Peace, Fathermom

September 30, 2011
Get Outside Yourselves

By Tom Ehrich

Take this as both true and profoundly challenging: Your congregation’s future lies outside itself.

Instead of spending so much time and money trying to serve present members, you need to be seeking new constituents. It’s a numbers thing: with an average age of 60 to 65, you will be out of business soon if you don’t drive your population younger by recruiting the new. It’s also a Gospel thing: faith communities exist to serve others, not themselves.

Instead of making worship better and better, you need to be finding fresh ways to reach and respond to those for whom worship is of little interest.

Instead of surveying present constituents to see what they want, you need to be listening to your larger community and naming the needs, yearnings, hurts and hangups out there. If you truly see your members as ministers, then you need to stop seeing them as consumers of religious goods and services. Instead, deploy them as agents of the Gospel outside the church walls.

Instead of trying to soothe the prickly, send them out into a world of flood and famine, economic injustice and mounting rage, and help them to see actual suffering.

On average, after 46 years of relentless decline, mainline churches have at most five years of life expectancy. If you spend that time perfecting your common life, your church will die. Plain and simple.

The typical mainline church needs to triple its constituency. Not just add a few like-minded souls, but add dozens and hundreds of people who almost surely will be different from you.

Those people won’t be walking in your front door on Sunday. They don’t even know you exist. You need to touch their lives – go where they are, respond to their needs, stop seeing prospects as guarantors of your institutional survival.

Instead of seeing people out there as “unchurched,” and therefore needing to be fixed, see them as God’s beloved from whom you have much to learn. Don’t be surprised if they are already serving God, praying to God, knowing God, without benefit of church life.

Instead of demanding that our clergy devote constant attention to us, we should ask them to lead us out into the community. We need them to be entrepreneurs, visionaries, builders of bridges, who hear the joys and sorrows of the world and imagine ways we can make a difference.

In short, we have got to get outside ourselves, stop focusing so much on our own comforts and desires, and start doing what Jesus did. This will be profoundly challenging. It won’t feel natural or right. Many will cry, “What about me? What about my needs?” Our congregations have little experience in saying to people, “This church isn’t about you. It’s about the people out there whom God is trying to reach.” We have much to learn.

Can we do this in time? Not unless we pick up the pace. Your budget for 2012 should focus entirely on growing your congregation. Anything that doesn’t contribute to growth needs to be examined. Your plans for ministry need to focus on touching more lives.

This isn’t craven commercialism. This is serious Gospel business. This is what Jesus intended for us to do. The small groups and house churches that growth will require are exactly what Jesus formed. The giving away of wealth and privilege that growth will require is the ethical heart of the Gospel. The dying to self and living for others is what Jesus said to do if we want to live. The building of bridges to people unlike ourselves is what Jesus died for.

I have come to believe that one of the most difficult and necessary things God calls us to do is to welcome others into our midst. Although it might seem counter-intuitive or even blasphemous to say, this is especially difficult in the church. One experienced priest explains the difficulty this way:

“In the parish…we may be constantly rubbing elbows with people…we would not normally choose as friends….We do not get to pick out who we will encounter….We work with whoever is put in our path. Most of those people are delightful, and not much needs to be said about the benefit of working with them. We enjoy what they offer us, as they expand our horizons and teach us to see things in a new way. This is one of the real joys of community life.

“There are also always a few difficult members of the parish. They are also our teachers. Those who are emotionally unhealthy or irritating force us to take seriously the teachings of Christ. Through them we learn how to love unconditionally, and also how to stand firm and set needed boundaries with kindness. They push our buttons, and thereby reveal to us uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Others are difficult for us because they think differently about the faith than we do; they force us to become clearer about what we believe, and teach us the value and possibility of living respectfully with our differences.

“There is a story about the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff, whose community suffered long with a particularly obnoxious member and eventually pressured him to leave. It is said that Gurdjieff chased after him until he found him in a nearby town, begging him to return, because of the way the community kept learning from his presence….The church is not perfect, but like the ‘good enough’ parent, a phrase coined by the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, often the parish community is good and healthy enough” (Brian Taylor, Becoming Christ: Transformation Through Contemplation, pp. 100-101).

That’s a question for all faith communities to consider: When it comes to welcoming others, how “good enough” or healthy is my church or your church? Is it healthy enough? If not, what might we do about it?

Peace,
fathermom

Some hard-to-hear headlines over the past week: “Disapproval Rate for Congress at Record 86%” and “Gulf Between Political Parties Reduces Standard and Poor’s Confidence.” Our financial stress ebbs and flows from what feels like an endless tidal wave of the countless consequences of bad behaviors. Is our national budget mess simply the result of our elected leaders’ immaturity? Although able, they often seem neither ready nor willing to grow up. We have come to trust leaders of all our institutions – not just those in government, but that’s an obvious place to start – a whole lot less lately. Their antics remind us of the kinds of things that we (some of us, anyway) used to do in high school. A former religion writer for the Washington Post reported that he left the District in part because “in Washington, it’s not the heat….It’s the humility. I haven’t been in a place with so many people clamoring for attention since junior high.”

When psychologist Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ in 1995, it became a classic. The first in a series of books on different kinds of intelligence, Goleman based “EI” on what was back then ground-breaking brain and behavioral science research. Essentially, he redefined what it means to be socially smart. By the time he published his next book, Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead With Emotional Intelligence (2002), Goleman had created four simple categories for measuring leaders’ (and followers’) competence, through his “EI” lens:

Self-awareness
Self-management
Social awareness
Social management

Let’s say that, in a meeting with a group of other people, you demand I change my behavior. Your demand triggers my anger. Questions that might emerge for me are:

How do I know I’m angry (self-awareness)?
What will I do right now with my anger (self-management)?
How is the rest of the group responding in this moment (social awareness)?
How might my response affect others, as well as the group (social management)?

Goleman dared conclude that, when it comes to one’s overall success in life, E.Q. (emotional quotient) is usually a better predictor than I.Q. He also quotes these ancient words from the philosopher Aristotle: Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, for the right purpose and for the right way – this is not easy.

When we become angry in the right ways (religious tradition would call this righteous anger), we are, in Goleman’s lingo, exercising our emotional intelligence. Of course, anger is just one of our feeling responses. Sadness, fear, even joy can also emerge from challenges or confrontations. “EI” implies we know what we’re feeling.

“Intelligence” is taken from the Latin verb intelligere, which means to choose or to discern. When we try to discern our truth in matters that matter to us, we are seeking to use our hearts and minds wisely – in ways, I believe, God intended. With God’s help, we learn, understand, reason and then communicate things more intelligently. But how much more intelligent do we really want to be? How ready, willing and able am I to look at myself and my own behavior before I critique someone else’s? And even when I have learned how to pass the “ready, willing and able” test, will I do that again – and again?

In the church our time, energy and other resources are readily spent on what we might call spiritual or religious intelligence. But how much of an investment are we as people of faith willing to make in other kinds of wisdom and discernment? How might God also want us to use our emotional intelligence?

The New York Times Magazine recently carried an essay entitled “Geekdom Revisited: Was junior high really all that bad?” The writer, now a published author and happily married mother, describes her painful experience of being bullied by a male classmate in her teen years. Nowadays she feels “magnanimous, secure, and pretty,” and she longs to show that guy just how well she has done since eighth grade. So she screws up her courage and “friends” her old bully on Facebook. Several weeks pass. He does not respond. Eventually she deletes her “FB” request. “And there I am again,” she says candidly, “the 12-year-old girl who can’t look herself in the mirror.”

Whether parent or president, child or adult, it’s hard to be a “grown up,” to be a mature adult, let alone a mature adult Christian, day after day after day. It’s the hardest work we’ll ever choose to do. Actually Christians don’t have to like doing the work of “growing up into…Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). We just need to do it. The good news is that, if we want to be more intelligent, help is available. We just have to ask others, especially the Holy Other, for help, and stop insisting we can do things all by ourselves.

Emotional intelligence is about questions: How ready, willing and able am I to look at myself? A mature adult will make the time and effort daily to look at the man or the woman in the mirror. A mature adult of faith sees a reflection of an imperfect imago Dei, a very human image of God, a real human being. And mature Christian adults who want to journey with Jesus will love the person they see in that mirror – and won’t hesitate to ask others for help. Every day I try to ask myself these questions. Some days I do better with these questions than others. My prayer is that, together and with God’s help, we keep asking these questions, growing more fully into the full stature of Christ.

My children make me proud to be their Papa. As they live into their young adult lives, each of them seems to be listening to their hearts, and they have each found good companions for their journey into adulthood. They inspire me. But there are moments.

One of those moments during my son’s high school years was the day I had to go to the principal’s office about something he was doing in class: winning every argument. Even his teachers said they lost their debates with him. There was a part of me – I’ll call it my “inner father” – that whispered, “YES! All RIGHT! You GO, son!” Debate is an art, and while I’m not as good at it as I’d like to be, he was perfecting some kind of gift he had been given, at a time in his life when, everywhere he turned, the multi-media of messages told my teenage son how imperfect and inadequate he was. So there he was, trying not to mislead others with his silence, speaking his truth in the best way he knew how. It’s just that…he didn’t know when and how to restrain himself. Not just yet.

A memorable moment in his stewardship of debate took place in a more public performance. The annual Gay Pride parade had come to town, and a group now known for picketing military funerals – who are, I would argue, still stuck, all these years later, in their own version of adolescence – was standing on the sidewalk. A dozen or so protesting adults were joined by teenagers and a few small children. One boy held a sign that said, “God’s Hate is Great.” My son approached that boy and said something like, “You know, you don’t have to believe or say what your parents believe or say. You can be different.” The angry adults standing near that boy and my son began to catch on to what was perhaps my son’s finest, most purely unrestrained behavior. They came toward him, wielding their signs, and he walked away.

More than a decade has passed since that day. My son has begun to learn when and how to back off. He has been learning that proper restraint, practiced over time, can also be a powerful way to change lives. He and I are alike, because we are both lifelong students. We both still have some things to learn about restraint before we grow up.

As grown-up citizens of a democracy and especially as mature people of faith, we need to keep learning when to speak and when to fall silent, especially in times of stress and transition in our lives. A longtime spiritual teacher of mine puts it this way:

“If I were asked for two words to summarize the habits of the heart American citizens need in response to twenty-first century conditions, chutzpah and humility are the words I would choose. By chutzpah I mean knowing that I have a voice that needs to be heard and the right to speak it. By humility I mean accepting the fact that my truth is always partial and may not be true at all – so I need to listen with openness and respect, especially to” the other,” as much as I need to speak my own voice with clarity and conviction. Humility plus chutzpah equals the kind of citizens a democracy needs. There is no reason, at least no good reason, why our number cannot be legion.”
(an excerpt from Healing the Heart of Democracy:
A Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. © 2011 Parker J. Palmer)

One way recovering alcoholics practice humility is through the “restraint of pen and tongue.” This is, of course, a spiritual practice from which we can all benefit. Exercising restraint – trying to be humble, truly listening with respect – is a way to create more life and health, as citizens and believers. Isn’t that what we truly want?

I have come to believe that the true measure of health in a family or a church, not to mention a country, is the degree to which that community or family will tolerate outrageous behaviors. For example, in healthy families, parents are not afraid to set appropriate boundaries for their children. No parent in her or his right mind would allow a toddler to play in the street, eat candy for breakfast, or look at pornography. Likewise, the healthier a church gets, the less tolerant people become of someone who “acts out” their unreflective, unrestrained, adolescent anger. “Work it out, or you’ll act it out” is a simple way to remember this truth.

As a parish priest, I participate in countless conversations. I read a lot of what people write. More and more I hear and see what I believe must be named as outrageous, sometimes death-dealing “language behaviors.” These categories of UN-restrained pen and tongue are things like: letters or blogs, sometimes anonymous, that demand the removal of a leader; angry e-mails, forwarded to innocent parties without anyone’s permission; damaging rumors or innuendoes, injudiciously, insensitively or unconsciously spread. More and more of us have become the object of some or all of these behaviors. More and more, in our 21st century wireless, connected world, it is hard for us not to fall into an occasional, unrestrained rant. (Or at least some whining. I love this light-hearted response to whining: “Would you like some cheese with that whine?”)

Today and every day, we need to ask God to help us “grow into the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). We need to learn “the wisdom to know the difference” between chutzpah and humility. Will you help me with this work? Won’t you join me?

In her prize-wining novel “Gilead” Marilynne Robinson tells the story of fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that rage in their hearts, battles that can also exist in our hearts, even in the heart of a church. In the words of three generations of Congregationalist (now called UCC) family members, she writes:

“In a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however, that they had buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it.

They had a particular way of addressing each other when the old bitterness was about to flare up. ‘Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?’ my father would ask.

And his father would say, ‘No, Reverend, you have not offended me in any way at all. Not at all.’ And my mother would say, ‘Now, don’t you two get started.’”

Today, in a culture where Republicans and Democrats are seen as too stubborn to resolves their differences (this time, it’s the budget), I long for that kind of resolution. But is resolution of differences, not to mention reconciliation, actually possible? And if it is, just what, I wonder, will it take? What will it take for our country or our churches or our families to “get to yes” – if not agreement, then at least some kind of mutual respect for one another, as children of God?

Families are the best place to start with resolving differences respectfully, and yet, as Marilynne Robinson reminds us, we really don’t want to get started. You see, if we got started, we would have to change the way we relate to each other – parent to child, sibling to sibling. If we got started, if we began to practice ways of expressing with respect how we think and feel about issues that matter to us, especially issues of the heart, we would have to live our lives differently. If we got started, we would have to learn to say to our loved ones things like, “When you said that, it hurt my feelings. When you did that, it made me angry. May I tell you why?” And they would listen, truly listen to us. And we would listen, truly listen to them. And surely, God would smile on us all.

I long for the day when the phrase “burying the hatchet” does not mean someone is thinking half-way seriously about burying that hatchet in someone else. I long for the day when I can more easily, more honestly and more safely express my thoughts and feelings. Life is too short, and as person and priest, I long for kinds of behavior that are life-giving, rather than death-dealing.

Getting started is, I believe, exactly what families – including church families in transition – need to do. But how do we do that? How do we start to get started, so we can live together in something that resembles harmony more than discord? What are the “baby steps” on a spiritual journey to reconciliation?

At the church I serve we’re starting to get started in some weekly, 30-minute informal sessions called “God is Doing a New Thing: Transitions at All Saints.” Through Sunday, August 29, after the 8 am and 6 pm services, feel free to join us upstairs in the Parish Hall for some good, healthy conversation. Or just come, sit and listen, truly listen.

At one of last week’s sessions we “got started.” Someone took a risk and expressed some anger at a church leader, in an honest, respectful way. I was not the leader, but even if I had been, I would still applaud that person’s courage, as I did. In the words this church member spoke, there was no hint of revenge or resentment. There was simply the speaking of one’s truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). I think I can safely say that the courageous person who spoke did not go to bed angry. I’ll go even further: God rested a bit better last Sunday night, as well.

- Isaiah 43:19

During the six years I served a large church as the associate pastor for pastoral care, there was one month when I began to wonder if God had it “in” for me and the good people of that parish.  In less than thirty days there were sixteen deaths and funerals.  Not surprisingly, that congregation’s grief was deep and palpable.  As did the Psalmist, we kept on praying, “How long, O Lord?”

In the aftermath of all that death, I came to see that I had been fortunate to have served other churches that had suffered some significant loss and transition.  Unexpectedly, I had been prepared over those earlier years for what now, amidst all that death, seemed like a tsunami of grief.  Congregations weather their stormy seasons, but not without getting in touch from time to time with the fact that, both as individuals and in community, death must always be a part of life.  At each celebration of the Holy Eucharist Christians first confess that “Christ has died” before we claim that “Christ is risen.”

In her bestselling book Praying Our Goodbyes, spiritual guide Joyce Rupp suggests that, before Christians can become Easter people, we must own up to the fact that we are also, like our Jewish sisters and brothers, people of the Exodus.  There is no Good News without bad news first, and the bad news for those who will get to their Promised Land is that they will first have to go through a land in which promises seem nowhere to be found.  This is no less true for 21^st century people of faith or faith communities than it was for the people who lived and died before Jesus was even born.

In the time of that first Exodus, the Israelites became discouraged over and over again.  Israel’s God defeated Egypt’s Pharaoh, but the Israelites wanted to give up and go back to Egypt, even after they were delivered from death at the Red Sea.  God made a way, first through the sea, and then, again in Isaiah’s time, God made a way in the wilderness.  God made another wilderness way when Jesus was tempted for forty days.  And God keeps it up, making a way through water or wilderness, every single day.  It’s just that, even though we might believe God is with us and makes a way for us, sometimes we just can’t find our way, because our grief is too great.  And when several of our friends leave our lives or our church, whatever the circumstances, it can feel like death.

Do we believe that God will make a new way and do a new thing?  And if we do believe it, how will we live our lives differently?  More than a decade ago, someone made this simple statement about a death-like moment in her life.  Facing the end of her marriage, she could have given into what felt, at several levels, like death.  Instead she said, “I’ve decided to live my life differently.”

In the congregation I now serve, we suddenly find ourselves in a new season of unsettling transition.  Clergy are departing.  A capital campaign is coming to an official end.  And the schedule of weekend worship has changed again for the summer.  Taken together this feels like a sea change to some, while to others it is a chance for them and for their church to live life differently.  Most folks are probably somewhere in the middle.

Here’s what the New Interpreter’s Bible, a standard commentary and sermon help for many clergy, has to say about Isaiah 43:19: “I am about to do a new thing signals the freshness of God’s ways and the continual possibility of a sudden, unexpected turn of fortune….The challenge for the church is to remain open to the radical freedom of God to ‘do a new thing,’ yet fully within the context of prior divine activity” (p. 382).

My prayer for my church and for all those who walk with God in faith is that, based on God’s prior activity, we trust God’s promise found in the words of Jesus: “I will not leave you desolate…comfortless…orphaned…”(John 14:18).  In fact Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will come both to comfort and challenge us, to do that new thing God promises, to help us live our lives differently.  I pray that, empowered by the Spirit of God, we make that decision today: to let God make a way in our lives, to let God’s new thing spring forth, in our churches and in us.

“Follow me.”
- Jesus, throughout the Gospels

“Home is where the heart is.”
- unknown

“Here’s a question you’ll want to ask,” she said, when I was discerning whether I might be called to be rector of a parish. “Is my new bishop in a castle, or on a journey?” Bishops and baristas, doctors and dancers, each of us is faced with that ageless dilemma. Am I willing to embark on an authentic spiritual journey today, or am I guarding myself against the threat of what I have not yet seen or don’t yet know of God?

“How appropriate,” Brian McLaren says in Finding Our Way Again, “that the three Abrahamic religions begin with a journey into the unknown. It might be said that ever since, each religion has been at its best when it is on a journey, not settled on the throne of power at the capital city of Empire, but walking intrepid on a path of exploration to the margins of Empire, then beyond” (p. 23).

Power is what my friend, a bishop on her own journey, was referring to when she posed that question. “Tom,” she coninued, “it’s always all about power.” Corrupted power – sometimes known as empire – is one thing, but what about the spiritual power of home? Isn’t that important, too? What about “a man’s house is his castle?” What’s wrong with having a safe place for those who gather, as well as hunt? Isn’t it OK to be a spiritual settler, not a pioneer? Can’t I be a faithful Christian, Jew or Muslim rooted in one place, for a long, long time?

During my six decades of life I have called many places home. This sabbatical has returned me to a number of them. I’ve logged more than 5,000 miles since May 15. It’s a long drive from Maryland to Memphis and back, especially when you go through Wisconsin! In the past seven weeks I have seen and spent time with my wife, my daughter, my teacher, members of my extended family and many of my dear friends, including those from my family’s church, where my sisters and I joined my widowed dad in “our pew” to worship God together on Father’s Day. “It’s good to be home,” I said, when folks in Memphis welcomed me. Home is where the heart, not the address, is.
There is significant bias in our worlds, religious and otherwise, toward the one who takes a journey. “It’s the journey, not the destination.” I have come to believe that it’s both. Dualistic thinking, which seems so hard to change, always ends up with “it’s this, not that,” “either-or.” I don’t mean to question the wisdom of bishops or doctors, but my inner wisdom keeps telling me that life is not just about the journey. The destination is just as important, perhaps more so. So are gatherers and settlers. Homebodies are not nobodies, at least not to God.

That’s why I think McLaren uses the right word when he describes the “both-and” nature of the spiritual life. Pilgrimage is both the journey we choose to take and the destination we seek, which may be home. “People of faith have periodically interrupted their normal lives with an intentional experience of discomfort, dislocation and intensity, a kind of re-enactment of the original journey of Abraham, by engaging in voluntary pilgrimage.” Pilgrims interrupt “their normal orientations – their familiar sights and sounds of daily life – by seeking the new, unknown places God will show them” (ibid., p. 24). I have experienced the both-and-ness of Christian pilgrimage in interruptions and disorientations, known and unknown, in all kinds of sacred spaces and places. My homes are both internal and external, my journeys both inward and outward.

Whether our pilgrimage takes us on a labyrinth walk at a retreat center or a walk around the neighborhood, a trip overseas or downtown, a visit to Graceland or to a grace-filled community of faith, there will be interruptions – if we allow them, sometimes even when we don’t. As followers of Jesus, we will, if we pay attention, become disoriented with opportunities for spiritual growth. How could I predict that, in addition to visiting a new friend in a state I’ve never inhabited, I would suddenly know deep healing and reconciliation by finding, at a Tennessee conference, an old friend I had not seen since our Kansas days? How could I have planned going to worship in that old church where I was confirmed fifty years ago, only to find newer clergy friends who also call that church and Ohio home? We can’t make this stuff up! But God does, all the time.

Before I left on sabbatical another wise friend wondered with me whether I had ever truly left Memphis. There is a way in which Memphis will always be my home. But I have several homes, including one in Maryland. Parts of my heart remain in several places across the country. We 21st century pilgrims need more than one spiritual home, more than one sacred space, more than one place in which to heal our hearts and rest our bones. I’m grateful to call all of my homes home, for I know my pilgrimage is not complete. I still need safe places to go, where friends take me in, before I resume my pilgrimage again. – Peace, Tom

“To everything, turn, turn, turn,
there is a season, turn, turn, turn…”
- Pete Seeger, based on Ecclesiastes 3:1

[During my sabbatical I have been reflecting on seven practices for spiritual growth, common to all three Abrahamic traditions. Jews, Christians and Muslims share these ancient paths to God, which are the basis for Brian McLaren’s book “Finding Our Way Again.” I’ve asked folks at the church I serve to read that book this summer. I believe the seven practices found in McLaren’s book are so important, so useful that I have also been blogging about them during this time. The first entries were about Sabbath, Prayer, Fasting, Feasting and Giving. This, the sixth, is about “Seasons.”]

I began writing this entry on the day of summer solstice (this year it was at 1:16 pm EDT, June 21). “Solstice” is rooted in Latin words that suggest the sun stands still. In elementary school I learned how solstices in both summer and winter, along with autumnal (fall) and vernal (spring) equinoxes, mark the start of nature’s seasons. On summer solstice there is, at least in this part of the world, more daylight than at any other time of year. I still hold close an early childhood memory of getting to stay up late enough to see the sun go down on the longest day of the year.

In celebration of this particular transition of seasons, I attended a gathering hosted by Philip, a pastor now serving in a Memphis church. He invited me to join his staff and significant others for an official solstice party. You might ask, What? Hasn’t the summer arrived, weeks ago? What about all this heat? If climate change is real, it may be altering the way we experience the seasons.

What season does it feel like to you? Or, as I sometimes ask when I try to break the conversational ice in a group, What season are you in? Inside as well as out, it may feel like summer to you. Or you might find yourself in a different place, an interior season that feels like anything but summer. I am speaking metaphorically here. Metaphors are figures of speech. They can take on a life of their own, sometimes even naming our experience of life. Seasons, one of my teachers tells us, “is a wise metaphor for the movement of life.”

Parker Palmer, that teacher, has built an entire methodology for a practice of spiritual renewal using the “seasons” metaphor. “The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities for growth” (from Let Your Life Speak).

What season are you in? Chances are your seasons are something like mine – complex, full of metaphor and paradox. I’ve chosen some of Parker’s seasonal images and phrases, placing them into questions for our spiritual lives:

• How are you in the midst of both great beauty and gradual decline, feeling the power of autumn’s reminder that “daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life?”
• In what way do you find yourself in winter, resting from life’s rigors, yet knowing that “winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them?”
• Where is the glorious springtime of your life, which before it becomes beautiful, must, unfortunately, first be “plug ugly,
nothing but mud and muck?”
• How might you be caught in summer’s tension, between the scarcity of drought and flood and the abundance that comes when “when we have the sense to choose community?”

“Summer,” Palmer goes on to say, “is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with compound interest. In summer it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life. Summer is a reminder that our faith is not nearly as strong as the things we profess to have faith in – a reminder that, for this single season at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life” (ibid.)

People of faith also observe religious seasons, creating a rhythm of time punctuated with “holy days.” We mark those days “with occasions to tell our children the stories of our faith community’s past, so that this past will have a future, so that our ancient way and its practices will be rediscovered and renewed every year” (Brian McLaren, Finding Our Way Again). All of God’s creation, it seems – even a faith community – moves through cycles of grace-filled seasons. That grace is ours to receive. May you and I embrace life anew, by learning from every season of it! – Peace, Tom

“Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing:
go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor….then come, follow me.”
- Mark 10:21

It is “the duty of all Christians
…to work, pray and give for the spread of God’s (kindom)…”
– The Catechism (altered), The Book of Common Prayer

[During my sabbatical I want to reflect on seven practices for spiritual growth, common to all three Abrahamic traditions. Jews, Christians and Muslims share these ancient practices, which are the basis for Brian McLaren’s book “Finding Our Way Again.”
I am asking everyone at the church I serve (and anyone else!) to read it this summer.

I believe the seven practices found in McLaren’s book are so important, so useful that I will be blogging about them during my sabbatical. This first entries were about Sabbath, Prayer, Fasting and Feasting. This, the fifth, is on “Giving” or “Giving away.”]

While preparing to host a second dialogue originally inspired and led by members of a local Muslim community, I suggested to my new interfaith friends that we hold our next meeting over dinner. I knew that “sacred meal” (or “feasting,” as I called it in an earlier blog posting) was a spiritual practice we Christians share with Muslims and Jews. As time had passed in planning those dialogues, our growing friendship began to feel more and more sacred to me. It seemed that having a conversation while breaking bread together could make this even more of “a meal of peace and fellowship…of inclusion and of reconciliation” (Brian McLaren, Finding Our Way Again, p. 26).

What I didn’t expect was that, instead of just two Muslim guests for dinner, I would be entertaining two others, including their new imam. I found our time together more interesting than I had hoped for – even exciting! As we talked through dinner, I began to realize: here are people who care about me. My respect for them and my trust was growing. As dinner ended, one man asked, “Could you please show us your church?” And when it came time to pay the bill, their imam said, “Please. Allow us. We would be honored if you would be OUR guest.” They had become my hosts, and I had been entertained by them.
In the 14th chapter of Genesis we learn about Abraham’s encounter with the priest of Salem, King Melchizedec. Melchizedec was a stranger to Abraham, a foreign “other.” He wasn’t a member of Abraham’s family, culture or religion. Perhaps, McLaren says, “in the otherness of Abraham and Melchizedec, there is a lesson for us: that we discover practices for our own faith in an encounter with someone of another faith who comes to us, not with argument or attack, but blessing and hospitality. “King Melchizedec of Salem…a priest of God…blessed him and said, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth….” And Abram gave him one-tenth of everything” (Genesis 14:18-20).

The spiritual practice of giving proportionally with the goal of tithing (ten percent) is a response to a gift. Throughout all Scriptures, the people of God learn that all we have, all we are is a gift from God. God created us because God first loved us (I John 4:19) and gave us life out of that love. How else, then, shall we respond to God, except with gratitude? Sacred, Abrahamic giving becomes not just a duty but a joy, not a veiled threat about what I’ll do if I don’t get what I want, but a sacred promise of delight, freely giving back and giving away, no matter what. One priest tells a childhood story about his father getting upset with his church (and his priest) from time to time. Each time the boy’s father got angry, he would come home and say, “I’m not happy with the church. But I’m happy with God, and I’m thankful. It’s time again to increase my pledge!” This kind of lived stewardship by his father turned my priest friend into a tither. It models for me and for all of us the spirit of true “thanks-giving.”

As a priest I tithe and make special offerings to the church I serve, not because I ought to but because I choose to, with love for the God who is worshiped by countless traditions. For the gifts I give I do expect in return some kind of accountability. But the “no strings attached” approach – God’s approach, I suggest – is one I constantly need to learn, one which others model and about which they remind me. I need reminding, because I practice my giving in the same kind of human way I practice anything that is spiritual: imperfectly.

If our giving is truly in the spirit of Abraham, we will learn to “let it go.” Jesus reminds us that at our giving does need to be directed toward those made poor and marginalized by societies around the world. And McLaren reminds us that some of our giving also “sustains priestly people such as King Melchizedec, people whose lives are devoted to sustaining the spiritual life of the people who give” (ibid). This sabbatical has been just such a time of spiritual sustenance for me. I am deeply grateful to God, the giver of all good gifts, and to the generous people of All Saints’ for making it possible. – Peace, Tom

# 4: Fasting (letting go)

“Is this not this the fast that I have chosen?”
- God (Isaiah 58:6)

[During my sabbatical I want to reflect on seven practices for spiritual growth, common to all three Abrahamic traditions. Jews, Christians and Muslims share these ancient practices, which are the basis for Brian McLaren’s book “Finding Our Way Again.”
I am asking everyone at the church I serve (and anyone else!) to read it this summer.

My first blog entries were about Sabbath, Prayer and Feasting. This, the fourth, is about what all faith traditions traditionally call “Fasting.” I am also calling it “letting go.” ]

I love what Brian McLaren says about the ancient spiritual practice of fasting. “When I fast, I don’t in any way feel closer to God. In fact, when I fast, I feel mostly closer to pizza. And glazed doughnuts. And tortilla chips. When I simply miss a couple of meals, they call to me, they haunt me, they stimulate culinary fantasies that in turn stimulate my salivary glands, and if that sounds a little sicko, I suppose it is. And maybe that’s the point of fasting, I’m realizing” (Finding Our Way Again, p. 84).

In a chapter called “Practice Makes Possible,” McLaren goes on to say that he has learned how fasting works for him, when he works at it:
• I feel and acknowledge my weakness in the face of impulses and cravings from my body.
• I practice impulse control.
• I assert to myself the importance of something other than impulse gratification.
• I trade something I can see for something worthwhile that I can’t see.

During my sabbatical I have noticed that I have often been eating less food and in a more healthy way than I did before my time away began. I have been abstaining from some foods at times but confess I have not yet fasted. I have also noticed that, while the impulse to, say, have dessert after a meal is almost always there for me, I find that when others with whom I eat “just say no,” it’s easier for me to abstain. Members of our family, friends or other loved ones can encourage us in the practice of a healthy lifestyle. But sooner or later, I will surely find myself alone, in the “Candy and Chips” aisle. (I wonder: Was it a good thing I was out of town when a new, mega-supermarket had its grand opening?)

Part of practicing impulse control is, as McLaren observes, feeling those impulses and acknowledging them when – not if, when they happen. He also admits that practice does not make perfect. Practice, above all, must be practical. Our spiritual practices of Sabbath or prayer, fasting or feasting all need to be offered to God in sweet surrender, with a lightness of being, allowing we might not do it right every time. McLaren is able to laugh at himself and let go of his mistake when he realizes he is having a doughnut relapse. “I smiled, threw the doughnut away and got back on the wagon with my fast for the rest of the day.”

Spiritual masters from countless wisdom traditions say that all great spirituality is somehow about letting go. Poet Mary Oliver says that “To live in this world / you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones / knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go” (“In Blackwater Woods”) Real, authentic, spiritual life is about letting go. Weakness, not just strength. Powerlessness, not just power. Fasting, not just feasting. If that is true, then fasting – letting go of our need for food, drink or anything that might keep us from getting closer to God – is one of the great spiritual practices. Twelve-step recovery, grounded in practicing the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, comes to mind here. The First Step is, we might say, about fasting: We admit we are powerless over (alcohol or anything else), that our lives have become unmanageable. When we fast, we feel and acknowledge our own weakness in the face of impulse. And we learn that practicing impulse control will be hard sometimes, and yet, it will almost always be easier when we do it with others.

McLaren finishes his reflections on fasting with this story: “Last week…someone sent me a link to a website where a critic of my work indulged in some high-flying religious character assassination. My reaction to being misrepresented, insulted and mocked (this website did all three) was quite literally visceral! I felt something tighten in my gut, strangely similar in some ways to the craving for a chocolate-covered glazed doughnut. I started thinking about ways I could get back at this fellow, things I could write that would prove to him and to all virtual reality just who the better man is. It was a kind of hunger…for revenge, I’m ashamed to say, and for self-justification, and to win and to hurt rather than lose and be hurt. And sitting here now, I wonder if my ability to let that feeling go last week didn’t have something to do with letting five hundred calories of delight drop behind the ‘Thank You’ sign on a trash can door one day” (ibid., pp. 86-87).”

Frankly, Brian, I don’t wonder about that at all.

Peace, Tom