The Real Work

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

— Wendell Berry

(Contributed by Abby Shuman)

To Reteach a Thing Its Loveliness

Walking in circles, crisscrossing through shadows and light, trying not to look backwards too long at the last known signposts that pointed towards a certain future. Sometimes the wilderness road can cause us to doubt.

We must relearn everything . . . not least of which is remembering how much we are loved, not just as we are (implication: despite our flaws)  but exactly as we are: fearfully and wonderfully made, utterly unique in all of creation.

Saint Francis and the Sow BY GALWAY KINNELL

The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; 
though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; 
as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch 
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow 
began remembering all down her thick length, 
from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, 
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine 
down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering 
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Facades

The Juniper Tree was recently launched as a place to share reports of Spirit sightings in the world, which has proven to be interesting timing, since it requires me to blog about God at a time in my life when God feels unusually hidden. The very nature of social media is that of 'profession' not confession. We curate the best pieces of ourselves to put on display--our joys and accomplishments, our passionate causes, the darnedest things our children say, the prettiest pictures of the remarkable world we all walk through each day. Where in this rarified place is space for the struggle? Perhaps it is a breach of the social contract to let down our guard.  But how to talk about spirituality if we only go skin deep?

When I was a young girl, among my favorite books were the "Little House on the Prairie" stories, wherein Laura Ingalls Wilder describes life in the American west in charming detail. I remember the way she depicted settlers constructing sawdust shanty towns almost overnight. The tall façades would spring up, gaily painted, while people lived unseen behind them in much smaller living quarters. Similarly in the rugged frontier of today's Internet, there is daily hammering and hoisting as we cheerfully construct our outward facing façades byte by sprightly byte. But what goes behind our Facebook walls?

Times of crisis do bubble up in our digital expressions, of course. News of cancer and death and injustice of many stripes, often engendering an endearing response from our digital tribes. But what of other, more secret maladies? The non-ER, "primary care" chronic toils and troubles of daily life which can bedevil us with equal pain? Dare we speak these out loud? This is not just an issue in cyberspace. It plays out similarly in our physical world, such as in congregational "prayers of the people" in churches. We publicly pray for world peace, homelessness and hunger, help for those who are ill, et al, but seldom do we pray aloud for the couple whose marriage is disintegrating, or the father under so much pressure at work that he has started adding vodka to his Starbucks grande cup each morning, or the teen who can't stop daydreaming about the sharp knives in the kitchen drawer, or the mother who isn't sure she can afford to take her children to the dentist. And thus in the small living quarters of our lives, just behind the bright facades of our mortar neighborhoods and cyber villages, sometimes the desolate wilderness seeps in under our doors like invisible tear gas.

This is where I find myself today, overtaken. Frozen in place like Lot's wife, or like a Pompeii peasant. I have been overrun by a series of closely-clustered literal deaths: father, sister, dog, mother. To grief, add wrenching vocational dislocation, identity crisis, mysterious autoimmune disease. How does one speak aloud from this unflattering place of unraveling? Lament is a buzz kill--messy, awkward. But without it, we are cardboard facades, even to ourselves.

Here is the unlovely detail: the bank of heart screens overhead where God typically dazzles me with a stream of visions and music and magic are presently dormant. All I see is snow, like in the olden days before cable, when a station went off-air at 2am. Lately I've been twisting the rabbit ears of my spiritual antenna, but all I get it is silence. How then, does one speak when everything is muted? I am Paul, dumbstruck on the ground near Damascus.

This is spiritual formation. Like a homesteader in the wild west, I must content myself with laying low and waiting, tending the hearth fires through this season of emotional winter. By firelight, I must painstakingly learn a second language, the lexicon of absence, which wants to teach me of another side of God, the One who inhabits sheer emptiness as well as the whirlwind, distrust as well as faith, germination as well as harvest.

In the cold darkness over the prairie, a pale moon rises to give light.

Soon to be Hatched (I hope): The Friday Café!

Prayers needed!

I’ve reached an important milestone in my new life as a street outreach minister. On Monday, October 27, the Executive Council of First Church in Cambridge will be voting on a pilot proposal to welcome homeless and low-income neighbors in out of the cold on Friday afternoons from November through March. We’re calling it the Friday Café.

It will be simple, to start with: Hot coffee, donated food, and a welcoming atmosphere. Over the next several weeks I hope to add a free library, an art table, and a clothing rack. The emphasis, though, will be on getting to know guests and building connections between the church community and its neighbors, housed and unhoused. The Outdoor Church of Cambridge is excited about being involved; so is our resident preschool. The Juniper Tree’s canine partner, Maestro, is planning to stop by some afternoons and share some love. If you live in the area, you’re welcome to drop in too.

I decided on the café format because I didn’t think either I or the church was ready to try to put on a full-scale community meal, and because the Harvard Square homeless community lost their daytime drop-in center in March, and because I wanted to be able to sit with people and listen—not run around trying to get a meal on the table. The church already houses a 14-bed men’s shelter in the basement, focused on helping people get their lives back together and find housing. We love being able to do that, but we don’t get to interact much with the guests. The Friday Café would offer us the chance to be friends and neighbors to people we pass on the street.

Please pray for us on Monday night as our leaders vote on this brand-new ministry. They will also be voting on whether to authorize me to carry it out and to do what I’m already doing, which is street outreach. And finally they’ll be voting whether to allot a small but vital sum of money to fund the ministry and me. May God fill us with all wisdom, courage, and grace to answer this invitation and see where it takes us.

It gets pretty cold in the Square.