Inquiring Gannets Want to Know

Gannet, who is always attuned to historical and liturgical context, is curious as to why her little Ash Wednesday survey reveals a predominantly Anglican/Episcopalian presence here. Gannet herself being apparently Celtic by name, Puritan by ancestry, Methodist by childhood, Catholic by friendship, and Presbyterian by confession, wonders if all of that equals the Middle Way?

Or is it just that the survey happened to be about ashes?

Maybe if she asked about election, all the Presbies would show up.

Friday Five: Some Forks

Wonderful Friday Five today! Here it is, from Singing Owl:

I am at a life-changing juncture. I do not know which way I will go, but I have been thinking about the times, people and events that changed my life (for good or ill) in significant ways. For today's Friday Five, share with us five "fork-in-the-road" events, or persons, or choices. And how did life change after these forks in the road?

Obviously, the biggest fork in my road, ever, has been the sudden death of my son six months ago. But that horror of a life-changing event happened within a broad context of life, and it's that context that I want to focus on today. Herewith, five forks:

1. That first Brownie camera, received for my 9th birthday. I have experimented with photography off and on throughout my life, and it has played a big part in helping this cerebral, left-brained, language-oriented person become more attuned to how vast is the universe beyond words. I have noticed, in the six months since we lost our son, that despite the cascade of words that have come my way, most of the things which really speak to me are visual, either images themselves or words which create images.

2. The marriage. I have been married my entire adult life, since just before I turned 21. All of the things I have done as an adult have been within the confines and expansiveness of that relationship, meaning that, while sometimes my options have been limited, I have always been supported in decisions that are sometimes a little bizarre and more often than not seem to lead nowhere. I became a lawyer, a teacher, and now a seminary student, welcomed three children and said good-bye to one, all in the context of one marriage.

3. The venture into church, a Methodist church, in my late 20s. I simply woke up one morning and announced to the Quiet Husband that we needed to find a church. Who knew? In addition to serving as the foundation for a whole host of life choices, that church was the place in which we became part of a group of friends who have been family to one another for more than twenty years.

4. Great-horned owls. I first became interested in birding as a law student, when I read an article about a local guy studying and photographing nesting great-horned owls. Who could not fall in love with baby GHOs? That led to a decade-long volunteer relationship with the Museum of Natural History, my first experiences as a teacher, time up-close-and-personal with bald eagles and, most of all, a lifelong dedication to birds of all kinds.

5. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. After a couple of graduate courses on spirituality as expressed in literature, I signed up for a course on the Exercises and within a couple of weeks asked my professor whether he would guide me through them. With that low-key modesty characteristic of individuals of profound achievement, he simply said "Sure," never letting on, as he had not through three semesters of classes, that he is one of the giants of Ignatian interpretation. A year later, I was en route to seminary and to becoming a spiritual director myself, immersed in an experience and a tradition of prayer that have, quite simply, changed my entire being and course of life.

So that's it, five forks. All of them unexpected people, unexpected gifts.

(Image: Here.)

Getting Here (VI): In and Out of Church

One of the subjects which interests me tremendously is: What experience do people have with church? To what extent does church inculturate a faith in people? How does it change us? Why do we drift away, or move to different churches or forms of religious faith? What do we find in a church, and what do we not find?

I am merely reflecting on my own experience here; I'm not developing a thesis or arguing a point. I am only offering one person's encounter with church in the context of the questions I've raised, and even that in no particular order.

Why were we personally so attracted to a church about which we knew next to nothing? The preaching was the first main thing. Our senior pastor, who turned out to be rather famous in preaching circles, had started that new year off with one of his favorite approaches: a short series on a theme. The theme arose from the book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. Written in 1896, it was, as far as I know, the first book to ask the contemporary question, "What would Jesus do?" For four weeks, our pastor preached on the response to that question -- as it might be answered at church, in the workplace, etc. His sermons were exactly what I was looking for, as I tried to figure out how to reconcile an increasingly upscale professional life with the call of the Gospel, although at the time I wouldn't have identified what I was trying to do as such.

For the first couple of years, we were content just to go to church on Sundays. Church as lecture and concert, I guess you could say. We didn't know anyone (there were about 1500 members, with about 400 in attendance on any given Sunday morning) and we didn't know how to get to know anyone. That changed a bit when I was asked to join a committtee, but we were still on the periphery of the community. I don't think that we really understood that there was even such a thing as a church community. In retropsect it seems a bit odd, but I gave birth to my twin sons and then to my daughter during that period and, while their arrival and baptisms were duly noted in ther church bulletin, no one beyond the senior pastor showed up with a dinner or a prayer or anything else.

Things changed shortly after our daughter was born. The church began to focus on small group development, and we found ouselves hooked up with a neighborhood group of several young families like our own. We all had small children and most of us were on our own, far from extended family support. We were starving for companionship, eager to learn about our religion, and thrilled beyond belief to have found each other. Suddenly -- community!!! In the early years, we met regularly for various Bible and other studies and began to celebrate our holidays together. As the women quit work to mother fulltime, we began to get together for conversation every week, and started going away for an annual week-end together. At the same time, we all became deeply involved in the life of the church: teaching classes, taking classes, and serving on committees and boards. Many of us took two or three of the Methodist year-long DISCIPLE Bible study classes together.

I suppose, looking back, that each of us was approaching a life of faith differently from the others. Many in our little group had a childhood faith that was being nudged back into practice. Others were skeptical, but willing to go along. Certainly the magnificent worship services we attended enriched all of our lives, those of us who did DISCIPLE found the intellectual side of our religious lives well nourished, and there was plenty of community activity: programs and service in the church itself and lots of time together, building the friendships that have sustained us all for 20 years.

As the kids grew and moved into involved sports and activities schedules and the moms went back to work, we found it harder to get together, and some of us drifted away from the church. A few years ago, the moms reinstituted our weekly get-togethers -- at a coffee shop these days, where other groups of women also show up and sometimes merge with ours. The days of meeting in someone's kitchen while the children play underfoot are long gone, but more recently we have been known to settle in at the tables we pull together for breakfast at around 10:00 and on occasion decide a few hours later that we might as well have lunch, too. Most of us are pretty liberal, politically and theologically speaking, and we live, intentionally, in a community of unusual diversity. We never run out of things to talk about.

For myself, over the years I found less and less sustenance of a spiritual nature through the church itself. Ministers came and went, and the preaching waxed and waned. I got burned out on volunteering. My husband lost interest -- and it's VERY hard to keep children focused on weekly Sunday School when their dad is sitting in the kitchen reading the paper. Our family was vacationing at the Chautauqua Institution every summer, and it was to the speakers and classes at Chautauqua that I was increasingly turning for my religious life. There were a few years when the music and preaching at Chautauqua would carry me all the way through to Christmas -- I would buy the tapes of the summer lectures and church services and listen to them as I drove around all year long. (I still do.) I took at least three journaling classes there over several summers, took yoga classses in the early mornings, and bought stacks of books from the authors I heard speak.

At Chautauqua I was discovering a rich tradition of Christian spirituality, contemplation, and scholarship that was not particularly accessible through my local church. Over the years, I heard, many times over, speakers such as Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, Episcopal priests Barabara Brown Taylor and John Claypool, religious scholars Marcus Borg and N.T Wright and Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong, Unitarian pastor Forrest Church, rabbi and lawyer David Saperstein.

My favorite concert ever, and as spirit-moving an event as any of the Sunday services where 5,000 people rise every summer Sunday morning to sing Holy, Holy, Holy in an outdoor ampitheatre, was Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie in combination. There we were, the same outdoor ampitheatre crowd that would come back to worship the next morning when, late on a summer Saturday night, Pete Seeger got all 5,000 of us to sing All People That on Earth Do Dwell in a ROUND.

So I was a Methdodist in form and name, but not in practice or attentiveness anymore. I was reluctant to give up my church -- the building is huge, but I knew its every nook and cranny, and the architecture and stained-glass windows are breathtakingly beautiful -- and yet, I wasn't really there anymore. The questions I had weren't being answered and the experience of God I had begun to seek wasn't being fostered. We went as a family to Christmas Eve services, because we couldn't abandon the music and the candles held by hundreds of people in the dark of a cavernous cathedral at midnight, but I was gradually responding to a call from another direction.

Getting Here (I)

Not surprisingly, with the transition to seminary and a program in spiritual direction looming in my near future, I've been rethinking the path that led me to this juncture. Much of what I'm going to post over the next few days -- with possible unscheduled interruptions from the Cat Who Needs A Home -- has already appeared in a long-abandoned blog of mine, so apologies to anyone who's read it before. You might want to move on for the next week or so -- although there will be some new material at the end, so please come back!

**********************************

When Life Was Easy

I spent the first seven years of my life in idyllic circumstances. The oldest daughter of very young parents, the first grandchild on both sides, and the first girl for my paternal grandmother who had three sons, I was adored and doted upon by almost every adult with whom I came in contact.

We lived in rural southwest Ohio, on several acres at the top of a hill behind my grandparents' own land. I was too young when we moved from an apartment in town out to the country, first to my grandparents' home and then to our newly built little ranch house carved into the side of a hill, to understand the ominous motivations behind the abrupt transistion. It was the early 50s and polio was abroad; parents thought that they could spare their children by moving from densely populated areas.

By the time October rolled around "when I was six," I was an older sister, to a three-year-old and a newborn baby brother. I absorbed the natural world as easily as I downed my morning orange juice and scrambled eggs: our house was surrounded by scarlet and gold trees in the fall, by soft snow and excellent sledding hills in the winter, and by carpets of flowers planted by my mother and grandmother in the spring and summer. I spent a lot of my time with my grandmother next door. She had a porch table full of jars of monarch caterpillars and chrysalises in various stages of development, a house full of books and games and art supplies, and unending patience for her oldest grandchild.

We spent the springs of my kindergarten and first grade years living near the beach in Florida. My father was trying to get a home construction business going, and one of the last houses he completed was ours. We moved out of our small rental house, set back among trees festooned with Spanish moss, to the spacious second floor of a triplex, sometime in the late spring of my first grade year. I acquired my very first room of my own, and my mother and I made big plans for how I would decorate it with shells and other ocean paraphernalia the following year. Photographs show a largely unfurnished apartment, an up-to-the minute 1960s kitchen with pink appliances, a handsome young husband and attractive blond wife, and three 1960 children: a little girl in dresses, short socks and Mary Janes; a little boy in shorts; and a fat and happy baby.

I can't say that we had any kind of spiritual life in those days. We attended the Methodist church in town, where my mother had sung in the choir as a young woman. As far as I know, she was the only member of the family who held an official church membership. I can remember standing on the pew next to her as she sang in the congregation, and straining to see around her slim body when my soon-to-be aunt came down the aisle in a hoop-skirted white wedding dress.

My father claimed no religious belief; he simply accompanied my mother. I don't think that any of my grandparents actually belonged to the church, although they were active participants in its major events and fundraising efforts. Many years later I discovered the names of most of the adults in my family -- parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles -- on the programs for a church anniversary celebration and the dedication of a new classroom wing. They had all been fundraising and building committee and decorating committee participants, but I believe that they saw themselves as fulfilling a civic duty rather than acting upon religious convictions. Certainly no one in my family talked or taught about a life of faith, and while our Christmas and Easter celebrations were extravagant, they were decidedly secular in nature. If I did go to Sunday School, or to summer Vacation Bible School, it wasn't with any resistance. But it wasn't with any sense of their import, either. The red brick church on the corner was simply one of several familiar spaces in my rural and small-town childhood, known to me in much the same way that my father's office and the town drugstore and grocery were.

I have a number of friends who grew up in the Methodist Church, attending Sunday School every week, belonging to youth groups, singing in children's and youth choirs. My husband, actually, is one of those people. One of my best friends has a whole string of pins for her thirteen years of perfect Sunday School attendance. In the Presbyterian Church that I attend now, enormous attention is lavished on the children's and youth programming, and the response on the part of both kids and parents is entirely positive. Who knows how things might have turned out for me in the church if my life had stayed on its ordinary and happy little track?

(My childhood church.)

A Laywoman's Lectionary: The Methodist Years

Why were we so attracted to a church about which we knew next to nothing? The preaching was the first main thing. Our senior pastor, who turned out to be rather famous in preaching circles, had started that new year off with one of his favorite approaches: a short series on a theme. The theme arose from the book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. Written in 1896, it was, as far as I know, the first book to ask the contemporary question, "What would Jesus do?" For four weeks, our pastor preached on the response to that question -- as it might be answered at church, in the workplace, etc. His sermons were exactly what I was looking for, as I tried to figure out how to reconcile an increasingly upscale professional life with the call of the Gospel.

For the first couple of years, we were content just to go to church on Sundays. Church as lecture and concert, I guess you could say. We didn't know anyone (there were about 1500 members, with about 400 in attendance on any given Sunday morning) and we didn't know how to get to know anyone. That changed a bit when I was asked to join a committtee, but we were still on the periphery of the community. I don't think that we really understood that there was even such a thing as a church community. In retropsect it seems a bit odd, but I gave birth to my twins and then to my daughter during that period and, while their arrival and baptisms were duly noted in ther church bulletin, no one showed up with a dinner or anything else of use.
Things began to change shortly after our daughter was born. The church beban to focus on small group development, and we found ouselves hooked up with a neighborhood group of several young families like our own. We all had small children and most of us were on our own, far from extended family support. We were starving for companionship, eager to learn about our religion, and thrilled beyond belief to have found each other. Suddenly -- community!!! In the early years, we met regularly for various Bible and other studies and began to celebrate our holidays together. As the women quit work to mother fulltime, we began to get together for conversation every week, and started going away for an annual week-end together. At the same time, we all became deeply involved in the life of the church, teaching classes, taking classes, and serving on committees and boards. Many of us took two or three of the Methodist year-long DISCIPLE Bible study classes together.

As the kids grew and moved into involved sports and activities schedules and the moms went back to work, we found it harder to get together, and some of us drifted away from the church. A couple of years ago, the moms reinstituted our weekly get-togethers -- at a coffee shop these days, where other groups of women also show up and sometimes merge with ours. The days of meeting in someone's kitchen while the children play underfoot are long gone, but more recently we have been known to settle in at the tables we pull together for breakfast at around 10:00 and on occasion decide a few hours later that we might as well have lunch, too. Most of us are pretty liberal, politically and theologically speaking, and we live in a community of unusual diversity (all of which we take for granted, except at times like the recent election). We never run out of things to talk about.

For myself, over the years I found less and less sustenance of a spiritual nature through the church itself. Ministers came and went, and the preaching waxed and waned. I got burned out on volunteering. My husband lost interest -- and it's VERY hard to keep children focused on weekly Sunday School when their dad is sitting in the kitchen reading the paper. Our family was vacationing at the Chautauqua Institution every summer, and it was to the speakers and classes at Chautauqua that I was increasingly turning for my religious life. There were a few years when the music and preaching at Chautauqua would carry me all the way through to Christmas -- I would buy the tapes of the summer lectures and church services and listen to them as I drove around all year long. (I still do.) I took at least three journaling classes there over several summers, took yoga classses in the early mornings, and bought stacks of books from the authors I heard speak.

At Chautauqua I was discovering a rich tradition of Christian spirituality, contemplation, and scholarship that was not particularly accessible through my church. Over the years, I heard, many times over, speakers such as Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, Episcopal priests Barabara Brown Taylor (my favorite preacher on the planet) and John Claypool, religious scholar Marcus Borg, commentator Karen Armstrong, Unitarian pastor Forrest Church, rabbi and lawyer David Saperstein (and, for the first time last summer, his brother, Rabbi Marc Saperstein), environmentalist Jane Goodall.

My favorite concert ever, and as spirit-moving an event as any of the Sunday services where 5,000 people rise to sing "Holy, Holy, Holy" in an outdoor ampitheatre, was Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie in combination. You haven't lived until you've been part of that same outdoor ampitheatre crowd that will come back to worship the next morning when, late on a summer Saturday night, Pete Seeger gets you all to sing "All people That on Earth Do Dwell" in a ROUND -- all 5,000 of you!

So I was a Methdodist in form and name, but not in practice or attentiveness anymore. I was reluctant to give up my church -- the building is huge, but I knew its every nook and cranny, and the architecture and stained-glass windows are breathtakingly beautiful -- and yet, I wasn't really there anymore. We went as a family to Christmas Eve services, because we couldn't abandon the music and the candles held by hundreds of people in the dark of a cavernous cathedral at midnight, but I was gradually responding to a call from another direction.