Asking For Money. Receiving Forgiveness.

Just sent out our stewardship letter today.    End of the year.  Sunday is Christ the King.

The rap on churches is “they’re always asking for money.”  Turns people off.  I guess I bought into that because “asking for money” has not been a particular strength or interest of mine.  Maybe it’s part of the “oldest child” syndrome.  It’s hard to ask for anything when you’re raised to be self-sufficient and independent. 

Congregations tend to shy away from raising the issue of money, and a lot of other issues, afraid to alienate anyone.  Keeping people quiet and calm and in the pews.  Except, that hasn’t worked so well…

Still, we try to keep the lid on politics, issues of justice, equality, or anything controversial that might get people riled and excited.  As if keeping people calm    

was a Christian teaching of the highest order.

Isn’t faith, by definition, controversial?   Isn’t obedience to the God of love a sure-fire recipe for push back from all the places in the world where love flies in the face of “business as usual?” 

Was for Jesus.  King of the Jews.  King of all that was a laughing stock, broken, despised and contemptible.  God’s chosen One.

Can we be disciples of Jesus and live irrelevant lives in communities that value everything bland and innocuous and avoids anything controversial?  Especially when the heart of our faith demands of us: open minds, open hearts and open arms? 

Faith is permission to ask for what we need, because faith requires us to be open to the needs of others.  Even when it’s controversial.  Especially when it’s controversial. 

Faith is a whispered plea for pardon, improbably granted in a moment of utter forsakenness.  “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

These are the moments our faith lifts up.  This is where we are directed to look for meaning and peace.   

Faith is not a means of avoiding the unseemly, for tip-toeing around disagreement.  Faith is a means of living authentically by living for others. 

That in itself is the height of controversy. 

Leaves

I have lived a long time without a leaf vac/blower.  Without the obsession or the sense of personal affront that leaves scattered across the lawn seems to evoke in some suburban neighborhoods.  As if the summer was a party that got out of hand. People come out on their lawns in the fall like tired hosts after the guests have gone, clearing glasses, dumping ash trays, before climbing the stairs and turning in for the winter.

Admittedly, I have lived an atypical life.  Most of my life has been spent either in church owned parsonages, or in cities where leaves were rare things.  All the fall leaves required was a a rake, if you absolutely just couldn’t ignore them.  Get them to the curb and the city will come by in big sucking trucks and haul them away.  Usually by Thanksgiving.  It was all  very casual, and in its own way, a little pathetic.

But all that’s changed.  I own a leaf vac/blower.  It blows leaves into a big pile, sucks them up and mulches them in a zippered bag.  You empty the bag into larger, clear plastic bags and line them up by the curb.  Monuments to a kind of communal Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder.

Our house now has three deflated sacks of minced leaves out at the curb.  The sight fills me with an ironic sense of pride.  

Blowing leaves around your lawn is a kind of absurd thing, and being new to this, I was very self-conscious, heightening the absurdity factor even more.  So many questions came up.  Do you blow the leaves out to the curb?  Get them into a pile on the lawn?  Do you clean the gutters by the  curb?  How far into the street should you chase strays?  Where do “international waters” start on a neighborhood street? 

I was sure the neighbors were all looking out their windows thinking, ”Amateur.”

I knew that I was jamming my leaf vac/blower into the spokes of the circle of life.  Fallen leaves were meant to return to the soil.  To nourish the tree.   But something bigger was going on here. 

I was standing in solidarity with my neighbors.  Holding up my end. Buying into shared meaning, and I had to admit, grudgingly, the lawn looked neat and unnaturally green for this time of year.  Shared meaning does that. 

But meaning doesn’t just happen.  We create it, and in creating meaning we are shaped and created ourselves.  Our communities.  Our families. Our selves.

Meaning is the mirror in which we see our own reflection.  We wash our face, comb our hair in it.  We shave in it or put on make-up before going out into the world. 

Meaning is the blood that carries oxygen to the organs and limbs of our lives, and it carries away the wastes and toxins our lives produce. 

Sometimes meaning overwhelms you like a wave.  You move from one place to another as we have just done and start again.  What does it mean to be starting again at our stage in life? 

Or, you have children, they grow and leave home.  People die, leaving great holes.  Foundations without houses to cover them. It’s all variations of a theme.  These are meaning tidal waves.

And sometimes meaning just floats out of the air like a bright leaf you can chase all over the yard with a high powered leaf vac/blower, to bag for someone to take away.  Because you just do, that’s all.

A deep silence fills the chilly twilight, our three bags of leaves at the curb like the bags in front of every other house.  Behind them, up and down the block, the house windows are all beginning to shine.

Moving Is Like Playing Whack-A-Mole

It is amazing how disruptive moving is, or, to frame that positively, how important routines and disciplines are to creativity.  I think I've placed far too much emphasis on inspiration in my writing and in my work.  Moving has reminded me, inspiration is mostly a matter of just showing up every day.   

Now, things are coming together in our new home.  Moving a short distance helps us whack one mole before the next one pops up.  That's what moving feels like.

Last night, sitting out on the deck in the early evening, the thinning leaves and trees dark shadows dissolving into the darkening September sky, I actually wrote a few lines.  The dust may be settling.

I am surprised how comforting it is to be in a neighborhood again, surrounded by other houses and other lives.  Maybe that stems from the simple animal comfort of presence.  Of other people carting their trash to the curb, walking their dogs, leaving in their cars in the morning and coming back at night.


Or, maybe it is the familiarity of this floor plan in our new place.  We lived in a house like this with our boys through middle school and high school, and left for college.  This place takes us back and moves us forward. 

The places we go and the stops we make along the way become part of our evolution as people.  We think we leave a place and move on, but we never really leave.  It comes with us as the people we have become from having lived there.

The Spirituality Of Moving

Living in an area with lots of military personnel, moving is a fact of life.  Clergy aren’t quite as mobile, but we do our share of relocating too. 

My wife and I will be moving again in about a week to the new church parsonage in Riverside Estates.  The process of moving again helps me understand, just a little, the lives of the military families that are part of our congregation and community. 

For the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about our move here.  I’ll be sharing tips, mistakes, hopefully some small successes, and exploring the spirituality of moving.  You’re welcome to come along...  

Yesterday, I rented a 16’ truck and picked up a new sofa, recliner and area rug at Costco.  I remember when our entire lives fit inside a 16' truck.  The fact that it doesn't now is a testament of the way our lives together have flowered.  Children. Children's spouses. Grandchildren. Dogs.  So many blessings. 

Sure, some of this accumulation of "stuff" represents the typical postponed decisions.  Even after only a couple of years.   Lots of this stuff is headed for the trash.  Probably should have been there long ago.  Many of my books fall into that category.  I still have my books from college and seminary.  A lifetime ago. 

For a writer, books are companions.  They are relationships, lessons learned, a record of the questions and collective wisdom that has shaped my life.   In the age of ebooks, the time has come my friends... 

Things are coming together in the house.  The congregation has done a great job getting things ready for us.  Looks good…hopeful…with our new rug down, the empty bookcases in the study waiting to hold the books I’m not ready to part with yet.  It becomes possible to imagine a life here.  It begins to take focus and shape. 

The sofas, the chairs, the rugs, the pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves…these are all the silent witnesses to our lives.   I haven't always paid them the attention and respect they were due.  I've mostly taken them for granted.  I realize that as they are taken down one by one, wrapped or sealed in  cardboard boxes.  This is exhausting work.  Slow and painstaking.  Thankfully, my wife shoulders the bulk of this.  Driving the truck, lifting and sweating is the easy part comparatively and  I’m better suited to that.

I believe it's true that a life observed is changed simply by being observed.  These things carried from our old place to our new feel like an extension of ourselves.   A bridge to take us from who we were to who we will become.  They are the immense gratitude, sealed and delivered,  for all that has been.  They are gestures of faith in what is yet to be.