The Lunch Stop

Wandering, Falling Upward, Coming Home, and Learning to Be Where Your Damn Feet Are

There are moments when geography starts screwing with your head.

This past Monday, I had lunch with a new group of friends. It was one of those ordinary things that probably wouldn’t look particularly significant to anybody watching from another table. A few people eating lunch. Conversation. Stories. Laughter. Nothing earth-shattering. And yet, as I sat there listening to people I had only recently met tell pieces of their lives, I realized I was sitting within about fifteen miles of where my maternal grandfather was born and raised.

He eventually wandered about 120 miles away from there and built most of his adult life somewhere else. He raised his children there, and that is where my mother eventually met my father. Then there is another strange little twist in the family geography: Thomasville, the city where they met, was named for my third great-grandfather on my father’s side. My father would eventually wander away from Thomasville himself, a young husband and father following his own road into the mountains where I would grow up. Generations of my family have apparently been incapable of leaving well enough alone.

So there I was, having lunch with people who hadn’t been part of my story very long, sitting in a landscape where pieces of my story had been unfolding generations before I arrived. Sometimes life folds the damn map back on itself and drops you almost exactly where the story started, just to see whether you’re paying attention this time.

One of my new friends, Karen, told a story that made that point even better. Years ago, she ran a bookstore about ninety miles from where she had grown up. One day a man walked into the store who looked like somebody Hollywood might cast if they needed a stereotypical Appalachian hillbilly: overalls, long hair, boots, tattered clothes—the whole damn costume.

Karen is a highly educated woman who has traveled the world as a missionary. She wasn’t telling the story because she thought she was better than him. Quite the opposite. The appearance matters because of the assumptions appearances invite us to make. She started talking with him, and the hillbilly turned out to be remarkably intelligent and very well educated. Then the conversation took another turn. He was her second cousin. She laughed when she told us about it. You just never know where you’re going to run into somebody.

I understood exactly what she meant.

Years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop about three hundred miles from where I grew up and went to high school. A woman nearby was reading a book that caught my attention, so I struck up a conversation with her about it. The book led to conversation, conversation led to backgrounds, and backgrounds eventually led us to discover that we had attended the same high school. Not only that, we had been there at the same damn time.

I was a freshman. She was a sophomore. Then we discovered that we had both played in the marching band together. She played flute. I played trumpet. We had apparently spent Friday nights marching around the same football field, probably rehearsed together countless afternoons, traveled on the same buses, played the same music, and inhabited the same little universe.

I didn’t remember her at all. Not even a little bit.

She eventually showed me an old high school photograph. There may have been some vague flicker of recognition, but if I told you some great sentimental story about suddenly remembering her standing three rows over during halftime, I would be lying through my teeth. Maybe I was a freshman and too busy trying to survive high school to notice much of anything. Who knows? But there we were decades later and three hundred miles away, two former members of the same marching band meeting one another for what somehow felt like the first time.

Maybe that is one of life’s great cosmic jokes. We spend half our lives searching for connections while walking past people to whom we are already connected. We imagine ourselves as separate stories when, more often than we realize, somebody has already been writing in the margins of ours.

Maybe we’re all just objects moving through this enormous universe. Some of us seem to follow fairly predictable paths, like planets circling their stars. We are born, establish an orbit, and spend most of our lives traveling around familiar people, places, beliefs, and routines. Others of us seem more like meteors, comets, and assorted pieces of cosmic debris flying through the darkness on trajectories nobody completely understands. We cross somebody else’s path for a few seconds and never see them again. Sometimes our orbits circle back years later, and we suddenly recognize somebody from another part of our journey. And every once in a while, the timing is just right and two completely different paths line up like an eclipse. For one extraordinary moment, everything overlaps.

Maybe that is part of why I have always loved the stories of Celestial Navigations. The name itself seems appropriate for this kind of wandering. Celestial Navigations was the unusual storytelling and musical collaboration built around character actor Geoffrey Lewis and musician, songwriter, and composer Geoff Levin, with other musicians contributing over the years. Lewis told these wonderfully strange, funny, philosophical stories while Levin and the musicians created an atmospheric musical landscape underneath them. Geoffrey Lewis may be familiar even if the name doesn’t immediately ring a bell. He appeared repeatedly alongside Clint Eastwood, including as Orville Boggs in Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. He’s the guy standing beside Eastwood and Clyde the orangutan in the movies where Eastwood’s Philo Beddoe delivers that immortal command: “Right turn, Clyde.” Lewis was one of those marvelous character actors whose face you recognize even when you can’t immediately remember his name.

But Celestial Navigations revealed another side of him. Lewis was a storyteller. The stories could be funny, absurd, strange, mystical, and surprisingly profound. “The Lunch Stop” has stayed with me because beneath the humor is something I increasingly understand as I get older: sometimes we are so damned determined to reach the next destination that we fail to notice where we have stopped along the way. Maybe celestial navigation isn’t only about figuring out where we’re going. Maybe it is about recognizing the strange intersections that happen while we’re getting there.

Some people are born into a particular world and remain inside that world for their entire lives. They live near where they were born. They inherit the religion of their parents, the politics of their community, the customs of their culture, and often the assumptions of the people around them. They work, marry, raise children, grow old, and die within a remarkably small geographical and intellectual radius.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Roots can be beautiful. There are people who spend eighty years within twenty miles of where they were born and become extraordinarily wise because they remain curious about everything beyond those twenty miles.

But anybody who has kept a plant in the same flowerpot too long understands what happens when roots have nowhere else to go. The plant becomes root-bound. The roots circle themselves, consuming every available inch of soil until the very system that once nourished the plant begins choking the life out of it. Eventually it stops growing. It struggles to produce flowers. It stops bearing fruit. The roots aren’t bad. The problem is that the container has become too damn small.

People can become root-bound too. So can families. Communities. Churches. Political parties. Religions. Entire cultures. The beliefs and traditions that once gave us stability can eventually become the very things preventing us from growing if we refuse to give our roots more room.

I remember talking with a deacon about twenty years ago about growth and change in the area where we lived. He was absolutely convinced that nothing significant was going to change there. Not in his lifetime, he told me. Not in his son’s lifetime. Not even in his grandson’s lifetime. The area simply wasn’t going to grow. Case closed.

That was about twenty years ago.

Today there is a shopping center there. Restaurants have appeared. Development has spread across an area he was certain would never substantially change, and the interstate exit itself has been redesigned with an entirely new traffic pattern just to handle the enormous increase in traffic and growth. His grandson didn’t have to wait for it. Neither did his son. The world changed while all of us were still standing there looking at it.

That conversation has stayed with me because we can become so root-bound to our little corner of reality that we mistake our limited view for the whole world. Small-town thinking isn’t necessarily about living in a small town. It is the assumption that what I can see from my front porch is all there is to see. We forget that the world is considerably larger than our corner of it, and reality has never asked our permission before changing.

Other people wander. They cross state lines and national borders. They meet people who pray differently, vote differently, eat differently, love differently, dress differently, and understand the universe differently. Sometimes they discover that the people they were warned about aren’t nearly as frightening as advertised. Sometimes they discover that the beliefs they inherited don’t survive contact with actual human beings. Sometimes the most sacred thing that happens on the journey is discovering that God—or truth, wisdom, mystery, whatever name we dare give it—refuses to stay inside the little theological box we packed for the trip. And sometimes we discover that neither geography nor theology has a monopoly on wisdom.

I suppose I inherited some wandering blood. In fifty-seven years, I have lost count of how many houses I have lived in. I have lived in at least fifteen different towns. Ministry moved me. Military service moved me. Relationships moved me. Work moved me. Circumstances moved me. Curiosity moved me. Sometimes life simply kicked me in the ass and moved me whether I wanted to go or not.

I served as a missionary in the Soviet Union during those extraordinary years surrounding its collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I have stood in places that the younger version of me could barely have imagined. I have met people whose cultures, histories, politics, religions, and experiences challenged assumptions I didn’t even know I was carrying.

Travel does that if we allow it.

The dangerous traveler isn’t the person who crosses borders. The dangerous traveler is the person who crosses borders without ever allowing anything inside them to move. You can travel around the world and remain intellectually sitting in the same chair where your parents put you when you were six years old. And you can live your entire life in one Appalachian hollow and possess a mind spacious enough to contain the universe.

Wisdom has never been measured by the odometer. It is measured by whether the journey changed you.

Some years ago, while hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail, I came across a handmade sign. It was weathered by rain and sun and whatever else those mountains had thrown at it, but the words were still readable: “Be where your feet are.”

I don’t remember how far I had walked that day, but I remember those words. They stopped me more effectively than any trail marker could have. Be where your feet are.

There was something especially profound about encountering that sentence on the Appalachian Trail because people don’t always hike that trail simply because they enjoy walking uphill while carrying everything they need on their backs. For some, the trail becomes a pilgrimage. People take to it after somebody they love dies, after a marriage ends, after college before beginning a career, after retirement, after military service, or during one of those strange thresholds when the person you used to be no longer fits but you haven’t quite figured out who you’re becoming. Some are trying to find themselves. Some are trying to lose themselves. Most probably discover a little of both.

There is an Aboriginal Australian concept commonly described in English as “walkabout,” although the traditional meanings are far richer and more culturally specific than the way outsiders sometimes casually use the term. I wouldn’t pretend that hiking the Appalachian Trail is equivalent to an Indigenous Australian cultural practice. But I do recognize a distant human resonance in the idea of leaving the familiar landscape of ordinary life, walking through the world differently, and allowing land, solitude, movement, and attention to teach you something that cannot be learned while sitting safely inside your normal routine.

Be where your feet are. Maybe that is the entire damn sermon.

Human beings have been wrestling with that truth for thousands of years. The Buddha left the protected world of his palace because the carefully constructed reality surrounding him could no longer contain what he had begun to see about suffering, aging, sickness, and death. His wandering became less a search for someplace else than a search for a way of being fully present to what already is. Eventually the road led beneath the Bodhi tree, where the great journey became stillness.

The Hindu traditions contain the ancient image of the wandering seeker who gradually releases attachment to status, possessions, and identity. The journey isn’t merely toward another geographical destination. It is inward, toward the discovery that the self we defend so fiercely may be far larger—and considerably less separate—than we imagined.

Abraham hears the divine invitation in the Jewish scriptures to leave the familiar and travel toward a land he does not yet know. Jacob spends much of his life traveling, scheming, running, wrestling, and eventually discovering that sometimes the holy place is the place where you finally stop running long enough to wrestle with yourself.

Islam remembers Muhammad’s Hijrah, the journey from Mecca to Medina, as a migration that transformed not simply location but community and identity. The pilgrimage of Hajj continues that symbolism: people from vastly different nations and social positions becoming pilgrims together.

Taoism offers a different kind of wisdom. Rather than constantly forcing the river toward our preferred destination, we might learn something from water. Water travels precisely because it does not insist upon controlling every inch of the journey. It moves around the rock. It descends into the valley. It follows the contours of reality instead of demanding that reality follow its itinerary.

Many Native American traditions—each distinct and deserving not to be flattened into some generic catch-all spirituality—have understood journey, land, relationship, and identity as inseparable. Sacred journeys and vision-seeking practices in some traditions are not about conquering wilderness but entering relationship with the world around us. The traveler doesn’t merely pass through the land. The traveler listens to it and allows it to become part of the journey.

Jesus, for that matter, doesn’t spend much of the Gospels sitting behind a desk developing systematic theology. He walks. He eats. He visits villages. He crosses boundaries. He sits beside wells. He touches people respectable religion says shouldn’t be touched. He talks with women he isn’t supposed to talk with, foreigners he isn’t supposed to admire, sinners he isn’t supposed to eat with, and religious leaders he isn’t supposed to piss off. He seems considerably more interested in encountering people than constructing religious systems for categorizing them.

Unfortunately, the religion built around Jesus hasn’t always followed his example. We built the building, put God inside it, constructed a theological flowerpot around the mystery, and then spent centuries arguing about whose pot was the correct shape. Before long, the container became more sacred than what it was supposed to contain. We became root-bound in our theological ideas about God, the universe, love, truth, salvation—whatever language we use for that larger Mystery that refuses to fit inside our definitions.

Churches that should have become life-giving gardens of wisdom can become theological and ideological prisons disguised as flowerpots. The roots keep circling the same doctrines, the same interpretations, the same political assumptions, the same cultural prejudices, until there isn’t enough fresh soil left for anything new to grow. Then we wonder why there aren’t any flowers. We wonder why there isn’t any fruit. Maybe God didn’t stop growing. Maybe our damn pot is too small.

Christianity eventually constructed magnificent buildings in his honor, but Jesus himself seems to have spent an extraordinary amount of time on the road. Maybe the church became so obsessed with getting people to a destination called heaven that we forgot Jesus spent most of his ministry teaching people how to be awake while their feet were still touching the earth.

Be where your feet are.

Maybe there is something theological about wandering. But there is also something theological about stopping. That may be the harder lesson for me.

I come from wanderers, although not all of my ancestors wandered in the same way. One grandfather wandered geographically. Another planted himself more deeply into community life—politics, education, religion, civic responsibility. One explored through movement. Another explored through involvement. Both remind me that wandering isn’t really about geography. The opposite of wandering isn’t staying home. It is sleepwalking through your own existence.

You can remain in the same town for eighty years and be wonderfully awake to the changing world around you. You can know your neighbors, study ideas that challenge you, listen to people whose experiences differ from yours, question your assumptions, deepen your relationships, and become a different human being at eighty than you were at eighteen. Or you can collect passport stamps from thirty countries and never really leave home.

That is where Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life increasingly makes sense to me. Rohr argues, in essence, that the first part of life is largely spent constructing the container—building identity, establishing ourselves, accumulating achievements, deciding who we are and where we belong. The second half asks a considerably more difficult question: What the hell was the container for?

The first half of life says, “Become somebody.” The second half begins asking whether we can loosen our grip on the somebody we worked so hard to become. The first half gathers credentials, identities, possessions, certainties, tribes, titles, and theological answers. The second half starts discovering how much of that baggage is too damn heavy to carry the rest of the way.

And falling upward doesn’t necessarily happen because we reach a certain birthday. Sometimes suffering pushes us into it. Sometimes failure does. Sometimes grief does. Sometimes war does. Sometimes religion falls apart. Sometimes relationships end. Sometimes the road we were absolutely certain would take us somewhere dead-ends in the middle of nowhere. The things that wound us can become the very things that deepen us—if we allow them to.

Maybe that is a good place to stop for a while—not because the journey is over, but because every decent journey needs a lunch stop.

So far, I have been talking about wandering: the strange people whose orbits cross ours, the places that stretch us beyond the little worlds where we began, the danger of becoming root-bound inside containers that once helped us grow, and the wisdom traditions that keep reminding us that sometimes we have to leave what is familiar before we can see it clearly. Richard Rohr calls some of this falling upward. I might simply call it discovering that half the shit you were certain about at twenty-five looks considerably different after you have actually lived a while.

But wandering creates another question, and perhaps it is the harder one. What happens when the road begins bending back toward home?

Thomas Wolfe famously suggested that you can’t go home again. I’m beginning to understand what he meant, although probably not in quite the way I understood it when I was younger. Because after enough miles, enough losses, enough scars, enough people passing in and out of our orbit, and enough falling upward, we eventually discover that home hasn’t been sitting there frozen in time waiting for us. Neither have we.

And that is where Part Two of this journey begins.

Not with leaving. With returning. Or at least trying to figure out what the hell “returning” means when both you and home have changed.

I grew up in a Christianity where dreams could get you into some serious shit. I’m not talking about the kind of dream where you show up for church in your underwear or discover halfway through the sermon that you forgot to write one. I’m talking about biblical dreams, the kind where God apparently bypassed the prophets, priests, committees, Roberts Rules of Order, and church board and just waited until somebody went to sleep.

Dreams are all over the Bible. Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams about the coming famine in Egypt, and that gift helped take him from a prison cell to becoming one of the most powerful men in Egypt. Daniel interpreted dreams. Peter had his strange vision of the sheet coming down from heaven filled with animals he had been taught were unclean. Paul had a nighttime vision of a Macedonian man calling him across the sea. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, was warned in dreams. Whether every one of those stories happened literally as written, whether some of them grew through religious tradition, or whether they represent ancient people trying to describe experiences they didn’t completely understand, I don’t know. But our ancestors certainly believed that sometimes the conscious mind had to shut the hell up before we could hear something important.

Maybe they were onto something.

Modern neuroscience can tell us an extraordinary amount about the brain, but there is still plenty we don’t understand about that three-pound universe between our ears. We know dreams are connected somehow with memory, emotion, experience, and stress. We also know that the brain continues working on things while the conscious mind is off duty. For those of us whose brains have been affected by trauma, nighttime can become particularly interesting territory. PTSD and sleep problems often go hand in hand. Insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, and traumatic memories don’t necessarily punch a time clock and go home when we crawl into bed.

I know something about having a brain that occasionally decides to operate without consulting management. I also have something called musical ear syndrome. I can be sitting watching television or sitting in a perfectly quiet room and suddenly hear music. Sometimes it sounds like a symphony. Sometimes it’s classic rock. Sometimes it sounds distant, almost as if somebody has a radio playing several rooms away. Apparently my brain has its own Spotify account, and the bastard refuses to give me the password. I don’t know exactly how much of it comes from the relationship between my brain and my hearing, but it reminds me that the brain can manufacture experiences that seem remarkably real.

That is part of what fascinates me about dreams. I don’t believe there is some universal dream dictionary sitting on God’s nightstand. Dream about a snake, turn to page 37. Dream about your ex, you’re screwed. Dream about being naked at Walmart, seek professional help immediately. Dreams don’t seem to work quite that neatly. Still, certain themes show up often enough to make you wonder what the subconscious might be working through.

Dreaming about your teeth falling out, for example, is sometimes associated with anxiety, insecurity, appearance, loss, or a sense that something in life is beyond your control. Dreams about falling can show up when life feels unstable. Being chased can represent something we are avoiding. Showing up naked in public can reflect vulnerability or fear of exposure. Being unable to speak or scream can resemble feeling powerless or unheard. Being lost can accompany uncertainty about where life is headed. Missing a flight, train, meeting, or deadline can reflect anxiety about opportunities or responsibilities. Driving a car that suddenly won’t steer or stop can look an awful lot like life getting away from us. Then there is that wonderful dream where you discover you have been enrolled in a class all semester and somehow forgot to attend. That one can show up when we feel unprepared, inadequate, or like there is unfinished business somewhere in our lives. None of these meanings are absolute. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a weird dream is just the result of eating pizza at midnight. But sometimes it is worth asking what the hell our brain is trying to tell us.

Recently, my brain sent me a black bear.

A black bear showing up in my subconscious isn’t completely ridiculous. I live on eight acres surrounded by roughly a hundred acres of woods, and wildlife is part of the neighborhood. Kuechly, my dog, has treed a bear on my property before. A couple of months ago I was walking her through the woods when a mama bear and three cubs crossed our path about fifty yards ahead of us. We stopped, they crossed, we waited, and everybody went on about their business. Nobody screamed, nobody tried to become a wildlife influencer, and everybody survived.

But something else happened recently. Before going to bed, I was scrolling through the internet and watched a video of a cat bowing up, hissing, growling, and standing its ground against a black bear probably twenty times its size. The commentator was explaining that this was how you should respond to a black bear: don’t panic, don’t run, don’t act like prey. Stand your ground and make yourself known. Apparently my subconscious was paying attention because later that night I dreamed I was trying to tame a black bear.

The strange thing was that the bear wasn’t exactly attacking me. It was curious and almost playful, but it was still a bear. Powerful, wild, formidable, unpredictable, and something I could never completely control. When I woke up, I started looking at interpretations of dreams about bears. One idea caught my attention: trying to tame something powerful or uncontrollable in your life.

Well, shit.

My subconscious wasn’t exactly being subtle.

The past month has been stressful. My house was under contract, and the buyers backed out. From my perspective, they entered the agreement in bad faith. They had never physically seen the property. They had seen it through FaceTime and put it under contract, effectively taking it off the market while giving themselves time to travel here and decide whether they actually liked it. The inspection contingency gave them broad discretion to walk away. The inspection itself came back with less than $200 worth of repairs. There was nothing catastrophic and nothing remotely resembling a reason the house couldn’t be purchased. They simply decided they didn’t want it.

Technically, they may have had the contractual right to do exactly what they did. Ethically, I think there is another question. The buyer works in the real estate and escrow business. He understands contracts. He understands contingencies and exactly how the machinery works. In my opinion, he used the technical language of the agreement to accomplish something contrary to the spirit in which I believed the agreement was made. Can I prove his intent? Probably not easily. Intent is notoriously hard to prove. Could I pursue legal action anyway and make him spend time and money defending what he did? Possibly. And there is the bear.

Do I fight it, tame it, or let the damn thing wander back into the woods?

This isn’t even the first contract recently that has left me wrestling with this question. I experienced something similar in an employment agreement involving a church. I believed we had agreed to one thing in spirit, while someone who deals regularly with contracts understood how to manipulate the technical language to produce something quite different. Nothing says Christian fellowship quite like needing a lawyer to interpret what your Christian brother meant when he gave you his word.

There used to be an old saying that a man is only as good as his word. In ancient societies, breaking your word could have serious consequences. In the Old West it might even get you shot. We supposedly became more civilized, so instead of shooting each other we developed lawyers, contracts, courts, bylaws, constitutions, fine print, and seventeen pages explaining what everybody supposedly meant when they said yes. My son and I have a running joke whenever one of us manages to get something over on the other through clever wording. We look at the other one and say, “Lawyered.” It’s funny between a father and son. It’s considerably less funny when that becomes the way a society conducts its relationships.

Jesus talked about this pretty directly. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. In other words, if you require seventeen pages of fine print to explain why your word doesn’t actually mean what everybody reasonably thought your word meant, maybe the problem isn’t the fine print. The Jewish scriptures take vows seriously as well. Numbers says that when a person makes a vow, they should not break their word. Jewish tradition has long wrestled seriously with vows, promises, contracts, and obligations because words create responsibilities between human beings. There is even an old Jewish story about Rav Safra, who silently agreed in his own mind to a selling price while he was praying. The buyer mistook his silence for rejection and kept raising the offer. When Safra finished praying, he accepted the original lower offer because that was the amount he had already agreed to in his heart. Think about how foreign that sounds in our modern world. We have gone from “I agreed to it in my heart, therefore I should honor it” to “let me call my attorney and see whether paragraph fourteen, subsection C gives me a loophole.”

Buddhism approaches the issue through Right Speech. Truthfulness isn’t merely about avoiding a technically false statement. Speech should not intentionally deceive, manipulate, divide, or cause unnecessary harm. Hindu traditions similarly elevate satya, truthfulness, alongside ahimsa, non-harming. Truth and compassion belong together. Rumi repeatedly wandered around the same territory from the mystical side, warning about how greed, ego, and desire distort our ability to recognize truth. Sometimes the question isn’t whether I can escape an obligation, exploit a loophole, make more money, or win the transaction. Sometimes the question is what my need to win is doing to my soul.

Indigenous traditions have their own distinct understandings of relationship, covenant, community, and responsibility, and I don’t want to lump them together into some generic Native American spirituality. Cherokee teachings are not interchangeable with Haudenosaunee teachings. Still, values such as integrity, honesty, respect, honor, humility, service, cooperation, and responsibility to community run deeply through many Indigenous traditions. Haudenosaunee treaty traditions in particular remind us that agreements are not simply legal transactions. They establish relationships. The relationship itself matters.

Different religions, different cultures, different metaphysics, but the same damned question keeps showing up: Does your word mean anything?

Contracts aren’t bad. Laws aren’t bad. Constitutions aren’t bad. Human beings disagree, which is precisely why we need them. But those documents were never supposed to replace character. They were supposed to give character structure. Even the Constitution assumes disagreement. Democracy isn’t built around everybody agreeing with everybody else. It is built around people agreeing about how they will disagree. Once everybody decides that every loophole, technicality, procedural trick, or institutional advantage is legitimate simply because they can get away with it, the document may remain intact while the covenant underneath it dies.

The same thing happens everywhere else. Corporations find contractual ways to exploit workers. Governments find legal ways to exploit taxpayers. Employers manipulate employment agreements. Consumers exploit return policies. Buyers exploit sellers, sellers exploit buyers, and churches—God help us—sometimes discover that apparently Jesus needs a contractual loophole. Everybody gets lawyered, and everybody walks away convinced they won.

But did they?

That’s where my bear comes back.

PTSD is, among other things, a brain that learned survival extraordinarily well. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Scan the horizon. Identify the threat. Remember what hurt you so it doesn’t happen again. That is enormously useful when the bear is real. It becomes considerably more complicated when the bear is an escrow dispute, a church disagreement, a broken relationship, or somebody who pissed you off on Tuesday. The survival part of my brain says, “Fight the bastard.” The wounded part says, “Make sure he pays.” The justice part says people should be accountable for their actions. The pastor in me asks when accountability becomes revenge.

Maybe somewhere underneath all of them my dreaming mind was asking a different question: Can you tame the bear without becoming one?

I don’t know. Maybe the bear represented the buyer. Maybe it represented the church situation. Maybe it represented my anger, my PTSD survival response, or those parts of life I desperately want to control but can’t. Maybe it represented all of them. Or maybe I watched a freaking cat yell at a bear before bedtime and my brain made a movie out of it.

Both can be true.

That is the mystery of dreams.

The whole experience got me thinking about karma, justice, forgiveness, accountability, revenge, and that old biblical “eye for an eye” business. “An eye for an eye” was originally a limitation on vengeance, not permission for unlimited retaliation. Justice says the consequence should fit the harm. Revenge says I want you to feel what you made me feel. Those two things can look remarkably similar when we are angry. Sometimes revenge even puts on a suit, carries a briefcase, files paperwork at the courthouse, and introduces itself as principle.

That doesn’t mean accountability is wrong. Forgiveness does not mean pretending somebody behaved honorably when they didn’t. Compassion doesn’t require becoming a doormat. Grace doesn’t erase boundaries, and letting go isn’t spiritual language for allowing people to keep screwing everybody around them without consequences. Sometimes love says no. Sometimes justice says you need to answer for this. Sometimes accountability is necessary precisely because behavior that goes unchallenged becomes behavior that gets repeated. But there is still a line somewhere between accountability and retaliation, and I have been wrestling with where that line is.

We often reduce karma in Western culture to cosmic revenge: “Don’t worry, karma will get the son of a bitch.” That isn’t particularly enlightened. That is revenge with incense. The deeper idea of karma is cause and consequence. What we repeatedly think, say, and do shapes what follows, and it also shapes who we become. Maybe “what goes around comes around” isn’t primarily about waiting for the universe to kick somebody else’s ass. Maybe it is about recognizing that what I send around also comes around inside me. Hatred changes the person doing the hating. Greed changes the person practicing greed. Dishonesty changes the dishonest person. Revenge changes the person seeking revenge.

That brings me to an image I’ve carried around for years. You cannot receive anything with a closed fist. Sometimes we hold onto anger because we think releasing it means the other person wins. We hold resentment because it becomes evidence in the courtroom of our soul. “See, I’m still angry, therefore what you did mattered.” But letting go doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. It means I refuse to let what you did determine what happens inside me next.

Maybe this is where transactional relationships and transformational relationships finally separate. A transactional relationship asks what I can get, what I am technically required to give, what I can legally get away with, and how I can win. A transformational relationship asks who we are becoming because of the way we are treating each other. Imagine bringing that question into a real estate closing. Imagine bringing it into corporate America, Congress, or, God forbid, a church board meeting. We might need fewer lawyers, although I’m not holding my breath.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do about the house contract. Maybe I may pursue it because accountability matters; maybe I won’t. Contracts should mean something. Good faith should mean something. Your word should mean something. But before I make that decision, I have another question to answer: Am I pursuing justice because something genuinely needs to be made right, or am I pursuing revenge because something inside me wants somebody else to hurt?

That question is a hell of a lot harder than anything written in the contract.

Maybe that is what the black bear came to ask me. The bear wasn’t attacking me. I wasn’t shooting it, and I wasn’t running from it. I was trying to tame it. Maybe our deepest spiritual work isn’t killing the wild things inside us. Maybe it isn’t pretending they aren’t there either. Maybe it is learning to stand in their presence without fear. Anger, trauma, pride, fear, justice, revenge, control, and the wounded ego demanding somebody pay are all powerful animals. We can acknowledge them without letting them run loose and destroy whatever crosses their path.

Perhaps dreams aren’t prophecies at all. Or perhaps some are. I don’t know. Maybe they are something stranger and, in their own way, just as sacred: a nighttime conversation between the person we present to the world and the parts of ourselves that don’t give a damn about appearances. The conscious mind says, “I’ve got this under control.” The subconscious looks over from the corner and says, “Bullshit,” and sends a bear.

Maybe God speaks through dreams. Maybe the subconscious speaks through dreams. Maybe trauma speaks through dreams. Maybe memory does. Maybe the collective wisdom buried somewhere deep within millions of years of human evolution occasionally whispers through them. Maybe it’s some strange combination of all of the above. I don’t know, and I’m increasingly comfortable admitting that. “I don’t know” may be one of the most spiritually mature sentences available to us.

But I am learning to listen.

Because perhaps the important question isn’t whether the bear in my dream was prophetic. Maybe the question is what the bear caused me to examine when I woke up. What am I trying so desperately to control? What am I unwilling to release? What would justice look like without revenge? What would strength look like without domination? What would accountability look like without hatred? And what might I finally be able to receive if I opened my fist?

Maybe it was just a dream.

Then again, Joseph supposedly started with cows.

I got a bear.

I’ll take it.

Postscript update: I decided to let the issue with the buyers go and move on. I put my house back on the market, and within 6 days it was back under contract with a better offer. Which just validated what I have believed for a long time. A closed fist can hold something, protect something, or strike something, but it cannot receive. Sometimes, you let go and receive a greater blessing.

The Age of Aquarius promised harmony and understanding. The Independent Fundamental Missionary Baptists had a slightly more detailed plan.

By the time I entered this next chapter of childhood, two different currents were already flowing beneath my life. One came from the culture into which I had been born—a world putting footprints on the moon, questioning institutions, experimenting with music, confronting old assumptions, and imagining possibilities that previous generations had considered impossible. The other came from the religious world in which I was being formed—a world that believed truth had already been revealed, that the Bible contained the answers, and that our responsibility wasn’t so much to question those answers as to learn them, defend them, and eventually convince everybody else of them.

I didn’t know those currents would eventually collide. Hell, I was a kid. I wasn’t sitting around contemplating the epistemological limitations of religious fundamentalism. I was learning Bible verses, playing games, going to Vacation Bible School, watching my parents work, and trying to figure out the world like every other kid.

But looking backward, I can see the tension. The child of Aquarius was being taught certainty: certainty that I was part of the right religion, certainty that I would escape the coming judgment and destruction of the Earth, and certainty that I could escape a fiery eternal punishment after I died. And even though that last one would send me to the altar many times, certainty would serve me well for a while.

Welcome to Fundamentalism

Dad eventually graduated with his associate degree. The pastor he’d been doing construction for offered him a position as youth pastor. We could live in the church parsonage, which helped offset the salary. Dad could continue working construction with the pastor during the week and work with the church youth evenings and weekends. And now we arrive at one of the most important boxes in my spiritual development. It was an Independent Fundamental Missionary Baptist Church. Yes. Every word matters.

I’ve come to believe labels belong on boxes more than they belong on people. But labels can still tell us what’s inside a box and how we’re supposed to handle it. If someone tells you a church is Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Episcopal, Buddhist, or whatever else, you immediately have some idea of the traditions, rituals, beliefs, and expectations you might encounter. Stacking Independent Fundamental Missionary Baptist together narrowed that theological box considerably.

This was not casual Christianity. We had church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Sunday morning included Sunday school. Sunday evening included Training Union, which was basically Sunday school’s evening cousin. Then twice a year—spring and fall—we had revival. Revival began Sunday night and ran through Friday. Sometimes it kept going because somebody determined “the fire of God had fallen,” which apparently meant God wasn’t particularly concerned about anybody getting enough sleep before work the next morning. I’ve heard of revivals continuing two or three weeks. The longest I ever heard about lasted around nine weeks.

Then there was Vacation Bible School. For one week, mornings or evenings, children came from everywhere we could haul them in by bus or convince their parents to bring them. There were games, crafts, snacks, Bible lessons, and enough organized competition to make Vince Lombardi proud. We collected offerings every day and pitted the boys against the girls. A large wooden balance scale sat with a 2-gallon bucket on either side. Boys’ money went in one bucket. Girls’ money went in the other. Whoever won got some extra reward at snack time, and the overall winners at the end of the week got to eat first at the family picnic. Nothing says the unconditional grace of Jesus quite like turning charitable giving into a competitive sport.

Dad eventually raised the stakes. He let kids throw Cool Whip pies in his face. He invented shaving-cream fights for youth rallies. Dad was wonderful at helping kids have fun. Mom was equally important because Dad could get competitive enough to invent games better suited for Marine boot camp than elementary-school children. Mom would take Dad’s idea and translate it into something that wouldn’t require an ambulance. They made a good team.

Leaving and Coming Back

During the middle of the 1970s, Mom became pregnant with my sister, and for a brief period we moved back to our hometown to be closer to family. It lasted about six months. We had been gone long enough that Dad had lost many of his old construction contacts. Finding steady work wasn’t easy. Meanwhile, the pastor back in the mountains continued offering him construction jobs. Dad got tired of living in one city during the week and another on the weekends.

So we returned to the mountains. He went back to roofing and resumed his role as youth pastor. And I returned to the church that would become foundational to my religious identity. I attended that church from roughly age three until age ten. Those are formative years. And this was formative religion.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

The theology of that world could have an almost military quality. We pledged allegiance to the American flag, then the Christian flag, then the Bible. God and country lived remarkably close together, so close that as a child I didn’t yet understand where one ended and the other began. Looking back, that blending may have been one of the earliest theological tensions planted inside me, although I wouldn’t recognize it for decades. We were being taught allegiance to Jesus while simultaneously practicing allegiance to nation, and nobody seemed particularly interested in asking what happened when those allegiances collided.

Then there were Bible drills. Even the language sounded militaristic. Everybody used the King James Version, which allowed the instructor to know whether you had actually found the correct verse. We stood holding our Bibles down by our sides. The instructor called out a book, chapter, and verse. “Attention!” “Draw Bibles!” Up came the Bible. “Search!” Suddenly, a room full of Baptist children frantically flipped through Scripture like gunslingers at high noon.

Find the verse, step forward, raise your hand. First person forward got the first chance to read it. If they were wrong, the instructor moved to the second, then the third. Usually there were around ten rounds. With larger groups we’d have heats and advance winners into subsequent rounds. It was clever. It was fun. It taught children how to navigate the Bible extraordinarily well. And it was also indoctrinating as hell.

I don’t say that today with bitterness. I say it with perspective. Ancient wisdom traditions often distinguish between the container and what the container is trying to hold. The finger pointing toward the moon is not the moon. The map is not the territory. The words describing the sacred are not the sacred itself. I was being taught to master the map before I was old enough to realize there might be a much larger territory beyond it.

Because the same little boy being taught that the Bible contained all the answers was also born into a world asking enormous questions. The same child pledging allegiance to the Bible had been born the year humanity walked on the moon. The same child being taught the boundaries of acceptable belief was growing up listening to music created by people constantly pushing cultural boundaries. The same little Baptist boy memorizing the 23rd Psalm was living in the aftermath of Vietnam, the civil-rights movement, Watergate, the energy crisis, changing gender roles, technological revolution, and a culture increasingly suspicious of authority.

And maybe that’s where the Irreverent Reverend really began. Maybe it didn’t begin when I eventually questioned fundamentalism, studied theology, became a minister, or when life, war, nursing, travel, and people from different cultures complicated all the simple answers I had been given. Maybe the Irreverent Reverend was already there, quietly taking notes.

Maybe the Irreverent Reverend was that little boy standing on Grandma’s table quoting the 23rd Psalm while the Age of Aquarius played somewhere out in the larger culture. Maybe both were seeds falling into the same soil. One taught me that the Lord was my shepherd; the other imagined harmony and understanding. Neither seed looked particularly revolutionary when it went into the ground. Seeds rarely do. They disappear into darkness before anything begins to grow.

One world taught me that certainty was faith, while another slowly taught me that curiosity was not its enemy. One taught me that the Bible contained truth; life would eventually teach me that truth could never be contained by a book, denomination, creed, political party, country, culture, or preacher. I learned how to defend what I believed long before I learned the far more difficult discipline of questioning it.

And somewhere between the King James Bible and Neil Armstrong’s footprints, between Hank Williams and Van Halen, between Bach and Lynyrd Skynyrd, between Bible drills and public school, between poverty and pride, between Daddy Martin’s station wagon and Dad’s shaving-cream fights, a strange spiritual foundation was being poured. I just didn’t know what was being built on it yet.

The irony is that fundamentalism gave me some of the tools I would eventually use to question fundamentalism. It taught me Scripture. It taught me discipline. It taught me service. It taught me community. My parents taught me sacrifice. My mother taught me that having a right to something doesn’t necessarily mean you need to take it when someone else needs it more. My father taught me that a calling was something worth getting up in the morning for, going to school, working construction all afternoon, tending a garden at night, and getting up the next morning to do it again. Those lessons survived my theological deconstruction. Some of the theology didn’t.

And maybe that’s the first lesson in becoming an Irreverent Reverend: deconstruction doesn’t require burning down the whole damn house. Sometimes you carefully take it apart. You examine the lumber. You save what is still sound. You throw away what is rotten. Then, using some of the very tools handed to you by the people who built the first house, you begin building again.

My dad, now 84, just did this very thing to his house when he added a shed roof and a block walkway to the back. The old structure wasn’t discarded simply because something new was being built. What was solid remained. What needed to change was changed, and something new was added to what had already stood the test of time.

The Buddhists might call some of that learning to release our attachments. The Taoist might remind us that a vessel is useful precisely because there is empty space inside it. The mystics might simply tell us that sometimes we have to empty our hands before we can receive anything new. Different traditions, different metaphors, same little pinch of salt: don’t confuse what carried you this far with where you are ultimately going.

Maybe that is what the Age of Aquarius was whispering into the year I was born—not some astrological prediction about planets and constellations, but a cultural longing for something humanity has been trying to find since we first looked toward the heavens: more understanding, more compassion, more freedom, more peace, more love, and perhaps most of all, enough light to see one another more clearly.

And in the chaos of our current social climate, maybe something old is dying while something new is struggling to be born. There is pain in pregnancy before the joy of the newborn. Life moves in circles and seasons, and there will always be moments when beginnings and endings overlap—when what was, what is, and what might yet become are somehow sharing the same sacred ground.

The fundamentalists taught me to look toward heaven. The scientists taught me we could actually go there. Music taught me there were a thousand different ways to describe the journey. My parents taught me that beliefs weren’t worth much if they didn’t eventually get dirt under their fingernails. Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie taught me that before God becomes a doctrine, the sacred can sometimes arrive as an old couple in a station wagon who make a frightened three-year-old feel safe.

And life would eventually teach me that perhaps the greatest spiritual mistake we make is becoming so certain we’ve found God that we stop looking. The ancient traditions have been warning us about that for thousands of years. Don’t mistake the finger for the moon. Don’t mistake the cup for the water. Don’t mistake the name for the mystery. And for God’s sake—or whatever name you choose for the Mystery—don’t mistake your little box for the whole damn universe. I had a long way to go before I would understand that. After all, I was still only ten.

The little fundamentalist Baptist boy had no idea how many times his world was going to be taken apart and rebuilt, how many people outside his religious box would become his teachers, or how much sacred wisdom, healing, grace, and love he would eventually discover in places he had once been taught not to look. The Irreverent Reverend was still decades away from having a name. But the seeds were already in the ground. And they were beginning to grow.

Toward the Age of Questions

The next stretch of the journey would be different. Childhood had given me the box; adolescence was about to test whether I could stay inside it. The 1980s were coming, and with them would come teenage hormones, high school hallways, changing music, first loves, questions about identity, a growing awareness of the wider world, and that peculiar collision between what a young Baptist boy had been taught and what a young man was beginning to experience for himself. The Age of Aquarius had promised harmony and understanding, but adolescence is rarely either one.

That would be the next movement in the story: from the Age of Aquarius into the age of questions, when the little boy who could quote the 23rd Psalm from Grandma’s table began discovering that faith was harder to live than it was to memorize. Somewhere between teenage rebellion, religious expectation, music, love, mistakes, responsibility, and eventually marriage, the Reverend would keep forming.

And the irreverence was about to find its voice.

I was born in the year of Aquarius. If that doesn’t tell you something about how this story is going to go, you haven’t been paying attention.

It was 1969, the year The 5th Dimension took Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In to number one. The song came out of the counterculture musical Hair, and it imagined a new age marked by harmony, understanding, sympathy, trust, liberation, and a breaking down of the old divisions that had separated human beings from one another. Now, I don’t know that I believe the stars arranged themselves at my birth and decided, “This boy is going to spend the next sixty years questioning everything people tell him he’s supposed to believe.” I’m far too agnostic these days to make that claim with a straight face. But I have to admit, the irony is pretty damn good. The Taoists might simply say that I entered the river at an interesting bend. I didn’t choose the current, but I would spend a lifetime discovering where it was carrying me.

I was born into one of the most socially and religiously conservative worlds imaginable at almost precisely the moment America seemed determined to blow open every box it had built. The country was wrestling with Vietnam, civil rights, race, women’s liberation, sexual liberation, political assassinations, generational rebellion, and distrust of institutions. Young people were questioning authority. Churches were trying to figure out what to do with a culture that no longer automatically accepted their answers. And somewhere underneath all of it was this yearning that maybe humanity could become something more compassionate, more peaceful, more connected. It was an old yearning wearing new clothes. The Hebrew prophets had dreamed about beating swords into plowshares. The Buddha had taught that suffering was bound up with our attachments. Lao Tzu spoke of a Way that could not finally be captured by our words. Mystics across cultures had been whispering for centuries that beneath all our divisions there was something deeper connecting us. Aquarius didn’t invent that longing. It just put it to music.

And while all that was happening, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Think about that for a minute. Human beings who had spent thousands of years looking at the moon as something mysterious, unreachable, divine, poetic, and impossibly distant suddenly put footprints on it. The impossible became possible on television. Maybe that was part of my spiritual formation too. I was born into a world simultaneously looking toward the heavens through a telescope and through a Bible. One world was saying, “Here are the answers.” The other was saying, “Look what else there is to discover.” I would eventually discover that I needed both—the reverence that looks up in wonder and the irreverence that keeps asking what else might be out there. Somewhere between those two worlds, eventually, I became the Irreverent Reverend.

Between Two Generations

Generational labels aren’t nearly as tidy as marketers would have us believe. Depending on whose chart you’re using, someone born in 1969 gets classified as a late Baby Boomer, early Generation X, or part of that little transitional microgeneration sometimes called Generation Jones. I don’t particularly care which box gets checked. I’ve spent most of my life climbing out of boxes anyway. What matters is that I grew up standing on a cultural bridge. I inherited something from the generation before me while growing into the generation that followed it. And nowhere is that more obvious than my music.

My musical tastes make absolutely no damn sense unless you understand where I came from. I can listen to Grandpa Jones, Ernest Tubb, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and Hank Williams Sr., then move right into Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. Keep going, and I’ll happily listen to George Strait, Travis Tritt, Joe Diffie, and those last great country troubadours before somebody apparently decided country music needed to sound like pop music with a pickup truck parked in the video.

But then my band director came along and ruined any chance of keeping my musical tastes respectable and predictable. He introduced me to Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Bach. Then there was Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, the big bands of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, jazz and blues. My older brother took care of the next part of my education: Blackfoot, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and the great Southern rock bands of the ‘70s. Then my own generation showed up: Phil Collins and Genesis, Van Halen—and yes, I prefer David Lee Roth, although Sammy Hagar is damn good too—Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Chicago, Journey, and that remarkable explosion of music that became the soundtrack of the 1980s.

Maybe that strange musical stew says something about my theology today. I never learned to live comfortably in one genre. Eventually I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably inside one religious tradition either. Maybe music taught me something theology took much longer to teach me: harmony doesn’t require everybody to sing the same note. In fact, if everybody sings the same note, you don’t have harmony at all. You have unison. Harmony requires difference. That little bit of musical wisdom would eventually become a pretty damn important piece of my theology.

Poor, But We Didn’t Know We Were Poor

From my birth in the late ‘60s until graduating high school in the late ‘80s, I lived inside what was, in many ways, a sheltered nuclear family. But books, movies, public school, music, and simple curiosity kept opening little windows into a much larger world. We weren’t wealthy. In fact, we were poor enough that we probably qualified for reduced-price school lunches, if not free lunches. My mother wouldn’t take them. Her reasoning was simple: there were people who needed the help more than we did, and those programs should be there for them.

I didn’t understand the significance of that philosophy as a child. Looking back, I realize it planted something deep inside me. Responsibility wasn’t simply taking care of yourself. Responsibility also meant recognizing when somebody else had a greater need. It was one of the first seeds planted in me that would eventually grow into something much larger. Jesus would later give me language for it in loving your neighbor. Buddhism would teach me about compassion. Indigenous traditions would help me think about community and our obligations beyond the individual self. But before I knew any of those words, my mother simply lived it. Sometimes theology gets planted in us long before anyone gives it a name. That little lesson would come back to haunt me—in the best possible way—many times throughout my life.

Rather than depend on assistance, my parents worked. In the early 1970s, Dad packed up our family and moved us roughly 165 miles west from the hometown that actually carried our family name because he believed God was calling him into ministry. Today that’s not a terribly long drive. Back then, through those mountains, it meant being three to three-and-a-half hours away from the grandparents and extended family who had been part of my everyday life.

Dad went to Bible college every weekday morning. Classes ended around noon, and then he went to work construction for another eight or ten hours. Construction was what he knew. He’d been doing it since he was young. Somehow—whether through Bible college, a mutual friend, Providence, coincidence, or whatever theological word one prefers—Dad, another friend who had moved his family there with us, and another man from their Bible class ended up doing construction for a local pastor who also built houses.

This was the 1970s. Vietnam was still shaping America. The economy was struggling. The energy crisis hit. I remember Mom sitting in those long gas lines. And I remember Dad going to school in the morning, working construction afterward, and then coming home and working in the garden because growing food was another way he could provide for us. Mom worked too. There was nothing romantic about being poor. But there was dignity in watching two people do whatever was necessary to keep a family together. Long before I learned theological words like vocation, sacrifice, stewardship, or servant leadership, I watched them come home tired.

Which created my first major disruption.

Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie

Until I was three years old, either my mother or my grandmother had always taken care of me. Suddenly I was going to daycare. And the daycare arrangement sounds absolutely insane by today’s standards. An older couple we called Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie operated it. Parents would bring their children into town near the library. Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie would arrive in their station wagon, load up the children, and drive everybody out to their property where they had built a daycare center.

Just picture proposing that arrangement today: “Hello, parents. Drop your three-year-old off downtown. We’ll put them in our station wagon, drive them somewhere out in the country, and bring them back later.” Child Protective Services would probably be waiting before the station wagon made it through the first stoplight.

But there is something about the innocence of that era—and the loss of some of that innocence today—that stays with me. I’m sure Mom did her due diligence. At least I hope to hell she did. We continued visiting Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie even after I left daycare and entered elementary school, so clearly my parents knew where these people lived eventually.

What I know is what they became to me. I had been pulled away from grandparents I’d seen practically every day of my life. Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie became surrogate grandparents. I don’t have many memories from ages three to five, but the memories I have of them are memories of peace and contentment. They also taught me the 23rd Psalm. So there I was at about three-and-a-half years old, standing on my grandmother’s table during a weekend visit home, quoting, “The Lord is my shepherd...” Apparently the preaching instinct arrived early. Nobody knew yet that one day I’d spend considerably more time arguing with shepherds about what the hell they were doing to the sheep.

I also met one of my best childhood friends at that daycare. We would eventually enter kindergarten together, which was unusual because we lived in town, many of my future classmates lived on the east side, and the daycare was out on the west side. Looking backward, I see something I couldn’t have understood then: my spiritual formation wasn’t beginning in a church building. It was beginning through relationships. Long before theology taught me doctrines about God, Daddy Martin and Mommy Elsie taught me what safety, kindness, belonging, and love felt like. The older I get, the more convinced I become that this may be where most authentic spirituality begins—not with believing the right proposition about God, but with encountering enough love that you begin to suspect there might be something sacred underneath it. That distinction would become enormously important later.

Before the Box

Looking back now, I realize that before anybody taught me systematic theology, somebody taught me belonging. Before anybody taught me what God supposedly thought about everything, I knew what it felt like to be safe in somebody’s presence. Before I understood salvation, sin, heaven, hell, atonement, inerrancy, or any of the other words that would eventually crowd my religious vocabulary, I knew the 23rd Psalm because two elderly people who loved children had taught it to me.

Maybe that’s important.

Ancient wisdom traditions have understood for centuries that the deepest things are often learned through experience before they are explained through words. A child learns warmth before understanding fire. We know thirst before anyone explains water. We experience love long before we can define it. Perhaps the sacred works much the same way.

My earliest experiences of faith were not arguments.

They were relationships.

But that was about to change.

My father’s graduation from Bible college would move our family deeper into church life, and the Christianity surrounding me would begin acquiring increasingly specific boundaries. There would be rules, labels, doctrines, revivals, Bible drills, flags, pledges, competitions, and a carefully constructed understanding of who was right, who was wrong, who was saved, and who needed saving.

The little boy standing on Grandma’s table reciting the 23rd Psalm was about to be handed a theological box.

And it was a very well-built box.

The strange thing is that some of the tools I would eventually use to dismantle parts of that box were going to be handed to me by the very people who taught me how to build it.

The Age of Aquarius was still humming somewhere outside those church walls with its dreams of harmony and understanding. Inside, I was about to learn a much more certain version of the universe.

That is where Part Two begins.

The child of Aquarius was about to become a fundamentalist. And somewhere inside that little fundamentalist, the Irreverent Reverend was still quietly taking notes.

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