song, silence, solidarity, and celebration...

NOTE: This Advent Di and I are cooking our way through two extraordinary cook books: Monastery Soups and A Monastery's Kitchen. We both tends towards life as solitaries - she even more than me - so we wanted to take another step into this charism. Throughout Advent I'm making a few monastic soups each night for our evening meal. Here's tonight's blessing supposedly born of St. Anthony's life in the desert as the first monastic.

We'll do the same from Epiphany to Lent with both the Gaza and Jerusalem cookbooks. And we're exploring a way to give our days even more form with a personal "rule of life." What follows is part of my reflection on what this might mean as it ripens.

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One of the blessings I experience during the "gratitude getaway" retreats we've been taking during the Thanksgiving holidays in the USA is an extended encounter with silence. Except for the rushing river across the road - and the CDs we might play during dinner - the only other sounds are the ones we create with music or conversation. Not that our ordinary days are all that noisy, mind you. We are, as you know, introverted monastic wannabes with a commitment to simplicity and solitude. Still, the traffic, phone, TV, dog, various musical rehearsals, and periodic guests all add a layer of sound that's noticeably missing right now. This poem by the incomparable Billy Collins evokes what this sojourn into silence feels like to me.

I pick an orange from a wicker basket

and place it on the table

to represent the sun.

Then down at the other end

a blue and white marble

becomes the earth

and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,

open a bottle of wine,

then I sit in a ladder-back chair,

a benevolent god presiding

over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing

a homemade canticle of thanks

for this perfect little arrangement,

for not making the earth too hot or cold

not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees

and the owl become possible,

not to mention the rolling wave,

the play of clouds, geese in flight,

and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again

and give thanks for the trout,

the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,

as sun and earth and moon

circle one another in their impeccable orbits

and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

Some may know that after a more or less five year hiatus from active local church ministry, I'm currently exploring a NEW call: not a BACKWARDS into what once was- which was a satisfying, complicated, challenging, rewarding, blessed, and often frustrating 40 year run - but rather FORWARDS into serving, sharing, and celebrating the counter-cultural love of Jesus as a "transitional" pastor. I'm discerning what it might mean for me to journey with a faith community more as a partner and spiritual friend than a top-down "leader" for congregations trying discern their own purpose for being in this semi-post-pandemic world. Small parishes often find themselves bewildered and/or perishing once their formally clear mission either changes or collapses. 

In a way that is both prescient and practical, ecumenical judicatories are now striving to equip congregations with pastoral care specifically designed for a mutual search into what the Spirit may be saying about what takes place next. The current wisdom is no longer hierarchical, but horizontal: a partnership of prayer and practice crafted to empower churches in creative ways to be the Body of Christ for the 21st century. I, too have been exploring such horizontal commitments over the past 20+ years - a way of doing ministry NOT as Rev. Fixit - but more like a contemplative partner walking and listening for the still small voice of the sacred within the tempest with a congregation. I like how Carrie Newcomer wrote about this recently:

Practicing care and the protective nurture of the heart is to lean into what is still beautiful as I find it each day. Living well with gratitude and joy is an act of resistance, a claiming and affirmation of all that is still good and still true. Remembering what we love and what still shines is a counter-balance to a culture of endless doom scrolling. Gratitude lifts up what inspires and sustains us even in troubled times. Time with trusted community is a sanctuary of rest that rebuilds and renews our courage and hope. Laughter is a balm that soothes what hurts and heals what is aching. So, in this season of Thanksgiving I am leaning into beauty, holding close what I love. I am sensing the threads of Mercy that still hold the world together, grateful for the golden woods, for the song I started this morning, for a walk with a good friend, for an afternoon planting garlic at Marcia’s farm. I am grateful to be gathering with family, for the good health of many I love and for hopeful medical treatment for those navigating illness. I am grateful for every soft and tender thing, for the god of small birds who watches over them as they fly and takes them into it’s endless heart when they fall.

Over the past fifty years, my commitment to loving the Body of Christ has shifted: once, I was all about theology and an anthropocentric sense of Scripture. I am, after all, a metro-sexual, white, bourgeois intellectual of the Western Reformed tradition where religion has fundamentally been about right doctrine. Abstract ideas and complex creeds constructed in and for the mind. And while I continue to ponder life with intellectual curiosity, my faith is now more about right practice and testimonies of faith rather than tests and creeds. Some call this orthopraxis not orthodoxy. It's a way of trusting and loving God grounded in relationships with all living beings and matter. A spirituality of tenderness, compassion, incarnation, and mystery rather than doctrine, exclusivity, hierarchy, and dogmatic certainties. This path yearns to make peace with the ambiguities of life and love and befriend both enigma and paradox. To that end, my renewed encounter with so-called organized religion (there's a misnomer if there ever was one) is an open-hearted spirituality where three polarities embrace, dance, and whisper clues to any paying attention about some of the places that the divine is now beckoning to us.

Song and Silence: music cuts through so many divisions to communicate directly

with the heart and soul; silence as a partner to song evokes not only space to "be" but also to notice the songs within as well as the songs all around. Nearly every day I discover songs of joy. But more often than not, they are at least as many laments rising up, too. I find that praying with song and silence is part of my practice of leaving behind binary thinking and moving towards holistic wisdom.

Celebration and Solace: St. Paul, mostly likely imprisoned, wrote: Rejoice, rejoice, and again I say rejoice. My organic disposition is towards the light: I may inwardly feel anxiety, but outwardly I am an ally of possibilities. Indeed, I was once a loving monastic associate of the Community of Celebration! As one drawn to the peripheries of life by my conscience, however, I've learned to love and sing the blues, too. There's some of my historic Celtic roots showing up as those songs of sorrow are saturated in a drone note that tears my heart to shreds. To live a life of celebration that holds solace close at hand is, again, a commitment to both paradox and non-binary prayer. 

Solidarity and Solitude: I can STILL sing "Solidarity Forever" (at least most of it) in both Spanish and English. Same with "We Shall Overcome." I learned them - and countless other union and organizing songs - while sojourning with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers movement of the 60s and 70s. In fact, I learned the Wobblies' (International Workers of the Word) words to songs that once were part of the Methodist religious revival in the USA like "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" was really, "Hallelujah Thine the Glory." As a young, democratic socialist doing union organizing, how was I to know?. Singing together, struggling for equity and compassion together in the company of strangers who soon become sisters and brother, walking, talking, listening to and learning from others is soul food for me. And then, with regularity, I must step away from the fray to let the richness, the grief, the love, insights, and questions sink into my soul through intentional solitude. Solitude and silence are restorative.

Now: how to frame this in a gentle "rule" is still to be discovered. For now, I am making soup, creating a welcome basket for our new neighbors, playing more and more songs I love with Dave and "Double Dropped D" and seeing if the Spirit IS leading me back int a transitional ministry.