One of my favorite people is Eugene Peterson. He’s up there with Howard Thurman, Gardner C. Taylor, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Henry Nouwen in terms of heroes. In this video he talks about being a pastor. If this is meaningful to you, you should certainly read Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor.
Category / Faith-Related
This category is like Interior except that it covers faith and spirituality.
Mums and None of the Expected Characteristics
I read Barbara Holmes’ book on contemplative practices in the Black Church the other month, and the book was as amazing as it was historically grounding and refreshing. In it she says, “Some sacred spaces bear none of the expected characteristics.”
It is within the spirit of contemplation and the gift of sacred spaces that I offer this poetic piece which Nate shared with me. You may enjoy it, but hopefully you won’t (in the best way). There is language in this that you may not want to blast:
Thurman on An Island of Peace
A beautiful and significant phrase, “Island of Peace within one’s own soul.” The individual lives his life in the midst of a wide variety of stresses and strains. There are many tasks in which he is engaged that are not meaningful to him even though they are important in secondary ways. There are many responsibilities that are his by virtue of training, or family, or position. Again and again, decisions must be made as to small and large matters; each one involves him in devious ways.
No one is ever free from the peculiar pressures of his own life. Each one has to deal with the evil aspects of life, with injustices inflicted upon him and injustices which he wittingly or unwittingly inflicts upon others. We are all of us deeply involved in the throes of our own weaknesses and strengths, expressed often in the profoundest conflicts within our own souls.
The only hope for surcease, the only possibility of stability for the person, is to establish an Island of Peace within one’s own soul. Here one brings for review the purposes and dreams to which one’s life is tied. This is the place where there is no pretense, no dishonesty, no adulteration. What passes over the threshold is simon-pure. What one really thinks and feels about one’s own life stands revealed; what one really thinks and feels about other people far and near is seen with every nuance honestly labeled: love is love, hate is hate, fear is fear.
Well within the island is the Temple where God dwells–not the God of the creed, the church, the family, but the God of one’s heart. Into His Presence one comes with all of one’s problems and faces His scrutiny. What a man is, what his plans are, what his authentic point is, where his life goes–all is available to him in the Presence. How foolish it is, how terrible, if you have not found your Island of Peace within your own soul! It means that you are living without the discovery of your true home.
From Howard Thurman’s “An Island of Peace Within One’s Soul” in Meditations of the Heart
Clinical Pastoral Education
The room of you, a small circle of goodness, lights in your faces that remind me of grace waiting, tentative scenes from your lives turning into a dozen gifts wrapped for us all.
The table cloaked with comfortable chairs, the package of cookies made by our leader’s friend and the ones Keebler made with dotted pecans, eaten and enjoyed.
The framed pictures of godly people, people who hopefully lived well, people who hopefully called upon others to do justice, love, and mercy, people whose ecclesiastical garments hopefully never blocked them from service.
The lightning, the thunder, the darkness from Ogden Avenue spilling over to us, framing our voices and reflections in the tones of divinity. These were the images and sounds of our first meeting. What a wonderful unit this will be!
Being Sick
I like myself when I’m sick. I don’t like to be sick. But I’m a better person when I’m sick. I don’t argue much. I try to be an easy patient. I don’t like asking for things because I don’t make a big deal over being sick.
I almost appear aloof because like my body, my mind concentrates on getting better. Though I usually have to focus on feeling worse for a while before skipping to all the things I must ingest to get better. It’s so easy to focus on getting better.
I’m good at that–at focusing on ridding my body of the badness than I am at connecting with, feeling, and accepting that badness. Perhaps, for a moment, I’m closer to the basic human impulse to fall into a small space of helplessness.
I’ve been drinking everything from hibiscus tea to concoctions from a loving, older Indian couple who I met with the other day. But no matter what I do, the cold or the virus will take whatever time it will take in me.
Being sick. Accepting the wall that is a stuffed head, an endless stream of yuck in my nose and sinus cavity, a roll of toilet paper on my car seat just because I’d rather use that than the little nice packages of kleenex I bought to replenish things at home.
Being hot but never quite cold, seeing the look in my wife’s eyes that accuses me of doing too much when I’ve only been able to accomplish a few things well. The swell of my head when I move too quickly, my constantly open mouth because I’d suffocate if I tried to breathe through my nose. A penetrating glance of grace in the form of my son’s prayer and of many other people’s acts of compassion.
I hate it when I’m sick, but I am probably much closer to being right when I’m being sick.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Evening Prayer
You, neighbour God, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe;
I know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.
Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.
The wall is builded of your images.
They stand before you hiding you like names,
And when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.
And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.
Hearing Voices
Sometimes you hear that Voice, speaking through people, and were it not for the proximity of their words, the identical nature of those sentences, you’d put off the emerging truth. It can jump off the page of poem, scream through an essay, or whisper through conversation over tea or wings or johnny cakes.
The Voice may come through the often misunderstood tones of a faithful friend whose so dependable that he’s overlooked. But it will not relent.
Like a burn it sears something on your skin, a purple bubble of skin that can’t be avoided. There’s no pain in it. The scar that’s left will be a memorial to the power of that influence you thought took flight.
Speaking, reminding, and convincing is the terrible and deeply comforting Voice saying one thing or another. Then there’s the choice to turn and listen, or try to, or to walk away from the words spoken. To walk away is to return a gift. To listen is to enter into an unknown world of faith. Indeed, hearing that Voice is hearing a melody of faith.
Walking in a foreign place
In Case You’re Considering Seminary
I posted this three years ago. A conversation and the start of another academic year brings these ideas back to me.
One of my favorite writers said that everyone is a theologian. Not necessarily a professional theologian or an academic theologian, but a theologian still. We all, in his thought, have an understanding of God and a way of communicating (i.e., speech to communicate) that understanding to others. For people who spend a lot of time talking about God, there’s seminary.
Before going further, you should know this bit of biography since it anchors what I’ll say–people formed in other places, at other times, may have different wisdom. I went to graduate school at Wheaton College, completed a program in theological studies and didn’t get enough. I enjoyed what I was learning. I signed up for more at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and enrolled in the MDiv program while I was serving at Sweet Holy Spirit, my home church. I came to serve New Community, a multi-ethnic congregation in 2006. I started teaching…
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Tremble for Our World
From Martin Luther King Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here?, the chapter entitled, “The World House”:
So when in this day I see the leaders of nations again talking peace while preparing for war, I take fearful pause. When I see our country today intervening in what is basically a civil war, mutilating hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children with napalm, burning villages and rice fields at random, painting the valleys of that small Asian country red with human blood, leaving broken bodies in countless ditches and sending home half-men, mutilated mentally and physically; when I see the unwillingness of our government to create the atmosphere for a negotiated settlement of this awful conflict by halting bombings in the North and agreeing unequivocally to talk with the Vietcong–and all this in the name of pursuing the goal of peace–I tremble for our world. I do so not only from dire recall of the nightmares wreaked in the wars of yesterday, but also from dreadful realization of today’s possible nuclear destructiveness and tomorrow’s even more calamitous prospects.
Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. We are called upon to look up from the quagmire of military programs and defense commitments and read the warnings on history’s signposts.
One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful end through peaceful means.
Sounds of Sunday
A congregation of three in a room of many more, tapping feet making circles and their own harmonies. They hummed and yipped and yayyed, and then one of them, mine I think, started repeating the leader’s words. It was as if he had just heard what the rest of us of had, or as if he just accepted that what we were doing and what the little congregation of three were doing were twin gestures.
I wondered if it was the children and not the adults who were in worship, who were at play in the Presence. I heard Kelly, the leader, her voice light with grace and heavy with gratitude, and when the adults did not quickly reply to her with a response, the children did, with Bryce brave to begin. Hallelujah is what he said.
I was struck when I heard the mumbling coming up from him because I knew the formation of those words from years into my past. I knew them as a boy of size and ever since. But it was my son saying them with the worship leader and not me. The boy who has trouble listening to his parents. The boy who has difficulty hearing instructions when he’s playing or when distracted from too much joy.
And then the three of them sang the old song that Christians have included in their weekly and daily lives of praise. In the corner were Eliot and Bryce and the daughter of Jason and Courtney Bilbrey whose name I don’t know. I was smiling, refraining myself from disrupting their joy, explaining to myself that they were the leaders, the ones with the Light spreading throughout the space.
They were the ones worth following. Kelly was with them. They were in front. I was halted from my own involvement while I watched them, eventually corrected by the silly, untimed, and melodious participation. They were creating the sounds of Sunday, and for a moment I believed that their play was the essence of the Christian Sabbath.
Bret Lott on Work, Writing, & Stories
My friend, David Swanson, sent me this video interview John Wilson conducts with Bret Lott. These men talk about work, stories, humility, Flannery O’Connor, and the things that make good writers.
Monday Considerations, Pastoral Routines, & Soul Junk
Monday has been my off day for years, ever since I started working in a church, with the long exception of having to be on-call at Sweet Holy Spirit for administrative matters. Back then, it wasn’t strange to get a minutes long call from our accountant or from a co-worker that changed the direction of the week. Those Mondays are distant, though I hardly forget them.
Usually by Monday, since Sunday is traditionally a longer work day for pastors, I’ve lived through the equivalent of a work week with the compressed emotions of half a second one. There has been the previous week itself. It will bring with it conversations that stop me, meetings that unsettle me, group chats where someone is inevitably struggling with faith, offered counsel that helps or hurts people, conflicts left open for too long. There are projections about the future of the church, potential partnerships or courses of action. Quiet is seldom found without effort. There is the loneliness that feels like a heavy blanket in summer. There is the balancing of my own soul.
By Monday, my sleep has been disturbed for a few days in a row, dealing both with the expectation of Sunday and all that it brings and the throbbing exhaustion that comes afterward. Sleep will catch up to me by the next day usually, but when Monday comes, I’m somewhere in the middle of looking at the day for the deep breath it will bring and planning for the week, even though I’m trying not to plan. The busy tapping of my phone tells me that there is an email or a text. I check it, only to see if it’s from someone whose text I actually read on Mondays, a tiny list of loved ones whose requests are of a slightly different order.
On Mondays I do much less. Sometimes I fall into the mode of catching up with things at my address. There are errands to run for myself. Things Dawn has asked me to do. There is laundry and dishes and remnants from the previous night’s dinner, and all the things in everyone else’s home. There is the smell of urine that comes from the place where my son tossed his pajamas that morning, and the sneaky feeling that I’ll never stop cleaning the tile and washing the sheets, that I’ll go to work smelling of my boy’s liquids. I remember the conversation about reintroducing pull ups for the overnight shift, and I feel that aching familiar feeling of failure that never totally leaves. It’s one of those reminders in my life that I need grace.
For a long time I think about meaningful moments from the previous week. And I try to think about nothing at all. But I’m not successful. There is the crammed calendar and the list of things. This week there is one more sermon in the current series. There are the big anchors of the upcoming message rolling around in my head and falling to my feet. There is the nagging persistence that what I preach matters and doesn’t. There is the slow, night-time work of an assignment due before the end of next week. There is the upward and onward motion of not wanting to stop and the competing better desire to quit for a bit.
Quitting for a bit is the point of Monday. But it is hard to do. Leaving my moleskin at home and walking. Picking up a book of poems and heading to the Point. Exercising with no thought or nobody’s question or open conversation rattling for resolution. Eating a recreative-for-me meal that someone has prepared. Laughing with my friends or someone who for a moment is in my life for that sole purpose.
The anticipation of tomorrow is brutal on the soul. Not just mine. Not just a minister’s. But everyone’s soul. Thinking ahead into the next day, into the next post-Sabbath, into the second day of the week, is theft. Planning ahead is robbery. It’s sinister because we both believe it must be done and are so good at it. Good at leaving now for later. Good at staying nowhere for long. Never being present. Never reaching future.
It seems to me that it’s underneath most of the layers of our junk. Yet it’s also over the basic simplicity of our souls this movement ahead. But there are springs that come up through the layers. Springs: those people who ask a simple question and wait for a response. Springs are those messages that come from the lips of angels, the ones that stop your breath for a moment and help you appreciate the moment because it almost took you. These are the things I need to consider on Mondays. God, help me, especially since it’s Tuesday and the next Monday feels like a year away.
Michael Washington 