Author / Michael

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Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.
by Michael

You Have Time

I have a problem with time. I always have. I blame being born in my mother’s sixth month of pregnancy. I came very early, undeveloped lungs, ready to sit for weeks and weeks in intensive care.

In a psychic way, making timely decisions has been a lifetime project. I have to convince myself that I have time, that I need not rush, that I need not choose immediately.

The belief that I have time is a day to day belief that I have to cultivate. I have to believe in this in order to live well, to make good decisions, to make better choices.

On one hand, I regularly tell myself that I don’t have to chose now. If I do, the choice is likely not worth my consideration. It’s a soft enough call that I’m making that the consequences will also be soft.

On the other hand, if there is a serious decision called for, I can trust my previous choices, my previous applications of wisdom, to choose with confidence. I need not be frozen and I need not be silly. I can be intentional either way, to not rush or to do what I think is best.

by Michael

Remembering School

Waking up to see your mother buttoning your white shirt.

Making your breakfast and talking to you about your first day.

Listening with you to the “Good Day” song.

Tying my tie that looks like yours, being your twin.

The full feeling of watching you enter a room with children you’ve never met.

Seeing your mother reach for you after we’d left the classroom.

The rumble and bustle of students in the school, dressed for learning.

Parents greeting, introducing, and drinking juice.

The sound of your cough echoing in my memory from the morning.

Taking your mother to work and joking about how you’re growing.

by Michael

Peaceful Perspective

When a wounded child climbs into its mother’s lap, it draws so much strength from the mother’s presence that its own wound becomes insignificant.  So too with us when we climb into the lap of our great Mother God.  Our crisis soon domesticates and comes into a peaceful perspective, not because it goes away, but because the presence of God so overshadows us.

When I read this in Forgotten Among the Lilies, I thought of Eliot, next to Bryce, slipping at the table one Sunday, nearly falling to the floor but stopping as his ear clipped the chair. Hard enough to sting. Hard enough to crack the little eruption that is a child’s pain magnified by surprise and other people’s company.

I had one of his arms to lift him. Maggie came over to pick him up because he was crying by then. He complained about the pain and Maggie took him in her arms, his head to her shoulder, and convinced him by her hug that he would live through it.

He calmed as long as she held him. Then he cried again, trading his mom for his dad. David, master of redirection with the boys that he is, turned Eliot’s attention with a high-pitched question.

The image of a child in pain. The image of a mother, then a father, and a few onlookers. It seemed like these words were easily seen, like wounds were becoming something else.

by Michael

Staring Contest That Is Spiritual Direction

by Vanessa BumbeersI located this post in my blog drafts. It’s worth my reading it as I prepare for the coming days. Even though it’s six years old, it feels relevant!

“If you fall asleep while you’re praying, you are either too busy or you are running from something.”  That’s something my spiritual director told me in one of our earlier sessions almost two years ago.  She was quoting Ignatius.  I thought about that quote for weeks.  I still remember it when I’m struggling to pray, when I’m avoiding prayer, and when I’m tired.

I mentioned in a few posts that I was completing the process of ordination.  Some time after I started pursuing ordination with the C0venant, I started seeing a spiritual director.

Spiritual direction is an ancient practice or discipline where a person seeking direction meets with a director.  It is an old practice, direction.  When I started, it was at the encouragement of our denomination’s Board of Ordered Ministry’s Executive Minister.  I was taking a class on vocation a couple years ago, and I decided I wanted to “enter spiritual direction.”

I had heard about it in seminary.  I read about some of the comparisons between direction and counseling.  I had been in counseling before by then but not in direction.  I sensed that direction would be helpful to me as I sought to fundamentally be a director to others though as a pastor. I’m influenced by Eugene Peterson’s perspective on spiritual direction (prayer and worship leadership) as the pastor’s primary tasks.

Pastoral ministry very much includes this kind of work.  In many instances, I provide spiritual direction to people in my congregation.  There are folks I counsel, but there are certainly folks who I am directing, even if they don’t know the nuances between the two.  Counseling, in a church context, tends to be directive and short-term.  Direction is broader and wider.

Rather than having a problem to fix, the problem is God. The context is not my relationship with my wife or my church leaders. The context is my relationship with God. So that direction becomes an experience in listening for the movement between me and God. It’s an  unending source of moving, dancing, singing, struggling, and silence–my relationship with God–and direction helps me face the movement.

It opens me up to being broader and wider. It opens me.

by Michael

The Year of the Child

By Robert Hayden for his grandson

And you have come,

Michael Ahman, to share

your life with us.

We have given you

an archangel’s name–

and a great poet’s;

we honor too

Abyssinian Ahman,

hero of peace.

May these names

be talismans;

may they protect

you, as we cannot, in a world that is

no place for a child–

that had no shelter

for the children in Guyana

slain by hands

they trusted; no succor

for the Biafran

child with swollen belly

and empty begging-bowl;

no refuge for the child

of the Warsaw ghetto.

What we yearned

but were powerless to do

for them, oh we

will dare, Michael, for you,

knowing our need

of unearned increments

of grace.

I look into your brilliant eyes, whose gaze

renews, transforms

each common thing, and hope

that inner vision

will intensify

their seeing.  I am

content meanwhile to have

you glance at me

sometimes, as though, if you

could talk, you’d let

us in on a subtle joke.

May Huck and Jim

attend you.  May you walk

with beauty before you,

beauty behind you, all around you, and

The Most Great Beauty keep

you His concern.

 

by Michael

Howard Thurman’s Stages of Maturity

by Martin Vorel

The immediate reaction of the child is clear and precise: varying forms of protest from the sustained whisper to the roaring scream (these two words are used together quite advisedly).  Sometimes it is a battle of nerves between the baby and the mother.

At this point the baby is having his initial encounter with spiritual discipline.  A pattern of life has been interrupted.  In the presence of an expanding time interval between wish and fulfillment the child is forced to make adjustment, to make room in the tight circle of his life for something new, different, and therefore threatening.  The baby begins to learn how to wait, how to postpone fulfillment.  He thus finds his way into community within the family circle.

 

…If the response of the parents or others continues to be available on demand, the conscious or unconscious intent being to keep the time interval at zero between wish and fulfillment, the baby begins to get a false conditioning about the world and his place in it.  For if he grows up expecting and regarding as his due that to wish is to have his wish fulfilled, then he is apt to become a permanent cripple.  There are many adults who for various reasons have escaped this essential discipline of their spirit.  True, in terms of physical and intellectual development they have continued to grow.  Their bodies and minds have moved through all the intervening stages to maturity, but they have remained essentially babies in what they expect of life.  They have a distorted conception of their own lives in particular and of life in general.

by Michael

Chapel Prayers

by Victor ZambranoA little out of time with the season in one sense but appropriate in another given how the days are filling and changing. May this prayer fit the growth cycles in your life, too:

As the days are lengthening and the earth spends longer in the light of each day, grant O God that I may spend longer in the light of your presence.

And may the seeds of your Word, which to now have been long-buried deep within me, grow, like everything around us, into love for you; love for your people; and trust in your abiding and healing power.

May I become a visible declaration of your presence in the midst of life.

Grant, O God, that in this springtime I may be a tree in your world,

Getting nourishment as I am rooted in you;

Giving comfort to others as trees give shade in the heat of day;

Giving shelter from the winds of life to my family, friends, and those around me.

Revive me, O God, even as you revive the world of all living things this spring.

Amen.

by Michael

When Suicide Happens

by FreestocksI’ve read of the suicides of many people in the past, and no such story is a good story. Whether it’s a person who’s in the public eye or a person who was hardly noticed, we lose a person. A mother devastated by her toddler’s death. An actor who suffered in bruising isolation. A seminarian whose struggle was largely unseen. A doctor who couldn’t continue under mental anguish. A pastor who was overwhelmed by everything.

The loss is aggravated by the circumstances surrounding the death. Those left to respond  rotate a series of questions, all of them in big-deal categories. We question life, ours and theirs. We wonder about God and faith. We query our social relationships and relatives. We turn to the tragic circumstances that form around an individual and try to see them.

Here are a few things I think are worth doing–commitments worth making–when someone commits suicide, in no particular order. They sound too general because I’ve written them about “a person” and I fully intend for that be come across as a person who comes to mind, a particular person, a designated individual or individuals who you love:

  1. We commit to being and not only doing, to tunneling into the beautiful wonder that is the self and to emerging from that wonder with a stubbornness for searching for the same in others.
  2. We commit to grieving, feeling as fully as possible, the deep fissures in us when someone kills herself or himself.
  3. We commit to becoming more human by relating to individuals differently and based upon their uniqueness all the time.
  4. We commit to the hard work of paying attention to what turns a person, lifts up a person, spoils a person, hurts a person.
  5. We commit to loving as much as possible in the present moment.
  6. We commit to getting mental and emotional support for ourselves and our communities in the forms of clergy who are permanently slanted in the direction of full liberation; therapists who are helpful in pursing with us our own deep change in the face of psychologically rough worlds; spiritual directors who can listen us into freedom as we journey into the company of God together; family members who embrace us unconditionally and love us lavishly; and friends who are just like family and who stay in place when family diminishes, drops, or dies.
  7. We commit to asking better questions, even when the question is “How are you?” and staying around for the response.
  8. We commit to telling another person how they impacted us, how we felt because of something they did or said, and how we are changed specifically because they matter.
  9. We commit to standing close when a person feels abandoned, reminding them by our physical presence when our unheard words ring hollow that we are with them.
  10. We commit to responding after any death with a voracious invitation to our own special life, to cultivating healthier relationships, to dealing with the destructive dynamics in our own lives, to being different and better people, and to advocating for everybody’s healthcare and self-care.

Also, if you’re in Chicago, consider attending the National Day of Solidarity to Prevent Physician Suicide.

by Michael

Chats with Pediatricians & Parents & Children

by Michal Ramey

All too often our sex-ed conversations get bogged down in whether to stress abstinence as the safest (or only) option for teens. But an early, healthy understanding of sexuality can shape a person in ways that are significant and lifelong.

“Healthy sexuality,” the statement reads, “includes the capacity to promote and preserve significant interpersonal relationships, value one’s body and personal health, interact with both sexes in respectful and appropriate ways and express affection, love, and intimacy in ways consistent with one’s own values, sexual preferences, and abilities.”

That’s hard to cover in 40 seconds. It’s also pretty hard to Google.

Ideally, a pediatrician is just one of several respected adults talking to a kid about healthy sexuality.

Read more here.