HOME

When someone turns their back on you, it hurts. When you can tell that someone is talking about you to someone else in the room with the whispered warning of, “don’t look now, but guess who just showed up,” it pushes down on you like a ridiculously heavy backpack. When your very best efforts to please someone result in a dismissive lack of affirmation, it creates distance, anger, and resentment.

When a person is ugly or dirty or smelly or boisterous or crass or impatient or flamboyant we all treat them differently. We turn our back to them without realizing we’ve hurt them. We warn others in our group to be aware of “that person over there” without intent of malice. We dismissively nod thanks to them with a fake smile and hurried eyes if they engage us while unknowingly reaffirming a multitude of rejection stereotypes.

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The “Homeless”—I don’t even know what that means anymore. I get that we’re talking about people that don’t have a home. We’re talking about individuals and families that lack the resources necessary to procure sustainable shelter. What I mean when I say that I don’t know what “homeless” means is that I need a definitive explanation of the word HOME.

I’m too philosophically driven to only accept HOME as the place where a person, family, or household lives. That’s the easy definition, but what about HOME as a safe place? A place where a person can find refuge and safety or live in security? What about a HOME office or HOME field advantage? What about a criticism that hits HOME or driving the nail HOME? What if I’m HOME free or happy to be HOME for the holidays?

Certainly, there are connotations of where someone dwells within each of these depictions, but it has to be about more than where someone physically resides. It has to do with one’s origins—less about geography and more about a sense of belonging.

HOME is more about where the heart lives and what the heart connects to than it is about where we keep our stuff.

If that’s true then I think more of us are “homeless” than we realize. I’ve known wealthy CEO’s and pillars of the community that were as homeless as any vagrant living under a bridge. I know families living in 6,000 sq. ft. houses just as homeless as the dirtiest bag lady on the street. Politicians, Clergy, Writers, Doctors, Educators, Sculptors, Executives, and Judges—all as homeless as anyone could ever be because their hearts don’t have a HOME.

When a heart doesn’t have a HOME (a place of safety and nurturing) it develops a sense of entitlement, self-importance, paranoia, and ultimately the mechanism of rejecting others before being rejected.

A heart needs a place to rest comfortably from time to time. A heart needs food and shelter. A heart needs to be fed compassion and trust and loyalty and love and respect in order to remain healthy. A healthy heart needs time to heal and time to rest and time to experience peace.

But that’s not all a heart needs!

A heart also needs exercise through acts of service to others. It needs work and responsibility and needs to be stretched. A healthy heart needs to perform. It needs cycles of rest and work, peace and stress, acceptance both received and given. A healthy heart HAS TO be used or else it decays. And once it has decayed for long enough it becomes a hardened lump of atrophied muscle capable of one thing only—self-preservation.

You’ve seen the street homeless with their dirty clothes, constant walking, bags upon bags of “stuff”, and distant stares shuffling down the street. They are in self-preservation mode. Their defenses acutely devised to keep you and everyone else away. Their trust has died. Their fears have overtaken them. They’ve had backs turned on them for so long that they wonder if they themselves actually exist. Their flamboyant behavior is a warning sign to stay away.

From a broken, lonely, depraved place where a healthy heart struggles to exist we all defend against the sadness, loneliness, and hopelessness we’ve suffered in our lives.

We are all homeless.

We are all dysfunctional.

We are all broken.

We are all HOMELESS.

Beware false promises of a HOME for your heart. Physical beauty, possessions, power, influence, control, and stature may be how we errantly label one’s identity, but none of these things provide a HOME for the heart. And once you find that true home for your heart, DO NOT abandon it for promises of something bigger and better. The most honorable, healing, peaceful, loving places a heart can call home are also, more often than not, the simplest places, things, and people in our lives.

Find a home for your heart and then go about the business of finding homes for other people’s hearts. Because if you are interested in fighting poverty, abuse, hunger, and hatred you need to understand that these are malignant tumors on society brought about by a culture of homeless hearts searching for significance through the exploitation of others.

The worst part about a heart without a home is NOT that it dies. The worst part is that it WANTS TO DIE but cannot. The worst part is that when it cannot die it feeds on others. The homeless heart, left unchecked, can destroy and consume and devastate anything in its path. It’s like a tornado—a resulting force of nature without any positive reason for existence. And often, just like that tornado, the chronically homeless heart is arbitrary about who or what it affects.

Here’s the magnificent part—when you are about the business of feeding compassion and trust and loyalty and love and respect to the hearts of others, your own heart is satisfied. It’s circular. It’s rhythmic. It’s organic. It’s what we call communal living and there is no individual achievement that can take its place.

A healthy home for a heart is NOT an efficiency apartment. It is a high school gymnasium filled with cots. Don’t buy into the idea of self-sufficiency. If you do, you might find a place for your stuff, but you will not find a place for your heart.

Think big and give big.

Christian cultural warfare

Let me be clear about something for a moment. No more nuance. No more metaphor. No more poetic adaptations of spiritual revelations. Just straight up honesty…right…wrong…or otherwise. Pure individual opinion and preference.

Today’s brand of western Christianity sucks ass!

If you’ve been brainwashed with the message of fanaticism that HATES Obama or HATES gays or HATES immigrants (legal or illegal) or HATES anything then you need to stay the fuck away from me. I’m trying my best to be a godly man.

I want to be loving. I want to be joyful. I want to be peaceful. I want to be patient. I want to be kind. I want to experience all the “fruit” (or byproducts) of a life lived according to the Holy Spirit of our God, but you assholes keep pissing me off.

I want to be non-violent, but every time I hear a “Christian” spouting hate, disrespect, and malicious slander I want to kick them to sleep. I want to be gentle, but every time I hear a “Christian” reciting their pastor’s particular flavor of scriptural interpretation which clearly runs cross-grain to the life of a peaceful loving Christ I want to bash their teeth in with a Maglite. I want to be respectful, but every time I hear a “Christian” speak with authority about politics, spirituality, and sexuality that they have NO personal experience with I have to fight back the urge to fold their knee backward with a well-placed heel kick. I want to be humble, but it’s hard not to think everyone around me is a complete dumbass when it seems clear that all the noise of the culture war around us is obviously drowning out human suffering in every corner of our world. I don’t want to let these things get to me. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to rant. I want peace.

But today’s most visual and vocal brand of a provocative Christianity is THE biggest stumbling block for me. I’m guessing it’s quite the stumbling block for others as well. Either that or I’m the only one out here psychotic enough to be affected by these lunatics. Yes, I can call them lunatics because I was once one of them. I taught the same garbage. I worshipped the same idols of religion, politics, doctrine, and selfish interpretation of scripture. I was fully dialed in to the frequency of status quo mainstream Christianity. But then God saved me.

I’m certain that the greatest salvation I’ve ever experienced in my life has been a salvation from what I thought Christianity was. I know now that Jesus died on that cross for me that day not to save me from my sins, but to save me from my religion. He sacrificed flesh, bone, blood, dignity, and life so that someday Bonar Crump would be saved from the hell of 21^st century western Christianity.

Obviously, everything in me isn’t fixed if I truly have these tendencies of violence toward jackass 21^st century Christians, but I’m really really trying and praying and seeking and working on it. This is why I keep ALL forms of organized Christian religion at arm’s length. This is why I try to debrief my daughter each time we attend church. This is why I confer and seek council from my wife anytime the noise of Christian cultural warfare begins to drown out my sense of peacefulness and joy. This is why I write this stuff as I attempt to release it from my brain via verbal processing. I have to verbally vomit into my laptop from time to time just to keep the noise level in my head to a dull roar.

Is it any wonder that I cling so tightly to the biker subculture that I embrace? See, there is peace in being a part of a subculture that the jackass “Christians” don’t want any part of. Don’t get me wrong…there are plenty of Christ followers among the ranks of us bikers, but the really nasty “Christians” stay very far away from us. As a matter of fact, they lock the doors to their cars when we pull up next to them at intersections. That suits me just fine.

The curious thing to me is that there is a lot of the same kind of hate speech within the biker community, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much. You’ll find a fair amount of bigotry, misogyny, and political fanaticism at any of our large biker meetings, but these are mostly folks exercising their freedom of belief, speech, and lifestyle guaranteed by our Constitution. What appears to me to be intolerance and anger is based on their own authority. It’s their opinion and right to have and express whatever they like. I get it. But it’s different for me when I hear someone reflecting the same exact intolerances while wearing a shirt that says, “Jesus said so.”

You know what! If you’re wearing that shirt today I have one very important thing to say to you: go fuck yourself. That and stay the fuck away from me. I respect your right to your freedoms of speech, action, and lifestyle, but NOT if you’re going to cover it all with a self-serving coat of Christian paint, thereby, presenting the message to the world that you are merely following the directives of your God. You are not! You are following the guidance of your idols. You just don’t know it yet.

I’ve been told that I am actually a very nice person. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that it’s a lot easier for me to be nice when I’m not surrounded by mainstream Christians. Wondering why church attendance all over the western world continues to drop off at an amazing rate? It’s because no one wants to hang out with assholes. It’s really not all that complicated. Figure it out!

Herd versus Tribe

A close friend of mine recently told me that mainstream Christianity had made her an asshole. The more we discussed the subject, it seemed to draw toward what happens to an individual when they become part of the “herd”. We discussed our individual rejections of the “herd”. We wrestled with the defiance of “herd mentality”. We resolved to maintain our independent critical thinking and never again follow the “herd.”

The victorious defiance that we shared was real. But…the more thought I put into the matter over the next couple days, the more I began to question if we were trying to function as fully autonomous disciples. It seems counter-intuitive to completely reject the herd as a means of redeeming the herd. (That sentence makes a lot of sense to me and, yet, when I read it the meaning gets tangled up in the syntax.) What I mean is that those of us on the front edge of a Christian reform movement which is driving the post-modern, missional, socially responsive changes that we are witnessing today in the Church have to sell more than just the message of “damn the herd”. Because everyone that buys that t-shirt automatically defines themselves as one group rejecting another group’s dynamics based on the precept that being a part of a group will always make you an asshole. Do you see the insanity of it? I want to be a part of a herd that rejects herds.

Over the last couple of days as I’ve processed our discussion, I remembered writing quite a bit about rejecting the herd and seeking a new tribe in my book. So that got me thinking about the differences between a tribe and a herd. I don’t think I need to drone on and on about the differences, but I will say that the most obvious distinction is that animals form a herd and people form tribes.

Maybe the real discussion is about being a Christian animal versus being a Christian human. I would argue that the Christian animal is concerned with little more than survival (receiving sustenance), procreation (increasing numbers), and preserving the integrity of the herd (worship of religion). By contrast the Christian human embodies the burning desire to question and reason—to seek knowledge and truth—to sacrifice safety and security for the sake of humanitarian efforts—to save and rescue other tribal members from the savages of neglect, abuse, and hunger.

Personally, I reject the institutional church because I don’t want to be fed from a trough—I want to feed from the land. I don’t want to be led by professional shepherds—I want to be interactive in the direction and goals of the tribe. I don’t want to be fenced in by traditionalism and culturally irrelevant ethos—I want to explore uncharted regions of faith and risk injury from time to time. I don’t want to be labeled a Christian beast—I want to be known as a critical thinker even if I’m wrong sometimes.

I want to reject the herd for the sake of being a part of a tribe. Maybe you don’t see the distinction, but there is one. The difference is huge! The tribe is an organism that works together and relies upon one another to meet the collective needs of the tribe. I like to think of primitive indigenous tribes and how they live with one another and for one another. I like to think about my tribe as one that is nomadic, dynamic, and culturally savvy. I like to look around me and see the tribal tattoos and piercings. I like to look around me and see a tribe that celebrates diversity and compassion. I like seeing a genuine acceptance of racial, sexual, and economic diversity in my tribe. And when I say it’s “my tribe,” I don’t mean that it belongs to me. I mean that I get to belong to IT as a contributing, learning, respectful member happy to be a part of something bigger than myself and more powerful than any of the single members of the tribe are independent of one another.

Are you a part of a herd or are you a part of a tribe? The answer will have a profound effect on your heart and soul. Jesus had a tribe of disciples that He led. He was also often found trying to get away from the herd of curious folks looking for healing, food, or hope without the understanding that Jesus was offering them entry into the tribe. He was NOT offering them admission to a herd.

If you’re suspicious that you might be mingling with the herd instead of participating in a tribe then chances are you don’t know yet how to engage scripture, religion, and fellow herd members with independent critical thought. It’s difficult to transition. It’s hard to reject something that has always been a part of your life. It’s physically, emotionally, and psychologically exhausting to engage the members of your herd with the message of a tribe. All you can do is leave the gate open when you escape. Some will find their way out. Some will do everything in their power to shut that gate back up.

The herd and herd mentality are powerful agents of persuasion. Do not underestimate their appeal. Most members of my tribe have experiences anything from 2 to 5 years of soul-searching transition, conflict, and self-doubt before ever finding our group. One member that I know of was subjected to such ridicule, shame, and spiritual abuse that he contemplated suicide. That’s right—educated and trained at Southwest Theological Seminary; this guy started asking too many questions about herd mentality and was shamefully cast to the curb without an inkling of concern for him or his family, how they would survive financially, or how it would affect every single aspect of their future. Another is a family member of mine cast aside by a church herd where the pastor of the institution wept at his shameful dismissal but in the end threw up his hands because major financial benefactors in the herd required his head on a platter because this family member had questioned the necessity of a new organ and sanctuary remodeling when 1/10^th of that money could have funded an established program to house and feed several dozen homeless families.

We’ve all heard the stories and seen their effects, but we tell ourselves, “wow, THOSE guys are really messed up.” All the while the same things are happening in your herd without you even knowing it. Wake up! Analyze, pray, research, ask questions, seek, find, knock, open, pray again, and be sure to listen this time. Because the thing about being a member of the herd is that you don’t realize it’s a herd. Just like an asshole justifies being an asshole because they always have an excuse for their behavior. You have to separate from these things in order to really allow the blood to begin circulating to the independently critical thinking parts of your brain.

The gospel will not make you an asshole. Jesus will not make you an asshole. Even the being a member of the herd doesn’t make you an asshole. It is the hardening of one’s heart that creates the asshole, and that, my friend, happens when the complacency, laziness, and self-centered nature of the “herd” sets in. It’s simply that WE aren’t designed to be a herd. We are designed to be a tribe.

I’m looking forward to the next conversation with my close friend. I want to explore these thoughts and see if there is somewhere to settle on how to make the transition from herd to tribe more efficient and less damaging. It’s great once you get here, but the trip is murder. Maybe she’ll be able to help me release the anger and resentment I feel toward the herd. Maybe that’s my barrier of forgiveness that I need to breach in order to be a better member of my tribe. Maybe I’ve transitioned to the tribe but still maintain my asshole status. Maybe we’re all living in a constant state of uniqueness transition. Maybe God likes us that way. Maybe the potter likes molding clay more than He does putting it in the kiln. Maybe the journey is everything and there is no destination. Maybe I should wrap this up.

The Boys of Summer

Every year at this time I try to convince myself that this will be the year I cultivate a love for baseball.

It is beyond me why I’ve never caught the baseball virus. I’m built like a baseball player. Most people assume that I played baseball in college. It’s a game that seems to encourage statistical analysis. Baseball mixes power, finesse, bravado, and steely-eyed competition into a beautiful confederation of colors set on a field of grass and dirt that emit a sense of puckish youthfulness.

I want to love it. I should love it. By all accounts I should be a complete fanatic about the game, but it cannot hold my interest for long. I can find no fault with baseball that would preclude a passion for the game. I think that it is a game I was probably meant to love but for some reason cannot.

I think that for one to truly be a fan of something does NOT mean that they must be a fanatic. I mean…I think I could argue that I’m a fan of baseball, but to do so in the proximity of a few of my closest friends that are fanatics would earn me the label of HYPOCRITE.

These guys that I speak of consume the game. They adjust their schedules around the game. They spend a considerable amount of time and money attending games. They watch the games, analyze the games, and then read someone else’s analysis of the same games the very next day as they are watching the current games. These guys invest the kind of time, money, and heart into the game of baseball that makes me feel hypocritical when I describe myself as a fan.

I don’t deserve to wear the same cool stuff they do when they invite me to the games. I don’t know who the legendary announcers are that have nurtured their love of the sport. I don’t understand the nicknames and histories of individual players (see Fat Elvis). I get it, but I just don’t get it. I get it when I’m watching a game with these guys, but when I’m watching a game by myself I don’t get it.

Passion is a funny thing. It summons enthusiasm that cannot be faked. It invokes emotion that cannot be faked. It induces desire sometimes distinct from reason or intellect. It arouses love, joy, hatred, anger, jealousy, et. al.

Sometimes I envy my good friends that are passionate about baseball. This is an exciting time of year for them. From the moment that pitchers and catchers report to camp until the last game of the World Series these guys gleefully grin and toast and argue and cheer for a game, a team, and for individual players that throw, hit, and catch a ball. It’s quite a zen-like thing to watch as a non-fanatic wannabe baseball fan.

Having passion is good, I think. Your passions help to mold you and define a piece of who you are. I love that passion can change us at our core. I love that passion is somehow reliant on hope. Whatever we are passionate about will get the majority of our time and mental RAM.

I want more passions in my life. My passion for Jesus, my wife, my daughter, my Harley, and my running should be enough. But I’d like more. I’d like to be as passionate about people, in general, as I am about people’s ideas. I’d like to be passionate about child abuse and human trafficking and hunger and need. I’d like to be passionate about grace, mercy, and peace. I’d like to be passionate about injustice. I want to be passionate about the things that Jesus (one of my passions) is passionate about. I feel hypocritical being a fan of these things when I’m in the presence of those that are passionate about them.

Maybe I’m a fraud. Maybe we’re all frauds. Maybe we all want to take sides on the Trayvon Martin issue without understanding that Godly passion is laced with hope not hatred. Maybe we all want to be passionate about our political agendas without considering that righteous passion loves—it does not destroy or discredit. Maybe we all want to formulate exhaustive opinions about anything and everything as a means of convincing ourselves that we are not living lives void of passion. Maybe we all suck. I suspect that we most certainly do.

I hope we don’t all suck. I don’t want to believe that we are all frauds, phonies, and hypocrites. I want to believe that we all have passions that might be misguided instead of believing that we are absent of passion. I’d much rather think of us all possessing misplaced passion rather than being passionless. Passionless means dead. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to have misguided passions—but I know that I do. Still, I’d rather know there is passion in my life than to be dead inside—absent of hope—eyes at my feet instead of on the horizon.

Here’s to passion and all the messiness that it brings with it! I do love people, but I hope to become passionate about their lives and their suffering. I want to be infected with the passion that I see in Jesus. I’m not interested in the passions of His followers. I want the real stuff. I want to know that what I’m passionate about matters. I don’t want to be a fraud. And as these righteous passions grow inside of me I’m hoping that there isn’t a limit on the number of things one can be passionate about.

I still want to be passionate about baseball. That part is real, too. It’s just that I want to be equally as passionate about people’s heart as I am about the Cardinals. It’s much less messy to be a Cards fanatic than it is to be a fanatic of suffering, environmentalism, economic disparity, and the elimination of hate. However, I still think baseball might be my gateway drug. I sense that the green grass and rosin and smell of beer might represent the pleasant hopefulness necessary to dive into the messier passions of human existence.

I want to know what a RALLY SQUIRREL is. I want to put 20,000 miles a year on my ’07 Dyna Lowrider. I want to run 4 full marathons a year. I want to be fully engaged in the everyday miracle that is my wife and daughter. I want to “seek first the kingdom of God.” And through kingdom seeking I hope to add the passions of Jesus to my growing list of passions.

All of that and I’d like the Texas Rangers to win the World Series. But don’t tell all my buds that are Cardinal fanatics. The reason they all say that the Rangers didn’t win the 2011 World Series is because Ranger fans aren’t the same caliper as Cardinal fanatics. The say Ranger fans only show interest in the post-season. They say a team without passion can never ultimately achieve their goals against adversity. Maybe they’re right. Maybe a group of fanatics CAN raise the level of play of the team they’re passionate about. I’d certainly like to think so. 

KONY 2012