of light and the courage to lean into it

yesterday I copied and pasted a post on facebook about the silent illnesses many live with and the way you really can't understand without personal experience. the post generated varied responses, from naming or hinting at the illnesses people are living with, to remembering that I have lived with some silent pain and illness for much of my life.
it is a long time since I reached the point where I had lived half of my life with back pain - thankfully, I don't suffer nearly as much since finding a practitioner of network system analysis, which has helped my body to find healing for itself. I realised this morning that as I turned 34 last week, I have reached the point where I have lived half my life under the cloud of depression. From now on, more of my life will have been woven through with experiences of mental illness than not.
as I read today's daily reflection in Disciplines perhaps these thoughts shaped my somewhat angry, impatient response. the scripture passage was Isaiah 40:28-31, in which the hearers are reminded that God's strength does not wane, and therefore, in God, neither does ours.
the writer of the reflection talked about driving through unknown rural roads in the dark; then this empty platitude - let God's strength and provision guide you through the darkness. what what does that mean?? How is God's strength, are God's promises like light in the darkness?

Sitting in a kitchen wanting life to end because the pain of depression is so overwhelming and has lasted so long you can't imagine any other way for the pain to stop without ceasing to live. That is darkness. It is a darkness out of which you have pushed everyone in your life. You cannot love when you no longer want to live It is a darkness you imagine no one else can inhabit with you, and before your housemate comes home, you crawl into bed and cry yourself to sleep.
But in the morning, you wake to a small surprise - you are alive. You realise that though you sat in that dark cave, with your hand on the trap door to escape, you did not open the door. You realise that though you were curled up in a ball beside the trap door in the dark, today you are sitting once again. You begin to wonder what stopped you from opening a door, from taking an escape you longed for with all you had left. And suddenly you see - you are not alone. Your Holy Friend has remained - there was no request from you for departure - and, like a light, small and faltering but unmistakeable, hope is lit. Together, you stand, ready for the climb toward life.

That is what light in the darkness is like. That is what it is like to draw on God's strength. To have been in the darkness, known God's presence with you there where no one else can be with you, and to find the strength and the courage to live through silent seering agony.

of telling stories around the table

Last night I was the guest of The Last Supper, a gathering organised by my friend Cameron, of folk who like deep and engaging conversation ranging over various facets of life - religion, politics, social issues, humanity ...
Cameron invited me as a Biblical storyteller to come along and, well, tell stories, sharing a bit about storytelling as well.
We me upstairs at Jah'z Lounge in Cinema Place in the city - it's a lovely cafe, the staff are friendly, the food was delicious, and right by Palace and Nova cinemas, I recommend it for the dinner part of your next dinner & movie outing.
As we gathered, conversations already began to touch on issues and ideas that would be raised through the stories I was going to tell, such as: how do we meet each other in our difference, willing to listen, or assuming our worldview is the correct worldview and everyone else is just burning (in hell?) to hear the Truth we have to offer?
I began by sharing a little of what it is to be a Biblical storyteller -

I am a Biblical Storyteller – I learn the stories, tell them for an audience / listeners

In many ways, all artists are storytellers – different genres

Actually, we are all storytellers – each have a story to tell

As a minister, I am a story hearer – I create spaces in which we as individuals and as a community can tell our story, be heard and affirmed for who we are

Incidentally, I am not a biblical storyteller because I am a minister – I am a minister because I am a biblical storyteller

For those who follow Christ, the foundational story of our tradition and communities is the Story of God, the Biblical Story

We are called to embody this story with our living and our being

As a biblical storyteller, it is my privilege and responsibility to embody the story, so as to communicate, inviting others into the story of God, to be moved, transformed, to find healing and wholeness, to discover & encounter the Holy

I tell the stories so as to extend an invitation to encounter God in whom I have found healing and wholeness. I don't invite others assuming that this is the only way you can find healing and wholeness. I invite others because when you discover something wonderful - a piece of music, a movie, a book - you want to share this experience with others.

And this is the nature of Love, God's Way of Love - we know ourselves to be loved, and we cannot help but love in response.
I shared another discovery I have made this past year: God's Way of Love is named in the New Testament as the kingdom of God / heaven. Bruce Sanguin talks about the kin-dom of God - where a kingdom is about a king's power and territory, this term seems to me to be more about relationships (our kin) ... and it holds the radical contrast between God's realm and earthly rule with its hyphen replacing the g.

I talked a bit about how when I tell the stories of Jesus, and tell the stories he told, I find myself standing in his shoes, feeling the compassion he felt for those outside community, and his understanding of the restorative love of God.
I told the parable of the father and two sons (otherwise known as the story of the prodigal son), as one of the stories he told to demonstrate this unconditional, radical, challenging and uncomfortable love for those we think cannot be welcomed home.
Conversation ranged about how we respond to such stories, where we find ourselves in the story, and how there is a tension we could learn to live with that has us simultaneously the older son and the younger son (and perhaps the father as well).

'Tell us another story' - words that make a storyteller's day. So I told the beginning of the story of the beginning of our story - Genesis 1:1-5, and talked about how I translate the Hebrew 'ruach' with the three English words it conveys - 'breath-wind-spirit' - because these three meanings are held in the Hebrew word, and when we hear it in our language, I want us to hear the nuances, the complexity and the levels of meaning held here. I come to this decision because of how it feels, telling the story - in other contexts, I might translate ruach as wind or breath or spirit; here, it feels to me as if we need all three for the hovering ruach over the waters.

Conversation ranged far from here, as we explored what it means to live on earth, shared our knowledge and ideas as we wondered at the extraordinary growth in the earth's human population, and our relationship with creation.

I finished with the first part of a story I am developing as part of a series I began to imagine when I was on study leave last year: I am calling the series, 'In the name of ...' In this series, I want to explore how we see / don't see each other, as fellow humans, and how when we do not see each other, when we dehumanise other/s, we are capable of great harm: conversely, when we truly see the other, when we recognise the importance of each other for our own fulness of being, we are capable of great courage and extraordinary, life-giving love.

The first story I am working on for this series has a working title of 'Eichmann versus Wallenberg: in the name of what is right', and tells the story of Raoul Wallenberg's thwarting of Adolf Eichmann's plan to force the evacuation of all the Jews in Hungary in 1944, for the extermination camps. I appreciated some early feedback from the group, as I develop this, and other stories in the series.


It was a joy to share with this group of people - 8 or so around a table, engaging in deep, thoughtful, respectful conversation as we shared our stories, shared of our selves. For these moments, we are alive: for community, for the fulness of our humanity. For what else have we been created, but to be fully, beautifully, wonderfully, human?

The Sin-Eater & a Bee in my Bonnet

Another thing Lynch said in his introit to this gem of a book was: Argyle (the main character) 'knows the greatest gifts are one another; the greatest sins against each other.' (xxiv)

I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment, as I've been developing stories for telling, and the words I want to say when I address a dinner this Friday.
The kin-dom of God attracts me as a name for God's Way of Love, otherwise named as the kingdom of God/ Heaven. It is a term I read in the poetry of Bruce Sanguin (If Darwin Prayed, 2011). I like it for its direct contrast, swapping a hyphen for the 'g' and turning the focus from a power-protecting king to relationships with kin.
One of my favourite concepts from the Hebrew Bible is hesed, in English most accurately translated as lovingkindness - a love that affirms the other in the fulness of their being.
It seems to me that Jesus was all about fulness of being, he came that we might have life in all its fulness.

these disparate thoughts come together in my dream for the world, which emerges from my experience. I dream that all would know what I have come to know - fulness of being. I dreamt for such a long time of becoming a writer, of living into my gift with language and story in a way that would bring something of value to the wider community. I hope I am doing this through my unexpected call to ordained ministry within the Uniting Church. I feel more fulfilled than I could have imagined - this combined role of minister / poet / storyteller suits me; my ecclectic gifts, my understanding and love for people, my introspective bent, my ability with words and passion for story, and my preference for rhythm over set patterns in daily living.

it causes me great sorrow to think of my fortune at having found my place, knowing that there are so many in disadvantaged situations who will be considered fortunate merely to survive each day in the face of famine, drought, war and illness, let alone realise their fullest potential as human beings.

People have often heard me say that I hate money - what I really hate is that commercialism has taken over our way of life to the extent that the opportunity to shop and to sell is more important than the public holidays previous generations faught hard for so that families could spend valuable time together. I hate that love has been commercialised with Valentines Day and Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day; I hate that two central festivals for the Christian community have become opportunities for making and spending money more than they are opportunities to encounter the Sacred.

What I really hate about all that is that opportunities to make money cause blindness - we see dollar signs before we see human faces, and we are all complicit in this exploitation of other humans and think it's ok because we're saving a few dollars here or there. And we see this attitude with regard to creation, too, when we get incensed at the suggestion that we might have to pay more for energy as a result of attempts to encourage us to use the earth's resources more wisely and appropriately.

We have a privileged place in creation with God - with it comes responsibilities to care for creation. We have failed to do this. It diminishes our humanity to do so. When we fail to see creation, we cause harm. When we fail to see each other as fellow human beings, we cause harm. We can only perpetrate genocide when we fail to see the other's humanity. We can only sling anti-gay diatribes around from soap-boxes when we dehumanise those of other sexual orientation.

I have a bee in a bonnet about our propensity to fail to see the value in the other, in other humans, in creation. And it makes me so angry I cannot actually construct a reasonable reasoned argument. I can only name what I do not like as a lament, and hope that we might learn again to see, and thus to love with lovingkindness that honours God and each other.

Thomas Lynch's The Sin-Eater: first impressions

There are lines in Lynch's poetry and introit that resonate deeply on first reading, that invite further reflection. I am going to list them here, for my benefit, so I know which ones I want to dwell on. Perhaps they'll entice you, spark your imagination - and I hope they'll invite you to seek out this wonderful collection of poems about an intriguing character.

'to be awestruck was better than certainty' (xii)

questioning 'the legalisms and accountancy by which glorious and sorrowful mysteries were rendered a sort of dogmatic and dispassionate math' Lynch says, 'to be so certain about God struck me as sacrilege. Faith must be more than religious belief and obedience.' (xvii)

'When someone shows up - priest or pastor, rabbi or imam, venerable master or fellow traveler - to stand with the living and the dead and speak into the gaping maw of the unspeakable, I know I am witnessing uncommon courage and my perennially shaken faith is emboldened by theirs.' (xxi)

'What makes this aching in the soul? he thought ... And though no answer was forthcoming he went forth.' (Argyle's Return to the Holy Island', 19)

' "The last among the earthen decencies -
this shovel and shoulder work by which are borne
our fellow pilgrims on their journeys home." ' ( Argyle Among the Moveen Lads, 31 )

'Sometimes he counted words or parts of words
as if they amounted to something more
than sound and sense attuned between his ears' (His Ambulations, 33)

'Some days he felt so happily haunted,
by loving ghosts and gods upholding him.
Some days he felt entirely alone.' (He Considers Not the Lilies but Their Excellencies, 37)

'Among old stones a calm came over him
as if the dead beneath them held their own
redemptions on their journeys heavenward,
like wild flowers gathered out of bones,
their sweet bouquets a comfort beyond words.' ('He Weeps Among the Clare Antiquities', 39)

Thomas Lynch, The Sin-Eater. A breviary. 

of God calling Samuel

this morning at Belair I told the story of God calling Samuel for the first time. I didn't spend a lot of time preparing this one, so I in some ways I am still sitting with questions I usually work through before I do a telling.
the main one is regarding Eli. in this story, Samuel hears God calling to him, but not knowing God or having heard God's voice before, he doesn't recognise it as God. So he assumes it is the near-blind priest Eli calling him, and each time he runs to Eli's side - 'Here I am, for you called me.'
Eli responds - 'I did not call, return to bed and lie down.' I haven't quite worked out how much characterisation I want to put into this - you could go over the top and yawn, and do an old man's voice ... as a general rule, I tend not to act too much because the difference between storytellers and actors is that storytellers take on the role of the narrator, actors take on the role of the character.
So I want to sit with that a bit more.
And there's another question about the telling of this story I am yet to resolve - how to tell Samuel's response to God when he has been guided by Eli. Is he a little timid? Does he hesitate? This morning I told it with a hint of 'I'm trying to remember what Eli said to say and get it right because this is God talking to me'. On reflection, I like that. But I still want to sit with this story some more.

As to why I didn't prepare it so much - I decided late to tell it, and it was one I knew from learning Hebrew, as we translated this passage, so the words were inside already. This is an interesting question for the future, I imagine, as I build up the stories I know - the balance between laziness and trust that I have the stories within and can tell them without needing hours of rehearsal ...

of the Holy in me & in you

Reading Marilyn Brown Oden's reflections in Disciplines (The Upper Room, Nashville, 2011) this morning, this was more or less my train of thought (the passage was 1 Corinthians 6:12-20):

The body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit (v. 19) - the Holy Spirit is within you. The Holy Spirit is therefore within each person we meet (Brown Oden).
I remember the eastern greeting, Namaste - the Sacred in me greets the Sacred in you - Holy, Divine, Sacred ...
Holy = set apart (recalling the understanding of the stories in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament).
Humans are set apart.
I remember what we heard from Craig Mitchell in Church Ministry & Sacraments at college: that ordained persons are set apart within the priesthood of all believers, for the good of all, the good of the whole. We have a particular role and function, but are not above, or extra special or outside.
So then I get to thinking that humans are set apart from the rest of creation - within creation - for the good of all creation. When we ignore the responsibility of this set-apartness and see only the privilege, we diminish rather than enhance creation, and ourselves.

Elsewhere Paul talks about the Holy Spirit (who dwells within us) gifting each one of us. The Holy Spirit sets each one of us apart with our particular gift, for the good of the whole Body.
An ear is set apart for the purpose of hearing, feet for the purpose of standing, walking, running (in partnership with ankles, legs, back, heart, lungs ...). Then I pause to think about this - many members of the body are involved in the task of walking: heart and vessels to pump blood, lungs and mouth and nose for breathing, legs and feet for carrying, arms and torso for balance, eyes and ears for direction ... (and I do remember that there are plenty of people who in reality manage to move about without certain of these members, but for the sake of the metaphor ... ) - each member has an important role to play in moving the body along. No one member could do it alone - if the body were all eyes, it could see where it wanted to go but never get there.

So what are you called to be in the body of Christ (here I begin to make links with the other lectionary passages for the week, and the pieces fall into place to finish off my reflection for tomorrow morning's worship gathering at Belair). How does the Holy Spirit dwell within you and gift you for your fulness of being, and for the health and wholeness of the Body, the community?

telling the story of John the Baptist & Jesus' baptism

yesterday as part of a joint worship gathering of Blackwood and Belair Uniting Churches, in Belair National Park, I told the story of John the Baptist & Jesus' baptism (Mark 1:4-11).

John the baptiser appeared in the wilderness - question of emphasis: if on 'appeared' makes it seem as though he apparated like the witches & wizards from Harry Potter's story; if on 'the wilderness', says something about the history of salvation for the people of Israel, which so often happens in / out of the wilderness. This is a story of salvation, of God's participation in creation for the redemption of God's creation. 
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins - this feels like a mouthful, and I ask myself, is it a tautology? I think not, for we must turn back to God (repent) in order to enter into the grace (forgiveness) God bestows. 
And people from the whole Judean countryside, and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him - this feels like the Hebrew parallelism that says things twice in order to convey magnitude. so a lot of people were travelling into the wilderness towards John. 
and were being baptised by him in the river Jordan - question of emphasis again - on being baptised? well, that's what they were there for; the river Jordan? that's just geography; by him - aha, and here I was helped by socio-cultural interpretation, which tells me that Jewish people ritually cleansed themselves with water as part of purification rites: and the important thing here is that they cleansed themselves, it was an individual act. so they were baptised by John - this is what to emphasise, this is a new baptism, a different kind of rite, and the next sentence summarises what the meaning of that rite is: 
confessing their sins - this is a baptism of repentance for the once and always forgiveness of sins. this is a baptism, a water rite, that will not be repeated. there is a simplicity in the baptism that John is offering, a simplicity that is demonstrated by the narrator in the following sentences that describe his clothing and diet. 
Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. these are traits of prophets in older stories from Israel, and point to a simplicity of living which mirrors the simplicity of his message and actions. it's really difficult to convey the meaning of these characteristics of John, for it sounds to us like a very strange way to clothe and feed oneself, so we automatically pick up on the oddity, rather than the simplicity. I am not sure if I conveyed the simplicity, but I did try to speak these sentences without a tone of surprise or 'wasn't he a strange person'. 
He proclaimed, 'The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptised with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.' It felt to me that this proclamation from John was in response to an undocumented question - and perhaps this proclamation is an example of his broader message, and the question around whether John was the messiah was frequently posed. But as I spoke these words of John, I had the question in the background, which I think gave a tone of response to these words, rather than a grand and general declaration. We have established already that John's being, his message, was of simplicity - he didn't feel like a grandstander, so his proclamation would have been drawn out of him - or that's the sense I got as I inhabited his story. 


In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee - another question of emphasis, of meaning. what is the relation of John's 'the one' to 'Jesus' here? John's just talked about this one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit, so is the narrator implying a trumpet sound and 'ta daaa!' here he is, Jesus! This is how I spoke it at first, but it didn't feel right in the context of what follows. It feels more like a step back from the words of John for a moment to introduce Jesus, who is baptised by John like all the others, but as he comes out of the water, here's the Holy Spirit John mentioned, here is the 'ta daa'. 
and was baptised by John in the Jordan - however, when this story is being told, in communities of followers of Jesus, they all have accepted that Jesus is the messiah, so there would have been a bit of surprise that the messiah would submit himself to another in this way. the message here then is that Jesus was identifying with the people who needed to repent of sins, who needed to turn back to God, for whom he was sent to proclaim his message of the realm of God. I pause a little, gave a little space around, and emphasised slightly 'by' here, to draw the attention of today's audience to this element of the story, to remind us that this was significant, Jesus' participation in John's baptism, his submission to John, who as a messenger of God symbolised a submission to God. submission - I'm thinking here of giving oneself over to the reality that we cannot be human without each other or without God, and that this baptism is about more than individual salvation - it is about the kin-dom of God, which is community, wholeness experienced together; so we need each other to guide us through the waters of repentance, through the door back into the presence of God ... that's all there for me as I tell this story, a deeply felt conviction about the nature of the kin-dom of God. 
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart - I look up here - and the Spirit descending like a dove on him - here I have lifted my arms up, and brought them down again, and closed my eyes. 
And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved, eyes remain closed: for Mark, this experience was for Jesus only 
with you I am well pleased.' here I open my eyes, for the implications of God being pleased with Jesus are for all. Jesus is here for all. 

Of course, when I actually came to tell this story, I was rained on. We met in Belair National Park on a stormy weekend, and it was difficult to know how much the rain beginning during the telling of the story was a distraction from the meaning I was trying to convey. I just had to trust that God was in the story and in the moment of the telling, and let go ...