I am happily reintroducing the Outpatient Monk blog after a long period of consideration. We have redesigned a few things, and even more importantly, I have taken some time to cultivate a heart and voice capable of speaking clearly in a time of awful and intentional muddiness. We can do better.
I am thrilled if you are willing to read any of the upcoming posts, but I am honestly much more drawn than ever to developing a conversation with you. I am convinced that listening and thinking matters and is one of the acts of rebellion of our day. So if you have a thought or topic you would like to see the Outpatient Monk think about, address, or just sit with, please send me a direct message or email. I will respond as soon and as best as I can, but only once there is something Good to be said. You can help the conversation along by sharing posts and engaging people who read them. Ask your friends questions about their reactions and let’s reconnect with people over the hard stuff and allow ourselves to be earnest, gentle, …and uncertain
… as certainty is so easily a precursor to violence.
See if you and your community can collectively forge a more Truthful, Beautiful, and Good response that I can. I will work for you. Also, I am committed to being prayerful for you, so let me know what that needs to look like for you. So in short, it seems I am literally offering you my “thoughts and prayers…
When I finally pulled on to campus I remember parking my car, getting out and looking far off to the ocean horizon, and then turned and face the buildings and literally said to myself, “Now what?” To call these moments anti-climactic is somehow entirely wrong, they are both exactly climactic and exhilarating, but like all real human moments, they keep going. There are the few moments after every spectacular moment when we are returned to the hard churned out work of time and remember just how mundane each of our lives insist on being. Every Oscar winner eventually has to set Oscar down and use the bathroom. Every medal winning Olympian still awaits they have to take NyQuil to barely, and miserably sleep through the night to wake dehydrated exhausted, and cranky. And even the Holy family had the morning after. The shepherds looked at each other and said, “soooo, well, I guess we should be going…” and even the Holy family had the morning after. The shepherds looked at each other and said, “soooo, well, I guess we should be going…” and Mary with her eyelids half open said, “yeah thanks for stopping by to worship God-incarnate that just popped out of me, g’night, drive safe,” only to be awakened a few hours later by a cold and hungry baby Jesus who was not yet so keen on acting like the divine king we had been expecting… and, of course, there was the first diaper, when one half of Joseph’s mind was asking, “Is he ok? Is this poop normal? I should ask my mom,” and the other half was saying, “So you, mr poopy-butt, have come to save us. Alleluia. Alleluia.”
I like to repost blog entries from earlier years, not only because I like to revisit
think that is true. I still think our imaginations are dominated by someone else’s playbook. We are still speaking someone else’s language and hearing someone else’s song. That is all the more reason I feel the need to return to a conversation about grace before we go any further.
At least December 21st, the winter solstice, has some astronomical significance. But there is nothing about the sun, moon and stars that seem to put Christmas Eve, Dec 24th on the “Big Deal” calendar. Historically speaking, it was Emperor Julius that declared December 25th the celebration of Jesus’ birth, but actually the calendar itself has changed since then. In fact, in Russia, the orthodox church still celebrates Christmas on January 7th (which would be December 25th in Julian’s Calendar.) And even if you’re looking for the actual feast day for Saint Nicholas, the day when children used to put their shoes out in hopes of getting gifts, look to December 6th in western countries, not, “Christmas.”
Cynicism. In many ways it seems like the most logical, natural way to wrap up a year like 2016. There have been so many unexpected deaths: 
So here we are at the end of a year that has captured our imagination if by no other means than the fear and spectacle of it all. Not only have our thoughts and feelings been driven by the political circus of this year, so have some of our actions. It has demanded our attention, but now it is Advent. It is time to redirect our attention to where it belongs.
FaceBook is admittedly a strange land. Is it not? And it has been clear for quite some while that we don’t really know how to dwell there as our best human selves. Even so, in the past few weeks I have noticed something in myself and in others that has lead me to an admittedly bizarre but entirely sincere conclusion: I may be in need of an exorcism, and it is very probable you might need one too.