Thank you so much for reading the shitty first drafts for Edge Dwellers (intro: chap one) and for making your commments. I was able to gather up my readership status to day, and to send that info plus your comments and proof-read drafts to the publisher who made the original query. Hopefully things will progress in that official direction. If not, fear not, the writing will continue and you’ll either get it piece meal on the blog or in some self-published form.

Thank you for all of your comments, encouragement, and suggestions. I have finally been able to write a few of you back in the comments on the orginal posts, and have emailed a few of you as well. I’m hoping I can kick the hienous insomnia (evil fiend!) so I can write to you more promptly in the future. Much love to you all.

Yours on the journey,

Rachelle

The Itch at the Top of your Nose
Tell-tale signs that you have put on a new set of lenses

Sometime in my thirties, just after getting my first gig as an ordained minister in an evangelical church, something about how I was living my religious life started to feel not quite right.

The first itchy little problem was that I was having an increasingly hard time hiding the fact that I disliked Bible study. The truth of the matter was I’d never been one for ‘devotions.’ I was forever setting my good intentions towards daily readings, only to find that my Bible ended up on the shelf covered in dust. In seminary I took as few Bible courses as possible, and although I loved studying Hebrew, I never did develop a heart for that Biblical studies mainstream, exegesis. I dreaded any small group session that involved Bible study, text-based sermons made me nuts, and any staff devotional I had to sign up for was mercifully brief.

By this time I had taken on a preaching roll in the church, and I was good at it. True, my sermons were more stories that scripture, but the words rolled off my tongue and I was getting animated responses from the congregation. But the truth was I was tired of sermons. Suddenly I, the person who could take non-stop notes for three solid hours in a graduate school seminar, could not sit still through a simple Sunday morning message. (And I certainly didn’t remember much of what was said once I was outside the church doors.) I felt as though I had developed some sort of adult-onset ADD. I just could not absorb a twenty minute sermon, much less for the hour-long pulpit sessions which were in vogue at my church.

Then, much to my dismay, the standard versions of prayer started not working so well. The “prayers and praise” format which had carried me most of the way through college was making my skin crawl, and I was practically developing an allergic reaction to meeting with a “prayer partner” or spending an hour praying for people in a small group. The long prayer session that were popular in my charismatic church began to feel like a laundry list of worries and demands, and in our intense healing prayer circles I felt twitchy and discouraged. The church staff I was on was quite large at the time, and we had called in a specialist to come and do some communication training with us. He asked us to pray prior to the meeting, something that had been standard practice for us in the past. But when ten minutes went by with only one or two moments of spoken prayer, the trainer called the prayer session to a close. He was quite disturbed by what he perceived to be our lack of participation, and when the younger pastors in the group tried to explain that we had become more accustomed to silent prayer and meditative listening in recent years, the trainer chastised us for not doing “real prayer” more often.

All of this was a little concerning, but I had one ace in the hole that was preventing me from having a full-blown spiritual crisis: “Worship”. I still adored the worship activities at church. We had great musical worship sets. Man could our church bands play! We had original songs that were seriously hip, adaptations of Fat Boy Slim mixes that rocked the joint, and ballads so plaintive they could bring you to tears.

Not only did we have great music, but the artists were really coming into their stride in our congregation and the place was filled with beauty. Most months there was something fabulous and inspiring in the Sunday morning services: a series of paintings on walls and easels; interactive sculptures for various sermon series; and for Lent and Advent whole services created completely of visuals and music.

I was thrilled. I should have been thrilled. I was trying to be thrilled.

But the truth of the matter was, the worship sets? I’d been working myself into them for quite a while, trying to convince myself that they were ‘working’ for me as a connection to God. In truth, they were feeling a little forced and repetitive. Moreover, after the high of jumping up and down with 200 people wore off, I was left with just me walking out the doors and into the rest of my life. There was little connection between the ecstasy of Sunday morning rock and everyday reality of Monday morning living.

And the art? I adored the art. But it turned out to be a secret agent. The art was my undoing.

During my second year on staff one of the artists, Stephen Wood, made an enormous sculptural installation for Advent. It was Mother Mary, her figure formed of bent bamboo and draped in gauzy cloth. Her arms were arched up and outward like a dancer and her belly glowed with an internal light. Each Sunday, while the worship band played, while people clapped and sang and raised their hands, while the senior pastor gave us good and wise words in a sermon–I sat at the feet of Mary. There was a little half-wall that curved around one side of the sculpture, and if I leaned against it I could sit behind Mary’s draping sleeve. Crouched there, something solid at my back and something beautiful at my side, I could be present to the congregation I was serving, but at the same time feel protected from a system of faith practices I no longer understood. I could soak in the reality of what I really needed, while still being tethered to what was familiar but no longer functional.

It was in this small Marian way station that I finally acknowledged that everything I’d grown up with as a Christian had stopped working – probably hadn’t been working for a long time. I’d been talking myself into so many things: convincing myself that prayer was a discipline; that the Bible had to be helpful somehow; that God needed me to express my devotion to him through lots and lots of emotive songs; and that I needed to be lectured at for at least 30 minutes a week or I’d backslide my way into hell. But as I gave each of those things up, then after a bit of a delay realized that I’d given them up, a stunning reality came rushing in. It didn’t really matter. I still loved Jesus. I still lived as morally or immorally as I had before. I still felt randomly connected or disconnected from God on any given day or any given hour.

In spite of the art, liturgy, and ritual, church still wasn’t helping me. It wasn’t transformative. I didn’t help me be a more Jesus-like person. Rather than letting me be a minister and servant to the world around me, the tasks of running the Sunday morning show just kept me trapped in the church. I began to see the church as a castle, holding me inside with the Ruler, but isolated from the rest of the population outside. The amount of time it demanded of me, and the amount of energy I spent feeling badly that I wasn’t doing Bible study, prayer, or worship left me unable to be present to the people outside the walls of the church – unable to be part of the broad range of God’s kingdom.

There, sitting behind Mary, something had happened. My nose had started to itch. When I reached up to scratch it, there at the top right between my eyes, I found that I had a pair of new glasses fairly permanently affixed to my face. I started to think of it as wearing a pair of very funky cat’s eyes glasses – orange maybe—a style linked to the past, but hip enough for the future. Everything looked different now, through those funky lenses.

Perhaps this is happening to you. Perhaps after a life time of devotion you are waking up on Sunday mornings and feeling sick at heart. Perhaps you are starting to feel angry that what you say you believe and the way your life in “the world” really works are not in alignment. I’m here to tell you: Don’t be Afraid.

What you are experiencing is not a dark night of the soul. It’s not a crisis of faith or a season of doubt. What you are experiencing is a shift away from one kind of Christian faith practice to another. In technical terms you are moving away from traditional Christianity – probably evangelical Christianity, but possibly some form of mainstream Christianity—and into what is referred to as “postmodern” or “emergent Christianity.” Now, we aren’t going to get into what all those things mean yet. That’s for the next chapter. For now let’s look at a list of symptoms.

Symptoms

• Former religious practices (sermons, prayer, Bible study, small groups, worship sets) are no longer meaningful to you.
• You are beginning to suspect that Christianity may not have cornered the market on Truth.
• Your intellectual life and your spiritual life no longer seem to be able to play nice together.
• You are increasingly interested in spending time outside the four walls of the church.
• Many non-Christians seem suspiciously Christ-like to you.
• If you are a woman, you may have begun longing for a God that looks like you.
• You have started asking questions that worry your family, friends, and pastor.
• You have begun to suspect that you might have to give up your faith in order live with integrity.

Don’t worry my friend. This discomfort you are feeling, this disconnect, is just a portal you step through into being what Brian McLaren calls A New Kind of Christian. You’ve just put on a new pair of glasses, and that’s a good thing. They are going to help you see things more clearly, and with that clearer vision you are going to be able to craft a new version of your faith that is going to work for you. It’s going to be a true reflection of what you believe and how you intuitively want to live. It’s going to bring integrity back into your life, and allow you to honor what you truly value about God, Jesus, and the Christian life. A new kind of faith is growing– is emerging out of your soul. You are forming a new kind of spirituality:

• A spirituality which finds its inspiration in ancient teachers and newly published writers.
• A spirituality which spins out of fresh translations of the Bible.
• A spirituality which will be messier and more open-ended, but ultimately more genuine to you and truer to the deepest parts of your soul.

Joseph Campbell, the godfather of comparative religion, tells us a story in his videography The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In these interviews he talks about the epic hero’s journey which is captured in the myths and traditions of every culture and every faith. According to Campbell, we are all on a hero’s journey—intentionally or because of life’s unexpected circumstances. He tells us that each of us will come to what appears to be a great impasse. For Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz it is the field of poisoned poppies near her journey’s end. For Luke Sykwalker it is the great literal and metaphorical divide between him and his unknown father, Darth Vadar. For Indiana Jones it is literally a deep chasm between himself and the Holy Grail. Campbell says “On your journey, you will come to a great chasm. Jump.”

Are you ready? Give your cat’s eyes glasses a rub and make sure they’re nice and clean. Can you see the chasm? Go ahead. Jump.

Introduction: Sea Change

There’s was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy
They say he traveled very far, very far
Over land and sea
And then one day, one fateful day he came my way
And though we talked of many things, fools and kings,
This he said to me:

The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved in return.

Nature Boy
Nat King Cole

Once there was a girl. This girl was a good little girl. She was a Christian girl. It’s true that she was a bit of a mutt, having been raised in a Lutheran church and sent to a private school run by the Pentecostals. The latter were rumored to be found swinging from the rafters. In proper religious circles this was just shy of snakes handling, but still, she made the cut. She had, after all, prayed the prayer and studied the catechism, filled her memory verse chart with shiny silver stars, and taken first communion. She got up at 6am to be a teenage prayer warrior and responded to altar calls in the school gym (for what reason she was never quite sure.) She even sang in the choir.

After a while this girl grew up. She went to more private Christian schools and got letters after her name. She met people who thought that the Holy Spirit was still afoot, and she learned about healing and prophecy and things that, frankly, acted a lot like magic and miracle. She met a wizened old man who everyone called a guru, but who called himself “Eugene.” When the girl talked to Eugene, his faced curved upwards into swoops because he smiled at the questions that only made other people look worried. He told the girl lots of stories, this Eugene, and some of them the girl seemed to remember like a mist in her memory. She thought she might have heard them once a long time ago. Only the stories were more interesting when Eugene told them. (When Eugene told them it was they were full of trolls and fairies, she was sure of it. There! Behind the sackcloth and ashes!). The felt she might be a part of these stories, and that maybe that everybody got to play, that things weren’t quite as scary as they were meant to be–or maybe they were more so–but the ending was even better than she had first understood, so the scariness of being in the story was worth it.

Eventually, the girl became mostly grown up. She got herself a job and house and a husband. She even graduated from two cats to two kids. Being the good girl that she was she worked for the poor, and volunteered to teach Sunday school, and spent all her time serving and serving and serving some more. (For which she got many kudos…and many requests for still more service.) She was doing all the things she was meant to do, dotting all her “i’s” and crossing all her “t’s.”. The rules in the church involved never being quite good enough, and always striving to be better. The girl wasn’t sure what to do about that, because sometimes she felt just fine, and everyone told her that couldn’t be right. So she tried to follow the rules and she worked on being holy. But something kept worrying at her, like a burr in her socks. Nothing fit quite right– everything was too big or too small. She could never nibble on just the right amount of Alice’s cookie, or she was always gulping down too much of the liquid from the curious little jar. She kept trying to find the Christian “perfect,” to be buttoned up properly and know all the right things to say. Finally, she realized that she could never truly accomplish that elusive goal. The girl decided the next best thing was to go on an adventure. So she ate enough of the cookie to crawl through the little door in the rabbit hole, and that made everything Far More Interesting.

You see the girl had found that she wanted to do what she was created to do instead of what she was supposed to do. (It was a fine line sometimes, quite hard to decipher.) So the girl forged ahead into the territory below the rabbit hole. She got ordained, which was against the rules. Then she took her ordination and she walked away from her church, which wasn’t so much against the rules as it was just plain foolhardy. You see, she had loved her church very much, but things had stopped making sense. Her soul was getting anemic. She had to find her way back to the story with trolls and fairies.

I am of course the girl-grown-to-woman. I was the good Christian girl who earned her pedigree via degrees and discernment groups and ordination processes. I am the one who’s career path went social work-homeless ministry-associate pastor. I am the one who read Brian McLaren’s The Story we Find Ourselves In, said “ah ha!” and then left her church. And I am now, among other things, the one who is ripe with ritual, eager to eat with the heathens, and full of priestessy things.

These are my stories. Well, my stories and all the places my stories intersect with many other wonderful stories, many of them bigger than my own. Hidden amongst them there are hypothetical trolls and fairies–wonders unaware. You might not see them at first, but they are there hiding in the spaces between the words.

I don’t know yet, what stories I will pick or which will come to live in this volume. But it is my fervent desire not to write anything here that is not true. Too often in the past I have cooled my words so as not to produce sparks, or hidden my passions under language I thought would go over better in the church-y milieu. But hiding what I really believe in the hope of avoiding an argument left me feeling displaced. My pledge then, to my own heart and to you dear reader, is to be as transparent as possible. My soul says, “Write true things.” And I reply with a phrase from the liturgy of my childhood, “Yes, with the help of God.”

By true things I do not mean things which are purely factual. I am not much one for facts, living so often as I do in the realm of memory, which is faulty; or in the landscape of spirit, which is numinous as best. Quantitative methods do not do much for us here, in the realm of the soul. What I do feel quite fondly towards are what Sabrina Ward Harrison calls “the true and the questions” – those things which are true for me, those which are true for you, and all the bit in between that lead us to wonder. I promise to try to stay there, in that world where questions are Queen.

In a world ripe with “I wonder,” there are a great many things of which I am unsure. If the church can be repaired. If theology can or should be systematic. If “Christian” will ever be a name I can wear without cringing. But this I believe:

The Light is never extinguished.
Jesus loves those on the fringes.
The Muse, she is a foot.

It doesn’t matter if you are unsure precisely what these things mean. It’s okay to be in soft focus around the edges of things. But if any of these ring true to you – if some small wave of recognition surges there behind your breast bone, or catches a bit in your throat, then you are in the right place now. We are meant to be here together—you, I, and the great Divine. And the stories we tell here should be about those things: Jesus, edge dwellers, illumination, inspiration, and the lost bits of the Divine. These are the stories that right now, in this season, will guide us to fertile ground.

Yes, this book is full of stories: things I’ve loved and that have given love to me; places on the journey that have swelled ripe and full of life. All the tales of lost and found that helped me on the way. You might be on the way too. You might find directions for the trip you’ve set out on. You might reconnect with the God you once knew, or find the God you’d never known. Something might ring with you, and you might pack it in your overnight bag. Or you might swallow the whole thing, hook line and sinker. Truthfully, I don’t really know. But I am sure, somewhere in these tales, magic happens – or maybe its miracle – and I think you might want that too.

When explorers used to set sail into the New World, they would take the old maps with them, and draw new ones along the way – making notations, filing in the blank spots. On the edges, where they did not know what lay beyond, they would scrawl “Here There Be Monsters.” You are on the edge of a map, looking across an uncharted sea. But I am here to tell you, there are no monsters here, but instead companions. We may be few in number, but numbers are slippery things and of little import in the end. I am sure there are enough of us here for good company. Set sail with us. Come along.