And a little something from me.....

The last four days were spent in Santa Fe and the annual conference of the Pastor Theologian program. These are always incredible events, with major powerhouse speakers and lots of time for conversation and reflection. I met for the third time a man by the name of Jeremy Begbie, who has done some wonderful thinking on the ways in which music allows us and assists us in thinking and living our faith. One of his critical insights is that because of the way the modern world works around us, we tend to think in a more or less linear way--one thought follows another, and we get confused when there's more than one thought that fills a given space (the best example, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity--how can God be three in one, how can Jesus be human AND divine at the same time.)

Music, Jeremy suggests, gives you a way to think about three things, four things, and number of things at the same time, each existing together without eradicating the other, or merging into some different thing. So, while yellow and red on canvas either obscure each other r create orange, a c/e/g/c played together on a piano make a c major chord with each note present to all the rest.

Okay, it's getting a little heady, but it enforces something I've been thinking about since Iona: how much music shapes the way in which we learn/practice/articulate our faith. It also got me to thinking about the "paradigm" of church, and whether the goal is not to choose one or another, but to search for the "harmonics" of the many churches any one congregation might be at any given moment. Just as God is One in the Many, the Body of Christ is most faithful when its finding not "the one true way to be in this world" but ALL the diverse and wonderful ways in which, together, we witness to the harmony God intends for this creation.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Below is a summary of the Sabbatical Team's visit to the Marshfield Church, forwarded to me by Jim Bowman (THANKS JIM!) a quick shot on the things going on on the home front. I'd be curious if anyone who's flitting through has and reflections on the now 2 completed sessions with Prof. Irizarry from Mccormick?

Visit to First Presbyterian Church
Marshfield, WI
The Sabbatical steering team visited First Presbyterian Church in Marshfield, WI on Sunday, June 6, 2005. The purpose is to understand the role that First Presbyterian seeks to play in the 21st century.
We attended their worship service and then met with Pastor Scott Marrese-Wheeler and five members of the congregation. We asked these questions and listened to their responses:
Q: Do you have a mission statement? How do you see yourself living it?
A: The mission statement, printed in the bulletin in both English and Spanish, follows:
First Presbyterian Church, Marshfield, Wisconsin seeks to welcome all to join us on our journey of faith, denying no one, based upon his or her particular human condition, participation in the life of the church. We want to be a safe place, a sanctuary where people are accepted, included, and cared for as they are. We will be agents of God's transforming power, aligning ourselves with the Holy Spirit as we pray, worship, learn, share fellowship and serve together. By attending to the love of Jesus Christ in our midst, we discover a deepening faith that makes a difference in our lives. As a community based on God's love, we strive to be of service to our neighbors and to the world.
In the past, First Presbyterian was known as the "doctors and professionals church". Three years ago, the mission statement was updated. The congregation wanted to reach out to its community and welcome gays, lesbians, and others. Because of this policy, a group of Spanish-speaking Presbyterians came to the church.
Issues exist within the congregation and the members do not always seek unanimous agreement on these issues. The church is a broad-based umbrella. Members are "works in progress". If they cannot reach consensus, they "agree to disagree". Pastor Scott believes that new people join because the church is living its mission.
Q: How does your congregation equip its members to live out their mission?
A: Members learn through their involvement in activities. To pursue peacemaking, for example, the church sponsored a peace conference. They conducted a survey with questions like: What do you think of when you think of peace? They held a workshop on peaceful parenting. The congregation read the book "The Future of Peace" and brought in its author to clarify peace issues. Muslims from the community were included in these events.
Q: How is your church shaped by the world around it?
A: Visits from mission people from countries like Zimbabwe affect the congregation. Through standing committees and a book group, members develop their own thinking.
Q: How does your congregation determine whom to reach out to? How do you reach out to them?
A: The congregation takes advantage of opportunities that come their way. For example, one family invited its Spanish-speaking neighbors to join the family for Thanksgiving dinner. Because the group was too large for the family's home, the dinner was moved to the church. More people were invited and ultimately 75 attended. The church expects this dinner to become an annual event.
Q: Describe your congregation’s assets: physical, human, financial, intangible.
A: They congregation moved into a new building two years ago. It is a very important asset. It is handicapped accessible and the cost is $3 million. The sanctuary holds 250 people. There is a large narthex with only one exit. Members believe that the narthex causes people to talk immediately after leaving the service. The building also includes a gym that serves as a fellowship hall. The members believe that the congregation would not be growing if they had remained in the old building.
Q: What role does budget play in determining whom you reach out to?
A: Budget is a concern. For the first time in several years, the church began 2005 with a balanced budget.
Q: What is holding your congregation back from doing more?
A: "Only fear may hold us back. The Spirit will take us forward if we are willing to risk. Risks don't even seem like "risks" after you are in that mode."

Midpoint Musings

Sorry it's been so long since the last post. I could give you excuses, but basically, life moves faster on the road than I thought.

Yes, we are back in the US, after our course side-tracked a little and we ended up in London rather than Geneva---more on that another day. Father's Day was transit back from Paris to Chicago, with Lisa's kind boyfriend greeting us (and her!) at the airport, a drive back through Milwaukee, and what a wonderful feeling at about 10:00 p.m. to turn into River Drive.

I will NEED the next two months to put thoughts together after these last four weeks, but for right now, I'm off to a Pastor Theologian event. It's hard to believe we've made it to the midpoint of this sabbatical journey. While on the flight home, I found myself pondering John Brigg's very thoughtful comment on the nature of community, and surrender, and it provided quite a meditation point for me. How hard is it, in this world in which SELF is the center of the universe (do you recall George Carlin's bit on how we went from Life magazine to People to Self?) to talk about our core meanings arising when we give UP ourselves, and surrender to the most basic unit of human being not being ME, but WE. It reminded me of how much I miss John and Suzanne as a part of our congregation's life!

So, there WILL be more postings--I PROMISE--on the rest of the trip. There's more to say about hospitality and Lisa's wonderful host family, the combination of religion and power, seen from the Papal residence in Avignon, and how narrative structures our existence while skipping from mass at St. Martin's in the Field to the British Library to track 8 3/4 at the train station in London and wet walks to the zoo where Harry Potter freed the snake (or whatever it was that Harry Potter did at the London Zoo!) But right now I've got to get my bearings a little, sort out some of the financial stuff, and ENJOY being HOME!

Thanks to all of you for tracking this journey--and know from what's been said above that I TRULY enjoy your comments and feedback.

Chuck

Riomaggiori and the Train to France

The towns of Cinque Terra were wonderful change of pace—no museums, no churches, but spectacular views of the Mediterranean and village after village chiseled into the cliffs that rise mightily out of the water. The towns were, to me, a witness to the indomitable human spirit. There are paths that link one town to the next, and along and aside them are carefully tended groves of grapevines and olive trees. I cannot imagine how hard people worked to make those terraces, and then, year in and year out, care for those vines, and tend those branches, to bring their fruit to market. The sea is gorgeous, but the boats are small, and you see in pictures how the winds and waves can create truly treacherous conditions. Tourists may come now, and sip a fine glass of wine, enjoy a delicious dinner of the freshest fish imaginable, but our ease lies on top of the immense labor of generations.

Cooking School—how simple, and wonderful

A half day’s cooking class at a villa about a half-hour outside of Florence proved to be a highlight of the journey. With another family from Alabama, we made pasta with pesto sauce, bruschetta with tomato and eggplant, and herbed chicken with olives---oh, and something called “chocolatissimo!” Complimented with a good white wine, and topped off with my one and only taste of Grappa, it made for a pretty happy time!

The curious thing about it, for me, was that there was nothing particularly complex about anything we did. They were simple ingredients—flour, eggs, eggplant, tomatoes—though they were as fresh as the morning’s market (it’s worth thinking about what we lose by having the choices our supermarkets make available 24/7/365—eggs with yokes so bright yellow that they’re almost orange, and basil and thyme that are straight from the garden to the kitchen with an aroma I think I can still smell). But as these simple, fresh ingredients were combined in a mindful and patient way, they create a feast.

I wondered what would happen to my life if ALL my eating were so mindful and care-full? One of the things that’s Hard to adjust to in Italy is a daily schedule that takes a good 1 ½ to 2 hours for a lunch break—a far cry from the 15 to 20 minutes we too often take to ”drive through” and then wolf down a burger and fries at our desks or at a stoplight.

One of the things you notice as you tour the various monasteries is that the refectory in each place is dominated by a painting of the Last Supper on one wall. The monks, it seemed, understood that EVERY meal was an extension of the Lord’s Table (remember how peeved Paul was to learn that some in CORINTH?? Were eating their meals before the community’s worship began?)

On a very practical level, I wondered what it would do to the life of a community like Memorial if were ate, regularly, in this mindful—dare I say spiritual—way? It’s why, I think, potluck suppers are such high points of our common life, but what if such a pattern of eating were not an exceptional event in our life, but (as our Book of Order’s Directory of Worship suggests) gathering at the Table were understood to be integral to, and not an exceptional act of worship? Maybe, in some deep way, we ARE what—or at least HOW—we eat.

Day 40 or so…Florence, Medicis and a Humble Monk

Florence is the cradle of the renaissance whose fruits were so magnificently born in the halls of the Vatican museum, and the next stop of our sojourn. The city of the Medicis, it had the great good fortune of emerging from the plagues of the late 14th century in relative health, and thanks to the banking genius and penchant for collecting the very best of anything they could, it became the locus for a cultural transformation that would alter the fabric of Western culture.

As Denise’s friend likes to say, you can’t swing a cat in Florence without hitting a fresco. Our first stop was the gorgeous baptistery that stands next to Florence’s famed Duomo, or Cathedral. Its immense dome is completely covered with golden mosaic that bears the obvious influence of the Eastern Church. As I sat beneath them, and then in our tour of the next day learned of the banking prowess of the Medicis, and the way in which tiled floors were made to look like Persian rugs, I was struck by the immense influence that what we would recognize as Eastern Orthodox traditions had on what came to be known as the Western renaissance. Many of the texts which were “recovered” in this time, which allowed science to flourish, had been kept in safe keeping by Muslims as well as monks. The moral of the story: the way in which we carve up our world is sometimes too convenient, and tells the tale of only one facet in a diamond. The richness of who we are owes a great deal to those whom we suppose to have conquered, and our debt is great to those who might otherwise be considered more “primitive” than us.

Making your way from one Medici palace to the next, one cathedral to another built by their patronage, you begin to wonder what it was that drove these people. Were they such pious folk that they simply couldn’t help but spend their next fortune on another church, or was the church one more of the things from antiquity they collected just to be able to say it was theirs? Did they have any idea as they were bringing together the incredible resources of Florence, they would create a treasury that would last long after their power had faded? The elder de Medici, in return for his patronage of San Marco, had the largest cell in the monastery, but there’s no particular reason to believe that it was ever used as a place of prayerful contemplation. It’s much more likely to have been the secure place in which the most sensitive of his business dealings might have been accomplished, sequestered from the public eye.

If the monks had their way, much of the collection people come from around the world to see today would have been consumed in Savanarola’s “bonfire of the vanities,” but power and piety being such as they were in the 15th Century, it was Savanarola who was consumed, instead, and his quiet brother, Fra Angelica’s mystical paintings are what endure.

I need to give more thought to what the implications are for the church and world in which we now live. Clearly, the arts have taken their own path, and no longer rely on the patronage of the church, nor in general use religious imagery as their major palate for subjects. The simplest observation is that if there still is something that can be talked about as Western Culture, its roots are firmly planted in the soil of the church, but it was a church very different from one we might recognize today, in that it was a central pillar in the power structures of the day. It WAS a matter of life or death as to how you stood in relation to the church, and not a matter of taking your family down the street to a church whose teachings were more amenable to your way of thinking.

It’s a double-edged sword. The institutional church clearly is less central to life in our times, and as a result plays a far smaller role in shaping the surrounding culture. We find ourselves, more often, shaping our culture to the world (as when the football schedules are the first thing on the church calendar, and we search for music forms that are “more attractive” or “accessible” to those who were not raised in the church. But does that more marginal role allow us to be truer to the central calling of Christianity? To be more “Christ-like”? If the church no longer needs to be the bearer of the entire cultural legacy of the surrounding world, might we instead be better placed to clothe the naked, feed the poor, bring justice and mercy to a world in deep pain?

Day 36 continued...yet again

I don’t suppose I’ve ever had as deep a sense of history as in Rome. The Vatican gives way to the prison of Marmartinum, where tradition says St. Peter baptized St. Martin—the self-same St. Martin who then becomes the compatriot of St. Columbo in Iona. But even that gives way to the ancient gods of Rome, and Romulus.

Touring the Vatican museum you cannot help but see how deeply our civilization is embedded in Christianity, and Christianity, in turn, is a product of this Greco-Roman culture whose roots stretch back well before Christendom. Perhaps the most thought provoking art to my eye came in the papal rooms, which were painted by Rafael. The story is that Michelangelo and Rafael were locked in competition as one executed the masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel while the other worked in what would have been thought to have been the private residence of the Pope. Our guide explained the magnificent murals in what would have been the Pope’s “signature” room—the place where these most significant acts of his papacy would have been accomplished. Two walls dominate: one showing the history of theology in a single fresco, the facing wall with the greatest philosophers and scientists. The middle wall would have been where the Pope himself sat, surrounded by the virtues. In a single room, there is literally a universe with the church it’s final interpreter and arbiter.

To stand in the Sistine Chapel is not only to look up on the most amazing achievement of Renaissance art, but to contemplate a history of succession, intrigue, and great piety mixed with the basest of political motives. It was not more than two months ago that this room was filled with the cardinals who elected Benedict XVI, in a process that dates back longer than any Presbytery. It is an awesome experience.

But it all comes at a certain price, doesn’t it? Our Sunday excursion began at the Coliseum—the Lambeau Field of its day. If ever I complain about the violence that colors our American society, I’ll be reminded of the bloodthirsty scenes that cry out from those rocks. Fifty animals slain in a day, and that was the “warm up act” for gladiators who would fight to the death, or the condemned (which at one time meant the Christians) who would be helplessly thrown into the amphitheater to be gored and killed while the crowds cheered.

Praise God that we’ve found forms of entertainment that don’t require such horrifying spectacle, but I did, for just a moment, wonder why I was so intrigued when the American military mounted Operation Shock and Awe, and I was glued to the television set while bunker busters and 2 ton bombs leveled cities, but didn’t seem to count those killed or wounded unless they were members of the US Military. Beneath every civil society, it seems, there is a pulse of blood thirst. May God have mercy on us….

day 36 continued

One of the objectives of our time in Sicily was to experience and reflect on the nature of “family” as we met those relations of Denise’s family who remained in the first quarter of the last Century when a part of the family gave hugs and promises, and made their way to a land of new promise.

Sicily is a BEAUTIFUL land, with rolling hills covered with grapevines, orange groves and olive trees. We had the chance to take in the view outside the gates of the house in which Denise’s great-grandmother was born, to stop briefly in the beautiful church in which several generations would have been baptized, married and mourned. For them, it would have meant several months journey to a land they would not even have seen in photographs. It’s difficult to imagine how one could come to such a choice, but choose they did—to at least MY great good fortune!

We greeted several folk who could only be characterized as shirt tale relations, but were welcomed as received AS family. Eating pizza in the street café on our first night, or near midnight in the family pizzeria in Calmonici on our last, you see how fiercely and proudly these family ties are guarded and valued. It would be very easy to sentimentalize the relationships and the lives we found in these days, but I think it’s fair to say that what might have separated folk by the better part of a century, several lines on a family tree, and thousands of miles, melted away when dissolved in the medium of “la famiglia”. Even a middle aged American with German heritage felt right at home—wanted, welcomed, made to feel like “one of us!”

day 36, i think!

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to write—sorry to those who have been following, but apparently, internet access is harder in Rome than in Sicily. Who’d have thought it! Since last checking in we’ve been to Ribera, Agrigento, and Calamonici—the ancestral home of Denise’s father, and then overnight on the train to Rome.

What have I learned? How much time have you got? Let’s start with some basics. The best of travel plans don’t always work out. We knew that one of the challenges was going to be getting Lisa to the various places we were going to be along the way, while getting her back to Aix in time for her exams. What you cannot control for are late planes, train strikes, and what I’ve come to think about as the human aspects of travel. There are many things you could say about the process, but most are not appropriate for a blog that’s rated “G”! Once the steam settles, and you get over the frustration, however, you come to realize how often while traveling you are dependent on the kindness of strangers—maybe the ticket agent who listens to your story and sympathizes, or the veteran train traveler who assures you that those seats are, indeed, your seats, and the people in them will have to move! It’s harder to be assertive when you don’t speak the language!

So, Agrigento, and some of the finest ancient ruins in the world was one of our first stops. Huge temple ruins mark a place where Greek civilizations thrived at about the same time as the late Kingdoms of Israel. Massive structures were built without the aid of our modern building equipment (though you do see the remains of a rudimentary crane). All of it, eventually, came to naught, stones from magnificent temples were carried away to make homes for people who looked upon the former gods as oddities.

From the time of those “old rocks” as Gabi affectionately called them, three or four other major civilizations have influenced the Sicilian culture—Arabs, Spanish, Roman, and North African. There are memorials to those who died in WWII, and still traces of the bombing that even a place as remote as Southern Sicily was subject to. One thinks of the preacher in Ecclesiastes---vanity of vanities, all is vanity!

Then, if you’re looking down as you make your way along the path, you notice colony after colony of ants, toiling away as, I have to assume, they have since those ancient Greeks gathered in the dawn’s light to offer their sacrifices within the great temples, and then when the Moors and Muslims, and Christians traded blows. I thought of standing at the foot of the great Sequoias in California—trees that had stood in the same place since the time of Jesus—and wondering just who this world “belongs” to. Maybe more than anything, that we are most certainly sojourners at best on this good earth. We may build things we think will endure for al the ages, but it’s the ants who will be there when everything is said and done!

Take a breath, go to the tap and draw a cold, clean glass of water, and ponder that!