The Merry Monk

Mother Internet has been very good to me this week.

Burnside Writers Collective published “May God Bless the Hell Out of You” and just yesterday a new magazine called Genuine Motivation published my piece titled “Our Father.” Pretty cool huh?

Click the links above to check out my work and let me know what you think (I’m a comment junkie).

I’m a little bummed that the good folks at GM had to edit “Our Father” down to meet the 1200 word limit. But hey, the fact that anyone wants to publish my messy monkery is a gift.

Anyway, just in case you were interested in the full piece, here’s the original as it appeared in Key Life Magazine this summer.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”

- Dr. Seuss

“Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.”

- Dr. Seuss

I did a good bit of cleaning this weekend. Nothing helps energize me for housework like good tunes. This weekend Phish kept me and Mrs. Monk rockin’ in the clean world.

Where does the Merry Monk go for his Phish fix? Glad you asked.

LivePhish.com pumps out a free live stream that will blow your mind. Head on over there for some spectacular live jams 24×7. Just click “Listen” in the upper right corner of the site and you can use the player of your choice to jump into the live stream and catch some Phish!

If you really dig it and you want Live Phish Radio on your phone, there’s an app for that. Looks like it’s currently half price for $3.99. I just bought mine with some remaining gift card money!

May God bless the Hell out of you Phish!

Sufjan Stevens meets Paul Simon. No more reading, listen.

Click here to listen to the All Delighted People EP and purchase the album.

Album description:

All Delighted People is built around two different versions of Sufjan’s long-form epic ballad “All Delighted People,” a dramatic homage to the Apocalypse, existential ennui, and Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence.” Sounds delightful, yes! The song was originally workshopped on Sufjan’s previous tour in the fall of 2009. Other songs on the EP include the 17-minute guitar jam-for-single-mothers “Djohariah,” and the gothic piano ballad “The Owl and the Tanager,” a live-show mainstay (and Debbie Downer if you ask us; what’s it doing on a “Delighted” EP?).

Raise Your Hands!

God is not fair. He gleefully flaunts it too. He shoves it in our faces. Jesus’ version of reality is devoid of common sense. The Kingdom of God might as well be called, “Crazy Upside-down Jesus World.”

Here’s an example.

Say I need some landscaping done at my house. So I go to the day-laborer place and I hire up all the guys standing around. We agree on $100 per guy for a day’s work. They work hard for a couple hours, but it doesn’t look like we’ll get all the work done by quitting time. So I go back to the day-laborer place and get some more guys.

A couple more hours go by. I need more guys. I go get ‘em. They work.

A couple more hours. More guys. More work. About this time my yard is looking like an ant colony with workers swarming all over the place pulling bushes, planting trees, laying sod, hauling decorative rocks, building planters, etc.

Everything looks good, so I go get the guys some chicken and beers to show my appreciation. With about an hour of daylight left, I head back to my house and pass the day-laborer place on the way. To my surprise, I see some guys just showing up looking for work.

I think, These guys are slackers. You don’t show up at the end of the day looking for work. They probably slept all day after partying the night before. Now they’re here to hook up with their friends who actually got their butts out of bed to earn some money.

So I pull in and ask them why they’re standing around. They say, “Look man, you know…we been standing here all day and nobody hired us.”

I know they’re full of it, but I’m a good guy. I have plenty of cash and these hosers look like they could use a break. I hire the guys and haul them to my place. They get about an hour of work in before everything is done and we all sit around eating, drinking and BS-ing.

It comes time to call it a day and pay the workers, so they all line up. Of course the slackers step up first, beers in hand, licking their fingers clean of fried chicken. They’re delighted as I hand each a 100-dollar bill. Then the next group. They get $100 too. Same with the next guys…and the next.

About this time, the guys who showed up first think they may get more since they worked the entire day. They step up. All eyes are on me. They each get $100. They look at me like I’m the Frankenstein monster and they’re the townspeople ready to attack with shovels and pitchforks. They start shouting complaints.

I say, “Hey, you agreed to a day’s work for $100. That’s a good wage. If I want to give the last guys the same as you, it’s a free country. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Or are you giving me the evil eye because I’m good?”

Jesus tells a story just like this in Matthew 20:1-16. Then you know what he says? He says, “Let me tell all y’all somethin’. In the Kingdom of Heaven, the last are first…and the first are last.”

WHAT?!! You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s outrageous. It’s not fair. Who would pay good money to guys who don’t deserve it and then shove that fact in the faces of the guys who worked the hardest? But there you have it, right there in the Bible.

That’s just one example. Go read about the rebellious son who squanders all his dad’s money on hookers and booze. You know what he gets for it when he comes home? His dad buys him new clothes and throws him a party while his brother works in the field. The religious folks get a tongue lashing from Jesus while the drunks, outcasts and whores get the Kingdom. The meek inherit the earth. The persecuted are blessed. It’s all simply scandalous.

In the real world, you work, you get paid. That’s reality. You study hard, you get an “A.” That’s the way of the world. You do bad stuff and you get punished. You do good, you get rewarded. However, God’s ways are certainly not our ways.

So what is he up too? Why all of this insane generosity to the worst and weakest of us?

I’ll tell you. It’s the way that he chastens us. It’s the way he sets us straight.

Romans 2:4 “Do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?”

There you have it. He doesn’t give us cancer or earthquakes. He doesn’t get us fired or wreck our car to teach us a lesson. He doesn’t take our children or our spouses. That’s what you would expect. In fact, that’s how all the pagan gods do it, but not Yahweh.

If he were interested in punishing us for the evil in our hearts, death and destruction would be in order. Sure we’ve seen that kind of thing in the Old Testament, but that was all part of God setting the stage to come himself to take the punishment humanity deserved. Now, he’s not mad at us anymore. He spent all His anger on Jesus; there’s none left for us. God was never interested in wiping us out. He’s interested in getting us to turn around and come Home. He’s interested in getting us to repent, and to do so, he blesses us. God literally blesses the Hell out of us.

Listen to these words from Spurgeon:

“When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against One who loved me so, and sought my good.”

So, while it’s not what we expect, it’s what the gospel is all about. That’s the good news. Jesus taught that it’s the way things work in the Kingdom of Heaven. You see, we can’t work hard enough to get God to owe us anything and we can’t be bad enough to get him to punish us.

Romans 4:4-8 “Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.”

What’s more, grace through faith is not just how we get into the family of God. It’s how we live (Galatians 3:1-3).

All that isn’t to say that there aren’t consequences for the stupid things we do. On top of that, there’s the mess we all experience from living in a fallen world. But don’t confuse that stuff with God’s punishment. There’s no punishment left after the cross.

However, he does want to bless the Hell out of us. This is obviously great news for the slackers who show up hungover to work for an hour and get paid just as much as the guys who worked all day. It’s great news for the prodigals who get to come home to a party after spending dad’s money partying. It’s great news for a jacked up guy like me. But, for the older brother and the guys working in the field all day, this great news is a tough pill to swallow.

Robert Farrar Capon expresses their thoughts on the gospel with style:

“Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance. Lord, let your servants depart in the peace of their proper responsibility. If it is too much to ask, send us to bed with some few shreds of self-respect to congratulate ourselves upon. But if that is too hard, leave us at least the consolation of our self-loathing. Only do not force us free. What have we ever done but try as best we could? How have we so hurt you, even by failing, that you should now turn on us and say that none of it makes any difference, not even our sacred guilt? We have played this game of yours, and it has cost us.

Where do you get off suggesting a drink at a time like this?”

It’s not fair, but that’s how the Kingdom of Heaven works. If you don’t like that, I bet you’ve been working really hard to please God. I also bet you can be a big pain in the ass. Lighten up, he’s already pleased.

As he loves us, we become more loving. As he indiscriminately accepts us, we become more indiscriminately accepting. As he blesses us, we become a blessing.

May God bless the Hell out of us all!

“May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is Father, Son and Spirit.”

- Father Larry Hein (Brennan Manning’s spiritual director)

…wouldn’t you like to be a mystic too?

This morning I watched a video of Brennan Manning talking about the future of Christianity. He quoted Karl Rahner saying, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will cease to be anything at all.” Of course I thought this was right on. I am, after all, a whiskey mystic and I always get off on Brennan Manning. Here’s the video:

Then my daughter threw up. Meetings. Emails. More throwing up. Now I’m sitting here listening through tomorrow’s talk show. Ah the life of a mystic.

As I’m sitting here listening, I’m bouncing around the Internet and I just came across this link from Mike Morrell to a post by Ian Morgan Cron titled, Are You a Christian Mystic? Ian used that same quote from Karl Rahner that Manning used. Coincidence? Not for a mystic. Check out the piece. You might be surprised to find out that you’re a mystic too.

Here are a few questions Ian asks to help take the “mist” out of mysticism:

Have you ever found yourself inexplicably capable of forgiving someone who has deeply wounded you?

Have you ever been surprised by your ability to maintain a spirit of faith, hope and joy in the face of crushing circumstances or perhaps even in the face of unspeakable horror?

Have you ever spontaneously laughed out loud at the absurdity of life?

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sense that everything in your life is a gift?

Have you ever been given the gift “seeing the inner splendor” of something in creation?

Have you ever been stopped in your tracks by the sound of wind moving through a stand of trees or by the sight of a markless snowfield illuminated by moonlight?

Have you ever received the Eucharist and felt tears of gratitude well up from your soul?

Let me know what you think. If you’ve hung around me for any amount of time, you know I eat this stuff up. As I’ve said before, I need way more than ideas about God. I need experience. I need to eat and drink and breathe God…to know him in the Biblical sense. I want to dive naked into the divine and live to tell about it.

I liked my life before I picked up Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life. I had good relationships with my wife, kids and parents. I was getting paid to do work I loved, work that gave me a sense of purpose. Friends, church, health…all good. Then I read Miller’s book and things started changing.

I invited my dad to dinner and told him I wanted to go on an adventure with him before it was too late. Then he got cancer. Even so, my dad and I just returned from an RV trip to the Grand Canyon. I went on a liquid fast for 40 days to raise funds for Tony Campolo’s work in Haiti. This was no small feat for someone who enjoys food and drink as much as I do, but I pulled it off. Enough money came in to keep 40 slave children in school for six months. I started writing. I got a few articles published and I’m working on a book. These things are examples of what Miller calls practice stories. They consist of inciting incidents, negative turns and positive turns.

The things I liked about my life before I read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years are still extant, but the book took me to the edge of my world and filled me with enough hope to jump. I’ve been swimming in a sea of possibilities ever since.

Now it’s time for another inciting incident. I’m going to point to the horizon and call my shot. By telling you my intentions, I’m setting myself up for public failure or public success (probably both). I’m going to commit to a course of action. Are you ready? Here I go…I want to DANCE! Just kidding. I don’t really want to dance.

I am committing myself and the resources at my disposal to channeling the creativity of a generation to conjure the experience of God’s grace. What’s more, I’ll do this while embodying radical freedom, infectious joy and surprising faithfulness with the naked abandon of an Old Testament prophet.

For too long, some of my dreams, passions and talents have been dying of starvation in a cell of hopelessness.

I’m not alone.

I’ve met too many people who are stuck in jobs they hate in order to buy crap they don’t need. Gifted designers, musicians, storytellers, filmmakers, leaders, speakers, programmers, actors, artists, businessmen, writers…all either putting their dreams on hold to pay the bills, or giving up completely and begrudgingly putting their unique gifts in the service of a company they don’t believe in. They’re not free. Hell, I’m not free (but for different reasons). All the while, like John Lennon said, “we’re doped with religion and sex and TV.” We prefer the stupor to overcoming our fear, failures and lack of faith that we really can live a better story.

However, I’ve dared to live enough practice stories to begin to sober up. Also, while I’ve sampled the bitter taste of doing a job I hate just for the money, for the past 13 years I’ve worked for a non-profit company dedicated to a message to which I gladly give my life.

I’m the executive producer at Key Life Network. I oversee the creation of radio programs, videos and web-based media for an old preacher of grace named Steve Brown. His simple message is that God isn’t mad at his children. In fact, God is a Father who’s crazed with unconditional love for his jacked up kids and he has come to set us free!

God tricked me into working at Key Life. I didn’t apply for the job. It’s a long story, but the short version is that Steve hijacked my life. I thought Steve was sent by the devil when I first met him. However, I have come to believe that he was actually in cahoots with the Author of my story to give me the gift of freedom…freedom from religion, freedom to be myself, freedom to be more than myself, freedom to fail, freedom from addiction, freedom to enjoy union with God.

I’ve struggled with that freedom for a long time. The band The Swoon sums up why:

Prison could be a nice place to live
the bars on the window like bars on a crib.
Freedom is the least desired gift, to give.

Don’t trouble yourself with seeking peace, go cheap.

Bottom line, I’ve been too scared to grow up or to grow into the leader I’m called to be. This fear that I don’t have what it takes has been my biggest hindrance. But thanks to counseling and people like Steve Brown and Donald Miller, I’ve caught the scent of freedom on the wind blowing through my prison. I’m busting out. Here are the particulars.

I dare to step fully into my leadership role at Key Life Network and help transform this company from an organization that exists to help one man deliver a message into a company that exists to empower anyone who wills it to use their God-given creativity to share that message.

Imagine inspiring movies about radical reconciliation born from the radically freeing forgiveness of God. Imagine the news reporting on real-life lavish displays of love for our worst enemies, fueled by the infectious joy of the God who loved his enemies into friends. Imagine music and street performers and viral videos and books and radio shows and websites and apps and media we haven’t even invented yet, all declaring the surprisingly transformative message that we are freely invited to be the very image of God on this planet bringing healing to a broken world.

Now imagine so internalizing this empowering message that you were freed from the mundane into the adventure of using your talents to answer the prayer, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.”

The best ideas are still in our heads. I hereby solicit them. Send them to Erik@KeyLife.org.

- We will prioritize promising projects, and help link people and resources to bring visions into reality.
- One approach would be to post projects on our Key Life Network websites and solicit dedicated donations from those who believe in their individual merit.
- Anyone wishing to volunteer for a specific project could also be linked up.
- Our radio programs, email lists, mailing lists and publications could also help promote selected projects to potential donors, volunteers and audience members.

There will, of course, be practical obstacles to overcome. Resources and staff at Key Life Network are already stretched thin. However, as funds are raised, a percentage will be used for overhead and new staff. Volunteers who believe in the vision will be crucial to success.

Organizational issues aren’t my chief concern though. The biggest obstacle is inertia. My generation has gotten used to our prisons. The devil we know has been deemed better than the devil we don’t know. We have all, in one way or another, gone cheap and settled. Our actions prove that many of us have lost our faith that the Author of our collective story is writing us out of our cold cells and into his grand adventure.

My job is to inspire people to embrace the message of radical freedom, infectious joy and surprising faithfulness that they may join me in sharing that message using their unique talents and gifts in order to set others free.

By its very nature, this story cannot be written alone. We must “get it” together. Also, I’m relatively new at editing a life. That’s where the Living A Better Story seminar comes in.

What better place to begin this new chapter in my life than in a theater full of passionate life-writers led by the man who has already begun to impact my life in a dramatic way through his editorial guidance? The seminar sessions will give me additional tools and inspiration in the midst of negative turns. Beyond that, I hope and pray that the Living A Better Story seminar will connect me with like-minded people so we can become characters in each other’s stories to our mutual benefit.

If you’re not planning on attending the seminar, read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Edit your life. Get in touch with me and let’s get it together. Buy the ticket and take the ride. It’s for freedom that he has set us free.

In closing, I’d like to quote an email I recently received:

Press on. Write your life story. Don’t allow the narrative to stagnate in the routine eddy of circular time. Don’t wait for someone to empower or invite or open your doors.

Whether you grasp it, or not, each day is a precious gift.

Seize each day by God’s grace and wrest every drop of meaning and possibility. Embrace the life adventure that is uniquely yours.

Resist the mundane and the routine. Run from those who would deny, discourage, and disdain, all the possibilities. Make noise. Rattle doors. Look for the serendipitous opportunity that is a game changer in your life.

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which when taken at the flood, Leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and miseries.’ – The old Bard

Here’s an archive of the MonkCasts from July. Click here to subscribe to the MonkCast via iTunes or your favorite RSS reader and join me for more merry monkery.

You can also listen by clicking the links below or using the player over there to the right in the sidebar. If you have an iPhone, download the free ipadio app and listen there.

Remember, if you’d like to join me on a MonkCast, I can record a conference call. Just email me and we can set up a time and I’ll give you the details. It’s really as simple as a phone call.

July MonkCast Archive

07.23.10 – Everything is Burning
07.14.10 – Irrelevant
07.13.10 – Back from the Vortex

“Maybe in the real world, the one without cameras and happy food and travel shows, everybody, the good and the bad together, are all crushed under the same terrible wheel. I hope, I really hope, I’m wrong about that.”

- Anthony Bourdain

“You know, when the world is upside down and seems to be spinning out of control, a few touchstones go a long way.”

- Anthony Bourdain