I love it when I remember my dreams. My strangest ones seem to occur when I am at the beach. I’m not sure why. Last year I dreamed I was Phil Bredesen’s (Tennessee’s governor) social double, kind of like Dave in the movie. I really like that movie, by the way. In my dream, having forgotten what Gov. Bredesen actually looks like, for some reason my mind decided that I/he would look just like Donald Trump. It was great.

This year I dreamed I was in this place that turned out to be an underground orphanage/prison. One of my former professors, Harmon Wray, was in this one. He was quite the hell raiser before he died, not in in the sense you might think though. He hated institutions, especially prisons, and he was never short on words to describe his displeasure. In the dream, though, as he and I were trapped inside his least favorite place, he began to sing (for you Bible scholars, there’s a reference here). This prompted, of course, an earthquake, and it just gets out of hand from there…

I had a strange dream last night about someone close to me dying. I was with her when it happened, and she went very peacefully. She was in her favorite place at the time: the beach. It’s my favorite place too. There was no ambulance ride, no frantic trip to the emergency room. No one tried to revive her. We all knew it was just her time to go, and so we let her go, peacefully and without interruption.

This reminds me of a remarkably poignant (and thank you Mr. Kadison for realizing that meaning can be conveyed in brevity) book: Seventeen Ways to Eat a Mango. I like the small books with the profound lessons. A favorite (and often hostile) professor of mine once began a sentence thus: “You know how some essays are four pages and four pages too long…” Get to the point. So I will.

I’m not one of those people who believes that everything in life happens for some divinely inspired reason. That is not to say I believe life is random either. I have seen too many coincidences to believe that is plausible.

So, I am not likely to encourage people to blame their fortunes or failings on divine intervention. But I am also disinclined to push people either toward or away from their goals. If you want something, I believe you should go for it (unless, of course, that something belongs to your neighbor. It always does, by the way, but that is another story.).

Several years ago I found myself in Missoula, Montana, floating the Blackfoot River. I quickly learned that floating, also called “tubing,” is much different than rafting. When you go rafting, you take a paddle with you because you want to control your raft. The joy of floating is letting the river do the work for you. Applying sunscreen and opening beer cans should be one’s most difficult tasks.

Having rafted several times before and never having seen this river, however, I was disinclined to trust it. Many times I tried to help it guide me through its forks and down its currents. For my efforts I often lost my group (ahead of me) and occasionally fell off my tube. My back was sore for days. As the day wound down, I realized that my efforts hadn’t done me a damn bit of good. I ended up in the same place as everyone else. It turns out that the river wasn’t my enemy after all.

I think life is a lot like that. I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever make an effort toward anything. I just think we should change our perspective a little bit. Fighting who we are won’t change us. Things will just hurt more, and it will take a little longer to reach our destination. We are who we are, good, bad, and indifferent.

I, for example, am extremely disorganized which is why I’m not even going to try to make a proper segue into what this has to do with my friend’s death on the beach. It’s about control, okay? We don’t have it, so we should stop trying to dictate our own circumstances.

I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. This would surprise many, maybe all, of my recent friends, who probably think I’m quite a slacker. They’re right, of course, but I think I’ve become a slacker because I was a perfectionist for so long. Too much pressure from myself and everyone else finally got to me (at age 9), and I just quit.

But even though I quit trying to be the best in school and on the field, I never was willing to give up my image as a really good person. Through middle school and high school, I worked hard to let everyone know I was a devout Christian and an all around good guy. My sister is three years older than I am, and we went to this school that was a little nicer than the other schools in town. As seniors my sister’s class was so sick of taking shit about it that they made T-shirts that read “Dalton High School Class of 1994: We are better than you”. I should have made a similar T-shirt for myself.

I always thought Christianity was about being the most well-behaved and the most courteous and the most obedient. These are all good things, and if you do them, people’s mothers will love you as will lots of girls–they’ll always come to you to tell you about how mean their boyfriends are.

But someone told me once that Christianity has a lot to do with grace, and that makes sense to me because Jesus was always hanging out with people no one else really liked, at least not the religious leaders. But he didn’t seem to like the religious leaders very much. And he never really cared what they had to say about anything.

So, I don’t know why we were always so big on following rules. Jesus never seemed to care for them very much; he seemed to like the rule breakers more than the rule makers.

A few years ago I had an opportunity to take some classes with some men in a maximum security prison. We were students together, inmates and “free-worlders” navigating our way through classes like “Theology and Politics of Crime and Justice in America”. And I began to contemplate once again concepts like grace.

One of my pastors used to encourage me to be “a big sinner”. I think his point was that human beings should realize the depth of their own depravity and their helplessness to rectify the situation.

And in my mind I was. I thought I was an awful person. But I think I really just had low self-esteem. After all, I was in high school at the time. Too be honest, the religious indoctrination that I was a horrible sinner didn’t help matters a whole lot. I mean, I guess I was happy that God loved me anyway, but no one likes to be told they’re a piece of shit (as far as I know).

And my self-esteem isn’t nearly as low as it used to be. If anything, I think people see me as cocky, but I like to think it’s more the Andy Duphrain effect. It might have something to do with the fact that in college, in order to cope with my poor self-image and overcome my deathly fear of women, I coined the Joel postulate: “I am Joel; therefore, every woman (and I assume a healthy portion of the men) here wants me”. I don’t think that lie was nearly as damaging as the one I believed in high school.

But here I was in graduate school, sitting next to some people who had taken my pastor’s advice rather literally. I didn’t learn the nature of everyone’s crime, but no one gets sentenced to 99 years for stealing a pack of chewing gum (unless, of course, they happen to be taken prisoner in the “war on terror”).

As an aside, did you know that the United States government offered rewards “beyond your wildest dreams” for turning in some of the folks now serving indefinite sentences–without trial, without formal charge, without representation–in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? But that’s another story.

So, here we were in a classroom in the middle of a maximum security prison talking about the major Christian themes of grace and redemption. And I was a middle class (although my socio-economic status seems to be on the decline) white man hung up on my own goodness. What a fucking wanker I was! But I learned a thing or two from those men, for they became some of my most meaningful mentors.

I learned to value my own voice, for I saw that it can be taken away.

I learned that true ministry begins with authenticity. If we insist on separating ourselves from the evil around us or even within us, we are undeniably phony. There’s nothing wrong with being a salesperson, but that is not the role of a minister. If we offer anything except ourselves, exactly as we are, we might as well tell the world we are actors.

And I am beginning to learn what it is like to disappoint people. For too long I tried to please the people who have invested so much time, energy, and money in me. But to be true to myself and the spirit inside me, I have to find my own way.

I still haven’t given up on being a perfectionist. But my ideas about what it means to be perfect have changed. Authenticity, integrity, and wholeness–perfectly me.

I think about religion quite a bit for many reasons, including the role religion played in my childhood, my time in Divinity school, and one of my current roles as a volunteer in a local church. I can’t seem to get away from it, and don’t really want to, for whatever opinion I have of any religion, religious understanding (and often misunderstandings) guides much of our personal lives and public discourse.

My background is in Christianity. I was raised in a fundamentalist church. I began to slowly move away from my fundamentalist leanings during my high school years. I had begun to suspect that my world was not nearly as black and white as I had been told, but I couldn’t quite shake my youthful understanding. As with many things, the first few steps were the most difficult. One reason I was reluctant to change course is that I was tormented by thoughts of hell, believing that if I didn’t conform exactly to the religion I had been prescribed that I was in terrible danger of spending my postmortem days in the smoking section.

Another problem I had was that my religious education had been extraordinarily narrow. Though I began to have ideas about what I didn’t believe, I was unaware of a reasonable alternative. I remained conflicted for years, too frightened to give up the security of what I no longer believed.

There was also the issue of reputation. My father, who has now been dead for almost twenty years, was a fundamentalist Christian and a deacon in our church. My childhood world was filled with people who idealized his lifestyle and beliefs, and I was afraid I would let them/him down if I veered off the proper path. And I didn’t want to ruin my own reputation as a strong Christian. My friends would be disappointed, and I would be ashamed.

I was at war with myself, struggling to convince myself of things I simply could no longer believe, trying to direct my thoughts toward the convictions of my youth. And I was losing my mind. I was fighting so hard to concentrate on what I was supposed to believe that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Classes, once routine, became onerous. I simply couldn’t focus. Routine homework assignments took hours.

There’s a rather long story here, but the short version is that I eventually simply had to give up. I finally let go of all the nonsense in my head. I did it because the alternative was killing me. I didn’t know what the end result would be. I didn’t have a whole lot of answers, but I simply couldn’t go on trying to carry such a heavy burden.

I had been afraid that once I let doubt creep in that all the dominoes would begin to fall. I was right. They have. But I was wrong to fear that process. What I didn’t know then was that instead of developing the strength of my faith, the religion of my childhood destroyed it. I had been taught to hold onto a system of beliefs. That system failed, and I was left with nothing. Faith is nothing like that. As Alan Watts points out in The Wisdom of Insecurity, contrary to popular understanding, faith and belief are more nearly antonyms than synonyms. A healthy faith is one in which beliefs come and go freely, for belief is about holding on, while faith entails the ability to let go.

In the high school Sunday school class in which I currently take part, we are discussing the idea of church: what it is, what it should be, what it can be, what we want it to be, etc. It strikes me that of the church’s many failures, one of its most critical is its emphasis on belief over faith. We went over some statistics a couple of weeks ago about the decline in church attendance and religious belief of college students. I heard similar statistics when I was a high school senior. It didn’t surprise me then. It doesn’t surprise me now.

One of the most dramatic periods of change in modern American life takes place in college experience. We live in a new place, meet new friends, become more independent, are taught new things, etc. Much of our social life is thrown into total upheaval. So why should our religious experience be any different?

If church leaders are concerned about making a lasting impact on the lives of their members, they must emphasize faith over belief, for the latter can and must change. Instead of worrying about “losing” high school students as they venture out into the world (if college can be called that), we must trust (God forbid) that their faith journey will continue. But the tricky part is this: it will change. What our young people believe should change. To work toward or hope for anything else belies our own faith.

To expect a person’s beliefs to remain the same throughout one’s life is both ridiculous and unhealthy. It is akin to expecting the peoples of the world to also maintain ideological stagnation. No one walks around declaring that the earth is flat and the center of the universe. As our collective understanding changes over time, so does that of the individual. Stifling that growth betrays the evolution of human understanding and decries any sort of real faith.