What Am I Reading?

One of my favorite questions to ask someone, if there is a longer time to talk, is this: What are you reading right now?

The first time I was asked this question I felt like I was being tested. And maybe I was! But when I headed out on my latest vacation, my beloved bible study of five young women about ready to graduate and launch into the big world asked me what books I was taking with me. And that question prompted me to blog during my vacation out of what I ended up reading during the trip. Thus the six posts preceding this one... Thanks for asking, ladies!

But now I'm home. And while it is PURE DELIGHT for me to have nothing but time to read my little heart out on vacation, I find it so much more difficult to discipline myself to stick with substantive reading in the midst of "real life." My days tend to fill up with a bunch of things that are demanding my attention: appointments, errands, a never-ending email inbox... plus fundamental needs like sleep, exercise and prayer.

Nevertheless, I vowed on this vacation that I would not let my deeper reading slip up when I returned home. So here I am. What am I reading?

Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today by Joan Chittister. By and large, I have really enjoyed this book. I can't deny that at times it gets a little too touchy/feely/mushy for me, but overall, it has been a lovely read. For example, these sentences kicked me in the teeth this week:

“Our time gets totally out of balance. We spend it all on friends, or we spend none of it there. We spend it all on work, or we spend it all on our compulsions… we go from one personal prison to the next.

Balance, the Rule says. Balance. And harmony. And awareness… Benedict says that we must bring a sense of order and awe and proportion and perspective." (pp 75-76)

"Benedictine spirituality requires that we live life to the full." (p. 79)

How MUCH do I want to live out those challenges on a deep and sustainable level?! Reading them here were powerful reminders of where I desire to put my priorities.

Travels in Alaska by John Muir. If you have a Kindle, search for all the free books you can download. Pile about 10 of them onto your Kindle, in case you actually have some extra time to dive into something just for fun. That's what happened on my vacation, and is continuing as I finish up this book. Ponder the photo I've included in this post: it says it all. This book is a GEM. Unexpectedly, I have found it to be spiritually moving too. Though I would not want to split hairs over Muir's theology, in this particular book he references God frequently. In fact, one of the people who was with him in much of his travels was a Presbyterian missionary named Mr. Young, whom he referred to as "an adventurous evangelist." I love that! Frequently, Muir describes how he experienced God in his enjoyment of creation:

[Describing past visits to the Sierra Nevada mountains in California] ...they seemed to me the most telling of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. But here the mountains themselves were made divine, and declared His glory in terms still more impressive.

The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community by Sparks, Soerens and Friesen. I found this book through the Twitter recommendation of my friend Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, someone who is not prone to shameless promotion. If he recommends a book, he means it. So I grabbed it on my Kindle and started reading. I'm halfway through it, and am finding that it really captures much of what we are experiencing in our own first year trying to live "on mission" in Santa Barbara's Westside community. Here's something from the introduction that sums up my heart as well:

Our collective story doesn’t begin with a grand vision or contagious momentum. It begins with deep hope for the church in the twenty-first century and an honest need for one another.

Whether or not you leave a comment here, I challenge you to ask this question in a conversation this week: What are you reading these days? 

Holy Week Readings, Day Two

Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them—and receive them from others when we are in need.

Parker Palmer

Several of my hours each week are dedicated to conversations, Bible studies or classes with college students. Graduating seniors are in the thick of big questions right now, and I could not begin to calculate how many hundreds of times I have had the "so what should I do with my life?" conversation. 

I try hard to bring fresh eyes to each one of those encounters, firmly avoiding a "been there, done that" attitude. To be sure, I have to work hard at times to suppress an eye roll (or two) when I hear some of them express what they think are original thoughts, but overall, I find their earnest searching to be refreshing.

At the top is a quote by a favorite author of mine that sums up much of what my thoughts are when I share with those students. Determining calling and career are obviously important, but I have come to believe that the community one lives in trumps them all, and is often the one of the main decisions they neglect. 

Certainly, I am not encouraging students to keep "livin' the dream" and bunk down with 8 of their best friends in a two-bedroom apartment, suffering together through mindless barista jobs, drinking wine and sharing deep thoughts every night... But I am also not pressing them to dive right in to the fast-track career trajectory, ignoring questions of faith community and service.

Palmer captures it perfectly, and as I now look back some thirty (gulp!) years after graduating from college, I can say that what has given me the most meaning in my life (and strength, joy, and challenge) has been the community in which I have lived. I'm not talking about the city or town where one resides... I am talking about the group of people one is "doing life with" week after week. 

Though the group has changed over time, in the last five years God has been slowly shaping a very safe, nurturing, thought-provoking group of people in which I get to live and work.  In my reading this morning from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, these words are timely: 

Humility is the glue of our relationships. Humility is the foundation of community and family and friendship and love. Humility comes from understanding my place in the universe.

I encourage graduating seniors (and those muddling through their first year or two after college graduation) to look for (and help to shape) a community that is not held together by affinity (what things do we have in common?) or memories (we were all in this youth group or graduated from this college) but by mission.  First we are called to Jesus, and second we are called to serve... that is the essence of the Great Command: "'The first is... you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’" (Mark 12:30-31)

We love God by loving our neighbor, but the only way I can really love my neighbor is by loving God. It is a wonderful, interconnected, complicated, compelling, and at times exhausting pursuit. Jesus models all of this to us in the actions of his final week of earthly ministry. May we all contemplate those with fresh eyes and ears in our approach to Easter.

Doubt and the In-Between

I love listening to a variety of podcasts when I ride my bike: great storytelling, fascinating journalism, round-the-horn discussions on politics and trending topics, long and probing interviews, new music... and truth be told, a little sportstalk too.

This one caught my attention the other day: "This hour, we walk the tightrope between doubt and certainty, and wonder if there's a way to make yourself at home on that razor's edge between definitely...and not so sure."

It followed the story of a geologist who had to face the fact that one day it hit him: "I don't believe in God anymore."

This didn't scare me. In fact, I have variations of this conversation quite frequently. As a pastor friend of mine put it recently in an email exchange: "We increasingly are doing ministry in a place where the people are interested in Jesus but not that interested in the traditional ways churches have expressed their service to Him.  This requires new thoughts and new methods as we bring the holy love of God into the world." Amen to that.

I won't give away the story told in the podcast - it is definitely worth a listen. But I'm not giving anything away by saying it follows the winding road of someone's journey with doubt. I mentioned in the post previous to this one that I am reading a fascinating book by Christian Wiman on this very topic. I read this passage this week:

Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward— or at least outward— even in your lowest moments.

He contrasts this sort of authentic searching with "an almost religious commitment to doubt itself, an assuredness that absolute doubt is the highest form of faith," which he describes as "static and self-enthralled." I like the way he describes that, because when I have conversations with people who have many questions about faith and meaning of life and suffering and grief and all that, I engage with them according to the posture they take. If people want to banter and debate about the unknowability of such questions, I do not linger long. The abstractions of such talk does not interest me all that much, and experience has shown me that they are not really looking for conclusive answers.

But hear me out: I am not saying that I only want to nail down hard and fast explanations either, because I think those are hard to come by as well. I like the way Wiman puts it -- "honest doubt" keeps drilling down for adequate insight into the big questions of life. It cannot rest. Rather than enjoying the sound of its own voice as it rattles off quotable and snarky quips, honest doubt wrestles with questions. I can remain in those conversations as long as people want to talk.

I think Jesus did too. This week, as I was reading in the Gospel of John, I came across this seemingly insignificant detail. Jesus has been crucified and is dead, still hanging on the cross:

After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. (John 19:38-39)

Nicodemus! I flipped back to chapter 3, where this Jewish leader comes to Jesus under cover of darkness, with his questions and doubts, after having heard Jesus teach in public earlier. Nicodemus recognizes that Jesus is some sort of wise teacher with a new authority, and Jesus responds with some enigmatic words about being "born from above" (where we get the all-too-abused phrase "born again") and Nicodemus is baffled: “How can anyone be born after having grown old?" Jesus says some more strange and exciting and disturbing things and Nicodemus responds with a simple question: “How can these things be?”

This strikes me as an example of the "honest doubt" that Wiman describes. And when I came upon this lovely little detail in chapter 19, where Nicodemus came to bury Jesus' body with Joseph of Arimathea, "who was a disciple of Jesus," I immediately thought, "how I wish I knew the story in between!" Wouldn't you love to know more about Nicodemus' journey of questions, doubt, and faith between chapters 3 and 19? It reminded me that we are all on a long and winding road, and I have learned that the story isn't over when someone expresses some life-altering questions and concerns. (Here's another plug for listening to that podcast on doubt -- it captures this process really well.)

May we be patient listeners, and always keep the "in-between" in sight. I am partnering with a great group of people to think through how we meet people where they are, in their skepticism and frustration, rather than write them off as "lost." Instead, we want to join people in the journey of honest doubt.