I’ve noted in my eclectic twitter and facebook feeds a slight trend that I first noticed this past week, before Easter, during which someone commented that they are tired of being, or that they shouldn’t be ashamed of their faith and wanted to shout it out. Then, of course, someone quoted the verses where Jesus said, if you are ashamed to acknowledge me in this life then I won’t acknowledge you in the next life. That was a bit of a buzz-kill, but I still saw a few “He Lives!” that seemed to come from this initial thought that we shouldn’t be ashamed of our Faith. Is this the Christian version of the “I love you, man” that guys say to each other after watching a good football game and a few round of beer?

In Bad Faith, Part 9: He Lives … In the example of Your Day-to-Day Lives

My Jesus-Freak high school self

I poke fun because I’m that guy in high school who, with my dear Christian friends, decided one beautiful, sunny lunch break, probably around Easter time, that we needed to not be ashamed of our faith and confronted our non-believing fellow students and got all verbal with them about the gospel. I’m so thankful (and hopeful) that my fellow students might remember said incidents as just another silly adolescent not-thought-out moment. I mean, I forgive them for wanting to and/or throwing stuff at our little group after those incidents. I’ve never been particularly fond of Confrontational Christianity since then. Of course, mom would remind me that words are cheap and that actions speak louder than words. Thanks mom. Love mom’s obviousness.




Our culture is so weird where politicians feel the need to prove how qualified they are for the job by parading their family and faith out to the public, where we’re either over-sensitive or oblivious to whether we should talk about our beliefs with our neighbors, but doing anything about the disenfranchised all around us isn’t even on the agenda. I mean, part of the reason some of us go to church is to not be part of the disenfranchised and unconsciously we make such people uncomfortable to walk in the door and stink up our plush pews. We’re not mean. We just prefer an impersonal way of “dealing with those people,” through our tithes… assuming that any of that money goes any further than the pastor’s latest building project or salary. I don’t mean to be mean. I’m writing mostly to myself, in that I was a serious tither, giving my 10 percent (after taxes) from the time I first started working many many decades ago and wonder whether that money really did anyone any good. And why is god always running out of money?

I love my brother’s approach:

Too many glasses of wine, feeling love for all mankind. I know we don’t deserve this, we are all so flawed, but that is the real message of Easter. That we are lovable despite all of all of our problems. Have a wonderful Easter. Jesus is Risen, now go hide some eggs.

And as my mom would probably say, it really is all about how we treat one another, not during the special moments, but in the day-to-day moments. Now go out and hug someone who needs a hug today.

“When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?” And the King shall answer and say unto them, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25: 38-40 KJV

        

Last week I wrote this thought on my white board in my office:

What is it that you most love in life,
and how do you express it in your
day to day routine?

Thinking about the aunts and uncles who’ll be at this year’s Christmas gathering, and realizing that the list is getting shorter. My dear sister-in-law, Connie, passed last Spring. And a life-long friend whom I haven’t had the best communication with, has had incredible health difficulties since taking a fall a few months ago. For my part, I’ve been so busy, with an almost around-the-clock sense of urgency tending to my job. Because of the freedom I’ve been given I feel the need to work all the harder to deliver the best possible learning experience for my students. That’s a blessing, but I still need to pause a moment and consider bringing the bigger vision into the daily routine.

I shouldn’t let a day go by without picking up my guitar. I shouldn’t let a day go by when I don’t write in this blog. I should let a day go by when I don’t call up a friend just to say, “hi.” I’ve done these important things too infrequently this past year and that needs to change. After my uncle Joe passed, whenever I found myself relaxing for a moment, especially if the moment included a good IPA, I raised my glass in his honor. I didn’t do this because I thought that he might be haunting me or aware of my gesture, but because I wanted to honor the memory of his work ethic, what he contributed to in the life of his six daughters and dozen of grandchildren and just the man’s man who he was.

So, there needs to be more room for the meditation that I find in my guitar. Thus, last night when I should have been trying to get some sleep because I had an early morning video shoot (I was doing the behind the scene stills), I found myself listening to some Sarah McLachlan and then strumming along, then looking up the lyrics and chords for the song on the Internet, then learning the song and playing until my finger, that have long lost their callouses, forced me to quit. I’ve long felt a strong emotional connection to McLachlan, but when I listened to the lyric last night, something in the careful twist of words really connected it to the journey I’ve been on. I decided that this would be a good place to start getting back to the things/people I love in my life.

“Fallen“
Heaven bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I tried my best
But somewhere long the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
But the cost was so much more than I could bear

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves
The past can be undone
But we carry on our back, the burden
Time always reveals
In the lonely light of morning
In the wound that would not heal
It’s the bitter taste of losing everything
that I’ve held so dear…

I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Heaven bend to take my hand
I’ve nowhere left to turn
I’m lost to those I thought were friends
To everyone I know
Oh they turn their heads embarrassed
Pretend that they don’t see
But it’s one missed step you’ll slip before you know it
And there doesn’t seem a way to be redeemed

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Sources:
* “Fallen” by Sarah McLachlan from her Afterglow CD

* youtube video: Sarah McLachlan Fallen Live – Macworld 2003 Keynote posted by cryotekk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKqFw9x_IM retrieved 12/11/2009

p.s., I used to catch hell for my affinity and attraction to artist’s like McLachlan. This person would tease me, saying that I needed to quit listening to the “lesbians” because the music was making me too moody. I’m glad that I didn’t stop listening. The music didn’t make me moody, it spoke to the shitty situation and my frustration with it. Making this song a part of my emotional vocabulary is a far better way to move past those trouble times than to pretend that they didn’t happen or wall off whole sections of ones life. There, I said it.

        

Well, crap…

Now I forgot what it was.

source:
Sister Kat’s Email Spam

        

One of my students commented in his blog that he’d just had a relaxing weekend, noting that he’d actually had time to do some yard work with his wife and how much better the experience was versus the typical weekend of continuous running around. Interesting. As I continue my own house-hunting adventure I wonder how this change from life-long renter to first-time buyer will change my own disposition towards a “relaxing weekend doing yard work.” In a Pepperdine assignment on mentoring for my Masters degree I’ve already gone on record writing that I’ve already done my time doing yard work as a child and adolescent. Maybe that’ll change. maybe not. Here’s the Pepperdine essay:

Mentoring Analysis – The Benefit of Learning By Example

dad workin' on the MV house circa 1977

I thought that it was understood that once we’d successfully escaped our father’s unsatisfiable tutelage that we’d never ever again spend another day toiling under the sun, pruning trees, or doing anything beyond the minimum necessary to keep the lawn from over-growing and swallowing up the patio furniture. But there he was proudly displaying his garden and the huge ears of corn he was expecting in a few weeks. Damn. I guess new homeownership does that to a person.

Okay, so not everyone takes the vows of teenage-boys seriously (brother!), and it wasn’t exactly the “Grapes of Wrath.” But it was negative enough to leave the above “not-so-fond” memory. Let’s just say, when I began to read Shea and recalled the nurturing/supportive characteristics we all agreed a mentor should have, my father silently slipped off the list . . . at first.

Based on Gordan Shea’s list of twenty characteristics about “What Mentors Do” (p.14) my father exhibited eight of the twenty characteristics (usually having to do with doing the job right, and his quotable quote was, “Can’t you guys do anything right?!,” so I wasn’t sure whether I should count that one). Of the twenty-two characteristics (see below) that we cooked up in Colorado his numbers dropped to just two. Actually, this whole business of going back and mining my memory for mentoring moments and/or relationships was getting pretty depressing for me. As I worked my way through my list there was an obvious pattern of learning from a distance so as not to get too close to whichever leader (and suffer from his/her potential wrath). It’s pretty clear where that pattern came from.

It was many years later in the middle of one of my child-development classes, when we were discussing the Characteristics of Play, that it suddenly dawned on me that my father’s endless weekends of yardwork was his form of leisure. It was his form of play. Of course, none of this had made sense to my brother and I as kids because this was anything but fun to us. But to my father the “work” meant a great deal to him and having us there to “share” it with him also meant a great deal (even though we were anything but receptive to any message at the time). And even odder still was that he worked in landscaping and spent his whole week doing pretty much the same things for a living. The only difference, on the surface, between his work-a-day world and what he did on the weekends he was working on his yard with his boys. But at the time we never saw it.

In one of last term’s readings Frank Smith made it clear that learning happens whether we want it to or not, more from the people we’re around than from the words of teachers.

“We learn from the people around us with whom we identify. We can’t help learning from them, and we learn without knowing that we are learning.” Frank Smith. The Book of Learning and Forgetting, 1998, p.3

So when I look at the person I’ve become and look at the long hours that I put in and the high expectation that I have for myself and the work that I do, I now know where those values came from. Those were values that were important to him, values that saw him through the early years of his own life when he didn’t have a father to lead him. And just as he never looked at the difficulties of his own up-bring for an apology for not having had a “perfect childhood,” I don’t expect or want an apology from him for the often vitriolic relationship that we had as father and son. I understand that he was just being a man, a man true to his core values and those values didn’t always translate well to squirrely seven- and ten-year-old boys.

cloudy sunset over Mission Viejo CA circa 1977

Sources:
"Crisp : Mentoring , Third Edition : How to Develop Successful Mentor Behaviors – Crisp 50-Minute Book." by Gordon F. Shea

"The Book of Learning and Forgetting" by Frank Smith

All images by Joe Bustillos

        

I was bitching last week about feeling like the only one I knew using the ‘Net to connect with family, so my sister surprised me this morning with this amazing photo of my nephew, Danny, on stage playing with his band. It’s a friggin’ awesome photo. Now that’s what I’m talking about, as far as using the web to share stuff. Kat & flickr (& Danny) FTW! jbb

        

It’s long past the election season and things have moved on from battling video days between the two warring campaigns. After I’d forwarded a get-out-the-vote/Obama video a friend sent the following video to me:

“One Vote” – ValueVotersUSA.com (official)

Beautiful video with a somewhat overly dramatic soundtrack, then I started paying attention to words floating up on the screen. Very moving words about very moving ideas, just one problem, did the producers of this video seriously think that the Democratic candidate was going to take away the rights and beliefs expressed in the video? Except for being Pro-Choice, which is more than enough for most conservative Christians, one would be hard pressed to reject Obama’s credentials as a Christian.

This is something that I never quite understood about the Republican Right somehow claiming conservative Christianity as their own territory. The “down home” kind of Faith of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton seemed much more genuine than the more “religion of political expediency” of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Senior. G.W.’s faith was certainly “genuine” but I’m not sure whether that was an asset or problem for the Right. Really, once we gets past the rhetoric and to each man’s genuine Faith, who could one look at this video and not say that both candidates were committed to the American values we all hold sacred?

The video mentions several times about how divided America has become. Perhaps they should examine the notes from their own strategy meetings to find the source of this fear-mongering and divisiveness. And while they’re looking, let’s think about whether we really hold that every life from conception is precious while we continue to kill hundreds of people in foreign lands. Aren’t their lives precious too? It’s easy to float powerful, emotional words across a screen. What’s more important are the actions of a man with regards to his beliefs and the actions of the nation amongst the other nations. Everything else is bankrupt and meaningless noise.

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do. James 2:14-18

        

The Thanksgiving holiday is a family thing. In years past, with one notable exception I’ve never suffered from a lack of having family to spend the afternoon/evening with. I’ve been fortunate that way. Having a “significant other” has been an entirely different story. Given that I’m now a several hundred miles from family and the significant other issue… well, I’m going no where near that one… Let me just say that I have been most fortunate to have several friends here in Florida who have invited me into their homes to share the holiday with. Granted, I would have never anticipated that the turkey, dressing, potatoes, and salad would be mixed with a healthy dose of Nintendo Wii Boxing, Cow Racing and Tennis. All I can say is “Life is Good.”

        

At the end of a nice call with dear ol’ dad recently he asked, “So, have you found a church to go to?” I gave a friendly chuckle on my end, hoping to defuse the question. I didn’t expect that one. A week or so ago a new friend who had been cruising my blog asked, “So how’s the God search going?” and then immediately add, “sorry If I overstepped ,” when I hesitated with an answer. In both cases I hesitated because I knew that a straight forward answer would have been the exact opposite of what they were hoping for or anticipating. For my dad, his faith is such a deep seated part of his whole reality and I’m the son who has a degree in Biblical Studies and more recently was very active in my church back in CA. And with my friend, I’m under the impression that her conversion experience is something very new in her life. I didn’t want to say something that would upset their experience of life. It’s funny, my hesitancy comes from the fact that I care enough about them that I don’t want to upset them or disappoint them with my contrarian point of view.

In the past I’ve been accused of writing things in my blog that seemed to show no regard as to whether what I wrote might be hurtful to others and in some cases writing things with the intension to hurt. Truthfully I might have written things in my blog that I was so passionate about or overwhelmed over that I didn’t or couldn’t look too far beyond my angst to realize how some might take my venting. So, it seems odd to me, in my old age, that I’m so hesitant to work out my “faith issues” here in my blog…

On one level I don’t want my dad or my old church friends to visit these pages and be left with a head-shaking “that’s too bad” feeling about me. I don’t want them to think that I was anything less than completely sincere or genuine with my expressions of faith. At the same time, I’m not like some I’ve known who couldn’t reconcile their private and public lives and so lived in fear of being “discovered.” I guess the best that I can do is to be honest and continue to work through my issues and trust that those who genuinely have my best interests will give me room to explore my life’s path even when it heads in directions that they’d rather I didn’t follow. Anyway, besides being my usual busy self, this hesitancy is why I haven’t written as much in this category of my blog as I’ve wanted to. Having now covered this part of the conversation, I guess I can move on to the other stuff like musings on the wiring of my home network or whether I should buy an Amazon Kindle. Just kidding… kind’a. jbb

Music: Mr. Blue Sky by ELO from the All Over the World: The Very Best of ELO CD

        

I have a very good job in Florida teaching masters students how to use media and technology in their classrooms and businesses. I left a very uncertain situation in public education in California where most of my co-workers are going to have to look for other teaching jobs or interview to keep the jobs they have in the next two-years. Another friend, who has been battling on-going medical issues, openly wondered whether it was worth the hassle for her to keep her house as the medical bills mount up. And yet with all of this my friends and I are by world standards very, very rich. Our difficulties are generally not about survival but about which luxury activity we’re going to have to forego because things are “a little tight.” It’s hard to balance this kind of life with issues like Poverty.

In a discussion session with a group of masters students last night, one student posed the question about whether our use of technology (some might say “addiction”) was preventing us from living a life connected to our neighbors, our environment or our heritage. He followed up with an observation that it seemed like places that are less driven by technology like some parts of Europe and the Third World move at a much slower pace and seem to actually have a better quality of life. It was an interesting insight to imagine that we are technology rich but our lives our poor in terms of meaningful connections, whereas parts of the world that we would consider poor might have richer, more meaningful existence.

I do not pose these thoughts in an effort to generate some “we should feel guilty for being so rich” kind of thing. If anything it should be obvious that there isn’t a one-for-one connection between being “rich” and the quality of one’s life. I’ve been thinking for some time that I need to contact my local chapter of something like Habitat for Humanity and get involved. In a life that’s often overly crowded with things and thoughts I need to do this for me, get my hands dirty and join others helping ourselves by helping each other. Sending a check isn’t such a bad idea, but spending some weekends in someone else’s shoes and neighborhood would be much better… for all of us. jbb

Music: Mad World from the album “Donnie Darko (Music From the Original Motion Picture Score)” by Michael Andrews