Tug-of-War In The Furnace

September. One year ago. I was in a small Tennessee cabin at a trauma treatment center with Furnace in its name, surrounded by an inferno carefully stoked just for me. I stared dumbly at my ordeal, a lone pillow-fort palm tree on the other side of the psychic flames where a young woman playing my inner child was waiting for me. No fork in the road, no other path, no open door, only this mortal choice: give up or fight through the fire, which might not be possible. A white bedsheet representing my father’s current dementia-care restraints (and also maybe my vestments?) bound my midriff, the ends of the improvised rope held by two strong men in the roles of my anger and my sadness. We were given instructions: “Anger and Sadness, you are going to do everything in your power to keep Jamison away from that palm tree. Jamison, your inner child is waiting for you just over there, take a look at her. She has your guitar, a pen and paper, and the Beatles’ White Album. You are going to do everything in your power to get there. Let’s see who wins.” Other clients sat around the room watching in earnest.

Perfect, just perfect. I came all this way, took time off, and spent all this money to reenact a game of childish, macho, playground tug-of-war as my final project. So on brand! So me, so dumb, so pointless. Then I felt the sheet jam into my ribs and pull me backward off my feet, and it was suddenly game on, battle-time, let’s go to war.

~

When I returned home from Nashville to New York City, I began to set in motion plans for the most momentous transformation of my adult life. I’ve been in vocational ministry non-stop since college, shortly after my conversion. I’ve spent the last two decades as a church planting pastor in Brooklyn. During the pandemic, I found myself the last remaining full-time pastor from a once-thriving network of neighborhood churches. Our remnant put together a team to merge three of the congregations into one. We brokered the purchase of an historic church property in prime Brooklyn – our first permanent home. We trained and installed new leaders to preserve the culture. Then I decided it was time to quit.

~

On the one hand, this is not a newsworthy story. I’m an average middle-aged guy that performed well enough with one “company” for two decades, successfully delivered a once-in-a-lifetime project, felt my job was complete and I’d reached my ceiling, who was also burnt-out, exhausted, needing to take a rest and find something new to do. That’s all true. Nothing extraordinary to see here.

But there’s a deeper meaning too. There’s always a deeper meaning for those willing to look beneath surfaces. Dr. bell hooks writes, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible.” I am an artist, though that deep, innocent, unnamed part of me has long been living in exile. I am also an experienced and natural priest, especially to artists and outsiders. I am now endeavoring to discover what might be possible – for me, for you – if I unleash both of these parts of me in the world, together. If I let my little child lead.

Easter 2025 was my final Sunday as a parish pastor. On May 1st, I became unemployed for the first time since I was sixteen years old. I have more to process and repair than even I know. I face daily doubt and anxiety, but I’m also filled with imagination and, yes, hope. I have no certainty. I only have this rude vocational map I made to guide my path forward (the planets are hyper-links).

MISSION WONDER

My family and I have embarked on an endeavor we call “The Year of Living Wondrously,” a season in which we radically reduce our income (by two-thirds) and way of life by prioritizing presence wherever we are needed over job prospects. God and his calling on me over money. This is more than symbolic reframing. I just turned 48. We have meager savings, three children in college and one in high school, our New York City rent is due every month, and we own literally nothing of any value. We plan to live for the time being on my wife’s non-profit salary and see how long that can last.

It seems obvious to me now – much of the real ordeal, that is. My hero’s journey was always going to be about money, the unreal monster I was going to have to go to war with to slay or be slain by. A Saint Francis devotee in the heart of the belly of the beast of Mammon; the founder of Tau; a minister trying to transition to an artist in midlife. It’s not even that personal, just necessary. Money will be a problem! We live in the world commerce has built, and our economy does not tend to financially reward or value works of deep spirit – in art, religion, or community. So the crucible before me? Spend at least one year finally not prioritizing money as a power worth serving, and trying to live after the pattern of Saint Francis, wandering where needed, singing songs, loving nature and people, spreading joy, going out to his people – the prodigals – to let them know that they can come home again. (And, to be honest, battling daily self-doubt, delusions of grandeur or destitution, and scarcity mindset.) This is the journey, my necessary next step, armed with nothing but faith and foolishness, plus a little magic. It could be no other way.

As an artist-priest, I am embracing my life as performance art, though it is not a performance — it is my life. In fact, the first thing I did after resigning was create and perform a piece of multimedia memoir theater in my home state. (I think we’re going to perform it some more. Invite us to your town.) As I was preparing the monologues, I found a full-page imperative in my journal from The Furnace. Though it was in my handwriting, I could not remember writing it, and it seemed like a note from God: “Do not perform. Be presence in the earth.”

Presence. Practice true presence, to and with my whole self. Through art, creative ministry forms, and my life story, be present to those of faith and especially to those outside organized faith communities. That is the mission. To inspire and help others to be present to their deepest self – often hidden underneath the surface facades we present to the mirror and others – which I believe is also God as he is potent in us, refined of ego and ambition by the fires of suffering and love. To be in existential communion with the always-present God as he truly is. To be fully present to one another, in empathy and encouragement. To be attentive to and in love with the creation, the theater of God’s glory. Present to sorrow and death, to life and joy. This is how we’ll make it through to wonder.

Hope is hard-won. Like faith and love, it is a freely given gift – the gift of God giving himself –– but it can only be received and appropriated by our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, by “filling up what is lacking in the suffering of the body of Christ,” which work begins by seeing one another. This is the free gift my Furnace cohort gave me when most of the people in my life could not.

Seeing pain. Sharing pain. Seeing the child inside, that indestructibly hopeful and abundant part of God’s spirit within us, who is a kind of eternally renewable believer, or dreamer. Seeing the possible.

So many of the people I meet betray by their body language, unkept comments, and overall spirit of meh-ness that they have settled. Because the system, the culture, we have made feels inevitably like a prison gym, feels inescapable, is in fact unable and unwilling to reward the marginal, the outsider, the lowly hard worker, the artist, the dreamer. And so they’ve stopped hoping, stopped dreaming of and fighting for something more life-giving. Grinding it out in whatever utilitarian job they can get paid for in order to maybe buy toys, take a vacation, give some spare change away. As a lifelong outsider to financial resources, in the financial capital of the world, I have seen clearly how beneath nearly every problem and proffered solution we experience in America hides the snarling smile of the demon Mammon, or love of and service to money. It makes me sad, and it makes me angry. I feel like Jesus would look at us and say “O generation of small faith, I have lit you inside with my resurrection spirit, I am calling you to be and do something deeper and wider and bolder. I am wanting to change the world through you, millions and billions of you. If only you’d believe together, you could fling Wall Street into the sea. You could topple kingdoms. You could win! By your love, which is my love. I know you have needs; I’ll see to them. Now follow me.”

I think hope made real in this life is a dogged clinging to Jesus of Nazareth, leading and alive, into a strange horizon. Maybe we have so little transformation because we have so little living hope; we’ve risked so little in our faith. The consumer goods are too comforting, the systemic minions too daunting. I am staking my life on the belief that the universe and God are abundant. That human beings too are created to be abundantly generous, open-hearted and open-handed; that when their imagination for what might be possible is enflamed by the presence of a powerful story, they find that deeper hope, generosity, possibility, connection, and love are within them to be shared. I harbor a punk-rock, sermon-on-the-mount belief that, though deadly real, money is a human construct, a limiting belief and, like control, mostly an illusion. Love gets paid.

~

The Furnace tug-of-war went on for more than five minutes. Anger was a 6’2”, 235-pound athlete from the deep South, and he wasn’t letting me off easy. He also had Sadness on his side. But I wouldn’t be deterred. I fought and scraped and expended every ounce of energy in my body in a physicality not required of me since Texas youth football or behind-the-school-dumpster fisticuffs. I was sweating everywhere. Gasping. Determined. I would get within inches of my inner child and our palm tree only to be swept off my feet backward. When dragged in reverse to the corner where Anger and Sadness resided, I’d redouble my efforts. I wouldn’t lose, not this time, not with these stakes. I never knew I was this strong. Toward the end, I was prostrate on the floor, my knuckles buried in shag carpet clinging for dear life, the carpet covered in blood from my own bare feet, locked in a final stalemate between me and my restraints. No one seemed capable of winning or losing. We were indurated by the fires of battle like statue wrestlers, the room suspended in breathlessness. Right then, by a pure prophetic power erupting from the most guttural region inside of me –– a place I’d known, if ever, only on occasion –– I bellowed out a vow and warning to all in the room, to Anger and to Sadness, to my inner child, to boredom and despair, to all those watching and waiting for a resolution, to every pirate and to every dreamer: “I might not make it, but I will never give up!”