“The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.”
– Charles Fort
In 2014, I staffed a Bible study the night before my family’s summer vacation began. Two people showed up. Louise and Paula. My mind kept wandering across the lake to Michigan. So, we were two or three, depending on the moment. I read a psalm. The deer’s deep longing led us to lament a youthful enthusiasm for cocaine and to confess that wheelchairs breed idolatry.
“This chair controls my mood. It has too much power.” The women were so hard on themselves. I interrupted. “What if you saw yourself through Jesus’s eyes?” That turned our talk to heaven. Paula wondered where her dead husband was. Louise whacked the side of her wheelchair. “When I get there I don’t know whether I’ll become deer-like, leaping, free, or if I’ll finally be at peace with this body. Either way, I’ll be with Him.”
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Vacation: swimming, badminton, cold gin. Time shifted. Or we slipped its hold. It was an hour earlier in Michigan, but we went the other way. The sun didn’t set until 9:30. My children were in grade school. Our whole family was up past 1:00 a.m. for three straight weeks. We wrung the month of August dry. Then we began to resent its end. “Two days of vacation left.” Time did its trick. We were back in the noose.
On our last day, neighbors we barely knew invited us for a boat ride. We conferred as a family, and agreed that we’d keep the boat ride to an hour. Our time was precious. The neighbors’ family cottage hadn’t changed in sixty years. The place glowed. Knotty pine walls and taxidermy lit by hand-painted deerskin lampshades. A Velveteen Rabbit home; kitsch loved so well it became real.
Our vacation neighbor is a dentist. He has a gentle, distracted demeanor, as if his mind is simultaneously pondering how not to hurt you and how quickly your insurance reimburses. He drove his Chris Craft like a madman. We ripped across the lake. Storm clouds gathered, but the dentist outgunned them, dodging squalls and rainfall gleefully. When he finally slowed down, our own wake rolled us. The moment the boat began to slow, his wife stood up, sure footed. Without saying anything, she reached under her seat and pulled out seven loaves of moldy sandwich bread. Then she moved to the stern, tore a piece of bread apart and began to toss it in the air. A seagull appeared. Then another. Soon there were about a dozen. Her husband increased the boat’s speed carefully, moving just fast enough to keep the bread in the air and the birds ten feet behind us.
The dentist and his wife handed each member of my family a loaf of bread and an unspoken invitation. “Would you like to play our weird game?” Absolutely. We tore at our loaves and began throwing bread in the air. In ten minutes there were at least 200 gulls behind us. The clouds dispersed. I saw hundreds more on the blue horizon. It was disconcerting. Seagulls have a vulture aspect.
The dentist kept us safe. By the end, there were hundreds of seagulls riding the wind behind us, turning as we turned, the airborne train of a sky-sized wedding gown. We kept throwing bread, the gulls increased, billowed, became like doves.
When we reached the neighbor’s dock, the birds turned away. Our hour had flown by. All five of us were lake-stunned and giddy, bonded to our neighbors, laughing with the dentist and his wife, hugging one another gently. Nobody tried to explain. When we got home, I glanced at the kitchen clock. We’d been on the lake for more than six hours. Time’s noose slipped again.
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Back at work, I learned that both of the women from my Bible study were hospitalized after being diagnosed with fast-moving cancer. It must have been in them at the Bible study. Louise was a wreck, shifting in her bed, afraid she might lose her costly independence, enraged at the prospect of being the youngest resident of a nursing home. She had two friends with her. One looked like a nun and kept saying “trust the Lord.” Louise twisted, grimaced. “That is not fucking helpful.” Her other friend kept quiet and looked at Louise with pity in her eyes. I offered up a prayer asking God to intervene while thinking, once again, that providence is the least helpful Christian doctrine. We were Job’s friends, pouring confusion into open wounds. Louise scowled. She resisted us. Her anger was the only truth in that room. It had the purity of fire. Everyone should witness such honesty.
Paula’s husband Frank died of an aneurysm in 2000, still young enough to ride his Harley Davidson daily. Sitting up in her bed, tethered to three different machines, Paula was animated and joyful. She told me that Frank came to her just after she was diagnosed. He stood before her in their bedroom and spoke out loud. “You worry all the time. About the girls. About work. About the future. There is no worry here. Stop worrying. Don’t wait to get here. Stop worrying right now. Start early.” She beamed as she told me this. “Frank said, ‘Start early. Life doesn’t end. Or if it ends, it ends in a beginning.’” Unnerved, I hurried out of her room.
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The first chapter of Genesis is clear. God gives us time. We live within it. God made days to make a week, and then made us to live inside time’s structure. We cannot escape the iron of time’s logic. Six hours cannot become one. I know this. Just as I know a dead man cannot stand at the foot of his wife’s bed to speak comfort in her ears.
In the early 1900s, Charles Fort spent years in the New York Public library, pouring over small town newspaper reports of things like a hailstone the size of an elephant, a cloud that rained stones, a cloud that rained nuts, or fish, or fish again. He found many fish storms. After collecting four books’ worth of occurrences that science deemed impossible, Fort concluded, “Science is established preposterousness.” Elsewhere he wrote, “I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs.” His work aims to destabilize materialist rigidity. He takes the destabilization of Christianity for granted.
And yet, Fort’s best work contains a Christian resonance. To believe in the Genesis account of creation is to confess that all phenomena is preposterous. Scientific dogma draws an arbitrary line between things that exist and then turns a blind eye to realities beyond the pale, deeming them impossible and unreal. I am not here to argue with science. I have no dog in that fight. But I wonder if the Christian dogma that defines my sense of possible (perhaps a better word is permissable) might cause me to suffer something like the scientific blindness Fort decries.
I believe that after death we wait for resurrection. In this, I am a Christian, and therefore at odds with the boundaries drawn by scientific materialism. The last time I preached on the general resurrection, a trustworthy church member told me the sermon was “intellectually insulting.” Of course it was. Insofar as we let modern definitions of “possible” define reality, the resurrection of Jesus is impossible. We cover the ensuing dissonance with a brass quartet and flowers. The resurrection of everyone isn’t so easily obscured. A marching band couldn’t drown out how loudly the general resurrection shouts impossible! But, without the promise of its universal conclusion, Easter is reduced to a one-off miracle. If Easter’s resurrection were the resurrection and took place for Jesus alone, it would be the only Jesus miracle rooted in his self interest. Indeed, one criterion used to establish whether a purported supernatural occurrence is a Christian miracle is whether or not it happens on behalf of another. The very notion of a self-directed miracle is anti-Christian, making an isolated Easter a nonsense holiday.
When we celebrate the resurrection, we are not celebrating the anniversary of Houdini’s greatest escape. Instead, we are allowing ourselves to be shaped by a promise, a hint, a foretaste. We are tasting the first fruit, fed by it before the rest of the harvest comes in. Because of the resurrection we celebrate, we know how human existence ends. Resurrection has begun with the resurrection of Christ. It hasn’t ended. We will die. And after dying, we will wait for Christ’s return. We will keep on waiting until the promised end when heaven comes down to earth and brings the harvest in. On that day, the dead will be raised as Christ was raised, this ravaged earth will be made new, and we will finally be at home. For now, we wait. Even in death, we wait.
This is what the New Testament says when it speaks of resurrection. We wait until we rise. This is the line it draws. The Bible does not say, “You can go to heaven while your body rots or your ashes cool, and you may qualify for a day pass that lets you visit your cancer-stricken widow.”
No. Scripture is clear. The soul and the body comprise the self. Without both, you are not going anywhere, because you are the sum of both. Without both soul and body, there is no you. This is why the incarnation took place. It is why human bodies should be revered, not violated. And it is why rational mainline preachers should aim to insult our church members by pressing past Jesus’s resurrection into Paul’s wildest claim. Do it the Sunday after Easter. Our people already know how to doubt. Let Thomas be. Lean into the general resurrection. It’s safe. Nobody comes to church the week after Easter. You’ll only insult your most faithful members.
And the ones who have held conversations with a dead spouse.
This is where my unhinged love for Christian dogma leads me. I assure you, such looniness will preach. But, its logic requires me to regard Paula’s conversation with her husband as an impossibility or a heresy. At best a wishful lie. Materialist orthodoxy and Christian metaphysics have at least one thing in common. They both think Paula’s wrong. Or crazy.
But she isn’t. She’s an accountant. She is a deeply moral, stable woman. And she wasn’t the first congregant to tell me she had been visited by a dead loved one. The first one rattled me. I thought she was nuts or drunk, talking about her dear husband (who had finally succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver after three decades of daily, determined boozing that she was equally determined to ignore) showing up in the kitchen ten days after his funeral, espousing a kind of joyful regret and promising all would be well.
Then it happened again. A grieving father whose son died from suicide encountered his son while hiking in the White Mountains. “This wasn’t a daydream. He was wearing hiking boots. We walked together for more than a mile. He told me he loved me, and that I must let myself be forgiven.” Three such reports in twenty six years of ministry. This suggests three things:
All of which makes me love and fear the Holy Spirit. The first church felt God whirl inside its walls like a storm of joy. Turning over chairs God came on “like a wildfire” and left the church gasping in languages its gasping members could not speak. It wasn’t just the furniture. Everything was upside down. A handful of rowdy fishermen and unemployed tax collectors, a few shady young women and half a dozen widows are now the direct ancestors of the Sistine chapel and Dr King on the march in Birmingham. Obviously, this wasn’t done on their own. All they did was call on God. And he showed up. Pulsing, surging, crackling.
The Spirit is not independent of the church in an absolute sense, but the two aren’t reliably connected. The Spirit is the church’s animating fuel, but it holds more in common with a burning river in Cleveland than the result of your thermostat. The Spirit is a corresponding wildness, not a partner. Right next to our long-running attempt to contain God’s presence inside dogma, sermons, and stained glass, the Spirit of God is out of control and unwilling to stay in its lane. Which means it will come crashing through the walls we use to define propriety, permissibility, and possibility. Can you hear it? It sounds like wind, braying preposterousness to the tune of a hymn. Maybe. Perhaps that’s just the sound of a storm. I am afraid to claim that my congregants’ pious encounters with the uncanny are evidence of the Spirit. And I am afraid to say they aren’t.
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Years ago I served a buttoned-down church that longed to be more diverse. We prayed and planned and remained the same. Then a man with a closed-head injury came to worship. He was wearing a helmet more than twenty years after his accident. Our practice was to pass a microphone for requests during the prayers of the people. Our guest took the mic and howled into it. “I want to have a child, but fifteen years ago my parents forced me to have a vasectomy! Lord forgive them!” At our next Worship Committee meeting, we decided to discontinue the open-mic policy. The Spirit will blow through the church. We can always close the windows.
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We can close the windows, but the Spirit will persist. Recently, a congregant who works in commercial real estate told me that her standard poodle spoke to her. It had good news. Her terminally ill husband had just qualified for a drug trial that could save his life. The dog shared this information five days before the man’s neurologist received it. The dog didn’t speak actual words. Canine physiology won’t allow for it. Neither the dog nor the woman who told me this story are stupid. They know dogs can’t vocalize in English. Rather than using his voice, the dog employed a sort of canine/human mind meld.
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The cliche, of course, is that the Protestant Mainline is unable to find or feel the Spirit. This is a self-loathing lie. Just last week, a struggling congregant explained why she was avoiding church. “It’s the only place I cry. I can’t cry at work. I don’t cry at home, alone. But lately in worship, tears just overcome me. It is so embarrassing. I’m sorry.”
I was quick to respond. “Don’t apologize! People are always crying in church! You can’t see them from where you sit, but I see people weeping every week!”
I was riled up. Three days earlier I broke down and wept while watching a rock and roll show. I went by myself to see the folk singer Joan Shelley and her husband, the guitarist Nathan Salsburg. The crowd had an NPR vibe. We sat in rows of folding chairs, as orderly as Presbyterians. But the whiskey and coke I ordered was surprisingly stiff and the music was wildly beautiful. The songs swooped and shuddered. They were pointed and grand.
Music comes to us as a signal from outside ourselves. Music forecasts heaven’s dawn. In this regard, even the loudest song hits with the force of a hint, pointing toward our joyous end. Some day … one day … Music shows us where we’re going. Music is so obviously tied to the Spirit. It comes to us from beyond us as a promise, a beckoning.
But Joan Shelley can sing. And singing isn’t a visitation. It rises up from deep inside us. Not as a manifestation of human genius. More like a vestige of Eden still within us. An embodied ingot from a ruined empire, or the most important words of our great-grandparents’ language, scraps of meaning in this new and broken land. Echoing Eden, it calls us back to what Eve and Adam lost, back to the paradise we were made for. Can anything evoke nostalgia like a song? Music is mysterious, but singing is our mother tongue.
None of this occurred to me in the moment. I was simply opened by the power of the songs and the lovely dynamic of this humble couple; two artists in love, transcending while pointing beyond themselves.
State precedes experience, of course. Meaning that when this music opened me, I felt the deep pain of my own life. Wondrous art onstage before me, failure and brokenness inside me. Of course I wept! I hope something similar spurs the tears I see on Sunday morning. I cannot let myself be so open during worship, but I know that others can. I mean to say, that while I cannot break down and sob in the pulpit, I must be in touch with the feeling. The theater director Henry Godinez recently told me, “A good actor brings an audience to tears. A bad actor cries on stage. You don’t want an audience to take care of you, or to feel your feelings. You want to bring them into their own emotions. To do that, you have to know the source of your own tears quite well.” Preaching isn’t acting. Most good preachers have felt the difference after failing to honor the distinction. Beyond the performative, if I were to weep in the pulpit, I would violate the same professionalism that prevents me from bringing a toothache to the dentists in my congregation. You don’t want your congregation to take care of you. And I don’t want them feeling my feelings.
Which isn’t to say I don’t feel theirs. I lied to my tearful congregant. I don’t see tears every week. In the churches I serve, few people are torn enough to collapse in public. Or spirited enough to disarm themselves. At least at any one time. But when I recall the dozens of people I see weep each year, and then begin to recall the hundreds I have seen in prior years, people weeping on Easter, weeping at weddings, crying fat tears on a dull Sunday in February, I see hundreds and hundreds of faces shining with holy tears. The pews of the Protestant mainline are flowing with charisma.
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On August 31, 2022, the governor of Texas began bussing Venezuelan migrants to Chicago. By late 2023, more than 30,000 people had been relocated. When human beings are used as political props, the church is given an opportunity to be the church. Chicago’s shelters were overwhelmed. The city began housing Venezuelan families in police stations. There were infants sleeping in the foyer of the 18th District station, a few blocks from the church I serve. We had space and began housing migrant families. At one point, more than thirty people were living in our building. I got to know these families, but communication was a challenge. We did not speak the same language. Each weekday on my way into work I exchanged an awkward sidewalk “hola” with two teenage siblings making their way from the church to our local high school. Despite the language barrier, many of our migrant guests joined our church. I baptized the teenagers’ baby brother. Eventually, we found apartments for our guests. The teenagers, their little brother, and their parents moved across the city. But, they remained enrolled at the same high school.
Last October, ICE began abducting people in our neighborhood. On the day they arrived, I could hear helicopters above my office and some shouting from the street. As I began to realize what was happening, I received a text message. Google translate revealed, “Pastor, ICE is outside our school. My sister and I need to get home. The train isn’t safe today.” I wrote him back, called the school, and reached out to neighbors in the congregation. We joined several dozen other drivers in the high school cafeteria as a kind of makeshift school bus. I drove my two teenage congregants home. I hadn’t tried to talk with them since they moved out of the building. My Spanish had not improved, But after a few months of language acquisition classes and a summer intensive, they suddenly spoke English well. It felt miraculous, diving into conversation with kids I knew, but hadn’t ever understood. They were afraid, of course. But, they had the buoyancy and forward thrust of adolescence. It took more than an hour to reach their home. In that time, our conversation moved easily from ICE to rap music to college dreams and laughter about their teachers. By the time we got to their new neighborhood, what had begun as an emergency felt like a normal pastoral errand.
We parked a block away from their apartment. It was a bright day. The street was lined with trees. The sun hit the street through orange and red leaves. The sidewalk held an amber glow. I saw their little brother in this gorgeous light. He began to race toward us, moving with a toddler’s thumping diaper-stride. He was gleeful. I laughed out loud. And then, behind him, I saw his parents the moment they saw their endangered older children. I’d seen them a few days before in worship. They appeared to have aged ten years in the interval. They looked terrified, careworn, horrified by the prospect of their children, abducted. They embraced their teenagers with such force.
I caught their eyes as a momentary respite washed over them. Their eyes spoke deep relief, but not a word of hope. They said thank you and pray for us and thank God this day is over but tomorrow will bring more fear and we will keep on living. I told them I understood, or was learning to at least. This was all crystal clear. We understood each other. We did not speak a word. We don’t speak the same language.
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“to retrieve the bright unbearable reality as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshiping.”
— Alice Oswald
Obviously, the spirit can work in safe sermon illustrations like the story I shared above. But it can’t be confined to them. The moment we think so is the moment we confuse the church with what Alice Oswald calls God’s “bright, unbearable reality.” I wonder if the Spirit wants to tear the roof off the church to remind his people of who we’re really worshiping. Which is to say, in its most vivid appearances, the Spirit does not preach.
I spent my first seven years of ministry in an urban church that housed a food pantry. I grew familiar with vaguely threatening appeals for cash. “I’m on the run from the Colombian mob. I just ditched a car full of cocaine on the side of Addison Street and I need $200 to get a bus ticket out of town. Otherwise they’ll come after my family. They could be on their way here right now.” Or the old standby, “I found a job as a line cook, but I can’t begin until I’ve got a pair of rubber-soled shoes, and they cost $60.” Or the quick and dirty version: “I’m down to my last colostomy bag!”
I heard a lot of wild stories, but I didn’t fear for my life in a church office until I began serving in a wealthy suburb. To get into my office, the man who threatened to kill me had to overcome significant barriers. A train or a bus, a locked church door, two secretaries, a long hallway, and then my closed door. I have no memory of his arrival. It was as if the wind blew him in. He wore a dirty windbreaker, dirty jeans, and a blown out pair of old Brooks running shoes. He smelled like fish and cigarettes. I remember that he was very short and had a beard that covered his entire face, stopping just beneath his eyes. He told me that he had been working on a fishing boat in Alaska and had once witnessed an eagle swoop out of the sky to snatch an infant from its mother’s arms. I told him I thought this was unlikely, and he grew offended, began to curse.
Then he asked me for $100. He needed it to catch a bus to New Hampshire to visit his sick mother. I declined and he persisted and I felt a familiar sadness, that old void between a desperate person bending the truth for cash and a church that sits on money. We are all lying when this happens.
He continued, cursing louder now. I told him to leave. He leapt out of his chair and stepped toward me. He had me cornered, pinned to a comfortable office chair, alone. Anger rolled off him. He said he was going to kill me, and reached into his jacket for a weapon.
The strangest resignation came over me. I remember thinking, “So, this is how I die. Stabbed to death by a tiny deranged sailor while sitting in a wingback chair in a church office in a tony suburb that does not feel like home.” I accepted death. I exhaled. He pulled his hand out of his jacket, brandishing … a filthy rain damaged Mario Puzo paperback. I don’t remember the title, but I do remember it wasn’t The Godfather. He wanted to kill me with some lesser work.
The moment I realized he wasn’t going to stab me, peace rushed out of my body as quickly as it had arrived. I became enraged. I leapt up, shouting, spitting foul insults and thinking of my children. I roared threats and violence at the man, raised my hands, stepped toward him. Both secretaries and the church custodian burst into my office. I caught my breath and apologized. “It’s okay, I’m okay, I’m safe.” The custodian looked at me, “I wasn’t worried about you. It sounded like you were about to kill someone.” I looked around the room for the little man. He was gone. As if the same wind that blew him in, had carried him away. The Spirit, saving him from my violence? Saving me from the same? Or, perhaps, the Spirit, blowing a strange reminder on its insistent wind. You want to be alive.
