Tag: Personal Prose

Posted in Beauty, Health, Poetry

A House Divided

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

I have recently been going through a lot of my writing from the last decade, both poetry and prose. I am working on assembling poetry by theme. The goal is a poetry chapbook of some sort. I am also trying to actually work on the memoir that I have been talking about working on for the last two years.

Seven years ago to the day, I wrote this. At the time, I posted it for all the world to see on my blog, this very site. For various reasons, all posts between 2004 and June 2015 have been deleted. Still, I posted it for the world. And still, things still lingered on for another 5 years, to the day.

Assonance or Resonance?
So desperate, I need some respite, in this place of war
I need a place to say some things I haven’t said before
A place to say the names of the bones behind the door
Voices echo in this headspace as you creep across the floor
Just like that broken record I picked up discounted in the bins
Only one side ever plays and the last song never ends
The last word gets repeated ’til I lift the needle from the skin
Mixing metaphors with my dopamine, like whiskey with my gin
Should we exit like we entered with no input from our friends?
Or give them all one more chance to peer around the bend?
If this ship is really sinking, they could be our rising wind
Can’t help but thinking…
They’d love another chance to play pretend
Maybe in this pool of listlessness, they’d be quick to condescend:
“Can’t comprehend why she didn’t leave him long before she did
Of her own volition, no contrition and no cognition turned to shit
It was painful to watch her dying from all those wounds she hid”

It would be far too easy for me to be angry: Where were my friends, family, seminary colleagues, professors, pastors, mentors, people who declared their love for me and my ex-wife while we were both crying out for help, each in our own way?

I think ultimately there is a twofold lesson for me: First, I have to write for me, for my own “salvation” and mental health, come what may. No matter who reads it, or how many, or how they respond. And secondly, I have to learn to separate those who appreciate my writing whether on a blog, in spoken word performances, or hopefully someday, in a book from true friends. And I have to do my part to hold close to the latter.

Jesus and Lincoln both purportedly said, on their respective campaign trails, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Most of my life I have been a house divided: A free spirit, free thinker, trying desperately to cling to the dogma of the past to save me from the flames of hell. A self-proclaimed “extrovert” who took a Myers-Briggs Test, scored ENFP but has struggled with life-long social anxiety. I have worked just as vigorously to shut people out -who would love to love me – as I have to draw them in.

But I am changing. Good gawd, even at the ripe old age of 40, I am changing for the better. For most of my life, I have suffered from a simultaneously self-hating and self-aggrandizing fear that the eternal fate of others might be inextricably-intertwined with my words: my excelling or failing to say, “Jesus loves you.” But now I know that I have to be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning and say, “I love you.” My “salvation,” my mental health depends on it! And others depend on me. They wouldn’t be lost or hopeless without me. But I contribute to their happiness and well being right here, right now. So I continue to work towards casting out my own demons. I continue to work towards my own mental and emotional emancipation.

I am a house, perhaps in a permanent state of remodel. But I am no longer closed for repairs. Welcome to my living room. Take a seat. Or don’t. I have many stories to tell.

Posted in Beauty, Health

Lent 40

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

I have stalled all day. I intended to have something written before noon. I finished my morning coffee. Late morning turned into early afternoon. Early afternoon turned into midday.

I thought I knew what I was going to write today. And I had it all wrong. I used to write for a Christian blog called, “That Reformed Blog.” Hell, I didn’t just write for it. I started it with a few friends. I wrote the “About” page. I spearheaded things, brainstorming with others, divvying out writing assignments, occasionally editing for others. I called upon a lovely band of misfits: LGBTQ affirming pastors and chaplains, women ministers in a tradition that has been anything but kind to women. I was trying to create an avenue for progressive theology, through the lens of the Reformed tradition that I was trying so hard to anchor myself in. But in retrospect, I realize it was my last ditch effort to try to change the way people think in hopes of changing the world, rather than changing myself, the way I lived and the way I approached the world.

Over the course of the last 40 days, I have revisited my last contribution to that site a few dozen times. At least half of those visits were today. It was a poem I wrote for this day, Holy Saturday 2015, called Where We Live. I still think it is a fine poem. I just can’t live there anymore: In that space where one hopes against hope that god did this thing once and is coming back to do it again.

Our lives are already a sometimes deafening cacophony of anguish and beauty. And millions of voices – some of them true sages, some of them charlatans, most of them a mixture of the two – are clamoring to be the clarifying voice of reason and truth above the noise. Trying to be the loudest voice at the party, never brought me any sort of inner peace. It did bring me occasional pats on the back for being being ‘loving, caring, or so open and accepting.’ Or it brought moments of temporary satisfaction when I won an argument with a “conservative” Christian that I saw as an opponent. But that satisfaction was fleeting. And living in that contradiction: self appointed spokesperson for a softer, gentler, more loving god and the need to make others see things the way I saw them nearly made me blind to all of the ways I needed to improve myself by becoming a softer, gentler, more loving me.

For me it obscured the tiny deaths and resurrections that happen all the time throughout the dizzying cycles of life on this planet. I don’t think it is necessarily the same for everyone. I can only speak for myself. I never really heard other people when I tried to speak for everyone, speak for god. Over the course of this last 40 days, I have recounted some of those tiny – yet not so tiny – resurrections. The change I have seen in my dad. The ways I have sought to become more loving and patient and break cycles of anxiety in my own parenting.

As I have looked back on my life and especially on the last two years – meditating on these things for more than a month – I guess I have looked at it all through the lens of Holy Saturday and that last poem I wrote as a spokesperson for god. It was enshrouded with genuine doubt and tremendous fear. Looking back now, is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Within a few months after writing that poem, I wrote my friend April, a fantastic and gracious human being, and passed the blog domain, passwords and spearheading onto her. I told her I couldn’t write in that space – within those limitations of orthodoxy – anymore because I didn’t believe in the resurrection anymore. What I didn’t realize was that was the beginning of my own resurrection.

It all had to happen! My becoming honest about my cognitive dissonance with orthodoxy. My coming out publicly about my own bisexuality. And yes, even the divorce. I was sucking the life from those around me by living in my own extended state of slumber, my own unending “Saturday.” I was shouting at the top of my proverbial lungs in cyberspace to get my atheist friends to believe in god, to get my conservative evangelical friends to believe in a more tolerant god, to get everyone to accept the LGBTQ community, to get everyone on board with women in ministry like they should have been hundreds of years ago. In doing so I wasn’t dealing my own projection of a tyrant, bloodthirsty god who was crushing me, my own internalized homophobia that was killing me, or my own misogynist and patriarchal tendencies that were sucking the life from those around me. I ignored my ex-wife. I ignored my children. I poured all of my energy – when I wasn’t punching the clock at the factory or the gas station – into trying to change the world instead of changing myself.

I look back at the person I was, and I want to hate him. But I can’t. That’s what got me to that state of constant anger and depression in the first place. I can only say, I forgive him; for he knew not what he was doing. After the series of excruciating death blows that came in church after church rejecting me, through my divorce, and finally – on a mattress on a floor in a rented room – through whispering, quietly to god and to myself “it is finished” maybe my Sunday has finally come.

Posted in Health

Lent 39

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

Most of my life this was the most important day of the year for me. I was trained and ordained in the Reformed tradition. But my religious lineage is decidedly evangelical. More precisely, it was revivalist and nearly on the fringe of evangelicalism. I have talked more about the blood of Jesus in my life and in my prayers and in my private journal entries than I have probably any other topic under the sun.

It wasn’t until I had started training in the Reformed tradition and was working at a progressive (though highly apathetic) Methodist church, that I realized this. I was a youth director, in charge of the Easter Morning Sunrise service. My friend, roommate, and boss at the time remarked that I had picked more songs about Good Friday than I had about Easter, for us to sing at 6 am, at the top of the hill in Mount Hope Cemetery.

Over the course of the next few years, my “theological orientation” shifted considerably! Easter became my jam. I traded John Wesley for John Calvin. I traded John Eldredge for Jürgen Moltmann. I was becoming.

I guess I am still becoming. Call me a “none” or “spiritual but not religious” if you wish. When pressed I call myself an agnostic with deep, deep sympathies for Religious faith and atheism alike.

But I prefer not to say it. Who doesn’t prefer not to pressed? I think all of this labeling, “othering” of each other and of unexplained things that we call god or the devil, is part and parcel of what it means to be flawed or “sinful” human beings.

I believe in good. And I believe in evil. I don’t know if I believe in relational spiritual entities that have the power or will to intervene or posses. Some days I think the good and the evil that is in the world is just us, the sum of our actions. And some days I think it is more than the sum of our parts.

This used to be the most important day of the year for me.

Posted in Health

Lent 38

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

This is the night it purportedly all went down. Betrayed with a kiss. Abandoned by his followers. Peter denouncing his connection to him three times.

I remember the first time I felt truly and deeply betrayed. As I’ve mentioned in several of these post my parents fought a lot while I was growing up. My dad would move out of the house for months on end. Without fail, I always saw things from my mother’s point of view. I always took her side.

Then when I was 15, during one of my father’s long absences, my mother kicked me out too. I was already double grounded for listening to rock and roll music while my mother was at church and I was supposed to be, well… grounded. Now the stakes had doubled. My mother was in her bedroom crying away the weekend about the problems between her and my dad. My brother and I were given extra household chores, on top of chores to keep us busy. I made my brother laugh. That was my crime. I was supposed to be grounded, not enjoying myself. And the house was supposed to be filled with sadness.

My brother and I were dusting the living room and I was singing songs from Beauty and the Beast with the candlesticks. At the sound of our laughter, my mother came raging out of her bedroom. She told me that I was in denial. I was in denial about the pain, sickness, and “sin” in our household. It was the only time I remember her ever really laying hands on me. When I was young she had spanked me with boards and belts across my ass. On this day she set me down in a chair plummeted my chest with her fists.

I had always taken her side! Now she was sending her demon seed to live with his devil of a father. Over the course of the next couple of months, I began to believe my dad’s account of things. He said that he had not been drinking again. He said that my mother was paranoid and imagining things. The pastor and the youth pastor of the church we attended reinforced his narrative. I was a believer! I jumped at what I felt like was the first real opportunity in my life to really connect with my dad. Over the course of a couple of months, we had some nice time in the sleazy little one-bedroom apartment that he rented for us.

Then one morning I woke up to the smell of alcohol permeating the apartment. I saw the back of a man’s head with his arm around a woman passed out on the floor. How Could my father do this? It was the only time in my life I ever thought seriously about harming another individual. I thought about it intensely. I imagined violently attacking the man on the floor.

Then a man that I recognized as my dad’s old drinking buddy Carl pulled the covers off and said “Good morning Wayney.” He told me my dad was in no condition to drive home and sent him to look after me for the night. My dad made it home later that night. We sat in darkness as he told me that everything my mother said about him was true, the drinking and worse things.

I came home from school a few days later to see my mother and my father holding hands in living room. In retrospect, I am glad they made up. I’m glad my dad finally stopped binge drinking for real. I am glad that my brother and my sister knew a somewhat happier adolescence than I did. And I am glad my dad was there during my mother’s final days. It is a really shitty way to learn to be a better man. But the experience of my mother’s death changed my already sobered up father into a better man. A good man.

But on that day, in the shitty little apartment, having defended them both, having found out their allegations against each other both proved to be somewhat true, my mom was a little neurotic, my dad was a drunk up until that very day, I had never felt more betrayed. None of my teen angst, or justified hurt and anger at their lack of apology for what they have put me through could keep them apart. Maybe it was true love after all. My mother never apologized until two or three years later. My Dad apologized for those difficult times when I was a young man in my twenties and took him out for breakfast.  I told him I love him, and confronted him about the hurt and the pain.

I have hinted at this story once before and public writing. I have shared it over beers with friends. It has made appearances in poetry committed to memory that I’ve never written down. But here it is as bare and open as possible. I think my parents really loved each other. But up until that day much of their loved had been toxic. I packed my bags and my dad and I drove home that weekend. There is a picture my mom took of us in the doorway on our return. It wasn’t Calvary. At the time it felt more like Gehenna. I might forever hold inside of me the tension of wishing things were different, and being glad they happened the way they did. But on that day all I felt was betrayal as I watched my father kiss my mother and a new chapter in our life began.

Posted in Beauty, Health

Lent 36

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

“It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.”

I’ve always loved that quote! If your familiar with the source, Kevin Spacey’s character, Lester in American Beauty, don’t worry, I am not about to embark on a midlife crisis. I have already had enough crises for one lifetime. But it is day 36! I have written everyday. I set a goal. I stuck to it. I am digging deep, evaluating, reflecting, offering up the heart that is usually on my sleeve to loved ones and strangers in cyberspace. In doing so, I am remembering things I have forgotten about myself. Chief among these things I am rediscovering is my tenacity.

I don’t give up easily. I have a few times in life. I’ve had momentary lapses. But I certainly posses a strong ability to push on and persevere through perceived and sometimes very real barriers. I am reminded that with my familial history of anxiety and depression, it really is amazing how time and time again I have found the ability to pick up shattered pieces of myself and move on. My mom – despite her shortcomings – was an anchor in my life. When she died, only a year into that married life that is now behind me, I really wondered if I could go on. A decade after that, the divorce knocked my ass to the ground, left me feeling like Judas and Jesus at the same time. Trust was shattered on both sides. I had never felt so alone or betrayed. And I had never felt like so much of a failure, not only as a partner but as a human being. For a moment, I was left waiting with bated breath for life to destroy me. But here I am.

And there are the more positive instances of this tenacious spirit. I graduated high school with a C average. Right after high school, I was rejected from Cornerstone College when I applied for the youth ministry program. I entertained going to community college. But my mom was more overwhelmed and intimidated by the fucking paperwork for FAFSA than I was. So I spent the next 7 years, working in retail and trying to become a rock star. I probably didn’t try very hard. And I didn’t have the heart or voice for it. But people kept saying I could write.

After a long lull, I became the first in my family to go to college. At age 26, I did start at community college. Then I transferred to a small Bible college. Then I transferred to Calvin College for a more rigorous and academic study of religion. Then I went to seminary. People unfamiliar with seminary don’t always realize, it is still a freaking Master’s program. It may not be the hardest one. But difficult is still an understatement. 96 credit hours! Reading complicated Fourth Century Christian writers, Medieval mystics and often extremely dense contemporary theologians. It is not a 3 or 4 year Bible study with campfire songs. It is paper after paper and exams, while balancing an internship. And I did it in the midst of having two kids and life changing surgery. I kept on after the death of a close friend. I graduated with a high GPA.

Then I had to jump through all of the hoops of denominational examinations. You don’t just get a piece of paper and then start a church. You graduate and then still have to pass the church’s closest thing to a Bar Exam. And then you still – at least in the Reformed tradition – do not get ordained until you find your first “call” or job at a church. That took me another 2 & half years after seminary. While I am not in ministry anymore, I don’t regret any of it. While people find many ways to become many things – from ministers to co-founders and CEO’s of Fortune 500 technology giants – without a college degree, it was something I needed to do for me. I don’t give up or give in easily.

It is day 36 of Lent, day 36 of a writing series I wasn’t sure I would start, let alone finish. It is day 14,687 of my sometimes tumultuous, often nauseatingly dizzying, yet wonderfully dazzling journey. The journey is long and hard and marked by struggle and some real tragedy. But I see beauty all around me in the midst of it. I know I am not alone. And I may not necessarily be all that unique. But for any and all of us who have been able to pull off such a feat, it takes remarkable fortitude. It is day 36 of me rediscovering my voice and my ability to surprise myself while doing so… yet again.

Posted in Health

Lent 35

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

Holy Week has begun. Yesterday, churches around the world celebrated Palm Sunday. At many churches, children walked around sanctuaries waving palm branches. Devout believers (and people not so devout) sang songs proclaiming “Hosanna in the highest.”

I still have a few friends who are pastors and very connected to the church and the movements of the liturgical calendar. Throughout the week I saw several of them on social media asking questions and posting their reflections as they geared up to preach yet again on Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem. The collective consciousness of these faithful friends is something like this: The story is ripe with startling juxtapositions to be observed. Jesus had just descended from the Mount of Olives. At the foot of the Mount of olives is the Garden of Gethsemane. Those familiar with the story know that by the end of this week, Jesus will be betrayed by one of his own disciples in that very place. It really is startling, people shouting, “Hosanna.. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” They are laying cloaks on the ground (Matthew, Mark, Luke) or waving Palm branches (John). Meanwhile, Jesus looks about as unstately as one can get. He is riding on a colt. It is a brilliant literary device, if nothing else.

And yesterday people – some of them whom I love deeply – preached sermons, expounding upon these startling contrasts. Some probably highlighted that Jesus wept over Jerusalem on his way into town (at least according to Luke). It is explained people just didn’t get it, this kingdom that Jesus was proclaiming. They wanted an “earthly king” but Jesus’ kingdom “was not of this world.”

Nuanced readers, pastors and commentators may even express some sympathy for the crowd. Some even find some sympathy for the villain of the story, Judas who has a bigger part, later in the week. Jesus was subverting (or changing?) the expectations of faithful Jews. Folks had been waiting for the day that Isaiah and other prophets had proclaimed: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.” Jews had no disembodied notion of Heaven. They were waiting for the vindication of their god, their people, their beliefs. They were waiting for the day that they would be the epicenter of religion and spirituality for the whole world. But it is said that Jesus thwarted those expectations. He turned the other cheek when insulted by Pharisees and Roman soldiers and died to usher in some new sort of kingdom.

People got it all wrong! That is what some of my friends preached yesterday. Now let’s set aside for a minute minor discrepancies, history mythologized or mythology historicized. For a moment, let’s suspend any speculation or doubt. Let’s say it happened just like the best synthesis we can make of the various accounts say it did.

My pastor friends say that the hopes of faithful Jews were stretched near the breaking point for those first Jewish Christians who would proclaim that Jesus was the hope of Israel fulfilled. They had to have a “reorientation” to what god reigning upon the earth and being adored by the nations might mean. Where does that leave folks waiting for Jesus’ triumphal return?

From the earliest Christians, to the present day, faithful believers have waited for Jesus to come back with a sword in his mouth and judge the earth. From the most sectarian groups who believe very few will be accepted into Christ’s kingdom, to the universalist who hopes “all of the earth will be restored in Christ.” Everyone is waiting for the day of an earthly kingdom: some form of vindication or perhaps unification, where god reigns on earth.

Does this make the difference between yesterday’s sermons and the present hope of the many faithful the most startling juxtaposition? Whether shaming the crowds, disciples and Pharisees or finding some sympathies for them, the consensus is, “they didn’t get it… Jesus preached a different kind of kingdom!” But how different is it really if people are still waiting for “the great and terrible day of the Lord”?

Let me make it much more personal. I stood up and proclaimed for years, the return and reign of a triumphant Jesus, an earthly king. As an evangelical, it was more about warning people of the fires of hell. As a progressive pastor in the Reformed tradition, it was more about hope of god’s power and might, reigning on earth, restoring the cosmos. The means to an end – submission onto death and resurrection – may have been different than ancient Jews anticipated. But was the end result any different? What if Jesus was actually right when he said ‘the kingdom of god is among you, the kingdom is in you.’ What if we really are supposed to be the ‘his hands and his feet’? Does that make me, with my proclamations of a coming king, a present day Judas?

What if the faithful and the non-believer alike started to live like no god was ever coming back to save us? What if we lived like it was up to us to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream? What if, rather than waging war or passively watching war and destruction on all sides, and waiting for god to clean it up, we resisted, protested, waged peace like we were earth’s only hope? I wonder if we all lived that way, and suddenly the sky did part, and the trumpet did sound, if Jesus might be a little more pleased with what he found?

Posted in Beauty, Health

Lent 34

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

I finally made it back to Spring Park in Middleville with my kids today. It wasn’t as epic as I wanted  it to be in my head. Last spring we had the park to ourselves. Today there was another family there with several kids. My two are always a little bit bashful and shy in such situations. Then after about 30 minutes, my daughter was “bored” and wanted to leave. Last year it was this whole thing! We spent a couple of hours there. Then we went to “downtown” Middleville and looked at the river, walked the boardwalk and concluded with going to Mount Hope Cemetery and visited my mother’s grave. Daddy was looking for another deep, cathartic experience today. But kids were just being kids. And they were more than a little eager to get to their Uncle’s house to have an Easter egg hunt with cousins.

Conversely, I was really nervous about my time with my family today. But it was a really great time! I woke up with a bit of a vulnerability hangover after yesterday’s post. This morning I was doing some self-interrogation about about sharing things that make some of my family members uncomfortable the night before I am going to spend the day with them. I had these ideas in my head about how bad conversations might go. You see, while my brother and sister know about the whole bisexual thing, my dad still has no clue. It was hard enough for him when, as a pastor, I told him I was accepting of LGBTQ people in all of their beautiful variety. That conversation went really bad. Really, really bad.

Other conversations have been difficult since I stopped pastoring, and eventually stopped going to church. He calls to tell me he is praying for me and worried about me. He says things like, “You think you’re fine now; but when you die…”

There was none of that today. He did start to talk about Trump (he is a supporter) and Syria. My brother and I (who agree on a lot of things socially if not “theologically”) just ignored it and moved on. My dad and Stepmom are really excited about a weekend trip to a log cabin resort next weekend, that we all chipped in and got them for Christmas. They are going on the one year anniversary of the car accident that my dad survived last year. So we talked about that. We watched the kids play. My brother shared some music with me that has been inspiring him. It was a nice time.

I am still working on not having those preemptive conversations in my head that make actual flesh & blood conversations more difficult. Sometimes we have to just be present in the moment, not in our heads about the way we think things could or should be.

Posted in Beauty, Health

Lent 33

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

There are certain musical artists whose music left such an indelible mark upon me in my youth, that I can only listen to them on rare occasion. The music takes me back, sometimes too far back. Besides church and my Mead Composition notebook (where I poured my heart out to Jesus and wrote poetry) music was my only other place of escape from anxiety and depression, which was was seriously exacerbated by dysfunction at home, being picked on at school and generally scared of the world. Many (but not all) of these artists who still have the ability to take me to a different time, place and state of mind are dead. Kurt Cobain is one of them. Tupac Shakur is another.

There was a time when I always turned the radio up in my car as loud as it could go if Smells Like Teen Spirit or California Love came on over the FM airwaves. Now I almost always turn the radio station. I’d rather listen to anything from Nirvana’s Unplugged or Tupac’s Me Against the World anyway. I always have been – and still am – a bit of a sucker for the softer side of “hard” artists.

By the time I was in seminary, I had already over-cultivated the practice of avoiding the music that took me back. I avoided a lot of emotions back then. After a friend of mine died, something in me snapped. I am still putting it some of those pieces back together. He took too many prescribed pills and swallowed way too much whiskey on December 27, 2009. He wore his broken heart on his sleeve, where it was colorfully represented by a tattoo rendition of Jakob von Steinle’s “Jacob Wrestles with Angel.” He struggled with anxiety and depression too. He had also struggled with his weight and body image. We both had bariatric surgery. And he didn’t like to talk about his, at least with me. In his final year or so of life, he abused copious amounts of alcohol. Being gay and feeling rejected by the church that he loved and longed to serve wasn’t his only struggle, to be sure. But it certainly fanned the flames of his depression exponentially.

After he died, something in me began a long slow and painful death. It was my internalized homophobia. I didn’t become an overnight activist. But I did slowly start to tell more and more people about my own bisexuality, my “experience” with that older boy at youth group when I was a teenager. And little by little my theology shifted from closeted and “concerned” to “open and affirming.” It would still be nearly another 6 years before I would “come out” publicly in cyberspace and on local public radio.

In retrospect, little about my slow, painful and increasingly vocal transition was “fair” to many of those around me, not least of which was my ex-wife. She had married a man who was theologically conservative, closeted and a willing participant in reparative therapy. She wasn’t the bigot it is sometime easier to believe she was. She simply didn’t recognize me anymore.

I didn’t do much to help that. I dove headlong into my shallow pool of depression. I wasn’t drinking a lot back then, in seminary. It was a weekend thing. It was an almost every weekend thing. I threw the best parties on seminary campus. But most nights, I settled to immersed myself in my adolescent place of escape. Over the shared high speed WiFi connection on campus, I went to the torrents and downloaded the complete discographies of Kurt Cobain, Andrew Wood (Mother Love Bone), the genius Shannon Hoon (Lyricist and vocalist for Blind Mellon and author of the quote across the top of my blog), Biggie and of course Tupac.

I became a bit obsessed with dead artists who had sad stories. And while I sat alone with my headphones on, I added the new habit of swimming in articles and books about their sad lives, the sometimes mysterious circumstances and conspiracy theories that surrounded their deaths and helped form the mythologies that enshroud their legacies. In between watching Tupac Resurrection and Nick Broomfield documentaries, I was reading contradictory theories about how Tupac was killed by the Illuminati because he refused to have sex with his sometimes girlfriend’s father, Quincy Jones, how the US government had orchestrated both Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.’s deaths or how Suge Knight was behind it all (I think some of these might have more validity than others). One of the songs I listened to a lot on repeat back then was Tupac’s Runnin’ from the Police.

Tonight I listened to for the first time in a few years. On it’s own it is a sad and rightfully angry song about police brutality against the black community. But when you add to it the fact that it is the only song Pac and Biggie ever recorded together before they became bitter enemies, it makes it a tougher listen. When you start dwelling on the fact that four of the artists on the song – 2Pac, Notorious B.I.G., Yaki Kadafi (then known as Young Hollywood) and Stretch – have all since been murdered, well holy shit it is can be a really depressing listen. Start reading around the inter-webs the various theories about how all of the deaths were connected by gang members or police or the FBI or all of the above working together and it can be a recipe for a tailspin. It was for me.

But it was a headtrip that I sought out. I was doing anything I could to avoid my own thoughts. If the world and the church hated my friend for being gay, then they hated a part of me. Harder still, I hated that part of me. Also, pieces of the great mysteries and myths that had marked my whole life (and to some extent still do) were beginning to crumble: god becoming a man, the devil hiding out in the basement. It was easier to think about the sad death of a celebrity than process the death of my friend. Believe it or not it was less disconcerting at the time to think about crooked law enforcement officials and gang members in collusion to kill some antihero rap stars than it was to think that the devil was literally all around me, trying to entice me to masturbate, or drink heavy, or eat too much.

Please do not misunderstand my intentions with this series of Lenten inspired posts. I am trying to write – better and more often – and in doing so finding much healing for myself. I am doing what I was born to do, even if for now, it is just pouring myself out for a few eyes who give me 5 minutes of their time on a busy internet where every story is sensational. What I am not trying to do is co-opt Lent to convert others to some sort of agnosticism with a deep sense of wonder and deep sympathies for religious faith (in particular Christianity) and atheism alike. I have spent way too much of my life as an apologist, trying to convert everyone to believe what I believed about the the world, about the divine and about myself.

Because I was so deeply afraid I was wrong! Now, I am just trying to avoid joining Tupac and my old friend in the ether before living as long and loving as much and as deeply as I possibly can.

Posted in Beauty, Health

Lent 32

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

On my way outa work I was listening to the old people Best of 80’s, 90’s and Today station. I heard Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream followed by Rod’s Stewart’s Forever Young. I had to turn the station before I heard Jack and Diane.

What is with all of our fetishizing of youth? I can appreciate Alphaville and bob my head to the Jay-Z remake of that other Forever Young (and we still haven’t even tapped Dylan). So many songs with the same theme, same name for crying out loud!

I am sorry Bob Seger, but I’m glad I know now what I didn’t know then. I wish I could have learned a few of life’s hardest lessons by osmosis. But it simply doesn’t work that way. I want to take what I’ve learned about myself, about the world, life, trust and doubt, hate and love and wear it on my sleeve. I realize it still won’t cover my whole arm. I have so much yet to learn, so many areas in which to grow.

I was a handsome little guy. But there was no simpler time. Just simplistic understanding. I want to allow the world to continue to stretch my heart and imagination longer than Yao Ming’s wing span.

Posted in Beauty, Health

Lent 31

Posted on by Wayne Bowerman

Since Lent is the season of “repentance” let’s talk about it. Religious faith that is useful, constructive towards a better life, a better world might rightly proclaim that we indeed are fragile and maybe at times even broken people. And sometimes, we do horrible things to each, to our planet and to ourselves. Sometimes we can be downright vicious and self absorbed. Other times we can be utterly blind to the way we hurt others, our surroundings, or ourselves. Church folk sometimes call these things “sins of omission.”

But I am not a monster. Neither are you. We are not refuse. We are not garbage. We are not objects of wrath. If it offends your sensibilities when I say that god does not hate us then perhaps you do not truly know anything resembling a god of love.

Unfortunately it is sometimes hard for me to hear anyone say I love you. And sometimes I have to force the words out of myself to others. Because somewhere deep inside my whole life I have believed that I am just trash. And I have so closely aligned this feeling with the plain truth that we are all imperfect. I really thought god wanted me to hate myself. I have confused the self hatred that is a product of what Christianity calls “our brokenness” with the anxiety of growing up in a broken home. I mistook the disposition of my father or mother for the disposition of a divine being towards me. This is a tragic distortion of whatever might be good or true about the world’s religious faiths.

I have done many things in my life for which I am sorry, “repentant” even. But true repentance means a true effort towards different behavior. Guilt and shame and “worm” theology almost always perpetuate cycles of undesired behaviors and characteristics. It has become hard for me to hear some of the hymns and Christian songs that were my favorites growing up. Songs that were so attached to my “spiritual formation.” Amazing Grace just doesn’t sound as sweet anymore, when I hear a congregation singing in unison “a wretch like me.” I can’t listen anymore to Sufjan Stevens compare “The things under his floorboard” to John Wayne Gacy Jr.

I am not a wretch! I’m not a monster! Are you?