Category Archives: Six Ways to Sunday

Creative ideas for church – worship, education, community-building projects, sacred space….

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might be [gasp!] an evangelist

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I’ve been taking copious notes lately from JR Woodward’s Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World, about half of which focuses on how the five kinds of leaders listed in Ephesians 4 (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors & teachers) can work uniquely and in unity in a church wanting to be the church for others. I’ve read about these ministerial gifts before and taken probably half-a-dozen of the dozens of self-assessments available to tell you where your gifts lie. If you’ve grown up in the Protestant church, I’m guessing you have, too. (If you haven’t then cast your mind back to your teen magazine years and those quizzes that helped you determine what bubblegum flavor you were. These assessments are a lot like those except these tell you how the Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is raising you up “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” Very similar, yes? ) I ended up writing my own self-assessment quiz based on Woodward’s book, which I’ll post in a few days. I don’t generally accord gifts and personality assessments too much weight, especially not ones I’ve written myself, but they are good team-building conversation starters for church leaders. Particularly if you’ve already analyzed your respective bubblegum flavors to death. It was also a useful exercise in examining the slight to significant differences between how I heard these gifts described growing up and how Woodward saw these gifts operating in the context of a church committed to being church for the world. He doesn’t spend time calling out all the abuses that can happen when these gifts are assumed as mantles and titles, but he offers quiet correctives to them all the same.

The definition that seemed most altered when viewed through a missional lens was that of the evangelist. It would have had to have been a big difference for me to notice, because I would tend to gloss over that section. Based on my scores on other gifts assessments I have come to self-identify very strongly as not-an-evangelist. At times that has bothered or mystified me – I’m sociable. I care about people. I’m not ashamed of following Jesus. I believe in putting words to our faith. I want the world to know that God loves the world. While I think of my primary calling as helping the church be the church, I consider demonstrating and articulating this faith to our larger communities in credible ways to be one of the signs of the church being the church. So why wouldn’t this register on the tests?

Reading Woodward’s description of an evangelist I realized how many other descriptions I’d read that were based on narrow and rather stilted models of sharing the good news. Of course the accompanying lines of questioning used to identify the evangelists among us reflected those models as well, e.g. Would you rather hand out tracts on a street corner or prepare a Bible study? On a scale of 1-10 how willing are you to tell your friends they’re going to hell? Does at least one of your everyday accessories double as a device for sharing the gospel in five minutes or less? Do you cold-call people for a living and hate going home at the end of the day? Yes, I’m dangling a couple of toes over the deep end here, but our images of evangelism have been indelibly colored by evangelical notions of “witnessing” that differ both from simply being a witness and from what an evangelist, in the Ephesians 4 context of church leadership, would be concerned with – the witness of the church as a whole and serving as a messenger/ ambassador between the church and the rest of the world.

Assumptions that verbal assent constitutes faith and that commitment to following Christ bears no relation to our human relationships also taint our assumptions of what evangelism and evangelists look like. These assumptions actually screen out those with the gifts necessary to tell the story of God convincingly to a skeptical public and to draw people toward the community of faith. Our shift toward thinking that evangelism involves demanding an answer from the unprepared discourages those the Spirit keeps preternaturally prepared to give an answer for the hope within them from thinking of themselves as evangelists.

The true evangelists among us would be the folks who have the best handle on the gospel as good news rather than those who consider it a tough sell. According to many assessments, if you can move product and close deals you may be an evangelist, but they shunt away others who can best give the gospel away. If you think of salvation in terms larger than individual souls, you’re an apostle. If your commitment to truth leads you beyond warning sinners about judgment to calling the systems of the world and the church to justice, you’re a prophet. If you’re equipped to care for other people relationally, you’re a pastor. If you want others to recognize the heights and depths, and not just the breadth of God’s love, you’re a teacher. This tends to leave those whose faith is unusually exuberant and simple and – not always, but often – still immature, uninformed, or unexamined to communicate the gospel to the world. Yeah, how’s that workin’ out for us?

By equating one’s willingness to offer a shallow salvation through artificial methods with the spiritual gift of evangelism, we unwittingly anoint as evangelists the garrulous, who prefer being right to having right relationships and for whom the propositional truths of Christianity assure them a winning argument every time; the gregarious who can turn anything into small talk, including the staggering news that God died for you; the spiritually anxious who bear their responsibilities for the fates of others’ souls with potentially crippling fear and trembling; and the socially anxious for whom conversations with strangers never get easier, so they might as well turn them toward something important like accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior in the hopes that some greater good will come of them. The church, thank God, has very few evangelists by this measure. But we do have the real deal. We’ve been promised them. We’re not able to do the work of the church without them. Who knows, but you might be one of them – even and especially if the thought of knocking on a stranger’s door to show them your corny beaded bracelet makes you physically ill.

If you’d like to find out, I’ll post the assessment I drafted up based on Woodward’s descriptions in a couple of days – let’s say Saturday. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you getting all prophetic on your co-workers at the end of a long week.

A Mother’s Day Festivus for the Rest of Us: Some Inclusive Alternatives for Church Observance

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Most reflective congregations will already be aware of the dividing walls between those settled in “traditional” families and those who are not. Do we want to religiously observe a day that builds up those walls or one that breaks them down and builds us all up together? I believe the Church does her best work when we regard one another primarily as brothers and sisters and act together as children of God. The Church is the family into which God has set each one of us. How might some different approaches to Mother’s Day establish rather than undermine that truth in our midst? Motherhood is one role/ ministry/ calling among many. As such, it should be honored within the Church, but not above or at the expense of other roles, ministries, and callings. How might we affirm, support, and challenge each other on Mother’s Day?

1. Skip it.

Everyone knows that it’s Mother’s Day. Multiple industries are working day and night to ensure this is known. Honoring mothers is a fine thing (honoring one another at any time is a fine thing), but churches are in no way required to drop everything to issue a statement on the subject of motherhood this morning in particular. This can be an emotionally charged day for people, but it is not a national crisis and needn’t override regularly scheduled programming.

Being asked to stand is not such a significant a form of recognition that anyone with a mother’s heart wouldn’t willingly give it up to spare her single-and-hating-it sister pain. None of us wants to win a potted plant for having the most children if it means another woman in the room is forced to wonder if her miscarried or stillborn or aborted or adopted out children “count.” Does she still “have” the child if he died or disowned her or if her parental or custodial rights were terminated? No one needs an African violet that badly.

Allow the congregation to relate to one another organically and appropriately during the natural times of greeting before, during, and after the service. Trust that your people will recognize and rejoice with any woman in your midst beaming with a pregnancy-rounded glow, or distracted by devotion to her newborn, or visibly chuffed in the company of her adult children who don’t normally join her in the pews. By not directing these times the congregation will also have the freedom to support the women around them for whom this day represents loss, whether that’s through a hug in silent acknowledgement of a mother’s recent passing or a more private grief, or by checking in with offers of practical support for those caring for mothers who are fading away, or by directing the conversation toward rousing speculation about the NBA draft because this marks another year that this day must simply be borne, and not celebrated.

If the fancy hat brigade asks why you "skipped" Mother's Day, tell them. They're moms. They'll understand

If the fancy hat brigade asks why you “skipped” Mother’s Day, tell them. They’re moms. They’ll understand

2. Address it.

Just know that it can’t be a one-size-fits-all gloss. Build language into your corporate prayer time in the service that contends with the struggles of the day as well as the joys. There is an excellent example here along with some potentially relevant editorial suggestions immediately following in the comments section and a lovely follow-up here.

As a matter of personal taste, I would reframe it as a prayer rather than a message, as a time of coming before God as one people with all these experiences. But then, I like to think that everyone in the church already knows they’re welcome there. If you preceive the message that we are all in this together needs to be heard, say it loud and clear.

3. Preach it.

But please, no sermons about following Jesus while raising children, especially if it’s romanticized as some greatest calling, and even if it’s gritty as all get out. As gratifying as it can be to hear someone publicly recognize the difficulty of maintaining a spiritual life while housebreaking small humans, I reckon doctors have to pray while surrounded by others’ bodily fluids as much or more than most mothers, and I know my friends in customer service and corporate America get pooped on more times in a week than I do. What other week of the year – besides Father’s Day, of course – do we choose to preach to a fraction of the congregation? If there are any families in your church you probably have better and more meaningful ways of supporting them that aren’t potentially heart-rending to the rest of your congregants. I don’t need my church to honor me for my fertility, especially when dear friends who I know to the core of my being would make better mothers than I am are struggling to conceive or adopt. I don’t want to be honored as a mother on general principle by someone who, chances are, has no idea how I’ve interacted with my kids over the last week. Give me an exhortingly honest contingent of other parents and friends privy to the sordid details over hollow praise any day. Parents need more support than an annual sermon, and non-parents need to know they are integral to the life of the church every week of the year.

If you choose to preach a Mother’s Day sermon, preach about the inconvenient and unifying fact that we all have mothers and talk about the work of relating to our universally messed-up families of origin in all their weird permutations and uncannily entrenched patterns. Preach the texts in which God longs to mother us, gathering us up, teaching us to walk, modeling flight and catching us when we fall, then tie in the physical impossibility of forgetting the children one has borne. Help us all see God as a loving mama with our names tattooed on her hands, who will always get a little misty-eyed thinking of us when we’re far away, even if it’s because we’re in juvie or run-off with a bad crowd. Who always has a room for us even when we call her names and can’t make the token $100 she charges us in rent. Who swells with pride for our every little achievement even when we have convinced ourselves we have done well in spite of our upbringing. If your congregation is into carnations give everyone a red one on the way out as a reminder that we all have a loving and living Mother who would rather die than see us hurt.

4. Re-radicalize it.

Mother’s Day in America only goes back a hundred years or so, and most of its early supporters envisioned a day that had more to do with community organizing and peace-making than with thanking women for having children. When it became a national holiday it was to honor women who had lost children to war. “Decorative” clay handprints and poorly executed breakfasts in bed were not the original intent. What if Mother’s Day became a rallying cry for fighting for everyone’s children? Revving up the fierce side of our collective maternal instinct and living into that day when war will no longer be taught by declaring that day begins now? Something along the lines of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation?

Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for carresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Identify the social ill that breaks the hearts of your congregants and go at it like a mother protecting her young. Unleash your church’s inner mama bear on planning a clothes drive or activity for foster kids. Fund additional shelter beds in your town because everybody’s somebody’s baby. Scour the local middle school bathroom stalls and desks of cell numbers to call for a good time.

Mother’s Day was originally a day to mourn with those who mourn, but it is so much easier to rejoice with those who rejoice. How do we do both? What is your church doing for Mother’s Day? What ideas do you have?

Dead Can Dance: A Meditation and Playlist for Holy Saturday

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The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel

“[Jesus] was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner…. [Jesus] was as dead as a door-nail…. There is no doubt that [Jesus] was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.” adapted from Dickens’ _A Christmas Carol_

Christians are sorely tempted to gloss over or spiritualize the death of Christ. After all, how dead can we imagine the Source of all life? At what point do our imaginations fail to allow for his return to life? If we find Jesus’ resurrection easy to believe, might it be at the expense of our belief in Jesus’ death? Our scriptures and our creeds stress that Jesus did not just die, he was buried. He was counted and fully identified with the dead. He took kenosis, humanity, and mortality to their furthest limits and poured himself out even to death. Christ’s earliest followers wanted to impress upon all who would listen that he did not faint, lose consciousness, or swoon. He was not “mostly dead.” He was as dead as dead gets, deader than we’ll ever be, as ultimate in death as in life, not only the firstborn of all creation, but also the jigging and grinning leader and Lord of the danse macabre that ultimately unites us all regardless of who we were and what we believed. Wherever we go when we die, he went there, and conquered it in his own name. Harrowing of Hell - from a 15th century French Book of Hours at the Huntington Library

Death couldn’t hold him any more than heaven or earth could. Holy Saturday makes room in our theology for the death of God, and a God beyond Being, and all the contributions of William Blake and John of the Cross, Hegel and Nietchze, Caputo and Zizek. We are given a time to mourn him and celebrate his life, time for a proper wake, granted an interval to contemplate the horror of life without him, an opportunity to come together and make sense of and respond to what he was on about in life.

It’s a time to allow our perspectives to shift, like Robert DeLong sings about in “Global Concepts.”

After I die, I’ll re-awake,
redefine what was at stake
from the hindsight of a god.

Whether or not you believe Jesus completely grasped the entirety of who he was and what he came to do before he died, it’s quite obvious that his disciples did not. Only in losing him and in his return did they begin to understand the magnitude of what was at stake. Even those who believed he was the Messiah had a limited notion of what that meant before Christ’s death and resurrection. To John’s disciples who wondered if he was the One, he replied “that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Luke 7:22), and to the crowds he wondered aloud, if John’s preaching and my healing can’t do it, what’s it going to take to get you people mourning and dancing? What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed in the wind? A man in soft clothes? A prophet? What will you make of me coming to eat and drink with you?

Did I make money? Was I proud?
Did I play my songs too loud?
Did I leave my life to chance
or did I make you f***ing dance?

Holy Saturday redefines death, life, and power. The dance of the dead is not a sign of futility or defeat, but of completion, hope in more than this life, and victory.

Should I close my eyes and prophesize
Hoping maybe someday come?
Should I wet the ground with my own tears
Crying over what’s been done?

Should I lift the dirt and plant the seed
Even though I’ve never grown?
Should I wet the ground with the sweat from my brow
And believe in my good work?

Hey there, I’m flying up above
Looking down on the tired earth
I can see, I can see potential
Speaking through you, speaking to you
From all of heaven’s possibility

Power, hey, do know how it work?
Hey, do you know that the meek
They shall inherit the earth?
You should work, you should work
Yeah, for the self and the family

Should I hit the water or stay on dry land
Even though I’ve never swam?
Take machete, take them into the brush
Though at first there is no path

Taste the war paint on my tongue
As it’s dripping with my sweat
Place my gaze in the future’s path
Seeing things that ain’t come yet

Hope to watch the victory dance
After the day’s work is done
Hope to watch the victory dance
In the evening’s setting sun

Need more for your playlist? Try Elbow’s “The Night Will Always Win” (imagine Peter and Judas singing that for their various reasons), Dave Matthews’ “The Space Between” and The Waterboys’ “Song for the Life” along with, of course the Dead Can Dance’s eponymous album from way back when for atmosphere. Interestingly enough they put out an album called Anastasis (=resurrection) last year that I’ll be listening to tomorrow.

I’ll close with a poem that leads a great post on the subject of Holy Saturday by Christine Valters Paintner

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you as few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,
My need of God
Absolutely clear.

~ Hafiz

Pantoums

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Despising the Pain: A Pantoum by Jenn Cavanaugh

 

I face death every day

For the joy that is set before me.

Dust returns. Death loses the fray –

The happy end begins the story.

 

For the joy that is set before me

I ride the eternal like a tide.

The happy end begins the story –

We’ll wear our spirits on the outside.

 

I ride the eternal like a tide,

Dizzied and spun, despising the pain.

We’ll wear our spirits on the outside

For the work that is not in vain.

 

Dizzied and spun, despising the pain,

Dust returns. Death loses the fray.

For the work that is not in vain

I face death every day.

Poor blog, doomed respository for my second-tier poems. I post this one as an example to accompany yesterday’s Writers Workshop post on the pantoum form, so you can see what you can get out of working in the form in short order. It’s only the third or fourth one I’ve ever written, and the results still feel blocky, compared to writing in unrhymed free verse. If you get something out of the theme or a phrase, I’m glad. Otherwise, this is what a writing exercise looks like!

So far, the best part of writing pantoums is that they practically write themselves – you put a couple of lines together, give them a flick, and you have a perpetual motion poetry machine. For me, they are line-generators. You put a line in, you get a line out, because the form is going to take you there. To write one that stands up as fine poetry, like the one I’ll leave you with here, I will probably have to give up the rhyme, as she did, make my lines more grammatically creative, and incorporate more narrative detail. A pantoum doesn’t have to tell a story, but the ones that appeal to me most suggest one. Do you have a favorite or one of your own to share?

Stillbirth by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

 

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:

No, Laetitia, no.

It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,

but I rushed in, searching for your face.

 

But no Laetitia. No.

No one in that car could have been you,

but I rushed in, searching for your face:

no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

 

No one in that car could have been you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.

No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:

I sometimes go months without remembering you.

 

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:

I was told not to look. Not to get attached—

I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

 

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.

It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.

Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

Writers Workshop: Pantoum

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Poems that sway like a Malay palm

Poems that sway like a Malay palm

PANTOUM

A pantun is a traditional Malay form of quatrain-based poetry. Victor Hugo introduced it to France in 1829, calling it pantoum. The westernized pantoum descended from a specific form: pantun berkait, which repeats whole lines in an interlocking pattern. The second and fourth lines of any stanza become the first and third lines of the stanza that follows. In the pantoum's last stanza, the first and third lines of the opening stanza are finally repeated as the fourth and second lines. The order of those lines can be reversed, but ideally a pantoum will end with the poem's opening line, creating a kind of circle. Pantoums are not required to rhyme, but most do. They can vary from two stanzas to as many as you wish to write.

Composing a pantoum is a great writing warm-up. You first write a stanza of four lines. The pantoum will work best if the lines are fairly intact, evocative phrases of similar length or rhythm -- each expressing just one basic idea or image that can resonate in different ways when placed in a new context, as they will be throughout the poem. Most of your work in setting the tone and sense goes into laying this foundational stanza, because by the second stanza, you’ll see the poem start to take on a life and significance of its own, while you just follow along or nudge it into shape with an additional line here and there. Allow the wave-like quality of the form to carry you along. Be spontaneous. Allow for happy accidents and juxtapositions. Once you get to the end you’ll probably need to go back and edit a couple of lines to fit into the rhythm that’s developed. This form demonstrates the power of the line. If you have an old poem lying about that isn’t working, but some of the lines are keepers, or an orphaned line running through your head, start a pantoum with one of those lines. This works especially well for couplets that start to sound a bit sing-songy; the pantoum form aerates them – giving breathing space between the rhymes and finding depth in the repetitions. This also works in reverse, as your pantoum might generate one perfect line that starts a whole new piece. Writing a poem in any form is a challenge. Give it what you have today. There might be a glaring hole or clunky line that you know you need to come back to. Start a new project and go back to this one next week when you can hear the poem as a whole with fresh ears and respond accordingly. Getting started is as easy as copying and printing the form below. Stuck for a first line? Scroll down further for some ideas there. Make it rhyme ABAB and it will start writing itself after that.

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 1)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 2)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 3)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 4)

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 2)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 5)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 4)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 6)

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 5)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 7)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 6)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 8)

_________________________________________________________________ (Line 7)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 3)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 8)
_________________________________________________________________ (Line 1)

I find this a very meditative form. The wave-like structure encourages movement in place, like something caught in the tide just off shore. The water churns up deeper layers, but by definition you end up where you began. You swirl around a thought until you come to rest. If you have a phrase, mantra, or story that just won't let you go, maybe it's a pantoum.

When I introduced this form at church for a Lenten devotional writing class, I suggested starting with a biblical phrase...

Ideas for opening lines/ texts: 

“Dust you are and to dust you will return”/ Genesis 3

“Do not put the Lord your God to the test”/ Matthew 4

“[And afterward] I will pour out my spirit on all people”/ Joel 2

“This inheritance is kept in heaven for you”/ 1 Peter 1

“Revive us, and we will call on your name”/ Psalm 80

“You will be like a well-watered garden”/ Isaiah 58

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”/ Philippians 2

“It is written about me in the scroll”/ Hebrews 10

“He loved them to the end”/ John 13

“She has done a beautiful thing to me”/ Matthew 26

Give it a try! I’ll post the results of my writing exercise tomorrow, as well as a much finer example.

To the Tune of “The Lilies of the Covenant:” A Psalm 80 Haibun

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To the Tune of “The Lilies of the Covenant:” A Haibun

by Jenn Cavanaugh

(Yesterday I posted about the haibun form. I wrote this one for our church’s Lenten Devotional to accompany Psalm 80.)

Restore us, O God

make your face shine on us

that we may be saved

– Psalm 80:3

Scripture often compares us to grass, to flowers, to trees. We are plants of the field, of the garden, of the wilds – rambling, bristling roses; burning, flowering bushes; a host of succulents storing water in the driest deserts; swaying oasis palms flagging hidden sources of water; tumbleweeds that mark the sand and frame the next generation of climbing plants. We sprawl through the wilderness toward a land of streams, a land cleared of everything that doesn’t yield fruit.

Consider the vine

without fangs or teeth or arms

it survives nations

The strength of a vine is its tenacity in springing back, in adapting to the place it is planted. The terms of its survival are unconditioned – a mark of the people of the God who preserves and glories in faithful remnants. The vine’s response to being trampled is to renew its grip on the good earth, anchor itself with the buried tendrils, and keep growing. When cut back mercilessly, the broken bits form new shoots. The vine’s long stems are designed to break new ground and cover it, not to stand on their own. One lonely strand epitomizes the frail, but as a whole it establishes itself in heaps, disregards artificial limits, surmounts impediments, drapes itself lightly over inhospitable terrain, and clambers toward the sun at every opportunity.

Photo by CameliaTWU/ Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/cameliatwu/3992092192

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rooted in motion

Runners commit to earth and sky

Morning glory

Writers Workshop: Haibun

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Once or twice a year I’ll put together a guided writing workshop for our adult education time at church. I’ve found that introducing different forms and themes each week limbers us up to experiment with something new and gives us a nudge to get started rather than staring at blank sheets of paper. No one feels the need to write something expert in a form they’ve never encountered before or on a subject they just started thinking about five minutes ago. The writing is fresher, and people are consistently surprised by what they come up with. I think I have enough material to share at this point that I’ll make my intros to these forms and themes into their own “Writers Workshop” category.

The haibun form combines haiku and prose poetry. Originally it was a form of travelogue or journal writing. Writers pause in their poetic narrative or description of an event, person, place, or thing to compose a haiku that captures the emotions of their experience or encounter. The effect is that of a transfer of memory, whether real or imagined. The descriptive narrative evokes the senses with concise, poetic langauge, usually in the present tense, drawing the reader into a dreamy immediacy. The haiku functions to further the narrative or comment on it through summary or juxtaposition. Good haibun, like haiku, favors impressionism over abstraction. Don’t muse about how children grow up and leave us. Tell me about how your hand, now stuffed in a pocket, used to be both colder and warmer holding hers in this park. Then show me the indentation in the grass of the empty nest.

There are many examples to be found at Contemporary Haibun Online, and I’ll post one I wrote tomorrow.

Culling, Cultural Consumption, and the Myth of Eternal Boredom

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I just happened upon “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything”  by Linda Holmes. It struck me as Lenten in tone, in the sense of learning to choose one good thing over another and learning to live in the balance of healthy grief and letting go.

It also fits with what I try to articulate in my book about approaching cultural goods and literacy as a Christian. I’ll pull in some significant quotes, but it’s worth reading here in its entirety.

there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read…. It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

I carry around with me distinct memories of conversations with wonderfully engaged people who decided Christianity was not for them because they deemed heaven boring. If it literally consists of throwing down a single crown then standing around forever in a white robe, I’d have to agree. I think we’ll be free to come and go from the throneroom. I think the new heaven and the new earth will include all the best of the current heaven and earth – anything made with lasting value. The nations will bring their treasures, and we’ll wander the stacks in the Library at Alexandria and the galleries of the Hermitage, hit homers at Wrigley Field, do a little restoration work then catch some improv at the Globe Theatre, kick back at a Chinese movie palace, have falafel with Tolstoy, and meditate in the stone garden of Ryoanji.

I could see Ryoanji becoming one of Augustine’s favorite thinking spots.

Best of all we’ll have the freedom and time to enjoy these places and artifacts in perfect relationship with others and to make more wonders together. And when they inspire us to the classic prayer “Wow,” we’ll know we’re heard and by Whom. Any time someone applauds our efforts, we’ll head back to the throneroom with that spiffy new crown, pausing to play pick-up games of frisbee with it along the way to give others credit where due, toss it in the pile, and sing a spell. The ancient Greeks envisioned a placid eternity without novelty. Jesus comes to make all things new.

What I’ve observed in recent years is that many people, in cultural conversations, are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, “All genre fiction is trash.” You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you’ve thrown out so much at once.

The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don’t talk about rap; it’s not important. Don’t talk about anyone famous; it isn’t important. And by the way, don’t tell me it is important, because that would mean I’m ignoring something important, and that’s … uncomfortable. That’s surrender.

It’s an effort, I think, to make the world smaller and easier to manage, to make the awareness of what we’re missing less painful.

This sort of aggressive culling heightens culture war tensions in the unspoken name of self-protection; we cannot categorically dismiss hip hop or sci-fi or romantic comedy without communicating categorical dismissal of those who identify culturally with the genre. Pretty much anything you can’t be bothered with has changed another person’s life, and the larger that mental category, the truer that statement becomes. This is why I believe that Christians need to learn this balance of being discriminating without being discriminatory. We follow a Savior who came to break down the dividing walls of Jew and Greek, male and female, and so on. Adopting this vocabulary of culling and surrender would be preferable to us slamming entire swaths of culture because we heard somewhere they fail to edify. We could claim our preferences for Pixar over Saw franchises as personal choice rather than holy writ and ascribe our inabilities to enter and understand the worlds of Persian poetry, Japanese anime, and Grey’s Anatomy to our limited human resources of time and attention rather than defensively portraying them as unworthy of them. We can make choices and lament our limitations without making the world artificially small and manageable.

If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.

We’re human. We are always missing relatively everything. Let’s not pretend otherwise. We can celebrate that there is so much to miss, enjoy what we’ve been given, and look forward to more.

A Protestant at Lent

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Stretching Out in Faith

Lent is the season of the Church calendar before Easter. The word itself comes from the Old English meaning “lengthen,” in reference to the lengthening of the days in Spring. The practice of setting aside a time of spiritual preparation before Easter began very early in Church history as most people were baptized and officially joined the Church on Easter. Together they would spend the weeks prior praying, fasting, learning the tenets of the faith, and getting their habits and affairs in line with their new lives in Christ. As the Church grew and became culturally acceptable its leaders began encouraging members to join the acolytes in this process annually, as a way of shaking off the trappings of a merely cultural Christianity (we’re talking 4th century here; this is not a new phenomenon) and rededicating themselves to following Christ together body, soul, mind, and spirit.

Protestants have a hard time figuring out how to handle Lent, because we actually have to figure it out for ourselves. Orthodox and Catholic Christians have more established parameters informing them when to pray and fast and a more coherent structure of spiritual authorities clarifying these parameters as needed. Historically, Protestants have rejected many of these parameters and structures as adding requirements, conditions, and intermediaries to our walk with God where scripture, faith, and Christ Himself should suffice. As a Protestant I appreciate the inclination to unfetter our freedom in Christ and yet I can see how my Christian heritage has cut me off from Christian traditions that are useful, faithful, and ultimately freeing. Statistically fewer of us have grown up on the spectrum between confusion and mortal fear about doing certain things certain days and not others, but we’ve also lost that sense of collective spiritual rhythm and practice. Recently, many Protestants have been trying to reclaim the benefits of a common Church calendar and traditional spiritual practices without the sense of obligation or tying our works too tightly to our hope of salvation. We have lost some of the comfort of community, but gained the advantage of being able to enter these seasons mindfully, intentionally and without a sense of imposition.

Letting God Choose Your Fast

Spiritual disciplines help us learn to control ourselves, but we’re not to be cruel masters. One indicator of whether we control a habit or it controls us is how moderate the habit is. If you watch a couple shows a week as a way to unwind with roommates or family, giving up TV for Lent won’t make you a “better Christian.” But if you feel your prime time drained daily by the tube or there’s a particular show you know is coloring your outlook and language in decidedly un-Christlike ways, give it up and take up a more prayerful habit during the time it frees.  Maybe you sleep too much, maybe not enough. Eating chocolate or drinking wine to celebrate special occasions doesn’t indicate unhealthy use. If you discern that you are using them on a regular basis to stifle your negative thoughts, use this time to break that pattern and take your worries, moods, memories, and pain to God instead.

Write down 3 things that seem like good ideas to you, then draw a couple of blank lines to designate space in which to receive ideas other than your own and pray over the page. Maybe this year Lent will be about cultivating gratitude for what you have and committing to celebrate it daily instead of denying it to yourself. Maybe it will be about living more simply with less stuff or maintaining or organizing what you have to make it functional or useful again. Maybe it will be more about giving generously than giving up. In scripture 40 days is a long, yet finite time. Things shift over the course of 40 days or years in the biblical stories. 40 days is a credible and creditable amount of time to commit to trying on a new habit or changing an old one without it feeling onerously indefinite. What is God nudging you toward? How can you work it deeper into your life in this season?

Epiphanies Part I: How the Light Gets in…

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About twice a year our church’s arts group plans a themed group show. We identify a theme that corresponds to an upcoming liturgical season or sermon series, send out a call for submissions, offer prizes so modest they hesitate to call themselves that, and work with what comes in. If you’re looking for a creative faith-building exercise, I recommend the practice.

Our current show is “Epiphanies,” in which eleven artists and poets reflect on those a-ha moments of connection, recognition, realization, and revelation. Now that it’s all put together, though, a secondary theme seems to be emerging: Cracks. The chorus of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” runs

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

For me this show has become about how the Light gets in and where it settles. Cohen’s chorus has long been a favorite of mine and our friend Matt Whitney alluded to it while he was installing his piece which uses the various textures of sidewalk cracks to form a received word.

"Clairvoyance" by Matthew Whitney

“Clairvoyance” by Matthew Whitney

Next to it we posted a poem of mine in which the tears and fissures that threaten our faith become themselves a source of hope.

                Miss Vera Speaks
They ask how she grin through that face with that life.
I say I’s never shielded from nothing
‘Cept dying young.

 

People deep bruised by something
Talk like the world should end.
Won’t catch me dying every day like that.

 

‘Cause I seen them once
Just once – the cracks in the universe –
Thought I’d fall right through.

 

‘Stead I laughed – said some kind of God
Put up with a tattered-old place as here
Gotta have some grace for me.
 –      Jenn Cavanaugh
(originally published in America Magazine in 2007)

When it comes to hanging these shows, we often find ourselves strategizing about how best to disguise the myriad holes, blemishes, and outright failings in sanctuary plaster. At the artist reception on Sunday I was joking about how the condition of the walls was starting to inform our artistic decisions overmuch, and a few of us got looking at this tableau:

Noyes Epiphanies Cracks

Photo by Elizabeth W. Noyes. “She Crawled Like You Out of the Wreckage” by Carrie Redway. “Swarm” by Robroy Chalmers. “Wall” by Church + Use + Time

This patch of wall we’re usually so anxious to conceal became part of this piece by Carrie Redway about the Fall and Eve’s anguished banishment from Eden and of the permanent installation by Robroy Chalmers that speaks to our congregation so eloquently and wordlessly of the Spirit’s movement in our midst. Our church building has been in continuous use since 1923. That wall has come by its imperfection honestly. Why hide it? Why not let it inform our artistic decisions?

More next week…