My journey of recovery - A talk I gave this summer as I re-find my bearings in life

INTRO
I am so grateful and humbled to be here today
to share my story in regards to your summer theme of Calling.

I am not officially part of your community
but have found a safe and kind haven here during my self imposed exile as a recovering Born Again Charismatic Right Wing Evangelical Christian.

I have read and love your principles and it's very comforting to me that according to them, no matter what I say today…
you probably will not throw me out!
Although, you might not invite me back…

I am also grateful for the lunch I had with Margie, during which she kindly allowed me to spew forth my faith journey…
mixed with all of the accompanying Joy and Angst.

And while I was here playing with Jim Dexter’s Band at your Woodlands Folk Festival, I walked through your church building, with a beer in my hand, and read your principles on the wall
…and I just felt that they were so right for my heart.

For several reasons this was a bit of a conflict of soul.
The first being that I had never considered drinking alcohol in church,
and the second, that in the strict Bible school I attended,
I had studied carefully why UUism was a cult. And it was now becoming my favorite cult…..forgive me for saying so…

One of the things I really appreciate about UU is the practicing of your fourth principle, which states that you “covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning”.
I love that.

And now I’ll share some of the story of my search with you here today,
in hopes to inspire dialogue, connect with a few fellow strugglers, and hopefully add a humble piece to the joint human struggle for meaning and purpose in our short days on this beautiful and messy planet.

BEGIN
I grew up with no formal religious training or stories whatsoever.
I do not ever remember thinking about God, church, Bible
or anything associated…. other than that we were Methodists …whatever that meant.

I do not remember ever being formally told anything
about the story of life, or the world,
either scientifically or any other organized way.
Nothing really about earth, humanity,
where we come from or are going… if anywhere.

I don’t think that really bothered me either.
If I had a soul I was pretty sure it was the size & color of a football, but a little squishier and light enough to float.

My mother and father were very adventurous
and loved nature and worked hard and they really loved us
even though we threw up on them sometimes and went tinkle in the bathtub before the next kid got in.

I mostly grew up here in Stony Brook, with a regular family [if there is such a thing]
We liked the Walton’s. We liked camping and hiking.
We had pets and friends with no pets.
My best friend was John John,
and he taught me how to get into trouble…he never got caught.
I played in the woods. I played with matches.
I loved kick the can, but playing army was better,
because there were nurses.

It was a regular Friday night… I think in October at age 13,
when mommy and daddy sat my sister and brother and I down at the kitchen table and announced that daddy would be moving out.

Well I loved my daddy. I loved my family. I loved the Walton’s.
I loved playing in the woods with my friends who had no pets….
and matches and nurses and hiking…
and getting into trouble with my invincible friend John-John.

Of course this is not unique,
all children face pain in a variety of flavors.
But this was my life. It was all I knew. And now it all changed.

As I will tell of my spiritual journey this morning,
I would like to use the metaphor of finding my Pulses, when I am talking about Callings.

For me it’s this sort of… feeling of something moving,
just beneath my soul, and a little bit out there somewhere…
...where truth or love or someone is, which draws me in
and I lean myself up against for awhile and do life…
….until it gets shaky again.

The first pulse of great significance, which drew me in, was during the years just following my family’s new status as a “broken family.”

I would call it the PULSE OF SURVIVAL

I began hiding and pretending my family wasn’t broken, and when that got hard I liked getting into trouble, and getting high
…then I liked stealing sometimes and fooling around with girls.
I didn’t like school or telling the truth.
I left my invincible best friend John John for a girl.
I Left a girl for drugs.

I mostly didn’t want to feel. I secretly wanted to find HOME I think.
I loved the rituals and sense of community I felt with my new fellow partiers and lovers.
The sense of common purpose….to escape…. To not feel pain.
The excitement of secrecy, being sneaky and the adventure of having to figure out life by ourselves…until I felt alone….again…
…and felt pain again….and shame again.

By the age of 17, this pulse got so loud,
I could no longer bear the noise and the feelings
of failing people,
of pretending,
of losing while trying to free myself from addiction and self hatred and the terrible feeling of being so small and insignificant and dirty.

I was tired of hiding the scared hurting little kid that I really was.
I didn’t like hanging around me any more,
but I couldn’t get away from me either.

During this time my mother had met Jesus.
I had never met Jesus before.
And he really helped her….
even though I didn’t understand why the Jesus people had,
what looked like séances in my kitchen, while my friends and I played Led Zeppelin in the basement as we coordinated a small pharmaceutical business under black lights and fluorescent posters.

I finally got desperate enough and gave in
and talked to a Jesus person.

I had never heard anything like this in my life.
It seems that it is possible, apparently, to play in a Jesus Rock and Roll band…..and not get high…. and to still be happy.
People were actually doing this.

And there was, as I learned, this God… out there…
who knew everything there was to know about me ….
….I mean everything…and loved me anyway…
just as miserable as I was…

Even more…I was told that this God liked me,
and wanted to forgive me for all the crap I had done to people…
and to myself….and I guess to him.

I was hearing, and finding it hard to escape from this NEW PULSE
….and within two weeks, on a Monday night,

February 6, 1980 at 9 o’clock,

I asked this god to forgive me, and to come into my life,

And to help me find out who the heck I was supposed to be in this world…

….and I balled my eyes out like a little boy,
while snot ran down my face and
my chest heaved like a baby catching its first breathes on earth…

…and my squishy football shaped soul felt like it filled up with air and floated for the first time in my life.

I felt clean….. I felt alive….
And I was breathing new life, and this is what it sounded like……

SING “HERE I AM” SONG [4:30]

I was immediately accepted into this community of people
and I exchanged old friends for new,
old groups for new, old passions for new.

I began tracking with a very strong new pulse, which invaded every part of my life and interests.

With an even stronger commitment than I had to partying, I began a journey of freedom from addictions, forgiveness and forgiving, personal empowerment…
and an incredible, larger than life mission to give myself to…

I found myself given to a story and a pulse that I would call the pulse of BEING ALIVE again

I had been yearning to be me, to be free, and I found it through surrender and renewal, community, and awakening to a brand new story and new life.

I strongly sensed and believed what I was being taught…that this God out there knew my name, my story, and loved me anyway.
I experienced what felt like help from outside of me…you know like an empowering which I had never experienced all the times I had tried to quit drugs, quit being a jerk and trying to be a free ME again.

I began incessantly attending all sorts of gatherings and enjoying a sense of a community of hope, and of shared leanings into a story,

It included joint singing, sharing of affection openly, and even sometimes sharing of some inside private stuff.

This was so brand new to me and exhilarating.
And no one else that I knew, was experiencing anything like this.
I learned how to say “Halleluiah” and “Praise the Lord” at just the right times. And I really meant it!

I felt a sense of mission, of common purpose and responsibility to others...to the bigger narrative of life.
There was this sense of adventure too.... but without the hangover or guilty feelings or memory loss.

There was also this feeling of trusting each other and finding help from community in issues of marriage and family, of a safe place for kids.

I poured myself into Jesus headlong, and into what I was told was his family.

Daily I found myself coming home after school and laying for hours on the living room floor, talking, singing, crying and just sitting before God.

I was 17 years old, and no one in Ward Melville High School who knew me would say anything otherwise, than that I was a changed and brand new person.

I went to Bible school and felt called to be a missionary. Which meant going into other parts of the world to preach and teach the gospel to those who had not heard it so that they would not go to hell, and so they could enjoy the good life which God wished for them.

I married my childhood sweetheart, and we both joined a missionary organization and lived in community for over five years with two of our three children in the eighties.

We did missionary trips where we preached on streets, in orphanages, in churches and on college campuses through music and drama and personal conversations.
I spent time with people jails and nursing homes and down and outers on the streets to share the gospel with them.

We also gave out food and built some buildings for needy people once in awhile. We served food to the homeless in soup kitchens after they listened to the required preaching, which was the required price for them to get food.

We then ran a maternity home for pregnant unwed teenaged girls before we finally settled back into a house and a regular job back on Long Island.

For the next fifteen years we continued to immerse ourselves and shape our lives around what we felt were the teachings of God or Jesus.

Running men’s and women’s groups, teaching children, leading worship, doing cantatas, serving all sorts of ministries, and leading people in what we always called “the ways of God”.

And we loved people. For real. And we loved God, for real.

We just didn’t know that sometimes how we loved was not very loving at all.

And then, a few years ago there developed this silent haunting in me.
This noise in the background.
These questions and doubts about my faith.
And finally they began to get so loud, and so unavoidable I had to sit down and start to listen to them.

I realized that there were all these unmet yearnings, and aches, and pulses, which I had been ignoring…
and what was worse, they were not allowed to show themselves in the brand of Christianity which I called home for nearly 30 years.

I began to be embarrassed and ashamed of much of what my fellow Christians were being associated with.

Taking America back for Jesus…Pro-war rhetoric, gay bashing, anti-environmental policies…

And more subtly in my own close circles, a sense of exclusivity,
of demonizing groups and harping on just a few certain private sins while ignoring systemic evil and injustices….

questions about hell and heaven which seemed a great distraction to actually living here and now.

Pre-occupations with end times and prophecies about wars and non-believers…. Which all just bothered me.

As a youth pastor, my students would ask me questions to which I knew the answer I was supposed to give, but could no longer give.

There was all this dark stuff which I overlooked in the Bible, and all these huge holes began to appear in my airtight theology.

Someone wise told me at that time, that “what we focus on determines what we miss”

I took a missionary trip with a friend to Turkey, and I found the people absolutely delightful….did they need Jesus?

Were they really going to go to hell if they didn’t accept him before they died tonight?
They seemed nicer than some of the Christians who were living all confident with their hellfire insurance…. What do I do with this?
I travelled to southeast Asia with an organization called Love146, which I now belong to, which cares for young children who have been rescued from sex slavery.

Were these children going to go to hell if they did not pray to Jesus. And was this God sovereign still in the way I that was taught,
even though this happened to these innocent ones?
What would I tell them about this God?

And when I found myself foolishly caught up in their game of Chinese jump rope as they giggled at my clumsiness,
I felt like I was peeking into Gods eyes, hearing God giggle,
and I was being saved from my smallness by the bravery of these little ones as they seemed to trust this white middle aged male who must have represented all that was once evil to them.

Where did this come from?
What theological box did this belong in??

These things and many others began to unravel wildly and uncomfortably over the next few years for me.

I learned of some of the terrible history of the church through the ages….right up until present….involving racism, ethnic cleansing, power trips and struggles and ugliness.

I saw how well meaning people could use the bible, which I had immersed myself into for decades, feel they were following the truth and in fact be terribly unloving and in many cases fly right in the face of truth.

All this to say, I began to feel dirty again.

I felt like a dirty, white, heterosexual, male, American, Christian….

The few beautiful things which I loved about this story.. and which changed me forever …were surrounded by small print about a whole bunch of stuff I could not stand….
…and the small print was getting larger by the day.
Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to berate Christians any more than any group of people. All groups have their demons.
And most groups compare their BEST with the others WORST.

Nor do I want to overlook the very amazing things which many Christians have contributed and still contribute to the brokenness in our world.

And not only to the world, but to my own broken and screwed up life and the life of my family through the years.

This is not about that. It is about my story, and about the smallness I began to feel.

It’s about ways that I began to feel that the beautiful story, which I had fallen in love with, had been hi-jacked by religion and politics and had lost most of its plot.

This pulse for me began to feel like a TOXIC pulse, a POISONOUS one which I can’t imagine Jesus ever being a part of.

For me it was about the disconnection from yearnings and longings which felt SO human.

There was so much I felt I was missing….
Missing out on connecting to creation, to the wonder of it all because “its all gonna burn anyway and Gods gonna take us all to heaven or hell”

Missing out on the connectedness of the Whole human family and culture, of honoring what was beautiful about the others outside our circle of experience.

Of the importance of maintaining and exhibiting unconditional love for all people, not just for those IN the new family

Missing out on the appreciation of art and beauty and healthy clean passionate impulses to be honored as god given and inspired, and not smashing down desires all the time.
Missing out on really good parties.

Missing out on truly connecting with the broken, exploited and marginalized without an agenda to get them to heaven,
but only an agenda for loving them as people because…that’s what they are…. people.

My wife and I ended up stepping down from being youth pastors and worship leaders to begin to recover both our time and spiritual re-orientation.

I began to push outside the walls I had created, which isolated me from people unlike me. Walls which made it easier to exclude them and treat them as others, as outsiders to God, as sinners outside the family and care and experience of God.

I am ashamed to say this, to admit this, but it is the truth.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I became what I think would have made Jesus throw up if I ran into him.

Someone claiming to follow him…. and trying to… and using his name, but leaving others out. Not loving. And actually not really living.

I found out that the Bible contains over 2,000 references to Gods heart for the poor and exploited…and not once did it occur to me how important these people must be to God….and should have been to me…

Once I began to realize these things….it all began to change…and I felt like I was being born again…..again….

I think I will call this current pulse I am now in...The pulse of becoming HUMAN….again…

As I began to push beyond the toxicity I felt, I began perhaps the most thrilling and yet disorienting times of my life.

The thrill of honoring doubts and questions that ran just below the surface, but were not permitted an audience.

Yet, the insecurity of not having absolutes all figured out anymore.

Of the thrill and adventure of re-discovery, of deconstructing and of reconstructing of my faith.

Yet the fear that after all the deconstructing, there would be nothing left but cynicism…

There was the thrill of finally being true to myself and finding courage to break away and challenge the system, the broken story, to parasitized story, The morally and politically hijacked story

And the deep joy of finding the face and beauty of God in new friends I was getting to know who were Strangers, Muslims, Gays, Homeless or de-churched people.
People who are now teaching me about life and love and showing me that God was never closer to me than to them….

that God and Truth and Love are bubbling up waiting to be discovered in the messiness of all our human relationships.
That when I hear their stories, I find they are not that different than me. We are made of the same stuff.

I felt so much sadness at what judgment I must have passed on to so many people through the years …along with the guilt of how many relationships I had short-circuited, missing out on them, and them missing out on me.

I had this hollow feeling about the loss of community, of support, and activities and shared mission,
And a deep deep grieving…which was only tempered with the gratefulness of being able to re-do this journey with my wife and all three children…who were co-incidentally going through a very similar metamorphosis of their own.

And a huge new vibrancy and urgency overtook my life after my trip to Cambodia and Thailand.

I had learned that:
there are 27 million slaves on the planet today.
That $30 Billion is made each year in the selling of people
That 1.2 million children are taken into slavery every year,
That’s 2 every minute, every day,
and that each child has a story and a name…like I do,

And after having my soul torn from me in hearing what these children in front of me had gone through,
but then… having it returned to me… filled with hope after hearing them giggle on their way out of hell….yea this is the stuff which has been replacing the toxic faith I carried…

and this new life has inspired my friends and I to raise over $750,000 in the past few years to help Love146 to build and run a safe-home in the Philippines for the kids we are learning to love as well as inviting thousands to join the modern day abolitionist movement.

There came to me a freedom and a joy of finally trying to BE the Good News to people, and not to PREACH the good news to people.

And this has been a major help for me in re-connecting the missing injustice and love piece I had lost site of. The fact that LOVE was SO much bigger than I had let it be.

In regards to really loving…
I had the realization that saying it is not doing it…
That singing it is not doing it
That believing it or writing it as my creed is not doing it

The only thing that IS doing it…..is…doing it.

And that I needed to shut up and live a sermon with my life.
And if it was worthwhile reading, it’ll get read, and if not…it’s probably not very good news anyway.

These days I find myself a little less anxious and disoriented.

And I am grateful for places like this, with people like you, which have created a safe space for dialogue, questioning, inclusiveness and active care for the under-resourced, overlooked and mal-treated brothers and sisters we all have.

I am still a bit gun-shy about formal gatherings of well intended people while I am still in religion detoxification mode.

But I have to say, the sensitivities which I have heard expressed and read about in your community, do a great deal to adding to my courage, and helping to bleed out what is left of my cynicism.

IN CLOSING
Life has changed greatly over these 30 or so years.
I am grateful, and feel so wealthy with things that matter.
I still have a deep love for God and the way and words of Jesus.

I’ve been spoiled with some of the most amazing people and moments a person could have.
I have hurt people deeply and needed forgiveness.
I have been hurt by people and needed to forgive.
I have been myopic, narcissistic, and unselfish and joy filled.
I been thrilled mostly by being a dad and a husband even though I’ve been quietly scared the entire trip.

… I still like the Walton’s. I like camping and hiking.
We have pets and friends with no pets.
My best friend John John, who I left in the dust for a girl,
the one who taught me how to get in trouble…and who never got caught,
well he hasn’t slept in his own bed since January because he has bone cancer now …but we’ve recently re-connected on the phone with memories and tears.

I still like to play in the woods, but I don’t play with matches.
I can’t play kick the can because my lower back hurts,
And I don’t believe in playing Army anymore even though there are nurses…who needs ‘em?
I’m still in love with my best friend Lisa for over thirty years.

I think that what I now call "the addiction to certainty" was probably been one of the most disturbing things about the faith I once held.

I am now finding myself loving the wide open spaces which have been created by embracing mystery, people and hope.

And I’m feeling a little certain about just a few things
....but mostly about LOVE.

And I know me…it’s gonna take the rest of my life to learn this one out loud…

Thank you.