Passiontide

We used to call the last two weeks of Lent Passiontide--today, the 5th Sunday in Lent, would mark the beginning of Passiontide, which would last through Holy Saturday.






In these days of compression and short attention spans, many churches celebrate all of Holy Week on what once would be called Palm Sunday.






I yearn for a return to the old ways, when crosses would be draped in black or purple for these last two weeks of Lent.






I want to slow down, to savor this season, the austerity of it, the Lenten practices which give our days a discipline.






I want to take time to ponder this Lenten journey from ash








to resurrection.






I want to take my lesson from the monks and others who call us to the old ways, who remind us that those ways still have much to teach us.

This morning, I'm wondering how our experience of Holy Week might change if we stretched it out, rather than trying to contain it all into one Sunday morning. Two weeks to spend with one of the central events of our faith: how might we change?

A Look Back at Create in Me 2018: Day 1

A year ago, the Create in Me retreat would be waking up to our first full day at camp.  I never really posted the wide variety of pictures that I took, so let me do so today.

We began our Bible study with Kevin Strickland. 

When I look over my notes, I don't see the specific Bible verse we studied on this day in 2018, but I did find some interesting nuggets:  Luke was written at the same time as Matthew (80-85 CE).  Luke has more women doing ministry than any other gospel, but John has more named women.  More than any other Gospel, Luke looks out for the Other.  It's in Luke where we get the inn and no room for a stranger (the Christmas story).

After Bible study, we had our workshops for the day.  Workshops give us time to learn something in a more focused way than the drop-in stations; workshops have at least one leader for a guide.  On the first day of the retreat, we could learn about decorating eggs

and dying them after the wax application:

baking bread

(which would later be used for communion)

essential oils

knitting

and a non-craft presentation on immigration (it fit with the hospitality theme of the retreat):

After lunch, we did some worship preparation.  I am always amazed that a group of people can arrive and put together an amazing worship service with so little time and resources.  Of course, we're a group of creative people, so I shouldn't be surprised.

All afternoon, the drop in stations were open.  I won't try to catalog those here--we usually have 12-15 stations, with a variety of activities for a variety of skill levels. 

We also had a community art project:

Everyone was invited to create a place setting--what a fascinating collection by the end of the week-end!  The tags could be used to give information about what hospitality meant to us.  Many people remembered tables and settings that were most hospitable, but some recounted painful memories of exclusion.

After dinner, we had a wonderful worship service:

We ended with time to go back to drop in stations or head off for some private time.

Yes, it was a great retreat.  If these pictures whet your appetite, you could join us the Thursday to Sunday after Easter.  The retreat will be at Lutheridge, a wonderful camp near Asheville, North Carolina.  Go here for more information about the camp and the retreat.

Stony the Road

Yesterday I listened to this wonderful conversation with Henry Louis Gates on NPR's Fresh Air.  He's just published a book, Stony the Road, which explores the time after Reconstruction and how the newly acquired rights of freed slaves were taken away again--in short, it's about the birth of the white supremacist movement that's with us today.

While the whole interview is wonderful, I bring our collective attention to it because at minute 17:06, Gates sings the 4th verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing."  It's the verse that gives the title for the book, and Terry Gross asks Gates if he can quote it.  He says, "You want me to sing it?"  It was an unexpected blessing.

I was so moved that I hollered for my spouse so that he could listen too.  I am tempted to listen to it every morning.

It's a moving song, just on its face.  Gates reminded us of how we came to have this song:

"Well, this song was written to inspire young black children at a time when there was nothing on the horizon that was inspirational, nothing that would make black people think that the rights our people had been given by the amended Constitution in the 13th, the 14th, and 15th Amendments would ever come back because starting in 1890, those rights had been chipped away by the Redemption governments in the former Confederacy.

So that - the fact that our people never gave up hope, that we never stopped believing that a better day was coming and that if we worked hard enough and prayed hard enough and believed deeply enough, that one day the glories that we saw in Reconstruction would return. And hope against hope, that's what happened."

What a treasure--both the song itself and the willingness of Gates to sing it for us.

At a Lenten Journaling Workshop: Midway Through

A week ago, I was out of town, so our church's Lenten Journaling Workshop didn't meet.  Last night, we met again and did some thinking about parables--although we might not have always known we were thinking about parables!

First, I handed out 4 slips of paper in different colors. Each person had all four colors. On the green slip, we wrote a natural object. On the lavender sheet, we wrote an action or a verb. On the ivory sheet, we wrote a tool. On the salmon colored slip, we wrote an arts and crafts supply or medium.

Then we pulled slips of paper out of a box. We ended up with these words:

sunset
throw
pen
watercolor painting

We wrote/sketched/pondered for 10 minutes with the prompt to write and to use these words as we thought about what God is like.

Then I read Matthew 13: 24-35, which contains two parables where Jesus tries to explain what the kingdom of God/heaven is like. We talked about how the word "kingdom" might mean something different than "heaven," which is a common translation. What might it mean? Perhaps the world as God conceives it.

We then pulled all the slips out of the box:

Ivory:
drill
drill
pen


Green:
pine tree
river reeds
sunset


lavender:
throw
sharing
dance


salmon:
watercolor painting
embroidery thread
brushes


We then took another 10 minutes to write/draw/respond to create parables of our own. The last thing we did was to try transforming our ideas into haiku. You may or may not remember that haiku is a 3 line structure. The first line has 5 syllables, the second has 12 syllables, and the 3rd line has 5 syllables. Haiku specialists would want me to tell you that there's much more to haiku than the structure, so now I have.

We took some time at the end to read what we wrote, if we wanted, or to discuss our approach.

We talked about why Jesus would teach in parables. I think it's to shock us out of our complacency--Jesus uses some bizarre comparisons to explain God. For example, yeast would be seen as something that pollutes perfectly good bread dough. It would be as if I said, "The Kingdom of God is like mold that takes over your bathroom when you're away on vacation and the AC stops working."

We talked about haiku and the value of condensing ideas into just a few syllables. And then it was time to go.

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, April 5, 2019:

First Reading: Isaiah 43:16-21

Psalm: Psalm 126

Second Reading: Philippians 3:4b-14

Gospel: John 12:1-8

I've always had some amount of trouble with this Gospel; I suspect it's because I would have been that disciple who said, "Just think what we could have done with the money that went to buy that expensive oil. Doesn't Jesus know the electric bill is due? We could have helped the poor. And she went and poured it all over his feet!"

I know that traditionally we use this Gospel lesson to make us think forward a few weeks to Good Friday, when Jesus' dead body will be anointed with funeral oils. But there's still something about this Gospel that makes me restless.

Perhaps it is Jesus saying, "The poor you will always have with you." I'm uneasy with the way so many people through the centuries have used this line to justify their unwillingness to work to eradicate poverty. A shrug of the shoulders, that verse out of context, and poof, we don't have to worry about our riches.

I've been trying to sit with this passage in a different context, in the context of the whole Gospel of John. Jesus says that the poor we'll always have with us, but we won't always have Jesus (at least not in human form). I'm trying to see it as Jesus telling us that we must treasure the moments in life that are sweet. Did Jesus know what was about to happen to him? Different theologians would give you different answers, but even if Jesus didn't know all the particulars of his upcoming execution, he must have known that he was stirring up all sorts of worldly trouble for himself. He must have known that he wouldn't have had many more of these occasions to sit and savor a meal.

I'm sure he's also speaking towards our impulse towards anger and self-righteousness. I can criticize the decisions of others in how they spend their money and what they should be spending their money on ("Imagine. She calls herself a Christian and she goes to get her nails done. She could do them herself at home and send the money she would have spent to Habitat for Humanity"). It's not always easy for me to know how to allocate my resources of time, treasure, and energy.

Truth be told, I find it easier to work on many a spiritual discipline than to sit and savor a meal with those whom I love, the ones, whom, like Jesus, I won't always have with me. I find it frighteningly easy to slide into the behavior of the disciples, that self-righteousness which precludes being able to enjoy a meal together.

In these days that feel increasingly hectic, let us remember to take time to focus on what's truly important. Let us put aside the anger and judgment that can make it so hard to live in community. Let us take the time that it takes to break bread together.

Enhance Your Spiritual Practice with Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and I've always recommended a poetry practice to enrich one's spiritual practice. Why write poetry?

--Many of our sacred texts are written in a variety of poetic forms. Experimenting with writing poetry of our own can enhance our appreciation of the poetry of these texts.

--Much of the teaching of Jesus comes to us as something ambiguous, like a poem.  Think about various parables that tell us what God is like--a woman searching for a lost coin, a father with two sons who are lost in profound ways.  Writing poetry helps us move away from literal readings and gets our brain into a mode where we might better understand this kind of teaching.

--Writing poetry can enhance our powers of observation, which will enhance our feelings of gratitude and praise for our creator. I could make this case about other art forms too.

--If we're experimenting with poetry, it takes less time than some other art forms, like say, writing a novel or painting a huge mural. But the payoffs can be much greater than the investment of time would lead one to believe.

How to get started? Let's begin at the beginning, with the simple line. I'll give you some prompts, and you fill in the blank.

The creator is like __________________________.

I am a creation, the same as __________________________.

All of my being sings a song of __________________________.

_________________________ best represents my future.

Here's another exercise. Choose a color and then do the following prompt:

--list 5 shades of this color.

--list your 3 favorite things that are this color.

--this color represents what mood?

--what's a song that uses this color?

--what aspect of God does this color represent?

You may have a poem right there, hiding in plain sight in your answers.

Be Your Best Teacher, Not Your Ideal Teacher

At some point, I may go through my AWP notes in hopes of capturing those things which seem worth remembering.  I go back through my blog more often than I go through my travel notebooks, because it's more searchable.  I suppose I could have lugged my laptop everywhere, but it's much easier for me to take notes by hand.

Part of me wonders why I'm taking these notes.  In part, it's a way of paying attention.  In part, because those things I note seem worth it at the time.  I looked through the notes I took at last year's AWP, and I enjoyed the memories as I read through them, but didn't find much of the material speaking to me a year later.  Hmm.

I talked about blogging with a fellow conference attendee on the plane ride back.  She gave me several quizzical looks as we chatted while the plane was descending to the Dallas airport.  I said that I didn't realize Portland was such a big city--that quirked eyebrow was deserved.  But when I said I blogged, she said she had kept a blog once, but didn't write anymore.  She said it seemed like such a chore, that daily writing.

I realized as we chatted that I keep this blog for all sorts of reasons.  It's become a repository of all sorts of things, and it's more searchable than my written notebooks.

Today instead of looking back over my notes, let me capture here the one tidbit that was so memorable that I don't need my notebook to remember.  As I've moved through the conference, one person's advice stuck with me.  At a panel about achieving balance between doing one's own writing and helping student writers, one woman said, "Don't be the teacher you always wished you had.  That's a way to insanity.  Instead, think of a good teacher that you had in real life and try to be that person."

It seemed like a great way of capturing the way that many of us set impossible standards for ourselves, and then beat ourselves up for not ever living up to them.  It seems applicable across many of life's situations:  the way we think we should be more spiritually evolved, our relationships with each other, on and on I could go.

Another note about that panel--they were refreshingly honest about how much of the drudgery work they have outsourced, like the cleaning of the house and the lawn work.

Now it's back to that regular life--so much work I haven't yet outsourced and so much of it that can't be outsourced.  I need to go to spin class and then work.

But before that, let me also capture the wonder of the geography of this country as seen from the air.  Yesterday I saw both Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helen's.  I gasped when I saw Mt. St. Helen's, that snowy peak stuck on a green landscape, and then later Mt. Hood.

And then we were over the mountains, seeing that vast dry landscape, and then more mountains, which I assume must have been New Mexico.  I thought about how amazing it was that people made their way across that landscape, on horses or in covered wagons.  There's so little water visible from the air.  And the land looks treacherous, even from above--or do I think that, just because I know the history of those settlers?

Interesting to see the mountains and rivers from the air, those places I've read so much about, those places that have shaped my imagination--and the larger country too.

And now, back to more mundane things:  spin class and then work, where a new term awaits.  Welcome Spring quarter!