On President Obama, this extraordinary week, and the holy breast pumps of grace

Posted on June 27, 2015 by admin

I spent most of last week on retreat with my writing group, half of whom are nursing mothers with babies in tow. When I made it home late yesterday, my husband and I went straight to the computer to watch President Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Perhaps if I hadn’t just been witness to a week of breastfeeding, I would have heard it differently, but I hung up on his repeated phrase “we express God’s grace.”

He couldn’t have done a better job speaking Methodist, with his sustained emphasis on the undeserved, unearned, unmerited grace of God we all receive. (And I was proud to see the United Methodist Church sitting in solidarity with our AME sisters and brothers, represented by South Carolina Bishop L. Jonathan Holston on the front row on stage – yes, geeks like me can spot the cross and flame logo and the bishops’ insignia on a stole in the background of a video shot.) As President Obama spoke, circling back around to God’s grace in our lives, I heard something I haven’t before.

I usually think of God’s grace flowing – gushing – continually into the world and into each of our lives. Sometimes we notice, sometimes we don’t. Either way, it’s always there and we can actively participate in it or resist it or halfway notice it, or not. What I never thought about before hearing the President preach-speak is how we might be able to participate more directly and persuasively than I’ve considered in the past. We might be able to squeeze out another ounce of grace when it seems to be running dry, like a mother pumping breast milk for her newborn.

When President Obama first used the phrase, he said, “by taking down [the Confederate] flag we express God’s grace. But I don’t think God wants us to stop there.” I heard “we express God’s grace” as We are exhibiting God’s grace, demonstrating its existence and power. Which surely we are….But as he repeated it I heard it differently. A little later he said, “The vast majority of Americans – the majority of gun owners – want to do something about [the epidemic of gun violence]. We see that now. And I’m convinced that by acknowledging the pain and loss of others, even as we respect the traditions and ways of life that make up this beloved country, by making the moral choice to change, we express God’s grace.”

As he repeated, “we express God’s grace,” I began to hear the verb “express” differently. I started to think about breastfeeding and how the milk doesn’t just gush on its own, especially when a mother is trying to express (literally, press out) milk into a bottle for her child to drink some other time. A breastfeeding mother who expresses milk needs to spend time and give attention to getting her milk from breast to bottle. She has to push, pull, suck, and squeeze to help it flow from her to where it’s needed. From what I understand, sometimes even with a breast pump, a mother has to wait through several minutes of sucking-pumping for the milk to start flowing.

What if, in some times, places, and circumstances, God’s grace is like this? What if it’s not just gushing all the time like an open fire hydrant? What if it’s ready to do that but needs some active participation from us?

I am not saying God is completely stymied without the likes of us. That open fire hydrant of gushing grace is an image that still works for me. But I have known places and people where, even though I witnessed God’s gushing grace drenching us all from head to toe, someone in the crowd didn’t seem wet or sensible to their drenched state. Surely God’s grace was flooding that Wednesday night Bible study last week when a group of the faithful welcomed a stranger and invited him in. Obviously the grace of God flowed through the families of those who were killed, as they offered forgiveness in the midst of their deep pain and loss. But it’s not obvious to everyone.

There are times and places and people who seem to need more than the ocean we’re already swimming in. Those times and places and people need us, to point to and live out and express every last drop of God’s grace – not just to witness to it and live gracefully and graciously, but to squeeze, prod, suck, and push until every single drop of grace lets down into the situation at hand. Like mothers who want to be sure every ounce of precious milk gets to their hungry helpless babies, God enlists us to help express grace into the world and the lives around us so it gets to every hungry helpless child of God. We are the holy breast pumps of grace. It’s not a sexy job and not as beautiful as the babe at the breast, but it still gets the milk to the sucking puckered mouth. It gets the job done. And sometimes, when the baby’s sleeping or not hungry right then or the mother needs to be somewhere else at feeding time, expressing milk is the difference between feeding and not feeding, between flow and drying up.

I love to hear Barack Obama sing and his rendition of “Amazing Grace” was stirring and soulful, but to my ears, what he said about grace was even better. We are witnesses but we are also tools to help get the job done, the breast pumps expressing (pressing out into the world) the grace of God. We are expressing God’s grace when we answer hate with love and forgiveness, when we recognize how the past is killing the future, when a group of United Methodists in Virginia votes for a new way forward, when we choose to care for everyone’s health and safety as a basic human need and right, when we recognize love looks just the same on everyone and rejoice in everyone’s right to marry…

For a breast-feeding mother, every day brings a hungry baby, so even though this week has been extraordinary, every week brings opportunities to express what God gives. Keep it up. Keep pressing out every bit of grace you know, into a world in desperate need of knowing it, too. Keep pumping.

photo credit: By Beukbeuk (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Straight and flat, the boring parts

Posted on June 25, 2015 by admin

On long backpacking hikes in my twenties, we passed the time going up and down mountains by cataloguing the ways we were struggling. Going up, we were breathless and our muscles were shaky; going down, knees and ankles, different muscles. One wasn’t really better or worse than the other, just hard in different ways. We never said much about the hike itself on the few flat portions of trail.

I find myself doing this in the rest of life. I spend a lot of time hoping for and anticipating the uphill sections – the family vacation planned for July, the next kiln opening, finishing the project, beating my mile swim time – and a lot of time dreading and trying to just make it through the downhill sections – sickness, cleaning the bathroom, meetings and reports, uncomfortable conversations with difficult people. I’m realizing lately that I have underappreciated the occasional straight, flat parts of “the trail.”

Hiking in April after a sluggish and inactive winter, we were on a well-groomed trail with small, intermittent flat stretches built into the switchbacks. Going up, I used those stretches to straighten up and catch my breath and gather my wits and steam for the next uphill bit. Going down, I relaxed and felt relief from the joint-pounding, muscle-quivering descent. These seemingly boring straight flat parts saved me – in both directions.

As with many spiritual break-throughs, my own weakness and vulnerability on that first hike of the season allowed me to see and appreciate something I’ve been missing. And needing. Those usually unheralded flat parts had a beauty of their own. I didn’t have to concentrate so hard or push myself or hold myself back. I could just let them take me to the next up or down. They were absolutely necessary for both recovery and gearing up.

The parts (on the trail, in life) that are easily overlooked, the flat reprieves where nothing much happens and we aren’t engaged in heroic measures or managing failures, are as necessary as up and down to get where we are going. It’s easier to see this on the trail than in the midst of life. When my panting slows on a flat path after a steep rise or my knees stop barking after a sharp descent, if I’m paying enough attention I can see the need for something flat and straight and just boring enough to give me a moment. In life off the trail, it seems harder.

This summer, I’m trying to slow myself down enough to appreciate the relative flatness but it’s taking great intention, like pulling on the reins of wild horses. So I’m remembering April’s hike and the unexpected savoring I did on those flat parts of the trail. I know the uphills and downhills of the academic year (and the rest of life) are coming but for right now the path is clear, flat, and straight. I’m catching my breath, offering thanks for this blessedly boring stretch, and letting it take me where it will.

Drowned by God

Posted on June 16, 2015 by admin

I was swimming along just fine, regularly going for a mile or more, several times a week. I felt strong and sleeker than usual. Then, one day, I just didn’t feel like it and had to argue myself into going to the pool. I felt bloated and stressed and harried, and in my convincing conversation with myself, I reminded me that this is exactly the kind of time when it’s important to go ahead and get moving instead of eating half a cake in front of the TV. It’s probably a result of watching too much TV and too many movies, but on the first lap I kept waiting to start feeling better. I’m moving now. I complied. Kick in the soaring inspirational montage music and I’ll feel sleekness return. I’ll be out of the funk.

That’s not what happened. I don’t remember how long I swam that day – maybe a half mile, if I made it that far – and every single stroke was a struggle. There was no montage music. There was no lightening of my load. I never hit my swimming stride to feel sleek and smooth, gliding through the water. I felt like I was thrashing around, slapping and splashing, struggling to breathe.

I was praying the whole time. Praying as I convinced myself to go. Praying as I got into the pool and started thrashing. Praying for my stroke to even out. Praying for God to be with me and lift some of the burden I felt, weighing me down. I thought I was struggling with myself – with self-doubt and that strangely stultifying combination of physical laziness and overwork – but as I doggedly kept slapping the surface of the water, gasping for each breath, I started to think maybe it wasn’t me.

I started to wonder if I was in a wrestling match with God. And, since I was in the pool, I also wondered if God was trying to drown me. That feeling didn’t go away for the entire swim, and I wondered why God would want to wrestle me right then, on a shaky day to begin with, in a particularly vulnerable location.

I love the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel/God (Genesis 32: 22-32), refusing to let go or give in until he’d received the blessing he was after. I love the idea of God as one who’s willing to get this intimate with us in our struggles, but until my own wrestling match I always thought of the wrestling itself as merely a metaphor. I preferred my actual experiences of God to be in more in the comforting metaphor variety – Good Shepherd, mother hen (John 10: 11-18, Matthew 23:37).

That day in the pool, I was face-to-face, breath-to-struggling-breath, with a very present but not so comforting God. I don’t know why and I am not sure I know yet what blessing I wrangled that day, but God was definitely present in the pool with me and it wasn’t the comfort I thought it would be when I started swimming and praying.

Months later, when I’d pushed that episode to the back of my mind, it came pouring back to the front during a conversation with my students. We’d been singing the David Crowder Band song “How He Loves,” which includes this line: “If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking.” I told them this doesn’t seem like grace for me, that I like the metaphor of grace as an ocean but it needs language like “floating” and “buoyed up” to describe it. Do we really want grace to sink us? Isn’t that like being drowned by grace?

Then I remembered my wrestling match. Maybe Crowder’s got it right after all. Maybe we do want grace to sink us. From our watery beginnings in baptism, death for Christians is as present as life. When we join the tribe, we enter through a “watery grave,” believing it holds the promise of life. And it does, but we go by the road Christ himself traveled, as Charles Wesley wrote (United Methodist Hymnal, p. 302): “Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!/ Following our exalted head, Alleluia!/ Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!/ Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!”

I don’t know why I thought God would stand back in my vulnerable moment instead of jumping in with me. I don’t know why I thought metaphors were enough. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want a rematch, at least not in the pool. But maybe part of the blessing I received that day was the experience itself, of being taken hold of by God in a desperate and vulnerable moment, and being held onto no matter how I struggled and resisted, no matter how much I begged for a mother hen instead of an underwater sumo wrestler.

Traveling Companions: New Music

Posted on June 2, 2015 by admin

Back before the Internet, when downloads and iTunes didn’t exist, I drove to another state for the new Indigo Girls album. It was 1990 and I spent my day off driving from Jonesville, Virginia, to Kingsport, Tennessee, to the mall. Remember mall record stores?

I had recently upgraded from my first car, a 1968 Dodge Dart named Arthur (yes, it was incredibly old even then), to a nondescript K-car. I got air conditioning and FM radio in the upgrade but no tape player. So, on road trips I’d bring along my radio/cassette player and one of those power cords that plugs into the cigarette lighter. It didn’t play through the car’s speakers, I just blasted it as loudly as I could from that sad little “box,” sitting, speakers up, on the passenger seat. It takes about an hour to make that drive, which means I got to hear the whole album at least once on the drive back.

I want to say new albums meant more when obtaining one was an event like this, but I don’t think it’s true, even though I remember small, specific details of that day, like how steamy the car was when I got back in at the mall parking lot, wrestling with the thin, tight-wrapped plastic to open the hard, textured-plastic case around the tape. Like putting my sunglasses on and hearing “Hammer and a Nail” for the first time, making my way back to the highway. Like I was recognizing something I’d heard before yet couldn’t wait to hear revealed.

I want to say this but then, today, on retreat in a remote locale with a one-bar signal, I managed to download the new Indigo Girls album, One Lost Day, onto my phone in decent time. And when I heard “Elizabeth,” the sound of summer and longing all mixed up with their voices – like another summer whose stormy soundtrack was Rites of Passage (“Ghost,” “Romeo & Juliet”), like the epitome of late-summer ripeness and longing I can actually taste every time I hear “Mystery” (Swamp Ophelia) – memory of that drive flooded back.

It took a lot less time to procure this album, but I’m in the same place, transported.

Driving to my retreat yesterday, I listened to another musical traveling companion, Susan Werner. These days I can plug my phone straight into the car’s sound system to listen, but the essence of companionship is the same. Driving alone through the green gorgeous western Virginia mountains, Susan sang to me about “the greenest corner of God’s green earth,” and though she meant Iowa, it resonated.

Lately I spend most of my time in the car navigating appointments, with NPR on in the background. Yesterday’s drive reminded me how much I need music and what great musical traveling companions I’ve spent time with over the years. To give myself the excuse to listen to more music this summer and to evangelize a little about some of my favorites, I decided to do a relaxed series here called Traveling Companions, telling stories about and highlighting songs/albums/artists that have accompanied me. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Working and Resting Revisited

Posted on March 4, 2015 by admin

resting hotel door hanger

I’ll admit this woman looks like she’s having fun. But I was almost as dismayed with this hotel door hanger as I was with the all-working version we encountered in October. I’m sure she’s working up a sweat with all that jumping. I might even be willing to call it “rejuvenating,” but restful?

Why can’t she be taking a nap? Or be snuggled beneath a blanket reading a book? Why can’t she be listening to music with her feet propped up?

It seems one of the many causalities of our overworking is our resting. When we deign to rest it now looks like a competitive sport rather than an afternoon spent dozing or meandering through a music collection.

Yeah, I know, it’s just a door hanger. It’s some hotel marketing department’s creative answer to standard equipment. I get that I’m allowed to rest how I want to no matter what the picture shows. I just think we deserve work that looks less like a constant war and rest that looks a lot less like work. We deserve cycles of work and rest rather than one-speed-fits-all living with the labels changed every now and then.

Permission not to take notes

Posted on January 6, 2015 by admin

markcantrelltakingnotes_C2009_GPeeples

The competing voices in my head each sound reasonable. That’s the problem.

One voice is the keep-track-of-it voice. The one who wants to capture the precise moment with a picture or by writing down that perfectly turned phrase. This voice knows that someday when I stumble upon the preserved memory I’ll stop and take it in again. I’ll be so happy then that I kept it and can remember and relive it.

The other voice is the be-here-now voice. The one who wants to be fully immersed in the present experience, not with one eye on the future memory of the moment I’m still trying to have right now. This voice knows that whatever I remember, unaided, will be enough and just the thing I needed to know when the time comes and that, even if I can technically remember nothing from the present experience, it will have changed me somehow whether or not I can articulate or point to or recall it.

Being the kind of English major I was in college was the perfect combination of these voices. I came to class with novel in hand, underlined and highlighted. I opened my notebook to a fresh sheet and dated the page. The things I wrote in my notebook were extensions of thoughts, an idea or something I wondered about because of the conversation taking place in class. I rarely wrote down plot points of facts or direct quotes from the professor or my fellow students. Mine were not the notes a friend would borrow to catch up on what she missed when absent. My notebook might have only the word “sea” underlined, with no other words nearby, from a discussion of Mrs. Dalloway. It might have the beginnings of an outline for the paper I conceived of during and because of the discussion.

As an English major, I was committed to living in the texts, wading around in them, feeling emotions because of them. For me, class was an extension of the reading experience – a bunch of readers wading in together and seeing how swift the current was or how temperate the water. Who needs notes to understand or remember that sort of thing?

Those note-taking enterprises were entirely different from, say, attending a workshop on saving for retirement, where the terms are not organic or natural to me and where remembering the feeling of the workshop isn’t an adequate action plan to take home and implement afterwards. That kind of endeavor needs 1-2-3 and if/then.

Theology and religious life seem much more like my version of English class than like a retirement workshop. I don’t mean we don’t need rigor and specifics when studying theology or biblical texts, but it does seem we are meant to wade in and see what happens and let our minds free-associate and our hearts feel. I think I used to do that more.

I resist the preacher-with-all-the-answers model of ministry, though too often I have looked for the right or best answer. I’ve let the questioner or the question back me into a corner rather than seeing him or it as an invitation to go swimming.

I notice a strange thing happening these days. As we concoct more and more easily retrievable means of “remembering” (phones and computers and email that can store ridiculous amounts of info, texts, photos, correspondence, recordings…) I’m increasingly worried over forgetting, misplacing, or missing out on something. Strange since it is actually hard to lose track of our information now and easy to save it without once thinking of whether it’s worth saving. (Recent research indicates our devices don’t help us with recall as much as we might like – or as much as old school pen and paper.)

At a fall conference on theology and storytelling, I didn’t feel like preparing for the right answer or being the good note taker. I knew for sure I would forget finer points but I was tired and I was thinking of the time away as a deep well. I needed water, not documentation. So out of exhaustion more than intent, at first, I gave myself permission not to take notes. I sat with an open page and wrote very little. As I watched others in the conference typing and writing furiously, I felt conspicuous at first. I heard the voices in my head arguing. They both made their good points. I was positive I’d forget some things worth remembering – but the permission to be fully present while it was happening was freeing and more important than being able to tell someone else exactly what the speaker had said later on.

I’ve been trying to do this more. Permission not to take notes is an invitation to step in and try the water. I’m guaranteed to forget a few things, maybe even some important things. But that was always going to happen, no matter how copious the notes or diligent the note taker. Besides, I can jot down a few impressions of the experience later, while I dry off on the bank.

What An Old Monk Can Teach

Posted on December 17, 2014 by admin

flood sign in water

I was visiting a 90-something-year-old who had just asked how things were going. I admitted I had too much on my plate and felt overwhelmed by it at that moment. She said, “I can’t remember the last time I was overwhelmed.” I was annoyed and ungenerous in my heart.

About that same time, early October with gorgeous colors ablaze in the trees and perfect crisp weather, a very nice woman at church asked if I’d been doing any hiking. My first and most accurate response, which I somehow managed not to say out loud was, “Are you f*@#ing kidding me?”

Yes, I know I have a problem.

Between college and seminary I worked for 3 years in Appalachia. I lived just outside of a town with one flashing light, on the side of a mountain where I could hear cows mooing from the other side of the mountain and, standing on the front porch, I could look across the ridges to Tennessee. This makes it sound like a simple life and a slower pace. From my current vantage point, I’m tempted to think that way, though it’s not entirely true. I worked for a non-profit hosting huge groups of volunteers doing home repair, with full blast, no-stopping seasons of activity and slight pauses to catch our breath at other times of year.

During that time I first ran across this quote from the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander):

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

I highlighted, starred, and dog-eared this quote. I read it and re-read it.

I posted it next to my desk when I first began in campus ministry. Back then, observing the pace at which students were living, I was convinced that one of the best things we could do in campus ministry was to convince students to slow down, empty out, take a day off, and even skip a class here and there. I was dismayed to hear students talk about skipping class – to finish a paper for another class. It was never to lounge on the grass and read poetry or contemplate the sky.

Unfortunately, it’s still just as applicable in campus ministry today, more than a decade later. Even more unfortunately, Merton’s quote is still just as applicable in my own life now as it was when I first read and seized upon it on that hill in Appalachia 25 years ago.

Temptation is great. Memory and will are weak. This time, I can get it all done. This time, I’ll fit in everything everyone wants. This time, it won’t break me to work and never rest.

Wrong again.

In these months of being overwhelmed and undernourished, when I want to snap at pleasant people in church and nonagenarians, I return to Merton’s wisdom. In this Advent season when we hear the invitation to repent (“turn around”), I am trying hard to turn around – again – and to move in the direction of life. Or at least, more life and less death.

It’s been too long since I “skipped class.” I’ve been missing out on poetry and the gorgeousness of the unearned sky. The two hardest things I did in the past week were when I said “No, not now” to people asking for my time or attention.

I’ve been living with this quote for a long time now but it’s newly occurring to me that, yes, it’s about me and choices I make and the encouragement it gives to choose otherwise. But it’s also about a lifelong practice. I used to think I could learn this and embody it and move on to other issues. Now I think maybe Thomas Merton was even wiser than I knew. Maybe his advice is also about the continual staunching of that tide, about the necessary maintenance we must undertake on the retaining wall holding back that persistent hillside of “too much.”

I don’t know that I’ll ever “fix” this as I once imagined was possible, but I hear the call to tend to it. To turn around and tend to my spirit, even as many other things and people need tending. My prayer-in-practice in these waning Advent days is to be met in my turning, to realize at bone-soul level that my best work is to behold and receive. Every time I turn, there’s God. This is my prayer for all of you, too.

Emmanuel

Posted on December 7, 2014 by admin

An Advent homily, preached 12/7/14 at a Wesley Foundation at UVA & Wesley Memorial UMC joint worship service.

If we can’t find the connections between what we do here in this place and what’s happening out there, we aren’t really trying. In this messy, desperate, trauma-filled semester at UVA and in our country, if we wonder what Advent and Christmas have to do with all that, then we aren’t thinking at all.

This is the time of year when we sing and pray, Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus…Come, O Come, Emmanuel…..Come and be with us. Come to our aid, be who you promised to be, God-with-us.

And even though we use royalty purple as the color for Advent, the Prince we got came without an army. The Prince of Peace entered defenselessly, in the dark of night, naked, unable to take care of even himself at first.

The Savior of the world came as a despised Jew, born in poverty in a borrowed barn. When God decided to come down here Godself, it was to an unexpectedly, shamefully pregnant teenager. Right from the beginning, God incarnate – Jesus – chose an inexperienced, poor, minority, female teenager to be the first one to hold him. A nobody, easily overlooked. A girl, with no power, who was lucky her fiancé Joseph believed in his dreams enough to marry her and be part of God’s strange plan, rather than leaving her disgraced. (Because some things haven’t changed nearly enough in 2000 years, one of those being our inclination not to believe what women tell us about their own lives.)

Jesus is still showing up in places just like this. Who’s paying attention?

If I say to you Jesus is as interested here and now in sexual politics and violence towards women as he was when he chose to be born to an unwed teenage girl, does it seem like too much?

If I say to you Jesus is showing up right now in Ferguson and New York, looking like a black teenager wearing a hoodie, does it seem out of line?

In a couple of weeks we’ll hear again those beautiful words Mary sang when she and her cousin Elizabeth met, both pregnant and full of promise (Luke 1: 52-53): God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

The sides are not as simple as some of us want them to be: frat boy/ first year woman…real threat/ police officer….protestor/ law-abider … white/black …reporter/subject…

And yet, this is the language Mary sings…powerful/lowly…hungry/rich.

I can’t hear her song this year and not also hear echoes of the old protest song Pete Seeger sang in the 60s, “Which Side Are You On?” The sides are not as simple as we sometimes think but Jesus’ side is always the same one. Lowly, powerless, poor, hungry, vulnerable, defenseless. The nobodies everyone else ignores.

In the past I’ve leaned heavily on the waiting imagery of Advent, the tension of this time when we’ve tasted and glimpsed the full reign of God but we’re still struggling, waiting, for it to come in all its fullness and glory. That’s all still true and Adventy.

But this year I can’t stand here and encourage you to wait, if waiting means the status quo…if waiting means more of the same…if waiting means blind trust in the ones with all the power…if waiting means not looking too closely at my own power and my reticence to use if in service of the powerless…

One of the best things we Christians do is re-tell our stories. There is no way to hear all they have to say in just one telling.

This story bears repeating. We may have occasionally gotten a little too cozy, fuzzy-focus, Hallmark about hearing and telling it again, amidst our decorated homes and churches and trees and holiday parties. We may have replaced our religious fervor with uncomplicated nostalgia, gazing at the familiar manger.

Don’t settle for cozy when God’s offering emancipation.

Where is God calling you this season? “To the manger” is not the answer, unless you are an especially metaphorical person.

Where is God calling you? Always, again and again, to the places and people who are hungry, powerless, poor. The overlooked and unimpressive nobodies, by the world’s standards.

Don’t wait to meet them. Don’t wait for things to settle down. Don’t wait for that sweet manger-baby to turn into a nice young man. Emmanuel, God-with-us, is here for nothing less than a revolution – and he thinks it’s worth dying for.

What we do here is meant to carry over out there. It may not look the same in my life as in yours. For some of us it may look like volunteering with a sexual assault support group. For some of us it may mean becoming reporters and reforming ethical journalism. For others it may look like a “die-in” or a march on Washington or crossing over the color lines at UVA to meet someone on their own turf and terms. For others, it may begin with paying attention to our own language and the ways we abuse our own power and injure others without meaning to or realizing we’re doing it.

There are a million ways to choose to see and support our neighbors as fully human brothers and sisters. There are a million ways to meet God in the process.

The story we tell and re-tell – the one we long to hear and live out in its fullness – is a story about God-with-us, Emmanuel. The long-expected Jesus who came into a real body in real time and a real place – who still comes, and who will not stop coming, no matter what.

Come and be with us! Come to our aid, be who you promised to be, God-with-us.

Thanks be to God!

Why I Watch The Walking Dead

Posted on November 2, 2014 by admin

I’m a squeamish watcher. If it’s a cop show and someone gets shot in the leg, my hand instinctively grasps my own leg. If it’s a horror movie, I involuntarily repeat-shout “Don’t open the closet! Don’t open the closet!” One time, watching the first X-Files movie, I started to wonder who in the theater was talking so loudly before I realized that coming from my own mouth was this high-volume mantra, “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!”

So, I’m not a likely viewer of The Walking Dead. [Spoilers ahead.] I don’t care about zombies, just like I didn’t really care about vampires when I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel (in my book, still the only worthwhile ones among the many vampire-themed shows and movies). I’m not especially interested in knowing the “rules” of how zombies are made and how they can get you and what attracts or repels them. For me, zombies are just a vehicle for delivering story in a heightened and focused way.

Here’s the kind of thing I mean: In season two of The Walking Dead I realized with a start that until that very moment I’d never wondered or even considered what anyone (besides Rick, the obvious sheriff) did before the world started to unravel. During a scene on the sanctuary-for-a-while of the farm, Andrea and Dale are talking. Dale says to her “But you were a lawyer.” Andrea, practically and matter-of-factly says “I’m nothing now.” In that moment – a season and a half into watching the show – I realized I’d never once considered anyone’s previous jobs. When’s the last time you spent time with anyone for more than ten minutes without obtaining this information? What do you do? is almost always one of the first things we learn about someone. I’d spent a season and a half with these characters and never even wondered about past lives because, in the world of this story, all that’s important now is what kind of person you are and how you can be part of the group in order to survive.

I routinely look away when zombies are eating or when something particularly gruesome is happening – I don’t need to see (or hear) that in order to get the point. But I can’t look away from the show as story because it’s telling some of the most soulful, character-driven stories out there… Who are you when everything and every one you knew and loved is gone? How is community created and sustained? What do we retain and preserve from our previous lives and culture when the rules have completely changed? Where’s the line between caution and hospitality? In what ways does violence change who we are and in what ways does it show us who we are? What does leadership look like? How do we make ethical choices when all the parameters for ethical behavior have changed? How to we (re)define good or bad?

One of the most beautiful, pregnant-with-meaning, but spare scenes in the series to date was during last week’s episode. Rick and Tyreese are standing outside a white wooden church in daylight. They’re both holding shovels, standing in front of holes they’re making, with bloodied sheets covering a pile of dead bodies next to them. The bodies are those of several people they’ve killed the night before in a kill-or-be-killed battle. The dead had previously held them captive and were intending to butcher and eat them – that was their answer to survival in this bleak time. But Rick and company – though they knew they had to kill the cannibals in order to live and so that others might live – do not leave them uncovered and unburied where they’ve fallen. Because of Rick and company’s answer to violence, ethics, and survival, they are taking the time to bury the people who acted like animals and who had treated them that way.

The scene would have been enough just for that. Enough just to see Rick and Tyreese completing the sweaty, hard work of burying people behind the church, working side by side to keep the smallest semblance of order and dignity and ethical behavior in a crazed and panicked world.

It would have been enough. But they say just three lines of dialogue.

Rick says to Tyreese, “I never asked how it was for you, making your way to Terminus [the place the cannibals lured them].” Tyreese, who had to kill a child along the way, says, “It killed me.”

They keep shoveling in silence. We are watching them in a wide shot, edge of the church in one corner, pile of bodies covered with a bloody sheet next to the holes, green woods behind them, birds singing incongruously. Not breaking the rhythm of shoveling, Rick says, “No, it didn’t.”

No, it didn’t. Those who are dead feed on others. Those who are dead don’t bother to properly bury the dead.

This is why I watch, sometimes holding my hand up to block the parts I can’t watch. I watch because when everything else civilizing has been ripped away, what you do with the dead and who you become in the places you thought were dead tells the story I need to hear.

[Bonus: For those who weren’t geeky enough to pause this week’s episode and copy down the Bible passages listed on the wooden board in the church, I’ve got you covered. They deal with life in and after death, God bringing life to lifeless places, suffering, and resurrection. I imagine the priest putting those up on the board after everything started going down, long after there were parishioners left to read them, in an effort to make sense of the terrifying new reality in terms of God’s promises. Here they are: Romans 6:4, Ezekiel 37:7, Matthew 27: 52, Revelation 9:6, and Luke 24:5.]

Do Not Disturb

Posted on October 16, 2014 by admin

Come to think of it, “working” is more prominent than “do not disturb.” Pretty disturbing.

We went to the beach in October to rest, just the two of us. We ate an amazing meal, got our feet wet in the ocean, walked in the sand, watched and listened to the surf from our beachside balcony, took naps, watched baseball, and slept all night with the sliding glass door open to the cool air and the constant rumble of waves. Aaaaah.

So imagine my surprise to find no resting option on the “do not disturb” door-hanger at our hotel. Both sides said “do not disturb” but they also both offered the explanation “working,” accompanied by a picture of a very frazzled, business-suited man standing on his head, tie like a floppy noose, in front of a stack of papers and his cell phone. The only way to ask folks not to disturb you at this hotel was to claim the excuse of working. Not sleeping or resting or enjoying passionate sex. Nope. Working was the only acceptable way to claim undisturbed time and space.

This makes me so sad because I’m sure it wasn’t a printing error. Though I flipped the door-hanger back and forth several times to be sure I wasn’t missing something, I’m sure they didn’t mean to put a different message on the opposite side. Why bother asserting my right to some down time when I’m just in the room reading email on my phone? Why bother claiming to sleep when that seems so much more disturb-worthy than working?

This is what it’s come to, folks. Choosing work all the time means eventually it’s the only choice left.

This sad revelation made our pre-vacation decision to stay off email even more meaningful. For me, it was a total offline weekend, no email and no social media. Woody stayed away from email but checked into Facebook here and there. That’s what worked for us on this trip. The point is, we thought about it and talked about it in advance. We set up our perimeter so we could enjoy the pace and place and each other.

If you don’t set and practice your own boundaries, no one else will do it. Even in a beachfront hotel room on a day off.

Period.

Posted on September 26, 2014 by admin

Last time I visited my parents we stumbled upon an episode of The Middle playing on the Hallmark Channel. It’s Thanksgiving and the extended family is gathered at the grandparents’ house. Throughout the day the women of the family gather at the kitchen table to talk. It’s a no kid zone and they revel in their time together apart from the rest of the family.

Sue Heck, the beautifully awkward, contagiously enthusiastic, overwhelmingly geeky teenager walks in to the kitchen where the women are and ceremoniously announces with a toothy braces-filled smile that this Thanksgiving she will finally be sitting with the women because she got her period.

I’ve seen the episode before and I could read her lips. That’s how I know that she says the word “period.” Otherwise I wouldn’t – because the Hallmark Channel bleeped the word “period.”

I was aghast. Not only is this piece of information central to that main storyline in the episode, but this show normally airs on broadcast TV at 8pm. If it doesn’t need bleeping then, why did Hallmark apply a stricter standard?

We hardly ever watch Hallmark because we don’t get the channel at our house but I can see from their tagline when I Google it that they are about “Family, Holidays, Original Movies & Series.” Just as I suspected: “family.” How, exactly, do you celebrate family values without acknowledging the way families are created? How do you prioritize and focus on family while treating the fact of women’s menstruation as a dirty little secret?

The bleeping in this episode is particularly ironic, given that the other main story line is the teenage son, Axel – along with his dad and his granddad – trying to pick up a teenage convenience store clerk with their pick-up lines. To recap: Girls experiencing menstruation as a rite of passage, taboo; boys and grown men hounding a teenage girl at work, full of family values!

The Middle is a great comedy that often has something worthwhile to add to conversations about class in our country. So I’m not picking on the show, which was, after all, setting up the antics of the grown men trying to “help” Axel with pick-up lines as the unsettling, ridiculous attempts they were. I am pointing out the tone-deafness of the Hallmark Channel.

There is nothing “un-family” or inappropriate about a young girl announcing, “I got my period.” The language is as neutral as possible without using the technical, medical-sounding “menstruation.” Is the concern about having to explain the facts of life to young children before parents are ready for that conversation? If so, the bleeping seems misguided. “Period” is not even a word that would make a young child’s ears perk up upon hearing it. “Period” is used all the time, in a variety of contexts. Bleeping it calls more attention to it.

This started as a minor post about a network’s stupid decision to bleep a natural, everyday part of life in the supposed interest of “family.” But in a week where a young woman is still missing from the university community where I minister, in a week where beloved Hermione Granger actress Emma Watson is viciously threatened for expressing her feminist beliefs at the UN, and in a week where NPR is reporting on Gamergate, it’s obviously not just about Sue Heck’s period.

We are clearly still having trouble acknowledging the humanity and dignity of every person, regardless of gender, sexuality, religion, opinions, and a host of other things. I could let Hallmark off the hook – it’s not the biggest fish to fry. But it all adds up. Bleeping “period” is the small, seemingly insignificant seed that grows into some mighty ugly, poisonous plants.

No one needs a bleep to protect them from a period. Let it be right there in the midst of the family’s kitchen conversation where it belongs.

Who Wants to Pray?

Posted on August 27, 2014 by admin

People in my profession get asked to pray a lot. Many times, there isn’t even any asking going on – it’s simply assumed the pastor is the one who prays. When one of us pastor types goes off script and cheerfully offers for one of the other Christians in the group to have the honor, uncomfortable silence ensues. “Who feels called to offer a blessing for this meal?” Crickets.

I can’t blame the non-pastor types. It can be intimidating to be The One who announces through prayer – through what gets prayed for and what does not – where our collective focus lies and where we especially hope for the signs and wonders of God’s presence. Since, in many faith communities, pastors are the only ones who ever have the opportunity to pray, it can send the message that you need special training or voice intonation or secret knowledge about the “right” things to say.

A couple of weekends ago I got to be one of the listeners as a group prayed together. We took my stepson to a wonderful surf camp offered by Surfer’s Healing. I’ve written about them before and the overwhelming nature of standing on a beach together watching our children go out to sea without us. This year I was teary and moved again. I found myself standing at the shoreline with gripped hands at my chest – almost in a prayer position – holding my breath, watching him work on trusting the surfers enough to go where they led.

It was breathtaking and comforting again to move through this “one perfect day” together, rehearsing the hard letting go of parents. But what struck me this time was the ritual of beginning the day.

Once the surfboards are unpacked and lined up at the shore, the beach area roped off, and the registration tables up and running, the event organizers gather everyone. Logistical announcements and thank you’s are issued and then Izzy Paskowitz, the founder of Surfer’s Healing (along with his wife, Danielle), says a few words.

He and the other surfers all wear wetsuits and stand together in a line at the front of the gathering. Izzy talks about the “club none of us wanted to be in” as parents of autistic children and he talks about the generosity of sponsors and volunteers. Then he calls on one of the other surfers to come offer the first of several prayers before embarking on the day. We hear a prayer in English then a second surfer takes the mic and offers one in Spanish. Then a third surfer comes forward and sings a traditional Hawaiian prayer to the tune of the doxology.

When we first got to the beach I saw the surfers in wetsuits and felt some competing combination of being a geeky teenager around the cool kids and being an old mom. Each of them is young, many are tattooed, and they look sleek and muscular in their second skins. If I let my own high school experiences or movies clichés take over my thinking, they appear to me as a group of untouchably cool dudes.

But I look at them as we are praying. Every last one of them is holding hands with the surfers next to him, heads bowed. No one looks impatient, bored, or uncomfortable. I don’t get the feeling from any of them or from the crowd at large that this part of the day is imposed or strange or old-fashioned or constricting.

They do this every day of camp all season long. Before heading into rough waters with autistic children they’ve never seen before this moment, they pause and pray. As they gather their strength, stamina, patience, and hopes for a rough and rewarding day, they recognize their intentions and ask for God’s blessings on the camp. There was nothing showy about any of the prayers or the fact of praying together before beginning. I only consciously understood the words of the English prayer but I’ll go out on a limb and say none of the prayers were self-conscious or full of buzzwords. They were simple, short, in and of the moment, heartfelt.

I was completely taken aback and had to wipe tears from my eyes during the prayers. The sight of the cool dudes, long hair flying in the wind, holding hands and praying on the beach got me choked up. It was the opposite of what many of us experience in church – or what we are afraid will happen when we pray together in church, especially if one of the “non-professionals” offers the prayer.

That day on the beach, I began wondering about how we are teaching people to pray in context. For those of us who are asked/assumed to pray, how can we model praying so it’s an invitation to others to do the same? It seems to me that many times in the church we gather to offer prayers and ask God’s blessings on a meal or a service trip but our humility is hidden under slick phrasing or a tone-of-voice assumption that the prayer is a “lock on it” rather than the start of it.

What I experienced on the beach was a group of consummate professionals vulnerable enough to hold hands and remember the One who makes all days gifts. How can we professional pray-ers model this spirit and invite the non-professionals to the mic? What would this look like at tax time in an accountant’s office? In a writer’s room? Before surgery in an operating room?

I need to hear more prayers from the trenches, raised up from wherever by whomever, stating the simple but obvious truth and need of our lives. This matters and we give it to you – the success and the difficulty of it – and ask your blessing. We know you’re here. Thank God.

Snow Day

Space to play, rest, create, feast.

Category Archives: Paying Attention