Wading In

Join the Union!

2011-03-01T07:55:00.000-08:00

        I’ve been thinking about my grandfather a lot this past week, as I’ve watched the country wrestle with the questions raised in Wisconsin as Gov. Scott Walker seeks legislation that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for public union employees. I wish I could hear my grandfather’s take on events.

        My grandfather was a staunch Republican, a fan of Ronald Reagan and a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy. He believed government shouldn’t buy what it couldn’t afford, and was deeply suspicious of government “giveaways,” particularly programs that he thought promoted dependence.

        He was also a union man, through and through. A small businessman, he ran a union shop, and was proud to be a member of the printer’s union. His advice on almost any subject was to “join the union,” so much so that it got to be a running joke in his old age.

        I am not certain how he reconciled those two things, because I was in my early 20s when he died and did not yet have the wisdom to see that they needed reconciling. Our political arguments (and there were many, because Grandpa taught me to love a good political argument) were mostly about his commitment to self-reliance and my youthful enthusiasm for using government to fix what is wrong in the world. As I’ve watched events unfold in Wisconsin and elsewhere, though, I’ve been thinking more about that question, and I think I have an idea of how being a Republican union man might have made perfect sense to my grandfather.

        Unions level the playing field. They help balance the vast differentials in power that occur when one side has all the cards -- money, influence, desperately needed jobs to offer or take away. Unions are the only way the working class can play the one card they have -- the fact that without their toil, everything the company’s owners have built is worthless. Unions brought us the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, disability insurance for those injured on the job, and industrial safety standards so there would be fewer injuries. In other words, unions made it possible for hard-working people to gain a toehold and build better lives for themselves. The union movement gave them bootstraps to pull themselves up with.

        Sadly, unions do not always champion such righteous causes. Sometimes they stand in the way of needed change, and become champions of mediocrity, defending the jobs of people who probably deserve to lose them. They have sometimes carried an “us vs. them” mentality into a world where there’s now a much bigger “them” out there than company management. Public employees’ unions have sometimes championed the good of their members at the expense of the good of the people.

        Alas, that’s the problem with human organizations -- they are never perfect. But getting rid of the unions is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It favors those who already have power and influence, and if you think *that* doesn’t lead to greater problems than flawed unions, you need to read up on 19th century American history. Be sure you place yourself firmly in the working class, unless your last name is Rockefeller or you come from a long line of Boston Brahmins. I doubt you’ll come away wishing the world were the way it was before the labor movement.

        I think we need *more* unions, not fewer. I listen to my professional friends talk about working 60 hours a week while being paid for 40, because they are afraid they will lose their jobs if they don’t. I hear them griping about the loss of benefits they feel powerless to stop. I hear about paid vacation time that “expires” because management refuses to approve vacations, again and again, because there’s too much work to get done. I read constantly about CEOs and upper management who collect multi-million dollar bonuses on top of their multi-million dollar salaries, while talking about “shared sacrifices” and insisting workers making $50,000 a year pay the cost of their health care.

        These are just the kinds of corporate greed and individual powerlessness that unions empower workers to address, fairly and equitably, through collective bargaining. Unions force companies to share the benefits of their success with workers as well as shareholders. So I say, let’s have more unions, not fewer. Let’s have unions for engineers and accountants, as well as assembly line workers and electricians. Let’s force those with money and influence to sit down at the table and figure out how to fairly and equitably share out the pie. Let’s work on fixing union short-sightedness and greed, instead of simply handing the whole pie to those who are already getting the biggest piece of it.

        I sympathize with the frustrations of those who have come up against immovable unions, and spent too much time defending against ridiculous grievances. There’s no doubt that we need to keep working on better ways to maintain a balance between the needs of employers and employed. But if an occasional shift in the balance of power towards the employed is the price we pay for keeping a place at the table for those who otherwise have little influence or voice, I’m willing to live with the union system’s flaws. I guess that makes me a “union man” through and through. I think my grandfather would be pleased.

Tiger Moms and Me

2011-02-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

When my daughter was born, I held my tiny baby girl in my arms, and hoped she would one day play Little League baseball.

This is particularly strange when you consider the fact that I did not think about future baseball teams at all when my son was born, two years earlier. Eric could play baseball or not, and I would be content. But my daughter... I wanted sit in the stands and cheer my daughter on as she helped lead her Little League team to victory.

The reason is that I never got a chance to play Little League baseball. I loved baseball when I was in third grade. I had a baseball glove, which my father taught me to use, and I practiced hitting and catching with my cousins and best friend’s brothers. I watched the Red Sox every chance I got. But I didn’t play Little League, because in the 1970s in my hometown, girls just didn’t. My mother suggested that when I got to high school I could play softball, like my cousins, but no one ever suggested I challenge the boys-only assumptions of Little League, and I probably wouldn’t have done it if they did. By the time I got to high school, it was clear I lacked my cousins’ athletic prowess, so I never did play organized sports.

So when my daughter was born, the first thing I wished for her was the opportunity I hadn’t had. I imagined myself sitting in the summer sun cheering her on as she deftly fielded ground balls and hit line drives that made the boys duck out of the way.

As it turned out, Becky had other ideas. I convinced her to try T-Ball when she was 5, and she hated it. She was bored by the waiting and discouraged by the difficulty of hitting and catching. What she loved was gymnastics and dancing, those eminently girly-girl pursuits, with pink leotards and cute little skirts. Sigh. So I dutifully sat outside the dance studio and the gymnasium at the YMCA while Becky took her lessons, and have had to content myself with sitting in the baseball bleachers to watch my son play Little League -- because baseball turned out to be his favorite sport.

This probably tells you a lot about my parenting style -- and it’s not that of the Tiger Moms everyone seems to be talking about right now. If I were a Tiger Mom, my daughter would have played baseball, by gum. And she’d have been good at it, because I’d have thrown balls at her for hours, and spent all winter with her in the batting cages at the local indoor practice arena. I’d have sent her to baseball camp for weeks on end. I wouldn’t have let her wimp out after that first season because baseball was “boring.”

It is quite possible that if I had made her stick with it until she got good at it, Becky would have come to like baseball. And I’m betting she would have learned a lot by being the only girl on her team, and beating the boys at their own game. It certainly would have been good preparation for a successful career in a competitive world. Maybe the Tiger Moms have a point. These are, after all, the parents who produce concert pianists and Olympic swimmers, not to mention students that get into Harvard, which is currently one of Becky’s ambitions. It may be that in my lack of Tiger Momishness I am failing her -- that if I’d just pushed her harder when she was in kindergarten to excel at baseball, she’d have a better chance to fulfill her dreams when she’s 18.

But the truth is, I just don’t have it in me to be a Tiger Mom. I am just not very good at the kind of intense, demanding, fiercely detail-oriented, utterly child-centered approach Tiger Moms are supposed to adopt. I’m lucky if I remember to check and see if Becky has remembered to practice the piano at all, much less give it the kind of intense focus that perfection demands. The reality is I’d just be a bad Tiger Mom, because you can’t be a Tiger Mom if you sometimes forget to take the child to piano lessons.

Does that make me a failed parent? It occurs to me that the question, itself, is what’s wrong with the whole debate. The furor over the Tiger Mom is just another example of our national obsession over the “right” way to be a parent. Working vs. stay-at-home, demanding vs. relaxed, strict vs. not, Tiger Moms vs. whatever I am: Inherent in all these arguments is the assumption that one way is right and the other is wrong. And while there are clearly some parenting approaches that are wrong -- abuse and neglect are never OK -- I think a lot of our parenting controversies are less about right vs. wrong than they are “it depends.” I think the best parent you can be is the one that reflects who you are.

I may be a lousy Tiger Mom, but I think I'm a pretty good mom-who-plays-D&D-and-talks-about-almost-anything-you’re-interested-in. My parenting traits are curiosity, willingness to engage in discussions about almost anything, and eagerness to learn new stuff. I’m the mom who delights in museums and travel to new places, and doesn’t get upset when creative exploration in the backyard results in mud-covered children and a knee-deep hole. I may not be a mom who produces Olympic athletes or concert pianists, but I am the mom my son's friends hang around the kitchen with because they know they'll be taken seriously. They complain that every topic ends up coming back to religion, but they keep coming back with new questions.

In other words, maybe instead of the "right" way to parent, what we need to know is who *we* are as parents. Maybe there is no "right" way to parent anymore than there is a "right" way to pray. Will my style of parenting shape my children in particular ways? Absolutely. But what if there isn’t a “right” shape for human beings, either? What if it doesn’t really matter if they go to Harvard or become Olympic swimmers?

Little League was my dream, not Becky’s. She will be a different person because I didn’t force her into fulfilling my dreams, for better and for worse. It may be that her dreams will have more power because of it -- Becky is already mapping out how she will get into Harvard, after all, while I bemusedly look on. And whatever college she goes to, she’s learned to dream her own dreams and take responsibility herself for making them come true. And I’m really proud of that, even though sometimes I feel guilty that she’s learned self-reliance because I’m so bad at even the basic Tiger Mom stuff.

In the end, parenting is more about relationship than it is about a puzzle to be solved, or clay to be sculpted. And just as all the other relationships in my life have good parts and not-so-good parts, so does my relationship with my children. Parenting, for me, means giving my children the best I have to offer -- and letting them learn to cope with me at my worst. And really, that’s all any of us can do, Tiger Mom or not. Maybe we are so anxious about parenting styles because we are so afraid of that “worst,” so afraid that our children will end up the sum of our weaknesses. But we cannot make our weaknesses go away by trying to be something we’re not: Mostly, doing so only accentuates our weaknesses and buries our strengths. And one thing my children have taught me is that sometimes, my weaknesses allow them to develop their own strengths.

Ideally, in parenting we learn how to be what we truly are, and to teach our children to be what they truly are. So I think it will turn out just fine that Becky and I muddle along while we figure out what it means to be a Priest/Writer Mom and her Tiger Daughter. And I’ll wait for a granddaughter to come along who loves baseball as much as I did.

Guests at the Banquet

2010-08-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

This week’s sermon on Luke 14:1, 7-14... for those friends who were curious how I might put together Achievement, Wedding Banquets, and Grace. :-)

A couple weeks ago, while driving to church, I drove past a fitness center that had one of those little sandwich-style signboards out on the side of the road. In an effort to drum up business, they were putting cute, pithy little sayings up. This particular week, the saying was something like, “Discover the meaning of life: ACHIEVEMENT.”
I suppose most people probably didn’t even slow down. Those sorts of pithy sayings are almost always chosen for their universal agreeableness – the kinds of inspirational verbiage that doesn’t offend anybody. But maybe because I was on my way to church, it hijacked my attention completely.
Is it true? Can true meaning in life be found through achievement? Certainly it’s what our culture holds up as the highest good: My children’s educational success is measured through their performance on achievement tests. Job promotions usually focus on what we have achieved in the past year. We turn on in huge numbers for the Academy Awards and other awards show that focus on the achievements of actors, actresses, movie directors and producers. We hold parades and send trophies touring to celebrate the achievements of championship sports teams.
And yet… reading today’s Gospel, I get the distinct sense that achievement is not what Jesus is pointing to as the true meaning of life. Despite the fact that he sounds like Miss Manners, I think Jesus is trying to point his listeners towards something much more significant than questions of etiquette. This isn’t the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s a glimpse of what the Kingdom of God looks like.
In Jesus’ world, social status was perhaps even more important than it is today. The seating arrangements at a casual dinner party were more carefully choreographed than most modern weddings. Where you sat sometimes even determined the food you ate: those at the head table would not uncommonly be served a better wine and more gourmet dishes than those at the lower seats.
So Jesus’ instructions here sound like simply good sense and manners. Don’t embarrass yourself by claiming a space too high: better to let your host reseat you higher than to be asked to humble yourself by moving down below the salt.
But taken in their full context, they push beyond simply good sense. Because Jesus goes on to instruct his hosts in who to invite, and it’s not the leading citizens of the town. It’s the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind – in other words, people without prestige, without status, and without achievement. What are you supposed to do if you go to this banquet? Even here, are you supposed to seat yourself below the salt? Surely here, at least, you can feel confident of your superior status? If achievement is a valid way of measuring the meaning of a life, then it’s not hard for almost all of us to feel confident that we deserve a place higher up the table than the blind, the lame, and the beggar.
And I think that is Jesus’ point – our achievements don’t matter at all. At the Heavenly Banquet – which all our earthly banquets are foreshadows of – the last will be first. This is not just a veneer of humility, designed to exalt us in the eyes of others when we are asked to sit higher at the banquet. God means it – the people we are uncomfortable with, the people we regard as failures, the people who don’t have much in the way of achievement are the ones who will be welcomed first, and shown to the highest seats.
Jesus is not giving us a set of achievements to strive for in order to earn an appropriate seat at the Heavenly Banquet. It is easy to focus on the instructions part of this passage – don’t take the highest seat, invite the poor to our dinners – and miss what it is truly about. It’s about grace. It’s about God’s love that invites us to the banquet and exalts us even though we haven’t earned it. We are the poor, the lame, the blind, and the crippled who are invited to the banquet, who are led past the well-connected and the successful to take a seat at the head table.
In his book What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey tells the story of a young woman and her fiance who book a wedding reception at one of Boston’s fanciest hotels. The deposit alone is several thousand dollars, but they’re in love and they gladly hand over the money. But as the big day approaches, the groom gets cold feet. “I’m not sure I’m ready to make this kind of commitment” he tells his bride, and breaks the engagement. The bride goes to the functions manager at the hotel and pours out her sad tale, and finds the woman sympathetic and kind, but unable to refund the money already paid for the reception. “You signed a contract,” she apologizes, “and we can’t refund your money. So you have two choices: you can just walk away from the deposit, or you can go ahead and have the party.”
Rather than waste the thousands of dollars already spent, the former bride decides to throw the party anyway. Years before, she herself had been homeless. And even though she now had a good job, a nice home, and excellent prospects, she remembered what it had been like to live in a shelter. So she sent invitations to every homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Boston, inviting the homeless and the lonely to her high-class celebration. Tuxedoed waiters served boneless chicken – in honor of the groom – to a ballroom full of Boston’s homeless and hungry.
It is, Yancey says, exactly what it means to be a recipient of God’s grace. We are the guests at the feast, even though we have no claim on the host. The meaning of life is not about our achievements – not even those of mercy and charity – it is about being invited guests at a great Banquet. We are the ones who are served by tuxedoed waiters and thanked for coming -- not because we have earned our right to sit down to dinner, but because the host is amazingly generous.
It is this generous outpouring of grace to us that we are called to remember as partake of this Eucharist, this foretaste of the Heavenly Banquet. In our lives together as disciples of the Risen Christ, fed as we are on his Body and Blood, we become the hosts, the people Jesus addresses in his instructions, telling them who to invite. It becomes our task to share the feast with everyone we meet – young and old, famous and unknown, successful and down-and-out. Because that’s what the Heavenly Banquet, the Kingdom of God is like. All are welcome at this feast. All are welcome at this table.
Achievement, when it is a reflection of our joyful offering of our gifts to God, is a good and joyful thing. But it is not the meaning of life. The true meaning of life is found in knowing that whatever our failures, we have already been invited to the feast by the Host who loves us regardless of our achievements – or lack thereof. The Heavenly Banquet awaits us, and the last shall be first, and the humble shall be exalted. Amen.

Just sitting and thinking...

2010-07-24T19:37:00.000-07:00

The cover story in this week’s TIME magazine is a story warning us against the romantic attachment to summer vacation because “that downtime is making our kids fall behind.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, really. The corporate world already considers any kind of vacation a criminal waste. Too many professionals brag about how they never use up all their days off, boast about how much vacation time they lost last year. They’ve convinced many of us to react with resentment toward anyone who gets (and can actually take) paid vacation, or who only works 40 hours a week.

To be fair, the TIME article has in mind far more than just another 30 days sitting in the classroom doing more math sums and grammar drills. What TIME envisions is more like the greatest summer camp ever, particularly for kids from tough neighborhoods and other low-income areas, who often lack resources for “stimulation.” There is certainly great value in suggesting that we could do far better by kids with few resources than we do now, especially when it comes to offering them fun and interesting alternatives to sitting inside playing video games while their parents work two jobs and tell them to stay put because going down to the playground means risking getting shot.

But I am wary of a “one-size-fits-all” solution, and I do think we have a tendency to overemphasize the value of “stimulation.” While doing nothing but playing video games all summer is hardly enriching, not every child will spend the summer trapped in a stuffy apartment. By all means, offer great summer programs for all kids, and make them free and available to all. But there is value in the boredom of summer vacation as well. And getting rid of summer vacation entirely, eliminating a good, long break where kids have enough time to get bored, would be a terrible mistake.

What message do we send when we fret about “falling behind” and ditch vacation time to improve test scores? It makes perfect sense if we say, as the corporate world would like us to, that the meaning of life is economic productivity. But there is much more to life than hours spent toiling to make stuff, in order to earn money to buy more stuff. The more hours spent working, the better, because then there is more stuff we can buy (though never enjoy, because we are too busy working).

The prevailing view in the campaign against summer vacation seems to be that summer vacation is good only for emptying our children’s heads of the useful and important information we spent 10 months stuffing into it. Summer vacation teaches our children to be lazy!

Well, yes. It does. It gives them time to learn all kinds of things that have nothing at all to do with economic productivity. They may learn to sit silently, watching a dragonfly or a frog. They might dig a hole, not for any particular purpose, but just to see how deep they can make it. They spend time with friends. They make crafts that have no purpose other than the joy of creating. They swim. They play games. They may even be forced to spend some time with family. They sleep. They rest.

In other words, they learn what gives life meaning. They learn about sabbath. They learn the wisdom of slowing down and resting from hard labor. They learn to do it in a slow way, not in a frantic rush to cram all the fun they can stand into the one week allotted by the Powers That Be. You can only learn to sit and listen for the still, small voice when you have no place else to be, or something to do. Constant enrichment could actually impoverish children, who will never learn to endure boredom long enough to wait upon God.

Summer vacation is not just the remnant of a time when most people lived on farms and were needed for agricultural labor in the summer months. It’s a remnant of a time when people didn’t move quite so quickly, when there was time to notice the passing of the seasons, when Sunday was a day of rest even for farmers, when sundown meant time to sleep. It’s a reminder of a time when hard work was valued, but so was time for prayer, worship, and rest. It’s a reminder of what a balanced life could be -- one with time for study and learning and accomplishment, as well as time for rest and reflection and just sitting there doing nothing.

In our 24/7 world, we have been taught to view every moment not spent accomplishing something to be wasted time. We multitask, and brag about how many things we can do at one time. And we look with horror at summer vacation as a pit of squandered time, when our children’s hard-earned academic accomplishment somehow leaks out their ears.

But corporate values should not be our values. The meaning of our lives is not to be found in how many documents we create, or widgets we build, or money we make. It does not rest in our ability to do calculus in our heads, or in having higher test scores than kids in Japan. The corporation may value us in dollars produced per man hour, but God values us for the wonderful, unique person God created. We cannot fully become that person if our every hour is governed by another lecture, or another set of flash cards, or more striving to achieve higher levels of economic productivity. To learn who we truly are, to learn what it means to be human, we need to stand on the shore and watch the waves... and watch them... and watch them. We need to sit on the lawn mesmerized by the ants. We need to build relationships not through Carnegie Mellon classes designed to teach us how to manipulate people, but simply by being present to another human being for hours on a hot summer day.

If I thought for an instant the summer programs we’d replace summer vacation with would include long hours for exploring each child’s own creative impulses, for sitting watching the rain, for hanging out laughing with friends, I might be willing to support them. But I know it would take perhaps 30 seconds before corporate values of accomplishment would take over, and school committees would demand to see results from those extra 30 days. We spent all that money, and all you did was sit around watching ants? How can you waste time like that, when you could have done MCAS practice questions?

What good is summer vacation? Why, it’s only where we learn who we are separate from the work we do, the unique person that God created. That’s something the corporate world would rather we didn’t know -- and it’s why kids need summer vacation now more than ever.

Walking with Dog

2010-03-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

So, for this class I’m taking on youth ministry, I’m supposed to blog about my spiritual practices. No problem. I’ve got the blog. I like to write about spirituality and discipleship. I’m really into sharing the journey of this life in Christ.

So why am I a month into the semester and writing my first blog post? It’s that spiritual practices thing. I know -- and those of you who know me know -- that a disciplined rule of life isn’t really my thing. I’ve always been more of a “controlled chaos” person than an organizational maven. The basis of this assignment is to accustom us to talking about our daily spiritual practices so we can teach them to youth. Makes sense to me, except....

My favorite spiritual practice is walking the dog.

No, that’s not a typo. It would sound a lot better if it were “walking with God.” But honestly, my daily time of contemplation and reflection is when I take Emma the pooch for her morning constitutional. And I’m not reciting Morning Prayer while I do it, either. I’m just wandering along, nodding at the people (and other dogs) we pass, noticing what Emma stops to sniff at, thinking about how it’s getting lighter earlier. Sometimes I do think about religious things... but quite often I just hang out with the dog. God’s welcome, but mostly He just hangs out with the dog, too. If Emma has noticed God along for the walk, she hasn’t said anything.

I often feel guilty about this. As spiritual practices go, walking the dog doesn’t appear in any list I’ve ever seen. I know that that as a spiritual leader, I’m supposed to practice what is preached -- the importance of daily attentive listening to God. But here’s the thing: God and I go way back. He got me into this crazy juggling act of school and church and family. And I’ll say this for him -- he’s stuck with me while I juggled it. He always seems willing to come along for the ride. The times my spiritual life has been most satisfying has been when I’m looking for God where I currently am (usually between point A & B), rather than forcing myself to wait in one place for God to come by.

So I walk the dog. And I do dishes. And I read the newspaper. And I look around and see if God is with me, and mostly, God is. Those are the times when I am most conscious that God is present.

I do need formal worship, too, to feed me spiritually. But I’m an extrovert, a raging loves-people extrovert, so I am fully fed by helping to lead worship two services on Sunday and one on Thursday night. It pours energy and joy for God’s work into me. I’m perfectly happy getting my spiritual sustenance from the church where I am working. For silence, well, I have walking the dog.

I can teach other forms of prayer. I have a pretty good collection of kinetic prayers I use when I feel the need to connect with God in a different way because there are too many distractions getting in the way. I do and have taught drawing prayer, and next week I’ll be teaching rosary making and prayer at Trinity Church, Stoughton. (Come by Thursday night, March 18, 6 p.m. for soup supper and rosaries if you’ve a mind.) I like labyrinths, and am contemplating buying a small one when I have income again. These are forms of prayer I find very useful, particularly when I feel the need to slow down and listen for God’s voice. But it’s not like I can say, “well, on Wednesdays I pray the rosary” or “I do drawing prayer three times a week.” I might... or I might not do it for a month. Just depends on where I am at the moment.

All of which works for me, which, as my spiritual director tells me, is the point. But I don’t think I would suggest anyone else follow my routine -- who knows whether God hangs out with other dogs? Emma just looks inscrutable when I ask her. Telling other people to go out and get a dog to enhance their prayer life seems like a really bad idea. So this will be my last blog post about my daily prayer life, and remember: don’t do what I do, unless, of course, you discover God hanging out with your dog, too.

In the next couple of weeks, maybe I’ll share some of those more traditional prayer practices. Or maybe something in one of these books I’m reading will inspire me. (Already mulling the question of the discerning church and youth...more to come on that, I think.) But if you’re coming here thinking you’ll learn how to get in contact with God through the use of regular spiritual practices of the sort you can talk about in Sunday School without embarrassment, I’m afraid you’ll likely be disappointed.

God and I will be out walking the dog.

Suzanne

Fear Not!

2009-03-31T13:45:00.000-07:00

“After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised.” -- Matthew 28:1-6

I can’t imagine a more absurd thing for the angel to say than “Fear not.” Don’t be afraid? Are you kidding? There was an earthquake and an angel with an appearance like lightning rolling away the stone. It’s scary enough the guards -- those big strong military men -- have fainted dead away. And this angel’s first words are “Do not be afraid!” Yeah, right. Did he think the women would just go, ”Oh, all right, then“?

As this Lenten journey draws to a close, though, I find myself pondering the angel’s words. This is a season of repentance -- a word meaning, “turning away” the the sense of turning away from our sins and back towards God. And as I listen to the news, I wonder if maybe what we most need to turn away from is fear.

I’ve had this thought before. A year ago, when the airwaves were filled with reports of lead paint in toys and toxins in baby bottles, politicians predicting more acts of terrorism (unless you elected them, of course), and school notices carefully explaining what steps would be taken if a gunman walked through the front doors, I was struck by the sheer number of things we seemed to fear. And that was before our retirement accounts and job security vanished in a puff of Wall Street smoke.

What’s wrong with being afraid? We certainly have plenty of reason to be. But then, so did the shepherds and the women at the tomb. And yet... Fear Not!

I am coming to believe that fear may not be only the most visible evidence of our human sinfulness, but possibly also the root of that sinfulness, as well. When Adam and Eve transgress by eating the forbidden fruit, their reaction is to hide from God when he comes to walk in the Garden. Where are you? God asks, and Adam and Even answer, “We were afraid.”

Isn’t it fear that drives us to lay up our treasure in storehouses where the moths and rust will consume it? Isn’t it fear that holds us back from relationships with the most vulnerable among us: the sick, the mentally ill, the poor, the “different”? When I examine my own heart, and repent of my sins, I find fear at the root of so very many of them -- fear that I will be seen as unworthy of my calling, fear that I will not be loved.

Repentance, then, should free us from fear. John Howard Yoder writes that Christian social service agencies can often undertake efforts public service agencies wouldn’t dare to try because “they can afford the risk of failure.” Why? Because the success or failure of those efforts is not where our hope lies.

Our hope is in that tomb with the stone rolled away -- that empty tomb. “Fear not!” the angel tells the women -- the tomb is empty. Your hope is no longer ended with death. The most terrible thing possible has happened -- and it wasn’t the end of everything. “He is not here; he has been raised.”

What would it be like to live without fear? If we really, truly believed that our hope was never in our 401k, or our jobs, or our houses, anyway? What if we could respond to the angel’s call, and fear not?

We never seem able to do it, and maybe that’s because fear really is the original sin that entered the world with the Fall. In this season of repentance, though, we are reminded that it is not our own ability that lifts us out of sin, but the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We are invited to place the cross and the empty tomb as a beacon of hope against our fear, and turn away from fear towards God, trusting in God’s grace to lift us up where we cannot lift ourselves. “Fear not!” says the angel. And even in the midst of war and economic meltdown, we can trust that advice.

Sabbath

2009-03-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

It’s official. I’ve finished my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. I know it’s official because I have two thick final evaluations, one written by me and one written by my supervisor, signed and in a folder that will soon be carefully placed in a file, removed only to photocopy (probably a hundred times) to turn in with all the paperwork I need for school, for my application for candidacy, and probably for all the other applications I will prepare in the next two years. And then it will stay there, probably never removed again, for years and years and years, because it is too hard-earned to simply throw out.

Really, though, I’ve been done for almost a month. My group gathered for the last time on Feb. 12, and I made my last clinical rounds on Feb. 13. I returned to a life where I was *only* juggling four classes, church, and my family -- and I was right, after three weeks of four classes, family, church, and nearly 30 hours a week of CPE related stuff, it feels like vacation.

Or maybe more precisely, like sabbath. Because I’ve been a little slow to start diving back in, reluctant to take on new tasks. I’ve been keeping my head down, not raising my hand to volunteer to preach, or teach, or even to take the first presentation slot in class. I’ve kind of been hoping that no one will notice I’m home more often. I thought about things I could do at church, but didn’t act on any of them. I considered signing up for the Spring Learning Event in the diocese, about inviting friends for dinner, about going to the YMCA. But in the end, I stayed home. I left whole days filled with nothing on the schedule. When it snowed, I slept in, re-upholstered my dining chairs, sewed Becky a dress for her doll. I skipped church and went skiing. I played Rock Band with my husband, and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I set up a profile on Facebook.

I hadn’t planned to slow down. There are so many things I need to do! But after the intensity of CPE and the lack of time that accompanied that last six months, I realized that one of those things was to take some time to breath, to play, to just be around people I care about. And that’s the wisdom of sabbath.

The to-do list never gets shorter. There are always more tasks to do than we can get to, more people to care for than we have hours in the day. Somehow, pray, play, breath never find their way into the top spots. Sabbath invites us to reserve some time where they do -- and even God knew that after a busy week of work, it’s important to take time to play.

After my sabbath time, I’m holding things more lightly. There are papers to write, and I’m feeling more eager to engage with them. I’m beginning to organize, to take pleasure in checking things off the to do list. The books on my desk beckon, rather than chastise. The work awaiting me feels inviting, challenging, new.

That’s what sabbath is for. For strength and renewal, for the rest that allows us to gather up the threads of our lives afresh and anew, more fully present than we were before. God commands it because he knows we won’t do it on our own -- but it isn’t a burden, it’s a promise. We can take time to rest and blame it on God. Thank you, God.

Claiming my sabbath time means some task will go unfinished. But some task will go unfinished anyway. They always do. I needed the rest, the time to play. Now it is time to begin the work again. And I’m ready -- until it’s time once again for sabbath rest.

Letting Go

2008-09-08T06:06:00.000-07:00

        I won’t be at the 8 a.m. service this year -- at least not all the time.
Someone else needs to lead the Brownie troop. I have reluctantly concluded the Bible Study Breakfast will need to be hosted by someone else. We will need someone new to take on organizing the St. John’s team at the food pantry. I will not be available to chaperone field trips or plan the new First Friday Christian Education program. There will be far fewer cookouts and dinners and day-long excursions with friends.

        I start CPE this week, and combined with two classes, have probably signed up for something rather more than a full-time job. I need to do these things, but I already know that it comes at a cost of doing other things. There are only so many hours in the day, and convincing myself I can do them all will only mean I will not do any of them.

        But it’s really hard letting things go. It’s not just a sense of obligation, although that’s certainly a part of it. The people who will take up my left-behind tasks are mostly just as busy as I am. This year, though, they have put themselves forward to manage some things I can’t, and may God bless their efforts. But if it proves too much for them, too, well, the world will not end because my daughter has to wait until next year to participate in a Brownie troop and the Bible Study Breakfast serves donuts picked up on the way to the church instead of pancakes and waffles.

        What makes this so hard is that these were things I have been happy to do, that have given me great joy. Some I picked up because if I didn’t, no one would, but I came to love the task. Others tasks I sought out because they are something I am passionate about, and leaving them behind is so hard because how can I know someone else will do it as well, or with as much energy and love?

        But they are not the things that are most important. Preparing to tackle the new tasks ahead of me has forced me to examine all the things I currently do and think about what is really important in ways I rarely do. I suppose most of us don’t, most of the time. Instead we let the tasks pile up and pile up until something gives. And then we feel guilty, and pile on more stuff out of guilt. Maybe eventually we pile it on until what gives is something we never would have chosen to surrender if we had thought about it: our marriage, or a friendship, our relationship with our parents or children, our awareness of God’s presence in our lives. Love bears all things, so sometimes maybe we just trust the people we love can always bear just one more thing -- until they don’t. We are not perfect in love, after all. If we were, we wouldn’t let guilt and duty push out the needs of love. We’d know what was most important, and we’d always manage to put it first.

        This is, I understand, what people faced with serious illness or other disasters learn -- that an awful lot of what you thought was essential isn’t, really. I am fortunate that my internal inventory is being forced by new opportunities, not tragedy. I am incredibly lucky that I will have the opportunity to pick many of them back up, refreshed and appreciating them all the more for having had to leave them aside. And some of them I will leave in the hands of others for good, as God pries my fingers from them so that others may find joy in that service.

        Letting go is hard, but it’s all in God’s hands. All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.

Suzanne

Praying Without Ceasing

2008-04-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

For years, I’ve listened to people tell me how to pray. I’ve attended workshops on centering prayer, I’ve listened to sermons advocating making time for silence, I’ve been counseled by priests to rise early to say the daily office. And I’ve tried, really tried. But I’ve always ended up feeling like a complete failure. Somehow, I could never sustain this type of daily prayer. I would do it for awhile, but eventually it became such a chore that I would give up. The harder I tried to cultivate silence, the drier and emptier my prayer life became.

Then this fall, I began seeing a new spiritual director. I went to our first meeting with trepidation, because I had just started seminary, and that sit-in-silence time had been the first casualty to my daily commute. I expected to be rebuked: gently, of course, but still... an aspiring priest shouldn’t be a prayer failure.

My director, however, didn’t chastise me. When I confessed I wasn’t finding much time for the daily office or sitting in a prayer corner, she just asked if I felt it as a lack of God’s presence. And I admitted that I didn’t, that God seemed very present in my life right then, in my classes, in my family, in worship services, even in the daily commute. God was present in the very hecticness of my life. “Well,” she said. “Maybe that’s where you need to find God right now.”

Feeling less guilty about my “failure” to pray, I stopped worrying about getting my prayer life “right.” I began paying attention to my director’s favorite question, “Where are you finding God now?” One month it was in interaction with friends, another month it was in the Scripture that I was reading in preparation for preaching. Right now, I think it’s in corporate worship, in Evening Prayer, chapel, and Eucharist, in distributing the wine and even, once, the bread.

I began reading books about different types of spirituality, about personality traits and prayer types, about praying through dancing, or drawing, or walking. And I began to understand that my sense of failure came from seeing my prayer life in a single dimension -- contemplation.

The truth is, I’m not by nature a contemplative. Breath prayer -- where you pay attention just to breathing in and out -- makes me tense. Silence and solitude are not restorative for me -- in fact, they can leave me cranky and depressed. In striving after contemplative prayer, I was forcing myself to embrace practices that too often left me irritable, instead of renewed.

Yet God and I are regular conversation partners. I pray for family and friends while I do the dishes, and frequently stop when reading the daily newspaper to offer a prayer for those suffering through various calamities. When I read a thought-provoking book, I spend at least half my time sitting and reflecting, waiting in silence for fresh insight or a spark of meaning. I talk to God out loud when I am in my car or in the shower.

Somewhere along the way I had picked up the idea that active kind of prayer didn’t really count, that the only serious prayer was the sort where you sat alone in your corner, emptied your mind, breathed in and out, and waited for God to speak. When I found this routine impossible to sustain, I considered myself a prayer failure.

What I have learned in the last few months, though, is that God speaks to us in many ways, not just in silence. God answers with flashes of insight, in the laughter of friends, in the pages of Scripture, and in the upturned hands held out to receive the bread. God speaks through friends, teachers, and sometimes total strangers. I am not a prayer failure as long as I am attuned to the ways God is moving in my life right now. I don’t have to go sit in my prayer corner to be in prayer.

But now I can. Freed from the expectation that I do it daily, or do it “right,” I am finally beginning to learn the art of silence. I know now not to turn to this type of prayer when I’m tired and in need of renewal: for me, this silent prayer takes work and energy, and I should enter into it when I am fully rested and energized to devote myself to it. That’s not going to be every day, or sometimes even every month. But knowing I’m not expected to do it all the time, I find I can enter into it much more readily when the opportunity presents itself.

If your prayer life is dry and uninspiring, or if you “never have time to pray,” maybe you should ask yourself whether it’s because you are trying to pray the way someone else says you should. Instead, consider where you are aware of God’s presence in your life. Start there. And don’t be afraid to try unconventional approaches -- dance your prayer, maybe, or draw it. Croon it as a lullaby to a baby. Take a walk around the block, and have a conversation with God. Go to church -- or a different church, just for a change. There is no one way to pray any more than there is one type of person in the world. Finding your way of praying can help open the doors to other ways, as well. You’re only a prayer failure if you give up entirely.

This aspiring priest is no longer ashamed to admit that her “prayer corner” is getting a bit dusty. I’ll point out the rosary in my backpack, and tell you all about the new “drawing prayer” I’m planning to undertake during my May vacation. In fact, I think my struggles with praying will make me a better priest, since I’m not the only person sitting in the pews who has a hard time just sitting and breathing. God loves wondrous variety -- including in the ways we talk to God. It’s about time we celebrated that.

Blessings,

Suzanne

Remembering the Elves and Wizards

2008-03-10T08:03:00.000-07:00

A friend from seminary passed on the sad news that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died. Many have written eloquently on D&D’s importance in the geek world, and credited it with being the genesis of everything from video games to Microsoft. As wonderful as all the techie stuff is, though, I wanted to take a minute to share some reflections on D&D from a less “geekly” perspective.

In high school and college, I ran the only girl's D&D game I think I've ever encountered -- D&D tends to be a masculine world, with most games overwhelmingly male. But when the boys didn’t invite me to play, I rounded up a few girlfriends, bought some books, and started my own game. It was soon infiltrated by boys, but they had to play by our rules -- relationships mattered more than the numbers, role playing was more important than dice rolling, and the DM (that would be me) was god. (Or I suppose, god-dess.)

D&D's rules were flexible enough to let you could create a game like that, as well as a numbers-driven game like the one the computer geeks ran in college. (One or two of my friends played in both -- a comment on their versatility or possibly their weirdness.) It was always the role playing that drew me, though. I loved the chance to be someone else, and to play out the most outrageous scenarios with others. Maybe the computer geeks stuck with formulaic characters, but in my game, for every goody-two-shoes Lawful Good priest there was also a Klingon-type Lawful Good paladin. (Think honorable Klingons in Star Trek: Next Generation: You will give courageous opponents a clean death, not shame them with mercy. Effective and within the rules, but rather shockingly different from the sweetness-and-light version of Good.) In role playing, you got to explore what it meant to be good -- and evil. My favorite character was a neutral-evil assassin, who hid from her enemies by joining a good-aligned party and got co-opted by them. (I wonder what the diocesan psychologists would make of that?)

Over the years, D&D was the beginning of many deep and lasting friendships. Twenty years later, I look around at my closest friends and discover many of them had alter-egos in my D&D world. I think those friendships lasted because we learned as much about each other in those choices between good and evil, between flight or fight, as we did about the rules of fantasy. The first world I shared with my husband was the one populated by Citgo Mobil the Mage and Chester the Paladin; how could we fail at building a life together, when we had already shared divine rulership of an entire world? And when I grew up and moved away, D&D gave me a way to find a new home and community in a far-off land. (Ok, Philadelphia, but to this girl who had never lived outside of the town where she was born, that was far off enough!)

I recently started playing with my children, creating yet another generation of elves and warriors, paladins and assassins. My parent’s generation worried that D&D would corrupt its children: I only hope that it will shape my children in the same way it shaped me.

So I will raise a glass to Gary Gygax tonight, thanking him not just for hours of delightful escapism, but a world that introduced me to leadership, living with ambiguity, and the love of my life. Not a bad legacy.

Peace,

Suzanne

Get Up, And Don't Be Afraid

2008-02-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

This is the text of a sermon I gave at St. John’s in Taunton this week. Those of you who have heard me preach know that does not mean this is necessarily what the folks at St. John’s heard me say! I don’t preach directly from the text, so there’s always some variation, and sometimes quite a lot. But this is was at least my starting point, and I wanted to share it. ~ Suzanne

In the ancient world, mountains were where you met God. Moses met God on a mountain: Our Old Testament reading today recounts how Moses encountered God at the top of Mount Sinai. Elijiah encountered God on a mountaintop as well: 1Kings tells us that after Elijiah fled into the wilderness to escape Jezebel, God called Elijiah to Mount Sinai. There was a great wind, the story goes, but God was not in the wind. An earthquake followed, and God was not in the earthquake. A fire roared past, but God was not in the fire. And then God appeared, as a still, small voice.

So when the disciples begin climging a mountain with Jesus, Matthew's readers had an idea what to expect – Caution, God ahead! Sure enough, the disciples witness Jesus transformed before their very eyes, glowing with the Light of God, and in conversation with Moses – whom God entrusted with the Law – and Elijiah – the embodiment of the Prophets. Matthew's audience, good Jews all, would have seen clearly what Matthew was getting at even before God spoke from the cloud, reiterating the words He spoke at Jesus’s baptism.

Peter -- good old Peter -- immediately offers to build them a place to live. He doesn't even get the words out of his mouth before God interrupts him. "This is my son. Listen to Him."

And Jesus response to the disciples, who are now – perfectly understandably! – cowering on the ground, is "Get up, and don't be afraid."

This is a story where every detail carries wonderful significance, so I don't think this is a throwaway line. I think this is God's call to us – get up, and don't be afraid. The most important thing is not staying in the moment of the encounter. It's what comes next. It's walking back down the mountain with Jesus.

It occurs to me that one reason the encounter with God always happens on a mountaintop because you can't actually live at the top of a mountain. There's no water there, no shelter from sun or wind. It's a marvelous experience, standing on top of a mountain, but it's a fleeting one by its very nature. If you've ever climbed a mountain, you know that the only thing to do once you've finished admiring the view is to start back down.

Peter's instinct to want to build a dwelling for the glory of God, to bask in the light of God's presence for as long as possible, is perfectly understandable. We often want to do the same thing – we look for the "peak" experiences, and often think of the spiritual life like that of a mountain climber, scaling one mountain after another. The more peak experiences you have, the more holy you are.

But God doesn't invite the desciples to set up camp on the mountain top. He shows the disciples exactly what it is he is offering them – his beloved son, part of God's care for his people that began with the Law and continued through the prophets, and would shortly reach its most profound expression in Jesus' death and resurrection. That moment of glory and majesty will stay with them their whole lives, offering strength when the days get dark. They will will treasure the memory of God’s light in their hearts, and it will be a lamp to them as they wait, and wait, for the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom.

But the task for the disciples is not to make a dwelling place for God on a mountain – or in a magnicient cathedral, or in a lofty liturgy. The task is to take Jesus's hand and walk back down the mountain. On the way down, Jesus reminds them what that means – he tells them not to tell anyone the vision until "the son of man is raised from the dead." The road ahead is not an easy one. It will lead, in the end, to crucifixion. But God, in Jesus, was descending the mountain with them. They are not alone.

On Wednesday, we will begin Lent with the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. We will leave the glory of Transfiguration Sunday to be reminded that we are dust, and to dust we must return. We will descend the mountain and walk through the valley of our own mortality. What tasks await us as we descend? Worship will be part of it – we will seek out God's dwelling to give us the light we need while we walk in the valley. But if worship is all of it, we've missed the second part of God's invitation – Get up, and don't be afraid. How will we bring God's light into the world?

The past week, I've been reading the book chosen for Mansfield's town-wide reading program, called Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson. The book recounts the story of an accomplished mountain climber, who on the way back from a failed attempt on the world's second highest mountain, K2, gets lost and is rescued by Pakistani villagers. Moved by their generosity to him, he promises to return and build a school – something they could never afford on their own.

The school takes three years to build -- but in the process, he finds he has discovered his life’s work. He will build dozens of schools in Central Asia, bringing the light of knowledge to villages where hardly anyone is even literate. After 9-11, Mortenson received death threats from people who believed his work was offering comfort to the enemy, but he perseverred, convinced that the only way to counter people who preach hate is to bring the light of knowledge and of hope to vulnerable to such preaching. I think we might even suggest that his work is one way of telling people, "don't be afraid."

Fortunately, most of us don't have to get lost in the Himalayas for God to direct us to the work He has waiting for us. It might be raising money to build schools, or helping to feed the hungry. It might be joining with others in our diocese to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It might be praying daily for our brothers and sisters around the world who are struggling through their own valleys – in Kenya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan.

We don't have to climb Mount Everest, or Mount Sinai, or even Mt. Monadnok to encounter God. We can do so right here, climbing no higher than the altar behind me. We will encounter God in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. And then we are invited to get up, and no longer afraid, go out into the world to do the work God has given us to do.

For information about Greg Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, and his ongoing efforts to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, visit www.threecupsoftea.com or your local library.

Giving and Receiving

2007-12-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

        If you’ve come here looking for me to join the flood of religious people reviling the retail orgy that Christmas has become, you probably want to go back to Google now. Not that I don’t think that the consumer orgy isn’t insane: anyone who skips Thanksgiving dinner to wait in line for a big sale the next day clearly worships something other than the babe born in a stable. But in all the craziness, I think we’re losing sight of what the whole giving of Christmas gifts thing was supposed to signify -- love, generosity and caring.
        While frantically schlepping from mall to mall to find something -- anything! -- for the 23 people on your list can hardly be called a spiritual experience, it doesn’t have to be a soul-sucking horror, either. I think the difference is the spirit in which we seek.
        My mother is the poster-child for the joy-of-Christmas-giving club. She adores Christmas shopping. It is a source of absolute delight to her to seek something special for the people she loves. There’s no sense of obligation there: even the gifts she has chosen for professional colleagues over the years have been selected with a fond eye towards the unique human beings she works with.
        In the process, she mostly seems to skip the guilt that appears to drive so much of our retail-driven Christmas shopping. She doesn’t buy gifts because she has to, and she doesn’t feel driven to spend more than she ought out of fear that she might look cheap. It actually is the thought that counts. And so her Christmas giving comes from a place of joy, love, and generosity.
        And it’s that spirit that also makes it a joy to receive a gift from my mother. Because you know how much love she puts into them, it’s really easy to be pleased by any gift she gives, even on the rare occasion when she misjudges your fondness for the current fashions. Her joy in giving is infectious.
        Which brings me to receiving. We talk often enough about giving as a spiritual discipline, but rarely is the spirit of receiving mentioned. But I’ve discovered that graciously receiving can be a spiritual gift as well.
        I have a friend who is more often on the receiving end than the giving end: she lives on a fixed income, and because she doesn’t drive, is dependent on others to be able to participate in social and church events. She is also a devoted and careful thank-you note writer, and her appreciation for assistance is genuine and warm. She lifts up and recognizes the gift of your time and care for her in ways that make you glad you were able to help.
        Being with Ellen has taught me that receiving help graciously is a gift, too -- one I don’t possess. I am a doer, and I find it difficult to allow others to do for me. I’m embarrassed when I have to ask someone to look after my kids because I have a late day at school, even though I gladly and frequently watch others’ children in similar circumstances. I feel guilty when someone offers to take over a task I’m finding I don’t have time for, even thought I’ve done the same thing for others many times. And I’m always apologizing to people who find my things -- my prayerbook, my Bible, my gloves -- and make sure I go home with them.
        I’m not alone in this. Lots of very capable people have trouble allowing others to help them. In my experience, clergypeople may be the worst offenders: those called to ordained ministry tend to have a sincere and deep desire to serve, and as a result, we tend to resist being the ones served. I’m certainly in that category: I am one who serves, and so I struggle with seeing being served as a failure of my calling by God.
        Except that we are all -- each and every one of us -- called by God to serve, to love one another as he loves us. God didn’t create us in two categories, the servers and the served. He created us interdependent, meant to serve and be served. The others I serve cannot be fully complete as long as they only receive; for those I love to be able to experience fully the joy of service, I must be a gracious recipient of that service, of that gift of themselves. Learning to receive graciously requires an admission of vulnerability and need, which is also a gift of humility and shared humanity, one that opens us up to deeper relationship with each other and with God. We are served and serving, and love abounds.         So this Christmas season, my prayer is for all of us to give with gladness and love, and to receive with joy. Whether it’s home baked cookies, a fur coat, an offer of babysitting or a ride to church, or a really ugly tie that you can’t believe Uncle Herbert bought, may giving and receiving both be a source of abundant life for you and yours.

Suzanne

Why Do You Go to Church?

2007-10-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

When Sunday School started this fall, I asked my Grade 6-8 class, “Why do you come to Sunday School?” They looked at me in disbelief, and I immediately corrected myself -- I know why they come to Sunday School: their parents make them come. “So why do your parents make you come?” I asked.
They understood that their parents felt it was important to learn about God and Jesus, but really had no idea why: they figured it had something to do with making them good people.

So here’s my problem: if you’re just looking for a way to be a good person, you can be a secular humanist and sleep in on Sunday morning, and sooner or later, these kids are going to figure that out. Christians have no lock on being good people, and there will be plenty of non-Christian friends who will gleefully point out the many, many times throughout history when Christians have actually been as far from “good people” as it is possible to get.

My co-teacher, and the mother of one of our students, mentioned her gratitude to God for all that he has done as one of the major reasons she wants her daughter to be in Sunday School. And that’s great, as far as it goes. But is it enough? Sooner or later her daughter is bound to notice that God causes the rain to fall upon the just and unjust alike, and wonder what the point of gratitude is.

A study by the Barna Group recently arrived in my mailbox showing that young people have an increasingly negative view of Christianity. (You can read the report at: http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=280) Even those with some experience in churches saw Christianity as judgmental and hypocritical. They also thought that Christians were “anti-homosexual,” failed to put into practice our teaching of “loving our neighbor as ourselves,” and that Christianity no longer looked like Jesus.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s what the kids in my Sunday School class are going to hear from their peers as they move into high school and college. There will be lots of reasons not to go to church -- will we have given them any reason to come?

We can no longer count on social pressure to keep our children in church until they discover their own answers to why be a Christian. If we are to have any hope that our children will know God, we need, desperately, to be able to articulate a deeper understanding of our faith, something that goes beyond platitudes or a fear of Hell. And for that to happen, we need to understand, ourselves, what we are doing here.

The place to begin, I believe, is in telling our own stories. I know why I go to church, but I’ve spent the last four years in an intensive discernment process listening for God’s voice in my life. That makes me far from typical. But I don’t think it should. I think that each and every one of us has a powerful and compelling story about how God has moved in our lives. If we didn’t, we’d long ago have quit setting the alarm clock on Sunday mornings.

What is your story? Why do you go to church? Or why don’t you go to church -- is there something about the way Christianity is taught that keeps you away? What would you tell my sixth to eighth graders?

If you feel up to being public about your story, leave a comment on the blog. If it’s something too intensely private to share with the world, I’d love to hear from you directly: I’ll keep it confidential, just between you and me.

in telling our stories, I believe we begin to find the places where God is truly and deeply present in our lives, allowing us a fuller relationship with Him. And that, in turn, allows us to help others find and be found by Him, which is the true meaning of Christ’s command to us to “go out and make disciples of all nations.” So please, join the story telling! At the very least, it will help me offer better answers to my sixth, seventh, and eighth graders about why they should keep dragging themselves to Sunday School when they’d really rather stay in bed.

Suzanne

Fall in the Garden

2007-10-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

It’s fall in my garden. The undisciplined flowers of summer have given way to brown stems. It’s particularly sad this year, since my fall-blooming asters succumbed to some illness in mid-summer. There’s just row on row of deep brown leaves, about eight inches tall, filling the lower half of the garden where there should be bright purplish blue and yellow flowers.

The cucumbers gave up the ghost in August, too. I’ve never yet managed to keep them alive and healthy through the whole season. I think it’s powdery mildew, but I haven’t found the cure, yet. So all I have left is a couple sickly yellow leaves -- and a lone cucumber I somehow missed when there were still leaves on the plant. The zucchini succumbed as well: so much for my father’s prediction that I would be up to my elbows in squash. And I think the squirrels liked the peppers: I kept seeing baby peppers but only got to eat one. It was almost two, but the squirrel got there ahead of me.

The tomatoes are still doing OK -- there are lots of green tomatoes on the vines still, and we’ve been eating tomatoes non-stop for about two months. The herb garden is doing great, too, but it’s too crowded -- I squeezed too much into too little space trying to make room for the new patio. The plants have done surprising well considering the fierce competition for sun and water.

It’s fall in the garden. Some blighted promise: the cucumbers, the asters. Some hopes that bore generous fruit - the tomatoes, the parsley and thyme. Some that as it turned out, I didn’t really know what to do with them when they did reach their potential -- the Thai chilis, the lavender.

Maybe that’s why I garden: it’s really a lot like life. There are no guarantees, but there are lots of surprises. You don’t really control any of it, and when things go well, it’s best to share -- sure, you can put up tomatoes, but really, how much picalilli can one family eat? Best to share them with friends so they all get eaten at their sun-warmed best.

Most of all, I appreciate the reminder that no matter what succeeded and what failed, there’s always next year. By next April, I’ll be wandering around looking at new plants poking through this fall’s dead leaves, debating what variety of tomatoes to plant, surfing the Internet looking for yet another treatment for powdery mildew -- or another answer as to what’s causing the cucumbers to die! And whatever the results, I’ll plant the cucumber seeds anyway -- in the hope that this year will be different.

Those green tomatoes are big enough to ripen on the window sill into November, and the pesto should be great this year. And I just noticed that the Gerbera daisies I had given up for dead are blooming again. Maybe I’ll get a bouquet before final frost after all. It’ll be a good reminder, as the papers and unfinished reading assignments pile up, that all things end -- and that for the things that do fail, there’s always next time.

Welcome to Wading In

2007-09-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been saying for months that it was time to start a blog. Everywhere I go people say to me, “Be sure to let us know how things are going for you at EDS!” I deeply appreciate this interest in my progress, but I soon began to feel like personal correspondence would take more time than the research required to earn my Master of Divinity degree! Thus, the blog.

So what took so long? Those of you who have met my wonderful husband and IT guy, Rich, know that it wasn’t being intimidated by the technology. I told Rich I wanted a blog, and BAM! I had a blog. No excuses there.

No, it was the name. I was moving right along until Rich asked me, “What do you want to name it?”

Hmmmm. I hope the blog will offer a way to keep in touch with all the wonderful people I meet on this journey, as well as to offer reflections on ministry for years to come. So I wanted something catchy, but not too tied to a particular moment in time. Throw in the fact that I’ve never excelled at short punchy writing, and you have a recipe for complete writer’s block.

But I finally came up with the title above -- Wading In. You’ve probably already caught the obvious pun on my name. But my perhaps unfortunate fondness for puns aside, the more I thought about it, the more appropriate it seemed.

This blog will be about the experience of wading into classes at Episcopal Divinity School, and wading into the new opportunities for ministry that I trust will be coming in the years ahead. I’m also well known for wading into theological discussions, particularly ones where others might have the good sense not to go, and I hope that this will be a place where I can share the resulting reflections with all of you.

But best of all was an image from my childhood, of people being baptized wading into the waters of a lake for immersion. Wading in, they are unsure of their footing, stumbling and uncertain. They are sinners and outcasts, a disparate people of no particular religion, lost to God. But they wade in with the great hope and confidence in God’s promise that He is waiting for them, to grant them newness of life and forgiveness of sin. They wade in hoping to be transformed into people of God, into God’s holy priesthood. And God answers in the waters of baptism.

What a perfect metaphor for my journey. Stumbling and uncertain, often unsure of my footing and sometimes of my destination, I wade in anyway, trusting in God. And God answers, in the water, in the bread and wine, in the people who pray for me and love me.

Wading In. Daring to get our feet wet. Inviting God to transform our lives.

Welcome to my journey. I hope it will prove to be a source of encouragement on your own, as well.