What's an Ootle?

I've often used the phrase "oodles"... but this is a different kind of oodle... In fact, it's not an oodle, it's an Ootle! That's the Open Old Testament Learning Event.

It's a worldwide event (similar to a MOOC) meant to help people from all over the world learn more about a particular topic, in this case, the Old Testament. To be honest, I did not have a good learning experience in my seminary Old Testament class... neither of them, actually. I learned next to nothing in one of them and was force fed to memorization in the other one.

That is to say, I need this course.

I need this course because I feel like I missed out in seminary.

I need this course because I am a life-long learner.

I need this course  because I feel like I know very little about the Hebrew Bible.

I need this course to be a better pastor/minister/clergy person.

I need this course to be a better Christian.

I do a grave disservice to my faith and my actions when I am not critically studying the Scriptures in which my faith tradition is rooted. I have less of an understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures than the Christian Scriptures and that's problematic because both are integral to Christianity. Jesus' lineage is in the Hebrew Bible. The people, places, events that made Jesus who he was, and is to us today, are chronicled in those books. Albeit, with some missing pieces, overlap, and contradictions, but that is exactly what I hope to learn.

We are all called to wrestle with our scriptures, our traditions, and our rituals. We are called to be all of who G-d has called us to be in this world and without these wrestlings, we know not the depth and breadth of our faith community, of the Church writ large. The Christian tradition is rooted in the history of a people, of many peoples, struggling to find their place in the world and the place of G-d in it all.

And that is still our struggle today.

So I invite you to join me through Ootle 2016. You can find me here, blogging... probably sparsely because, work... and you can find me on twitter @emilymlab. Or, just go to twitter and search #ootle16 and our collective learnings will be posted.

Looking forward to learning with you!

spaciousness in the wilderness

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I wrote the following piece for the church newsletter. As mentioned before, this church is focusing on Spiritual Practices while the pastor is on sabbatical. Read on to hear about my spiritual practice of spaciousness....
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And so it has begun… our journey, alongside Jesus, that leads to Jerusalem; our journey into the wilderness. I wonder what we will find in the wilderness? Who or what awaits us? What struggles will we encounter? What revelations will we have? What practices will bring us through? Perhaps you have already started to discover the answers to these questions. Or, perhaps you just have more questions.

It is in this place of wilderness that we begin to think about those things that separate us from God. Process theologian Marjorie Suchoki defines sin as “an extended event in an interdependent world… sin [against God] manifests in our violence toward the creation.”¹ This includes harm done toward ourselves, others, and the earth. Sin doesn’t just occur between us and God but between us and everything God created in God’s own image. What we do, how we act, and the words we say all have power and we are not always aware of how much power we exude.

Lately, I have been incredibly mindful of how quickly I move from one thing to the next without allowing space. It used to be that typing teachers taught students to include two spaces between each sentence, but that is no longer the case. In this world of efficiency and bureaucracy we now leave just one space between sentences because who has the time for an extra keystroke.

Likewise, I know I am generally inclined toward busy-ness. I am always running from one thing to the next. Everything I have to accomplish feels so important and it seems like if I don’t do it now, at the same time as three other things, none of them will ever get done. No matter how much meditation or prayer I do in the morning, thinking that it will calm my spirit for the day, I still move at roadrunner pace.

For me, this year, Lent is about discerning the ways in which I do harm to myself and others by keeping up this pace of busy-ness. I don’t actually need to speed to get to church and I don’t need to go from one meeting to the next without stopping. Jesus took time to go to the desert and pray by himself. We too are called to follow his lead. Even if it’s just taking one minute to stretch between staring at the computer and walking into a meeting. Even if it’s just pausing to give thanks for my lunch. Even if it’s ten seconds of deep breaths. I am committing myself  to creating more room for spaciousness, and therefore God, to abide. 

Movement. G-d. Rhythm.

So I have to bear witness/testimony to this not only for the sake of sharing it with you, or because it's a spiritual practice to share how G-d is transforming me, but because I want to remember this.

As many of you know, I have recently started as the Sabbatical Guest Pastor at Community United Church of Christ in Champaign, Illinois. Their pastor, my mentor, Rev. Leah Robberts-Mosser, is on Renewal Leave for the next three months. The church went through a hiring process and of the candidates they had, they hired me. And I accepted the opportunity with gratitude. As part of the renewal plan for the church, they built in a sermon series of sorts around the theme of "Spiritual Practices." We will be having three guest preachers, who will also lead a workshop, that will preach on a different spiritual practice each: honoring the body, building community, and engaging the creative spirit. Honoring the body is getting the least amount of airtime-- I don't know that it was a conscious decision-- which is unfortunate because we live in the midwest and honoring one's body, much less paying attention to one's body, is not the norm.

So let me start there.

I have been working really hard lately (many thanks to my former therapist, former field education supervisor, former CPE supervisor, and my spiritual director) to feel my emotions, to pinpoint what it  that I feel and to validate that feeling. That also means paying attention to where I feel emotions in my body. So last night I had a terrible stress dream about work that left me feeling angry when I woke up. There was a point in time when I thought I never got angry. That's no longer true. (It probably wasn't true then either.) When I woke up I wanted to throw something against the wall. It was that bad. This doesn't happen very frequently, so it is becoming easier to recognize when I have strong emotions. I'm going to come back to this feeling in a second.

One of the things I preached about on Sunday was the difference in people's needs when it comes to how they do spiritual practices. Some folks need rigidity-- meditation, every morning, for 30 minutes, at the exact same time. Other folks-- read, me-- need a whole variety of practices. I used to think I needed a rigid schedule, but I could never make it work. [And if the shoe doesn't fit, don't freakin' force it.] I have also been working really hard to figure out how I can do all my favored spiritual practices-- exercising, collaging, meditating, praying, writing, drawing illuminated manuscripts-- and have enough time for life.

jellyfish at the monterrey bay aquarium. movement. 

So, when I was preaching on Sunday, I remembered a sermon my friend/colleague/former parishioner, Rev. Donene Blair, preached in Tiburon about the difference between balance and rhythm. She preached about the way in which creation was six days on, one day off; how Jesus didn't pray on a schedule, but rather when he felt the need to do so. And the second to last paragraph was this: "When we strive for balance it is like standing on one foot. When we find our own rhythm in work, play, rest, prayer and silence, we care for ourselves. We open up space, and let God in." Standing on one foot is not sustainable. Balance is not sustainable. But rhythm. Rhythm opens us up to movement.

Movement is fluidity.
Rhythm is not rigidity.
G-d is movement. fluidity. 

Just let me say a quick word about the paradoxical nature of G-d and how it gets me every time. We know G-d in the stillness, the still small voice, the quiet-ness of prayer, the calm of meditation. I think we try to convince ourselves that G-d can only be found there and then convince ourselves that we can't find G-d because we're only paying attention to stillness. 

Guess what: G-d is both/and. Don't ever for a second believe that G-d cannot be in both of those things and more than those two things. Christian spirituality and theology calls us to be paying attention to all the places we find G-d, naming them, claiming them, and telling others about them. We are being transformed by G-d all.the.time. The question is, are you paying attention?

So this morning, when I woke up angry, I discerned the spiritual practice that would help me best work through the anger, the thing that would help me let go of it before moving on to a full day of work at church. And who's surprised that that practice would be running? 

Movement. 

Fluidity. 

Rhythm of steps and breath. 

I turned on my Pandora Dance Cardio radio station and busted up that treadmill. And even though it's been a year since I last ran four miles, and last week I could hardly run one mile, today I was able to run two and a half with ease.  And sort through my anger enough to get on with my day without letting it consume me. 

Holy Spirit for the win. 

Strangers like me

 

So you may be thinking, "Why did Emily post what is essentially a love song between a jungle boy and a rich girl?"

Let me start here. One of my spiritual practices during CPE has been to listen to broadway music during my drive to and from Livonia. Granted, this has left me singing songs from multiple musicals in my sleep, but it has been a good practice because it gets my mind off of the difficult stuff so I can leave it at the hospital.

So one day this song came on and I thought, "Hm. Strangers like me... That sounds familiar..."

My work at the hospital is full of strangers. This is one of my dislikes about hospital chaplaincy. Unlike church work, where week after week, month after month, year after year, you deal with the same group of people (give or take a few), the hospital is populated by strangers. And as someone who thrives in ongoing community, especially the work of bringing people together to think through church life and theological quandaries, essentially the work of becoming together... well, the hospital just isn't that place. Sure, a chaplain may see people for a week or even a month if the patient is in rehab, but even at that it remains very individual work.

Here is the chunk of lyrics that I am focused on from this song: 

"Oh, these emotions I never knew

Of some other world far beyond this place

Beyond the trees, above the clouds

Oh, I see before me a new horizon

I wanna know, can you show me

I wanna know about these strangers like me

Tell me more, please show me

Something's familiar 'bout these strangers like me."

"Oh these emotions..."
All throughout the CPE program we are digging deeper to get at our emotions. It's not unusual to feel like I'm sitting in therapy during my Wednesday class time with my peers because our supervisor will frequently ask us "How did you feel when ____  happened?" (And no, the answer cannot be "fine"... well it can but you have to have a really good rationale.) So it's emotionally draining work, not only the hospital visits but the class time, too. The benefit of CPE is that it brings up all kinds of stuff from my past, my family system, my expectations, my relationships that help me to see "a new horizon" where I can differentiate between my emotional baggage and another's so that I can do better ministry. That is not to say that after CPE everything will be figured out and I will be able to draw hard and fast emotional distinctions in every interaction because emotions are messier than that. However, it has prepared me for an emotional "world far beyond" the one I have been living.


"Something's familiar about these strangers like me..."
One of the exercises we do in CPE is called "Cultural Narratives." We write a two page family history including major cultural shifts, interactions with diverse communities, and personal place in our family system. After someone reads their narrative aloud, the process that follows includes naming connections, disconnections, and curiosities. Essentially we name the places where we have had a familiar experience, where we know nothing about that experiences, and where we have questions (respectively). This translates into patient work because we then pick either a connection, disconnection, or curiosity and frame it in a way that we would speak to a patient.

Here's a made-up example...

• The cultural narrative says, "I come from a long line of family members in the armed forces. I am not continuing that as I am seeking ordination."
• I say, as a point of disconnection, "I don't know what it's like to have a history of military involvement in my family."
• My reframing for patient care: "How does that family history impact how you see the world?"

So the other night when I visited with a patient and he started talking about his involvement in multiple symphonies and pit orchestras playing woodwind instruments (primarily clarinet), I felt an immediate connection. It was great! I never mentioned to him that I also played clarinet for nine years and that I love broadway shows, but his stories gave me a gateway to become more curious than I usually am because I had the language and familiarity. I may not be a straight white married man in my 70's, but I do know something about music. "Strangers like me..." 

Of course it's easier to connect when we can relate. I struggle when I don't have that place of connection. It requires staying in the conversation long enough to really hear what the other person is saying. Perhaps that's an emotion that I understand ("That's frustrating.") or an experience I've never had ("What was that like?")... but it requires paying close attention to the other person. 

This is what people in caring professions usually call "empathy"-- being able to feel the feeling the other person is experiencing because as a human, you also know that feeling. Hence, my example about frustration above. It's not always that easy... sometimes I run into people who have had a really challenging life and are now fraught with medical issues and they have no family left. I don't know loneliness like that, or overwhelm like that... so I simply sit in it with them, perhaps in silence, perhaps in prayer. My approach may change person to person, but no matter what, it still requires a sense of genuine care for the other. (Note to self: Write a blog post about my understanding of empathy.)

"I wanna know about these strangers like me." Jesus dealt with strangers all the time. Rachel Held Evans, a great blogger on Christianity, ministry, and more, recently wrote this blog post in which she stated, "If Jesus started with the outliers, why shouldn't we?" Strangers can be people that are unfamiliar to us, in which case we can be curious about them-- ask questions and get to know them. Strangers can also be people we consider outliers or outsiders, in which case, we should treat them as Jesus would, with care, compassion, and empathy. ((Disclaimer: we still need to use our common sense when we feel as though we are in danger. Trust G-d but tie up your camel.)) 

So here's me holding myself accountable through my writing. When I go to work today, I will do my best to be curious about people. To show compassion. To be empathetic. To ask questions. To make a point of un-stranger-ing the patients. 

And I encourage you to do the same. The more genuine care and compassion we share, the more human we become, the more love is spread, the better the world becomes. 

Will you join me?

All Saints: Culture. Inheritance. Chair.

Grandma,

I'm sitting in your chair.

The chair you made a coverslip for

when the velvety sky blue was worm

and out of date.

Now covered in a pattern that

screams your name,

Ethel Violet Oie.

The chair in which you sat

and drank your barley green...

that smelly drink that kept you

healthy for so long,

that kept you ahead of the

organic, natural, whole-food curve.

The chair in which you watched

the fish swim back and forth,

back and forth, up and down,

with all of their movement, dynamism,

and flow.

The chair in which your

body deteriorated

from the cancer that took over

your body.

I look at this chair every day and think of you...

think of your smiling face,

your big hands and crooked fingers

worn from a long, grief-filled,

and joyous, G-d infused life.

I think of the times we
played hide-and-seek,
watched Mary Poppins
or Peter Pan
over
and over
and over again.

I think of the times we
shucked corn and peas
on the back patio
on Crown Dr.
When Gracie was two
(and she thought she was nine).

I think of the times we
went to St. Marks
for Good Friday
and how when that stone rolled,
and the tomb shut,
and the lights dimmed...
how that memory shapes my
understanding
of one of the most solemn nights
of the year.
That night that
emotionally paralleled
what it felt like when you left this earth.

Your tomb shut and
the lights of life dimmed.

You were particular and fastidious,
traits that I only kind of inherited,
but that mom and Gracie
totally admit to.

You were kind and gentle,
qualities that I continue striving to
embody because they made you, you.

You were a woman of G-d,
whose beliefs probably
would have opposed mine
in a lot of ways and yet
we would always have agreed upon
G-d's infinite love
for G-d's people.

Grandma,
I'm sitting in your chair
writing my cultural narrative
for my CPE internship.
Thinking about the ways you
shape(d) my life.

Thanks be to G-d,
every day you
resurrect
for me in this chair.

I see you.
I feel you.
I hear you.
I miss you.

You would want it to become my chair.
But it will never be my chair.
It will always be your chair.

Because you are in it.
Every stitch. Every fiber.

And you resurrect for me.
Every. single. day.

What more could I have asked for?
You are a saint.
And this is legacy.

Love,
Emily