No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

For Ken Malcolm, who hiked this trail with me.

Thanks, Brother.

Contents

Prologue

At the Ranch

Discernment

Mistakes

Nineveh

This, That, and the Other Jesus

Bible 101: Peace and Justice

Yet Even at the Grave We Make Our Song

Dancing with the Saints

Beauty

Father’s Day

The War Against Terror

Hurt by the Church

Helping

Ecclesia

Prayer 101

Coffee

Back at the Ranch, Or Discernment, Part 2

Acknowledgments

Notes

Prologue

It was my last night in Germany. It had been a rushed trip—five days sandwiched in between two weeks of teaching in New Mexico, with public speaking engagements in Munich and Stuttgart talking about religion and film, and a meeting with a Stuttgart writing group to talk about writing and publishing. The organizer of that writing group, Karenne, and I were walking the streets of downtown Stuttgart. We had lost a couple of members of the group when we emerged from the hauptbahnhof—the train station—and set off toward the theater where we were going to see a play written by another of the members, and we backtracked through the central city to see if we could figure out where we’d lost them.

As we walked, Karenne asked me about my life and about my future. This is not as strange as it seems: Self-disclosure is an important element of my writing and public speaking, and people often respond to that openness by asking other personal questions, sensing that perhaps something in my experience might be a help in their own journey. Two nights earlier, Karenne had been part of the audience in the Kino Kommunales, the Stuttgart movie theater where I gave a talk on good and evil in American film. The last movie I discussed was 3:10 to Yuma, a Western written by friends of mine that focuses on an outlaw played by Russell Crowe, who is transformed—at least for a bit—through the good represented by a rancher played by Christian Bale. I find the movie both entertaining and inspiring, an authentic spiritual vision of what can happen in this life. I do believe with all my heart that transformation is possible, that people can change.

Afterward, during the Q and A period, Karenne had asked me a probing question about whether I could think of any really bad people who had been transformed by grace and their own desire for new life into good people. It seems the worst people stay bad, she said. And they go on hurting other people until someone else stops them.

Well, I was on the spot—standing in front of a group of people in a foreign land, my so-called theological expertise about to be laid bare. At first I couldn’t even think of a really evil person. Or, rather, the only one I could think of was Hitler, and clearly we weren’t going anywhere there. Not the best way to endear myself to my German hosts, and anyway, there wasn’t much of an upbeat spiritual ending to that story.

And then something came to me that felt like an answer. As gently and as honestly as I could, I said, I think you’re right. History is full of people who never stopped being evil. But I can think of one person who was changed from darkness to light. Me.

For although I never murdered the innocents, robbed banks, or stole Social Security checks from great-grandmothers, during that long stretch of my life when I was in the throes of deep and life-threatening depression, I hurt other people—often the people I loved most—with my selfishness, my anger, my inability to look outside my own suffering, my conscious decision to pursue my own will. I was not entirely under my own control, the bus didn’t always turn when I turned the wheel, but there’s no denying that it had been a disastrous life with me at the controls. And while I hope and pray that I also helped some people along the way, during that time, I lost three marriages, I lost the chance to be a part of my sons’ daily lives, and I spread rage, guilt, and shame around me like a water sprinkler turned up high.

But in the early years of this millennium, when it became clear that I was not going to get any better physically, emotionally, or spiritually pursuing my own wisdom, when it seemed that the only path out of the pain I was inflicting and suffering seemed to be to leave this life altogether, I suddenly experienced this momentous and, some would say, miraculous, change when I gave up, when I stopped trying to do what I wanted and tried to do what I believe God wanted.

This was a shock to me because not only had I not been a very religious person for some years, I actually wanted to have very little to do with formal religion.

Like most Americans, I believed in God, or something I called God. But I had thought I was probably better off running my life than the God I had been taught while growing up, who was something of a petulant and angry creature; I didn’t yet have much information about any other idea of God. It wasn’t until I had a direct experience of a loving God through a group of loving people at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, that I realized I was wrong about God, as I’d been about a lot of things.

But before that, things went about as wrong as things could go.

You weren’t so bad, Karenne said to me that night as we walked through downtown Stuttgart. This is what people often say to me when they hear about my past because they think the person I seem to be now would be hard-pressed to hurt others. But I assured her—and I assure you—that while I may not have been Hitler, I destroyed my family, I almost destroyed myself, and the minor holocaust that was my life is plenty of evil for one lifetime. The bad chemicals in my brain might constitute a mitigating factor, but I still have to take responsibility for the real-world results.

When I came out on the far side of my depression into new life in 2003, at first I was stunned and a little bit blinded by all the color and vibrancy of life. The biggest decision of my life had simply been about whether or not I was going to live, and yet the life I was discovering was so much bigger and more beautiful than I had ever imagined. But then, as my eyes began to get used to the light, I felt this ongoing tug that accompanied my gratitude—the idea that I had been saved for a purpose. I hadn’t expected to be alive for long, and now I had what might be years in which I could try to do something worthwhile for others.

During that time, the church that saved me suggested that maybe I was called to be a priest in the Episcopal Church, an ordained leader in the tradition that had opened up a new way of life for me, and I was open to that calling. I began the process we call discernment, began full-time seminary study, served in a church, preached, taught, wrote, and experienced daily joy, which I had heard was a sign that you were doing what you were supposed to be doing—what Parker Palmer calls living the life that wants to live in me.

But that first foray into the ordination process did not lead me to the priesthood; ultimately, after the physical and emotional screening and the background check had not eliminated me, my disastrous past life came to the forefront as an issue for the people who make decisions, as perhaps it should have. While I don’t feel like my worst mistakes and past life measure who I am now, past performance is our biggest indicator of character. And yet, I continued to feel that pull to some sort of vocation in the Church.

So there I was—with life ahead of me that I did not expect to have and a clear vision that, somehow, I was supposed to serve others.

But why do you think you’re supposed to be a priest? Karenne asked, after we had at last given up on finding our missing friends and were having a tall cold glass of German beer at a biergarten. Why isn’t it enough to be a human being?

And this is another response I hear from people, particularly good-hearted people who are not people of faith. You seem like a nice person, they say, not crazy like some. Why must religion get mixed up in it?

Of course, it is enough to be a human being, especially if you are the human being you’re called to be. And I don’t know that I’m supposed to be a priest. For the past five years, I have done my best to follow the path that has opened up in front of me, and it has been a joyful one. Particularly since I went to seminary, I find my professional life bounded by service: I teach, I write, I do pastoral counseling, I preach, I lead retreats, I lead workshops, I lecture—and it is a life filled with more joy and satisfaction than I can say.

I have found love and understanding, I have discovered forgiveness for my badly mangled past life, and from day to day I am doing my best to do the work God has set in front of me.

But I also feel—and others around me feel—that God may have something additional in mind for me. In my tradition, we say that we understand our calling in community, and several communities have lifted me up and said they think that perhaps I am intended to be a priest in the Church.

If you had told me in the years before I came back to faith that I might be called to this, I would have rejected it outright; this is not some long-deferred dream. And if it never happens, I know my life will still be filled with joy and meaningful work, with my family, and with love.

But I also know that I now have years of life ahead of me I never imagined I would have, and perhaps there is a reason I could not once have imagined for my continuing presence here on planet earth.

So I say, if God wants me, here I am. Whatever it is, I’m prepared to do it.

And like Thomas Merton said, I hope and pray that this desire will lead me in the right direction.

So far, as circuitous as the route has sometimes been, as far into the desert as I may have wandered, I always have ended up exactly where I was supposed to be.

And I trust, by the time we get to the end of this story, even if there is more wandering in the desert, that will still be true.

At the Ranch

It’s sometimes a challenge to know where to start a story. My fiction-writing students are always asking me where to begin, and I usually tell them, As late as possible. Right when things start to happen and not a moment before.

Of course, when you’re telling your own story, it can be harder to know exactly when that moment occurs. Is it in the big events of our lives, the births and deaths?

Or is it the moment that you have a realization that changes you?

It had been raining all afternoon at Ghost Ranch, sometimes just a spatter of drops, sometimes a torrent. I had been writing since mid-morning and hoped to take a break and go out on my bike—why was it raining in the desert?—but the rain kept falling, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always steady. So I worked until late afternoon, when I finished a draft of the chapter I was working on. Then I put on my anorak and walked out from Casa del Sol, the isolated retreat center where I was staying on the ranch, and down to the nearby creek, mud clumping on the bottom of my Tevas, my feet gathering weight as I walked, rain tapping on the hood of my jacket.

The old timber bridge down at the creek was shuddering with the violence of the water rushing beneath it. Most summers the creek was a tiny trickle of clear water over stones far below, or even just dry creek bed. Now it was a fast-flowing brown liquid, not quite as thick as chocolate pudding, but certainly thicker than chocolate milk, and it was swooshing by just a few feet below me. Down at the next bend, the current had washed out a bank and pulled a tall cedar into the water—a tree that had lasted for long years in the desert, and now was going to drown.

I felt bad for the tree. But I felt good away from the computer, out in the rain and the cool air, and I walked across hillsides and up at last onto a mesa across from the painted rock that surrounds Ghost Ranch. People have been traveling here from all across the country for at least eighty years to see this sight, and one of them, the great painter Georgia O’Keefe, had actually strong-armed the ranch into selling her the house across the valley from where I stood, a place where she painted some of her best-known landscapes.

Man, I am so lucky to get to see this, I thought as I looked out across the valley at the multicolored cliffs of sandstone, at the dark gray clouds behind and above them.

Then I saw a jagged flash of lightning, heard the thunder follow a second or less afterward, and knew that I was in real danger. There were no trees anywhere near, and I was the tallest thing for some distance; never a good thing when there’s lightning around. So, bent over like Groucho Marx—if Groucho Marx were also a sprinter—I dashed across the pasture, panting with the altitude (Ghost Ranch is five thousand five hundred feet higher than Austin, Texas, where I still live), rain pattering off my head and shoulders.

I clambered down hills and climbed with some delicacy over a barbed wire fence. I followed a pickup track back to where I had diverged from the road, and by then it was raining harder.

When I got back down to the bridge, where I was surrounded by lots of things taller than me, I felt some relief. But I also paused for a second, smiling as the rain ran down my face and cold down my back. And then I started laughing.

I wished I’d been able to see myself on the mesa, ducking and running as I made a dash for safety, and I could still feel that pinprick of fear that had grown at the thought of not seeing my boys or my Martha again, of not finishing the book sitting on the table in the common room in Casa del Sol.

I laughed again, and the rain came down in sheets as I made the long walk back. I was soaked and chilled to the bone and amazed at how much I loved being alive.

I laughed, although not because I found the thought of getting struck by lightning funny—or because I enjoy courting pneumonia. But one of the things you will need to know about me if we are going to walk together is that, not so long ago, if I’d been up on the mesa with lightning flashing around me, I probably would not have been induced to quicken my pace back to the ranch. During long stretches of my life, I had very little interest in preserving my life, and for some few horrible years I actively thought about ending it, and so this storm would have seemed like a godsend.

Bring it on, I would have told God. I’m ready whenever You are.

No, I laughed now because I was alive, and because I received that life as a gift and wanted to protect it—and because I know how much I have to live for, and because I know more than most how wonderful it is to feel this way, even with red-spattered legs and cold mud squishing between my toes and cold water running down the small of my back.

But then I always seem to be having these flash-epiphanies at Ghost Ranch, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, since that is why it exists. Formally speaking, Ghost Ranch is a conference center in the high desert of northern New Mexico affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA, and it has