Hamel Family Wine Makers

Wine making is like playing with a chemistry set. The potions include percarbonates, bentonite, metabisulfate, sorbate and fining agents—yummy! The equipment isn’t too expensive if amortized over several batches: hydrometer, digital thermometer, wine thief, carboys (not pool boys), siphons, whips and tubing of various sizes.

Directions are straightforward; chances of major explosions are slim; empty bottles are free if you have the right sort of friends. In the process you pick up the vintner’s arcane vocabulary and learn the difference between: hips and shoulders, bunts and bungs, legs and lees, racking and fining.

If wine making is an art, we are at the finger-painting stage. Practice might not make perfect but hopefully it will prove the difference between a sociable drink and salad dressing.

Jesus made as much as 180 gallons of good wine in an instant. It will take us about six months to produce 30 bottles. The first vintage from Toe Tag Winery should be ready by Christmas.

Wine testing

When was the last time you started a new hobby, tried a new sport, sampled a new cuisine, visited a new country, studied a new subject, bought a new toy or made a new friend?

Even nuns try on new habits once in a while.

Several years ago I entered a season of spiritual questioning. The questions made praying seem hypocritical so I waited for God to woo me back. I wanted the indwelling Spirit to speak up. Instead, everything became eerily silent when I quit talking.

I missed praying with Susan but chose not to go through the motions. Instead we talked about my concerns and tried to understand what I was experiencing, or, more accurately, not experiencing.

Daily Bible reading was another spiritual discipline I had maintained for my entire adult life, thanks to a youthful vow made at a Bill Gothard conference. This too dropped away as I felt a growing distance between me and God. The contradictions and paradoxes in the text stood out more than the commands and promises.

I missed the certainty of knowing exactly what the Bible taught but could no longer ignore the nagging difficulties of applying parts of this ancient book to a modern world.

Much has changed in the last few years—for good and ill—but I am still a seeker of Truth. I am still stumbling toward heaven. Nowadays I pray, but with fewer words and less certainty. I study the Bible, but without evangelical eyewear. I believe these practices are vital, but no longer treat them as talismans.

Even good habits can ossify with age and hinder movement. Rote behavior can lead to rigid practice and limit growth. Spiritual rigor mortis can set in long before physical death. Don’t let it. It hurts to stretch but it keeps one flexible.

I’m launching my new fiction series for young readers in June. The Lighthouse Company (TLC) is a group of kids who meet in the Cape Myra lighthouse near the Makah Indian Reservation in Washington.

Ten-year-old JJ Tyler comes every summer to stay with his grandpa, the lighthouse keeper. JJ leads TLC in solving mysteries, finding treasures and helping Cape Myra’s two-man police force.

Every book has a believable story line that raises and resolves a moral dilemma—with an unexpected twist. The importance of character traits such as loyalty, honesty and faithfulness are affirmed throughout.

The books will be available on Amazon. Stay tuned for details.

Survivor’s guilt is, “a deep feeling of guilt often experienced by those who have survived some catastrophe that took the lives of many others; (it) derives in part from a feeling that they did not do enough to save the others who perished and in part from feelings of being unworthy relative to those who died.”

In my case it’s only one other: Susan.

Thankfully, I have no qualms about the quality of our relationship. We were best friends for 37 years. We loved each other heart and soul—imperfectly but intimately. Yet I now find myself asking:

Did I cause too much stress in her life: unintentionally through my cancer and directly through my spiritual questions?

Could I have done more to help in her ongoing struggle against the health conditions that contributed to her untimely death?

How did I miss the warning signs she was nearing the ledge?

Then there’s the irony of Susan being taken before me:

I was increasingly cut off from ministry; disabled by my doubts. She was daily involved in life-saving work at the Pregnancy Center. Her team helped thousands of clients and rescued scores of babies every year.

I was the one doing hand-to-hand combat with a terminal disease. She was only dealing with the pesky problems of weight gain and pre-diabetes.

For three years she lived in dreadful anticipation of losing me, yet I was the one left behind to grieve.

My main consolation is that while I’m still stumbling toward heaven, Susie is already there.

“A picture is worth a thousand tears.”
–Mike Hamel

In my last post (Imaginary Friend) I wrote about being tripped up by “the irreconcilable differences between an all-powerful, all-loving Creator and the mess of a world we find ourselves in.” When I slipped off my faith-colored glasses things around me got blurry and I became dizzy, disillusioned, disappointed, discouraged, depressed and even a bit dyspeptic (look it up).

I’m not the only one who has been stumbled by what Liebniz called “theodicy.” Indeed, “the inability to reconcile God’s goodness, omnipotence and omniscience with human suffering is the compelling logical puzzle that has led many out of faith.” -T. M. Luhrmann

I haven’t been led “out of faith,” but my faith has been knocked out of focus. So why not put the specs back on?

I’ve worn eyeglasses since I was two years old. I accept the need for corrective lenses to rectify my astigmatism and nystagmus. So why balk at wearing biblical bifocals to clarify my spiritual vision?

One reason is how easily our own flawed presuppositions and prejudices are ground into those lenses. I wanted the divine optometrist to check and adjust my prescription himself. I longed for a personal consultation, not just a written script.

I realize such appointments are rare—but it’s what I’m still hoping for.

Training the imagination to “see” the invisible God involves what T. M. Luhrmann calls absorption.

The capacity to treat what the mind imagines as more real than the world one knows is the capacity at the heart of experience of God. The very concept of a god, a more-than-natural being rests on the premise that the world we know is not all of the world, nor indeed the most important part of it. The psychological capacity for absorption allows us to experience that concept as true.

Absorption gives us the ability to use our imagination to conceive of a being not in the world who nevertheless is the reason that the world exists. Absorption also gives us the capacity to imagine that being as good, because the world as it is does not naturally lend itself to the inference that its creator is wise and good.

The dichotomy in that last sentence is what trips me up; the irreconcilable differences between an all-powerful, all-loving Creator and the mess of a world we find ourselves in; a world suffused in pain, suffering, misery, loss, sorrow, grief, loneliness . . .

Jesus came into the world to make things right, but in a way that only exacerbates the dilemma since the quality of life hasn’t significantly improved in the two thousand years since his resurrection. Despite the blessings of Christianity there’s still so much that’s broken.

I know the pending promises of future blessing. I know that, “With God one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years are one day.” But with us it’s been l-o-n-g centuries soaked in blood and tears.

It’s hard to cling to an invisible God when drowning is a sea of visible suffering. But he’s our only hope.

If he is not our friend, we are sunk.

Control means “to exercise direction over; dominate; command.” Influence is “the process of producing effects on the actions, behavior, opinions of (ourselves and) others.”

We don’t command the wind or waves but we can set our sails to make the most of them. Sometimes it makes a difference. Sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s a waste of time to fret over what we can’t change—and a waste of life to not change what we can.

Control is an illusion; influence is a responsibility.

Worthen comments on two themes that stood out to me when I read it. These seminal and correlated ideas are hallmarks of the evangelical psyche: that God wants to be our intimate friend—BFF in text lingo—and that prayer is an essential mental discipline to enjoying this friendship:

As Luhrmann writes, “God wants to be your friend; you develop that relationship through prayer; prayer is hard work and requires effort and training; and when you develop that relationship, God will answer back, through thoughts and mental images he places in your mind, and through sensations he causes in your body.”

I resonate with this mindset because I shared and taught it for decades. I know the constant effort it takes to develop and maintain this spiritual perspective.

Though everyone has the ability “to treat what the mind imagines as more real than the world one knows,” honing this skill requires practice. Luhrmann compares the “sophisticated expertise” required to hear God’s voice to the training that a sonogram technician needs in order to distinguish the outline of a fetus from a fuzzy black-and-white haze: it is a matter of “training perception.”

This training works. (It worked for me for years.) Luhrmann notes that “Both history and ethnography suggest that the Christian cultivation of the inner senses has real consequences for those who use it.” It produces peace, purpose and a coherent way of seeing the world. But what happens when perception and experience are seriously out of sync over an extended period?

I’ll tell you what happened to me in a future post.