Posts Tagged ‘seminary’

Truth and action.

{ November 24, 2009 @ 10:31 am } · { Eucharist, personal reflection, Sermon }
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There was once a young and gifted woman who set herself the almost impossible task of setting up a printing press so that she could translate and distribute the Word of God to the people.  Yet such a job would require a great deal of money, and so, almost as soon as she had conceived the idea, she sold the few items that she possessed and went to live on the streets, begging for the money that she needed.
Raising the necessary funds took many years, for while there were a few who gave generously, most only gave a little, if anything at all. But gradually the money began to accumulate.  However, shortly before the plans for the printing press could be set in motion, a dreadful flood devastated a nearby town, destroying many people’s homes and livelihoods.
Without hesitation the woman used all the money she had gathered to feed the hungry and rebuild lost homes. Once the town began to recover, the woman silently went back to the streets in order to start all over again, collecting the money needed to translate the Word of God.
Many more years passed, with many cold winters that caused great suffering to the woman. Then, shortly before the target amount was reached, disaster struck again.
This time a deadly plague descended like a cloud over the city, stealing the lives of thousands.
By now the woman was herself tired and ill, yet without thought she spent the money she had collected on medicines and care for the sick and orphaned.
Then, once the shadow of the plague lifted, she again went onto the streets, driven by her desire to translate the Word of God.  Finally, shortly before her death, this woman gathered the money needed for the printing press and completed the project she had set herself many years before.
After she had passed away, it was rumored by some that she had actually spent her time making three translations of the Word, the first two being the most splendid of all…
… What language are you translating the Word into?
Our mandate is double-edged: “We should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another.” Does not the whole of the gospel hinge on that one word, “and”? Believe… AND love.
I don’t know about you, but this terrifies me. Not only do I have to do more than think the right things (hard enough) or say the right things (sometimes easier), but I have to live rightly, in truth.
And I don’t even get to decide what that truth is – it’s love. And it’s not up to me what that action is – it’s love. Given freely, radically, generously, as long as there’s need for it… love’s circumstances might be flexible, they are likely surprising, but the mandate itself is not a puzzle.
We can stop asking what the “right” thing to do is… Which cause is the best? Where can I be the most effective? What if our resources run out? What happens when it floods, or the plague comes, Or (have mercy) institutions fail usand we have to start over, from the foundations?
God’s pretty clear on this one. We keep loving. In truth, and action.
We silently went back to the streets in order to start all over again.
You’re not here to be effective or successful.
You,… I,… am here to be faithful to the Word made flesh.
Because what we believe is a fabulous mystery, that we’re commanded to bring about the Kingdom when it’s already here… that we’re to reveal it and that’s all we’re to do.

This goal is already fact, God’s fact, the fact of grace and promise. No gap divides what God says from what God does. God’s Word is God’s action. And it, God, is waiting for us to see him in ourselves, here all along…
Truth and action… called to live in such a way that the Way, Jesus’ way, is read in the very fabric of our relationships to one another, to our fellow human beings, to Creation.
The sacraments, too, as Augustine says, are the “visible word” of God. They are the Word, enacted… and when we receive them, when we claim them, when we are saying we’re ready to welcome Jesus in his many disguises, that our hearts and doors and arms are open, that we’re gonna live out being bread and juice, that we too are the Word enacted, lovingly revealed, truthfully shared with all the world, not just talking about it, not even just theologically reflecting on it, translating it into just more speech, more words… but living it.
Then, then, we’ve finally translated the glorious Word in truth and action.
May it be so for you, and for me, and for all the world. Amen.

Ceasing and desisting.

{ May 31, 2009 @ 1:29 pm } · { personal reflection }
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With graduation from my Master of Divinity program behind me, I’m beginning to realize how easy it is to simply move on to the next thing.  This smacked me in the face particularly hard on the Friday night before commencement, when as friends and faculty congratulated me on my accomplishment, they each seemed incapable of leaving off the parting comment, “But, you’re not really done, are you?”  After all, I do have another degree to finish.  I have classes this summer, Annual Conference to attend.  I will be studying for the GRE, applying for some mission programs, attempting against all odds to learn some Spanish.  But… no one would simply allow me to rest in what I had already done.  More than anyone, I know what is left to do, what is ahead.  One day, even just an evening, would have been a lovely space in which to look at the last three years, breathe deeply, and exhale.  But we push one another into the future.  I’ve been thinking about this during the last week since graduation.  It’s why I haven’t written.

Sometimes, it’s simply a good thing to rest, to take a break, even from the things we enjoy.  It’s good to be present in what we’ve already done and not attempt to move into the next phase of the process.  It’s good to be still and view the past from this particular vantage point, take some stock, freshen up a moment before stepping out again.  It’s good to clear the mind of what’s already been by appreciating and revelling in how it has come to pass.  I worked all week at a job I enjoy, though it’s emotionally draining and often heartbreaking.  In that break, between graduation and gearing up for what’s to come this summer, I found myself rested, even in the difficulty of work.  It was, in an odd way, a vacation.  And this sense, of needing to take a week or so to simply do something else, use my mind and my hands in new ways, to engage my heart with kids who can’t read or do math rather than with books about theology or doctrine, I sought out a sabbath time.  And stumbled into the realization that I need to schedule this.  The word from which we get “sabbath,” shabbat, derives from the idea of ceasing and desisting.  This doesn’t mean to cease existence or to be lazy.  It simply means to stop the work you’ve been doing and to rest by being a different way for a time in order to appreciate, refresh, and return with a new heart.  I am very good at procrastination.  This is not shabbat. I am also an expert at doing exactly what I like because it feels fun at the time and I’d rather not be doing something else.  This, too, is not shabbat.  What I need is an intentional break, a setting aside of habitual work in an effort at habitual rest.  This looked like taking time from writing this week, and it also looked like appreciating my newly minted degree before diving into the next one.  It looked like building a garden outside my apartment yesterday and visiting with friends yesterday evening rather than striving to outline my presentation for Annual Conference next week. Because the work will always be there, and I can’t do it if I’m not connected and rejuvenated.  Pushing through it isn’t as helpful or as lovely, doesn’t speak to the appreciation I have for simply being alive today, as focusing on it at the right time, after a bit of rest.  Putting everything into perspective, getting a handle on where the priorities lay.  God never ordered anyone to work, but God keeps reminding us to rest.  To cease and desist.  To shabbat.

So here’s the plan.  I’m starting small but with commitment.  Thursday mornings are now unshatterably sacred.  They are mine, all mine… for time to simply be, with God, alone, in company with friends, however rest will look.  But they will be different from the rest of the week.  No procrastination, simply sheer existence without the purpose of accomplishment.  Until noon on Thursdays, consider me at rest, ceased and desisting.

#26: Thank you for detours.

{ May 14, 2009 @ 12:41 pm } · { personal reflection }
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***This is the twenty-sixth of a series of posts based on a book I’m reading for a class called Connections in Religious and Ecological Education entitled Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. The chapter is “Confessions of An Evangelical Treehugger,” by Matthew Sleeth.

It’s the last day of seminary.  At least, this version of seminary.  After today’s classes, and one more research paper, I will have earned my Master of Divinity.  All I can say to that is, “huh.”  Three years ago, I took a detour into the world of theological education.  I didn’t realize that at the other side of that experience my life, my relationships, and my faith would look entirely different, not exactly better, but more nuanced and often more painfully complicated.  Complexified.  Sometimes, miraculously more interesting.  Always more.  In 2007 when I quit my job, one I didn’t believe I’d be doing for the rest of my life, but a good one nevertheless, I wondered what the hell the future would look like.  I plunged into school, not knowing how everything would look at the end but thinking I had some idea.  Sort of “my-life-but-better.”  God must have laughed at that one, a trickster laugh.  Three years later, I have to say that nearly nothing looks the same.  I’m different emotionally, theologically, professionally.  The world is different, my choices are different when I look into the future, my expectations of myself and my friends are changed.  My relationships have shifted and so has the ground under my feet.  I took a detour.  The thing is, I’m pretty sure that’s the point.  When I hear people talk about detours, they always sound so… regretful.  As in, “I was supposed to be in ministry, but I took a detour into chemical engineering for thirty years first… *sigh*… I guess I was running from God.”  This usually seems to mean that there’s been a mistake somewhere.  I don’t want to stomp anyone’s personal experience, but I think that’s illogical.  We don’t take detours that don’t get us where we’re supposed to go.  That phenomenon is called “getting lost.”  You don’t usually end up in the right place, lost.  A detour gets us exactly where we’ve been going the whole time, just not by the route we had previously planned, often a better, if longer, one.  So.  Here we are.  Detoured, but at the destination.  I’m not going to regret that.

Reading Julian, knowing all will be well.

{ April 23, 2009 @ 2:43 pm } · { personal reflection }
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dame-julian-of-norwich-21

Something mysterious happens when I read Julian of Norwich’s Showings.  Somehow, despite more than six hundred years and an ocean separating us, I hear her voice.  Her visions, those vivid, living, sense- and image-drenched encounters with Jesus Christ, have a body of their own, and it finds its breath through Julian.  Her voice, speaking them into existence at God’s urging, permeates the text.  Sitting with her words, they reverberate through me as though she sits nearby, hand on my cheek, speaking directly to my life.  That is one of the powers of Julian’s words: they are at once available to every person and personally transformative.
Because of this sense of Julian’s real presence in these texts, I wondered what it would be like to hear them read aloud.  I imagined the way breath, time, and the rhythm of the human voice, a woman’s voice, would change the meaning and influence of the words.  Indeed, it seemed to me that the Showings are only truly accessible when lined out into a less prosaic form, allowing Julian’s own pauses and inflections to bubble to the surface.  Her text is musical, and so I have also set it to music, hoping that the setting will bring forward new meanings and opportunities for new meditation.  As the first female writer in the English language, the fact and being of Julian’s language itself seems intrinsic to its meaning and purpose, and to ignore this significant fact misses some important aspect Julian’s reflections.  They are, after all, not simply a sharing of unalloyed words from God, but filtered through twenty years of personal reflection from a very particular cultural and personal context.  Julian as an individual, as a woman in 14th century Norwich, as an anchoress, as a survivor of a difficult political, economic, and social reality, as a representative of the Church, as a mystic… all of these parts of her personality influence the meaning of her words.  They are personal, and meant for persons.
So many of these words focus on sin and salvation that I chose, in the spirit of Julian’s own concern with the very immediate pastoral dilemma of how we are to have hope in this world of obvious brokenness, to explore and choose texts for the reading that will guide us, her listeners, through a wandering in the wilderness toward the other side, to where all is well.  We begin with sin, with pain and suffering.  We end with the mystery of all being well, with God’s comfort, with not only the possibility of but the guarantee of God’s love, of healing and wholeness.  Human beings find love in relationship.  It is my hope that in hearing Julian’s words rather than merely reading them, we will be in relationship with her and feel the love she had for her “even Christians,” her fellows on the journey.  More than that, I hope that through Julian’s words, set to music and read to us as a story, as though we were her children, we will know ourselves once again to be children of God, looking to our Mother Christ for comfort under Julian’s guidance.

To listen to this half-hour podcast, click here or follow the link at the top of this post.

Most courteously and most tenderly.

{ March 20, 2009 @ 2:08 pm } · { Eucharist, personal reflection, spirituality }
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I’ve been submersed during the last month or so  in the writings of the 14th century English mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich as part of a class I’m taking about her life and spirituality.  Every week as part of class, our professor opens a half hour for us to meditate through art on a passage related to our learning.  A few weeks ago, armed with my sketchbook and some borrowed crayons, I showed up to this late evening class feeling raw and open-nerved after a fourteen hour day, an emotionally difficult weekend, and heaviness in my heart.  I rolled my eyes and felt a sinking pit in my stomach when I read the two prompts for meditation: one was about Julian’s vision of the bleeding Christ on the cross and the other was about mothers.  I was unprepared on all levels to think about either my suffering Lord or his relationship to mothering, parenting, provision.  In a word, I was feeling oppositional.

But, I had to choose one, or sit in my uncomfortable chair with my arms crossed for the duration.  So I picked the second one, hoping that some sort of lovely feminist vision would come to me, edging into my consciousness and having nothing at all to do with my recent struggles to understand myself within a larger matrix of the story of my own parents.

So, I read and reread Julian’s gentle words, “The mother can give of her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly…”  I thought about communion, and Jesus feeding us out of his own body.  I thought about the powerful experiences, at some times of total emptiness and at others of absolute peace and assurance, I’ve found eating at that table.  Finding sustenance there, despite my anger or doubt or conviction.  Then I read the rest of the meditation… “With what do you need Christ to feed you right now?”  Oh, no.  I very desperately didn’t want to reflect on that question.   But, actually, I didn’t have to.  I just began to color.  I need to engage some full disclosure here.  I have no artistic ability whatsoever.  None.  I appreciate beautiful things but don’t create them.  Especially with Crayola crayons.  But, keeping those words in my mind, “our precious Mother Jesus… feed you…,” here’s what came out:

Julian, Christ as Mother

I sat and watched myself draw this stunning, living woman, these gorgeous heavy breasts and tummy, this open posture and radiance.  And had no idea what the hell it meant.  But in order to honor Julian, you’ve got to sit with something for a while.  I mean, the woman had a vision of the Christ on the cross and meditated on it for twenty years before she wrote about it again.

My mother is not this image.  I don’t know this mother.  I know I want her to be mine.  What do I need Christ to feed me now?  This image tells me my heart is crying for comfort.  I want warm, luscious fullness.  Plenitude.  Her arms aren’t showing in the picture, but in my mind they’re plump and warm and full, and they’d probably fit right around me while I cry.  She’s peaceful, and that peace simply oozes out into the rest of the picture.  Christ is this woman.  He’s my mother.  I need one, right about now in my life, and this is the one I want.  Open, vulnerable, strong, and comforting.  Available, compassionate, and unafraid.  Thing is, I think I’ve got what I’ve been looking for.  It’s been there, in my heart, all along, just waiting for me to drop my defenses and pick up my yellow crayons.  I hope you find what Christ wants to feed you, too.  Amen.

This mouth is writing checks this heart can’t cash.

{ February 6, 2009 @ 10:51 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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You may know this story, but it’s worth hearing again.  So listen.  Once upon a time, a very long time ago in a not-so distant land, when there were still witches and fairies and trolls and Prince Charmings foolhardy enough to show their faces in public, there was a husband whose wife was dying.  The Husband was terrified of what would happen to him if he were left alone in the world, and one day he heard, over the wall he shared with his neighbor’s garden, a woman talking about the herb she was growing there, that it was rumored to heal any illness, no matter how dire.  This man was honest, and good, and he wanted to find out how to get some of that herb for his wife.  But they were very poor, and he was ashamed that he couldn’t care for his family.  So one night, very late, when the clouds were dark over the forest nearby and even the animals were silent, he vaulted the stone barrier into his neighbor’s garden and stole one of the plants there.  He took it home, made a tea with it, and gave it to his wife.  Miracle… the next day, she felt much better.  But after a few weeks, she began to feel terribly sick again, and the man knew he needed more tea for her.  So he stole again.  Once more, a third time, with more ease and perhaps a bit less caution, he snuck into the neighbor’s garden for the herb.  This time, however, as he stood over the little plant in the moonlight, snipping what he needed for his wife, the woman who’s garden it was rounded the corner of her house.  “Are you stealing my herbs?” she asked.  The Husband, caught in the act, tried to explain his situation, his wife’s health, his own poverty.  The woman, who was actually a witch, wondered whether they had any children.  “No, my wife is so ill, we’ve never dreamed of it.”  “Well,” replied the witch, “I can’t let you keep stealing my plants.  So you may have them, as many as you wish.  But, make me a promise.  If you ever have a child, she will be mine, and I will raise her as my own.”  The Husband was certain,  in his heart, that this promise would only ever be one-sided, and so he crossed his heart, and his fingers, and took the little herb home.  Over and over during the next year, he visited the garden, and every time, before he took his herbs, the witch asked whether he had any news for her.  “Never,” he said.  “No child.  Thanks for the herbs.  My wife is quite well.”

Then, his wife bore a daughter, beautiful with copper hair and big blue eyes.  He and his wife kept her, secretly, afraid that the witch would find out and take her from them, along with the supply of herbs from her garden.  Except, you can’t keep secrets from witches.  On a sunny day, in the girl’s third year, the witch heard the child laughing on the family’s front walk, snatched her from the porch, and locked her in a tower.  The Husband, terrified that his daughter had disappeared, went over to the garden to see whether the girl had wandered there.  Encountering the witch, he was torn – what to do?  Admit he had a child and have to give her up, or pretend there was no daughter and lose her in any case?  The witch, aware of his dilemma, said to him, “You knew, when you made that promise those years ago, what would happen.  How could you believe I wouldn’t call upon your debt?  Now, you have no daughter.  But your wife will live.  Take your herbs, make your tea, live with your decision and with your promise.  Our bargain is complete.”  And the Husband turned and made his way back home.  You know the rest of the story.  In the pretty version, there’s a dragon, and long hair, an ivory tower, a prince, and a rescue.

It was between night and morning in the darkened parking lot of a catering company downtown.  I had worked an 18 hour shift that day, partly for the money, but mainly for the sense of numbness having tired muscles and aching feet bring to my mind when it’s jumping from problem to problem.  It had not been a good spring, and I was in a bit of trouble, feeling lost and desperate and entirely sure that whatever was around the corner during the next few weeks was going to be awful, no matter the path that was chosen by and for me.  So, at around 3:30 in the morning, I sat in my battered navy Mazda with the windows up, heat on, my head on the steering wheel.  One of those moments when it feels as though if you just sit still enough, time won’t move and no decisions will have to be made.  But they do, regardless, and as I hunched in my seat, I argued with God.  Now, at this point in my life, I didn’t really know what I thought about God.  Entirely unsure whether God listened or really cared, I was a bit fed up with myself and with where I had arrived in my life, feeling lonely, and God was about the only one I had around to take it out on.  Earlier that week, I’d decided that there was really only one thing to do for things to work out the way I wanted them to, but in this particular case, I was pretty sure God (whoever That was), the God I’d sort of figured out for myself, anyhow, would not be very pleased with me if I did it.

So I made a promise.  I said, out loud, in my car, “God, if you let me do this, then I’ll do whatever you want.  I’ll go to graduate school and I’ll make the world a better place.  I promise, if you let me not listen to you on this one thing, I’ll listen to you forever.”  I didn’t say amen, I didn’t cry, I didn’t cross my heart.  I started my car and drove home.

A few years later, the decision of that week still influencing me, still altering the course of my life but under the surface like a riptide, I found myself called to go to seminary.  I fought it, a bit.  I told God that there would have to be a full-scholarship.  God said, “Check.”  I said, “I’ll have to quit my job.”  God said, “Okay.”  I said, “I’m going to be angry and bitter with church people and those silly self-righteous colleagues who judge and act like those ‘other’ Christians I know.” God said, “Huh.  We’ll see.”  And I ran out of excuses and went.  Only last year, in the midst of a conversation with a friend, did I remember the promise I’d made in that parking lot.  It flashed in my mind and I realized I’d done with my promise what the Husband had done.  I’d made a one-sided promise.  I’d tried to trick Someone with more expertise in the game of planning, and creating, life than I had.  I’d attempted to out-God God.

What I’ve found, over time, is that God doesn’t much appreciate that.  Now, I think it’s more complex than simple disappointment, on God’s part.  I wonder if God doesn’t use those moments, when we’re the least beautiful and the most cunning and the absolute worst we can be, spiritually and ethically.  If God doesn’t take advantage of them and turn them into the possibility for good.  Yeah, I didn’t get abducted and stuck in a tower.  Hell, I’m no princess anyway.  But I put myself in one.  I locked myself up.  Who are we in the story with the Husband and daughter?  Maybe both those characters.  Maybe the witch.  It’s a complicated story.  But I know, in my own life, that I feel like the Husband, making promises and hoping I won’t be called to the table to pay out.  And God’s tended to let me do that and then come around the back way and use it for good.  Sometimes, that’s been years later.  But it always happens.  What I suppose I’m saying is, you can only run from promises for so long.  Just know that when you get tired of running, it’ll be okay.  You’ll keep your promise.  It just might not look like you wrote it.  It will be better.

The really big words.

{ January 10, 2009 @ 10:23 pm } · { personal reflection, social justice, spirituality }
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Sin. Evil. Justice. Redemption. Salvation. I’ve got to admit, even after a significant amount of seminary, I’m not entirely sure what it is we’re talking about when we use these words.  Sure, any one of us could take a vigorous stab at them, talk around them, maybe even rattle off a definition or two, thanks to lectures and chapters tucked away in the dusty recesses of our minds. Some of us will need to do much better even than that when faced with our ordination boards.   Actually, before I came to school, I probably had an easier time of it, defining what these concepts mean.  But I look at them now, and instead of feeling confident in my knowledge, it’s like a mist has floated across my vision and I can’t tell what I’m looking at.  

I’ve been asked by my internship supervisor to reflect on and attempt to answer for our next meeting, “What are the connections between evil, suffering, social justice, redemption, and salvation for you?  How do these understandings shape you as a minister?  How does this inform your interaction with other people?”  I’ll be honest, I put “think about deep stuff” on my to-do list, “due next week,” and left it there.  And now it’s hovering over me, edging in on my thinking and my reading and my time, waiting for me to notice it tugging on my pant leg, asking for attention.   I know there are connections.  I even know that they’re important, central, essential, to how I see the world and live within it.  These aren’t questions you just ask as an academic or professional exercise – we ask them all the time, with every important life decision we make, every time we watch the news or see a film or hear about the death or illness of someone who has touched our lives.  

I suppose the only way I can begin to think and feel around this problem is to ask myself, “What makes me question that God exists? And what gives me some certainty that, in fact, God does exist and is, further yet, good, despite those questions?”  I have to confess, a lesson I’ve learned quite well recently is that evil, or badness that hurts other people and the world and is opposed to who we know God to be, is rather harder to point out than I’d thought before.  I’ve learned quite well that sometimes good people do pretty awful and hurtful things, while “bad” people pretty regularly do kind and generous ones.  I hesitate to call any person “evil.”  Sinful, now that’s a different story altogether.  It seems like pretty much every one of us walks away from what we know is right, often intentionally, with some regularity.  Willfulness, even.  Panache.  Intention.  There are times, specific choices I’ve made, when in my mind I’ve walked in a particular direction, making a very specific choice, and imagined myself sticking my tongue out at God.  ”Nanana-nanana.  You can’t stop me, just watch this.”  But I suppose that’s part of the answer to the question, isn’t it?  The fact that I can intentionally choose, in a moment of pique or misguided independence to give my Creator, the maker of the universe, the spiritual finger… and yet still exist, be allowed to learn from it, is grace indeed.  Justice is the correction of it, the hard realization of how stupid or cruel or inhuman I looked while doing it.  The pain of realizing how far off I was.  The shame of it.

I’ve worked in the area of relationship violence for a while, beginning with my first year in college.  At first, I got involved with rape crisis because I was lonely, away from home for school, and thought that the girls in National Organization for Women, a club associated with the rape crisis facilitators’ group, were cool and might make good friends.  I was a pretty vanilla kid from nowhere Ohio, and they were (it appeared to me) cosmopolitan, hip, interesting women whose innate coolness might with some luck rub off on me.  My selfish motives led me into a career where I actually found value, deep friendships, meaning, and excitement, as well as a developing understanding that there are many ways human beings like to hurt one another, as well as diverse and incredible ways they find to survive and discover beauty in the ugliness of living.  It led me back to church, and it dragged me to my utter surprise into recognizing a call to ministry.  Now, that’s gotta be redemption.  Out of my selfishness and deep loneliness, my lack of self-identity and confidence, God made a way for me to live with meaning.  

Further yet, out of the times when I’ve strayed away from the way, making terribly destructive personal choices or making apparently good decisions out of intensely selfish motivations or striving to enforce my own fickle will on mapping the direction of that path, God’s still somehow been able to bring me back.  Not always to the same place I would have been before, but somewhere for my good.  Like Tim Gunn says, God “makes it work.”  This gives me hope for the people in my life who make me want, even need, to believe in hell, in a place where the baddies suffer.  If God’s looking out for this vanilla girl with no apparent magically special characteristics or goals, watching what I’m doing and paying enough attention that I’m getting guided and helped along my stumbling way, then I absolutely have to believe that the same God’s got an eye on the ones who are doing serious damage to themselves and others even beyond what I’ve been capable of so far.  Gotta believe it.  Which means they’re getting second and third chances, too.  I hope it’s true.  I think it must be.  It seems as though our motivations don’t really matter much to God… just that we’re human and somehow mysteriously special.  And that, friends, is salvation.

The road taken, but not quite yet.

{ November 21, 2008 @ 5:48 pm } · { personal reflection }
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A few weeks ago, while attempting to plan my classes for spring semester, I realized to my utter surprise that it is possible to graduate my Master of Divinity program in May.  Despite the fact that this is cause for celebration, especially considering that I may be the only person in the history of graduate school to accidentally graduate early, it is also an enormous source of stress.  You remember Peter Pan?  He didn’t want to grow up.  Well, I would in fact love to grow up, get a “real” job, do whatever in the ever-lovin’ world it is that God is calling me to be, but the possibility of ending this process is pretty scary.  Today at a retreat I took, a friend of mine talked about a book she recently read by Howard Thurman in which he talked about suffering.  Humans most often try to avoid suffering, which makes sense.  However, Thurman offers the thought that perhaps there are some aspects to suffering that are integral to what it means to be a full human.  It is nearly impossible to find freedom without it – periods of suffering and anxiety nearly always precede freedom.  Secondly, suffering creates growth, pushes us to be creative, adaptive, to change ourselves and our direction, to resist.  It hurts and isn’t to be sought, but once we’re in it, suffering tends to change us in some way, many times for the better if we can do the work necessary.  Finally, suffering simply is a part of life.  It is, it is, it simply is.  We’re human, we live in a fallen world, and because of it, we suffer.  Now, I’m badly mangling a deep and complex conversation, but I think it is what my friend told us next that is the most important part of Thurman’s argument: when we spend all of our time protecting ourselves from difficulty, suffering, challenge, and pain what we’re actually doing is cutting ourselves off from freedom, growth, and life.  Whoa. 

I am deeply sensitive to the fact that there are many kinds of suffering in this world, and some of them are both unavoidable and not at all our own fault.  Some of them are the work of other people, due to their sin and brokenness rather than ours.  But I think we can still view suffering from Thurman’s perspective, from the view of this theologian who broke through many barriers as an African-American pastor during the middle of the 20th century.  Even the stuff that scares us the most, that may hurt us the most, holds within it the possibility for growth, freedom, and joyful life, the life we’re made to lead.  How many of us are where we are today, doing work we love to do because of traumas or heartbreaks we’ve suffered?  The suffering wasn’t good in and of itself, but God helped us turn it into possibilities. 

With this conversation in mind, I’m thinking about graduation.  It would be (oh, so!) comfortable to simply stay in school.  I could get more degrees, go on to post-graduate work… school is fun, and challenging, and my natural habitat.  Honestly, I love it: the learning, the environment, the opportunities… and (when I’m really honest with myself) the fact that I don’t have to risk throwing myself into the world, not quite yet.  What was it Augustine said?  “Give me chastity and continence, Lord, but not yet”?  I feel as though I’m a bit like that cranky old saint, asking for the map to the path, the super-final-Big-Answers Path, but please, not quite yet.  Because to really commit to asking for the next step, to wait it out and be patient, to be willing to hear what the next direction is to be, means opening myself up to major anxiety, to suffering.  It means opening myself to not knowing, to changes I can’t control.  But it also means freedom, and it means life.  You can’t stay behind the Looking Glass forever (I am mixing my literary metaphors here, I know.  I wonder how Howard Thurman and Augustine would feel about being paired with Peter Pan and Alice). 

We all ask ourselves, and sometimes God, “What’s next for me?”  But I think that often, we don’t really want to hear the answer.  I wonder how many times I’ve asked that question and God has chuckled, saying, “She doesn’t really mean it.  I’ma gonna let her wait this one out until she’s really serious.”  Well, God, I’m serious this time.  I’m on-call and waiting for instructions, my ears and heart are open.  And can you send the info by May 15, 2009?

Supposed to be working? Blog instead.

{ November 7, 2008 @ 1:33 pm } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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While it’s been more than two years since I left my fulltime job and entered seminary, I feel as though I haven’t learned even one thing about balancing my life.  Well, one thing, perhaps, which is that I don’t balance my life.  There is nothing like steeping oneself in a world that attempts to integrate spirituality, academics, and praxis, the personal and the community, the religious and the secular, the individual and the systemic for revealing the complexity and apparent impossibility of juggling every aspect of daily life.  No matter what, it always feels as though something must be sacrificed.  For most of us, I think the first thing to go is self-care.  We feel as though we’re pouring ourselves out, out, out, but there is no time for refilling.  Exercise?  Yeah, right.  Reading fiction?  In your dreams.  Sleep, maintaining old relationships, even prayer… all out the window, sacrificed on the altar of finishing that midterm exam, reading that final chapter, making it to that committee meeting, doing that project, checking one more thing off the ever-growing to-do list.  Now, I realize this is true for most every person, whether they exist within or without the world of the church.  But it makes me wonder.  In a culture that’s known for its “takin’ care of me” obsession, why is it that when things really get hard, the first thing we do is give up on ourselves?  It is certainly not an issue of ignorance.  In nearly every conversation I have with friends, both in school and those on “the outside,” I hear the same wistfulness.  “I wish I had more time to pray.”  “If only I could make time to go for a walk every once in a while.”  “I miss spending time with my kids.”  In the world of the church, this surprises me, considering the model we have.  Jesus made sure to spend time eating with friends, took himself off into quiet spaces to pray and be alone, away from the crowds.  Sure, he was ready and willing to do what was necessary as it came across his radar (remember his repeated conflict with the Pharisees about working on the Sabbath?), but he was intentional about why he was interrupting holy time, time in which he could regenerate and refuel and reconnect with what was important. 

I’m reading a book right now by AJ Jacobs called The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. AJ, during his year of attempting to live out the Bible’s rules and regulations literally, committed himself to pray for a half-hour every day.  In conversation with  rabbi about his prayer practice, he says this:

“I love saying prayers of thanksgiving, ” I say, “because it makes me more grateful for life.  But I still have trouble with the prayers where you’re glorifying God…” 

The rabbi responds by telling him to stop looking at the Bible as self-help book.  Asking, “How can religion make me more joyous, give my life more meaning?” misses the point.  It isn’t about that, it’s about serving God.  So he tells AJ this story: Two men do their daily prayers while at work.  One spends twenty minutes in his office behind a closed door and afterwrard feels refreshed and uplifted, like he just had a therapy session.  The other is so busy, he can squeeze in only a five-minute prayer session between phone calls.  He recites his prayers superfast in a supply closet.  Who has done the better thing?  AJ quickly replied that the first man did.  The rabbi disagrees.  The second guy was doing it for God, only.  He was sacrificing his time.  There was no benefit to himself. 

I wonder if this complicates the problem of balance.  Not only are we supposed to find time to connect with whatever we understand as the Big Thing That Is Ultimately Important (I call it God, you might call it something else), but we’re to do that without thought to our own benefit.  Again, I think Jesus helps here.  Connecting to God indeed is a good thing for us.  We do, for sure, “get something” out of it.  But the things we get are secondary to the connection itself.  I would argue with that rabbi – there was indeed a benefit to the second man.  It just wasn’t his first priority to “gain” something.  Why would he continue to go back to that closet?  Going there fulfilled a need, and it seems like it was a need for connection, a desire for momentary rest, a place to be still.  It seems as though our experience, the fact that we feel so out of whack, so unbalanced is precisely because we are seeking to take care of ourselves.  We’re just going about it the wrong way.  Checking off that item on the list is not as meaningful as five, even one, minute of quiet reflection, of reconnection with what’s ultimately important.  We need to accomplish that item, certainly – I’m not arguing that we should drop every activity.  However, perhaps we would do it better, with clearer intention and more energy, more attention to its purpose and our own, if we’ve already made it a priority to be present in a larger way.  I don’t think that has to mean adding yet another item to the list, “Pray between 10:00 and 11:00;” “Reflect quietly before lunch;” “Reconnect with friends tomorrow.”  Rather, it may mean accepting the fact that balance is less about dropping or adding things to our daily lives than acknowledging the way in which we approach them.  Are we doing it for our own benefit (taking care of us) or because we recognize their importance and find ourselves drawn to them?  I think we’ll find things arise or fall away on their own if we simply choose to see our lists differently.

Sins of the father.

{ October 26, 2008 @ 12:26 am } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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All day, I’ve been dreading writing – perhaps it was the neon red “priority” highlight on this item of my to-do list, or the fact that I’ve already spent more than 8 hours on the computer today.  Maybe it’s the fact that the weather was gorgeous and my heart felt a bit raw from too much reflection and busy-life-stuff.  Maybe it was chapel Thursday.  I think that was probably it.  A few friends and I hosted the last worship service of the week at school on Thursday.  The service we offered was based on one designed by Peter Rollins, an emergent church theologian at Ikon Community in Belfast, Ireland.  It was titled, “Sins of the Father,” and offered worshipers the opportunity to, simply, be angry with God.  It asked these questions: Is our faith radical enough, is it passionate enough, to embrace and acknowledge our anger at God? Must our relationship with God always be friendly and comforting or can we dare to confront, demand  and shake our fists at God? Could, perhaps, a violent reaction against God signal a close and authentic experience of God’s presence?  I won’t bore you with details, but it was stunningly beautiful to see how visual media, old-church ritual (most of it turned on its head), and music could come together to create a space where it was not only safe to be horrified at God, to expose our deep wounds that find their source in our inability to understand how God can be good and also allow, well, what is allowed… but expected to do so. 

The centerpiece of the service was the opportunity for each person present to write on a slip of paper (or 2, or 5) the ways in which God had offended against them, the ways they were shaking their fist in God’s face.  I could sum them up as saying, “HOW COULD YOU?”  Each paper, unless marked with an X, was read anonymously but out loud and then burnt, offered like a sacrifice in the Temple, the smoke curling up toward the chapel ceiling.  As I faced my peers, professors, and friends, reading their pain outloud, there settled over my shoulders a deep sense of quietude and holiness.  The pile was large. I found myself slowing down after about a dozen slips because my heart simply didn’t want to read the next complaint, knowing that there would be no sweetness, nothing to break the monotony of brokenness, fear, and anxiety.  But as I read things like, “my mom’s health,” “AIDS, world war, destruction, global warming,” “child abuse,” “debt,” and “your silence is deafening,” held them to that candle flame and watched them burn down to my finger tips, it was obvious that this was the most priestly act I had ever done.  I am a lover of the Eucharist.  The open table, the banquet of the Kingdom open and ready for any to share, is a central feature of my understanding of God and God’s reality.  There is a bounteous generosity, a provision of abundance, openness, and inclusion that cannot be diminished by any human act.  The bread and cup are evidence of the brokenness of the world, but also of its hope for reconciliation.  But that smoke, those terrible words on those tiny, fragile slips of paper… they were a Eucharist, too.  So, as I continue to think about this experience, the holiness of it, the weight of it, I know that God can carry its heaviness, but I wonder if we can continue to sit in the discomfort and tension of the question… Can we stay in love with God and feel this devastation? 

The final word offered during the service was not a neat answer, but I think it is one of comfort.  “For now, all we can comfort ourselves with is the possibility that the God we accuse is a God our our own creation… our own creation which subsequently makes demands on us.”  This is not to imply that the service ends with the sense that God does not exist, but rather, the God we with whom we are angry is not really God.  The God of Creation, not of our creation, is far more mysterious, complex, wonderful, and (likely) more difficult.  In some way, this scares me.  In another, it absolutely must be true in order for me to be faithful, since I confess that the God with whom I am angry is one who is not worthy even to hear my lamentation.  And so I will hope, and I will pray for each one of the angry, sad, and broken accusations offered on Thursday.  I will pray that God will hear them and will do something magnificently generous to heal them.

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