A Thin, Thick Place

Posted on April 12, 2015 by admin

A sermon on Acts 4: 32-35, John 20: 19-31, and Psalm 133, preached at Wesley Memorial UMC on April 12, 2015, during weekend festivities for the Wesley Foundation at UVA’s 50-year Celebration and Groundbreaking.

woman holding freshly baked Communion loaf

One of the Wesley bakers, with dairy-free, gluten-free bread fresh from the oven.

In my twenties I often concocted dream visions of communal living. Visiting with Wesley Foundation friends or Appalachia Service Project friends, we would revel in our reunion weekends, drink up the goodness of being together again, and plot our Someday dreams…a retreat center and intentional community in a big farmhouse with a huge kitchen table, a garden, and a writing shed for me, a little removed from the bustle….a self-sufficient community where we could grow our own food, make our own furniture, create all the pottery for our kitchen… These were dreams born from tight communities of faith formed at pivotal times in our lives, and that remained touchstones for all of us, no matter the time or distance. Whenever we got together we just wanted more. Not to go “back” exactly, but to create again that sort of Spirit-infused, life-defining, deeply communal expression of faith and love.

In none of these scenarios was I thinking explicitly of today’s passage from Acts. In all of these times I was remembering how good and full a community I had left, how lovely it was to dwell together in unity (to quote the psalmist). We had come together in a thin place – what Celtic spirituality calls those spaces where heaven and earth seem to be closer and more permeable to one another than usual – and in that thin place, we’d made thick, substantial, meaty community. We had seen glimpses and flickers of God’s kingdom made manifest and those were enough to sustain visions and lives.

When I think of the book of Acts, this is the passage I most often think of, though, we have to acknowledge, this idyllic time didn’t last that long. This time when no one held private possessions and no one was needy didn’t last. But it was thick and real while it lasted. It was important enough to describe and include in scripture so no one would think Did that really happen? Was I merely dreaming?

There are many thin places in the world but we are often too busy to notice them.

There are fewer thick communities and they can be so rare that we’re tempted to think we dreamt them.

We’re celebrating 50 years of ministry at the Wesley Foundation this weekend. It isn’t 50 years total but 50 in our current building, which we’re renovating and showing some TLC this year. Thanks to Ed for inviting me to preach here in the midst of this weekend as part of the celebration – how fitting, since Wesley Memorial has been our partner in campus ministry since the beginning. We had 200 people worshipping and celebrating here yesterday, alumni from at least as far back as 1963, “Wesley legacy” families with parents and children who’ve all made Wesley home, the Bishop, our district superintendent, students, and tons of friends.

Those of us celebrating yesterday and many of you here know the Wesley Foundation as a thin place. It’s holy ground, a thin place that’s home to a thick community with permeable boundaries, always being re-formed as people graduate and matriculate.

A couple of weeks ago the Wesley Foundation’s Student Coordinating Council (SCC) met for its “changeover” meeting, our peaceful transfer of power from one group of student leaders to the next. One of our practices at that meeting is to offer words of gratitude for those rotating off the SCC. At one point, in the midst of a long list of wonderful attributes and things she would miss about departing a student, one student stopped herself and blurted out, “How are you real?”

In some ways this is what Thomas needed to know and see and feel for himself, when he met the resurrected Jesus. How is any of this real? Do you remember what Jesus does? He does not refer to Thomas as a doubter or chastise him in any way. He simply offers up the most visibly wounded part of his body and invites Thomas to stick his hand all the way in and get a good, tactile feel for it. Thomas doesn’t even have to ask; he just has to reach out in the direction of the living, very real Christ.

How are you real? Here, see for yourself.

At its best, this is what campus ministry is: an invitation to see for yourself, in the midst of a community thick with the Spirit of the living Christ. It’s the kind of place where people are transformed, where they become more fully who God is calling them to be and, though it may only last 4 years, it’s enough to sustain a vision for the future.

Let me hasten to add, about that early Christian community in Acts and about the Wesley Foundation, that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the people involved. Don’t get me wrong: I love me some Wesleyanos! But what I mean is, those early Christians weren’t somehow the cream of the crop, and though UVA students are the cream of the crop in many ways, Wesley folks aren’t the cream of the cream. That’s not what makes the community faithful or memorable or life-transforming. What makes both the Acts community and the Wesley community thick communities is the presence of the living Christ. It’s not the prefect storm of personalities and skills, dreamers and engineers. It’s Jesus.

How are you real? Jesus. The “thickening agent” in this recipe of love is the risen Christ.

The point of highlighting this long-ago and short-lived community from Acts isn’t to show what exceptional people they were. It’s to show what’s possible when the center of your life and community is the living Christ. The point is not that they were particularly un-needy people but rather that living with Christ at the center meant they prioritized the needs of others, they treated one another like family.

As I read our scripture passages this week I was struck by how physical and tangible the images are in each one. The risen Christ offers the wound in his side to Thomas. Surely the Acts community prays and worships together but we hear how they “bear powerful witness to the resurrection” (v. 33) by sharing things, the tangible goods they owned; they sold houses and properties and gave the proceeds to the group, to be used to purchase what they needed; people were housed and fed and clothed. And Psalm 133 offers us the messy but luxurious image of Aaron’s long, thick, bushy beard, claiming that living together as one is like expensive oil poured over his head and running through that big beard, soaking it through. Like I said, it’s messy, but it’s hard to read that and then think that spiritual things are separate and apart from physical things.

It’s also hard to read these passages and think that being faithful, being Christian is merely “between me and God.” Part of what is real and tangible about God in these stories is that God is made manifest in Christian community….in living together as family…in making sure no one among us is needy…in offering breath, touch, forgiveness, sharing our vulnerable and wounded selves with one another…

The reason we had 200 people here yesterday is because this is a place and a people who have embodied life with the risen Christ. People from across the decades are still savoring the thin place and space of their time at Wesley. Students are fed here, literally, every Thursday night. They stay up late together in Study Camp, offer rides home in the dark. They take each other to the hospital, offer hugs on hard days, and water on hot mission trips. Some meet their future mates here. We welcome strangers – every fall when new students arrive, and many other times when someone comes in crisis, or when other religious groups fall short and they are looking for a faith community where they can be and become all of who God made them to be.

One of the clearest recent examples of “no needy persons among us” is our Communion bread. At the 5pm worship service we celebrate Communion every week, gathered around the Table, offering the elements to one another around the circle. It’s a highlight and an orienting moment in each week.

But in the past few years we noticed we were meeting more and more students with gluten sensitivities, celiac disease, and some folks who both gluten-free and dairy-free. We struggled along for a while, using a little side plate on the Table to feed those who needed special bread at Communion. It seemed like the best we could do.

Until a student asked if she could try making a loaf we could all eat. There are two very important things to say about this endeavor: 1) It took her and a few other dedicated bakers experimenting for several weeks before we settled on the recipe we now use. Those early loaves were not all pretty or as tasty as what we have now. So, it wasn’t “perfect” from the start. And 2) The second thing to say is the one who offered to bake was not one of the students who had food allergies. She herself didn’t need the bread to change for her own health – she wanted to do this so that there would be no needy persons among us.

These are the moments I hear students and alumni recount decades after their years here. Deep spiritual moments expressed in physical ways, in the context of community…She remembered my name, he gave me a ride, they listened when I vented about my roommate, they didn’t laugh when I said I was thinking of going to seminary, they made bread I could eat, too…

Real, tangible bread, offered so that all could eat. That’s what a community thick with Christ looks like – that’s what it tastes like! That’s how love ends up looking like a round loaf of bread glistening with coconut oil on its crust. That’s the simple but extravagantly grace-filled type of thing that keeps this a thin place thick with the love of Christ. That’s why four years is a short time but long enough to send us out into the world and the rest of our lives, with the beacon of this community to orient us and the taste of heaven on our tongues.

Thanks be to God!

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.

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.

So, a United Methodist and a Jew go to Appalachia…

Posted on September 9, 2014 by admin

wesley.hillel light writing at hinton_c.a.stiles.2014

The first day of our spring break trip I noticed how Christian-centric my Facebook feed is. Relaxing after the first achy work day, waiting for dinner, we’d only had one group conversation at that point, but already I was seeing things a little differently.

Rabbi Jake Rubin and I have been colleagues and friends for a few years and we’d casually said, “We should do a trip together sometime.” Last summer we got less casual about it and decided to bring our student leaders into the conversation. After the first meeting, standing in the parking lot talking a bit more, our main Wesley spring break organizer said, “I expect to be challenged and to learn a lot.” We talked about that being a great orienting stance for our group and she expressed the concern that everyone from Wesley would need to be on the same page – this is a service trip together, not an opportunity to convert the Jews. (For the record, we didn’t have any students interested in doing this.)

Saying “service trip” instead of “mission trip” was one of the first things we noticed. The Brody Jewish Center – Hillel at UVA usually refers to their trips as Alternate Spring Break trips and when we asked we realized “mission” has a resoundingly Christian ring to it. So we worked on our language a bit and referred to our joint venture as our “Interfaith Spring Break Service Trip.” Those of us at Wesley started to think more deeply about what we communicate by saying “service trip” or “mission trip.” For many years in our pre-trip meetings, Wesley has stressed the theological understanding that we don’t “bring God” to anyone – we go to see what God is already doing there. Adjusting our language this year helped us to see this even better.

We also adjusted our schedule. Hillel usually travels to and from service trips on Sundays, observing Sabbath in place from Friday night to Saturday night. In the past we have usually traveled back home on Saturday. Making room for Sabbath also meant volunteering some place we felt comfortable just hanging around in on Saturday without the distractions of work. We ended up choosing the Hinton Rural Life Center, a United Methodist organization with whom we’d volunteered previously. I called them before we registered to go over the particulars of our trip (longer stay, Sabbath, more dietary needs) and to be sure they were as comfortable with and excited about our interfaith venture as we were. The Hinton location had a lot of what we needed to make things work and from our previous Wesley experience we also had a sense the staff would welcome and support the unique nature of this year’s group. We were right and their staff – everyone from the chef to the executive director – went out of their way to make it a great week.

Jake and I were committed to having actual interfaith conversations, not merely watered down “spiritual” talks unconnected to either tradition. One of the best parts of our week were several evening conversations we had, led by Jake and using the Ask Big Questions framework. These were excellent in helping us connect our work in North Carolina with our beliefs, questions, and developing relationships with one another. “Big Questions” like “For whom am I responsible?” and “What do we choose to ignore?” focused our conversations and gave everyone permission to speak from the heart. There are no right or wrong answers to the big questions themselves so students were free in their responses and generous in their listening to one another.

For me, the highlights of the week were our worship services on Thursday and Friday nights. During the rest of the week we offered interfaith prayers but on Thursday we had a Christian worship service with Communion and on Friday we had a Shabbat service and celebrated the beginning of the Sabbath before we shared dinner. Following each worship service was an open time of conversation, reflection, and questions. Wesley folks were surprised to hear Hillel folks point out how much we talk about love and God’s love in our worship. Jewish students expressed longing to sing together the way we did in the Christian service, though Christian students were surprised at this reaction since almost the entire Shabbat worship was sung. After each worship service we talked for at least an hour together. Fearing we might be going on too long after the Thursday night worship, I offered that perhaps we should close the conversation. One of the Jewish students said, “I don’t have anywhere better to be,” and we talked for another 45 minutes.

Midway through the week I’d already had several Wesley students come up and tell me it was the best trip they’ve been on. One said, “A lot of my Christian friends from other groups wondered why were are doing this. I have learned so much and I have so much to tell them now.” One of the Jewish students reflected on observing Jake and me, “The two leaders of two different religious communities have engaged in constructive discussions of religion without fighting—something that I do not often encounter.”

Like my Facebook feed realization, that student’s reflection caught me off guard. I was surprised to hear that something as simple and civil as two people talking respectfully was such an anomaly. For our two groups, at least, it won’t be. We are hoping to make this part of an ongoing tradition, every 2 or 3 years.

Dogged and Wooed by God

Posted on August 7, 2014 by admin

lake george from the little dock_w.sherman.8.14

Sitting on a porch by a lake in New York last week, my brother-in-law offered me a section from The New York Times. I declined and kept watching the boats go by, listening to the water lap the rocky shoreline. He joked, “You don’t want to know what’s happening in the rest of the world?” Nope.

Not that day anyway. During my time away I didn’t spend time online or listening to the radio or reading papers or watching any TV except baseball. It wasn’t hard. It was satisfying, restful and rejuvenating.

Coming back to the world of 24-hour noise after a tech Sabbath can be disorienting. Some news stories and have come and gone. Others are into level three of their coverage and I have to go back and piece together how we got there. Others, like the coverage of the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa and the Americans being treated at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, are simply puzzling.

I heard a snippet on NPR one morning this week during media re-entry. Ebola in Africa, Americans transported. I thought, I hope they’re OK. By the time I got around to listening to a lengthier report or reading anything about this online, Ann Coulter and others had already chimed in and yet others had retorted. Having been out of the media cycle and as relaxed as I’ve been in a year, it was hard to imagine what sort of left-right divide could have happened around this issue.

Silly me. In the world some folks live in, everything is a left-right issue, if they want it to be.

I’m not going to thoroughly research this “debate” or try to catch up on each twist the “conversation” has taken. I’m not even going to dwell on the hatefulness evident in Coulter’s article, though it will reach out and slap you in the face if you read it. (You can find her 8/6/14 article “Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to ‘Idiotic’” on her website but I don’t even want to offer the hyperlink here.) I’m simply going to point out one thing, in response to two questions she poses.

Talking about Americans who would be protected from this virus if we stayed put instead of traveling to Africa, she asks, “But why do we have to deal with this at all?”

(We deal with things – unpleasant, seemingly remote things – because we are all living on the same planet and because the far away people suffering a plague are our brothers and sisters. We deal with it because to care for other humans – especially when we don’t “have to” by law or familial obligation – makes us more deeply human.)

Later she laments people going to Africa on mission trips and asks, “Can’t anyone serve Christ in America anymore?”

(Of course we can, and do. But this question suggests we either serve Christ here or in other world locations. It’s a false choice.)

Both questions reveal a lack of understanding about how and why Christians express their faith as action in the world.

Christians deal with the things we would not choose for ourselves and we go to unusual places far from home (literally, emotionally, spiritually) because we are called. Pushed, nudged, prodded, dogged, and wooed by God. Beckoned to a task or a place beyond what we would have chosen for ourselves, sometimes an illogical one by other standards.

We worship and follow the One who came in the vulnerable form of a human body, a body just like ours and just like our brothers’ and sisters’ bodies in Africa, susceptible to disease and hunger. Jesus put his hands all over the scabbed contagious bodies of his neighbors and he sends us to offer healing, too (Matthew 8: 1-3, Matthew 9: 18-38, Acts 3: 1-10). When we go, we are called to look for Christ in the “distressing disguise of the poor” he wears so often (Mother Teresa).

Medical missionary work in Africa is not how God calls everyone. It’s OK if it’s not your calling or Coulter’s. Don’t worry, there is plenty to do here in the States and right there on your street. But don’t make her mistake. Don’t assume that hiding out behind vitriol, fear, and an insulating we-take-care-of-our-own mentality will save you. It might protect you from a virus, at least for a while, but none of that will protect you when God comes calling with another idea.

Though I don’t want to isolate myself in a protective bubble, I enjoyed the bubble of time I preserved for vacation and time out from this fray. I appreciated the smaller circle of care and concern and I reveled in saying “no” to the newspaper. I felt called to step back and out of the normal loop of work and responsibility, called into God-given Sabbath time (which is another way God operates that doesn’t make sense to the way the world operates).

The point is not whether you step forward or step back, whether God calls you to this or that at any given moment. The point is that God is calling. Always. And each time we are called out of loops of our own making, into deeper relationship – with ourselves, one another, and God. Are you listening?

Holy Scarcity, Batman

Posted on July 17, 2014 by admin

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Last Sunday I preached in a church that has three different worship services in three different locations within the church. One is a moderately sized chapel, one is a voluminous fellowship hall with a stage at one end, and the last one is the original sanctuary of the old downtown church. The variations in space accompanied the differences in worship style. The one thing all three had in common: a clock easily seen from the pulpit.

I know all the practical reasons for this. As someone who doesn’t wear a watch and doesn’t carry my cell phone into worship, I can appreciate the orientation the clocks give, especially in that church where pastors rush from service to service to make it in time for all three. Still, I was a bit sad and wistful thinking of those clocks and the importance we place — even in a weekly set aside time to worship — on adhering to the schedule.

I’ve been longing for less scheduled time in my life. I’ve been wanting to roam freely through at least some of my days or seasons, without the constant constraint of being pre-scheduled for the next appointment or task. I’ve realized lately that my great skill in organizing and scheduling is both help and hindrance, both a survival mechanism and something that might be slowly killing my spirit.

Along with several of my sister writer-pastors from last summer’s Collegeville retreat, I’m now part of a cohort awarded a grant through Austin Seminary’s College of Pastoral Leaders. We wrote the bulk of the grant together but we each had to write individual responses to certain questions. Every one of us commented on the swirl of demands on our time and attention and how we need to establish more balance and pace in our lives. We didn’t discuss this as a theme but reading through our responses it was the one, glaring thing we all had in common.

This summer, re-reading MaryAnn McKibben Dana’s Sabbath in the Suburbs, I came across this already-highlighted passage (p.150): “I have found it much more liberating spiritually to embrace the idea of holy scarcity. There isn’t ever enough time. Even when we strip away all the inessentials — even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world — there is still not enough time. But our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.”

I keep trying to believe the myth that I can reallocate time and rework the schedule so there will be enough time, as if there is a secret key to this I haven’t stumbled upon but I’m oh-so-close to finding. When I’m honest I see how even when the options are all deemed good, I can’t say “yes” to everything. Making friends with time, as McKibben Dana calls it, means embracing “no.”

I have known days so full they seemed out of time, perfectly paced, lingering just so. They are rare. I’ve known many more that were crammed full, often with amazing things and people, but so packed it was hard to take it all in or to “come down” enough to go to sleep at the end of them.

“Our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.” At least half of our biblical stories are about this very thing: wanting to be God instead of ourselves. Guilty as charged. Through my amazing organizational skills, I want to command time to obey me, find the elusive formula to the perfectly balanced day, and sleep satisfied in my own powers of management and discernment. This hasn’t been working out so far.

When I look more closely, I see those few full timeless-seeming days in context. There were dishes in the sink while we sat outside churning the homemade ice cream, watching the sky turn black and star-pricked. There were emails left untouched and – gasp! – unseen when we hiked by the waterfalls and rested in a meadow for as long as we felt like it.

Perfection is always illusion. Mastery is misguided.

“Even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world — there is still not enough time.” My choices aren’t usually between horrible, bad, soul-denying things and beautiful, transporting, soul-enriching things. Many, many times I have the wonderful choice in this time-limited life between two very good things.

That’s the rub. That’s what I’m trying to make sense of these days and make a little peace with as I go forward. Saying “no” is, painfully, often a “no” to something or someone I’d really like to spend time with, too. But I’m tired of this torn-ness and never-ending calendar calculation. I’m ready for more imperfection and the grace that orients better than any clock.

When the Words Sink In

Posted on June 29, 2014 by admin

Today we closed the church building where my dad attended growing up and where I visited throughout my childhood on summer Sundays at my grandparents’. They are buried in the cemetery out back now, along with two sets of my great-grandparents. It was bittersweet to worship at Rocky Run UMC one last time with second cousins and longtime country neighbors, helping celebrate Communion in one of the places that helped form me as a person and a pastor.

For years now, whenever I serve small children during Communion, I offer them the elements by saying, “This means God loves you very much.” I can’t claim credit for this idea since I copied it from my colleague Alex. But I love its simple restating of the point of the Eucharist and what all those other words mean. Boiled down and essential good news: God loves you very much.

Today, during the last Communion we’ll share in that place, a small blond boy of about 5 came up. I offered him the bread and the simple words. He took them and took a step towards the other minister, who was holding the cup. Then he did a double-take. He looked back at me as if the words had sunk in and he realized after a beat what they meant. He was radiant, with a smile of surprise and delight on his open face.

Yes! That is good news. Yes! It is for you, little one. Yes! Even on a day when the doors will close and lock behind us, this is still God’s Word for you. Yes, yes, yes!

Conference Conversation

Posted on June 28, 2014 by admin

It’s easy to gripe about Annual Conference. Too easy. Uncomfortable seats, long drives, longer hours, the Bishop can’t see people standing up waiting to speak at the microphones, the drums are too loud, there aren’t enough drums…. I am not immune to the complaining.

I often imagine a wonderful retreat-like locale, where we could spread out in time and space and really be together. I picture walking across a green campus to a dining hall for breakfast and I wonder how the tone of our annual gathering would change if we were “there” when we got there — no more driving in long snaking lines out to lunch and dinner, no more traipsing back to the hotel dead tired late at night then rushing to get a parking space in the morning. If we held our Annual Conference at a place like Lake Junaluska, would we hold it differently? Would it be less of a Christiany business meeting with pre-planned entertainment and stunts? Would it be more spacious and leisurely and would we actually participate in the holy part of holy conferencing?

So much better than a convention center. A girl can dream, right?

One of the most-anticipated parts of Annual Conference each year are the resolutions. These are submitted in advance and are usually pleas for our church to make a statement about something like fracking or predatory lending. They often anticipate an upcoming General Conference (the international United Methodist gathering every four years) and they are aimed at changing our polity or our church’s stance or statement on a particular issue.

As with much of the church, our corner of United Methodism is in constant conversation about sexuality issues. One of this year’s resolutions was about same sex marriage, though we never talked about the resolution itself. We spent the measly half hour allotted to discuss whether or not to discuss it right then or put it off for a year.

At the opening of Conference our Bishop announced a series of conversations that will be held during this next year, opportunities to delve prayerfully over time into issues around sexuality and the church. When it came time for resolutions, someone made a motion to put off talking about the submitted same sex marriage resolution in favor of the prayerful conversation model being put forth by the Bishop. That’s what we spent our half hour deciding and that’s what passed: we will engage in conversations throughout the conference and throughout the year.

I’m not going to complain about that decision or about the way we handle resolutions generally. I want to talk about conversation.

We have an opportunity to get to know one another better and to listen to the pain and promise in each other’s stories. How do we prepare ourselves to listen well, faithfully, lovingly? How do we listen when we don’t like what we are hearing? How do we listen without immediately, simultaneously, making ready our response? When we are certain of the ethics and theology, how do we listen to contradictory views? When we are in conversation with someone who is undecided, how to we engage with her as a person rather than another number to win to our side?

I don’t envy those who will organize and moderate these conversations. It’s a tough job that deserves to be done well. They are long overdue so people on all sides are raring to go, or at least to speak. I wonder how the moderators will approach the process. Are we trying to get one another to agree or to agree a little more? Are we merely trying to “take the temperature” of this corner of United Methodism? Will we report on the tenor of the conversations in order to assess where we are or are they meant as preamble to the one we put off and may have next year at Conference? How will we encourage people to participate? How will we facilitate deep, prayerful listening without shutting down passionate and pent up emotion?

I know where God has led me on these issues and where I hope our church will eventually go. I don’t know how to get us there and I don’t have many answers for the questions I’m posing here.

I do have a few suggestions on how to proceed during this next year in Virginia:

Hold at least one conversation in every district of our conference. It should be easy to get to a conversation nearby. Allow and encourage folks to attend any/all that are convenient for them (not just the one(s) in their district).

Hold them on different days and in every month between now and our next Annual Conference. Do not make assumptions about when people have time off or time to fit this in. Again, if should be easy to make it to at least one conversation. Hold them on Saturdays and weekdays. Hold them during the day and in the early evening.

Require all members of Annual Conference (clergy and laity) to attend at least one conversation. If we achieve an amazing conversational turnout (like half of all United Methodists in the Virginia Conference) but only half of those folks actually attend Annual Conference next June, we still aren’t having the same conversation. If this is important enough to spend the year on, make it a requirement for attending Annual Conference as a member.

Publicize the conversations themselves (when and where) and some of what’s coming out of them. Make it a media blitz and one of the communication strategies for our conference in the coming year so there is no excuse for being unaware of or uninvolved in this. Use the email lists, conference website, Facebook, Twitter, e-Advocate, and The Advocate (to name a few) to consistently hold this up as something we are spending time on together.

Arrange the Bible study sessions of Annual Conference around this topic. Our Book of Discipline makes it clear how we as United Methodists read scripture. This doesn’t mean we will all understand every passage in the same way but it does rule out some lazy scholarship and incendiary off-base “readings.” Help us, as a group, to read together in the context of this ongoing conversation. Give the gathered body this grounding so that when someone veers off course, the Bishop or another moderator can gently guide them back with authority and in the context of an explicitly shared understanding of scripture. At the very least, then we’d all be talking about the same thing when we talk about “what the Bible says.”

Pray. Without prayerful and open hearts we won’t get anywhere. We need more than our own experiences, theologies, and interpretations — no matter how faithful and hard won. We need God’s Spirit to breathe in us and inspire the conversation.

Part of me dreads this conversation because I’ve been having it for more than 25 years now. But I’m going to practice patience and listening and engage in it as well as I am able…Take a deep breath. Listen. Take part in the conversation. May the Breath of God disrupt our usual conversations and inspire every moment.

Overheard at the Pool

Posted on June 18, 2014 by admin

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I love to people watch. Sometimes I’ll plunk myself down with a coffee and a good view and just observe the comings and goings on a particular day in a particular spot. Often I’m watching from afar, my own silent movie, guessing about that fight across the street or the rush of that family whizzing by outside.

Sometimes I hear entire conversations I’m not trying to hear. On those days I’m simply trying to get some work done or read a few chapters yet I find myself next to a table of talkers. If I can tune it out I usually do, but in a tightly packed coffee shop sometimes we are stuck with each other and the stories floating past their proper tables.

Then there is the public bathroom stall, wherein some folks feel the need to keep talking no matter what. Bodily noises, doors slamming, flushes galore, and yet these folks keep up their end of the conversation which is, of course, loud enough for the rest of us to hear. Most of the time I can’t listen to those conversations because I’m too busy plotting my move to yell loudly, “You know she’s on the toilet, right?” (No, I haven’t done that yet.)

Our pool opened up a few weeks ago and I’m swimming my laps outside. I try to go early enough to avoid the throngs of kids but there are usually a few parents in the shallow end with toddlers. They are often there together at the same time each day, parents chatting while kids intermittently shout, “Look at me!”

I don’t try to listen to these conversations but water is a great sound carrier and some parents are used to having adult talk while kids play nearby. I usually dry off and catch my breath and log my miles in my phone. Just a few minutes in the fresh air sitting near the pool. And then phrases come my way, bouncing across the water’s surface…”Then I switched to Prozac”… Just enough so I’ll look up, wondering who said that and how the rest of the story unfolds.

Even in coffee shops and bathroom stalls a lot of people are talking to other people in other places. I’ve gotten so used to the louder-than-normal cell phone speech that when a quiet little person-to-person sentence blows across the water to my ears it seems strange now. Strange that folks are actually talking to one another in person, sometimes about things they might want to keep more private. But still.

Today I said a little prayer for the talker who’s been trying out medications. And I thought how old-fashioned it is to overhear two sides of a conversation. I thanked God for the 90 degree heat, forcing us to quit our houses and our phones and jump into the pool together for a while.

Why You Hate Rest

Posted on June 6, 2014 by admin

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I wish I could say this was the only time I’ve had a conversation like this. A few years ago I was asking a clergy colleague about days off and he proudly spoke of writing his sermon at home in his underwear on Fridays.

Isn’t Friday your day off?

Yes, but this is sermon writing. I love doing that.

Sure you do, but it’s still work. That’s not a day off.

He didn’t understand my point. Maybe you don’t either. Maybe the allure of being able to lounge in underwear all day is the siren call drowning out the distinctions you might otherwise make between work and rest. My point was you can love your job and still take your days off. You can love your work and your leisure.

Last week’s article in The New York Times, “Why You Hate Work,” suggests limiting work is actually part of how we are able to love it. The authors are part of The Energy Project, which surveyed about 20,000 people (14,000 white collar workers and 6,000 employees at a manufacturing company) and found:

Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.

Simple, no-cost changes, like giving everyone a break every 90 minutes, result in employees with a “30 percent higher level of focus than those who take no breaks or just one during the day. They also report a nearly 50 percent greater capacity to think creatively and a 46 percent higher level of health and well-being.” No matter how appealing the findings, many companies seem to have a hard time putting these findings into practice:

Still, the forces of habit and inertia remain powerful obstacles to better meeting employee needs. Several years ago, we did a pilot program with 150 accountants in the middle of their firm’s busy tax season. Historically, employees work extremely long hours during these demanding periods, and are measured and evaluated based on how many hours they put in.

Recognizing the value of intermittent rest, we persuaded this firm to allow one group of accountants to work in a different way — alternating highly focused and uninterrupted 90-minute periods of work with 10-to-15-minute breaks in between, and a full one-hour break in the late afternoon, when our tendency to fall into a slump is higher. Our pilot group of employees was also permitted to leave as soon as they had accomplished a designated amount of work.

With higher focus, these employees ended up getting more work done in less time, left work earlier in the evenings than the rest of their colleagues, and reported a much less stressful overall experience during the busy season. Their turnover rate was far lower than that of employees in the rest of the firm. Senior leaders were aware of the results, but the firm didn’t ultimately change any of its practices. “We just don’t know any other way to measure them, except by their hours,” one leader told us. Recently, we got a call from the same firm. “Could you come back?” one of the partners asked. “Our people are still getting burned out during tax season.”

“We just don’t know any other way to measure them, except by their hours.”

So, your lack of imagination and courage will be the downfall of the rest of us?

I’m not interested in never counting hours – it can be helpful to realize you spent 10 hours on something you thought might take two. I find promise in the phrase “a designated amount of work,” though I suspect it will take many of us a detox-like cleansing period in order to have a true sense of what amount of work to designate. Our sense of what’s possible and appropriate for the given amount of time has been damaged.

Earlier this week another clergy colleague, preparing to take a weeklong trip with the youth of her church, wondered if it would be OK to take off one day when she returned. This is a trip where she will be in charge and on call 24 hours a day the entire time and she was hesitant about taking off one day to recuperate and do laundry – or do nothing at all, it’s a day off! During the conversation another colleague wondered about doing this if it was an adult group. Why would this matter? Presumably she thought it was “less work” to supervise adults than youth but the point of leisure and rest time is that it’s the complement to work time and the necessary balance to it.

Ministry doesn’t get a pass here. Ministry cannot slide by on these findings simply because meaning and significance are “built-ins.” My conversations with colleagues demonstrate how insidious overwork is and how glaringly absent deep rest, Sabbath, and time off are.

And I mean really off. One of the biggest values of time off and away is that when you are taking it you are off and away. Not tethered to people/situations/projects/deadlines/sermons/hospitals someplace else. To be truly present in the place and time you are is a gift our culture has become too adept at refusing.

That’s one of the most interesting and life-giving findings in this study: encouragement to focus on the task at hand. Workers who are able to set aside time for only one thing and to give it deep attention for an uninterrupted portion of the day are happier, more productive workers. Same goes for rest. Being “on vacation” while “reachable by email” is not being on vacation; it’s divided attention. Taking a nap with your cell phone ringer on and by your side is an invitation to be interrupted.

I’ve had too many chocked-full, living by the outsized list, just-going-to-do-this-one-more-thing-before-I-leave days. Part of it is because I love my work. But I know I’m most centered, focused, content, and fun to be around when I have adequate work and rest. I love rest, too, but I’ve turned my back on too many days of rest.

This summer I’m going to enjoy a couple of vacation weeks without email and with a large dose of porch. But before that even gets here I’m going to start the detox. I’m going to take breaks every 90 minutes, reminding myself with a handy phone alarm. I will be considering other ways to incorporate some of these findings into the way I work.

For now, I might just take a nap.

Snow Day

Space to play, rest, create, feast.

Category Archives: Spiritual Journey