WALKING ON campus this morning, I realized that this week is a bit of an anniversary for me: twenty-five years ago I began my undergraduate program on this very campus. I was seventeen years old. Just a child.

Today I see that there are piles of rubble being created by the wrecking machines whirring and roaring along where now only a portion of my old dormitory remains. The piles are being sorted out as if to make sense of it all; chunks of concrete here, twisted steel there, things defying categorization over there. I think to myself that I once worked and played, studied and slept, laughed and cried within the walls now crumbled before me. Within the rubble is a part of me, and within myself is a part of the rubble. I do not force the issue, I do not bother to ask if somehow this could make for an apt metaphor; you know, the idea of rubble, and time, and trying to organize it all into proper stacks and piles as if it may still be put to use. Nor do I bother to ask myself why a tear flows over my eyelid, and rests at the top of my cheek.

Yesterday in class I was reminded once again of what time and age can take from you. The students in their twenties have such endless bodily stamina, and a remarkably quick recall of material. I can sense in my own mind a sluggishness, as if there are several layers of translation I must perform in order to answer a professor’s query. The young recall information as if by sheer reaction—unhindered electrical impulses traveling somewhere near the speed of light across a few centimeters of grey matter. I on the other hand must process, correlate, shuffle and sort, summon and will, to remember a name or date or quote. Sometimes in all my effort I am met with nothing, nothing but the apprehension of what more the quickly coming years will take from me.

But time and age give to you as well, and their costs are not so high once you adapt to them, accept them for what they are. Reading and recalling wise words is not the same thing as becoming wise. Stamina fails to teach you where and how to most meaningfully spend your hours. And the freedom of youth exists because you have not yet made yourself a servant to those who love and need you most, and those whom you love and need the most. With age you learn that things are only temporary—our accomplishments most of all. You learn that rubble unavoidably comes with life, and yet can become life. You learn that rubble is okay, that it is about give and take, about falling down and about being made new, about compassion and grace—about loving and being loved. You learn that the mystery of all these things is flooding through and making beautiful this very day, this very moment. And you learn that this is enough.

THE NEW dormitory across the way, with its earth tones glowing softly in the morning sun, looks far more attractive and fun than its predecessor. I smile with a solemn joy at the site of it, and for all its young residents I make a wish that each may find all the most wonderful, most beautiful things in life; things that as yet they cannot possibly comprehend nor imagine. I wish for them rubble, and I wish for them rebirth. Both are painful. Both are joyous. The two are inseparable.

As for me, I feel as though I am standing in this moment straddling time itself—and the moment feels flawlessly true.

HERE'S AN interesting list of claims to consider:

Well, you’re not a real writer. You’ve never been published.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You’ve never been published in a magazine.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You’ve never been published in book form.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You’ve never been published in trade form.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You’ve never been published in hardback.

Well, you’re not a real writer. Your book wasn’t published by a real publishing house.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You never sold more than [pick a number] copies.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You’ve never been published by [pick a publisher].

Well, you’re not a real writer. You just write about [pick a subject].

Well, you’re not a real writer. Your [grammar/ plots/ characters/ settings/ logic / argument/ etc.] is/are an embarrassment.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You got lucky and wrote one decent book that got picked up and sold 3 million copies. Big deal. You’re a one-hit wonder.

Well, you’re not a real writer. You are so prolific your work has lost its integrity. You love money more than the art.

Well, you’re not a real writer. My dog can write decent [poetry/ prose/ fiction/ non-fiction/ etc.].

And the list goes on and on.

At some point during this present summer I read something on a blog (a blog from a fairly “successful” writer) that caused me to remember something I had read years ago about writers always bashing other writers because of… well, things like I’ve placed in the list. So the idea behind the list I’ve just put forth is not original. But it is a bit intriguing in a larger sense, and I’d like to talk about a couple of reasons why I think so.

First of all, the list betrays much of our human weakness to do two things: Judge those who don’t rise to our personal standards as being losers, and judge those who rise above our standards as irrelevant, arrogant fanatics who have lost all focus upon the matter. I see this in Christianity all the time: If you aren’t as moral/spiritual/devoted/etc as me, you don’t really love God, and are in danger of going to Hell (good riddance, by the way). And, if you try to live as more moral/spiritual/devoted/etc. than me, well you’re just a holy-rolling Jesus freak who has lost all practical understanding and perspective on being human in today’s world (leave me alone, by the way). The unspoken claim is much simpler: I’m at precisely the perfect place. My standard is the correct one. Anybody who has a different standard is an idiot.

Most of us can see that in principle this isn’t a good way to view life, but we cling to it anyway. We do it with writing, painting, driving, basketball, football, sewing, cooking, jobs and careers, religion, marriage, raising kids, and anything else you can think of. And it’s pretty sad to admit that we each think we are God and measure things just right. From my way of thinking, this must fall somewhere under the list of no-no’s resulting from the idea, “do not judge.”

Second, there’s a line item for the list that would go something like, “If you were a real writer, you’d write every chance you got.” Uh-huh. Well, that’s pretty close to the blog post I read this summer, but I think the better concept is the claim that “you’d make every chance to write.” By this I mean, some writers would say that if you’re not ignoring everything else in life so you can “polish your craft” or “live your art” then you really aren’t a true writer. God pity me, I can see both sides, agreeing and disagreeing with this idea. Don’t think for a minute that I haven’t wrestled with the dichotomy at least once a month for half of my life.

On the one hand, look at somebody like Thomas Merton. If you read enough of his journals, you figure out that he loved to write. In the rare case where he didn’t have anything sublime to put on paper, he’d (yikes!) complain about his superiors, write words about words, or just make lists of things. Merton was a writer. I think the person who writes the blog I keep mentioning is a writer, too. Many entries a day, every day, about just about anything. It’s not drivel, either. It’s decent stuff, mostly with a point. I liken my view in this paragraph to a comment that was made about a journalist who had interviewed a pop star who got famous for singing. The comment was something like, “I’ve interviewed a lot of singers, and every one of them sang during the interviews. It’s like they couldn’t not sing. But not [this one]. She never sang once. I’m not so sure she really is a singer.” Good point. You can’t stop singers from singing. You can’t stop writers from writing. You can’t stop engineers from engineering and you can’t stop mommies from mommy-ing. It’s the way it is. So, if you don’t write much, if you don’t make every opportunity to write, are you a real writer?

On the other hand, the crux is between the ideas of taking chances to write, and making chances. Believe me that I, for one, take every chance I get. But do I make every chance into a chance to write? Do I make every moment a writing moment? No. Not on paper or computer anyway. Why not? Maybe I’m not a real writer. Or maybe it’s something different. You see a house on fire. Do you dial 911, maybe try to help , or do pull out your journal and pen and start writing? If you did the first two, are you a writer? Some would say not, and some would say that if you do the third you may be a writer, but you’re not much of a human being (which, round and round, eventually means you’re not a real writer. See how the list works?)

I’m rambling, which is by the way one of the things that makes me not a real writer. I have a tendency to mix singular and plural personal pronouns, my vocabulary is small, and I am overly verbose. Got it. Thanks. So to stop the ramble for a moment, here’s the point: If writing, like so many other things in life, is a vocation, then it matters. It matters greatly and you had better take it seriously. But shame on you if you forget this: every such vocation is (at best) a secondary vocation that is trumped by our primary Christian vocation to charity, mercy, compassion, spreading the love of God directly to others, and demonstrating the Kingdom. Sure you can do these by writing (and by almost anything else), and if you can, you must; but there are absolute direct ways to which we are all called. Although these ways differ from individual to individual, if you’re a spouse it means your spouse matters more than your writing. If you are a parent it means your children matter more than your writing. It means that sometimes doing the shopping, or landscaping a yard, or fixing a broken toy or simply talking about the day is your first priority; not writing. So, no, you don’t make every moment a writing moment. You make every moment a Love moment, a God moment. And when possible, those Love and God moments are spent alone with your pen—because you’re a writer. In simpler terms: You are a human first. You are a writer second. This is how it has to be, or else you run the risk of being an inhuman writer.

So, pick what it is that God has made you to be. Follow it. Live it. Love it. Pursue it with a fiery passion—right after you first love everybody you can with all the energy you can. To die to one’s self means, paradoxically, to be willing to die to your vocation. Just read the end of Merton’s Seven Story Mountain. He understood, and the battle was his private little Hell.

IT’S BEEN a crazy summer, at least in my head. I’m sure this has something to do with why I’ve veered in the blog over the past couple of months and done things I haven’t before. I was a little more opinionated in one of the posts, and I started to have regular posts on The Spadefoot Project, before I moved them elsewhere. There have been a number of ideas going through my mind this summer, and for the most part my internal efforts in such times are all about tying everything together into something not necessarily whole, but at least related. I’m not sure I’ve accomplished that this summer, but I am trying to get the major ideas online before classes start.

I’d like to start with the Spadefoots. I’m sure people watch me do things, and they take them pretty much at face value. Usually that’s a good thing, because most of the time I have some underlying motive behind what I’m doing and, for the most part, the motive is not something with which most people want to be involved. But here’s my attempt to start tying this summer’s thoughts together. If nothing else, I think I deserve an “A” for effort.

SINCE I live in the desert, I guess the little frogs have taken on the burden of being as close to sea turtles as I can get for now. And so they, like the turtles, have a little something to do with this: I was walking along one day a few years back, my brain minding its own business, when into it popped—in an instant and quite unbidden—the following challenge: (1) Traditional Christianity as I’ve been taught says (a) God won a certain and complete victory over sin and death through Jesus, (b) Few are they who find eternal life with God in Heaven. (2) Unhappy conclusion: (a) This isn’t much of a victory, especially considering the cost, and (b) I think I have a serious problem with this.

Now, before I go any further let me say I’ve read a fair amount about the Arminians, the Calvinists and the Universalists. To pick down-to-earth terms, the Free Will, the Predestination and the God-saves-everybody crowds. Each makes biblical sense in some ways, and each fails biblically in some ways. Welcome to religion. But I purposely decided to look at the point as posed to myself differently; at least for a while. It’s not particularly philosophical or theological or even clever. It’s more just (gasp!) the way I tend to feel about it. I call it the Big God, Little God view.

On the one hand, if you really think that God defeated sin and death, if Jesus really died once and for all, if God is all powerful and all loving (I know, it crosses over into the problem of evil), then why not just accept that God is a Big God, and will work it out so that everyone makes it to Heaven? And I do mean, everyone; even Satan. In the Big God theory, given enough time, God will bring every being unto himself, into his loving arms, and unto salvation. This is the universalist ideal and, I have to admit, I like this view quite a lot.

On the other hand, if you really think that God sent Jesus to die for our sins, once and for all, but that the fact of the matter is that relatively few people will be saved from sin, then why not just admit that God is a Little God? I don’t mean this badly and in fact I mean it in a very positive way, but one which begs that we first ask ourselves what we might mean by the “victory” God claims through Jesus. Enter the turtles and frogs.

The vast majority of turtle eggs never result in an adult turtle swimming for countless years through the ocean depths. The vast majority of Spadefoot eggs never result in an adult frog. But is this defeat? Perhaps not and to the contrary, the extreme cost incurred by the species is what makes their beauty so compelling. It costs something to bring an adult sea turtle or frog into the world. It costs the death of scores or hundreds or thousands of intricate, delicate, beautiful little creatures. This can’t be taken lightly, but in the most mundane of terms there is a victory we call the perpetuation of species—species that, especially in the case of the turtles and to me, are movingly glorious. The victory is not in the life of each and every turtle or frog, but in the being of turtleness and frogness; It’s an ontological thing. The glory of the victory is that turtles and frogs continue to grace creation. It is the victory of a Little God who is beyond a concern for numbers. It is the victory of a God who is holy and righteous and victorious in the quality of his being and in the being of those who enter into relationship with him. Victory is not in quantity, but quality. Victory was obtained in Jesus because it ensured the perpetuation of holy relationship in the eternity of the human creature. It was victory because of its unfathomable grace, and as such it would be victory even if only one soul who ever walked the earth was saved by it. I like this too. I like it quite a lot.

[Tangentially, the Achilles heal in the Little God view, one that most Christians deny as being a weakness in any view, is the idea of eternal torment in hell for the wicked. Following my amphibian metaphors all is lost if, say, every little hatchling which never made it to the sea were in a stasis of endless pain as a gull’s beak pierces its shell for one eternal, agonizing instant. All is lost if, say, every little froglet which ever existed but never became an adult were trapped in a forever-moment of drying in the desert sun. The image of endless suffering (if you will allow me the concept applied to simple, voiceless creatures) nullifies the beauty of the species. It ceases to be glorious and becomes simply and purely tragic. I would choose instead to have no turtles, no frogs ever, than to know that millions are stuck ceaselessly in the throws of death’s agony, for then turtle-ness and frog-ness would come to symbolize ugliness, cruelty and suffering. Likewise, if we are to believe that the majority of human souls are to be locked in some eternity of unimaginable agony, then there is no possibility of God’s victory in any sense. (It’s at this point that I should mention I don’t view Christianity as predominately about Heaven and Hell, but when forced to do so, my stand is that I don’t accept eternal torment; it’s inconsistent with the concept of God’s victory. I can sometimes accept the idea of a purgatory, and I can sometimes accept the idea of a “final destruction” of a soul, but never the idea of an eternal torment.)]

So where has this rambling brought us? For a moment, back to the Arminians, the Calvinists, and the Universalists. I have spent a number of years as an Arminian. There is a lot about it that makes sense. Free will must be considered for a practical acceptance of the individual, human experience. To deny free will is to open up a can of worms that is very difficult to deal with. Yet there are times when I cannot fully fault the Calvinist view. Some things happen in life that convince you there has to be a destiny, a fate, a providential choosing beyond the capacity of human will. Sometimes the Arminians seem exactly right. Sometimes the Calvinists do. But then, in either case, what about victory? I mean, what about Victory? What about the Big God?

I have an idea for now. I may not have it ten, five or two years from now, but it’s the best idea I’ve come up with. I think that each great religious idea of man has its root in the Truth of God. I also think that every great religious idea of man is pathetically incomplete—infantile even—compared to the Truth of God. And so when it comes to Free Will, Predestination and Universalism, I think it’s all three. I think all three are true. I believe in the ability to choose; at least to an extent. I believe God wants us to choose him; to genuinely have a choice for good or evil, and exercise it. I believe that love must be chosen in order for it to truly be love. I also believe God chooses some of us with a grace that is irresistible. There is seemingly no other explanation why some of us are literally pulled toward God no matter how hard we try to go the other way. And, I believe that somehow God will save everyone.

Now here’s the trick: I believe the first two are so that we—you and I—can be a part of bringing about the third. I think you and I are hatchlings who in the end of all things are to be sacrificed for the sake of all our human siblings. We are the tiny, delicate, beautiful little ones, the children of a holy but (apparently) little God, who will eventually help bring about the complete and utter victory of the (now obviously) Big and Glorious God. I think that’s the victory of the Big Little God. I think that’s the meaning of the Jesus Story. I think it is victory in every beautiful, mysterious way imaginable. I think it’s the true victory, and I like this view most of all.

In my heart this year, I give myself to God for this image of his present and eternal Kingdom. Choose me irresistibly. Or if you do not, then I give myself to you of my own free will. Either way, from this day forth I give myself to die in your Kingdom for the sake of all who don’t fit the first two.

I REALIZE it’s an idea that most likely seems silly to everyone. I understand that you can argue against it from every side. I know it’s not logically formed. But I think part of what has been going on in my mind this summer is the idea of letting go enough to be willing to openly say things that perhaps nobody will agree with. And even if the idea of all three views being true is completely absurd, there is still something important in this post. Perhaps it is actually the complete point of this post, and so I must ask (I mean, I really must ask) of my fellow Christians a question: Forgetting everything else I’ve said, if you reject the idea of salvation for all, then what is your reason? Why do you reject the idea that every soul can and will be saved? If it’s your doctrine and/or your theology and you’ve searched your heart and you’re humble before God in your conviction, then no problem. This is the best any of us can ever do, and you are still my sibling in God. But I wonder how many of us reject the Universalist ideal for a far more base reason; that, to put it bluntly, we want people to go to hell. I wonder if some of us want to see those we consider vile, immoral, disgusting, sinful—in short, not enough like ourselves—to suffer for forever. Do you think? Do you think that we have no better reason for rejecting Universalism than we want “justice,” which is to say we want some serious Godly anger and vengeance poured out like molten metal upon the heads of those we think deserve it? I hope not. I seriously hope not.

Jesus gave his life to save a people. Jesus asked God to erase the guilt-slate of those who killed him. I cannot help, when I think of the cross and the one who died upon it, that the truly Christian thing is to want all people to be saved. And I cannot help, when I think of the cross and the one who died upon it, that the truly Christian thing is to be willing to die to make sure they are. In the end of all things, perhaps God will sacrifice me to save a bunch of people who really don’t deserve to even be in his presence. Come to think of it, I can die for that. And I can live for that. After all, Jesus did it for me. And he’s the only one I need to follow.

THERE’s a metaphor I worked up some time ago, and I published a short version of it online in honor of my father-in-law when he passed away. Because I am planning to soon invite an ecumenical list of folks over to this blog, I’ve decided to post the metaphor here in an effort to send them my heartfelt welcome.

(Oh, and by the way, if you’ve been following The Spadefoot Project and are wondering where the posts have gone, I’ve deleted them and replaced them with a running pdf file to which you can now link from the “Day 0” post. If I get all of my before-school-starts posting done in the next couple of weeks, I’ll mention why I’ve changed my approach to posting The Project.)

SOMETIMES I think that if God asked us to dinner, we’d want to know what we should wear. And while we waited for God to say “Formal,” or “Casual,” God would say, “Cotton. Cotton is good.”

I have long said and am quite convinced that when it comes to our faith in God, faith is a material, a cloth, not a particular style or cut of garment.

Jim was a conservative Christian, and he wouldn’t mind me saying so. In fact, come to think of it, he’d want me to say so. I, on the other hand, am a liberal Christian, and wouldn’t mind Jim saying so. The cut and style of our garments were always different. But, we both were always good old fashioned cotton. When Jim and I got together, we didn't bother to talk about differences in doctrine. We knew they were there, we respected them, and left them in their place. Instead, we talked of our love for the poor, of our passion for the Jesus Story, and our struggles to be what we believe God wants us to be. Jim and I met and laughed and cried in the Love and Grace of God, and that made us friends in God.

It is my hope and prayer that people like Jim, and relationships like the one I shared with him, can be a witness to all people of faith that in the end, it is the unsurpassable glory of God’s infinite Love which binds us together, and not our frail and questionable human ideas.