What if You are already exactly Who you need to be?

A heart broken - new life shining through the cracks.

Welcome to my first Substack post! This is an exciting day!

Below, I share my essay and performance at Shelf Life: a Modern Show & Telling.
The theme was Protest.

Enjoy!

Peter

Rheumatic fever shaped my first 18 years. On the playground, if I tagged Chick Manning he would get Polio, at least that is how the game went. I had something dangerous.  I sat on the bleachers in gym classes — loved it when those turkeys had to learn to square dance while I watched.  Music saved me.  I sang. President and student conductor of five choirs, three in high school and two in college.  Pam and I sang an original duet for the first time at a rehearsal for the musical we all had written and when we finished, the kids around us spontaneously applauded.  It was wonderful. The trouble with applause is that it ends and the loneliness returns.

I was smart and always did the right thing.  I was the epitome of the good young man.  They didn’t know the turmoil, the confusion, amorphous sexual feelings before I had any idea what they were.  I just lived with shame that I didn’t understand.  I knew I was bad on the inside. One night just before I turned fourteen, I decided to become a pastor. I would sacrifice my life to God.  God would have to love me in spite of the ugliness in me. 

I learned Hebrew, Greek, Latin and German in the required 8 years of University and Seminary to become a pastor.  I read the Bible in the original languages. It was demystified by world class professors who were subsequently fired, fifty of a fifty-five member faculty, fired because they studied the Biblical writings as the ancient literature that they are. Maybe Jonah had not been swallowed by a big fish.  Maybe it was a fable containing a divine message. Then I bailed completely on the existence of God. Refused to accept an assignment to a church — embarrassed by Christianity that demonized perceived enemies, justifying killing them in Vietnam at the time.  I confessed to Professor Walt Bartling the end of my belief.  His response was “so?”  Doubts are part of the deal. They are no more deserving of power than blind faith.  I decided that if infinity actually exists, all bets are off. I could create a space big enough to hold the doubts and the faith, certainties and mystery. They could dance together one leading and then the other. Not a lovely dance, sometimes frenzied, but strangely appealing. I don’t want answers, unless they are permeable and allow light from the other side to enter. Questions are the music of the dance. 

I taught school at a large Lutheran High school.  I decided to completely avoid religious jargon.  Jesus Christ Superstar had just come out, the perfect foil for engaging the accounts of Jesus’ life in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. If the doctrines were true, they had to be true outside of church words, no more Justification and Sanctification, but instead the capacity of unconditional love to empower us to grow and change.  It worked.  After three years I was fired.  It happened on a Friday. The news got out on the following Tuesday. On Wednesday I walked out on to the gym floor toward the portable altar, and 800 students in the bleachers stood up and applauded.  I do like applause.  They wrote letters, circulated petitions signed by 688 of them.  I was rehired. For the first half of the rest of my 40 year career, most of my time was spent with high school and college kids immersed in relationships and self-discovery.  I lived it with them.  I was inside the lives of people of all ages for my entire forty year career. 

Twenty-four of the forty-five years of marriage to Mary Ann was a threesome with Parkinson’s Disease. For the last ten of those years, she needed someone present all the time. Beloved parishioners filled that need. We lived life to and past the limitations of the disease. Every day was full, husband and wife, partners, equals, not one in need and the other the provider, but a team. She was never needy. Finally, she decided it was time. She stopped eating and drinking. Three weeks later, my son and daughter were around the bed, grandchildren nearby, I was in the bathroom washing my hands. Lisa said, “Dad, I think she has stopped breathing.” I came out. She looked beautiful, peaceful. It was time. I got out my book of pastoral care liturgies, turned to the one for such a time. I had done it many times at other death beds.  I spoke clearly, lessons, prayer, …the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine upon… I broke, I started sobbing. At that moment, I died also.  The room changed from color to black and white and grayscale — the world and the people in it all changed — immediately, completely.  She had been100% alive until then. In a moment she was not alive. She had left that beautiful face. 

Everything that defined who I was, was gone.  I had retired two years earlier to be with her full time. Attending to her needs filled twenty-four hours of every day.  The moment she died everything was stripped away.  There was no evidence of who was left, who I was outside of what I had been doing for a lifetime.

I began a journey of self-discovery. I trained for eight months and then, just me and my backpack spent two months hiking on the South Island of New Zealand, riding a horse in the Snowy mountains of Australia, snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, scared spit-less as often as utterly exhilarated. I began introducing myself as Peter instead of Pastor Pete. 

The journey took me to a forty day, five-hundred-mile pilgrimage on foot with only a backpack. I lived a lifetime on that walk. I bonded with people, a new community, friendships that have lasted the nine years since then.  The Camino, the walk, was not about the destination: the cathedral in Santiago, Spain.  The journey was the destination.  Every step as I took it, blisters and all, contained 100% of my life. 

I will be 80 in April. I am already living my 80^th year on the planet.  I am about to begin the next chapter of that Camino experience.  I realized how freeing it was to have everything I need on my back along with a pension and a credit card in my pocket.  I downsized from the three-bedroom house in Topeka to a one room loft at the River Market here in Kansas City. Now, four years later, I am selling or giving away the rest of my belongings, taking a few cherished pieces to a storage area in Louisville, KY where my daughter and her family live. They have a spare room I can use when in the country. I need a legal address.   

In January I will take only my backpack and fly to Europe. I will live in rooming houses or Airbnbs, short stays in hostels. All I need is a bed, a bathroom, maybe a window, access to a fridge, and good wifi, so that I can continue working on my book. I will stay for three months at a time on a 90 day visitor visa in a Schengen visa country, then 90 days in a non-Schengen country, so that I can return to a Schengen country for three more months, then maybe back to New Zealand or Australia near friends there.

As a friend recently said concerning a relationship struggle with her boyfriend, “I have had enough of this shit.”  I have learned that shit has value when it is composted and nourishes the land. At the moment, here in this in this country, the shit seems to be fighting against becoming fertilizer that could nurture a new reality, a better one, one that doesn’t smell so bad.  At the moment the shit is refusing to decompose.

My object is this oil derrick music box that plays “Dream the Impossible Dream.” We received it as a gift from beloved friends when midstream in my career we moved from the parish in Prairie Village to one in Oklahoma City. Since MaryAnn died over twelve years ago, my life has been impossible dreams becoming realities before I knew they were my dreams.  No bucket list, just a bucket waiting for lived dreams. 

What if it is not necessary to wait any longer to realize the impossible dream? What if this moment, the one we are in now, in this room, surrounded by these people is the fulfillment of the impossible dream?  What if the breath filling our lungs at this moment is that dream fulfilled?

I have no clue what will happen actually when my future becomes the present.  All I know is that I am 100% alive, right now. I will remain so until I am not. I am waiting for nothing more to fulfill my dreams. Yes, I have goals.  The next one is to be a cool 80-year-old starting next April 14th.  The goal after that is to be a cool 90-year-old. Given the immeasurable odds against my even existing in this 13.8-billion-year iteration of the Universe, my Protest, my act of defiance, is taking my next breath. This is the impossible dream.