Lent Two: All things new

A decade ago, a house near ours burned to the ground. It was then rebuilt on the exact same
footprint. Some windows may be a bit larger. I'm sure bathroom and kitchen are more up-to-date. But in many ways, the new house is the same as the old. 

I wrote about the house five years ago, asking: 

If you were going to build a new house, wouldn’t you want to make it really new? Start with a new, more functional design, rather than settle for new siding?

I suppose the interior may be totally redesigned, but from what I can see, it’s new, but not really.

That word “new” is a tricky one. There are two words in Greek that are sometimes translated “new”. Neos has the same root as new:  “With neos the temporal aspect is dominant, marking out the present moment as compared with a former.” 

That new house on Biddle is neos: fresh, recent, in the same way that the new growth in my yard is neos: fresh, green, but showing up where the same plants grew last year.

The other word translated “new’ is kainos:  qualitatively different from what came before; unprecedented; unheard of; new not just in time, but in substance.

The past twelve months have shaken so much of what we know, upending patterns, shredding friendships, leaving so many around the globe anxious, depressed, angry, alone. 

We've seen the ugly underbelly of our comfortable systems: escalating inequality, partisan idolatry, angry assertion of our personal right to endanger others rather than face momentary discomfort. We've seen our fragile loyalty to fact and logic and moral consistency falter. Families, churches, communities are divided on everything from the efficacy of masks to the validity of electoral outcomes, the science behind climate change, approval or dismay at a golden statue of a former president. 

As winter snow melts, leaving oozing mud, I find myself praying, longing, hoping for the newness of kainos: qualitatively different from what came before. I don't want to go back to the old forms and formats, comfortable as that might feel. 

I've been meeting recently, by Zoom, with some organizational leaders to talk about the intersect between gerrymandering, prison gerrymandering, and unjust prison policy. We've been wrestling with ways to bridge the divide between impacted communities and places of privilege. Zoom has opened the ability to meet with new people and host new conversations, and our hope is to host regional meetings where stories not often heard can be told. 

Some of those stories break my heart. I wrote about Robert Saleem Hollbrook last August: a kid who was sentenced to life as an accessory to a capital crime. He spent 27 years in prison before gaining release. Now executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, he speaks softly, a calm, thoughtful, strategist with a steely determination to make sure his friends still behind bars are heard. We are planning a series of forums together: stories of maps, of prisons, of aging inmates locked away far too long.

Thirty years ago I heard our friend Dan Van Ness, my husband Whitney's colleague at Prison Fellowship, speak at a staff retreat about the need for paradigm reform. He  described the failures of "lock them up and throw away the key" policies and the need for a new, more Biblical approach.  Since then he's written extensively about restorative justice. He became Executive Director of Prison Fellowship International Center for Restorative Justice about the time we moved to Pennsylvania. Thirty years. Has anything changed? 

In 2005 the US Supreme Court ruled that life without parole for juvenile offenders is unconstitutional. Most states either passed legislation to re-sentence juveniles already serving such sentences or held parole hearings to release them. Not Pennsylvania. Our state now has the highest number of juvenile lifers in the world. The average cumulative cost to the state for each child held for life: over 2 million dollars. Imagine if that money was spent on early education, or on under-funded schools. Or on public services for struggling families caught in cycles of poverty.

What would kainos look like? How can I lend my weight, my voice, my own privilege to open doors of life and hope to geriatric prisoners who have never once seen a beach, or a lake, or a backyard hammock? What would it take to create new, transformed political structures that would enable wise policy rather than partisan folly?

Leaving my conversation with Saleem and others this week, I headed out for my carefully-planned biweekly grocery run. As I turned on my car, I heard

You make all things new
You make all things new
in places we don't choose.
You make all things new. 

I had left my Porter's Gate CD Work Songs disc in my car. That part of the song caught me off-guard. 

What would all things new look like? For Saleem's friends still in prison? For the deeply-divided, angry, even dangerous partisan politics of PA? For our churches, our schools, our families, our world?

The song continued:

May the words of my mouth speak your peace.
May the words of my mouth speak your peace.
May the words of my mouth speak your peace.
May the words of my mouth speak your peace. 

As the refrain continued, I found myself praying along;

May the words of my mouth speak your peace.
May the words of my mouth speak your peace.
May the words of my mouth speak your peace.
May the words of my mouth speak your peace. 

I'm not sure what speaking peace looks like. I'm not sure what newness looks like. Maybe the first step is to recognize how much kainos is needed, and to refuse to settle for neos instead. 

Lent One: I said to my soul, be stll

Last year I helped lead worship at a retreat at Harvey Cedars Bible Conference. For several
decades our church has led this retreat, attended by a mix of old friends, newcomers from other churches, men and women willing to dig deeper into the reality of God's love. 

Part of my contribution the past two years was to do a talk that focused on setting down things that get in the way of that love. I start with an old, heavy backpack, symbolic of weight I carry from my formative years: a heavy rock of abandonment, bright glass shards of broken relationships, tattered boxing glove, dusty cassette tapes, a long black fabric to drape around myself. 

Whatever we start with, whatever we carry, we have work to do to set it down. We're not alone in that work, but it doesn't happen overnight, and doesn't happen at all without our willingness to see, name, set things down. 

That's what Lent is for me: a time to look again into that backpack of old baggage. A time to see what I'm ready to address, what I want to be finally freed from. Sometimes the first step is to be still enough to listen.

In a way, we've all been living through a year of Lent. We all let go of control as schedules changed abruptly and events we worked toward were canceled. We were stripped of pastimes and habits as venues closed and even simple shopping trips became less safe. Many of us have spent more time alone than at any times in our lives, while others have had no time alone at all, in close quarters with children, needy and demanding, all day, every day.

The pandemic has simplified things: less meals out, less travel, less gatherings, less choice.

It's been such a hard, strange time I almost chose to forego any Lenten disciplines this year. I normally give up sugar, to remind myself how susceptible I am to slipping into self-medicating with sweets and food. 

But Lent isn't really about the sugar, or whatever else we choose to set aside.

It's about the habits of the heart, the inner landscape. The patterns of thought that shape our days.

Hard as the year has been externally, it's been even more challenging internally. We've all struggled with anger, bitterness, doubt, discouragement. We've all wrestled with inner narratives and inner dialogues that take us to places we'd rather not go. Sometimes it feels like the silence is deafening. Sometimes it feels like there's no silence at all: just lots of inner voices: instructing, cajoling, accusing, lamenting. 

This week we've had much more snow than usual at the same time that my husband has been battling a case of tendonitis. I've been doing more shoveling than I've ever done. I go out for a half-hour at a time, clear a stretch of driveway or walk, then come back inside for a meeting or call or the next set of emails I need to answer.

I've been doing lots of taking off and putting on: boots, gloves, hat, scarf, coat. Rattling around in my head as I've done this are the words of scripture about putting down and taking off: 

Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Ephesians 4:31

Rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 1 Peter 2:1

Rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.  Do not lie to each other. Colossians 3:8-9.

Like the snow that drifts and tumbles no matter how hard I try at neatly shoveled edges,
emotions and behaviors don't stay put. There they are again, accumulating in unexpected corners, swirling into motion after a tense conversation or a glimpse of a disappointing headline.

We can try to empty our backpacks of baggage, but there's always more there. We can try to address the bitterness and malice, but like February snow, there it is again. 

Which is why, in our church, we say the words of repentance every Sunday:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. 

We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. 

We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

I AM giving up sugar again this Lent, although I'm debating the idea of Sundays as "little Easters," with slightly relaxed rules from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday. 

And I AM asking God to show me what I need to take off, set down, get rid of, whether habits of the heart or patterns from the past.

But mostly I find, as I enter this cold pandemic Lent, I am praying to hold my heart open, to listen, to wait, to step even further into this place we've all been called: a new openness to an unexpected, unfamiliar future, a new awareness that the way we've understood the world must be radically rearranged. A willingness to set down even those things that seem good to be open to what God has in store. 

In grad school I studied TS Eliot's Four Quartets. I wasn't aware then that he and his wife had survived a bad case of the 2018 flu. He had seen the impact of World War 1, converted to Christianity a few years later, began the series of poems in 1935, then wrote the final sections during World War 2. There are parts of the poem that make clear the tension between faith and reality, the challenge of holding harsh experience in the light of promised grace. 

This section from East Coker is my starting place this Lent: 

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. 

 

Weave Us Together

I started my first blog eleven years ago, just after leaving youth ministry, feeling isolated and disconnected and wondering what would come next. 

The name of the blog was "Weave Us Together," taken from a girl scout song, a prayer, really, sung while standing in a circle, with arms weaving forward and back:

Weave, weave, weave us together, 
Weave us together in unity and love,
Weave, weave, weave us together, together in love.

Reading back over those posts this week, it occurs to me I was trying to understand why I'd gone into youth ministry, what might come next. 

I wrote about isolation:

That prayer, [weave us together], is needed more than ever, yet we have few places where we can ask, or even imagine, that kind of weaving taking place. . . .

From my own vantage point, as a youth pastor, parent, friend to many families in distress, our current culture does much to pull both youth and parents into ever more self-determined paths. Points of intersection, for families, friends, church communities, neighbors, are less frequent, less potent, less of a priority, as other demands become increasingly insistent. I'm sometimes reminded of the sobering poem by William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Kids can't hear parents, parents can't hear kids. Families seem to lack a center, a place of focus, and spin into dissolution.

Numerous statistical studies demonstrate the growing isolation of Americans of all ages, while other studies show the painful consequences for both emotional and physical health. Teens experiencing unrelieved loneliness suffer from greater anxiety, greater depression, greater addiction, greater likelihood of self-harm. 

I had come to see that isolation as a stay-at-home mom while my children were small.

In fact, I had become a stay-at-home mom in part for that very reason. While teaching writing at the college level, I had seen glimpses of youth unmoored from the generations before, lacking the ability to connect with each other or with elders. In my neighborhood, I had seen isolated families struggling with no supports, in a fractured, isolated, too busy world.

After a short return to teaching, I transitioned to youth ministry for much the same reason; no longer committed to grading papers and explaining the proper use of semicolons, I wanted instead to devote more time to helping teens and young adults connect with each other, with their faith, with God. I wanted to find ways to weave community with love.

We are more isolated now than ever: socially distanced because of the pandemic, weary of our own enclosed pods, but also isolated by hidden assumptions, increasingly divergent ways of seeing the world or understanding the events around us.

I wrote in that first blog post: 

Words are fragile connectors; what I’d like to do is gather all the families I know, sit under a tree, have barbeque and lemonade, and talk, laugh, and pray for each other. But there’s snow on the ground, everyone I know is far too busy, and I’m wondering if God is calling me to share what I know, what I see, in an attempt to weave a slender community.

The first step? The simple song / prayer above, and a resolve cited in the Psychology Today article linked above: “Resolve to live each day as if your relationships are your highest priority.”

Or, as John, beloved follower and friend of Jesus said, repeatedly in his three short letters: "Love one another." 

God has led me in some unexpected directions in the years since that first blog post. My world is larger than I expected, the need to weave unity and love more complicated and demanding than I imagined.

But on this wintry Valentine's Day, I find myself thinking of friends who are alone. Family members grieving spouses. Loved ones struggling with anxiety, isolation, dark depression, deep discouragement. I find myself grieving the impeachment drama of this past week, grieving the increasing divisions and the fracture political landscape. Prayerful about inequities and racial tensions that, unaddressed, could rip our nation and our faith to shreds. 

What does it mean to love our neighbors as ourselves in this difficult, isolated time?

2 Corinthians 1 says:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.

Rereading those words, I'm reminded: the world is not mine to save. The work of weaving is not mine to do. My challenge is to hold my heart open to neighbor, to pain, to tension, to God's leading. God has already promised comfort, has already done the work of reconciliation. Our task is to live in that reality, to live in the mystery of love even when that love seems out of reach. 

God of all comfort, as we wait on you in this cold, gray, mid-winter season, weave us together in your love and comfort, so our comfort, love, encouragement abound. Help us to listen well, to watch for your grace, to wait in hope, to see you at work among us, today and every day. 

Song for a Snowy Sunday

This snowy Sunday, watching a heavy snow fall, I'm reminded of a snowy Sunday from my childhood, when I woke to silence instead of the normal scurry of dressing, breakfast, preparation for church. It was the only Sunday I can remember that my siblings, grandmother and I didn't pile into someone's car, me usually sitting on someone's lap, all wedged into a back seat for the twenty-minute ride to Mt.Vernon Christian and Missionary Church. It was a tiny congregation that met in a gritty neighborhood just minutes from the Bronx. one of New York City's boroughs.

That little church was demolished in the sixties during urban renewal, then met in a bank basement, then a cavernous sanctuary historic church that had lost its congregation during white flight from that once prosperous residential city. During those years the congregation dwindled. The youth group, by the time I reached youth group age, was my two older siblings and their two or three best friends. 

I remember that congregation with fondness. They were far from perfect.  Even as a kid I could see odd discrepancies in their theology. Yet they were generous and kind. Our family had no car, but there was always someone willing to drive extra miles to pick us up. There were people in that congregation who prayed for us, watched that our needs were met, drove me to college years later when I needed a ride. 

During high school I lived in Yorktown, New York, farther north, just two blocks from another little church, Calvary Bible. It was a non-denominational congregation led by a part-time pastor who sold insurance during the week. I remember walking to church on snowy mornings, and walking through snow on a wintry Wednesday night to prayer meeting. There was never a question of Sunday morning attendance, but Sunday evenings and Wednesday nights were more voluntary in our household. I went regularly, for the hymns we sang on Sunday nights, for the certainty that prayer was real that surrounded me in that little white building on quiet Wednesday evenings. 

The first church my husband Whitney and I joined was Woodland Presbyterian, in West Philadelphia. I remember walking there on snowy mornings, and remember a snowy morning when friends from Woodland arrived at our first apartment to play a game of Risk. Many in that congregation lived within blocks of each other. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-generational family, a place that exemplified welcome and grace and shaped Whitney and me in more ways than we could measure. There was a shared lunch every Sunday, supposedly for the college and career fellowship, but in reality anyone and everyone took part.

We have a cookbook made in those days. One entry: John Dakota's Spaghetti Sauce, beginning "Start with love" and ending "Pepper to taste." Everyone who knew John, a tall man of mixed African and Native American descent, knew he would empty a whole pepper shaker on any dish before he ate it. John's personal ministry was to pick up anyone who needed a ride to church, then take them home again, some before lunch, some after.  John died not long ago, and the congregation dissolved a few years ago, but we are still close friends with some we knew in those days, still remember how much we learned and grew during those early days of marriage.

We spent fourteen years in Virginia. While there we attended Truro Episcopal Church, a large, historic, mostly affluent congregation, with multiple services and a reach in ministry that spanned the globe. I remember driving there on snowy mornings, hoping we'd find a place to park. That church was alive with the Holy Spirit: exuberant in worship, active in outreach to the poor, planting new churches as it outgrew its multiple services. Never perfect, but blending historic streams of faith in exciting ways that suggested the best of what a church might be: liturgical, charismatic, committed to mission, creative in its care for children, always looking for new ways to welcome strangers and blend the best of new and old. 

God led us to our current church, Church of the Good Samaritan, through a difficult year after our move back to Pennsylvania in 1998 when Whitney accepted a role as president of Scripture Union USA. We started out at a large non-denominational church down the street from our home, but ten months in felt clearly that wasn't where we needed to be. We visited a mix of local churches, praying together that God would lead us. Our first Sunday at Good Samaritan, we all agreed: this is where we should be. Two years later I found myself applying to be associate youth pastor. I left youth ministry eleven years later but we're still attending Good Samaritan, along with our daughters, our son-in-law, our three grandchildren.

Good Samaritan, until the pandemic, was also hosting weekly lunches, begun to make sure college students would have lunch if they missed their campus meal, but quickly growing to include anyone who wanted to share a meal together. I miss those deeply: the conversation with friends and newcomers, the chance to share life with young parents and aging parishioners. I miss worshipping together, and the chance to pray for others, the little side conversations about how we're all doing and what's on our minds for the week ahead. 

It's harder, in this time of virtual reality. And odd to realize, as I watch huge snow flakes sailing from the sky: a snow day doesn't mean church is cancelled. We'll still join and worship and pray, despite the snow. 

And around the globe, despite the snow, despite the pandemic, despite human imperfection and political division and all the changes life throws our way, God's people still gather, to sing, to pray, to be reminded of grace, always grace, that sweet never-ending song that echoes across the centuries, around the globe, holding us together, reminding us of what is most real, warming our hearts on a cold wintry Sunday.