No Playbook But the Gospel, or Comments on Finishing Seminary in the Pandemic

As the pandemic slowly enfolded VTS like a cloud, it was apparent that my class would not ever worship together again. No meals together either. There were no Holy Week celebrations, no in-person Commencement. Many classmates understandably did not return from spring break once classes went online, and most of the rest of us slowly and silently trickled away without fanfare. There were a few who got a good physically-distanced send-off. Others chose to quietly pack their belongings and head home. That might have been the worst part--finding out someone you lived, ate, worked, and worshipped with, someone you loved for three years, left without saying goodbye. But at that time there wasn’t really a mechanism to say goodbye, and each of us did what we could do to stay sane or something close to it. Goodbyes are hard, especially shrouded in sadness and disappointment—the upside down nature of what should have been something more triumphant. The entire spring was marked by a profound sense of loss, confusion, frustration, and grief. No one was happy. Everyone was anxious. Fights broke out on our community FB page. Everyone was disoriented. Our community slowly disintegrated over three months. 

     But in our life of faith there is a time for that--there is a time for profound loss, fear, grief. The idea that something beautiful has not only been lost, but taken away, is not a new theological concept for Christians. But living it is different. While we all experience loss in our lives, for a student body that is almost completely white and American, and generally but not completely from a middle-upper class background, the concept of something being taken away from a community is pretty foreign, because what is taken away from others—opportunity, safety, liberty, agency and franchise, is given to us. Some of our classmates, seminarians of color or international students, have experienced the loss of these things so that people like me can experience what we describe as a “normal” life. So for the white, middle-upper class Americans like myself, in losing our last months together, in having our collective future taken away, near-term as it was, perhaps we could learn in a very, very minute way what it feels like to be powerless, to lose a bit of our promised future, if only temporarily. My ilk would do well to sit longer in this feeling of helplessness, fear, and loss.

      And so during Holy Week it felt for the first time like I didn't have to pretend or playact--there was death, and it was happening daily--tens of thousands of lives all over the globe were being lost to a disease that is both everywhere and nowhere. Our community was dying, Confusion, fear, chaos, depression, anxiety reigned. We did not know what was going to happen from one day to the next. The tomb was very, very empty. This is not a space white America, or even the community of white American students at VTS, has ever had to linger very long.

     And then, what happened 2,000 years ago, what happens every Spring, and what happens every Sunday—what always happens, began happening. We were sent out, away from the tomb. Like Jesus, we ourselves were taken away, and spread out into the world. A world that bears even stronger the mark of our last three months at VTS--fear, confusion, anger, loss, a sense of security--and many many lives--taken away. We, my classmates and I, are out in the world, unsheltered, exposed to the fraughtness and fragility of being human in a world on fire, to the wicked ways of Satan who peddles doubt and fear. These times are uncertain. Things will get worse. But hope never dies, and God is faithful to us always. “It is a sin to strive for security and safety,” one of my professors said once, because we know our story does not end in death or fear. It does not end at all. It continues, tumbling forward always toward redemption and resurrection. Jesus saw to that already. 

     And so we are here, out in the world, beginning our ministry at home in the middle of a pandemic. And now amid remarkable civil unrest and righteous calls for justice--a nation at war with its sin. We were taken away, sent out into a world reckoning with racism and reeling from disease. And yet, everything in our spiritual DNA has equipped us for such a moment. Because we know about death and fear and we know about empty tombs and Holy Saturdays and you better believe we know about what happens every spring, every Sunday, every morning, every inhale that ushers new breath into our lungs. There is no playbook but the gospel. There is no time but now. 

Turning Points

The following is a reflection on my time as chaplain at Boys Home, a home for boys with fractured, disrupted, and often tragic home lives, that grows boys into successful young men. My father grew up at Boys Home from 1956-1963, and like all who spend their years there, is forever a “Boys Home boy.”

If you start from the Atlantic Ocean and go west, through the Chesapeake Bay, up the mighty James River, you’ll find the Jackson River in the Allegheny Highlands of Virginia. If you continue up the Jackson, you’ll run into Dunlap Creek, and if you travel far enough, you’ll come to a sharp bend in that creek on the property of Boys Home. Set against the bank, on the far side of the creek, is a bulging cliff, a hundred feet high, punctuated by scraggly pines on its ridge, looking over a deep pool just past the bend. The James, the Bay, and the Atlantic carry the stories of those living upstream in their watershed. This summer I have learned and lived some of those stories at Boys Home, and seen them rush downstream, past the sharp turn in the creek. The water picks up speed and gurgles and churns around that bend, as all lives do when they make a turn. 

This morning before breakfast I took three boys out fishing in the deep pool just last the bend under the shade of the giant cliff face. I met them on the road to the creek--they were excited to fish, and had gotten themselves up extra early and were waiting for me, poles and tackle boxes and sleepy smiles. We turned onto the farm road down a slight hill. Fog tucked in between the ragged mountains like gauze. Gravel crunched under eager feet. We spread out and began to fish. Lures plopping into water. Comforting soft cluck of a bail clicking shut. Soft whir of the reel spinning. Rocks chunking underfoot as we fished and walked down the bank looking for luck.

We caught two fish, lost one lure, had two line tangles, and caught no crawdads. The boys were real talkative so eventually I made them just listen to the river and hear what the cliff had to say, partly for them, partly for me. We stopped on the way back home to pick morning glories. “I want to bring these back for Mrs. Angle.” Each of these boys has been in trouble recently, and one couldn’t come to the movies later in the day because he misbehaved. The water rushes and gurgles when it makes a sharp turn. The soul is not quiet and peaceful in the midst of change. 

“The peace of Christ, it is no peace,” says the hymn written by William Alexander Percy, who raised his nephews, author Walker Percy and his brother Phin, when their mother died. Houseparents at Boys Home know this well--they are raising boys for parents who can’t or won’t. The boys know it too. After compline, the Episcopal nighttime service we pray together each night, many stay and pray in the candlelight. Last night one boy stayed longer than the rest, head in hands, shoulders shaking. “I keep praying to do better, but every day I keep making mistakes,” he sobbed. 

It is not easy to be at Boys Home. Changing direction is rough on the boys, and it is the challenge of a lifetime for the houseparents. As Percy intimates, the peace of Christ--the cost of discipleship--will demand more than we know we have. It will shake shoulders and rumble souls. But that is not where the story ends. The peace of Christ that noisily rushes past the sharp bend in the creek is also the peace that flows into deeper, still waters, passing all understanding. One boy weeps for his life, and another stoops down and picks morning glories. 

In the Woods of Shenandoah

I Walked the Woods of Shenandoah

experienced and written July 4, 2018

Typed and edited October 17, 2018

Once I walked the woods of Shenandoah.

I found a platform in the woods, just inside the woods, and so I sat on it.

After a time of sitting, the forest became orderly in its wildness and a path appeared.
In time the mosquitoes, God's helpers, forced me out onto the path, and I
journeyed out along in the wild woods with its sweet, dank smell of life and death.

Everything in the woods dies except the path, so long as it is walked once in a while.
The path is the only thing in the forest that depends on us. And we are its only purpose.
Yet the path dies too, overtaken by the wilds, if neglected.

The mosquitoes lost interest in me. The path did not.

I walked a bit to see where it led.

It soon evaporated into dead leaves and small brush which tickled my ankles.
So quickly, the path was now my own choosing.

Along the way I saw two box turtles facing each other nestled in the leaves,
one shut up tightly and the other looking intently at the first, waiting.

“Are you in there? Are you ok?”

“Yes I’m here. I’m fine.”

I wonder if we are called to look and listen patiently with each other until we all feel safe
enough to poke our heads out. I picked up the one with its head out, looked into its ancient
eyes, set it back down.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m fine. I’m just...a little scared. I heard footprints, and you know I’m scared of people.”

Turtles are magnificent when you think about it. They might be more like us than anything
else. Strong, hard shell protecting soft, vulnerable interior. Capable of shutting out the world.

But shutting out the world blinds you--it is self-imposed darkness.
I’m glad this shut-up turtle has a friend to help who can sit with her and help her see, be her
companion.

“He seems nice. He smiled at me when he picked me up.”

“I don’t care. He’s big and scary and I don’t like to be picked up.”

“Well you look dead you know.”

“I’m not dead, I’m hiding.”

We need companions if we are ever going to come out of our shell. I think that’s what
Jesus does for us. Sits by us real close and says, “I’m here. It’s going to be ok.”
He sees for us until we are able to see for ourselves. The mosquitoes renewed their interest
in me so I left the turtles and ventured further on.

“What’s the difference between dead and hiding? You can’t see anyone and no one can
see you.”

“They can look at my shell.”

I found the path again, a somewhat organized trail that led to a definitely organized trail
that was passable by truck, though no truck in decades had made it through, and the
forest claimed it now.I followed this until it wrinkled back into disorganization, and finally
truly ended--no tamped down leaves, just wild, wild creation ruling over everything. Under
two giant trees that had fallen onto a third, I found a stone draped in lichen so I sat on it.

“You are not your shell. Our shells all look the same, silly. But you are a beautiful and
unique box turtle. Plus, it’s hot out here. I want to go to the creek and you’re holding
us up, slow poke!”
“You’re just being risky. What if that man had taken you away? What if we slip and fall
into the creek? You love being risky and it’s going to get you killed...You really think
I’m beautiful?”

On this leg of my journey into the somersault of the unknown, I wondered if being in the
forest was like inhabiting the soul of Christ. The forest floor is covered with death: dead
leaves, dead limbs and trees, yet what dies here feeds what lives. It is necessary. And
what lives here--trees and bugs and plants and animals--lives with what is dead but not
gone. I sensed beyond our vision a tumbling force of motion, forward always, yet

containing the past. The future a breathe away, yet present from the beginning.  
The mosquitoes were having a field day so I headed back home.

“Absolutely I think you’re beautiful. I wish everyone could know you the way I do. And I wish
you could see this world out here like I do. It’s like Disneyland for turtles!”

“I’m unique?”

“Oh Ronnie, of course you are. Well not when you’re closed off like that. But when you’re
not afraid, when we walk together, you are the most beautiful and unique turtle I have ever
known. You eyes twinkle and your shell shines.”

The path looked different on the way home. A new direction on the same path, a returning,
offered a new perspective. I walked quicker and the bugs and mosquitoes buzzed around
me, scurrying me out of the forest. The unruliness of the forest was trembling me back home,
out of the wilds and into the world of humans (God’s most unruly creation of all). I looked
forward to the cool air conditioning and order of the human world, and smiled at
my walk in the woods.

“I’m beautiful and unique.”

“Yes.”

“I’m beautiful and unique.”

“Yes you are, Ronnie.”

Ronnie slowly poked his head and feet out and stood up.

“I’m beautiful and unique,” he said, louder, and began to walk toward the creek.

And then again, almost shouting, “I’m beautiful and unique!”

“Yes!” shouted Tabitha with delight, walking beside him.

Ronnie picked up speed and began to run toward the creek, with Tabitha trying to keep up.
“I’m beautiful and unique! I’m beautiful and unique!”

He was now approaching the creek at top turtle speed, and when he got to the edge he
launched himself as high as he could and shouted “I’M BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE!”
before splashing down into the cool mountain stream, Tabitha splashing right next to him.

It had been too long since my frenetic soul took counsel from the stoic wilderness of the
soul of God. Approaching the edge of the woods, faint hint of clearing ahead, I was at
peace.Just before entering the clearing I stopped to say hello to the turtles but I found
only two warm empty imprints, nestled together in the leaves.

The war

The battle didn’t last long, but it proved the war

She’d suspected it, felt the pangs and fury of a fight

But never knew it was like this.

A pilgrimage of the soul isn’t a walk in the park, you know.

The fiercest fighting was hers alone.

Others pointed, but the the creeping vines and vegetation were hers to cut

The wild jungle was always growing, twisting,

Dank as a spring house,

vicious as a broken promise

From the field it raged, I am the jungle!

I am made of death! My vines of despair!

My floor of rotting corpses!

But it was silent when she entered.

She would not have gone into the jungle

But they depended on her

and they gave her a machete.

The battle was slow and terrifying at first.

But she found the vines could be cut

The bodies could gently be lifted and placed aside at rest.

She slashed and cleared until her arms gave out but a path had emerged

It called out to her as she walked home through the field, “I am the jungle of your fears! You made me! I cannot be destroyed!”

She smiled and remembered its silence during the fight, and knew.

The jungle didn’t hate her

It loved her

It was calling her back,

begging her to tend the corpses, cut the vines

And build a simple cabin among the branches

The jungle was her real home.

The war would last a lifetime

But she had a machete.

And the jungle had been silent.

The Secret We Forgot

It’s not as though we wouldn’t know

If you gave us a test on it

If you asked us, really asked us, we’d tell you right

If we hushed up the horns and set down the clangs and listened

To the real Mother

We’d tell you the secret we forgot

We’d tell you that we do believe we’re made of stardust,

science says so

But this isn’t science.

If you sat on the dirt floor with us in our rondovel

if you shared a Black Label on a moonless night, we’d tell you

what we’ve known since the stars were young

ain’t no me without you

And ain’t no you without me, sisi.

It has to be all of us.

If you really needed to know, we’d put on some music

And dance the sema together

Hearts circling heaven

And we’d show you

all spinning whirl and whisper “learned theologians do not teach love.”

If you begged us, baking on that rickety table,

we’d untie the cloth strips from your hands and feet

And carry you down the mountain trail and tell you what he said

Being chosen isn’t easy, but what do we find in the binding?

And he was rooting for us, you see.

If you were dying to know, as if you didn’t already

We’d tell you shame got the best of the men that day

But the women persisted as they do

If you hadn’t done it where would we be?

Shadows crouching in shadowy rooms

And you loved anyway

And you smiled and said

It has to be all of us

If you asked us about doctrine we’d rush to find a few textbooks

(Liturgy requires another set of books.)

And if you pointed out all those fancy things got us was

Wars and blood

you’d be right and we’d know it.

It’s all horns and clangs we’d admit if you really stared us down

We’d gulp and stammer that books get dusty but people never do

An afterthought worth thinking, we’d say

A broken compass still marked with true North

It all came from the dark rooms and dusty tables and spinning dances and dirt floors.

If we put it all away and returned the gaze

we’d tell you the secret we forgot:

We can hear each other’s heartbeats

And when we do we know

It has to be all of us.

With Jesus In Between

“There they crucified Him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus in between.”

The shad are running in the James River right now.  Millions of shiny ocean fish swimming upriver to spawn, then heading back out to sea.  Shad are not a great fish to eat, but they’re wonderful to catch when they’re running. They put up a great fight, and you can catch 20-30 in an hour.  Two days ago I rose before the sun and went fishing down by the 14 St, bridge. As I stood on the south shore facing downtown, the river looked docile and just…normal. There was no sign of the great swarms of fish swimming up the river.  The normal appearance on the surface of the water belied the twisting, shimmering turmoil of millions of shiny silver creatures chaotically, instinctively, swimming upriver.  Standing on the shore I was aware of the gulf the river makes between each shore, the juxtaposition nature gives us: a powerful, ever-changing force, roiling with unseen life, chemically distinct from the stoic land masses at either shore.  A river is a dynamic movement in between two static masses. 

          This is the time of year when the sun and the moon hang in the air together at sunrise and sunset, and as I stood on the shore I saw both the setting moon on my left and the rising sun on my right. These two celestial bodies greeting each other from opposite horizons reminded me of Marilynn Robinson’s description of a similar scene in her novel Gilead.  She writes of that great orbital tension, “Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them.” 

We exist between the sun and the moon, illuminated by those great skeins of light.  A planet full of life and action; people, animals, plants, all growing, living, dying, and reproducing themselves over and over again throughout the ages. Our earth, our world, is a dynamic movement in between two heavenly bodies.  

          The movement in our lives can be found in what’s between.  Not the before, not the after, but the space in between.  The birth and the death are significant, but it’s the life that matters.  The growth of our bodies and our hearts and our souls, they don’t happen at the beginning or the end, that transformation happens in between. 

          And so Jesus trudges up the hill to the place of the skull to inhabit reconciliation, and become a wild, primal river between the shores of life and death. To become the great skein of light between the heavenly sphere of the divine and the dirty sphere of the human.

Now, at the place of the skull, we have Jesus in between two criminals, one chastising Him and one asking for salvation.  The criminals on either side of Jesus that day may as well be us. Sometimes we chastise and sometimes we ask for salvation, but we always have Jesus next to us, in between who we are and who we want to be.  In between God’s dream and our reality.  And most importantly, in between ourselves and everyone we encounter. Those criminals may as well be us, but they could be an estranged parent and child.  Victim and perpetrator. You and someone you don’t understand. Jesus, the river, the Light, is the dynamic movement in between all of us. He is the teeming, roiling life just beneath the surface of what we can see.  He is the Light that stretches out across the world and brings life to all who bask in it. In the heartbreak of this day and this moment, consider the gift we’ve been given: a life with Jesus in between.

We Killed Anthony

This is a story about a man named Anthony (not his real name) who became my friend while we rebuilt his house in 2008.  Over the next few blog posts I'll explain how we killed him.

About a month after I joined the The Rebuild Program, Katie Mears asked me to meet a potential homeowner. Anthony was in his mid-50's and living in a half-gutted house on France St, two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina.  My job was to build a relationship with Anthony and ease his anxiety about having volunteers working in the house.  In the chaos of the storm he was evacuated to North Carolina, while his octegenarian parents were sent to Atlanta.  Anthony suffered from mental illness, and when the social services system in NC was tired of him they packed his belongings in a trash bag and plopped him on a bus back to New Orleans.  This is called Greyhound therapy, and it was a common practice among the overburdened, underfunded state-run social services programs after The Storm.  This is what the safety net really looks like.  Greyhound therapy only happens to our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.  Anthony walked the three-plus miles from the train station to his Upper Ninth Ward neighborhood and began squatting in his old home where he had lived with his parents.  There was no running water or electricity.  I met Anthony and his parents at the same time--his parents traveled from Atlanta to New Orleans to discuss rebuilding the house. "Hi, I'm Pete Nunnally, nice to meet you.  I think we're going to rebuild your house."  It was the first time Anthony had seen or talked to his parents since the storm.  He was not a cute picture of hopeful poverty that you see in brochures, a farmer with his arms wrapped around a goat like on the cover of Heifer International.  His eyes were a watery yellow and far away.  His teeth were mangled and decayed.  He had a gut and his hands were knarled and cracked like pieces of ancient machinery.  Anthony had no sense of order or hygiene, and there was only one time I thought he may have bathed.  This could have been because there was no plumbing in the house and no place else to bathe, but also was likely an effect of his mental illness.  He smelled like rotten urine and faintly of shit, and had the acrid body odor of someone who lives, awake and asleep, in one food-stained pair of sweats.  
Inside the house was much worse.  From the outside it was a beautiful lavender shotgun, narrow but long, with white and teal striped awnings and an iron gate around the porch, the kind found in inner-city neighborhoods where crime came to live during the white and black flight of the 60's and 70's.  We walked up the concrete stoop past the iron gate and inside to take a look at the place, and as the door opened the situation went from bad to appalling.  The walls were gutted halfway to the ceiling, exposing the scuffed old wooden beams and rusted nails and the thin wooden lathe that kept the house together.  It was like standing inside a skeleton dressed with strips of cloth.  Closer to the ceiling the walls were intact, plaster over the lathe to make the imperfect walls of the early 20th century, but they streamed toward the floor like jagged fingers. Half-eaten cans of fly-ridden food--tuna, beans, and Saghetti-O's--crowded the window sill beside used plastic forks.  The front room smelled like piss, and you could tell Alvin either peed in a corner or indiscriminately all over the place.  Clothes and trash littered the ground like an old dumping ground and you couldn't see the floor.  I kept looking for the bed, and finally realized he simply slept on top of the clothes and garbage, using a patchwork of cardboard and a thin piece of plywood.  Beside his "bed" were fifty or sixty empty Sweet and Low packets.  I fought for air as we walked in, turning my nose into my shoulder to avoid retching.  As we kicked our way through the trash and into the rest of the house I was acutely aware that despite Anthony's mental illness, he seemed embarrassed at the state of things.  I felt wildly uncomfortable knowing I'd be going home to sleep in a nice bed in a well-appointed house in the Uptown neighborhood of Broadmoor, socioeconomic light years away from Anthony.  We all struggled with that part of our work but couldn't talk about it.  

How do you reconcile a world in which you are born into good favor and others aren't?  Where is God in a world where you can go back to your air conditioned home, away from this horror, and unwind on your couch with a nice craft beer?  Why do you have this privileged life when others don't?  How is this even making a difference? 

You think you are godly, beating out your white guilt on the pavement of France St, don't you?  

Don't you?

So you open up a beer and then another and then another and push the questions away.  But they never go away.  You can leave New Orleans and get a regular job and make new friends and try to ignore them but the questions never go away.  

Does God go away?

Where is God?

Can you hear me?

CAN YOU HEAR ME?!

Just off St Claude Avenue--once a thriving corridor of commerce--Anthony's house must have been stately in another time, with soaring 13-foot ceilings and the strong bone structure of old buildings in New Orleans that were often built with barge wood.  Like the street itself, the house suffered the indignity of watching the neighborhood slowly arch away from a lively, bustling community to a pock-marked, addled place nice people quickly pass by with locked doors.  France St was as rough a street as there was in post-Katrina New Orleans.  Most of the houses were gutted and empty. Even those that were inhabited bore a garish "X" on the front, the spray-painted tattoo leftover from search teams who came after The Storm to pluck bloated dead bodies out of attics and living rooms.

Still, France St was alive.  People on their stoops, people walking, people biking, young men hanging on corners.  Everyone waiving and greeting with "alright," a New Orleans version of "hello" favored by many black residents.  It felt lawless, but strangely not unsafe because we were (mostly) white volunteer do-gooders.  A corner store two blocks down (which was jacked three times while I worked on Anthony's house) let our volunteers use their restroom, and most people on the street were at least outwardly friendly.  Our volunteerism seemed to create a bubble around us, the community and even the very obvious criminal element acknowledging that we were "off-limits."

That attitude slid from appreciation to passive toleration to exasperation as the years wore on.  

"What we'll do is finish gutting the house, starting in the back and working our way to the front, so Anthony's room isn't disturbed too much, then he'll have a clean place to sleep while we work on the front room where he's staying now."  

As we walked around the overgrown perimeter of the house Anthony showed us his toilet, a used 5-gallon bucket half-full of shit, baking in the sun next to a bottle of bleach. 

The next day I grabbed a couple Cokes and headed down to visit Anthony.  "How you doing, Anthony, want a Coke?"

"Thanks."

"What do you think about us rebuilding your house?"

"It's good."

"I know you're not used to having strange people in your house, but they're all nice people, and we're going to rebuild it really well for you."

"Will they be there all the time?"

"No, just during the day, and I'll be here too.  If you ever feel anxious or nervous, just make sure to tell me and we'll leave for the day, ok?"

"Ok.  Do you know about the Word?"

"The Word of God?"

"Yeah."

"I do, man.  I'm a church-going man myself.  Actually, everyone who is going to work on your house knows about The Word."

"God says He's going to save us."