saddling their horses for the last ride
Of Jesus and John Wayne

And you can never let us see
There's a boy insde the man
In the shadows, under lock and key
And you can never let it go
There's a truth inside the child
It's a secret none of us can know

'Cause Billy's riding shotgun
For Jesus and John Wayne
With a pose of his lost boys
Holding up the train
Making deals with the devil
And trading pain for gain
And saddling their horses for the last ride
Of Jesus and John Wayne

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, a book review

One of my favorite pieces of classical music is Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, in Eb Major. I love the whole piece, but the second movement is especially moving, both stirring and soothing at the same time. Whenever the opening notes of its gently shimmering piano melody wash over me, I find myself teleported to a place where beauty is more tangible than usual, and feelings like yearning, joy, and passion have concrete form.

At least, that’s how I want to say it after reading Robert Jourdain’s Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination. Jourdain explores the phenomenon of music from seemingly every angle—the anatomy of the ear, the neurology of hearing, the physics of sound, the mathematics of harmony, the art and craft of composition, and the psychology of performance—integrating all theses fields of study to explain music’s power to transport the listener.

“Music makes us larger than we really are,” he writes, “and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond, not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and the world is more than it seems.”

Listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 certainly has that effect on me, and, mysteriously enough, it continues to have that effect, no matter how often I hear it.

Jourdain argues that music "works" on us by triggering deep physiological responses in our neurological structures that are evolutionarily “trained” to perceive subtle layers in sonic relations—the inner relationships, that is, between different sounds as they occur in an organized sequence. He suggests that this ability is the result of eons of evolution that refined our sensitivity to sonic relations, as a way of heightening our chances of survival. As a result, our brains are structurally attuned to the subtle (and often not-so subtle) relationships between sounds that well-crafted music presents us with. As a result, music has a unique ability to engage both the right and left hemispheres of our brains at once, stimulating pleasure both through its orderly structure, and through its close association with memories, emotion, and sensory arousal.

This physiological response, he goes on to suggest, interacts on a deep subconscious level with our specific cultural conditioning, which we use to make meaning out of the organized sounds of a musical performance. Our culture trains us to expect certain things of the music we hear, prompting reactions of delight (or disgust) as those expectations are met and/or subverted. At the same time, our bodies resonate physically with the rhythmic patterns of music, responding kinesthetically to the elegant structure it imposes on time. All of these responses—the neurological, psychological, kinesthetic, and cultural—he argues, were inadvertently wired into the human animal, as evolutionary processes naturally selected certain traits that better-fitted us for survival, helping us to avoid being eaten by the proverbial lion on the primordial savannah, and predisposing us to a kind of social interaction that would better ensure the propagation of our species.

I’m not sure how directly he argues that last point, but it is certainly one of the corollaries of his study. The seemingly-spiritual response music produces in us is really little more than a pleasurable biproduct of evolutionary forces that were themselves the result of decidedly unmusical events: those of our ancient ancestors who were less adept at interpreting the meaning implicit in that subtle rustling in the grass on the savannah died in the springing lion’s paws; those who were better at it survived, and passed on to subsequent generations a deep sensitivity to the meaning of sound. Those of our primaeval parents who responded well to the socially organizing effect of cooperative sound-making stayed together and were more likely to survive and pass on that predilection to their progeny. Those who didn’t simply died, and passed on nothing.

While Jourdain’s exploration of the phenomenology of music was profoundly fascinating, I have to be honest that, as a Christian reader, I felt it proved far more than it meant to. The word “ecstasy” literally means “standing outside one’s self" (or something along those lines). But if Jourdain’s fundamental assumptions are true, and meaning is only to be found in the random forces of a faceless evolution, then there is, actually, nowhere outside ourselves to stand. Throughout the book, he continually refers to things like the “elegant structures” of music, making value judgements regarding how “beautiful” some forms of music are and how crude others. Yet throughout my reading, I kept wondering: on what basis—if his basic argument was true—could we safely speak of music in terms of its "beauty" or "elegance"? Probably the most we could say is that certain types of organized sound are more effective at achieving its evolutionary effect, and others less so, but this is a far cry from describing something as intrinsically beautiful.

For all his talk about ecstasy, Jourdain has very little to say concretely about how and why music transports us the way it does, and where, in particular, it is transporting us to. As a Christian reader, in fact, the overall effect of Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy on me was not to cause me to stand in awe at the mysterious results of eons of blind evolutionary processes. Rather, it led me continually back to my deepest faith commitments: if the effect of music on the human psyche really is as complex and mysterious as Jourdain continually insists it is, where could so complex and mysterious a phenomenon have come from?

More to the point: what is really happening in us, when carefully structured and aesthetically pleasing sounds strike our bodies and elicit a response that can only be described, for lack of a better word, as spiritual? The evolutionary answers to those questions—like the ones Jourdain proposes—leave me personally feeling empty and cold. In the words of Puddleglum to the godless Green Witch: “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one, and the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That’s why I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t Narnia.”

If you’re not a fan of Narnia, perhaps a more concrete quote would help. In his book The Devil’s Delusion, philosopher David Belinski surveys the many confident claims of the evolutionary atheist—and he’s writing as an atheist himself, mind you—but he looks at the wild claims evolutionary atheism makes, of having made the “God Illusion” unnecessary. At the end of his survey he offers this humble acknowledgement: “We live by love and longing, death, and the devastation that time imposes. How did [these things] enter the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things in it that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.”

The best of music, I think, puts us in poignant remembrance of the love and longing, the death and devastation that indeed marks our existence, assuring us that there are things in this world that cannot be explained purely in terms of the physical sciences; and whatever else is happening when a rapturous—or stirring, or alarming, or exciting—piece of music washes over us, and we feel it, and respond, we are being pointed out of our world to another. Not that the music itself can bring us there, but it reminds us that such a place exists, a place where the most satisfying answers of all are offered us. To quote C. S. Lewis in quite a different vein: "If I find in myself desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world." It is our longing for that other world, I think, that the aesthetic effect of music stirs up in us.

It's not for nothing that even in the earliest biblical witness, people responded to their experience of God in song, and in the fullest glimpse of his throne room that we're offered, we're told it's pulsing with the indescribable music of heaven.

Thistle and Thorn, a song

When I was just a little boy
My father taught me how to work with him
Breathing life out of the dust
Till hands were bruised and fingers torn.
Somehow his love redeemed the curse
Because just so long as he was there with me
I didn’t notice it was thistle
Or that they were his thorns.

And then when I was twenty-one
I waited tables for my schooling
Serving life in smoky rooms
Till the wee hours of the morn.
Somehow a joy redeemed the curse
Because with all the laughter we had there
I never guessed that was my thistle
Or that they were my—

Thistle and thorns, thistle and thorns
Watered by the sweat of my brow.
It isn’t much to give,
The simple work of simple hands
But what I have I give to you now.

And then a child was on the way
So I stood up in a classroom
Learning life out of my books
Till the lessons were well-worn.
Somehow his call redeemed the curse
Because with all the lives that I touched there
I didn’t know that was my thistle
Or that those were my—

Thistle and thorns, thistle and thorns
Watered by the sweat of my brow
It isn’t much to give,
The simple work of simple hands
But what I have I give to you now.

And child, you’re almost all grown up
And the worlds spread out before you:
Will you build or will you heal?
What feats will you perform?
O, let his love redeem the curse
And just so long as it is done for him
He’ll make sure they’re never thistles
And they won’t just come up thorns.

On Speaking Up, a poem

Constantly risking absurdity or death,
Said Ferlinghetti about the poet’s speaking up;
And yet weekly I walk a half hour
Tight rope strung taut between
The twin poles of divine transcendence
And human immanence,
An absurd dying and rebirthing
That is no real risk but a lived reality
Where everything and nothing is on the line.
This is my speaking up
In the face of apathy to things divine,
The disenchantment of the universe,
Blindness to the prevenience of grace
And the weary human capitulation
To every oppressor: sin and death and devil.
I know at any moment the crowd
Might snap awake and hear far more than I’m saying
And God knows what hell might break loose then—
What demons defeated—
What wounds healed—
What raging waves stilled—
What burning questions fanned into flame?
The only fear greater than fear of this
Is the fear of saying nothing at all.

Leaving Church, a Book Review

I first encountered the preaching of Barbara Brown Taylor in a homiletics course I took in Seminary. Taylor is an Episcopalian priest turned professor of religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. As such she doesn’t tend to garner much attention in move Evangelically minded circles, though Time magazine named her as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world, in 2014, and Baylor University named her one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world, in 1996. So she has street cred.

In my homiletics course, we were given a number of different sermons to view and critique, as a learning exercise, and a Barbara Brown Taylor sermon on a passage from Ephesians was included on the list. Taylor is a careful wordsmith, with a poet’s ear for rhythm and a storyteller’s taste for imagery, and these qualities sparkled in her preaching. I was still trying to find my own voice as a preacher, at the time, and was wondering if my own love for a well-turned phrase might somehow marry with my passion for speaking the Word of God. Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon gave me at least one reason to hope that it might. She never became one of my “top 12 preachers” in terms of influence, but the example she set, of using words poetically in the proclamation of the Word of God, left an indelible mark on me.

It was with great joy and much curiosity, then, that I started into Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, her personal story of becoming a priest, serving God in a small Episcopalian church in Clarkesville, Georgia, eventually discerning that God was calling her into something other than the priesthood, and finally, as the title suggests, leaving church. Not that she left faith, or worship-in-community, or serving God, but she did leave active ministry.

I myself have wrestled at various times with my own sense of vocation. Even when I left my career as an English teacher and went to seminary to prepare for ministry, I did not know exactly what form that ministry would take, whether academic, or pastoral, or something altogether different. When the Lord made it clear to me that it was time for me to leave my previous ministry appointment, a post I’d held for some 12 years or more, I was not entirely sure I was being called back into a pastoral position. And over those last 12 years—during a pastoral burn-out in 2014, deciding to complete a doctorate in Rochester, New York in 2016, stepping back for a three-month sabbatical in 2020-- at each point I've had to do some wrestling again. Sometimes this was mild sparing, even play-wrestling, other times it felt like a life-or-death struggle. Each time, however, I eventually pinned my questions and doubts to the mat, and emerged from the ring clear in the conviction that God was still calling me to serve him in this way.

So I was deeply intrigued to read Barbara Brown Taylor’s story, as someone who has wrestled in a similar way.

The book is good read. Even if you’re not in vocational ministry specifically, it asks a whole bunch of important questions that we all should probably wonder about more: what’s the real difference between doing and being? What does it mean to be “called” to a vocation in the first place? What should life-lived-in-community-loving-God really look like, after all?

As a pastor, though, a few things in Leaving Church felt especially poignant to me. Taylor has an extended section where she describes the days immediately after leaving her position as priest, as she begins to realize how deeply she had longed, throughout her ministry, to be treated like “just one of the flock,” and not set aside the way being a pastor often does set aside those who do it. In another scene she describes the moment she realized that she first went into the ministry because she had fallen in love with God, and yet the demands of the ministry were making it harder and harder to experience that love. In another passage, she describes the discovery that her vocation is broader than simply the things she does as a priest, and is tied more fundamentally to who she is in relation to God. These were all things that spoke to my own experience in ministry, some because they were lessons I, too, learned the hard way; others because they’re lessons I’m still trying to figure out.

A few days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is also a pastor, and we were talking about the unique challenges that come with this particular line of work. In a moment of epiphany, I said something to the effect that I was starting to think that being a pastor actually changes the person doing it in some deep psychological way. I hadn’t thought about it like that before I said it, but when he asked me to elaborate, I mentioned how the “setting aside for ministry” and the unavoidable “being setting apart from community” that so often comes with it, how the weight of spiritual responsibility that we unconsciously shoulder, how vagueness of the job and yet its intense precision (we pastor people wherever they happen to be, through whatever they happen to be experiencing, yet our work is tied to and focused on the singular person of Jesus Christ as revealed in his Word)—how all this shapes our psyches in ways we probably none of us fully appreciate.

As a pastor, reading one colleagues journey through ministry helped me to appreciate these things more fully, and caused me to reflect more deeply than I have for a while, on the nature of my own calling. One of the conclusions that Barbara Brown Taylor draws from her experience is that all of us have a calling in Christ, even if we don’t wear a collar to signify it, and sometimes, ironically, the more formally we attach our calling to our work, the more difficult it becomes to pursue it. These are lessons all followers of the Great Shepherd would do well to mull over, not just those who serve as under-shepherds.