living into the slower charism of summer...

After five months back at leading worship - and sharing pastoral care and support - it feels a bit off to be at home this morning. Not bad, mind you, as I've been resting profoundly. Just off a bit. One of the lovely traditions in Palmer is to truly take a break during the summer and share worship with two other congregations: the Universalists and Baptists. This gives me six Sunday's off before I take over the shared worship commitments during the later part of August. I will still do some pastoral care throughout the summer - some planning and meetings, too - but no Sunday morning commitments for 42 days!

The next three weeks will be full: some solitude and quiet in North Country for a week, a quick trip to Tucson for an important memorial service, a weekend in MD for our nephew's wedding, then almost a week with my brother and sister-in-law from San Francisco. This week is chock full of engagements: pastoral work tomorrow, rehearsal and playing Methuselah on Tuesday, packing the car to bring Lucie with us on vacation, and departure on Wednesday. We celebrated Di's birthday yesterday. We had hoped to pick strawberries together but the weather did not cooperate so we did the next best thing: hung out at Matt's Bookstore in Lenox. Later we feasted together and shared a killer chocolate fudge cake. 

I quickly forget both how much a cherish worship, and, how easy it is to get out of
the habit. I delight in this time off even as I miss being with the faith community. I had the same experience last year at this time when my "bridge ministry" in Williamstown came to a close. So, from the solitude of my garden, I offer up these words from the SALT Project and Mary Oliver as we all enter the mystery of this season.

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is

when something
different crosses
the threshold — the uncles
mutter together,

the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
like the wind over the water —
sometimes, for days,
you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was —
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer sea.

”Maybe” is one of Mary Oliver’s theological classics, just in time for this coming Sunday’s lectionary readings, which include Mark’s story of Jesus calming the storm (Mark 4:35-41; check out SALT’s commentary here). In a sense, Oliver picks up where the story leaves off: the sea is silky and sorry, but soon enough, the people get restless. Something different has crossed the threshold. We may plead for deliverance, but the truth is we’re often attached — more than attached — to the way things are, the devil we know, and wary when things threaten to change.

In this way, Oliver helps us understand Mark’s story, and its aftermath, on a deeper level. “Everybody was saved that night,” yes, the disciples and also the “other boats” Mark says were with them — but at its core, the episode is more unsettling than settling. The disciples are astonished, and also unnerved. “Who then is this?” they ask. Even they, who’ve left everything to follow him, who presumably believe him to be someone extraordinary, the Messiah, the deliverer — even they are perplexed, eyes widening. Who then is this?

The storm has gone silent. But now they’re left with him, and with his tender, luminous demands.

A thousand times more frightening / than the killer sea.