Unemployed Theologian

In her writing tutorial/memoir Bird by Bird , Anne Lamott advises her students to look through a one-inch picture frame as they write their stories. Focus in on one thing, she says, like a dimple, a calculus test, or a smell that recalls a memory, and dig into the truth behind that object or moment. Many a writer has drowned in the enormity of their scope, so Lamott reminds us to start small and go from there. She also suggests near the end of the book that her readers practice on stories from their childhoods. Because childhood is a tender time, when we're innocent and malleable and more attuned to whispers of the cosmos. And if we can manage to dig up some of those old memories, we might find embedded in them nuggets of truth.  So, for kicks, I tried to sort through the files of my inner archive for my earliest memory. Unfortunately, someone made a real mess in there and forgot to clean it up, so memories from that far back proved elusive. Maybe that's how memory works ...

Prologue: The Jesus Prayer goes like this: "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me." Remember that. It will be important. Act 1: Delilah I have officially decided to name my new car Delilah, because she is on the one hand beautiful and on the other a harlot who has betrayed me. The list of pickles she's gotten me into is getting longer and more maddening by the day, and the memory of one of the more harrowing of said pickles is still fresh, having taken place not two months ago on the way back to Newberg from an interview in Portland. You guys tried that picasa photo editor? Really easy way to make your car look like it's in a comic book. The interview was for a position in Young Life's Associate Program, a dream job of mine except that it would require me to live wherever they might place me, rather than in Springfield where I had resolved to go after graduation. My interviewers and I reached this impasse at the end of the interview, them telling me I wo...

Party at Jay Gatsby's A few weeks ago I found these words at the bottom of my ticket to George Fox's spring formal, a dance themed after the novel and fast-approaching film  The Great Gatsby . I would say loosely themed, considering the DJ offered no tunes from the roaring twenties but instead pumped the standard Top-40-techno-dance-hip-hop fusion, but having now seen the movie it was actually pretty on the nose. In any case I initially found it a bit odd that my Christian college would theme its dance around the bacchanals described in F. Scott Fitzgerald's anti-tribute to classic American excess, but I made no large fuss about it and indeed had a splendid time, cutting the rug with a few dear chums whom I will miss very much. It was no party at Jay Gatsby's though. No, it couldn't hold a candle to those raucous scenes depicted in the film, to the hyperreal colors, the impossibly shiny sequins, the manic, untethered energy, and no one in attendance at our dance w...