Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wasn’t the only big deal in her family. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher, a well-known abolitionist and preacher of the era, was a supporter of the anti-slavery group in the Kansas Territory. His organization raised funds to supply them guns. They became known colloquially as “Beecher Bibles.”

More interesting in this family is Lyman Beecher, their father. Also a minister, Harriet shared this anecdote about him. “he kept a load of sand in his cellar, to which he would run at odd intervals and shovel vigorously, throwing it from one side the cellar to the other, on his favorite theory of working off nervous excitement through the muscles, and his wood-pile and wood-saw were inestimable means to the same end.”

The dude burned off excess energy by literally shoveling a pile of dirt from one side of his basement to another. I don’t have basement sand. But I do know something about the anxiety attacks that wake you up at night with your heart and mind racing and you can’t turn it off.

And over the last several months I’ve realized that the internet is one thing that manifests itself as my basement of sand.  Which can be good. After all, Lyman Beecher needed the basement of sand to cope.

But lately I’ve begun to see that the internet has been like Vernor’s Ginger Ale to me (yeah, another metaphor. Hold on for a second). As kids, Mom gave us Vernor’s to settle the stomach when we were sick, the traditional remedy of native Michiganders. And it worked for some time. Until the psychological association of Vernor’s and illness happened in my brain. And now I can’t see Vernor’s without feeling ill. It’s not Vernor’s fault. The fault lies in my brain.

These days I’m finding that when I see the pile of basement sand and I don’t need it, it’s the total opposite reaction as intended. I don’t feel better. I feel worse. It makes the anxiety worse. It’s doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to do for me. Not always. There are times when the basement of sand is necessary, but there are a lot of times it’s not.

Lyman Beecher had an interesting mechanism to help him cope with whatever was going on in his brain. But Lyman Beecher also had a basement full of sand.

So an acknowledgement: the Nashville statement bullshit is exactly the type of thing that caused me to leave the ministry I was in.

(Swears and spoken slang below. It’s written as I spoke it, not as a quality, edited written word. Whatever. Insert snarky GIF here.)

First, about the statement itself. A huge majority of the Nashville signers are not even theologians. Of the signers/formulators of this document, you’ve got:
• A professor of English literature at an evangelical university
• The founders of World magazine, which is an evangelical/conservative magazine in the vein of Time/Newsweek
• At least one church pastor who admittedly never even went to Bible college, let alone seminary (yeah, I got links, this isn’t hearsay)
• someone who is listed as a volunteer at an organization that contends the Gays and Pagans are Destroying America
• Multiple political lobbyist/activist/writers with no theological training
• A child development specialist with no theological training.
• A senior writer for a conservative magazine/website with, yes, you guessed it, no theological training.

For the actual trained theologians category, it’s a bunch of Southern Baptists and some other nondenominational churches (sorry, not looking up all of the affiliations of “Open Door Church” or  “Family Church” right now). Interesting too that Rick Warren didn’t sign, but one of his junior pastors did. Assume then that Saddleback affirms this statement.

This is a problem. I’m not anti-laity (if you’ll see the very first sentence of this post, you’ll see that I’m not in ministry anymore.). However, when a document comes out that’s supposed to be theological in scope and a good half of the signers aren’t even trained in any sort of Scriptural study or exegesis… WTF guys. The head of the group that put this document out is suggesting it’s as important as the Nicene Creed. LOL. Denny. Your arrogance is almost impressive.

Folks, if Tony Perkins and Marvin Olasky and David French are your bishop-equivalents, you need to leave that church yesterday. That’s not a church. That’s a political lobbying agency.

——

What they did was they drew certain lines in the sand  on non-creedal issues. Here they have cast a line of no negotiation (article 10) around creationism, the relationship/roles of men and women, and on a very specific piece of a sexual ethic and transgenderism/gender dysphoria, as well as body dysmorphia. Cute, really. Gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia ain’t in Scripture. They’ve “stuck to Scripture” (the “stick to Sports” of the evangelical world) but made up the Scripture part of it. Maybe *that* is why they didn’t throw citations in the Nashville statement.

To pretend this is anything less than rigid fundamentalist rhetoric is ridiculous. They’ve introduced non-negotiables while ignoring all the other “non-negotiables” they’ve brushed aside to get there. This isn’t exclusive to this mostly baptist/evangelical group. GAFCON and its fans have done this too. I’ve got no time for this. If you’re gonna have an allegedly rigid sexual ethic, be consistent.

But nah. Who needs consistency? Not church leaders. They’re playing the base, just like politicians.

This isn’t an ethic. And frankly, I’ve got no more time for this bullshit.

This “ethic” is the Statement that screams about marriage/fidelity and Never. Fucking. Once. Mentions. Divorce. You know, the thing that happens to over 50% in this country.  The thing that Jesus directly talks about.  Oh, they say in the statement that you should only have sex within a man/woman marriage. But what’s the other side of it? What’s the pastoral care for the half of their adult parishioners who are divorced? Oh right. Pastoral care. That’s not something your English professor/magazine editor/political lobbyist leaders are particularly concerned about.

—-
This Nashville statement isn’t “new” in the sense that it’s the drum the evangelical/baptist leadership has been beating for decades. They’ve usually tried to be less “You’re out if you can’t sign this” they they are with this. Heck, even one of the signers spent a day on Twitter saying “you can still be Christian if you disagree” even though THAT IS LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT SHE SIGNED HER NAME TO IN THIS STATEMENT. Fun.

—-
So where do we go from here?

I haven’t been a Capital-E Evangelical for 15 years, but I’ve been in church worlds that have often kept one foot in the broader evangelical conversation. It’s possible that’s true for a bunch of you too. Here’s what I’m doing and what I’d offer up as suggestions to the broader church world.

• Don’t let these folks dismiss your own faithfulness to the study of Scripture.
◦ “Well the Bible clearly says” and “you obviously don’t trust God’s Word” are two common rejections of a redemptive, affirming hermeneutic. But those phrases are just empty phrases that themselves require clarification. Things like interpretation and wrestling and exegesis have been going on for thousands of years. We need to do those things, and continue to do those things.
• Do engage the wider church tradition. Listen to voices outside of your own denomination, like the Catholic Catechism that says of gendering God:
◦ 370: In no way is God in man’s image. He is neither man nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes. But the respective “perfections” of man and woman reflect something of the infinite perfection of God: those of a mother and those of a father and husband.”
◦ Wrestle with Coakley and Williams at St. Basil and St. Augustine and St. Thomas and Flannery O’Connor and the breadth and depth of the work of the church throughout the generations.
• Do ask yourself why the broader evangelical church tradition has staked this claim now while ignoring other “sexual ethic” positions on IVF, surrogacy, and contraception.
◦ What does it mean to have a robust conservative sexual ethic?
◦ What does it mean to affirm LGBTQ persons within the church?
◦ What does it mean to stand up in your church and damn LGBTQ persons and their allies to hell, which is essentially what Art 10 has done in this document?

There is good, important, Scripture-loving theological work happening and I’m trying to follow Christ’s call and the Spirit’s leading. I hope that, if you’ve read this far, this post has given you a sense of where I’m coming from, where I am now, and what significant inconsistencies there are with something like the Nashville statement. I hope this fosters some thoughtful reflection and might stir you to ask questions of your ministers and church traditions.

I’ve found personally that theology is best worked out in conversation with others, in person. I’ve been reluctant to post this here for risk that my own process of discernment and wrestling can be reduced to a few paragraph rant in the summer of 2017.

There are those that will celebrate this, and those that will go full blown “farewell Rob Bell” on me for this.

Anyway, here it is. My heart. My love of Jesus. My attempt to love my neighbors and my community.

Love wins.

– padre

I distinctly remember telling my friend Justin why I loved Law & Order. The show that often billed their episodes as “ripped from the headlines” found a way to humanize those same headlines that seemed to be banal statistics. A murder. A rape. A crime spree. By high school, those things felt like just natural facts of society. The Law & Order universe, especially SVU, tied me into a human reality that existed far, far outside of my sphere. Yes, it’s fictionalized entertainment, but as a conservative religious kid growing up in a small Midwestern town, the human realities discussed week after week, in their own way, broke away at the Othering I had been formed to project.

In college I met Sharon. I’m not sure what year we realized our shared SVU fandom, but it was real. Only a few years into our shared alumni status, we were back in our tiny college town for graduation. I don’t know for sure why I was there. I didn’t have family graduating that year, but there I was anyway. We somehow found a house with cable (I don’t know who owned the house) and lo and behold, USA had an SVU marathon airing. A quick trip to Rite Aid and we spent the next…eight, ten? hours drinking mimosas and watching New York City’s most dedicated detectives, Stabler and Benson, solve the heinous crimes.

I think that was around the time that Sharon was preparing to move to New York herself, to chase her lifelong dreams. That’s not my story to tell, but I remember how all of the fears and hopes and anxieties all coalesced as she made the move.

Kelli Giddish joined the SVU cast in season 13, playing a detective from the South who moves to NYC with the necessary baggage to be a new character in a seasoned show. It turns out, though, that she’s an incredible actor with a brilliant writing team developing her character. I’ve grown to love Detective Rollins.

Episode 16.10 of SVU, “Forgiving Rollins,” is one of the most powerful things I have ever watched. It’s a story, I’d contend, that you ought to watch. It’s heavy. It’s not pretty. Rollins has to speak some serious truth about herself over the course of it. But it’s so utterly important, so utterly human, so brutally honest. The weight and sadness and hope of speaking truth to power, of defending the victims. It’s seared into my memory. I rewatch it more than I should admit publicly.

Sharon ended up at a fundraiser dinner recently, only to find that the guest who signed in before she did was none other than Kelli Giddish. The SVU texts flew for a bit, of course, and I asked that if she did get a chance to talk to Kelli, she share how much I appreciate “Forgiving Rollins.”

Sharon’s a good friend. A great friend. The type of friend that’s proud to brag about you even when you’ve done nothing to deserve it. So she didn’t just bump into Kelli Giddish and tell her how much I appreciate her character. Sharon had to go and tell her about me.

The ugly cry I cried was for the goodness and the love and the watching-a-friend-achieve-all-of-her-dreams and for Detective Amanda Rollins and for Kelli Giddish and for Ileana and Shane and Cortez.

Like I told Justin 15 years ago. The humanity.

As a teenager/college student, I was a punk/alt/metal kid. A lot of it started in the Tooth&Nail/Solid state family, but it grew pretty wide beyond that. Norma Jean, Demon Hunter, Emery, and Anberlin were my favorites, hands down. I was never a Warped Tour kid, I never rolled in the scene, I was just an obsessed listener/fan. And I went to St Andrews/the Shelter a LOT from 2003 – 2006 for Solid State shows. Life changes, I got older, and I haven’t been in a mosh pit in a decade. My musical tastes are a lot broader than they were in 2006. I can’t say I’ve listened to a lot of alt/punk/metal of late.

So it caught me by surprise the other night when I was listening to All Songs Considered and caught a discussion about My Chemical Romance’s album The Black Parade. It’s the 10th anniversary of that album.

See, I graduated college in May 2006. Black Parade released in October of that year, and a month later over Thanksgiving, my buddy Dylan found out he had lymphoma.

In March 2008, lymphoma killed Dylan.
Somewhere back then I packed that genre away, for the most part, and haven’t revisited it since. But now here we are, a decade later, and the subconscious and the real come crashing back together.

The Black Parade is a musical story about The Patient. A young man who finds out he has cancer and his story of dying and the afterlife is told over the course of the album.

When I hear The Black Parade now, it’s as if they are narrating the last months of Dylan’s life to me and it’s an incredible thing because I never expected a 2006 emo/alt album to be the story of my friend.

But it is, to me.

So thank you to My Chemical Romance.
Thank you for telling Dylan’s story to me, over and over again. Thank you for keeping him from receding into the dusty corners of my memory.
Thank you.

I love you My Chemical Romance.
I love you Dylan.
——

Dylan’s thoughts from the summer before he died:

“I’m not really afraid to die. More than anything, I just don’t want to look back on my youth – this time when we should all be out having fun and doing stupid things – and realize that I missed my chance to do it. Really, that’s all I’m afraid of.”

and the last track from The Black Parade, titled “Famous Last Words,” leaves us with

I am not afraid to keep on living
I am not afraid to walk this world alone
Honey if you stay, I’ll be forgiven
Nothing you can say can stop me going home

A few months ago I asked Sergeant Scary to draw me my next tattoo. We spoke for a bit about what I wanted it to convey. My narrative goes something like this:

I’m Padre. I am one of several people that lead chants for the Northern Guard Supporters. The NGS motif is skeletal, so the story I always think of is the Valley of Dry Bones. The voice of the LORD tells the prophet to speak to the bones, to prophesy, and they will reanimate. He does and they do.

For me, being a devoutly religious person in a supporter section has never been, and never will be, about preaching doctrine. That’s for another venue. For me, it’s about living (and proclaiming) love and grace and mercy in everything I do. Our NGS family is incredible and I try to love each member as much as they love me. Love is life. Love is Resurrection. Love wins.

So it made sense to tie the Ezekiel text into my supporter identity, and my identity in the section as a capo is pretty visible. Sarge’s design looked like this:

For those of you who have been paying attention, Sarge ultimately used the version of my face as the inspiration for the new NGS bass drum head. See the resemblance?

I took Sarge’s design to Jeff McMullen at Signature Tattoo in Ferndale to translate it into a tattoo and today we have the finished product. #Padrehugs are a thing in the supporter community, but there are plenty of people who meet me for the first time and stick with the more formal handshake. Now, every time they do, they will get part of Padre story immediately. Sarge and Jeff combined to produce this incredible piece:

A while back I wrote about having depression and I’ll be honest, the response was unreal. My community, especially the group of people in the greater Northern Guard Supporters/Detroit City FC community, has been nothing but incredible in supporting me. It turns out that many of us share a fight against mental illnesses and adversities.

Some time ago I came upon this beautiful letter that the lovely and wonderful Stephen Fry wrote to a young woman. She too suffers from depression and needed some encouragement. He wrote back a lovely note and one phrase, in particular, stood out to me, which you will see below momentarily. If you’ve never read the letter before, stop, go read it, then report back here.

I’ve saved that letter and read it often, especially on the days that are the worst. Last year I asked my incredible friend Sarah if she would draw me a tattoo that would go on my arm under the Love Wins. She drew me an incredible image of hope, of light, and of encouragement, an image that ties so many aspects of who I am, of what I believe, into this message of hope that Stephen put into words to a complete stranger.

There is a certain profound timing, I think, that the same day I got this tattoo was the day my grandfather passed away. It seems a Holy Nudge happened that suggested I might need the visible encouragement and hope immediately.

Recently some friends of mine invited me on their theology/ministry podcast to talk about the soccer supporter community here in Detroit. I get it, that might seem weird, marrying theology and a soccer supporter community that encompasses every view of religion under the sun. But I promise it makes sense.

Consider: the soccer supporter community has one core tenet: we support our club forever, until we die. This foundational point brings us together despite all of our differences.

The church, as it ought to be, brings people together at a core set of first-level beliefs, while understanding that we are all one despite whatever other differences we hold.

In a way, then, the soccer supporter community is like Plato’s Theory of Forms, where it is a glimpse of what the church is, but a less-fully-understood version of it.

Take a listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts. I’m interested to know what other people thinks about this.

Note: I’m not writing this because a famous actor died, although that has forced some important conversations into the limelight. I’m not writing this to garner any sympathy because we all have our own diseases and struggles. I’m writing this for me, to try and give me a small step toward healing.

I don’t remember when I first encountered the Betrayer. I know it was a long time ago, and I think I had encounters with him as far back as high school. He’s the worst kind of companion. He doesn’t tell me when he’s going to show up, suddenly appearing at my door in the middle of a good day or a bad one. Other times he drops in when I’m on vacation, or with a friend, or at work. Or really, anytime and any place.

The Betrayer has two modus operandi with me. Like a boxer, perhaps, The Betrayer swings hard from the right with his fist – Anxiety. Anxiety comes in rapid-fire jabs. Sometimes I can’t even catch a quick breath in between them. Then The Betrayer follows with his intended knock-out left fist, Depression. It’s staggering. Time slows to a crawl, and the dull and growing pain of the blow sets in for a long, long visit.

I’ve painted around the edges on this subject at times, even using the “d” word once or twice in writings online. But I’ve realized over the past week that there are some things here I need to voice, I need to name, I need to post for my own good.

This week has been hell, but not because a famous actor who struggled with depression committed suicide. It’s definitely sad and it sucks, but that’s not why this week has been hell.

The week started out incredibly well. But the Betrayer showed up in a cup of coffee. It was evening, I was with friends, and I was offered a coffee with dessert. Due to the Betrayer’s existence, counselors have recommended that I avoid caffeine in the evenings. But that’s okay, it’s decaf. No big deal, right? Except.

The Betrayer’s jabs of Anxiety set in. “You know what, it’s probably caffeinated? You know that there is some caffeine in all coffee anyway. You’ll probably be awake all night because of the caffeine.”

That’s how it started. A damned cup of decaf coffee. And the Betrayer has been at it all week since.

But because depression is a thing, because it is real, it rolls down upon me like the fog settles over San Francisco and stays for as long as it wants. Sometimes it’s mild. Sometimes (usually in the winter) it’s a lot worse. This week has been worse than most I can remember.

I’ve read a lot of good things this week as so many who are coping and battling with it daily have shared their wounds openly. We’re moving the conversation a little bit this week, and that’s incredible. But I need to put this out there, in my words, and shine some light on where I’ve been.

Every time you negate or belittle the truth of depression, you’re piling on somebody. Debating mental illness and suicide with somebody who suffers with the disease is callous and cruel. Stop it.

Mental illness isn’t something I’m going to debate. I don’t have the energy to debate whether the Betrayer is real. He is. He lives in my brain. I know it. Professionals know it. I don’t care if you do or not.

Every time someone tells me that the Betrayer can be defeated if I just have a little more faith, a little more joy in Jesus, I wonder if they’ve read the entirety of the Psalms.

Because I’ve been there. I’ve been curled up in a ball on the floor crying for no reason. I’ve spent days moving through the motions while my mind screams how awful I am, how worthless, how everything will surely fall apart.

That’s the reality of the Betrayer. I’m trying to learn how to anticipate his arrival, but he still finds new ways to appear. And his stays are unexpected and as long as he wants them to be.

So, yeah. I have depression. Somedays it’s horrible, nearly debilitating. Some days it isn’t.

But it’s real. Some days my brain hates me and tries to destroy me. That’s the disease, the illness, the battle I face.

Nish Weiseth sums it up best. Nish is an incredible woman who shared her own suicide story this week. Her words are beautiful and broken, truthful and profound. You should read her post in its entirety.

God does heal, absolutely He does. But sometimes, healing happens through good doctors, counselors, practitioners, and yes, medicine. God’s grace can look like a sliver of light on the bathroom floor, but it can also look like a life-changing counseling session or the right combination of drugs to regulate your brain chemistry.

Prayer and a deepening faith have helped many along the road to depression. But it doesn’t always work out that way. It didn’t for me. And you know what? That’s okay. It doesn’t make us any less of a Christian believer. It doesn’t diminish our value in the eyes of God if we find His grace in our name printed on a pill bottle.

And finally, as Christians, we should never be pointing our fingers at the hurting and calling them selfish.
Rather, we should be looking at them with our eyes wide open and saying, “I’m here. You’re not alone. Let’s get help, together.”