I just heard that clergy friends will be moving in January to a St. Louis suburb. Jon and I started the process for discernment to the priesthood about the same time. He already had a degree in pastoral counseling so was able to finish quickly after one and half years at General Seminary. His first call as rector was a hard one, with conflict. Small town, where he was missing big town amenities, as well. So I am glad that he has found something more for his soul. Also, he and his family will be 3 hours closer and I may actually be able to take the train down to visit some time.
My call continues to be a challenge, with challenging people who seem to be stuck in the old conflicts and make these conflicts about personalities. I am now in a clergy consultation group to help deal with parish systems and hope to help the parish get through these difficulties. If they don't the conflicts and personalities will continue to clash and be counterproductive for the life of the parish. They want to grow; there is much work to do.
As Christmas Eve approaches, I have been preaching on the love that came down in Bethelehem--God's most wonderous and mysterious love through the Christ. Our being able to accept this love is crucial in responding in a way that continues the love of Christ in our world.
How can I help my parish move beyond its conflicts, the wounds so old I would have thought they would have scarred over by now. There are deep longings for new life, but some people get mired in their grieving and their wounds that have not healed.
Like Jon, I want to do good work, but I also need to be fed in my situation, in a way that lets my given talents and creativity come forward in my priesthood. I don't want to be constantly working with old wounds, I want to help the healing begin and finish or at least be more functional, if healing is to take much more time than I had hoped.
Pray for all congregations who carry wounds of past hurts with them. Pray for individual parishioners who seek to be more peaceful even as they call up old wounds, fears, enmities, and continue to live through them. Forgiveness seems to be far away from their hearts, but this is the season that teaches us how God forgave so much sinfulness within us. How can we not respond by forgiving those who have hurt us, how can we not give God a chance as helping us heal?
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Nearly Advent, Thanksgiving
Hoping for Advent, getting through too much food and excess of Thanksgiving. Not how it should be maybe.
Am losing sleep with the same old feelings of inadequacy and questioning: Does God really mean me, is God really calling me? And the same answer: Yes. Get over it. (well maybe not the last part--that sounds like me).
At diocesan convention last weekend, I heard about using parishioner spiritual autobiographies as a tool for evangelism. They showed some videos of autobiographies. I rememberd how spiritual autobiographies affected us in EFM. To know someone's spiritual journey is to be allowed into the depths of the person's greatest pain and sorrow as well as their greatest joy. A person's depths are reached by God as they open themselves in vulnerability. Without that vulnerability, we are not reaching our very humanity, our humbleness and humility before God and are not open to God's grace. When one refuses to feel sorrows, griefs and challenges, and feels nothing, one cannot feel grace either. When we touch our very depths, that open space allows mercy to flow into us.
So, hearing a person's autobiographical journey with God helps us know them deeper than before. As they talk about those places of vulnerability where they have met God, we see them as fully human, without the mask of anonymity for the general public, but with the grace of God as a beam of light suffusing their very self before us. What a transformation we have of understanding. Where before we saw a two-dimensional human being, now we see God's created spirit coming through this person whom God loves unconditionally. We want this for ouselves, we want to love this person as God has loved them, and we do because they are now purely themselves.
Before we see the full human being, we have perhaps seen a person who seems perfect. When you don't know a person's story, you only see how they appear at church, at work, in the grocery store--put together for public faces. We begin to "judge our insides by their outsides": we certainly can't feel perfect like that person is perfect. But then we come to really know their struggles. We find out their challenges, the problems of their family and home life, their growing up, their personal demons. We find they are like us in every way, flawed yet loved by God.
Knowing another is to reach into God's spirit a little more. It is to break out of the self-pity, or navel-gazing we may be doing about our own problems, and to see ourselves as part of God's created world and of God's own hand, along with all of humanity. We are special in our unique selves. but our challenges and foibles are not unique--we share them with all the world. When we know this, we join humanity and join with God in seeing the grace of God walking before us. We begin to see the face of Christ in the suffering we all have undergone and to see how loved we are in our struggles.
Tomorrow give thanks.
Am losing sleep with the same old feelings of inadequacy and questioning: Does God really mean me, is God really calling me? And the same answer: Yes. Get over it. (well maybe not the last part--that sounds like me).
At diocesan convention last weekend, I heard about using parishioner spiritual autobiographies as a tool for evangelism. They showed some videos of autobiographies. I rememberd how spiritual autobiographies affected us in EFM. To know someone's spiritual journey is to be allowed into the depths of the person's greatest pain and sorrow as well as their greatest joy. A person's depths are reached by God as they open themselves in vulnerability. Without that vulnerability, we are not reaching our very humanity, our humbleness and humility before God and are not open to God's grace. When one refuses to feel sorrows, griefs and challenges, and feels nothing, one cannot feel grace either. When we touch our very depths, that open space allows mercy to flow into us.
So, hearing a person's autobiographical journey with God helps us know them deeper than before. As they talk about those places of vulnerability where they have met God, we see them as fully human, without the mask of anonymity for the general public, but with the grace of God as a beam of light suffusing their very self before us. What a transformation we have of understanding. Where before we saw a two-dimensional human being, now we see God's created spirit coming through this person whom God loves unconditionally. We want this for ouselves, we want to love this person as God has loved them, and we do because they are now purely themselves.
Before we see the full human being, we have perhaps seen a person who seems perfect. When you don't know a person's story, you only see how they appear at church, at work, in the grocery store--put together for public faces. We begin to "judge our insides by their outsides": we certainly can't feel perfect like that person is perfect. But then we come to really know their struggles. We find out their challenges, the problems of their family and home life, their growing up, their personal demons. We find they are like us in every way, flawed yet loved by God.
Knowing another is to reach into God's spirit a little more. It is to break out of the self-pity, or navel-gazing we may be doing about our own problems, and to see ourselves as part of God's created world and of God's own hand, along with all of humanity. We are special in our unique selves. but our challenges and foibles are not unique--we share them with all the world. When we know this, we join humanity and join with God in seeing the grace of God walking before us. We begin to see the face of Christ in the suffering we all have undergone and to see how loved we are in our struggles.
Tomorrow give thanks.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
FALL
The leaves are prematurely falling here in the north. Today is equi-lichtal--equal light (is that a word?). My dad always said that it rains around the equinox and sure enough there is plenty of rain in the air. I like fall, the growing sense of inward journey, of internalness and the beginning of nesting for cooler weather.
Nesting is a particularly happy thing for us introverts, who like navel-gazing in quiet times, writing in our journals, and being contemplative in a noisy way in front of TV. Is fall a gift for good introverts?
Nesting is a particularly happy thing for us introverts, who like navel-gazing in quiet times, writing in our journals, and being contemplative in a noisy way in front of TV. Is fall a gift for good introverts?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Sabbath
It's cold where I have chosen to have some Sabbath time. The coldest July on record, with temperatures yesterday only in the upper 60's. I wear a jacket on the last day of July!
Sometimes Sabbath can be like this--something that is surprisingly different than normal, that jolts us out of the complacency of life and plonks us down in a new place. This Sabbath for me is beginning to be like this.
I have had a challenging spring and early summer. Conflict. Being called names like Liar. My head has swum with the vehemence of it, the utter unbelievability of how something I wanted to be so positive turned so bitter and accusatory of my very intentions. I intended good and it was perceived as evil. What surprising and hurtful results.
I have questioned myself, lost confidence in my skills, been hurt deeply.
Getting through all that to this coldest of July's is perhaps a perfect gauntlet to run through.
I ask prayers for those who hate me, for myself and my hurt, for their hurt.
I have gone fishing here and caught nothing. Catching nothing is the metaphor for God's calling me forward to my own humility and pain, to be real. God is with me, I feel it, calling me. I have answered one large call and must keep answering that call again and again--keep reasserting that I am responding YES to all that God is creating in me.
This Sabbath has not been easy. When I hear the word Sabbath, I imagine rest and low level activity. Yes there has been that, but also a rending of my heart, catching nothing, being here in the surprising cold, hoping for sunshine.
Sometimes Sabbath can be like this--something that is surprisingly different than normal, that jolts us out of the complacency of life and plonks us down in a new place. This Sabbath for me is beginning to be like this.
I have had a challenging spring and early summer. Conflict. Being called names like Liar. My head has swum with the vehemence of it, the utter unbelievability of how something I wanted to be so positive turned so bitter and accusatory of my very intentions. I intended good and it was perceived as evil. What surprising and hurtful results.
I have questioned myself, lost confidence in my skills, been hurt deeply.
Getting through all that to this coldest of July's is perhaps a perfect gauntlet to run through.
I ask prayers for those who hate me, for myself and my hurt, for their hurt.
I have gone fishing here and caught nothing. Catching nothing is the metaphor for God's calling me forward to my own humility and pain, to be real. God is with me, I feel it, calling me. I have answered one large call and must keep answering that call again and again--keep reasserting that I am responding YES to all that God is creating in me.
This Sabbath has not been easy. When I hear the word Sabbath, I imagine rest and low level activity. Yes there has been that, but also a rending of my heart, catching nothing, being here in the surprising cold, hoping for sunshine.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Refiner of Silver
Malachi 3:3 says: 'He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.'
This verse puzzled some women in a Bible study and they wondered what this statement meant about the character and nature of God. One of the women offered to find out the process of refining silver and get back to the group at their next Bible Study.
That week, the woman called a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him at work. She didn't mention anything about the reason for her interest beyond her curiosity about the process of refining Silver.
As she watched the silversmith, he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up. He explained that in refining silver, one needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest as to burn away all the impurities. The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot; then she thought again about the verse that says: 'He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver.'
She asked the silversmith if it was true that he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time. The man answered that yes, he not only had to sit there holding the silver, but he had to keep his eyes on the silver the entire time it was in the fire. If the silver was left a moment too long in the flames, it would be destroyed. The woman was silent for a moment.. Then she asked the silversmith, 'How do you know when the silver is fully refined?' He smiled at her and answered, 'Oh, that's easy -- when I see my image in it.'
This was passed on to me via email from an attorney friend of mine, who got it from her sister. I usually don't engage with this kind of spam, but the story intrigued me and meant a lot to me and my own life and wanted to share it with you.
This verse puzzled some women in a Bible study and they wondered what this statement meant about the character and nature of God. One of the women offered to find out the process of refining silver and get back to the group at their next Bible Study.
That week, the woman called a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him at work. She didn't mention anything about the reason for her interest beyond her curiosity about the process of refining Silver.
As she watched the silversmith, he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up. He explained that in refining silver, one needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest as to burn away all the impurities. The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot; then she thought again about the verse that says: 'He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver.'
She asked the silversmith if it was true that he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time. The man answered that yes, he not only had to sit there holding the silver, but he had to keep his eyes on the silver the entire time it was in the fire. If the silver was left a moment too long in the flames, it would be destroyed. The woman was silent for a moment.. Then she asked the silversmith, 'How do you know when the silver is fully refined?' He smiled at her and answered, 'Oh, that's easy -- when I see my image in it.'
This was passed on to me via email from an attorney friend of mine, who got it from her sister. I usually don't engage with this kind of spam, but the story intrigued me and meant a lot to me and my own life and wanted to share it with you.
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