About sixteen and a half years ago, my Grandma Campbell died. I was in the midst of a long and difficult search for my “first call.” I had been interviewed by nearly a dozen churches and religious agencies. Some went well. Others were dismal. None of them was working out. Altogether they had worn my soul thin.
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But finding a book in the mail stack or on the front porch is nothing unusual. The surprise in this book today was the author. And the topic. The real surprise is that I had overlooked this book for so long.
It has been 11 years since I first sat down in silence and began the practice of centering prayer. It has been 20 years since I first sat down in a classroom with Dr. Wayne Oates to learn the tasks and the art of pastoral care. It has been more than 30 years since he wrote Nurturing Silence in a Noisy Heart. I was still in middle school.
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Tomorrow is the Sunday of Advent in which we invite and celebrate joy and a good Sunday for a baptism. I will attend a baptism for a baby I know tomorrow. He and eight other little ones will be blessed and welcomed into the church. I assisted at the wedding of his parents a couple of years ago. It will be a joyful time for many reasons. Yet, it is not a joyful time for all children.
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It actually started almost a week ago. Sitting at my desk in St. Paul, I realized I had extra time. The snow was pouring. My flight had already been delayed by an hour. That’s an email, by the way, that you really don’t want to see when the snow is pouring. Even in Minnesota where they have the world’s best snow removal equipment and more plows and de-icers than Garrison Keilor has jokes. An extra half hour. I tell myself: Surely that’s enough to put together all the receipts for my credit card bill and turn it in before leaving campus! I start printing and gathering, sorting and checking. Then I see I’m missing one hotel receipt.
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St. John’s Abbey church is an amazing cavern with a multi-story wall of honeycomb shaped windows. Each pane is filled with abstract shapes and color. They grow more beautiful as morning light rises. However, this morning the beauty cannot outweigh the exclusivity and harm of the words and deeds of the tradition itself.
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What are we going to do with Jesus?
A dozen or more years ago I was invited to be on a panel of Baptist leaders in Georgia to forecast the future of our kind of Baptists (the moderate and progressive kind). I was too young and inexperienced to do much forecasting. And I’d been asked mostly out of tokenism. They needed to have at least one woman say something.
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Advent I : I am Wide Awake
Wide Awake
I am wide awake.
Standing at the top of a six-foot step ladder.
About to fall off.
Backwards.
On purpose.
Ordinary Time XXXVIII
Gratitude: On this eve of Thanksgiving, what else can one write, but words that offer thanks? So many places to start. But I think I’ll simply name a few small things. Things easy to overlook, but important not to miss. . . like ladybugs
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For me this week, which ends the church year, also marks coming around full circle in a year of blogging. I began with Advent last year. So this week I will take time to read through all 93 entries of the past year. Except for a six week sabbath in July and August, I blogged twice weekly. I will be noticing themes, ideas, patterns, and even things that are missing.
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My daughter loves to hear our childhood stories. She also likes for us to tell stories from the time after we were married, but before she was born. That’s a barrel full of material. So the other day on the way to school, I told her about climbing up to Spence Field. “We wanted to climb high up the mountain so we could see a long way.” I tell her. I don’t tell her that it was also because we were young and wanted to prove ourselves.
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This morning’s run along the Harpeth River brought birds from out of the bushes and trees. As the last leaves skittered up the path before me, the sun was shining, and the wind alternated between a steady breeze and great gusts. Overhead and along beside me crows complained, red-winged blackbirds swirled, a hawk circled two times, doves mourned, and other smaller birds busily prepared for colder days ahead.
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This week I sat down with one of my favorite pastoral theologians and got to catch up on what she’s doing with her life energy now and tell her about the work that I’m doing as well. Christie Neuger has written and edited several important books in pastoral care and counseling and also in the broader arena of the practice of ministry.
Read MoreOrdinary Time XXXIII
This post is especially for the many of you who are also writers, or aspiring writers, sermon writers, devotional writers, academic writers, bloggers, and journal-keepers. This week I took steps to solidify one of my most central habits. I have a habit of writing. It has been slow coming.
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When a flood overruns the banks of a river, things are swept into surprising places. In early May of 2010 my neighborhood and all of Nashville saw the most dramatic flood in living memory. The news cameras caught a building floating down the interstate. One child was swept through a culvert only to survive. The rivers roses to inundate homes, schools, businesses, cars, roads and bridges. The death toll was over 30. The financial cost of the destruction was estimated in the billions. Efforts to sort through the damage and rebuild from the destruction continue and will for months and years to come.
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All Saints’ Eve . . . I spent the last few days at the American Academy of Religion . . . and came home in time for Halloween Trick-or-Treat. Driving home this afternoon I thought of the many friends old and young who have been lost to me. So many of them will be remembered this year on the first All Saints’ Day following their deaths.
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Margaret Atwood’s Nashville Debut It was her first time in Nashville. She used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry in the cold winter of northern Canada. When they got short wave radio reception. So because it was her first…
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Yesterday I got lost for an hour taking pictures of acorns and oak leaves. The sun was autumn bright. The sky a brilliant blue. Some leaves were still green. Others were tinged red and yellow. Little stripes on the acorns…
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This Sunday some of us will hear from Luke’s gospel of Jesus. It is a parable about praying. It starts like this. . . . Luke 18:9-10: He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray
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Deeper Into the Shadows. Last post I wrote about some of the complexity of racism and white privilege as seen in American pop culture. If you follow the link to the description of the Rat Pack you will find another element in that complexity: gender.
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Me and My Shadow: Fans of the Rat Pack and their 1960s version of “Me and My Shadow” still argue about whether the friendship of the Hollywood stars was a resistance to racism or recapitulation of it.
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We are coming to the end of the season of the church year we call “Ordinary Time” but tomorrow is no ordinary day. At least not for Mary Beth Dunbar-Duke. She will be ordained tomorrow afternoon in a special service at Providence Baptist Church in Cookeville, Tennessee.
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