Category: Uncategorized

by John Indermark

In November of 2000, I received the phone call from my sister in St. Louis, saying that our mother had died. This was 12 years after Mom had been tentatively diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and 10 years after she had been committed to the first of several institutions. Those years were dark times: in her life, and in the lives of those of us who loved her. Moments of clarity grew more isolated, and briefer. Finding a way forward became a difficult task.

I am reminded of those years with the onset of COVID-19. The duration may not stretch out in length like the one I write of above. But in the midst of this crisis, the challenges are similar. Ordinary means of experiencing community (read, “family”) are suspended. The cost of “social distancing,” while necessary, is real. Finding a way forward – whether the context is having to deal with work from home or worse yet no work, or developing new ways of worship and pastoral care and administration overnight – requires extraordinary creativity and hope that we are not just going through the motions until a return to normal . . . whatever and whenever that may be.

And above all, in communities like those that gather us, whether in pews or in front of personal LCD screens, finding a way forward requires faith. Faith that COVID-19 does not hold the last word.

For me, the reminder of faith’s indispensable part in finding a way forward came the same afternoon as that phone call from my sister. The immediate aftermath of that call on my part was a profound sense of sadness and loss. But that afternoon, our local PBS radio station chose to play a set of South African freedom songs. I no longer remember the specific ones. But what lingers is the profound sense of release they affirmed for Mom, and for our family’s long-endured grief. Even in the worst of times, a way forward can be found. And at the head of that way, at the lead of that procession, is the One whose Grace has the last word for us all. COVID 19 does not get the last word. God does.

That does not mean we get to be all Pollyanna about the way ahead for us as individuals and churches and as a nation. We are still, as one commentator recently noted, only at the beginning of the beginning. But in the words of Isaiah, our faith affirms this: Even when we pass through the waters, even when we walk through the fires: we journey with the promise and gift of Holy Presence. Or, to use the words of our sisters and brothers in the United Church of Canada:

            In life, in death, in life beyond death,
                      God is with us.
                                We are not alone.
                                         Thanks be to God.  

by Jocelyn Emerson

For me, Lent is a time to slow ourselves down, to ponder, to wander, to contemplate, to be still. Lent is a journey. Each Lenten journey is different and unique.

For me, the Labyrinth is a beautiful metaphor for the Lenten journey. You start at the beginning following the path set before you. Depending upon which style Labyrinth you walk, you twist and turn, sometimes facing the center (your goal), sometimes turning away from the center. If you stay on the path, trusting its wander way, you will end up in the Center — the center of your heart, the center of your soul, that sacred place where Spirit resides within you. Each step you take on the labyrinth is an invitation to prepare for the center — to slow, to deepen, to open yourself to the movement and presence of Spirit.

As you enter the Center, your walk has prepared you for being fully in the Presence of the Sacred. You are invited to commune with the Sacred. Stay there as long as you would like, Pray your questions and await answers. Release what no longer serves you. Heal. Sing. Be Still.

When you are ready, with gratitude in your heart, you follow the same path outward. Each turn toward the Center an opportunity to embody deeper gratitude for the blessings you received. Each turn away, an opportunity to prepare to re-enter the outer world, to integrate what you received in the Center with your ordinary life.

This is the Lenten journey. You have an opportunity this Lenten season to journey to the center of your Heart. What is there? What are you cherishing? What needs healing? What needs releasing? What are the shadows hiding? What is the Light illuminating?

I hope this Lenten season you will journey deep into the Center of the Center of the Center of your Heart.

image credit:
Jocelyn Emerson
Purple Adobe Lavender Farm Labyrinth
Ojo Caliente, NM

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

How do we make sense of an internal commitment to love while the external world is spewing so much fear, and so much hate?

These are my efforts to reconcile that reality. 

Anger, fear, and hate exist as a demonstration of futility. These emotions and states of mind are finite, limited and diminishing. It can feel powerful. It can feel easy and safe. It can feel certain and strong. It is the very opposite of this, though. 

These states of mind and emotion have the largest taxation on our soul. It’s exhausting. They cannot be sustained and leave us lonely, empty and lost.

Anger, fear and hate occur when we are idle and reactive. 

Love is cultivated and nurtured in our skillful, intentional actions. 

Love is powerful. It can be steady, understated and quiet. It can be fierce, passionate, charged. Love holds us, replenishes us again and again.

While hate languishes and grapples and clings and begs and wails and cries as it dies…

Love remains. 

by Abigail Conley

It’s the week of church meetings of a different sort. The United Methodists are meeting to figure out their relationship with the LGBTQ+ community. The Roman Catholics are meeting over their sexual abuse scandals. I never know if people who aren’t clergy are as aware of these sorts of meetings. They always blow up my social media and then some.

I don’t discredit the importance of these meetings. I can only begin to imagine the pain wrapped up in the meetings. Like many people, I have my own share of church-inflicted trauma. There are styles of prayer that will make me physically ill because they remind me of a different sort of church. There are songs and styles of preaching that do the same.  I mostly keep away from them now, though some trigger pops up unexpectedly every now and then.

And yet, I remember this: it was the church that taught me to trust people.

Strangely, wonderfully, hopefully, transformingly: the church taught me to trust people. I say people because I still don’t know what to do with the institution, and that’s another conversation entirely. But if I begin to count the people who cared for me and honored the covenants I was born into, there is no end.

I think first of Ruth, seemingly ancient in my mind. Her hair was always done in a French twist, which fascinated me as my family sat behind her in church. I remember talking with her, which means she bothered to talk to me as a child. I remember the feel of her hand on mine as it grasped the back of the pew. The endless patience I recall from elementary school had to be there all of my life, including when I played with Cheerios to make it through worship as a toddler.

Truth be told, it’s probably my fault that the children’s sermon at my childhood church was short lived. The pastor didn’t really know what he was doing when he started that particular addition to worship and I gave lots of unhelpful answers and so it only lasted a few weeks. That same pastor, though, gladly fulfilled my requests of him at church potlucks: black pop only and help removing the devil from my deviled egg. He shook my hand at the door, too.

Maybe it seems weird to name those simple things as honoring covenant, but to me they are. People cared about me, took care of me, and made space for me because we were church. The breadth and depth is astonishing now.

Randy both taught my Sunday school class and let me rollerskate down the hallway with his daughters. Kenny and Sheila had long ago lost control of their house when the third kid was born, and so they hosted all of the kids in the church for sleepovers. We played crocodile on their king-sized waterbed—an absurd game of someone lying in the middle trying to knock everyone else off the edge—and ate blueberry pancakes in the morning. We piled on wagons for hayrides and Kenny misjudged bridges so we had to get off and walk. Still, they kept us safe along the way.

It was this strange world of people who were different than family and different than just being together in a small town. I say that because these people were still there long after I left a small town, just there, choosing to be church.

The church where I was ordained took care of me as a seminary student long before they ordained me. Elizabeth, in charge of the children’s Easter egg hunt, pressed $20 for gas into my hand because she knew it was a long trip to the church in a time when gas prices were very high. They asked if I needed help buying tires for my car and packed up extra pizza to take home. When I had the youth van rental charged to my credit card, a reimbursement check was waiting for me when I got back from the event. They gave me every reason to believe them, to trust them, day in and day out.

And I think of the other things they got right. They loved the gay kid in a church that wasn’t ready for any conversations about becoming Open and Affirming. They made space for the adult with Down syndrome. Occasionally, there was the hot mess at a board meeting because, well, that whole wrangling with institution thing. But each and every person taught me trust, simply by existing together as church.

I skipped over the people in college, the church I attended as a teenager, the churches I have served after ordination. Each adds its own flair to the larger picture: these are people who live into covenant in ways that would not be possible except for the Spirit among them. And I trust them—indeed, with my very life in the vocation of pastor.

Many of us find ourselves tied to the church in spite of a million things. Some days, I’m one of them. More often, I am overwhelmed, dazzled even, by these church people who faithfully work to reflect the Christ they serve. I am humbled by the gift of trust they gave to me, and I hope to share with others. It is my deepest hope that, with God’s help, the lasting memory will be all the times the church got it right.

by Jim Cunningham

Through science I have come to realize that I have been blessed for 13.8 billion years… now that is a lot of blessings. If any one of multi-trillions of events did not happen just so… I would not be here today. All of it gift, miracle, and blessing!.

Through science, a research geneticist taught me that it is likely that 78% of human egg/sperm unions do not result in a live birth. Most fail in the first days to six weeks. So when I was conceived my chances of being born alive was 22%. I call that a miracle, a blessing, a gift!

Science has taught me that I began as one cell and after a multitude of cell divisions and specializations, I am born with 1-5 trillion cells and as an adult have some 25 to 100 trillion cells. Wow. Miracle! Blessing! Gift!

Each day also a gift and blessing. Each breath and heartbeat a gift and blessing! If I were to go to bed and count all my blessings… well, I would never get any sleep.

I remember hearing a story where a student asks his Rabbi, “What is the key to a spiritually healthy life?” It happened to be the Rabbi’s day of silence but not wanting to disappoint the student, the Rabbi wrote on a piece of paper one word… “Awareness.” The student looked puzzled and asked, “What do you mean by ‘awareness.?’” The Rabbi again wrote one word on a paper, “Awareness!” The student said, “I do not understand? Please, I really need to know what you mean by ‘awareness.’ !” Finally, the frustrated Rabbi breaks silence, “When I say ‘awareness’ I mean awareness, awareness, awareness!!!”

I pray that I may never lose my awareness of 13.8 billion years of gift and blessing and miracles!… that I may never lose my awareness of the gift and blessing and miracle I am… that I may be keenly aware of the vast number of gifts and blessings and miracles I am privileged to enjoy every day of my life. I awake, aware that just waking to another day is a gift and blessing and miracle followed by millions more before I lie down to sleep… each breath, every heartbeat, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, speaking, ability to use my hands, to walk, to think, to learn, to read, to eat, clothes, food, water, a roof over my head, heat, air conditioning, medicine, a bed, pets, rocks, trees, gardens, air, diverse humans who share the journey… even pain and suffering, and oh so much more!

Awareness. Awareness. Awareness.

Thank you to the source of it all… a source I experience and call GOD.

by Rae Strozzo

A dear friend in Berkeley sent me Facebook message one evening saying that she felt called to go stand with the water protectors at Standing Rock and did I want to go with her.  “No” was never really going to be the answer, but I definitely had to think about what I was agreeing to do. After several meetings and a week of prep – including research, prayer, meditation, meetings, and just trying to discern my role and reason for showing up there, I left on election night with a group of six friends to go to the Ocheti Sakowin Camp on the bank of the Cannonball River just outside of the Lakota Sioux Reservation at Standing Rock.

I have a deck of cards on my altar that a friend  in Georgia gave me thirteen or fourteen years ago. It has images of the Buddha from all over the world and from many lineages. I pulled a card from that deck for our trip. I pulled the only card that has no image. It has this word, sammasati, which means remember. This is a portion of the dharma that goes with this word:  “The last words of Gautam Buddha were sammasati-“remember.” In a single word, everything significant is contained. Sammasati. Remember what is your inner space. Just remember. . . Just for a few seconds sit down with closed eyes to remember, to make a note of where you have been, to what depth you have been able to reach:  what is the taste of silence, peace?  What is the taste of disappearing into the ultimate?  Look in. And whenever you have time, you know the path.  Just go again and again to the inner space so that your fear of disappearing is dropped, and you start remembering the forgotten language.  Sammasati. . .

There is an exercise in Buddhist meditation practice where two people sit together. One person simply asks the same question over and over and the other answers it each time it is asked.  The dyad is designed to pull the questioner into deep listening and compassion. The person answering is exploring more deeply the complexity of feeling and experiences of what is being asked. Standing Rock felt to me like the call of this questioner, and I was the one trying to answer.  I was asked over and over during the prep to go and during my time in Standing Rock – why are you going?  Why are you going? Why are you here? What is your intention? Why are you here? What are you doing here? The answers are an ever-evolving response.

Why are you going?
A friend asked me to go.
To help.  NOPE! To be in solidarity. To see my settler language and to try and decolonize my responses.
To lament.
To be with other queer people.
To show up.
Why are you going?
To learn.
To pray.
To meditate.
To ride in a van for sixty plus hours with people I love.
To NOT get arrested.
To make phone calls, send texts, to check Facebook.

Why are you here?
To hear the wind.
To follow the water.
To sit on the ground.
To smell like campfire smoke.
To pound in tent stakes.
To hold my breath.
To wait.
Why are you here?
To chop onions.
To paint banners.
To connect to bosses, partners, friends, chosen family, moms
To meditate.
To be in ceremony.
Why are you here?
To talk to a Buddhist monk at the sacred fire.
To stand for the first half of the pipe ceremony with the women and for the second half with the men.
To hear the elders call for Two Spirit Nation to take their place at the water ceremony.
To smell sage.
To cry.
To have no words.
To watch the supermoon outshine the floodlights over the pipeline
Why are you here?
To not know.
To not understand.
To hold stories and songs in my heart that were a gift to hear and to know that they are NOT my gift to give.
Why are you here?
To learn that Two Spirit is not just a beautiful way of saying LBGTQ.
To NOT see burned out cars, barricades, or militarized police.
To see community.
To see peace  – not to bring it.
To join prayers – not to create them.
To live into story – not narrate it.
To learn from elders and follow their lead.

Zubian, a two spirit elder, said to me:  “ I have been transformed before. Others are here for that transformation.”  He was speaking of a young woman who had pulled him out of the way of a speeding truck meant to hit him and stop him from praying at a direct action. But it was clear he meant more than just her.

Why did you go?
To follow the water.
To sleep on the ground, listening to the calls of prayer, and drums, and drones, and helicopters, and wind, and flags.
Why did you go?
To shout Mni Wiconi and mean it.
Why did you go?
To protect.
To have hope.
To be surprised.
To remember.

Image credits: Rae Strozzo.