The question for me as a Christian is not whether “a live donkey is better than a dead horse,” as Shackleton put it (a man who nonetheless died on expedition – the second expedition after assuring his family that he had no desire for further exploring.)  I prefer to paraphrase my former CPE instructor, Rev. Marion Thullberry, who would repeatedly remind me that I needed to CHOOSE the hill upon which I was prepared to die.  Which she did mean metaphorically (there are many hills on which I have staked friendships and other relationships, upon which I have staked position, reputation, or career.)  But it applies literally as well.  What is worth dying for?

Explorers are those who will risk death in order to know the truth of a place first hand.  Or, to put it another way, they would rather die than not be the first to know a particular place in a particular way.  Upon reflection, my problem with these “men of great daring” is not that they think too big, but instead that they think too small.  Knowledge is worth dying for?  Knowledge of the Earth or of space or of the limits on one’s own body?  No, knowledge may be a means to an end, a useful thing to have on particular occasions.  But knowledge pales beside love.  As for knowledge, it will come to an end – but Love never ends.  For God is love.  And we are called to love one another as Christ loved us, which is to say that Christians are called to die on behalf of one another, for love of God and love of one another.  Which we can do without fear because we know that we have nothing to lose.  Not because our lives are without value, but because God loves us beyond any human understanding of value, and will not allow us to die forever.

But I still stand before the previous post about slowing down – because I trust that God does not wish for me to go up in flames for something as trivial as proving that I am smart or productive or possessing any other “virtue.”  As both Jesus and Paul warn us in the New Testament, we need to be more concerned about our reputation with God than our reputation with *anyone* else.  So long before I reach the precipice of martyrdom, I need to be asking myself, “What exactly am I witnessing to here?”  And if the answer is anything less than “The love of God as revealed in Jesus,” then it is time for me to change course.

We went skiing this weekend for what was only the fourth time in my life (although arguably the first time, when I was 15, might more accurately be described as downhill careening.)  As when we went two years ago, my husband was shepherding our young daughter down the hill.  Which meant that I was only semi-supervised:  whenever he and Hannah were at a standstill, Brian would turn to me and give me a pointer and a half before needing to return his attention to Hannah, who within those 20 seconds or so had taken to happily chomping on well-travelled over snow.

As we headed from the plateau where the chair lift had deposited us to the slope, Brian asked me, “What do you need to know?”  ”I think I’m in good shape right now,” I replied confidently.  About 20 meters downslope, all too aware that I was now going too fast for me to control, I threw myself down in the snow.  Brian looked back, not having seen what led to my now comically rag-doll evoking posture.  To the amusement of a pair of snowboarders, sitting together a few meters upslope, I shouted to him (I hope) good-naturedly, “I wish I had asked you how to stop!”

Once I was upright, I made my way the short way down to Brian and Hannah – where he made this suggestion:  ”Go a little slower, a little easier than you are comfortable with.  That way, when you hit a spot where you speed up (as you inevitably will), you won’t be going faster than you can handle.”

And with that, I made it down the rest of the slope with a lot more enjoyment and less anxiety.  And I had a good time down the slope the next time, too – even though we took a more difficult initial approach.  At the end of that last run, I thanked Brian – that had been the advice I was most needing to hear to improve my skiing: not to push it.  The mountain would push me more than enough.

As I pulled into the parking lot at my daughter’s preschool yesterday, I was driving faster than I ought to have been – I was running late, having once again allowed one minute less than I would have needed to get there under perfect conditions.  And, as usual, the conditions were less than perfect.  As I came around the corner of an SUV parked at the end of a row of cars, I braked less than a car’s length from a little boy who had wandered away from the truck’s open door.  Brian’s advice came to me again at that moment, adjusted for the situation: “Allow a little more time than you need to.  That way, when delays come (as they inevitably will), you won’t be late and inattentive and almost knock down a preschooler.”

I spend so much of my life careening downhill.  I take on one more responsibility, I add one more skill, I invite one more person – I test my limits – right up to the edge of what I am comfortable with.  Without accounting for all of the things I cannot account for!  That is, I forget that the mountain will push me more than enough – that life throws all sorts of things at us that we were not counting on, and that we had not made time for in our schedule.

In our culture we celebrate (mostly) men (and some women, too) who pushed themselves to their limits and “achieved great things.”  That they cannibalized half their expedition team, even after learning from the earlier mistakes of six other people who died making the same attempt – that sort of thing is best brushed over.  What we consider to be “achievements” says a lot about what we expect of ourselves and each other as a culture.

As for me, I am learning that I am not cut out for careening.  I am not interested in seeing “how fast this baby can go” and losing myself on a forgotten hairpin curve.  Sure, there are emergencies that call for taking a chance on fast and edgy – life will push us more than enough.  But in the meantime I am going to stop trying to figure out how to prove how much I can do and how fast I can do it.  Instead of speeding up, what I need right now is to slow down.

However much I like chocolate, though, I wonder if James would have picked up the latter if he knew what sort of mumbo jumbo was to be found inside the wrapper.  Apparently the marketing department at Dove has become aware that many people use chocolate for a quick “pick me up,” and they decided to build on this selling point by printing self-help phrases on the inner foil.  ”You are where you are supposed to be,” affirms one.  ”You’re invited to relax today,” chirps another.  I am teetering between morbid curiosity and self-righteous indignation – shall I eat another and see what it says? Or mail them all back to the chocolatier with a note explaining that I eat chocolate for the chocolate – not for the “insights” of the product label writer?

As an individual who believes in freewill, I am neither New Age-y nor Calvinistic enough to suppose that I know for certain that I am exactly where I am “supposed to be.”  And as the mother of a preschooler, I may be “invited to relax” only for the next hour and a half, after which time (cold or no cold), I am on duty, and will have (thanks to the viral invaders filling my sinus cavities) a harder time than usual staying focused and alert.  Not only do I not need my chocolate to give me permission to relax, it is in absolutely no position to do so!

So Dove, I’ll tell you what I really want on the inside of my wrappers – information about your chocolate:  about your rainforest alliance certification, for instance,  or better yet an assurance that your cocoa is not raised using child slaves.  So far, I haven’t seen any positive assertions about this.

I wonder if Dove would say that the children working against their will on cocoa plantations are where they are “supposed to be?”  Or perhaps it is only American women with disposable incomes who are “invited to relax?”  To grossly paraphrase Christ, if management loves their customers, how is that a virtue?  Every company does that.  But if management loves every person in the supply chain, truly and eagerly seeking their well being, then that is something new and different.  Today, I am praying for a transformation of the hearts of those who have the power to share – that they might find that they love people more than money after all.

Right now, I am trying to decide whether or not to keep Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller.  Its first chapter was brilliant.  (I noticed that Umberto Eco included it in his recent collaboration with the Louvre, The Infinity of Lists.) Its concept was, at first glance, better than the merely self-aggrandizingly clever conceit that too often serves as the chief feature of the post-modern novel.  (I’m looking at you, Martin Amis.  As for you, Thomas Pynchon, you are off the hook only because your work is sufficiently unreadable that I have never made it through more than 50 pages of one of your novels.  So I will reserve judgment.  And Nabokov, I’m sure many have found Pale Fire to be turribly intresting, but either I am a dim bulb or this emperor is in his skivvies.)  But as Traveller went on… and on… and on… it became a trainwreck of a Saturday Night Live sketch – trying to eke 10 minutes out of 2 minutes of material.  Note to SNL – we are on to you.  Better to end a sketch too early than too late.  By the end of the novel, the predictable inscrutable female with many secrets was predictably thrown into a circular self-referential plot that predictably involved elements of magic realism, rendered predictably as an affront against a Cartesian world view.  Ah, the post-modern novel.  Like Bartleby, it would prefer not to.  And it defiantly sits about doing nothing.

Or at least that is where I was when I finished reading the Calvino.  (My sister was very sorry to hear about how I felt about the novel – she had read many of Calvino’s works in some distaste, and had been saving this one in hopes that it would be a worthwhile read.  My advice, Sallie – read the 1st 2 chapters, then put it down – life is too short to read any more of this book than that.)

But I remembered that long ago I had enjoyed reading many novels by Jeanette Winterson, who is arguably a post-modern, even if on the fringes – toying more earnestly at times with magic realism and/or more traditional narrative storytelling.  Ditto for Julian Barnes.  So… what was really missing here?  Why was I so disgusted with Calvino (and Amis, and Pynchon…?)

It was then that another unread book on my shelf called to me, and I began to find an answer.  I had never read any books by Milan Kundera, which seemed to be a tremendous gap in my literacy.  Once upon a time, I had picked up a couple of his books at a yard sale, but they had languished on the shelf as I raised a baby, then a toddler.  But this summer, I finally pulled Immortality off the shelf and gave it a go.

There is no denying that Kundera is a post-modern – he appears in the book, interacting with and commenting upon his characters, giving insight into his decision to include certain plot elements, revealing the origins of one of his characters.  It reminded me of a book I had once read on Gestalt dream interpretation – you begin with the understanding that everything in the dream arises from within yourself, and thus represents an element of yourself – of your character, your potential, your experience… In the same way, that Immortality has no reality apart from Kundera is explicit throughout the book.  And yet – and yet I devoured it.  Post-modernism was not my problem.  What made Kundera different from Calvino was LOVE – Kundera loved his characters, and Calvino did not.  Kundera’s characters, though explicitly figments of his imagination, were drawn with great empathy, with a desire to understand them in detail.  Further, it seemed that his treatment of them indicated not merely that they could be so understood, but that they in some sense DESERVED to be understood, and so loved.

Picking back up some of Julian Barnes’ novels at the library, I found that this was true of Barnes as well. (Congratulations, by the way, Mr. Barnes, on winning the Booker Prize.)  And I remember Winterson to be a similarly compassionate writer.  I can’t wait to catch up with what she has been up to in the past 15 years.

But it does raise the question with me – what about Amis, Calvino, Pynchon, and others?  Are they writing just to demonstrate what clever wordsmiths they are?  To reveal shortcomings in the underlying theory of the modern novel?  Are their own idea(l)s all that are important to them, to the exclusion of the personal?  (And if so, can we argue from their novels alone that they are sociopaths?)

Or instead (additionally?), might we theorize that those who do not love their characters must not love themselves very well, either?  When authors create characters without any sympathetic detail, characters who seem to be unknowable to themselves and each other, are they themselves revealing that they believe they too are unknown and unknowable, even to themselves – and so, by definition, unloved and unlovable?  If it is one of the best known “truths” of post-modern philosophy that no person can know another – then love, too is impossible, and that is very far from my belief in Christ’s assurance that “you shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free…”

So I have resolved to keep the Calvino on my shelf, to remind me to pray for his soul’s repose, and for any others I encounter – in life or in literature – for whom connection with another seems only a fool’s dream.

One of the mnemonics that she taught us was a key to writing our own collects: “To, Who, Do, Through”: TO – in which we address God; WHO – in which we express an attribute of God; DO – in which we petition God; THROUGH – in which we name God in an explicitly Triune manner.  For instance:

God of Abraham and Isaac, who led your people out of slavery in Egypt, release [name] from the powerful bonds of addiction, and provide [her/him] with every aid [she/he] requires to step forward with confidence into the wilderness through which [she/he] will reach the promised land.  Through your Son Jesus Christ, who with you and the Holy Spirit is worshipped and glorified.  Amen.

One of my many wonderful experiences as a local church pastor didn’t take place in the local church at all, but on the District level:  the erstwhile Portsmouth District began offering (roughly) quarterly Lay Academies, in which lay people (that is, not paid pastor people) could come and spend a Saturday morning becoming more immersed in one of four topics of interest to them.  I was asked to teach a class on the topic of prayer at one of these events.  Not too broad, right?  All about prayer in two and a half hours!

I wanted to be sure to talk some about private prayer and aids to prayer, about using our bodies in prayer, and about praying together in groups.  But I had been informed by the organizer that the reason he was wanting to offer the class was because so many lay people feel intimidated by the prospect of praying in public.  Which I easily identify, because I myself had not been so comfortable with it before entering seminary, and I was a pastor’s daughter!  And so I decided to teach the group about how to write collects.  After running the ten or so students in my seminar through TO, WHO, DO, THROUGH, I gave them all a piece of paper with that heading on it (to remind them), and set them loose with a stack of church news magazines and recent issues of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot (our regional newspaper.)  Their assignment was to find an article that moved them to prayer, and to write a collect based on that news article.  Then we each shared our collects with one another – which is to say, we took turns praying before the group – leading the group in prayer.

I took both the local (weekly) and regional (daily) papers when I was in the parish, and saw reading them and praying over them as part of my job as pastor.  I tried a subscription to the Durham paper after moving here, but found that enjoying raising a child led to a stack of untouched tree corpses.  Which, having lived downwind from a paper mill, is not an abstract image for me.  So instead, these days, I buy papers one at a time only on those days when I know I have the time to read.

Somehow, not having that daily inoculation has given me a real newspaper sensitivity. Picking up the paper today to read over breakfast, celebrating my little one’s return to school, I found myself needing to pause to plead with God many times before I made it even to page A7.  Iowa Caucuses, the Keystone XL pipeline, unemployment, budget cuts in the public schools, ongoing killing of peaceful protestors in Syria, the routine acceptance of civilian casualties in war.  Arson, murder, PTSD as a result of military service, divorce and restraining orders…  I folded the paper and put my head in my hands.  It was too much, too much, too much.  As I say to my daughter when she is dithering, “Focus, Crocus!”  But when I am feeling bombarded with the unlovely and surrounded by the unloved, how can this one person choose where to put her focus?

To? Lamb of God  Who? Takes away the sins of the world   Do? Have mercy upon us  Through? In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

After some unreasonable hoping that the Episcopal church I was visiting this morning would run contrary to type, and that the rector would somehow produce a full loaf of challah from the sleeve of her robe, I found myself watching her lift up the large round wafer and thinking to myself, “this could be a deal-breaker.”

I have spent some time now not particularly expecting God to show up in worship, so that might be what opened me to be so thoughtlessly cheeky about the sacrament.  Or perhaps God has just become that small to me that I thought I could predict or even dictate when and where I might feel God’s presence.  Or maybe I am just an ordinary broken human being who, like anyone else, is riddled with hubris.

At the rail, I could not wait to get the wafer into my mouth, to let it melt there and to think about Christ and the medieval desire to honor him by making sure that not a crumb of his body might be lost between the floorboards.  When a priest came around with the cup and saw that my upturned hands were empty, he began to tip the cup towards me, and I drank – perhaps for only the second or third time.  ”The cup which we share…” The wine, so unfamiliar at the feast to this Methodist, burst on my palate as if welcoming me home to a place I had never seen – a foretaste of the kingdom, a reminder of the already and the not yet that is this time between the times.  I leapt back from the rail and managed to make my unsteady way back to my seat; thought of pulling out a kneeler, but didn’t know whether it was allowed at this point in the service.  And then I burst into tears as I felt God clearly articulate to me, “Did you think that I could not show up for you here?”

After a couple of words to the rector, I decanted myself some decaf and made my way to the car where I cried and texted my husband and cried some more.  I felt so unworthy, so impossibly beyond redemption.  And at the same time, so near to God – reminded that my second greatest sin (after the first of thinking I no longer need to be redeemed) is the idea that I cannot be.

Bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.

But if Godliness does not mean “holiness,” but instead “sharing a characteristic with God,” then I recently received some insight into how tidiness, at least, might be next to Godliness.  It began when I tried to find a notebook that contained my notes on the movie “Blood Done Sign My Name.”  I wanted to properly quote something as a launching point for a blog entry.  After more than five minutes of searching, I decided that I would be satisfied with the book, because I might locate the incident in there and see if the quote had been preserved intact in the movie.  But ten minutes went by without me finding that either.  And it occurred to me:  God doesn’t lose track of anything!  God knows right where everything is.  (And God, since you know where my notebook is, I would love to find it soon.  Though I’m sure this insight into my limits and your limitlessness was the more important one to have today.)

If I kept a tidier house, I wouldn’t lose track of anything, either.  I would be master of my domain!! Hmm… Maybe it is a good thing I don’t always have “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”  Keeps me humble.  ;-)

But before my nine-year-old brain could even fully grasp the question, one girl answered, “It is like when you close the door when you are going to the bathroom, even though there is no one else in the house.”  Whatever godliness meant, that couldn’t be it, I thought.  That was ridiculous.  But the teacher said, “Exactly!”  Then she went on to say, “Some people have said that cleanliness is next to godliness.”  And we spent the next 40 minutes or so talking about personal hygiene and keeping our “private parts” private.

This was a lesson that could only go over with children who had not actually read the gospels, which I had.  I didn’t speak up to contradict the teacher that day – but it may have been the last day on which I held my tongue.  The curtain was pulled away, and it was revealed that you did not have to be a wizard to teach Sunday school, you just had to be willing to show up.  (Disclaimer: my daughter’s Sunday school teachers are indeed wizards, for which I am deeply grateful.)  Looking around the table at the eager and attentive faces of my fellow students that day, I felt very lonely.

Lonely in the church.  It is a way that I have felt very often in the years that have followed – and I am realizing now that this is because there are no special qualifications for church attendance.  Anyone can do it.  We don’t question people at the door, make sure that they are kind, or believe in Jesus, or read the Bible.   This is something that gets missed when people ask “how could someone who goes to church [do/believe] [some outrageously unloving thing]?”  How could anyone?  If you can answer that one, then you have your answer, because anyone is welcome at church.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Church should be a place where anyone can come and ask any question and get a Christian answer, given Christianly – with warmth and generosity.  The trouble is: if you can find any kind of person at church, even people without [m]any answers, then how does an inquirer know who to ask?

My Dad had a children’s sermon that he loved to do (it wasn’t his idea – he got it from a book, but it was years ago, so I don’t know which one.)  He would invite the children up to see his beautiful new bird.  He would whip the sheet off the birdcage in a “ta-da!” sort of motion, and inside would be… a kitten.  After a good deal of banter back and forth, the point would be made that just as you can’t put any animal in a birdcage and call it a bird, you can’t put any person in a church and call them a Christian.  There are any number of cats in our collective birdcage.  Which leaves us… where, exactly?  Well, lonely in church, sometimes, if you are looking for a community of gospel-delvers.

So over the years, I have found myself making pilgrimages to the holy sites of my faith.  Which, as a believer in the Body of Christ – Christ embodied through a Christian community – has meant the places where professing Christians travel to gather and celebrate God together:  District Clergy meetings, Annual conference, retreats and continuing ed events… seminary.  While I have found Christ embodied sporadically in the local church, I have found Christ reliably in these places.  It is not for nothing, I am realizing, that the annual gathering for teenagers from all over the NC Conference of the UMC is called “Pilgrimage.” Any teenager who will take a weekend to travel to sing about Jesus with other teenagers they won’t see again until maybe next year is making a clear statement about her/his priorities.

There’s a catch, though:  even travel and time commitments do not serve as some kind of perfect filter.  Even the burdens of seminary: the financial commitment, the loss of free time – do not guarantee that even clergy (or seminary professors) know what is what.  The scriptures have warned us that not many should teach.  Which warning comes with a clear undertone:  some who shouldn’t, do.  (Witness this egregious use of pastoral power to exclude an interracial couple.  Not in the 1950s, but in 2011.)  Nevertheless, the commitments required in such environments means that there is a critical mass of people who (with integrity and love and thoughtfulness) are trying to figure out what it means to live a God-haunted life.  I may have been disheartened by a handful of my fellow travelers from time to time, but I have never been lonely on pilgrimage.

So if you are someone who (like me, I must admit) has been quick to judge “church people,” consider that many people find their way to church because so many churches are slow to judge.  This is how I ended up in the congregation I am in, incidentally – I was impressed by the welcome received by EVERYONE who comes in the door.  I hope that, if you are a church skeptic, you will come visit Trinity UMC in Durham, because you are welcome, just like everyone else – the Democrats and Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, and Independents, those in second hand coats from the community coat closet together with the fur-coat wearers, the ex-convicts and those who somehow sincerely believe they have never done anything wrong in their lives, the seminary professors and the high school drop-outs, the pacifists, the veterans, and the pacifist veterans…  Radically welcoming is something Trinity does well, praise God.  Not that it has been easy for me – most human beings have people that we struggle to include.  I am trying to do better, not least by remembering that for some of my sisters and brothers, I am an equally difficult person to include.

On the other hand, if you are someone who is going to church and nonetheless feels lonely – if you are someone who wonders how many other God-haunted people there are out there under their “Sunday best” exteriors, it may be that you just need to engage more in the small group ministries of your local church.  But it may be that you have tried that and are still coming up empty.  Do you try a different congregation?  Maybe.  On the other hand, this could mean that it is time for you to go on pilgrimage.  Godspeed!

A year ago today, I had left the house just a couple of days before, on my Dad’s birthday.  I had spoon fed him ice cream to celebrate, only later to discover that I had been giving him one of the few flavors he disliked.  I just hope the cold and sweet were more dominant sensory perceptions for him at the time – maybe he didn’t notice it was blackberry flavored.  I talked some with my Mom and with my sister; Sallie was less than two months from her delivery date, and had made the flight out to see Dad before he died.  Then I went in and told Dad goodbye.  And we both knew that I wouldn’t be seeing him again, which made it really hard to walk out.  I gave him a hug and told him I loved him.

So a year ago today, we were out to dinner with friends, and I was asking Clay, a doctor, how long my Dad could last without fluids.  Mom had called me that morning to say that she and the nurse had agreed to stop giving him water to drink, and I was upset, and not sure how that would feel for him.  All I could remember was seeing my grandmother for the last time in her hospital bed, her hair all spread around her head, an IV in her arm, her tongue dry and cracked and her breathing raspy.  I couldn’t take my eyes off her tongue as I sang “Amazing Grace” to her.  Clay said it was hard to predict.  Could be days.  I didn’t tell him about my grandmother’s tongue – just nodded and tried to swallow my refried beans.  The phone rang, and it was my mother.  Dad had died just minutes ago.  I told her we would be there that night.  ”Do you need to go now?” Sarah asked.  No.  We needed to finish eating our dinner. There was going to be a long night ahead.

Our friends took their son and our daughter out for doughnuts while my husband and I went home and tried to think of everything we might need over the next who knew how many days, and loaded up the car.  It was only when we were all ready to go that we met our friends and our daughter in a grocery store parking lot, and I told her what had happened, and we put her into the car and drove away together.

A year ago today.  It is one of the dates that I know.  Like the date we first met with the Hospice nurse, and the date I last saw him.  There are so many other dates I do not know: days no less laden with loss or longing for my inability to commemorate them.  The last day I heard him speak an intelligible word.  The last time I heard him say, “I love you.” The first time I changed my father’s diaper, and discovered how far past embarrassment we all were.  The day I bought sheets for his new adjustable bed.  The day I laid down in that empty bed and cried and cried before they took it away.

I do not grieve as one who has no hope.  But still, I grieve.