Wednesday, March 29, 2017

WWJD at a monthly meeting of the Council of First Kind-Of-United Church of Galilee?

Still mulling over the Council meeting Tuesday night.  Specifically, the ways and times my obsessive-compulsive disorder shows itself in my dominating discussion at every turn, and assuming that I ... of course ... have the answer necessary for things to be right.  And the ways my introversion shows itself in the way I work things out by myself in my head without sharing all the bits and pieces with other members of the Council ... leaving me in control, of course.

At least that's what I've been mulling over.  Others, I'm sure, would have other perspectives.

It makes me wonder ... what Council would be like if we had the time and safe space to explore and share among ourselves our individual personality disorders (apparently there are basically 6 or 7, and we all show traits of at least 1 or 2) ... or where we each land on the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory ... or what space we each inhabit in the Enneagram ... and how this affects our interaction at Council meetings.

Makes me wonder as well how Jesus would act and would conduct himself at meetings of the disciples ... at a monthly Council meeting of First Kind-of-United Church of Galilee.

I know he wouldn't be the Chair of Council.  He pretty consistently turned down jobs like that. In fact, he nominated Peter to chair.  He knew Peter would do a great job.

But how would Jesus act and conduct himself there when business came up?

Would he announce the truth, teach, guide, and expect others to listen, accept, learn, and follow?  Turn a Council meeting into a mini Sermon-on-the-Mount kind of time?

Or would he be ... was he ... is he, more conversational?  More dialogic?  More mutual and open?  And open-ended?  Basically just offering his piece of the puzzle as best he can ... to encourage the others to offer their pieces as openly and humbly ... so that together they can find their way to seeing what the answer will be?  Which none of them see or hold or can ever discern alone?

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Chores

It looked like a weekly routine.  Household ritual.  Part of the family's liturgy.

Dad looked like he was just home from work -- still wearing overalls (with a kind of civic-employee or company-issue look to them) and boots, seeming not yet to have cleaned up after a day's labour.  Carrying a bag of trash down the driveway for pick-up at the side of the highway.

Behind him by just a step or two his daughter, maybe 6 or 7 years old, followed carrying a blue box in front of her -- arms stretched forward by its size and weight, hands holding it as tightly as she could, back arched just a little to counter the weight of the box in front of her.

Beside him walked his son, maybe 2 or 3, carrying nothing yet but all the same resolutely walking beside his dad in this weekly procession.

The little girl's arms and hands surely know by now and by memory the weight and size of the blue box.  Just how to hold it.  How to manage its weight.  How not to drop it on the way.

And the little boy knows by memory the pace of the weekly walk, the feel of the ground under his feet and the wind on his face, the number of steps required without even being able to tell you the number, what it feels like to be doing this with his dad and his big sister.

The memory is in the muscles, I was told long ago by someone who studied bioenergetics.  

Even without putting in the 10,000 hours (almost 250 years of weekly 5-minute trash processions!) to become an expert, after only a short childhood practice of this how deeply will the body, mind and heart of this boy and girl be shaped around the experience and expectation of working together as a family in household chores?   And in who knows what else?

Spiritual practice as much as any Bible study, worship, or prayerful meditation?

 

Monday, March 27, 2017

Fifteen degrees

15 degrees celsius
the morning forecast 
   stirs sensation
   awakens feeling
even before a step outside is ventured

mere (mere?) memories of sudden spring balm
   enticing into openness
   sufficient 
   to touch the skin today
   and warm the flesh
longings long held in stoic check
   for tomorrow
   not yesterday
   to be our now
   sufficient
   to stir the spirit 


outside the front porch window
neighbours meet and greet
   a little longer than usual
   not hurried by cold wind
   into quickening their retreats
a jogger 
   in t-shirt and shorts
   down the sidewalk
   beats out the rhythm of a new season 
   in his stride
even the overcast sky
   seems only to bear the promise
   of clearing sometime soon
the world is surely today
   half-full
   never half-empty

and stepping out
still only on the steps to ground
   robin song
   above before around
   assures the rightness of what is felt

how long has it been
how many years have passed
since first knowing
   the sudden freedom
      from weight of 
      winter coat touque mitts and boots
   and the utter lightness
      of spring jacket baseball cap running shoes
the possibility and promise of running
   like never before
   like the wind
of positively flying
   and of free

in the general rising
   is there anything to say
   and do
   and live
but thank you?

Saturday, March 25, 2017

The Champ

Earlier this evening was the Second Annual Valerie Webster Birthday Euchre Tournament -- my sister and brother-in-law, and Japhia and I in three games of euchre, each time with different team pairings, to see which one of us proves to be the winningest player.

And after all was played and counted, Japhia is now officially the repeat, two-time, and only Birthday Euchre Tournament Champion.  

She enjoys it, but can't understand or explain it.  

She's the least competitive of the four of us.  She's the least intense in playing.  Of the four of us she's the least likely to triumphantly slap a low trump on an opening Ace -- more likely she'll place it quietly and even apologetically -- at most, maybe betray a little smile of satisfaction at having been able to do it.  She's the least likely to crow over a victory or cry over a defeat.

Of the four of us she's also the most likely to hold the game up to share a story and enjoy a memory, while we three hold our cards at the ready, all the better to resume the game as soon as the conversation break is over.

Feeling pressed to describe her play, all Japhia says is that she plays to support her partner, and when she doesn't have the cards to call, just does what she can to play to her partner's lead and provide the one trick she knows her partner may be counting on from her.

I have a feeling there's some really good lesson about life, about love, about marriage and community and the real meaning of success in this ... and no doubt I'll begin to see it, as soon as I get over the disappointment of finishing in the middle of the pack once again.

And maybe that "getting over it" will be the lesson itself.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Invitations

the anguished voice of a friend
crossed-legged alone
   on a couch
hunched-over
   head in hands
lamenting what seems to him a never-ending struggle with inauthenticity 
just a few feet from the arm-chair
   that holds me
with him in the bosom 
   of a spiritual growth group

the guileless eyes
of an eighteen-month-old 
   grand-daughter
sitting in a high chair
    just a foot or so from me at the supper table
just watching
knowing my face
but not really yet knowing whether
   across the chasm 
   of my busy self-containment
I am friendly and fun

a tug at my heart's coat
a knocking at my door
lament and longing alike
   call through the keyhole
can brian come out to play?
 

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Just where is eternal life?

Today I drove up to Our Lady of The Angels Catholic Cemetery.  A nice drive for a sunny early-spring afternoon.  I'm helping with a committal of ashes there Saturday, and I wanted to know where I would be going.

And as I thought about that, I realized there was a time in my life when those last nine words would have been a question about my eternal destiny.  The time when adolescent puberty-fueled fear of eternal hell for my sinfulness drove me to ask Jesus to be my saviour from God's unquenchable wrath.  The time also, a few years after that, when I and other members of our youth group did door-to-door evangelism for a few months in the neighbourhood around our church, armed with a ten-question survey, the ninth question of which was "If you were to die tonight, do you know where you would go?"

I don't remember what the tenth question was.  I do remember, though, that that ninth one didn't scare people nearly as much as we thought it should into wanting to know more about God's plan of salvation.

Something else I don't remember clearly is exactly when or even why I stopped fearing for the eternal destiny of my own soul.  No doubt it was a process.  But right now I wonder why.

Is it because I am secure enough in the grace of God that I know I need not fear what comes beyond this life?

Is it because I am overall less sure and certain about exactly what follows life on Earth?  Less certain of the location, the landscape and even the population of heaven and hell?

Is it because my experience and understanding of God and of the meaning of salvation have grown over the years?

Is it because I am focused more on both the questions and the promise of the here-and-now living of "eternal life"?  Not in spite of, but because I am that much older and nearer the end of life here?  And still trying to work it out?

I know when my dad died just over twenty years ago it was (and, I must admit, it still is) vitally important for me to be able to imagine him in heaven, fixing stuck windows and off-square corners in the eternal mansions, building shelves in people's cupboards to increase their storage space, painting and maintaining and repairing and just generally being in heaven and forever the persistent handyman-helper of his neighbours that he was here on Earth.

But as I sat in the parking lot at Our Lady of the Angels, looking through the car window at the almost-Prairie-like untended grass field stretching out behind the mausoleum, and at the open blue sky above it, I realized that what I was singing over and over to myself was just a few lines from "Spirits," a song by The Strumbellas on their new disc called "Hope":

And I don't want a never-ending life

I just want to be alive while I'm here

And I don't want a never-ending life

I just want to be alive while I'm here

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Church is Not a Bus

The church is not a bus.

For a few years now I've sometimes wished I could have a framed, old-fashioned cross-stitch sampler of this little maxim to hang on my office or study wall.  Just to remind myself when I need to.

The realization came about three years ago in conversation with a therapist about my need to know, design and control the flow of everything around me, in order to feel I'm doing my job -- as a parent, as a partner, as a person, and as a minister (I was about to say "parson" to maintain the alliterative chain, but somehow it seemed a little much).

That way of being and working is what I saw and admired in my father -- that because of his grasp of the whole, and his ability to imagine, design and perfect the relationship of the particulars that would make the whole work, he was successful at building buses.  And trying to live up to his way of being successful and respected was driving me crazy, alienating others around me, and exhausting me spiritually, emotionally and morally.  

Because the church is not a bus.

My therapist laughed aloud as I blurted those surprising words.  And as I felt as much as heard them come out of my mouth, a lifelong cloud vanished from above my head.  I felt good.

The church is not a bus.  Which means I am not, and don't have to be foreman of research and development.  I don't have to know the factory and the process inside and out, from bottom to top.  I don't have to be able to tell everyone their part, and how to do it.  I don't have to know what and when the finished product will be, or even if it will be.  I have, and can have, and am expected to have a different way of working and being.

I know I've written about this already, from a different angle.

I will probably come back to it again, from yet some other starting point.

I will probably always curl back time and time again to engage this struggle just because it is so central and essential.  Like in a labyrinth, I am sure I will come back in some way again and again to gaze at this life-long place.

Such a slippery path to walk -- on one hand to admire, love and deeply honour one's father's way of being, doing and building what he built, and on the other to trust, affirm and consistently follow one's own markedly different way of building one's own life's work. 

And to know that it's good.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Blue Man Jesus?

Phil Stanton, one of the three co-founders of the Blue Man group 25 years ago, and still active in constantly re-imagining and re-composing the show to keep it current, was interviewed on CBC radio today.

What is now the around-the-world-acclaimed and long-running Blue Man theatrical show began as a one-off public funeral for the 1980's staged in Central Park by Phil, Chris Wink and Matt Goldman as a way of putting that decade to rest.  The three together saw the 1980's as a very lamentable decade, and staged the funeral as a way of affirming its end, leaving it behind them, and opening a way to be born for and into something new.  The fact that they dressed as blue men was a result of a dream that one of the three had, of a blue man.  

And it worked.  Something about the performance clicked for them, and for whoever saw and heard of it.  And Blue Man was born (or, perhaps, raised anew?)

The three men remain the creative genius behind the on-going iterations of the Blue Man, constantly re-imagining and re-creating the show to keep it current with the cultural life of the day and in whatever part of the world the show is being performed.  They see Blue Man as "the outsider within" -- an icon of the inner, tribal human spirit, in touch with our deepest, universal identity, always in creative and critical conversation with the culture of the current day -- culture that sometimes expresses, but in so many ways is at odds with, or alienated from our deepest human identity.

They also see Blue Man as a singular character -- a composite of the three persons who are Blue Man on stage, each of the three expressing some side or aspect of the fullness of the core, essential human character.  It's also interesting that at one point in the show's history, the three included something strikingly new in the Blue Man show, and after they staged it the response from friends was an intuited but clear judgement that "Blue Man would never do that."  It was removed from the show.  It was clearly a false note and a mis-step in the on-going incarnation of Blue Man.

There really is something about Blue Man that resonates with something deep within us, no matter where we are in the world and what culture we live in.  Somehow, when we see Blue Man, we recognize him as us on some deep, inner level -- a level that we ourselves are often alienated from until we see him.  And the resonance is so deep and clear, that we also recognize when it really is Blue Man, and when it is not -- when it is really our deepest spirit, and when not.

I wonder if that's how people knew Jesus was Jesus -- that it had nothing to do with miracles, proofs, theological arguments and all that kind of thing, and everything to do with what people recognized within themselves when they saw him in relation to the culture of their day.  Somehow it clicked.  They knew.  They knew who he was.  Because in seeing him, they knew who they really were. 

And is that maybe how we are saved?  How you and I and all of humanity at any time and in any culture are saved?  Or at least one image of what salvation is?  

That we intuitively recognize particular aspects and sides of truly Human being, in different persons of our time and in their creative, critical conversation with our culture,  and that in recognizing it out there -- on the public stage of our era, we come to know our own deepest and truest self from which we have been too easily alienated.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Measuring Up

I awoke this morning to every obsessive-compulsive perfectionist preacher's nightmare -- the crystal-clear realization of how yesterday's sermon could have been different and, of course, better.  What different and, of course, better path I could have followed from the mid-point on.

Realizations like this are the terror of every OCP person.  I just happen to be a preacher, so for me this kind of regret-laden, anxiety-inducing thought focuses a lot on some of the sermons I have preached.  And ... some pastoral visits I have made.  And some calls I haven't made.  And maybe, too, some comments that slip out at meetings.  Or some look that crossed my face in a conversation.  And, I guess also sometimes, on something I've written and posted in a daily Lenten meditation blog.

As any OCP person knows, the list is endless.  We drive ourselves crazy with regret and anxiety that easily coalesce into a feeling of failure, guilt and shame.  We drive others around us crazy as well (if we don't drive them away, first) as we impose on them our own crazy-making judgement that there is one right way, things have to be perfect, we dare not make a mistake, and anything other than the one right way is a mistake.

I wonder -- if God were OCP, what waking up on the morning of the first seventh day would have been like?  

Earth was done.  Creation was complete.  Within the cosmos of God's fullness, a beautiful little globe had been set on its axis and in rotation around its sun.  Bit by bit habitability had been established, and stage by stage life had been brought to be -- in the sea and in the air, and on land -- plants and animals in successive, progressive development.  Until finally on the sixth day, in late afternoon or just before sundown, there emerged humankind -- God's image and likeness on Earth, open to God-consciousness, blessed by God to take good care now of what had been made.

If God were an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, I imagine upon waking on the morning of the seventh day God's first thought would have been, "Oh Man!  What did I do?"  God would have had a crystal-clear realization of how differently that whole sixth day might have gone ... how differently the last part especially -- the emergence of humanity, might have been managed ... how maybe it might even have been better to have knocked off early, maybe around noon, and have stopped with the chimps and gorillas.

As it is, though, God doesn't seem to suffer OCP.  On the seventh day, even realizing all that the creation of humanity the day before would entail and lead to, God rested!  Rested somehow in faith and trust that in spite of the grave imperfection of what had just been done, in the words of Julian of Norwich, "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

A good sabbath thought -- that "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" in spite of, and maybe even at times precisely because of the less-than-perfect, and other-than-the-imagined-one-right-thing, I too easily and too often regret and rue.