Catechisms and Cataclysms

Of Pilgrimage, Guilt, and Social Change

2007-12-19T17:32:00.000-08:00

I've included below some reflections - really unfinished thoughts - about the march and rally I attended for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (labor organization behind the Taco Bell boycott, earlier McDonalds post, etc.) The experience itself was invigorating and hopeful, and I even got to address the crowd, which was a thrill. Here is a link to the Presbyterian News Service article regarding the rally in Miami. However, while I was there, I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't doing enough - that there is so much more work I could be doing to actively change our systems of injustice. I felt guitly for times I had chosen not to act. I heard in my own explanations for how I lived in Louisville during the Taco Bell campaign but didn't turn out that same hollow ring I get at times when people who I know have a few hours to donate to a good cause beg off from taking direct action on social issues. I know this sensation of shame is a fairly common phenomenon. What do you all think about activist guilt? Am I a closet subscriber to works-righteousness? If so, is that a bad thing? Is this a motivating force for good? If so, how do I keep my sense of guilt from spoiling the victories I do see?

Pilgrimage of Social Change

The pilgrimage has a long history as a ritualistic journey of urgent piety and desire for change - both inward and outward. Tom Driver describes it as "a journey undertaken not so much for empirical as for moral reasons.... First of all, a journey undertaken out of felt necessity." (Driver, 42) Whether in the mandatory trek to Mecca, the pious paths leading to and fro throughout medieval literature, or in modern day horror tourism, where sites of rampage and grief become centers for popular education and communal mourning, people throughout history and across cultures have learned that the act of travel with moral purpose can transform the heart and mind. It is a personal ritual, enacted across long stretches of public space, and through this journey the spirituality of the environment we come to adopt is challenged and challenges us. Through the motion of walking, flying, biking, we ourselves are moved to spiritual transformation. In this process, we also become a public witness to the possibility for transformation, and hope that the new reality will embrace will spread to those around us.
I, too, took a pilgrimage of sorts this month. Through a sense of moral urgency, and the desire for personal and communal transformation, I embarked on a wearying journey of a spiritual - and political - nature. I took this pilgrimage alongside 2,000 others, declaring together that, this time, the spiritual journey of moral necessity would change not just the souls of the pilgrims but the soul of our economics.

Pilgrimages begin with a sense of moral urgency - the raising of consciousness that something must change for the process of spiritual rebirth to continue. My consciousness-raising began about 5 ½ years ago as I was reading about the proceedings of the General Assembly. I saw an article describing the Assembly’s decision to endorse a boycott of Taco Bell in support of tomato pickers in Florida. I was brought back to 2nd grade, when my mother dutifully explained to me that we didn’t buy Nestle products because they made families in Africa dependent on formula that they couldn’t afford, and our faith (and the United Methodist Women) taught us that this was not alright. I did not yet understand the working conditions of Immokalee, the lack of labor law as applied to undocumented peoples, or the growing influence of agro-business on our economic policies. What I did know was that my church had spoken out against Taco Bell, and that my church provided moral guidance in the ways of economics. As I learned more about the movement, and saw it grow, my sense of moral urgency grew with it.

I then moved to Louisville, and saw this moral battle play out before my eyes. I scoured the want ads, and felt a tug of resistance each time I saw YUM! brands advertising for another customer service assistant. I worshipped in the same space where local people planned the demonstrations that would eventually prove a victory for Immokalee. I felt guilt about my own inability to get involved because of a work schedule that conflicted with each event they had planned. I saw how my beliefs and buying practices had not yet been realized in my actions enough that I would make the commitment to action, even while living in the shadow of YUM! brand’s headquarters. I saw, in myself, how my own actions needed transformation in ways I had not yet been able to embrace.

And so, I admit, I embarked on my pilgrimage to Miami partly out of guilt - out of a desire to mediate this conflict between orthodoxy and orthopraxis that had nagged at me since I first came to Louisville. In this I am not alone. I stand with all those through history who have embarked on a pilgrimage as a way of penance for actions of which they are ashamed. Yet part of the power of the pilgrimage is its ability to turn this shame into inspiration and devotion.
18 hours of travel brought us to the city center of Miami. Having driven all night, 6 of us joined an ever-increasing crowd of devotees who marched together for 9 miles in 90 degree heat, partial penance for our complicity in exploitation. Communally, we were bearing witness to the hope that not only would we, individually, be transformed in the way that we saw the labor of others, but that this transformation would extend to those who witnessed our dolorous journey. In our pilgrimage, we made our selves representatives of our society, and hoped that they, too, would take note and repent of their sin as we were repenting and making reparation for our own.

In fact, I believe that it is this hope that personal penance become social penance that inspires all marches for issues of social justice. We walk together, knowing that the journey binds us together as a community of hope and repentance. Martin Luther King described this phenomenon when he described the March on Washington, stating "The enormous multitude was the living, beating heart of an infinitely noble movement. It was an army without guns, but not without strength... It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that is most powerful weapon was love." (King, 123) In these words, King describes the reality that this was a group who came together to usher transformation into the world around them, through hope and a love that rectifies injustice. In doing so, this march, like all marches of its type, acted as a beacon to the community that there is a greater, transformed, possibility for our world if we will journey together on a communal pilgrimage.

We walked by faith, through faith, in faith that change can and will happen. It is that desire for change that is at the heart of all pilgrimages, and the heart of all great social movements. And so, in a way, the archetypal march for justice has become a communal means of sharing the truth of pilgrimage - that change and transformation occur through the journey, whether we will have it or not, and that those who choose to ignore it are those who should be shackled by shame. Through this journey, I personally learned to embody the convictions I had been declaring for years. For me, that was the transformative power of ritual pilgrimage - the spiritual change and charge that come from an arduous but inspiring journey.

Bibliography
Driver, Tom F. "Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual." Boulder, Co: Westview Press 1998
King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Why We Can’t Wait." New York: Penguin 1963

Results are in

2007-10-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

And the verdict is...

Two exams passed, and two failed.

I expected the results on the Exegetical exam but...

How in the world did I fail POLITY?!!!!

Over and done... Maybe...

2007-08-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

I've spent nigh on the last week buried in the Song of Songs, Chapter 1, and while I found it intriguing, I'm glad to know that it's over - maybe. In a fairly typical, flaky move I misread the time the test was due by three hours. Thankfully, a classmate asked me about it around 9, when it was due. I had the paper in by 9:25 (though the sermon outline wasn't nearly as formed as I would have preferred), and my proctor had me staple a note to the front telling them what time I handed it in. So, either they reject it and I fail, and they accept it, and I still may either fail or pass. I feel good about Exegetical questions, but the sermon outline still needed alot of work. I guess I'll find out the verdict on Oct 22. At least it was an intriguing text...

I'm looking forward to the semester that's looming ahead. My classes are looking to be quite fascinating, and I've got an internship in our denomination's national offices working as support staff to 10 advocacy networks, collectively known as "Presbyterian Health, Education, and Welfare Assocation." I'll be swamped in issues regarding community transformation, reproductive option, mental health issues, child advocacy, domestic violence - all sorts of social issues the church needs to be addressing. This should prove to be exciting work.

Right now, I'm glad to be done with ords, at least until January. I'm fairly certain I passed everything but Exegesis. I hope all is well in your respective worlds. Take care.

Amy

Things I Learned this Summer

2007-08-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

1) I really like living in my hometown.

2) Therapeutic lying is a riot.

3) My CPE supervisor thinks I'm "enigmatic."

4) That said, I'm still really bad at anything that requires hiding what I think or feel.

5) The ordination exams aren't nearly as intimidating as I had feared.

6) My Preparation Committee knows me better than I think they did.

7) As much as I talk about the need to "preach prophetically," it scares the bejeezus out of me when I do it.

8) 12 hours of travel each way for a 48 hour meeting is no longer exciting and fun.

9) I can live in the same house with someone who annoys the heck out of me, and remain civil.

10) But I do so by making up errands for myself and avoiding going home.

11) Mandolins have two strings for each note, and they're a lot harder on your fingers than a violin.

12) Sometimes, it's refreshing to not see another Presbyterian for days at a time.

13) However, I really love the richness and variety of our Book of Confessions.

14) While the signs say that I'll be cleared to seek an ordained call in March, chances are good that if I were to find a job within my home presbytery, I would be denied membership for my political views.

15) I grieve deeply because of statement #14.

16) But I'm also emotionally ready to take the risks associated with stating it out loud.

Quite the summer, huh?

2007-08-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

Blessings to you all from Washington State.

I'm currently sitting in the Spiritual Care office of St Peter's hospital, the same building in which I was born 27 years ago next Thursday.
I have attempted to write and post several times over the course of the summer, but the computer at the house where I have been staying seems to have a specific block that only targets new posts in this particular format. Odd, I say the least.
The summer has been full. CPE has been rewarding, as I have delved inward, built community, and discovered that working with people with dementia can be riotous fun. I preached to my home church for the first time since learning how to go through the full process, which was intimidating but powerful. And, I have adored living in Olympia again after 6 years as a domestic ex-pat, which was my biggest fear for this summer.
These two months have been more rewarding than I had hoped.

Now, just for a little notice - I finally figured out how to track where my readers (0-5 per day) are coming from, and how they get to this website. I've discovered that there are a few blogs out there that have linked to me without telling me (Namely, Levellers and Prog(ressive) Nostications). While I am horribly flattered, and will return the link, I would love to be notified in the future when such unknown alliances appear. Also, there seems to be one reader in Georgia who keeps returning to my page. Please leave a comment so I can hear back fron you!

Thanks, everyone, and you'll hear more from me when I have access to a computer that doesn't detest blogger (I know, promises promises....).

Mizpah,
Amy

Surprise! You're Published!

2007-05-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

Conversation at lunch yesterday:

Becky: I got Horizons Magazine yesterday, and read your article!

Amy: What article is that?

Becky: The one on No More Deaths.

Amy: They published that in Horizons?!

So... The news is... Horizons adapted a resource I wrote for Presbyterian Women's Justice and Peace committee into an article for their magazine... With a circulation of about 45,000... The issue arrived in mailboxes Tuesday, and hasn't yet been put online. I'm still rather surprised - shocked - excited - all rolled into one. As they didn't tell me they were adapting it beforehand (or if they did, I skipped reading the memo), I was rather bemused for a good portion of the day yesterday, but it's still quite thrilling. I've written for the magazine before, and am currently working on a book review for the October issue, but, beforehand, I've always known I was writing for publication before it was sent in. Golly, what a week!

Eucharist

2007-05-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

This poem shook me today as I read about the organic nature of pastoral care. May it shake you as well.

When the hands that hold the host
Have plunged fingers, with seeds into damp soil,
Or swung an axe in sweat-soaked toil,
There's blessing in the cup.

When hands that break bread in remembrance
Have tenderly birthed a lamb,
Or cradled an infant at midnight,
Life itself is elevated on the altar.

When the soul of a celebrant has known
The sweetness of friendship ripened on love's vine
Been duly crushed by heartbreak, flattened by aching loss,
The wine of the covenant is richly shared.

For the soot of the city,
The pain of the people,
The touch of another,
Stain the tablecloth, yet
Consecrate many hands.

By them, bread is blessed, and rises,
Thus, the corpus contains
Every grain of creation, broken
In bright conspiracy --- transformed.

by Kathleen O'Toole

Unblock the River of Life

2007-05-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

Another post of outside material. I've been in a Revelation mood recently, and it shows. This is a devotion I've written for a PW study trip to the Borderlands coming up next April. I have a month to revise it, if you have any suggestions...
Amy

"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations."

Revelation 22:1-2

A few days ago, I stood on the banks of the Rio Grande as it traced the Mexican-American border. Where I had imagined a roaring current, I found a cracked and crumbling furrow where once water had flowed freely. Closer up to the headwaters, the water had been diverted into a protective canal that ran about 40 feet north of the dry riverbed. It was as if the Rio Grande itself had become one of the parched and thirsty victims of the desert heat.

I was reminded of another river, in another land wracked by deserts and international conflict, which found it’s way into John’s vision as written in the book of Revelation. After describing the decimation of the earth through nigh unimaginable wars, plagues, and earthquakes, the writer of Revelation tells us of a final healing vision, a restoration of the earth, that accompanies Christ’s second coming. A New Jerusalem is established, a city of peace and righteousness, and in it is found the River of Life, who feeds and nourishes this new city of God. It’s waters are never murkied by mud or dust, and it has the power to heal and renew all who drink of it. Indeed, the tree that grows along its’ riverbanks has a never ending harvest of fruit, and leaves that offer up their medicine to all nations that would come to it. This river, and the tree that depends on it, are manifestations of a wholeness that can inspire and renew our entire world. In them and their presence is the knowledge that hope is never out of grasp, that healing can occur, and that nations can come together and share of the same tree.

The Rio Grande has the potential to be such a river of life for the two nations it divides. While I don’t believe that stopping the diversion of the Rio’s waters will wash away with it’s first rush all remnants of the way our border has been scarred by governmental handling of immigration, I do believe that conversion of a symbol of refreshment and new life into another, dangerous and ineffective, barrier between us and our neighbors is emblematic of the way we have warped the land we share with our neighbors to the south into a tool against them.

While the Rio Grande’s current incarnation is a reminder of the way our border policy has decimated the river and torn apart those who surround its banks, such reality does not correspond with God’s vision of what-can-be. If allowed to flow freely once again, the Rio Grande can become a marker of the international partnership and nourishment that accompany the waters in Revelation. If we learn how to create a more humane, uplifting policy which addresses the border issues that dry up our souls as well as divert our rivers, then we can let the water flow freely again. In doing so, we state that the divisions between us manifested in both borders and barriers of the cultural variety are insignificant. We can wash together in the waters of the Rio Grande, eat of the fruit that grows upon either bank, and let it’s holy flow heal the wounds that destroy us.

2007-05-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

While I don't usually have a particularly high opinion of recycled matter being posted to blogs, I've decided to include here the sermon I preached on Revelation a few weeks back. I hope you enjoy it. It recieved a good response from my parish, but I am interested to hear how a wider audience takes it...

I saw Jesus the other day. Or rather - I heard him. It wasn’t anything my senses could perceive, or that those around me could witness. I guess I should explain...

I was seated Wednesday night, a week and a half ago, at the circulation desk of the seminary’s library, mundanely filing books on the shelving cart in precise decimal point order. My co-worker Monica and I were anxiously awaiting the closing hour, when we could tear people away from their exhaustive study of incomprehensible Greek manuscripts, and cast them out into the scholastic wilderness until morning. The night was black; the day was long; I was tired. I felt a slight buzzing in the back pocket of my trousers and was startled out of my rote analysis of book bindings and plasticized labels. There was a note on my cell phone, letting me know that I had missed a call, and that I had a message waiting for me. I caught Monica’s eye, let her know what I was up to, and dashed out into the cold for a short bit to discover what secret was waiting for me to dial it up.

Standing there, on the steps of the Ernest Miller White Library, I punched star - eight - six into my keypad and heard the voice of my dear Aunt Nancy wishing me a "Happy Easter." In her dulcet tones rang a note of healing, a note of recognition, a note of joyful triumph. In that 30 second message, I heard the voice of Jesus because I experienced the power of hope, resurrection, and wholeness that is promised in the Book of Revelation. I could sense the second coming.

Now, healing, resurrection, and wholeness have not always been the images associated with the Book of Revelation, or with Christ’s second coming. Sadly, this particular portion of Scripture has been abused and twisted to instill a thirst for destruction in the practitioners of Christianity. Eschatology, or the study of the end-times, has been misused to further an agenda of death within Christian discussions of what-is-to-come. However, over the course of the Revelation, we see (just as in the resurrection) that destruction does not have the final word.

In order to understand our passage this morning, we need to understand a bit more about the genre in which it was written. The Revelation to John is an apocalypse. You all have probably heard this term banty-ed about in pop culture. Originating as a genre of Ancient Mid-Eastern literature, it has come to popularly encompass any work of art or expression that demonstrates a dooms-day like vision of the future of humanity. It has been applied to warnings of nuclear holocaust, big-budget blockbusters like "Waterworld," and other strange and fearful images that can dominate our ideas of what may be on the horizon.

In it’s original context, an Apocalypse was a piece of literature, written by powerless minority populations, that used fantastic and mythical imagery to give voice to a sense of discontent and oppression within it’s contemporary context. A series of violent and gruesome scenes eventually cede to a vision of God’s triumph within history and the creation of a new, harmonious society. The voice is set in the recent past, so that concurrent readers can associate the "things predicted" with events that have already occurred. Apocalypses use a lot of highly symbolic, dream-like imagery to villain-ize those who are in power at the time, provide emotional support to the oppressed communities that create them, and speak to the importance of
hope in the face of adversity. They were documents created to sustain communities who felt that their very existence was endangered by outside authorities.

Revelation finds itself well within this apocalyptic tradition. Our passage this morning is from its introduction. John begins in with the standard greeting "Grace and Peace to you," which he credits as coming from God, Jesus, and "the seven spirits." As seven was a number denoting wholeness, the "seven spirits" are probably included to represent all those credited as being already with God. He then continues to proclaim God’s dominion over the earth and all it’s rulers, and declaring that upon Jesus Christ’s visible return, everyone will recognize him in his glory and will mourn over the damage they have done to Christ. This section then concludes with the statement that God is the "Alpha and Omega" - the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, representing fullness and completeness. By stating "I am the Alpha and the Omega," God is stating that all that is finds both its beginning and its end in God. Ultimate authority and power lie with the divine..

It is at this point that the visions begin to take on traditional apocalyptic format. John is called to by Jesus, taken up to the sky, and given messages for seven of the churches in Turkey (again, seven representing that the church in its entirety is being addressed), and after castigating the churches for their weaknesses and celebrating them for their strengths, John is ushered into another region of heaven where he witnesses Jesus, imaged as a Lamb, taking the throne in heaven. Scrolls are presented and opened, and with them, carnage is ravaged upon the earth. A series of surreal images of destruction follow, including blazing stars, giant locust/scorpion hybrids, angels wielding sickles, and all manner of near-hallucinatory plagues ravage the planet. The world we love, and the homeland of the writer John, is desecrated beyond recognition.

In doing so, the writer is providing a vivid description of the havoc we wreak upon ourselves. Metaphorical, fantastic language is used to elucidate the disease, warfare, and pestilence that results from our abuse of each other and the world. Indeed, it is the powerful and the dominant, those most guilty of this abuse, who are most afflicted by the nightmarish turns of events recounted throughout Revelation. Those who are faithful, the weak and powerless, are affected as well, but the church is portrayed as having the strength to maintain itself and it’s belief even as those who have grasped power in the world spectrum are brought down by the events that occur. The church is able to survive, and grow, even as the world around it falls to its knees.

It is this section of the Revelation narrative that has fed the thirst for destruction among some of it’s interpreters. There is a school of thought that disregards the nature of Revelation as a metaphorical narrative to support the oppressed, and instead sees it as a calendar of events to be fulfilled in the future. You may have run across their theories in one of the "Left Behind" novels or the movies based off of them. Because they have invented a concept of "the Rapture," in which those who already believe are taken from the earth before the events of Revelation occur, these thinkers emphasize the destruction of revelation as a meet reward for those that ignored the Christian truth. They celebrate the desecration of their own environment as just retribution for a world in transgression. This is a reading filled with vengeance, which ignores the message that lies central to Revelation, a message of hope in the midst of turmoil

It is in the last two chapters of this disturbing vision that we find the return of Jesus Christ to the earth itself, as predicted in our passage from the first chapter. With Jesus’ arrival, a new heaven and a new earth are ushered in, and we are given a vision of Christ’s dominion which was declared in the opening verses.

This New Jerusalem is said to need no sun nor moon, because it shines so bright that the nations will walk by its light. There is a constantly flowing river of life, which feeds a tree whose fruit is "for the healing of nations." That which had been destroyed and ravaged by the plagues in earlier chapters has been restored and healed into something unimaginable before. The very earth itself is formed into a land defined by its ability to bind up the wounds of others. Healing, wholeness, and resurrection have become a vivid reality. What a glorious vision for the world! What a fantastic celebration of Jesus Christ’s work of reformation!

I’ve got some news for you my friends. This second coming has already happened. We celebrated it a few weeks ago. The power of the resurrection is in its ability to show that death and destruction do not conquer all. Revelation shows us that, although we may see vividly the ravages caused by the worldly powers condemned through the book, these powers and their abuses are not the end. Rather, we must recognize the New Jerusalem in our midst. We must see how Christ has, is healing our society. We must deny our defeat by destruction, and rather recognizes that wholeness is right here. Such a vision may be difficult to see sometimes, but it is real if we live into it.

Let me return to the story of my aunt, who called with that Easter message, that message which rang to me of the New Jerusalem.

It would be inaccurate to say that my Aunt Nancy and I had a strained relationship - rather, until this time last month, we had no relationship at all. My father’s older sister, Nancy moved to New Mexico when I was in fourth grade, and I had seen her once since then 10 years ago. About a week and a half into March, I found myself with a free day in the midst of a committee meeting in Santa Fe. I called her, she drove up from Albuquerque, and we spent the day together, becoming acquainted with each other for the first time in my adulthood. She spoke of the silence within her and my father’s birth family, which had spurred our own lack of communication. She showed how she had fallen victim to the destructive cycles that dominated her relationship with my family. However, she ended the conversation - "We need to stay in closer contact. 10 years - 2 years - is too long. From now on, we must change and act like the family we are." In that moment, my aunt embraced that resurrection and wholeness that came Easter morning and is illuminating the world we live in. She negated the power of corruption and desecration, and instead embrace our ability to live as transformed people.

Indeed, I don't need to go to New Mexico to see the New Jerusalem. I see it every Sunday morning. I see the city descending when those who have been cut out of the church refuse to give up their faith, and still worship the God they know. When I join my pew-mates on vigils for peace or immigrant rights, I taste of the tree whose fruit is "for the healing of all nations." When I drink the wine of communion which restores our community, I am guzzling down the water of the River of Life. I experience the second coming on a regular basis.

May we all discern, as well, ways in which we can recognize and realize the New Jerusalem.
Thanks be to God.

International Theology of Dissent

2007-05-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

I haven't written in a very long while (three months). In part, that's because I've found myself on the road alot and working long hours, and extra writing simply does not come. You can hope for more, as I begin CPE this summer (that is, if there's anyone still out there). I've attached a reflection that I was asked to write for the school newspaper of my Alma Mater, for a special issue on the Central America Study Tour, regarding the ways in which it has shaped my theology. There should be no surprises here. I speak of a fair food demonstration three weeks ago; this afternoon, I had a similar experience at a rally for International Worker's Day. It's emphasis has been echoed in many of my reflections. Read this piece. Challenge it. May it serve as an insight into why I believe and preach what I do.
Amy

Three weeks ago, the sun broke upon picket signs and Spanish chants in the parking lot of the McDonald’s. Local residents gathered to support the rights of immigrant agricultural workers and continue the fight for fair treatment of laborers within the food industry. I was there, one of those bleary-eyed but devoted activists pressuring Ronald McDonald to turn his garish grin into a frown of distress over the mistreatment of his laborers.

I was there because of lessons I learned in Central America about the mandates of faith and their economic repercussions. Five years ago last January, I packed up all the possessions I would need for the next four months in a small green backpack, and showed up at the SeaTac airport to embark upon a journey of transformation with just over 20 other Whitworth students. I came, expecting to improve my Spanish, learn more of the history of my neighbors to the South, and begin my collection of passport stamps. I had begun to learn a bit about their tradition of liberation theology, and had discussed it in both my religion and political science courses. I did not know that these four months would make a convert of me, and shape the future course of my theological education.

Theologies of liberation have, at their center, a concept called "preferential option for the poor," which states that God is always working on behalf of the marginalized within society, to make real a world of greater equity and justice. Birthed out of the pangs of civil war throughout Latin American, I saw God "preferential option for the poor" made real throughout Central America in a manner I had missed growing up Washington State. We walked in the footsteps of Bishop Juan Gerardi, who had been killed for unveiling the horrors of forced disappearances and mass killings among the indigenous peoples. We visited with Father Fernando Cardenal, whose ordination had been revoked because of his role as a people’s educator and government official during the Sandinista administration in 1980s Nicaragua. We toured a seminary in Costa Rica that had long been a breeding ground for those who pursued social righteousness for the sake of the gospel. It was there, seeing the spiritual power of those who had taken a prophetic stance in the midst of conflict, that I was convicted of the need for social action on the part of all those who claim Christ. I learned that to live my faith was to side with those who are exploited within my own social system. I discovered what it mean to live a theology of liberation.

Now, as I see my own ordination as a minister in the not so distant future, I know that theology is not real and genuine unless it is lived. We can claim to love the poor as Jesus loved the poor, but unless we are willing to work for social policy that addresses their needs, our theology is formless and void. Central America taught me that to honor God, I must participate in creating the world I know God desires. In rectifying injustice, we are helping to realize the reconciliation Christ brings to the entire world.

Many of those farm-workers I stood with on that street corner in Louisville were born on the very streets my classmates and I walked five years ago. They have come to the United States with hopes of a better life for their families, only to be victimized by unjust working policies with our own borders. If I do not support them here, I betray the heroes I met in my four months as a foreigner. In doing so, I abandon the theological convictions I discovered in the mountains of Guatemala. Thanks be to God for that lesson. Amen.

FREE BOOKS!

2007-01-25T18:08:00.000-08:00

Have you been scouring your local bookstores for the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, but can't seem to find him in print anymore? Been dying to find out what John Chrysostom REALLY said in his original Russian? Have you been wearing thin the local library's copies of Calvin's Commentaries? If so, look no further than Christian Classics Ethereal Library!
My professor for Reformed Worship showed it to us yesterday; it's a great resource for those who want instant access to the theological works that have shaped our tradition. If the translation is in public domain, it's probably posted to this collection (or may be soon!). All the volumes include are free for download. For those of us in Seminary, this is a great relief to our book budget (though, sometimes, the more recent translation is worth the money). I hope you all enjoy!

My First Meme!

2007-01-11T20:22:00.000-08:00

Thanks! I’ve now been tagged with my first meme! This is my entry into the "Best Contemporary Theology Meme," thanks to Strappy. I, too, am looking forward to having you back in February. While I’ll be sheepish, and admit that I have not read ALL of any of these books except "Geography of Faith" and "Amazing Grace," (yet), I’ve read enough excerpts from them that they have come to influence my thinking and my conversations. At this point, I’m looking forward to the years I have ahead of me to further plumb their depths.

Three Contemporary Classics of Theology

"A Black Theology of Liberation" - James Cone (1981)
James Cone, of Union Seminary, took the new and burgeoning field of Latin American Liberation Theology, and found in its cries to the God-of-the-Oppressed a message of hope and sustenance for black, who have been consistently marginalized throughout our nation’s history. He founded the Black Theology movement, which would later inspire the Womanists to investigate the ties between Black Theology and Feminist Theology and find their own identity. An inarguable classic, though a year too old.

"She Who Is" - Elizabeth Johnson (1992)
A former Grawemeyer Award winner, Elizabeth Johnson’s "She Who Is" is one of the essentials of feminist theology, expressing and arguing for use of feminine imagery for God in a way that is grounded in orthodoxy and accessible to the lay reader. It’s already been listed on a few of the other lists, but demands inclusion.

"Terror in the Mind of God" Mark Juergensmeyer (2003)
Another Grawemeyer Award winner, "Terror in the Mind of God" is a comparative study of the doctrines and conditions that create religious violence, including examples from Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Hinduism. As we speak of the rise of "terrorism" and religious violence of all forms, we in the United States have a tendency to focus on the Abrahamic Faiths. Juergensmeyer’s book gives us a strong perspective on those questions, as well as broadening the discussion to include other world religions.

Three Lesser Known Works Everyone Should Read (This the Fun Part!)

"The Geography of Faith" - Daniel Berrigan and Robert Coles (1971)
While technically a decade too old, "Geography of Faith," written in 1971, is too strong of a gem to get put aside. During the months that Daniel Berrigan, Society of Jesus, was underground evading capture by the authorities for acts of civil disobedience in opposition to the Vietnam War, he spent part of his time living in the basement of Robert Coles, the Pulitzer-Prize winning psychologist who had been instrumental in the Civil Rights movement in the South. What arose out of those months was a series of conversations recorded for posterity about the interrelationship between social action, psychology, and a lived theology. Beautifully inspiring.

"Amazing Grace" - Kathleen Norris (1999)
Kathleen Norris, who has become the laureate of mainstream Christian Spirituality through such works as "The Cloister Walk," took a series of the words that make Christianity difficult - words like "salvation," "ecstasy," and "apocalypse," - and created an intensely personal connection to each of them through her anecdotes and explorations of what they mean in her spiritual life. It’s style is clear enough to engage the average member, while profound enough to inspire the headiest theologian.

"Saving Paradise" - Rita Nakashima Brock (2007)
I’m cheating in all sorts of ways today - from the slightly-too-old to the not-yet-published. However, while Brock’s book isn’t due out until August of 2007, I heard her speak at the Voices of Sophia breakfast at the General Assembly this last June, and her upcoming work promises to be as controversial and inspiring as her earlier books. In an effort to dismantle sacrificial models of atonement, Brock stated in her speech....
"(Christians knew) that by his defeat of death and his resurrection, Jesus Christ re-opened the gates of paradise on the earth, especially in the church. Through immersion into earth's waters, which flowed out from paradise, the baptized received the indwelling spirit of God. Jesus became human so we might become divine. The newly baptized gained the power to grow in wisdom together and ascend to God. In the communion feast, paradise could be tasted, seen, and felt in its healing power and joy as it was celebrated with the risen Christ, who joined together the living and the departed in the great feast of life, of Eucharist."

Most of my readers have been tapped already; however, I extend the invitation to share with Kristen, Andrew, Tom, and Will. I can’t wait to see the diversity of the responses that arise!

2006-11-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

Hey all!
Below, I've included the first sermon I'll be giving for my preaching class. I'll be giving it twice, once for class on Nov 7 and once at church on Nov 19. Let me know what you think, and if there's anything you feel needs significant work or improvement.
Amy

"I am a daughter of Hagar, outside of the covenant."

Spoken by a black woman borrowing the Biblical story to express her own sense of deserted-ness as she expressed the desolation of those shackled by our social systems of sexism, classism, and racism; remembered and recorded by Phyllis Trible; these words ring with the sense of isolation that comes when our expectations are deflated and our hopes are dashed. They voice the hollowed-out existence of those who have dared to trust, and seen that trust broken. Hagar, like many of her daughters and sons, nurses a body bruised and a spirit broken by the abandonment of those who surrounded her.

Yet Hagar has also been adopted as a sign of hope and persistence by people such as the Women in Black, who stand vigil in Hagar Square of Jerusalem each day, waiting for an end to the Palestinian Occupation. They see her as a symbol of God’s promised refreshment in the face of violence and death. Who is this Hagar, that she is read as a symbol of both victimization and liberation? What is the source of this grief and inspiration? How do two such disparate visions find a basis in the same narrative?

Our story begins approximately 14 years before the commencement of the passage this morning. Last week, we learned of Sarah’s rolling laughter at the notice that she would carry and bear a child. Yet, this was not the first time that a child had been predicted to their family; her conception was not the first in their household, nor was Isaac the first child to call Abraham by the tender name of "Daddy."

Fourteen years and five chapters before Sarah and Hagar’s conflict reaches the breaking point, when Abraham and Sarah were still Abram and Sarai, Abram is promised as many descendants as there are stars. And, yet, a problem remains. Sarai, Abram’s wife, appears to be infertile. After many decades of marriage, they are still childless. There is no one to support them in their increasingly old age. They have produced no heirs to fill the vision of multitudes that God has laid out for them.

But Sarai; cunning, wizened Sarai; Sarai who HERSELF had been given to Pharaoh in order to protect her husband; Sarai has an idea. She pulls Abram aside one night to discuss their little problem. Sarai arranges for Abram to take Hagar, her slave, in order that Hagar will give him a child and provide the progeny that he and Sarai had been denied. Hagar is brought in without her consent as a remedy for Sarai’s infertility.

There, in that short exchange between a husband and wife, Hagar was sold into a forced marriage by a woman who had been sold into a similar situation just a few chapters earlier. Hagar, who was given neither voice nor choice in this little family business arrangement would lose the last bit of freedom offered to her as a slave. The covenant of marriage had been replaced by a contract of convenience.

Soon, it says, Hagar became pregnant, and her opinion of Sarai began to lessen. Quite understandable, as Sarai was the broker of the deal that robbed Hagar of her dignity. As her belly swelled, did Hagar’s throat swell up from cries of remembrance? Did she confuse the nausea of morning sickness with the symptoms of emotional distress? Did each kick from the child growing in her belly remind her of a motherhood that was thrust upon her?
Whatever her situation, we know it wasn’t one of contentment, excitement, and anticipation. We are told that as the pregnancy wore on, Sarai began to complain to Abram about her. When Abram shrugged off her complaints, saying "Hagar is your slave; You decide what to do," Sarai even became abusive.

We are not given details of this abuse; It may be better that way. As the founding parents of the Hebrew people, we are supposed to respect and love Abram and Sarai. Sometimes, just as living with those we love means embracing and supporting while recognizing and challenging their destructive tendencies, so too we need to learn and embrace our faith stories like those in Genesis, while recognizing and challenging the faults in the characters we lift up as heroes. Documenting the details of Sarai’s abuse of Hagar could only make our job of learning to love and challenge the characters in our sacred text more difficult than it already is.

What we do know is that this mistreatment so affected Hagar that she chose to run off into the desert while still expecting rather than remain with Abram and Sarai. I can see her, stumbling through the sands while still learning to navigate her ever-changing center of balance, struggling for a resting place not too easily spotted lest Abram and Sarai had set out looking for her. It is now, in her first lonely venture into the wilderness, that Hagar encounters God. She is told to return to Abram and Sarai; to raise her son with them; that he will grow strong and proud; and that she is to name him "Ishmael," which means "God hears." She responds to this charge by naming God as "The God who Sees Me." At this moment, Hagar herself creates a covenant with the Holy One. Hagar is claiming God as a witness to the slavery and the oppression to which she is returning. She, in essence, says that she can and will return only because she knows that God will bear witness to her suffering. She is returning, as she has been mandated, in order that her pain may be exposed before God.

Hagar returned to the home of Abram and Sarai. She had her baby. They named him Ishmael. We are given no more details about the lives of Hagar and Ishmael until 13 years later, where our scripture selection picks up.

At this point, Abram and Sarai have changed their names to Abraham and Sarah. Sarah has finally conceived in her old age, and bore a child named after the same raucous laughter than accompanied hearing the prediction of her son. At first, Sarah is content in motherhood. After the first few years, though, Sarah’s bitterness and anger sets in again. She sees Ishmael, at his brothers weaning celebration, laughing with the same mirth she herself has shown in earlier passages. Once again, she cries out to her husband Abraham, complaining that the son of "THAT SLAVE WOMAN" would inherit alongside her own beloved Isaac. Sarah demands the immediate expulsion of both Ishmael and Hagar.

Abraham, who in earlier stories had so easily acquiesced to Sarah’s often unreasonable demands, is understandably hesitant. Sarah has demanded that Abraham cut off all ties with his own son; she has commanded Ishmael’s ex-communication and disinheritance. Abraham becomes disheartened and dismayed at this domestic conflict that is tearing apart those he loves. In all respects, Ishmael had become the promised son; Ishmael, too, was understood as the fruit of God’s covenant with Abraham. To cast him off, with his mother, would be to abandon the first produce of God’s faithfulness.

And yet, as Abraham is grieving over the choice he is being forced to make between his beloved and beautiful wife of many decades, and his oldest son and potential heir, the God - Who - Hears comforts Abraham, telling him not to worry. Abraham is instructed to follow Sarah’s wishes, and send his son off into the desert with only his mother to accompany him. Both Isaac and Ishmael will be named the founders and nations; both will become the means of God’s promised multitude. Remembering and trusting this conversation, Abraham wakes Hagar and Ishmael in the wee hours of the morning, and sends them away from camp with only a small canteen and a sack of food, and casts them off to whatever unknown experiences may await them.
Soon, the canteen had been emptied and with it had dried up Hagar and Ishmael’s hope of survival in the harsh desert environment. Without a source of food or water in sight, without any sign of sustenance, Hagar lays her young son down under a shrub, and sits a ways off so that she will not have to watch him die. Her parched throat produced the raspy, weary sobs of the deserted.

Hagar, bewildered and bedraggled, must have felt like she had been excluded from that same covenant which had hovered around her campsite since she had left her home in Egypt. Hagar had been used by her owners, in order to take advantage of her fertility. She had attempted to leave while still on her own, but been sent back to a life of slavery. Now, she knew with the intuitive knowledge of a burden-laden mother that the same son God had promised would grow and thrive was about to die of dehydration; a death that was the direct result of banishment by his own father. God’s witness to their suffering appeared to have evaporated in the heat. It would seem that all of the promise and hope that filled the potential life of Hagar and her son had been drained away with this final act of abandonment. In fact, "Beersheba," the name of the land in which Hagar and Ishmael wandered, can be translated as the "Well of Oaths." There, once again surrounded by isolation and the desert sands, Hagar is drowning in a lifetime of empty promises and broken relationships. Even the vow of God seemed hollow and worthless.

It is at that point that the name "Ishmael," "God hears," begins to take on a prophetic nature. A messenger descends, and taps Hagar on the shoulder. The messenger tell Hagar that God has indeed heard the cries of her son and has responded with the nourishment and sustenance she had been promised since her first weary trip into the desert. She is pointed to a spring, a well of water that will quench their thirst and replenish their spirits.

Hagar fills her canteen, and with the loving care of a once-grieving mother, she holds it to the lips of the son she has raised up these thirteen years. Like the infant she carried in her arms more than a decade early, Ishmael suckles at the canteen as the water strengthens, renews, and refreshes his parched throat.

In fact, this forbidding land filled with reminders of empty promises was to become their home, and would itself bear witness to a burgeoning and a thriving of the life of Hagar, Ishmael, and their future descendants that could not have been foreseen on that hot and dusty afternoon. It is written that Ishmael grew strong, and made a home in that desert, re-named the "Wilderness of Abundant Foliage." He married a woman that Hagar brought from her home for him, and their settlement grew and multiplied. In deed, tradition states that Ishmael became the father of the Arab peoples, and the religion of Islam traces their roots back to Ishmael, Hagar, and the home they made for themselves in that same land they thought would take their lives.

Was Hagar ever truly outside of the covenant? On that blinding bright afternoon when the blazing sun was causing their last hope of survival to evaporate, she certainly appeared that way. Hagar, like the woman who calls on her name, felt abandoned by those who had pledged to support her, victimized by systems that restricted her from deciding her own destiny, drowning in the well of empty and illusory promises. And yet, we know from that miraculous provision of water, and the generations that call her their foremother, that the covenant never truly left Hagar. Rather, it stayed with her and came to fruition even when death seemed certain. It is that covenantal relationship which we celebrate tomorrow at the "Children of Abraham" dinner. We know that Sarah and Hagar are equally foremothers of the multitudes that name and follow the God who witnessed their desert pilgrimage.

How often do we feel that same sense of powerlessness? How commonly do we see that which we depend on leave us stranded in the desert? How frequently do we feel parched for that life-giving nourishment which will promise us another day?

I, like Phyllis Trible, am haunted by the memory of the woman whose quote we heard earlier. She knew the story of Hagar because she lived the story of Hagar, but her individual version is not provided. She, too had seen her hope evaporate in the midst of desolation. Is this sister of ours one of the thousands of women lured to the United States by a promise of marriage or money, only to become a nameless victim of human sex trafficking? Is she one of our neighbors in Appalachia who have seen their homelands devoured by the appetite of the coal mining companies? Is she my grocery clerk, with bags under her eyes from the heavy burden of life in low-wage America?

Additionally, I long to know how and where her well appeared.

Not all of our experiences of the "Well of Empty Promises" are as grandiose as Hagar’s abandonment. Some are as quiet and indiscernible as a household where rollicking laughter has been replaced by silence. Some sow disappointment in our sense of service to God, like those who follow God's calling only to find their ministry pulled out from underneath. Still others tear the fabric of family life, like the shadows of abuse and addiction that shade over generations. Each of these, and all of the varied and individual situations that tear away at what is left of our hope, are desert experiences in the lives of God’s covenant people. They are not to be taken lightly, brushed off like dust that has alighted on our shoulders. Yet, we also must remember to listen and wait as we are directed towards nourishment and refreshment even as our parched throats are crying out to God as witness.

As we search for that hidden well, we also must keep vigilant, and struggle with our own role as Abraham and Sarah as this same story is played out within our society. I cannot condemn their role in Hagar’s marginalization without taking action and reforming my own role in our systemic and personal cycles of exploitation. I must offer myself the same challenge I offer to the Biblical narrative.

*I am a daughter of Hagar, waiting and watching for my spring to appear.*

I am a daughter of both Sarah and Hagar, waiting and watching for the spring.

* I did end up making a few changes. Everything I added is in bold with italics. Those lines I changed are listed first in the original version, surrounded by asterisks, and then afterwards in the final version.

These Things Give Me Hope

2006-10-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

It was less than two years ago that I wrote plaintively from this same website, mourning the lack of prophetic leadership from the religious left. Since that time, the Sojourners movement has produced a best-selling book; the Christian Science Monitor has published an in depth series on ethical investing; and my own denomination has made headlines for our commitment to inclusive language, socially responsible fiscal policies, and even supporting medical marijuana. It seems that my anguish was paralleled in my brothers and sisters throughout the country, who are speaking up and out. Or, maybe, I simply became more aware of what was already going on.

Now, our immediate past moderator and my hero, Rick Ufford-Chase, was arrested for protesting against the Iraq war, along with 4 Presbyterian ministers and 70 others, on Tuesday Sept 27 in the Senate Building in DC. To those who know of him, this comes as no surprise. Since June, when his term as moderator expired, Ufford-Chase has been serving as the Executive Director of Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (who co-sponsors the Colombia Accompaniment Project which sent me to Barranquilla.) However, as my dear friend Kelsey noted last night, the act of a former moderator carries weight. It demands respect. It gives this act of communal civil disobedience a validity that keeps the common congregant from writing this action off as simply the act of wide-eyed idealism and ex-hippies.

That same day, before the press releases had arrived in our mailboxes about the protest, nearly concurrent with Declaration for Peace's spontaneous die-in there in the Senate office building, as their strains were being lifted for peace, I discovered a previously unknown bard of the faith-based anti-war movement.

A few years ago, as I was starting to leave behind the Contemporary Christian subculture I adopted in my teens, one of the musicians whose work stayed with me in my consciousness, and that I continued to admire, was Caedmon's Call, a highly literary Christian folk pop band. Most of all, I listened to them for the lyrics of Derek Webb, one of the few songwriters on Christian radio whose work respected and delved into a faith more intricate and deep than most modern praise choruses would suggest.

Concurrent with my final year and graduation from Whitworth College, and with it my increasing awareness about the interrelationship of faith and social action, Derek Webb was also undergoing a career change. He left Caedmon's Call, in order to pursue a solo career. His first album put him in a testy relationship with his previous audiences, as he drew parallels to the situation in Hosea and compared the modern church to a whore. A conflict over the appropriate use of the word "damned" in a Christian context (in a song where it took on it's literal, original menaing) led to the expulsion of his work from many Christian bookstores. Since then, Webb has continued writing and publishing as an independent artist, creating music that continues to challenge Christian preconceptions.

In December, Webb released an album called "Mockingbird," a collection of what could be referred to as "faith-based protest music." It's titles include lines like "Love is Not Against the Law," "My Enemies are Men Like Me," and lines such as "There are two great lies I've heard; The day you eat of the tree you'll not surely die, and Jesus Christ was a white, middle class, Republican, and if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like Him." (From A King and a Kingdom). In an effort to reach a greater public, get his music heard, and make known that there are Christian songwriters providing an alternative to the monolithich conservatism of Dobson's favorite radio stations, Derek Webb is now offering his entire album (intentionally, I might add ;) ) as a free download. At this point, one month into the campaign, 40,000 people have downloaded it.

These are both signs of resistance. Ufford-Chase offers the standard vision of social change; He is the non-violent revolutionary like Amos or Martin Luther King Jr, standing in the city square and preaching repentance to the public officials. Webb demonstrates a different approach; in a church context where we learn our theology through hymns like "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," Webb provides alternative language and music for a faith that values peace and justice. These are the keys to education and mobilization; the understanding that there are others out there expressing the same truth, and that voice is slowly but surely reaching the public.

May their work continue.

"Shock and Awe" Takes on a Spiritual Context

2006-09-16T16:50:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I read the Gospel of Mark in one sitting. I wasn’t in devotional overdrive like you may think; rather, I’m one week into classes and I’m already behind in my reading. This Saturday has been dedicated to the perpetual game of catch-up that characterizes grad school.

I was struck by choppy nature of the narrative. Mark lacks the flowery prose and rich descriptions that I’ve come to expect from my readings. It feels segmented and awkward at times; confounding at incidents the cursing of the fig tree, and filled with seeming non sequiturs as teachings are chained to one another through relations that seem strained.

And, last of all, there was the original ending. Instead of the call to baptize and disciple that we find in Matthew; Christ’s ascension in Luke; or the affirmation of the "beloved disciple" to continue the work in John; Mark ends with the three women who come to tend to Jesus fleeing from the tomb in fear because they’ve seen a stranger decked in white. Christ himself has not appeared. It finishes with a shock and a jolt, and in doing so, continues that stylistic pattern.

In a way, the choppy nature of Mark reminds us that Christ’s ministry was thoroughly unpredictable. Just as we are jolted back and forth through changes in focus and style, so are we continually shocked into attention by the surprising work of redemption in ourselves and our neighbors. It is easy for us to fall asleep, like the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, with the expectation that what awaits us is something as familiar as waking each morning. And yet, it was as those disciples were shaking the sleep from their eyes that they saw their leader arrested. They had lost their comfort and false sense of understanding. In the same way, as the women went about their traditional methods of caring for the dead, they were suddenly jolted out of what they expected to occur. They were shocked into seeing the truth, and reacted as we all do, running away in fear, to share the story later.

Tonight, Mark reminds me to embrace those sudden jolts as part of the journey of faith, as those events that awaken us to spiritual truth.

Del Cristo Desplazado

2006-07-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I will be leaving August 6 to spend a month in Barranquilla, Colombia as an accompanier with Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Colombian Presbyterian Church. I have begun a second blog, Del Cristo Desplazado, as a means of recording and sharing my reflections and experiences. I hope you will join me there. Thank you, my few and faithful readers!

Uncomfortable Heat in a Momentary Spotlight

2006-07-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

Monday night, I was installed into a position I have now held for two and one half years before an audience of 3000 women gathered from all corners of the nation. I was commissioned before this sea of faces to live out the PW purpose, as well as guide and govern my sisters of all ages as they do the same. Yet, throughout my time on that stage, I felt a nagging desire to abandon that platform, to hide myself in the back of the audience, to fade into the cloud of witnesses that had accumulated in the Kentucky International Convention Center. It felt showy, as if I were on parade as a mini-celebrity to wave at the masses, and give them a bow before going off to make staggeringly important decision about the FUTURE of the INSTITUTION.

My call experience for the Churchwide Coordinating Team was much more intimate, and felt much more genuine. I had returned to my hometown of Olympia for Christmas, trembling with excitement and intimidation because I knew that the next afternoon held my first meeting with the committee that would guide me through the ordination process; it was their role to either accept me or reject me; affirm me or dissuade me in my call; this was to be my first official step toward ordained ministry. On the eve of this momentous afternoon, I was returning home to a broken family situation, in the midst of a year of mission that would end up wracking my soul and devastating my spirit.

When I arrived at the guest room of a family friend, a close comrade and nurturing soul who welcomed me as the crux of my conflict with my parents descended along with the plane that took me home, I discovered with that small joy of recognition that I had a voicemail. That voicemail was from Kelsey (with whom my few readers are already familiar). She was at that time, and still is, one of my closest and dearest friends. Hearing her voice, and knowing that she thought of me enough to call that cold December afternoon was a bit of glorious encouragement. And yet, there was a professional tone to her voice that did not lend itself to the chatting of old roommates.

Kelsey also happened to be serving as the national intern for an organization I had belonged to all of my four years as an undergraduate, and to which I had introduced (and started to indoctrinate) her. That afternoon, she was calling with an institutional affirmation that would sustain me throughout my experience in Cincinnati. One of the representatives from the National Network of Presbyterian College Women to the Churchwide Coordinating Team of Presbyterian Women (their national governing body) had resigned because of academic commitments, and the Coordinating Committee of the NNPCW was asking me to fill out her term, six months after it had started. My first meeting was to come in two months, in Puerto Rico, where I would take an active role in the governance of the single largest entity to support the Presbyterian Church (USA). My life, and the life of PW, became intertwined. There, in that guest bedroom as I struggled with both my vocation and my sense of home and family, I received the blessing of true calling, all the stronger and more affirming because of its timing and the voice that delivered it.

Throughout the remaining eight months that I lived in Cincinnati, as I spoke up about the structural problems that were plaguing my Young Adult Volunteer site, as I was belittled and betrayed by my co-workers, as I wrestled with the isolation and loneliness that came with living 3000 miles from those to whom I wanted to cling in my pain, the CCT provided an avenue where I could serve and feel affirmed through it. When I felt like those I worked with and for simply wanted me to disappear, Presbyterian Women took and celebrated what I had to offer. They were a validation during a year of seeming futility. They provided me with a different mission to support and enjoy, when mission itself had left me dry as Ezekiel’s desert of bones.

I wrestle with the idea of my installation, in part because the position I am bringing to a close throughout the next year has already brought tangible joy and hope to my ministry. The two and one half years I have spent working with the last Churchwide Coordinating Team have helped define me and support me. An installation is intended to be a new beginning, yet for me it was an overstated demonstration of work that I was already doing. My term truly began that evening in Washington. In addition, I remember that I was, indeed, the second choice, the younger daughter, the substitute. In fact, I think I prefer it that way. The evening before the installation, as I was enjoying a drink with acquaintances new and old who share that vision of women’s empowerment and service to the church, one of the new members of the national PW search committee referred to my co-representative and I as the "bigwigs." I was rather shocked. I am not, nor will ever be, able to identify myself with that term. Rather, I am the support staff, the back up, the interim, who steps in when others falter and allows all of us to simply carry on. I am the catalyst for what is already happening.

And, so, on Monday night, I longed to sit and enter back into that crowd, to watch as my sisters entered into their own new vocations as the CCT, to pledge to support them in their efforts and pray for their wisdom. I did not feel as if I belonged alongside the new officers, even though we work together as sisters. They will govern PW for the next three years; I will simply accompany them for the first third of their time. My term extension is simply to allow the staggering of rotation between our two co-representatives; it is an effort of practicality. I am, once again, the substitute, filling the gap between the beginning of this Triennium and the time that my co-representative will be able to welcome and assist my own successor. I am, still, the interim member. When my time is over, I will enter back into the crowd and take the place where I feel most comfortable

Birmingham Bound, or Ga-GA

2006-06-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

What happens when you combine a family reunion, the exhibit hall at the county fair, a multitude of multicultural worship services, and one very long committee meeting? Why, you have the (now bi-annual) national convention for my personal brand of the frozen chosen. Church geeks, get out your laptops and follow the bouncing ball through the legislation process as we bring you to General Assembly!

I’ll say I was "predestined" to be a nerd for church government. When I was in eighth grade, we had to fill out those goal sheets with our life dreams. At that point, I planned to get a job in journalism after graduating from college, write a sequel to Watership Down, and, at some point attend the national governing body of the PC (USA). 11 years later, I have no desire to write professionally, but I am about to attend my third General Assembly. That dream has been realized, and my love for the church has been strengthened. The first time I attended, I was the youth delegate from my Presbytery, in 1999. My second time, I was being commissioned as a representative of the Young Adult Volunteers, the mission program that brought me to Cincinnati. This year, I have joined the ranks of the gad-flys and onlookers as I prepare specifically to work in the exhibit booth, watch the committee meeting to which I’m assigned for anything that affects Presbyterian Women, and in general serve as a voice to lift up women’s concerns to the General Assembly through whatever means are at my disposal.

At my first GA, in Fort Worth, Texas, I remember standing in awe as the delegations from the various presbyteries entered, and sensing for the first time the connectivity of Presbyterians from coast to coast. At my second GA, in Richmond, Virginia, I remember my exhilaration as the outgoing moderator chose the congregation I had dedicated myself to the previous summer as an example of churches living in fulfillment. Now, at my third GA in Birmingham, Alabama, I’m a little less starry-eyed, a little more cynical, and yet still hopeful for what may come. We have the opportunity to make a landmark decision this year that may maker our churches the inclusive community of which many of us dream. We will be examining our communal doctrine of the Trinity and re-affirming what we believe and expressing it better. We will continue the social witness of the church through overtures involving immigration issues and other pressing concerns. We enter into this exciting time, not knowing what our church will support in two weeks time.

The Spirit is moving in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Our staid little selves are coming together, to listen to the prophets in our midst, and discern what the will of God is for our little section of Christianity. Come what may, in two weeks time there will be a new vision and a new birth in our denomination, as there is with each General Assembly. That is what draws my comrades and myself; that knowledge that God’s work is prevailing in ways that may surprise and shock us. The Presbyterian Church is far from predictable. Will we have the courage to follow where this call leads us?

Voices from Our History

2006-05-31T19:35:00.001-07:00

Thanks to I-Am-Bored.com, I was directed to the website linked below (Someone as to teach me how to do the link on a word thingy!) It's an amazing site; It's compiled sound clips through American history. Where else can you hear the voices of PT Barnum, William Jennings Bryan, Stokely Carmichael, and Richard Nixon all from the same page. Absolutely thrilling.

http://www.freeinfosociety.com/site.php?postnum=460

Guest posts

2006-05-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

Hey all,
I wrote two more guest posts for Network Notes, for Monday May 28 and Tuesday May 29. Check them out, leaving a comment. With school over for the summer(turned my last paper in at 9:30 on Friday YIPPEE!), and much too much spare time on my hands, it's looking like I'll be writing more in the coming months. I can't wait!
Amy

The Theology of Detergent

2006-04-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Today served as a reminder that you cannot predict the ways that the Holy Spirit will use you or your words....

For my class covering practical issues of parish ministry (web authoring, budget making, research techniques, etc) we’ve been writing once a week short entries inspired by lectio divina. Though we are supposed to read each day, most weeks I simply read once and write once to fulfill the requirement. Daily discipline has always been one of my weakest points; that’s why I failed at praying the rosary nightly for Lent, why my homework is very often late, and why nothing in my life that is routine stays that way for long. I know this isn’t a good practice for me; however, I lack the will to allow myself to broken of this lack-a-daisicalness.
In October, as I was rushing to complete my weekly lectio passage before flying out of town for training, I spit out a hurried reflection on something new, and almost silly, I had seen in the Message translation of Psalm 51. I was puzzled by the imagery it used, and wrote in that off-kiltered state. I didn’t think much of it...

However, this afternoon I arrived to spend my lunch with the Presbyterian Church’s "Committee on Theological Education," which visits one seminary campus each year. As I sat down, my professor rushed over to me. She had presented to the Committee about the use of technology in education, and had used our discussion board as an example. One of the lectio responses she pulled out to show her audience was my reflection on Psalm 51. After hearing it, she said, there were those among the committee who had asked specifically for copies of the text to take home with them. I was rather shocked; I had composed it almost haphazardly and was surprised to here of other’s reactions to it.

Now, I’ll admit, I still don’t consider it anything particularly special. To me, my own writing smacks of the smarmy saccharine spirituality you find in the feel-good publication they give you at the drug store when you purchase $10 worth of adult diapers. Yet others have seen something in my words that I do not see myself; and that I can only attribute to the work of the Holy Spirit. Praise be for working in ways we do not expect.

Here is my entry, for your bemusement....

"Scrub away my guilt, Soak out my sins in your laundry.. Soak me in your laundry and I'll come out clean, scrub me and I'll have a snow-white life."
I spent the summer after my freshman year of college working in a laundromat. One of my primary duties was to take in clothes of some of our clients and wash and dry them for them. That's how I learned how nasty dirty clothes can be. I saw the remnants of all sorts of nastiness. I was also glad that I didn't get the stories behind it most of the time!I think there's a reason we call the secrets and hidden things in our lives our "dirty laundry" - they are the reminders of the things we are most ashamed of, the behaviors we know are unacceptable and so choose to hide from our neighbors. To God, we can very often be dirty laundry - we are not the best and brightest, that which should be shown off, because we fail daily at the mission God gives us. And yet, instead of throwing us to the rag heap, we are cleaned and bleached through repentance and forgiveness and put on again, only to be stained again by our own weaknesses.Laundering is an intimidating process; you're submitted to all sorts of chemicals, drowned in the water that will cleanse you, and then tumbled around at hot temperatures. Then your new found "cleanliness" only lasts for a day, and you're put through the entire cycle again. How much patience God has to do so much laundry every day! How strongly ought we to strive to stay clean!

Free at Last

2006-03-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

This news arrived today, via SojoMail, a publication of Sojourners. I have written of the CPT situation before; I was delighted to recieve this news. I praise God for the safety of Norman, Harmeet, and Jim. I thank God for the ministry that Tom provided, and only wish that he had been able to return home as well. May they give us courage to continue to seek the reign of God throughout our society.

CPT rejoices in the release of our peacemakersby Doug Pritchard and Carol Rose

Our hearts are filled with joy today as we heard that Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember have been safely released in Baghdad. Christian Peacemaker Teams rejoices with their families and friends at the expectation of their return to their loved ones and community. Together we have endured uncertainty, hope, fear, grief and now joy during the four months since they were abducted in Baghdad.
We rejoice in the return of Harmeet Sooden. He has been willing to put his life on the line to promote justice in Iraq and Palestine as a young man newly committed to active peacemaking.
We rejoice in the return of Jim Loney. He has cared for the marginalized and oppressed since childhood, and his gentle, passionate spirit has been an inspiration to people near and far.
We rejoice in the return of Norman Kember. He is a faithful man, an elder and mentor to many in his 50 years of peacemaking, a man prepared to pay the cost.
We remember with tears Tom Fox, whose body was found in Baghdad on March 9, 2006, after three months of captivity with his fellow peacemakers. We had longed for the day when all four men would be released together. Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration. However, we are confident that his spirit is very much present in each reunion.
Harmeet, Jim and Norman and Tom were in Iraq to learn of the struggles facing the people in that country. They went, motivated by a passion for justice and peace to live out a nonviolent alternative in a nation wracked by armed conflict. They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers. We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.
Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families. In the spirit of the prophetic nonviolence that motivated Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom to go to Iraq, we refuse to yield to a spirit of vengeance. We give thanks for the compassionate God who granted our friends courage and who sustained their spirits over the past months. We pray for strength and courage for ourselves so that, together, we can continue the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace.
Throughout these difficult months, we have been heartened by messages of concern for our four colleagues from all over the world. We have been especially moved by the gracious outpouring of support from Muslim brothers and sisters in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. That support continues to come to us day after day. We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.
During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?
With Tom's death, we felt the grief of losing a beloved friend. Today, we rejoice in the release of our friends Harmeet, Jim and Norman. We continue to pray for a swift and joyful homecoming for the many Iraqis and internationals who long to be reunited with their families. We renew our commitment to work for an end to the war and the occupation of Iraq as a way to continue the witness of Tom Fox. We trust in God's compassionate love to show us the way.
Living through the many emotions of this day, we remain committed to the words of Jim Loney, who wrote:
"With God's abiding kindness, we will love even our enemies.
With the love of Christ, we will resist all evil.
With God's unending faithfulness, we will work to build the beloved community."
Doug Pritchard and Carol Rose are co-directors of Christian Peacemaker Teams

In memory...

2006-03-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

The news was broadcast today that Tom Fox, member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, was found dead at an Iraqi railroad station. He had been killed by those who took him captive at the beginning of Advent. A video was released on Tuesday with his three other co-captives featured. Presumably, they are still alive... May we lift up his family, his co-workers, and Christian Peacemaker Teams as a whole as the repercussions of this tragedy play out... You can find his writings at http://waitinginthelight.blogspot.com Oh, that we could all live out the gospel as he did.... Tonight, I mourn for Tom Fox.

Maybe I'm a Mennonite...

2006-02-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

"True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all men." Menno Simons
This evening, a Missionary Baptist co-worker and I tussled around a pool table and wrestled with issues like scriptural authority and interpretation. I was reminded throughout our conversation that I am, truly and fully, an evangelical. That may surprise my cohorts; in some circles, "evangelical" has become a curse word that we fling against hate-mongering, book-burning image of the Christian Right. We claim that we are spreading the abundant love of God in contrast to a faith that is based in fear, when in reality we are making an idol of our own understanding of God by shutting out the voices with which we disagree. I DO serve the same Christ as Pat Robertson, and though our interpretations of what Christ mandates are different, it is the same Christ. We forget that we share the same language, imagery, and faith. When we tear each other apart, it is ourselves that we are blinding for we are all one body.
The social justice I preach, the simplicity I practice, the work I take on to overturn oppression are all the work of evangelism. They are the embodiment of the wild, radical, and beautiful teachings of Christ. They are the enactment of the Sermon on the Mount. They are realization that true evangelism is not contained in the winning of hearts and souls, but also encompasses the participation in the establishment of the Kingdom of God, which is indeed mandated as our primary motivation. Our conversion is not complete until it is made manifest in all aspects of our lives, including the belief and behavior that my friend emphasizes as well as the political and economic ramifications to which I have devoted myself. Menno Simmons understood that, and from the tradition he inspired have come some of the bravest and truest saints I have encountered. Oh, how I desire to have that same courage.
And so, I will continue to preach Christ crucified and risen, and declare the liberative power of the resurrection to overcome the violence and darkness that has been shown through our destructive lives and social cycles.

Spiritual Grammar

2005-12-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

Here's an entry I did as guest blogger for the NNPCW... Check out Kelsey's writing on www.networknotes.blogspot.com. I'm so proud of my former roommate!

Boker tov, Achiot! Greetings, my sisters!

My name is Amy, I’m in my first year at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Kelsey has asked me to be your guest blogger this fine afternoon. Like you all, I just finished my last final this morning, a grueling Hebrew exam. I tell you, there’s nothing worse for a student than the sensation that your mind has suddenly liquidated and gone pouring out your ears the afternoon before the end of the semester. However, learning Hebrew has been exciting for me; I love being able to read the Bible in its original language (even though it can be a struggle), and doing so has brought a greater depth to my own spirituality.

In fact, a few weeks ago, I was writing a paper for my introductory theology course on the nature of the Trinity. Defining God in five pages is truly a hefty task. I was struggling with our traditional imagery of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which we use to define the different ways we see God working. When we describe God with "person" words, those image we have of God project upon God a concreteness and finiteness that isn’t there. They build false separations between the work of the three parts, and create doubts among ourselves and those we dialogue with about whether or not we worship one God, or three. I was struggling to find a way to express the truth of the Trinity without building up those false divisions that can hinder our own understanding.

I went back and examined the call of Moses in Exodus 3:14. When Moses challenges God to define Godself, in order that Moses can respond to those who challenge the nature of the Divine in Moses’s work, God states "I will be what I will be." The God in the burning bush is a God who is defined by becoming and doing and acting in a variety of ways, rather than in anything tactile and concrete. In this verse, God is a verb rather than a noun.

Now, many of you will check your Bibles and say.... "My version says "I Am Who I Am. Why, here, God seems to be a person, a thing you can touch..." My friends, this is where the wonder and horrors of language of take place. Interpretation has played substantial role about God, and has created some limits. In the Hebrew language, there is no present tense, rather only completed actions and incompleted actions. Completed actions are usually translated as past tense, and incompleted actions as future tense. Grammatically, it is impossible in Hebrew to say "I Am Who I Am" for these very reasons. We began to interpret it that way because when Exodus was translated into Greek for the Septuagint, they translated, and in the same action transformed, the verse to the present tense. The Vulgate, the first major European translation of the Bible, used the Septuagint as its model, and so the language of "I am" has continued throughout our tradition, despite its grammatical impossibility in the original language. Indeed, "I will be what I will be" is a more accurate interpretation of that truth that resonated throughout the desert where Moses was exiled.

When I discovered that God refers to Godself as verb, it was if my entire understanding of what God does had been illuminated. As I delved into this new and sudden revelation, and discussed its implications with my classmates, I realized that this understanding had been on nearly every page of the Old Testament, and I had been unable comprehend it because I was limited by language. Where is it, you ask? Why, it is in the very name of God! As some of you may know, the Hebrews had such respect and reverence for the name of God that they were not allowed to speak it. Therefore, whenever the Holy name is written in Old Testament manuscripts, the scribes replace the vowels for the name of God with the vowels for the different words people substitute for it when speaking about God, such as "Adonai," or "Elohim." The only part that has survived of the divined name are the consonants - YHWH. These consonants manifested the third person singular incompeted form of a verb that we have not defined. Indeed, God’s name essentially says "He will do the God thing." Once again, God is defined as verb, as action, as what God does.

That frees us as well to talk about what God does rather than what God is when we talk about the Trinity. When we refer to God as "Father," we are really saying that God acts like a father rather than actually being a father. And there are three patterns of Gods work that we can see in our lives. However, we need to remember that when we talk about those patterns, they are just that, patterns and actions that God takes. Creating God, Redeeming God, and Sustaining God are all examples of actions take by the one loving and true spirit that we all worship and serve.

Mizpah,

Amy

2005-12-11T13:02:00.001-08:00

"I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of Peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how as the day had come
The belfries of all Christendom
Had roll'd along th' unbroken song
Of Peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair, I bow'd my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song,
Of Peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep;
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With Peace on earth, good will to men."

By Henry Longfellow

Advent is a time of anticipation. We wait and long for a new birth. We know that hope is on the horizon; that we will soon be transformed in a manner which we cannot currently comprehend. And yet, we are now at our darkest. Without Christmas, December becomes a time of defeat as the bitter cold and the dark remind us of our own pending deaths. Yet it is now that we choose to celebrate with wonder and awe the glorious appearing we experienced once from a humble stranger, and long to see again.
For those of us in the peace community, anxiety and anticipation has been heightened. Two weeks ago, on the first Sunday of Advent, four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were abducted while working in Iraq for that same transformation we await with longing hearts. These four men left their homes in New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and England in order to make real the vision given to us by Jesus Christ of a world of peace and justice.
Yet, their presence was misinterpreted and they were seen as a threat by those who did not understand their real meaning. And so, these four men were taken captive by an Iraqi vigilante group named "Swords of Righteousness." Yesterday was the deadline given by these insurgents; if an agreement was not come to about the release of Iraqi prisoners, the Peacemakers would be executed. News of their fate has not been broadcast; we long to know that these men of true righteousness will be set free by their captors and given the ability to continue their witness to the message of love they have lived out.
The CPT members went to Iraq, knowing the threat to their own lives, in order to live among and minister to the villagers with their presence. They went to bear witness to the brutality and speak out against it. They went to work with all of us, in order to change our structural, social, psychological, emotional, and physical patterns of violence. They went to accompany. Christ also became incarnate in order to accompany us; to liberate us from our own self-destruction and sin; to teach a new and better way to live. As we remember the birth of Christ our Accompanier, we must remember those who are living out his call today. Christ triumphed over the systems that attempted to destroy him without using their own methods; we can only hope that the same success is waiting for those who follow Christ by accompanying the Iraqi people.
Though I am also tempted to hang my head as I await notice about the lives of these followers of Christ, I must remember that this Christmas, like all Christmases, that "God is not dead, nor doth he sleep," despite the bleakness of our situation. Rather, peace on earth can be established through the imitation of Christ, and our hope continues as we wait His and our rebirth this December.

2005-11-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

I have discovered a new form of silence. It is the silence of contentment.

the status of aisle and window

2005-08-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

Airplane passengers can be inconsiderate bastards.
My cousin Valerie and I are on our way home from one of the most emotionally difficult journeys I have yet taken. My grandma's memorial service was Monday, a time of tears as we remembered the woman who shaped all of our lives. One of the virtues she instilled in her children, and which has been passed on to her grandchildren, is the value of giving part of yourself to others. Sitting in the small, simple Presbyterian church that was her spiritual home for 45 years, we spoke about her support for the community; whether it was running off the bulletins every Saturday for church the next morning, serving as a campfire leader, or welcoming her future son in law into her basement for four months as he searched for a job, my grandmother took care of those around her even when it was uncomfortable. She taught us how to serve.
I can see these same values in my Eagle Scout brother, who earned this accomplishment despite attention deficit disorder, a learning disability, and other issues that hindered him. I see it in my cousins Elisabeth and Valerie, who each postponed college to spend a year apiece as missionaries for the Baha'i faith in Senegal. I see it in the hospitality of my Uncle Bob and Aunt Renee, who hosted seven houseguests as we prepared for Grandma's service. I see it in my own mother, who gave up one day a week for years, and in the past few months postponed searching for a job, so she could take care of my grandmother as she lost her eyesight and her health declined. Pat Johnston taught us that there are things greater than the self, and that to live a good life meant to actively work for the betterment of others.
This morning, when Valerie and I embarked upon our return journey, still grieving through laughter and holding to each other as we started life grandparentless, we arrived at the airport late because my mother (in typical form) got lost on the way and missed a couple of lanes. We obtained our boarding passes too late to find seats next to each other, and so pleaded in turn with a half dozen of our fellow passengers, trying to find someone willing to change seats so we could continue side by side. In turn, each refused us with simple excuses like "I don't like sitting in the middle." They were relentless, even when they saw my tears at being separated and heard us discuss why we had been traveling. On an already difficult flight, the one thing that had made it truly bearable for me was knowing that I was with someone else, and that comfort was taken from me by the unyielding nature of our fellow passengers. I wonder if there answers would have been different if they had been taught as we were that taking care of others was more important than your own comfort.
And so, I urge each of you to always be willing to switch seats. You never know what it could mean to someone.

Louisville and Athens are one and the same

2005-06-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

"There’s always been someone missing in my family, Hans Thomas. Someone has always gotten lost. I think it’s a family curse."
Dad, in The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
Tonight, I long for a sense of satisfaction, a sense of completeness. In one month, I’ll be embarking on a three year journey of Biblical theology and pastoral methodology, a dream of mine that has finally become realized. I know how blessed I am to be given the opportunity to follow the yearnings of my soul as I pursue full time ministry. I know that through this process, and through my future career, I will learn and discover new and exciting ways in which God is being made manifest in our lives anew each morning. And yet, it’s still not enough. There still seems to be one piece missing, something that leaves me feeling unsettled and unfinished.
In the last few years, my relationship with God has become very raw. While I still believe deeply in our very beginning in the Creator, the redemption of Jesus Christ, and the empowerment of the Spirit, I am still very angry and very numb about they ways some things have worked themselves out in the last two years. I don’t understand why, when I leave what I know and cherish to follow God, I end up being misused, belittled, and diminished by the very organizations through which and with whom I was and am striving to further the Kingdom of God. I am scared to enter seminary, though I do sense a calling and a desire, because I am afraid to be irreparably broken if these patterns continue. I don’t know if I can handle another Cincinnati, or another ACORN. Just this afternoon, I broke into tears again as I remembered the bitter and hostile relationship I had with one of my coworkers in Cincinnati, despite my own best intentions.
I remember in high school, going to my Saturday night bible study with my fundamentalist friends, talking about how people would just feel wholeness like they had never understood if they were to just accept and enter into a relationship with God. It all felt so simple. Yes, I knew that there would be hardships, but I believed in an unshakable faith that would enable me to continue to pursue God when the world around me was in chaos. But how do you respond when it seems that it is that same pursuit of God that seems to leave you bewildered and damaged by those alongside you?
Like Hans Thomas, I have left my home a long way away in order to learn and discover how to become complete. Hans Thomas left Norway for Athens, thinking that the woman they would find there would be able answer their questions about why someone was always running away. I left Washington for Cincinnati, and then Louisville, and now am trying to find what I have lost, a faith in and understanding about where I am being lead.

Vulnerable visions

2005-06-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

I understand why artists are plagued with emotional difficulties. Expression is an exhausting experience; varying influences and voices merge into a single creation that attempts to communicate one person's understanding of how life intersects within itself. It's an experience that leaves you weak, exposed, and vulnerable in a world where concrete fortresses provide impenetrable barricades between you and those who have power over you. It is to speak truth, and truth inevitably leaves you among the powerless because cloaks of secrecy shroud the actions of our economic and political oligarchy. Fragility and vision are sisters who have been undervalued and repressed amidst the generations of their daughters who were told that an emotional nature made them unreliable in the work place and unable to handle the pressures of public life.

Last Sunday, caught up in the auditory trembling of the Third movement of Dvorak's "English Symphony," in the heat of an under-ventilated gym at the dawn of a Kentucky June, I found myself overwhelmed by the combination of emotional strain, artistic expresssion, and physical proximity that attends playing in an ensemble. I felt as if I would faint because of the physical effect of opening oneself up for an extended period of time in combination with people whose names I am still learning. The easiest culprit to pick out was the heat; however, that was simply one factor in the strain that comes with performance. At the end of the evening, after a program no more physically challenging than a few hours of typing, you fell drained by that same sense of artistic vulnerability that has helped radicalize so many writers, painters, and other cultural revolutionaries.

That same afternoon, I listened as my friend, who has a propensity for tall tales, recounted details of his hometown. Mike described the annual feast when the first calf of the season was slaughtered, when his family would gather around giant mounds of ground beef that they would eat by the handful, celebrating the work that would put home grown meat on their tables through the bitter Pennsylvania winter. He related specifics of the ways that his ancestor’s farm roots were still playing out in his family, including his two bachelor uncles who have parked their trailer on the family property and still use an outhouse a few feet from their home. His stories revealed the way that tradition and modernity intersect in each of our lives. He also spoke with regret about how people refuse to believe him when he talks about his uncle’s outhouse; his reputation as a storyteller has caused those around him to discount what he says as a lie, without listening and delving in to its depths.

I choose to believe Mike’s stories because I know that there is a truth that is greater than fact. I know that storytelling is an art as powerful as symphony, and that like in the case of Rigoberta Menchu, they do not need to be historical to be an honest and open expression about his life. In this act of visioning and believing, we escape our culture’s emphasis on numbers and statistics as the purest way of understanding ourselves. Numbers are cold and easy to hide behind, whereas story is rooted in the human experience. Like music, it leave us open and fragile to our listeners, in that same subversive and fragile action that is inherent within all art.

2005-02-19T05:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, when I arrived home after toiling away at the phones until 8 pm, an envelope was waiting for me on our dining room table. My roommate, Kelsey, had left it there to greet me as she went out and enjoyed her Friday night. This is a rather normal occurrence, and normally wouldn't be worth noting, except that it was one of the large, official looking envelopes, and the return address was Louisville Seminary.
Immediately, my heart started pounding. I saw the next three years of my life potentially decided by what was contained in that envelope. I knew the admissions committee at the seminary had been meeting this very week. Could they have come to a decision so early? In trepidation, I opened the envelope to find....
A housing application. Oh well - I guess this dress rehearsal for next week helped me prepare for the affect, right?

ashes

2005-02-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

Last night, after travailing the Louisville bus system, I fought my way to James Lees Presbyterian Church for Ash Wednesday service. I was late because I didn't recognize my bus stop. As I arrived, harried and upset because I had missed the opening, I saw the table in front of the sanctuary covered in candles. I learned later that there was one lit for each of us in the service.
We were each handed a small piece of paper, on which we were to write down those barriers that keep us from being close to God. Phil, my minister and one of the officiators, quoted a Sufi mystic who spoke about how there are 10,000 veils between us and God, but none between God and us. We bent them in half, and placed each one in front of our individual candle, to shine light upon and through that which we keep between us and our creator. Then, one by one, the Phil and Judd (the other officiator) burned each of them to supply the ashes we would be using. Instead of tracing a cross on each of our foreheads, we dipped our hands in the ashes, covering them. As we felt the grittiness under our fingertips and over our palms, we contemplated how similar this is to the conditions of our own lives, spotted and speckled and coated with a grit that keeps us from revealing what we could be to each other and ourselves. We were charged to go about cleaning up our souls with the same desire we had to clean our hands. It gave a new, deeper theological meaning to Ash Wednesday for me, that I had been missing.
I was also left with a strong desire to keep my hands dirty, not because I didn't want to expose myself, because I felt a yearning to keep on the work of tearing down those barriers. I dipped my hands in the rubble that came from burning up those veils, and I wanted to continue that act of purification. I don't feel that I have done anything significant since I left Cincinnati in August. I have figured a few things out, healed some scars, and restored my emotional state, which is good, but not satisfying. That said, I am anxious to get back to the working for the kingdom of God; I am antsy to get my hands dirty again, helping restore our world and burn up those things that keep us corporately from being that which we are intended to be. I can't wait to get back into full-time service. It's just a matter of time.

We need a prophet

2005-02-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

Last night, I watched the State of the Union Address. Once again, I was left indignant about the leadership of our state. I watched THAT MAN started verbally attacking yet another country, in preparation for yet another unjust war, in this case Iran. I heard the sweet-as-molasses-and-just-as-sappy stories he told about those involved in Iraq, which sickened me. He is trying to justify our culture of violence by speaking about the Iraqi elections and their rise of democracy - but true democracy cannot come when we batter people into supporting our causes. He's following the same pattern his predecessors (Reagan, etc.) established in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America. How many countries can we subjugate before we ourselves collapse? We're building something instable - both abroad and at home - because these elections are coming out of weariness, not any belief that the system can work. It's the same reason the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were kicked out of power, though they truly were a people's government - the Iraqis think that maybe if they simply play the game, they'll finally be able to be rid of the violence WE are perpetrating against them. THIS is a crime against humanity.

The Democrats make me just as angry. I listened to them, as they refused to stand up against THAT MAN'S totalitarian tendencies. They spoke about the need to come to the center, and work together to rebuild social security, etc, without actually speaking out against anything except for some privatization scheme that no one really cares about. How I long for a national leader who has the guts to stand up and call this dictator what he is, to stand in the prophetic tradition of Nathan, Hosea, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Daniel Berrigan. One thing we have learned from this election (horror that it is) is that waffling doesn't get you votes. Speak the truth! Get out there and say exactly what is wrong with our situation - that we are oppressors, and our cultural, structural and physical violence needs to stop to ensure our own survival. No one stays on top forever - we need to build a more equitable society, for our own benefit, because when we're toppled, we'll be treated in the same manner that we treated those below us.

The worst part about it is this talk of faith. The Conservatives co-opt it as if Christianity belongs to them. However, they have forgotten phrases like "Blessed are the peacemakers," and "He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble." It is not following Christ to kill and subjugate others for your own gain; there is no such thing as a "holy war." This is a violation of our biblical mandate to love our neighbor and work for the peaceable kingdom.

The true state of our union is in transgression. I can only hope that we see the light, and work to repair and restore our relationship with our neighbors after such destructive behavior.

2005-01-28T18:31:00.000-08:00

A cataclysm is defined by Webster as a flood or deluge; a momentous and violent event marked by upheaval and demolition; at the root of it is the Greek word kataklyzein, to wash or inundate.
I've always been taken with the sounds and meanings of words. As an avid reader and a former foreign language student, I am intrigued by the levels one word can have; in three syllables, cataclysm captures the rushing and tearing apart that happens so often in our lives. You can hear the waves crashing down on you. You can feel that overwhelming presence of chaos. You can see all that you know being carried away from you on the currents.

Within it, however, is that same feeling of cleansing and rebirth. Yes, all is washed away by the deluge, but the flood waters also leave you stripped of the grime and salt that has built up and coated you. You are left fresh.

In the Biblical creation accounts, we hear a story about the earth emerging from the deluge and flood. We see chaos as that powerful creative force that is there even before the land and the air. It is that first thing from which everything else is formed. So being, this cataclysm is at the center of each of us, the essence of who we are as created beings.

I consider it appropriate that the sounds of the words cataclysm and catechism are so similar. In a world whose very beginning was inundation; of water, of light, of creative force; we find a need to steady ourselves. In the midst of chaos, we discover answers that we know to be constant. We have been cleansed of falsehood, envy, and sundy other temptations that fall away when we re-examine who we hope to be. In this process, we discern answers about our very nature. For us, these become catechism - what we know to be true, day in and day out, while the deluge of life surrounds us.

As I considered starting this journal that would expose my daily thoughts and concerns to anyone who fancied a peek, the act of naming was my gravest concern. In one phrase, I needed to allow people to identify what they would find; I needed a catch phrase that would give them a glimpse of my reflections, and be the key to whether or not they chose to delve deeper.

I find that these two words capture the essence of what I wrestle with; that constant struggle to remain afloat, knowing that in the middle of the cataclysm, as all is crashing around, I can take solace knowing that some things are constant - those answers about the essence of who we are, our catechism.