Scott Peck said it succinctly in his groundbreaking book The Road Less Traveled, “Life is difficult.” Standing alone, admittedly these three words don’t amount to much. But with more thought we recognize how important it is we come to accept this foundational truth. Peck added to it to help us understand its simplicity, “It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.” Thus, he challenges us to think more deeply about the saying and to resist it as what he later calls the sin of “simplism.”

Later in Further Along the Road Less Traveled, he added a second line of thinking: “Life is complicated.” In this thought, Peck drew upon his wealth of knowledge about human growth as a psychiatrist and combined it with wisdom derived from a deep spiritual thirst. The result was a map to help us understand our journey more fully. I think he wanted us to understand as peaceably as possible what it means to be human on the arduous path of life. Finally he added to his trilogy on growth in The Road Less Traveled and Beyond by offering this last thought, “There are no easy answers.”

Each of those simple statements is loaded with meaning. I recommend reading him if you’ve never done so. Recently I’ve been reading The Road Less Traveled and Beyond as it’s sat on my shelves for several years and I’d never cracked it open. As a psychiatrist Peck has a gift of taking complicated psychological theories and translating them so the rest of us can understand them. As a fellow believer Peck takes what we’ve heard from our faith all our lives and fills them with new life so they speak anew to us in ways that become fresh and helpful.

I heard Dr. Peck lecture after the release of his first book and shortly after he had become a Christian. Like most new believers, the spiritual transformation from “old to new” had begun but he was not yet swallowed up in a religious attitude that had turned staid and boring. After his lecture, an arrogant youth minister took him to task for his smoking habit, something leftover from his old life. It was a weird moment that someone half his age and twice as pompous would challenge him - rather his accuser chose to ignore the wisdom to think the thought without giving words to it. After the challenger posed his question, the room went silent as Peck thought before he spoke. I liked that Peck didn’t try to dodge the question or resort to belittling his young questioner.

Instead of retaliation he spoke right into the heart of the insubordination of this young idealist who had used shame to begrudge Peck for his lifelong habit. “Cut me some slack,” Dr. Peck said to his challenger, “I’m new at faith and this is a part of my journey.”

Frankly, I thought it was a great answer and obviously honest. He was still “on his way,” and not any further down the path than where he was at he seemed to be saying. While I thought he might have been privately peeved at the umbrage of his accuser, he didn’t step outside the stream of his story of being a new believer just because someone in the back of the room was rude to him.

Peck helps us understand more deeply what is like to face our problems rather than living wishfully that our problems would simply go away. While some mask their problems by deflecting the blame onto others who inflicted them upon us, Peck chose to face his problems directly and thus helps us understand that only when we face our own situations squarely will we find productive solutions that deepen our lives. “Problems do not go away” he explains, “They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”

We live in an anxious time these days. Some are worried about the status of jobs, of relationships or any number of other anxiety-producing concerns. Peck explains how our problems can be paths to a deeper kind of wisdom: “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

Thus, we are travelers on the same journey … a journey toward wholeness. The path toward wholeness doesn’t run around our problems, it runs right through them!

I just love a good “doolally” moment, don’t you? Honestly, who hasn’t acted like a doolally person every now and then and thought afterward, “Wasn’t that lovely?” I thought I knew what a doolally was about until I received today’s A.Word.A.Day published online by Anu Garg. I guessed it was a word derived from a similar silly-sounding word, “lollygaggle.” They look related, don’t they? Doolally, however, has nothing at all to do with lollygaggle. They’re so completely afar from one another as to border on the ludicrous. Doolally is an adjective meaning, “irrational, deranged, or insane.”

Maybe that’s what happened to the Iraqi news reporter who took off his shoes and threw them at President Bush the other day. How dare he become a doolally journalist thus insulting the President of the United States!

In the aftermath of an incident that occurred while Bush was saying goodbye to Iraq and the war he unleashed there but cannot seem to end, Muntader al-Zaidi, a 29-year old news journalist exploded in anger at a news conference with Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki. As Bush was speaking, Muntader al-Zaidi rose and shouted angrily, “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” Then he threw his shoe at the President, narrowly missing him as Bush dodged the throw.

Before Iraqi security guards could stop him, al-Zaidi shouted again, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” He then threw his other shoe, missing high and to the left. al-Zaidi was then subdued and beaten by members of the Prime Minister’s security team who carried him from the room in only his sock-feet. Bush laughed the incident off as if this had happened to him many times before.

So was al-Zaidi behaving like a doolally person? Or was it the response of someone fully sane and expressing the sentiment of a nation that’s had enough of the rebuilding effort that’s been more of an occupation than a rebuilding? Needless to say, a storm of response has been unleashed in the Arab world. In Damascus, shop owner named Muhammad said he was on his way to celebrate the shoe-throwing incident with friends. “This is like a holiday,” he said. “This is just what we needed for revenge.”

Worried that al-Zaidi won’t be able to hire a lawyer to defend himself? More than a hundred lawyers from around the world have said they would represent him for free. Not formally charged as yet, he could face up to 7 years in prison for committing an act of aggression against a visiting head of state.

In Saudi Arabia, an American ally (sort of), a newspaper reported a man has offered ten million dollars to buy just one of al-Zaidi’s black dress shoes. Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s daughter offered him a medal of courage.

The New York Times pointed out that calling someone “son of a shoe” is one of the worst insults in Iraq. But this simple act, this doolally deed, if you will, has caused people in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City to remove their footwear and place them on the end of long poles, waving them high in the air in his honor.

Maybe al-Zaidi was simply having his doolally moment on the biggest stage available to him. Call him insane, call him rude, but chunking his shoes at the President has united the Arab world into calling him a folk hero. Who knows? Perhaps Bush should have sat down with him and listened to his complaints. Maybe he had a point worth consideration.

What makes your heart sing?

That’s a question a friend asked recently and honestly it’s a question that can’t be sloughed off as meaningless. In my case, it’s been like a bomb going off in my brain! The question sounds like it might be an easier question to answer than it really is; truth is, it’s a toughie! In general, I suspect all of us have something in us that sets us off in some kind of song … something that tickles our hearts to think about or puts us a lift in our step.

Some think a warm spring day on the golf course is heaven. Others have a special lure you put on your fishing line that makes the heart of some fish sing and that alone makes your heart sing! Some love nothing more than a day off and a good book to curl up with on the sofa by the window where you can watch the trees sway and can observe the birds who find your birdfeeder on the deck. What bliss!

Advent can become a burdensome season when anticipation gets swallowed up by the craziness of shopping lists, travel plans to consider, invading waves of relatives who crash at your house, and all the nutty things we do and call “a merry Christmas.” Really, when you think about it, it’s enough to drive one to the nut house.

Maybe we should give thought to what it would mean to be centered in faith, rather than refugees of a faith that’s overwhelmed by the marketplace. Think of the ways you might consider to shift the season to deepen it into a more thoughtful season:

Simplify - make an agreement with your family and friends you will cut back and will make your gift-giving more appropriate. Include a gift to a ministry of need that has as much importance to you as any gift you might give to those who don’t have near as much need. In the end, the move toward simplicity is a gift that the entire family needs and it helps the soul to resonate with the deeper gifts of God.

Celebrate - find a meaningful way to celebrate the Christ child this season. Invite a neighbor whom you know won’t have a family to share the season with to one of your family events. Bring them with you on Christmas Eve and make them feel included in your family. Be sure to make worship a priority! The season is alive with reasons for worship. Join your church as it gathers for music, drama, candles and prayers of hope and anticipation, gathering with the members and their guests who gather to worship the One whom we follow.

Observe - all around you are signs of the real season of the celebration of Christ’s birth. More often than not, those signs are buried under advertisements, shopping lists, anxiety and even sadness. Work to open your eyes to the Christ-child who is already among us.

Seek those things that make your heart sing!

This past spring I was with two of my preacher buddies in Decatur Georgia and met a blues singer by the name of Pierce Pettis. My goodness, he could play the blues and passionately sang song mostly of his own composition. I’m now the owner of two or three of his CD’s and enjoy one particular song he sings that floats the sweetness of the challenge all of us face when we snapshot our experiences only to recall them later, savoring the goodness of them like a treat that’s been held back as a reward for a day devoid of its own sweetness.

Here are a few lines from his song, “You’re Gonna Need This Memory”:

I’ve seen baby hands reach out
Grab my fingers like a vise
Grab my glasses
Grab my keys
Grab my heart by the strings
Hold on boy, you’re gonna need this memory

If all we got for all our trouble
Is just this box of souvenirs
Still it’s worth a lot just to remember
Just so we know that we were here

Footprints walkin’ in the sand
The tide will come and wash them clean
Sometimes when you squeeze my hand
I think I know just what you mean
Saying hold on boy, you’re gonna need this memory
Saying hold on boy, you’re gonna need this memory

“Hold on boy, you’re gonna need this memory …” seems to embody how we hold memory in ephemeral form to be remembered like buried treasure we find ourselves inexplicably recalling. I say that because Christmas is a time for memories. Have you given thought this last week to those days long past when you were young and remember fondly those who are now no longer alive?

By the way, do you remember Christmas better visually or through some other sensory experience, such as through the smells of certain Christmas foods being cooked or through the smell of candles scented to reflect the season’s themes? Perhaps it’s the smell of your grandmother’s flowery perfume as she hugged you close or the feel of your grandfather’s whiskers as he brushed your cheek with a warm kiss.

Maybe you remember being so filled with expectation you could not sleep and instead of sleeping wandered into the darkened living room to check under the tree just after your parents went to bed exhausted from setting out your gifts from Santa along with the obligatory milk and half-eaten cookies left out as evidence that Santa did indeed pay your house a visit while you slept.

“Hold on child, you’re gonna need this memory…”

You must realize by now no memory is entirely factual. In memory’s mystery you have captured an event or experience and your brain naturally puts the information, the raw data of that moment, on the back burner of time to simmer. Your memory nuances your memories shaping them further until they have deeper meaning.

Writer Patricia Hampl describes the power to re-imagine memories in sharing her own life in the form of memoir, I Could Tell You Stories, Sojourns in the Land of Memory (1999):  “Memoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing. It can present its story and the meaning of the story. The first commandment of fiction (show, don’t tell) is not part of the memoirist’s faith. Memoirists must show and tell. Memoir is a peculiarly open form, inviting broken and incomplete images, half-collected fragments, all the mass (and mess) of detail. It offers to shape this confusion - and in shaping, of course, it necessarily creates a work of art, not a legal document” (Hampl, 33).

What I love about that is the oddly mysterious way we experience memory as our companion through life, both as welcomed friend and as haunted foe.

Advent, it seems, is a season inviting us to soak in memory. Perhaps we experience the season of the birth of Jesus as painful because we only see the world through the cynicism of adult experiences of anxiety, stress and the strain of trying to make Christmas a happy event for everyone around us. But on occasion, in moments less freighted by adult cynicism, we receive a visitor from the past in the form of a child-like moment of joy or anticipation.

Advent is just such a season.

I’m at the age where I want to revisit the touch and smell of a little baby. So on those wondrous days when we mark the birth of a church baby through a child/parent dedication, I get the sweet privilege of holding the baby in my arms as we say the words of a litany that describes our holy calling together. It’s holy because we hold a life in our arms as we speak and it’s holy because the power and privilege of raising a child is one God gives us through creation and procreation.In a strange and wonderful mystery, we hold the future in our arms if you consider all that is held in the potentiality of what might happen in the one we hold so tenderly. Utterly amazing!

Parents and church join together to say the words of commitment that we will come together to pledge to God and to one another our faithfulness to that calling. “This child,” we say grandly, “will be loved. This child will be given the holy gift of our faith. We pledge to God to make it so.”

So I take the baby in my arms and walk into the center of the church talking to the child as I walk. The child doesn’t know what I’m saying because all words are gibberish to her – probably because she doesn’t know any language other than warmth and love and the sweet exchange that occurs when old eyes look deep into her fresh new eyes that are just now embracing this world outside the warm wet womb. In that moment I talk to the child as if she understands every word I’m saying.

Sitting on the aisle not far from the front row sits Bonnie, a woman who loves this church with a pure heart … a woman who is herself a grandmother and perfectly prepared to love this child as one of her own. I point out across the aisle from her sits Jack watching her with a wisdom that knows to love with a kind word meant to warm the soul. Near the back sits Charlene, a woman who ran our daycare center for two and a half decades. As one of our charter members, she raised her own children here. Now her children have kids who have grown older and one of them is even ready to birth her first great-grandchild this winter. Charlene has a grace and a goodness about her that I want this child to know. Charlene sees the world as an adventure. She has a generous faith in this ever-perilous adventure called “the church.” These and many more are the saints who will love this child unconditionally.

I always pass by the Middle School and High School kids who usually sit together. I want them to know they’re included in this high holy moment. Sophia Lyon Fahs once wrote, “Every night a child is born is a holy night.” I want them to know life is a gift from God and to understand that if I live right, a few years from now it’ll be their baby I’m holding out to the church to love.

My friend Birdie works in the nursery to love on babies regularly. One day I told her I appreciated how faithful she was to teaching Sunday School to the Infant Class. “Sunday School? Is that what I’m doing? I thought it was my job to hug the babies, change their little diapers and feed them when they were hungry! I thought Sunday School was when we sat around a table and had a boring discussion about anything but the Bible.”

“You know what I mean … you’re teaching them about God when you do those things. That’s the lesson for them. They need to know when they come to church someone will hug them and whisper sweet things in their ears and look deep into their eyes with pure love. If that happens, we’ll be doing the best thing we can do. We’re loving them like God loves all of us.”

“Not bad Mister Tall Steeple pastor. Maybe we should put up a sign in the churchyard:  ‘Free Hugs and Sweet Words!’ Maybe that would bring in the lost and lonely from our neighborhood.”

Indeed. When we dedicate a child to God, a holy hush descends upon us and calls out our better natures. I think holding a baby in our arms melts all our cynical defenses and forces us to love. Young wet eyes alive with wonder remind us of what we’ve forgotten and call us to remember there’s a price to growing older. We’re given a sacred gift whenever a baby clings to our finger and holds tight with a gleam in his eyes that says, “I’m here! Love me! Be someone I can trust!”

“Preacher, it’s Advent again. Tell the people God loves them. Remind them that Jesus was born just like this. The five little fingers of God wrapped tightly around the world with eyes drinking it all in as though it was the first day of creation. Walk Jesus around in the Sanctuary and introduce him to us so we’ll remember to welcome him with the promise we’ll love him and be there as followers upon whom he can rely to tell the world of his love.”

Indeed.