Greiving

this is probably best described as the underbelly of the ordination process, and I am probably doing damage to my own possibilities in posting it, but it is a pretty accurate summary of what the last year has felt like. Things are looking up, life is feeling good.

I recently received an email from Donna Anderson wondering what ever happened to me. And I very much appreciate the poke, because I have thought of you all often and felt ashamed that I did not know how to say what was in my heart. But know that no matter the failure on my part to communicate, I continue to know that I am supported by you.

This has been a difficult year. Perhaps not the most difficult of my life, but certainly the most difficult since the Lord called and I answered. School has been a great deal more difficult as an adult than it was as a child. I find I have less patience and ability to sit still for long hours, or to study things I when I cannot readily discern the value. School has been harder on my family than all my ministry, school volunteering and part time jobs combined. I find that the demands of 24-7 availability are far less strenuous than consistently showing up, on time, pencil ready. I have so much more sympathy for children. I want to work harder for a saner work ethic in this country. I continue to show up for class on time. But it is hard, especially by the end of the semester.

It has been a difficult, sometimes frightening, year to follow the Lord. This time last year, we were unsure that my husband would have a job come January; his entire department was laid off, except for him. Had we stayed in Oregon, or returned, my husband would be unemployed. The company he was working for in Salem is now in bankruptcy. Still, it has been awkward, to be in seminary, pursuing ordained ministry, yet not to be a Postulant. It has been a year of learning that “blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17.7-8) The trees in my mind are those around Seaside, root balls in the air, after the flooding a few years back. Yet still I trust, although our bishop resigned; although my parish priest retired. And as Advent approached this year, I began to see that although this tree thought there was a drought (thought perhaps there was no support), I was, all the same, bearing fruit.

A couple of things happen in the second year of seminary. One, you have a few papers under your belt, so when the instructor says “two, 10-12 page papers, Turabian style, with bibliography,” you know what it means. Two, you embark on a year (or two) of field placement; an internship in a parish somewhere in the diocese. Last spring, I looked at a few parishes, chose and was accepted at a large parish in a wealthy bedroom community in Marin, County. And I will admit to doing something very theologically unsound. I made a deal with God. I said, ‘God, if this doesn’t work out – and it won’t, because I in fact teach people about power and privilege and how they need to let go of it– I will know that I wasn’t really supposed to be ordained and I will just finish school and move to L.A. and go work at Kaleidoscope Institute with Eric Law.’ Making deals with God is a bad idea, He has a way of making an 'either-or' into a 'both-and.'

My field education parish has been amazing. I have been working in family ministry, something I knew I would be horrible at. I have been helping lead multi-generational worship without any paper, books or bulletins, which I knew was a terrible idea. I have been working in a team, when I knew I was better as a solo leader. (And I have been letting my family do their own dishes and laundry and cooking, which I knew they could not do.) So many things I knew, and in knowing, was sure that everything would go so horribly that I could get out of this calling. How awesome a God we have; not only can He turn failings into strengths, he can turn outright denial into success. I have fallen in love with this amazing and faithful and generous parish and they have embraced me and trusted me with their most precious gift – their children. (And their Christmas pageant, which was an amazing success by every measure, especially the tingle that says the Holy Spirit hangs heavily in this place.) My field ed parish has given me the face of God, up close and shining, telling me that this is the work that has been given me to do, and my sadness, my confusion, my feeling that God is not there, only overwhelm me when I forget my work. It is my job right now to write academic papers, because even if I couldn’t tell last spring why I needed a class to break apart the Gospel in technical details and a class to apply literary criticism to the Old Testament, or worst of all, to memorize those maps in the back of my bible; every Sunday from 10-11 am, I sit with a group of 10 and 11 year olds and break open their Godly Play education with several translations of the bible and some maps and lots and lots of discussion of all those things that had me rolling my eyes or just plain crying last spring. They eat it up. They ask for more. They are so excited to learn that all those stories came from our living Scripture, and what we know about the birth of those same stories. I changed my class schedule for spring, just to learn more academics, because now I see how it fits.

This Advent has been the best advent(ure) of my life. I have often used the crucifixion and resurrection in my work with the anti-racism commission to talk about power. I have never really connected to the Advent cycle and Christmas. This year has been completely different. Right now, my life is not a cycle of receiving and releasing power; my life is about becoming a wholly new thing. Heather, the mother, wife, church volunteer, pta member or friend has been a faithful follower of God, but God has asked for a different commitment, a commitment that my sponsoring parishes and fellow commission members and field ed parish and discernment committee have affirmed. God is asking that I commit to holding sacred space, sharing it and shaping it, so everyone can find His up close and shining face; 10 year olds, 2 year olds and their parents, grandparents, friends who slept over on Saturday and family visiting from out of town and people new to the church, new to the area, and new to God. This is sacred space I have always held, was surprised to learn I was holding, was amazed that God and people considered it a gift. I am a spider who weaves a web; I am a waiter with an extra chair for the table; I am an innkeeper with some space in the stable.

post colonialism, like racism, is a forgotten agenda

I think it is hard for us to remember that the version of the Gospel that we in North America ascribe to in the mainline churches is not a standard or accepted version of the Gospel. We have taken a story, written for the oppressed and molded it to fit our desire to do good while remaining the oppressor.

The Gospel doesn't ask the oppressor to do anything at all for the oppressed. It asks only that the oppressor become one of the oppressed. (Give away all your possessions and come follow me, not start a soup kitchen on Saturday afternoons.) It is the oppressed who are asked to do good to each other in Jesus' name.

If there is any fault in the Anglican ideal (and anyone you ask will have a different idea of what it is, being Anglicanism) it is that it remains trapped in the founding ideal that England ought/need only have one church, neither catholic or reformed. In a post colonial world this translates into a confederation where each nation/culture/confederation of like minded possess the monopoly on Christianity in that local or grouping. We do a lot of ecumenism in a lot of places, and we even engage in some international Anglican crossover, but we persist in believing that location makes right, and that it supercedes common identity.

We are to be forgiven, however, as those two competing ideas are both foundational to Anglicanism. It isn't who gets ordained or what theology that divides us, it is, really, simply, do we believe we are a local church with a preference for ecumenical relations with other churches or are we a global church within various cultural contexts. I suppose it depends on whether you think postmodernism is dead or alive.

Something no one seems to be talking about and that I am wildly interested in is post-Colonial relations between the Anglican remains around the world. We are really busy especially in America funding MDGs in the second and third world but through the Gospel lens that Jesus came to ask the rich to take care of the poor. That is still colonialism, even if you wrap pretty .07 percent ribbons around it, even if you let the people in those countries tear themselves apart in the name of democratic freedom. Mission is the work of the church but giving up all you have and following Christ is how you become the church in order to do the mission.


(Been reading again. Liberation theology and Eric Law and post convention blogs of all stripes.)

June 24, 2009

How is my call shaping itself now that I am in school?

School has perhaps only made me more committed to the work I do on the anti racism commission. School has made me more keenly aware of just how stacked the deck is against people who do not fit a very narrow model of behavior.

Example: Overheard in the cafeteria between the admissions officer and a student. “We have someone from the Gulf Coast looking at the school today.” To which the student replied, “Great, that will really add to our diversity.” I don’t even know what to do with that. School is overwhelmingly white and middle class. I am really glad that John and Ellen introduced us to gin and tonics before we got there because we are pretty outclassed in the socializing department.

Altogether, I still feel called to the sacraments. I still feel called to facilitate radical welcome and communication between people. I summed this up for a fellow student the other day in this way, so I will just share that. We in the church are pretty guilty of having a relationship with God that happens 2/3 up the nave. Which in a decent sized church means you have to step on a lot of people in your reach for God. Jesus called us to have a relationship with God that is about 2 feet in front of us, placing another individual right at arms length. I really feel called to bring about that change in distance in people’s lives.

A very wise mentor said to me awhile back that I need to look at those places where I am most angry and most raw in order to find my ministry. And I am most angry in the way that we are so unintentional in our welcome to people. We say inclusive, but that is really, especially in the Bay Area a code word for gblt friendly. I am, but not at the expense of all the other people who make church.  

Why I am a Christian

I am a Christian for no other reason than one day, in an intellectual stupor, I realized that the breathing, the eating, the shitting, the birthing and the dying were the most important parts of life. And I realized that some dude not only already figured that out, but went on to lead a revolution to that effect 2000 years ago. An entire institution built up around that idea - an idea that is so dangerous to power that an institution was necessary to bottle it up and take away it's power. Ironically, the institution is the very means of preserving and protecting that dangerous truth so that people like me can keep discovering it anew.

Greeting and Hospitality

The very best reason to have your church members wear nametags is so that the ushers can remind people to wear then. When the response is, I don't have a nametag, you have identified a new member without the direct and rude question "Do you belong here?" name tags should also be quasi permanent so that peoples affiliations within the church can be printed as well. Then, while looking at nametags, new people also get a sense of what we are about.

Find the balance between Sunday is for Christians, for us, but strangers will always be present. First, respect that they are strangers. Assuming that someone who has never been to your house before will be perfectly comfortable and know where the bathroom and the knife drawer is, is silly. Don't expect that church is self explainatory. A handler, wrangler, guest services associate/host, call it what you will available for each new person or family that comes in. Take them around, offer them a primer on the particularities of your service. Remember, no one reads signs, thus they are very important.

Primers. A customary for the laity, can include basic catechumanate material FAQ's about the specific building and community, all sorts of things. Rather than reinventing a full service customary for each service, let your actual members worship rather than read. Some things are simply meant to be memorized. The more you read along in church the less you listen. Listening activates a totally different part of the brain. Listening in church is like practicing for life.

Cultural Relativism

It occurs to me that we taught cultural relativism to the first culture to truly experience globalism. Can we wonder, then, at the increasing fractionalism/factionalism rather than the "buy a world a coke" phenomenon we were hoping for?

Some ideas in search of a theme

What I learned this year.

Thematically, I need to make this work, Time is Money. Spent a lot of this year pretending that was the case. Time isn't money. It isn't a medium of exchange. It is, perhaps, the fluid in which our communion with God floats. So all of the things that we decide to commodotize into money are places where God has a much harder time being visible to us.

Some other ideas that might not relate
This year I set out to take whatever I thought I might need, time and money. This was a gift to me, because I was doing great deeds and deserved it. Ok, maybe not. But I ended up isolated in my little loft with a view of downtown san francisco and two bridges, which was a nice view, but ultimately lonely.