I begin this like we begin all good things. In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit. Dear Lord, please forgive me for what I'm about to do. Please keep in mind that I mean well and that my intentions are, at the very least, interesting. And that this probably won't be any worse than any of the other shit I've already done. Thanks for listening. See you soon. Amen.
Welcome to the Good News. If you don’t know who I am already you haven’t been paying attention. I suggest you start now, because you never know when I’m actually going to say something worth listening to.
This is The Good News, also known as The Bible Talk, also known as the most boring talk in the history of mankind. In previous years I’ve talked about the stories of the bible, I’ve talked about the physical bible itself, I’ve talked about the history of the bible. I’ve told jokes and cracked wise and read in the most vulgar ways possible large sections of the bible having to do with the improper discharge of bodily fluids. In short, I’ve had a good time with it. And hopefully so have some of you who have heard my spiel before.
But I’ve pretty much exhausted any new and interesting ways to discuss the topic. I could just rehash one of my old talks since the first time I did this most of you were about five years old. But I decided I didn’t want to do that I didn’t want to give a talk that I’d already given before. Besides I like to think I’m very genuine and honest with my talks, and the person I was giving this talk nine years ago is not the person I am now. So after much thought I decided instead of talking about the bible I'm going to tell you a story. A story about me, and the first time I did this talk on my own.
It starts nearly ten years ago in the fall of 1999. I was a freshman in college, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York to be precise. It was a nice place. Not too fancy, but certainly not a dump. A place you'd think I probably could have been happy in. It was a big deal for me going away to college. I was leaving all my high school friends behind, trying to start fresh. It was an interesting thing for a guy like me. When you go off to a school where no one knows you there's this very real opportunity to totally redefine yourself. You start to think you can make yourself into whatever it is that you want other people to see you as. Then when you get there you realize very quickly that everyone else had that exact same idea and you sort have to come to grips with being the person that you are. And I was the quiet guy without any friends, the guy that everyone knew to see but no one really knew who I was. I wasn't a sad kid, or a depressed kid really. It was a conflicted kid, but show me a teenager who isn't, right? But I was a lonely kid. There was a lot wrong with me. And for the half dozen of you who just though, "Ha, still is." Thanks but...try and keep up. I was totally alone and having a really hard time with it. I’d spent a lot of time alone already that fall, a lot of time in a real raw mood. I didn’t really have an outlet. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. For the first time in my life I was in a situation that I felt wasn’t working out and I couldn’t think of a way to fix it. For the first time in my life, I was losing.
And then Antioch starts up. It was all pretty much people I went to school with back then, it was the first time my best friends weren't on team. But they were still around, still part of the program. I knew my brother and his friends would be around too. It certainly wasn't better than it is now, but it was different. Things are going along, we get assigned our talks and I end up with the bible talk.
Really early on I started reading the bible from page 1, and without skipping around I read it pretty much straight through. I read books about the bible, essays on the bible, I bought other kinds of bibles and I tried to read them too. I wanted to know what I was working with. It was entirely too much information to process in a short period of time.
So on the day that we practiced our talks I came into the youth room, sat silently in the corner and waited my turn. No one had really seen my talk yet, no one knew what I was about to do. And from what little they knew about me they really had no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. And I started slow. Started a lot like they would expect me to start. And then I started to pick it up a little. And people chuckled here and there, but they still had no idea.
And then I started talking about Leviticus. Anyone who was here last year knows about my affinity for Leviticus. But they didn’t know back then. So when I spit out the line “And the bible says man shall not lie with animals.” Does anyone else find it a little frightening that God has so little faith in us that feels he has to remind us not to fuck goats?” And everyone in that room who had been nodding off, or doodling on their papers, or whispering to their neighbor every single one of them was suddenly paying total attention.
Everybody has really positive things to say about my talk. I think the most commonly used phrases, "Where the hell did that come from?" and "What the fuck just happened?" But it got me feeling pretty good. Suddenly I had just a little glimmer of hope in what had lately turned into a reasounding clusterfuck of despair.
So the weekend comes, I do my talk, I absolutely kill because I'm in a room full of people that know me and I'm doing something about as out of character for me as you could imagine. And I get to the end of my talk and I was getting ready to play the song, and I told everyone that there aren’t really lyrics to this song so you don’t have to sing or hold hands, but if everyone could just close their eyes I’d like to read to you from the bible while the song plays. So I put on Moby’s memory gospel, and read the last chapter of the bible while I walked up and down the aisle between the seats of the chapel. And when I was done, while everyone’s eyes were still closed and the music still played I slipped out the back door. So that when everyone opened their eyes to clap and line up for hugs…I was gone already.
And I remember standing out in the cafeteria with this big shit eating grin on my face, immensely pleased with myself, just thinking I’ve been here for years…but I just showed up. And I knew that by the time everyone left the room they’d have forgotten everything I said and did, but it didn’t really matter because I knew. I knew what had just happened in there. I’d changed. It was the highlight of my year at that point. I’d felt so shitty for so long, and in one day in just under twenty minutes I’d wiped it all away. I was back.
So Antioch ends, I head home on Sunday night. It was a late Antioch that year and school is off that week. So I just plan on hanging around the house and not doing much. By Tuesday I realized that I haven’t heard from my father for a couple of days. So I try to give him a call, and I just can't seem to get a hold of him. So I start calling around. I call his house, I call the office. No one will tell me where he is, and my first thought is that he's gone off down to Florida and I won't see or hear from him for a few months. It was something that happened a lot back then. But then I talk to his secretary and I start to realize that something's really wrong. And when I finally talk her into telling me she says that he had some sort of heart problem that he refused to call a heart attack and was having open heart surgery. And he just wasn't going to tell my brother and I about it. While this is going on my mother hears from her doctor that she's got a lump. And they're afraid that it's cancer. So they're getting her all ready to do a biopsy to find out. And I'm just thinking finally things were starting to shake out for me and now all this shit is going wrong. So that Wednesday morning, my mother wakes me up, tells me she's going to visit my grandmother down in Bayonne and that I should go with her. But I'm tired. So I don't go. And two days later my grandmother dies.
I’d lost people before. People I cared about, people I loved. But my grandmother was special to me because I was always her favorite. She was the only one who was always on my side. She knew things the rest of my family didn’t, she saw things that they refused to see. And she was always on my side. And it took the wind out of me knowing that she was gone, knowing that I didn’t go see her when I could have, and now I couldn’t.
I just remember thinking about how a few days before I’d been on about as high of a high as you could get, and suddenly here I am in the shitter again. I couldn’t figure out if God loved me or he just loved fucking with me because I felt like I’d just been kicked hard in the balls and I really wasn’t sure what was coming next.
We get down to her house that morning and my grandfather is sitting out in his chair in the front room not reading the paper, not watching tv, just sort of sitting by himself. My aunt was sitting at the kitchen table, my little cousin crawling around in the back room. And my aunt told us how my grandmother died, told us how horrible it was to see, it was quick but it was sudden and there was a lot of blood and a lot of pain and when she told us how they’d zipped my grandmother up in the body bag right in front of her I was the only one who wasn’t sobbing. My aunt had managed to clean up before we got there but she must have missed a spot because my little cousin came crawling out to me and I remember picking her up. She was wearing this corduroy outfit with white stockings and when I picked her up I noticed that there was just a single thin streak of red, and I knew what it was right away. And I just picked my cousin up and went and sat on the couch and bawled my eyes out. And it felt like I cried for hours, but when I finally got right I realized it had only been a few minutes and my aunt took my cousin to clean her up and I just sat there on the couch thinking, “That was the worst of it. Now we’re ok.” And even though I knew that, even though I knew it was true. I still didn’t feel ok.
We make all the arrangements. I don’t go back to school on Monday, after the wake and the funeral and visiting my dad in the hospital I decide to take the whole week off of school. I drive back up to Poughkeepsie that following Monday thinking that I’ve had two weeks off but I’m going back more beat up then when I left. I got back to Poughkeepsie late Monday afternoon, pretty much everyone is in class or already out for the night. I look like hell, my hair is all woofing I haven’t shaved in a week there are these dark bags under my eyes and here I am wandering into the dorm still in a bit of a daze. I wasn’t as fat and ugly then as I am now, but I was still big enough that I took up most of the dorm hall and about halfway to my room there’s this girl coming towards me. I don’t remember her name now but I knew it then, I think I’d only talked to her once before. I didn’t really talk to many people up there. And as we come to the same point in the hallway I kind of turn to the side so she could get past and mumble an apology for being in the way, but instead of continuing down the hallway she stops. And she’s looking at me with this surprised look on her face, so I think I’ve done something wrong and I’m about to apologize again, but before I can she says, “You’re back.” And I was so pleased that someone noticed I was gone that I started to grin a little and she says, “We were wondering what happened to you.” And I said “It was a rough week...but I’m ok now.” And she probably thought I mean that I’d drank too much or gotten a little too crazy on Spring Break, because again no one really knew me up there, but she just smiled and said “Good.” and continued on her way. And I don’t think I ever talked to her again after that, but it was the first and last time I ever felt like I didn’t totally fail at my freshman year of college. And when I got back to my dorm room I just remember sitting there and thinking two weeks ago I was definitely not ok, and I was beginning to doubt I ever would be again. But then I did this talk, and I felt really good for the first time in a long time. And then the wicked whirlwind of the next week knocked me down. And ten days ago I wasn’t ok, but because of this place I knew that I would be ok eventually. I just didn’t know how long it would take. And that day standing in the hallway of Leo Hall in Poughkeepsie, New York I found out. Shortly later my father was back up and about and for a few weeks he wasn’t even a miserable son of a bitch like always, after a little bit of worry my mom’s biopsy came back all clear so that was nice, Gram was still dead…but two out of three ain’t bad. And I was ok for awhile. And then when I wasn’t, I just took comfort in knowing that I would be at some point.
That was the first that Antioch literally saved my life. Not because I experienced this total change, not because I did a 180 on anything. Just because it helped me get through something I know I wouldn't have gotten through otherwise. And it's been doing that pretty much every year since.
It wasn't the church that got me through, it wasn't even God. It was the people sitting right where you're sitting now. And it's been the people sitting there for over thirteen years now.
I knew very early on in my Antioch experience that I wasn’t going to be able to reach anyone with my stories. Everyone else had these stories about these great things they’d done or these horrible things that happened to them. They had something which would help other people relate to them. I didn’t have that. I’ve never done anything, nothing’s ever happened to me. Most of the time I’m incredibly grateful for that. But it also means that I'm very often defined by my quirks more so than my character. And I just wanted to take a minute to talk about one of my quirks that has been a minor topic of conversation for many many years at this point.
See I have this thing about hugs.
Some of you may have noticed that I'm not the most outwardly affectionate person in the world. I used to say, I won't hug you, but I'll shake your hand twice if that makes you feel any better about it. Or some other random silly thing. And then it kind of went from being my thing that I didn't hug to being other people's thing that I didn't hug. And it was all in good fun, a joke really that just sort of grew with time till it was a quirk that was a part of my character. And I was fine with because I wasn't really comfortable with hugging everybody and I wasn't too keen at all on the idea that people felt obligated to hug me. It's not really the way I was raised. You always hear people joke about things like this, but I really wasn't hugged enough as a child. And when I was it was because it really meant something.
You see a hug should say I love you, or at the very least I care. It shouldn't be a casual plesantry, it shouldn't be an obligation. A hug can say hello, or it can say goodbye. A hug can say it was nice to see you. A hug can say I'm here for you, or that everything is going to be ok. A hug can say a lot of things. But it should always say I love you. Or at the very least I care. If it doesn't it's just an empty gesture. Not really a hug at all.
I love you guys. I don't say it enough, and sometimes when I do I'm afraid it just seems like I'm saying it because it sounds like the right thing to say. And I just can't think of a way to properly explain how I feel about you guys, but there's this line in my favorite song and it goes, "You think everbody's talking about you. And conspiring to bring you down. You're thinking that nobody loves you. Ever wonder why I'm still around?"
There's just something about this place. Something about you guys. Thank you for everything.
I want to finish with a quick bit from his story, and a quick bit from mine.
The Final Message...
13"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
14Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.
15Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.
16"I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things for the churches I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star."
17The Spirit and the bride say, "Come " And let the one who hears say, "Come " And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost.
18I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book;
19and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book.
20He who testifies to these things says, "Yes, I am coming quickly " Amen Come, Lord Jesus.
21The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.
That was Revelations, that was his.
Mine is slightly less inspired, it's from a journal entry titled Bravery-ish-ness, and it’s dated November 7th, 2007:
“And finally. I've just run through another cell phone. The plumbing in my house is shot. My pants don't fit anymore. My shoulder still hurts like a bitch. Even though I'm sitting on a pile of money I can't prove that the company is making any money. I'm sick and tired. I'm bored but busy. Everything and everyone is totally fucked. And Antioch starts this Sunday. So everything is going to be ok...”
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