The Outpatient Monk. Posts

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…

Almost exactly 30 years ago, in the fall of 1988, I was attending high school in a suburb of Los Angeles when I caught the acting bug.  In that part of the world, wanting to be an actor was more of a rite of passage than a particular vocation.  A lot of us went through some kind of acting phase. Nevertheless, I took myself quite seriously at the time, so I dropped out of high school, took an acting class, and landed my first paying gig saying two lines in a sex education movie for high schoolers and youth groups.  While my performance was… ahem… not Oscar worthy, the crew took a liking to me and was generous enough to invite me to the movie set every day while they were shooting. One afternoon we filmed an interview with a man who would become the first person I would actually meet who was living with HIV/AIDS that I knew about.  His story moved me, (and haunted me, and inspired me) in a way all the vague and ominous news reporting about this thing called “GRID,” the “gay cancer,” “ARC,” and AIDS had not. And it was a bout to cheange the entire direction of my life…

December 1st Release Date

I promise you this, Rigel Thurston’s new recording, We Sing Together, is your new favorite Christmas album. Thurston has crafted something scarce here merely by having faith in the music he is playing and his ability to play it. Because of that faith, his songs are generous and endearing without any of the sentimentality and cheap manipulation that plagues almost every other Christmas recording of the last few years. If you aren’t already sold, keep reading. I am willing to make my case.

I like to repost blog entries from earlier years, not only because I like to revisit
what I was thinking at the time but I like to consider how changes in our context changes what is important to say in an particular moment.   When I wrote this, I really wanted to underscore the need for grace, in the sense I wanted to emphasize that what happens in lent at its best is a gift of God and not a mere matter of will-power as I am sometimes tempted to think. This year is different.

This year I have been experiencing how this is true on a visceral level. I am somehow more aware than I am unable to say very much that is to interesting or helpful given our current profound division and tension.  In Advent, I even suspected out loud that I (and all of us) might be due for an exorcism.  I still 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.

If we are going to end up anywhere but in the middle of an inevitable mess, we will need an intervention, an in-breaking of insight, an impossible way out of Egypt, …deliverance? Grace.

It is a good day, today, Ash Wednesday 2017, to remember that we don’t have to rely on our mere will power to get us there.   There is a lot of will power going on around us and it seems to be sending us in circles.  More is waiting for us.  More is at hand.  More is near.   But ‘more’ asks that we throw ourselves into it’s fire. I’d like to think I am ready, willing, and able… but more importantly, I am at least just willing if not ready and able, that God will get us there.

Here is my post from before…