Reproduction III

Part I
Part II
Part III

I used to hate Phil Collins' In the air tonight. I don't know why, no real reason, it just didn't appeal to my musical palate. Flash forward about, oh, 27 or so years. I'm listening to an online radio station, when this song comes on. And I cry. I listen to it on repeat for hours and try to suck the life out of it so I can be set free into the new thing.

There is a lot of urban legend surrounding this song, but all I can hear reverberating my head is the heartcry of the chorus:

"I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
Ive been waiting for this moment, all my life, oh lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord, oh lord"

It echoes endlessly in my mind, waking something that was once dead and creating in me a new hope.

A group of us have begun talking about something else (here and here and here, for starters). We don't know what else, but something other. A grassroots, kind of subversive thing. A new thing. We don't yet know what this is, but we each feel it. It is strange; in fact I initially thought the whole idea was batshit crazy. But I can't deny that I'm only one of many who have some crazy in their hearts, and it sank into my soul, where it germinated and sprang up out of the dark and dirty place in me where church once held my spirit hostage.

One thing I have learned in this last altogether tumultuous year is that blogging is not a solitary venture. Let me clarify, for I realize most of us know it's not a solitary venture...we need others to read and interact on our blogs in order to be "successful" at it. However, most of us go into it with a certain self-centeredness; this is not wrong, because the motives that get us in the door are not important. But we must remain open to what happens once we are there. And what we find, if we look closely with an open heart, is something we might not expect. The level of community I have found continues to deepen as time goes by, as shared dreams are discussed and as the future is considered. Today, the spiritually free place I live is mostly attributed to the people I have met along the way; not to my own wisdom, but to the collective wisdom that is shared in this place. Suddenly my blog isn't my blog anymore, it's a gathering place...this is how I see it anyhow. It's not my place where I brag about what wonderful things I know or how much wisdom I possess, but a place where I am acutely aware that I only own a small piece of a puzzle, and as others bring their pieces, we will begin to form a picture. And I don't just mean here, again here is just a piece of it. As we have begun to congregate in places like Rahab's Kitchen...something has changed in me. It's no longer about me and what I know or don't know, experience or complain about. I see a place to begin to fertilize this batshit-crazy thing.

I see Jesus' mission to be like a virus rather than a meeting or a building or a service. It's not something we give to other people, it's something they catch from us. It's not a place we invite people to, it's something we become. It's not something we give to, it's something we give from. So much of Christianity, churchianity, is inward focused...we give of our time and money and love and relationships back into the church....and it is there we lose Jesus' vision. For he was outward-bound.

So often we talk about how Christianity is really about relationships. I agree, to some extent. However, I have one big disagreement with that train of thought, because so often what I hear from that is that our reason to be in relationships with people is so eventually they will become Christians. Not so, in my mind.

But then here is where I go off on my tangent. Christianity isn't something we are or somewhere we go or even who we worship. Being a little Christ is something we give to others, because of an example that was set for us...something we bless people out of. Whether or not they ever embrace Jesus is of little concern to me; for it's not up to me. I want to be a blessing because I can, not because of what someone will give back to me by their conversion. So beat me with a flannelgraph, because, yes, I just said it doesn't matter to me if they ever embrace Jesus.

However, any new thing is going to have pitfalls and snags, especially if it is bound and determined to replicate or reproduce something that already exists. Newer Better Faster. Improved. What I'm thinking about today is how to avoid the pitfalls...certainly not all the pitfalls can be avoided, but I believe the pitfalls of reproduction can. I do think in this new connected world, more fascinating things are possible than ever conceived of before.

So how do we start from the beginning, to truly build something from the ground up, without taking the shortcuts of reproduction, without utilizing the skeleton of the old thing? We have this new vision, and this new sense of this faith we hold and this new sense of smallness in the world. How do we run with it and create something tangible without drawing on things that seem to have worked in the past? It's so easy to fall back into the knowns instead of forging ahead into the unknown.

More to come.

Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving

To all my friends,
whether you are American,
Australian, Canadian, English, Welsh, or South African
(did I forget anyone?)...
Thank you so much for being my friends.
I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate your hearts and voices,
encouraging me, listening to me, and sharing life with me.
I wish you and yours blessings and joy,
health and peace.
I wish you closeness with our Creator
when you need it most.
And beauty in your surroundings.
Most of all
I wish you an abundance of love
both to have and to give away.
Thank you.

That Voice Again

How is it that things from the past can haunt us so? They jump into the future all fast and ferocious, leaving us melancholy and settled in a depth where we can't always touch bottom? Once upon a time there was someone who meant a great deal to me. He was a good friend to me in a difficult time of my life, when I was still full of confusion and self-doubt and wildly spinning trying to find center. Don't get me wrong, it's not a romantic drama; when I say 'friend', that is what I mean.

I found out in 2000 that he had died several years prior. All I have is a copy of an obituary that I came across by accident while searching local newspaper archives for clues about my husband's birth family (and I'm certain it was fate that I happened upon it -- what are the odds?). The obituary doesn't tell me anything about what happened, but enough information to be certain it was him.

And every so often, I wonder.

Sometimes it comes writhing and wriggling to the surface, when I least expect it. What if I hadn't been so selfish and blind? What if I hadn't moved on....what if I had been realistic with myself, would he still have died? Would I have known if he did? Would I have possession of that ever-elusive thing called closure? Would it matter more or less to me than it does now, hanging in my heart like someone's coat in my closet that they will never return for? What if he had known what he meant to me? Or maybe he did? I suppose; I hope.

I'm not holding on to guilt; we had lost touch a number of years before he died, and I can't second guess it, I'm far too wise and life-lived now for that. It's not entirely like grief, either, for it brings too much happiness to me to think about him. I fully expected to see his name in lights one day, for he had a dream and the gifts to achieve it, chasing it down like the wind. I used to tell him that I would say "I knew him way back when" and tell silly life-affirming stories about the time he convinced me to ride the hammer head at the fair. I was certain I would be sick, and he insisted 12 ways till Sunday that he would not be. In the end, I wasn't sick; he was, and we laughed about it. There are scholarships in his name, and I find joy in the knowing that others are realizing his dream, by proxy. There is also a sadness for me, deep and reverberating, wondering what could have been. I still think about his family, his mother in particular (whom I only met once or twice), and pray for them to know peace.

This feeling tonight, it's more like, reflection.

What I carry in my heart
brings us so close or so far apart
Only love can make love*

And I cry. And it brings a smile to my soul.



*Peter Gabriel - That Voice Again

From the Irony Files

KATU news reported last night that the Oregon Employment Department is having trouble with their streamlined unemployment claims system. People filing claims are unable to get through on the phone or online; the only two ways to file a claim. (With the current system, claimants are unable to file in person at the unemployment office). The phone lines are forever busy, leaving people on hold for hours each day, day after day. The website apparently fails while in process of a claim, before it can be completed. Some people are going weeks before ever being able to successfully file their claim for benefits.

Ironically, this evening, KATU reported that the Oregon Employment Department will be hiring a number of additional staff to handle the overwhelming influx of unemployment claims.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Maybe they ought to hire some of the people who are trying to call them?

Reproduction II

Part I
Part II
Part III

The other day, Wayne Jacobsen wrote 'Is Deconstruction Enough?' where he recounts being asked if his life mission is simply to deconstruct Sunday church attendance. His response was beautiful; here are some excerpts. (The emphasis is mine.)

"The reason church life grows stale is because we’re looking for institutional solutions, not relational ones. If we equip people to live loved of God and live as lovers of people, the church will spring up all around us. It probably won’t be contained in a specific meeting or building but will grow wild and free and bear fruit in the interconnection, collaboration, cooperation and submission of brothers and sisters who are being changed by Jesus. That can look like a hundred different things. But once I begin to describe some of those things, I know our tendency as humans to prefer replicating a model to following the Head! We love to construct things, not build up people.

"I am convinced that’s the process we are in. Having another model to shift to will only shift the problem into a new shell. We’ve got 2000 years of church history to say that can’t work. And I’m happy to help on all sides of that process as Jesus gives me grace."

So then the problem with reproduction in postmodern/missional/emerging church is simple. It is still trying to reproduce a model that doesn't work. It is saying that we can create a better sequel, we can reproduce something that is similar enough that people will still call it church, but different enough that it isn't the same manifestation of as "church as we know it". However, eventually it will become just a tired reproduction of the same old same old because the motivation is the same. We still feel we need to have "church". We can call it whatever we want and we can light candles and sing original songs and meet in a pub, but in the end it's still church; and something we're doing because we're supposed to do it. We seem afraid of moving outside the bounds of this thing called "church". We feel a person ought to attend a specific church, on a weekly basis, and that a church service should consist of certain things.

OK so I'm making an overarching generalization. I know there are some who do not fall into this category. I'm saying that the common theme is simple...we think we need church. We desire it, we aim for it, and we recreate it in various forms. But it's still church. The innate desire to organize cannot be avoided. It is what and how we organize that can be a problem. Maybe it's the difference between being intentional and controlling.

What happens when there is no more church? When we find ourselves outside all of the parameters that are normally considered to be church?

Wayne Jacobsen calls it "Living outside the box of organized religion."

I know that curls some hair, and so be it, but I also know it's a mighty wind for some of us, moving us on to something new.

Reproduction

Part I
Part II
Part III

I was going to write one long post, but I saw as I wrote it that it really is a series.; so be looking for additional posts on this topic in the next week. I suppose my dry spell is coming to an end as I begin to see the future and hope again.

Did you ever see Grease II? The ill-fated and overwhelmingly dumb sequel to one of the greatest musicals ever? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield? It's OK if you don't want to admit that you've seen it. Just think it to yourself.

In that movie there was a song called 'Reproduction'. One of the choruses goes like this:

"Reproduction, reproduction!
Put your pollen tube to work.
Reproduction, reproduction!
Make my stamen go berserk.
Reproduction!
I don't think they even know what a pistil is!
I got your pistil right here...
Where does the pollen go?"

For those who don't know, in the film the song is spurred by a school lesson in plant reproduction, but it quickly dissolves in to a raunchy and tasteless diatribe about human sexuality. Unfortunately this is a very catchy tune and comes to mind from time to time, even against my will, and even though I haven't seen the movie in over 20 years. Lord take me if I ever venture to watch it again.

However, I think there is more than one analogy here. The first being obvious...in all of film history, sequels rarely do well. Sometimes they come close to matching the original, but more often they are tired at best and abominable at worst. Something new attempts to play upon the success of the old thing, and fails.

For those who don't know, we have been working on our kitchen. We decided we wanted a tile floor, which meant tearing up all the old layers of vinyl. Layer after layer of vinyl, plywood and mold came up, all they way to the subfloor. We could have stopped after just a layer or two, just enough that the tile would be level with the carpet in the other room. But we knew it wouldn't have turned out well and we decided to go all the way, to strip it down and start over. The only thing left was the foundation of the floor, the joists. Then we built up again from there.

In the forests there is something called a nurse log. That is a tree which has died and fallen on the forest floor is rotting, and in the process it is hosting the growth of ferns and other plants. From time to time a tree will begin to grow on a nurse log, which works well for awhile. But eventually as the nurse log rots away from underneath the roots of the new tree, and we are left with a tree who's roots are supported by nothing but air for several feet. While these new trees can survive for a long time this way, they are far more prone to toppling in a wind or ice storm than other trees.

How can we expect to reproduce something well on the carcass of the old thing? How can we take the existing idea of church and turn it into something organic and life giving if we are still just doing the old thing with a different look? In Christianity, I do not believe we can grow something new on the nurse log of the old way of doing church. We can, but we will not end up with something stable and healthy and long-lasting.

The other analogy I see is this: Something good can easily evolve into something bad, simply because we are selfish human beings. We have our own motives for things, we want what we want. So we still want church to be something to meet our needs (i.e. human sexuality) rather than it being a process by which something new is constantly being created (i.e. reproduction in the plant world).

How can we begin to see church as something by which we create new life, rather that something that gives us pleasure for the sake of it?

I could have done more.

We are still mid-stride in working on our kitchen, but I don't want to abandon the blog entirely. So here is something that has recently made me think. We all have bad days, and even bad seasons. We all worry about the economy and the state of the world. We have mortgages and chronic illnesses and arguments with people we love.

Let this story change your perspective, if only just a little.

There is a boy in Washington State named Brenden Foster. He is 11 years old and dying of leukemia. And his dying wish has been to feed the homeless. There is an article at KATU, but here is a glimpse of his story.

"The end is near, and Brenden has one question for God.

"Why at so young an age? I could have done more. But if it has to be now, it has to be now," he said.

It's easy to imagine all he could have accomplished after seeing what the 11 year old has achieved in his final days. Brenden's dying wish to help the homeless has touched hearts from Saudi Arabia to South Carolina. Many of them left voice messages for their new hero."

More of his story can be found at KOMO. If you have time, read the comments on that article, which at the time of this blog post total 184. I'm sure it will continue to grow. People all over the world have taken his wish to heart and looked for ways to help the homeless in their area. It has has an impact in the far reaches.

What lessons we all should learn from this boy! That he would have the wisdom to say he could have done more with more time. If we all look at the time we have this way, we will all do more good. My son is 12 and I can't even begin to imagine what his loss would be like for my life. But I do know that age is very young to have had such an impact in this world.

I don't know how Brenden is doing, but I believe KOMO will post updates as they are able.

I pray love and peace to his family, friends, and all the lives he has touched.

Binary Life

A friend pointed out that I haven't been posting much lately. Not like normal, anyhow. For almost 3 years I averaged one post per day. In October, I had a total of 9. In September I had 12. So yes, something has changed. So I was thinking about this, wondering what has changed. I have no intention of quitting, but it seems I have slowed down. One big factor is stress, or should I say, just life.

As most of you know, my mom in law has been very ill for months now. If you aren't familiar with the story, I wrote about it here and here and here.

She is improving by leaps and bounds, but she is still a very long way from being well. She is speaking in sentences more often than not, and much more relational and communicative. But also, because she is more aware, she is quite sad, I might even say depressed, as she realizes more and more how much time has passed and the condition she is in now. I have told her that feeling and expressing emotion is a very good thing, because it means her brain is processing feelings now. I'm very glad for that, it is progress. But this doesn't make it any easier for her to cope with being bedridden and watching TV all day because she still cannot read or do other things to entertain herself. Not to mention over 5 months have passed and she is still months away from going home, at least. She is realizing all she has missed and this is extremely difficult for her.

My parents also moved at the beginning of October, and while they have come a long way in 4 weeks, they are still not settled. This isn't the stressor it was for me a month ago, but I still am dealing with the emotional upheaval it has created for them and the way my life and history has changed because of it. Stories about that can be found here and here.

We are working on our kitchen. It's been about 3 (4?) weeks now and I know that isn't long. I'm doing well with having my kitchen in my living room, but it still challenges our daily routine and creates a bit of chaos and makes it more difficult to focus.

Maybe, as well, I have decompressed my faith enough that there isn't much left for me to hash out. Yet, I'm not really involved in any real life community so there isn't that to write about, either. Mostly I'm looking to support people who need to know that the journey out of church, organized religion and cookie cutter beliefs is an okay thing. So maybe I have bored myself listening to myself talk, and am more interested in what others are going through.

Otherwise, my life is pretty mundane these days...kids and family and bills and all...voluntering in the school, and keeping life togther. I just haven't had anything interesting to say, not often anyhow. I'm sure things will pick up again here eventually, so don't delete me from your reader just yet. I will never run out of things to say.

So an interesting question was posed recently on another blog, and I want to bring it up here for those who haven't been involved in the conversation yet. I know it has been asked before, but it usually leads to some interesting discussion. Learning to be less dualistic in life (sacred/secular) also carries over into this format (tangible life/online life).

Are you the same person online as you are in real life?

History and Hope

Image by Patrick Moberg. Full size image here.

Most of you know I'm not generally political, but I couldn't pass this image up.

What this election means for our nation remains to be seen, but I can't help but feel hopeful. I'm not an idealist about this hope; I know there are campaign promises that, however well-intentioned, will never come true, and some that were downright empty. I know mistakes will be made, and I know some of us will look back in four years and shake our heads, wondering what we were thinking. I realize politics is impacted more by big business than by the voice of the people; and the President only has power to the degree that Congress permits.

However, there is a difference, today. We have seen that America has opened their minds to change, not even primarily because of the color of his skin; but because of who he is; and who he is not.

I know many of my Christian counterparts are unhappy about this election. In fact, I live with one who believes we are now going to hell in a handbasket. If that is the case, I am truly sorry for your dismay at this election. However, many of us have been dismayed at the results of the last two elections and the condition of our nation because of it; give us a chance. We all know the Presidency will result in some good and some bad, no matter who holds the office; I happen to feel we will see more good than bad in the next four years.

For the record, I did not vote for either man. Yes, I voted, but I made another choice, to have a voice of my own because of what I deeply believe in. However, I'm not disappointed with this result; in fact, I am immensely proud of my nation and look forward to what the future will bring. I do have a suspicion that it will not be exactly as we anticipate, but I don't expect it will be regrettable.

They say hindsight is always 20/20, but our view of the future is not entirely myopic. In this election season, the troubles of our daily lives have likely superseded global or long-term issues in the minds of many voters; yet we have voted for hope in the future, as well as hope for today.

A New Day

Do you see what I see,
what the future could be?
Do you feel what I feel,
now that this moment is real?

Good morning.

Leadership Synchroblog

Tomorrow marks the upcoming Leadership Synchroblog. While I was hoping to participate, I just am not going to be able to get it done this time.

However, anyone is invited and welcome to participate, and this one will be interesting, so I wanted to throw it out there in case any of you have not heard about it and would like to be involved.

This is from Jonathan Brink's blog:

"Just a reminder that the Leadership Synchroblog is coming this Tuesday to coincide with the Presidential election. Send me your links by Monday night if possible.

———————————

From Previous Post:

This November 4th marks a profound opportunity in American history regardless of who takes office to the Presidency. And this focus on leadership got me thinking. What if we got together and had a Synchroblog on leadership. There’s already a group on board but I wanted to open this up and ask if anyone else wanted to participate. If you are interested let me know.

The focus is not on the Presidency but on leadership. This is your opportunity to speak to those who lead and let them know what you are looking for. The context can be in politics, family, the church or to any leader you want.

Please join us. Leave your name in the comments and I’ll add you to the list. The post will be due on November 4th and will include a list of those participating."

If you would like to participate, write a post on Leadership (that topic can be however you determine it) and get the link to your post to Jonathan. You can leave your link in the comments of the above post at his blog.

Also, if you would like to be on the mailing list for future synchroblogs, visit THIS link and sign up!

I look forward to reading all the posts!