What New Ministers Might Need

The summer brings new ministers to churches.  Some are newly-minted from graduation and ordination; others take the summer to move to new pulpits after a search process.  Lists of what the new priest or minister needs in her/his new church float around, filled with things like vestments and a home communion kit.  And yes, depending upon your denomination, you'll need those things (and a second job to pay for them, I might add - priestcraft tools are ridiculously expensive).

But while you're gathering your tools of the trade, consider these not-so-obvious items:

1.  A glue gun and duct tape.  In my years of ministry, I've used a glue gun to fix the Sunday floral arrangement, repair damaged Vacation Church School crafts and damaged church property, and glue orphreys back on vestments until they could be properly sewn on.  Get one.   And what a glue gun can't fix, duct tape can.  Trust me on this.

2.  The entire series of The Vicar of Dibley. It's more fact-based than most clergy care to admit.  And it's a fun way to laugh at yourself. In case you are wondering, we do sound and look that absurd at times.

3.  A sense of humor about yourself. Laugh at yourself.  Laugh when you need to laugh.  Life is hard, as Job in the Bible realizes, so enjoy the sound of laughter when you can.

4.  An email address only your friends know.  Having an email that, when you see the inbox, you  know it will not be an email complaining about the Sunday hymn selection or an opportunity to get prescription pills for pennies on the dollar.  It will be a message from people who simply know who you are, underneath the vestments and the titles.    

5.  A strong sense of humility.    A rector I once knew told me not to do something because, in his opinion, "Our skills are too valuable for that."  That happened to be working with the Sunday service leaflet.  Remember this:  If Jesus can wash the feet of the disciples, there is not one thing that our ministerial skills are too valuable to do.  Preach the Gospel at a funeral.  Set out chairs for a Wednesday night dinner.  Take out the trash (literal and metaphorical).  Do what needs to be done without treating underlings as such.  And know you wouldn't last one minute in the Hunger Games.  God did not call any of us because we are awesome.  God called us because something in our brokenness allows the Holy to shine through, if we are courageous enough to recognize our brokenness. 

6.  A subscription to People magazine.  Or the mindless entertainment reading of your choice.  After a week of service planning and pastoral visits and a tree in the playground after a storm, reading an interview with Joe Manganiello about how he brings heart and soul to Alcide the Werewolf in True Blood makes me smile.  And, okay, I admit it - my heart swoon.  Whatever reminds you that you are wonderfully human and a bit shallow is just dandy.

7.  A good selection of the Caldecott Medal winning children's books.  Some of the best theology in the world exists in these books.  Read, learn, and inwardly digest.  And they have pictures, something most Biblical commentaries lack.

8.  A quiet coffee shop or place of refuge of your choice.  Sometimes you need to get away to a place where no one knows your name.  Find that spot.  Hide out with some regularity.

9. The "Shocked and Appalled" file.  For the letters and emails you will get that begin along the lines of, "I was shocked and appalled by (fill in the blank)."    Some of the complaints will be things to which you might want give some thought and reflection; others will be letters that will make you l-a-u-g-h.  If you want a head start, just name your blog Dirty Sexy Ministry.  That generated a fair amount of shocked and appalled responses...and a book deal.

10.  A therapist or spiritual director.    When I mentioned to a priest in a previous diocese that I hoped all clergy had a therapist or spiritual director with whom they could work, he replied, "Why?  We get all our issues worked out in seminary."  I was shocked and appalled.  Trust me, we don't.  We all get overwhelmed by life, and having someone to show us how to navigate those times is a sign of great strength, not weakness. And the only way we learn to let God's light shine through our brokenness is through courageous soul work that almost always needs a guide. 

Yesterday morning

I watched the news yesterday morning. I am sure many others did as well. People shot and a booby-trapped apartment brought together by a seemingly "easy going" young man. Each station gave chilling details of the attack in Aurora, but the one question they were unable to answer was why.

Why would a young man who appears to have a lot going for him decide to start gunning down people in a theater? Sure, each news channel will trot out some psychologist or profiler or psycho babbling bobble-head with a theory. For that matter, this young man may probably start talking soon, and his reason? His reason will be utter nonsense.

We ask why, but the answer will only confound us more. We try to make sense of something senseless and cruel. Maybe we think that if we know the answer we can have some control over this situation. Maybe we could stop this if we could just figure out the reason.

In college, the one piece of information I remember from my psychology class is people are not rational, rather people rationalize. We do what we want to do and come up with a reason or excuse later. Try as we might, there are some situations where we did not think our way into it and we are not thinking are way out of it either.

I would like to know why this man chose to do what he did, but I also know that his explanation, his reason would never satisfy me. I am not sure anything he says or thinks would make me feel better. I guess I am asking why because my brain is trying to make sense of some heart or soul disconnect. Certainly, if you feel so angry, so isolated and so small that you feel you must hurt and kill others, there is a disconnect with your soul.

Perhaps our asking why demands we answer with what. What will we do? What will we be? We must respond to the situation.

So how do we feel our way out of this situation?  How do we feel our way to the why and move forward? How do we reconnect our minds, our hearts and our souls?

I think that we acknowledge sadness over the loss of life. We acknowledge that for better or for worse, we are all connected to each other. When any of us dies or is hurt, the whole can feel that damage. So, we pray.

We pray for those other parts of the body, the human family. We pray for the loss and the losses that are felt by those closer to those parts- their families and friends. We also pray for ourselves. We pray that we do not lose our connection to our souls and the souls of others.

So, we reach out to those who we love, and those who need our love. We may never get a why that will satisfy our logic or our reason. If we get an explanation, we still will not get control. We do, however, get to respond, and perhaps that response is more important than any man with gun.

A Strongly-worded Letter about General Convention and Love

Why the rush to kill the Episcopal Church?  I mean, really, Wall Street Journal, are we that much of a blight on the face of faith communities? (If you haven't read the article published, do a quick search or better yet, read Scott Gunn's reply).  I expect a few of the regulars to condemn the actions of General Convention on same-sex blessing.  I get that there are those within our pews who do not believe that gay and lesbian Christians should have the same equality as heterosexual Christians because of how they choose to interpret the Bible, even though we long-ago started understanding that straight men could be bishops even though they are divorced and wear clothing of mixed blend and eat bacon (sorry, just had to get that out of my system).

I get that having a female Presiding Bishop who is poised and frighteningly intelligent scares some men.  I understand that we are not willing to admit we live in a country and a church that is still sexist and racist and homophobic, so we create all sorts of logical-sounding sentences and statements to qualify our prejudices so they sound less-prejudicial and more, well, justifiable.

I get that the foundation of the Gospel is not a place of comfort for any of us.  Loving each other is a wonderful mantra to put on a bumper sticker, but living it daily?  Well, that's another challenge.

Maybe that's why some are in a rush to proclaim the demise of the Episcopal Church.  Because we are trying to love each other.  We are trying to recognize that for centuries, the love of God has been limited to a particular set of human beings, usually the Caucasian male property-holder.  Then we started listening to the voices of those who had been outcast.  You remember them, right?  The outcasts, the ones with whom Jesus broke bread.  The ones that were in Jesus' posse? Yep, we started listening to them.  And that always upsets the proverbial apple cart.

When those of us in power begin listening to the outcasts, we generally do a few things.  First we ignore them.  But the Holy Spirit gives them courage to keep talking, and She also cleans out some of our ears so we can listen.  And we listen, and we then justify our actions.

"You see, we understand that you might want to vote in the Church, but the Church councils have ALWAYS been made up of wealthy men, so we can't change them now."

"I understand you feel called to be a priest, but how will you celebrate at the altar as a woman?"

"Yes, you want to have your relationship blessed, but marriage has ALWAYS looked like this, so sorry."

And the Holy Spirit, as She likes to do, holds our foolish prejudice in our face until we realize that God is a God who ALWAYS loves, but manages to express that love in more ways than there are stars in the universe.  God never stops creating, something we occasionally remember. And we begin to feel more than we think.

That's the real truth about love - it's a feeling.  When we feel what feeling outcast feels like, how being told you are not enough as God created you feels like, then we start acting in love.  And acting in love is not a particularly neat and tidy process.  We just start walking, and know that God will open the path step by step.  We know that you will stumble, get sidetracked and lost, and God will find us and get us back on the road less travelled.

And so we did, again, at General Convention, act in love, in many ways.  We listened to each other.  Some needed to go home and feel their hurt, and that's okay.  We will leave the light on for them.  Other acts of love, like revisioning what this Church will look like as a structure in the future, are still a bit ephemeral, but we will get there.  Wandering in the desert is a long-standing Godly act.

So, to the WSJ and every other person or group that is joyfully proclaiming the crucifixion and death of the Episcopal Church, I say this:  We are Christians who love, and we believe in resurrection.  Death is only part of the journey, and love always wins.

Join us on a Sunday.  Outcasts are especially welcomed.    

Declaring Independence

Has it been two years?

That's what I thought as I made coffee on this July 4th in my kitchen in Lexington.  Those moments where the time-space continuum doesn't seem to make sense need to be shared, so I promptly called the other half of the Dirty Sexy Ministry team and asked her the same question.

She thought the same thing.

Oh yes, a mere two years ago, we had the nefarious Declare Your Independence Party in the Garden District of New Orleans.  You entered the home to a stack of plates from the dollar store and a bunch of permanent markers.  Select your plate.  Grab a marker and your beverage of choice, and start celebrating.  Through the night, we encouraged everyone to write on the plate (or plates, depending on who and what had been living in your soul rent free) all those things from which we declared our independence.

The names of ex-wives and ex-husbands and people in our lives that sucked the life out rather than infused us with spirit.

The people whose friendships had been hurtful and wounding with no hope of immediate healing.

The situations that felt overwhelming and oppressive.  The anger that needed to be released.

Family issues.  Job issues.  Too much grief.  Too little hope.  Paths that had come to an end and the fear that accompanies stepping onto a new road.

Then, as fireworks and a few gunshots celebrated the birth of this nation, people smashed their plates into thousands of pieces on the back patio. And smashed.  And smashed some more.  Someone started saying the words written on his plate aloud, and others joined in.  As words were spoken and plates were smashed, people clapped and cheered and cried and released emotions that had been begging for daylight.  We were quite amazed at how much people need to be freed from in their lives.

Mary and I cleaned up those thousands of little pieces of the shackles of people's lives the next morning.  The crashing noise as we dumped those pieces into the bin did not help our headaches, but we got the priestly task of taking the shards and tossing them into the trash.  Right where the things that shackle us belong.  And we said some prayers that all the written words broken into a million pieces (they seemed to multiply as we kept sweeping) would be redeemed by God, somehow, someway.

Two years ago.

And to both Mary and me, two years feels like a lifetime ago.  The things we had written on our plates were redeemed by God - with a deep amount of work.  That's the rub, isn't' it?  That we want change and newness and all the painful things in our lives to disappear, but we aren't too keen on the soul work that goes into getting to that new place.  Quite honestly, believing that such massive and holy change just happens is like believing all was fine and dandy with the newly formed United States after some white male property holders took quill to parchment on July fourth.

Massive change takes massive work, and most of that holy work occurs while we are simply being.  Boy, we hate that, too.  We want something to do when many times, God simply asks us to be patient while She shifts and moves things.

Mary and I decided to break plates while we waited.  It was something, right?

Harriet Tubman said of her emancipating work, that she freed thousands of slaves, and could have freed thousands of more if they only knew they were slaves.  Most of us gathered that night had no illusions that the names and things we wrote on our plates would somehow just magically be made all better on the morning of July 5th.  Well, we hoped, but no such luck.  Yet in those moments, surrounded by laughter and friends on a hot summer night, we all perhaps found that small amount of courage to admit we were indeed enslaved by shackles and chains of many things - unhealthy relationships, long-festering anger, hurtful patterns, blaming others, diminishing ourselves - to name a few more popular ones.  

So we wrote them down.  And smashed them to bits.

Saying things out loud or writing them on cheap pottery made them real.  No more vaporous words.  The things that enslaved our souls were written in bold marker.  A great tragedy I see in the lives of many is the unwillingness to admit that there are things from which they need to be emancipated.  They would simply rather be slaves to their many hurts and to their own darkness; admitting their enslavement would be too damaging to a fragile ego.

But when the cracks start to form and the ego begins to crack and the shifting begins, something miraculous can happen.  Light flows through the breaks.  God's light.  Holy light.  My life had started to change long before that night.  The slow movement of holy creation had begun with the stirrings of my soul and the breaks in the surface, but on that night, I felt a sure and certain hope that my present would not be my future.  I knew, fully in my heart, that only in our brokenness can the light of God fully shine through.

So much has changed for both of us in two years.  People who were in our lives are no longer living in our souls rent-free.  New, joyful friends have appeared.  We both have new communities of faith to serve in places that seemed an eternity away two years ago.  We are both doing things in our lives we simply could not have imagined two years ago - being a mother, writing a book, even riding horses competitively.  Weeping may spend the night, or a few weeks or months, but dawn does come.  

There are more chains and more struggles.  There always are.  More lessons to learn.  More words to write and plates to break.  But for now, looking backward and giving thanks for the brokenness that leads to freedom is enough.  For now, seeing how far away back there seems is enough.  

What I imagine Laurie is doing at General Convention

General Convention has begun. My amazing awesome blog writing co-author is there, somewhere in some convention center in Indianapolis I am sure. Even though we probably speak to each other almost everyday, still I wonder if she is leaving out any interesting details from her days there, for example:

1. In the midst of some quiet business meeting, Katy Perry leaps to the center of the room and grabs the microphone. Fireworks and sparklers explode around the frightened but curious convention goers as Katy Perry offers a well-thought out amendment to the currently discussed item on the agenda.
2. Somewhere at this convention there is an evening gown competition. Which diocese will go home with the title is left up to the House of Bishops.
3. At the party honoring new books from Church Publishing, Jason Stratham comes stumbling in demanding to meet Mary, the woman of his dreams.
4.  The Pitt-Jolie nuptials.
5. Flashmob when arguments over, well, anything begins.
6. Cocktail hour starts at 8 AM, full sushi bar and an ice-cream sundae station for those who feel stressed out.

I have never been to General Convention, but if any of these items occurs I will be there next time.