Welcome new Subscribers and old, one year old friends on Substack. Yes, that’s me standing in awe in-between, what I call, “The Four Apostles.” You’ll read it all below.
But first, a few house-keeping Substack things. I am not writing leaning into an algorhythm to grow my influence. I am writing here because I felt compelled to start writing again—but from a different place—a different space—and in a different voice. On Substack, I’m offering you both prose and poetry. The prose part is what I’m most use to as I’ve had the good fortune to write a few books and guides. But in my 6th decade of life, or is it my 7th?—a new “greening” began to happen inside my heart. I felt myself greening—greening after a long season of prunning. Substack is the fruit of this greening.
You get the prose for Free! But to get the poetry, you’ll need to step up and become, what in Substack world, is called a “Paid Subscriber.” I took this important step because in the history of artist, many sought patrons who believed in them to help them “do” their work. Substack is this old way of believing in me in my writing and most especially in the writing of poems. So you can decide what you both want and need.
If you have ever supported my work through Potter’s Inn, then I offer you a Paid Subscriber as a token of saying Thank you. If you want to be able to read my poems but don’t want to or can’t be a Paid Subscriber, you get a free pass and I’ll get you signed up if you email me at info@pottersinn.com and just tell me. No questions asked.
Finally, I keep feeling the nudge to clear the deck of my soul and just say some things that I feel need to be said. This may all fall on you like dust. If so, then shake this off and move on. But, if my words hit a tender place in you, then perhaps my words might become your own words to describe your inner world; your inner weather and your inmost thoughts—never spoken until now. Who knows? But this is precisely why I think there is again, “fire in my bones” that I must just get out and Substack is the way I’m getting “it” out—for better or for worse. You be the judge.
Oh—one more thing, I’m trying to discern what actual day is best to send the Substack to you. Seems like most of us have more time to read things like this on the weekends, so this week, I’m going to send this out to you on Friday and I”ll be able to tell what works best. Ok. That’s enough. And I know, sometimes, I send more than one a week. If I do, then you will know that Steve must be having a very good week.
Gwen and I once camped in a magical forest not far from Pagosa Springs, Colorado. We drove our truck on a gravel road for 25 miles, deep into a National Forest to find a postcard worthy place to enter and actually camp in for seven days—that holy number—that just seemed right. It seemed a miracle, that as we drove into this forested campground with a glistening blue lake, one sole camper was packing up and leaving the most pristine and beautiful of all the possible sites for us to be. We waited for their exit to arrive at our own new beginning. Then, it happened. The Four Apostles greeted us. We needed the peace of wild things. We needed rest. We needed life.
There beside a crystal blue mountain lake, stood four giant, Ponderosa Pines. They were a hundred feet tall—maybe more. They grew there in almost perfect symmetry making a rectangle shaped space of grass and straw between their trunks. There I felt compelled to fall down and lie prostate—face down and surrendered there between those massive trunks of life. I felt small. I felt insignificant. I felt as if I, like Moses was on holy ground and I too needed to take my shoes off—shoes that I had worn too long over unsure ground in my work.
As soon as I saw them, I yelled out to Gwen, “I name these trees—the Four Apostles.” We camped there in their refuge and shade from the hot summer sun. I’ve seen cathedrals of Europe and the temples of the Mayas. I’ve been inside St. Peter’s in the Vatican. I’ve been in the Pilgrim’s Church in Leiden, the Netherlands. But no church made by human hands compares to the Four Apostle’s sacred space that I found or perhaps better put, found me. We are told, “When the student is ready, the teacher will come.” I was ready. The Four Apostles taught me what I’m going to tell you here.
Each morning, I took my chair and sat beside the one I named, Matthew. The next morning, I sat with Mark. The third morning, I befriended, Luke . On the fourth day, John, became my beloved Apostle. They told me things. They brought me back to life.
We had devotions there. I was devoted—can’t you tell? I became devout—a believer there.
Sometimes, it takes the grandeur of the world to convert the human heart. Don’t you know that we need to be saved from far more than our sin?
There is no conversion that compares to feeling small under the canopy of love that I sat under and in that week. Perhaps, the greatest act of love we can give ourselves is to go outside—go out into the Big—feel ourselves becoming very small—very, very small. In this smallness, we re-establish ourselves. There in the Great Expanse, the ego, which I call, “E-dging G-od O-ut” actually deflates and we are re-sized, repositioned and detoxed.
This “tall timbered choir”(Wendell Berry’s famous line of a poem I love) sang as the morning breeze flowed through their green candles showing tender and new growth. They were alive. I was alive. I was resuscitated by beauty which became oxygen. (A line I borrow from my dear friend Wes Vander Lugt in his mavelous and amazing new book).
This was in the day when I worked almost exclusively with mega-pastors who had hit a wall in their rituals of performance, light shows and smoke machines. Mind you, not all mega-pastors do this. But, nearly all who came to me did. They came “dead on arrival” as several often confessed on our first day together when I asked them, “What is the state of your soul?” They came to me for help. They came to find their breath. They came to find a life worth living.
It was in this season, that I too hit a wall and confessed my agnosticism at the mega movement. I just didn’t know anymore—like an agnostic doesn’t know about God—I didn’t know about the mega-church. I saw this arm of the church as an industrial and imperial complex that required the grease of men’s souls to stay afloat. They built huge edifices. But their souls where crushed in the process. The stories were nearly all the same: sad beyond belief; childhood wounds of the leaders never addressed; unhealthy and unfit; many with secret addictions and obsessions for power and control. But all had a personality on steriods. They were all gifted in oratory skills. They all were driven. That unholy trifacta seems to bring them all down.It was all being lived out unredeemed; unchallenged and in un-Jesus ways. And oh, by the way, the churches that they pastored, all wanted this kind of leader to lead them—until they didn’t. It’s not all the leader’s fault.
I got sick and infected by this work. Mind you, this is the story I, myself lived when I pastored a mushrooming, mega-church in the making, It was there, that I too, imploded and found my life again when Dallas Willard resuscitated me back to life. Four years later, Potter’s Inn was born to help sick souls like us. It really is true that we find our passion from our pain. The word, “passion” has the word ‘pathos’ or pain in its roots.
Back to the camping trip….
Before we left for our camping trip, Gwen and I went to a psychiatrist, Dr. Curt Thompson, to see if he might help us. It was called a “de-brief” but we knew we needed more than a ‘de-brief.’ Curt is a friend and we’ve done alot of retreats together through the years. After listening to us both lament our frustration and grief over the state of these pastors and the mega-movement, he simply said to us, “Steve and Gwen, you have no idea how all the sad stories you have heard are sticking to your soul and how these stories are now affecting you.” Then came these words: “You’ll need to de-tox.”
To find relief from so many sad stories and sad souls, Gwen and I felt compelled to go into the forests and find our solace there. I took my books by John Muir and found in his voice-- a voice crying in the wilderness, indeed. I needed, wanted and knew his words were true. John Muir wrote things such as:
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.”
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”
“In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
“None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.”
“The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.”
All these things and more, I wrote in my journal so that I would never forget. And I have never forgotten. No one can forget the glory they see in wilderness—no one. This is the beauty that inspires the poet and writer. This is the beauty that brings us back to life.
I could go on. Perhaps, I should. But you must go for yourself as soon as possible, if even in the least little way, you are moved by his or my words. Your soul demands this of you. To go into the wild is your simple most God like thing you can possibly do.
Go quickly. But move slowly and go now. Re-arrange your plans for the summer and head west or east or north or south. Make it a pilgrimage. Find your own apostles. Find your own birds that will be sent to you from far beyond to tell you something you both need to see and desperately need to hear. Trust me in this—they are waiting on you to show up.
Leave your cell phones and move where there is no Wi-Fi and de-tox and de-tox and de-tox.
I know there are those of you who in reading this will dismiss me.
Some might say, “Oh there he goes again.” Then, let me go and you stay there sitting, under the fluorescent lights, on the concrete, in plastic chairs and holding the fake light of the cell phone that give us our false light, false friends and false world and false truth. Seriously, let me just be true to the fire within!
When Martin Luther mustered the courage to begin to speak out against the atrocities he found in the Catholic church in the 16th century, there are many of us finding the courage he mustered to say the exact words Luther said, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” With those words, Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the wall of the castle for everyone to read; everyone to know and everyone to discover a better way.
I do think there is a better way to live than all these ways we are now living—all trying to survive. What we may lack—is the courage to live the way we know we want to live.
The Four Apostles asks us each this question: How shall we then live?
Answer this question and we might find, the life we actually want and a life that actually worthy to be lived.
And though today, I am not by those Four Apostles, I am in the Blue Ridge, the confluence of French Broad and Davidson River and the green valley alive with emerald green life everywhere, I feel this same courage rising up in me to say these words again to you today. The Four Apostles told me what to say. I would be a fool to not say their good message.
They are still speaking today. Can you hear them?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Potter's Inn with Stephen W. Smith to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.