Who am I?

This past Friday and Saturday the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut met in annual convention. We don't sit in pews or chairs facing front anymore. We quit that last year. Now we gather around tables in groups of 8 or ten and we do Bible study in our groups and we have conversations around the theme of the convention.

This year the theme is Claiming, Equipping, and Sending.

The Friday morning Bible study was on the passage from Exodus in which Moses meets God in the burning bush, from the 3rd and 4th chapters of Exodus. God tells Moses to go to Egypt and speak God's words to the Hebrew people. Moses says he can't. He doesn't have the gift of public speaking. We ask ourselves if we have ever tried to run away from God's call to us to do or be something or someone.

God tells Moses he will give him Moses's brother Aaron to do the speaking. God will give Moses the words, and Moses will give them to Aaron and Aaron will speak to the people. We ask ourselves how Aaron must have felt, not having been consulted as to whether or not he wanted to become the mouthpiece for Moses.

We are asked to publicly claim one gift we have been given - maybe even one we run away from. I claim the gift of silence. That's all I say. "Silence." The table wants to know more. What can I say? I say I like to create spaces of silence, in worship, in retreats, in quiet days, in working to create retreats that don't require any words, so all people of any language or ability or none can come together to sit before Jesus.

I claim silence.

And then, the whole rest of convention, I have to school myself to keep silent and listen instead of planning what brilliant piece of personal experience I know everyone absolutely must hear because it's so very brilliant.

On day two, I have the job of being one of over forty table presiders. Immediately, during all the discussions at table about the business of convention, everyone turns to me to answer their questions. I spend all day talking, as if I actually know something or other.

Now, today, I will try to protect a day of silence for myself. And here, on my desk, is a name and phone number a parishioner gave me at the door after worship yesterday, someone who is a member, who needs a phone call, someone I am pretty sure I don't know, because I don't recognize the name, but that doesn't matter. He needs to hear from the church.

Silence. Just what did I mean when I claimed silence as a gift? And not only that, I said it is my core gift, the core of my being - Silence. What did I mean?

Maybe it was a wish, a prayer. Maybe it is what I most want to have and to be. Silence. Not a gift already actualized, but one yearning to be made alive.

Rainfall

When rain falls overnight,
and creeks fill,
and grasses turn from brown to green,
my heart is full.

Writings from Vacation

I keep reading online that people thirty, forty and fifty decades younger than me demand that people and institutions, like the church, be authentic. I know how I think of myself - artist, painter, musician, writer, poet - and I know I rarely live into that self-image. Mostly because I'm afraid. Afraid what I do won't be good enough. So I don't write or draw or play the piano or scrawl out a poem hardly ever. And when I do, it's often that I force myself. Never mind that I feel most truly myself when I do, most authentic. I have no idea what the authentic "me" would look like.

I've been reading Kathleen Norris - The Cloister Walk - and Lauren f. Winner - Still - and find they too have lived with this sense of being other, of not fitting in, whether with themselves or in the culture or the society or company in which they live. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Norris finds comfort in accepting that being "other" - not fitting in, always being a beat behind or on a different track from everyone else - is a calling. All three of us trace our sense of otherness back to our beginnings. I think I was born "other". I have struggled with this, worried over this, fought with myself and God because of this for my whole life, trying to fix those things about me that make me different so I won't feel so wrong about everything.

From my journal this morning, written on the deck as the sun broke over the top of the mountain in front of me: "I am other. I have always been other. Never fitting in.
      Kathleen accepts the necessity of being other
      She takes it up as a cross is taken up
      She embraces it
My angst-filled, self-questioning, self-justifying writings are symptoms of my own eternal other-ness.
The isolation of my life as a child - created by abuse and dysfunction> or me created as a necessary isolate? - is/may be in itself a call.
I have always been, tho without knowing it, free to accept it as a call, or not. The authenticity, then, is in living into my self-doubts and letting go of the need to seem to know-it-all. As Jeremiah [the prophet] challenged and questioned God, authenticity would be to know when to do so myself."

I end my journal entry with this question: Does everyone feel other, as I do? And does a calling to be other, then, once accepted, become a calling to point others to freedom?

In other words, a person who always feels out of step is authentically herself keeping on being out of step and embracing it as a calling. Jesus said, "Take up your cross and follow me." In this, he said, we will find life. Jesus is the number one "Other". He took up the cross of otherness and chose life.

Choose life.

Vacation

Vacation - to vacate
To vacate a place
To vacate a work
To vacate oneself
To leave behind
And
To take on
rest
peace
noticing
enjoying
delight
for a time
so as not to forget what these things are like-
beauty, water, earth, play, play, play
so as to store them up
to be remembered
after vacating
when one takes up again
the daily round

From Lauren f. Winner's "Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis"

"...I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God." (page 77)

This is my experience. I show up; I participate, sometimes. I have known, sometimes, that I am participating in God's prayer. I never thought, however, that even my cries for help do not originate with me but in God. That blows my mind!

The One Line Sermon

The best antidote to fear is the heart at prayer.
(Fr. Jose Diaz, sermon at the bilingual service at Grace and Betania, June 24, 2012)

Open Space

A friend sent me the first 34 pages of what could become a novel. It takes place in the future, but not the distant future - 2037. Without giving away the story, the island nation about which he is writing has found that everyone has the need for a place to be quiet, to meditate on or to or about whatever. So one of the places they have built is a Peace Hall. Inside it is open space. Sometimes there are directed things, but mostly people just come and are still.

As I read this part of the story I think again of the church building in which I serve. I saw, once again, the pews removed, or at least most of them. I see again the beauty of that open space. In the Peace Hall in my friend's imaginary island nation, there are whole tree trunks where, in my church, are square, wood paneled pillars. I think of the space in my church, open in my imagination, and I feel stillness, peace, quiet.

I believe what the people of that imaginary island found to be true, that everyone has a need to feed their spirit in places like the Peace Hall, which is a place for all people of whatever religion or none. I want to open up the space. I want to open up the doors and leave them open to the world and the elements all day, all night, all year.

Sometimes I wish I wouldn't have these visions.