Spirit fingers

Sometimes I miss the spirit days we used to have in high school: things like Nerd Day (though at my high school this was every day), Talk Like a Pirate Day (OK, that was never an official one), Pajama Day (this was my favorite, and I brought back this particular spirit day several times in college on my own.) I'd be all for a few more adult spirit days. So I am happy that today is St. Patrick's Day, and not just because it means I get to wear the awesome green-pompom headband I found in Target's dollar aisle.

I walked through CW a little on my way to Wawa for lunch, and all the people wearing green made me smile. Young people, old people, black people, white people, even (remember, this is CW) 21st century people and 18th century people. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of people.

Why do we wear green today? Personally, I'm 1/8 Irish, but I don't really strongly identify with that. And since I'm no longer in elementary school, I'm not terribly afraid of getting pinched. The green is just for fun. It's fun to be part of something bigger just to be a part of it. We wear green because other people will be wearing green. It's a way to wiggle our metaphorical spirit fingers.

Wearing green on St. Patrick's Day lets us come together, in a way. And we're not coming together over any tragic event (though we have some to choose from) or for any sort of rivalry, or even for any particular cause. It's just that doing something together makes us happy.

It may not be communion, and St. Patrick's Day might be the most secular of all saint's days, but there is something vaguely spiritual in a whole bunch of different people who will probably never know each other coming together just because. Amen to spirit days!

And if anyone wants to bring back Pajama Day, just let me know.

Words that pale

I started a blog post earlier about something else, but instead, I feel like I need to write something about Japan.

But I don't know what to write about Japan. Anything I might say pales in comparison to the reality, especially since I'm so far away.

Every time I read or see the news it seems to get worse. I saw on the TV attached to the treadmill next to mine at the gym tonight that over 13,000 people were now dead or missing.

And maybe it's that last sentence that makes it so hard to say anything worth saying. It is amazing to me that while in one place, the whole world is falling apart, here life goes on as normal. While workers desperately try to save nuclear reactors and ex pats flee the country, today I went to work, and helped some people pay their power bills, tried to visit a woman at a nursing home (she was asleep), attended a board meeting, went to the gym. Those are all good things, but they are normal things. While the headlines on BBC.com are all about earthquakes and radiation, a link on the side brings you to a story about Boston's Running of the Brides. While people starve and die, others are storming Filene's Basement. That sounds like a condemnation, but it's not. It's just the way it is. And though that means that those of us on this side of the world buying dresses and counting calories aren't thinking all the time about what's happening in Japan, when we do think about it, it makes it even more awe-inspiringly heartbreaking, and even harder to say anything about.

The earthquake was Friday. Then there was a tsunami. Then there was radiation. Things have been getting worse for days. And yesterday, I blogged about potatoes.

The dichotomy there reminded me of lyrics to a Dave Matthews song. I wrote out the lyrics and then deleted them. They didn't seem like an appropriate response. Maybe that's why when something horrible happens, or someone we love dies, we have a moment of silence. It's the response with the most integrity.

In that case, I guess I've already said too much. I'll end with just three more things, not even in complete sentences: prayers, and grace, and a belief in a God who suffers with us.

Waltzing with Potatoes

For Lent, I'm leading a study of Barbara Brown Taylor's book An Altar in the World. This book is all about spiritual practices you can do in your everyday lives, and one of the first ones she writes about is the Practice of Paying Attention. That might mean paying attention to nature, paying attention to people you'd ordinarily ignore, paying attention to what countries items in a catalogue come from--no matter what you pay attention to, doing so is supposed to evoke reverence in you. Everyone in our group, which met for the first time last night, is supposed to find some way to practice paying attention this week, and come back and talk about what they gleaned from it.

So today, since I Lead By Example, I was looking for something to pay attention to. What I quickly discovered is that there are lots of choices, but it's hard to think of something that would sound worthy of coming back and talking about.

I ended up at Bloom on my way home from our worship committee meeting tonight, because as is often the case, I had no food at home. I decided I was in the mood for mashed potatoes. And then I thought that maybe potatoes were something I could pay attention to.

So I got home and started paying attention. As I held and washed my potatoes I noticed how rough they felt and how if you looked close enough, their skin almost looked like snakeskin. I noticed their lumps and eyes and ridges. I don't know who first decided that a potato was something they might want to eat, because it is dull and brown and hard, like a rock.

The next thing I quickly discovered was that I was bored. Maybe it is hard to practice reverence when you are hungry.

So I went ahead and chopped my potatoes. I tried to pay attention as I did this, too. After all, I've read things about how distanced we Americans often are from our food, and how just slowing down and spending time actually cooking can reconnect us to what we eat. And I like cooking, in theory. I just don't always like cooking when I get home from a meeting at 8 or 9. Also I don't like washing dishes, which is somewhat of a deterrent. Anyway, I paid attention. I felt the tension between my knife and the potato, heard how the slices crunched like an apple when I cut them, felt how they were almost a little slimy on the inside. I suppose if you pushed me I might say the cutting became slightly meditative after a few minutes.

So I don't know. I'm glad God made potatoes. They are delicious mashed up with garlic. Did I develop a heightened sense of reverence for these potatoes and the God who made them? Maybe not so much. Maybe I stopped too early.

Or maybe the practice of reverence and paying attention really does take practice. Maybe it just takes a while to see something new in a vegetable, a person, a catalogue. In the meantime, I suppose it can't hurt to be a little more aware of the things and people God has put around you. And maybe you just have to be in the right frame of mind--and have a snack first.

Ashes and nail polish

For the past several years working and volunteering in various churches, one thing I avoided like the plague was the children's sermon. Every once in a while I was offered the chance to do one, and I would worm out of it as subtly as possible with an excuse like "it's just not my gift." Once or twice I wasn't able to worm far enough, and so I was stuck in front of the whole church, awkwardly rambling about Jesus while kids played hide and seek under the chairs.

It's not that I don't like kids. I love them. But I suppose I didn't have any confidence in my ability to communicate with them in groups, and especially in front of a crowd of adults.

Now it is my job to do the children's sermon almost every week, and in spite of myself, I have discovered I enjoy it. In a way, it's not so different from preaching to adults. No matter who you're preaching to, it is the preacher's job to figure out what God is saying in a certain scripture to his or her particular congregation, and communicate it in a way that is relevant. That comes out looking different for kids, but the process is similar.

I'm learning to go with the flow and be ready to improvise. Yesterday at the 8:15 service I sat on the chancel steps with a bowl of ashes left over from Wednesday's service, and two little girls came up and joined me (most of the kids come to the 11:00). I showed them the ashes and explained what they were, and asked if they knew what we used ashes for in church.

And one little girl eagerly extended her hand and replied, "Do you like my nail polish?!!!"

I did. It was sparkly.

And that's what I love about children's sermons, though it is hard to explain why. I love that they put me right in the middle of the immediacy and the urgency of whatever the kids are excited about at the time. I love that they force me to let go of the importance of my own message for a moment, and to instead celebrate something a child wants to share. I love that I am becoming more comfortable without having an exact plan.

I did, of course, steer the lesson back to my bowl of ashes. And maybe that little girl will remember something about ashes and Lent and saying we're sorry, or maybe not yet. But if nothing else I hope she'll grow up knowing that church is a place where people like her nail polish.

Post-it theology

I didn't have any profound theological thoughts of my own today, so I thought I would steal someone else's. I heard it on The View this morning. Sarah Silverman was on the show talking about a new movie she's in, and after they showed a scene from it, one of the hosts (forget who) said that her character was kind of a bitch. (Her words, not mine.) "Yeah," Sarah Silverman said, "but of course, as Mr. Rogers said, there's no one you couldn't love once you've heard their story."

(Disclaimer: a quick Google search actually attributes this quote to Mary Lou Kownacki...but maybe Mr. Rogers used it sometime.)

My first thought, because this is how I think these days, is that that would go great in a sermon sometime. Maybe my upcoming one on the woman at the well. So I grabbed a post it and wrote it down before I forgot. But now it's just sitting on my coffee table, and I think I might leave it there as a reminder for a little while.

I think it's kind of cool that actors get to practice knowing people's stories when it's their job to make "kind of a bitch" into a sympathetic character. I don't know how well that skill translates to real life. In real life, we don't always get to to hear the stories that would allow us to love people. But I think it's a good reminder to assume that those stories exist, and that if we only did know them, we could love someone--so I guess we might as well love them in the meantime too.

The Kingdom and Awkward Turtle, part 2

This Lent, our music director is leading Taize services every Thursday. Today was the first. We started early with a movie about the Taize community and what Taize worship is. A smattering of people sat quietly in the fellowship hall, watching.

About halfway through the movie, a woman came in and stood hesitantly at the entrance to the fellowship hall. The woman sitting next to me waved her in. She came in and put some stuff down on a chair. Then she started handing out bulletins.

The bulletins said "Taize" at the top, had a picture of a cross, and the words "United Methodist Church" at the bottom. Inside were the words to some Taize songs.

This was odd, because I did not know this woman, and I had seen the draft of Richard's bulletin, which this was not. But hey, I wasn't in charge. I figured either she knew something I didn't, or she was maybe a little crazy, in which case I would pick up the real bulletin and not worry about it.

This strategy seemed to be working out OK until Richard caught wind of what was going on, and brought her out to the lobby and asked her to leave. Only she didn't want to leave. I'm pretty sure she had no clue why she would be asked to leave. By this time it was becoming clear that she leaned a little more to the crazy side of things.

I tried to figure out what her story was. After all, she seemed to legitimately know something about Taize. I asked her if she had been there. But all she did was point at Brother Roger up on the movie screen and say that he had invited her. After a little while, a friend of hers came in. She was able to clear things up: the woman had, indeed, been to Taize, as had her friend. She had also gone to Yale Divinity School. She had also been diagnosed with dementia. Her friend agreed to sit with her for the service, which she did, with no more incidents.

Thoughts on this:

One, sometimes you have to take a step back and laugh at the hilariously absurd things that happen in the course of ministry--or, I suppose, life. Coming to a church service and handing out your own bulletins? That's great.

But second, it is things like this that should make us constantly examine what it means to be a welcoming church. Do we welcome people even when they are (non-maliciously) disruptive? If we think we should, are we able to in practice? What lines do we draw? We have certificates on the wall that declare us a Certified Welcoming Congregation. How do those accolades help us understand ourselves in situations like this one?

Third, if this woman was a Yale-trained Taize pilgrim now riddled with dementia, then I think it was probably more important for her to be there at that service than it was for anyone else. We might appreciate the beauty and the silence and the meditative music. For her, it might have been a connection to a life she had once loved, now out of her grasp. She might not have been able to worship God in the ways we often think of worshiping God. But tonight, she wanted to worship God.

In the end, even if events like tonight's are hard, awkward, uncomfortable, disruptive; whether we handle them wrong or handle them right; I believe with all my heart that they are blessings to the church. They make us think about how best to love people.

At the end of the service, I told the woman I was glad she came. I meant it.

To dust

When I was little, and just learning what death was, I was scared. I remember nights sitting on my bed with my mom sobbing over the inevitability of this thing I didn't understand. I remember Mom trying to comfort me, telling me that probably neither of us would die for a very long time. Eventually she took me to a therapist, who I remember suggested that belief in heaven was an answer.

I have no other memories of this counseling and don't recall if I went anymore. I know that I now consider myself a fairly well adjusted adult, on most days, probably no more or less wrapped up in morbidity than the next person. But I am still scared of death. The word "forever," if I stay with it a little while, is enough to make me panicky. Of course, the alternative is no better. Forever is forever, whether you spend it alive or dead.

I am scared of death, and yet it is my job to tell others that they should not be scared of death. I know that is an overstatement. But it is my job to speak at funerals, to stand at a casket and proclaim resurrection; to reassure people taking their loved ones off life support that to let them go is the unselfish thing;to preach on scriptures that tell us to lose one's life is to gain it; and to smear people's foreheads with ash and remind them that they will return to dust.

We had two Ash Wednesday services today, and I thought about this more at the second than at the first: for one thing, there were about a hundred more people at the evening service, so I had a lot more time, and for another, I read this essay by Sara Miles in the meantime, posted by several friends on Facebook.

Miles writes that a woman came up to her with a week-and-a-half old baby to receive ashes for both of them. "I crossed his forehead with ashes," she says, "and took a deep breath, and told the baby he was going to die."

I didn't tell any babies they were going to die tonight. I did tell one girl, maybe age nine, and I didn't like doing it. Miles writes about giving ashes to kitchen workers, and truck drivers, and drug dealers. I didn't tell any drug dealers they would die, as far as I know. But I did say those words to my senior pastor, and a retired bishop, and a bunch of college students with makeup on and hair done from their concert before the service. Telling people they were on their way back into dust, I felt embarrassed, even apologetic. True or not, who I am to tell them this--I, who am also dust, who am scared of my own dustiness?

I believe and love the words it is my job to say: that we will die, but that we will ultimately live. And I think that we're allowed to be scared, even if we believe that. And as always, I hope the truth and the good news of the words I say come through to people, whether or not I am scared.