Author / Michael

Unknown's avatar

Posts by Michael

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

Stuff I’m Writing (3 of 3)

Photo Thanks to Aaron Burden

Photo Thanks to Aaron Burden

When I started the supervisory education program in CPE, I noticed that there were hardly any meaningful trails about the process on the internet. I decided to write through my process. So I have some “public process notes” on the blog in order to keep track of some of my experiences.

Related to that, I’ve been working on materials for a committee appearance in early April. While I won’t go into much about the appearance on this side of the meeting, I want to put up a few thoughts from the three papers I prepared for submission to the committee.

This is a part of my theology theory paper—a major paper for the supervisory process. I’ll get feedback and work on it until it sings and is ready for the subsequent processes. This portion is around the mini-section on contextual theology and the incarnation, a major second step in the paper after I talk about sources of theology which emerge out of the narrative tradition of my African-American experience. There are quotes from James Cone’s God of the Oppressed and Smith and Riedel-Pfaefflin’s Siblings By Choice: Race, Gender, and Violence.

My experience shaped how I arrived at scripture, how often I visited the Bible, and how basic encountering the passage has been to how I encountered the God behind it. In that sense, I’m a contextual theologian. In my pastoral theology there are roots of contextual theology. Having sources like experience from which to draw theological language eventually brings me to God, the content rather than the periphery. God is who we were singing about in my younger days.

Traditional Christian formulations of God are Trinitarian. They are more than that for sure because God cannot be captured by our formulations. As is true in the grand historical human experience, God has been disclosing God’s person in many ways. I’ve “met God” through conversations with an addict named Lawrence who talked to me about beauty while painting the church. I’ve met God through the silence of a person who was struck by a loved one’s sudden death. God’s come in those moments and come to me. Always sensitive to me, to us, to the audience, God meets us in our specific conditions.

The incarnation where “God becomes flesh” is the striking example of this. Thurman called the incarnation “the great disclosure.” Through the incarnation God is at work, revealing, disclosing, and opening to others who God is. James Cone reminds us that Jesus is not a theological proposition restricted to the conceptual. Jesus matters because he is matter, because he exists outside of our heads.

He is an event of liberation, a happening in the lives of oppressed people struggling for political freedom…Jesus is not simply a doctrine or even a particular event limited by time. He is the eternal event of liberation in the divine person who makes freedom a constituent of human existence. There is no existence apart from him because he is the ground of existence without whom nothing is.

I think of God as eternal, as essentially loving, as relatable. I think of the inextricable way that justice is the avenue whereby God’s loves. “In short, God is manifest to us through material means.” God expresses all that God is through particular means. We never is love without justice, mercy without reconciliation. One is the expression of the other, the explicit exhibiting the implicit. As Kelly Brown Douglas, a womanist theologian writing Christology, says, there is a compatibility between Christianity and acts of justice.

Spiritual care, then, as an incarnational act is an expression of God’s intention toward human beings, and that care is at the bottom of our work in CPE where we attend to our selves and our ministries. As an expression of love, our work is also an expression of justice. As necessary as people are to that theological articulation, the first actor is Divine. God acts, expressing love and justice—expressing God’s self—and people receive that action, respond to it.

People are created by God, and as created beings have a host of ways through which we interact with the world; we are emotional, intellectual, and physical beings. Each element of a person’s makeup is grounded in the Creator’s initiation and desire. Seen and unseen elements compose us. All of these avenues become vehicles through which God can reach, heal, teach, and transform us.

God touches the world through us, connecting with us—the incarnation, again, being an exemplary portion of this, a clinical encounter is another—and then connecting with the creation through us. God cares for creation in other ways which we cannot see. A chaplain’s role is to participate in God’s work in the world by, variously, cooperating with God to care for, protect, preserve, challenge, and observe the work of God through human interventions, through silence, and through the variety of ways we care. People are the means for and recipients of that care. Care is aware of the past.

In Siblings by Choice, the authors tell us the truth about the power of the past:

The past represents ways of knowing that emerge from struggle and can inform us today. The complex and ambiguous present is the result of the experiences, thinking, and struggles of our ancestors who were born and raised in civilizations and circumstances different from our own. Their struggles birthed the conditions under which our consciousness develops and our life narrative unfolds. From them we may gain wisdom for patterns of living that extend an otherwise limited perspective on the present.

Care isn’t beholden to the past. It honors the past, holds the past and present together, particularly as people struggle with the present crises of life such as death, sickness, loss, and change. But care is future-oriented, always looking for the right now connections between humanity and divinity.

by Michael

What We Need From Men

Since I’m reprising earlier lessons, here’s something I read five years ago at church. It’s for men in general and fathers in particular.

What We Need From You

We need you to pay attention to God and to you and to others—though not necessarily in that order.  We need you to wake up in the morning and to spend your days doing what will contribute to your block, community, neighborhood, and world.  We need you not to be convinced by advertisements and commercials and publicity which say that you must have something or someone else other than what God has placed in front of you today.  We need you to communicate your fears and the things that keep you awake.  We need you to take your work seriously, to take your city seriously, to take your own health seriously.  We need you to cultivate an ear, not just for God and for others, but for yourself because the ability to hear others is tied and twisted with the ability to listen well to ourselves.

We need you to stop making excuses and to give yourself to God.  We need you to realize that God gives grace to the humble and that humility is simply seeing you for who you really are and the Divine for who God really is.

We need your life to matter for something other than how much you make, how many women you’ve loved, and how many babies you’ve had.  We need you to look again at numbers altogether and to turn upside-down the notions you’ve attached to them.  We need you to build wealth but in more areas than you first thought or have often been told.  We need you to give yourself to some hobby, some way of playing, some way of re-creating so that you can stay sane.  We need you to build and to create and to draw and to envision and to breathe deeply when you see something fantastic and unmistakably amazing.  We need to draw away even when you want to keep talking.  We need to pull a part so that you can be counseled by other voices.  We need to find times of silence daily and to lock yourself into the rhythm of Sabbath, keeping the command made for you.

We need you to love our children, particularly when they aren’t your own, because nobody else may love them.  We need you to, a year from reading this list, know at least one child’s name, one child’s family, one child’s story, and one child’s pain.  We need you to cultivate a relationship with a person who will live longer than you.  So that you can hear their fears and concerns and spend all the days you have left addressing them by God’s grace.  We need you to find a family whether or not they look like you and to give yourselves to them in big and small ways.  To make sure that the parents feel supported even if you know nothing about parenting.  To make the children feel encouraged even though children may scare you.  To make sure that some figure in that family unit is a reminder that there is great love and possibility and integrity present.

We need you to commit to our sisters, to our women, and to treat them as precious, powerful gifts whose purpose is to please God.  We need you to respect them and to cherish them, especially when they aren’t your wives because they don’t get enough respect.  We need you to listen to them and to befriend them for no other reason than that.  We need you to hear their pains without another motive.  We need you to take their burdens upon your shoulders and to carry their problems with them so that they can feel a community around them consisting of more than other women.  We need you to pray for our sisters more than you pray for yourselves.  We need you to question the men claiming to love them and to make sure that their relationships aren’t destructive but life-giving.  We need you to be faithful to your wives if you’re married, holding them up as significant gifts.  We need you to remind them of your love for them and tell them through word and deed what they mean to you.

We need many things from you, more than what I’ve named.

So will you, by God’s help, be greater than your station in life, than your present situation, or than your status at this point?  You are more than a box that you’ve checked, more than an unemployed or very employed person.  You are more than some unknown because we know you.  We know you to be a beautiful man.  We know you to be a strong man.  We know you to be a man of God.  We know you to be these things.  We need you to be these things.

 

by Michael

Stuff I’m Writing (2 of 3)

Photo Thanks to Peter Belch

Photo Thanks to Peter Belch

When I started the supervisory education program in CPE, I noticed that there were hardly any meaningful trails about the process on the internet. I decided to write through my process. So I have some “public process notes” on the blog in order to keep track of some of my experiences.

Related to that, I’ve been working on materials for a committee appearance in early April. While I won’t go into much about the appearance on this side of the meeting, I want to put up a few thoughts from the three papers I prepared for submission to the committee.

This slice comes from the section on my CPE pilgrimage. Using my experiences in CPE, this particular paper is a reflection on my learning issues, my process of professional development and growth, my evolution and personal integration, learning experiences, and self-understanding. My section here is essentially my professional development portion.

I see chaplaincy and supervision as expressions of pastoral ministry. When I serve in the church, that community is the context for my pastoral ministry. For supervisory work, the context is CPE. The work is still pastoral. To track my development in ministry, I draw upon a tool I’ve used in teaching. I’ve worked with students on developing rules of life as a vehicle for exploring and containing practices for development. When I think of my own process of development, I think about the rule which I include as a process of my development.

Included in the process is my intellectual, physical, spiritual, and emotional development; there is room for each. The elements relate to my growth, even if each is not happening while I’m in the professional setting. For example, if I’m not taking care of my body, which my work setting may assume I am, I’ll be no good for the work of spiritual care of patients or families.

I use my birthday as a time to reflect upon my work and life and how I can continually develop. I acknowledge and celebrate how I’ve developed and I spend time thinking through how to continue doing so. As I’ve gone along, other moments have emerged to augment what consideration I have during my birthday. These include an annual assessment from my denomination (March); the beginning of a semester for the classes I teach (late August); the ending of the classes (May); the start and end of CPE units will fall into this developmental plan. At a micro level “processing our process” is something that I’ve drawn from my training supervisor, and that is a constructive way for me to regularly attend to the work I’m doing.

In terms of content, the process of development includes 1) noticing areas of weakness or interest that I might address in an upcoming year; 2) getting some consultation from the people within my “venues of growth”; 3) listing ways for me to give room to my new or abiding interests; 3) locating strategies for addressing my areas of weakness; 4) implementing those ways and strategies; and 5) evaluating myself in a way that makes sense for the area of development. CPE has been a part of that process. I came to CPE because it was a way for me to respond to my needs for continued development. When I participated in my first unit and certainly since then, the process has been substantial for my growth (I’d point to my student evaluations to revisit some of those learnings).

I see chaplaincy and supervision as expressions of pastoral ministry. When I serve in the church, that community is the context for my pastoral ministry. For supervisory work, the context is CPE. The work is still pastoral. To track my development in ministry, I draw upon a tool I’ve used in teaching. I’ve worked with students on developing rules of life as a vehicle for exploring and containing practices for development. When I think of my own process of development, I think about the rule which I include as a process of my development.

Included in the process is my intellectual, physical, spiritual, and emotional development; there is room for each. The elements relate to my growth, even if each is not happening while I’m in the professional setting. For example, if I’m not taking care of my body, which my work setting may assume I am, I’ll be no good for the work of spiritual care of patients or families.

I use my birthday as a time to reflect upon my work and life and how I can continually develop. I acknowledge and celebrate how I’ve developed and I spend time thinking through how to continue doing so. As I’ve gone along, other moments have emerged to augment what consideration I have during my birthday. These include an annual assessment from my denomination (March); the beginning of a semester for the classes I teach (late August); the ending of the classes (May); the start and end of CPE units will fall into this developmental plan. At a micro level “processing our process” is something that I’ve drawn from my training supervisor, and that is a constructive way for me to regularly attend to the work I’m doing.

In terms of content, the process of development includes 1) noticing areas of weakness or interest that I might address in an upcoming year; 2) getting some consultation from the people within my “venues of growth”; 3) listing ways for me to give room to my new or abiding interests; 3) locating strategies for addressing my areas of weakness; 4) implementing those ways and strategies; and 5) evaluating myself in a way that makes sense for the area of development. CPE has been a part of that process. I came to CPE because it was a way for me to respond to my needs for continued development. When I participated in my first unit and certainly since then, the process has been substantial for my growth (I’d point to my student evaluations to revisit some of those learnings).

by Michael

Stuff I’m Writing (1 of 3)

Photo Thanks to Leeroy

Photo Thanks to Leeroy

When I started the supervisory education program in CPE, I noticed that there were hardly any meaningful trails about the process on the internet. I decided to write through my process. So I have some “public process notes” on the blog in order to keep track of some of my experiences.

Related to that, I’ve been working on materials for a committee appearance in early April. While I won’t go into much about the appearance on this side of the meeting, I want to put up a few thoughts from the three papers I prepared for submission to the committee.

This slice comes from the section on my religious development. The paper speaks to my history, my venues of growth, my strengths and weaknesses, my religious development and self-understanding, and my appropriation of culture and how all those things subjects relate to who I am as a pastor, chaplain, and educator.

My religious development has paralleled my own “human” development. I was raised as a participant in local churches, serving in those churches, and understanding my sense of self in relation to the activity of the church.

This is as much underneath my view of what it means to be a person and what it means to be created by God. The church was the place where I was first called, where I questioned my understandings of it, and where I was given opportunities to flourish as an academically bent preacher who critiqued what was said, usually constructively, and who was unafraid to bring his experiences from other places into the church.

The religious community was the place—complimented and inextricably connected to my family as it was—where I grew. It’s hard to imagine how I would have developed without the seam of the church.

Church (and I’d use “religious development” as a synonym) was tied to my expansive understanding of family since I had a biological and a church family. Both were able to guide, mentor, correct, challenge, and inspire me. Both families were means of development. Through my religious upbringing the following three values were instilled in me—again, not intending to split these from the other developmentally formative community of my extended family:

 1.      Hospitality is normal. My mother fed other people’s children and took people into our home. That was how people in our church lived, and the residential and ecclesial behaviors taught me that hospitality-as-caring was normal.

2.      Salvation comes in many forms. The church’s focus was Jesus, but the saving influences of the community came through the mundane practices of teaching children to cook, after-school tutoring, playing games, and singing. Each act of religious expression helped me understand the broad ways in which healing, change, and growth happen.

3.     Everybody was welcome. My home church boasted a sign that was a joke and a mission depending on how we felt. Of course, both were true. The sign was “Sinners and Rejects Welcome,” and it was a clear statement of the explicit (and practiced) theology. It sticks in how open I want to be in my teaching and ministry to people.

by Michael

Again, Fathers Know Best (Winfield)

I’m repeating a few posts for my own good. Even though, in every case, families have grown and aged, I hope you enjoy this interview.

FF: Describe your family.

PW: My family is comprised of me, my wife Vicky, and my three sons: Chris (16), Joshua (7), and Caleb (5). We are a fun loving bunch. We laugh together, go to church together and enjoy each others company doing many things. Everyone has their own personality – Josh and I are the extroverts; Vicky, Chris and Caleb are the introverts. I think all of us are temperamental at times but we have learned to give each other space when needed and to live in each other’s space with understanding.

FF: How has fatherhood changed you?

PW: First of all it has made me respect and love my parents more. It has given me a new perspective on the impact that fathers have on their children and family. It has pushed me to live carefully and cautiously. For me, parenting challenges me to know me better. I think about why I say no and yes in many situations. Even if I don’t always tell my sons why I said yes or no, I, at least, think my responses through. There have been times when my responses were based on my upbringing and I had to reevaluate them. I have enjoyed the process.

FF: Have you made any mistakes as a dad? If you’re not a liar, name one and talk about what it meant to you.

PW: Yes. I was made in an household that believed you “do as I say and not as I do.” In my house my children respond better to what I do rather than what I say. So I don’t ask them to do something that I am not willing to do. I used to just tell them to do stuff around the house but now I do it and tell them to model what I do.

FF: What’s the most helpful advice you heard when you were becoming a father or as you’ve been a father?

PW: What you do in moderation your children will do in excess. Be careful what you do; your children are watching and listening even when you think they are not. Oh how true this is!

FF: How do you attend to your relationship with your children’s mother? It’s changed over time. How so?

PW: I believe my sons take their cues in how to treat their Mother from me. I am careful to demonstrate how I want them to treat their mother. Even when we are angry with one another, I am careful with my words and careful not to argue in front of them. Our relationship has improved. I think how we handle our frustration has changed and we have some understood rules of engagement, now. Our children must see that Mom and Dad are okay. They must see that we love, respect and cherish one another so we are careful to demonstrate t in front of them.

FF: How do you pay attention to the differences, the unique characteristics, between your sons? Do you have a spreadsheet?

PW: LOL…No I do not have a spreadsheet but I am very observant. I know each of their strengths, personalities and temperaments. I listen to each one’s questions and conversations no matter how silly I may think they are. Their questions and conversations are the inroads to their possible passions. The movies, books, music, toys, etc. that they show interest in give me some clues as to how I should feed their passions. Chris loves technology, CSI and music. Josh loves math, hero cartoons, performance and movies. Caleb loves cars and singing. All of them have their likes and interests that are unique and fascinating to me. So I observe carefully.

FF: What surprises are there along the way for parents? What do you wish you were told to expect?

PW: I wished someone would have said to prepare my heart. Parenting is joyous, painful, sometimes confusing, frustrating, happy, thought-provoking and challenging. If your heart is not in the right posture you may respond erroneously. A parent’s heart is that of a servant. If you do it right, you do grow and develop a good relationship with them. Over time the relationship changes and may have to be modified to fit their station in life. There are sometimes when I look at my 16 yr old like he is still 6 and have to understand that he is becoming a man. Eventually I will have to let him go or at least change how I respond to his needs because his needs will change and what he needs from me will be different. The shifting in our relationships carries with it a host of emotions.

FF: What is one recent memory you made with your children?

PW: I took the oldest boy and his friends paint balling for his 16th birthday. I took the 7 year old and his friends along with his 5 yr old brother to Lego Land. We have gone camping, to football games, baseball games, basketball games, field trips, boating, etc. We are always trying to find something to do together.

There are times when I remember all the things my 16 yr old and I did when he was younger and how I was involved, present and engaged in his world. Now, since he is becoming a man I must shift. It hurts because I have grown to love him and enjoy his company but he is growing up like we expected he would. Now I am careful to be just as present in my younger sons’ lives. The thought of doing it all over again with them is exhausting. But they need the same amount of time that I gave my oldest.

I was teacher, pastor, coach, mentor, principal and many times playmate. In the time of their lives I find myself trying to be the father that I felt my father should have been. Don’t get me wrong my father was a great provider, fun loving, outgoing, and present. But he was not a good listener, watcher and observer. I have always believed that he should have been more involved than what he was in my life. Now I understand that he was more involved than his father was in his life. His job and the demands of life – i.e.providing for a family, dictated how involved and present he could be. My career choice creates opportunities and possibilities of being actively present and involved in my sons’ lives. That is a blessing!

I recently told my son that I know he is growing up and the boundaries that we have in our house are becoming more noticeable to him. I told him we have these boundaries because as Christian men it’s good to have boundaries and accountability. I shared with him that the time is coming where he will have to set his own boundaries, I will try hard not to tell him what to do and that how I function as a father will change from life overseer to life coach. But it’s not now but soon. I would not have been able to make that statement if I had not done some soul searching to see how best to serve his ever changing needs.

Fatherhood is ironic because while I am fathering my children and helping and directing them in development and and healthy growth; the interaction is developing and growing me. I appreciate the lessons my sons give me everyday.

by Michael

A Home for Your Introversion

Photo Thanks to Dana and Peter

Photo Thanks to Dana and Peter

I was talking with my big brother, Patrick Winfield, weeks ago. I had been on his heart and he followed the rule that when somebody is on your heart for a couple days, you call. Among our words was this notion of our uniqueness.

We talked about personality. Winfield is an extravert. He’s orange. I’m an introvert. I’m gold. The colors come from some staff exercise he had us conduct years back at Sweet Holy Spirit, where we picked pictures and found out our colors and the associations with them. The colors became an abbreviation we use in our chats. We’re identified by our pictures, by our colors.

While we were talking, we got down to something specific: people need a home for their introversion. People like me. People like my sister, Vicky, Winfield’s wife. Introverts need space, created room, to be at home.

Sometimes we forget this. We, as introverts, impacted by our peopled calendars and social days, forget that we need that space to cultivate quiet. We require solitude for the sake of our selves.

But this isn’t just true for introverts. Introverts need that cultivation space for personality maintenance. Everybody needs that quiet room for the sake our the soul. Parker Palmer talks about the internal space being created in activism and not only quiet. Howard Thurman talks about the soul need for centering down. Centering down and being active don’t prevent solitude; they can foster it. In other words, it doesn’t have to be quiet around you for your soul to have quiet.

But the soul, the interior, unseen part of you that is really you, needs space to be free, space to be home. That home may be a physical place or an internal place. It may be in a broad sweeping valley; it may overlook a breathtaking mountain; it may be deep within your consciousness.

That home is for the introverted and the extraverted. Where do you feel at home? Where does your heart move when it needs relief or quiet or calm? Have you given your heart that space lately?

by Michael

Again, Fathers Know Best (Mark)

I’m repeating a few posts for my own good. Even though, in every case, families have grown and aged, I hope you enjoy this interview.

To follow is my interview with Mark Washington.  Mark is my brother, and though he isn’t the first father I knew (our dad is), I thought it’d be fun to have him be my first interviewee on the blog.  He’s a man of few words.  Just like our father.  My sense is that Mark’s interview will be the most succinct.  Mark’s two daugthers, Laila and London, two out of three of my nieces, are pictured to the left.

FF: Describe your family.

MW: My family are comedians, they always keep me laughing.

FF:  How has fatherhood changed you?

MW: Fatherhood has changed me where I’m more giving then I was.  It has also taught me that it’s not all about me anymore.  My children come first before my needs and wants.

FF:  Have you made any mistakes as a dad?  If you’re not a liar, name one and talk about what it meant to you.

MW: One of the biggest mistakes that I have made was to start taking Laila to the beauty shop at the age of four.  Now she expects it every two weeks.  LOL.  No, but really sometimes I don’t choose my words carefully and, sooner or later, I hear them echoed around the house.

FF:  What’s the most helpful advice you heard when you were becoming a father or as you’ve been a father?

MW: The best advice I’ve heard is to enjoy the younger years with them because when they become teenagers, I will start to feel the gap.

FF:  How do you attend to your relationship with your children’s mother?  It’s changed over time.  How so?

MW: Well, we hear each other out, and then we discuss what logic will work.  With any relationship it’s all about communication.

FF:  What surprises are there along the way for parents?  What do you wish you were told to expect?

MW: I can’t really think of one, but my children never cease to amaze me.  I mean just when you thought you heard or seen it all, here’s another surprise.  And part two of that question is, how expensive they can be.  I mean I’ve been told that, but no one ever stressed it!  LOL.

FF:  What is one recent memory you made with your child?

MW: Last night I was playing shouting music off You Tube and the little one (London) came and got Laila and I.  She said “I’m about to shout,” and we all started shouting while holding hands.  It was too funny!

I appreciate Mark for his answers.  Since this is the beginning of a series–we’ll have a couple interviews per month on the blog–I invite you to participate.  If you are a father and would like to be interviewed, or if you know one who would, leave a comment with your email address.

by Michael

Sitting with Edits

Q4D99NWK6T

Photo Thanks to Tram Mau Tri Tam

I’ve been spending a lot of my edge time editing. Edge time is time that I have on the edges on my schedule. Frankly there isn’t much. But every few years I get to edit something meaningful. I’ve been working on someone else’s stuff while also writing a few things of my own in the last months. More on that later.

One thing I’ve noticed about editing—my own and other people’s work—is that the space between the readings is the space where the writer grows. That’s particularly true if you sit with the edits long enough to learn from them. The same is true in a verbatim seminar, in a class, or in a meeting with members or stakeholders or friends. The longer you sit with what’s said, the more impact what’s said has.

Feedback is only as good as you allow it be. If it’s dispensable, you’ll dispense with it. Of course, my post is about editing. All those tracked changes can instruct you, change you, improve your ability to communicate. But you have to take the risk and let that happen.

You have to choose to be vulnerable, to admit to poor word choice, to accept that your phrase was confusing, and to surrender to another option. That option may not be what the editor suggests, what you at a different time might choose. But another option may be the route toward clearer, tighter sentences.

Another thing I’ve noticed about editing is that it helps the editing process to pause. There is always space between words in a sentence. Even though there’s only one space after periods, it’s still a space worth respecting.

Giving myself time to think through the questions of my editors or to notice my own literary proclivities or to see how many times I use passive voice will make me a stronger communicator. It’ll make me a poet. It’ll charge my words. It’ll engage me, and an engaged me eventuates into a engaged sentence.

by Michael

Siblings by Choice

by Pierre Bouillot.jpg

Photo Thanks by Pierre Bouillot

I finished Archie Smith, Jr. and Ursula Riedel-Pfaefflin’s book, Siblings by Choice: Race, Gender, and Violence. I read one of Professor Smith’s books in seminary (Navigating the Deep River: Spirituality in African American Families) and have found in him a deep well for my own thinking and practicing of pastoral care. When I saw this book, I had been developing my reading list for my supervisory education training, and I put this on it.

The book is about their studied suggestion in how women, men, and children from different cultural and spiritual backgrounds can, together, struggle against oppression. They write about how we can choose to become siblings as we form relationships of resistance, safety, trust, and accountability.

“When people are thrown together by external circumstances, they may discover themselves as siblings in a common struggle against whatever it is that oppresses them. They are siblings in struggle, perhaps, but not yet siblings by conscious choice” (pg. 8). The book highlights the intentionally taken paths toward becoming siblings by choice.

My reading was first in the context of my current training. I’m studying to become a supervisor of pastors, an educator of chaplains, and a caregiver to folks in a myriad of crises, likely but not exclusively in the medical setting. But my inherent reading experience is shaped by my right now work as a pastor in an urban multiethnic congregation and as a teacher in two distinct denominational seminaries. There is much to learn and enrich me in the book for all of my work settings.

I say this for a couple reasons that are worth repeating to myself. First, violence has been a historical reality for people I know, and the book does a great job in thoroughly summarizing several peopled experiences of violence. Note that oppression is one form that violence takes.

Second, gender and race are two words which are of continued appeal to me, especially by these two writers—one a black man and the other a white woman—who were working together out of their shared, abiding interest. In the book they are using their experiences as racial and gendered people to point to paths they’ve taken as colleagues so as to offer us a good read of reconciliation.

Third, I’d love to see churches who are trying to reach people from different social, cultural, and experiential spheres use this book’s treasure. Churches are experiments in multiculturalism even if they don’t make explicit their concerted efforts to embrace that multicultural attribute. People are different, especially when skin color shows off that difference. But churches need real and constructive resources which are thoughtfully prepared and easily adaptable for their own local church processes. This is such a resource. And I’m a pastor and will be a pastor so material like this is enlivening.

Finally, I’m a reconciling, contrarian who finds delight in starting illuminating, educational, and interior fights for the purpose of healing and growth. This book and books like it help me become clearer about my role in the world in that respect. I’ve taken to telling people that a part of practice is in graciously initiating fights and then seeing what happens. I instigate. I do this better now because of readings like Siblings by Choice.

The material helped me think through the authors’ primary conceptual vehicles of narrative agency, systemic thinking, and intercultural realities, words they define well throughout the book. Here is a quick summary from their text:

Narrative agency is the meaning that people make of their lives over time—gifts of love, activities, beliefs, hopes, anxieties and doubts, fears and courage.

Systemic thinking is based on the principle of linkage, in which everything is actually or potentially linked to everything else, either directly or indirectly.

Intercultural realities are the coming together of influences from many different streams of cultures and systems of meaning.

If these definitions leave you interested, spark a question, or light you up, take a look at the book. The three pieces above become their primary means of investigating public morality, gender, and cultural traditions. Their wedding of Mark 10:28-30 with these three avenues brings an echo of biblical and theological reflection to the book so that you keep with the reminder that you’re reading a work that is pastoral-theological.

We read of life from the African-American experience of man who is of the Baptist tradition and life of a white feminist who is of Lutheran and Catholic heritage. They intend to push by boundaries which impede community, and they give real, helpful exercises to pursue community. I find that inclusion to make this book extremely useable. Using vignettes, literature, and examples from current life, a theoretical work is immediately made practical.

The authors also have a lot of good stuff about reflexivity and experience, and the book is worth buying for the individual and group exercises they develop in order to show how pastoral people can work these concepts into practice. They use literature, historical events, and personal experiences to highlight how vital race, gender, and embodiedness are when it comes to addressing the varied expressions of violence in the world.

They are counselors and theorists in pastoral care. They are basically talking to people who care about some of the same things, and if those areas are yours, you’ll want to locate this book. Bending toward clinical applications, they discuss the ways life these days is connected to life in past:

We create the future through our behavior, and whether recognized or not, we reproduce certain established patterns from the past. Our current activity is guided by maps in the mind or certain enduring ways of thinking and being in the world. (pg. 89).

They encourage the reader to “become aware of the history that has shaped” them in order to “self-consciously work for the good, confess our limitations, stay alert to every new and emerging form of evil, and challenge our students, colleagues, family members, individuals, and groups to develop their own practices and traditions of care, prayer, and work for spiritual discernment” (pg. 71).

History is not our only influence. “We are also shaped by ignorance.” We are impacted by what we don’t know and what we choose not to know. I’m particularly aware of this as I sit through and live through the nasty, vitriolic presentations of people claiming to be Christian in the political realm. As the authors recount stories from their own lives and from their people’s lives, you hold the strong reminder that such stories are hard to hold, heavy.

And this book is encouraging for the witness who, in their words, “hears the story of the traumatized ones, acknowledges their demoralization, helps to give voice to their trauma, and enables them to face the depths of their experiences” (pg. 135). We don’t witness alone. Remember that, whether you read this book or not: we don’t witness alone.

by Michael

Again, Fathers Know Best (David)

I’m repeating a few posts for my own good. Even though, in every case, families have grown and aged, I hope you enjoy this interview.

FF: Describe your family.

DS: I am Maggie’s husband of twelve years and Eliot’s dad for the past two years.  I’m Kevin and Linda’s son, Anne Marie’s brother and brother-in-law to her husband, Tony.  I’m privileged to have known well all four of my grandparents.  When we adopted Eliot in 2009 our family grew to include members of his birth family.  We’re an imperfect but decent group of folks.

FF: How has fatherhood changed you?

DS: I’ll need a few more years before I can answer this with any certainty.  Honestly, like marriage, I think fatherhood is simply revealing more of who I already was–both good and bad.

FF: Have you made any mistakes as a dad? If you’re not a liar, name one and talk about what it meant to you.

DS: I make mistakes daily.  My flexible schedule allows me to be with Eliot while Maggie works.  Because much of my work is done from home I often feel the tug to respond to work-related tasks when my attention should be given entirely to my son.  Put another way, I struggle to be fully present to Eliot.  Like my previous answer, I’m pretty sure this struggle has little to do with my delightful son and everything to do with my own distracted self.

FF: What’s the most helpful advice you heard when you were becoming a father or as you’ve been a father?

DS: In the days before Eliot came to live with us a friend and parent of three sensed my growing anxiety about being a good parent.  Her counsel was simple and significant: “Parenting is all about grace.”  This truth has alleviated some of my tendencies to strive to get it right. I desire my son to come up in a family atmosphere where grace is the air he breathes.

FF: How do you attend to your relationship with Maggie?  How has it changed since you’ve become parents?

DS: My first answer will sound silly, but it’s true.  Getting Eliot on a sleep schedule as soon as was reasonably possible may be our best parenting decision as of now.  By the time he was four months he was sleeping through the night.  Reclaiming our evenings together, not to mention our rest, was great for that new stage of married life.  I realize not all children will take to sleep this well, but it’s worth trying!

Another thing we’ve done is to go on a date twice a month.  We’ve been able to secure some great babysitters who spend time with Eliot while we take a few hours together.  I should say that Maggie initiated both of these things.

Our relationship continues to evolve now that Eliot is part of our family.  Sleep training and date nights are proof of the added intentionality we’ve found to be necessary to nurture our marriage.  But much of this evolution is completely haphazard.  Predicting how your spouse will respond to parenthood is tricky business; it’s been good to watch each other react to this little person who we care so deeply for.

FF:  Does your job as a pastor bring any particular blessings and challenges to you when it comes being a dad?

DS: I’ve mentioned the flexible schedule being a gift to our family.  There are plenty of dads who rarely see their children throughout the week and I’m grateful this isn’t my situation.  On the flip side, much of my time is given to the church and this includes times –weekends and some evenings – when many families are together.  I’m also keenly aware of the pressures many pastors’ children have felt and I hope to actively oppose those sorts of expectations.  Again, it’s all about grace!

FF:  You adopted your son.  What did you learn about yourself in that process?

DS: I learned that waiting is hard!  While it’s not unique to adoption, the process does require vast amounts of patience and making peace with ambiguity and an unknown future.  This was tough for someone who desires to be in control, especially of these types of really important events.

FF: What surprises are there along the way for parents? What do you wish you were told to expect?

DS: Hold loosely to your plans.  Make plans, wise plans.  But don’t be too nervous when the plans change.  Make a new one and go with it until a new shift is required.

FF: What is one recent memory you made with your child?

DS: Maggie’s work schedule requires three weeks of full-time work, so this week I’m spending a lot of time with Eliot.  Our mothers are graciously traveling to be with us for the next two weeks.  Yesterday we ran errands.  Today involved a walk to a neighborhood splash park.  Given his passionate interest, I’m sure a ride on a train will be required tomorrow.  All of these moments are excuses to watch him interact with his circumstances.  I love the delight I’ve gained as he invites me into his ever-expanding world.

by Michael

Inscrutable Grace in Helping

by London Scout

Photo Thanks by London Scout

One of the things I’m proud of with how I spend my time is that I don’t go two days without assisting others with some thing that they’re doing. I help people. I find value in this. I find life in this.

I don’t need to be needed. I never have. I’m actually a little too crass and introverted for that. I’m a little to “off to myself” for that. But I love to help. It’s one of the thirty things I want to do from that assignment Dr. Hodge gave me a couple years ago. A lot of people need boundaries when they love to help. The focus of my post is on the love.

I’ve told my wife in the last few years that I know more about saying yes and no based upon my self-understanding. A part of my self-understanding is that I’m around in order to assist others in directly and regularly contributing to the world. In other words, my contribution is in my ensuring that others are contributing. I find that there is a gift in helping others. I don’t mean the hallmark version. I mean that there is a grace, an immeasurable one, an inscrutable grace in helping others.

You can’t put your finger on it or slice it or quantify it. But it’s one of those soul deposits that you feel. You know that connecting another person to their something big makes you bigger.

Are you helping somebody else achieve something that’s important to them? If you can’t find a time in the last month when you genuinely helped another person pull something off, meet a goal, live better, answer a question: what exactly are you living for?

Look at that question. Sit with it. Turn it over. Inspect it. What are you living for? I think most of us don’t even hear the question much less offer an answer. Do you know what you’re about? Do you know why you’re alive? Do you know the places where your grace comes from?