The tender green of spring

March 29.

Prayer Posse update, cont'd

More updates. Bless your hearts.

Deborah has gotten over her virus and is out and about.

Mimi's wallet turned up! An honest cab driver and St. Anthony did what they do best.

I am still writing. (With a break for church this a.m., the last of my Lenten Series session in the late afternoon / early evening, and supper and conversation with +Maya Pavlova. Also, I have to read and grade some exams and papers sometime before tomorrow morning.)

The funeral for Aunt Anne is Tuesday in Yonkers, NY. I won't be able to make it, nor will the other members of the Acts of Hope family (my 90-year-old parents who can't travel this week plus my Beloved Sibling and two generations of offspring who all live in Europe) but Anne's granddaughter, who was away in India with her (Indian) husband and children, was due back today with her family (this was already planned) so I think all of Anne's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will be there. Thank you for your kind messages.

New baby human

My colleague Eric, who teaches courses on Buddhism, Shamanism, Tibetan and Himalayan Religions, Religions of the Minorities of Southwest China, and all manner of other interesting things, and his wife Dáša, who recently joined our Foreign Languages faculty part-time to teach Chinese and is also a fantastic runner, are the new parents of a little boy, Soren, born yesterday evening. Soren has ten fingers, ten toes, and a cute nose, and everyone is fine, if a little tired and stunned. Welcome, Soren! We're so glad you arrived safely.

Adolescent geese

These are from last week. It is now June and the baby geese, fuzzy and grey, have turned into adolescents, with smooth colored feathers just like their parents'. Mom and Dad (or Mom and Mom, or Dad and Dad, who knows, it's been known to happen with penguins) are still watching carefully. The adolescents are not quite on their own, thought they are just a shade smaller than the adults. You can hardly tell them apart.


If you count the goslings carefully in that second picture, you can see there are still seven of them. For some reason these photos won't enlarge when clicked. I have to figure out how to make this happen; I usually just rely on luck.

Seven little goslings, all in a row

... at least in one of the pictures.

I took these pictures last month before going out of town.

The goslings were just about to leave the cute baby phase: they were no longer small, round, and super-fuzzy, but they were still a little fuzzy, undifferentiated grey, and visibly smaller than their parents.

As you will see tomorrow, they are in an entirely different phase this week. For now, pull out the oohs and aahs.

I am including the first overexposed photo just so you can see the baby geese together on land. On land they and their goosey parents poke into the grass almost constantly for food. If I am remembering correctly, we'd had some rain, so there were probably a lot of delicious grubby things to eat.

The family is prettier on the water.

Click each photo to enlarge and see detail.

Ploof! They jumped into the water. These next seven photos are a sequence. As soon as the geese started jumping in I followed them with my camera (Pentax ME-Super, 400-speed 35 mm film) and clicked and clicked and also moved around on the shore. (No telephoto lens, just a standard one.)

Back to shore they came.

Don't forget to click each picture to enlarge it: you'll be able to see the goslings up close and the details of the water with its swirls and reflections.

Office move

So, the college decided a few months ago that I needed to change offices.

Bad news: moving is always a pain in the patootie.
Good news: it makes you clear the clutter.

Bad news: my old office is much larger.
Good news: my new office is much sunnier.

Also, it is closer to my Religious Studies Department colleagues (two* full-time, one part-time) so we will all be on the same part of the hall together.

******One is new, we ran a search this year to replace a colleague who left a few days ago.

Overall, not a bad thing, but it had to happen today and this meant packing books and papers yesterday for several hours in the p.m. with one other person and spending half the morning today supervising four or five large young men in bright orange t-shirts.

I will unpack sometime in August. Maybe sooner, but I am working at home for the first two-thirds of the summer and have the books I need here, and I really don't want to see the inside of my office building right now. At any rate, all the furniture is in, all the books are in, the internet and phone connections are properly wired (there was another nice young man in a bright orange t-shirt who came and took care of that), the door is locked, and someday I will make order out of chaos. Ah-choo! There was dust on those books.

I came home and had a long nap.

That is all.

Gone writin'

Friends, I am taking some time away from both my Guilford work and my blogging to get some writing done.

There is plenty to read below (see also the archive to the right) since, as usual, I have been posting obsessively, so enjoy yourselves and please don't stop visiting. Plus, I'll be checking my home e-mail and your comments come to me there too.

Also, I would love some prayers for focus and concentration. Seriously. Thanks.

Please note the prayer request for Robyn on the post below, too.

Yes, I have read the seven senior theses and been to all those thesis defenses plus one. All I have now is a stack of final research papers, haha, and the final reflection papers which students will have handed in by Monday. Monday is also the party for students (I always throw one at the end of the semester, usually during Finals Week) and that's Monday, May 5, so of course there will be a Cinco de Mayo theme. In the food department, that is. We are also adding a little Puerto Rican to the Mexican, because my teaching assistant is half Puerto Rican and she makes rice and beans the Puerto Rican way.

Meanwhile, I am crawling into the hermit cave to meet my own writing deadlines.

Peace out. Back in a few days.

Hillary is on campus

The place is, apparently, crawling with security people. Senator Clinton is speaking mid-afternoon.

Me, I am away from campus --well, I live on campus, but the house I rent is away from center campus-- and am staying here, away from the bedlam, because I have some important writing to do.

I'll be curious to see and hear the reactions after the fact. Many of the campus activists here are Obama supporters but I'm sure we have some Clinton folks as well. She didn't pick her time well - it's the first day of Finals, and we aren't really prime Clinton territory; Obama has already been to Greensboro (huge success) but I wonder if he'll come back. The North Carolina Primary is May 6.

And yes, I'm sure there are some McCain voters around this campus too.

I'm off now, really. (I'm posting this after the post above, but am changing the time signature so that the "gone writin'" post is the first thing people see.) Pray for me.

Snow, Greensboro, Valentine's Day: another view

Snow on the edge of Guilford campus, Valentine's Day morning.

Photo by Jane Redmont. Click to enlarge and see detail.

"Isolating the Images" (more from Nelle Morton)

Here is the second half of the essay excerpt my students read for today in the "Feminist Theology" class. (I'm going to have the registrar change the title to "Feminist Theologies" for the next time I teach it.) We discussed the excerpt from the writings of Nelle Morton (see my previous post for context and this for some background on Nelle Morton) in class today and students also wrote a page of reflection on it. We had a great conversation -- and a very moving one at times.

Isolating the Images

When we want to begin with the image out of which we live most of the time, we are not aware of what that image is or how to isolate it. We may find it at the end of a diffused pain, difficult to follow to its source. It comes clearer in telling one’s story or in keeping a journal. This is not like the early consciousness-raising sessions in which women took turns telling their stories. A woman must be granted all the time she needs when it appears that her story is being told for the first time. Depth hearing dares not interrupt but deepens when the telling halts or the pain becomes intense. Hearing walks alongside the teller all the way down to her most excruciating agony. At such a point one suburban women cried out, “I’m a sex object. I have been one all my life. I am one, now! Oh-o!”

Once the image is isolated a woman may savor its fit; ponder its power, the grip it has on her life; trace it to its source. Stay with it until it breaks from the inside and she touches her real self –that part of the self that the image has bound. The stereotyped image keeps us imprisoned. It is a false image to be shattered from within—false because it was assigned. The woman who discovered she was a sex object discovered also that when she dealt with it the image shattered and another more positive image emerged to take its place. The new image enabled her to affirm her sexuality –far more pervasive than she had thought – as a spiritual gift.

Women have tried to get at the image through drawing the self, then dealing with what the drawing indicates about our self-image. Often in such an exercise a woman may draw a much younger self than she really is. When this happens it may mean that there are experiences and living that she inadvertently has evaded, perhaps that she is not willing to take responsibility for. After I had turned gray, I found myself continuing for a year or so to put “black” on questionnaires asking for color of hair.

When working with children in the Deep South Robert Coles used the method of drawing the self. He discovered little black children often drawing themselves with some sort of physical handicap when, as a matter of fact, they were not physically handicapped at all. Societal structures and cultural images had functioned so powerfully that the children had developed handicapped self-images long before they had come to the age of conceptualization. One child drew himself as a small and insignificante figure until he went to visit his grandfather who owned a farm in another state and who cultivated his own field. The boy he drew on his return covered the entire page and was colored very black. His only comment: “When I draw God, He’ll be a great big man.”

An image is not just a picture in the mind’s eye but a dynamic through which one communicates publicly or which communicates oneself. An image is its functioning – whether it operates consciously or deep in the unconscious; whether it operates in an individual or in the body politic.

For next time, they're reading essays by Susan Secker and Jeanette Rodríguez, among others. Shortly we will get to Rosemary Radford Ruether and Katie Geneva Cannon.

Meanwhile, we're in the first few centuries of the church in "History of Christianity" and the very recent post-9/11 era in "History of Religion in America" (which is actually 3/4 history and 1/4 contemporary, and we're starting in the present; two weeks from now we'll start back in the 16th/17th centuries) -- I think I have historical-theological whiplash. But it's been fun, though tiring, and the students participated really actively today even in the heat.

Happy eve of St. Bartholomew's day!

Eboo Patel and the Interfaith Youth Core (not a misspelling)

Excellent gleaning from NPR kitchen-listening during a late lunch hour: Eboo Patel, author of the new book Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation and founder of the Interfaith Youth Core (not a misspelling, you might expect it to be "Corps") in Chicago. Neal Conan interviewed him on "Talk of the Nation."

The book sounds good (based on the interview and on the excerpt on the website) and perhaps good for use with a college students' class or for a congregation- or community-based reading group or discussion group.

I'll post a few notes (scribbled in the kitchen -- I keep little pads of paper everywhere!) if I have time later on. Particularly interesting is the focus on youth and young adults and formation for religiously pluralistic living vs. formation for fanaticism.

Meanwhile, have a look (and a listen if you wish; the audio link is up) and let me know what you think.

An excerpt from the book on the "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" site speaks, as does the "Talk of the Nation" interview, of the influence of the Catholic Worker movement on Patel, who is a committed Muslim.

There was also a program featuring Patel, "Religious Passion, Pluralism, and the Young" on Krista Tippett's radio show "Speaking of Faith."

Media sites to bookmark:
Talk of the Nation
Religion and Ethics Newsweekly
Speaking of Faith

A sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter

A contextual note: here is where I pray and preach these days. The bit in italics is how the congregation describes itself.

St. Mary’s House is the Episcopal Campus Ministry for UNCG and Guilford College.

For 107 years, St. Mary's House has served college students in the community of Greensboro. We are a welcoming and inclusive communion of friends who come together to nurture faith through the Eucharist, nurture the spirit through fellowship, learning and the arts, and nurture change through social action.

Note: Our congregation's mission is to students, but many of them do not attend church, or they come to the Sunday evening gathering during the academic year. Much of our Sunday morning congregation is made up of non-students, though at least half of us are affiliated with the local colleges and universities as faculty, staff, and alums. The congregation is tiny, but a disproportionately high percentage of its members are active in a variety of endeavors in the community (with both local and international concerns) and in the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina.

The Fifth Sunday of Easter
(Year C, Revised Common Lectionary)
May 6, 2007

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35


In the name of the Triune God:
the One
***who is life and gives life,
Jesus Christ, savior,
***who makes us whole
and their Holy Spirit, consoler and advocate,
***who will dwell with us for eternity.


Mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars;

Wild beasts and all cattle,
creeping things and winged birds;

kings of the earth and all peoples;
princes and all rulers of the world;

Young men and maidens,
old and young together,

Let them praise the Name of Lord... [Psalm 148]


I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
For the first earth had passed away,
And the sea was no more...

See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them as their God...

God herself will be with them
And will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more...
For the first things have passed away. [Revelation 21:1, 3, 4]


The creation in which we live
and the new creation whose vision we dream:
into this dimension of today’s rich scriptures
I want to invite you.

But first, a story about a bird.

A couple of weeks ago, just a few days before Earth Day,
I was walking through the Guilford campus,
from the office to the house.
I was smelling the spring
and listening to the birds,
and one of the birds, a little one, chirping away,
was perched above me on a telephone wire.
“Hello, bird!” I said.

But of course the bird was up there on the wire
and probably didn’t hear me, or care,
which was just fine
because it made me think:
when we humans look
at what we know and perceive,
thinking
that our way of perceiving and seeing
is the only way,
we are not in our right minds.

The world looks entirely different
from a bird’s point of view.
I am curious to know how, but never will know.
One thing I can do, though,
is imagine that point of view enough
to displace or de-center myself.
I can imagine enough to realize
that the big lumbering human below who said “hello, bird!”
is of not much importance to the bird,
and that this is as it should be,
because the world does not revolve around humans,
much as we have thought of it that way.

Theology, biology,
philosophy, physics,
poetry,
and all manner of other fields
are finally telling us otherwise –
though it did take the environmental crisis
for Western philosophy and religion to wake up
and begin reformulating their vision of the universe.

In religious and spiritual traditions worldwide
–including our own Christian tradition–
we are both reformulating and re-examining.

Re-examining,
we delve into the meaning of our scriptures
and liturgies
for ancient insight
into new dilemmas.

But back to the bird, briefly.

Of course I like it when I say hello to a cat or a dog
and the animal talks back,
or when the deer come out of the woods
and we look at each other, curiously and quietly.

But there is something healthy in saying “hello, bird!”
and not getting back an answer, or even the slightest notice,
and realizing that the ecosystem functions just fine without us humans,
thank you very much,
and sometimes fares worse
because of the way we walk the earth.

Which is not to say that birds don’t speak to us sometimes.
I am not sure why, since that day,
birds have occasionally swooped down very close to me
as if to say
“I know you’re there”
or perhaps
“... and I’m telling you something!”
It is perhaps best that this bird behavior
remain a mystery
and that I not know
whether or not
the bird and I are having a conversation
or whether I have just, at last,
begun to notice
God’s creation at work
and my own smallness within it.

I have decided we would do well
to consider the bird-centered view of the world
as best we can
regularly,
as a spiritual discipline.

Which brings me to the Bible.

We live today
between the two creations:
the one of which the Psalm speaks
with its wild beasts and winged birds,
and the one in the book of Revelation,
written to console persecuted Christians
and raising for us all manner of questions:
Was the author in a trance?
What hallucinogen had this person ingested?
Or how had this person prayed?
And what did God mean
by offering to human mind and heart
these fantastical visions?
What do they mean today?
Why is this book, so full of symbol and coded speech,
one of the favorites of some –not all–
Christians who tend toward a literal interpretation of scripture?

We live between the two creations:
the vision of what is not yet
and the vision of what is already here;
but we have trouble remembering
even what is around us
until a bird
or a Psalm sung for four thousand years
brings us back
into divine perspective.

Birds and sea monsters and God’s perspective?
Let me say what I mean
and lift up one biblical value
that sings out from the Psalm today.

In the Bible, especially in the Psalms,
there is always an intertwining of nature and history.
Creatures both animal and human,
mountains and seas,
wild springs and cultivated olive trees
spring to life side by side in the text
as they do in God’s vast creation.

There is rarely a “nature” section and a “culture” section,
an “ecology” bookshelf
and a “history” bookshelf.
We made those.

Intertwined in the text,
the presence of God in history
and the glory of God in nature
are, for the biblical writers –in the Hebrew Bible certainly
and also in the stories of Jesus in the Gospels–
theologically, spiritually, practically,
yea even cosmically
interrelated.

Now, we have to be careful about reading into Scripture what is not really there.
but it is helpful and legitimate to look for
consistent insights and consistent lessons:
the trend of wisdom, as it were;
the holy threads.

One consistent lesson from many centuries of biblical writers
and from God whose ways they teach us to understand
is that the language of history and the language of nature
do not live in separate realms.
History and nature
are all part of creation.
All life, natural and social, is from God and returns to God.

All the creatures praise God in their own manner.
they have a life of their own.
At the same time they are interrelated with one another
and we with them.

Many commentators on the lectionary
note that the readings from Easter to Pentecost
–the season in which we find ourselves now–
are about community:
its formation, its shape, its struggles, its growing pains,
and the constant presence of Jesus
in the young and growing communities of his disciples,
Jewish and Gentile,
Palestinian and broadly Mediterranean.

We, the creatures, and our societies,
the seas and the trees,
are all part of the same community.

Our culture is paying increasing attention to the community of earth,
prompted, perhaps, by a certain Oscar-winning documentary.

I’m seeing this in many places,
from
the latest issue of People
which I read while standing in line at the supermarket checkout counter
this week, with the story of
“How One Family Went Green”
to
the new NPR series on climate change.

I saw it in an article informing me this past week
that Darfur may well be the first war influenced by climate change.
The article is from a magazine called Seed.

In recent years, increasing drought cycles and the Sahara's southward expansion
have created conflicts between nomadic and sedentary groups
over shortages of water and land.
This scarcity highlighted the central government's gross neglect of the Darfur region
—a trend stretching back to colonial rule.
Forsaken, desperate and hungry, groups of Darfurians
attacked government outposts in protest.
The response was the Janjaweed and supporting air strikes.

Chalking the Darfur conflict up to climate change alone
would be an oversimplification.
The governmental, religious, ethnic, and other factors are real,
as are our own inaction and the slowness of the United Nations to respond.
But the earth and climate factors are just as real,
and they are inextricably bound up with the social realities of Darfur.

I want to share with you one more story, closer to home,
about Earth and human community.

One of my students recently wrote a reflection paper
about his participation in Earth Day.
This student, who cares deeply about the earth
is committed to working for justice
and is not particularly religious
or interested in being religious.

Whenever the course examined religious beliefs and observances,
he had to be persuaded that these things were practical.
In the course on “Health, Spirituality, and Justice,”
we examined the relationship among health, poverty, race, and
the environment.
We also learned about four spiritual practices from different traditions:
Zen mindfulness practice;
the Jewish Sabbath;
the rule of St. Benedict and its applications both ancient and contemporary;
and Quaker testimonies of simplicity.

This student had the most trouble with the Rule of St. Benedict.
Even after our learning that the Rule begins with word “listen”
and after I had invited the class to ponder what it might mean
to “listen with the ear of the heart” as Benedict puts it,
the notion of following any communal path,
especially one intruding on individual freedom,
remained foreign to this young man.

Benedict’s invitation to the monks to sing
only to benefit their hearers
was not to the student's liking at all.
If you want to sing, sing out loud and have fun,
he wrote;
do it for the fun of it, and do it for yourself....
I think, he continued,
that when you sing for yourself
you are listening with the ear of your heart.
I think that you can listen to that ear quite well without a rule,
and in some cases...
that listening to the ear of your heart requires the abandonment
of the guidelines laid out by Benedict.

Reflecting on the first three of the spiritual practices we had examined, he noted:
I know that the ideal way to live would be in complete awareness of all my actions,
but I think that the Sabbath is a great alternate.
It is not ideal, but it is a good way to live,
especially in comparison to the craziness of the rule of Saint Benedict.
The Benedict tradition is just too intense.

All my professorial protestations in favor of old Benedict,
my explanations of the social chaos of the 6th century and
of the contribution of monasticism to civilization, and
my observation that whether we notice it or not, we all have a rule of life
– we do brush our teeth in the morning, don’t we? –
were unpersuasive.

But just weeks later, in the student’s reflection on his Earth Day project,
the value that surfaced,
surprisingly for him and surprisingly for me,
was community.

Originally, he wrote, he had wanted to focus on the woods on our campus,
their uniqueness in this urban setting, and
all the ways [as he put it] in which people
can improve their mental, physical, and emotional health
by simply taking a walk once in a while.

All this, he noted, makes sense and is very true,
but as we got up to the actual day of the event and then throughout Earth Day,
I realized that the community which had planned and executed
and the community that came out to the event
were much more... what I was looking for in improving communal and individual health.

From long meetings to plan the details of the festival day
to slicing potatoes in the shade,
care for the earth and life in human community came together, intertwined,
as they are in our Psalm and in our lives.
They became visible and conscious.

But what about that passage from the book of Revelation?
Read through our contemporary lens
it can be frightening.
And this is probably the most consoling passage of the entire book:
who can fail to be moved by the image of God wiping every tear from our eyes?
With its vision of the sea being no more
the passage raises in today’s climate
–and I mean climate both literally and metaphorically–
the specter of destruction,
though I am not sure that this is what the writer meant.
It is, most certainly, a vision that speaks of change, even in the earth we know.

We don’t know the shape of this change.
And, as Jesus reminds us in the gospels,
we know not the day nor the hour.
Speculation about the details of the end time is not a fruitful task.

What is striking, though, is what the vision says about God
in this transformed creation.

Revelation’s vision of the new creation has God dwelling among us.

How interesting.
We humans creatures are not raptured from above
or left behind.

The righteous do not fly up to heaven.
God and the new Jerusalem
come to earth.

The new life that we celebrate during this Easter season
is a new community among the creatures of earth.

Today’s lessons invite us to meditate on our place in creation – God’s creation.

It does not matter where we start;
whether in a conversation with a bird on a wire
or a student Earth Day project
or action in the Save Darfur coalition
or in the struggle to balance action and contemplation
in our busy lives.

The earth is the Lord’s,
says another well-known Psalm of creation.

The earth will be the dwelling-place of God,
says the early Christian mystic. [Rev. 21:3]

Living between the two creations,
still in the first one,
a foot in the next one because of the risen Christ,
how then shall we live?

How then shall we live?


*************************

I requested hymn 412 (“Earth and All Stars”) as a recessional. Everyone loves the “loud boiling test tubes” and it worked with the Psalm and the sermon. I love the syncopation and key it’s in, too. And it makes Episcopalians sing loud, which is always a good thing. Alleluia! Stir up them folks.

Nashville bound

No, not for the Grand Ole Opry. For a meeting of scholars. Believe it.

****

P.S. That is not a picture of me.

Thoughtful adventures in Ghana, and a proud mother hen cluck

Indulge me, friends. I want to cluck with pride about one of our wonderful students. (Clucking twice, because Blogspot and the internet just ate the long post I finished writing due to one tiny piece of broken code. AKH! Now I remember why until a week or so ago I always wrote long posts in my word processor first and did a cut and paste. So I've just reconstructed this post.) Rachel is on semester abroad in Ghana. We usually don’t allow students in their final term go on study abroad –though we very much encourage study abroad during the students’ middle years here— but the college did allow it in this case, so Rachel will miss her own graduation this spring because she won’t be back from Africa. She is enrolled in courses in Cape Coast, though she has a bit of an opportunity to travel to Accra and elsewhere, and she has a great host family. She has been a stellar student, and she is now blogging from Ghana in her customary thoughtful way. Her blog has been on my blogroll on the right since day one, but in case you haven’t had a look, do – or just click here. The blog is mostly a way for her to communicate with her family and friends, but since blogs are in the public domain and her writing is so interesting, I am taking the liberty of recommending it.

Rachel is a keen observer and has a wonderful ability to reflect on her own experiences as well as the lives of those around her. She’s also well aware of the (post-) colonial dynamics and the realities of race and gender involved in her being a white, blonde intellectual from the U.S. who likes to read and dance and is residing in Ghana for just a few months -- and right around the time of the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. Although one of the theologians whose work* I teach and have studied for many years, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, is Ghanaian, I’ve never been to Ghana, and I am learning a great deal about daily life in its cities from Rachel’s “dispatches from the field.”

Rachel is also a devoted Methodist Christian, with a vocation to ministerial leadership, and the major reason for today’s cluck of pride is that Rachel writes in today’s post that she has been accepted at Candler (the divinity school at Emory University in Atlanta, a fine school of theology) with a full-tuition scholarship for next academic year. Hooray for Rachel! And blessings aplenty.

* I want to note that I am not endorsing amazon.com by making this and a few other of the links on this page. (I encourage you to shop at your local independent bookstore, or if you shop by mail, to use the nice folks at alibris.com, who function with a network of independent bookstores, sell used books but some new ones too, and have plenty of religion books.) But I’m using them here because for some of their books they have that nice “Search inside” feature so you can look at the Table of Contents and other bits. Those of you unfamiliar with the work of Mercy Oduyoye could start with this one. And one must always read her work in the context of the broader theological project of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, which she founded. Two of her colleagues from the Circle have recently edited a Festschrift in her honor (she turned 70 a couple of years ago), on the subject of women, religion, and health. Have a look.

Fox News

First, a laugh. With a groan.

Newsweek had this, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; I thank them both for it.

As for what *I* think of the FoxTube, you really don't want to get me started on this one. I don't even watch TV news any more, and those FoxFolks aren't worthy of being called journalists most of the time.

So why did I say yes to a quick interview today? Vanity or nostalgia for my Media Girl persona or inability to keep my mouth shut or misplaced sense of responsibility or just not thinking? There I was, walking out of the office after class to go for a quick lunch before the first meeting of the afternoon, and there they were again, at one of the major campus intersections. I think the college laid down the law a few weeks ago that only a limited part of the campus would be available to media. We've had a situation here, as you may have read or heard. (The local alternative weekly has been attentive to many aspects of the story.)

Wouldn't you know this would be the ONE day I left the house without makeup. And while I usually dress up (a little - this is a rather informal setting) on the days I teach, I was almost running late, and the weather was warm and I figured the students in my seminar would enjoy meeting outside, in which case we'd be sitting on the grass, so I'd better wear clothes that would survive that close encounter with God's green earth. My buddy Victoria, a.k.a. PeaceBang (whose blog I visit often and participate in pseudonymously) will not be amused when she hears about this. Oh the horror. At least I was wearing earrings.

As for the interview, it was all of a few seconds long, and I refused to answer the question right off the bat; I took a few moments to think. Came up with the appropriate comment. Tried as usual to reframe the issue in a couple of sentences. That was it. Kept my glasses on, which I don't usually on television, but this called for the pundit look, and besides, they're new.

Much better coverage of course here and here. Those two were older stories, but they were pretty good. The New York Times short one a month ago was terrible. hasty, superficial, full of clichés. Our student newspaper, impressively for a group of young people who had strong opinions and were in the heat of it all, initially did a genuine job of reporting.

Today's news is brief and the local paper promises more for tomorrow.

I come from a media family. So as the daughter and sister of journalists (of whom I am immensely proud) I can't help but be interested in the news and how it is reported, and how its reporting is changing. I write, I had a radio show for a while here on campus, I used to co-host a radio show in Boston, I was a regular guest on a tv show there, and I have been both interviewer and interviewee on and off, most of my adult life. I've also been at a lot of events that have been covered by newspeople, and that's an interesting one too. You're in a demonstration or a liturgy and then you read about it, or watch it, or hear about it on the radio, and sometimes you wonder whether you and the reporter (or commentator) were at the same event. Sometimes not. I've also been a participant-observer a lot.

Given the complexity of the situation here in the aftermath of the fight, and the high emotions on campus, I have felt it is more my job to serve the situation as an educator and (not my official job here but it's part of who I am) minister (and many, many faculty, some more than I, have been confidantes and sounding boards for students during the past weeks), so I have stayed away from the TV types, intentionally, and spoken only to one or two very carefully chosen media folks, never from television and usually on background.

So how are things at Guilford? Not sure I can do it justice here in blog-land. Calmer. Still soul-searching about the causes and consequences --personal and systemic-- of the January 20 attack (or fight, or altercation, depending who's talking). Mostly, this week, people are just back from spring break overwhelmed with overwork. Next week we continue the teach-ins and happily, Tim Tyson, whose book Blood Done Sign My Name I've been reading, is coming to speak.

I don't see this as a short-term reporting space. And what we're doing on campus is, in any case, a long-term piece of work, as I told the Fox people. Just because the DA dropped the charges --and the college internal judicial hearings concluded before spring break-- doesn't mean that the hurt or the questions go away or that the need to examine a host of patterns, attitudes, relationships, and policies disappears. Not very sexy or TV-worthy stuff, but it's what's there and there are real humans and institutions involved.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming. And lipstick in the morning.

Time for Lent

This will come out shortly in Guilford College's campus ministry newsletter.

And see the post below this one for an Ash Wednesday reflection from two years ago, "Ashes and Weeping," published in The Witness. Two very different audiences. The one in this post is not very churchy. The "Ashes and Weeping" one is much more so.

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Time for Lent

“What are you giving up for Lent?” a friend asked me the evening before Ash Wednesday. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to think about it – I was in the middle of a late-night Mardi Gras party. Besides, it often takes me a week or ten days to figure out what I will “do for Lent.” By that time, it’s around the Second Sunday in Lent, but there’s a whole month left after that.

Lent, for those of you who don’t know, is the long season before Easter, the feast (and season) celebrating Jesus’ resurrection which begins with the commemoration of his suffering and death. For six weeks, Christian communities and their individual members engage in spiritual practices that foster a deeper relationship with God, a keener attention to charity and justice, and a reflective mood. Traditionally, this has also been a season of repentance – a season of turning, as in “turning back” or “turning around,” as in turning or returning, to God: in other words, a season of conversion, in the deepest sense of the word.

The three traditional practices of Lent –prayer, fasting, and almsgiving— are bodily and communal as much as they are matters for the individual and the soul. They are also intimately connected with one another, just as for Muslims the fast of the holy month of Ramadan is related to the injunction to give to the poor.

Christian congregations have various ways of living and encouraging their members to live Lent. And the individual members, depending on the shape and circumstances of their lives, adapt the ancient practices to the times in which they live.

And so we ask ourselves, and our friends ask us, “What will you do for Lent?”

There are some dangers hidden in this question. The first is this “doing for Lent” notion. We are, as a culture, preoccupied with and caught up in “doing” – producing, working, competing, achieving, being and staying busy. Our “doing for Lent” can get tangled up in that very pattern.

What Lenten practice or practices will help you and me get out of production mode in our lives and into relationship mode or contemplative mode? Is there a discipline we can practice that will bring us more life? That’s part of the point of Lent and its ancient practices. There’s a passage in the Gospels in which Jesus talks about coming to bring “life to the full.” I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean “a fuller schedule.”

If anything, Lent calls us not so much to do as to make room: for quiet time, for empty time, for time when we can receive the great message of embracing love.

Which brings me to the second difficulty with the “What will you do for Lent?” question. In case you hadn’t noticed, we have a big time problem at Guilford. Much of our community is sleep-deprived. Faculty and staff work twenty and thirty hours beyond the long-forgotten forty-hour work week. Students often do as well, juggling jobs and full course loads and in some cases, families or sports team commitments. Paperwork and deadlines abound. Meetings multiply. E-mail and cell phones are ever present. A constant stream of information and communication enters our ears, our visual field, our bodies and minds. Our weekends have shrunk. Sabbath time is scarce.

A telling conversation took place in my “Health, Spirituality, and Justice” class just this week. We’ve been reading The Sabbath, the classic work on Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath) by Abraham Joshua Heschel and a few essays on related topics. Students have learned about the Jewish Sabbath, but also had a chance to reflect more broadly on Sabbath in their own (mostly non-Jewish, in some cases Christian, in other religiously unaffiliated) lives and examining whether and how they engage in any of the practices associated with the traditional Sabbath: a regular weekly rhythm of rest, time for reconnecting with the sacred, festive meals with loved ones, the nurturing of community life, study of holy wisdom and sacred texts, attention to beauty and sensuality, honoring intimacy. Several in the class noted that they simply were not able to find time even for a Sabbath afternoon, let alone for 24 or 25 hours.How can we find time –not just once a week, which is hard enough, but on a regular basis during Lent, perhaps daily—for practice that fosters contemplation, reflection, and remembrance of the world’s need for justice and healing, when this time is “on top of everything else?”

Something’s got to give.

Think about Lent as a time to do less. Let go of something. Maybe that’s what fasting means for us this season. A little less television. A little less web surfing. A weekly or daily time of prayer or meditation, indoors or out, that can happen because something “gave,” or rather because we gave up something. Without the building of a protective boundary around some portion of our time –on a regular, repeated basis—we cannot even begin to live the practices of Lent.

We can start “small and simple.” This is not the spiritual Olympics. God isn’t standing over us with a stop watch. Not ever, but especially not in a season meant to help us rediscover the tenderness of divine love.

Giving up time in order to make time, for the sake of life to the full, life to the full in the here and now: this is a choice. Most of us have it. Most of us can make it.

But sometimes –often— the time bind is systemic. It isn’t just about our lacking will power or discipline. More and more, the culture in which we live, both in the U.S. and at Guilford, reinforces doing rather than being, production rather than celebration and contemplation, and the lack of boundaries between work and home. It squeezes out time for contemplation and relationship. It affects privileged people whose salaries are high but who are pressured to work 70 hours a week and who worry –I have seen this!—about what kindergarten their 3-month-old baby will get into five years hence so that she can get into the best prep school to get into the best college later on. Even more, it affects the greater number of people who don’t have the choice whether or not to work that extra shift so they can pay their rent or feed their children, or to attend school full-time while working twenty hours a week at minimum wage.

So what keeps us from adopting spiritual disciplines –in Lent and elsewhere in time— is sometimes a cultural or economic or institutional factor: the encroachment of work on private and community time, economic necessity, the structuring of workplaces, schools, and religious communities.

The solutions to spiritual need, then, are not just individual. Like the solutions to physical hunger, they are communal. The loss of Sabbath time – and by extension, the loss of Lenten contemplative time – will not be remedied only by individual choices and mindful acts of spiritual practice. It will also find restitution, repair, and healing through campaigns for living wage, through creation of healthier workplaces, through collective and leadership decisions to consider and honor the hungers of body and spirit.

Which brings me to a final point. “What are you going to do for Lent?” and “What are you giving up for Lent?” are individual questions. Alert: Lent is a communal journey. A colleague of mine once spoke of it as a retreat on which the whole church community goes together for six weeks. The Christian community looks toward Easter together and it journeys together. Spiritual practice isn’t just something that happens as one more personal choice. We can’t do it alone.

Find a community of faith and practice, on campus or off. (You won’t be signing your life away. We’re talking six weeks here.) Find a buddy and share your Lenten practices with a partner. Find or start a small group, whether it is a Lenten group for prayer and meditation, or one of the campus ministry-sponsored “Passional Attraction” groups. Seek out wise elders and peers. Ask for help and for resources. Use your imagination and tap the imagination of others. Stillness needs and requires support.

Time for Lent. Think about it.


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One possible source of support for the Lenten journey, written especially for students:

Sitting Still, available for free download at
http://www.cescm.org/Lent07GuideWeb.pdf .

Or, if you want, you can sign up for free daily e-mail meditations by sending a blank e-mail with your e-mail address as the subject line and the words “join meditations” in the body of the e-mail to gwilliams@episcopalchurch.org .