Living word by word

Blessing for compost

   Our middle schoolers took the initiative and -- finally -- we're composting organic material here at the church with a bin built by one of our members.

We formally dedicated the bin on Sunday. I know of no formal blessing for compost (try googling that one!), so I wrote one:

Blessed are you, O Lord our God, for you have made the earth on which we stand, the soil from which our sustenance comes, and the ground to which all living things return.

 

We praise you for the cycles of life and death, for your precious ways in which no good thing is lost. Make this compost bin a sign of your goodness, a reminder to us of death and resurrection, and a signal to remember all your creation as we live and eat and move upon this earth. Amen.

 

 

Married to a wonk

 I'm so proud of my spouse, even if I can't really explain what he does for a living in 20 words or less.

 But now you can read some of what he works on, in a real-time policy debate, at "Reality Based Community: You're entitled to your own opinion, just not your own facts."

 Will's lengthy response to the first article is at the bottom of this post. One of the fascinating things about his job is that he now gets to argue against recycling an idea that he helped promote some ten years ago.

While his argument is nuanced, here's my two-bit summary of a complex issue: we can't consume our way out of the environmental crisis we face. Producing new stuff -- even "green" stuff like hybrid cars -- takes an environmental toll, so think twice -- and do your research --  before you replace something that still works with the latest shiny new thing, even if it's "green."

terminal uniqueness

My dear husband and I work in fields that look completely different. I'm a parish pastor. He consults with federal, state and local governments at the intersection of sustainable land use, transportation, and climate change.  My job is about as local as it gets. He racks up frequent flier miles. My job is ancient, his didn't exist as a profession fifty years ago.  People immediately know what I do when I wear my collar. If you really want to understand his job, you need to watch a PowerPoint presentation.

But the differences end there. We both try to facilitate long-term, sustainable community growth. We both spend lots of time on the phone. And we both encounter some of the same intractable dynamics, known as human nature.

One of our pet peeves is what the recovery community has aptly coined "terminal uniqueness." You see it when someone argues hard that they don't have a problem, even when every external measure says they do.

"Other people might fall into addiction drinking this much, but I can handle it."

"Other churches might be facing hardship if they continue to age without focusing on growth, but ours won't, because we're so unusual." 

 "Other communities might be facing long-term environmental issues if they continue to grow this way, but ours won't."

Oddly enough, the pattern continues even when people DO acknowledge that they have a problem. In fact, it's often even worse then.

 "Other people might need medication to get out of this hole of depression, but I don't."

"Other families might benefit from therapy, but our problems are so unique we won't find a solution there."

 "Other towns might benefit from learning some basic principles for sustainable growth, but our situation is so unique, that won't work here."

Ironically, the insistence on being "special" is often the very thing that spells doom -- because one codependent family is oddly very much like another, and one town that is sprawling with mindless car-dependent growth is going to end up looking like every other town with mindless sprawl.  The very things that make individuals, families, and local communities unique are lost when they refuse to learn from the experience of other individuals, families, and communities.

why we're busy

    I absolutely think a change of adminstrations will be good for the country, but it's also clear that it's going to make things very very busy for our family for awhile.

   Will's group is busy trying to make sure the stimulus package doesn't all go into paving over the universe and instead investing in clean energy and more transit choices.

  

Nate Silver at 538 rightly points out that this is not a narrow agenda, but one very fitting with the platform Obama ran on: energy independence, cleaner air, reducing greenhouse emissions, etc. Unfortunately, it still sometimes gets labeled in the press as a hopelessly granola-y dream. (We do make granola homemade at our house, but that's beside the point. . . ).

  My public apology: I've been a little grumpy about how much time this new effort is requiring of my beloved. When I had to leave the family to tend to a pastoral care crisis this afternoon, we were both thinking the same thing: "Don't complain about my work, and I won't complain about yours."

  Will and I regularly have to remind ourselves that meaningful jobs, left to their own devices, can quickly devour family life. We also have to remember that we're both serving the Lord.

recovery reading

I'm reading The World Without Us, recommended to me by a number of friends as "more hopeful than it sounds." In parts, it is. There are many places which are a testament to human ingenuity and the resiliency of nature. But there are places where I've just had to stop reading. I understand why most people find it easier to deny climate change.

So, as recovery, I'm re- reading a book I already knew I liked, Leaving Church. I was irritated the first time around that Barbara Brown Taylor had, in the end, left parish ministry. I'm still not happy about that, but this time I can read her spot-on descriptions of parish life and simply enjoy the good writing. For example:

"On my worst nights I lay in bed feeling like a single parent, unable to sleep because I knew I did not have enough love in me to go around. God was the boundless lover, but for many people God was the parent who had left. They still read about him in the Bible and sang about him in hymns. They still believed in his reality; which made it even harder to accept his apparent lack of interest in  them. They waited for messages from him that did not arrive. They prepared their hearts for meetings that never happened. They listened to other Christians speak as if God showed up every night for supper, leaving them to wonder what they had done wrong to make God go off and start another family."

One of the things I love about Advent is that the season of waiting is a time we're allowed to acknowledge our sense of orphanhood, our worry that God has indeed given up on this world. I know it is not true, but I also know the worry, the longing , is so very, very real. It's good to hear a writer as gifted as Taylor acknowledge it.

praying for snow

Carol  Howard Merritt at Tribal Church has written an insightful piece on prayer, prompted by her daughter's request to God for snow. Her concern is that her daughter not get the wrong idea about prayer. My comment, which you can read at the site, is that snow is not the equivalent of praying for a bicycle, or another such purely personal request.

We pray for snow a lot at our house. Yes, we want to play in it. But more than that, we want snow because it is a sign that winter is not going away forever. We want snow because it blankets the earth and lets northern plants do what they are supposed to do for the winter. We want snow because it reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere and holds down the temperature just a bit more.  We want snow because if we don't get it now, the drought which began earlier this year is going to be much, much worse next spring.

We pray for snow in the same way we pray for peace -- not because we expect global climate change to halt at our request, but because we pray that our pleas, our actions, our change of heart might also be assisted a bit by a God who wants the planet to survive as much as we do.

Lectionary blog: Reign of Christ; Ezekiel

Ezekiel 34:18-22

Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? ¹⁹And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet? ²⁰Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. ²¹Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, ²²I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.

 

Is is not enough for you to feed on the good pasture?

 

There’s a good question for us, O We the Self-Absorbed!

 

The news has quickly turned from the wave of hope and empowerment brought on by our election two weeks ago. Now the analysis is all about the enormous expectations that will be placed on the new administration. Everyone has an agenda. And make no mistake about it: most of our agenda is about US.

 

A relatively poor economy makes us all turn inward. Meanwhile, the rest of the world might well be asking, “Um, are you people ever going to join the rest of the planet? There’s an ecological disaster unfolding here!”

 

And it’s not just the ecological situation that should give us pause. It was an unfashionable question to ask, in the wake of 9/11, but it’s still worth asking: “Isn’t this the kind of unjust violence experienced by thousands of people around the world all the time? Yes, we can grieve, but do re really think we’re the only ones suffering?” The Current Occupant eschwed self-examination and asked us to go shopping.

 

Let’s face it, if the sheep are God’s people in Ezekiel’s metaphor, then we, American Christians, are the fat ones. (And not just metaphorically either. Ask any European. “Fat” is one of the top adjectives used to describe U.S. citizens). And we’ve done plenty to soil not only our waters but those of the rest of the world too.

 

Yes, we have plenty of challenges right here at home. But let’s not forget that, on a global scale, we are still the fat ones.

another straight cyclist for gay marriage

 

 

As I’ve been riding to work and taking my kids to school with the Big Dummy (our new S.U.B) this year, and following the various public conversations about cyclists and motorists sharing the road, I had a revelation.

 

Drivers treat cyclists the same way “one man, one woman” people treat same-sex couples.

 

Let me explain.

 

Most drivers I know (including myself, much of the time) are not belligerent roadhogs. They are, at their best, sensitive to the fact that they are driving several tons of steel and that a cyclist is a lot more vulnerable on the road. So they make “helpful suggestions” -- like the letter to the editor that appeared last month, saying things like, “Stay off the busy streets,” “don’t ride at night,” and “if there’s a bike path, don’t ride in the street.”

 

The trouble is, if you’re using a bicycle for transportation, not just a fun ride around the park, bike paths are woefully inadequate in most cities (including ours), and staying off major roads is, in many communities, virtually impossible.

 

Yes, I am choosing to ride my bike, and I love doing it, but it’s not just a lark for me. It’s a way of life, something I do because I love the earth, my health and my children. (And yes, I do stay off the busy streets as much as I can when the kids are on the bike). I wish for a city where I wouldn’t be treated like an inconvenience at best, or a danger to others at worst.

 

Now, I do not believe that same sex couples are  “choosing a lifestyle” in the same way I am when I ride my bike, but I can imagine the frustration that arises when people, in the name of “tolerance,” suggest that gay couples are fine with them as long as they are not visible in public. Or when people suggest that we devise some “alternative” route to civil rights for same-sex couples, just as long as we don’t call it marriage. Why is it so threatening that same-sex couples would want to share the same joys and challenges of a publicly recognized, committed relationship? (I also think the U.S. could save a lot of headaches by seriously consdering the European model of separating civil marriage from sacred marriage --  but that's a whole 'nother article).

 

No, it’s not a perfect analogy. For one thing, I can’t think of a single way that same-sex marriage would “slow down” anyone’s traditional marriage in the way that more bikes on the road actually could slow motor traffic. But the combination of fear and frustration I feel --  when it is made clear, in words or in a driver’s behavior, that my right to the road is only secondary – is instructive.

not so bad

 A lot -- yes, a LOT -- has happened since Barbara Brown Taylor published a little piece called the "Upside of a Downturn" in Christian Century a few months ago. But my mind keeps going back to the title.

Yes, the fact that we can even speak of an upside betrays a certain comfort. Our local suburban food shelf reported that requests for food were up 25% in September this year over September 2007. A long-time volunteer from our congregation says he's never seen the need so great.

Yes, we are comfortable. We don't have to retire any time soon. Our public school is just fine, and even though Will just took a new job with substantially less pay we can still afford our wonderful home in a great neighborhood. And if anyone gets sick, our health insurance is OK. So no, we aren't hurting.

But we feel the pinch of gas prices, the worries about the future, the wondering about how we'll ever pay for college for the kids. And yet, and yet, I can't help but feel an odd upside to it all.

More people than ever are biking to work and taking public transit. When I took Amtrak a couple weeks ago from Chicago, the train was full. People are trading in their SUV's for smaller cars.

 I don't feel sheepish about planning a very modest birthday parties for the kids this year. I'm getting a little excited about possibly making a lot of our Christmas gifts. I'm experimenting with granola recipes -- and not feeling like it's a waste of time.

And, somehow in the midst of all the anxiety, it seems that people pay more attention when we pray for the poor now. The requests for help for the food shelf ARE resulting in more donations at church. We all seem to pay more attention to the stuff that's free -- our relationships with each other most of all. 

I'm reminded of the end of a NY Times magazine piece on Obamanomics, in which the candidate mentions a speech from Robert Kennedy:

"In it, Kennedy argues that a country’s health can’t be measured simply by its economic output. That output, he said, “counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them” but not “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.”

The second point Obama wanted to make was about sustainability. The current concerns about the state of the planet, he said, required something of a paradigm shift for economics. If we don’t make serious changes soon, probably in the next 10 or 15 years, we may find that it’s too late."

An upside? Yes, maybe there is.

a nice nod

    The Christian Century just gave a nice nod to the latest Word and World issue on the automobile. You still can't access our article online, but there's a brief abstract of the piece Will and I wrote together: "Actually, You Did Go to Seminary to Deal with Parking!"

   Our friend Ryan has suggested that our title could be the first in a series of articles on practical/ pastoral issues "Actually, you did go to seminary to deal with. . . ."  Now accepting nominations on the next piece.