I have been very neglectful of my blog in the last couple of weeks, leaving my readers high and dry—my apologies to all five of you!
Tomorrow DP and I leave for our Regional Conference (she is the lay delegate), so I will definitely not be blogging until I return, early next week.
So I’m off to worship with old friends, retreat and conference with new ones, and hopefully get some time to relax as well.
A word in advance of late Saturday night---If you have a dog, walk it proud!
Ever have times when you were so busy you barely had time for a meal, when you went right back to your office/study after an evening meeting to finish a project, when you barely had time to breathe, when your laundry piled up, the houseplants wilted for lack of water and the dishes piled up in the dishwasher (because you didn’t even have time to turn it on)?
That’s where I am. I’m not going to list the many meetings, projects, and so on that I have deadlines for in the next four days…but rest assured, I don’t think I’ll have much free time for the next ten days.
Which is why I’m planning to take tonight off. A good dinner, a little Jeopardy, some light reading and bed early. It’s what I need to get through the next few days!
Lest you think I’m a very grounded person who always knows what she needs and takes it, let me say that this wouldn’t be happening if not for a letter from a friend of mine that arrived today. He is ill, chronically so, and had not been taking care of himself. But one day he realized that he probably wasn’t going to die that week, or even that month, and if he was going to live for a while, he might want to do so in a state of as much health as he could muster. And so he made some changes in his life, not the least of which is pulling back on activities, taking evenings to himself, taking care of himself.
What was so wonderful about his letter is that he thanked me for writing to him while I was on retreat (his letter was in response to mine), for taking the time while I was at a place where he would love to be, to think of him and write.
There is grace. Not only the warmth of our reconnection, but his openness, his honesty in confessing his need, his shortcomings (as he sees them), and to thank me for hearing him into speech, when I have long felt that he was the one encouraging me to grow and change and become what I needed to be.
There is the true agape love—helping each other to grow in love for ourselves, for God, in service to God, and in love for others. There is no part of our relationship that is self-serving—if he receives support from me, so do I receive encouragement from him. When I needed a good slap upside the head, he gave it to me. When he tends to neglect himself, I (unwittingly, in this instance), remind him that he is not the only one who cares about him. And so on.
I cherish him, and our friendship. I’ll be seeing him soon, and I’m saying this now, here in my blog, so I won’t forget or decide it really isn’t important—I will tell him how very important he is to me, and how much I treasure our friendship.
If you have a friend like that—your partner, spouse, friend—be sure to tell them how much you treasure them. I know we hear that all the time, but have you done it? If you haven’t said it recently, try it. They need to know, and so do you.
Last week I was on retreat.
I saw:
I also:
GilChrist (the retreat centre) is a wonderful place. I can highly recommend it as a place for a solitary retreat or for a small group retreat (I don’t think they can hold more than about 12-15 people at the most). After I was greeted and given a tour and taken to my cabin (Jeremiah House; somehow very appropriate!), I was pretty much left alone. If I wanted to wander about and speak to other people, I was welcome to do so—but no one came by to invite me to the various activities at the main building (I had been told about them) or to “check up” on me. I had said I was doing a solitary retreat and they respected that—my solitude, my silence, and my space.
Jeremiah House was just about big enough for a table, two chairs, a small kitchen, a bed and a dresser, with a fireplace/chimney in the middle, and a bathroom to one side. I also had a lovely small sun porch. The table stood in a tiny bay window overlooking the meadow where the deer played and the mist flowed in the morning like an ocean. All around the cabin were woods, with wrens, chipmunks, jays, nuthatches, turkeys, deer and raccoons, all feeling safe.
I wrote, I read, I slept, I meditated, I stared into space, I simply was—for a whole week.
And now I pray that the serenity with which I returned will remain with me for a long time.
Browsing around to try to get a start on the sermon for next week, I ran across this ">article on pastoral plagiarism.
What the original writer seems to be saying is that we cannot trust to the Spirit, that we have to have “the best sermon” at all costs, and the end justifies the means.
Well, that brings up some questions for me.
I’m with Ray Van Neste on this one—we preachers have to trust in the Spirit to convey the truth of God to the congregation, over time, in spite of ourselves. If we use another person’s words, we are not true to ourselves, or to the gospel. Does it really make sense to preach a sermon written for, say, a rural majority-white congregation in
This is troubling. Are we so afraid of not “hitting a home run” that we cannot trust the Spirit? Are we really putting things of the world (a “successful” sermon, whatever that is) ahead of divine inspiration?
I thank God for the example of the friends and blogpals on this ring, who every week gather at a virtual sermon-writing party, difficult and stressful as it is, to pull out another sermon from our hearts and spirits, praying for the Spirit to breathe life into it, that it may rise up and show God to our congregations.
In the immortal words of Songbird and the other 11th Hour hosts:
Two books.
As long as I can remember, I have loved to write—to put words together in a way that brings a deeper meaning to the world, that offers new ideas, thoughts, or experiences to the reader. For a long time, I wrote a lot of (bad) fiction. I wrote (bad) poetry in high school and at university. I always did well in academic subjects that required papers and written exams—psychology, literature, history, theology. I like to write (as demonstrated by the fact that I am writing this instead of doing other tasks, like phone calls and laundry!).
Over the last ten years or so, I have come to some conclusions about theology, religion, and spirituality. My life has changed a great deal in those years—I have experienced things I never thought I would, done things I had always thought were for someone else to do. I have read and thought and grown and changed. As a result, I have a vastly different perspective on issues of spirituality and culture than I did when I was, say, 20 or 30. Some of that is maturity and experience; but some of it is due to the specific experiences I have had, and some of it is ideas I might never have encountered if not for the changes in my life. I’m talking about seminary, field experience, the death of my father, of a parishioner, the whole experience of 9/11, of divorce, of coming out, of leaving a denomination I had grown up in and fully expected to die in, of becoming part of another denomination, of new relationships, of moving to a new country, and so on. Because of all this, my theology has changed. The personal creed I had to write as part of my Systematic Theology class in seminary is totally outdated now—there is little I would bring into a creed today from it.
I want to test those ideas, beliefs, concepts—put them out there and see what others have to say about them. As they used to say in advertising, “Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.” I trust in the cut-and-thrust of intellectual debate (allowing, of course, for nastiness and jealousy, not to mention ignorance and bias—both ways) to help me refine my ideas. But first I have to get those ideas out there. Thus the first book I want to write is a book of theology, of understanding Christianity without sexism, heterosexism, racism, or any of the other –isms that creep into our beliefs. I want to try to bring back the radical vision of the world and God’s realm that the Gospels show, and that has been overlaid by tradition and the inability to accept the depth of the changes required by the Gospel. Do I sound nuts? Perhaps. But I want to at least try to get this all down into words, on paper. That alone will help me to refine it, and to see whether what sounds reasonable in my head also looks reasonable on paper!
The second book is much less ambitious. Over the years, I have written a variety of prayers for many different occasions—weddings, weekly services, retreats, funerals, civic events, and so on. I want to gather those together, see what I have and how much work would be needed to polish them up, and decide if it’s enough for a reasonable book. If not, perhaps get together with some friends and put theirs in there as well, and see what we come up with. This is much simpler, of course, and perhaps more do-able .I know I can get this outlined and maybe organized during that week away.
Two books, one week. We’ll see what happens!
Personalities fascinate me--people do. One way I try to understand history and places is through people--which is why I love good histor...
