Part of the Pilgrimage Summer 2013 Series
On Sunday I started a 10 day church immersion internship at the Swedenborg Chapel in Cambridge on the Harvard campus.
I enjoyed co-leading the service with Rev. Kevin Baxter, meeting the congregation, and touring the building. Over the week I’ll learn more about the congregation, experience some of the broader community connections, and prepare a sermon for next Sunday.
Cheers to Cambridge!
Part of the Pilgrimage Summer 2013 Series
As part of my summer adventures, I am crocheting a long scarf, a prayer shawl, for which I am gathering yarn each place I go. One of my hopes in this venture is to get to know local people and connect in with the communities I’m traveling to. And what better way to connect with people than through a shared love of color and yarn!
Athena and Jesse and I scoured the internet to find the best yarn shop in Nashville and we and google agreed that the Haus of Yarn was the place to go. Athena and I got in the car on the rainy Friday afternoon and after a few misled turns on the GPS, arrived at the Haus.
It was a lovely full-fledged local yarn shop, overflowing the colors and textures and I quickly was lost in looking and feeling. They had one shelf of local yarn, which was my first choice, but then was quickly out of the running based on the price-tag… I narrowed it down to three good choices under $10 and decided on a knobby green variegated.
When I took it up to the register, I pulled out the beginnings of the shawl and told them about the project. A minute later three women were all crowded around the counter and feeling the existing yarn and asking about where else I would be on the hunt for yarn shops. They were very friendly when I asked if I could take their picture and they insisted I take a small gift of a tape measure with their Haus of Yarn logo proudly displayed.
After going outside, Athena and I stopped and I quickly finished off a bookmark with the newly found yarn woven in and ran it back inside to reciprocate the gift. Thank you Nashville!
Part of the Pilgrimage Summer 2013 Series
A few more notes and quotes from some powerful preachers…(again, these notes are just that, my best hearing and scribbling of these voices).
Carol Howard Merritt
Nadia Boltz-Webber
Phyllis Tickle
Part of the Pilgrimage Summer 2013 Series
(These fragments are from my notes and are quoted as I heard them, I hope they might be close to what was actually said).
“Be inventive in hospitality.” “Make friends with nobodies.” “If you see your enemy hungry, buy them lunch.” –Barbara Brown Taylor
“It’s time for a preaching renaissance.” “Words must be performed. All religion is performative if it is to be memorable.” –Frank Thomas
“We are narrative beings.” “Seminary–repository of the best practicals of the previous generation.” “Cultivate Biblical imagination.” –David Lose
“Make hope as tangible as despair.” “Can you see it now?” “Not the word Isaiah heard. The word Isaiah saw.” –Barbara Lundblad
“There’s a third church out there.” “The purpose of the church is not to meet your needs, but that God has specific need and calling that match your gifts.” “God as knitter…knit me together in my mother’s womb.” –Lillian Daniel
“Preaching is maintaining God’s sacred conversation with the congregation.” –Craig Barnes
“Replace ‘word’ with ‘story.’” “Words are not the language of culture. Images are.” –Len Sweet
“Expose and envision.” Speak a word out of place.” –Barbara Lundblad
“I get up every morning and write for a couple of hours. If you do that much for 50 years, it’s cumulative you know.” “The text is the residence of the holiness–in all it’s messiness.” “We need to learn how to grieve the loss of the ‘world we knew.’” –Walter Brueggemann
“Even liberation requires a certain amount of grieving.” “What is being preached matters.” “What happened 40 years ago where you live that shapes the place today?” –Anna Florence Carter
Part of the Pilgrimage Summer 2013 Series
This chair has taught me. It has held me these last two years as I have explored spiritual practice. In this chair, I did my homework for Dr. Carole Spencer’s Spiritual Formation and Personal Practice class. Part of our homework: 1/2 an hour a day of spiritual practice. The Daily Examine; an evening reflection of gratitude and self-examination. Sitting in the silence. Training myself little by little to be still and know God. Reflecting on scripture or sacred texts, and journaling. Each practice done with various degrees of consistency and success. More and more regularly as it slowly moved from “have to” to “get to.”
Spirituality and Peacemaking class with Dr. Lonnie Valentine broadened the definition of “spiritual practice.” I played my guitar, walked and sat in nature, did yoga, wrote, and started painting. This chair where I picked up paints and found a form of prayer.
Next to this chair you would find my craft table. Two stack of plastic tubs, the closet door I took off the hinges, all disguised with fabric, (the magic elixir for a decorator on a budget). This table held my paints and brushes, paper and pens. Ready and waiting for me to sit down in the chair, set the timer and melt into my time set apart.
The time always started with lighting a candle, and breathing a prayer of remembering the sacred at the altar. The altar that shifted and changed with flowers and shells, icon, roaches and art. Always holding the possibility of invitation to sacred space.
This chair. This table. This altar. My sanctuary. This sacred space and time that has become food and lifeline, sanity and gift.
And now it’s time to pack up and move. To leave the chair behind for the next tenants and to pack my large tablets of paper and altar art into boxes. I know it’s not really the physical things that make things sacred. Yet there’s something sacred in that which we dedicate as such. And there’s something that happens when my fingers guide that color-filled brush to the paper, the pencil to the journal page, the sound of the wick bursting into flame.
And so, I’ve been gathering. And when the cloths came down and the boxes sealed, two little pouches were already carefully stowed in my suitcase. My traveling spiritual practice kits.
Ready to be unpacked wherever I am, breathed on, and opened into the container for a time set apart.
Part of the Pilgrimage Summer 2013 series.
I saw the glint.
Robin’s Egg Blue
in the grass under
the cherry tree.
I stopped
crouched down
and picked up the
tiny half-shell.
And cradled it
in my hand.
As an eight year old,
I found a similar treasure.
I remember wondering:
How could something so fragile,
so precious,
be tossed out of the nest.
As if it didn’t matter.
To be crushed by my
black rubber boot,
had I not stopped and
noticed it.
I had taken the eggshell home
and placed it carefully
in a small jewelry box
and named it among my
eight year old treasures.
Today I stop,
as I walk between
dropping off a final project
at school, and
packing another box
at home.
And I hold this eggshell in my hand.
At thirty four and on the brink
of transition,
it makes more sense to me.
This shell has not been discarded
or tossed out of lack of reverence,
or care for its use.
This shell held,
with strength,
nurture,
beauty
and wisdom,
a little bird as it grew,
and was prepared.
This shell created the
boundaries and space
for the bird to become
who it is and then
patiently released
as it was pecked at,
broken,
split
open
for the bird
to emerge.
Then, its work done,
the pale blue eggshell,
ever so gracefully,
drifted to the earth,
ready to be mulched
back into the cycles,
a witness to the container
from which the bird
would fly.
