Authenticity

some things (that are different)

2012-02-04T21:38:00.004-05:00

I've now lived an entire month as a fully employed woman of the cloth (though that term is sadly archaic, as a) there were no women originally included in that designation and b) my profession no longer comes with any designated "cloth," unless you include the pretty purple stole I sometimes get to wear with my stolen alb...), and there are some things that are different. I shall enumerate them, for your reading pleasure.

1. I live in a house, and sleep in a bed. The same house, and the same bed, for five consecutive weeks' worth of nights. Oh, except the one night I slept in the upstairs church hallway during the Jr. High lock-in. And those two on the floor of a condo at Wintergreen during the Sr. High ski trip. Still, my point: consistency in repose.

2. Money: I have some, and I have some that sticks around in my bank account longer than it takes for a monthly billing cycle to pass by. I am befuddled. (No, seriously. I am confused about this, for real.)

3. Friends: I have some of these, too, in dinner-eating range. And dinners I have eaten. Lunches, too! And brunches. And shopping trips. And mountain climbing, and movie watching, and grocery shopping, and all with...PEOPLE. PEOPLE I LIKE. WHO LIVE NEARBY. IN (nearly)DOUBLE DIGIT THRONGS!

4. There are events and appointments on my calendar, sometimes multiple entries for one single, solitary day. I realize this is not unusual for most of the world, but my recent past has been filled with woefully empty blocks on the google calendar homepage. Staff meeting! Coffee conversations! Home visits! Wednesday night youth group! District events! On top of all that, I GET TO DO THINGS: write liturgy, plan lessons, send emails, lead worship, balance checking accounts, register for workcamps, preview curriculum, write grant proposals. Call it whatever you want (distraction from the ever-present existential angst? delusion from the real?), but holy productivity, batman, doing things will do wonders for the psyche.

5. I like going to church. What?

6. Morning alarms, standard coffee consumption, regular diet, work-out routine, weekly schedule. Formless and void, transformed into order. And order = life.

A friend pointed out this morning that these benefits are usually the parts of life that are lacking in the pastoral profession. Money, friends, and health are not, shall we say, first on the list of the perks of a ministerial life. My response was that a decade of student poverty and volunteer isolation will leave you with radical visions of what's truly necessary to sustain abundant living. It has severely improved my predicament: unthinkably low expectations of what "wealth" and "health" actually mean.

I still have no idea what I'm doing, but apparently that comes with time. This current level of mushy, oozing, almost feral joy leaves me rather skeptical - about both the reality and the sustainability of the whole enterprise. Honestly, I am grossed out by this happiness. But I've long considered a stance of principled hedonism: pleasure rules. So be it.

impressionism

2012-01-26T20:11:00.003-05:00

A congregation, at first glance:

Where a search committee, comprising members of at least three generations, can spend twenty minutes spontaneously and clearly articulating their vision of what the future holds for the Church, and for this church.

Where the doors are unlocked and open all day every day - for soccer teams and support groups, beekeepers and bible studies, preschoolers and the lonely elderly gentlemen at a loss without their wives, a sanctuary wide open for a weeping woman to pray alone this afternoon.

Where patriots and pacifists coexist, serving and worshipping together - not always without argument, but in fellowship nonetheless.

Where the youth group outright rejects religion described as duty, salvation interpreted as excuse for inaction. Where high schoolers sing hymns on road trips and call the community to work for justice and mercy.

Where God is at work, in at least seventeen different discernible ways, where the gospel gets preached and the Spirit gets moving, where people are glad to be at church and really want to be out in the world, transformed and transforming, hearing God's call and searching for ways to heed, follow, answer.

I'm transferring my church membership to this new congregation this weekend, one bittersweet transition of the pastoral lifestyle. The people of First Church of the Brethren in Roanoke loved me before I was born, welcomed me into the life of the Body of Christ, formed my faith, encouraged my gifts, and called me into leadership. My memories of "church" are deeply rooted and very visceral because of that place and those people. My pneumatology, ecclesiology, christology, and eschatology were shaped by that little piece of the Body of Christ on Carroll Avenue long before I knew that there were words for them. I am sad to move my membership away from those people who've loved me so long and so well.

But this...this place and these people and their call to join in, to come and see, to hear and answer God with them: this is an offer I can't refuse.

new place playlist

2012-01-26T19:15:00.002-05:00

letters and numbers

2012-01-04T20:17:00.006-05:00

Days I Have Lived In Manassas, Virginia: 8

Bedrooms in My New House: 5

Persons Occupying Bedrooms in My New House: 1

Hours Since I Officially (and finally) Assumed the Title of "Minister": 83

Screws Installed in Ikea Furniture in One Night: 62 (approximate)

Meals Eaten at Katerina's Greek Cuisine in Old Town: 2

Hospitality and Welcome Received: abundant

Trips to Super Target, 2.1 Miles South: 6

Cookies Consumed During Sunday Night's Surprise Welcome Party at My Own House: 4

Youth Hiding By Stoop at Night to Scare the Living Daylights Out Of Me in Welcome: 8

Chain Restaurant Possibilities Within a 10 Minute Drive: innumerable (approximate)

Exponent Applied to Renewed Social Life (versus the last 4 months-2 years): 10

A. Possessions Misplaced During Major Move:

Glasses (of the eyewear persuasion, not drinkware, though those were temporarily hiding for a day or so)
1 Pair Favorite Jeans
Desk Lamp (white, with bendy neck)
Extra Soap (currently supplied, but bought in bulk months ago)

B. Eclectic Meals Actually Consumed in Transitional, Moving In Kitchen:

Party Mix + Banana
Grilled Cheese + Cashews
Cranberry Juice + Beef Stew
Venison Lasagna + White Cheddar Popcorn

C. Scheduled Grocery Shopping: Tomorrow.

D. Autocorrect:

E. Best Parts:

Every one of my books unpacked and orderly shelved in a sensible system in ONE ROOM.

Being immediately and warmly welcomed into an established congregational community.
Sunset clearing the sky each night (which seems always to be moving with clouds sweeping by - no mountains to contain the weather).
Being 67.5 miles from SP, 30.2 from KR + EF, 28.1 from JLM, 32.6 from BO, and still only 211 from KC, RC, JC, RC, LC, et. al.

F. Email Inspiration:

We are a restless and uncertain people. Our lives may not be centered anymore on plantings and harvests, but they will always center around buried failures and fresh undertakings. By celebrating and making conscious our endings, we take time out from our restless searching and allow ourselves hope for a new beginning. New Year's Eve can be one of the great washdays of the year. We can shed and give up the lost job, the old house, the missed opportunities, the tax forms, the political, economic, interpersonal regrets and anxieties, some good things, some bad things. Then we can announce a new day, a new year, a new creation which we resolve to participate in and to help form.

- Gertrud Mueller Nelson, To Dance With God

woke up new

2012-01-02T10:09:00.002-05:00

Where were you on January 1, 2011?

As best I can remember, I was in my little Salem apartment, sick and foregoing a trip to Elgin to kick a cold by sleeping and blogging and drinking tea from the new teapot my aunt Susan gave me for Christmas. 1/1/12, though, was a whole new story: woke up in a new bed in a new house in a new town and officially began a brand new job at Manassas Church of the Brethren. Yesterday was filled with more people and conversation and interaction than possibly in the entire last three months of life: welcomes and jokes and hymns and worship and lunch with lovely people and tours of the town and dinner invitations and a surprise welcome party waiting (sneakily) by my back door when I got home. I think this year's going to be quite good, actually.

barnacles

2011-12-30T10:08:00.002-05:00

What aspects of your life need attention in 2012?

All of them? Transitioning to a new everything requires a lot of attention from every angle. I anticipate paying lots of attention to: professional development (um, learning how the heck to do my job), instituting and maintaining healthy rhythms (working out! eating well! nurturing stable relationships! praying! sleeping in the same bed every night!), and working off the crusty edges of cynicism that have grown on my soul like so many old, ugly barnacles.

#

2011-12-29T10:58:00.002-05:00

If the year 2011 had a hashtag, what would it be?

#deceleration

#hibernation

#transitiontrapeze

plus you and you and you and you

2011-12-29T10:46:00.002-05:00

Who was important to you?

Too many people to list...but I did get to spend a lot of time with my family, made almost monthly trips to Winchester for time with Sara, and survived a mostly solitary existence by spending hours on the phone with John and Beth and Jess and Beth(any) and Sharon, and daily skype/g-chats with Cal and Anna and J and Kmrod.

give to get

2011-12-29T10:41:00.002-05:00

What did you give up?

I gave up having (free, stolen) internet in my house for a while. I gave up some possible income. I gave up big portions of my job with BVS. And I took a job in another place, which means I am, right this instant, in the process of giving up: living across the street from the coffee shop, weekday lunches with my grandparents, mountain views around every curve, being surrounded by SW VA accents, getting to be at every family gathering, living a mostly unscheduled life, jet-setting around the country, and ample time for reading and writing and baking and hiking. Here's to hoping the things that I get in return balance out the current sense of loss.

ask a better question, get a better answer

2011-12-29T10:34:00.002-05:00

Who surprised you?

If we do this again, we're going to have to evaluate some of these prompts. This question would be better if it weren't about people...people are generally predictable - once you figure out how they act, they're likely to act that way most of the time. Their stories are sometimes surprising - it's that underlying motivation that intrigues and surprises me, figuring out why someone is who they are and what's surface level and what's deeper down.

So, with that in mind...I think volunteers discovering resilience and perseverance in the face of discomfort and failure delightfully surprised me, the people who make up the church surprised me in both good and awful ways, and several friends surprised me with the ability to be a big part of my life even from thousands of miles away.

mill mountain blend

2011-12-25T18:29:00.003-05:00

Where did you spend the most time?

I sat in a a fair number of airplane seats this year, but probably spent more time in the driver's seat of my own little Civic driving up and down the East Coast again and again. The stretch of I-81 between Roanoke and Winchester has been especially well-trodden, but what a gorgeous piece of road to spend a few hours on - mountains upon mountains.

I also spent quite a bit of time in my own little apartment on North Broad Street in Salem this year - ensconced in JoJo's old rocker by the front window working and writing or skyping and reading, but my favorite spot is this one - the tiny table at Mill Mountain right by the front window, with a cup of good coffee and readily available internet with which to do work or write assignments or just catch up on the news of the world, all while the regulars - crazy Charlie and his chess companions, the little old man in coveralls dragging his red wagon down the street every morning for his cup of joe, the nasally complaining woman who brings a new friend every week with whom to whine, and the Jack Black wannabe barista singing and dancing people's sandwiches to their tables - provide comforting background chatter.

made? i AM a mess.

2011-12-25T18:23:00.002-05:00

What did you make?

Bread, granola, pies, dinner, Christmas gifts, curriculum, polity, friends, and more than a few messes.

to shine on those living in darkness

2011-12-25T18:10:00.003-05:00

What sunrise/sunset was most vivid?

That come to mind:

The sun setting over the water in the Florida Keys after a long day of clouds and gloom as I ate shrimp on a deck with those adorable Bostroms,

Summer sun dropping slowly over Maryland fields, a beautiful backdrop for a BVS orientation commissioning and footwashing,

And mornings in Salem, early morning sun creeping through my living room windows, reflecting off the glass pieces on my Israeli tapestry and filling the room with tiny dancing rainbows.

catching up

2011-12-25T17:50:00.002-05:00

What gifts did you give? What gifts did you receive?

I received friendship, compassion, bacon, coffee, couches and floors and wine and hospitality, shared stories and confidences, a job with good work and great people, mentors and advice, good health and a family that supports me always, time with my grandparents, trips across the country, time to rest and reflect and be, a place filled with blue ridges and mountain streams and thick and sweet virginia accents and people just dying to bring you into the fold, good questions with not enough answers, poetry, kindness, and a new job complete with a home and a place and some new people to love.

I gave phone calls and emails and dinners and hospitality, cards and letters in the mail, time, bread, pies, rides to the airport, words fit together in pleasing ways, loyalty, guidance, presence, and mix CDs.

lifelong

2011-12-21T20:42:00.003-05:00

What did you learn?

How to bake a successful loaf of bread, make cheese, love something you hate, and be alone.

Also, the names and personalities of the Mill Mountain baristas and regulars.

make new friends, but keep the old

2011-12-21T12:24:00.001-05:00

Who came into your life in 2011?

Approximately 60 new BVS volunteers, the people of the Manassas Church of the Brethren, and a bunch of good VEV folk.

with whatever 'yes' they can muster

2011-12-20T08:32:00.000-05:00

Just a few words from Rob Bell's last sermon at Mars Hill:

so when you find yourselves tied up in knots, having

long discussions about who believes what, a bit like

dogs doing that sniff circle when they meet on the sidewalk,

do this:

take out a cup

and some bread

and put it in the middle of the table,

and say a prayer and examine yourselves

and then make sure everybody's rent is paid and there's

food in their fridge and clothes on their backs

and then invite everybody to say

'yes' to the resurrected Christ with whatever 'yes' they

can muster in the moment and then you take that bread

and you dip it in that cup in the ancient/future hope and

trust that there is a new creation bursting forth right here

right now and

then together taste that new life and liberation and

forgiveness and as you look those people in the eyes gathered around that table from all walks of life and you see the new

humanity, sinners saved by grace, beggars who have

found bread showing the others beggars where they found it

the decider

2011-12-19T18:52:00.003-05:00

What’s been the best decision you made this year?

Here is a tip. If you're not sure what the answer to one of these year-end reflection questions may be and you decide that taking a little look-see into the new Facebook Timeline feature might help you figure it out, please let me advise you to STOP. CEASE. DESIST. It will only cause you to get hopelessly lost in the past, reeling from the pain of nostalgia (can you be nostalgic for a time that only occurred several months ago?!). It will not help you answer the question, only force you to re-live your recent failures and mourn the loss of those good old days of yore (i.e., yesterday).

Ahem. I'm pretty convinced that decisions are just decisions. Once made, they're neither good nor bad - just done. Also, I hate making decisions. I analyze and agonize and ultimately despise change of any sort. Also too, experts say making too many decisions depletes your ability to make any. So. I decided to go to Portland for vacation. I decided to travel less. I decided to bake more bread and read more(!) books. I decided to live internet-free (at home). I decided to move into my parents' attic for a while. I decided to become a pastor. I decided to like kale. I decided to date some people and to not date some others. I decided to paint my toenails red, always. I decided to stop caring about some things so that I could care more about others. I decided to start a retirement fund. I decided to write letters and answer phone calls. I decided not to live in Ghana. I decided to take my iron every day. I decided to eat granola some mornings and toast some others. I decided to wear chacos until my toes froze. I decided to hike a mountain a month. I decided to take the train. I decided to listen to Wilco, and Thao and Mirah, and Gillian Welch. I decided to give in and be hopeful despite my best intentions.

Who knows which of those were good, which were bad, and which were completely and utterly without any significant impact whatsoever. I'm saying: my decision-making reserves are depleted. I think I'll just sit here and practice those involuntary things like breathing and existing for a while.

new year's resolution: get more mad more often

2011-12-18T21:17:00.002-05:00

When were you the angriest?

It turns out, I only got angry at boring things this year: church polity arguments and condescending men. The first is entirely predictable and the second is a rather cathartic waste of energy. I didn't even get to throw anything, just punched a few pillows and wrote a few words. Boring. More to be angry about, next year?

in the crashing

2011-12-18T10:49:00.004-05:00

When did you see God at work?

(Gasp! First missed blogging day. Dad's birthday oysters, road trips with the fam, and a sister mastering the field of Public Administration made for a rather full 24 hours.)

Answer 1: Watching an entire season in a single place, watching the trees in my neighborhood and on the mountains blaze up and die out, smelling the autumn aromas flare and fall into winter stillness, being reminded to slow the heck down and pay attention to rhythms not my own.

Answer 2: Mid-year retreat stories from volunteers whose lives get changed by living in community: a prickly slacker kid discovering Dorothy Day at a Catholic Worker and becoming a passionate advocate for the homeless guys in his neighborhood, wealthy "conveyor belt" young adults admitting they're "realizing there's more than one way to do life," and witnessing real breakdown and redemption happen in people I know and love.

Answer 3: In conflict: all those moments where the reality of what is crashes into the reality of what also is and might be more fully...when the Church sucks at being the Church and we get motivated to do it better, when society fails at protecting the least and lost and we're driven to camp out in public squares to lament the loss and witness to another possibility, when we get passed over or ignored and are compelled to keep on doing what we're doing, when we see brothers and sisters neglected in prison and are moved to know and acknowledge them, when rancor rips apart our relationships and we rally to restore unity...all those moments where the glimpses of what is almost but not quite here convince and convert us into working toward its fullness, with whatever conviction and passion and commitment we can muster. I think that's God.

in want of whimsy

2011-12-16T22:21:00.003-05:00

What’s the most whimsical/spontaneous/ridiculous thing you did?

I made three orientations' worth of BVSers spend an afternoon blowing bubbles and hugging trees. I built pillow forts with Jr. High kids to illustrate Jesus tearing down walls. I decided the day before December started to write 15 prompts and blog every day. I co-wrote this screenplay:

I think I'm in want of whimsy.

as bees gather honey

2011-12-15T21:08:00.002-05:00

When did you struggle?

This year, I struggled with being alone. Sometimes, I was lonely. Other times, I was just alone. This is not complaint: I very much created the situations that left me to fend for myself, to fend with myself. And it is not grandstanding: I have never been utterly alone, not once in my life. I travel always with and toward people who love me, or at least know and willingly harbor me. I have lived in a city teeming with family and family friends who care for me. The solitude is, yes, part physical separation, distance from friends and honest acknowledgement that I live alone, work from home, and move through the world uncoupled. But it is the unending interior solitude howling its way up from the depths that caught me and held on fiercely.

From March:

Bread and wine, here in my house, halfway made by my own hands. Communion is and always has been, for me, communing with other people, other souls. Gathering around a big table for a potluck or a love feast, cooking dinner in the BVS house, meeting old friends over lunch. Communing necessarily means more than one person. Right?

I find myself alone a lot, these days. I live alone and I work from home, and there are rarely people present in the flesh with me when I’m not on the road. The days begin and flow on and end with me, just me, maybe a lunch date, maybe a barista, probably a phone call or three, a couple of Skype conversations. But mostly, I am alone, here, quiet or attempting to distract myself with books and the internets.

Communion can’t happen alone, right? Life can’t happen when there’s no one else around, right? I am useless when I’m just me. There’s no one to hear or comfort or enjoy, no one to soothe or serve or annoy. Just me, and my bread, and my wine. Just me.

Ironically, I am not alone in struggling with solitude. The thing is, everyone is alone, and everyone is lonely. The other thing is, there’s no way around it. I’m not even sure that there’s a way through it. There are plenty of avoidance activities: running oneself ragged by throwing body, mind and soul back and forth across a continent for four years on end, say, or perhaps you’d prefer dunking your nagging solitary self in the soothing vat of social networking, cable television, and mainstream media. They’re all just big sticks, staving off the inevitable confrontation of consciousness. And, despite the unending and well-intentioned suggestions, assumptions, and implications of loving friends and family, getting married and having babies won’t do the trick, either.

But: when I give in and acknowledge the solitude, when I assent that there’s nothing I can do to avoid or alter the basic fact of existing alone, I get drawn closer to other people. I’m more compassionate, more attentive, and kinder. That, I do not understand.

From November:

Somewhere in all this fallow restfulness, I’d been stocking back up on passion and motivation and willingness to build things back up on top of what turned out to be the bedrock of belief. So, if, for instance, when all else gets stripped away I find that the one thing I can’t let go of is this concept of fidelity in relationship, if that translates theologically into a suffering with, companionship, incarnational presence, then there are other necessary implications that I can be comfortable placing back on top of that.

If fidelity and relationship – the way I read the gospel, the way I understand God – lie at the root, then that translates into my own attempts at living. I try to act that way, and for good or for ill expect that of other people. And in trying, I recognize that I am incapable of true fidelity, true companionship. There are places I cannot or will not go. But the relationship, somehow, persists. And that is not me, and it is not human: that is God’s divine and holy Spirit at work within and between people, weaving us together and imprinting us on one another’s hearts. It is something unfathomable and deliciously mysterious that connects us.

And this is what happens when I am alone and voice the reality of it: a friend, who has struggled this way too, offers companionship for the solitude:

I don't want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring...

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see…

…And be glad and confident.

- Rilke to Kappus, 1903

a latte from a place called "stumptown" ought not be this good.

2011-12-14T20:13:00.005-05:00

Where'd you find the best cup of coffee (or tea, or wine, or beverage of your choice?)

(possibly the best latte I've ever had)

(from what may be the most hipster place I've ever been)

the ha-ha game

2011-12-13T19:21:00.009-05:00

What cracked you up?

A list:

1. This guy:

2. This lady:

3. This morning.

4. This movie:

5. These hilarious tiny cousins:

6. This blog post. (CHICKEN!)

7. This sister:

8. This scenario: Spending an hour and a half in dead-stop traffic on a windy two lane road in Eastern Kentucky listening to a local bluegrass hour hosted by a lovely woman named Catfish Jean. Catfish told me she loved me, drawled on and on about her inventory day, and played some kickin' music, all with the deepest Kentucky accent I'd heard in a long, long time.

9. This dad, especially post-anesthesia (oh, expect more details on that to be forthcoming posthaste):

10. This moment, rather inexplicable and indescribable but the cause of much laughter:

homebody

2011-12-12T20:30:00.002-05:00

When did you feel the most relaxed?

Oh man. I spent several good hours eating seafood and watching Gilmore Girls with Beth in Miami, had a really lovely evening with Anna by a fire pit eating s'mores and drinking beer, a weekend of lounging and cooking and eating with Jess in DC, a long week full of nothing but relaxation with Sara and Beth in Portland, and quite a few long lunches and afternoons with Bobby and JoJo.

But honestly, I've been the most relaxed this year every time I've gotten to return to my own tiny apartment after being away for a while. The entire place to myself and a guaranteed day off after a late incoming flight, I'd sleep late in my own bed, wake up and make my own coffee, walk the block to the coffee house or the library for an internet fix, breathe in the clean smells of travel-worn laundry spinning in the washer, take a long walk through Salem gazing at the mountains and listening or laughing along with a decent podcast, bake some bread or some granola, do a bit of leisurely grocery shopping (cheese and wine!) and end the day with a book and a drink.

Homebody, for sure.

Navel Gazing 2011, 1/3 Round Up!

2011-12-11T18:16:00.002-05:00

We've got a bunch of people joining in on the Year End reflections, so I thought I'd compile a little list of those navel gazers in the Blogosphere:

A few others are answering the questions on their facebook statuses, too. Anybody know of others?

in which i exceed the prompt's limitations

2011-12-11T17:37:00.002-05:00

What rocked your world, changed your life, shifted the ground beneath your feet?

Can one's world be rocked by something incredibly unsurprising and predictable?

I was almost completely unsurprised by the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference this year - the proverbial righteous wrestling for power in the church is so old hat by now that the acrid floor debates and disappointing vote returns were nothing new to me. What hurt more than the outcomes of the discussions and debates, though, were people's reactions after Conference was over - self-satisfaction and self-righteous claiming of God's favor (a "mandate" if you will) or foot stomping and door slamming as they declared themselves done once and for all with this oppressive institution.

I suppose all that isn't surprising, either, but Annual Conference was something of a watershed event for me. It exposed all the latent and rankling ill-will we feel toward one another, all the divisions and deep divides between us. Someone even went so far as to issue death threats under hotel room doors - to one of their sisters in Christ.

Like the earthquake that shook the East Coast this summer, I don't think big world-rocking things happen suddenly, all at once. The pressure on these plates has been building for decades, probably centuries, and the quake was just that final expression of frustration. We feel the ground shifting only after we've pushed it past its capacity to hold solid underneath our demands. I think that's what's happening in the Church, or at least in my particular little piece of the church. All the tension's coming to bear and the structures are starting to quake.

Honestly, I am entirely fed up with those shabby structures. But I'm also bound up in them along with everyone else. I ache to be free of them and at the very same time I know that I love what they're built upon too much to just run away. Sucks.

If Annual Conference exposed all the faults in our Body, it also laid bare all my own carefully covered up frustrations. I woke up at 3am one night not long after conference, thinking, "Oh, what the hell. Just say it. Just say what you've got to say. Just say it." And I wrote this. And I got flak. But that post still reflects exactly what I think, even after five months of cooling and calming and retreating and self-editing.

I am so weary of this infinitely slow process of break-down and so ready for new growth to emerge. I visited my aunt and uncle's church this morning, a downtown church plant with solid and thoughtful Reformed theology, good and invitational music, and an emphatic embrace of practices of hospitality and mercy. I'm sure if I entered into deeper theological conversation with the people there, we'd realize quickly our differences, but to worship with a vibrant and growing and thoughtful body on this Advent morning was such a relief. The sermon was, in part (we're talking 40 minutes of "teaching," y'all), an exegesis of Isaiah 7-9. The minister explained the whole "root of Jesse" deal, that phrase that crops up again and again around this time of year.

Ahaz was a Davidic king of Judah - one of the promised Davidic rulers, a sign that God was with God's people always. But Ahaz pretty much sucked at being a King. Atrocity after atrocity, perpetrated under his rule, and he didn't give one tiny damn about any of it. He just let it go on, even dumped the temple's contents out in the street to further piss off God. So the people of Israel were, understandably, a bit confused: weren't these Davidic guys supposed to be GOOD kings, God? What the heck is going on here? That's when Isaiah gives the metaphor: yes, God has promised you salvation, and God has promised to be with you always. But that doesn't mean that it will be quick or easy. You see, y'all are like a giant tree, and you're going to get cut down. Cut down to a STUMP. An ugly, useless, stump in the ground. It's going to hurt, and it's going to take a long time. But then, eventually (oh, let's say 735 years from now), a new branch will start to grow out of that old stump. It will bud and flower and an entire new tree will grow.

A promise is a promise. It just takes a while to come true.

There are days that I believe that, and there are days that I don't. There are days that I think we can soldier through all the crap to something better, and there are days I'd rather we just torched the entire thing today and be done with it. But today, it is advent, and so we wait. We wait and grieve and throw our hands in the air in disgust, and we hope. I'm not sure what else there is to do.

home "office"

2011-12-10T22:13:00.002-05:00

When did you take the easy way?

I spent a lot of time on the road, and there were many days that I was "working" from home where the work was actually outweighed by the hiking/reading/coffee drinking/baking/cleaning/lounging around at my grandparents' house that I did in order to catch up on my requisite level of monthly homebody-ness. It's nearly impossible to fairly allocate comp time from travel, and equally hard to self-regulate work and leisure time when you live alone and work from home. My tendency is not - like so many of my friends - to overwork, but rather to underwork. At least that's my own perception. All the work got done, I just carried a little extra guilt around for hiking when I could have been writing, baking when I should have been planning a retreat, etc. I'm definitely grateful for all that time and the freedom to be at ease with it, but holy cow am I ready to have an office to report to and people there expecting me each and every morning.

when vols blog

2011-12-09T19:18:00.002-05:00

What was your favorite blog post...that you read or wrote?

One of the things I love about working with volunteers is the opportunity to be a part of a year's worth of some intense spiritual growth. When volunteers blog, it's even better - I get to read on-the-ground reports of transformation in action. Each of the three community houses that I helped to start decided - of their own accord - to blog weekly on life in community. I LOVE it. My favorite blog posts this year were probably the ones from volunteers, the ones where they found the words and the voice to explain why and how volunteering has changed them. Some examples:

Don on community: "We are all vital to the life of our community, but not because of who we think we are. We are vital because of who we are when we don't want to be around each other anymore. I think you truly discover who you are when you don't want to be here anymore."

Chelsea on the peculiar nature of volunteering: "So it makes me wonder, when people from the outside world see the four of us from the house – what are their thoughts about the dynamic of our group?"

Clara on "home": "Our tree lacks the classic christmas tree shape. This is due to the fact that my family is somewhat incapable of estimating the height of the cedars covering the hills, and therefore we typically select a tree that is far too tall for our 7 and a half foot ceilings."

Callie on visiting prisoners: "His letters are quite incoherent now and he isn’t writing much. I can only surmise that he’s dealing with the new idea that he has his entire life to live in prison and that the death penalty isn’t looming over him as in years past."

Of course, there are a ton of blogging volunteers, and Jake and Sarah are even blogging these navel-gazing questions this month!

coffee, cheese, and student loans

2011-12-08T20:03:00.002-05:00

‎Where did you spend your money?

Mint.com (which is awesome and helpful) tells me that I spent most of my money on boring but necessary things: rent, student loans, health insurance, utilities, gas and food.

Also, I bought an inordinate amount of cheese.

And I always splurge on good coffee.

mountains and quakes and kindles

2011-12-07T20:01:00.003-05:00

What astonished you?

I asked this question, but I'm not sure I can answer it. It was either the view on top of Flat Top at the Peaks of Otter:

(seriously, those ridges go on for as far as the eye can see...and there were eagles soaring right above our heads as we ate, and the clouds flew by faster than I'd ever noticed)

Or experiencing an earthquake here in Virginia - commonplace for all you west coasters on the edge of a fault line, but pretty darn rare for the Eastern seaboard situated in the middle of a tectonic shelf, apparently. I was at Panera and thought, as the building shook, "man, I need to lay off the caffeine today!"

Or, possibly, I was astonished just this evening, when I discovered that I can borrow a library book on my Kindle simply by clicking one link online - downloads automatically to the Kindle! What!?

celebration without an occasion

2011-12-06T19:29:00.004-05:00

When did you celebrate?

Though not all of these occasions actually had an occasion to celebrate, there were definitely all celebratory.

Example A) dinner at Mandy's house during CoB board meetings: she filled us up with wine and bread, created homemade pasta and instructed me to MAKE mozarella. Right there in her kitchen, with milk and whey and bacteria. I made it. And we feasted. Celebratory to the core, and it's probably that Mandy's gifts lie in making even a non-occasion into a warm, joyful occasion.

Or exhibit B) a day in Chicago with Beth and Logan and Anna, celebrating nothing but the simple fact of our coexistence in the same city at the same time. We wandered city streets, took over the swingset on the beach, and feasted on streetside Thai food. Together. And it had been so long since I'd just sat and ate and laughed and drank with a bunch of people that I wholeheartedly enjoy that the night almost brought me to tears.

Of course there were birthdays and dinners and several babies born (two new tiny cousins added to the fold!). But the celebration that can't be topped is probably Lara and Ben's wedding in Charlottesville. It was the second Rodriguez wedding I got to be a part of, and I'm not lying when I tell you that family knows how to celebrate. Lara planned the entire weekend with grace and precision, the food was delicious, the bride and groom were so obviously in love, and the whole family was just excited and happy. I performed the ceremony, took shots with both the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom, danced to both Beyonce and Outkast, and hopefully improved the image of minsters the world over.

clunky southern bluegrass intelligentsia

2011-12-05T18:55:00.004-05:00

What were your favorite songs?

If I were more technologically adept, I'd post a little playlist right here for you to enjoy. Seeing as how I'm not quite that genius, I'll just give you the list, throw in a few youtube videos, and let you know that there IS a playlist on (ethically questionable) Spotify, that you'll have to make a couple of extra clicks to access.

And so, without further ado, the top 6 albums of 2011:

6. Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose.

I serendipitously heard "The Whole Damn Thing" one afternoon on WNRN, laughed my head off, and subsequently started looking out for these Darlins.Their music is loud, their lyrics are unabashed (see Be Your Bro: "I may have girly parts, but I got a boy's heart"), and their image is decidedly soused. I like 'em.

5. Ha Ha Tonka, Death of a Decade

I heard these Missouri guys play HERE, in my no-longer-dull hometown of Roanoke, at Kirk Avenue Music Hall (also seen IN ROANOKE this year: Lucinda Williams, Ruth Moody (one of the Wailin' Jennys), Carolina Chocolate Drops, Amos Lee, Alison Krauss, plus I missed Justin Townes Earle, The Felice Brothers, Chris Thile and Neko Case - seriously, when did this tiny town in SW VA get such musical chops?). They were incredible, even though John and I were late and missed the first half of the show. I didn't sit down once during their set in the tiny hall, and their southern rock from the Ozarks oozes the sense of place and generational angst that fuels me and my people. Plus, the lead singer is incredibly attractive even with the distinctive vocal resemblance to one Joel Osteen.

4. The Head and the Heart, The Head and the Heart

Billed and skewered as "the poor man's Mumford and Sons," The Head and the Heart actually occupy a different, brighter spot in my own catalogue. It's hard to choose one song to embed, because I definitely listened to the album as an album, over and over and over again. It accompanied me on most of the year's travels, and the fact that they're from Portland certainly doesn't hurt my estimation.

3. Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest

It may have taken 8 years for Gillian (and David Rawlings) to break out anything new, but I'll join the throng of admirers who agree it was worth the wait. More harrow than harvest, the album is all about loss and longing, and everybody knows the particular pleasure those can bring. It's a Sunday morning album for sure, paired with the news of the world. Or a Thursday evening soundtrack, accompanying a glass of wine and some poetic scribbling.

2. tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l

I've already written about this album once, so suffice it to say that Merrill Garbus embodies genius. Also, she looks like me. She's rough and musically refined, a singer who can belt it out like nobody's business (one critic compared her range to Mariah Carey?) but who has no problem writing lyrics of social critique that then get masterminded into the loops and feedback she engineers herself, even onstage during performance. Pass the face paint.

1. Wilco, The Whole Love

I learned to love Wilco in grad school, and Jeff Tweedy's voice always evokes a mental jaunt down memory lane to the land of community apartments, unrequited love and theological throw downs. Add that to Tweedy declaring this latest creation "basically an embrace of ambiguity" and I'm sold. Besides, the album is like a Wilco retrospective - with all new tracks.

lukewarm fiction

2011-12-04T13:57:00.002-05:00

What was the best book you read?

There wasn't a mind-bending or heart-rending book this year, but I did read a lot of good-ish to very good fiction. I also recommended some of this good-ish and very good fiction to others, and aside from the Hunger Games trilogy, no one seemed to appreciate these books like I did. Alas.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender - It was particularly sad. Also a weird voice combination that could easily pass for the stacks of teen-girl fiction I read during middle school (Paula Danziger, what!) but at the same time held an edge that I definitely could not have dealt with at 12 (nevermind that Ayn Rand seemed perfectly acceptable adolescent reading material at the time).

The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To, by D.C. Pierson - Also, strangely, about a teenage kid. This one, though, has incredible superpowers about which he's lovably nonchalant and jaded. Could be a comic book, but so deliciously not, there's adventure, intrigue, chase scenes and supernaturalism. Delightful.

Going Away Shoes, Final Vinyl Days and Creatures of Habit, by Jill McCorkle - Going Away Shoes was published last year and got pretty rave reviews, and a friend recommended and loaned it to me. Only after enjoying those stories did I realize that Jill McCorkle was yet another Hollins alum, holding company with the likes of Annie Dillard and Lee Smith. Hollins is a tiny women's college in Roanoke with a gem of a writing program, and McCorkle's stories are razor-sharp. I ended up reading her entire repertoire. She's got a little too much feminist axe to grind for my taste, but luckily she chops nasty attitudes up in such hilarious ways that every story was either laugh out loud enjoyable or melt in your mouth savory.

I'm always on the lookout for the book that makes me audibly regret turning the last page. None of these did - no sighs, no profanity, just contented enjoyment. Which is great, such as it is. But shake my brain up, y'all. That's what I'm looking for.

32.8% of life lived on the road

2011-12-03T19:06:00.003-05:00

Where did you visit this year?

Well...I spent a total of 120 days on the road this year, significantly less than the last few years and to much more predictable destinations. Still, the list is rather lengthy:

Elgin, IL (many, many times)

Cocoa Beach, FL

Durham, NC

Miami, FL

Gotha, FL

Atlanta, GA (twice)

Chicago, IL (several times)

Newark, IL (at least twice)

Williamsburg, VA

Arlington, VA

Washington, DC

Richmond, IN

McKee, KY

Burbank, OH

Elizabethtown, PA

Pittsboro, NC

New Windsor, MD (twice)

Grand Rapids, Michigan

Ocean Isle, NC

Winchester, VA (many times)

Manassas, VA

Portland, OR

Charlottesville, VA

Best of the trips? Definitely the trip devoted entirely to vacating and not at all to income-making - Portland with Sara. Turns out, we're fantastic travel partners. We stayed with Beth(any), who I already knew to be a fantastic hostess, and everything about Oregon was sublime. I was slayed. I am in deep, deep love. With the place.

salted caramel bourbon glaze.

2011-12-02T20:17:00.002-05:00

What was the most delicious meal you ate?

Honorable Mention: the wall-bursting dinner party at Wayne's house in Atlanta full of FTE peeps and kids and cats and wine and people talking over one another; the traditional Indonesian feasts at Dan and Wendy's house for BVS ThinkTank; every August retreat meal prepared with Cal and Don in the Acorn Lodge kitchen accompanied by good tunes.

Runners Up: Xoco, Rick Bayless' Chicago eatery and the incredible lime-soaked peach basil rice pudding with Logan and Beth(any); the Dungenes crab sandwich with both Tillamook cheddar and boursin at the seaside restaurant in Canon Beach, Oregon, paired with a local Quick Wit from a brewery in Astoria; Beth(any)'s home cooked dinner greeting Sara and I after a long tourist-y day in Portland: kale and mashed potatoes and bean salad and Oregonian cheese and plenty of good wine eaten with two of my very favorite ladies in the world.

But the MOST delicious, the meal whose tastes linger on my palate, was definitely just last week, at the rehearsal dinner for Lara and Ben's wedding in Charlottesville. The dinner was in a tiny art gallery space next to the restaurant, with funky chandeliers and portraits on the wall, and the food...well, the food...The asparagus was perfect, the pinot was from Oregon, and the beef actually melted in my mouth. Dessert threatened to outdo the main course: double chocolate bread pudding with a salted caramel bourbon glaze and a tiny pile of whipped cream on the side. Just the day after Thanksgiving, that bread pudding (and that salted caramel bourbon!) put even the most delectable pies to shame.

Navel Gazing 2011: Thanks, BVS.

2011-12-01T19:58:00.004-05:00

When were you most grateful? (#navelgazing2011, day 1)

This is the quintessential examen prompt, the foundation question for the spiritual practices I get to share with every BVS volunteer who comes through an orientation. It's also kind of the accidental basis of my other, daily discipline blog. You'd think, given all that, I'd have an easy time with this first question. But, honestly, there are too many moments of gratitude during a year to choose just one.

So, then, a representative moment: I finished up four years of working with and for Brethren Volunteer Service this fall, and while I'm still connected in about a dozen official and unofficial ways, BVS is no longer my employer or my main community. So when the staff took me out for a celebratory going-away dinner in September, complete with Happy Elephant curry, inappropriate laughter, a guest appearance from Beth(any) who lives in far-away Portland, and the very perfect gift of a Kindle, it was both bitter and very, very sweet.

In the last four years, I've gotten to hang out with people leaving their lives in order to change the world. I prayed with athiests, ate with vegans, laughed with Germans. I listened to life stories, signed faith journeys, dropped unsuspecting college kids off in the middle of a big city to wander their way back, doing service along the way. I witnessed hundreds of people work out their faith in deep, intentional, painful and hilarious ways. I learned to live in community, saw God at work in the hands and feet and faces of the people across the table from me. And I got to do all of this with the best bunch of people I can imagine - Dan and Callie and Beth and Sharon and Don and Jeremy, Kristin and Katherine. That dynamic in all of Aaron Sorkin's screenplays? That's what this is. BVS is an informal organization and every gathering is accompanied by ample laughter, but heck if we don't do some serious lifting in the arena of being the Church and witnessing the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. It's changed my lifestyle, and it's changed my life. And that, I suppose, makes me most grateful.

Year End

2011-12-01T10:16:00.003-05:00

It's December, y'all, and you know what that means: snowy winter weather, slow liturgical waiting, and year-end navel gazing. This year, Callie and I cooked up a little list of questions in the vein of the Examen that we practice with every BVS orientation. We'll be writing every day about a bit of our own lives, and you're invited to join us out here for some blogospheric reflection. Come on! Let's spend the season being silly and serious in public together!

When were you most grateful?
What was the most delicious meal you ate?
Where did you visit this year?
What was the best book you read?
What were your favorite songs?
When did you celebrate?
What astonished you?
Where did you spend your money?
What was your favorite blog post...that you read or wrote?
When did you take the easy way?
What rocked your world, changed your life, shifted the ground beneath your feet?
When did you feel the most relaxed?
What cracked you up?
Where'd you find the best cup of coffee (or tea, or wine, or beverage of your choice?)
When did you struggle?
What’s the most whimsical/spontaneous/ridiculous thing you did?
When did you see God at work?
When were you the angriest?
What’s been the best decision you made this year?
Who came into your life in 2011?
What did you learn?
What gifts did you give? What gifts did you receive?
What sunrise/sunset was most vivid?
What did you make?
Where did you spend the most time?
Who surprised you?
What did you give up?
Who was important to you?
If the year 2011 had a hashtag, what would it be?
What aspects of your life need attention in 2012?
Where were you on January 1, 2011?

oh, just a reminder

2011-11-22T19:48:00.001-05:00

“You can be a revolutionary, but you can also be a conservative. Where this contrast between revolutionary and conservative is united in one man, where he may be at once quite restless and quite at rest, where he may be with others in that way in the congregation, in which the members recognize each other in longing and in humility in the light of the divine humour, he will do what he has to do. In this light all our Church action is allowed and in fact commended. So the Church, waiting and hurrying, goes to meet the coming of the Lord.”

- Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (148)

wipeout

2011-11-08T16:13:00.001-05:00

The morning skies are cloudless and blue, these days. Leaves are either wisping around or dive-bombing my head, and my footsteps crunch over the carpeted sidewalks. The mountains stand stock still at the end of every street, but their faces change color each day, darkness sliding down their sides as the reds and oranges and yellows fall silent and bare black branches turn into the blue ridges that netted them their name. All around me, the world is dying in grand, operatic fashion.

This is, hands down, no questions asked, my favorite season in my favorite place.

The hard thing about loving dying things is, I suppose, fairly obvious: these things, they die.

And who doesn’t appreciate a good, solid wipeout once in a while? Noah got the flood to cleanse the world and Jonah spent a few days in a fish belly to clear his head from all that genocidal bitterness. Vesuvius decimated Pompeii, Sherman burned Georgia to the ground, and the Phoenix regularly reduces itself to ashes. There’s a certain satisfaction in this kind of complete destruction, an enjoyment of watching an entirety be annihilated in an instant.

Dostoyevsky says this is the most advantageous of all advantages – the pleasure of suffering, the value of demolition.

This is not just wallowing, though that’s certainly a steep precipice of hazard here. This is not just self-indulgent weeping, though there are certainly charms and comforts to be had in that. This appreciation of death, the beauty of failure, the love of things fading and imploding and temporal…seems primal, deeply satisfying in ways that I don’t understand and fail to appreciate.

But, here I am, walking through falling leaves and watching the world die around me…and loving it with a persistent and ecstatic melancholy that I cannot seem to shake. Here is the world coming and here is the world going. Here you are being born and here you are dying. Here is something true, and here it is proven false, and oh, right, here’s another thing to try but don’t hold on too hard because you know it’ll dissolve right through the cracks in your fist.

It would be easy to say that death clears the way for new life, and maybe that is true. Maybe there is something strong and sturdy and full of grace crouching just around the corner. But the trees tell me that it takes a lot longer than that. There are months yet to be lived without leaves, weeks yet to come in gray and white silence, endless days of darkness with which to contend before that newness creeps around again.

The trees must be used to it by now. Why aren’t I?

glad the lectionary cut off before all the pillaging

2011-10-31T12:21:00.002-05:00

Joshua 3:7-17, “Among You is the Living God”

30 October 2011

Ninth Street Church of the Brethren

⁷The Lord said to Joshua, “This day I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses. ⁸You are the one who shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, ‘When you come to the edge of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’” ⁹Joshua then said to the Israelites, “Draw near and hear the words of the Lord your God.” ¹⁰Joshua said, “By this you shall know that among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites: ¹¹the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is going to pass before you into the Jordan. ¹²So now select twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. ¹³When the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan flowing from above shall be cut off; they shall stand in a single heap.”

¹⁴When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the ark of the covenant were in front of the people. ¹⁵Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest. So when those who bore the ark had come to the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the edge of the water, ¹⁶the waters flowing from above stood still, rising up in a single heap far off at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, while those flowing toward the sea of the Arabah, the Dead Sea, were wholly cut off. Then the people crossed over opposite Jericho. ¹⁷While all Israel were crossing over on dry ground, the priests who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, until the entire nation finished crossing over the Jordan.

Can you imagine this scene? It’s a pretty incredible picture, like a lot of the scenes from the first few books of the Old Testament. The Israelites are just about to cross the Jordan after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. They’re THISCLOSE to the promised land of milk and honey, their final destination, their homeland and the fulfillment of God’s promise to their ancestors. They’re THISCLOSE to everything they’ve ever dreamed about, but first they have to cross this roiling, surging, dangerous Jordan River. They’ve come all this way – all the way from generations of slavery in Egypt – only to get this close to salvation and be stymied by the Jordan overflowing its banks. Dang it.

Luckily, they’ve got some super powered deity action on their side. God Himself has just appointed Joshua as his agent and leader of his people, and he’s about to do yet another of his timely miracles – about to once again stop rushing water in its tracks. Good thing the Israelites had God on their side. Good thing they had a new leader as faithful and fearless as Joshua in their midst.

Joshua has quite the list of expectations ahead of him: not only does he have to lead his whining, wandering people into their rightful land, he’s also expected to preserve God’s law (you know, that one from Mt. Sinai, the one on the big stone tablets), keep all the rowdy Israelites in line, fairly divide up the promised land between the twelve tribes, devise ways for the people to remember and retell all these important stories so their children don’t ever forget them, and, oh yeah, orchestrate a war to defeat a long checklist of peoples: the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, aaaaaand the Jebusites.

Parting the Jordan River – making rushing water stand still and pile up on itself - is really just the beginning for Joshua, this new young leader.

This is the beginning of Joshua’s story, but to really understand the story of Joshua, first we have to understand the story of Moses. In the biblical narrative, Joshua takes over right where Moses leaves off, but not without some doubt, some fanfare, and some divine reassurance.

So, here’s the story up to this point, in VERY abbreviated form. The Israelites have been saved from the tyranny of Egypt. Moses, the baby protected by Pharoah’s daughter, grew up and saw God in a burning bush. He obeyed the bush’s instructions, announced the ten nasty plagues upon the Egyptians and watched them all play out. He outran the Pharoah’s army by parting the Red Sea with his staff, and finally got to lead his people – God’s people - out from under the yoke of slavery. He went up on the mountain to hear God’s voice and receive God’s commandments, he called down manna from heaven to feed the people, he convinced God to be patient with the whining and griping of a displaced group of refugees, he wandered with his people for forty years in the wilderness, assuring them that salvation was right around the corner, pleading with them to hang on and be faithful, to believe God’s promises, to practice patience and keep observing the law. He walked with his people right up to the Jordan River, the gate of freedom and homeland and promises fulfilled.

And then, Moses died.

Of course, there’s good reason for Moses to die at this particular point in the story. First of all, it makes for great drama. Plus, he was 120 years old – the story goes that he died on his 120^th birthday, exactly. A leader can only lead for so long – I hear that after a hundred or so years, you get tired, you want to rest, to retire, to play some golf and hang out with your family. That’s what my grandparents tell me, anyway.

It was time for some fresh blood, some new leadership. And God had just the guy for it: Joshua. But seriously, no kidding, how do you follow the act that was Moses? This guy, when he died on Mt. Nebo, had to be buried in a super secret place so that the Israelites wouldn’t go building shrines and holding séances and start worshipping him instead of God – they loved him that much. How in the WORLD is Joshua supposed to live up to that kind of predecessor?

Well, luckily, God had already chosen him as his next go-to guy, so Joshua had that going for him. Moses had even laid his hands on Joshua’s head – anointed him – to show everyone that this guy was it, the one with the trust of both Moses and God.

But…we know how elections work. In order to endorse someone, you can’t whisper it into the dark. An endorsement needs a ritual, an editorial or a good ad spot, a visible sign of power being passed from one leader to another. Moses laid his hands on Joshua, passing on the power and responsibility. Interestingly, this is still how rabbis are ordained in the orthodox Jewish tradition – an older rabbi lays his hands on the younger rabbi’s head, and because they’ve been doing it this way for so long, they can say that the train of leaders laying on hands can be traced all the way back to Moses, laying his hands on Joshua. Imagine being in that kind of company when you started your first job…

So Moses anointed him, but God had even more reassurance in store for Joshua. This is what he says to him:

“This day I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses. ⁸You are the one who shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, ‘When you come to the edge of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’”

“I chose YOU,” God says. “And here’s how I’ll show you: I’ll part the waters of the Jordan here just like I parted the waters of the Red Sea with Moses. You’re capable, you’re a leader, and, moreover, I’m still here!”

This notion about God being present isn’t just mouth service. The way that God chose to make it clear to Joshua and to the Israelites that he was still with them even though Moses had died has to do with that “ark of the covenant” thing. The ark is the chest that God commanded Moses to build to carry the Ten Commandments. It was plated in gold, and the priests carried it with the Israelites the whole time they were wandering together in the wilderness. The ark was the visible reminder of God’s presence with his people – the law was kept inside it, and the story went that Moses communicated directly with God via the angels inscribed on the cover.

The ark of the covenant was God-with-the-Israelites. So, when God commands Joshua to send the priests who are carrying it out into the middle of the Jordan River, to send them in front of the people in order that the people might follow it into unknown territory, what He’s really doing is affirming – AGAIN – that he is with his people. Just as he was with Moses on Mt. Sinai, he’ll be with Joshua and the Israelites here at the Jordan. The ark is the sign of God’s presence, the reassurance that the Israelites are not alone, the reminder that all of this wandering and journeying is for an end, and in obedience to God’s leadings.

So, here we are. Moses, the long-time and well-loved leader is dead, and there’s a new guy taking his place. The Israelites are right up against the banks of the rushing Jordan River, right up against that new thing, that promised thing, that thing they’ve been hoping would happen…forever. Something is about to happen – everyone can feel it. The air must be electric with anticipation. What’s coming next? What will we do now that Moses is gone and this new guy’s in charge? How will we keep being the people we’re supposed to be?

God’s got a plan, and to make it clear that it really is God’s plan, he sends the ark of the covenant ahead of all the people. The priests do what Joshua tells them, and carry the ark right out into the river. As soon as their feet hit the edge of the water, ^“the waters flowing from above stood still, rising up in a single heap.” As soon as the presence of God hit the troubled waters, they stood still, and the entire nation crossed the roiling river on dry ground, onto the West Bank of the River, into the land of Canaan. They’d made it.

Now, of course, the story goes on for another 20 or so chapters: there are other people living in this promised land, and they have to be defeated before the Israelites can claim it for certain. That’s a whole other story of violence and argument that still rages today, right there on the same bank of the same river. It’s messy – just look at the news on any given day.

But here, in this part of the story, the message is clear: God promised to lead the Israelites not only OUT of slavery in Egypt, but also INTO a land they could call their own. Forty years ago, God had saved them FROM something. On this day, God made good on his promise to save the Israelites FOR something else. Brought not just OUT OF, but also INTO. Saved not just FROM, but FOR.

And the Israelites wanted to make sure that they remembered all this – the waters piling up, the God who led them out of slavery and into their homeland, the powerful leadership of Moses being transferred to the new leader Joshua. They wanted to remember the story of God going before them, leading them into new life, and to make sure that their children remembered it, too. So they left a marker in the middle of the Jordan River – a stack of stones that the story tells us is still there, marking that spot where the river became dry ground. A stack of stones that stands under water, reminding the Israelites and reminding us of God’s great fidelity and presence and power.

So here are my questions for you, Ninth Street Church of the Brethren, in Roanoke, Virginia, October 2011: What have you been saved from? And what is it that you’re being saved for? Have you built up stacks of stones to remember those moments that God led you out from slavery and oppression? Have you built up stacks of stones to mark the occasions when God led you across troubled waters into promised lands of milk and honey? What are those moments that you need to remember, those moments that you need to tell your children about?

I don’t know what those moments have been for you all as a congregation. I don’t know what occasions are about to come, what seas you’ve crossed together or what rivers whose banks you’re standing beside waiting for God to take you further. I don’t know who has been Moses for you, or Abraham, or Sarah, or Rahab, or Joshua. Only you all know those. But here are some things that I do know, and that this story in Joshua reminds me of:

God is always, always with us. In times of slavery, in times of comfort, in times of wilderness wandering and in times of promises fulfilled, in times of death, in times of rejoicing, and most especially in times of transition. God promised the Israelites that he’d deliver them from slavery, and he did. He promised them a home and a place and a land flowing with milk and honey…and he brought them there. There’s a great line in this chapter. When God directs Joshua to have the priests carry the ark of the covenant ahead of the people in verse 4, he explains that this is so that “You will know the way you should go, even though you’ve never traveled this way before.” You’ll know the way, because I’m going before you. We’ll know what to do, because we’re following God into the future. God is always going ahead of us, so we’ll know the way even when we haven’t gone this way before.

The question is not “is God here?” The question is, “how do we remember that God is with us?” God – the LIVING God – is with us: standing in the middle of the river and piling the rushing waters up in a heap so that we can get through. God – the LIVING God – is with us: guiding our leaders who guide us through wilderness and hunger and uncertainty and into new places, new life, new purpose. God – the LIVING God – is with us: then, now and always. The least we can do is stack a few rocks on top of each other to remind ourselves – and those coming along behind us - to acknowledge His presence.

more from the hills and hollers of sweet Virginny

2011-10-20T07:26:00.003-05:00

My Family, They Love [to embarrass] Me

Twice in the last week my name has been shouted with pride in public places, places of my professional purview. You might think that's tacky, but I think it's nice.

a) Last weekend, I had to join a denominational board meeting for a report. My mom also had to be present, as a seminary student observer. Mom was there in person. I was there via Skype. Apparently, when I got welcomed as present via internets, Mom said, in a not-quite hushed, not-so-sotto-voce, "B!!! That's my BABY GIRL!!!" Reports of the incident came in from multiple sources, so the story's been quite verified. Thanks for the introduction, Mom. Glad for the board and staff of my employer to know that my momma loves me. :)

b) On Tuesday, my grandma invited me to join her at the Northern Area Virlina District Women's Fellowship Fall Rally at Camp Bethel (holy capitalized event title, batman!). I was looking forward to going, because my friend Susan, who just finished a year of BVS as a foster parent in Houston, was the speaker and I wanted to hear her stories. (Side note: what I thought was a breakfast meeting with my grandma actually turned into a delightful day-long excursion as chauffeur to three of my favorite older ladies, who bickered and bantered and cackled all the way out to Camp and back, telling me stories of Pearl Harbor and meeting their husbands at illicit card games...). During the presentation, someone asked for a show of hands of those who'd done BVS before. I raised my hand along with just a couple of other women, and the emcee directed the ladies to see one of us - Judy or Carol or "whoever that girl was in the back" - to hear more BVS stories. JoJo, standing up on her way to the restroom at the back of the auditorium, raised her hand and shouted out, "Now, I want you all to know, that's my granddaughter Dana Beth Cassell!!" Properly introduced to the ninety or so silver haired church ladies who may (or may not, as things seem to be going at the moment) hire me to be their pastor in coming weeks. At least they know who the heck I am, now.

We Ain't the Big City, but we do Send a Lot of Them Texas

A drawn out airline fiasco (2 flights cancelled outright, a rebooking that wasn't and an offer to hightail it two hours down the road to POSSIBLY catch the tail end of a flight out to Chicago) forced me to find myself standing in a looooong line of angry travelers at ROA this morning before 5am. It was early, flights were getting cancelled, people were crabby, and the poor desk agents were getting hit with nastiness from every customer. I stood in line, and stood, and stood...and stood. The two guys behind me started talking about their disrupted hunting trip to Colorado (did you know that you can carry both your hunting rifle AND 11 pounds of shells on a commercial airline flight? I most certainly did not.), and I joined in their good-natured complaining about airlines. We'd all gotten rebooked on a flight that didn't actually exist, so we bonded a bit.

These guys were real country, and I mean REAL country. Their accents alone made the hour long wait the most enjoyable part of this day so far, and their stories were icing on the cake. Hunting stories, kid stories, a very strange recounting of a recently turned 21-year-old son with some kind of disability that keeps him in a wheelchair and requires him to drink through a straw:

"Well, he's doin' all right, I guess, but he's drinkin' a lot. Tore up the whole house last week, and you know, I got fingerprints all down the hallway from some tequila drink he done spilt. I don't give a shit, you know, but his momma's gettin' worried. You know we go out to the pizza place down there, round about 15 of us and we just sittin' and talkin' for a while...well he done drunk up beer after beer by the time we leave. His momma gotta carry him out to the dang van."

"Don't he have to drink anything through a straw? Ain't that how he's gotta do it, now? Guess that's how he gets so drunk, that straw just pours it down ya quick, I guess."

"Well, I guess. Don't know what I'm gonna do with the boy."

After a while, it became apparent that none of us were going to fly out of Roanoke this morning. The guys started calling their wives to update them. "Hey honey," I heard the second guy say. "Weellll, didn't ya get my texas? Yeah, I been sending ya the texas since I done been here. They ain't gonna get us on no flight til tomorrow. Yeah. You shoulda been readin' your texas!" (At this point I actually cracked a rare pre-6am smile and barely concealed my giggling. Texas! I been sendin' ya texas, babe!)

As I finally stepped up to the desk, a rather well-dressed (in spanking new outdoor gear) man and his son cut in, with a quick "oh, we were here before." I sighed inwardly, but nodded politely and gestured them ahead of me. Guy #1 behind me made a trademark SW VA ribbing joke, expressing both his discomfort and his willingness to engage the stranger in some friendly banter: "Eh, that'll be 20 bucks, there, brother." The man, wide-eyed, replied curtly, "Excuse me?" "20 bucks, man. 20 bucks to cut in line there," he said again, with a sly upturned top lip and an eyebrow tilt. The man, confused and already annoyed, decided, I suppose, that he had no time for this confusing rudeness, and turned abruptly back to the counter, ignoring all of us. "Welllll, he ain't from 'round these parts," guy #1 whispered to guy #2. He sure ain't, I thought, but I'm glad I am.

Hills and Hollers

As if that weren't enough, being awake hours before dawn also netted me this gorgeous sunrise out my back door:

native snark

2011-10-14T14:02:00.003-05:00

There are days - sometimes few, sometimes myriad - that my native snark wrests control and governs with an iron fist. Today is one of those days, and I choose - lest I excise my angry wit into the laps of friends and coworkers - to deposit that snark here, in the safe and cushioned world of the internet. Y'all.

First: How is it possible to be/have not enough and altogether too much at the very same time? Not enough employment, too much to do. Not enough compassion, too much need. No one to hang out with here, too many people to see elsewhere. Decidedly lacking in the healthy routine department, bullet points dropping off the page on the to-be-completed list. There's got to be a simple answer to this one, people.

Second: Stop crying "peace, peace" when there most obviously IS NO PEACE, you demagogues intent upon muzzling some obviously needed truth speaking. The occupiers - aka my cohort of underemployed, indebted, disenchanted young adults - are just making plain the actual dismal state of economic affairs in our country. It's not going to go away.

Third: What is up with the clinging to the sinking ship strategy? Is it just that the familiar evil is more comfortable than the unknown? Am I alone in recognizing that times are changing, things are shifting, but the Spirit moves nonetheless? Seriously, people, it's right there in the story: death happens before re-birth. Otherwise, there'd be no resurrection. It would just be...institutions sustained by human effort. What's so incredible, so divine, so upside-down about that? Might as well go ahead and stock your shelves with Ayn Rand.

Fourth: Look. For the gazillionth time: Just because I lack a penis does not mean that I lack a) logic b) leadership ability c) chutzpah or d) the wherewithal to drive/eat/travel/live/think/pay/carry heavy things...by myself. In fact, I exercise each and every single one of those qualities on a daily - some days hourly - basis. These qualities are in no way related to the region of male genitalia or an abundance of testosterone. SO STOP STARING.

Fifth: Loving people is hard. That's a snark-free bonus, y'all. Just straight-up truth.

us

2011-09-25T00:42:00.003-05:00

If, in the end,
we are really one,
then my poor, solitary Cogito
will be plenty pissed.

My independent individual,

rugged though she is,

will have sung this song of herself

so loud and so long -

and, for what? For whom?

I suppose what I'm saying to you,

without rhythm or rhyme,

is that your godawful giddy

commune theories

are messing with my happiness.

And that, you blobhorde,

is the ultimate transgression.

You, that convenient collective pronoun,

will pay

me.

Unless, of course,

if, in the end,

we are really one.

Then, it just won't matter

one bit.

dispatches from the land of tiny and hilarious cousins

2011-08-23T20:14:00.003-05:00

The last week or so has been completely filled to overflowing with family time - a week at the beach with 14 of the Cassell/Stultz clan and a grand birthday cookout last night with the Belcher side thrown in. My family is nothing if not quotable, and these dispatches come from the ankle-biter set, a.k.a the hilarious tiny cousins.

1. My Dad's lawn decor is slowly growing to epic proportions. Don't be surprised if next time you drive by there's a giant Elvis in the yard or a big old couch on the porch. For now, he's filled his landscaping with colorful flamingos (yes, flamingos) in appropriate collegiate shades: maroon and orange for Virginia Tech, green and gold for William and Mary (but, they're multi-purpose: should we need to ascribe the family yard flamingo colors to our high school alma maters, maroon and orange for William Byrd and green and gold for Northside). Last night, the littlest of the cousins, Rebekka and Eva, followed me around to the front porch. "THOSE CHICKENS!" Eva shouted. "No, those aren't chickens," I corrected her, "they're FLAMINGOS!" "Yeah! Those MANGOS!" Eva shouted. Rebekka, climbing atop the green one, joined in, "MANGO!" Sadly, the lawn flamingo was not built to be ridden, and before she could enjoy it, Rebekka got stuck. "I NEED HELP! I'M STUCK ON THIS MANGO!"

Can that hilarity be topped? Oh, I think it can.

2. Leaving the house last night, six year old Alec got a little creative. The doorway was filled with chatting grown ups, hands full of bags and baby carriers. Alec was ready to go, so he ducked stealthily under baby Eli's carrier and lunged toward the screen door...and went right through, head first. He had completely busted out the screen, but he seemed unfazed. He wandered through the adults with stunned faces assessing the damage, back into the living room with hair a bit askew but otherwise perfectly fine. When they'd figured out the screen was done for and taken it out, frame and all, it was time to leave for real. Alec turned back towards the door - frame closed but empty - took one giant step out of it and exclaimed excitedly to himself: "It's like a PORTAL into another world!" It is, indeed. And you created it, kid. Think about THAT for a while.

Just wait. There's more.

3. On the way back from (an incredible) last seafood dinner at the beach, Eva and I were talking about our route from the restaurant to the beach house. "We go over the big bridge, and then we're on the island! And what's on the island, Eva?" "The beach house!" In typical two year old fashion, she needed us to repeat the directions approximately a dozen times during the course of the 30 minute ride. Over the bridge, onto the island, to the beach house. When we finally crossed over the bridge, I told her, "Okay, Eva, we went over the bridge and now we're ON the island. What's on the island?" Eva furrowed her brow and thought for a minute, threw her hands up in the air and said, with great joy, "BABY POLAR BEARS!"

I've since been informed that there is a particular episode of Dora the Explorer that does, in fact, feature baby polar bears on an island in the "ice ocean," but being as I am not an avid Dora fan, I had no clue in the moment. Baby polar bears, such an obvious answer for Eva, was just about as ridiculous as it could get for me, Bruce, and Bobby, who all laughed so hard that it took me a good couple of minutes to give Eva a high five for her highly advanced sense of the absurd.

Tiny, hilarious cousins. They're great.

dear Donald Miller...

2011-08-03T15:38:00.006-05:00

*** UPDATE, 8/12: This morning, Don took down these two blog posts, and issued a very graceful apology. I'm grateful for that, and also regret the snark I used in my initial response. I could have been more graceful, myself.

Donald Miller, evangelical author of Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, has never been on my top ten list. A guy in seminary that I just couldn't seem to get along with LOVED Donald Miller, claimed him as the instrument of his salvation. I could never bring myself to wade into the autobiographical books of a guy who exerted such influence over someone I disagreed with on just about every single thing we talked about.

But when a curriculum project I was working on ended up shaping itself around Miller's tale of finding his vocation through story, I gave in, read the books, and began to appreciate his authenticity and enthusiasm. Since then, I've used his writing and speaking to draw out deep insights into vocation and discernment with hundreds of young adult volunteers. Let's just say, I have some respect for Donald Miller. But lately, he's taken to blogging about things like love and sex and gender, and I just can't stomach it. See his most recent posts, How to Live a Great Love Story: for the "girls" and for the "guys." So, because I'm a bit fed up with him, and because I have some free time on my hands and not many avenues for expression of late, a response (which was also posted on the most recent post on his blog):

Don,

I always appreciate your writing and the authenticity with which you do it. In my work with young adults, I’ve used several of your books to draw out great insight and discernment about faith and vocation. But I have to say, these last two posts have been both inauthentic and offensive. You’ve used your own personal experience and expanded it to claim norms and dispense advice for the entire population. Not only do you disregard intentional singleness (the chosen relationship status of Jesus, and the highest advice of both Jesus and Paul), you ignore those sisters and brothers who find great love stories with someone of the same sex.

That narrowness aside, these gender norms and roles that you’re describing as “biblical” and “Christian”** have actually proven hurtful, oppressive, and violent over the last several centuries. Who’s to say a woman can’t be a strong protector? And why shouldn’t men hear the advice to guard their hearts?

I take huge issue with the ways you assume that women ought to wait around and practice being pure while men should make a plan and “lead” a woman into a great love story. That story is a fairytale. Women mentioned in the bible (Ruth, Naomi, Lydia, Miriam, Mary, Deborah) were certainly not submissive, passive, or even necessarily sexually “pure” or virginal. The “don’t be a slut” love advice is old, tired, oppressive, and worst of all, unbiblical. God uses whomever God pleases, and it’s usually someone far from pure. And the Spirit works within and between us, creating relationship and breathing life into love stories, without regard to presupposed, culturally-inculcated femininity and masculinity.

I honestly thought you knew better, Don.

- Dana

**Update: Don replied on twitter with a correction: he doesn't use either "biblical" or "Christian" in his blog posts. That was me reading too many similar "religiously"-grounded relationship theories into his writing.

culinary domesticity

2011-07-23T14:34:00.006-05:00

My friend Beth gets the blame, I think, for making me learn to appreciate food. We lived together in the BVS house for several years, where we all shared the cooking - on a budget, gluten-free, mostly vegetarian - for a full table every night. Beth likes color, taste, and detail. She savors the experience of the world, and she'd spend hours in the kitchen preparing dinner, the Wicked soundtrack blasting through the house. She once led an entire chapel service based on the sight and sound of a crisp green pepper being chopped. No kidding. Ask her.

So, I guess it's no surprise that it's Beth who's been getting my nightly dinner photo texts. I'm off the road for a bit, I live across the street from a farmer's market, my dad and I planted a garden in his backyard this spring, it's summertime, and I have all this time to spend in the kitchen. All those factors combine to create the decidedly lovely reality of daily homemade dinners. After months (years, I suppose) of airport and conference center food, coming home to an empty fridge and no energy to fill it, these days of ripe produce and farm fresh eggs are surefire nourishment (in more ways than one).

Today's triumph: Salsa, with corn leftover from scrumptious Home Place dinner last weekend, tomatoes from the garden, avocado, cilantro, onion and plenty of garlic.

Sick day brunch: farm-fresh eggs from the friendly Amish goat-cheese seller at the market, tart blackberries from down the road, garden tomatoes, cheese, Peet's coffee, OJ

Dinner on the hottest day of the year: garden squash roasted with dried rosemary, a TON of garlic + sprinkled with goat cheese; fresh blueberries, cubes of friendly Amish lady's goat cheese; WHO bread, Sierra Nevada's summer brew.

Breakfast for dinner: farm-fresh Amish lady eggs, garden tomatoes, fresh spinach + basil, roasted red potatoes, farmer's market blueberries, WHO bread.

Turns out, my coming home ritual has become: bake granola & WHO bread; visit farmer's market for eggs, berries, & goat cheese; pick tomatoes & squash from dad's garden

Come on over. We'll feast.

what if we tried something more interesting?

2011-07-14T20:07:00.002-05:00

I’m embroiled in tedious church arguments at the moment, arguments about biblical authority and arguments about sexuality, but what makes me maddest is that there’s no argument for how we ought to interact with one another. The conservatives (who read things literally and use literal language) call “sin” on the progressives, and the progressives (who generally operate out of a feel-good theology without many teeth) call “abuse” or “meanness” on the conservatives.

And people spiral off into their respective self-righteous screeds – “you’re of the devil!” or “Fox News lies, and you’re crazy if you believe them!” A friend at Annual Conference commented that the whole affair felt like a scripted microcosm of our contentious culture: you say this line from the good social-justice liberal character, then I respond with this talking point from Fox News, and then you’ll get angry with me and I’ll get angry with you and we’ll talk about and past one another until the cows come home.

Or until they leave us and branch off to start a new district, or a new church, or a new not-district, not-church, as the case may be.

Splintering and fracturing isn’t new, and it isn’t novel. Heck, our own tradition broke itself up once upon a time over Sunday school, and whether or not it was a truly Christian thing to do. Sunday school! And let’s not get into the debates about the buttons, the birthday parties, the proverbial color of the carpet in the sanctuary. We’re human. We disagree. We split up, and sometimes we get back together.

Just once, I’d like us to try something different. All this feels so tired, so dull, so overdone. And that’s not what I signed up for, y’all. Your meanness and hypocrisy, your whining and self-righteousness are so daggone predictable. Excuse me, OUR meanness and hypocrisy, whining and self-righteousness. Because I’m guilty of each and every one of those offenses, those “inappropriate behaviors that will not be tolerated,” those…sins.

Yes, some of us are called to work for justice, to protect the oppressed, to call us out when we get too power-hungry. And some are called to remind us of our faithfulness to scripture, our commitment to wrestling with the hard parts of faith, our covenant with a God who is both granter of grace and keeper of very high expectations. And we need all of that. We need all those people, and we need all those reminders.

So stop being mean to each other, y’all. Stop sinning against your sisters and your brothers. Stop trying to keep people out and push people down, and stop screaming at people who honestly disagree with you. Just because someone sees the power of division possible in your rainbow scarf does not mean that they’re perpetrating violence. And just because someone dares to read God’s word with history and language and context doesn’t mean they’re engaged in sinful disobedience.

As much as we’d like to leave, as much as we’d like to create own church or manipulate election processes to keep leadership under control, the hard truth is that WE DON’T GET TO LEAVE and WE DON’T GET TO BE IN CONTROL. That’s the very basic baptismal vow – counting the cost of what it means to follow Christ and be a part of his Church.

Bonhoeffer says, “he who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial (Life Together, 27). Anna Mow reminded us that “we don’t make unity; we join it, for our unity is in Christ alone” (Messenger, 1968). The Psalmist reminds us to “behold, how good and how pleasant it is for sisters and brothers to dwell together in unity…for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even life for evermore” (Psalm 133). And Jesus himself prays again and again that all of us “may be one” (John 17).

The interesting thing, y’all, is NOT getting angry and performing the cultural scripts for argument and fracture. The interesting thing, family, is NOT that my faith is more evolved or more scriptural than yours. The interesting thing – the fascinating, transformative, God-given, Christ-centered and Spirit-led THING is that even in the midst of our differences and disagreements and anger and abuse and nastiness and hurt…we’re ALREADY one body. We can’t get away from one another – so what are we going to do about it?

like a watered garden

2011-07-07T13:55:00.005-05:00

(a bible study from the 2011 Church of the Brethren Annual Conference)

²⁷The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. ²⁸And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. ²⁹In those days they shall no longer say: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” ³⁰But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. ³¹The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. ³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31)

Jeremiah’s prophecies came during a time of incredible upheaval for his people. The book of Jeremiah – which was originally a set of spoken prophecies – came about over the course of a lifetime of uncertainty. During his life, Jeremiah saw King Josiah attempt to reclaim political independence for the Hebrew people. He supported Josiah, and hoped with the best of them for a renaissance of the Kingdom of Israel, a resurgence of world and political power for his people. And Jeremiah watched as that attempt failed miserably, watched as Israel got pushed one way and pulled another as the empires of Egypt and Babylon battled for control of their land and their people. He saw Jerusalem finally fall to Babylon, he watched as Hebrew leaders became exiled from the empire, and he watched (with what I can only imagine must have been a bone-shattering grief) the destruction of the Temple – watched the dwelling place of God on earth crumble to the ground.

Can you imagine what that must have felt like? Can you even begin to imagine what the Israelites must have been thinking during those decades? “This is it,” I guess they thought, “We’re doomed. It’s over. The temple is gone, our King is gone, we’re being tossed around like a hot potato.” Except, even in the midst of all this chaos, there were pockets and reminders of hope.

I think King Josiah must have run his campaign in the midst of such depressing times on a platform something like “hope and change.” And the people got behind him – they hoped for something better. And they had good reason to hope: remember God made these ancient promises to the Hebrews – to Adam and Eve and Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Zipporah – promises that were meant to stand the test of time.

Hope and despair, destruction and possibility – they must have all been tangled up together. Sounds kind of familiar, if you ask me.

And, as much as the Hebrews wanted a clear, decisive answer for what would ultimately happen to them – salvation or destruction, independence or slavery, life or death – they just couldn’t get anything definitive, they couldn’t find any prediction rich enough or certain enough to sink their teeth into, anything sturdy enough to anchor them. In fact, in the text of Jeremiah, the answers are decidedly ambiguous.

Chapters 30-33 of the book of Jeremiah are often referred to as the “Book of Comfort” because they present incredibly beautiful promises of what life will be like, of what will happen when God’s promises are finally fulfilled:

God will gather all of Her people from the ends of the earth and “plant them in THIS land” – the promise of a home, a place, a sure thing.

And when everyone gets there, there will be singing (I sort of hope for a capella four part harmony) and dancing (with timbrels – which, in case you were wondering, are really just big ‘ol tambourines).

We’ll plant vineyards, build houses, and nurture relationships. The goodness of the Lord – an astounding abundance of grain and wine and oil and flocks and herds - will make us “radiant” (well, yes, of course, after partying with all that bread and meat and wine, “radiant” might be a generous description).

Our mourning will be turned to joy. We’ll come home weeping and find consolation. God will “feast the soul of the priests with abundance,” (good news for all y’all pastors out there) and God says all of her people will be “satisfied with my goodness.” “Our life,” we’re told, “will be like a watered garden, and we shall languish no more.”

Just take a minute and imagine that - that glorious abundance, that deep hope, that overflowing beauty.

Except. None of it is certain. None of it is a foregone conclusion. It’s promised, yes, by God, yes, but even Jeremiah – privy to the very thoughts of God, the guy whose career started out with God actually touching his lips and inserting God’s words into his mouth – can’t even say it with complete conviction.

You can hear, in his speech, the chaos of the world: “For thus says the Lord,” Jeremiah reports in chapter 4, “the whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end” (4:27). And, later, here in chapter 30 – right smack dab in the middle of all those glorious images we just envisioned, the Lord says: “there is no medicine for your wound, no healing for you,” but just four verses later, God promises, “your wounds I will heal.”

I imagine Jeremiah must have gotten branded as a “flip-flopper” several times over the course of his life. His political career was riddled with inconsistencies: all will be well, but all will not be well. We’ll make it through, but we probably won’t. All that wine and comfort and singing and dancing will happen, except we’ll also be completely and utterly destroyed before it does. Jeremiah would have needed a very powerful press secretary to endear the public to his wishy-washy message.

Luckily, Jeremiah wasn’t a politician. He was a prophet. And his words – both hopeful and despairing – are the honest attempt to carry God’s message of promise into a world that seems to be crumbling beneath his feet.

Jeremiah’s honesty about the despair he felt, about the destruction of his world and the hopelessness of his people is not an indicator of lack of faith. Instead, it represents the best of faith – the ability to see the realities of the world around us, to remember God’s promises fully and clearly, and to hold them together – as different and contradictory and ridiculous and peculiar as that combination might seem.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that “the central theological issue in the tradition of Jeremiah is the deep and raw shift from pain to possibility, from judgment to promise.”[1] And that shift is not an easy one to make. It isn’t a straight line, and it isn’t a straight shot. It’s a constant negotiation of back and forth, holding onto hope even while honestly acknowledging crushing despair.

This is where I think we might find some sympathies with Jeremiah. We life in a chaotic, rough and tumble, back and forth time, ourselves. 30 years ago, the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre proclaimed that we were now living “among the ruins.” He wasn’t talking about a physical Temple getting destroyed, like Jeremiah and his friends experienced, but he was saying something similar – that most of our time-tested and age-old bedrock truths about how life was supposed to be lived were being dismantled, block by block, thrown down, disproved.

This is how Walter Brueggemann paints the picture of our day:

“I believe that the great pastoral reality for the church in the United States is that we are watching the termination of the world we have loved too long and lost – a world of Western, white, male, heterosexual domination, privilege and certitude. It has evaporated before our very eyes. Its loss creates acres of rage and anxiety. That loss, moreover, may be like the loss of Jerusalem – according to the text of Jeremiah, a judgment of God on a power arrangement too long recalcitrant. The two positive verbs of Jeremiah [to build and to plant] may script hope for the newness that God is giving, a newness that we cannot see clearly and that may come in forms we do not prefer.”[2]

If it’s true that our time resembles Jeremiah’s, then maybe we can find in his words some instruction for how to navigate them.

Brueggemann says that these huge losses are creating “acres of rage and anxiety.” It might be easy to pin those emotions on the people across the divide or across the aisle from us, to assume that people we disagree with are acting out of hatred or out of fear. But Jeremiah insists that we are ALL anxious and angry – that none of us can escape such massive shifts. So then, what can we do?

I think we have to take a cue from Jeremiah, and hold these two visions of reality up clearly before us, even when it’s painful. We have to take a wide-eyed look at the world around us, and be honest with ourselves and with each other about what’s happening. And, at the very same time, we have to hold firmly to that vision of life as a watered garden, of the promise of singing and dancing and abundance and LIFE.

It’s enough to make a person crazy. I cannot imagine the mental anguish that Jeremiah endured, the emotional rollercoasters, the difficulty of discernment. How do you know what to say when you hold both these things as true, at the same time? How do you know what to do when you’re pulled equally toward both deep despair and rich hope? How do we move from one to the other?

Brueggemann suggests this: that “the only way from here to there, from despair to hope, from death to new life, is by way of weeping, of grief, of exile.”[3] In order to walk into new life, we have to first walk out of the old. In order to live into the vision of promise and abundance, we have to leave out from our old habits of scarcity and fixedness. And when we leave, we have to grieve: grieve over the lost paradise of Adam and Eve, the lost home of Moses and the Israelites, the lost temple of Jeremiah and his people. We have to go ahead and acknowledge loss, be honest about our fears and our anxieties and our anger, weep over them, and commit ourselves to finding a new way, a new home.

And I suggest this: at the end of Chapter 31, Jeremiah writes:

³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

God will write God’s law on each of our hearts. And we won’t have to yell at each other or chide each other or disrespect each other or doubt each other. We’ll just have to trust each other – and trust that the God we know, the God whose law is written on our hearts is the SAME God, the same law, the same gospel that our sister or brother knows, even though we might disagree with them about some of the particulars.

The temple was gone, so what else did the Israelites have? The place they had always gone to meet God and to learn God’s law had been completely destroyed. All they had left for guidance was the law inscribed on each others’ hearts. All they had left was to trust one another – that together they could find a way, and to trust in God’s promise that on the other side of all this weeping was life like a full, abundant, verdant garden. Seems to me that’s all we have left, ourselves.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Like Fire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah, (Fortress Press, 2006), 152.

[2] Ibid, 27.

[3] Ibid, 178.

overheard at YAC

2011-05-31T18:19:00.002-05:00

I served as the designated listener/preacher at this year's Church of the Brethren Young Adult Conference. Here's what I heard. And said.

⁴²They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. ⁴³Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. ⁴⁴All who believed were together and had all things in common; ⁴⁵they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. ⁴⁶Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

I had a professor in seminary who insisted that the gospels got written and the church got invented because a few people witnessed something so incredible and awesome that they couldn’t help but build the rest of their lives around it: their friend and teacher died, and was brought back to life. They witnessed their world turned upside down, their leader – the one who did all the overturning – crucified, and then, miraculously, brought back to life. It must have been as if God was saying, “YES! All that ridiculous and illogical and unconventional stuff Jesus was saying and doing, I really, really mean it to be the way YOU live, too: so much that I’ll overturn even the most sure thing you know. I’ll overturn the power of death.”

How could you resist such powerful movement? How could you witness such incredible things and NOT be compelled to change your life and live in a different way?

That’s what this passage in Acts is about. And that’s what I think the Church, at its best, is about: responding to the mysterious, incomprehensible, ridiculous, illogical movement of God in the world with very specific and practical ways of living…together.

That actually sounds kind of simple. And the passage from Acts makes it look pretty simple, too. What, exactly, did the early church do? According to these few verses, they:

- learned from and listened to each another

- hung out with one another

- ate together

- prayed together

- lived together

- shared what they had

- acted generously, making sure that everyone was taken care of

- witnessed with awe the wonders and signs that the Spirit was doing through their friends

I don’t know about you, but this picture of church actually sounds pretty lovely to me. In fact, when I think about it, it actually sounds a lot like what we’ve been doing here, this weekend. And I LIKE what we’ve been doing here, this weekend. I like to hang out with people, and I especially like eating together. I like to pray. I love listening and learning new stuff, especially from interesting people I like. I want to be generous. I especially like being in a state of awe. And, honestly this doesn’t sound all that hard – it hasn’t felt hard. Being the church, here at YAC, and in this tiny paragraph from Acts, doesn’t sound complicated or forced or painful.

And yet, being church today – at home, in this denomination, outside the property lines of the Camp that hosts YAC each year - seems to be all these things for us: hard and complicated and forced and painful. Sometimes, it’s even that way here – maybe it has been for you this weekend. Why is that?

I have a couple of ideas. First, we’ve sort of lost the ability to discern the movement of the Holy Spirit. Robert Wall and Anthony Robinson, in their book “Called to Be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day,” say that “The first question is not, suggests Acts, what should we do? Instead, it is: what is God doing? Where is the Spirit moving?”[1] We rarely ask one another – or ourselves – this question. We “what should we do?!” all the time, but hardly ever “what is God doing right now?”

And, secondly, I don’t think we know how to act out of genuine awe. If the first Christians were motivated by their incomprehensible experience of resurrection, shouldn’t we learn to follow their lead? We often act out of fear and obligation, doing what we think we should and what we must in order to keep what we’ve got…but we rarely find ourselves compelled to do something just because we don’t know what else we can do with this overwhelming sense of wonder at what we’ve witnessed.

There are plenty of reasons explaining why it is that we can’t seem to do or be what we’re called to be and do.

Actually, if you keep reading just a little bit further in Acts, you find that the early church wasn’t so ideal, either. Despite how “quaint” (as someone in my small group described it) this picture of church is, the realities of the story are actually more nuanced, more complicated. The passage in chapter 2 says that everyone sold all their possessions and contributed the proceeds to the group. But later on, just a few chapters down the road, Ananais and his wife Sapphira try to pull a fast one on the community. They sell their possessions, but they try to keep some of the money back for themselves. When they’re found out and confronted about their dishonesty, each of them is struck down dead. Not so quaint. I mean, people aren’t getting struck down for not tithing their weekly 10% in the offering plate or anything, but THIS actually sounds a bit more like the church we know, right?

Still, there’s something about this kind of idealized picture of the church in Acts 2 that’s appealing to us. Even if these verses don’t exactly accurately describe the reality of the early church, they do express a greater reality of what it meant to be a church community, what these people were attempting and aspiring toward. Eating together and praying together and standing in awe of the works of the Holy Spirit was the benchmark for the church.

Notice, in this benchmark passage, what the church did NOT do:

- worry about heaven and hell

- act out of fear

- hoard their goods

- refuse to listen to new revelations

- huddle together in their bunker to wait for the end of the world

- create a strategic plan (I have a friend who recently said that strategic plans are for people who don’t know what they’re doing…people who have a clear mission just want ways to do more of that.)

This weekend’s theme has been “rethinking church.” It’s a good way to think about this time and place in which we find ourselves. It makes especially good sense to me when I think about what one of our BVS volunteers from Germany told me recently: In German, “rethink” is a verb used for “vomit.” As in, hurl, blow chunks, throw up. If you’re throwing up, he said, you’re sort of…”rethinking” your food. In at least a couple of ways, I bet: the actual thinking again about the food you ate that is now making you sick, and the more heady reconsideration you’re doing about the wisdom of eating whatever it was in the first place. When you rethink something, at least in German, you’re dramatically cleaning out your system.

And, honestly, that might be an appropriate metaphor for what needs to happen with the Church. We definitely need to rethink some of the things we do and believe. But I also think we need to…RETHINK them…if you know what I mean.

There are parts of what “church” has come to mean and to be that I think we would do well to get rid of, to rethink, to VOMIT UP. (Okay, I know it’s gross. But it is, at least, an emphatic metaphor!) Most likely, in our conversations this weekend, we’ve named some of those things about church that are making us sick. I could give you my list, but I think your own lists are already running through your heads right now.

So. How do we get rid of the deadening parts of church, and how do we find new life in the essential parts? I think it starts with paying attention, getting together, and allowing ourselves to be awed.

And that is, in part, what we’ve been doing this weekend. What you might not know is that part of my job here has been to listen to what you’ve been saying. Not in a creepy, hide behind the walls kind of way, but in a good, hearing what’s being dreamt and hoped for and lamented kind of way. Here are some things I’ve heard:

First, we know who we are, on a very deep level. Somehow, the stories of what it means to follow Jesus as Brethren have sunk deep into our bones. We know all the stories – Sarah Major and Dan West and Ted Studebaker – mention just the name and you get an understanding nod around the room. But how did this happen? At dinner last night, someone said that she learned the stories through the songs of Andy Murray. Someone else said that they learned because when they first started attending a Brethren congregation, their Sunday school class was doing a series on Brethren stories. We know how to do this – we’re good storytellers, and we’re good at forming disciples.

We know how to do lots of things well, I’ve heard you say: Love Feast and service and peacebuilding and community…we know these things not in a studied way – no one taught us the step-by-step plan for building a community – but in a deep heart and soul way. We know them because we’ve lived them, they have been the air that we breathed. We learned them almost through osmosis.

And I’ve heard you say that who we are and what we do is peculiar: even though we know who we are, not many other people do. And when they hear about us – when we start to explain who we are – people are baffled. They don’t understand: “You WASH each other’s FEET?!” “Your CHURCH encourages you to engage in civil disobedience?!” “You guys actually DO peacemaking?!” “You teach justice – based in Biblical TRUTH?!” “Wait, you’re going to serve beside someone you deeply disagree with?!”

I hear you saying that – maybe because all this seems so obvious to us – we don’t know how to share it with the world. Even when people ask us explicitly for it, we don’t know what to say. Maybe it is that we’ve eaten too many of Ezekiel’s scrolls, and we’ve lost the taste, forgotten how sweet they tasted, how powerful they are, and started treating them like boring mush.

And, finally, I hear loud and clear that we love the church, and the Church of the Brethren in particular. Maybe we even love it so deeply that we can’t find enough ways to appropriately express it.

We do a lot of things that we call “church.” Some of them are great, some of them are good, and some of them, honestly, stink. Luckily, we have some guidance for which parts we ought to sift out and which parts we ought to keep. Are we eating together? Are we praying together? Are we being generous? Are we paying attention to the wonders that are happening right in front of us? If we are, then maybe we should just keep doing that. And if we’re not, well, maybe we should start. They aren’t hard things to do.

And, the funny thing about this description in Acts is that, when the church started doing these things, they started growing. Not just in numbers, though the Lord did add to their number day by day, but in regard – they were liked by everyone around them. There’s this pattern in Acts: conversion leads to community leads to conversion leads to community, and on, and on, and on. Pay attention, be converted, join with community, pay attention together – to the food you eat and the people you eat with and the ways you do and be church together – and be converted again, into a new community.

I was sitting at breakfast this morning, and someone at the table asked if anyone would be seriously interested in joining an intentional community. Every single person around that table answered with either “yes,” “I have this dream about intentional community,” or “I’m already kind of doing it.” What I heard in that question was not just about living in intentional community; it was about who was really ready to commit to being church in a serious way together – intentional community is just one way to do that. And what I heard in the answers was a resounding YES.

That’s it: it’s not complicated, but it also isn’t easy. Eat together. Pray together. Pay attention to the wonders going on all around us. People might resist. People might hold back. People might fight over what we eat or how we pray. But this is what we’re given, and this is what we’re taught. I’m up for giving it a try. Are you?

[1] Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called to Be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006), 6.

an easter sermon, maybe

2011-04-24T16:49:00.001-05:00

I do not understand resurrection. I can deal with Good Friday; I can imagine Holy Saturday. I hear of countless horrors and have brushed up against deep grief. I know the world is utterly, unfathomably broken. I get that. I understand – theoretically, rationally – the cross. People get put to death every day. People get abandoned and rejected and flogged and unfairly punished and caught in systems of violence and oppression all the time. My political leanings and my personal relationships and my religious convictions keep me fairly well informed about the nastiness of the world.

So, it makes sense to me that Jesus would suffer. It makes sense that the hurt of the world would affect him just as much as any of us. I understand why and how his life ended the way it did. None of that takes too much imagination to visualize and comprehend.

But I do not understand resurrection. I just don’t get it. It’s not that I can’t imagine a dead person coming back to life - I can do that. It’s not that I disbelieve the biblical story – I trust the women who witnessed the empty tomb. It’s not that the image of resurrection falls flat - I love the story of Jesus eating fish and honeycomb, confirming his human hunger and need for nourishment. I just don’t understand it. What purpose does resurrection have in the already well-established biblical plot? How in the world are we supposed to integrate something like this into our constructions of reality? What the crap was God trying to tell us?

There are plenty of pat explanatory sermons to be had, a fair number of theological salves to make this ridiculous plot twist seem sane: You are forgiven. Death is defeated. Hell is conquered. God is bigger. Debts are paid, so sin no more. But these are all, in my estimation, poor and paltry explanations that fail to live up to the incredible awkwardness, fail to witness to the unspeakable mystery.

What the hell, God? I mean, seriously, what the hell were you doing there? You totally lost your audience with that finale, stepping solidly outside the bounds of the narrative world you’d created and throwing in something completely other and completely unexpected.

My favorite Easter text is the original ending of the original gospel: Mary Magdalene and Mary and Salome have brought spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ dead body. The tomb is empty, and instead of following the angel’s instructions to run tell that, “they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Well, obviously. Of course they were afraid. Of course they were trembling and astonished and fleeing. I’m not sure if those women were particularly sassy or particularly pious, so I can imagine two responses: “Well, I do declare! That Jesus always ways a wily one! Where DID he get off to, now?” Or, alternately and preferably, “HOLY SHIT, y’all!” And it was some holy shit, indeed.

Luke Timothy Johnson, my New Testament professor, insists that the scriptures were written and the church was founded for one, simple reason: This small group of people experienced something so completely confounding, so utterly perplexing, that they were compelled to do any and everything in their power to make sense of it. They gathered together in the comfort of good and sympathetic company to share every story of this man they could remember; wrote letters and sent envoys; gathered as many followers as they could because more minds are better than one; created and adapted rituals to remind themselves of what happened. They started a movement that fossilized into an institution; tried on explanations that settled into dogma and creed, defining orthodoxy and heresy.

I do not understand the resurrection. As my friend James reminded me when I tweeted that confession early this morning, maybe that’s the point. No one does. No one did. We spend this day in explanatory preaching and self-certain proclamation, singing hymns of sacrificial atonement and time-honored soteriology. We thank God for saving us. We make heroes out of villains, grateful to Judas and Pilate for doing their parts to see this horrific plan of divine abuse through so that we might find our way to heaven. We tell ourselves that we know what this all means, and that makes us feel safe.

But I don’t know what any of it means. I do not understand resurrection. Despite some early redactors’ confidence that the women did eventually spread the word, despite Paul’s theologizing the whole mess into a systematic framework of sacrifice and redemption, despite centuries of self-righteous proclamation and despite today’s Facebook feed full of confident but unsatisfactory exegesis and earnest but faulty theology, I do not understand resurrection. That bothers me, and it heartens me. I want to know, I want to understand. I want things to make sense and I want to be able to live within the bounds of a rational, sensible world.

But the mystery beckons me, and promises me some kind of endlessly fascinating pilgrimage. It surprises me, and baffles me, and reminds me that I don’t know squat about these things, or, if I’m honest, about anything. There is beauty here, too. There is beauty in surprise and beauty in fear, beauty in not-knowing and beauty in the possibilities to which this not-knowing gives way.

I do not understand resurrection. Let that be my proclamation for today. Let that be my confession and my celebration, my rejoicing and my lament. Christ is risen, and I do not understand. Alleluia.

is it spring, is it morning?

2011-04-13T10:11:00.000-05:00

It was spring
and finally I heard him
among the first leaves -
then I saw him clutching the limb
 
in an island of shade
with his red-brown feathers
all trim and neat for the new year.
First, I stood still
 
and thought of nothing.
Then I began to listen.
Then I was filled with gladness -
and that's when it happened,
 
when I seemed to float,
to be, myself, a wing or a tree -
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying,
 
and the sands in the glass
stopped
for a pure white moment
while gravity sprinkled upward
 
like rain, rising,
and in fact
it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing -
it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed
 
not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers,
and also the trees around them,
as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds
in the perfectly blue sky - all, all of them
 
were singing.
And, of course, yes, so it seemed,
so was I.
Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn't last
 
for more than a few moments.
It's one of those magical places wise people
like to talk about.
One of the things they say about it, that is true,
 
is that, once you've been there,
you're there forever.
Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?
 
Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then - open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.

- Mary Oliver, Such Singing in the Wild Branches

april is always poetry month

2011-04-06T18:47:00.002-05:00

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

- Rilke

oh, you know, some blather

2011-02-16T13:34:00.002-05:00

Oh, hello there, February. I'm sitting on a Floridian porch swing in 70 degree weather recovering from a bout of...food poisoning? 24 hour stomach flu? Personal intestinal disagreement with BVS orientation tuna mac? Too much detail?

Regardless, today is a day of gratitude. For healing, for functional bodily systems, for teammates and friends who can pick up slack and lead a session when I'm otherwise indisposed. For Florida in February, spanish moss hanging from big camp trees, birdsong and mosquito buzz. For good friends with warm and hospitable Miami homes, trips to the Keys and blue-green ocean tides, fresh seafood on the sound and startlingly beautiful southern sunsets. For my job and its long-reaching tentacles of service and transformation, for simple spiritual practices like remembering and rejoicing and blowing bubbles into the breeze. For the optimism and energy of volunteers, the commitment and light-heartedness of Callie and Don, the jolting realization that this is life and that I get to live it, day in and day out, over and over, again and again.

Hopefully, more often than not, with functional guts. And, if it's not too much trouble, balmy summer weather in the midst of mid-winter.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

On Thinking Institutionally

2011-01-12T11:49:00.000-05:00

Hugh Heclo’s “On Thinking Institutionally” (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) is a helpful – if unconvincing – argument for fruitful participation in the practices of threatened modern-day institutions. Acknowledging the century-long breakdown of societal institutions and the growing distrust that follows, Heclo nonetheless suggests that there is yet value in living faithfully within the limits these institutions provide for us. The key, he says, is in our mindset: in order to reap the benefits of institutional realities, we must learn to think institutionally.

At first glance, this proposition comes across as an attempt at pacifying the irate masses, convincing thinking people to put their trust and energies once again into the large-scale structures that govern our societal life together. To be sure, Heclo takes great pains to track the many convincing reasons why anyone paying even the least bit of attention to national events over the last half-century would have little reason to expect anything good to come from institutional life. He even goes so far as creating a five page timeline of trust-decaying events, concluding that “…we moderns have a culture-based distrust of institutions both because they get in our way and also because we cannot get out of their way,” (37). Still, Heclo contends, even this list of grievances ought not be enough to completely turn us off of participation in institutions. Leaving failing societal structures altogether does not leave us free and fulfilled.

Instead, the place we find ourselves (which seems quite similar to MacIntyre’s “among the ruins”) is one devoid of structure and guidelines for how life ought to be lived. Living without institutions leaves us “perplexed, burdened, and looking for some fixed points of reference” (39). Into this empty space, Heclo inserts the possibility of thinking institutionally, a practice that, he asserts with the promise of a first-tier self-help guru, “can actually help make you a more fulfilled human being,” (83).

Institutional thinking is not simply structural thinking, and certainly not critical thinking [which Heclo derides with a passion: it “may just as easily make a person a better scoundrel as a citizen,” (92)]. Instead, institutional thinking is something like “respect-in-depth,” “to honor something through your own appropriate participation in its practice,” (4). It is faithful reception of the past’s legacy, infusion of value into the mundane everyday, and a stretching of time horizons – making one beholden to both those who came before and those who are yet to come. Institutional thinking allows an individual – institutional leaders seem to be the target audience – to participate wholly in large-scale institutional structures while maintaining a critical edge, an active and engaged critique of current practice.

And therein lies the problem, or the first of them. Heclo advocates an insider perspective, a push for change from within. The problem with institutions, he says, is not those unwieldy systems themselves, but rather the human beings that make them up: “When institutions fail it is living, breathing human beings and not mental abstractions that fail,” (25). In order for institutions to function with integrity, those people who work within them need to act as such. Institutional failure is actually the failure of individuals who can’t seem to carry out the responsibilities of their office with any fidelity. But as Walter Wink has argued, the powers that be are not “simply people and their institutions…they also include the spirituality at the core of those institutions and structures.” Wink goes on to argue, “if we want to change those systems, we will have to address not only their outer forms, but their inner spirit as well.”[1] Heclo neglects to address the larger – and messier – question of how institutions take on a life and a power greater than the sum of their parts.

A second problem lies in what we might assume to be Heclo’s unstated personal attachments and underlying motivation for the work. Throughout his argument – and especially in the chapter explaining what it is to be institutionally minded - he sprinkles traditional Christian concepts, speaking of our need to be “willing to submit” to institutional tradition (100), appealing to Augustine and alluding to institutions as structures that can guide and harness our desires by offering answers to questions like “what should I want?” (102) and speaking of the distinct difference between a contract and a covenant (106). He even paints his argument in eschatological terms, contending that “human beings find meaning as they live in the tension between the universal and the particular, between what has been given and what is not yet fulfilled,” (190).

These attachments and motivations might be construed as form agreeing with content: perhaps Heclo is writing from his own mindset of thinking institutionally – namely a mindset of the institution of Christianity and the Church. But if this were so, if Heclo is indeed writing out of a commitment to and interest in our modern-day institution of Christianity, why step outside of that institution to do so? Why write an academic, secular work in order to shore up a practical, religious institution? It may be true that the applications of Heclo’s theory are much broader than the American Christian church, but if his reasoning holds, then he himself ought to be acting from within his own tradition, his own institution.

Heclo ends the book with what seems like a cry of utter frustration: “Is it really so difficult to cut through the fluff and blather of our popular culture to see the things that need to be taught and learned?” (187). The question is rhetorical, of course, and Heclo assumes that every answer will be negative. But in truth – in practice and in community – the answer swells up from among the remnants and the ruins of those very things that we need to be teaching and learning – YES. It is difficult to discern what is fluff and what is real tradition. Ask any pastor who attempts to preach against consumerism, or any church administrator who tries to operate relationally in a corporate system, or anyone transformed by Christ into a life of simplicity and service who tries to live their life this way amongst corrupted and overbearing institutions. Yes, Mr. Heclo, it is so difficult. But your book helps to explain exactly why that’s so.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers that Be (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 4.

lamentation

2011-01-10T11:13:00.002-05:00

The first language of the church in a deeply broken world is not strategy, but prayer. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in a call to see and encounter the rupture of this world so truthfully that we are literally slowed down. We are called to a space where any explanation or action is too easy, too fast, too shallow - a space where the right response can only be a desperate cry directed to God. We are called to learn the anguished cry of lament.

- Katongole & Rice, Reconciling All Things

How can we speak peace when we won't even acknowledge violence?

For those killed and wounded in Arizona; Lord have mercy.

For those imprisoned in crushing cycles of mental illness; Lord have mercy.

For those caught up in cultures and societies of violence and vitriol; Lord have mercy.

On us, who silently condone and willfully ignore our world's deep pain and utter brokenness, jumping all too quickly to blame and anger and solutions or, worse yet, say nothing at all; Lord have mercy.