Ahem

The Things We Carry

As often happens when I find myself on an overcrowded Max ride into the city, I seek out some mental breathing room. As I considered the ridiculous weight of my bag on my back I began to think about the things we carry. While I pondered that idea, a short story came to mind that I had read years ago. The story followed a group of soldiers into the jungles of Vietnam, while one by one, they opened their bags.

Each precious piece of their history was carefully unwrapped and laid bare, with hungry study of each fold of the paper, a deep inhale of the perfumed envelope, or lingering exploration of the silken softness of a pair of stockings. Each element tasted, smelled, and fondled like a talisman. Each one holding fast to a fragment of what was their past life. That last remnant of another world would be the lifeline to the unraveling thread of memory.

How like them I am. Lingering over my past, with smell and touch, wrapping its decaying shreds about me like a protective covering. Hoping that clinging to that which has come before will give me some comfort, some spark of illumination for the mist covered road ahead of me. I can look at my past logically and say, that is not where I want to be again, and yet, it still whispers to me. Like a burial shroud it can wrap my mind in fear and death.

Gently and carefully the Great Comforter, the Compassionate One, is removing this second skin we beg Him not to take from us. He washes us with tenderness as He knows our wounds have wept into its folds and bonded with this Fear in an unholy union. Each of us carries the markings of life on our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our souls. These whisperings are as soft and silky as a pair of stockings and yet cling to the weeping wound, covering the festering flesh. Christ kneels before us, carrying his simple bowl of water. We tremble with a mix of longing to be free of the rotten flesh and a dread of what is to come. With a steady gaze in our eyes he moves closer to us, dipping his cloth to begin the circular motions of cleansing.

                                                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So he got up from the table, took off his robe, wrapped a towel around his waist,  and poured water into a basin. Then he began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he had around him.

  When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied,

“You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.”

“No,” Peter protested, “you will never ever wash my feet!”

Jesus replied,

“Unless I wash you, you won’t belong to me.”

Simon Peter exclaimed, “Then wash my hands and head as well, Lord, not just my feet!”

 

 

 

Obedience as inspiration

As we collectively strain towards what's ahead, and dream dreams of a return to our First Love, perhaps it is not so important that people have a "passion" for the work, but more important that we simply move out in obedience with the faith that all the emotional "buy in" will follow.  In the midst of just such a conversation the following words were penned in a letter. I hope they find a place of inspiration and challenge in your heart and mind as they have in mine.

"The friendship of Christ toward us is the foundation of the church. The Spirit holds us together with God.  Trust and faith lets us believe and rest in that.  Without the practice of trust then the church doesn't live.  Individually, we can learn to trust God, we can learn to trust God together, we can even learn to trust one another. This makes a brotherly love-spirited church, an authentic community of christains for christains.  And that's where these churches are (with an open door to the marginalized). 

My issue, my question is how can we be friends to Christ if we won't befriend, as a church, the very people he says he is among. Invitations for the feast are sent to those who must learn to make priority the guest of honor; participants who are gathered are the ones who need the celebration.  Young protestant churches need to form an identity of knowing and befriending the communities it says it serves. The difference is doing it as a community of believers and knowing how to shape the church so it can.  So, do these churches have the same vision of trust building with communities at need as it does for its own?  Can it structure itself to operate in such a way?  We need only wait on those who are willing to work with us, not wait on the work. Christian obedience is inspiration."
                                                                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                            ~ nd

Time to get our advocacy caps on...

Or woolly knit caps if you prefer...

OCCV is joining together with Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon to descend upon the defenseless members of the government in Salem, Oregon on February 5th.  This day will be an Interfaith Advocacy Day, in which the agenda items of health care, fair pay, hunger and poverty issues (couched in the overarching theme of Family and Community Stability: A Value for All Oregonians) will be demanded to be placed in the center of the decision makers radar.   

Its an exciting time to get involved in what the OCCV is up to and support our sisters and brothers that are the overlooked and underfunded.  In case you are not sure who that may be, the working poor make up a large portion of the disenfranchised in our state. These folks struggle under a heavy load of supporting spouses/children/family members, while simultaneously not having (or making) enough to afford the simplest of health care.  This is an atrocity, and the responsibility is upon us who are those within the community of Christ and within the state to stand up for these people.

So attend this event, talk to your representatives, send postcards, letters, paper airplanes... just get the message out there, that this is not what we want our community, our state, our country to look like.

Lets turn the tide together.

Reflections on a profound life

As I do every year in honor of his birthday, I like to revisit the cadence of the Baptist preacher, and the eloquence of a brilliant mind.  This year is no different, and I am continually challenged and impressed by his words and his drive to "Be the change".  Dr. King was far from a perfect man, and yet, he strived towards his calling and towards a future he knew to be the very heart of God Himself.  I am humbled to reflect upon the idea that this man's life is but a fraction of what is possible when people, with all of their imperfections, complexities and beauty, turn their eyes on Christ and follow Him into the darkest places to shine His light around.

Here are some excerpts from a speech given by Dr. King on April 4, 1967  (to read it in its entirety click here. ) 

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

                                                                                        ***

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

                                                                                          ***

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

 

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

 

Gateway to giving more

I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, now that classes are back on and the end of my grad program looms a mere 6 months hence... eee gads....

So this is a quick and dirty, “huh” I had with someone dear to me the other day.  As he struggles to lead a ministry and engage people in joining him in compassionate service (short of doing a song and dance number during services), we fell into a conversation around levels of engagement.  Of course what he is hoping for, what most people are hoping for, is for Christians to get out of their pews and edgy overstuffed couches, and to do something.  To literally be hands and feet, and yet, perhaps we miss out on some other opportunities when the bar is so high, and engagement becomes and either/or proposition…

We began to talk about giving financially as he moved down his list of ways that people could engage. Writing a check used to be something that I thought was a fairly meaningless gesture and I joked that it is the "gateway drug" to giving more of our lives to Christ and to those in need.  Though I was joking in the moment I began to think about what those "shekels" mean in terms of personal cost.. Those finances represent time away from family, time away from passions, time away from so many other things that feed us, and inspire us.  Those finances constitute the stress and energy, the lifeblood, which most Americans hemorrhage into their jobs.   

At the end of the day, those funds are stabilizing entire communities, allowing one more person to be fed, to receive counseling, to get medical treatment, to be comforted and loved in a way that is transparently relevant to their survival for that day.  It used to perplex me why there are so many references to money in the Bible, why Christ spent such a large amount of time talking about something that seems so base to me.  I think this recent thread of thought is gaining some new realizations for me, that money is much larger than a means to an end, in some ways it is a larger comment about what we are willing to pour our lifeblood into, either directly or indirectly…. I am hopeful that we can find more to give towards than deadlines and new ipods…. We can give to stabilize our family. 

Whether that family member is our own child, or the homeless man with HIV that is eating a warm meal on our dime.

Peace and blessings

Easilly one of the best comedy sketches I have seen in a while...

John Mayer on Chappelle's Show

Check it out for yourself and have a giggle... enjoy.  

Excellent film

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend "The Good Shepherd".  It is a complicated look at the CIA in its initial decades while following one man’s experiences within the agency and all that being part of that machinery can mean in terms of personal cost.  It was gripping and smart, and rather than assuming the viewer is not a thinking being and needs to be hand held through all the plot lines twists and turns, the film expects you to pay attention, engage your mind, and made me want to pause it every few minutes to discuss what just occurred.  De Niro is deeply impressive both in his cameo as well as in his ability to direct and craft such a complex story and group of actors.  This is one of those films that all involved should feel deeply proud of bringing this story to the big screen.  Its deconstruction of power, and the corruptibility of the human soul were both profound and spooky especially in light of recent (and not so recent) events.  Go see it, and bring your most thoughtful friends, you will want to decompress after viewing this monolith. 

Imagine that, it rains here

As a native Portlander, I find it equal parts annoying and wonderful to be caught in the rain.  Tuesday was yet another example of moments where I have managed to forget where I live and that precipitation is inevitable.  Walking to the max on my way home people smiled at me sympathetically as if they were ready to pull me aside and explain the basics, "Umbrella, water-proof jacket with hood, you'll need them, go get them."   

Safely on the Max, I tried to look indifferent to my dripping hair, no doubt my refugee status rising from possible to certainty.  I plugged in my ipod and plotted options for the coming departure.  Stepping off the train and trying not to think poorly of the people smart enough to grab their umbrella on the way out the door that morning, I wrapped my woolen scarf around my head like a sister from the Eastern Block, and resigned myself to a wet, but at least warm, walk. 

Surprisingly, I began to enjoy the experience.  The amused smiles I received from drivers buoyed my journey, and I mean if you can't enjoy your own ability to look completely foolish, you really are wound too tight.  Finally to the last few blocks and I have surrendered the partial cover of the scarf.  Opting to let the rain fall on my face, my hair, my neck, and even exposing my hands and wrists to watch the drops splash on my skin changing its color, and creating a slick and watery alter ego. As I stood in the rain I am reminded of a summer rainstorm years ago where my housemate and I went dancing and splashing into the streets of my childhood neighborhood, barefoot, shorts  and tee shirts, while my crazy neighbor Janie squawked at us to get indoors. 

Walking out into the deserted street, and paying no heed to my neighbors, I allowed the rain to do its most cleansing and soul calming work.   Rinsing my psyche clean of the months, weeks, and days worth of worries.  Lifting my face to the sky and thinking of how God must enjoy these moments of letting go and being in the moment, of looking up and smiling that, I-think-I-just-learned-something-about-you smile I smiled at God.    

Thank you for the unexpected. Thank you for the mystery and healing of your Nature.   

Thank you even for the rain.