Inside the Cathedrals in Cambridge, It’s Bach and Handel; Outside it’s Indians and Robots

So, I’m back in Cambridge, England to do more work on my faith/science book that focuses on the physicist/priest John Polkinghorne. On every street there is a cathedral announcing a Christmas concert — choirs, bells, orchestras — and it’s easy to get caught up in the spirit. I wandered into a few cathedrals today and heard organists practicing. It was furious, loud and beautiful.

It’s chilly outside here — maybe about 40 degrees — and rainy. But the streets are full of  shoppers and nervous families. Students are being interviewed by professors to see if they’re the kind of people Cambridge University wants to admit to one of its colleges next fall. At lunch yesterday I overheard some professors discussing the many students they were going to turn down. The students will have to be chosen by another school in another town.

Still, it’s unmistakably Christmas in Cambridge. And nothing says Christmas like a group of American Indians playing Silent Night on their wind instruments and doing an interpretive dance in the cathedral of the street.

Christmas Carolers

And I was nearly chased down another street for not paying my tithe to the robot after listening to him sing in an outer space voice about Santa Claus.

Santa's British Helper

The one quiet place I found was the Westcott Chapel, where Polkinghorne said the daily office and prayed during his seminary training back in the 1980s. It’s a simple chapel — wooden floor, just a few benches, little ornamentation, definitely not a cathedral. But on the front wall, illuminated by a single candle, was the icon commissioned by Polkinghorne and his class of theology students. It is a picture of Christ, and the words of Jesus taken from John’s gospel — “You have not chosen me. I have chosen you.”

The True Chooser

That’s worth celebrating, whatever costume you’re wearing, and regardless of what the professors say.

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Risen Magazine Features God Hides in Plain Sight

Risen Magazine is one of the most interesting magazines I’ve come across. I was first turned onto it with their cover story on Alice Cooper. Then on Carlos Santana. Every issue had an interview that fascinated me. They’re interested in culture, faith, love, and the stories are almost all interview in format. It’s like Talk Magazine, only Risen actually makes a point. Here’s the interview editor Chris Ahrens did with me about my new book.

Look Here
Writer: Chris Ahrens

It was as if everything had a point, and it was up to me to get my Burning Bush decoder ring and figure out the specific hidden message God had for me. I don’t do that anymore. I just look for signs of his presence, because I know they are there. He doesn’t hide. I am just blind.

-Dean Nelson, God Hides in Plain Sight

Dean Nelson is seated in front of me. I can see him, hear the warmth of his words and laughter. I am certain he is there, just as I am certain that I am in the room with him. God, according to the scriptures, is also in the room with us. But He can seem harder to locate than His creation. A true seeker, Dean Nelson finds God in a place many Protestants wouldn’t think to look-in a place that many of us non-Catholic abandoned during the Reformation. We may have been a bit hasty in our baby and bathwater discards.

Interviewed exclusively for Risen Magazine in San Diego

Risen Magazine: Why did you choose to write about the sacraments?

Dean Nelson: I think it was Eugene Peterson who said that we talk about God in these veiled references. The sacraments are a way to talk about God without talking about God. We don’t end up talking about God, but the activity of God, the evidence of God, the experience of the sacred.

RM: Protestants don’t look to the sacraments.

Read the full interview >

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A Different Way to Think About Christmas Gifts, and Another View of God Hides in Plain Sight

Check out the article:

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To Writers, Random Events Aren’t So Random

A hotel lobby in Bombay, a school shooting in Santee, a parking lot in my neighborhood — all seemingly random and unrelated places. But stories happened there that made me understand something much, much bigger. I recently did a workshop with the Writers Ministry at the Rock Church in San Diego, where I talked about how my book God Hides in Plain Sight developed, and about how writers can pay attention to events in their own lives. Those events can lead to some compelling stories!

You can listen to the workshop here.

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Do You Want to Die Today?

Uh, no. I don’t. But that was the question the man with the knife asked my son at 7 a.m. recently on a street in Honduras, just blocks from the school where my son teaches. The man with the knife then made a throat-slashing gesture.

My son, Blake, has a bit of a commute to his school. He walks a mile or so to the bus stop, then takes the city bus to another stop, just blocks from the school where he walks the rest of the way. It can take him 45 minutes to get there. He has had marvelous experiences so far with the Honduran people. Early in his time there he got on a bus he thought was taking him back toward his apartment, but after a while he didn’t recognize any of the landmarks. He asked one of the riders if the bus was headed toward his specific neighborhood, and the woman gave him a look of concern. Soon she consulted with other riders on the bus, and all of them began gesturing behind them. Bad sign. But when the bus driver pulled over, four people got off the bus with Blake and walked across the street, and waited with him until a bus going the opposite direction came by. They told the driver where Blake needed to go, and he agreed to make sure he got there. As Blake gratefully boarded the bus, his new friends gave him a bottle of iced tea and an orange. Now THAT’s hospitality!

And when the United States’ soccer team tied a  Honduran arch-rival in a World Cup-qualifying game recently, making Honduras eligible for the World Cup for the first time in more than 20 years, the local Hondurans celebrated like it was New Year’s. They found any American they could to thank. Luckily for Blake, he is one of the ONLY Americans living in his town, so he became the object of their gratitude. He humbly accepted their adoration.

Politically, Honduras has been unstable because of a dispute over who was actually the nation’s president. They just had their election, so maybe in a month or so other nations will begin recognizing the legitimacy of the new Honduran government.

But hospitality, soccer and politics take a back seat to someone making a slashing motion with a knife.

At first the thief demanded my son’s cell phone. Blake pretended to not understand him. When he finally handed it over, the man put it in his pocket and they walked side by side in silence for a few steps. Then the man pulled out Blake’s phone, and then pulled out his own phone. The thief’s phone was much nicer than Blake’s, so he handed it back. Then the thief demanded all of Blake’s money. Blake said he didn’t understand Spanish.

Note to self, he told me in an email later: Don’t tell someone you don’t understand Spanish in Spanish! That’s when the knife moved across the air in front of the man’s neck and he asked Blake if he wanted to die.

“Oh, dinero!” Blake said, suddenly understanding. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing clears the mind like the knowledge of your own hanging in the morning.

So Blake gave the man a wad of cash. The man then reached into Blake’s pocket for his credit cards, but Blake pushed him away. They walked together for a few more steps.

“Now we are friends,” the man said to Blake.

“How can you call us friends? You just threatened me with a knife and took all of my money?” Blake said.

“I was hungry and needed some breakfast.”

“Then you should have told me that and I would have bought you breakfast. Now I don’t have any money for my own breakfast.”

At this point they were near Blake’s school, so he bolted through the front door. He told his principal, who was horrified, and who begged Blake not to quit. He reimbursed Blake for the money he lost, plus $5, and arranged to have someone drive him to and from school every day. So he sort of came out of the deal ahead. One of the teachers in the school, a Canadian, heard about this and quit on the spot.

One of Blake’s students in class that day said he saw Blake talking to a man on the sidewalk.

“Why didn’t you say anything? I was being robbed,” Blake said.

So now Blake and his students have a secret word among them. If they see Blake with someone they don’t recognize, they’re to say hi to him. If he uses the secret word, they know he’s in trouble and they should summon help.

Meanwhile, he’s grateful for his sub-standard cellphone.

Moments like these make anyone shudder with the possibilities of how else this could have ended. We’ve all seen the results of primitive acts. I’ve seen them in Kosovo and Kansas. This could have happened just as easily in Ocean Beach as in Honduras. But when we see how thin the veneer of civilization really is, it give us all pause, I think.

It confronts us with a choice. We can be people who help get others headed back in the right direction, adding food and drink for the journey, filling them with gratitude, or we can be people who menace and threaten others, filling them with fear. Bus people or knife people. It works in any language.

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Seeing the Sacraments in Shawshank Redemption, Away We Go, and USA Today

On Mondays USA Today publishes an essay on a topic of spirituality. Today they published mine, where I talk about the baptism scene in Shawshank Redemption and the confession scene in Away We Go, and the Last Rites scene in my neighborhood elementary school parking lot. Sacraments in movies and parking lots? They’re everywhere, when we’re paying attention. Here’s the essay: USA TODAY

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“One of the Best Pieces of Wisdom You Will Ever Hear”

This is what Dean Nelson in God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World  asks in chp 1 of his book.

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Why the Minnesota Twins Make the Spin of the Ball, and the World, Make Sense

Watching 54,000 people inflate the Metrodome with their cheering yesterday while their Minnesota Twins won a one-game playoff in the bottom of the 12-th inning , made me consider several things about baseball. Most of them involved memories.

old Metropolitan Stadium

I remember going to games at the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, when the Twins used to play outdoors, and snowplows had to remove the snow from the outfield warning track before the game could begin. The Twins are moving back outside next season after more than 20 years of the indoor experiment with regulated weather. I grew up watching guys like Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison, Zoilo Versalles, Cesar Tovar, Tony Oliva, Earl Battey and Jim Kaat. I met a couple of them through Little League events. I remember sitting in the right field bleachers as a kid, next to my Sunday School teacher, and as Jimmy Hall stepped into the batter’s box my teacher said, “He’s going to hit a home run right here.” That’s exactly what Jimmy Hall did on the next pitch, right to my teacher who stood and caught it with his bare hands. I paid much closer attention in Sunday School after that.

I remember watching Jim Bouton pitch for the Yankees against the Twins, and he threw so hard that his hat always fell

off. Then when Bouton wrote the book Ball Four, I read it as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls. Decades later my mom met him and got him to call me on my 40th birthday. I didn’t really believe it was him for a while. But it was. I’ve since brought him out to San Diego and interviewed him for our Writer’s Symposium. Cool guy. Great book. My parents claim that the only book I read in all of high school was Ball Four. Not true. I’m sure there was another one, too.

There is something about baseball that is different from other sports. The great sportswriter George Plimpton said that the essence of baseball (other than trying to hit one round object with another round object) was that it was a series of one-on-one incidents, where one player tries to induce another to make a mistake. A pitcher tries to get a batter to swing at a pitch outside the strike zone. A batter tries to get a pitcher to leave the pitch over the plate. If the ball is hit, then it’s a very brief issue between the batter and the fielder, one hoping the other makes a slight mistake — either in judgment or practice. I interviewed Plimpton, too, and you can see that interview on this website under the INTERVIEWS tab. Oh yeah — THAT’s the other book I read in high school. Plimpton’s book Paper Lion was brilliant. It was about his time as a participant/journalist in the Detroit Lions football training camp. It inspired me years later to do the same thing with my college alma mater for a magazine, and practice with their intercollegiate football team as they prepared for their homecoming game. I got to hold the ball on an extra point attempt. Ball sailed right through my hands, and I got crushed. All that practice…. I was a Paper Pioneer.

When the Minnesota Twins went to the World Series in 1987 against the St. Louis Cardinals, I had moved to San Diego, but my parents still lived in Minneapolis, and my dad got tickets for the opening game. I had just won a local journalism prize that had some money attached to it, and my dad said, “If you’re crazy enough to fly out here the game, you can have my tickets.” I found a flight that went from San Diego to Kansas City to Chicago to Minneapolis on Saturday morning, and took my five-month-old son with me. Other than my mashing his head into the luggage rack on the first leg of the flight, it went okay. We got to Minneapolis, I handed baby Blake off to my parents at the airport, and my brother and I went to the game. Dan Gladden hit a grand slam home run into the seats right below us, and won the game. Next morning, Blake and I flew from Minneapolis to Chicago to Kansas City to San Diego. Did I mention that this was also a year for Halley’s Comet?

A couple of years ago, my brothers and I asked my mom what she wanted to do for her 80th birthday. She said she wanted all of us to go to Cooperstown to the Baseball Hall of Fame. So we rented a house outside Cooperstown for a few days and had a happy birthday. At every exhibit, I heard grandparents and parents telling sons and daughters and grandsons about seeing the events that prompted those cleats to be in that glass case, or that bat to be on display. It wasn’t just baseball memorabilia in that Hall — the objects re-ignited people’s histories. I even saw my dad get worked up at the Mel Ott display. “I hated Mel Ott,” he said. I’ve never heard my dad talk like that in my entire life. “He always got the hit that beat the Cubs.” Back away from the case… easy now. Uncurl your fists.

I played baseball when I was a little kid, then in high school, then in college. I was on my college’s first baseball team. We lost every game. I write about that team in my new book, God Hides in Plain Sight. I think I was the only guy on the team to get ejected from a game by my own coach!

So when I see the Twins win, in such an unpredictable way as they did yesterday, I cheer for them, drink from my Twins coffee mug, and have great hope for the future. But mostly I am grateful to them for a wonderful past.

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What a Beliefnet Blogger Says About My New Book (Hint: He Liked It!)

Scot McKnight is a writer and scholar who writes about the Chrisitian Church —  where it’s strong and where it’s not –  and he has an interest in connecting the modern church to its ancient roots.  A good friend of mine said that his book on the spiritual discipline of fasting is the best thing he’s read on the topic. My book, God Hides in Plain Sight, struck a chord with McKnight because it looks at the seven sacraments in a new way that helps us see the presence of God that surrounds us and even goes before us. Check out his Jesus Creed blog on Beliefnet, and see how readers have reacted here.

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Now Appearing in Donald Miller’s Burnside Writer’s Collective; Announcing the Start of My Million Inches Tour

I have been a fan of Donald Miller’s ever since reading Blue Like Jazz. The humor, the depth, the doubt, all drew me into his attempt to live a life that was honest, difficult and true. Other books of his have continued those themes, and his current Million Miles tour appears to take listeners to an even deeper level of faith, understanding and practice. The guy has something to say. And he’ll make you laugh while he says it.

Dean interviewing Donald Miller

I have had him come to the Point Loma Nazarene University campus a couple of times, and I have seen him challenge that crowd better than anyone else. You can watch my interview with him in the Interviews section of my website.

So I was flattered when Jordan Green, who handles a website that posts writing that resonates with Miller’s, asked me to start writing for them. I’ll be doing occasional blogs on Burnside Writer’s Collective, but we started off with an excerpt from my new book, God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World. The excerpt deals with how we have the opportunity to be deeper people, but usually we let it pass. This will propel me, I am convinced, to begin my Million Inches tour. Stay tuned for details.

You can see the excerpt  here.

Keep inching!

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