I've begun a writing project for The High Calling. I'm going to write about every job I've ever had. I started with my first job and am working my way from there. We'll see how far I get. I've have a LOT of jobs over the years. I grew up in a working family, and I began working in 6th grade. Along the way I've done everything from bagging groceries to driving forklifts.

This piece is about my second job. I wrote about my first job here.

My Second Job

My second job, like my lawn-mowing gig, was arranged by my father. A local daycare center needed a janitor to come in every evening and do some cleaning. There was a tile hallway, five or six classrooms, and a couple of restrooms. In return for cleaning these, I would be paid four dollars an hour for two hours of work each day. That was a little more than minimum wage at the time, so I took home about $150 a month. It seemed like a fortune.

My specific duties were clearly laid out for me. I was to empty the trash, vacuum all of the classrooms, sweep and mop the hall as needed, and clean the bathrooms. I wasn't sure what they expected me to do when it came to the tile bathroom floors and hall. Along the baseboards and around the bottoms of the toilets, the tiles were dingy and not very clean. Did they expect me to make the floors spotless or simply maintain them as they were when I began the job? ...Click here to read more.

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The following is one of the last public prayers of Carlyle Marney, a roaring and robust, liberal (his word) Baptist who was the pastor of First Baptist of Austin and then went to Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. He died in 1978.

It is out of respect for Baptists like Marney that our church has remained Baptist, in spite of the fact that we take a beating for it. Many people show up at Covenant Baptist Church, expecting something that we are not. They generally don’t come back. One man almost ran to his car after I pulled out a rosary in my Sunday School class. And I suspect that many people see our name and pass us by, people who would have found what they needed here. For some reason I feel okay with that process. It feels like trusting. Be who you are and trust that the people who need you will find you. We were not called to be a powerful and influential church. And if we were any bigger we would have to have some sort of real administration, which would be a shame.

My love for the scriptures and for Baptists like Carlyle Marney have made me loathe to give up our name to mean-spirited fundamentalists who either don’t know our history or only live in 30 to 40 year chunks of it. So yes, we’re Baptists like Marney was. We’ll take whatever reputation that comes with that. With Christianity, really, you’re so busy trying to live that you don’t have time to worry much about what people think about your name. Your life speaks or it doesn’t. That’s all.

So this is a prayer Marney prayed from the pulpit just a few months before his death. I don’t know if this prayer exists in any book in print. I found it in a commemorative book called “Marney,” put out by Myers Park Baptist Church after he died.

If entering now the zenith of my brief arc around and within creation I should enter God’s grand hall tomorrow, called to my account for myself, I should offer this confession and defense if indeed I could do more than call down. But if able to give vocal response at all, I should say this, “Thou knowest, dear Lord of our lives, that for fifty of Thy/my years in ignorance, zest, zeal and sin I lived as if creation and I had no limit. I lived and wanted as if I had forever, without regard for time or wit or strength or need or limit or endurance and as if sleep were a heedless luxury and digestion an automatic process. But Thou, O Lord of real love did snatch my bit and ride me into Thy back pasture and didst rub my nose in my vulnerability and didst split my lungs into acquiescence and didst freeze my colon in grief loss and didst press me into that long depression at the anger I directed against myself. And Thou didst read over my shoulder my diary of that long journey when I did melt before Thee as a mere preacher. Thou didst hear.

Naked I came into the world, how I am dressed at the conclusion makes no difference. A pair of jeans or a Glasgow robe, it makes no difference. Meantime, well I mow, I cut wood for winter, I clean drainage ditches, I preach what is happening and look to see what God will do in the earth. I watch out always for babies and little rabbits in front of my mower and old folks nearby and black snakes worth preserving, and little puppies on the road, and the young-old who stutter and laugh and can’t hear too. The cry of us all, “Come Lord Jesus, come.

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The following post is a part of a joint blogging project at the High Calling Blog Network, a network I helped create and facilitate. Read about the animal writing project.

When Jeanene and I were 25 and had been married about a couple of years, we got a dog. It’s sort of a cliche, but yes, a dog was our first child. Perhaps we needed to practice. And so Linus came into our life. He was a salt and pepper Miniature Schnauzer, the runt of the litter.

I tried to think of fancy words to describe the depth of Linus’ love, but fancy words seem to diminish him. Linus loved us as dogs love their people - with complete and utter abandon. He adored us. He was always overjoyed to see us arrive at home. He never wanted anything more than to be where we were. His greatest thrill in life (apart from eating which I’ll admit did seem to be his first love) was being allowed to sleep on the foot of our bed, wrapped in odd positions around the lumps in the covers made by our feet. And when three sisters were born, one after the other, Linus patiently accepted them with grace and good humor, though he was always fiercely loyal with his love and gave it completely only to the two who raised him from a pup... Click here to read the rest, see the cutest puppy picture ever, and read Linus' eulogy, which I wrote in 2003.

The story so far:

Our little church has put on a number of Franciscan spirituality retreats, geared for our bunch, meaning not compulsively organized and pretty much an easy gathering of friends for conversation, prayer, and personal growth. On a whim, I thought, “Why not invite people who read this blog?” The response seemed good when I asked you what you thought. So we put three on the calendar. The first was last weekend (June 6-8).

This first retreat had less people than are signed up currently for the next two, which was perfect since we’re still figuring out the best way to do things. There were 7 people from around the United States (Washington State, New York, North Carolina, and a few from other parts of Texas). There were about 10 people from our church involved, some participating in the entire retreat and others who dropped in for parts of it.

The people who came were all delightful. It was such a joy to meet them. One woman pitched her tent on the church property and slept outside. Others slept on inflatable mattresses here and there. One person brought fancy chocolates from Seattle, so we had an impromptu chocolate tasting, my first.

Things were said and some information was given. People relaxed and spent time together. Most of the really wonderful things were not things we could have planned. I like our basic approach of trusting that living in the moment together is a virtue in itself and leads to the best moments. Such as:

-Mandolin music
-Chocolate tasting
-Midnight labyrinth walk by candlelight
-Conversation... Lots of it.

I was surprised at how immediately open everyone was. We had planned about 15 minutes for people to introduce themselves. Once everyone started talking, we ended up going over an hour. I immediately knew that some of these people needed to be here...desperately. A few had some rather important and difficult crises that they were dealing with. It seemed like they needed a safe place to relax, talk, share their stories, and yes, to pray and pursue a monastic, spiritual journey.

We were honored by their presence and so happy to provide a place where this might happen.

Whenever people get together, there are logistical details, of course. We used borrowed air mattresses this weekend, but a church here in Texas has volunteered to help us buy some really nice ones. And another church may purchase sheets and pillows and stuff. Ultimately, we hope to be able to say, “Just come. Bring nothing. We’ll feed you and care for your needs. Just find a way to get here and we’ll do the rest.”

I think this weekend was a good start.

And that brings me to the end of what I want to say, which brings me to Sumana. Everyone who came was, as I said, delightful. But Sumana was so delightfully unique. A very smart woman with, as she says, “Hindu leanings.” Her parents are Hindu priests. She grew up steeped in that tradition. Her natural curiosity, her love of life and mystery, brought her to us. She said she was a tourist in Christianity for the weekend. “I’m not a Christian, but you have such beautiful things. I’m always wanting to touch your pretty things.”

I felt grace coming from Sumana. I felt my own religion affirmed by her desire to find goodness in all things. I loved having her at the retreat. And at the end, when she came forward to receive communion with her head bowed, respectfully seeking to join us, I almost burst into tears. It was as if she said, “I don’t know all the details, but I’d like to join you as a fellow seeker after God.” I almost felt like this was finally coming true.

Technically communion is a ceremony reserved for those who have committed themselves to the way of Christ. But I dare anyone to spend a weekend with Sumana and not serve her communion. I double-dog dare you.

What can I say? It was wonderful. We get to do it again at the end of the month. The second retreat is getting full. I think we have 14 so far. Stay tuned. Who knows what this kind of thing can lead to?

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Chocolate Tasting

Breakfast with Ben

Sumana & Me

Dinner on the Riverwalk

Dinner on the Riverwalk

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Christianity has a heavy presence in the United States. You can feel the weight of it like a quilted cloak draped over the people, bending their heads forward and pressing on their shoulders. The air is thick with Christian words. Bible phrases fill our literature and are baptized into our culture, peppering our speech with feeble reminders of a lost faith.

- She’s the salt of the earth.

- It’s only a drop in the bucket.

The Christian Church in America is so symbiotically enmeshed with our culture that their hearts beat as one, and some people hardly know the difference between the two. The words of faith and religion have burrowed deep into the flesh of our language. They rise to the surface like shards of glass from a festering wound, reborn as oaths, obscenities, and vulgar expressions.

- Jesus Christ!

- Oh my God!

Are the people who say these things praying?

When your holy names are born again into the rarified order of words used to express rage and anger, you know you’re deep into the culture. Down in the cultural unconscious, right on the edge of the place where myths are born. And these quasi-religious phrases may well outlast the American Church. Words and phrases are notoriously long-lived, surviving for generations after all remembrance of their original meaning is gone.

And that would be fitting, since words will likely be our undoing. Much of American Christianity is all about words. Hollow words of theology that have all the depth and meaning of political slogans. Words delivered with a smile by ministers who dance behind their pulpits. Words that create false gods of hope and fear. Words that build up straw men and beat them down, while gently excusing the listeners from anything that remotely resembles radical living. Christianity has become a word factory, churning out half-baked ideas and spewing them across the bobbing heads of people who are looking for easy answers. The Church is Constantine reborn in our time. She mouths words of salvation and shakes her baptismal waters over the people who are marched beneath her arched weapons.

But good words must have good living beneath and behind them, or they will ultimately come to nothing. Words without living are just marketing, which has its place if you’re selling hamburgers or shoes, but not if you’re seeking the meaning of life.

I know about the danger of words, for I am a word man myself. I am a writer and a preacher, which means my words end up on paper and in the air, which means they hardly exist at all. Remember: even if my words touch your heart, having said them or written them gives me no special credits in heaven. My life is what matters, as is yours.

It should not have been this way, my brothers and sisters of nature, science, and the world. Christianity should have soared like a bird on the winds of real living. Christianity should have been a heavenly choice, a chosen path, the way of a pilgrim. You should have been warned of the difficulty of the Christian journey perhaps, but never lied to and never coerced. Those who seek to follow in the way of Christ should have taken up a rule of living like monks of old and never laid that rule on the shoulders of anyone who did not freely ask for it. Instead of demanding respect and threatening with fires of hell, we should have been the humble servants of all who crossed our paths.

I speak these words of criticism as a committed insider in the American Church. I speak them with love, but more importantly with great hope, for I always have been a dreamer. When it comes to the Church, you have to be able to see what she might have been and might still become. And strangely enough, you have to see this and believe in it, though you know the Church will never live up to it.

I have been discouraged by the Church many times. And I have even wondered if being a minister was the right choice for me. Thankfully, the Church as a whole is not my responsibility. I am a part of one small community, meeting in a little stone building in San Antonio. We have words to say, of course, various affirmations of faith and statements that we write. But our lives will either speak for us or not. And that is a bit scary, considering how imperfect we are. We try to represent the spirit of Christ. We try and often fail. Sometimes we love the people who come to us seeking solace, and sometimes we have failed to love them as well as we should. We stand before a fireplace on Sunday mornings, singing and speaking, sometimes making a mess of the words, not to mention the living that should stand behind them.

We are waiting to be redeemed. We are waiting for the gift of redemption. And while we are waiting we stand ready to bring whatever goodness we have into the world, as if we might prime some heavenly pump that might start some larger process and things might begin to become what they ought to have been.

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I received an interesting email a couple of months ago from a woman named Sarah Nagel, who reads Real Live Preacher. She was going to be in San Antonio and wondered if we might get together and chat.

Every sort of life has its own hardships and blessings. One of the hardships and blessings of being a minister/writer is accumulating too many relationships to keep up with. As I’m in a mode of simplifying my life where possible, I thought perhaps I should pass on this conversation. But then I noticed the domain attached to her email address. Rice.edu. That was curious to me, so I googled her name and found that she is a Ph.D. graduate of Rice University in the department of physics and astronomy and is currently lecturing there.

Ooh, that changes things. Astronomers and physicists are like rock stars to me. I don’t understand the mathematical language with which they express their understanding of reality, but I’m thrilled with even the simplified explanations they offer to lay persons. And I think that I can sense the grandeur of these truths even in that diluted form.

I wrote back and we set a date. I arranged to have the entire afternoon free on a Friday.

“Wow, my own personal physicist,” I said to myself with glee. “I am now the luckiest man in America!”

She came with her boyfriend, a computer programmer and linguistic philosopher who seemed to know something about, well, everything. I lured the two of them into my office and peppered her with questions for a couple of hours. Then Jeanene and I went out to dinner with them and continued the conversation. It was an absolutely wonderful day.

There was so much I wanted to know.

"I understand particle reality. And I know how waves move, of course. But what ARE waves? Are they ways that particles move, or are they their own kind of reality? And if they are their own kind of reality, could you describe that to me somehow?"

"What is dark matter? Is it true that it makes up 96% of reality? And do we call it dark because we haven’t figured out how to perceive it, or is it a kind of reality that is so completely different from us that we will never be able to interact with it at all?"

"I understand that you fire a single photon of light from some sort of gun or whatever in that classic quantum experiment with the slits in the paper. What I want to know is: who made that gun? I mean, how do you design a machine to fire a single sub-atomic particle? And how do you know if you really ARE just firing one photon?"

I suppose you’ll be wanting to know how she answered those questions. That could be a problem. If you consider how simplified her answers must have been for me, and if you further consider how I’ve lost the edges of those memories in the weeks that have passed, I’m certain I cannot do justice to her answers.

Briefly:

1. Particles seem easy to understand. They have their own energy and fly around colliding with each other. It’s the sort of thing we see every day in life. Waves are strange. They involve movement. And that movement transfers energy through a medium in some mysterious way. Like when you see wind waves moving across a wheat field. The stalks of wheat and the individual air particles don’t move all that far, but the motion itself moves great distances. Electromagnetic waves, like light, do not require a medium for their energy to move. That seems very strange. And now, far from feeling more enlightened in these matters, I’m not sure I understand anything about matter, whether in particle form, in motion, or in any state at all.

2. Yes. Dark matter makes up about 96% of all that is, which is a little sobering, considering we make a lot of broad statements about reality for creatures that can only perceive about 4% of it. But no one knows if we simply cannot see dark matter or if it exists in some way that is outside of our ability to perceive it at all. That’s the thing about dark matter. We can’t perceive it, so we can’t even know if we will ever have the ability to perceive it.

3. They do indeed have such a gun. Light is directed through a tube and exposed to elements of very low temperature such that collisions are caused. Somehow, by the process of elimination and by repeated actions, they are able to be quite certain that only one photon is emerging from the end of the tube, thus enabling some rather astonishing experiments.

To be honest, she lost me with that last one. I just don’t have the requisite knowledge to comprehend how they make this photon gun thingy. But here’s the deal: If you spend more than a few minutes with Sarah Nagel - or any serious physicist - you will realize that these are not the sort of people who take this kind of thing lightly. They aren’t going to take someone’s word for it if he says he just fired a single photon out of a tube. The makeup of that gun and all of the physics behind it are worked out ahead of time in a completely other set of disciplines.

If you, like me, are not a physicist and have taken a different path in life, you will never have enough knowledge to understand a lot of what goes on behind their experiments, even if you can understand the experiments themselves.

It comes down to trust. I trust Sarah.

Sarah tells me that the people who design these “photon guns” are certain that only one photon is fired from them. So I accept that respectfully and we can move on to what happens when you shoot a single photon of light at a point between two slits in a sheet of paper, which is where things really get interesting.

I suppose you’d like to know a bit more about that experiment. Well, I’m definitely in over my head now, so you’ll have to find your own personal physicist and talk to her yourself. Sarah Nagel is mine, so she’s taken. But I’m sure you’ll find someone. Try the Yellow Pages.

This is an interesting twist to the story: Sarah came to San Antonio to see ME. She has read Real Live Preacher, and clearly my writing has meant something to her. Maybe that is because I am called to drink from many different wells and draw them all together with the art of writing. And she has been called to drink very deeply from the well of physics. I don’t really know what she was hoping to get from me, but for one afternoon a physicist and a theologian/writer sat together in peace, talking and laughing and each valuing the other. I love her passionate search for truth in the Cosmos, and she loves my quirky, artistic ramblings about life or God or whatever you want to call whatever it is I think I’m writing about.

And now everything I’ve told you leads me to this truth that I believe, though I must confess that I have no proof for it save my own experience. But it seems right to me.

We all matter. All of us. And there is no way that any one kind of human search for truth, much less any one human, will ever be able to find all the answers to the most fascinating truths about life and existence. You will have to trust someone. People have given their entire lives to creating single photon shooting machines. Will you trust them, or will you spend two or three decades gathering the knowledge you will need to check the validity of their answers?

I find that trusting people is its own kind of spiritual exercise. I am deeply impressed by the strong and unwavering commitment of scientists to their method. It takes that kind of commitment to empirical data to discover their kinds of truths. Brother and sister scientist must take that path. And I love them for it. I am not ashamed that I cannot follow them. I don’t even speak the language. My path was set in another way long ago. But my ignorance is no shame for me with Sarah. So I can come to her with joy, like a child, and drink in an afternoon’s worth of her knowledge and her journey.

And I think I saw in her eyes a certain trust she has in me. “Here’s a man,” she might have said, “who has given his life to unraveling and understanding the oldest story/poems of humanity. He and thousands like him testify that there is still meaning to be found in these scriptures. They seek communion with deep forces of creation through ancient spiritual disciplines. And I trust this man. At least I trust him enough to respect him and sit and talk with him for a couple of hours.”

Back of everything is a love for truth and a desire for knowledge and wholeness and happiness. That we all share. Why would we be so drawn to God unless we have a love and desire for truth somehow embedded deeply into our humanity? Pilate, a proto-scientist, rightly asked, “What is truth?” And Jesus, the son of man, did not tell him. But he did once say that the truth would set us free.

And why would brother and sister scientist seek truth with such vigor if they had no spiritual connection to it? Why, if there were no desire in their souls, no emotional drive to know and conquer and to find joy in the discovery of what is?

I tell you this: If I had the time I would hear all of your stories. You could drag whatever expertise you claim and whatever experience is yours to San Antonio, and I would sit with you and love you and marvel at what you bring to the greater human search for knowledge. We are not all equal in this journey. Some are more equipped with intelligence, some with emotion, others with experiences that burned truth into them with a painful fire.

But we all matter. We all play our part. I cannot gather every precious bit of knowledge to myself and drink it, though I would love to. But I can love everyone who carries a part of our journey forward. And I can hear their stories with whatever time and energy is given me.

This is a goodness because this is a human communion that is a sacrament we all may share together.

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I preached a sermon this morning — one in a long line of sermons stretching back to 1992. I've preached so many sermons by now that I find it almost impossible to remember any particular one. Right now, on a Sunday night, I don't want to remember any of them. The discipline of Sunday night is forgetting.

It's strange, but while I can't remember my sermons, I do remember preaching them. And if I close my eyes, I can see myself laboring away at the work of it...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

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