Lisa Colón DeLay

I’m a bit more than half way through teaching a small group of adult learners about Evil, God’s Justice, Love, Mercy, Reconciliation, and Kingdom of God living with great guidance of a slew of videos from Tom Wright.

When we decry Evil we mustn’t stop there for we are the remedy for it.

God’s Kingdom is made manifest through us. We exact justice by helping those who are suffering rather than through the power games a godless world endorses and implements.

It is not about self-interest, but self-sacrifice.

Our fuel is the knowing that we are indeed image bearers and creations of God made from the outpouring and overflowing of his great love. We are God’s Beloved and we offer that gift to the world, that they too, each one is Beloved as well. We especially find the ones that are overlooked or oppressed or unhealed.

We do more than associate with these outcasts, the ones that others find embarrassing or scandalous, we suffer with them and enter their pain.

Sometimes simple seeing and hearing someone fully and taking them into our loving kindness will well convey that they are God’s Beloved because we’ve treated them with such honor. An honor that is due them because they are God’s children.

I made up this slide and it may be a good poster too, so I offer it up to you. (click the image) Pin it if you’d like.

And now a question for you.

What particular group of misfits holds a soft spot in your heart? Send me a voicemail or leave a message.

 “When people deny the humanity of others, they become evil themselves.”  -N.T. Wright

I’m preparing to do a quarter of a year (January-March) teaching with the themes and the companion videos of Tom Wright’s book Evil and the Justice of God.

We’ll be tackling some tough territory:

• Why is there so much Evil in the world? (More than ever?)

• Why does God let it happen and what, if anything, is God doing really about it? (What’s going on?)

• How does the Bible approach the subject? (Whoa. Lots of common misunderstandings here!)

• How does Justice work? (Revenge, Justice, Mercy, we’ll be sorting that out.)

• What is our role or best response with regards to Evil? (Do we stand against it, roll over, avoid it, bear it? The answers may surprise you.)

If you can’t make the classes Sundays 9:30-10:15 a.m. at Bethesda, I’ll be highlighting items here as I work on it and as I teach.

Here’s an intro video trailer. The book is remarkable. I highly recommend it.

I’m getting so much out of this little book!

(I really recommend getting a copy. I saw one on Amazon for $1.50 (used). What a bargain!)

Henri Nouwen gathered his thoughts and pennend notes for his personal use during a difficult 6 months of reflection and healing. They were meant as private notes, but after 8 years a few friends encouraged him to have them organized and published sensing other soul searchers would be encouraged by them. His pain is often palpable and humble and his words are like food for kindred spirits. I’m grateful he was so brave.

page 59

Love Deeply
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plow that break the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide no to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.

The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart even when they depart from you. They will become part of your self and thus gradually build a community within you.

Those you have deeply love become part of you. The longer you live, there will always be more people to be loved by you and to become part of your inner community. The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you. Those who are alive within you will recognize those who live around you. The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you. Thus the pain of rejection, absence, and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear.

Some people are relieved today. I see a lot of joy on Twitter, “You are wonderful. We love you Obama!”

White males took a shellacking and there’ll be gun sales to prove it.

But the victory is a short and really a bitter-sweet one, if anything. The troubles the mire this country are severe.

We must look for ways to love each other no matter how we voted.

I’ve talked to people who are hurting. I live in PA Coal Country. Largely white and low income. A great many get government assistance. The local Walmart is a mad house the days government checks are distributed. Companies are laying off and shutting down, too. For good. So many can’t find work that’s better that we they get with government checks. Some want to expand their little businesses but have low profits, no way to borrow money, and no way to provide what the government mandates if they expand.

Will people be too squeezed to give to charity? I worry about that. Will white people resent black people more and vice versa? That is not okay. Will hatred and divisions increase? We need to heal these rifts. How do we do this?

For my family, it’s the unstoppable incremental demise of making a few hundred dollars too much to be poor, and never really having the chance to make enough to be better off. It’s very precarious for my family. I didn’t have that much confidence in Romney, but I’d hoped the last four years wouldn’t lay waste to the area in which I live. Maybe it’s different for you, but. I see people begging for positive change and improvement, but none is in sight. That’s why people are so ramped up. No matter who’s President, when wages freeze, and food and fuel prices go up, the middle class suffers and deteriorates.

America spent 2.6 billion on the status quo. I shutter at that maddening thought. I can’t even clearly picture in my mind 1 billion dollars, can you? Just a portion of that would alleviate poverty for most.

16 Trillion dollars is out-of-balance. Again, this number is so large as to be meaningless. But what it means in a way that matters is that the interest to pay the debt back to China and others propping us up will ascend, and then the banks will tighten and investing will make little sense. Thus, prices will spike on everything.

I think there is a dear consequence to this path. The path both parties have been party to. Our national priorities aren’t sane. What a strange time and place we live in.

When people talk smack of God’s judgement they think in terms of demise. Maybe fire, or storms, or flood, or nuclear war. But, that isn’t how it works. God doesn’t get in our way.

We suffer not so much for the come-and-go leaders we pick, but for the way we’ve made our way.  That is, natural and obvious consequences: Go into debt, lose your credibility. That sort of thing.

I mourn that times will be tougher, and not really for me, but for those who are already poor. Kids lose out. I’ve see it already for several years. Around here, their parents buy alcohol, or lottery tickets, or cigarettes or other items (TVs, clothes, phones, guns, “toys”) to cope and they don’t keep enough money for food and essentials. Well, the assistance money isn’t food stamps in books (like it was when my mom needed for us, mid-1980s, when my dad ditched us for a while), it’s just a credit card looking thing. I’ve seen it used at McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts. That makes the money run out very quickly. Most run out in a week or two. They tell their kids to wait for school to eat. I’ve seen kids run, not walk, but run to get their free meal at school on a Monday morning, because they’ve hardly eaten all weekend. And these parents need not change their habits. It’s heartbreaking.

People who’ve helped others before will no doubt hunker down and use their energy and resources for self-preservation. Others with means will leave it to the government to remedy, and fail to care. It’s messed up.

And also I know, for sure I know, that struggles produce character.

Those who grew up in the Great Depression were made of stronger stuff. (see photo. Look at the girl’s eyes.) They tried harder and accomplished more, more for their children than themselves usually. They had a revived spirituality, that we’ve now replaced with entertainment consumption.

We’ve had great abundance in America. And, if we don’t have it, we’ll learn from that.  It’s not just about the economy. It’s not about a political party. We’ll learn to be good in deeper ways and give when it hurts. Isn’t that when love is made more manifest? We’ll keep trying. We are resilient.

And remember this too:

Perfect love casts out fear.

O’ God,

Give us your peace. 

If our hope be dimmed, light it with your Presence.

Create in us the stuff that you are made of,

Love, Grace, Hope, Peace

Relieve us from our bitterness and fear.

Heal us, deeply. Inside.

Comfort us who are downcast and weary.

Give us joy in your salvation

And eternal and internal peace that only you provide.

Amen.

Part of my journey, spiritually, has been to move from a fundamentalist upbringing, to an Evangelical / post-conservative theological formal training, and then toward “the mysteries” (i.e. mystic tendencies). What brought me there? Tremendous pain. I usually don’t talk of it for too long. Maybe there’s a memoir in me that should come to light, but the progression is palpable.

In “the mysteries” this means that I don’t think of suffering as a problem, sorrow as un-wellness, or bouts of profound unhappiness as a sign that I have too little faith. In fact, most of the biblical characters were kind of tortured souls. It’s a more recent construct that we should think the life of faith has a “Sunshine Mountain” feel to it.

So, I wanted to write out a few thoughts about what Mark Lepper posed out there on the Twitter-verse (see lower image).

My initial Twitter response (you see below) was less than 140 characters, so I thought I’d add a bit more.

@thelepper Nah. That notion helps us cope, but we can’t possibly verify it. It’s part of “the mysteries”

For just a moment…

Imagine your child kills himself. The most horrid thought (you needn’t linger there).

In the first few days, probably 20 people will tell you, “Everything happens for a reason.” Or, they’ll say, “All things work together for good…” You know the verse, right?

Rubbish.

(Probably most people don’t realize how out of context that verse is used that way. Erroneously they utilize just a part of it as a “band-aid platitude” to offer kindness.)

There are a great many things that have no good explanations and will not. The reasons won’t be revealed later either. On earth or in heaven. It really doesn’t work that way. And it really shouldn’t. Otherwise movement toward maturity would be at stake.

Really, it would be too confusing for us that God would answer these questions, so don’t count on an inquiry at the “ask the author” line in heaven, my dear friends.

When the pain of suffering wallops you and you can’t shelve your doubts long enough to work through the real hardship of it, one temptation is to consider that God must be malevolent or AWOL, instead of considering that we can’t possibly know the answer.

It is in the unknowing that we become enlightened to the ways of God.

It seems the two most common tactics (ways of coping) in tragedy are…

1. Try to believe that something horrible or evil has some sort of good redemptive reason, or will eventually come to something good because of it.

(Though it is true that God makes it his business to redeem everything…eventually….somehow…. we can’t think of this backward when we come into pain, and try jumping ahead. Pain can serve a point.)

2. Realize that so much is unexplainable and let our hope and faith erode or dissolve.

But there is a third option. And maybe more than just one more (you can let me know). Another way that’s been employed since humans have had optimism and spirituality (read: a very long time) is…

“the way of the mysteries”. And it’s not a cop out.

It’s farsighted. It’s a perspective that holds that the beauty we witness in this world is almost out of place in the nastiness and madness of it. It’s the idea of (good) ideals we all seem to possess that point to a greater, underlying and sustaining beauty and goodness obscured by the ways of the world, suffering, and the hardships of being human.

To embrace our situation as the mystics do is to not shun hardship or revel in it, but rather to let the pain refine us and make us wise. Oh, and it hurts. It hurts like hell.  And it, in some real sense, beats the hell out of us, and makes us endearing and compassionate. Beautiful.

The trouble is that if we’re satisfying with answers like, “Hey, friend! Don’t worry there’s a reason this horrible thing is happening,” then we are of very little good to those who are truly suffering.

In fact, our notions of “reasons” are often so pale and wanting. They just couldn’t possibly be sturdy enough. They don’t reveal what is legit and accurate.

Only when we can sit there alongside in the pain of those who hurt, and even take a part of the sorrow itself do we find we can make our way, honestly. And too, we must sit in our own pain. It’s uncomfortable. It’s dark. Sometimes horrid.

But to have the permission to hurt can send us toward wellness. It shows us that great sorrow comes on powerfully, and hurts badly, but does not have the final word. In the process of living well and deeply do we like a tender shoot become oaks of maturity and grace.

Please friends, be careful and don’t make a mockery of pain by disrespecting it or minimizing it (for yourself or anybody else). There is no human life without pain. There too is no growth without it. That’s the bit about incarnationality: The divine enters the human experience. That is our model.

So very deeply have I hurt, but now deeply can I love.

It’s true that redemption is chosen.

To be chosen it must first be acknowledged.

(that’s my longer answer)

This is Part II of my interview with 6th generation funeral director Caleb Wilde.

Caleb Wilde, Part II (click)

PLUS.

There is also Bonus Video material I decided to upload that largely contains my own thoughts on how we tend to wrongly respond to grief and suffering, followed by Caleb’s response.

It is an unbroken 4:24 min clip. This is also very unusual, as I usually feature very few of my own thoughts in Ninja Interviews. So, I didn’t even add the Ninja graphics into this clip.

Being that this is the season of Lent, it might be nice to hear your reflections on mortality. If you’d like to share you own thoughts about the theme of Lent, or what you’ve heard through watching the video, I’d love to hear them. (You can leave them either at the youtube channel, or here. Click the comments link at the top of the post, then scroll down to the comment field.)

I’ve appreciated Caleb Wilde’s blog for quite a while now. It could be my own experience with grief, suffering, and the dying process that makes Caleb’s sentiments on death and unique perspective a kind of solace to me.

If death and dying has touched your world, I think you’ll feel the same way about his blog. If it hasn’t, at some point it will. That’s just the facts.

Speaking from experience, I suggest purposefully familiarizing yourself with the inevitable issues of mortality (your own and your loved ones’) before they arrive without warning and manage to capsize your world, crush your faith, or in some other way batter you. And for purposes of minister and soul care it’s quite helpful too.

This is part one of our chat. Check back this week for part 2.

(click for video)

Here’s Janet chatting with me about courage and hope. Find out at her website how you can get her book FREE.

Thank you so much for stopping by today.

It’s a really big day for me, for at least 3 reasons…hold up! 5 Reasons. (I just found out it’s The Year of the Dragon starting today AND National Pie day. Eating pie like a dragon seems like the proper thing to do and Very exciting!)

Here’s 3 more reasons.

1. Author Shawn Smucker’s interview is now live, it’s awesome, and it’s the first of two parts (see the previous post).

2. Doomsday debunker and writer of a bunch of books, Jason Boyett, posted the pre-lease of his interview with me about his fun (yes I said fun) Doomsday book. For now, it’s only available at his site, here, (and it’s unlisted on youtube until that goes live, on January 30th to the general public).

Since it’s time-sensitive info…go ahead and get the word out! (We might only have 11 more months before ultimate doom and annilation, so be a darling and help some people not freak out, k?)

3. I have a guest post at Confessions of a Funeral Director. No, I’m not a funeral director, but it is a kind of confession.

Please stop by and read my deathly guest post at Caleb’s poignant site. He’s, by far, my favorite undertaker. And I mean that!

And check back for a fascinating Ninja Interview with Caleb which will be up soon.

(by Chris O Brien click for CC source)

You can’t die of a broken heart. It’s despair that kills you.

Having a broken heart, means you are alive. It means that something matters, and you haven’t gone numb (which is what usually happens to people after a while…or escapism, which is sort of the same).

Having a broken heart means that risk was rewarded with pain. But not pain unto death. Pain that gives way to experience you can’t find another way.

I used to think God was trying to kill me of a broken heart. Dashing my hopes and dreams. Allowing my son, or my father, or me to suffer until I couldn’t take it anymore. It felt like the beatings wouldn’t end.

At the end of that bit of brutality (as I perceived it) I realized I could be borne out of it, like a phoenix. And that was the point. To come to a resurrection. On the other side was life, not death. All the scars would be a kind of beauty, not a pitiable shame.

Don’t worry about your broken heart. It has to break apart to get to the fleshy part. The part so tender that only God can hold it…and be the only one who can and will protect it in a way you never could understand before. In a way that you can never do alone. You are brave enough for that. You. are.

Do. not. despair.

On the recent topic of Heaven (and soon, Hell) here at the old blog, I must bring up the baffling and sappy rendering of the heaven that we hear about quite a bit in conservative North American Protestantism.

If a boy nearly dies, and then tells you details about heaven exactly as you have taught him, what’s next? I’ll tell you what, a best seller (for people who need a spiritual vitamin B12 shot for their excruciatingly literal translations of biblical passages, and who pay no mind to historical context, linguistic idioms, let alone Hebrew and Greek).

Now, I realize young children tell silly stories. That’s part of their job. The trouble comes when the stories get massaged and coupled with a near-death tragedy to elicit a faith response from the more gullible among us. I do want to think the Burpos are on the up-and-up, but something stinks.

I heard Pastor Burpo and his little boy on a television program. What a cute kid. Some of the story seemed amazing, if not miraculous, but I got a bad whiff of something when Colton (really his dad) detailed heaven as, well, super lame.

People get around on their huge wings. Okay, I hope that’s not how it works. Boobs have been bad enough. The proverbial pearly gates make an appearance. The word “wicked trite” comes to mind, but maybe I’m just too cynical. A blue-eyed Jesus wears a purple sash over his white robe, and rides a giantic rainbow colored horse. Okay, bad wardrobe, and how could the genuine biblical Jesus from the ancient Semitic region possibly possess a double recessive gene for blue eyes? (And don’t say, because both Mary and the Holy Spirit had blue eyes, ’cause I’m not buying it.)

I don’t think Jesus rolls like that. But, I give the kid credit: An elephantine rainbow horse is pretty cool. Of course, I would have to know if it pooped rainbow too. That’s awfully critical info. God (the Father) has a body and sits on the throne, with Gabriel serving as a kind of right hand angel man on his left side, in a smaller throne…as we might expect, right? It all sounds like a bad Star Trek episode. Well, sort of.

Reader reviews often complain that only 3 pages of the book speaks of heaven in any details. But the book has done well. Very well. It spent 52 weeks on the bestseller list, and the family has since produced a children’s picture book, and you guessed it, a movie is in the works.

When the parents are asked about authenticity, their answers center on referring to the hope the story brings. This begs the question, is the point of the book to create hope in a plenty of people already know what they want heaven to be, instead of a faithful depiction of God (who, by the way, is non corporeal) and the Bible? (Which would be far more confusing.) Both can’t be true.

If you want to read a copy for yourself, and decide, here it is.

But, I offer you some thoughtful reflection on the the topic from arguably the foremost New Testament scholar alive today.

Advent Season is the perfect time to get all high octane spiritually speaking. Read, meditate, pray, and learn from others, and you will be so enriched as you enter the Christmas season.

My favorite undertaker, and writer friend, Caleb Wilde has been blog writing about God and Greek influence. And it struck me how much the Contemplative stream of Christianity may help inform us about things and in places where our finite intellectualizing fails us. The intersection of life and death is one of those spots.

I asked Caleb who and what he’s read from this (as Richard Foster says) “Stream of Christianity”, and he asked for recommendations. So, I thought, I’d offer them to all of you.

Please recommend your favorites too.

My not-by-any-means exhaustive list of favorite Contemplative Stream writers.

By way of a high-qulaity but compact primer I recommend Richard Foster‘s who gives a fantastic overview to each of the 6 Streams of Christianity. His “Streams of Living Waters” book covers the basic 6 traditions categorized as: Charismatic, Holiness, Contemplative, Social Justice, Evangelical,  and Incarnational flavors (if you will) within all of Christianity through the ages since Christ.

Gaining Christian spiritual insights from devoted lovers of God outside your own era and your own experience of a specific faith tradition is an invaluable blessing, and very faith building. Foster outlines major points and people of the Contemplative Stream, starting with the apostle John, in the book you see below:

Classic contemplative standby: Frances of Assisi (1181-1226)

Brother Lawrence (1611-1691) The Practice of the Presence of God (short read, and free online. sweet.)

Frank Laubach (1884-1970)

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941)

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Thomas Merton “In My Own Words”

Henri Nouwen 1932-1996)

Here are 2 useful previously posted articles on this Stream.
1. Kataphatic and Apophatic Prayer Explained
2.Meditation to Contemplation – Kataphatic to Apophatic Prayer (an prayer exercise/experience)

Crazy? (Well, it was the cat's idea.)

Think of all the words we have for people who suffer mental illness.

Mad, insane, out of one’s mind, deranged,demented, not in one’s right mind, crazed, lunatic, non compos mentis, unhinged,mad as a hatter, mad as a March hare; informal: mental, nutty, nutty as a fruitcake, luny, nuts, whacko, off one’s rocker, not right in the head, round/around the bend, raving mad, batty,bonkers, cuckoo, loopy, ditzy, loony, bananas, loco, with a screw loose, touched,gaga, not all there, out to lunch, crackers, nutso, out of one’s tree, wacko, gonzo…

What did I miss?

Stigma maybe? Uhm. yep.

For some reason, in Autumn it seems like more pronounced incidents of mental illness symptoms surface. Maybe it’s just that I notice it more because I start to hunker down for winter.

Who is “mental”? The unexplainable is quickly isolated as “not good enough”. It’s easier to plug in a label or term, than to empathize.

In truth, any one of us may be”diagnosable” for some period of time in a given month. We may not persist with symptoms long enough to need intervening treatment, but if we are human, we are prone, at some point, to have an unhealthy mind. For some, a lack of noticeable symptoms can make it harder to get help.

For example:
Take a person addicted to pornography: Addiction is unhealthy in the mental/psychic capacity. Through this or any addiction, a person may become attached to unhealthy behaviors, thoughts, and actions, and then digress to mental instability and illness without anybody really knowing until the problem is truly unmanageable, or it has reaped awful consequences. On the other hand, a person having a schizophrenic episode and enduring auditory hallucinations, may quickly signal to others that medical assistance and support is needed. Stat.

The bigger question is which kinds of mental illness do we prefer?

We know much more about the brain, in 2011. We don’t assume someone with epilepsy has demons we should exorcise, or that some one who is hallucinating needs to be discipled and punished so they will stop at once. Many more people understand that if a person has a sick brain, they aren’t trying to. Though a proper diet and exercise can be helpful, they can’t think or will their illness away…otherwise they would. Just like a person with a broken leg cannot un-break his leg by thinking, “This disfunction and pain is fiction, so I think I’ll take a jog!”

Medications create the chemistry needed so many people can feel well again both mentally and physically. Without help, the pain–both physical pain and inner psychic pain–can be thoroughly unbearable. Something like brushing tea or getting up from bed may be too enervating, because it all truly hurts that badly. Too many take their lives because of feeling that there is no help or remedy. The illness simply is–and there is no escape, but one most terrible.

Bi-Polar Disorder (formerly called Manic-Depressive Disorder) is a brain chemistry condition in which the person endures major shifts (or polar opposite shifts) in mentality, mood, and behavior. The high end is termed “Mania” and the low end is termed “Depression”. I covered the symptoms of Depression in the last post.

Here are the Symptoms of Mania

(3 or more of these following symptoms for 14 days or more, or if the symptoms interfere with a person’s regular life, constitute Mania)

• Increased physical and mental activity and energy

• Extreme optimism and self-confidence

• Exalted self-importance

• Irritability, aggressiveness

• Decreased need for sleep

• Pressure speech and thoughts

• Impulsiveness and reckless behavior (spending money, risking behavior, driving, sex, substance abuse, etc.)

• Delusions (thinking things that aren’t real or true) and hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t there)

As I read the lists of symptoms and mental sicknesses in Kathryn Green-McCreight’s book (See the Book here.)…friends, acquaintances, family members, neighbors, and so forth, came to mind. Some have mental illness mildly; others endure it severely. Some self-medicate with various substances in order to cope. Nearly all of them are misunderstood, unaided…and (formally) undiagnosed. Imagine, if they could feel comfortable enough to get help, emotional support, and medicine, to feel better…

Is there anyone you wish would get help?

In the next part of this series, I’ll go over the symptoms of Schizophrenia, and helpful options for support, pastoral care, and aid for people with mental illnesses.

I appreciate your comments. And as always, you can post anonymously, if you’d like.

The 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy a week from this Sunday. We will once again see images and recount the horrors of that day, and try in memorial to accept the reality of this world. Most of us don’t encounter death and our own mortality too often. Most of us don’t constantly see suffering, and witness grief and loss.

Please take some time today, or this weekend to remember that the events of 9/11 still bring pain to many. Loved ones are missed, and we can’t gloss over the national tragedy that left a collective hole in our hearts, even ten years later.

This seems a fitting time to discuss an author who is very acquainted with death. It’s his job to be, and his perspective can be very helpful to us. As promised a couple of weeks earlier, the following is my personal interview with blogger and upcoming author Caleb Wilde, a 6th generation Funeral Director, seminary student, husband, and expectant adoptive dad.

My Questions for Caleb:

1. Being a 6th generation funeral director, you have quite a unique vantage point on life, loss, and mortality. How do you think you live life differently than other Christians because of where God has placed you?

Caleb: In traditional religious calendars, the day in-between “Good Friday” and “Easter” is called “Holy Saturday”.  “Holy Saturday” is the day the disciples’ hopes and beliefs were engulfed in death and silence, as they viewed their Messiah’s death without the knowledge of the resurrection.

In some sense, I live the life of Holy Saturday.

As funeral directors, we’re paid by families to be a human shield to death, whereby we make death somewhat easier, less real and more proper.  As this human shield, I’m affected.  I’m affected by the brokenness, by the grief, by the hopelessness I see in faces, by the newly fatherless/motherless children, the tragic deaths and the accidents.

All this has made my personal faith more sensitive to questions of God’s goodness and justice.  It’s not easy for me to understand ideas of “eternal hell”, or ideas of “meticulous divine providence” or even “absolute foreknowledge” or “omnipotence”.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m still a Christian.

2. What do people misunderstand most about your work?

Caleb: We’re a lot like pastors.  Our jobs are really quite similar, except that one is recognized as “ministry” while the other is “business.”  That’s probably the largest misconception … there’s no way funeral directors can meet with grieving families through the most difficult time of their lives and come out on the other side as “business people.”

Everything else is true, though … we are dark and we are odd people.

In ancient times, death practitioners were ostracized from normal society by rule.  Today, we’re partly ostracized from the norm of society by practice.

3. The constant stream of customers (people dying, and their families burying them) can make one grow numb or cold toward the concept and process of death and burial. Do things still surprise you or impact you? What kind of things?

Caleb: There’s something so unnatural about death that (save the very old) it’s difficult to become numb.

4. You’ve probably thought about what you’d want your own funeral to look and sound like. Can you tell us about that?

Caleb: About two years ago, I started taking one minute video clips of myself, so that by the time I’m 70, I should have a montage of age progression videos that can be used for my funeral.

I’ve also talked about recording a message from myself to my family and friends that could be shown at my funeral as the eulogy.  But, by the time I’m ready to die, I figure they’ll have holographic projections, so I’ll wait for that tech until I record my final goodbye.

5. The saddest funeral I ever went to was for a 13 year old boy who took his own life. What have you learned about people during the time of more tragic circumstances that you’ve been a part of?

Caleb: Funerals/death are a perfect storm: you have death, the inheritance money, high emotions and family you might not like too much who are around you all the time.

Funerals intensify people’s real character.  You see the best in people and you see the worst.  The bad people will do horrendous things at funerals, like start fights, curse out their family members over money.  And you can see Jesus in the good ones.

6. Do you find your work mostly depressing, hopeful, profound, mundane, etc.? Would you recommend this vantage point to others?

Caleb: It’s a tough ministry that has little boundaries.  Many funeral homes are also generational, so many of us work with our dads, grandfathers, uncles and cousins, which can make this at-need work that much more difficult to set up healthy boundaries.

Similar to any ministry, I think there should be a passion for death work … a calling of sorts, whereby you know this is what you’re supposed to do.  And being a “calling”, few have witnessed this vantage point.

It’s unique.

7. Do you want to stay in the family business? Why or why not?

Caleb: Next question : )

8. Tell us a bit about how you view suffering, pain, and death from your unique perspective…which probably has a lot to do with the message in your book.

Caleb: I’ve built my understanding of God around suffering, pain and death.  It’s a local theology.  And my understanding of God, suffering, pain and death in light of my faith is the content of my upcoming book, “Confessions of a Funeral Director.”  Hopefully, it will be out in less than a year.  You can get an idea of how death has affected my view of God at my blog, www.calebwilde.com.  My book, though, will contain much more narrative than my blog.

9. What’s your best idea for a Smart Phone app.?

Caleb: I live near Lancaster County (PA), home of the Amish and Mennonites, so there’s a lot of intermarrying in these parts.  Not to mention, most of the towns in the rural areas of Pennsylvania have families that have lived there for centuries, so many of them are related.

I have an idea to partner with Ancestry.com and create an app the lets you bump smart phones with another person and it will tell you how you’re related to them.  My theory is that this will greatly help the evolution of humans by creating a purer gene pool.   The apps name is “Bump it before you Hump it”.

How are you formed?
Here are just two ways God can form us.

See this video of a potter. At the start, the clay is just a lump. Not much to look at, little beauty, non functional, and undeveloped. Yet, because of its quality of malleability, it can be fashioned, sometimes rather quickly, into a masterpiece. A lovely, useful, handmade, creation, worth much more than an untouched lump of clay.

When the raw material is harder, more force is needed to change its form. See this case in metal working. But, remember, hammering the metal into form is most often preceded by a time in fire to soften it.

We fall into both of these categories as we develop. We have metal areas, and clay areas that need work. Which do you have more of?

God employs his Holy Spirit in whatever methods and processes are needed for that particular area of our lives. Often we need to be more softened and flexible before we are ready. For our own good, and for the good of others, God fashions us. To a certain degree we can choose the kind of raw material we give to God to recreate. When we present our hearts and minds willingly, the process of forming us into something very beautiful is a less painful and vigorous process. Sometimes, we have already presented ourselves willingly, and the suffering comes, regardless.

However, the less we surrender to the skillful, creative, loving work of God, the more time we’ll need in “the fire” to purify, refine, and prepare ourselves. In the end, God makes us so beautiful that we may hardly be recognizable.

When you are in times of great struggle, keep the end in mind. No two people will be formed in the same way. And, no trail is wasted. Our change is in the process, and our hope is in God’s final product.

It the area of “Spiritual Formation” (also called, discipleship) we may intentionally undergo practices that nurture Christ-likeness. We encounter a series of little deaths in devotion to the process at hand. We relent.

Should we be weak like wet clay, and not strong like iron? Some of that is not up to us, and much depends on how we will be used by God. If we try to be rigid like metal, God will take our kinks out, and knock of the useless parts. It’s not possible to apply a bit of hand pressure to metal, like it is to a spinning mound of clay. God may employ a mallet to get the job done. The job still needs to be done, no matter the process. God will have his way, so that we can be recreated. The longer we are rigid, the longer the process takes, even for clay.

Here’s the part I missed in my spiritual formation, until recent times: God is Good, and trustworthy. There was such a string of woe in my life, that I took God for a menace, or very drowsy. In gaining experiential, devotional, and formal training about God (which is the study of God, i.e.theology), I changed.

As in the case of Jesus (God with skin on), we see a deeply compassionate image of the Divine. An accurate image. We see amaze grace and self-sacrafice. We see God caring for us, and caring for us well. A gaze at God’s abundant creation will tell us the same thing. So, this is the true picture/reflection of God. He may let us get a pounding, but we will not be hammered in vain. Here, my friends, is our Hope.

So, imagine the best and ideal parent. (Mind, this won’t be anyone you know. This parent is not possible, in human form.) As a loving parent looks at a helpless baby, the good parent feels a sense of great responsibility and deep compassion. The idea to hurt the baby is nowhere to be found. Non existent. It is in this type of love and compassion that we are forged or molded. (Often in the Bible this is word love and compassion is translated, in English, to “loving-kindness” or “tender mercies”.)