I have been Asked to do many impossible things for God over the last nine years.  Now that He has reduced me to zero, I can't say that I'm 'Asked' to do one more thing.  It's like I haven't been Given an option.

My dad just had a second heart attack in as many months.  All the doctors could say is that his heart is 'tired.'  At 87 years old, the body is just worn out.  He is a minister.  Now his son begins to enter the process to become one.  The doctors asked my mother about 'do not resuscitate' orders.' 

Face it, you're going back to the United Church.  You're going back to your father's church, the one you grew up in, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, not a straight line like you were taught.  But a circle.

It seems impossible enough, and God knows I'm only attracted to the impossible.  It is the only thing worth doing.  Then you have lived.  And it was strange that the decision to return to Canada, with $1 in my pocket, one cigarette in the box, and my car riding on fumes, happened between my dad's heart attacks. 

And I re-enter the biggest business in the world: bureaucracy.  Is the U.C.C. as rigid as I perceived it so long ago, the fear of the 'institutional man' controlling where I've been Given no option but to go?   

I admire my dad's calling.  He didn't need to be hit over the head to go into it.  But stubborn as I am, I couldn't see why I had to until I was reduced to zero, after running on 'empty' for years, learning the lessons God wanted for me.  He was attracted to it, I was repelled.  I saw the U.C.C. from a child's eyes through his father.  Typical P.K. stuff, and after the spiritual journey I've been on, it seemed my dad's job was to send me away from the Church until it was time to find my way back.

It was so strange.  As a child, my dad freaked out on my sister for taking Yoga, and considered Mad Magazine porn.  Generation Gap.  The Church run at that time by the 'post-World War I Cohort,' as they call them: typically Canadian, post-colonial, post-Victorian, social justice focused, the last great positive masculine drive to change the world because of the Great Depression and World War II.  Men doing something good, at the same time being clobbered by feminism.  Very funny.

Women.  For the last eighteen months God brought a woman into my life.  An interesting mirror to my masculine.  Like myself, she is a preacher's kid, but of an ordained R.C. deacon.  And like myself, her dad's first career was as an engineer.  And like myself, she has been driven forward by powerful spiritual forces that few can understand.  We spoke the same language.  I thought I found a friend, and could relax. 

But God Gave me a real woman, and as much as I resisted, I fell in love with her, as she did with me with the same resistance.  The heavens have certainly had some entertainment over the last year.  I have walked with God for the last nine years, sacrificing all for Him.  She has been walking with Jesus her whole life.  It was God vs. Jesus.  Who was going to win?  We both thought we had the other spiritual entity down pat.  John Knox of the United Church meets St. Theresa of Avila from the Holy Roman Church in the great re-match of the Reformation!  Totally exhilerating, I must say.

We didn't know as much as we went spiritually toe-to-toe.  Then one day she asked me, 'You've been walking with God all along.  Why do you ignore Jesus?' 

At that moment the most amazing spiritual thing happened, by simply recognizing the truth of its first speaking.  Jesus took the wounded little boy out onto the water with Him.

Rebellion.  No rules. The search for freedom and separation with God against the massive forces that silently run our lives: work, family, love, religion.  The long road away from civilization, the one we're so proud of, that we fixed from history, that is so devoid of spirit, yet is the son of Christendom.  The Church today struggles with its rebellious creation, science married with business, as it ages and it's son is in his prime.  It is all so corrupt, it corrupted me, until I rebelled.  That's when God showed up.  It seemed I was sick of this world's institutions, none of them with any integrity.  I wanted my own.  Dad had given his life to the Church.  God was about to show me the difference between spirituality and spiritual reality.  I agreed to let Him violate me, and I was outraged at what He showed me.  Everything was corrupt in this world, beyond my imagining.  It stoked my rebellion even more.

"You want some more?"  For nine months the great divide was shown to me.  For nine years the message has been forming.  It's been absolutely brutal at times, taken to the point of suicide so often, following God.  That's not nice.  That's not what God Asks of us.  God is love, He wouldn't hurt a flea.  That's what the United Church taught me as a child.

I guess it's right, except I asked for it, and God answers prayers.  'Letting go,' giving up so much, until it was all gone.  When you have been reduced to zero, what's left is truly who you are.  How many of us stand naked when we pray to God?  Love was nude.  Who needs to cover up in the Garden anyways?  But in civilization, it embarasses the Victorians. 

I used to be known as 'Sun Warrior' on here, the firebrand spiritual rebel that made ministers shut up and those with spiritual questions, and the Atheists, peak up.  The only one that really challenged me, of course, was Pan, the American.  How modern theology figured out so much in panentheism struck me with awe.  The father, Christianity, having taken the pounding for over a century by its son, science, and learned so much more because of it.

But since then I've grown, and the Native Elders have given me a new name, Gray Owl, after the great Chief, Gray Eagle, and the Great Spirit.  But even then, awed by what they gave me, I had to begin to grow into that name.  When they sent me back to my father's Church, I was dumbstruck.  Are they nuts?  Go back to your father, they were saying, as the Dalai Llama tells everyone.  You're meant to be there.

I scratch my whiskers.  My journey has been so strange.  I've been blessed with so much.  I think of my dad, lying on that hospital bed so far away.  He had to do it alone, on faith.  His Prodigal Son returns to his house, the little boy healed, the life in his father's heart is tired and worn.  My struggle with God, Who is All, Granted mercy from His Son.  One heart.  Two separate men.  The masculine struggle of the spiritual.  Finally laid low... by a woman. 

I come back to the Church.  They tell me well over half of the new minister candidates are female.

So here I sit, living off $281 a month of welfare, in my  parents' winter home in the biggest city in Canada, civilization.  Penniless, bankrupt, ineligible for government student loans, facing the bureaucracy of an institution that looks for 'emotional stability and maturity.'  How much spiritual reality can its spirituality take?  I know, I know, it's just the toolbox for those who come to me.  Dependent on a minister's recommendation, who I've only sat with once, and have a hard time getting emails returned, let alone the presbytery person.  And God says this is where He wants me.  Do I get it yet?

I got it.  But I'm gonna need some miracles from You to get me there...