Mark Scandrette

This summer Christine Sine invited me to write something about an unconventional spiritual practice. Here’s something I wrote that is posted on her blog.

Love-Making As a Spiritual Practice

“Fire crackers like gun fire
Shatter the velvet silence of sweet release
with you in my arms.”

When I shared these lines above with a group of friends, reactions were mixed. One friend nodded with the knowing relish of common experience. Others squirmed uncomfortably as if what was spoken was too private or salacious.  Despite the fact that sexuality is central to what it means to be human and to be alive, so often it is a dimension of our lives that is fraught with conflicted feelings, secrecy, wounds or shame. Here are examples of common themes I hear in conversations among friends:

“We’ve never been able to talk about sex– I don’t think my spouse would understand what I need or want.”

“I stayed up all night twice this week looking at internet porn.”

“My partner and I haven’t had sex for almost a year. It brings up too much pain about my childhood trauma. ”

“I thought that if we got married, the same-sex attraction would go away.”

“I accidently made out with someone I just met at the party last weekend. We may have had too much to drink.”

“My spouse just caught me pursuing someone I met online. This has opened up the wounds and broken the trust … but I feel desperate for soul connection with someone.”

“I wonder why I haven’t found anyone to marry yet. I’m so hungry to share life with someone and experience intimacy. What’s wrong with me?”

The yearning to connect with another human being in whole person ecstasy is a sacred gift that is frankly overwhelming in its potency. And often it is the unspoken energy that is shaping our relationships with one another and our sense of belonging to God. It is a beautiful treasure that needs to be awakened, cultivated, disciplined and celebrated.

Knowing that our sexuality is a sacred gift, my wife and I have tried to be intentional about  our sexuality and love-making as a spiritual practice:

One of the ways that we do this is by talking about sex and our sexuality regularly outside the bedroom. Sometimes we talk about the mixed messages we got about sex growing up, or the guilt, shame or confusion we have felt about our sexual awakening and desires. We acknowledge that we are sexually broken. Most, if not all of us have wounds, guilt or repression about our sexuality to navigate. Knowing that the journey to healthy sexuality is often a winding road from adolescence throughout adulthood, we try to be deeply vulnerable and realistic– while offering each other grace and understanding.  We also talk about the nuts and bolts of what works for us in the bedroom–the words and touches that make the other person feel attractive, beloved and aroused. And though it is sometimes embarrassing for our kids, we talk with them about the loveliness of a sexual relationship and the sacredness of sex between people who are committed to one another. And we try to normalize and celebrate their awakening desires to experience union and intimacy with another human being.

As corny or unromantic as it might sound, we schedule our times for love-making. For us the days of spontaneous eruptions of sexual desire diminished quickly with the onset of full-time jobs, children, and the other the responsibilities of adulthood.  The truth is that at the end of a fulfilling day of meaningful work, family and community life, we feel pretty tired and often wish for a few moments alone. Like our weekly dates,  we schedule love-making as a way to make it a value and priority in our lives. Sex can be a measure of the whole quality of a marriage. Scheduling special time for love-making each week is a way for us to take the temperature of our relationship. There is a lot that has to happen before we get to the bedroom. We need to be reconciled with one another. We need to be conscious of our words and tenderness throughout the day so that the other feels safe and open to intimate touch. We need to be relaxed, centered  and de-stressed in order to be fully present to one another between the sheets. The practices of exercise, healthy eating, dressing and cleaning the body are all ways that we  affirm that we are God’s temple– sacred, attractive and worthy of care. And our bodies are sacred temples that we invite one another to enter. The teachings of Jesus and the Disciple John suggest that the love and care we give to one another is as close as we can get to loving the God we cannot see. The attentive gaze into one another’s eyes, the tender touch and gentle words are tangible practices in the mysterious ways of the kingdom of love.

Whether a person is married or single, we can explore ways to be God-conscious in our sexuality.  I know a devout single woman who practices what she calls, “Sexy time” — a space where she chooses intentional practices that help her feel feminine, beautiful and in touch with her body in ways that affirms dignity and a sense of being beloved.  I believe there is a way for each of us to invite God into the earthy realism and beauty of our sexuality– to walk with us in the complexity and power of being created as sexuality– and rather than seeing sexuality solely in terms of moral successes or failures, perhaps it is better to ask, “What are my next steps towards healthy God-conscious sexuality?”

THE RESCUE:

On Saturday, 100,000 people will come together around the world in 100 cities to stand in solidarity with over 30,000 children that have been abducted and forced to fight a senseless 23 year long war by the Lord’s Resistance Army in East Africa.  We will be waiting to be rescued by a person of great cultural influence on that night.

We will not be leaving until someone of great cultural influence comes and rescues us.  There will be 1900+ young people in attendance on Saturday, and as many as possible will continue to wait it out for our rescuer if no one comes on Saturday evening.

We are meeting at 3:00 PM on Saturday at the corner of Jefferson and Hyde Streets to walk to East Beach (near Crissy Field), where we will be waiting for our rescuer from around 4:00 PM Saturday until as long as it takes.  If you would like to watch the video that better explains the situation, you can find it online at www.therescue.invisiblechildren.com

Don’t sleep through the revolution.

In September of his 11th year he boarded the school bus and left the neighborhood and childhood behind. They closed the local school a year before he would have finished sixth grade, and now a busload of children from the sleepy neighborhoods along the West Mississippi were being shipped off to the inner city. The bus quickly passed what was familiar: the library, the diner, and Wong’s Chinese restaurant and used car lot. Crossing the tracks by the new shopping center, they entered the West end of Lake Street where the Native Americans, black families and Vietnamese refugees lived. He looked out the window and noticed the marquee of the adult theater and watched the people milling around talking loudly on the corner.  They passed the old cemetery where some of the graves were so old that the trees had grown into the tombstones.

Over the summer he had entered puberty, somewhat prematurely, his voice changed, he was a head taller and his body was now covered in hair like a monkey.  He was becoming a man like his father, who was strong and wise and left bad smells in the bathroom. On the bus they regarded him as a wonder and freak of nature—someone their same age who had passed from childhood and was now on the opposite side of a great chasm.

He exited the bus and parted from the group. His parents had placed him in a special program they thought fit his personality and interests better than the three ‘R’s of a conventional education. He was going to Open School, a post-hippie era experiment in education that consisted of boundless learning opportunities and the absence of rules. There were no classrooms or walls, only wide-open spaces and choices. Students could choose the courses they wanted, worked on projects independently, and were instructed to address teachers by their first names (like Joan, Susan or John). Joan, his homeroom teacher, showed them R-rated movies on Fridays, called them “little f*#%rs” when she got angry and chain-smoked incessantly. Most of the other students were from progressive wealthy or academic families who lived on the east side of the river by the university, except for a few gifted minority students from the immediate neighborhood. If his parents had listened to public radio or read the New York Times they would have known that many his classmates were the children of prominent city planners, politicians, celebrity authors and musicians. Aram Karapetian, who would become his best friend that year, loved to tell about the time his father, an orchestra conductor, got into a brawl with Pablo Picasso at a bull fight in Madrid.

All of this was a new world to him. Home-life was gentle, strict, oriented around religious piety and duty with a conspicuous lack of humor or irony.  At school he found solace in the art studio, under the direction of a French Catholic bachelor who, recognizing his artistic inclinations, invited him to spend three hours a day working in the studio supplied with any materials he wanted. During that year he created three sculptures. The first was a terracotta bust of his father, the second, a terracotta bust of Jesus Christ and the third, a life sized plaster sculpture of a young man seated on a stool in contemplation.

The first sculpture of his father was admittedly crude, but showed promise and some familiarity with ancient and renaissance forms. In the fall of that year, his father was promoted from Lieutenant to Chief in the U.S. Amy. This change brought more money for the family, more responsibility for his father and meant more time that he was left home alone with his mother and three sisters.  Making this sculpture was his way of identifying with manhood in the relative absence of his father that year. He was becoming a man, and as he carved into the clay day after day he saw something of himself and who he might become. During that time he and his father had the talks about wet dreams, the strength of testosterone, and a man’s natural curiosity about the shape of a woman’s body. Becoming a man was exciting, scary and complicated—and though he closely identified with his father, they were different. He was flamboyant, creative and risk-taking while his father was shy, cautious and duty-bound. He was becoming a man like his father, but also like himself. It was the beginning of his journey to discover how to combine the integrity, sensitivity, and devotion of his father with the courage to dream and act with courage and abandon.

The second sculpture of Jesus Christ was more technically developed, but when fired in the kiln the skull cracked, necessitating an impromptu addition of a crown of thorns. This piece was of special curiosity to his schoolmates from more “enlightened” secular families. “Who is this sculpture of?” They would ask, mockingly. With sincerity he replied, “It is suppose to be God.” He was never the good student in Sunday school or family devotions, but this environment brought out his nascent interest in the spiritual. It was the beginning of his journey to negotiate deep devotion beyond the sentimentality of provincial folk religion. The crown of thorns this path requires would be a continual surprise.

The third sculpture of himself was life-size and inspired by the haunting figures of George Segal, with and obvious awareness of Rodin’s “thinker” in bronze. What is the proper posture of a person, in reference to one’s humanity and the awareness of the divine?  The figure sits leaning forward as in deep thought, with hands clasped to the face and eyes staring forward, equally conscious of the world within and the world without. When he visited the school fifteen years later, the sculpture was still on display in the window case. It was the beginning of his journey to identify as a mystic and a pilgrim—continually on a search for meaning and purpose—living into the questions—and inviting others to stare toward what is beyond and within.

My son Noah designed this party card. This event is the culmination of our Awakening Creativity Learning Lab.

I awoke, looked at the clock blinking 4:22 a.m. and slowly made my way out of bed towards morning oatmeal and the first cup of coffee. I leave the house shortly before six to begin the familiar ascent up Bernal Hill as the sun rises in blue-pink melancholy hues on a cool and foggy winter day. These early mornings are to be treasured, when the city sleeps and I receive the warmth of the Maker’s presence and the hopes and dreams of a new day–especially today, a day when the anticipation of thanksgiving weekend and the holiday season hangs electric in the air. Stepping along the ridge I meditate on the strange words of the Nazarene, “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” Today I want that love to breath through me.

On my way back down the hillside I walk past a group of migrant laborers waiting for work, their dark native features suggest recently departed hometowns in Oaxaca or Chiapas—southern Mexico. Brave adventurers, I muse, far from family and full of stories about border crossings and unimagined opportunities in the Northern country. In through the front door and back towards the kitchen I see Lisa beginning the day at her desk checking email, arranging the children’s itineraries, administrating a home school network, and preparing lesson plans. On Wednesdays our kitchen turns into a classroom—or more accurately a biology lab or writer’s salon. Eight to ten students sit around the large table dissecting a sheep’s brain, writing haikus, conjugating Spanish verbs or competing in math games. This morning Lisa is making breakfast for two French-speaking friends visiting from Montreal. Today she will buy the holiday groceries and finish preparing tonight’s simplicity workshop attended by thirty people in our living room. Our refrigerator is full of local fruits and vegetables bought at the farmer’s market. Lisa lets me choose a scarf for a friend from the collection of items she has created that is kept by her desk. If you have been near Lisa you know that her hands are always busy making something. This year we watched her clean, card, spin and knit wool fleece I brought back from Scotland in another winter.

Isaiah (12) stands at the stove frying potatoes for breakfast, his favorite thing to cook and eat with lots of ketchup. He hums cheerfully about his work, emptying the dishes from the dishwasher back into the cupboards, eventually settling into breakfast with a book by his plate (the third installment in the Eragon series written by a fellow home-schooler). Today Isaiah is going to Nature Awareness class in Woodside where he and his best friend will build fires and forts in the woods and hike along with a naturalist noting the flora and fauna. He is the king of relaxation. After his studies, violin, soccer or tennis, you will see him luxuriating in a hammock strung up underneath his bed listening to his ipod (Matisyahu) and reading comics. When I look at him I think of the comic relief he brings to our family and friends, a living three-dimensional animated cartoon with a heart of compassion and a longing for justice. He and I are the two people in our family who tear up at movies and Isaiah is prone to wax philosophical or theological at the dinner table like his father.

Dinner table conversations these days at the Scandrette home are always interesting and sometimes magical discourses on politics, scripture or family dynamics. They are also a cross-cultural affair now that Isaiah is the only one of us left on the concrete side of Piaget’s formal operations. In other words, the house is full of teenagers with growing wit and sophistication (“Dad, do we have to have the sex talk AGAIN!) Hailey will turn 15 in February and Noah (13) is currently the tallest person in our family at six foot one and still growing.

Noah can be found in the backyard sanding the handle on a knife he began making at a weekend workshop along with a rawhide leather sheath. Stoic and quiet like an Elvin warrior prince, Noah was made for the outdoors. A keen observer of what he discovers at Nature Studies or on camping trips, his greatest passion continues to be birding and photography. On Saturday mornings we roam the hidden and lonely places along the bay in search of new species to capture with the camera. While studying the brain this year we learned that some people are right brained (intuitive) and some are left brained (logical/analytical). Noah tested fully left-brain, which explains why he plays the cello with such technical skill and is the one person in our family who has solved the Rubik’s cube (a new fascination for a generation who did not experience the 1980’s firsthand, along with the Mohawk and the band Abba, also currently popular at casa Scandrette). This fall Noah and Hailey spent a weekend taking classes at Stanford, where he mastered the Rubik’s cube and learned to use image manipulation software to enhance his growing bird photograph library. Beneath Noah’s reserved demeanor resides a skilled and gentle conversationalist both among adults and younger children, who flocked to him when he was an assistant nature instructor last spring.

In the afternoon, I show up to the Marsh Theater a few minutes before the end of rehearsal to secretly observe our daughter Hailey practicing her singing parts and contact improv routine for an upcoming performance. Her flowing platinum hair, innocent grace and confidence win her the affections of many friends (and admiring boys who are kept at a distance by her brother’s protection and her own discretion). Younger actors and the students she teaches at preteen nature studies adore Hailey. In the spring she played Mrs. Beaver in the Marsh Youth interpretation of Narnia, complete with a convincing cockney accent. When she isn’t studying or performing her social calendar is filled with friends and new freedom to take the train to places she wants to go. She writes songs and plays guitar, corresponds with friends and is a dedicated diarist. During our Abolition project this fall, Hailey and her best friend developed a keen interest in human-trafficking issues, highlighted in the recent film Call + Response, directed by our friend. Hailey and her brothers wrote letters to our politicians about modern day slavery and were pleased to receive personal replies from our Senators and Representatives.

I stand in front of the mirror looking at a gray-bearded nearly middle-aged man bearing resemblance to each of his progeny who are early on the journey of living and becoming. I’m the dad who wears many different hats, writes books and ambles across the country telling stories, sometimes performing as his alter ego, preacher A.L. Withee in a rolling gospel revival show. The wrinkles deepen and hair now sprouts from his ears, but the eyes are bright and eager to learn to carry the growing weight of significance and responsibility with playfulness and humility.

“I want to learn to see the world through eyes of understanding and hands of healing”—my prayer early in the year answered by an opportunity to travel with Hailey through El Salvador in May, where we stood on mud floors in a shanty hut holding hands and giving thanks for daily bread with a widow and her children who live on less than $2 a day. In October our whole family received the leaping hugs and wet kisses of orphaned children in Mexico. We had our hearts broken by the knowledge that trafficked woman are being held behind the locked doors of brothels less than a mile from our house.

I bike through the mission and ride the elevator to the fourth floor of a building where the ReIMAGINE team is waiting to begin our weekly meeting. Jeff and Melissa moved to the city in September for an apprenticeship year and Sarah is just completing hers. Adam has taken over much of the management duties so that I can be free to write and speak and dream. The work of ReIMAGINE grows steadily. Two weeks ago more than thirty people took vows to live as intentional seekers of they way of Jesus together as the community and friends of SEVEN. The projects and learning labs that make up our year long spiritual formation process have 30-50 regular participants. This year we blessed Nate & Andrea and Damon and Alice to start SHALOM in impoverished east Oakland, and sent other team members to serve in Africa and Haiti. Our team is increasingly invited to tell our stories, inviting people into new experiments of faith and action. Throughout the year I led retreats or taught college students, mission & humanitarian agencies, musicians and songwriters, graduate students and church leaders. Lisa and I have enjoyed more opportunities to teach together and people have been quite responsive and appreciative of her voice as a model and guide.

Inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus, the work of ReIMAGINE is to help people revolutionize how they live their lives and to empower leaders who will revolutionize their communities. We continue to be passionate about helping people discover their journey with God in the complex and exciting matrix of the emerging world. When we think of 2009 we dream about how we can do our work more effectively and sustainably. We anticipate a new book project, an expanded learning network, a formalize apprenticeship process, funding for administrative assistance, and possibly a few months sabbatical. (If you believe in what we do and plan to do some year-end giving, please keep ReIMAGINE in mind).

In a world divided by politics, religion, economic disparity and a desperate sense of scarcity, we are tempted to forget that WE ARE ONE. The dream of the ancient messiah-rabbi, echoes in my ears, on my lips and in my prayers, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

May we live with one another in the hope and reality that this love has come to us. Grateful to share this journey with you! Happy holidays!

Mark & Lisa Scandrette | c/o: ReIMAGINE! | P.O. Box 411601 SF, CA 94141 |