Bold Simple Questions

Thoughts based in my reflections this morning during church:

I wonder if -

• we're too much "in our heads"
• we're really sold on what we say we're focused on

What if every Sunday each of us

• made a point of making personal connections with people at church
• tried one new thing - big or small - to deepen our worship and our community

I can imagine a diversity of responses.

Have at it.

Just don't kill any messengers, questioners or experimenters in the process - even if you disagree with them - remember we're Episcopalian :) okay?

Greeting Anyone

I've noted some juxtapositions in my life lately.

Engaging in social & religious conversation in the morning
with a member of a Baptist church that I used to call home.
Engaging in social & religious conversation that same evening
with a pagan high priest.

Reading quotations from the well known pastor of that same Baptist church,
indicating that women should not hold authority over men, even in some secular positions.
Reading "Dance of the Dissident Daughter,"
"A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine."

Between, within and beyond such juxtapositions
are my life, my experience and the people I love.

Sunday at church someone explained to my children that in the time of the service called "The Peace",
you can greet anyone you want.

Another person followed up: "That is, if they're in church."

How true!
So many of the people with whom I want to exchange a sign of peace,
In fact with whom in various forms I do exchange signs of peace,
are not in church.

Some are in other churches (of many different kinds)
Some are scattered across the country or around the world
Some do not express their faith in the context of a religious community and
Some belong to religions with other names.


God is with you.
And also with you.

Let us rejoice in the power of the Spirit.
(found in many, expected and unexpected, wonderful places.)

.

Church All Over the Place

There was a lot of church going on after church today.

Lots of people seemed to be connecting with lots of other people...building relationships, exchanging information & ideas, helping one another out, making discoveries, making plans...wonderful, exciting.

Wouldn't it be fun to hang out together and talk and connect like this more? Wouldn't it be great if we started to see this as church just as much as we see our formal service time as church? Not seeing church as either/or, but seeing church as both kinds of interaction (and many more) in ways that would inform and enrich all the ways we interact.

Makes me think of my visit to Solomon's Porch last week....the atmosphere the couches there create...their awareness that their community exits wherever the people of Solomon's Porch find themselves...

I'm also thinking about how much rich spirituality I experience outside other defined limits of church and how I want to be able to acknowledge and experience more of that too. I have a lot more thoughts about that. Too many to tackle effectively in this post.

Prayer at Work

When I went back to work after a death in my family I received a sympathy card signed by many of my co-workers.

People who, to the best of my knowledge before this, may or may not pray at all said things like "you and your family are in our prayers." Even when people I know to be religiously active mentioned that I was in their prayers it was striking. That sort of thing isn't usually part of my relationship with co-workers.

Of course maybe they aren't all really praying. Maybe its like the greeting, "How are you?" Sometimes you can take the question literally, sometimes not. It seems sadly cynical and disrespectful to think that, yet possibly naive not to. But either way, the statments in the card are holistic and human expressions of relationship of a kind that aren't often made among co-workers.

Thank you to all for your thoughts, prayers and sympathies.

Striving for Community

We're always striving for something. That's good. But sometimes we strive so much for that elusive thing that we don't realize the ways we already have it. We let it slip through our lives under appreciated, under engaged.

I got to thinking about this related to community. Why do I fail to appreciate the community I have? A-ha! Maybe because my relationships are so compartmentalized that they don't integrate to the point that they feel like community. Its as if work, church, my kids' school, various friends, relatives, etc. all exist in worlds of their own. The relationships I have in those contexts have boundaries of expectation and commitment that are largely limited to those contexts. Those boundaries can be a hurdle to cross even when it may be appropriate and desirable to do so.

But some of the boundaries are in my mind. I see co-workers, people from church, parents of my kids' friends, etc. when I could expand my thinking to see more holistically. I could be more mindful and appreciative of the relationships I have with these people. I could recognized that these are people with whom there may be potential to expand relationships and community if I (and they) are willing to open windows, doors, maybe eventually even take down walls of the boxes of our lives.

I'm not looking to invade any one's life. That's obnoxious. Nor am I looking for all my compartmentalized relationships to overlap. I think that would be too homogeneous, too stifling. But I would like a lot more integration than I have now.

Maybe a way forward is to continue to say this:

I have community. How did I experience it today?

Spiritually Transformative Stories

Hearing each other's stories is important.

When you just hear some one's position on something, you might agree, you might disagree, it might happen to strike you, or you might be unengaged.

But when you hear their story.....when you start to understand their experience and how it has shaped them & their perspectives.....that's where there's great potential for spiritual transformation.

Hearing each other's stories offers potential for learning new things about who we are, who those around us are, what our culture is, who or what God is, how those things interact and the ways we fit into that web (or that constellation, that metaphorical city, that collection of slime mold...)

Community with Aquaintances

One thought led to another & it occurred to me just now that in the 5-6 years I've been at Gethsemane, I've never been in the home of anyone from the congregation and no one from the congregation has been in my home (nor have I invited them to be). In fact, in terms of anything that "counts," I can't recall that I've ever done anything with anybody from church outside the walls of the church.

I have some good conversations at church. I have some personal conversations at church. I have some good connections with certain people at church. And yes, a community does include acquaintances. But I think it should also include people with whom one has closer or more developed relationships than I have at Gethsemane at this point. I wonder if its just me, or if lots of us are in the same boat.

I've had experiences, in a couple other churches, where there were very specific efforts to establish community that, though entirely well intended, and in some cases with very good results, I've had some tensions with. There have been times in my life when community was not what I was seeking through church, and not what I wanted to be pushed into at church. I think for where I was at in my life at those points that was fine. I assume others are at that point at some times too and I'm fine with that. Even at times when I was quite open to building relationships and community, some of the programmed efforts to establish it rubbed me the wrong way. Though programs may be needed to facilitate community, I think true community is organic more than programmed. When I don't feel this is adequately recognized and accounted for I bristle.

That said, nearly 6 years at Gethsemane without more development of relationships seems to be out of balance. What's up with this? In part I know. My social life has been in sorry state pretty much the whole time since I've had kids, if not longer. My sense of openness or flexibility to schedule any number of things that I might have in the past has gone by the wayside. My work schedules have been outside the mainstream norm for a large part of the last 9 years. In addition to these & other factors on my side, I don't think we've made a point to create as many opportunities at Gethsemane as some churches do.

What would happen if I could manage to make a point to create some opportunities, either formal & programmed or informal & personal? Would people have the inclination to respond? Would people have space in their lives to respond? I hope so. I know there is a lot to be gained in many ways on many levels. And selfishly (to be honest, of course this better reflects my felt motivation) sometimes I get very busy & very full of all kinds of stuff (ideas, excitement, questions, issues....) that grows out of working on children's & family ministry and out of parenting and I feel too alone with it.