Category Archives: Spiritual Stuff

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Breaking in Interesting Ways

Katherine Willis Pershey is hosting Any “May” a Beautiful Change, a blog carnival to celebrate the launch of Any Day a Beautiful Change through Chalice Press, which is also my publisher for Sabbath in the Suburbs.

This month, Katherine’s friends and colleagues are writing about a beautiful change they have experienced. Here is mine:

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Just so we’re clear: that’s not me.

My friend Keith Snyder, a music geek, recently tweeted a line from Brian Eno: “Analog synthesizers break in interesting ways. Digital synthesizers just break.”

Keith has made that line into a prayer:

May I continue to break in interesting ways.

That may be a strange place to start talking about a beautiful change, but stick with me.

I hit two personal milestones recently. First, I ran a 10K race. That was big for me. Until a year ago I had never run for more than a few minutes at a time. Ever. I was the smart one, you see, and the musical one, but never the athletic one. My body was the thing that carried my brain around. Aside from the occasional mountain hike while on vacation, and an intermittent practice of walking to stay in basic shape, I was a sedentary type.

But at 40, with a father who dropped dead from cardiac stuff at age 56, getting in better shape felt non-negotiable—the reasonable thing to do from an actuarial standpoint. That’s how the running started. Of course, it’s become something deeper than that.

Before I ran the 10K (6.2 miles for the metrically challenged), I’d never run farther than 5 miles in training. When I reached mile 5 at the race, I thought, This is as far as I’ve ever gone. Beyond this point, it’s all new. That’s a wonderful thing.

Indeed, my whole life feels that way in this, my fifth decade. I’m not a rookie in ministry anymore; I’m not the mother of little ones anymore; as of this fall I will be a published writer. Lauren Winner talks in her latest book about reinventing oneself every ten years. That’s happening, through my own volition and beyond it.

Among other things, running for me means embracing a blessed mediocrity. I’m not a fast runner; Robert has described my gait as “a bit loping.” I’ve never experienced a runner’s high. I like races because the crowd and the music provide a boost that my body chemistry seems unwilling to muster. I love the feeling of having run, but running itself is frequently a chore. At last month’s race, I was second to last in my age group, and way down in the bottom third overall.

Yet I do it. And there’s something liberating about doing something badly by most objective standards. I’m a perfectionist, you know. I like setting a goal and reaching for the top, and if I’m not good at something, eh…easy come, easy go. With so many luscious possibilities in this life, more than I could ever undertake, such a standard may not be the best way to discern what’s mine to do, but it’s what works.

Or has worked in the past. Something in me had to “break in an interesting way” for me to start running—to do this thing that’s never been part of my self-understanding. Something shattered in my brittle, do-it-well-or-don’t-do-it exoskeleton.

And thank heaven it did. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, in more ways than one.

I now ask myself: What else could I do badly for the sheer satisfaction of it?

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The second health-related milestone happened a few days ago. I hit my weight-loss goal of 40 pounds.

I’m no numerologist, but there is significance in the numbers. James weighs about 40 pounds, so every time I pick up his stocky four-year-old frame I think to myself, This is the weight I carried around all the time nine months ago. It seems fitting somehow: in another year, James will be in kindergarten. There are no babies or toddlers in my house anymore. It feels right that as I move into another phase as a mother, my body would look different.

Also, it took me nine months to lose the weight. Is it an exaggeration to say that a new person has been born? Perhaps. But as with the running, something in me had to break in order for this change to occur. Caring for myself—I mean really caring, not punishing myself until I shrink down into some “acceptable” size—requires a certain vulnerability. I can do all the right things, as many people do, but there will always be aspects of our health that are beyond our control. Life is a genetic and environmental crap shoot. That’s an uncomfortable truth to face. Denial feels easier sometimes.

Another thing that had to break: a rigid expectation of what I would look like as a 40 year old with a normal BMI.

Hint: it’s not like a 20 year old.

Don’t get me wrong, I look different than I did when I was a new mother, with all my ample post-pregnancy curves. But as I’ve left 40 pounds behind on so many jogging trails and city streets, I’ve been amazed at the parts of me that haven’t been magically transformed. There is still…a thickness. A settledness. This body will never be that of a college student. Or a newlywed. Or a non-mother. As that great philosopher Indiana Jones says, “It’s not the years…it’s the mileage.”

And I’m grateful for every one of those miles.

That’s the beautiful change.

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Beyond the Bucketlist

Yesterday I got the edits back from the publisher, and I’m hoping to turn them around in the next week. So I’ll be a blogging a little less than usual.

But first, I wanted to pass along three wise paragraphs about bucketlists. Bucketlists, of course, are those laundry lists of “exotic sensations of one kind or another (“Skydive”; “Shower in a waterfall”; “Eat jellied eels from a stall in London”).”

I am all for experiences that take us out of the everyday, but I resonated with the author’s critique of bucketlists:

Really? This is the best we can do? This is what it’s all about? These are the things that make our lives worth living? When I think about what really makes me happy, what I really crave, I come up with a very different list: concentrated, purposeful work, especially creative work; being with people I love; feeling like I’m part of something larger. Meaning, connectedness, doing strenuously what you do well: not sights, not thrills, and not even pleasures, as welcome as they are. Not passivity, not letting the world come in and tickle you, but creativity, curiosity, altruism, engagement, craft. Raising children, or teaching students, or hanging out with friends. Playing music, not listening to it. Making things, or making them happen. Thinking hard and feeling deeply.

At their best, religious communities are places that call forth these moments of purposeful work and connectedness. They are not the only places that do this, of course.

This essay resonates with me, since I’m not in a very Dive the Great Barrier Reef kind of place. This week, I’ll be seeking satisfaction in simple things: this week’s muffins. Welcoming Robert home from his trip to New York. Moderating a session meeting. Trying to make James laugh.

And trying to put words together in a way that matters.

h/t: Andrew Sullivan

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On (Not) Being a Runner

This is a re-post from several months ago on the RunRevRun website. It’s been on my mind lately, because my thinking is shifting on this topic. Being and doing, doing and being…

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I began the Couch to 5K program a few months ago. I wasn’t exactly starting from “couch”—I’ve been doing brisk walking several times a week for more than a year—and my fitness goal is not really to run a 5K, but to hike Mount Washington in New Hampshire this summer. I’ve hiked big mountains before, in various states of fitness, but it’s so much more enjoyable when you’re not wheezing your way up and stopping every ten yards to massage your charley horses. And since there’s no “couch to Mt. Washington” program, Couch to 5K is getting the job done.

Although I started this program to get myself up the mountain, I can see myself continuing it indefinitely, maybe even graduating to the 10k version. I’ve been an evangelist for this program on Twitter, Facebook and in real life. I’m grateful for the impact it’s had on my health and want to share it, but there’s also a selfish motive: I’m telling people far and wide to keep me accountable to continue. Along the way I have been very insistent with folks: “I run, but I’m not a runner.” This has been an oft-repeated refrain:

Oh, MaryAnn’s a runner now.
Actually, no I’m not.
But aren’t you in this running program?
Yes. But I’m not a runner.

What’s that about?

Why am I so reluctant to call myself a runner?

First off, I wonder what it means to be a runner. What exactly is a runner? Isn’t it simply “one who runs”? I think I have an image in my mind of a perfectly toned body, or a person obsessed with getting the right shoes, entering races, and reading Runner’s World, a magazine I wouldn’t even know existed were it not for the cover photo of Sarah Palin that emerged during the 2008 presidential election. I’m not really interested in running as a hobby. But is that really what it means to be a runner? Or is that just stereotypical stuff that’s not real?

Maybe I feel like I haven’t been doing it long enough to claim the identity of runner. I’m OK with the verb form—I run—but not with the noun—runner.

Am I giving myself an easy out by being Not a Runner? We are stuck with so many identities that we can’t shed in this life. I will be the daughter of my parents and the mother of my children forever. Maybe I resist calling myself a runner because I need to be free to have something in my life that I can quit without angst. Or that I can do badly. Intermittently.

Maybe I’m reluctant to call myself a runner because I’m playing old tapes about myself that aren’t helpful anymore. I was the slow kid on the softball team, the one the coach (my dad) would position at second base. It was a good fit for me because I had decent eye-hand coordination but couldn’t run very long without tiring. The best hit of my life would’ve been a home run with anyone else rounding the bases, but instead I was tagged out at home. By my best friend.

So, no. Not a runner.

My teams in school were theater/speech and Academic Decathlon.

But maybe that kind of baggage isn’t healthy. Over the last nine weeks I’ve been getting faster (slightly) and stronger (definitely). My endurance is increasing. Our bodies are for much more than brain housing and transport. Our bodies are built to dance, kneel, eat, love. Some of our bodies are built to grow other bodies and to push them out into the world. I get that in ways I didn’t understand when I was a kid.

As a pastor, I wonder about all this. I sometimes meet people who want to find a new term for “Christian.” They feel that the “brand” is fundamentally corrupted by people they see as judgmental, rancorous, loudmouthed. I’m not sure I agree that the word is irredeemable, but I sympathize with their struggle to find a label that fits.

I also know plenty of people who don’t identify themselves as Christian but whose behavior sure looks Christ-like to me. And I know Christians who are Christians in name only. I like it when people say they are seeking to follow in the way of Jesus. I can relate; it sounds like “I run but I’m not a runner.” And yet, belonging to Christ isn’t just what we do. It’s who we are; it is an identity.

I don’t know where all of these questions will lead me. Maybe someday I will consider myself a runner. Maybe I will continue to run and never take on that label. Maybe I will stop running and move on to some other physical activity. I expect that whatever I do, it will be in that strange space where action and identity intersect, where doing and being reside together.

Meanwhile, I pound the pavement.

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Image: Map of the 10K I ran last weekend. Funny, it looks a lot flatter on paper.

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Forgiving, Forgetting and Remembering

If you’re trying to run for speed, Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast is not for you. (See also: The Diane Rehm Show.)

But if you’re doing a nice slow run as a spiritual and physical discipline, On Being is just the right show.

Today’s run featured Contemplating Mortality, with Dr. Ira Byock talking about “dying well.” I am fascinated by this topic, and it’s come to me several times recently in different forms, so perhaps the universe is trying to tell me something.

This topic is also hard for me to listen to, because the most profound death I’ve experienced in my life was a sudden death, not a slow, impending one.

A death that comes with a collapse to the floor, an ambulance screaming down the street, a tearful phone call late at night… I don’t know. There’s no doing that well or badly. I’m not even sure the person is the subject of the sentence; more like the object. Death happens to them.

So I get a little angry when I listen to shows like this. A prolonged death is no picnic, and I’m glad that Dad did not suffer. Still… there was no deathbed for my siblings and me to flock to, no heartwarming StoryCorps Legacy interview.

Then after getting angry, I decide that the only thing to do, if dying well isn’t always an option, is to live well.

Part of living well and dying well is about forgiveness. There are so many cliches around forgiveness, the most famous being to “forgive and forget.” You know I hate that, right? So pat. So simplistic. So inadequate.

I told you the phrase that came to me after Festival of Faith and Writing, yes? “Fighting back with nuance in a sloganeering world.”

The simpler something is, the less I trust it.

Anyway, they talked on the show about what forgiveness is all about, and Krista quoted Paul Tillich:

Forgiving presupposes remembering, and it creates a forgetting, not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather, but in the way of the great ‘in spite of’ that says: I forget although I remember. 

The whole show was great, despite my own residual anger and grief over Dad’s death. But it’s “the great ‘in spite of’” that will stay with me.

Fighting back with nuance.

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What to Expect When Your Church Is Expecting

A few months ago I recorded a video for Bruce Reyes-Chow’s We Are Presbyterian project. It was fun, and I learned a lot in the process.

In the video I suggest that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is not “gravely ill,” as some have suggested.

Instead we are… well… take it away Barbie:

We’re not terminal. We’re just pregnant.

Apparently the video has hopped the Presbyterian fence and is wandering around other backyards, specifically Lutheran and Episcopal ones. It’s been fun to hear from friends and colleagues who’ve spotted it. I’m glad it resonates with others too… is there a baby boom happening in the mainline?

The video appears at the end of this post, but for those who prefer to read, here is essentially what I said:

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Recently a group of pastors wrote a letter to the PCUSA, expressing concern about where we’re headed as a denomination. According to the letter, we are “deathly ill”.

The group has facts and figures to back up this–lots of numbers related to membership loss, the declining number of baptisms we do, and so forth.

Well look… the numbers are what they are.
I can’t argue with the statistics.
I only argue with the diagnosis.

We are not deathly ill. We’re…
well…
we’re pregnant.

That’s right folks.
We’re Pregnant!
Expecting!
On the nest!
Knocked up!
Preggers!
With child!
Bun in the oven!

The symptoms are there, if you know what you’re looking for.

First, there’s the fatigue. I see a lot of tired people out there, trying to keep life going, keep ministries going, keep the sermons coming, the nursery staffed, the money flowing in, the furnace in good repair… often with fewer people–less energy–than before. It’s tiring!

I see some bad queasiness too: morning sickness, which folks will tell you doesn’t just come in the morning, but sometimes round the clock. There’s a sense that the world has changed right out from under our feet, and we don’t quite know how to deal with it. What is this “emergent” stuff? How do we deal with the internet and social media? What about this younger generation? How do we respond to the culture without being coopted by it? Not to mention our new Form of Government, the passage of amendment 10A, and on and on. It’s to be expected that we’d be feeling a little woozy, a little green, a little sick.

And there’s a lot of anxiety too… that question every prospective parent asks: Can we do this? Are we ready? Do we have what it takes to step into this new chapter of life?

So here’s a bit of motherly wisdom, a guide, if you will: “what to expect when your church is expecting.”

I offer these reflections knowing that the metaphor is complicated. Not everyone who’s pregnant wants to be pregnant. And there are many who struggle to become pregnant, or who grieve the loss of a child. So I just acknowledge that and tread as lightly as I can.

But here’s what pregnancy offers us that “deathly ill” doesn’t.

1. It’s deeply biblical. Scripture is full of images of pregnancy. The whole creation groans in labor pains, Paul writes in Romans 8, and he uses the image again in I Thess 5. Even Jesus couldn’t resist using the metaphor: “When a woman is in labour, she has pain. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy.”

(That’s not true, by the way.)

The Bible is also full of women that society had written off as barren, women who thought their time had passed. And similarly, some say this whole PCUSA thing doesn’t have much life left in it. And that may even be true on some level. Maybe we are in our declining years. But guess what? Sarah and Elizabeth were in their declining years too, and yet God used both of them to grow new life and give birth to a whole new world.

2. Another way pregnancy connects with our church right now: Pregnancy ain’t pretty. As much as we talk about women glowing, it is not a glamorous time. Your face breaks out. Your joints go slack. You get gas. You can’t sleep at night. You have to pee every 10 minutes. And let’s not even talk about the dreaded “cankles”:

It’s a bit of a freak show, to be honest.

And yeah, this period we’re in right now as a church? It ain’t pretty. We’re cranky and itching for a fight with one another. We used to be young and fresh, the belle of the ball. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we were thriving. People were flocking to our doors. But we’re not there anymore.

Now we’re in tremendous upheaval as a denomination. It seems like almost everything is on the table–our practices, our polity, our way of worshiping, our music, our structure…
But what’s not on the table for us is whether God is working.
What’s not on the table is what kind of God we serve: a living God, an incarnate God.
God is capable of doing a new thing: it springs forth, now, in nine months, in nine years, over a lifetime.
New life is what it’s all about. It’s the business we’re in.

3. Your sense of time is all messed up in pregnancy. On the one hand, it’s a quiet, slow, lumbering time. The nine months pass slowly. You can’t move as fast as you did. I had sciatica that would act up whenever I was walking too quickly; I finally decided it was God saying, “Slow down! Don’t go through this time at a breakneck pace. Stop, look, listen and feel.”

Even mental processes seem to slow down. Nouns and verbs come more slowly: “Honey bring me that, that… what is that? That thing! Beside the doohickey?” And maybe we as a church need to move beyond words for a while. Maybe we need to just be silent for a while, stop making so many pronouncements about the church. Sure, Mary sang, but she also pondered in her heart. Maybe it’s OK to shut up and let God do what God’s gonna do.

The time goes slowly… but it’s also an incredibly busy time. There’s a lot to learn, and pregnancy is a great time to do research. Hospital or birth center? Epidural? C-section? Breast or bottle? Stroller or sling? Pacifiers or thumb-sucking, cloth diapers or disposable? Television: harmless, or idiot box that will keep your kid out of Stanford?

And we’re doing the same research in the church. Every week I hear about a new group that’s meeting, a new conference to attend, a new website to keep track of. And the books! Oh, the books! Each one promising to give you that just-right approach to ministry, promising to grow your church, keep session meetings joyful and productive, and so on and so forth.

And any parent will tell you, that research is all well and good. But then the child is born. And it all comes down to that child’s personality, that child’s gifts, what that child needs. The books, ultimately, don’t tell you what you need to know. Your child does. So we in the PCUSA need to learn flexibility. We need to learn to respond to this thing being birthed, whatever it might be, instead of some idealized notion of what it might be. Is it a bunch of new churches? Ministries beyond the traditional church? Who knows, but as any parent will tell you, our kids are not carbon copies of us. They are their own people and they deserve to be treated as such. What is being born in the PCUSA is going to look different everywhere. We’re not all going to win beautiful baby contests. We are not birthing many 1950s Presbyterian churches anymore. No more perfect Gerber babies.

5. The final and, I think, most important parallel is this: Pregnancy, labor and parenthood are all embodied experiences–blood, sweat, tears, vomit… and poop. Once that labor starts, you can’t think your way out of it. You don’t do the work up in your head. You’ve got to participate in it with every bit of your being.

And that’s what this new phase of our Church is going to require too. It’s not enough to think about stuff. It’s not enough to talk about mission. It’s not enough to claim to value diversity. It’s not enough to give lip service to evangelism. We’re going to have to practice these things that we believe. To jump in, body and soul.

But I think the best thing pregnancy offers us as a metaphor is this: it’s hopeful. It’s a great big crazy leap into the unknown. It’s a vision for the future. It’s something you grow into. Nobody’s “ready.”

The question is, what are we going to do during this time of gestation?

Thanks for listening, and a special thanks to my friend and colleague Elizabeth Goodrich for the pregnancy metaphor.

We Are Presbyterian 2011 — A New “Diagnosis” for the Church from MaryAnn McKibben Dana on Vimeo.

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Word to the Impatient

This meme has overstayed itself by about three weeks, but I couldn't resist. Inexplicably, this came up when I googled the phrase from Romans, "hope does not disappoint us."

There were many nuggets, stories and quotable quotes from last week’s Festival of Faith and Writing, and I’m sure some of them will make it into sermons and future writings. Here’s one.

The last presentation I attended was by Paula Huston, who presented on the topic “Writing as a Spiritual Practice”—incidentally, she did so with laryngitis. There was something fitting about preparing to leave the conference, about shifting my energies from festival to home… just as the words were diminishing into a whisper.

Huston spoke about waiting many years (thirteen?) for her novel to be published, and talked about struggling with impatience. I listened, but with a detached and clinical interest since impatience isn’t  something I ever have to deal with.

~cough~

She finally decided to get some spiritual counsel and talked to one of the monks at a monastery she often visited for retreats. She asked, “How can I have more patience?” He replied, “Your problem isn’t a lack of patience. Your problem is a lack of hope.”

There was a palpable “aha!” that reverberated in the room when she said that. She elaborated: if you trust the process, and you trust yourself, and you trust that all things are working together for wholeness and good and abundant life, then patience and peace are the truest response.

I think I love this, even though I want to test the limits of her view against the kind of impatience that presses for change. We’re seeing that with the Columbia Seminary situation. Truth be told, I think the policy will change soon so that committed same-sex couples will have access to campus housing. Not soon enough, I know, for current students who are paying more for housing because they can’t live on campus, and not soon enough for people who’ve been waiting for justice for years. Agitating for change seems like a holy impatience to me, a faithful discontent with the way things are.

Even so, I wonder whether it’s possible to cultivate a patient impatience.

I’ve been tired and full since the Festival. Last night I wanted nothing more than to get the kids to bed and settle into my own with a book or two. But the kids were slow and needy, and every room I went into had yet another thing that needed to be done before I could read and rest. I know about resting when it’s time to rest and not when the tasks are all done—I wrote a book about it—but this was stuff that couldn’t wait. Like, giving the cat her medicine so she doesn’t seize.

I was testy and impatient over all of these things. So I began to mull Huston’s statement. What’s going on when I am impatient? What’s happening internally when I just can’t wait to get to the next thing?

Maybe I am acting, in the words of Paul, as one without hope. Maybe I need to cultivate hope. But not hope that everything’s going to be OK. I’m a fan of Vaclav Havel’s understanding of hope, which is not the assurance that things will work out, but a conviction that things make sense, regardless of how they turn out.

My life—cat medicine and all—makes sense. There is a strange coherence to it. And there is no next thing. There is only the current thing, whether it’s brushing James’s teeth or writing a blog post or reading My Life in France. This I believe.

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“A Prize I’ve Won by Not Doing Something”

Written earlier this week, before I left for FFW:

This article, called “The Hunger Game and How to Win It,” resonated with me on many levels: the fact that the author David Gessner has a self house, for one, which is something I covet. But also in this tangled-up stuff about achievement and possessing stuff. And hunger:

We have turned [our] insatiable hunger on our own land, swallowing, goring, fracking, drilling so that we can have more and so that we can fuel the vehicles and machines that transport us elsewhere. One of the reasons I find it hard to be too fully moralistic about this behavior is that I share it. In my own work –which is writing — I am always hungry, wanting more and better, and I recognize in my own ambition the same never-sated animal that I see in others. Long ago, I sent a letter to a neighbor on Cape Cod who had built a monstrous trophy house. I wrote: “You’re obviously an ambitious man and in that we are alike. While your workers hammer away up on the hill, I hammer away at my keyboard. Like you, I dream of creating something big, something great, and like you, I sometimes feel that my passion for this controls me, and not me it.” So you see, I am not writing about hunger as an outsider, not Spock looking on puzzled at a world full of Kirks.

And yet that does not mean that I believe that this gets me, or us, off the hook, that we can let our inner Kirks run wild and shoot phasers in the air and make out with every Nurse Chapel they run across. The next sentences in my letter to my neighbor were these: “But we are more in control than we admit, than it’s fashionable to say these days. I don’t suggest the laughable premise that we are rational creatures, or that reason controls our lives. What I do suggest is that our imaginations can be nudged, and work best if nudged earthward.”

He goes on to talk about the ramshackle cabin he built, and how a nest of wrens took up residence thanks to the fact that he neglected to screen up a gap between the door and the roof:

My life feels better, more intense and elevated, having this new family around…

For my part, I am not ready to retire like a Zen monk to my shack. I am still hungry for things. A Pulitzer Prize would be nice, for instance, and after that maybe a Nobel. But right now I am enjoying a different sort of prize, and I can’t help but think this is a prize I’ve won by not doing something.

That is a wonderful characterization of Sabbath, so the quote grabbed me. That’s grace, isn’t it? The goodness that comes to you when you’re not pursuing it.

But I also related on a literal level: our family, too, hosts a family of birds. I wrote about them in Sabbath in the Suburbs. They live in the exhaust vent of our range hood, and they show up every year. Because every year we forget to plug up the dang hole.

I try to be honest in the book about the difficulties of choosing a day of rest over so many other things—things like installing a finer mesh over a hole, so our stove’s exhaust fan doesn’t blow out because the duct is clogged with twigs and leaves and baby birds.

But I like the way David Gessner thinks about it. After all of this time spent Sabbath-keeping, I still have a lot to learn.

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On the Eve of FFW

I leave this evening for the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, a gathering I’ve been hearing about for years but never been able to attend. I’m eager to soak it all in, hear some inspiring speakers, deepen friendships, and network. If I’m feeling extroverted enough, my little box of Sabbath in the Suburbs postcards will be empty when I come home.

I’ve been to tons of writing things over the years: workshops, conferences and such. They provide a huge boost of energy and mojo. And if there is a lot of posturing and jockeying for attention, they can also bring out demons of competitiveness. I can’t account for why these group dynamics occur in some gatherings and not in others. Probably a chemistry thing—one or two people can really shift things into an unhealthy place. With any luck and grace, I am not one of those people.

However, there’s no denying that I am a person of ambition. I thrive on competition, particularly in academic pursuits. When this is channeled inwardly—when the competition is with myself—it’s a great source of motivation. When it’s not, well, let’s just say that Robert and I still do not speak of The Canasta Incident.

This has been a topic of discussion and reflection for me recently. You know how themes and ideas will keep coming to you when you’re working something out? That has happened to me. I appreciated this article by my friend Becky, who wrote about healthy ways to be driven to develop one’s skills.

And a friend shared this article about two best friends who are highly competitive in the area of Olympic-level kayaking. The relationship spurs them on to be better and better. I find this thrilling and hopeful:

Both Ashley and Caroline are training hard – the former near her home in Maryland, and the latter down in North Carolina. Caroline says it’ll be tough to face each other at the upcoming Olympic trials, since “we both want to be number one.”

But if nothing else, she says, it’ll strengthen their friendship… and their skills.

“It’s a very positive thing,” she says. “We push each other.”

Ashley agrees: “Ideally this year we’re pushing each other to get to that next level, to be able to compete with this international crew. Ideally, we’re training each other for the Games.”

I have been blessed to have mentors and spiritual directors who have said to me, “Stop trying not to be competitive or ambitious. Instead, keep pondering how to use that gift in a life-giving way.” Unhealthy competition means comparing oneself to others, making one’s self-worth about achievement, and being selfish and unsupportive. Healthy competition believes in abundance: one person’s achievement does not diminish another person’s; there is room for many offerings of gifts. It also means striving for personal excellence in one’s life, art, or whatever.

After all, competition is scriptural! Paul writes that we are to outdo one another…
in showing honor.

So be it.

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On the Return of Dessert

I backed into my Lent discipline this year. Caroline suggested we give up dessert for Lent as a family, then she changed her mind five days in. As Caroline goes, so go the siblings. But Robert and I stuck with it.

Many of my past Lent disciplines have provided a straight path from practice to benefit:
Giving up Facebook –> more incarnational time with family and friends.
Regular devotional reading –> new insights into the biblical story.

But a dessert fast is more circuitously beneficial, if it’s beneficial at all. I suspect I lost weight much more slowly during Lent than I would have had I not taken on this practice. Sundays were feast days, and while I don’t feel like I feasted all that much, I think my body got very confused and yo-yo’ed a bit.

But Lent disciplines aren’t really about self-improvement, are they? They are deeper than a reboot of the New Year’s resolution. They are about a relationship with God—a connecting with the Holy that is within and without.

Giving something up means acquainting oneself with deprivation and sacrifice, even if the sacrifice is small in the scheme of things. We don’t do enough of that in our culture. In my case, No Dessert was a string tied around my finger, a chance to pause, remember, reflect. Each time I craved something sweet, I tried to think about the sweet things in my life that are always in abundance, things I take for granted. A fantastic spouse. Hugs from children. Dates with friends over coffee. Satisfying work that pays the bills. The chance to write. I also became more mindful about the stuff I was eating. I thought about my body. I thought about what it means to hunger.

I also admit—and I hang my head as I do so—that giving up dessert was hard. Very hard.

I went to a mainline Protestant seminary with predominantly white and economically advantaged people. If you’re familiar with such places, you know that we talked about privilege.

A lot.

I like to think I am pretty tuned in to my own privilege. But my cravings for cookies and ice cream were enormous and sad and reminded me just how privileged I am. I hungered, strongly and several times a day, for something that is completely superfluous for survival. Sure, sweets make life a little more fun and, well, sweet, but they are not necessary. And yet it’s probably not a big exaggeration to say that I despaired over the lack of them.

I don’t say this to beat myself up. I say this to encourage people to push themselves with their Lent disciplines every so often. This was one of the most interesting, thought-provoking things I’ve done. If I can get so wound up craving dessert, what other wants do I try and turn into needs? To paraphrase the title of that cute little self-help book: what other small stuff am I sweating?

Robert and I broke the fast on Saturday night—OK sue me, I didn’t wait until Easter—while we were cabin-camping with our kids (more on that trip another time). We ate s’mores roasted over the fire, with Special Dark chocolate bars. They were little pillowy sandwiches of joy. The next day, I had bought a small pie at Trader Joe’s that we ate with our Easter picnic, and it was… just OK. Same with the cheap, ubiquitous Easter candy I’d been thinking about for seven weeks. It wasn’t very satisfying.

As it happens, Robert had brought Food Rules with him on our getaway, so I was reading it at the time. Pollan talks in the book about eating the “good” stuff, but doing so less often—this method of indulgence can be more satisfying than submitting to our every craving. Turns out he may be right. I normally adore Reese’s peanut-butter cups and can eat them by the fistful. But the Reese’s egg I pilfered from my kid’s basket wasn’t that great. Whereas the marshmallow, toasted on a stick that Caroline had whittled and assembled into a s’more by my husband, was heavenly.

Image is by Maira Kalman, from the Illustrated Food Rules. “When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.”

by

A Religion of Unachievement

 

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Idylwood Presbyterian Church
March 25, 2012
Easter Sunday
Mark 16:1-8

“A Religion of Unachievement”

The ending of the gospel of Mark is surprising. As you will see if you are reading along in the pew Bible, there is a shorter ending and then a longer ending that come after this. But those were added later. Centuries later. The very best manuscripts we have of the gospel of Mark has it ending at verse 8, which is what I will be reading.

Listen to this:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

~

That’s it.

That’s the whole resurrection story according to Mark, the earliest gospel. Matthew and Luke came 10-15 years later, which means that for a decade or more, this was the final word on Jesus’ resurrection:

They went out and fled from the tomb. Terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Ah, but then come the shorter and longer endings, to rescue us from paralysis and get our heroes moving again! Yes, of course. But as I read those new endings, I’m reminded of the Harry Potter world. The great wizard Professor Dumbledore had a wonderful device in his office called a pensieve. A pensieve stored memories, that you could view like a video recording and the memories would be as vivid as the day they happened. The problem is that people can tamper with those memories when they want to forget or cover up what really happened. You can tell a memory has been altered because they are a little fuzzier, a bit more vague. They don’t have that clarity or authenticity.

Now, there is a kernel of truth in Mark’s supplemental endings. Obviously the disciples did go and tell somebody, eventually, otherwise we wouldn’t be here two thousand years later. But I read those tacked on endings and they seem a little fuzzy, a little hastily composed, a little too willing to zoom past the fear and amazement and go right to the triumph of those brave disciples who shared the good news with the whole wide world, God love ‘em!

No… I want to stay with the original ending for a while. Because that ending feels very real and true to me. Of all four gospel accounts of the resurrection, this one might just be the one for us.

If you’ve ever wanted to keep your faith a secret because of embarrassment at what other people might think, this version will suit you quite well.
If you’ve ever chosen the comfort of the life you love over a life lived in risky faith to a wandering revolutionary, this is your story.
If you’ve ever asked yourself WWJD and known the answer but still not done it, welcome to Mark 16:8. There’s a lot of us who’ve taken up residence in this verse, stiff with fear, shuffling around scared and muttering to ourselves.

Meanwhile we croon to one another on a beautiful spring day: Christ is risen! I do it too—it’s such a nerdy church thing, but I love the singsong response, He is risen indeed. It’s comfortable and familiar.

And then I remember.

“He is not here,” says the messenger. Jesus is OUT! What was dead is now alive again, and everything we know about endings and beginnings is for naught, and nothing will ever be the same, neither you nor I.

Darn right they were afraid.

Brian Blount says, “Fear is a natural reaction to discipleship whose content is the way of the cross. If you’re not afraid, you don’t understand.”

If he’s dead in the tomb, we can follow his teachings, and they’re beautiful and they make the world a lovelier place. But if he is alive… then there is a power that’s loose in the world that shatters the rules—a power we cannot explain, control, or understand.

And that’s scary.

The preacher Tony Campolo has talked about fear and failure. It’s his story, but it’s one we’ve heard all too often lately.

When I was in High School there was a kid who was gay.  We made fun of him.  You would say we bullied him, but we didn’t push him or hit him, we just made fun of him. Well, we did bully him.

Friday afternoons we had Phys Ed. and when we’d all go in to the showers he was afraid to go.  And when he did go in all by himself, we waited with our wet towels and when he came out we whipped him with our towels and stung his naked body.

I wasn’t there the Friday when they grabbed little Roger and dragged him into the shower room and shoved him into the corner, and as he doubled over in the fetal position, five guys urinated all over him.  He went home and he went to bed at about 10:00, his parents said.  It was about 2:00 in the morning when he got up and went into the basement of his house and he hanged himself.

It was at that point that I knew I was not a Christian.  Oh, I believed the Bible.  I believed the Apostle’s Creed word for word.  I was sound, I was solid, I was orthodox.  But if I were a Christian, I would have been Roger’s friend.

And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

*          *          *

It’s happened again like clockwork: another magazine article published the week of Easter, something designed to capitalize on people’s religious curiosity in order to sell magazines. These articles usually deal with some archaeological discovery; last year it was a set of nails that may have been those used on the cross of Christ. This year, it’s Christianity itself that is the fossil.

Newsweek’s cover article is called “Christianity in Crisis: Why we should ignore politicians, priests, and get-rich evangelists, and just follow him.” According to the author, a Catholic named Andrew Sullivan, Christianity is on the ropes: fewer people are attending church or professing faith. People claiming no religious affiliation is at an all-time high, and growing year by year.

Meanwhile the message of Christ has been coopted by political leaders: “On one side, the Republican base is made up of evangelical Protestants who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life. On the other side, the last Democratic primary had candidates profess their faith in public forums, and more recently President Obama appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast, invoking Jesus to defend his plan for universal health care.”

In contrast to these Christian power-grabs, Sullivan lifts up the example of St. Francis of Assisi, a man whose faith and gentleness are legendary. Francis “insisted on living utterly without power over others. As stories of his strangeness and holiness spread, more joined him and he faced a real dilemma: how to lead a group of men, and also some women, in an organization… And it tormented, wracked, and almost killed him. He had to be last, not first. He wanted to be always the ‘lesser brother,’ not the founder of an order. And so he would often go on pilgrimages and ask others to run things. Or he would sit at the feet of his brothers at communal meetings and if an issue could not be resolved without his say-so, he would whisper in the leader’s ear.”

This is the kind of humble discipleship we see in the gospel of Mark, through the lives of the women who were unwavering in their devotion to Jesus. They go to the tomb to anoint the body of their friend, and one question is on their lips: “Who will roll away the stone?”

As they gather up their spices… “Who will roll away the stone?”
As they tie their coverings on their heads… “Who will roll away the stone?”
As they make their way through the deserted early-morning streets, with the sunrise in their faces: “Who will roll away the stone?”

They don’t figure out ahead of time how they’ll manage it.
They don’t say “Eh, that stone’s too heavy,” and decide not to go.
They just gather up their supplies and trundle down the road, shoulder to shoulder.
They do that one small thing they’re able to do.
They go right up to the limits of their own ability.
They go, knowing that they may be thwarted by a big immovable object.
They go, knowing it may be a fool’s errand for them to go. But go they must. Because the anointing is theirs to do—a small, beautiful thing.
They go in hope and possibility that even though they are too weak to move that stone, maybe something might budge it.

And behold… the Way opens up for them. And it’s astounding.

Andrew Sullivan concludes his article by talking about the saints of our faith.

[They] became known as saints not because of their success in fighting political battles, or winning a few news cycles, or funding an anti-abortion super PAC.

[Their] Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It doesn’t seek worldly recognition, or success, and it flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement.

The religion of unachievement creeps up on the moment, spices in hand, because that is what love requires.
The religion of unachievement stands alongside the gay teenager and says, “That’s enough. Stop.”
The religion of unachievement is in the whispering of St. Francis, or in a Birmingham jail with Dr. King, or in the church that’s opened itself to the day laborers who congregate near their building, or in a million other places where people may be afraid, but they are not fearful—afraid, but not full-of-fear.

Where will we live out this religion of unachievement? We, who crow “Christ is risen… he is risen indeed”? Because if Mark is our resurrection story, then we have to write the next section. Thanks to a quirk in the original Greek, the gospel of Mark ends with the word “for.” It is a conjunction: that bit of grammar that connects two thoughts together. The story ends in a fragment. What will the next section be?

At home this week we were talking about Easter, and my four year old said, “Jesus died on the cross because people were mad at him.”
I asked, “Then what happened, James?”
He said, “Jesus is alive again.”
And I said, “What an amazing story.”
And he said, “And it’s still not over.”

No James. No, it’s not over.

Thanks be to God.

 

~

Image: Easter Morning, He Qi