The Adventure: Chapter IX - Original Thought

“Lyin’ on my back in a cornfield back in Kansas

I think I might’a had my first original thought"

(Chely Wright, “Your Woman Misses her Man”)

Do you find yourself reading something or hearing someone say something or do something and comparing yourself to that person unfavorably?

Photo Credit Newlin Keen

I’ve spent my life comparing myself to other people and coming up short. My shrink said, the other day, “How do you know what you see is the truth?” Good question.

I envy bloggers who write spiritually deep things. I envy people who are doing what I want to do and are making money at it and are published. I envy those who every day can come up with an original thought that inspires others to share it with still others.

Of course, it’s not true that I have never had an original thought. I have original thoughts about scripture all the time. Last week I had an original thought about the dishonest steward or accountant in Luke’s gospel. A man had an accountant, a steward, and some people came to the man and said the accountant was dishonest. So the man demanded an accounting from the steward before he fired him. So the accountant thought, how can I make sure I can still make a living after I’ve been fired? So he called the man’s debtors and made deals with them – you owe this? Pay only that. – ensuring that they would remember him and help him out when he was fired.

My original thought was that Jesus is thinking of himself when he talks about the steward who slashes everyone’s bills before collecting on them. Only Jesus outdoes the steward. He cancels all our debts. Today, I read someone else musing on the same possibility. That doesn’t make my thought unoriginal. It just makes it validated.

I also have this blog, where almost everything I post here is original, and if it isn’t, what I do with it is my original thought. And I realized today that a lot of what I am envying is actually attributed to the greats: mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, scientists like Albert Einstein, presidents like FDR, women activists like Helen Keller.

So, now I know intellectually that comparing myself to other people who seem to me to be more wonderful than I am, more popular, smarter, more inspiring, and more original, is a waste of time and emotion. It won’t stop me from doing it. I’ve been doing it for too long. However, it will bring me up short every time I catch myself belittling myself in comparison to someone else, and make me wonder why. Because I realized today there is an integral link to my envy, for that is what it is, and the things I wish I could or would do, and there is no reason on God’s earth why I shouldn’t do those things I want to be doing. In fact, in a very real sense, I am doing a lot of those things, and on my way to doing others. I’m just not yet adept at recognizing my own accomplishments.

The antidote, then, to the downward spiral into self-denigration is this: What have you already accomplished? List them. Thank yourself for them. Even if they are very small.

Photo credit Lois Keen

I want to be part of a spiritual community of practice that companions others who need someone to walk along with them. Today I envied a community of Episcopalians that are doing that in another state. Then I realized I’m one step, no wait, two, three, more steps already on the way to that kind of community. I start hospice chaplaincy next week in a tiny way, one day a week, and it is a step, an accomplishment. I’m trained to be a consultant for congregations in transition and as opportunities open up I will companion them. I have been asked to be chaplain to a community of intentional prayer practice. I have a full schedule of supplying for worship on Sundays.

Each day, each week, I take some small step. But, because I can't not put myself down for not having the whole plan together yet, I said to my shrink, “But the writing…aarrgggghhh...overwhelming. I don't think it will ever happen” And yet, I write something, no matter how little, every day, not always for the literary value but because I cannot, not write. And as I thought about this, I said to him, "If I do this every day, one day what I really want to share with the world will find its way onto the paper and I'll be off and running."

Next time I compare myself and my habitual reaction is to look down on myself, as I envy the other, I will look over this list and then add to it what I have next done to become a practitioner of intentional companioning.

And as to spiritual practice – I commend this practice of noticing what you have done, and honoring yourself for it, and thanking yourself for it. And if you are a God person, give thanks to God.

Photo credit Newlin Keen

Where prayer is valid

"You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid."

These words are from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding", from his Four Quartets.

Little Gidding was the home of Nicholas Ferrar.

The links above will tell you something about Nicholas Ferrar and the community he established with his family, about Little Gidding itself today, and about the fourth poem "Little Gidding" in Eliot's Four Quartets. They are here to provide a background for my practice yesterday.

Pope Francis asked for a day of prayer to be observed yesterday, Saturday 7 September 2013, a day of prayer for peace. At Little Gidding one of the spiritual practices was to keep the Night Watch, during which members of the family would read through the entire Psalter during the night hours. I chose, yesterday, to pray through the Psalms yesterday from noon to 5:00 p.m. as my prayer for peace.

I've done this before. In times of great need that supersede my personal wants, I turn to the Psalms. Reading them through takes from four to five hours. In this practice I find myself in what Eliot, in "Little Gidding", calls "the intersection of the timeless moment".

Photo credit Lois Keen

It is Saturday. I have been praying the psalms and suddenly I am moved to lift my eyes from the page and look around me. I gaze upon my garden, and past that to the labyrinth painted on the parking lot of the closed church next door, then to the trees and green of the church property and then beyond it all to the little piece of Norwalk, the neighborhood in which I live.

There I wonder about the gardens of Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq - are there still gardens there? What about the neighborhoods there?

Another time I notice the breeze. It is a cool, sunny, clear day with no humidity. I wonder if there is a breeze somewhere in Syria and is it conferring a benediction on those who notice it, the blessing I am feeling right now.

A black squirrel crosses the path of my vision. A robin perched on a branch over my head whinnies. I wonder about the animals in those countries torn my strife. I have a very light lunch and I eat it very slowly, wondering when the people, in the countries for which I am keeping vigil before God, have last eaten. Was their meal interrupted? Did they have to eat on the run, gulping down hurriedly whatever they could lay their hands on? Or might God grant a brief respite for people to eat together, in companionship, love, community?

Photo credit Lois Keen

All afternoon it was like this. Reading Psalms 42-72 I walk the labyrinth instead of sitting. The words from Psalm 63 stand out starkly: "O God, you are my God, eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water." I stop to clean a water tub next to the garden and fill it with fresh water - an enacted prophecy. I put the hose in and leave it to fill the tub as I read Psalms 64 and 65. As I read verse 9 of Psalm 65, "You visit the earth and water it abundantly; you make it very plenteous; the river of God is full of water" I look up and see the water has just now reached the rim of the tub.

"You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid." The Psalter of the Hebrew Scriptures have been the place of valid prayer for centuries. I have come to steep myself in those prayers and offer them to God, as others before me have done. I have some insights as to how God might be using my offering. And I let go of intentions so that God's Spirit might use these prayers in whatever way is most needed.

"...And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongues with fire beyond the language of the living."
(T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding", Four Quartets, 1944, Faber and Faber Limited, London.)

Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, Connecticut
Lois Keen

The Adventure Chapter VIII: We Begin the Specifically Spiritual Bit

A week or so ago the Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton posted on Facebook an essay from the August 21, 2013 issue of The Christian Century magazine called "Boxed In" by M. Craig Barnes writing on the Faith Matters page. All but the first two paragraphs are behind a pay wall, I'm afraid, but if you have Facebook, and you type in Elizabeth Kaeton under "search", you can page down and find the article, I'm sure.

I'm way behind in my reading of The Christian Century. I'm a subscriber, and I read the article on Facebook, before I read it again, today, in the paper edition of the magazine itself. It helped me understand a bit more what is going on with me spiritually.

Today as I led the people in praying the opening Collect, or prayer, at Saint John's Episcopal Church in Waterbury, Connecticut, I noticed that I was - there was a time I would have said "entering into the prayer in a new way". Now I know better. I was reading the words and entering something beyond the words, behind the words, through the words. I was somewhere I have not been aware of being, and yet, I can't say that, really. Because I've been aware of something like it the past couple of days.

Photo credit Lois Keen

I've noticed when I read a motto on a Facebook post - for instance, "Let your light shine so brightly that others can see their way out of the dark", or "Sometimes this is all you need" written across a photograph of a path in the woods, or one of Bp. Steven Charleston's wonderful daily meditations - where I would normally think "That's nice. I think I'll share that", I'm now processing the words, seeing myself in them, doing them, seeing the implications of them in a way I wasn't doing just a week ago.

I have written that I'm looking on these months until December 31 as a sabbatical, the one I never got around to taking. Today, reading again the essay in The Christian Century, I found myself thinking, "This is what a sabbatical is about." No exclamation point. Just, "This is what a sabbatical is about."

M. Craig Barnes is president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He begins with the Benedictine way of accepting a new novice. The novice enters a room, asks Christ to receive him and to not disappoint him, then he is asked to take off his street clothes and put on the habit. His street clothes will then forever live in his closet along with his habit. It is a sign of his vow freely given. Every day the novice can choose which habit to wear - to put on the monastic habit or regain his street clothes and return to the world.

Barnes wants us to remember this as we reflect on the vows a clergyperson takes and the life we take on as he writes about burnout.

There are a lot of things that a pastor rubs up against as they live out their profession - the late night calls to the hospital, the annoyances of a problematic wedding, the number of funerals, the administrative stuff. But these are not the things that mark burnout. Burnout is when pastors begin to "think they are stuck in the church" with no way out.

As I read that line, I thought, "Hmm, I never did feel that way. I never felt stuck. I had times when I read the want ads and considered working for Borders, or as a teller in a bank. But I never felt I had no choice except to stay in the priesthood. Not in an enduring way. The occasional moment, but not a pervasive sense of being trapped."

The next paragraph that caught my mind was this: "It isn't that hard for a pastor to leave a congregation and get a job with a nonprofit organization, seminary or church bureaucracy..." Well, yes, I thought of that. "But these extensions of the ministry of word and sacrament change little about the pastor's identity. The real problem is what to do for the pastor who envies the calling of the lawyers, doctors, butchers and candlestick makers."

Aha! And here was where I knew I never wanted to be, or want to be, anything other than what I am: A priest in the Episcopal Church. The punch line came with the closing sentence: "What the church desperately needs is for its leaders to freely choose the habit of pastoral ministry as a means of being drawn closer to God." Light Bulb Moment!

That is exactly what has been slowly happening to me ever since that fateful Friday on the way home from vacation and I found myself saying to myself that I was on my way home to an adventure.

I have never felt close to God. I wanted to be, but only because I thought I was supposed to be. I knew that probably it was because of things experienced in my childhood. I had accepted that I might be this way for the rest of my life, at least on this side of life. And yet, here I am, drawing closer to God. And in drawing closer, I have felt free to explore as many ways of serving God as I might want to. I see that I am free. I have the freedom to choose how I live out my vocation. The street clothes are, as Barnes points out, and never were, "meant to be a judgment," a sign of failure. They are a sign of freedom. And each day I choose the habit rather than the street clothes.

Photo credit W. Newlin Keen, Jr.

I am drawing deeper and deeper into this adventure. In Sunday supply I am finding again the joy I have in celebrating the Eucharist, in preaching, in leading people to God in Christ Jesus. Today I found that I rejoice when I lead worship in Spanish - there's a feel of the words in my mouth that draw me ever closer to God through the people of God. And the options open to me as a priest are becoming endless.

All of which is to say that something is happening to me. It is not all hearts and flowers. There are some briars in there and not every path is smooth. Today the deacon told me that when something wonderful happens it will probably be among the most needy, who can't give me a living. So be it. He also said that just meant I'd also go among those who are least needy to get them to pay for work with the most needy. Ya gotta laugh at that one! I'd need new skills for that, but, then, is that not exactly what I did in my first call, as curate at the Cathedral of Saint John in Wilmington, Delaware when I went to civic clubs and gave speeches and wrote grants to raise money to fund my work as director of the cathedral's children's community center?!

But at the core of it all is the sudden awareness of drawing closer to God. I'm not used to this feeling. I wonder where it will go.