Back to the Grindstone...

"When I was a little boy they called me a liar but now that I am grown up they call me a writer." Issac Bashevis Singer, Polish Writer. 07/14/1904-07/24/1991

So I'm home. Sigh.

I'm back at 2,900 feet above sea level rather than Santa Fe's 7,800 feet. I can walk a few steps without fighting the need to grab a shower to recover from all the monsoon humidity or needing to find an oxogen bar just so that I can breathe.

I had no idea what to expect when I left Pend Oreille County for my first residency-I was shocked that I was even admitted- the program is very selective and less than one in five applicants are admitted. Although the Seattle Pacific University Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program is only three years old, already it is garnering acclaim from just about everywhere. Not just the faith based community, but everywhere.

The Santa Fe Residency I attended is held in conjunction with the Santa Fe Glen Workshop run by Image Journal, which is a week long celebration of the arts from a faith perspective. Not just Christianity-any faith. That is where I found hope. If they can deal with Islam, or a buddhist perspective, maybe they can deal with a guy like me.

Seattle Pacific Univerisy itself is a very conservative institution-last year they were visited by Mel White's group SoulForce. The balancing act of juggling faith and sexual orientation is something we've not moved beyond, or at least it ain't happened at SPU, yet. On a personal level, I am tired of discussing it.

I don't live a church filled life. I don't attend church nor do I have many friends that do. Most of the folks I hang around are disillusioned with organized religion, political systems and anything that preaches any take on "values". Most of the people I know aren't welcomed at the majority of churches, anyway. Yet they believe in Jesus and they pray-whether its from a street corner before they get into their next "date's" car or as they find themselves straggling out of a one- counter barstool at some last-call tavern in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. They pray with their single parented kids and their animal shelter adopted pets. They pray from rehab, unrecovered recovery, and from halfway in, halfway out, halfway houses. They pray from the uncertainty of D minus credit ratings, repo'd cars and foreclosed homes. They pray not because it's getting them something, or keeping them from something, but because its sure somethin' special to know that no matter how fucked up life gets, a divine love still holds up our lives as precious in HIS sight.

Faith isn't about finding perfection. Or pretending to have found it on Sundays. It's about searching out one's ultimate best relationship with God, even when the search is launched from an unexpected place. Faith is not a single act. I have not found Jesus. But I am always finding Jesus, a process that is like my cooking, and my history of relationships, the definition of messy. The Bible is filled with stories of the diverse potential of human wreckage, and life hasn't changed much since then.

I'd offer that Ted Hagard has more to tell us about faith now, more than he ever did from that pretty Colorado pulpit. The story was just getting good- how God finds us in our most desperate state.

And what does the church do? They shut Ted up, shipped him off, and silenced him.

I don't need any more renditions of the stale version of faith told from the sanctuary of a mega church sanctuary. I want to know about the place faith resides when some gay hustler has just kneaded your muscles into a permanent contraction, as the last bump of meth sends your brain into a place of unsustainable ecstacy not seen since the resurrection. God was just as much with Ted on the massage table as he was with him on Sunday mornings.

I still believe. I shouldn't, I mean the odds are against a guy like me finding anything of value in Christianity. But the way I see it, Jesus has nothing to do with the mess of the church, the planet, or the state of humanity and that is where all my hope rests. It is why I write. It is why I am going back to school.

So knowing all that, I went to Santa Fe. In ten days I had more stimulation, more input, and more opportunity for discussion than I've had in the last decade. I didn't go to fight the debates about sexuality and who is and who isn't on the slicked up downward path. That's for Dante and Augustine and for the Hilton's and the Brittany Spears and the George Michaels to demonstrate. It's for the McCains and the Obama's to wrestle through, as they each court the last version of the value voter.

Writing is something I used to be ashamed of. Just like my art. But it is, like trucking, in my blood. I'll probably have a reduced life expectancy (Just like trucking...hmmm seeing a pattern here?), lead an increasingly solitary life stuck mainly inside my own head (again more similarities to the road code) but I felt I had to take the next step.

And because your reading this, I guess you will be along for the ride. Which means here some advise from my old truck driver training days:

Buckle up. Check your mirrors. Leave yourself an out. And keep your eyes moving.