Friday Five: The Fork in the Road

Singing Owl writes,

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?

I thought about how to approach this question - on the one hand, it's hard to think of five specific things, but then again, it's hard to think of less than fifty - and I decided to go backward in time. So here's my list, starting with the most recent and working through to the one that probably started it all. And what I've found, thinking about each one, is that they began with a very mundane moment. That moment is what I think of as the 'fork.' The rest comes down the road.

1. A persistent radio commercial.
When Beloved and I were in the process of moving to New City - as in, when I was living here and he was living in Old City - I commuted to work about 30 minutes each way. Early on, I started hearing a radio commercial for a particular fertility clinic in the area. I had been meaning to get a second opinion, and that damn commercial just kept airing, so I finally called one day, made an appointment, and found my very wonderful doctor. Given how far we've come along the treatment process since then, I think of that ridiculously persistent commercial as a particularly providential fork.

2. A phone call in the downstairs church kitchen.
I was downstairs with the quilters when the phone rang during lunchtime. Since the secretary was out, I decided to answer it (frankly, I think I might have been fleeing a particularly chatty quilter at the time). It turned out to be my now-colleague, calling to see if I would be interested in a position in his congregation. Took me completely by surprise. Six weeks later, I had an interview. Three weeks after that, I had a call in hand. Two weeks after that, I told my congregation I was leaving. None of which were anywhere on my radar when I answered the phone in the downstairs kitchen.

3. Meeting for a coffee at Starbucks.
About six years ago, I met a colleague for coffee at Starbucks one day. For the life of me, I have no memory of why we were there, but what I do remember was his offhand question right before we were done: "hey, are you dating anyone?" And then he told me about this friend of his who knew this guy that I might like, and maybe we could all do a group-date-thing sometime, and I said "sure," because frankly, my love life was complete crap so why not try something different. It took nearly nine months to meet said "friend." To whom I became engaged seven months later, married five months after that, and here we are.

4. A conversation with mom in the car.
I don't have a particularly dramatic call story. The earliest part of it shows up in the final 'fork,' below. At this point in the story, I had made the decision to go to seminary - primarily through the persistent encouragement of others. It was the summer before my junior year in college, and I was home, working at the bakery as I had for a few summers before this. My mom and I had gone - somewhere, to the grocery store maybe? - and we were in the car on the way home. I remember with perfect clarity the hill we were on when I turned to her and said, "I think I'm going to go to seminary and be a pastor."

My parents were (and are) extremely active church people, so this wasn't an out-of-body experience for my mom (though she did tell me years later that she was quite surprised, but she tried to hide it so I wouldn't think she was unsupportive). For me, though, it felt like the first time my call was real. Saying it out loud, to my mom, was a whole new level. Of all the moments involved in my call story, that one feels like the biggest 'fork in the road' to me.

5. It all comes back to an offhand comment after Sunday School when I was 15.
Sunday morning youth group. I'm 15. I have a huge crush on our youth pastor, who was fresh out of seminary and looked like Tom Cruise (so I thought; Top Gun had come out two years before and I loved Tom Cruise). Harmless teenage stuff. One day, after bible study was over, I was walking across the fellowship hall and said pastor shouted after me, "Hey, Shalom! You should think about being a pastor."

I did not take this seriously. AT ALL. Mostly, I was flattered that he thought I could do what he did, but I had no interest in it. I really had no idea what pastors did, anyway. Didn't they just hang around the church all day? How interesting could that be?

It took five more years before that particular fork in the road became clear. Without it, there would be no conversation with my mom in the car; no Starbucks chat about 'the guy' I might like; no phone call in the downstairs kitchen; no move to the New City and consequent interest in the fertility clinic. There would be a different road, of course, and it might have been great too. But this one is pretty damn good. Fun to look back and see how we got here.

ashes, ashes

I found this poem someplace last year, and hurriedly copied it off and placed it in my "Lent" file. Now I can't tell where it came from, but it seems to be going in exactly the right direction.

Blessed Lent to all.

Breakthrough

This lenting
is a longing, looking,
isolating and locating process,
a passing of the time between
what has to be, what may become,
a late, last, solitary lingering
among the soiled and crusted snowbanks
of deep-drifted hurt and disappointment
seeking out those tender-tough new shoots
that pierce the calloused surface
of all losing with the agony
of life becoming green
again.

- J. Barrie Shepherd

cooperation makes it happen

Does anyone else remember this song from Sesame Street? "Cooperation makes it happen, cooperation, working together...dig it!" I am so a child of the '70's.

Anyway. Today I was meeting with a colleague to "plan" (quotes will become evidently clear in a moment) our "joint" Ash Wednesday service. This is not the person I work with, but another pastor from a church across town. We are doing a "joint" (again, using this term loosely) service between our two churches: his congregation, generally more elderly, is hosting the mid-afternoon worship, and we are hosting the evening one. Our idea was to share leadership in planning and facilitating the services.

[When this first came up, he said offhandedly, "Now, we've never done the imposition of ashes, so you'll need to help me with this part." Hold the phone, friend. This is a guy who's been a pastor since, I think, God was a boy (or, for about 30 years; God is younger than I thought), and I could hardly believe that he had never, in his whole ministry, done the imposition of ashes. I mean, what the hell else do you do on Ash Wednesday? It's the whole freaking name of the day! But then another colleague mentioned that many churches in her youth didn't "do ashes" because it was considered too Catholic, so maybe he comes from that piety. I'm trying not to judge here. So far, it's not going terribly well.]

I realize that many people might say, "goodness, Pastor Blogger. It's less than a week before Ash Wednesday! Shouldn't you have gotten around to the planning of this thing earlier?" To which I would say, "Yes. Probably. You bet. Not to disabuse you of your clearly high opinion of pastoral planning abilities, however, let me tell you: this is pretty generally how it goes in the church. Nothing will humble your image of yourself as a well-organized person as quickly as parish ministry. Seriously. It takes about a month."

So. Pastor Close to Retirement gets here to "plan" the service. He comes with a fully completed bulletin. My name is nowhere in it. He goes through the service piece by piece, saying after each one, "I'll do that," "I'll take that piece," "I'll do that part," and I keep thinking, "WHY AM I EVEN HERE?" and then finally, when we get to the Imposition of Ashes he turns and says, "will you do that?" To which I wanted to respond, "well, it sounds like it's the only thing I'll get to do, so, sure."

Also, I get to help distribute communion.

Sure glad I signed up to "help" "plan" and "lead" our "joint" Ash Wednesday service. There will, however, be actual ashes. So we will not need to call it "Ash" Wednesday worship, which is good.

Clearly, our pastor friend is not a fan of Sesame Street.

welcome home, friend.

You put us through quite a week.  But we'll forgive you.  Glad you're back.

a poem for the day

In Old City, the local NPR station ran The Writer's Almanac every day at 9:00am; a perfect time for me. Here in Still Relatively New City, it's on at some random time I can never remember, like 12:30pm or 2:15 in the afternoon, or something. So I've resorted to receiving TWA over email. It's not quite the same, but what I do like is the ability to savor a particularly good poem.

I don't know what the copyright rules are here. Maybe I'm not supposed to publish this. But I don't get any money for it, and in fact, I'm going out later today to buy whatever volume this poem is in - so hopefully it benefits the author.

Today's poem:

The Bat
by Jane Kenyon

I was reading about rationalism,
the kind of thing we do up north
in early winter, where the sun
leaves work for the day at 4:15

Maybe the world is intelligible
to the rational mind;
and maybe we light the lamps at dusk
for nothing...

Then I heard the wings overhead.

The cats and I chased the bat
in circles - living room, kitchen,
pantry, kitchen, living room...
At every turn it evaded us

like the identity of the third person
in the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary
by suddenly coming near.

from Otherwise, by Jane Kenyon. Published by Greywolf Press, 1996.

the hills are alive

This past week's Friday Five from Rev Gals was inspired by The Best Movie Ever, The Sound of Music. I didn't have time to write on Friday, but I do have a Sound of Music story of my own. It goes like this:

For years, The Sound of Music was on NBC (I think) every Easter. It might still be, for all I know; I'm usually in the official Pastor Coma o' Easter by the evening, so I no longer watch television that particular night. But when I was young, we watched it every year.

We didn't have a VCR, so all I knew of the movie was what I saw on television. Every year, Maria would climb to the top of the mountain and sing, and then she would descend and get kicked out of the cloister for being too spunky, and then she would transform the house of Von Trapp and the Evil Baroness would get her comeuppance (even though I secretly thought the Evil Baroness was also the most beautiful woman in the world in her dance dress), and then the Captain would fall in love with Maria, and then the nuns would sing her down the aisle.

And then, with the nuns' voices singing, "how do you solve a problem like Maria?" and the bells of Salzburg ringing in my ears, a commercial would come on, and my mom would turn off the television and say, "time for bed!" and I would happily trot off to bed and dream about long cathedral aisles and handsome, fertile, widowed captains. I guess. After all, we were only allowed to watch G-rated movies when I was a kid. Which meant we watched mostly Disney movies from the 1960's featuring computers that filled a whole room and a very young Kurt Russell, or cartoons. And in the cartoons, the movie ends when the couple gets together and there's a wedding. Or at least a big pretty dress and some kind of dance. Maybe with fairies. That's what I knew of movies: when people get married, then the movie's over.

Until one year, when I was probably 10 or so, and Maria had walked down the aisle in her wedding dress, and the commercial came on, and I stood up from the couch to go to bed, and my mom very unexpectedly said, "I guess you can stay up for the end of the movie this year."

I'm sorry, what? There's more? But she got married! Isn't that it? THE MOVIE DOESN'T END HERE? MY PARENTS LIED TO ME?

I think it's possible that The Sound of Music killed my childhood.

Anyway, I stayed up for the end: the whole crazy Nazi-chase, Rolf-betrayal, nuns-stealing-car-parts, mountain-climbing end, which I loved. My childhood actually rolled on, fairly uninterrupted. No permanent scars.

I used this story in a sermon once. Can't remember why.

Mostly, I just think it's funny.

paging the reverend emily dickinson

There are a lot of theories out there about the best way to understand, or frame, the work of a pastor. Pastor as CEO; shepherd; prophet; priest; (probably not king); counselor; preacher; teacher; presider; administrator. While in seminary, I read descriptions related to all of these - some very helpful, some not. Some very honest, some very idealistic. Some clearly written by people who had certain expectations of pastors; some written by pastors whose ideals had fallen short.

I have never really found an image for myself, which would help me frame and sift through my own work. I've gone with 'presider' most often: someone who provides gentle guidance, who serves the liturgy (the 'work of the people'), who helps things happen but is not the center or source of the activity. This image falls short pretty often, though.

Today I was in the midst of Pastor As Administrator (embodied in Pastor As Cleaning Off Her Desk) when I ran across the most current issue of Christian Century. (Side note: it's fairly impressive that I'm only one issue behind. I must have been doing Pastor As Reader and Study-er lately.) And in it, I found the first description of a pastor-image which really, thoroughly, and completely works for me: Pastor as Poet. Here's the paragraph that got me:

Pastors are not the only ones working on the kingdom of God. But they don't help by abandoning their specific call to be poets and taking on the work of the realists and the engineers. Someone has to teach people how to dream.

M. Craig Barnes, I salute you. This one, finally, works. (By the way, I don't think pastors have the corner market on being poets. If this image works for you, take it along.)

There are holes in it, like in any image. Pastor-Poets still have to clean off their desks, for example, and that's not particularly poetic. There are administrative tasks to be done, and personalities to be negotiated with, and budgets to be aware of. But behind even these tasks, behind all the tasks, is still the work of the poet. This is what makes the work so interesting to me, the idea that there is a reality behind it all, and my task is to help us all think beyond the obvious, beyond the familiar.

It's what, as Barnes points out, makes it necessary for pastors to recognize that someone who is really angry about the new choir director is actually masking their grief that the old one, a dear friend, left. It's what makes it possible to realize that the person who asks for prayer that they will find a new job is also asking for a new identity and hope. It's what makes it crucial to place the scripture into everyday life and wonder how they meet, where they rub one another raw, how each illuminates the other.

This is probably why I often think of sermons as midrash: a creative re-reading of the texts. Poetry does the same thing, calls for the same skills - and not even skills so much as passion, desire for coming at the old thing in a new way. Looking at it upside down, inside out. Seeing the texts and our lives as gems, held gently and examined in various lights, each facet slightly different than the others.

Read this article. It's great. "Poet in Residence," in the February 10 issue of Christian Century.

There are few things better than reading a description of what you do, and thinking, "Hey! That sounds like great work! I want to do that! How can I do that?" - and then realizing, "Hey! This is what I do!"

I'll take one of his last sentences with me for a long time:

What if, instead of working so hard at omnicompetence, pastors were free to work hard simply at being better poets?

random snapshots from a week

• Two days of sunshine makes an enormous difference in my attitude.
  
• There are few things funnier than an inattentive acolyte during worship. One who feels the need to stretch, sleepily, obviously trying to stay awake during the sermon. And is not trying to call attention to himself - that's the funny part. Kept me awake, anyway.
• Last night we had turkey dinner with all the fixings. I love doing this every once in awhile. It almost feels wrong, to have all that stuff when it's not Thanksgiving or Christmas - but nothing that tastes so good can be wrong (can it?).
• I think this will be the first week in quite awhile when it is at least possible for me to stay on top of my to-do list. Then again, it's only Tuesday.
• Right now I am re-reading Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, a book which indulges my love for and slight obsession with correct punctuation. (How can you not love a book with the rallying cry, "Sticklers unite!") The darker side of this, however, is that I find myself extra sensitive to bad punctuation. This is not the best part of my personality.
  
• If I hear one more story about this woman who gave birth to eight children, apparently as the result of the most unethical fertility specialist EVER, I am going to scream. Out loud. For a long time.
• Yesterday I wrote a letter to Oprah. (On the subject of bullet above.) I don't even watch Oprah. I don't really like Oprah.
  
• Next Monday I am babysitting my niece for the afternoon and I am already eagerly looking forward to it. She is the cutest girl in the world, I believe. (Though I would acknowledge many others who could fit into that category with her.)
• I started doing yoga again last week and it's great. I need to be regular about it this time. Don't hesitate to remind me that I said that.