Sunday, November 30, 2003

Sick clown


Are introductions/manifestos in order? Perhaps another day. It's much too late already.

As I was browsing (that sounds so much more highbrow, almost library-esque, than "surfing") the internet the other day and stumbled across Brad Birt's Jack 'n' Jesus: The Messy Gospel over at Relevant Magazine.

I for one will second the "...awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm a sick clown and so is everybody else..."

My life is a complete mess. I picture myself as a little kid on the floor with my favorite toy shattered in pieces, crazy glue in one hand and all over the other, getting crazy glue all over the place. Hey God, a little help?

So where's 7 Ways of Living Victoriously in the Spirit? Or 36 days of Purpose Defining (TM) Life? If there's one thing in which I feel ill-equipped by the church, it's how to handle the pain of life:
The prose-flattened landscape of evangelicalism is, at times, a foreboding beast. It's not even so much the prose as the quality of the prose. A distilled gospel message of sin-management and four-step-guides-to-better-humanity is no place for the human soul to breathe deep the reality of pain and disappointment, to air honest doubts and struggle with the possibility of God--of trading existence in on life, not even a shiny new life, but life with all its realness.

It's enough to get me out to the used book store in search of some Kerouac.

posted by Peter at 11:56 PM
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