Category Archives: Spiritual Stuff

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A Prayer for Easter

Weeping comes for a night,
but joy comes in the morning, O God of power and might.

Death has been defeated
and we shout Alleluia!

Let all that we do today be a prayer of praise.

For many of us,
it is an Easter just like the others,
with Easter bonnets and Sunday best,
with the ringing of bells and hymns of joy,
with the preparing of meals and gathering around tables and hunting for eggs…

But let this be an Easter like no other.
Let us see and hear with resurrection eyes and ears.

Let us discern signs of new life in the usual places—a new baby, the beauty of nature;
and in unusual places… who knows where we might find you if we but look?

It is daunting to be resurrection people
even as we read and watch the news—
news of continued violence, poverty, suffering and despair.
We drink in these stories with our morning coffee, day after day,
and wonder where the Easter’s gone.

One year ago we celebrated your resurrection,
and it seems little has changed in our world since then—
Easter seems an idle tale in the wake of
lives destroyed by war, children abused, a creation spoiled,
and endless bickering among our leaders—
too much hand-wringing and too little willingness to do the difficult things.

Close to home, we know loved ones
who have felt the sting of death in their families;
people who struggle to survive the loss of a job,
people entombed by depression or a crippling illness.

Yes, resurrection eyes are not blind to pain.
Resurrection ears are not deaf to cries of suffering.

But resurrection people see your goodness
that outlasts and overpowers any darkness
we can experience or concoct.

Easter is the climax of the story, but not the end.
You alone can roll away the stone,
but we are called
to run, and tell:
“We have seen the Lord!
Come and follow! Believe, and live!”

If we don’t, who will?
Resurrect us, O God of new life—resurrect us from our complacency and fear.
You have the power to do it.

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A Prayer for Good Friday

Holy God,
the hosannas have died away,
the palm branches have turned brittle;

Now, today, there is only this—
each of us,
all of us,
sitting in the darkness,
the hymns of lament in the air,
the mumblings of our own feeble confession,
on this Friday
which we tremble to call Good.

What is good about Good Friday?
What is good about the innocent one nailed to a cross?
What is good about the darkness of war that persists today?
What is good about our devastation of the planet?
… about people living in poverty?
… about the fog of addiction, depression, disease and despair?

What is good about the crushing weight of hunger, racism, scapegoating, apathy?
No, there is nothing good and desirable in these things.

Yet you, O God, are Good.
When suffering reigns yours is the first heart to break.

When despair lurks about, we remember that you were there first,
peering into the abyss and crying out, incredibly:
“Father, forgive them.”

When we feel forsaken, we remember that in your last moments,
you cared for your mother and your beloved disciple,
binding them to one another as a new family.

When we feel overcome by guilt, we remember that you spoke grace to a thief:
“Today you will be with me in paradise.”

Your love for us is just that boundless,
and ever-present,
and Good.

Thank you.

What else can we say here, in the dimness,
in the darkness,
but thank you.

~

Cross-posted at LiturgyLink, a website every church liturgy writer should know about.

Image: World of Darkness

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This Is the Story I’m Preaching Tonight

Andrew Solomon on The Moth: “Depression and the Cambodian Death Camps.”

MP3 file, about 15 minutes.

A slight, unassuming Cambodian woman works with women who’ve been brutalized by the Khmer Rouge. She teaches them to do the work that will save their lives and the life of the world.

It is the work to which Jesus calls us this evening.

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Let’s Get the Guy Out of the Tomb Already

Well Palm Sunday was a big success… clown noses and funny hats, shower heads and white carnations. I’m so thankful for folks ages 6 to 70 who were willing to dramatize some holy foolishness, and for a congregation that got it.

On to Holy Week.

If you’re not following Colossal, why on earth not? It’s an incredible collection of artistic goodness. Oh, if I had a projector and screen in the Tiny Church sanctuary… We are applying for a grant from the presbytery’s transformation project for exactly that, and boy, it cannot come fast enough.

Actually, that’s right. It can’t come fast enough because, if I had a projector this Sunday for Easter, I know what I would do.

Disclaimer: Even as I feel drawn to these images, I know they are not enough. The springing of spring is not deep enough. Easter is several orders of magnitude beyond that. But how does one preach resurrection? One leans heavily on the simile and prays it is enough, but we all know good and well that preaching resurrection is something like rendering the Sistine Chapel with stick figures. In crayon with stick figures.

Onward.

Several years ago the Massachusetts Mental Health Center was slated for demolition. The MMHC had been in operation for something like 90 years and the building… well, it was old and rundown but also full of memory, sadness and hope. How to commemorate it? Artist Anna Schuleit decided to fill it with 28,000 potted plants. The photos are tender and touching. Here are just a few:

That is something like resurrection, no? Especially in Mark’s eerie, unsettling gospel account. Resurrection is incongruous in that landscape. It sprouts up out of our own dingy existence, making it new, but not unrecognizably new. We are still in this world, yes? Just transformed somehow. There’s a “blank, unholy surprise” to it, to quote Macaulay Connor.

I’m also loving the Wooly Bear Caterpillar, whose acquaintance I’ve made while watching Frozen Planet these last couple of weeks:

The wooly bear caterpillar lives in the arctic and when spring begins, it eats like crazy, trying to amass enough weight to be able to spin its cocoon and become a moth. It takes 14 years to complete that process. Each winter in the meantime it hibernates, sort of. Unlike some animals, whose metabolisms simply slow way down, the wooly bear caterpillar freezes solid. Its heart stops beating. Its gut freezes, then its blood. It is not, in fact, dead; but one couldn’t be blamed for writing it off as such: motionless, crusted over with ice.

But then in the spring, it wiggles into existence once more, and that relentless lurch toward change begins again. I love this. As someone who seems destined to learn the same lessons again and again, whose growth is slow, whose need for transformation doesn’t coincide with a nice, pat, yearly CLANG! of Easter, I am heartened that God’s new and renewing world has space for a caterpillar whose heart thuds to life again and again and again.

Two years ago on Easter I compared Jesus to a gopher. Maybe this year it’ll be the wooly bear.

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Needing a Mentor, Being a Mentor

Ah, Generic Stock Photos. Where would blogs be without them.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about mentors lately. I thought this article was awesome: Get Ahead with a Mentor Who Scares You:

“You’re the best!” the four American Idol contestants cried to their voice coach Patty after narrowly escaping elimination, “We couldn’t have done it without you!” As they celebrated, I couldn’t help but notice that their hero was the same irascible, no-holds-barred woman who had been shown yelling and screaming at the same contestants just minutes earlier, leaving her devastated charges in tears.

With the group’s success, Patty’s tough-love approach was validated (much more clearly, perhaps, than that of the show’s previous tough-love artist Simon Cowell). Though her tactics were questionable, they certainly brought out the best in her team; she truly helped them to become better singers and performers. I’m not saying that you should go out and be like Patty, but if you’re young, ambitious and motivated, you should take a page from that foursome.

Go out and find the most qualified or talented mentor, coach, or manager you can, and subject yourself to everything they can throw at you.

The comments rightly caution against a mentor who is abusive. I’m not interested in being yelled at. After all, my kids will be teens before I know it…

But I love the basic idea. Over my 12+ years in ministry, lay and ordained, I’ve had a number of nurturing and supportive mentors and guides—spiritual directors, coaches and professors.

Now I’m ready for someone to scare the bejesus out of me. Or scare the Jesus into me.

I’d like a mentor who assigns me challenging work to do. Who is constantly reinventing herself in ministry. Who understands that good pastoral leaders are as much futurists as they are caregivers and consensus-builders. Who is where I’d like to be on this writing/pastoring journey.

‘Trouble is… I’m not sure I know anyone who fits that bill. Or who would be open to that kind of relationship. Do you? If not, I wonder what it says about the church that that’s the case.

~

On the other side of the equation, I will be mentoring a woman who is newly graduated from seminary. I’m not interested in scaring her. She’s looking for someone to guide and hold her accountable to her own goals and process. I’m excited, because she’s an awesome person and is going to be an incredible minister, and to the extent that I can help her along her way, it’s a great honor.

As I begin this process, though, I have a couple of questions for you, Gentle Readers of all persuasions:

Have you had a mentoring relationship that was helpful? Would you be willing to talk to me about that?

Have you ever wanted a mentor and not been able to find one? What stood in the way?

Have you ever been a mentor? If not, what has stood in your way?

If you’d like to talk off-blog, e-mail me at maryannmcdana (at) gmail (dot) com.

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A Pastor’s Kind of Creativity

The tagline for the Blue Room is “a space for beauty, ideas, creativity, and the life of the Spirit.” I tagged it thusly because that’s the purpose of the Blue Room in our house. It’s my home study, the homework place, the kid arts and crafts room. But it feels high-falutin’ to have that tagline. I don’t feel worthy of it.

Then yesterday I listened to Creativity and the Everyday Brain, an interview with neuroscientist Rex Jung on Being. And it encouraged me.

You can read the whole transcript, but here’s the pertinent bit for me, and I suspect, for many of you who plan worship, education and mission in the church. Prior to this, Krista Tippett and Rex Jung had been talking about Einstein’s term, “spiritual genius,” and what it meant:

Ms. Tippett: One of the people I’ve interviewed is Jean Vanier. Are you familiar with him? He started the L’Arche Movement, which is a global movement of communities centered around people with mental disabilities, especially Down syndrome. I think, if Einstein had known him, he might have said ‘there’s a spiritual genius.’ But even if you put that language to one side, I think that’s a form of creativity — there’s socially useful, novel and useful, creativity.

Dr. Jung: Yes.

Ms. Tippett: Right, that — that fits your definition, but it’s not immediately what comes to mind. We think of artists, we think of scientists.

Dr. Jung: It’s not, but I totally agree that that is a form of creativity and a very valuable form of creativity and perhaps something that we’re moving towards in our increasingly complex society. It’s not just going to be a product. It’s not just going to be an artifact like a painting or a dance number. It’s going to be moving groups of people together and motivating groups of people in certain ways, and that’s a creative endeavor in this L’Arche Movement that you’re talking about. This is a kind of — sounds like a new creative endeavor that we should start to recognize.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. I mean, people think differently and live differently as a result of this.

That’s the goal, isn’t it, of that kind of creative endeavor? That people think and live differently. That’s why we worship leaders pore over books to find just the right prayer of confession. Or comb our archives looking for a quote for the bulletin cover that will set the right tone. That’s why groups of pastors fly off for a week of lectionary study with other trusted colleagues every year. (OK, one of the reasons.)

The transformed life is the artifact we’re looking for.

But works of spiritual genius also happen on a level that’s beyond us and our efforts. During Sunday’s service I saw at least three people with tears in their eyes. That’s not all that unusual, in my experience. Church is a place where people can tap deep wells of emotion. You don’t force it or manipulate it. You just create a space where it can happen.

What was a bit unusual is that all three of these people were big strong men. It was holy ground.

In my work with NEXT Church, I’ve sometimes felt an insecurity among pastors of mainline churches. Are we dinosaurs because we offer a more traditional worship experience? Sometimes, yes, if it’s not indigenous to the people we serve. But it’s like we equate spiritual genius with tattoos and funky glasses. I feel this sometimes myself. I am in awe of the way some people think. I am creative, but within a form. I’m not nuking the Presbyterian order of worship, as many have (faithfully). It’s the sandbox I’m playing in.

For others, there is no box.

But artistry comes in many shapes and sizes. During the NEXT conference, we sang a setting of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” that was utterly fresh and new, with guitar and percussion. And the music we made was like a wall of sound—I’ve never heard a congregated people sing that song like that. And at the end of the conference, the organist played the Widor Toccata, and dozens of people stood and soaked it in… even came up into the chancel to behold an artist at work.

Both experiences were traditional. And both were of the moment. Both were moments of spiritual genius.

Be of good cheer, friends who work in the church. There is an artistry to what you do.

~

Image: from the New Yorker article referenced in the On Being program, about how brainstorming doesn’t work. Off topic for this post but worth a read.

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A Thing of Beauty

Follow up from this post.

I enjoyed hearing about your things of beauty via Twitter and other means.

And mine? Turns out I got to see cherry blossoms after all, during my run this afternoon. There are several mature trees in my neighborhood. Those are beautiful in their own way; I like the darkness of the bark against the brilliant white petals. But today I was drawn to the brand new trees I saw in several yards. They were staked in the ground, with a trunk the size of my arm, with tiny twig branches sticking out the top. In fact, the branches were so puny that the weight of those pink and white petals bent them towards the ground. So the tree looked like a mushroom, or maybe a fountain of blossoms.

And I thought about people I know who are going through really tough stuff these days, especially two families I know with children suffering life-threatening illness. Both of them have shared stories just recently of the extravagant kindness of people around them. And I know what that’s like. I felt that when my father died while I was great with child. People arrived with food and cards and oil to rub my swollen pregnant feet.

That kindness can feel overwhelming, like you can’t even carry it all. It’s a kindness born of grace, a grace that’s so powerful you feel like you might break from the holy heft of it because, well, look at you, you’re thin and pale and staked to the ground for gosh sakes, because you can’t even stand on your own, let alone reciprocate or say thank you or do all those things competent people do. Yet somehow, by some miracle, you have enough strength to bear the weight of all that love that blazes with a white light.

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Your Mission Today

cherry blossom

I have a mission for you, if you choose to accept it.

I blogged a few weeks ago about John Donohue, a Celtic philosopher and poet who inspired me to find the beauty around me, right where I am. That afternoon I picked up the girls at the bus stop and whispered to them, “I have a job for you right now. You are a detective, and you are supposed to find one beautiful thing between here and home. Don’t tell me what it is until we get home.” Caroline picked the deep red berries on the holly bush on the corner.

That’s going to be my practice again for today — to find something beautiful that I wasn’t expecting, something I might have missed if I hadn’t had my eyes wide. I was going to make a quick dash downtown to see the cherry blossoms, which are at peak right now. But it’s a yucky day so I think I’ll go Friday. That makes today’s practice a little more challenging. I’ll be working on the computer for much of the day, in my blue room, then running a quick errand before picking up the girls.

Then again, maybe it’s not so challenging after all. Just this second a friend sent me an e-mail containing a screen shot of something that she called a “miracle.” It’s her story and her miracle so I won’t say what it is, but I agree, it is miraculous. And a thing of beauty.

Sometimes it comes to you.

That was a freebie, though. I’m still going to look around for something beautiful today and I invite you to do the same. I need to look at the world that way, because right now the world is a dead black boy in Florida and mean Internet comments and a law student who was called a slut for having an opinion. The world is protesters slaughtered in Syria and dead Jewish children in Toulouse and a soldier gone mad in Afghanistan. Surely there’s more to the world than that.

Later today I’ll come back and post the beautiful thing I found. And I want to hear about your beautiful thing too.

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What is a Mentor?

Carrie Newcomer, a mentor from afar.

I made an offhand comment yesterday on FB about a “creative mentor” who had sent me an e-mail that made my week. Afterward a FB friend asked a simple but confounding question: What is a mentor? 

I await her response to the same question—it’s something she’s been wrestling with for some time, apparently—but I said something like this:

Mentor is a pretty broad term for me. There are people who mentor me who don’t know they’re doing it. Like the person I was talking about yesterday–she’s an artist whose work I’ve been enjoying for a long time. I met her several years ago, but we don’t talk regularly.

I guess my definition is someone whose life or work inspires you to be the best person you can be.

This is a timely question because Jan’s blog post for today talks about being a mentor. She, by the way, is one of my mentors. And friends.

Jo(e) is another one. I admire the way she lives, works, thinks, and walks around in the world. I’ve never met her, but I hope to someday.

I believe that technology allows us to be mentored by people in a way we could not be in previous generations. Sometimes social media creates a false sense of intimacy, though. When well-known people share their lives on Twitter or Facebook, we can get sucked into feeling like we know them. It’s a mistake to call them friends, though. But I think it’s OK to call them mentors.

I also think these virtual mentors are no match for someone who has agreed to take on the role of mentor—someone who interacts with a mentee with that intentional relationship in mind. I have had that kind of relationship too. Mainly professors.

What do you think? What is a mentor? And do you have one?

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The Internet Kills Community! Except When It Doesn’t

First, a big welcome to those of you who’ve made your way here thanks to the Fellowship of Prayer! Come on in and stay awhile. This blog is named after the Blue Room in our house, which is the arts and crafts space we set up in what used to be our dining room. We are well stocked with everything you need for your stay: glitter glue, play-doh, googley-eyes and more.

~

Two articles crossed my screen recently about the Internet and its effect on community. First:

Whenever Two or More Are Gathered… Online — Sojourners

My editor passed along this link in response to some of stuff I wrote in Sabbath in the Suburbs about my experience taking a tech Sabbath each weekend. The article describes a very vibrant, supportive community that formed via Facebook in the wake of a friend’s death in Iraq.

I noted that there was a physical dimension to the community—it did not take place solely online; in fact the author actually moved so she could live closer to several community members. Certainly there are online communities that get along and get deep without ever meeting face to face… but most of the ones I’ve been a part of are either physical friendships that are kindled and stoked online, or online friendships that deepen to the point that people want to meet face to face. Examples of the former include my group of friends from Rice, who have had an e-mail list for going on 20 years now. Examples of the latter include the RevGalBlogPals and the Young Clergy Women, both of whom have annual conferences now.

~

Second is this article about digital Sabbath that my mother sent me:

We Don’t Need a Digital Sabbath; We Need More Time — Atlantic

The blurb summarizing the article says, What if our technology isn’t the problem? A look at “Digital Sabbaths” and the dangers of holding our gadgets responsible.

But the article isn’t really about that. I thought from that description that the article would pooh-pooh tech sabbaths, but in fact it’s a fairly good synopsis of the ins and outs of them. Here is the vital bit:

When we make a Sabbath and push back against the many claims on our time, we are, in some ways, rebelling against this speed-up and the intrusion of work and labor into our domestic sphere…

It’s for all these reasons that a Sabbath, digital or otherwise, can be reinvigorating. When we take a day away from our tools and create a day entirely under our own control, we create that “palace in time” where we can meet our friends and family and, finally, connect.

If one concedes the point that a Sabbath for restorative reasons need not proscribe technology, it may seem pointless to argue against the digital sabbath. What’s the harm?

The reason is that if we allow ourselves to blame the technology for distracting us from our children or connecting with our communities, then the solution is simply to put away the technology. We absolve ourselves of the need to create social, political, and, sure, technological structures that allow us to have the kinds of relationships we want with the people around us. We need to realize that at the core of our desire for a Sabbath isn’t a need to escape the blinking screens of our electronic world, but the ways that work and other obligations have intruded upon our lives and our relationships.

I think that’s a little facile, and this issue of “blaming the technology” is strange. Yes, putting away the phones and iPads isn’t enough to make a radical change in one’s life and world. But I’m almost willing to say that radical change is impossible without putting them away now and then.

I think about this from an incarnational point of view, which comes from my faith tradition: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Technology, by and large, connects us with people across the miles (which is valuable) but it distracts us from the physical world immediately around us. Setting aside these gadgets is the first step to reconnecting with the real fleshy people right there with us.