What do you know?

I participate in an online (and sometimes in person) community known as Emergent Village. EV has gone through several configurations over the year, but basically it is a community in which to have conversations about Christianity in a postmodern context – the practice, exploration and even rejection of the faith.

Anyone who has been a part of Emergent Village knows that it has its share of conflict and frustrations because of all the different personalities and intentions that gather at the table.

As an experimental practice to try to open up a space for conversation where people are coming at scripture from different backgrounds (and may be moving in different directions with their faith), we are trying to engage scripture passages from a lectionary with a few “simple” questions:

1) What encourages you about this passage? (gives you hope, inspires you to act, makes you feel peace or joy, etc.)

2) What disturbs you about this passage? (frustrates or confuses you, makes you angry or sad, etc.)

3) What questions does this passage raise? What would you like to explore more?

That’s it. We want to practice reading scripture as a community, in a way that is not mining for rules or feigning certainty, but rather as an honest reading where we feel safe to be vulnerable. We want to say what makes us angry, what doesn’t seem to add up. We want to say what brings us joy and fills us with hope. We want to express our questions and maybe even explore them more together.

This may be a practice you want to try in your own scripture reading or in your local community. I hope that it can encourage and enrich you, particularly if scripture has become something you avoid out of expectations that have been placed on you. 

Listen Up, Y'all!

If we are going to be in community with one another, whatever form that takes, we have to learn to listen to one another.

If we are going to grow, to take deeply honest looks at our faults, to repent and turn in a healthy direction, we have to be willing to hear one another.

If I ever hope to become a wise elder, I have to first be wise enough to slow down, to listen, to hear, to process… these things precede all understanding.

Questions are healthy. Not having the answers is ok. Exploring the mystery together is growth. Listening together to how the spirit is moving, challenging, illuminating – this is an essential practice of the body of Christ.

When we fail to listen to those who feel their voices are being silenced, we dismiss their experience and receive their challenge as a something negative to be sneered at, rather than something valid and valuable from which we can grow.

“This is a common response to those of us who speak from the margins of evangelical Christianity about issues around gender, race, and sexuality, and it’s an effective one because it appeals to something most of us value deeply: Christian unity… far too often, the “stop-being-so-divisive” line is used by those in power to diffuse, or even silence, difficult conversations about why things might need to change… I don’t like being divisive. Believe me. But I don’t like being silenced either.”
~ Rachel Held Evans, “On Being ‘Divisive’…”

When we fail to listen to those who feel their voices are being silenced, we miss out on the beauty, honesty and healing that can come when we release our tight grip of control, and step out into the risky unknown of growth and change.

"To me, the marginalized are those who, for all kinds of different reasons, are on the border or edge of whatever groups or systems they are part of. They are not in the center where the power and resources flow, but instead are in the white blank space that lingers on each side of the center… So much beauty emerges from the margins, and I get to see it almost every day. Truth so pure that it is like gold. Beauty so glorious that it can’t be matched. Honesty so raw that it pierces souls. Healing so deep that it transforms the most hardened heart.”
~ Kathy Escobar, “Truth from the Margins”

Adam McHugh, who has an upcoming book on listening, recently tweeted, “We are, in large part, a result of the voices we choose to listen to. Pick good and diverse voices.” And also, “If the people with power in your community do not practice listening, odds are no one else will either.”

Who am I choosing to listen to?

How am I practicing listening?

Am I willing to learn from the voices that are speaking into my life?

Live Everything

“But if the truth is to be told, let us not leave out any part…”
– Life is Hard, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros




"…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
– Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

“We don’t live or become real if nothing ever happens to us.”
– Madeleine L’Engle




“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?”

“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
– The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams

the mountaintop experience

Photo Credit: Paul Martin (via creative commons)

I realize the mountaintop experience is the quintessential stereotype of divine moments, but there's a reason for that. Just look at the view in this photo - breathtaking, awe-inspiring, deeply moving.

Here in central Arkansas we have a popular hiking hill called Pinnacle Mountain. It's a little over a mile from base to summit, roundtrip, which makes it easy to set aside a few hours one morning or afternoon to enjoy.

One could incorporate the prayer model from the labyrinth walking up the hill (releasing), sitting at the top and taking in the expanse (receiving), and walking back down (integrating). Plus, all those endorphins you'll release should aid in prolonging that feeling of union, of being anxious for nothing, of resting in God's peace.

Born This Way

I'm headed up to St. Scholastica this afternoon to spend the weekend participating in a prayer retreat. Every Step a Prayer is led by Macrina Wiederkehr, and will focus on different forms of praying including the labyrinth, walking meditation and sacred journaling. One of my dear friends, who leads silent retreats & is a fellow lover of prayer, will be accompanying me, so I am very excited about the three days. In the meantime, I'll leave you with one of my favorite songs from the lovely Sara Groves:

How long?

Creator:

How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?
How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions?
How long will these people treat me with contempt?
How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them?
How long will this wicked community grumble against me?
How long will you mourn?
How long will you people turn my glory into shame?
How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?
How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?
How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?
How long will you lie there, you sluggard?
How long will you harbor wicked thoughts?
How long will you be unclean?
How long will this continue in the hearts of these lying prophets?
How long will you wander?
How long will you cut yourselves?
How long will they be incapable of purity?
How long shall I stay with you and put up with you?

Creation:

My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long?
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
How long, Lord, will you look on? Rescue me.
We are given no signs from God; no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be.
How long will the enemy mock you, God?
How long, Lord? Will you be angry forever?
How long will your jealousy burn like fire?
How long, Lord God Almighty, will your anger smolder against the prayers of your people?
How long, Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?
How long will your wrath burn like fire?
How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.
How long, Lord, will the wicked, how long will the wicked be jubilant?
How long must your servant wait?
How long must I see the battle standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?
How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered?
Alas, sword of the Lord, how long till you rest?
How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?
How long must this go on?
How long will you keep us in suspense?

Where are you?

I ask a lot of questions.

I ask them of myself, I ask them of others, and I ask them of God.

My questions are often confusing, and lengthy, and still in the process of figuring out what it is I really want to know in the first place.

I don’t think God minds my questions, because he seems to like them, too.

Jesus asked lots of leading questions, often about the crazy parables he told, knowing no one had a clue what he was talking about.

God’s not quite so cryptic.

God’s questions seem to be pretty simplistic and straight forward, which is kind of annoying, because you know he totally already knows the answer.

I think he asks the questions just to see what kind of whacky answer the human will respond with, and I think he gets a good laugh.

Oh sure, sometimes he may appear stern, but I think like any parent who is listening to his child trying to explain away a situation, digging deeper into a hole, God has to turn his head a bit to the side to suppress his uncontrollable chuckle.

Take Adam and Eve. They’re in the garden, communing with God, everything’s kosher. Cue the snake, Eve eats the fruit, politely shares it with Adam, boom they’re naked. Ok, so they were already naked, but now they know they’re naked. And they’re not just naked anymore… they’re nekkid! They start covering themselves up with leaves, hear God coming, and hide behind some trees.

God asks, “Where are you?”

Like. He. Didn’t. Know.

It’s like the parent playing hide-and-seek, whose child is lying under the coffee table with her feet sticking out the end, completely exposed. Yet, for the sake of the game, the parent continues wandering around the house, being sure to avoid the area directly surrounding the coffee table, calling out “Where are you?”

But here’s the thing for me, God could have ended it all right there. I mean, they ate the fruit, this is not going to be pretty. Like a writer whose story is going nowhere, he could have balled up the paper and tossed the draft into the waste bin. He could have called a do-over.

But he humored them. He played their little game. “Where are you?”

If God wasn’t the least bit surprised by Adam and Eve’s actions, if he didn’t scrap the whole project and go back to the drawing board, why are we so afraid to come before him honestly, just as we are?

Adam and Eve did not like everything God had to say to them, he didn’t just pat them on the head and let them off with a warning. Their actions had consequences. But life went on, and God did not leave them to face it alone. He loved them. He created them. He longed to be with them.

God loves you.

God created you.

God longs to be with you.

If you have to hide behind a tree and some fig leaves to be able to talk with him, ok – he’ll humor you.

But feel free to come before him just as you are. He already sees you, he already knows you, he already loves you.

“The great weakness in the North American church at large, and certainly in my life, is our refusal to accept our brokenness. We hide it, evade it, gloss over it. We grab for the cosmetic kit and put on our virtuous face to make ourselves admirable to the public. Thus, we present to others a self that is spiritually together, superficially happy, and lacquered with a sense of self-deprecating humor that passes for humility. The irony is that while I do not want anyone to know that I am judgmental, lazy, vulnerable, screwed up, and afraid, for fear of losing face, the face that I fear losing is the mask of the impostor, not my own!” ~ Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust