ash wednesday

last night maria led us in a beautiful ash wednesday gathering.  she had decorated the high st house in burlap and set a table (our alter is an old trunk previously used by a missionary to india) with ashes, candles, and tree debris from the ice storm.  the place around us was rich with symbolism as we followed a liturgy that reminded us of our mortality and our limits as god-made creatures.  we now embark on the wilderness walk of lent, offering up our fasting as a sign of our sincere desire to walk in the ways of Jesus.

divine normal

simon holt has a beautiful post at his blog.  i have clipped a quote he uses from kathleen morris.  truly inspiring.

"We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were.  We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places—out of Galilee, as it were—and not in spectacular events."

"I have come to believe that the true mystics of the quotidian [the commonplace] are not those who contemplate holiness in isolation, reaching godlike illumination in serene silence, but those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self."

World Social Forum Presentation

Just wanted to post a quick reminder that this Sunday, February 22 we will be doing a presentation about our recent trip to the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil at our weekly fellowship meeting. The meeting begins at 5pm at the High Street House (112 West High Street) and will be followed by our regular community meal at 6pm-dinner is provided. The presentation will include pictures, video, and oral presentation and discussion. Everyone is invited to attend and is welcome (even if you do not identify with the Christian faith perspective). I think that it will be a good opportunity to learn about and discuss issues relating to peace, justice and the environment on a global scale. Thanks......

i love mountains day

this from Will Samson

Hey Everyone,
Just a reminder that next Tuesday is I Love Mountains Day. Mountaintop removal has destroyed at least 1,400 miles of streams in Kentucky alone. For this year's rally, KFTC is trying to get 1,400 people to Frankfort to create a visual demonstration of the enormity of this devastation.

It would be great if we could have some folks from our
community there. There will be great speakers, great music and a chance to play a small part in helping to get a stream saver bill passed in Kentucky.

For more information about the event, check this out:
http://www.kftc.org/calendar/events/i-love-mountains-day-2009/view

Will

more from mark sayers

 

mark has posted two excellent reflections over the last couple of days.  the most recent one picks up in a major theme in his book...the perpetual discontentment our culture fuels.  this ties in with the challenge of "belonging to a place" as a key discipline in missional-incarnational living.  one cannot simultaneously have the proper affection required for mission and entertain all the other options (a good analog for this is marriage).

 

the second most recent post is a brilliant riff on the problems associated with making an idol of missional community.  rather than summarize it here i'll just encourage you to read it....

 

(geoff)

the trouble with paris

just read this fantastic book from aussie missionary Mark Sayers.  Mark writes of our enslavement in 'hyperreality' where "everything has become shopping" (p.51).  as supershoppers we are always looking out for a better deal and end up unable and unwilling to commit - to relationships, homes, places, gods.  why commit when there might be a better deal around the corner?

Mark writes with a very gracious style.  he is never shrill or self righteous....easy ways to be when critiquing our consumer culture.  after identifying the tyranny of hyperreality Mark offers a way out.  the path towards God's reality is marked by honesty, commitment, missional spirituality, countercultural community, redemptive living, and, last but not least, Jesus.  in short, mark suggests that the remedy for the everyday distractions of hyperreality is an intentional care for everyday christian ethics.  these six keys form a matrix in which everyday faithfulness is possible and sustainable.

i recommend this book very highly as a creative and piercing description of the mess we have made with our faith in the west.  his brief discussion of folk religion should peak the interest of anyone interested in a missiology for pluralistic western cultures. 

i was delighted to find a copy of this book at the public library...it will be returned and up for grabs as of tomorrow :)

on a side note, i have met mark a couple of times and heard him speak in australia on numerous occasions.  he is a most kind and passionate communicator and he is one of the sharpest missional thinkers going around at the moment...and best of all, his insights are drawn from and rooted in the streets and life of his city and community.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy

this is an amazing presentation.  highly recommended if you can download the podcast or listen/watch on your computer.  deals with the emerging energy and population crisis.  it is nearly 5 years old but more and more relevant.  wow.

click here

the long now - GB09

greenbelt has been a kind of mecca for me since my first visit as a chubby australian country kid of just 12 (1986).  the people that have cultivated greenbelt over the years repeatedly come up with the most beautiful and timely art and ideas.  the theme for greenbelt 09 is no exception.

see this wonderful, short piece of writing from festival trustee martin wroe.

here's a taster:

'The Long Now'. The phrase was coined by the musician, producer and all-round interesting thinker Brian Eno.  And a good way to capture what it alludes to is with a legend about the C14th founders of New College, Oxford. The story goes that the dining hall of New College was built with a series of huge oak beams. About half a millennium later, at the end of the C19th,  the beams needed replacing. Being a wealthy institution the College owned some land and wondered if there were any oak trees on it. 'Ah...' said one of the tenants who farmed their land, 'We wondered when you'd be in touch.'

Turned out the farmers had a tradition that back in the C14th a new grove of oaks had been planted to make up for those cut down to provide the dining hall beams. The story was passed through the generations, one farmer to another: these oaks were protected, set aside for New College. Through the generations, the farmers were waiting, for century after century. For half a millennia.

World Social Forum Update

I just wanted to give everyone back home an update about our time at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil. The Forum Social Mundial concluded yesterday and Greg and I will be leaving for Manaus today where we will be until Wednesday due to complications with our airline itinerary. Anyhow, we had a productive time at the forum and have a lot to process about the things that we've experienced over the last six days. Though painfully disorganized at points and hard in many respects to access, the forum has (ultimately) proved to be a great opportunity to learn more about what is happening in Latin America and the wider world. And, most importantly, it has been a good opportunity to meet new people and network with other groups. I must confess that it has been disheartening to see how the media's attention has been riveted upon the World Economic Forum in Davos with very little popular attention paid to the WSF (more on that later). It is clear that no one group at the moment has any clear cut answers to the current global crisis. Our time here at the forum, and our concomitant following of events at Davos, has provided further confirmation of that fact. However, there are droves of people with great passion and vision, in all the various centers of global society, who have much to contribute, much to share. This is why constructive dialogue is so necessary, so desperately needed at this time. This is a problem of global proportions and it is going to take a response of global proportions to begin to address it. In that vein our time here has given us a lot of hope for the potential of the global Christian movement (the largest single community in the world) to play its part in this process. This invovlement is what we're eager to continue pursuing with other Christians and people of faith and conscience around the world. I will end this brief update by saying that the greatest revelation for me has been the relationship that Greg and I have been building with our interpreter/guide Diego. We have spent an intensive amount of time with him over the last week and in that time have grown to really love each other and share a lot of hopes, questions, and laughs. It will be very difficult to leave him today. Diego has shared with us that he thinks this week has been one of the most significant weeks of his life; and I would say that our time with him has been a similar experience for me. So, I would end by saying that, as always, the last, greatest and only hope for this world and for the work of God is people sharing with each other, learning how to love and embrace the common identity and purpose that is our birthright as human beings made in the image of the community that is God. Look forward to seeing all of you soon......oum otro mundo es possivil....another world is possible!

it begins in the belly

one of the most wonderful blessings in recent years for sherry and me has been to meet Simon Carey Holt.   he is a professor at a baptist seminary in Melbourne, Australia.  his recent book, "God next door" is simply one of the most compelling and gracious texts we have read on mission and 'everyday spirituality'.  we cannot more highly recommend it to you.

Simon has a new blog/web address... check it out here.

on a recent post one of Simon's readers (Geoff B) quotes theologian Jurgen Moltmann.  i thought this was a beautiful distillation of what we are fumbling toward in Lexington.

"participation [in the Christian faith and life] means in the first place to eat, to drink, to live in common. It begins in the "belly" not in the head. One must savour it before one can speak about it... this happens best through [local] communities and groups which live intensely with the gospel and their neighbours"

(Moltmann, Jürgen. The Open Church : Invitation to a Messianic Lifestyle. London: SCM Press, 1978.)

Reflection on Genesis 1 and Ruth 1: Whanau Means Family

This afternoon, I was feeding the horses and taking Pieces out for a bit of a jaunt. We were walking through knee deep snow when I had the sudden urge to just drop backwards into it. I felt like I was falling into pillows; there is quite a bit of snow out here on the farm this year. While Pieces was eating snow, horse poop, and expending his pent up energy on the snow that came up to his back, I lifted myself up to my knees and became keenly aware of my surroundings. The snow on my skidoo suit, the one lone star in the dusk sky, amidst an array of blues, oranges, purples, pinks, and a hint of grey. The biting chill on my face, which happened to be the only skin exposed to the minus thirty degree weather, the pup playing in the snow, and the saliva jumping to my mouth's rescue in the freezing dry air.

I was reminded of Genesis 1 and the seven times that God saw that his creation was good. And then I thought about Ruth 1:16-17,

"But Ruth replied, 'Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me."

Ruth, a woman of a different people who had a different god, stayed with Naomi and took upon herself (to what extent I have no idea) Ruth's God and Ruth's people. Naomi's worldview had to have been strikingly different from Ruth's, yet Ruth was willing to risk the way she viewed the world for the sake of this relationship.

I am now son-in-law to Terry and Bev LeBlanc, Mi'kmaq husband and wife from Restigouche; I am nephew to leaders from the Cherokee, Lakota Sioux, Cayuga, Cree, Maori, and Aboriginal peoples; brother to Mi'kmaq, Anishinabe, Maori, and Aboriginal brothers and sisters. I am still son of Martha and Jeff Lowe of Florida and brother of Allison, also in Florida. I am nephew, still, to William and Tommie Taylor of Alabama and Thomas Lowe of Florida. I am still great grandson to the 10th power of a Revolutionary War captain that sold American Indians and First Nations people into slavery. I am Dan, a man of a different people who have a very different understanding of God, and now I stay with Jeanine. I am learning what it might mean for me to take upon myself her people, though I am beginning to experience what it means to take on their understanding of Creator and creation.

And somewhere in the mix of all of that, though not with me directly, is the example of what it means to live and walk the way of Jesus together. There is no reason that any of those representatives from any of those marginalized people groups should now call me, an obvious representative of the majority culture, family, but it is because of who they are and the way that they see the world that I am welcomed. And not only am I welcomed, but so are the various other non-indigenous people in their families and circles of influence (as far, broad, and reaching as those are). I am humbled to the core of who I am when I sit in very very cold snow and realize the immensity of this fact.

This picture, this understanding of community and relationship, accountability and mutual growth, is the only antidote to the Constantinian hangover. It is through this sort of welcoming, friendship, family-making, intentional dialogue, room making, and re-sorting the seats at the table, that the Church will be transformed to the depths of the claims that the going Western voice is making. Creator has given us indigenous people because we in the West have forgotten how to see and how to hear; we no longer remember our ceremonies nor our dances, and very shortly it may be that we forget even our prayers. And we, the Western people, have been given to them in order to help them heal from the Constantinian colonialism that our ancestors forced upon their ancestors. And they invite us to do so.

When we pray that God's Spirit would give us ears to hear and eyes to see, how often do we consider that the answer to that prayer is the irrevocable transformation of our worldview? We are, in fact, asking God to help us to hear and see in a different way. It is my hope and prayer that those in current leadership in the church in the West would begin to see that God is giving us to each other so that our prayers for new ears and new eyes might very well be answered. And in there, in the mix somewhere, will be the transformation of Christ's body in our world.

Sitting on this Side For Now

David Grey writes a song called, "The Other Side." I watched a live concert with him on television the other night with Jeanine, and he discussed his meaning behind it, much of which I don't remember.

This song, though, makes me think deeply about paradigm shifts, worldview changes, the questions we ask ourselves about faith, and the questions we want others to ask about their faith. The song is an invitation and a confession. It's a declaration of hope; it's a plea for understanding. I feel smack dab in the middle of this song. I imagine myself standing in a field, with a fence in front of me; the wooden kind, with 1x6 panels and the slits in-between the boards. It's got holes where the knots came out of the logs, and it's worn. And about two feet over my head. I can't see what's on the other side of the fence, but I can see what I'm leaving behind; I can smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it. It's tangible. Uninviting. And the other side? I don't hear anything, and when I peek through the knot holes, I see acres and acres and acres of nothing. No horizon, no darkness, no light, no nothing. It's like a blank canvas without border, without surface, just a vast amount of inviting nothingness. And I think about these lyrics from the song:

I know it would be outrageous/To come on all courageous/And offer you my hand/To pull you up on to dry land/When all I got is sinking sand/The trick aint worth the time it buys/Im sick of hearing my own lies/And loves a raven when it flies.

And I am struck with the deeply humbling realization that I have no idea what the other side holds. And that courage has nothing to do with jumping the fence or tearing it down. Most days I don't really know what I'm inviting other people into. I've got nothing tangible for you to put your hands on except for wet tears, beating hearts, and smelly bodies. I'm learning more and more that the words I've learned don't really carry the vastly deep pains that people experience; they're like buckets with huge holes in them. So many words and ideas and experiments that smell like feces and taste like vomit and sound like the screams of a dying cat; that's what I can smell and taste and hear and it's what I want to leave behind.

So, I don't know when I cross the fence; I don't think it'll have so much to do with courage as it will with hands filled with tears, reaching down from atop the wood and inviting me over. So many hands with so many faces and so many different stories and tears and wounds and fears. Because the shift isn't the end; it's not the fullness; it's simply a shift - I'm just hoping that when Raven flies, he releases the sun that's in his beak and when the sun bounces off of the nothingness and into the sky that the stars are remade, and when the sun stops bouncing that it will find its place in the sky and reveal the potential for creative action in a world yearning for buckets without holes and words and ideas that finally have meaning and experiments that have integrity.

O Lord, please. Hear my prayer.

Thanks

Thanks Communality women for helping me celebrate the upcoming arrival of our little guy

rev. mlk

"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured."

MLK Sermon Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.

more bits

seems like the new year has sparked a rush of interesting articles (or perhaps i am just now starting to pay attention.

 

• will samson sent this link on our communality list serve...a long article about Van Jones, a green-jobs innovator.

Tag line:  Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?

 

• i spotted this article at the blog belonging to Mark Sayers...a very interesting set of predictions about what the new year will bring for our always-changing culture.

Tag line:  We have suffered from too much choice and there will be less.