Cultural Daze (Part I): I’m not in culture shock exactly. But I do feel a bit dazed after spending most of yesterday in situations where everything was new and unfamiliar to me. I was in a minority. I stood out in ways that made me feel uncomfortable. I did not understand most of what I heard or saw. I tried to prepare, but reading and asking a few questions was not adequate. I tried to participate, but I kept feeling like I was getting things wrong. In fact I was getting things wrong.
Read MoreEaster IX
Tomorrow Pentecost begins. The birthday of the church! At my church we’ll wear red and celebrate the coming of the Spirit with wind and fire and bells. But right now it is the last day of Eastertide. On Good Friday, April 2, our family and some friends spent a good portion of the day putting in a quarter acre garden. The Great Flood of Nashville hit a month later May 1-3. We suffered very little damage to personal property. With the exception of the garden. It was under eight-to-ten feet of water for most of two days. And it was pretty well destroyed.
Read MoreEaster VII
A Decade of practice: This year feels like a series of milestones in a way. Why do we think that 10 years makes a difference? Why not nine years? or 12 and 1/2? Nonetheless. It was during the last few months of 1999 when my full-time work in and for a congregation came to an end. And a new vocation, or really a revised longer-term vocation, began to take shape. I started graduate school in the fall of 2000 and began learning the practices of becoming a scholar. This is scholarship that I understand to be for the sake of the church.
Read MoreEaster III
One of the best gifts we can give to people is to ask them “How did God’s presence get you through that tough spot in your life?” This was the advice of sociologist and self-described “immigrant in practical theology” Nancy Ammerman. Nancy gave the opening key note address at the Association for Practical Theology last Friday evening.
Read MoreLent III
“On practicing Our Faith” On practice. On practicing our faith. On practicing our faith with the Jesus story.
Where exactly are we in the Jesus story, right about now? Let’s try to locate ourselves on our journey through the Jesus story. The lectionary. You recall what that is: the list of scriptures that reaches out across the Christian landscape and leads us week by week and season by season through each church year. Each year we follow the Jesus story in the Gospel readings . . .
Lent I
Lent should not ever really begin the way it did. But then tragedy does not seem to have a timetable. At least not one I like. My feelings are still too raw to blog about this now. And some of you who read this are raw as well. So I’ll stick with one of the prayers I prayed in the funeral today. It’s a prayer for children, and it followed a reading of Luke 18:15-17. Jesus Christ, we love our children. You love our children. You love us as your children. And so we bring you our children now . . .
Read MoreEpiphany IX
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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