Artifacts of a Life Once Lived

  On being a dilettante  (pl: dilettantes; dilettanti)   A dabbler. Without commitment. Nonspecialist. Layperson. Amateur. Without knowledge. Jack of all trades, master of none. Latin: delectare – English “delectable” ? --> Italian: dilettare – to delight --> Italian: dilettante – person loving the arts. Ours is a highly specialized society fit with highly bureaucratic systems of governmental regulations to the degree that it can be challenging for a highly educated, though non-specialized, individual to come upon a meaningful vocation. Unless one is specially trained, certified, and approved by the government bureaucracy and meets requirements attaining to specialized knowledge, it can be difficult to find a satisfying and well-paying job, depending on one’s life experience. I especially have in mind the teaching vocation (especially in NYS) where exploring teaching as a vocation is not an option unless you commit from the very beginning and throw yourself into deb...

Pastor Turner smiled at the soloist as she descended the stairs and made her way back to the pew. He gathered his Bible and tucked it nicely under his arm and walked confidently up the short flight of stairs to his pulpit, a small climb, but the difference between heaven and earth. He stood for a brief moment and sorted his yellow pages of notes and then began, “Isn't it sweet to see such a young lady, only a teenager, already using her talents for the Lord? Amen?” An array of resounding masculinity bounced off the walls no sooner had the pastor finished speaking. “Amen!” came from the front. “That’s Right!” came from the rear. “Yes, Sir!” came from the side with the windows. Pastor Turner got on with it. He spoke softly, “Turn in your Bibles to the gospel of Matthew chapter thirteen and verse fifty. That’s Matthew chapter thirteen, verse fifty.” In a moment pages turned violently, fingers vigorously rushing to the text. Heads were buried in laps. The intensity of the moment guaran...

  I’ve taken to myself the resolve to live a life towards myself as one of poverty. I am not a monk, but have the desire to follow in the path of the monk to make vows of poverty. Of course, for me, a vow of poverty will not mean the same thing - not being Roman Catholic, nor a monk. What then is a vow of poverty like for a person who has neither taken formal vows nor part of a formal religious order?  I mean by this vow: to live simply.  The first way to appropriate this vow is to refrain from debt as debt is often a sign that one is living beyond one’s means.  However, I must allow some room in this principle for living arrangements. If I were in a monastery as a monk I would surely have a place to live, how meager it may be, and thus I would have no housing expenses and so would be able to maintain a debt-free living situation. But I do not live in a monastery as a monk, and prudence would lead me to the conclusion that I must have housing for my family as I have ...

Talk about misery. I sat in a stranger’s three-car garage with a heat gun in one hand and a razor knife in the other laboriously scraping the creamy, grayish epoxy coating off of a cool, smooth concrete slab. What in the world was I doing scraping a coat of paint off of a garage floor?  The one thing the job did not require was a brain. Heat the epoxy coating with the heat gun, let it loosen, and then try to scrape the paint off. Heat, scrape, and peal. Move. Heat, scrape, and peal. A few inches at a time. A three-car garage floor! That's what my body was doing, but my mind was elsewhere. Inside my head I was ruminating. What am I doing with my life?  Before I move on, I need to add some background. At age nineteen I was still too imperceptive to understand my life context. All I had known was the experience of a white, middle-class kid of a medium-sized family who grew up in a highly religious home in the suburbs of Western New York. In fact, highly religious would be an unde...

A peculiar narcissism feigns me to believe, concerning my decision to remove myself from the staff and fellowship of the saints at FBBC, that some persons may give a damn. Yet, if experience is any teacher, then I am inclined to presume the opposite. Instead, I should presuppose that life will march on and my resignation and departure, like much of life’s ebb and flow, will soon be a faint memory of the distant past. Perhaps a compromise can be made? Perhaps there might be a handful of dinner conversations or coffee gossip that will surround the topic of my resignation and departure, but these conversations will, like the vapor of a pot of coffee, dissipate into the oblivion of infinite space never to be subject of gossip again. So this little piece of writing will allow me to collect my thoughts and distill them onto the written page for a time in the future when I may wonder at THE decision due to a frail and dusty memory.    Leaving a church community of three and half deca...