Fog...

Trying to ease myself into a weekend retreat, I paused on the drive at a quiet beach cove. A sunny Friday afternoon in October had brought a handful of families to the beach. I walked from the boulders guarding one end of the cove to the scrabble of rock brought down by a mountain stream on the opposite side and climbed up on a driftwood tree trunk. I watched the waves crash, noticed a girl not much older than one of mine carried by her father into the surf, piggy back style. I studied the sunlight glinting off the water as it ran back into the sea, and laughed at sandpipers as they darted in and out of the waves. Suddenly I noticed the temperature drop. A tiny cloud had drifted between me and the sun; further down the beach was still sunny, but here I was sitting in my own personal fog bank.

That picture of a personal fog bank stayed with me through the weekend, a picture of my own spiritual life over the past few years. Something shifted in me Saturday morning when I sat with a quote offered in our retreat materials:

It is only self-love that grows weary and despondent in doing nothing, seeing nothing and understanding nothing. Yet let self-love grumble to its heart's content. Its very weariness and despondency will rid us of it in the end. By cutting it short of food, we shall make it die of hunger -- a death to be desired indeed! (Jean-Pierre de Caussade)

Oh, someone had my number! Weary and despondent in doing nothing, seeing nothing, understanding nothing. That was life inside my personal fog bank. And how I had let self-love grumble about how dissatisfying the whole deal was. Starve that grumbler -- heck, I'd been feeding it scraps under the table for years!

Grumbling had become habit; the fog wrapping around me was the enemy (if not actually The Enemy). It was my distracted mind, the tyranny of the urgent, the spiritual disciplines that no longer "worked" to produce some sense of progress in growing in God. Fog was the obstacle to be overcome, the pull of gravity weighing me down.

Gradually, over the course of the weekend, a new idea dawned: what if the fog was not my enemy, but my friend? What if, instead of struggling against it, I was meant to rest there in the dimness, right in the middle of not knowing, not seeing, not doing. What if there was an invitation to experience God with me there in the fog?

Pantry Update

Since I posted about working at the AIDS pantry, I got an email from 'S', the director -- due to state budget cuts (I'm sure there isn't a non-profit in California left unscathed by the sea of red ink coming out of Sacramento), his last day is Friday. The pantry will go on, with other staff covering, instead of one person dedicated to coordinating it. More opportunities for those of us on the "unpaid" staff to serve... I'm off for the summer with the kids, but plan on being back there after Labor Day. Keep you posted...

Spiritual Discipline: Serving at the Pantry

Christine Sine is sponsoring a summer synchroblog focusing on "What is a Spiritual Discipline?" I promised to write something....Summer being, of course, the worse time for mothers of school-aged children to even think about discipline. Then I left a comment on Jon's blog about volunteering at a local AIDS food pantry, and he encouraged me to write about that. So in the interest of killing two birds with one stone (well, perhaps the birdwatcher in me should find a different idiom), here goes...

It must have been one of those typical Sunday mornings when I really did not want to be at church, turning the bulletin over looking for something interesting to read (the pastor's wife offers up the occasional NT Wright or Miroslav Volf quote for our edification), when I saw the invitation: Help needed at the AIDS pantry, Monday evenings, Tuesday mornings, Thursday afternoons. Call Bob. No thunderbolts, no drama. Just two thoughts that connected in my addled brain: I've been thinking about food and our food systems, why not get involved in helping those who don't have enough food? And, somehow, this might be a place to encounter Jesus.

So I called Bob, and shortly thereafter found myself spending my Tuesday mornings shelving canned goods and "shopping" with the clientele of a decidedly secular GLBT organization that provides supplemental food for people affected by HIV/AIDS. Some of my fellow volunteers are also clients who will take a break to shop for their own needs. S. the director, tells so many stories about his glory days in San Francisco that one day I finally blurted out, so why do you live here now?

Most of the time, working at the pantry doesn't feel particularly spiritual. Often enough I leave wondering whether I've been tainted by the conversations flowing around me. One day another volunteer spent the morning flirting outrageously with the clients. Another morning S. put on the 6 inch heels that had been hanging on the coat rack all winter and revealed a bit of that wild personality he boasts of. There are clients who come in and grouse about whatever is going wrong in their lives, and others who are clearly moved with gratitude that they don't have to be hungry this week.

What's a middle-aged, white girl to think of all this? At the very least, it is entering into the world of "the other" -- folks whose life experiences are about as far from mine as I can imagine. As sophisticated as I might think myself, I'm sure my eyes bug out when S. starts in on his stories of drag queen races. I wonder what I have to offer, besides decades of experience in grocery stores. "How's your Spanish?" S asks, before introducing me to a young woman with a hesitant smile -- not so great, but I try.

Richard Foster's classic "Celebration of Disciple" defines a spiritual discipline as something that gets us into the ground where God can work on us (rough translation). Working at the pantry has its formative moments -- those times when I find my tendency to snap judgments and even idle curiosity putting a distance between me and the people I'm serving or serving with. I'm challenged to see into someone else's world -- as different as it may be from my own -- and find common ground. I'm learning what it means to love someone I'm not naturally drawn to, to serve in simple ways. I haven't seen Jesus walk through the doors yet, but perhaps my eyes and heart will be tuned by showing up week after week, and one of these days...

Jon at Blog One Another posted an interesting take on a recent episode of This American Life, the NPR radio show. In the segment in question, Ira Glass records a couple of phone conversations between Kris Hogan (a high school football coach who enlisted his team's fans to cheer for a team from a local juvenile hall) and a woman who was moved by the story, and wanted to talk about faith. Trisha is a lapsed Catholic trying to reconcile her desire to believe in God with the recent death of a friend from cancer.

Jon does a nice job of pointing out how stuck in Christianese Hogan is, and how unhelpful some of his apologetic arguments are. His wife adds a concluding point, blaming those who taught him this form of evangelism:

"The coach was doing his best with every tool he had been given. He was taught this stuff, just like you were taught it, and it's pure crap. The teachers are totally to blame."

Most of what you were taught about evangelism is now irrelevant. Actually, in a post-Christian society, it's worse than irrelevant — you may inadvertently be practicing "devangelism"! For your outreach to be effective, you must adopt a missionary mindset and missionary methods. If you have a teacher who is talking about evangelism without training you to be a missionary, walk away and find another teacher. With the Holy Spirit guiding you, that teacher needs to be a "native."

The whole post is worth reading, but a couple of thoughts are stirring in my mind. We may need to peel the onion back a few more layers. I'm not sure that the problem is that traditional evangelism lacks a missionary mindset -- in other words, it misjudges the distance in terms of culture, language and worldview between the evangelist and the other person. If that's the case, then the coach just needs to find a new language for expressing the old arguments.

What if we throw out the whole idea that what we're doing in evangelism is providing answers or reasons to believe? What if this is not an exchange of information between people who know about God and those who are curious or ill-informed? If the evangelist is not teaching/preaching/arguing, what are they doing? Ironically, the image that comes to mind is Hogan's profession: coaching.

What I have in mind here is spiritual direction, but you could call it coaching. Trisha calls Coach Hogan willing to reveal the tenderest part of her heart -- her grief and questions around her friend's death. Jon describes the scene well:

So they try another phone call, being clear that the purpose is to discuss Trisha's questions about why God allowed her friend to die. It's a good question. It's a tough question. And from my perspective, even a direct question like this should not have an immediate answer, but be treated as an invitation. Trisha is exposing a very sensitive part of her heart, and that calls for respect and an exchange of trust.

Again with the Christianese.

But Kris Hogan doesn't waste any time sticking his foot in his mouth: "This is the most common question that folks who are anti-God ask."

Whoa! In a single statement, he slaps Trisha as "anti-God," and dismisses the possibility that earnest followers of Jesus also wrestle with that same question.

One way to reduce the distance between Christian and non-Christian is to fess up to the fact that this is the most common question human beings faced with loss or tragedy ask. Yes, Christians may come at it from a different perspective, but anyone who says they don't ask Why? of God is either deep in denial or lying. And we don't always get neat answers, or completely satisfying ones. People of faith, by definition, are the ones who keep wrestling, keep believing despite the questions.

So what if Coach Hogan could put himself in the position of a spiritual coach and offer Trisha some resources as she wrestles -- including first of all a listening ear and a safe relationship where all questions are admitted? If might mean entering into that uncomfortable space where Sunday School platitudes and philosophical arguments get exposed for what they are, while we wait together for God to speak. The old apologetics might still be helpful to frame the questions or define new ones: What does it mean to live in a fundamentally broken world? What can we expect if God's Kingdom is here but not yet? A coach's role is to offer resources, teach some skills, but in the end the athlete is the one who who plays the game. Spiritual coaching assumes that the Holy Spirit is at work and trusts that those who seek will find.

I'm just an April Fool!

Dang, twice in one day!

First it was Bro Maynard's story about how his former church wants to engage him as a consultant to monitor their change of heart...

Then, the food sustainability stimulus story from Civil Eats!

I guess it's easy to get sucked in by things you'd like to believe are true...

Slow Food, Real People

It rained over the weekend, or I would have attempted to get some veggies into the dirt in my backyard. I've been procrastinating -- even Michelle Obama beat me to it this year! I finally got a chance to watch the 60 minutes piece from last week featuring Alice Waters and the Slow Food Movement. While I'm sure Waters deserves all the credit she gets for moving sustainable food from the fringes to at least the mainstream media, a slow burn was growing in me as I watched the piece.

What irks me is the mindless association of fresh, local, sustainable food with the notion of being elitist. Yes, I want to cheer when I hear Waters say: "I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that's not elitist." Absolutely. Amen and amen.

But then she goes on to purchase grapes for $4 a pound and cook Stahl a lovely breakfast that no one that has to get children to school or themselves to work could afford to labor over for so long (not to mention the gazillion-dollar kitchen in which it was cooked). And like a compliant dope, Stahl asks "probing" questions about whether schools can afford to teach kids to grow and cook their own food. As opposed to training them to take multiple-choice tests till the cows come home? As opposed to feeding them fast food and candy bars in the cafeteria? But the whole exercise demonstrates nothing better than the inability of the major media outlets to hold an intelligent converstation. If Stahl had been doing her job, she might have left Waters in her dream world and asked some of the other folks shopping at the Farmer's Market how they balance their food budgets and juggle dinner prep. Here's a clue -- look for the women with kids grabbing samples off the tables.

What the sustainable food movement needs is not a gourmet chef explaining how to roast an egg over an open fire, but a real Mom explaining how fresh and local can be affordable, and how real food can make its way to the table via a few simple techniques before the kids melt down. Thanks, Alice Waters for launching the food revolution. But please, go back to your kitchen, and let some regular folks take it from here.

16 Decisions for Kingdom Living

Well, maybe not 16. As promised, I'm posting some thoughts I have about some key commitments that might help us resist the lure of affluence and materialism in favor of Kingdom values. I'm taking off the Grameen Bank's list of 16 Decisions, which guide their members -- mostly poor women -- in lifting themselves out of poverty . For the most part they are simple and concrete, memorable and measurable.

So here are some ideas -- feel free to suggest additions or deletions.

1. We will attempt to follow the great commandments: to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
2. We will work together to help each other become better stewards of the resources we have -- breaking the power of consumerism by sharing together and talking about how we spend money.
3. We will be better stewards of the environment: waste less, buy local, grow our own food, carpool, etc. [Maybe some of these need to be spelled out separately?]
   
4. We will include the poor, marginalized and those not like us in our lives through acts of friendship, hospitality and service.
5. We will give time and money to help empower people in need in our community and around the world.
6. We will nurture one another's love for God through worship, prayer and other spiritual disciplines practiced together.
7. We will maintain an attitude of repentance regarding our own failures to swim against the current of our culture and grace towards one another.
   
8. We will enjoy God's creation, regularly spend time outdoors and teach our children to appreciate and protect natural environments.

Well, that's a start. Have at it -- debate, discuss, add, subtract.