A vision we give to others....

I recently heard a speaker talk about the importance of a person’s name. Jesus was a vision caster; he impacted the lives of his disciples by renaming them based on the vision of who they could be. Larry Crabb says, “A vision we give to others of who and what they could become has power when it echoes what the spirit has already spoken into their souls.”

Eugene Peterson tells a story about Martin Buber having said, "The greatest thing any person can do for another is to confirm the deepest thing in him, in her--to take the time and have the discernment to see what's most deeply there, most fully that person, and then confirm it by recognizing and encouraging it."

Peterson stresses the importance of looking beyond surface appearances. "We have dealings with hundreds of people who take one look at us, make a snap judgement, and then slot us into a category so that they won't have to deal with us as persons. They treat us something less than we are; and if we're in constant association with them, we become less."

....like country music

About twenty years ago a business partner commented that my music choices were somewhat strange. At the time I think we were listening to Bruce Cockburn... I admitted that I had always had an eclectic taste in music, and he jokingly responded, "When you grow-up and mature you'll like country music!".

Honestly, I thought this idea was not likely, but today having listened to all 43 songs on the latest Vince Gill album, These Days (without a break I'd like to add), I am reminded of my friend's words.

truth telling....

About two years ago, author James Fry published a book entitled, A Million Pieces that shot up the National Best Sellers List with the help of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club endorsements. He followed up with a sequel entitled, My Friend Leonard. I am a sucker for a good memoir and read both of these books with anticipated excitement. Upon finishing the last page of My Friend Leonard, I closed the book, put it on the nightstand, and turned out the light by my bed. Before my head hit the pillow I woke my wife up by saying aloud that James Fry must have embellished this story, it didn't ring true.

Later that week I realized that I had had a "BLINK" moment, because The Smoking Gun (a website that regularly posts legal documents, arrest records, and police mugshots with the intent to bring to public light information that is damning, shocking, outrageous, or amazing, yet also somewhat obscure or unreported by more mainstream media sources) exposed James Fry's best-selling nonfiction memoir as being "filled with fabrications, falsehoods, other fakery." After learning my suspicions about Fry's books were at very least embellished truths or at worst shameless fiction, I quickly removed the books from my "Recommends" list on this blog.

A storyteller is a person who invites others to enter into the experience of a story. Barbara Brown Taylor's latest book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith does just that. Unlike the James Fry books mentioned above, her words about truth telling, public and private give you a window into both. Taylor shares her story of leaving a 15-year career as an Episcopal priest. Her honesty is striking and at times her descriptions are comparable to other great writers like Annie Dillard or Frederick Buechner. The following excerpts are from an address given at the Washington National Cathedral, June 7, 2006.

"If there are other memoir writers sitting here this evening, then you can take a little nap now, because you already know how it goes. The book you meant to write is not the book you write. You turn out to be even more narcissistic, melodramatic, and self-pitiful than you had reasonably feared. People who love you are willing to tell you this, which makes you even more narcissistic, melodramatic and et cetera. Finally, after you have written the book three times, ruthlessly wringing the necks of chapters you raised from baby chicks, you find that the writing heals itself as it heals you. The language runs clear at last. The flaws you can still see are not the ones in the writing but the ones in the mirror. You can look at yourself now with something closer to forgiveness than shame, so that a mere five weeks after you have sworn on everything holy that you will never, ever put yourself or your family through anything like this again, you are already thinking about the next book. Am I right?"

"One thing I discovered over the years was that the people who put themselves at risk like that—telling their story out loud, taking responsibility for their lives, making their private truth public—they were the ones who seemed best able to move on, while those who concealed their damage carried it around with them like an IV drip."

rarely will a politician say anything....

A couple months ago I was listening to an interview on Public Radio with an Associated Press writer (don't quote me but I think it was Denis Gray or maybe James Fallows). He was commenting about how with so many political consultants and pollsters surrounding our Presidents these days that rarely will a politician say anything without considering the numbers.

He said that George W. Bush won the election on one sentence, "You may not agree with my policies, but I stand on my word." Of course as one would expect, this slogan was a calculated response to the accusations of John Kerry's "wishy-washy" stances.

The writer went on to say that Robert F. Kennedy's remarks to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination would never have been possible in today's age of sound bites, because to go "off book" can be a "political career disaster." I assume the writer was being ironic, although he did not mention that two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down during a celebration following his victory in the California primary, June 5, 1968.

I finally got around to downloading an mp3 recording of Robert F. Kennedy's address and found it to be very moving.

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
~ Aeschylus

....like resurrection.... an invitation; it asked.

Sometimes it takes someone to ask the right question or the same question. Over coffee I shared my vocational search with a local Pastor and friend. After hearing my story he asked me if I was pursuing my M.Div. to somehow "repay God for what he had done for me?" I would prefer to call it a "response" rather than payback, but the result is something "...like resurrection... an invitation; it asked."

I thought having come this far that bringing personal faith and pastoral vocation together would be the next step. But I find myself in a similar place as expressed by Nora Gallagher, "I was meant to remain in the middle for a while, between clergy and laity, a hybrid, a crossbreed, not the one and not the other. An inhabitant of the borderlands, in order to inform not only myself but the church, too. I needed to live out the "priesthood of the laity" to find out how far it could be taken inside the church, and what it might mean outside her walls" (207-208).

lose our life to find it....

You said, God is in the business of transforming people right where they are, and that my business is as much "holy ground" as any other piece of real estate around. Last year "fulltime ministry” seemed the best thing to do, regardless of the Paul Stevens book you loaned me about Christian vocation and ministry in the workplace. I remember Stevens quoting George Bernard Shaw, that every profession is a conspiracy against the laity, insisting that professionalism robbed people of the greatest motivation to “turn ordinary work into a sacred ministry.” So why did I want to go to Seminary

Do you recall telling me that you loved reading Frederick Buechner? Right away this endeared me to you, because I highly regard this author and his insightful wisdom about life. Buechner says, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness; touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are kept moments, and life itself is a grace.”

I am reminded of this as I have been reading a new memoir by Barbara Brown Taylor entitled, Leaving Church. Her story has resonated with my own sense of vocation and calls attention to the words of Jesus saying that we need to lose our life to find it.

Eat this Book....

I often experience when I read books and investigate different subjects that I regularly hit upon the same realities. I am more tempted to think that I am reading into these writings somehow, but I have come to understand that "spiritual reading" can be a matter of receiving.

From an early age I was taught to read like most people. I read for information and for comprehension. I learned to distill what I read to basic ideas or depersonalized facts. Reading for information only, I can distance myself from the facts; I can pick and choose what suits me. I may ask what can it do for me? How will I benefit from it or more specifically how can I use it? While admiring good writing, I learn to summarize, glean the main thesis and I make every effort to pack these facts into my brain falsely believing that just having more information will change my life.

Unless I internalize or take in what I have read it will never change me. I have always appreciated what the writer of the Book of James says about this concerning Scripture, “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (1:23-24). In a modern day parable involving his grandson Eugene Peterson shows that Scripture “depersonalized into an object to be honored, …detached from precedence and consequence… perpetuates a lifetime of reading marked by devout indifference.”

In his latest book Peterson draws on the prophetic experience of Ezekiel, Jeremiah and the Apostle John. Eat this Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading reflects on the nature of our Holy Scriptures.  He explains that Scripture is more than informational it is formational. The Spirit uses it to shape us into what God intends for us. In this way we present ourselves to become more like God’s Son. “The book, the Bible, reveals the self-revealing God and along with that the way the world is, the way life is, the way we are. We need to know the lay of the land that we are living in. We need to know what is involved in this country of the Trinity, the world of God’s creation and salvation and blessing.” (34).

Spiritual reading is personal and participatory, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love (28). We depersonalize the text when we read for information or just what we can get from the text whether it be inspiration, instruction or comfort.  We may be in danger of using the Word for our own ends and therefore miss the formative nature of the life revealing text.

"Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: 'Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey" (NIV, Rev. 10:8-9).