Changing Directions

This morning I opened my door expecting a fresh breeze.  Instead it felt a little muggier than usual.  Still, it was time to walk my dog, so we went for a walk.

It is fall here, so they say.  It is hard for me to notice the signs, because where I am from, the leaves are turning and the evenings have become chilly.  I am used to these signs, even when I grumble that fall arrives too soon and foretells a deep and dark and long snowy winter.

Here, the signs are subtler.  I can still wear my shorts, if I want to, even though it is fall.

I am not sure I want to, some days.

So, this morning, I took my dog out for a walk.  It was warm and still and the dog (who is a good sport, even at 10 years old) bounced around and sniffed everything.

And then, we turned around.

It was not my idea, actually, this 'turning around' thing, but I went along with it, and when I did, I felt it right away.

It was a breeze:  a lovely cool breeze that I never noticed until we turned, until we changed directions.  It was always there, but we needed to change directions to find it, to feel it.

The breeze was a small thing, but that is the way it is sometimes.  There are big changes, like turning around, and there are small things, like feeling the breeze, the wind of the Holy Spirit, who has always been with us, although we don't often notice.

I was at a conference most of last week.  The geography was so much different than here, and so much different than my home state as well.  We were up in the mountains, where the air is thin and you have to take deep gulps and slow down, where you can feel your heart beat and see the beauty all around.

We were talking about worship and faith formation, about the children in our churches, but not just the children.  We were talking about how to faithfully minister to all ages in a way that only the church can do:  by being together, by using the gifts of all the generations.   This does not sound like a big thing, but it represents a change in direction for us.  The church has gotten into the habit of segregating people by age much of the time.  Even in worship.  So we are thinking about how we might really honor the gifts and needs of all generations in worship, use our imaginations and our dreams, our bodies and our souls.

Today, I felt a breeze, a small reminder that the seasons change, that the Holy Spirit is among, and within us, to keep me on my course, changing my direction.

Holy Week

On one level, it is an ordinary week.  I get up, I have breakfast, I take the dog for a walk.  I go to church, and write a lot of sermons and plan a lot of worship, more worship than for an ordinary week.  The worship also takes a fair amount more choreography than ordinary worship.  So, it's not an ordinary week.

But I'll be honest.  In some ways, it does feel like an ordinary week.  I know this is Holy Week, which will be busy, and will be consumed with remembering and worshipping and singing and praying.  The part of me which would have made a good nun would like to think of this week with more intentional and disciplined times to stop and think about the week, and all that happened, how Jesus is getting near the cross.

What did he do today, I wonder?  It is Wednesday in Holy Week.  Tomorrow evening he will be celebrating the Passover with his disciples, one of whom will betray him.  Finally he will be alone.  But what did he do today, Wednesday in Holy Week?

He is in Jerusalem with his disciples, getting ready, I suppose.  He is telling those parables, the ones that make people follow him, or stop following him, the ones that make some people hungry and other people angry.  He is healing people, and getting ready for the Passover.

It is Holy Week.  And it is an ordinary week.  I need to clean the house, because we are having company for Easter.  But really, it is an ordinary week (and the house will not be clean enough by Easter either, but will still look like our house).

Somehow, for a flash and a moment I realize that the task is not to make this week special, not to wonder what Jesus was doing today and pay better attention and pray more, but it is to know that these ordinary moments are holy, that talking to the clerk at the grocery store is holy, that sweeping the floor and dragging the trash cans back from the street is holy, that doing my mother-in-law's laundry is holy.

God is in it, all of life.  In the flesh.

And it matters, every single bit of it.

Whose Lenten Journey is it, Anyway?

There's nothing like being told that a particular metaphor is tired and worn to make you suddenly realize that you see it everywhere.  Particularly in songs.

So on the day before Ash Wednesday I was flipping through the hymnal, looking for something to sing at our Wednesday Matins service.  First there was "Let us Ever Walk With Jesus."  Then "I Want Jesus to Walk with Me."  Then I couldn't help thinking about "Go to Dark Gethsemane" and "Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley" (though that particular one is not in our hymnal).  We sang "Amazing Grace" at a funeral on Saturday, and I remembered the verse that ends "And grace will lead me home."

A colleague of mine recently wrote an article that admonished us pastors that we have over-used the metaphor "Lenten Journey", and it is time for a break.  A long break, perhaps.  It is time to consider some other metaphors:  struggle, training, self-examination; light and darkness, water and wilderness.

But there's nothing like being told a particular metaphor is tired and worn to make you suddenly realize that you see it everywhere.  In songs, for example.  And not just hymns.  There are all those great train songs, like "City of New Orleans", and there are those World War II songs, like "I'll Be Seeing You" (okay, it's not really about a journey, but it is, in a way -- the journey home, whether real or in a dream).  And then there are those immigrant songs -- my sister and I used to sing an old Swedish song that my grandmother loved, called "Greet Those at Home."  It was supposed to be sung by a sailor standing on the deck of a ship, leaving for the promised land, America.

There's a journey for you.

Then there are the sub-sets of the 'journey' metaphor:   getting lost, for example.  What is it like to journey, and to get lost?  What is it like to read the maps and look up and realize you are in an unknown country where you don't speak the language and you don't know the customs?   Another subset of journey metaphors is deciding what to pack and what not to pack.  What do you carry?  What do you leave behind?  One of the things I actually like about traveling is deciding what is most important, what I really need.  It's not the journey metaphor exactly, but it is.

I'm not actually convinced that 'Lenten journey' is so tired.  But what it needs is less generality -- more specificity.  The Lenten journey needs to be the 296 footpath from Duluth to the Canadian border, or perhaps the road trips with the kids, where they whined in the back seat and said "We'll NEVER make it to Grandmas."  The Lenten journey needs to be the one where you mis-read the map, or the GPS told you the wrong thing, and you found yourself out in the middle of nowhere.  Or the Lenten journey needs to be the journey where you could only take ten things.  Or the Lenten journey is the journey by boat to an unknown country, the promised land, the one our parents or grandparents took, but we don't know anything about.

There's nothing like being told that a particular metaphor is tired and worn to make you start seeing it everywhere:  on walks with the dog, where we just go to the end of the block and back home, on trips to the hospital, to hold people's hands and pray, in the wilderness, on the boat that carried us to the new world.

I'm not actually convinced that "Lenten journey' is so tired.  But the real question is this:  whose Lenten Journey is it, anyway?

That is the question.

Accidentally and On Purpose

We're on vacation right now, for just a little while longer, anyway.   And I brought a little prayer book, and I brought a little New Testament, but I haven't spent a lot of time (truthfully) doing the daily prayers and reading the daily readings.

But I have been walking, sightseeing, planning and discovering.  And I think those are spiritual practices too.

We took a planned tour the other day, which turned out to be a good idea, since it was sort of a drizzly, cold morning.  We had a wonderful guide and got oriented to the city.  Then we got off the bus and walked, which was part of the plan, but turned out to be a bad idea, mostly.  It got colder and more than drizzly and the buses seemed to disappear.  I sort of got disoriented and started walking the wrong way a couple of times, which turned out to be because I was reading the map upside down.

But then, at one point, we just walked into this funky old locksmith store.   I saw a newspaper article near the entrance.  It turns out that the owner of this store saved the stools from the lunch counter where civil rights activists sat during the 60s, protesting Jim Crow there.  They were just sitting there, in all their shining silver and orange-seated glory.

Yesterday was sunny and beautiful.  We decided to walk.  And we had a list of things we wanted to make sure to see, too.  The Owens-Thomas House, an old bookstore, a couple of other things, a civil rights museum.  But the museum was closed, and as we were walking and looking for something else, we just happened to be standing by Temple Mickve Israel, the third oldest synagogue in the United States.

We actually got to see a Torah Scroll which was brought over to America in 1733.  We toured the sanctuary, with its beautiful stained-glass windows and gothic architecture.

I think it's a good thing to have a list and check things off, sort of like saying your prayers from the book, and on purpose.  But it's also a good thing to find yourself in a holy place, not by plan but by accident, and realize that God was in this place, too, and you did not know it.