This is a question that was posed to me by a faithful reader. If you have read all two of my posts, you are a faithful reader! It's so easy for me to forget that what is crystal clear in my head and my heart may not be so self-evident to others. Never much for ambiguity, it is only fair that I lay it all on the table.

A worldview quiz that I took recently described me as a "hateful Calvinist." Lovely. In everything that I write, I am coming from a place where there is one God. And what I believe about that God is that he is right and that he is good and, even more simply, that he IS. I remember having a conversation with a friend back in the olden days before I believed the things I believe now. We were talking about what we thought heaven was like. He said that he believed heaven was whatever you believed it to be. And I thought that was profound and beautiful. Now, of course, I think that is absolute crap, but I didn't come to that conclusion by being smart and figuring everything out. There is a whole sordid tale which brings me to where I am now in my Truth which I'm not going to tell here. I have to let my Truth speak for itself.

My truth consists of one God who has existed eternally and spoke the universe into existence complete with its laws of physics and science and nature and beauty and mystery. He is a God of order and not of chaos. He is not a schizophrenic God who hangs out in heaven chumming it up with other gods (or various facets of his god-like personality), making up different religions, imposing various restrictions and regulations and demanding worship to feed his monstrous ego. He is a God who from the very birth of his creation has had a plan for the ultimate redemption of humanity and this plan can be traced throughout all of history and is realized in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I believe that the cornerstone of all our struggles and questions regarding matters of faith and life and death and after-life is that self same Jesus. I believe his is the name we trip over and will be forced to reckon with at some time or another.

I believe that every single person who ever lived (with the exception of Jesus), whether knowingly or unknowingly; willingly or unwillingly, has rejected their Creator and is in dire need of being restored to him. Again, it is through Jesus and Jesus alone that this restoration occurs. These are terrifying things to write down and publish, because I know so well how to certain ears they sound awful and narrow and yes, hateful. But they are not! These things are beautiful and open and inclusive and tolerant and loving and merciful and patient and forgiving...but to make them appear so is not something I am able to transfer onto anyone, much as I would like to. It's like the illustration that so many of us have heard time and time again: If you a building were on fire and people you loved were trapped inside, and you knew the only route of escape, would you tell them about it, or let them wander around to figure it out for themselves? In all honesty, that would be so much easier.

The same person who posed the "What is you truth" question also asked me another question once. She asked me how it makes me feel when people like herself, and others among my family and friends, don't share my beliefs. I spent a long time trying to answer that question with magic life transforming words, but have regretted my clumsy attempt ever since. The short answer is that it makes me feel horrible. It makes me sad and lonely and heart broken. And it is HARD. It was so much easier when I didn't believe - easier to be popular, easier to agree with, easier to be right. It is not fun knowing that people think I'm narrow and ignorant and intolerant. But the beautiful thing is, no matter how often I might think I was better off not believing, the Truth that has infiltrated me keeps hold of me with a vice grip and refuses to let go.

I know that I come from a white bread, affluent, sheltered, uneducated and relatively unworldly (American) perspective. I don't have clever answers for clever questions regarding cultures and worldviews that are utterly beyond my realm of comprehension. However, I do believe that my worldview is actually a far cry from the homogenized concept of American Christianity. There are clever answers out there for every difficult question and I'm more than happy to track them down if the need arises.

My hope and intention is simply to create a deep longing in myself and in others to know exactly what it is that calls to our souls when we contemplate the futility of life and cry into our pillows when we think no one can hear us.

Two years ago, my mom and I visited my aunt in Washington D.C. There was an exhibit at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery of Bibles and Bible texts from before the year 1000 that I was keen on seeing. Both my mom and my aunt are indulgently tolerant and they agreed that we would all take in the exhibit. It was interesting...and relatively boring...especially considering that none of the texts could be read what with the all the Greek and Hebrew and eventually Latin I suppose (I'm just assuming those were the languages - the only thing I recall with absolute certainty is that English was not prominently featured in those early texts). My aunt stayed with me throughout the exhibit, and I have no way of knowing if she was truly interested, or if she was just humoring me. Whatever the conversations we had during that afternoon, I came away from it wanting desperately to communicate something. After coming home from the visit, I wrote the following page in a notebook. It is two years old, so the current events are somewhat dated but it accurately reflects the heart of that something I am still so desperate to communicate.

Just strip away the chaff. Peel away the layers of death. Only then will you find the center of the center of the center.

I said, "I just remove all the excess, all the dressing, strip it all away until I am left with only Jesus."

She said, "How is that possible?"

We need to move from a place where it is possible. Where we peel away religion: robes and liturgy and popes and hats and crusades and holy wars and white supremacy and abortion clinic bombers and God Hates Fags and Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson and yes even Billy Graham and Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King Jr and careless words and false prophets and poverty and HIV/AIDS and Katrinas and terrorists and tsunamis and horribly disfigured babies who live to become horribly disfigured adults and injustice and religious right.

And THEN when it is all stripped away - still present - oh God help us - ever and always still present. But when we fight through it - pushing each piece of excess to the side, clinging to the hope that somewhere at the center of it all is something that is True! Something that is Right! Something that can take it all and filter it and something that will make sense of everything. It is at this center, that we find Jesus.

It occurred to me once upon awaking that I frequently have dreams about houses. I wouldn't call them recurring dreams, because I don't recall them ever being the same - not even the houses in the dreams are the same. In most cases, the houses are ones that I have never seen before, and therefore have certainly never been in. There is often a sense of familiarity or anticipation. Sometimes, the dream is about the exterior of a house, like a camera is panning a street and then zooming in on a particular house that I recognize when I see it with an, "Ah, there it is." Or sometimes I am walking around the perimeter of a house waiting for someone to arrive, looking in the windows, or trying to figure out how to get in. Sometimes I'm just trying to determine, "Is this the right house?" Usually when the dream involves the exterior of a house, I don't get to go in.

Most of the time however, the dreams center on the interior of a house. My favorite ones involve secret passageways or miscellaneous junk - papers particularly - in an attic that are there to be sifted through like so much treasure. The absolute best dreams involve a trip to an attic where I discover the entrance to a slide, and the slide is like one of those red tube slides on a playground but longer...oh so much longer, and the colors are glowing red and black and darkness...but somehow it isn't frightening. I don't recall just now that I've ever come out the bottom of one of these slides. I don't know what is at the end. The more recent dreams about houses that I have had involve large rooms separated by curtains rather than walls. Behind each curtain is a surprising new room, often large and unfurnished.

So, when I came to the realization that so many of my dreams consisted of this recurring theme, I was terribly excited. I felt special. I thought that surely there must be some significance to the theme. I can't accept that having dreams and looking for meaning in them is entirely new age drivel. Do people even say "New Age" any more? It was all the rage once upon a time.

"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions."