What's the matter with us?

A three-year-old named Marcus was found wandering the streets in an Ohio town and then quickly placed in foster care. Some time later, Marcus was found bound and gagged, wrapped in a blanket and dead in a closet. His foster parents decided to put him there when they left town for a few days to attend a family reunion. The temperature outside was in the 90’s. The temperature in the closet went well over 100. Marcus died in a closet, tied up like an animal. The flesh on his feet was blistered and torn from his struggle to get free… He was just three-years-old.

He was just a baby.

“A half-million children like Marcus are drifting through foster care, dependent on a system that too often fails to meet their needs. Blaming the current system will not fix it, and looking the other way is no longer an option. As long as there are children, there will be children who cannot depend on their parents to take care of them. As long as the government shoulders responsibility for their daily care, there will be children who suffer. Until the community steps forward to right the wrongs of vulnerable kids, their childhoods will vanish, along with our hope for a better future for all of our children…”

(from INVISIBLE KIDS, by Holly Schlaack)

Marcus’ family failed him. The foster system failed him. The community failed him. But more than half a million foster children like Marcus are still here… waiting to be given a chance at a childhood. We can’t fail them.

I live in Jefferson County, Alabama. In my city alone, there are more than 2,000 children in the foster system and less than 200 “approved” foster families willing to help.

How is this possible? What’s the matter with us?

Burnside is Reborn

We're back, with an all new site.

BurnsideWriters.com.

The missing cross

It's easy to be critical of the church, especially retrospectively. Like Monday morning quarterbacks, we can all look back through the centuries and see the folly of crusades, colonization, slavery, and the unholy marriage of political power and wealth with the name of Jesus. These failures are, ostensibly, the reasons offered by millions for their rejection of Christ and, especially, of the church.

Surely our failures are part of the story, but I suspect there's more to it than that. Thomas Merton said something to the effect that the crisis among believers and unbelievers is really the same - we are, all of us, recoiling at the cross.

Of course, the church claims to embrace the cross. We sing songs about it; we wear it around our neck as jewelry; it figures prominently in our architecture; and most significantly, we teach it's centrality. The problem, though, is that in teaching it's centrality we tend to teach the reality that Jesus died FOR us, and so our responsibility is to receive this free gift so that we can be pardoned for our failures and be made right with God.

To declare that this is the heart of the gospel would be like saying that cutting down trees and making bats is the central theme of baseball. Talk about missing the point! The reality is this: Christ walked the path of the cross and then triumphed over the grave. Our journey with Christ begins by acknowledging our need for this gift and receiving it, but this is just the beginning, like receiving our bat and glove. The point is wholly other. The point is that we're now empowered with the same capacity to walk the road of our own cross, laying down our lives in literal and/or spiritual ways for three reasons:

#1 - because Jesus tells us that this is our calling

#2 - because this is where our credibility and life imparting power lies

#3 - because we believe that there's more to life than THIS life.

The early church gave validity to Christ's claims because it was the Christ followers who, in the time of the plague, were willing to open their homes and provide hospitality to the dying, often at cost of their own lives. Wherever the faith presents itself as powerful and real, it does so because there are real and tangible acts of relinquishing rights (to life, our happiness, or being first, or secure, or powerful, or vindicated) on the part of Christ's followers. Of course, the sad testimony of the church is that, too often, we've appropriated Christ's death FOR us, while overtly or covertly avoiding our own calling to die WITH Him. Thus does the church's lust for power, wealth, and prestige, mar the church's testimony, creating a caricature of Christ.

Yes, Christ died for us. But He beat death in order that we might be freed from the fear of death, in order that we might have the entire world opened up before us as we listen for the voice of our Guide and follow Him wherever He might take us. We know this, though, that the path that will impart life to others will only be seen to the extent that we say YES to the Guide who calls us to lay down our own agenda, instinct for survival, or lust for pleasure or power, choosing instead our own CROSS because we believe that life goes on, and on, forever.

As I begin the fall routine, I pray that I'll be willing to walk the path of the cross.

New Burnside on Monday

This may very well be the final post on the Burnside Blog.

On Monday, barring any unforeseen disasters, and requiring a load of work this weekend, we will launch our new site. We've been working on it for a while, and we're thrilled to finally show you what we have. We've also changed our URL. The new site will be at burnsidewriters.com.

The blog will still be up, but posts won't go here. Our old site will link directly to our new one. The blog and main site will be integrated. Some of the posts you've seen here will become articles. For shorter pieces, our site will offer an Asides department, for quick links, posts, and videos.

I get a lot of the glory around here for making this thing happen, but the truth is John Pattison did a thousand times more work than I did bringing this all together. I also want to thank John Whitaker for helping build our site, Metaleap Design for our logo, and a whole host of others who consulted and helped us out along the way (in particular, John's.

More thanks to those who donated to Burnside. Your incentives for giving will be sent out as soon as we get copies of Million Miles.

We're still working out bugs, but the submissions process will be greatly streamlined. Upon launch, we'll be welcoming open submissions, and we'll be much better in fielding them and responding.

Thank you for visiting so far. Spread the word about our new site!

Genesis - The Facebook Edition

I'm so glad I have access to David Sessions' Google status, or I would've missed this.

And speaking of our friends at Patrol Magazine, they have a terrific editorial on profanity and Christian magazines.

We've got a similar piece on censorship and profanity as it pertains to Burnside coming with the launch of our new site...stay tuned.

9/11

Relevant Magazine asked a few Burnside writers for short reflections on 9/11.

You can read those here.

We didn't have a ton of room, but I do want to mention how writing about 9/11 feels vaguely self-absorbed. I mean, think that day changed everyone on some level, but writing on how my thoughts about the world, politics, and war began to shift seem to pale in comparison to people who suffered directly, before and since.

(It's also a shame Susan Isaacs' memories weren't posted...she didn't have time to write a piece, but her story is in her book, and it's crazy.)

"More coffee, hun?"

I’ve had many memories at Waffle House. But I’m guessing some of you have never even been to one before. For those who don't know, it's a 24 hour grease-pit. A southern staple of grits and hospitality. It originally began in a little suburb outside of Atlanta Georgia in 1955 and now reaches as far north as Pennsylvania / Rhode Island and stretches west to Arizona / Colorado. Sorry Portland, but Waffle House might be my favorite cup of coffee. The coffee is not good, it’s bland. But the atmosphere is ironically endearing in that white-trash sort of way. A classic American icon if you ask me.

With three of us at the table my friend looks at my other friend and says, “translate this for me, I’ve been wondering about this for a while.”

He glanced across my friend’s brand new MacBook Pro and starts translating arcane Greek sentences from the ancient Nicene Creed devised by the Romans in 325AD. This is a bedrock, if not the bedrock document securing the survival and health of Christendom.

From across the table I hear, φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, δι' οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο . . . God from God, Light from Light . . .

In Waffle House, mind you, he starts telling us about the annoying propensity to which the Grecians utilized reflexive participles. A literary faux-pas if you ask him. I start laughing at the insanity of it all. I mean, a Waffle House is no place for a MacBook. Let alone an opinionated lecture on an archaic language. My life doesn 't make sense and I'm beginning to be okay with that.

And right before this happened on the same MacBook we purchased plane tickets from Shanghai to Xiamen (pronounced Shaw-Men) a paradise city located on the southern shores of China where we will be living and teaching English next week. A United States Passport and a Chase MasterCard were on the table trying to avoid coffee stains. Ten minutes before all this my friend was quoting Shakespearian Sonnets from his iPhone. This had to be the most sophisticated table in all of Waffle House history.

As we were laughing at this juxtaposition our waitress yelled across the room, “Good morning Duke!”

I looked up at Duke. Duke was more probably a local trucker. He had a Harley Davison hat with flames coming off the bill. A cigarette hung from his mouth and tattoos lined his arms. His black Sturgis t-shirt was tucked into his Brett Favre Wranglers but on his feet he did not have boots . . . on his feet he had flannel house shoes.

Duke garbled, “Good morning darlin.”

I later got in my car and followed my friend back to his house so he could use my car the next day. He was driving his mothers car at the time. And I passed a cop and panicked because my speedometer light is out in my hubcap-less 95’ red Buick Skylark. I didn’t know how fast I was going. It was five in the morning. The story started swirling in my head, “Officer, we were just at Waffle House buying a plane ticket to China because we’ll be over there next week and my friend needs to use my car because he’s taking his mothers car back to her so she can go to work in a little bit. He needs to go to this bookstore in Fayetteville and buy himself a dry erase book with the 500 hundred most used Chinese characters in it. He’s really smart, he knows a lot about Koine Greek and Shakespeare and all...you know he's a good guy.”

And I’m sure he would have said something like, “Sir, I’ve heard a lot of stories in my day. Step out of your car.”

Teach Me To Pray

I write at a kitchen table.  There are days when I'd love to have a writer's desk with an old Tiffany lamp perched just so and fountain pens in an empty soup can and copies of The New Yorker strewn about the edges and...but that would be someone else's story.  I write at a kitchen table.

As I wrote yesterday, I could see him.  Then he'd disappear.  Then I'd see him again.  Rising. Falling.  Rising again.  You see, his backyard has a trampoline, like our backyard does.  I watched him turn flip after flip after flip, I bet twenty in a row, his eyes closed.  He was poetry. Our trampoline has a black safety web that feeds our abandon.  His does not; he jumps without a net.

The lights in his house stay on all night long and the windows are always, always open, every last one, and people are always yelling or screaming or crying or hollering.  Sometimes, when I'm writing at the kitchen table in the wee small hours I see the lights and hear the sounds. Sometimes I stop writing and pray.  There used to be a daddy in his house, but now he's gone. There were rumors about, well, they were rumors.  Now there's a boyfriend in his house and rumors of marriage.

Sometimes I stop writing and wonder about him.  It used to bug me that the lights stayed on all night but then I thought what if that's because a daddy loved darkness rather than light?  That was the rumor.  It doesn't bug me so much now, after that thought.  And I used to wonder why he would spend long stretches of time doing flip after flip after flip.  But then I thought sometimes even a new boyfriend can't put humpty together again and maybe he asks God to make him a bird so he can fly, fly away but God doesn't listen, so the closest he can get to the sky, to being untethered by the things of this world, is to barrel outside and close his eyes and spread his wings and jump without a net.  

If I had that writer's desk like I mentioned, it would probably be tucked away in some corner of the house surrounded by books that reached to the ceiling.  If I had that desk, I couldn't see Icarus; I wouldn't know how to pray.