Sunday, February 18, 2024

When the Promise Comes Close: On Earth as It is in Heaven

Bath-time in the Melton home is a beautiful and sometimes also harrowing hour of the day. A veritable roulette wheel of parenting possibilities bending  both time and space, as in, it lasts just a few minutes and an eternity, all at once. The stakes are unspeakably high, regularly marked by life-altering questions, like, “Will this rubber ducky be enough to distract the young child screaming for the other parent?” And, will said rubber ducky, moments later, be voraciously claimed as “no, my ducky,” by rival sibling in the wings? (Spoiler: obviously.) Yet to be addressed are important considerations of correct water temperature and adequate water depth. All before the moment within the moment on which everything depends: the shampooing and washing of the hair. 

Sorry, I need a minute.


The washing of the hair. Forbid it, Lord, that even a single drop of water desecrate the landscape of those precious eyes. A dozen years ago or so, to avoid this great calamity, I came up with an original rhyming formula that 100% of the time works 40% of the time. A little sing-song call and response to diffuse the moment toward the good. “Look to the sky!” I’d say, and child in the water would (ideally) sing back, “Eyes stay dry!”


Let’s try it. Look to the sky, eyes stay dry.


A promise and prescription for peace in the midst of volatility. Not to be overly self-congratulatory, but in addition to being highly catchy and hygienically instructive, it’s also biblical. Consider psalm 121. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. Reminder that what is good for the eyes in the bathtub is sometimes equally edifying for those who wait on the Lord.


Look to the sky, eyes stay dry is an apt starting place for considering the scriptures that meet us on this first Sunday of Lent. Look to the sky! There, you’ll see the rainbow in the clouds. The first promise of God to his people. As in, in the whole Bible. This is the first promise of God to his people. A covenant. In it, God breaks God’s tools of retribution and revenge. The bow and arrow are retired. Turned into lawn ornaments. Exchanged for a decision toward peace and forgiveness. The rashness of wrath replaced with the decision to only ever be the God who belongs to God’s people. And the sign of the promise is there, shimmering, shining, in the sky. 


Ever after, looking up to the heavens has been a good and faithful thing for Christians to do. Led by St. Paul, who writes, “with my eyes fixed on the goal I push on to secure the prize of God's heavenward call in Christ Jesus.” When things are difficult in this life, following Paul, we can seek to rise above it. Find assurance in the promise that waits for us out there. Up there. In the heavens. Look to the sky. Eyes stay dry. The beginning of a trust in God.


But then something unexpected happens. And the unexpected thing changes everything. In the gospel today, the heavens that hold the promise of God up there, out there, kept in safekeeping for a far off “someday,” well, they tear open. And the promise falls from the sky. The promise doesn’t break. But the promise comes close; the promise of God comes down from the sky. 


And what you and I are meant to see is that, even though the rainbow and the baptism are two different occasions, it’s the same sky, and it’s the same promise the one sky holds. So when the heavens tear open on this man in the water, that first promise of God pours out on the earth. Shows up in him. And since he’s our brother, bone of our bone, the Spirit is now on us, too. In an instant, eternal life enters this life. The far off comes close. It’s the beginning of the prayer Jesus later gives his friends when they pray, on earth as it is in heaven. The high up and heavenly promise of God has been poured on the earth, not just as God’s restraint from violence, but as God’s presence as our peace. And the Spirit sends Jesus, with this blessing - who IS this blessing - out into the desert.


That last part had to be a mistake right? GPS broke or something. The blessing of heaven comes down and he takes it to the desert? I’m sure he meant to find St. James. Ended up in Oklahoma. Just kidding. But when the heavens tear open and the promise falls into the river, it’s like the waters of Jesus’ baptism bubble up into something new - a spring of living water to reach out and cover, even to heal, every last parched and aching place on this earth.


Church, do you see what is happening? Jesus is changing the lines of hope. It’s not good enough anymore to only “look to the sky,” but now also, to borrow words from the prayer book, we ask God to “open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works, that rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness.”


My friends. This is a significant development. Back when hope was only in the heavens, people would seek to put themselves in position to score a golden ticket through good behavior, maybe. Last train to Harps and Clouds. Only the best of the best need apply. Or maybe the far off promise of God could be a carrot on the end of a really long stick for those unable to change the circumstances of their oppression. Hope for something more, but don’t dare hope for too much here. But now with heaven in pieces and the Son of God out in dry places, those ways of thinking no longer fit. The Spirit has come to the desert! To the entire creation. And all through the scriptures, the desert is full of what you’d expect: struggle, broken things, people who are certain they are lost, forgotten, or don’t count. The Son of God, God’s own Spirit, comes to these. 


One of the most touching desert stories in the scriptures is the story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave, left for dead in the desert with her son, exiled by Abraham, the father of faith. A heartbreaking reminder that the healing of God doesn’t always come only to or through the faithful but sometimes it comes to those harmed or left behind by the faithful. In the desert, Hagar is hiding from her child so she won’t have to watch him die. And she sobs. And suddenly the voice that thunders over the waters today speaks to her. And his word is new life in the desert for herself and her child. After that experience, Hagar gives God a new name, my favorite name for God that you’ll find in the scriptures: El Roi. It means the God who sees me. 


What wondrous love is this? How is it that things which had grown old are being made new? Things that had been cast down are being lifted up? How is it that hope is not only up there in the sky but balm on the earth, poured out to heal the darkest desert, such that the psalmist can sing, “I am sure I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Yes, I shall see the goodness of our God, hold firm, trust in the Lord”?


Oh church, do you see what God is doing? You and I in the wilderness of this Lent may have at first thought that this was about our getting it together, cleaning up, looking sharp, extracting ourselves from the mess. But it turns out this Lent is about us getting clean but God getting dirty. And inviting us to come and see, in ourselves and in the world around us, on the faces of those we are likely to see without seeing, the least, the last, and the earth, that all of it, all of us, are the landscape of God’s redeeming.


As the late Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon puts it, “The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones; they are transfigurations of them. The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken; it is the created order - all of it - raised and glorified.”


This Lent, don’t be afraid of the desert. Don’t hide the hardest parts of yourself and your life. Neither turn your eyes from those you encounter in the deserts of the world around you. God’s promise is for there, too. God’s promise is at work there, too. But listen to your Savior as he calls you with your heart and life to live the prayer - as he calls us with our hearts and lives to become this prayer: on earth as it is in heaven. 


Amen.






Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Sobriety & Thanksgiving for the Year I did not Expect

Today is January 3, the last day of a good week spent outside of Cleveland with family of my wife’s side. Last night we engaged an annual tradition at the dinner table: naming thanks for particulars of the year just ended, offering hopes and naming challenges for the year ahead. Simple enough, but with so much life to absorb where does one start? Probably with the breath and the pause that says, “Stop. Look back. Reflect. Give thanks.”

Unbeknownst to me, an article I recently read had prepared me for the process. Acknowledging at the outset that life contains multitudes, the article suggested giving yourself a simplifying template, a filter to try on, for either before or after the fact. Example: “2023 was The Year of ____” or “2024 will be The Year of ____.” Imagine yourself filling in the blank, in retrospect, twenty years from now. See what you hope for. What lands as most true?


Reductionistic, sure. But also useful for identifying the location of one’s heart. The way some art forms, like haiku, use the gift of limitation to produce, to lovingly lure out of hiding, creativity, beauty, and truth. 


So it was that I was able to look back on a year and first name these wonderful gifts (not exhaustive):

    • the call to serve as rector to St. James Church & School, 
    • our family’s purchase of our first home and subsequent relocation to East Dallas, streets and stories of my childhood,
    • so much love and support and generosity from family, church, and friends, making both of the above possible, 
    • the discovery of good schools for our children, 
    • life-giving vocational opportunities for my wife and for me, and 
    • acquisition and completion of an as-of-yet-vacant chicken coop.

Having named all of these, I then found myself giving voice to an answer I did not expect. Twenty years from now, how will I ultimately regard 2023? 


2023 is and will be the year of my becoming sober. 


I didn’t set out to give up alcohol this year. But I realized about three months into 2023 that maybe wondering at regular intervals if my relationship with alcohol was serving me was itself the answer I both needed and didn’t want to hear. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a problem to be a problem. Or maybe I get to decide what counts as a problem. (It was a moment not dissimilar from a realization that led me to ditch my smart phone for a time, back in the day.)


Years ago, it was a therapist in Wisconsin who, after patiently listening to my struggles with anxiety and exhaustion, asked if I drank. Yeah, but not that much. “Huh,” he shrugged. “Well, just know it works against your goals.”


For better or worse, my own story doesn’t include waking up needing to make apologies for things I couldn’t remember. I wouldn’t even swear to be being drunk often (or ever). For me, drinking was more of a creeping superstition. A security blanket. An end of day ritual. A six pack a week. A marker of the passage of time. Years later, become a second six pack a week. Become blushing embarrassment in filling out the forms that accompanied a doctor’s visit. Still not enough to prompt intervention. “Just something you’ll want to watch,” the doc would say kindly.


All these years later, and it wasn’t enough. What was I waiting for my relationship with alcohol to show me? That new life was really there, after all, at the bottom of the whatever numbered drink? That I could somehow drink my way to an end dissimilar to the grandfather I never knew, who died, before I was born, of liver disease fueled by drinking fueled by what we now know to call PTSD as a result of service in the Korean War and World War II? To drink and manage to not die like that - would that be my victory?


I share some of those personal details to name the personal shape of the discernment for me, which comes without judgment of those who drink. I admire those who enjoy a drink without thinking of the next one. I’m not one of them. In the end, I gave up. I decided to save the energy I was wrestling away.


Similarly, I’m not bothered to be around drinking, apart from my occasional and embarrassed resentments at society's general lack of interesting alternatives. (Sodas being really bad substitutes because sugar inhabits a relatedly addictive world of its own. I do like Olipops now.) But, truthfully, the hardest aspects of this first year, for me, were felt individually: the first few backyard grill outs without brews; the first Christmas Eve, coming home from services to a sleeping house, without a celebratory nightcap. 


I also share some of my personal story because the stories of others gave me courage to ask questions and take steps toward what I’ve experienced as a healing. Brené Brown’s What Being Sober Has Meant to Me was a gift and revelation. I still return to her description of life’s “sparkle,” which I’ve known on every day - even the hard days - of this journey. I wonder if there are others like me who, because they’ve never woken up wondering where they are, endure a purgatory that, because they know it isn’t hell, never ask themselves if they “qualify” for the sparkle, too. My friend, you absolutely do. 


From Brené, again:


“If you’re struggling, reach out and ask for help. Find a meeting. Get a therapist. Call a friend. We don’t have to do this alone. We were never meant to.”


We don’t have to do this alone. We were never meant to. If that’s not the Good News that belongs to this season of Incarnation, of Christmas, I truthfully do not know what is. 


2024 will probably be the year of something less dramatic for me. I hope so. The year of the chickens? (Finally!) I like it. The year of deep roots and soil quality, metaphorically in my neighborhood and faith community, and actually, in my backyard? I’m here for it. I’m still auditioning possibilities. But 2023, for all its blessings, has just one name for me: the year of my sobriety. I couldn’t be more thankful.





Sunday, October 1, 2023

Bad Puns, the State Fair, & the Gift of Being God's People on this Earth Together

It’s that time of year again. State fair is in the air. And opening day this past Friday had me thinking of my grandpa, who loved both the fair and the opportunities for friendly competition it offered. After my grandmother died, Grandpa more or less taught himself to cook, which he hadn’t really done before (explaining his odd repertoire of sandwiches, like peanut butter, bacon, and onion), but the next thing you know he takes to baking cookies, which he becomes pretty good at, and sometimes he’d enter them in the fair. Sometimes he won! He loved the challenge of it all. Grandpa told me that one year, even, there was this one-time competition for puns. You could enter up to a dozen. Grandpa loved puns, but couldn’t quite come up with a full dozen. So he settled on ten of his favorites. Proudly sent them in. All but certain the blue ribbon was his, that one of his gems would claim the prize and finish first. But. Well. 


No pun in ten did.


(That one was his favorite.)


In honor of October, the state fair, and Grandpa…well. It’s not quite a pun, but there’s a single word doing double work in our scriptures today, pointing in the direction of two true things at once. One word on which everything depends. And the word it turns out that everything turns on is turn. The Lord, speaking up through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “…get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.” So the first turn we see is a turning we’re called to do. Do me a favor and just - a little bit - show me a turn in your shoulders. That’s it. A turning. Turn then and live, says the Lord.


And the picture is of a word, turn, spoken to a people in exile. Born into exile, even. By the time of Jeremiah, God’s people have been in forced displacement from home for so long there are generations now who have never known it. And they’re listless. Understandably kind of hopeless. Convinced of their own insignificance to make a difference in their world. They assume the generations before them sinned so badly, messed things up so foully, that their forbearers so profoundly broke life and relationship with God, that, well, why even try? And so they put limits on their imagination for what is possible. We’re told the people give up believing, - watch this now - that God will give them a meaningful turn at being God’s people together on this earth. They’ve even made up a proverb to express their assessment of the situation: The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. It’s another way of saying, “I didn’t make this mess, but I’m afraid I will never get out from under it.” It’s another way of saying, “God has buried us before we were even born.” And maybe you’ve known that feeling in your life. And maybe, in your life, you’ve never known that feeling. And if you’ve never known that feeling there are certain teenagers I can point you to. Some, sure, just grumpy, moody. Others, though, thoughtfully and existentially distraught at the condition of, for example, humanity’s heart and care for creation, problematic since at least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I can show you plenty of young people discouraged by, if not despondent for, this country’s generational inability to honestly confront and be present to the legacy of America’s original sin, namely slavery. With all of its persistent patterns in our own day. I didn’t ask for these challenges, you can imagine a younger generation lamenting. That’s Israel’s gist at the time of Jeremiah. 


But then God shows up and says something surprising. I don’t like your proverb, God says. The goofy one about grapes that’s hard to understand. It’s not as catchy as you think. It’s complacent. It’s complicit. “Do you really think,” God asks them, “that I’m punishing you for what they did? Do you think this moment is still about them? Come on now. That’s not how it works. How is that fair? No sin of theirs will keep me from being present to you. Don’t for a second think they finished your script. But look alive! Show up. Turn. Be as fully present to me as I already am to you. I see you. Lo, I am with you. Child, I love you. You will have your turn at being my people on this earth. You show up where the world would give up and I will make you a part of my promise and the repairing of all things.”


Anathea Portier Young explains God’s good news through Jeremiah this way, “The life of this present generation is God’s, and what God brings in the present is for them and about them. They can stop looking back and start looking around. This is their moment with God.” This is their moment with God. They get a turn. And the invitation of this unexpected good news is to turn toward the good news and live. 


I got to thinking about this turning, and it occurs to me you and I have our own practice at turning toward the good news to live in this place. We turn away from things that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, toward the new life of Jesus, in our baptism. After that, each week in this space, the gospel book goes out to the center, and what do you do, but turn? And some people turn left. Others turn right. You might think you’re centering yourself on Christ, but you’d be wrong. When you turn you are centering us on Christ, because - as we turn - Christ takes our many tiny turnings and makes one Christ-centered people out of us. Makes us one body. A new thing. A thing that wasn’t before Christ became our center. A church. You and I discover that being made friends of God, God would make us holy friends of each other. As we turn, we discover that we, too, are being given a turn at being God’s people on this earth, made bearers of the fruit of the Spirit, a community of sharers in the self-emptying love of Jesus.


I don’t have to tell you the cosmic improbability, statistically, of being born. The short of it is, you’re pretty special. I don’t think it takes much convincing that this life is a gift. How much more so the peculiar and particular combination of lives God has gather and made into the people of God called St. James Church and School at Audelia and McCree in 2023. Take a minute. Look around. Church. School. School that for fifty-five years has been an extension of the heart of this church. All of you, look around. Take a gander. Church, you are a gift. The life we share is a kind of miracle. This moment, just now, is God’s answer to the prayers of saints before us. And friends that’s so much more than a preacher’s hyperbole.


Long-time parishioner Pat Hind, of both past and present seasons of our common life, tells the story of some of those prayers, as lifted by her husband John, decades ago, in an especially challenging season: John thought the church needed to be in prayer daily, she says. He started dropping by every morning around 5:30, before heading to work, to pray in the sanctuary. He prayed for himself and his family. But one morning it occurred to him, “this church needs to be prayed for every day!” Each morning he prayed, “God, fill this church with people who love You and would come to love You!”  He did this for a year. Today, she says, the church’s congregation tops 400 members and has become a beacon of love and hope for the neighborhood. Our (prayers and) perseverance led to a wonderful example of “what the Lord…has brought about!” What the Lord has brought about - that’s you! That’s me. That’s us!


Church, school. Long-timers. New-comers. Like me. Each of us, all of us. Lifting hearts, offering gifts. Opening lives. Encountered by Christ. Time and again made a part of his body. Shown something new. Made sharers of his self-emptying. Made one. Made able to be a healing, a balm, for the soul of the world around us. Called to turn and discover that God has given us God’s self and all that we need, given us God’s fullest attention in this generation, you and I made alive to the truth that we have been given a precious gift, the gift of a turn at being God’s people on this earth together. 


This year’s stewardship theme is Growing in Faith Together. If you’re like me you’re glad for help to see that that spells GIFT. And gift is like turn, a word pointing us toward two truth things at once today: gifts of our resources are what we ask each other in this season to prayerfully consider making to our common life. Gifts of ministry, presence, and planned financial contributions. It’s a season of acknowledging that we experience the belonging we’ve been given most fully as we share what we have with one another. That’s why a special goal of this year’s stewardship season is pledged participation from every household. Because no gift of the body is insignificant. Because every member is a part of the larger gift to which our theme would point us: the gift of life together as God’s people, which we have seen and known, and which, by ourselves, is beyond the grasp of any one of us.


But, somewhere along the line, while we were living our ordinary lives, somewhere snuck into our endless, numbered, days, God has shown up and said something surprising. “I see you. Lo, I am with you. Child, I love you. My children, I love you. You will have your turn at being my people on this earth. Turn toward that life and live. You show up where the world would give up and I will make you a part of my promise, all things made new by the mercies of Jesus.”


Amen. 

Friday, June 2, 2023

God's Motivation is Love


"There move the ships, and there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it.” Psalm 104:27, Translation from The Book of Common Prayer

When I was in college, the prayer book’s mention of “that Leviathan” always brought a smile to the face of my priest. “For the sport of it,” he’d chuckle. “Can you imagine? That at least some part of God’s reason for creation is God’s enjoyment of it? Even parts of creation, like the Loch Ness monster, we will only ever guess or gossip about. Even those parts we’ll never know at all. Each one, known by God. Enjoyed by God. Creation brings God joy.” Maybe, added to the other verbs we remember about God’s relationship to us, we’d do well to remember “enjoys.”

In his short, whimsical book God is an Amateur, John Claypool obverses that, where you and I are likely to read the word “amateur” to mean “a person who isn’t good enough at a thing to be professionally paid,” the origins of the word suggest one who does a thing because they love to do the thing. So, he says, “God as an amateur in the original sense of the word, not as one who is a novice or inexperienced, but one who does something for the love of it. God’s only motivation is love.”

God’s approach to creation helps center me in the summer season. Don’t get me wrong, I love summer. And, if I’m honest? Summer presents its challenges. Four kids and no schedule? Or is it four kids and six schedules? Friends and neighbors, coming and going, sometimes ship passing. How on earth do you get a thing done? But also, how many times does the orbit of the urgent only talk us out of the space we might have made for other things that could have breathed our hearts to life?

I know, I know. Easier said than done. But as a start this morning I spent thirty minutes cleaning the insides of a fountain pen. Taking my lead from my Maker, I did a thing for the sport of it. Not because it was essential but because it brought me joy. And as I worked the pen flush through the chambers, I remembered that you and I are fountain pens of God’s delight. If I’m lucky, the next time I’m in church, I’ll still remember and blush a little bit. I might even break Episcopal protocol and laugh out loud.

You and me and our new to us neighbor, all of us, saved from the tedium of justifying our existence. Enjoying God and each other. Made for joy. And God’s delight.

Who knew?

In the joy and delight of Jesus,
Jonathan


Excerpted from this week's James' Journal, the weekly eNews of St. James Episcopal Church in the Lake Highlands neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. Click here to have it delivered to your inbox!

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Gun Violence, Tragedy, & Resources for Children & Families

I've given much of today to being a pastoral presence for those grieving/seeking to make sense of a thing for which it is imperative to grieve and there is no sense. Sharing these good resources from the director of the school my younger two kids attend, for those who might find them helpful.

Helping Children Cope with Tragedy

Media Consumption

Friday, March 3, 2023

Living with Limits (and Trust that Gives Thanks)

Each week I write a short article for the James Journal, an e-snapshot of that week's good things at St. James. This is from that. If you want to receive the e-note and don't already, you can sign up here!

Ash Wednesday has a way of throwing us off the deep end of our creatureliness. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Just in case we have found occasion to forget, these words remind us that we are creatures created and sustained by an Other, by God. The wilderness Jesus enters is likewise full of dust, the reminder that we do no make ourselves.

Creatures, of course, have limits. My kids reminded me the other day that I've slept for 14 of my 42 years on this earth. Not because I'm lazy but because I'm a human bound by rhythms of night and day, wakefulness and sleep. I affirm my trust in the God who made me when I nightly enter the surrender of sleep (some days more easily than others, so much left undone!). Likewise, I have known the limits of my creatureliness to save, for example, a loved one dying.

Christians, historically, have been at our best when we embrace our creatureliness. Rather than get hung up on the fact that we have real limits, we show up and keep a faithful presence, hold holy space, even with those we can't save. See, for example, the legacy of St. Jude's children hospitals. St. Jude is the patron saint of "lost causes." Christians do not limit our presence only to those situations we know in advance we can solve. Christians show up in love and not knowing. Which may just be different words for trust.

To be a creature means that, for Christians, grief and gratitude often share the same apartment. To hide from our grief blocks our gratitude. And the fullness of our gratitude will require us to occupy spaces of grief. I think this is because both grief and gratitude are practices that make us more truthful. Maybe more true. In the week ahead, will you join me in nightly praying the prayer of thanksgiving from The Book of Common Prayer? And, if God opens something to you in the praying, would you share what God has shown you with a friend? In this way, we might know together what the old Christmas hymn tells us is true of our Savior, the one who became flesh for our sake: And he feeleth for our sadness, And he shareth in our gladness.

Peace,
Fr. J

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

In Which He Attempts to Write a Blogpost Again

 I recently saw somewhere an interview in which world-famous NASCAR driver Danica Patrick observed, “If you’re looking at the wall, that’s where you’re headed.” (For those unfamiliar with NASCAR, the wall’s not a good thing to be headed toward.) Her observation mirrors that of leadership guru Simon Sinek, that the human mind is incapable of comprehending negatives. As evidence, he challenges us not to think of an elephant. (Aww, too bad.) So skiers, he says, who focus on trees are more likely to hit one (or at least more likely to find their experience defined by them), while skiers who focus on even a path surrounded by trees are astonished to discover how much path there actually is. More than enough. The challenge is that walls and trees represent big threats to things that are important to us. They are understandably challenging to ignore. But ignore isn’t quite the right word, is it? If Sinek is right about the brain, we can touch the negative by attending the positive. We can acknowledge the trees, in part, by attention to the path.

One time I found myself at a national gathering of campus ministry leaders. If anyone has reason to fear big (and often financial) threats, it’s campus ministers who hold holy space with teenagers and largely rely on the support of those outside the community. Conversations at leadership gatherings about fear of not having enough money, or losing the money one had, were frequent. At this gathering I got curious. What is the path of each heart surrounded by these daunting trees? “If you got $50,000 today,” I went around the room asking, “what’s the first thing you would do?” I had realized that, while I needed to navigate the trees, what I longed for was to learn from the paths of others and allow the imaginations of others to inspire my own; to open my heart to the path of God’s revealing in the context where I showed up each day and prayed to live in faithful community.

Experience and observation suggest that it’s easier to name the trees than the path. Will there be enough? is an easier question to ask than for what? To answer the latter question is to share a path, is to share your heart. It’s vulnerable and sometimes scary. Sometimes we don’t know. “Lord,” said Thomas. “We don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?” We see what gets in the way, but of what? We’re not always sure. I shared with a friend one time that I prayed for a life determined by the waters of baptism and shaped by the Easter Vigil. His blank look suggested he did not share this prayer. But then his face opened. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. (Fair enough.) “Tell me what that’s about for you.” And we were together, for a few minutes, on a path.

Don’t get me wrong. Some trees need naming. At one time or another, most do. But the path is what inspires to overcome them, the possibility of what could be.

Where do we look when we’re looking to what could be? Danica asks. What vocabulary do we draw from when we share our hearts and hopes? Not just individually, but in the communities (families, schools, organizations, churches, etc.) of which we are a part?

In his book, The Way of St. Benedict, Rowan Williams describes what we called the “currency” of a community: “All communities need a medium of exchange, a language that assures their members that they are engaged in the same enterprise. It involves common stories and practices, things that you can expect your neighbor to understand without explanation, ways and styles of doing and saying things.” Williams goes on to describe the experience of an English priest visiting a university mission, attempting to discover “what the currency of the university is.” After days of observation, the priest concluded, “What did these people exchange with one another when they met? You’d be surprised – they exchanged grievances. So the currency of that University is grievance.”

Williams goes on to shift the metaphor of exchange into one of circulation in the body, both an individual body and a body like, say, the Body of Christ. What do we put in circulation? With what do we inspire the life and being of the body, mindful that what we put in circulates through, becoming later what we receive. “If you put in grievance, you will get back grievance.” Meanwhile, the lives of so many communities are aided, if not healed, as members circulate instead the currency of goodness, positive expectation, and kindness.

Other currencies Williams names includes anxiety or censoriousness, pressures to conceal truths in the name of “peace,” on the one hand, and “a habit of stable determination to put into the life of the body something other than grudges” on the other. On the point of accountability before Christ, Williams observes that leaders of (not only) Benedictine communities are in unique position to put into circulation “the habit of hope, trust in the possibilities of compassion.”

At this point in this post, I’m mindful that I’ve

  • o   written for longer than I intended (if you made it this far, my deepest gratitude),
  • o   probably glossed a good bit of a favorite author’s (Williams’) thoughts, and
  • o   risked conflating 2 ideas, the tree/wall idea with currency and circulation,

so I’ll just end briefly by suggesting that the connection, for me, is the invitation to risk reflection on our habits of contemplation and contribution, individually and in the lives of those to whom we’re bound in love. So many of our thoughts are thoughtless (the fruit of unexamined imitations or habits). I say school’s not cool because it’s the cool thing to say. But in the space of an unthreatened heart, how do I understand the path? The good life? What holy yearnings has God planted in my heart? What do I believe the trees obstruct or diminish? With whom do I risk sharing the heart or vision God’s given me for the good and the true and the beautiful? What are my habits of circulation, both shared and individual? What do these habits convey about the path I pray God to be on? What opportunities to circulate the joy of the new thing God is doing does this day present?

I have a sign on the wall I face in my office that says, “Look for the Good, the True, & the Beautiful.” I have a prayer book that says, “Seek and serve Christ in each person.” I have, we have, been given all that we need (more than enough, even) to circulate the abundant life of new creation in, for, with one another. In the One Body we share. What a calling. What a gift.

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