The Comma

I cleaned my office on Friday.  I was done with it – the desktop stacked with piles of paper and books, the disheveled bookcases, the rolls of paper piled in the corner, the bag of work gloves from last summer’s mission trip (or was it from two years ago?), the box of toys and books I was going to sort through before taking them to Superfluity, the vase that had been on the shelf for so long that I forgot who gave me the flowers that had long since died. 

I wanted it back – what was only a memory – of a clean desk, straightened bookshelves, cleared floor.  I had been looking forward to this day – the rare gift of a morning and early afternoon cleared of meetings.  For hours I worked – filling box after box with paper and a room with questions.  Why did I ever think I needed to save reports years old?  What are these scribbled notes I can no longer comprehend?  What was I doing saving these piles of papers thinking I would look through them one day? 

A colleague once told me, “Never save paper” – and that is exactly what I have not done.  I have saved so much of it.  Trip after trip to the recycling dumpster.   

My colleagues have always known when these cleaning urges have come over me – I have moved half of my piles into their mail boxes.  This time is different.  There is very little here worth holding on to, much less passing on.   

What is it about this time?  That now that I notice the mess of an office I have been living in?  Why couldn’t I see it before?  Is it Don’s retirement a week ago?  Is it marking this time as a new season, a time to begin again?  As I look through these piles of paper I realize that I haven’t cleaned my office for two and a half years.  Dave had just left as a pastor here and I marked that new season by throwing out paper, changing the angle of my desk, moving in a new table and chairs, rearranging the bookshelves.  Why have I held on to all of this stuff since?  Maybe I am ready now to let go in a new way.  Maybe I am doing just that. 

Saturday we drive to Bellingham.  Driving north from the grey, cold, cloud-covered day that was Saturday morning in Seattle into the brilliant blue and light and warmth of this afternoon.  The sky pealing open before us as we drive north. 

We are out in Bellingham Harbor on a 90 year old 127 foot two-masted gaff rigged schooner named the Adventuress.  The same boat Scot and Christie met on in 1981.    It’s been a couple of years since Scot died.  Just over a year since their daughter Elizabeth died as well.  And it has been a while since this group has last been together.  Babies born.  Relationships ended and begun.  Little girls became young women.

Scot’s parents pass around a small photo album.   We delight at the changes over time – the changing hairstyles and glasses.  And we remark on all that does not – her smile, his eyes, the look of love.   It has been several hard years.  Its own particular grief of a father and daughter diagnosed with brain tumors at almost the same time.  Full of pain as such times are, we have walked through them the best we know how.  Not knowing what to say, how to be together, we have stumbled over each other and over our past hurts and grief.  Done our best.  Sometimes well; sometimes not so well at all.

And today this gift of a day – sun and blue, and all of us here together and in such a different season.  Here in a way that we couldn’t have imagined that we could have been before.   Here we are – just taking in the gift of this day, delighting in this time, this sun and blue and one another.  Can this be us?

Few of us have ever been on a boat like this – we poke around the deck, galley and at the delicious spread of snacks that together we have provided.  Share the stories around the deck.  “He was my best friend…I knew him since 10^th grade…I’ve known her since I was a baby….I will never forget…” 

The time comes.  Time to get up to the deck, gather together.  “This is it.  What do I do?”, she asks.  Answers her own question, “Go for it” she says, and does.  Tosses the container of ashes – husband, daughter, family cat into the sea.

It is the preciousness of life that has called us here to mark this space and time.  Beckoned us from so many places to be here in this one place because life is precious and our lives have been touched and deeply by theirs.  We have come to celebrate and give thanks. 

It’s a different kind of remembering now.  Now that this time has passed, this year, this season lived through. A different time now that healing has begun its work in us. 

Its not that we forget.  Ever can or should.  Yes, the faces dim, the memories blur.  It is always with you, part of you, this memory, this grief, as the rolling sea beneath us here.   But we realize this as well – this something that we cannot explain and only fleetingly touch – that we are carried.  Carried by this Life, this Grace, this unfathomable Mystery that is Word beyond all words, Hand between all hands, Sea beneath all seas, here now, in and among us all. 

Here I am – outstretched hand before me.  I want to do it differently now.   No longer hold on to years of accumulated stuff.  No longer letting it all   accumulate innocently in corners until it stretches out, filling the room.  I want to do it differently now.  To live an emptying life.  Emptying my cup, clearing the desk, tossing the paper.  To not hold on to so much.  But to do it again and again, this gracious thanksgiving of letting go.   

Of course I will.  Hold on, that is, as well.  In ways that I know I will recognize only years from now.  The corners will become crowded and dusty.  The shelves disordered, the desk cluttered.  Once again I will wonder how and why I was holding on to so much I now no longer need.    

And then may I, and you, seek out our ship.  And a sky clear blue day.  And toss it all out free and clear into the rolling sea of thanksgiving, memory and hope.   Clearing it all out, ready once again to be filled anew with this great Mystery that is the unfolding of Life.  Ready, now, for a different kind of remembering to begin. 

What does a pastor do all week? 

Due to the very nature of the profession, much that we do as pastors is hidden from public view. 

Other than leading worship on Sunday, the communities we serve rarely get to see us doing our work during the week.  It happens in conversations and small meetings, on the phone or in the office, at homes and hospital bedsides.  And yet, the congregations we serve also need to know the rhythms of our schedules, the breadth of our responsibilities and the quality of our days. 

This past week I thought about “pastoring” as a verb. 

Here are some of the verbs that defined a week in my life as pastor:

Prayed

Set up chancel for worship

Checked e-mail and phone messages

Reviewed worship service responsibilities with Catherine and Don

Prayed

Greeted congregants

Welcomed families to graduation breakfast

Prayed

Coordinated worship responsibilities with liturgists

Led worship

Greeted congregants

Counseled, celebrated, greeted, made connections at coffee hour

Celebrated with Don, family and friends his retirement

Prayed

Luxuriated in Sabbath day – slept in, rested, renewed.

Prayed

Greeted staff

Checked messages

Called members and others

Reflected on a book I am reading on Leadership, took notes.

Compiled list of issues for leadership staff meeting on management issues

Checked in with colleagues about how we are doing

Prayed

Prioritized, coordinated, responded to variety of issues at the meeting

Ate lunch with colleague, reviewed responsibilities, coordinated schedules

Supervised Youth Ministry colleagues ministry at our weekly meeting

Problem solved with other colleague

Attended leadership staff – parish relations committee

Shared reactions, provided ideas for next steps.

Prayed

Counseled congregant

Coordinated responsibilities with colleague

Thought through issue with colleague

Compiled agenda for worship planning meeting

Led meeting

Took notes

Offered reflections and ideas

Checked messages

Provided Mentoring Program supervision for colleague

Thought through issues

Met with family to plan committal service

Prayed

Checked e-mail

Attended Seabeck planning meeting with youth leaders

Celebrated leadership of group

Prayed

Checked e-mail and messages

Returned calls

Sent agenda items for meeting on Christian Spiritual Formation

Attended Committee on Ministry review of ordination call for congregant

Prayed

Prayed

Cleaned office

Threw out 3 years of accumulated paper

Rejoiced at clean office

Set up chancel for youth worship

Greeted youth

Attended worship rehearsal

Celebrated worship leadership

Ate pizza

Prayed

Checked email and messages

Greeted congregants

Coordinated issues with colleague

Prepared committal service

Drove to committal

Led committal service

Drove home

Prayed.

43 to 58

The range over one month’s work of how many hours it took to do such verbs.

Each week is different.

Every day brings the unexpected.

Some weeks many meetings, another week much pastoral care.  Some weeks much sermon preparation, another week much planning. 

Through it all what remains the same?

The grounding in prayer, the reminder again and again that in all we carry we are carried by that Mystery, this Holding of God, that carries us all. 

One of my current favorite thinkers, Margaret Wheatley, asks, “Are you taking time to reflect?”  Are you?  Am I? 

I find these times of reflection happening in my days sporadically.  It is in a waiting room earlier this week that I pick up the most recent copy of The New Yorker magazine and read a short article by the favorite author of one of my favorite authors (Andre Dubus).  Tobias Wolff has a beautiful short article called “Winter Light” – a remembrance of going to a movie with a college friend years ago and the impact that experience had on his friend’s life.  As he reflects on the role of aesthetics and faith, he invites me to pause and consider the role of aesthetics, or beauty, in shaping my life and my faith.   I remember walking off the street into a crowded Orthodox church in St. Petersburg during Holy Week.  Hearing the choir singing Rachmaninov and falling to my knees.  I remember the flowers I was gifted with this week and the joy they bring to me each day.  I remember this gorgeous afternoon when the sun came out and the sky turned blue and the breeze was warm and people smiled as they passed on the street. 

This evening I went to “The Visitor” at the Harvard Exit.  It was a rare gift of a night that I happened to be free and Dave was on retreat and I could choose to do whatever I pleased.  It is a beautiful movie on grief and coming to life, on what happens when we open up the closed, boundaried parts of our life and let in the new.  I recommend it highly.  And what a gift this night to happen to meet Paul and Nancy Weisner after the movie and share how moved we all are by this beautiful film and go to share Thai food together. 

A gorgeous day.  May tomorrow open my eyes and ours to more amazement. 

How are you?

I’m visiting Seattle.

I went to see a doctor about my health.

Actually, I worried about my health.

Anyway, I came here.

I open the Bible.

I had peace.

I had better.

Thank you.

(Found in the pew racks.  Note written on an envelope with a five dollar bill inside.)

The invitation:  Write a proposal to the Lilly Endowment for what you and your congregation would do on a three month sabbatical of renewal, reflection and exploration. 

For the past month I have working on developing such a proposal for my sabbatical (January to March 2009) with leaders of the church council, youth board, worship and music board, personnel board, and leadership staff parish relations committee.   We have had wonderful conversations that have shaped the church proposal that we submitted last month.   For the proposal, $30,000 is available to the pastor and $15,000 to the congregation to support staffing coverage for the pastor and support for a ministry project.  We will hear if we get the proposal by October. 

Our proposal is focused on intergenerational life and worship.  I will be working with church leaders in Seattle, San Francisco, New Zealand and Washington D.C. who are developing new models for intergenerational ministry.  The congregation will receive support to develop an intergenerational liturgical arts team that will plan and create a sanctuary liturgical arts installation for Easter.  The hope of this sabbatical proposal is that after four years of hard work of implementing and growing in our intergenerational worship and life, together we will have this intentional time to create, dream and reflect on where we have come from and hear God calling us to go.   

Ask me what has most excited and challenged me about ministry, and I will tell you about my passion for deep listening and mutual learning across the boundaries of generations, class and cultures that too often separate us from one another.  I hear the call to imagine and create intergenerational ministries as a call to do justice: to restore that dialogue and communion in our society and world today that too often separates us and tears us apart in fear. 

In a time when churches too often mirror this separation by dividing Christ’s body between traditional and contemporary services, between discrete ministries for seniors, youth and families with young children, I am passionate about bringing us together back to worshipping, living and learning with each other.  A center of my life and ministry has been seeking to restore that home which has been lost to many of us – building a community of faith grounded in forgiveness and grace where all have a place at the table and all deserve to be heard. 

Intrigued?  Let’s talk about how your can take part! 

I shared these words with Don Mackenzie at today’s retirement celebration. 

March 1, 1995.  Over 13 years we have been pastors here together. 

A lot was different 13 years ago:

Gail Crouch, Dave Shull and I had been called as associate pastors and been working together for seven months.   

I was 32, an inch taller, few pounds heavier and at least looked like I had a little more hair than I do now. At 32, I thought I was pretty grown up. 

Dave and I had spent a long time trying to get here – a place where we could live together and be in ministry.  This was the first church either of us had served that actually wanted to know who we really were as people. 

Looking back, if I were you, I wouldn’t have been quite sure what to do with me. 

In fact, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.  I was trying to figure out what in the world to do in ministry and how to be a pastor now that I had arrived here. 

Like many of us, I had learned that to succeed in ministry, as in life, one should:

Be honest but not too real.

Stick with the things that you do well.

Be “good”. 

And strive to be perfect.

13 years ago, it would have been very easy for me to let myself be put in the box of doing those very things.  Very easy to do ministry in the boxes of safety and perfection that it often is.  And quickly to have gotten dull, bored, silent and stuck. 

That is exactly what you didn’t do.

Instead you created and supported the environment I needed to live outside of the box and to become more fully myself.  And to let myself trust in this self I am becoming. 

It is an amazing gift to be given – that room and encouragement to become more fully the one God created you to be.  I don’t know if there are any greater gifts that we can give each other than that.  There certainly have not been for me. 

You made real for me, and others with whom you pastored, that favorite poem of yours from Emily Dickinson that begins, “Hope is the thing with feathers”. 

Instead of giving me a box to do ministry in, you gave me feathers. 

You gave me room and encouragement –

To try on being honest and real.. 

To not just do what I knew how to do well but to dream the new, try on the new, risk the new, to do what I had never done before.

To not tell me to do it or say it or preach it as you would do it but to give me feathers to let me struggle and find out how I would do it.

To do it not your way but to encourage me to find out what was my unique way.

To find my voice as a man and pastor.

You stood with me and supported me as I soared and failed, did well and messed up.  Which is all to say you gave me encouragement, support and room to grow – the only way that I know we can. 

You showed us what it means as a community committed to each others growth.  A community of forgiveness and grace. 

It was that commitment that enabled all of us to grow.  Even in ways we never anticipated.   

It is the reason I am still here, now 14 years later – you gave me the feathers I needed to grow. 

I realized the other day that I have been a pastor here for almost a third of my life.  An incredibly important time of growth and change.  I know that I am the pastor that I am today because you were there, Don, gifting me with the gift of feathers. 

Right there with me, supporting, encouraging, hoping, praying with me to become that pastor and man I am and am still growing to become. 

I have a prayer and hope for you – it is “the thing with feathers”.  In this new season of your life, that you soar.  To grow, risk, live, be the man God loved you into being to become.

To sing your song, to live your life, to do your work. 

To gift yourself with the gift you gave me – the gift of feathers.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

In my other life, today is a big day.  The abbot of my Zen community, Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji, became a “Dharma Heir” (“Dharma” means teaching).  That’s a big deal thing becoming a Dharma Heir.  As I interpret it, it’s like getting a PhD in paying attention or being consecrated as bishop in a religious community. It means that your teacher recognizes something has changed in your relationship.  No longer teacher and student; now, two students sitting together.  And today, on this big deal day we had a fancy ceremony and party to celebrate Genjo Osho becoming a Dharhma Heir.

In my other life, as in my life as pastor here, I have specific jobs and responsibilities.  In my other life, I clean bathrooms.  I’ve cleaned lots of bathrooms in my other life.  Things like cleaning bathrooms are part of our practice of paying attention.  And bathrooms need to get cleaned.  Today, on this big day, I scrub a lot of toilets, sweep and mop floors, weed the garden, clear tables, wash dishes. 

In my other life, as in my life as pastor here, I have a place in the community to sit.  Today, that was in the back row at the University Friends meeting hall where the service was held.  All the “important” people with robes and shaved heads sat in the front.  I have no desire to sit up front.  I like my place here in the back row.  I find my place as a lay member, as a student, to be a very important place to sit.   My responsibilities and place I sit here help me appreciate all the different roles that must be filled in any religious community.   In my other life there is a Japanese calligraphy in our zendo, or worship space, that reads, “no rank, no post.”  It reminds us that everyone is needed.  There is no differentiation, no better or worse place, no right or wrong place.  The community couldn’t be the community it is without each and every one of us there taking our place and doing our work. 

Just like I hear people in my life as pastor say they are embarrassed to say they are a Christian, sometimes I am embarrassed to tell people about my other life, that I am a member of a Zen Buddhist community.  Being a Zen Buddhist sounds very New Age and Trendy.  I am not interested in New Age and Trendy.  I have struggled with interpreting to myself and others how I can be a student of Buddha and a follower of Jesus as well.  I worry that it sounds like I have had to give up some beliefs that are important to me or that I am not a “real” Christian anymore.  I feel the need to explain that it is not about believing certain unbelievable things or worshipping statues or any of that.  It is about sitting and breathing and practicing being here and now.  It is about touching more of the all that is in me and in us and in all that is life.  It is very hard to explain.  I am quick to say it is not for everyone but that it works for me.  In fact, my practice of Zen has deepened and broadened my Christian faith and practice.  My interfaith life of Christianity and Zen Buddhism has felt to me like two hands meeting, folding together.  

Today, after weeding and washing and sweeping I am tired.  In the Dharma Transmission Ceremony, I briefly nod off.  Bows made, words shared, gifts given.  I also feel some things very deeply.  Some words that are shared, some feeling that is in this place, these tears running down my cheek.  In my other life, as in my life as pastor here, such feelings of grief and joy happen often.  It is what has called me back again and again to my communities of faith. 

Five years ago this month, I went on my first Zen retreat.  I was invited to go by my spiritual director, Genjo Osho, who also happened to be the abbot of what is now my Zen community.   For almost ten years, once a month, I met with Genjo and talked with him about my life and my faith, my struggles and my dreams.  He listened to me, reminded me of what I knew, and pointed me in the direction of the road ahead.  While Genjo sometimes talked about  Zen Buddhism I never was particularly drawn to learn more about it.  Then five years ago, I was ready to let go of some things in my life.  Genjo recommended this week long sitting meditation retreat as one way I could begin to do that letting go.  I went on my first week-long sitting meditation retreat or “sesshin” without ever having meditated or knowing much of what meditation even meant.  I went to a strange place with a group of strangers and I cried most of the week.  I learned that, of course, you can’t cry out loud in a place where you sit still and are silent.  I learned to cry without making any noise.

It is what brings me back year after year, that feeling, that touching something deep and mysterious and holy that I experienced that first sesshin.  That meeting and healing of something old in me that I don’t fully understand.  That grounding me in this time, this breath, this place.  That touching of what is deep within makes me know that that this strange and wonderful practice will be a center point for the rest of my life. 

In my other life, as Genjo Osho is celebrated today, we are reminded by his teacher that his 30 years of practice of Zen Buddhism means that he is just beginning.  Just beginning.   In my other life, as in my life as pastor here, today is always a big day.  For today, right now, is where it all begins, where it all happens.  Today is the day of resurrection.   Today the day, where there is work to be done, the stranger to be welcomed, the floor to be swept.  I rise and begin again.