BELONGING

I know it's not new, but I had never heard it put this way.

In a recent consulting session with a church staff someone said they had read that church life had shifted from "Believing, Behaving, Belonging" to "Belonging, Behaving, Believing".  

Now, like most bumper stickers, this may be an overstatement.  But, it resonates with my experience.

There was a day that it seemed that churches were more interested in doctrinal purity than they were in welcoming the stranger.  The church seemed to require some ascent to an agreed upon creed.  It seemed to follow that if we believed certain things, our behavior would follow from that belief.  If you believed rightly, and behaved rightly, you could belong to the group.

But, many people doubt that right belief is the forrunner to right behavior.  Some of us now assume that it is the relationships of love that shape our behavior.  The groups to which we belong call forth certain practices and behavior.  If we love people in a group and participate with them, our actions are formed by that love.  It then follows that our actions eventually lead us to articulate what we believe about life.

If belonging preceeds behavior and belief, I suspect the church that practices hospitality to strangers may be in a good position to grow.  At least, it might be the kind of place people will take a second look at.

OUT OF THE BOX

I loved it.  25 degrees--snow-covered trails, steel gray Indiana sky.  Usually few people travel the trails of Fort Harrison State Park on such a day.  But, as I parked, I saw a couple of yellow school busses.  Traveling down the trail I heard talking--young teens--not yelling and laughing--but talking and listening.  I approached and saw they huddled, looking, listening to a teacher.  As I walked by I heard her say, "If you close you mouth and open your ears, you can hear the water in the stream."  

Further down the path I saw another gaggle of middle-schoolers, their teacher telling them about the deer tracks, the clumps of leaves lying on top of the snow where animals were looking for food.  The apologized for filling the trail.

But, I loved it!

For here were school rooms learning "out of the box".  They were not reading.  They were freezing and smelling and feeling that which they were learning.  Some even seemed intrigued by what they were hearing and seeing.

I loved it not only because they students were leanring where life was lived, but they were in the wildest part of nature that you can find inside a modern city.  They are dealing with what Richard Louv called "nature deficit disorder".  In his book "Last Child in the Woods" he warns that children's fear of nature and their lack of exposure to the rural and wilderness parts of their landscape is leading to all kinds of personal and emotional disorders.  Whether this is true or not, I know nature to be a wonderful teacher of patience and flexibility.  I know it to be a place where, when we slow down and listen and experience, we discover ourselves part of an amazing system of life, energy, tension, death, birth, love and delight.

I loved it--kids out of the bos--learnig and laughing, tasting and seeing.  

MUSIC IN THE DEAD OF WINTER

January 20--blistering cold.   Snow falling.  Trying to keep ahead of it.  The driveway scrapes under the blade of the snow shovel.  The whishing of the snow blowing off the shovel, back into my face. The scratching was accompanied by the background noise of interstate traffic a mile away.  Scratching, whishing, humming--scratching, whishing, humming.  

I stopped to breathe.  Leaning on the shovel, I heard it.  Music--singing over the drum beat of scratching, whishing, humming.  A robin--a lone singer who forgot to head south.  Singing its call, hoping for a reply.  And then in a tree near-by, an answer.  Another snow-bird enduring an Indiana winter.

I thought, “The dead of winter can be such a hard time.  The absence of green, the sun hiding for days, the snow carpeting the brown grass for days and weeks on end.  And we can be so driven to keep ahead of the overwhelming gray-white days of despair that we fail to stop and listen--deeply and quietly, to the song that whispers in our soul--the song that reminds us that life has beauty and loveliness.”  

I am grateful for shovels on which to lean and breath to breathe in and ears to hear a robin’s song--and for my own song that sings my own soul forward.    

Gees Bend Quilts

They took the shirt tails, the pockets, the overalls tired from sweating in the cotton fields, they took the faded feed sacks sewed for little girl's dresses, the fragments of materials gleaned from the Sears Roebuck company project to make shams for pillows--they took the scraps, the leftovers--cloth too washed to wear but too precious to burn--they took it and cut it, spread it out and tied it together with the calloused hands of love to make covers for their baby's bed, warmth for their children's feet, safety against the cold which blew through the slats which made their homes. These women, African descent, these women, strong with determination, these women, daughters of slaves, created quilts which now hang on the pristine walls of the IMA. And thousands of us wander in awe as we stare at the olive green, the black, the red, the gingham, the corduroy, the art that their scrap collections have created.

What a story!! Women, a part of a community of share croppers, cut off from voting by the stopping of a ferry between Gees Bend and Camden, Alabama, kept on keeping on, persistent in their collection of pieces of lived life, recycling them into covers for their children, and now they are world renowned artists with their grace and beauty filling museums around the world.

Isn't this something of what it's like to preach sermons? Don't we do the same thing, persistently collect scraps of lived life, pieces of left-over sweat and laughter, work and play, scraps too tired to breathe but too precious to burn, and we lay them out, piece by piece, looking for patterns, and when we see something that might contribute to the quilt that could warm a tired and frigid soul, we tie it together with the thread of language, hoping to salvage the sacred and make it a blessing for those who cuddle under it.

Those are the best sermons--the best blankets--the most moving and blessed words. They are not the events of heroes, held up and reminders to the weary and wounded that they are inadequate and useless unless they become heroes themselves, but they are the scraps of moments of ordinary, overworked and under appreciated people who persistently press on in their living faithful love in community. They are the moments that clothe each of our lives that get cut from the fabric of our daily life, laid beside the moments of other cloth, different but sacred, of the gifts of other scared but sacred hands, loving daily life.

Women, weary with work sew visions of beauty from leftover living. Preachers, speaking in a word weary world, create covers of hope from scraps of life. And we who wander thorough the halls of museums and sermons are blessed and warmed.

Candy Bar Corner

It was a street corner filled with flying candy bars. Bitter cold January morning in Indianapolis, sun struggling to make a difference, and I was on my way to the office. I stopped at 75th and Shadeland and there in the middle of the intersection were flying Snickers and sliding Three Musketeers. Three boxes of candy bars were being mauled as cars raced by, tires flipping cold and chaotic candy bars all over the intersection.

I wondered, "Where are all the kids?" I was tempted to stop in the middle of the intersection, get out of my black Subaru GT and like a kid chasing dollar bills dropped from the back of a Brinks truck, collect as many of the unmashed bars as I could gather in my arms.

But, I didn't stop. I watched, and as the light turned, I drove over the hapless bars and headed on to work. I wondered, "What happened to the little boy who grew up at his parents Dairy Queen in Monett, MO? Where is the little guy who excitedly spotted a penny in the gravel of the parking lot, picked it up, polished it off and carried it carefully in to share the good news with my mother? Where is the little boy who delights in the little sweet gifts that fall from the sky (or from the pocket of some unsuspecting customer, or from the back of some truck carrying candy bars)?"

I wondered, "Have I become so gorged on the sweet gifts of life that I fail to delight in the little ones that fall in my path? Have I become so accustomed to having what I need and getting what I want that I fail to notice the candy bars that just appear out of no where? Am I so busy and moving so fast that I fail to stop and pick up the unexpected delights that fall my way? Am I part of a society that is so obsessed with getting somewhere we are not that we fail to delight in where we are?"

I don't know what candy bar corner was all about. I don't know where the candy came from. I don't see many people buying whole boxes of candy bars in the grocery store. I seldom see boxes of candy bars being carried down the street in open trucks. (The fact is, I seldom see food of any kind in open bed trucks where it could fall off-except tomatoes in the summer heading for the Red Gold factory in northern Indiana). As far as I could tell these wayward collections of wrapped calories just fell from the sky to stir storm-like in the middle of that unsuspecting intersection.

But, what I do know is that I might stop in the racing around of my life and notice the moments that come to me in the lives of other people who come my way. I have missed much because I failed to slow down and pick up the pennies that others have discarded. I have sought to fill my soul with "meaningful and purposeful" activity and in the process, missed the delight of "sweets from heaven" that simply come for a moment and lend light to my soul.

I suspect those candy bars don't really have any purpose or meaning. But, I am grateful they slowed me down to notice my own life.