Meaning and Authenticity

I chair the Advisory Board for the Pastoral Care Center at the seminary where I was trained. We work to 'get the word out' about the high quality pastoral care & counseling that is available there on a sliding scale. The board met tonight, and I was struck again with how important this work is. The acting director told us that the AVERAGE fee paid there is $25.00 per session. It's such a wonderful resource for folks without insurance who need good counseling. Our project for this year, in conjunction with the Wellness Team at my church and our local area Community of Churches, is to sponsor a workshop/conference on childhood sexual abuse. We are attempting to bring in Mary's Hope , an organization based in Colorado that specializes in the spiritual healing of those who have survived childhood sexual abuse. The event is targeted at survivors AND those who care for them--mental health providers, chaplains, pastoral care workers, foster and adoptive families, first re...

We went to a Christmas Eve service at a Baptist church in Georgia. This church recently decided to abandon its downtown location and move to the suburbs where it has built a functional, and actually quite nice, new building. I was fine with the service for the most part until it came time for communion. The minister asked the deacons to come forward. More than 20 people rose and came forward. All of them male. Every blasted one of them. Male. Of course I knew going into it that this church did not have women deacons. But seeing those twenty men up there at the front of this huge church, I knew it in a new way--viscerally, in my heart. I was surprised by how painful it was for me. Tears stung my eyes. We receive communion, the body and blood of Jesus who was the Christ, to say Yes to being with Christ as the disciples were with Christ. Two thousand years forward in time and that same Christ is present among us, too, and that same Christ continues to invite all to the table, to know this...

I've just returned from a two-day retreat for 'Courage to Lead' for Congregations. We are taking the 15-month series of Courage retreats (for clergy) that I participated in 2006-2007 into our congregations. Pretty amazing stuff. We each invited 3 or 4 lay members of our churches, ending up with 26 people in the Circle of Trust. (See Parker Palmer's Hidden Wholeness. ) I've written before about how I realized that the series of Courage retreats were about practicing what church should be like . I'm very excited about the prospect of actually seeing church cultures slowly change. The change can come about, I think, as people learn to EMBODY the Courage To Lead touchstones . Here are a few of my favorites: Speak your truth in ways that respect other people's truth. Our views of reality may differ, but speaking one's truth in a circle of trust does not mean interpreting, correcting or debating what others say. Speak from your center to the center of the circ...

The saga continues, but it's good news. I went to the orthopedic doc yesterday to get the cast, as my regular doctor said to do, but this guy said a cast wasn't appropriate. Just a sling. He showed me the x-ray and said it looked like the radial bone was pushed forward a bit. He could cast it, he said, but it would be six months before I could move my elbow after the cast came off. Better to try to move it as much as I can stand the pain in the next three weeks, then it should be fine. So, good news there. The pain pills made me sleepy, so I cancelled my appointments yesterday, keeping only the wedding rehearsal last night. Wedding is tonight and I'll figure out a way to do that, holding my notes in my left hand, I guess. ...................... I've been asked to do a workshop on prayer at our regional assembly in October. In my reading, I found this by John Mogabgab: 'Come,' my heart says,' seek his face.' Your face, Lord, do I seek" Ps. 27:8 Praye...

i fell down yesterday. yep. walking in the parking lot of my church, i must've stepped on a rock and fell off my [flat] shoes. dumb....and what a shocker....i really don't know what happened. one moment i was walking along and the next moment i was on the ground. splat! our church administrator was with me....her voice was the only orienting factor in my life....for several moments i didn't know where or even who i was...all i knew was cindy's voice and the pain in my arm. this was about 9:30....as it happened, i had made an appointment for 10:30 with my doctor about the sore throat, so i just drove myself, using my left arm only, straight to the doc.... david really thought there might be a small break in my arm....the doctor sent me to get it x-rayed, and it turns out that he was right....i get a cast on it today. ugh. typing with the left hand only is a drag. i have a wedding rehearsal at 6 tonight. can't miss that. soooo, my prayer this morning is: dear god...

What is my prayer today? Well, dear God, You know that the tiredness I felt yesterday morning became a sore throat in the afternoon, and, while it's a bit better this morning, I can tell it is still there, along with my ears that are strangely hurting. Yes, okay, I'll call my doctor to see if I can get an appointment this morning. Thank you for the new client yesterday; I'm grateful, and I anticipate good things for her and for me in working further with her. Holy One, you know my friend asked me about spiritual direction--I continue to seek your guidance about that. I don't want to turn her down, but is that my false ego? what is best for her, God? I do think it took quite a lot of courage for her to ask me. Last night as I was reading I came across something that applies to her so beautifully...were you speaking to me, perhaps, through that? I felt such tender love yesterday morning for Lovely Passionate Feminist. It was after 9 am, so I knocked on her door and asked...

I pray for LIFE today, dear God. I'm tired and I have too much to do. I don't want to drag around. I don't want my tired body to drag my spirit down with it. I don't want to do what is unnecessary to do. So I pray for guidance on how to maintain a really creative tension between working and taking care of myself. I know, Holy One, that if I can remain aware of You today the tired feeling will be overcome by the Loving Energy You Are. I know as well that remaining aware of You will help me know when to stop working and get some rest. Here You are. Come, Holy Spirit, come. Katherine Ah. In Thomas Merton's Book of Hours I read: Our souls rise up from our earth like Jacob waking from his dream and exclaiming: "Truly God is in this place and I knew it not!" God becomes the only reality, in Whom all other reality takes its proper place--and falls into insignificance. May it be so.

It seems to me that if the Ft. Worth Diocese of the Episcopal Church wants to withdraw to the Southern Cone, it will just have to accept the fact that it can't take its property with it. Baptists, Disciples of Christ, etc. own their own buildings. Not TEC. You can't have it both ways, Bishop Iker. The Christian tradition is valuable, of course. But Bishop Iker and all ultra-conservatives make the mistake of valuing their tradition above any belief that God is still working in this world, still calling us toward transformation, still nudging us toward repentence of the obvious EVILS (and I don't use that word lightly) perpetrated by that very "tradition" ~ one of the most glaringly obvious in my view being that of denying ordination to women. That one horrible belief alone makes me want to throw up. Katie Sherrod' s recent post is exactly right. She writes: "Someone once said that if fish could think, water would be the last thing they would discover. They...

We had a beautiful ordination service at my new church this morning. At one point the drama group, with six or seven people all dressed in black, went to the chancel and presented quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., Sojourner Truth, and Rumi, among others. All were presented as prophets, with words to the candidate about the awesome and beautiful responsibility of speaking God's truth as he will come to know it. Very moving. I am grateful for this reminder of my own awesome and beautiful responsibility.

I glimpsed what the Church should be during the five Courage to Lead retreats 2006-2007. (Thanks to Jan , once again, for the amazing image of Courage, below.) At these retreats we were invited to practice being the people God is calling us to become , and as I think about it, what better purpose for the Church than that? The Courage to Lead series of five retreats for clergy and lay leaders provided: * a time and a place designed to enhance our opening to the movement/voice of the Spirit * an emotionally safe environment * silence * opportunities that challenged us to move out of our false-ego's comfort zone * beauty * a context of both solitude and community, both of which are often required for courage to emerge * the patience to give over a year for all five retreats, an acknowledgement of the difficulty of this process * a pattern of "real world"/retreat/"real world" that also took the difficulty of this process into account * competent, inspiring, and co...