the ebb and flow of a tune in my life...

Once upon a time I lived in a sweet, second story walk-up apartment in University City, MO. My living room window faced Delmar Blvd. Half a block away was Our Daily Bread - an early veggie health food restaurant - that baked fresh bread three times a week and at the intersection of Euclid and Delmar was Left Bank Books (check them out @ http://www.left-bank.com/about-us.) For a few years I worked at ODB, starting out as a night dishwasher, moving on to cook and eventually became the night manager (while I was taking classes during the day.) It was a wildass neighborhood back in the day with the Blueberry Hill bar just getting established and an art film house offering James Joyce movies to the congnescenti. Our Daily Bread introduced me to the joy of avocados, potato latkes, cheese/rice casserole as well as the beauty of hippie waitresses, street culture and figuring out how to cook six different entrees at the same time so that they could be served together. It was a magical, mystery tour for me for sure.

Before my brother Phil moved in with me, I lived alone. There were precious few extra dollars each week, so I regularly haunted the University City public library on my days off. I would read my way through their periodicals each week while exploring new 331/3 records. One of my discoveries was the jazz/world music band Oregon. I especially loved their Distant Hills disc - and the opening cut, "Aurora," in particular.

Even today this composition informs my sense of the ebb and flow of liturgy, most of life and the arch of any musical performance I have the chance to shape. The mixture of East and West, the rising and falling intensity of the melody with the bass and tabula, the piano and drum dialogue all speak to me of what it means to share, cooperate, experiment, improvise and trust one another not only on the bandstand but in real life. In community. In love and family, too.

Tomorrow we set out for a few days in the Eastern Townships of Québec: there is an art show in town for the weekend so we will wander and watch, listen to what's guiding people's conversations and settle into the slower pace of love we both cherish. Then, on Sunday, Montréal and a neighborhood we've never stayed in:  Mile End. I celebrated my 60th birthday at the Rumi
Restaurant in Mile End (our kids chipped in and it was both the eatery's first gift certificate AND the first time Anglophones celebrated a 60th birthday with them!) I love that place - and love the vibe of the hood. So as I went about the tasks of getting ready - changing the oil on the Subaru, vacuuming the crap out of the car, shopping for last minute details and setting out my duffle bag and clothes - still, after all these years I still hear the strains of Oregon playing this tune n the back of my memory. Today, as I engaged the world with this song in my soundtrack I couldn't help but think: what a joy to be alive.

wandering in the mystery of the cross...

One of the joys of this site is that it allows me space to give shape and form to tenderness.  I read a quote from Henri Nouwen yesterday that captured the soul of my personal and professional life.

"My whole life I have been surrounded by well-meaning encouragement to go 'higher up,' and the most-used argument was: 'You can do so much good there, for so many people.' But these voices calling me to upward mobility are completely absent from the Gospel. Jesus says: 'Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life (John 12:25). He also says: 'Unless you become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 18:3). Finally he says: "You know that among the gentiles the rulers lord it over them, and great men make their authority felt; among you this is not to happen. No, anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matt 20:25-28).This is the way of downward mobility, the descending way of Jesus. It is the way toward the poor, the suffering, the marginal, the prisoners, the refugees, the lonely, the hungry, the dying, the tortured, the homeless - toward all who ask for compassion. What do they have to offer? Not success, popularity, or power, but the joy and peace of the children of God."

Clearly I have been on a downward trajectory since melting down in Tucson and then rebuilding and revisioning my life and ministry. As Richard Rohr writes: we must fall upwards to find true life in the second half of this journey. Indeed, we must fall upwards at regular intervals if we are to grow into a gospel life shaped by humility and loving sacrifice. Nouwen once wrote of the "Paschal Mystery" - a theological touchstone for many Roman Catholics but a notion liberal, middle class Protestants have never seriously wrestled with. At its core is the foolishness of the Cross - and it is the Cross that has called me downward over the past 15 years. So much so that I really no longer have a calling to "serve" the church in any of the ways that are recognizable. Rather, now is a time for me to simply be, sharing love when I can and encouraging tenderness in all its manifestations.  This gets it as good as it can be got...

task and reward...

As I shift deeper into flâneur mode in anticipation of our time in Québec, I have started to use a new prayer/planner resource:  Sacred ORDINARY Days. My inner practices have been feeling stale - and sometimes neglected - of late. So, after spending the past two days writing liturgies for the Season of Creation, October and November worship as well as Advent - and finding renewed energy and wisdom in the recent edition of Iona's A Wee Worship Book - it was clear I needed assistance.  

One of the delightful tools within this liturgical planner is the invitation to note both the projects to be accomplished and the rest/reward I will add to the rhythm of each day.  What a brilliant albeit ordinary way of deepening my Sabbath commitments:  work AND rest in each day - project AND reward. There are also prayers at the header, Psalms for use throughout the day, and blank space to record ideas, actions or insights. In true flâneur spirit, I look forward to wandering through this text and letting it suggest unexpected ways to rest in the Lord.

This poem by Wendell Berry gets close to my ripening spirituality. It comes from his Sabbath Poems in 1979. More and more, a balance such as this speaks to my heart - and calls me to leave.

The bell calls in the town
Where forebears cleared the shaded land
And brought high daylight down
To shine on field and trodden road.
I hear, but understand
Contrarily, and walk into the woods.
I leave labor and load,
Take up a different story.
I keep an inventory
Of wonders and of uncommercial goods.

I climb up through the field
That my long labor has kept clear.
Projects, plans unfulfilled
Waylay and snatch at me like briars,
For there is no rest here
Where ceaseless effort seems to be required,
Yet fails, and spirit tires
With flesh, because failure
And weariness are sure
In all that mortal wishing has inspired.

I go in pilgrimage
Across an old fenced boundary
To wildness without age
Where, in their long dominion,
The trees have been left free.
They call the soil here “Eden”; slants and steeps
Hard to stand straight upon
Even without a burden.
No more a perfect garden,
There’s an immortal memory that it keeps.

I leave work’s daily rule
And come here to this restful place
Where music stirs the pool
And from high stations of the air
Fall notes of wordless grace,
Strewn remnants of the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
And I remember here
A tale of evil twined
With good, serpent and vine
And innocence of evil’s stratagem.

I let that go a while,
For it is hopeless to correct
By generations’ toil,
And I let go my hopes and plans
That no toil can perfect.
There is no vision here but what is seen:
White bloom nothing explains.

But a mute blessedness
Exceeding all distress,
The fresh light stained a hundred shades of green.

Uproar of wheel and fire
That has contained us like a cell
Opens and lets us hear
A stillness longer than all time
Where leaf and song fulfill
The passing light, pass with the light, return,
Renewed, as in rhyme.
This is no human vision
Subject to our revision;
God’s eye holds every leaf as light is worn.

Ruin is in place here:
The dead leaves rotting on the ground,
The live leaves in the air
Are gathered in a single dance
That turns them round and round.
The fox cub trots his almost pathless path
As silent as his absence.
These passings resurrect
A joy without defect,
The life that steps and sings in ways of death.

i'd rather be a freak than a clone...

There is a pile of books on my bedside table - and I am working on the sequel to Chocolat by Joanne Harris - The Girl with No Shadow. I was apprehensive at first: I enjoy her works and was particularly taken by Five Quarters of the Orange and Holy Fools. I have also led Lenten studies using clips from the film, Chocolat, to help break open the heart of feasting and fasting in the spirit of love. Still, it took me a while to get into the groove. Some sequels are bet left uncreated, but not so here: I don't know where it is going to wind up, but I am in for the ride.

My favorite quote thus far comes from Anouk, the young, mystical child of Chocolat who is now a moody, insightful t'ween, who proclaims: "I'd rather be a freak than a clone!" Ain't that the truth on so many levels?!?

Today I had the second in a series of long conversations with a young woman who has been dancing with a calling to ministry all of her life. Sometimes she has been enchanted by a love that has cherished her since before there was time. At other times, this love has felt frightening or even freakish. But now, after more than a decade of avoiding this song, she has returned to sing it and tells me it feels like coming home. She, too, would rather be a freak than a clone - especially when it comes to heeding the Spirit. I couldn't help but recall the chorus of "Softly and Tenderly" that whispers:  Come home, come home, ye who are weary, come home.  Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling O sinner, come home. 

It is no accident, I think, that she first found a safe place beyond judgment among us by singing in our band and choir. She tells me that for all the years of work she has done after she seminary and avoiding her calling, she has always spoken of herself a minister:  "Others call me the group mother, but I am really their chaplain."  Now she is owning the invitation to go deeper and I am honored to be a companion with her on this part of the journey towards ordination.

The poet, Michael Blumenthal, also struggled through years of unsatisfying jobs that always ended up in poems.  In "A Man Lost by A River," he brings this strange, healing quest for holiness into focus for me in a satisfying way.

There is a voice inside the body.

There is a voice and a music,
a throbbing, four-chambered pear
that wants to be heard, that sits
alone by the river with its mandolin
and its torn coat, and sings
for whomever will listen
a song that no one wants to hear.

But sometimes, lost,
on his way to somewhere significant,
a man in a long coat, carrying
a briefcase, wanders into the forest.

He hears the voice and the mandolin,
he sees the thrush and the dandelion,
and he feels the mist rise over the river.

And his life is never the same,
for having been lost –
for having strayed from the path of his routine,
for no good reason.

Today I give thanks for making certain that my schedule was open enough so that we could get lost by this river together for a while. It is better to be a freak than a clone, indeed!

à tout à l'heure

In four days we will return to the Eastern Townships of Canada - and

then Montréal - places I cherish. Not only will they be filled with wandering slowly through new streets and into unknown cafes and brasseries, but we'll have a chance to meet people on their terms. 

This summer I have tried to do some of this while at work, building gaps into my calendar for unfocused wandering downtown or even celebrating being interrupted by unexpected guests. To make this real, I have consciously practiced abandoning most of my former administrative work. Truth be told, letting it go is the only way I can stay. I have neither the stomach nor heart for church administration in this current incarnation of ministry. Not that I am well-practiced forsaking it yet. I still sometimes wake-up in the early morning hours feeling anxious. Unhinged and irresponsible, too.  But, gradually, as I practice fasting from fretting, I am becoming more at home in my own skin. I rather enjoy living as the congregation's spiritual friend. Not their pastor, ok? Just Frère Jacques, Friar James, who doesn't have to solve any personnel problems. I am even starting to refuse to resolve calendar conflicts and ignore the budget deficits, as well. 

I suspect this is the only way a 21st century flâneur can survive in ministry. My goal, you see, involves quietly and humbly serving this small community as one who loves them: not a chaplain for the privileged nor a rent-a-minister for the elite; certainly not a pauper's cheap excuse for a therapist nor an administrative answer man either. I've been there and done all that an more - and it sucks the soul out of a tender heart. No, for as long as I continue working in this parish, my focus is to be fully present to real people every day, vigorously bringing beauty, insight and awe to worship, holding them all in prayer, and then trusting God to be God. Everything else - programming, stewardship, staffing and administration - is off my plate - and that's as it should be.

I read earlier today that the reason so many pastors are burned-out is because their congregations expect to be entertained during worship. That is probably true in our shallow and confused culture. But my hunch is that burn-out comes to pastors of small churches when our love for God and God's people gets squeezed out of existence through the endless demands of useless administrative tasks and the presence of cruel but petty tyrants in the church. This denigrates the call of the Spirit to our hearts and reduces most of us to mildly effective bean-counters with no connection to our love of Jesus whatsoever. The late Henri Nouwen once summarized our calling like this:

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.

When I wander Montréal with Dianne I remember who I really am in God's eyes. When I sleep and share love, when I feast with strangers and laugh or weep over the ups and downs of each day, I become alive in the beautiful simplicity of creation.  Over the next three days I have made certain that each is filled with open space for whomever I might need to see. And then: au revoir mes amis - à tout à l'heure!

rediscovering reverence...

It has been almost two weeks since I have had the space and focus to write here - much has been taking place in the Lumsden realm of late - but now that is done. Our various visits from beloved family members is finished, the informal committal "ceremony" of my parents' cremains is complete, and most of my liturgical planning for the next quarter is written and in the can. Soon, Di and I will be taking it slow in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, CA for a few days. There is a weekend art exhibit we're eager to attend in Bromont -"Bromont en Art" - that will be engaging por deux flâneurs(check it out: http://www.bromontenart.ca/) Then we will quietly slip into Montréal for a week of wandering, feasting and honoring the gift of love we share. My soul is ready to shift gears.

Two broad concerns have been swimming around my head and heart as August

incrementally shifts towards autumn: the recovery of reverence as an antidote to cynicism, and, the place humility in our humor plays as a part of this subversive spirituality. For the past five years, I have been consciously aware of how awe has been squeezed out of our language, worship, politics, music, art and everyday existence. Not only are most of us too busy to smell the proverbial roses, we don't even see them - except to curse their thorns when they hurt us. Dianne and I were wandering around Lac Brome Books one afternoon when I found myself drawn again and again to Ralph Heintzman's, Rediscovering Reverence: the Meaning of Faith in a Secular World. Perhaps you've had the experience of reading a snippet of a text, putting it back only to be lured for a second - and third - reading? Such is the subtle call of the Spirit and most of the time these days I try to pay attention to this summons. So, I coughed up the $30 dollars and haven't regretted it once.

Heintzman teaches at the university level in Ottawa, CA and states his case directly:

Reverence conveys a human attitude of respect and deference for something larger or higher in priority than our own individual selves; something that commands our admiration and our loyalty, and may imply obligations or duties on our part. In a gesture of reverence, either physical or mental, we acknowledge superior worth, our relationship with it, and our potential obligations toward it. "Reverence results from humility" as a Jewish text puts it. (p. 18)

He goes on to assert that awe is the emotion "we feel when we encounter someone or something that transcends our normal life, and embodies qualities of excellence, or beauty, or some kind of power or authority that (awakens) our admiration." Reverence is a commitment - a virtue - and awe a feeling. In much of Western culture in the 21st century, both have been banished by an addiction to busyness and the illusion of control. Indeed, we no longer have awe within our vocabulary and cannot imagine committing to a practice without an immediate physical or financial pay-off.

...  the hunger for reverence sometimes expresses itself in surprising

ways (in our era.) Starved for other ways to express itself, reverence re-emerges in new forms that can risk flipping over into a caricature of the real thing. The rock concert, the most pit, and the rave, for example, are all expressions of a hungry search for connectedness and ritual that are not satisfied in other ways...Sometimes this unsatisfying hunger goes beyond caricature to express itself in radically evil forms, as in the Nuremberg rallies of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (or, I might add, the recent political extravaganzas of Donald Trump.) As the American classical scholar, Paul Woodruff, remarks: what modern societies have lost is not reverence itself, but rather the idea of reverence... Our public language, the language of self-assertion, excludes any reference to that which connects us to something greater... This makes i hard for us consciously to nourish or develop the virtues of reverence so essential to the kind of society any of us would want to live in. 

This reality confronted me in an unexpected way while gathering with my loved ones last weekend. It was an emotional time: laying my parents to rest in a place we have all loved for decades. Each of us, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, shared a complicated love for them that was unique. Somehow we never claimed the time to speak of this complicated, real, uplifting and at times troubling shared love.  Yes, we were all gathered in the same place, to be sure we toasted their memory with their favorite Jim Beam (yuck) and we set their ashes into the lake. Later, we sang songs together as a family - passing the torch, if you will, to my generation - but the significance of this generational shift remained implicit, maybe even masked. We all felt something but never were able as a group to give these feelings expression.

That troubled me - and not just for my small and cherished family. It drove home for me what this absence of reverence and awe might mean in this culture. Put bluntly, it suggests a confusion about how to go deeply into the mysteries of real life including pain and grief. Without an awareness that we need guidance in listening to the wisdom of life's mysteries, new insights cannot be born from within these complex feelings. Our inner and outer transformation, therefore, remains frozen within our feelings. Without rituals and metaphors to lead us into and then beyond our emotions, we struggle to

make sense of these truths in private and truncate our transformation towards greater tenderness and compassion.  From my perspective, without conscious ways of intentionally expressing our feelings - and giving them meaning beyond the moment - it is extremely difficult to move into an adult spirituality. As my mentors in AA like to say: if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. In my Christian tradition St. Paul urges us to learn to trust and see even as through a glass darkly:  "When I was a child, I spoke like a child and thought like a child. But as I matured, I put childish ways of being away... for now we see as through a glass darkly; later we shall see face to face... faith, hope and love remain and the greatest of them is love."

There was tremendous love in our family gathering. It was palpable. And for that love I continue to return thanks. And... we each seemed to wrestle with ways of expressing that love in this time out loud. Some of it took place in private, I know, because we shared it as I huddled with my sisters alone, with Di each night and then later with my brother and sister-in-law at breakfast. My sister and I found ourselves embracing on the peer in tears as our parents' cremains drifted to their final in the lake. We each perhaps shared our own silent prayers of gratitude and farewell as we tossed flowers upon the water, too. And still I couldn't help but sense that even during the toast, a common moment of silence and an honest articulation of what this moment meant would have helped me go deeper. Maybe that's because I am now the unofficial patriarch (not that there is anything beyond chronology in this for most but it is staggering for me.) I'm not interested in sentimentality. And God knows I don't want a sermon from anyone - myself included. Rather I am looking for a clear way of marking of this moment in community with my loved ones.  These words get close to giving my feelings - and change of heart - some shape and form.

To those who came before me in seasons long ago
To those who are the loved-ones that I have yet to know
To those whose noble names I bear,
whose light within me burns
To them in gratitude shall my heart be turned

To those whose lives of courage prepared the way for me
Whose works became my heritage,
whose harvest I may reap
Who left for me a legacy that I have yet to earn
To them in gratitude shall my heart be turned

To those who came before me in days and years long past
To those who are the family that I shall know at last
To those who seek the blessings
of the truth that I have learned
To them in gratitude shall my heart be turned
(Sally Deford)

'round midnight...

For two whole days we mostly putzed: slept, read, talked to one another, watched French movies on Amazon and ate pasta with herbs from our garden. I practiced a few tunes on upright bass, too so that I am ready for tomorrow morning. But mostly we putzed - and as best I can tell from 48 hours of putzing, I need to do more of it! Apparently twelve hours of sleep each night agrees with me. So does talking and reading until way too late, sipping tea for breakfast and then pulling a few weeds.

Mary Oliver captures this reality in my life with her poem: "The Man Who Has Many Answers."

The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.

While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.

Tomorrow at worship, we will mostly make music - to give shape and form to the questions - and the putzing. Such is the season, yes?