Embodied Practice: Three Crashes from the Past Week
I stood looking at my things for the Prayer and Pastoral Care class: papers, books, chime. I was missing my water and one book. My watch said I had about three minutes before it was time to start the class. Just enough time to run up to my office and back down to the classroom. I turned quickly to my left and headed for the door. Half way there: Crash.
Epiphany VIII
The wisdom of a tree . . . Trees show up a lot in my poetry and life. This afternoon a look at some trees reminded me of this journal entry from September. I was in Charlotte, North Carolina for a meeting. I was feeling a bit lonely and bereft in the midst meeting. I ended up on a bench outside. Here is what I wrote. I turned at this moment on the bench and realized there was what I needed – right in front of me – a very large tree.
Read MoreEpiphany VII
Laundry. It seems like a good night to write about something mundane. And besides I’m doing laundry while I write. Multi-tasking is such an unexamined part of life for most of us. We do the laundry, run the dishwasher. Back up the computer. All while we’re taking out the trash. Or we send three emails, write a blog, pay the bills and post on facebook, all in an hour on the computer. Does this way of life really accomplish more? Or is it just a sign of an overly-busy and distracted existence, endemic to the middling classes?
Read MoreEpiphany VI
This Epiphany season one image keeps flitting through my mind. I snapped this pic of a statue of Jesus at Christ Lutheran Church on Capitol Hill last fall. I was there with a group of faculty and students from Luther Seminary sharing the experience of Pray and Break Bread. When I’ve visited churches of the neighborhoods of the Twin Cities I’ve found it interesting to ask this question: “What does Jesus look like here?”
Read MoreEpiphany V
Being here on campus this week reminds me of that first trip as a new hire. I arrived late in the evening to the snowy winter dark. The next morning I went in search of breakfast. I hoped I could remember where the dining hall was. I found it (eventually), but I felt disoriented at every turn. I couldn’t even decide what to eat. And I was slightly nervous about my first day on the job. When I finally managed to get a bowl of oatmeal together and some toast, I stepped up to the register to pay.
It was J-term which meant there weren’t many people in the cafeteria at 7:30 a.m. There was no line. I put down my food.
“You don’t owe anything,” the cashier said.
“Do what?” I sputtered.
“Someone already paid for your breakfast.”
Epiphany IV
A prayer for the children and parents of Haiti
I rocked my daughter to sleep just now
And I wept for the mothers who would never rock their children again
Epiphany III
Storytelling . . .
In 2001, as I was working my way through doctoral courses in Religion, Psychology and Culture at Vanderbilt, I read pastoral theologian, Andy Lester’s book, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling. In that book he articulates several important ideas including the notion of “future stories.” The stories we tell ourselves about the future can have as much impact on us in the present as do all the stories we tell about our pasts.
For instance right now I’m carrying around a host of future stories about everything from what time I’ll turn out the lights tonight to what movie I might see this weekend, to where I’ll be teaching and what I will be researching 20 years from now. The power of future stories seems obvious when you try it on. But it is a significant challenge to the psychological traditions which mostly focus on the past as the main or only key to understanding personal identity or behavior in the present.
Read MoreEpiphany II
Tomorrow is the second Sunday in Epiphany.* Many churches will read and hear the story of Jesus’ baptism. Some churches will invite worshippers to remember their own baptisms. I want to remember mine with you for a moment . . . I was baptized on Easter Sunday, 1973. I know because the date and occasion are written in a Living Bible (very popular in the 1970s) that my parents gave me on that day. What I remember vividly is the little white dress I wore that Sunday.
Read MoreEpiphany I
A wing and a prayer . . . This morning I prayed in darkness. And then I saw a great light. It was the sun. Filling up the all of the cold morning. My husband called me into the kitchen. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sparrow breathe,” he said. Not taken to fits of poetry or even flowery prose, he had to be speaking literally. He began to explain. It seems that the sun is at just the right mid-winter angle to fill our backyard bird feeder with light. If they perched just right the birds at the breakfast buffet were silhouetted by the rising sun. As they took their turns and tilted their heads just so, puff, their tiny warm breath exhaled in a little cloud.
Read MoreChristmas III
one tiny nest
perched high against a cold december sky
what comfort?
soaking up the gray morning
Christmas II
Pastors don’t pray much it seems. They are busy. But they are not filling their time with prayer, meditation or personal devotion. At least a study that came out this week says this is the case. Seems to me that more than families are likely hurting if pastoral leaders are spending so little time attending to their own spiritual lives. But lest I sound too judgmental, I remember well the struggle to care for my own spiritual well-being while also attending to the spiritual well-being of those I served in the years when I was full-time on a church staff. Even when I was doing what I knew to do to care for my own soul, it was not always the most effective or spiritually nourishing thing I could be doing.
Read MoreChristmas I
Christmas has finally come and gone and the night is deepening around me. Silent but for the tapping of keys on my computer and the distant whine of a train whistle. A few cracks and pops say that my in-laws’ house is still settling in for a long winter’s nap. Family Christmas celebrations are complete. Scraps of wrapping paper litter the floor and the bare-bottom tree seems a little spent.
Christmastide, being one of the shortest seasons of the liturgical year, celebrates the revealing of God in the world, the inbreaking of a Living Word into the mundane and daily routines of our lives. But how does the season live on through the year? Or should it?
Read MoreAdvent VIII
Unhinged and upended . . .
In my first Advent post I wrote about opening the little doors on an Advent calendar [link]. Today I’ve been thinking about a different set of doors.
It was 1993. (Don’t tell me, please, if you were in kindergarten that year.) I was just graduating from seminary. And I attended a worship service in Birmingham at the annual Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM) meeting. Nancy Hastings Sehested was the preacher that day. The occasion was a ten-year anniversary of BWIM.
Read MoreAdvent VII
Ten weather balloons.
One contact lens.
One very young, very pregnant girl.
Needles in a haystack, all.
Advent VI
Reshaping the body with prayer
As I lay face up on the table a few weeks ago, my massage therapist interrupted my reverie.
She said, “Do you know that your right leg is listing outward.”
“Nope, I had no idea really.” She was standing at my feet and gently adjusted my wayward right leg. “Now that you mention it . . . I notice what you are saying.” My left knee cap pointed straight toward the ceiling, but my right one was tilted outward.
Read MoreAdvent V
On Thursday of this week I found myself stunned by beauty twice in an hour. Let me tell you about the first of those two moments. The evening before I’d been in something of a foul mood, feeling anger and disappointment, which can take their toll on a body. But the drive and conversation between St. Paul and Collegeville, Minnesota had tempered and mellowed me. I was open in mind and heart, relaxed in body, but I was unprepared for what lay ahead.
Read MoreAdvent IV
I’ve fallen for a rock band. Shocking, I know. Well, when you hear this song, I think you’ll understand my attraction. The group, Switchfoot released their latest album in November. “Hello Hurricane” has some fabulous tracks, and I’ve been filling myself up with them this Advent season.
Read MoreAdvent III
It is late in the season of Ordinary Time. I am sitting in worship. Not in my usual home congregation but another setting. I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into despair.
Read MoreAdvent II
Falling . . .
The thing about falling is not the falling. That can be lovely in itself. Remember the “Nestea Plunge” into a pool on a hot summer day? Or falling into a really big pile of autumn leaves? Ever tried skydiving or hang gliding? Even running is actually falling and constantly catching yourself with each step. And of course there is falling in love . . .
No, the thing about falling is not the falling. It’s the hitting bottom. The landing. The thing about falling is the end of the fall.
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Advent I : Be Present to This Moment
I first learned the word “Advent” not as a season, but as a description of small cardboard calendars that my parents brought home from Europe. Each year following Thanksgiving, we unpacked them from musty decoration boxes . . .
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