Take a look around

In case you were unaware, there is a lot of snow in New York right now.

NYU had a snow day yesterday, which is rare, but becoming more and more common. (We got an email from the Vice President for Public Safety or whatever last year saying that NYU was NOT going to close for snow, that it had not closed for anything but 9/11 in 17 years or something... and then the next day was a snow day.) I've now had 2.5 snow days at NYU. Of course, I found myself at PHTS yesterday anyway, because when classes are cancelled it makes for prime rehearsal time. When I went outside, the snow piled up on top of cars was taller than I was. Sidewalks were pretty treacherous, depending on exactly where you were.

I am not skilled at walking in snow. I'm from Virginia. We don't get a lot of practice. (Try shopping for real winter boots in Virginia. Ugh.) I remember last year, trudging down the street using all my concentration to prevent myself from falling, and then seeing one of my teachers (from Connecticut) glide past with no trouble like Legolas or something. My pride was only regained as another one of my teachers (from Mexico) and I both stumbled our way down 4th St later.

I'm not the only one who has a hard time walking in the snow. As I walked along Stuyvesant Street, which was not at all cleared of snow, I passed a man also trying to navigate the shin-deep snow. We looked at each other, smiled these helpless smiles of good luck, and moved on. (slowly). I came to the corner, exhaling at the break while I waited for the light to change. A woman I'd been walking close to also arrived at the corner. We looked at each other with the shared, "Why is my walk talking twice the amount of time as it normally does?" look. She then took her headphones out of her ears and said, "This is ridiculous, isn't it?" And we had a conversation there as we waited to cross the street.

The nice thing is, I actually think I've had more random interactions of acknowledging people as people during this snowstorm than any other time in New York. Really, all of yesterday as I walked around, people were grumpy, sure, but grumpy very specifically at the snow, not at each other. United in our struggle to climb over these banks of snow without falling. Acknowledging each other. That's nice.

And as the news goes, while situations in Cote d'Ivoire and Yemen break my heart, I found this delightful New York Times article about Ashesi University in Ghana. Ashesi University is located right next door to NYU Accra. Really. I ate there constantly. (their red-red. SO GOOD.) Ashesi is one of the local universities where we NYU Accra students could take classes. (I did not take any classes there, I was at University of Ghana instead.) Our first week, we got to speak to the founder of Ashesi, who this article focuses around, and hearing him speak on education was truly inspiring. All about the importance of ethical leadership. Fabulous. Glad to see Ashesi getting some international recognition.

No life in his art

This is good: "The Problem of Christian Art"

I am a Christian art snob, and you might as well know that up front. I don’t like most of what is called “Christian” in art, music, or movies. I think I’m in good company here. C. S. Lewis remarked that he too had little to say about so-called Christian literature. Far too often, Christian art privileges message over art, and the result is that no one who doesn’t already share the sensibilities of the community will pay attention.

Oh, and it’s also true that a lot of so-called Christian art sucks.

When I say I'm a theater artist, and a Christian, a lot of people think this means I'm going to spend my life doing productions of things like Godspell. False. I hate Godspell. I like some of the songs, but the book is terrible. It has such a flimsy structure. Which is what happens when you try to put the structure of the Book of Matthew with traditional musical theater.

I plan on doing overtly Christian things. I like them. I have a perspective on them that's pretty unique especially for a theater person. I'm working pretty actively, at this point, on a piece that combines the Song of Songs and the Book of Job. But not all of my theater's going to be overtly Christian. In that blog, he mentions the idea of "Stealth Christian" artists. You may not necessarily know their work is Christian, but it is. I think the stealthiest Christian move was the later career of Alice Cooper. (Yeah, Alice Cooper's a Christian. Yeah, I love him. Though I loved him before I knew any of that, too. I've been a proud metalhead since middle school.) Tongues was my main stealth Christian piece. It was so Christian it was ridiculous.

Anyway. Well said.

I had a class yesterday where we all drew quotes from a pile. I happened to draw this quote:

"No man can stand within these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body."

That would be Charles Darwin.

That would also be the last part of my "why am I a Christian" blog post.

The teacher said, "He was really the most religious man of no religion, wasn't he?" And the discussion following this quote, that I happened to pick up from a giant random pile, was the only time religion was overtly mentioned in the class. I mean, of course I drew the religious quote. What else would I do?

Excuse me, now I'm off to my Intro to Jewish Mysticism class.

Domine ad adjuvandum me festina

(oh my gosh two blogs in less than 12 hours?! I must be making up for that absurdly long time with no blog earlier this month!)

I go back to school today. I have extremely mixed feelings about this and I've never had mixed feelings about this before and that disturbs me. I'm back in New York and still terribly confused and feeling like I'll never readjust. I know I'll walk into PHTS this morning and suddenly feel my chest fill with the happiness that inevitably comes when I enter that building (I walked into that place the other week and saw a folding chair in 4A and almost cried from joy... ...this might be sad...), but right now I'm antsy but excited but filled with dread but chomping at the bit to go. (This transition? EXACTLY like Fitzmaurice voice work. Really good for you but you want to scream when it's happening.)

Anyway. I'll report back on that after this week. Some important things involving a depressing lack of curiosity in the world (or maybe just New York City) and Psalm 27, but later.

For now, I just finished my morning prayer ritual. This is part of the way I keep my grounding during the busy PHTS semester - morning and evening prayer. I've cobbled together a series of prayers, psalms, various traditions (mostly from the Book of Common Prayer), and one prayer that I wrote myself. This is my third semester praying this specific prayer every day. And it occured to me that it might be of interest. So, here you go:

As I rise to begin this day, I do so as a scared, imperfect child. Already, I am entrenched in sin, in arrogance, in self-loathing, in fear, in self-centeredness, but you embrace me as your own. Be with me, Lord God, as I move through this day. Order my steps in your word. Help me to see you in every person, place, and situation. Inspire the entergy in me to be fully present and open towards others. Help me see every interaction as an opportunity to share your love. Push me past my fear, for there is joy in the morning. Teach me to see the resurrected Christ in each moment.

As I journey forth into this new day, be in my thought, my heart, my body, my breath, and my voice. Keep me humble so that I may know that my sole purpose is to serve you and the world through you. Use my selfishness for your purposes. Do your work through my sin, but push me to be a more perfect child in you. Guide my decisions in your will. Keep me from squandering my time and energy.

Bless all who I meet today; those I have known, and those I will never know. Mold me with them so we can create a community of intimacy and love where you are glimpsed in every glance. Guide us as we work towards establishing your kingdom on earth. Give us grace to behold you, present in your Word and Sacraments, and to recognize you in the lives of those around us. Stir up in us the flame of love which burned in the heart of your Son as he bore his Passion, and let it burn in us to eternal life, and to the ages of ages.

Above all, inspire me to live with the joy that befits your child, servant, handmaiden. May my step be light and my voice be free to sing your praises to the world without end.

Why did I do it? What did it get me?

Last week, Lauren Lobenhofer preached a sermon that was 1. quite good and 2. something I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now. It centered around Jesus’ first exchange with his future disciplines on the book of John. She pointed out that in this gospel (the mystical and poetic one), Jesus’ first word are a question: “What are you looking for?” A loaded question to ask to people looking for the Messiah (similarly loaded to someone looking for a romantic partner, as Lauren pointed out). I’ve been thinking about why I’ve come to Christianity looking for ever since the second Sunday of January, which was the “baptism of Jesus” Sunday. A certain “baptism of Jesus” Sunday, five years ago, was a major turning point in my faith, because it was around the time I returned to Christianity. And now, as I return to a rather secular environment (compared to the extremely religious environments I’ve been living in for the past 8 months), I’ve realized that that question might come up again. Now that I’m in an environment where you’re not assumed to be Christian. Why are you a Christian? I’ve had people ask me that before, and I’ve given a short response; that I was raised Christian, stopped believing for a while, then realized I was happier when I was a Christian, so I chose to go back to that. But a deeper investigation is useful. For me, for others, hopefully.

Most people don’t realize I’d ever left Christianity to begin with, because I never left the church, outwardly. But for about three years, I was a closeted agnostic. I had been born and raised in the church, I was extremely involved in church, I may have been the last person anyone would have expected to have major doubts, but the doubts came on strong at the end of middle school. Could this actually be real? Was there a God? My prayer life, then, was pretty incredible. I was basically in constant prayer. I haven’t reached that level of prayer since. But as I started to wonder if I was simply deluding myself into thinking someone was listening, I started to wean myself off of prayer. I’d find myself slipping into prayer automatically and would consciously stop myself. I remember my first audition of high school, where I would not allow myself to pray. And eventually, I stopped. And I started to distance myself from religion. And I claimed the title “agnostic” under a pure logistical point--you could not disprove the existence of a God any more than you could prove it--though I personally did not believe in God.

However, I was still interested in religion as a concept. It fascinated me, belief systems. So, since I couldn’t get away from the church even if I tried, I ended up developing a set of beliefs where, if there was a God, I would believe this this and that about that God. This grew largely under the influence of one of my pastors at the time. When she left, five years ago, I realized that I had to make a choice - either firmly believe in God or firmly not believe in God. I was worried that that strange kind of “reserve faith” I’d developed would leave. And I realized that if I worried so much about it leaving me, it was important and I needed to follow it. That I was, frankly, happier believing in God. So, I went there. I chose.

It took a long time to readjust my thinking. To rebuild my faith for who I had become. In three years I made some progress, but my second year of college proved so difficult that it left me spiritually drained and I thought, “I really need to make this a priority in my life.” So I started working at Montreat, and since then I’ve really shot off like a rocket. I have so far to go to get where I want to be, but that’s a life’s work, if you’re quick about it.

So, what was it that brought me back? What is it now? What have I been looking for?

I have three main things.

I think Jesus had some darn good principles.

Quite simply, if you look at Jesus’ teachings, the root of all of them is love. Love God, love others. Resist the temptation to judge, to strike out in vengeance. Choose love instead. Learn to live with less. Spend the time you would spend caring for your possessions caring for other people. All of these make sense to me, both as ways to personally live my life and as a way to encourage society to move forward. I do believe strongly that we in America often tend towards caring more about what we have than who we’re around, and I think we could ultimately have a much better time in our lives if we flipped that around.

It has come to my attention that I do a lot of work that could be called “evangelism”, even though that’s a word I would have run away screaming from for most of my life. the word always made me nauseous even in the most innocent of settings. (As Joan Gray, former moderator of the Presbyterian Chuch (USA) and the preacher for last summer’s Worship and Music conference said, “Alright, ushers, lock the doors. We’re going to talk about evangelism.”) But, really, what else is this blog? But, in accepting my identity as an evangelist, I do not see my ministry to those outside the church as rallying to convert heathen sinners to the redemptive power of Jesus Christ. Sorry. If there is any “conversion” in what I do, it is encouraging people to convert their lives towards the path Jesus took; namely, the call to love each person and the belief that each one has value. (Acknowledging, of course, that I fall short of following that path far too often, but I am trying.) And that is a conversion that needs to happen within the church as well as outside of the church. Christ said, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father but through me.” DUH, yes, absolutely, Christ was the model for an ideal way of living and interacting with others. So why do we so often fail to follow that way because Christ has atoned for our sins anyway (an idea Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace” which is the death of discipleship), and instead use this verse to condemn those who have not “professed Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior” but who very well could be following the way of Christ better than those who do?

Call me a heretic. Call me blasphemous. I just think we’ve got our priorities mixed up. I’m not sent to collect souls, but hearts. And yes, I believe that you can be filled with the love of Christ and call it by a different name, and yes, I believe that not one of those names is more valid than another. And I think that getting upset over what we call it is distracting us from our main purpose, which is cultivating that love. There are many reasons someone might not embrace Christianity. There are people who have been scarred by Christianity, by hateful actions done in the name of Christ. There are people who tried Christianity but were scared away by people angrily pointing fingers at their sins while not acknowledging their own. There are people, and I think a lot more people than we think, who may have been curious about religion but didn’t grow up knowing the language, and no one has bothered to translate for them so they’ve felt stupid or like there’s something they’re not getting and have given up. I, for my part, believe that Christ had some really good ideas on how to live. I believe those ideas could probably help out most people. Thus I believe in sharing those ideas with people, and to do that, often you have to translate. If I came up to you and started speaking in Twi, you’d have no idea what I was saying. It’s the same with religion. At Pentecost, what were the disciples gifted with? Tongues. The ability to speak to people in their own languages. So why do we, as Christians, insist the people use ours? If someone winces and shuts down at the word “God”, you’re not going to get anything across. It’s possible to talk about God without using the word “God”. Probably whenever you’re talking me I’m talking about God, even if we’re in a dramaturgy meeting (actually, probably especially if we’re in a dramaturgy meeting). One of my friends said, “Well, Colleen, whenever I’m having a conversation with you, it’s a theological conversation.” Honestly, if I can get the message across to someone, the whole “love everyone” message that’s at the core of Christ’s teachings, I’ll be thrilled. If someone is curious as to where this comes from, I’m MORE THAN happy to talk about religion. I love helping people engage with religious language. I’m overjoyed when someone asks me a question about religion. I love to be that resource. I love being asked questions that other Christians wouldn’t think to ask and I don’t know how to answer. It’s awesome. But that’s not my focus. My focus is encouraging people to love other people. Period.

I am too much of a natural pessimist not to need a resurrection story as the guiding narrative of my life.

Most people I know nowadays would not call me a pessimist. But the growth of my optimism is directly proportional with my religious growth. Very much trackable. Over break, I met up with a friend from high school who I hadn’t seen since graduation, and I referenced the running joke of my appearance, that I wear a lot of black and a trenchcoat and shave my head but I’m actually a ball of fluff, but I had to stop and tell her, “Oh. I’m an optimist now.” My own realization of my optimism was a huge shock to me, and when I went up to two of my teachers and said, “I just realized... I’m an optimist,” they said, “Yes...” like that was the most obvious thing in the world. But for a long time, I functioned very much as a pessimist. I had the most cynical, bitter, negative view on life out of anyone I knew. I was absolutely convinced there was no way to make life truly worth living, that all people were inherently evil and that you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone really worth your time (including yourself), that, in the words of Sweeney Todd, we all deserve to die, and life was just an arduous process you’d try to make as bearable as you could.

And frankly, even as I grow more positive, I cannot do it in a way that denies the things that are negative in the world. Not to the extremes that I once believed, but, yes, people do some terrible things, sometimes you have an extremely hard time finding a reason to care, some relationships seem to be more work than they’re worth, sometimes you can doubt whether there’s any point to the things you’re doing, or, worse, doubt if the things you’ve already done have made any impact. It would be stupid to deny that these things are part of life. And I don’t. At all. I’ve often wondered why people have come to me for comfort because I’m not the one who’s able to say, “Oh, it’s going to be okay.” No. Often it’s not. Often it’s going to hurt like hell. It may hurt more than you know and more than you want and more than you think you can handle and I’m sorry, but nothing’s going to change that.

Christianity acknowledges that. Jesus is born, he does a lot of cool things, say some smart-but-controversial things, performs some miracles, and then the whole thing starts to crumble. One of his friends betrays him, and he’s arrested, even though he hasn’t done anything to warrant what’s about to happen. Another one of his friends denies that he knows him, three times over. Everyone who used to support him now screams for his crucifixion. He’s beaten, flogged 39 times, which is just less than the “lethal” amount (40 lashes was said to be enough to kill a person). He’s mocked, called “King of the Jews” (which he never called himself, btw), a crown of thorns is pushed onto his head, he becomes so weak that he cannot even carry his cross nobly to the hill, where he is killed in a very painful and slow method of torture. (the sign of the cross must have caused fear back then, which should be noted now when we wear crosses as earrings). Really, it doesn’t get much worse than this, which I take as the Christian acknowledgement of, “Yes. Life often sucks.”

But that’s not the end of the story. He rises again, he conquers the terrible things that have happened, into new life and new hope. There is no denial of the trials he had to go through. The scars are there on his body. But he’s alive. It’s a story written through nature, in how a devastating forest fire brings new growth, in how the coldness of winter shifts to the renewal of spring. It’s in other religions as well, the Hindu concept of the importance of Shiva, the god of destruction. You have to die before you can be resurrected. You have to fully embrace that death and suffering. But that death and suffering is not the end of the story, and as a Christian I have to say, “Yes, this is terrible, but it isn’t over,” and look to the resurrection. It’s the same thing with Job. He loses everything, is sitting there covered with boils, and says, “This isn’t over. I hate EVERYTHING right now and I don’t know why this is happening,” (which he says for approximately 36 chapters) “but this isn’t over. I know that my Redeemer lives.”

Frankly, I need to be reminded of that kind of story a lot, or else I’ll slip back into negativity that doesn’t help me or anyone around me (and I’ll have less fun). A story that does not deny anything about how hard life can be, but rather embraces it, and transforms it. I think it is deeply, maybe even morbidly beautiful that the cross was an instrument of torture and now it’s a symbol of hope. It’s nothing if not appropriate.

I love you.

Here’s where I get abstract on you, so bear with me (and if you ever panic, please return to "Jesus had some darn good principles", because these are secretly the same thing). Some people wonder how anyone can possibily believe in a God. I wonder how anyone could not believe in a God. I totally get how someone can not believe in a God who sits up in the sky looking down on us, maybe pulling some strings and controlling people. Sure. But, to me, asking “Is there a God?” is like asking, “Are you alive?” And not in the sense that I think both answers are obvious. It’s that I think they’re the same question.

You can make a case that we’re not actually alive. Or that we’re all asleep, or figments of imaginations. I enjoy those arguments (I started wearing a trenchcoat because of The Matrix), I have a good time with them, intellectually, but at the end of the day I generally decide to believe that I am alive and in the condition that I generally experience, that other people are alive and I’m not just making them up, and I continue with my life as normal.

God is too much for us to understand. That’s why we have religion... it gives us a language to talk about something we can’t understand. Even religion is filled with abstractions, like the Trinity. God is three beings in one. This is saying, “God exists somewhere between these three ideas - parent, child, spirit. We can’t pinpoint one thing--God’s bigger than that.” If you were to ask me what God is, the simplest words I could give you are two: Life, and Love.

God is Love is a phrase that has been tossed around a lot, and I think makes more sense to a lot of people than God is Life. Jesus is the example of God as the most human form, and Jesus was nothing if not loving. As he ate with outcasts and healed the sick, even (especially) as he challenged people, pushed them. The core of the message is love.

God is life is a bit tricker, but God IS life. God and existence are synonyms. God is in all things, in every moment. God is the IS. What if we were to think of “I Am That I Am” not simply meaning, “I am what/I am”, but, “I am that I Am.” I am the state of “am”. is. being. existence. Last summer, I was walking back to my room after working an intense Bible study on Isaiah, and I stopped to look at a tree, and asked myself, “What is a tree?” I could break down the tree scientifically, I can talk about its function, I can break it down to the smallest unit of a cell, but that doesn’t tell me what is IS. That IS, is God.

So the call to love God is not the call to love some old guy with a long beard up in the sky somewhere. It’s the call to love every thing and everyone. And it’s hard, it’s extremely hard because you have to push through all prejudices and hesistations and fears, but it’s something to work towards. And I suspect that the moments where your capacity to love is stretched wider and wider are the moments where you can begin to connect with the bit of God that resides within yourself, as you embrace love, which is embracing life (and all its sensation)... which is embracing God. In “What Is Love?” (fabulous, go read it, a million times more articulate than I am) Alva Noë asks, “Can you love the whole world? I suppose this is like the question, Is there a God?” God is the whole world. God is love. God IS loving the whole world. Not: The entity of God is currently engaged in the act of loving the whole world, but the definition of God is “loving the whole world”.

And we can get in on that.

What could be more fun?

“What are you looking for?”

You.

Something of each...

So. College conference.

I have been around many, many religious conferences in my time. Not that my time has been long, but my time has been filled with religious conferences and retreats. Having both grown up in the church going to conferences and retreats my entire life (early memories of that retreat University Baptist Church went on where there was lots about “give me oil in my lamp” and “the cord of three strands is not quickly broken” and where we all made our own stamps), and worked at a conference center for two summers, I’ve been around a LOT of conferences.

This year’s College Conference at Montreat is probably one of the best conferences I’ve been around. Granted, it’s a conference aimed at my age group, but honestly, I’ve rarely connected with conferences aimed at my age group. My favorite conferences to work at Montreat were the adult conferences. (I particularly loved “Proclaiming the Text”, which was aimed at preachers.) But College Conference was fabulous.

I love the church. I really do. I know the church is far from perfect. I know the church has had many failings, I know the church has done terrible things, but I still love it. The church is an imperfect, human institution that at its best is people getting together and trying to make sense of things and I have great respect for that. I’ve met incredible people through the church, the church has enriched my life in so many ways. I know how to navigate the church. I believe the church is important, and honestly, that’s not an incredibly popular position to hold in a lot of the circles I tend to find myself in. And I have, personally, made a promise not to abandon the Christian church. They’re my family. And while I think my calling has something to do with the church, keeps me close to the church... it is not a call to a career solely within the church. Sorry, guys, but I’m not being called to pastoral ministry. I’m not being called to music ministry. I’m definitely not being called to youth ministry. I could see myself being involved with conferences, as a speaker, as a workshop leader. I could see myself working with readers and pastors on presentation, lending theatrical skills to the church world (I’ve already started that one, really). I will always be involved with the church, it’s quite likely I’ll go to seminary, but it won’t be to become part of the clergy.

And often, I wish it was. Sitting in the pews in Anderson Auditorium, looking up and seeing banners bearing the same kind of cross I have tattooed to my skin hanging on either side of the stage, I’d like to stay there. It was such a joy to have the opportunity to be with so many people who shared the same basic belief system, all asking incredible questions, being open with their faith, making jokes you really only get if you’re familiar with the Bible. I always felt so happy for the preachers getting together for the Proclaiming the Text conference because they’d make jokes about Schleiermacher and Zwingli and while I didn’t understand them, I knew that this was the one time in the entire year that they could make those jokes and be met with laughter instead of awkward, uncomprehending silence. Since I was there with Davidson College Presbyterian Church, I went to the dinner for groups involved with North Carolina Presbyterian Campus Ministry. Now, it’s not that NYU/NYC doesn’t have spiritual resources. But honestly, they’re not that easy to access. Apparently NYU is just now building a physical Center for Spiritual Life at NYU, which has previously only existed virtually with a very small circle of chaplains for a very large school. I went to a couple Christian fellowships my freshman year, but the only one I’ve been able to stay at all connected with is the Episcopalian one, which offers the best ministry to people with very busy schedules that I’ve ever witnessed. The others I experienced seemed to requite your constant presence for you to really feel comfortable within the group, which isn’t possible for many busy students, so it only reaches a certain (pretty small) percentage of the student body. Frankly, spiritual guidance is not a priority at NYU. Which, of course, you know when you start at NYU. Of course campus ministry is going to be stronger in schools in the South, and I bet NYU does a much better job with Jewish and Islamic populations than those schools in the South. If you’re religious at NYU, you have to create your own network. Now, I’ve been lucky in all of this. While I believe there’s no one else in my specific program who goes to a Christian church every week (...or even once a month...), there is someone who goes to a UU church every week, Lindsay, and we’re extremely good friends (as noted by anyone who’s friends with either of us on Facebook). I’ve managed to find lots of people who are spiritual and totally willing to talk for hours about the Song of Songs. (I feel like I’m slowly drawing all the spiritual people towards me because it’s all I ever talk about, really.) I’m incredibly enriched to be around people with so many different viewpoints and opinions on religion (this is quite important and I’ll expand on it later). And I even found one teacher who’s completely obsessed with religion and last spring semester had office hours every week where he let me come in and talk his ear off about Job. (Turns out the two of us have eeriely similar obsessions in religion. I’d say, “I think I’m going to write my paper for your class on St. John of the Cross, particularly The Spiritual Canticle,” and he’d say, “We did a show on that, called ‘Canticle’.” Of course.) But sitting there in a room of people who all have very easy access to a pleathora of mainline Protestant campus ministry programs... not gonna lie, I was jealous. Being the only one who comes into class with a marked forehead on Ash Wednesday gets tiring. And lonely.

“Do you think, my daughters, that it is an easy matter to have to do business with the world, to live in the world, to engage in the affairs of the world, and, as I have said, to live as worldly men do, yet inwardly to be strangers to the world, and enemies of the world, like persons who are in exile?”

--St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection

I know I am called to ministry. I think we all do, that’s been obvious for a long time. But I also know that that call is not to a vocation in the church, but being sent into the world. And while I know that working in the church comes with its own trials and hassles (both my parents work in churches, I should know!), it’s sometimes hard to think of a call to work in the world as being as “valid” as one to work in the church. And getting a taste of what it’s like again to live within a community of Christians (really, I had 7 months of that, with Montreat and Ghana), I really wanted to stay there, even though God’s clearly said, “Alright, keep moving.”

During the first sermon of the conference, Aimee Wallis Buchanan, the conference preacher (who was AWESOME), invited us to draw a road sign on a peace of construction paper, to physically represent the point of the journey we were facing. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be an actual, existing road sign like a STOP sign, or a more personalized, abstracted road sign, then I figured it was probably one of those “whatever you think I said is what I meant,” things where you do what you’ll best benefit from, so I went towards abstraction (as I do...) My sign looked something like this:

(I know, I know, I would.)

I actually found this an extremely useful exercise in articulation. Particularly having been relatively away from abstraction in any form for over half a year. A way to vent frustrations and confusions. This conference ended up being the perfect place for voicing such questions. The theme, “Wondering Wanderers”, was all about questions, and being okay with living with those questions. The conference provided us with group opportunities to voice our doubts, connect with others who may be having similar issues, and offer support.

There’s lots of debate floating around about how to get young people in churches, especially since you need to engage young adults if you want the church to continue. Some people feel that drawing young adults in has to do with the style of worship (“contemporary” vs. “traditional”, etc.). Now, I’m a member of that demographic the church is trying to engage, and while I acknowledge that I don’t necessarily represent the majority as far as how I feel about worship styles, liturgy, etc., I do know a lot of people within that demographic, and our opinions on how we like to worship are as varied as any other group. Having a praise band is not necessarily going to draw in young people. But something we are ALL doing is we’re all questioning. We’re at a major transition point in our lives. When people go off to college, it’s often one of the first times they’ve been exposed to new viewpoints. We’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do with our lives. We’re asking questions, and looking less for people to give us the answers, but for people who are going to accept our questions and doubts. So if a church is looking to reach out to young people (and really, in my opinion, if a church is looking to move forward at all), it must provide a place for those questions to be asked without fear of judgment, and must respond to those questions with humility and curiosity.

Speaking of this, let’s talk about Brian McLaren, the keynoter for Tuesday morning. I attended his workshop, “Everything Must Change”, on Monday, and I was floored. He believes strongly in the importance of diversity in the church and the world, the responsibility of the church when it comes to responding to global crises, and the inherent value of each person. He is an incredible communicator both in his ability to translate between different groups of people and in his ability to research, synthesize the information, and then present that information in ways that are easy to understand. Something that particularly hit me was something he said in his workshop, which was that the world’s religions are not offering “alternative stories” to the ones that are harming the world and the people in it.

For example. There’s a narrative that exists in society today about possession. It says that you should work to accumulate lots of things, own a house with a yard and have lots of money in the bank. However, this narrative is not sustainable. Our resources are strained, there’s inequality because not everyone has the resources to acheive that goal, and conflict arises when resources are strained and there’s inequality. Christ came in at a similar moment and said, “No, you should give up everything and share what you have.” Presenting an alternative story, that “a person’s worth is not the accumulation of possessions”. (Yes. I am making the claim that at least parts of “The American Dream” are antithetical to the teachings of Christ.) But instead of these alternative stories, you have religious institutions (definitely including Christianity) who keep outmoded, inequal stories in play. This struck me particularly not only as a person of religion, but as a theater artist. We deal in stories. Stories are our business. I cannot count the number of hours I’ve spent in class talking about the importance of story. I cannot tell you how many dramaturgy meetings I’ve had obsessing over story. If you want to talk about how the religious world and the secular world can meet, this whole idea of stories is a great place to begin. (duh, Colleen, duh. Jesus dealt in stories, too.)

Brian McLaren, in his keynote, talked about stages of faith development, which I was skeptical of until he outlined the exact state I’m in right now. We broke off to our discussion groups and debated these for a while, and then came back for a question and response session with Brian. We’d submitted questions just after the keynote, which was a great organizational move, and also gave people the opportunity to ask questions annonymously. (This was an opportunity I was particularly grateful for. I was, surprisingly, extremely self-conscious about my question which I desperately wanted to ask but would not have asked had it not been anonymous. My question was posed and answered quite well and I was grateful). This question and response session was fabulous. Tough questions were posed which Brian handled very elegantly. I’m planning on ordering a copy of this session from the Montreat bookstore, it was so good. (We actually gave a standing ovation.)

I’m still letting a lot of what he said sink in, it would take forever to talk about every thought he inspired. For now, I’ll say that I was clearly exactly where I was supposed to be at that moment. And I’ll give you some quotes:

“You can’t acheive peace by fighting wars with violence. That’s like trying to acheive virginity by sleeping around.”

“You could say that the Gospel and Religion are two different things. ...and religion has to get continually re-converted by the Gospel.”

“If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”

“Thinking is a social act. ... the community you're apart of makes some kinds of thinking easy and other types more difficult.”

“Denominations aren’t a problem; denominationalism is.”

"In its best expression, the Reformed tradition makes room for people to bring their brains to church."

(related on this talk on denominations, he mentioned how Presbyterians can help Pentecostals think, and Pentecostals can help Presbyterians loosen up)

“Part of leading is understanding and working with people where they are.”

On Christians who would call for the destruction of other people if a bomb hit America: "their loyalty isn't to Jesus Christ; it's to some sort of Christian nationalism."

“We can't live in the same relationship we have for the last 400 years.”

“By being here, we are all privileged to some extent. With privilege comes responsibility.”

“We've turned ministry into a profession of primarily knowledge, with a few people skills. We need a holiness in spiritual leaders.”

“Our seminaries have been able to move ahead way faster than our churches.”

Conferee: "Can you go on the Glen Beck show?"

McLaren: "Sure, but it wouldn't be pleasant."

"How do we live and communicate a message of love, and not fear?"

"You have permission to be bottom-up organizers of random acts of reconciliation and hope."

“It’s important for us to have a strong Christian identity that’s benevolent to other faiths.”

I’m currently reading his book, “A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian”. Russ says this book is my life and I have no doubt of it (I was born and baptized Baptist, raised and confirmed Methodist, worked for Presbyterians for two summers, and go to an Episcopalian church in New York).

RICHMOND FOLK: Brian McLaren is going to be speaking at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church as a part of their Lenten Series. He’ll be there March 9th - 11th. (Dr. Jim Forbes, who’s there April 11th - 15th has also preached at Montreat and was fabulous. And I’ve heard wonderful things about Tom Long, March 28th - April 1st.)

There was a cloth labyrinth set up in the Way Out Building as part of the ‘spirituality center’ offered during Montreat-sponsored conferences. I walked it, of course, as I do whenever I come across a labyrinth. Generally, the moment I feel the most at peace in any labyrinth walk is when I’m sitting in the center of the labyrinth in prayer. But this time, it wasn’t the center that did it to me.

“Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power. Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”

--Ephesians 3:7-9

Like Paul’s, my call to ministry is not simply within the church. I mentioned before that I’m blessed and enriched by the people who surround me who have wildly different opinions on religion. This is vital. In any group, the trap we can find ourselves in is the trap of failing to connect with those outside of the group, and we start inbreeding ideas. In my discussion group, we spoke of how to grow in our faith when we find ourselves in secular environment, how to create support systems for ourselves, and one of my suggestions was to surround yourself with curious people, of all religious affiliations and walks of life. I have people who I consider to be mentors of my faith who are not Christian. Who are not even religious. As I interact with those who don’t share my specific viewpoint, I am challenged with incredible questions that people within the faith wouldn’t think to ask, and I learn from other people’s ideas and traditions and opinions. And I try to spread the whole “love others” thing that is central to Christ’s message, and to be an example of a religious person who’s not a crazy fundamentalist for people who have found religion too often to be a place of hatred more than a place of love. I believe strongly that the church has things to learn from the world and the world has things to learn from the church. And thus, I’m working to bridge them. One foot in one, one foot in the other. Funnily enough, I’ve become a kind of evangelist. Actually, evangelism is most of what I do, which is mindblowing because I, like many liberal mainline Protestants, have a nasty association with evangelism. I have a giant rant about evangelism that I’ll post later. For now I’ll say, we all need each other, and we need to learn how to communicate with each other, and that’s a large part of my work.

When you’re walking a prayer labyrinth made in the style generally referred to as the “Chartres style” labyrinth, there’s a moment where you’re walking rather close to the center, but you’re actually about to exit the labyrinth. (There’s also a moment where you’re walking rather far from the center but are about to reach the center. The metaphors never end!) It was here, close to the center, but about to step out in the world, where I felt most at peace. Probably because that’s actually where I was, and where I’m supposed to be. Close to the center, stepping out into the world. In the center, I asked, “Where am I supposed to go? What’s the next step?” And I heard “You know exactly what to do next.” (almost with the subtext of, "oh come on.")

Which... somehow, I do. If you asked me what it is, I couldn’t tell you. Do I have any idea what it looks like? Nope. None at all. But I never do. I doubt I ever will. I just go.

wooooooo

College Conference is great.

I love Montreat.

My car is currently in the shop for reasons that are NOT MY FAULT SO DON'T EVEN TRY.

Brian McLaren just changed my life.

I'm very tired.

So here's a picture of me chasing a chicken in Ghana.

God bless.