What Makes you Grumpy?

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Holy Wisdom Monastery just outside Madison. This is a unique ecumenical community that shapes its life around the disciplines of Benedictine community. Located on a hill overlooking Lake Mendota it provides a beautiful and spirit-filled retreat from the pace or life.

The elements of Benedictine spirituality include five central practices: Prayer, Study, Recreation, Work and Hospitality. It is the last one that I wondered about as I joined the sisters for lunch in their newly completed building, with beautiful open spaces for worship, prayer, and reflection. In the Rule of Benedict it is written, “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: ‘I was a stranger and you took Me in’ (Mt 25:35). And let due honor be shown to all, especially to those ‘of the household of the faith’ (Gal 6:10) and to wayfarers.” I wondered how this new building was affecting the community, and the delightful woman next to me, wise with years, said, “It makes me grumpy!”

It was, of course, the friendliest “grumpy” I’d ever heard, and her partner in community explained more patiently that the new space provided them with the opportunity to truly practice this fifth practice of hospitality. They could greet worshippers who joined them on Sunday mornings, and sponsor things like the art exhibition that was spread in the entry way. More people were finding them, and not surprisingly new potential for programs was constantly bubbling to the surface. But all this change has a definite effect on a small group of people who had lived together in a certain way for several years. Things aren’t where you put them, there are people where there once were spaces, and sounds where there was silence. I thought of the poster that hung in my room as a boy, of Linus, hugging his blanket: “I love mankind…It’s people I can’t stand!” They make you grumpy!

Evangelism is a very popular word in churchy circles these days, usually referring to the need to get more people into the pews on Sunday mornings. Programs abound to attract visitors, and you could attend seminars from now to the end of the year on strategies for getting them to stay. What we too seldom admit is that as much as we may long for more people to share in the work of our congregations, new people are inconvenient. They don’t know when to stand and sit, they don’t realize you want to sit in that pew just behind your best friend, and if you take the time to greet them you just might miss catching up on the latest news.

The fact of the matter is that practicing true hospitality is a challenge to community. Systems theorists wisely note that the entire group is different if a single member is added, and every relationship in the web effected. It’s simply not possible to say that you like things the way they are and that you want to welcome new folk to your table. They will make you grumpy! That, I suppose, is why for Benedict it had to be a Rule, and one, by the way, set well into the other disciplines of community and not the place you start.

I suspect the first real key of “evangelism” is to recognize that we are called to hospitality precisely as a way of challenging the cosy, comfortable ways that we’ve grown into. It is intended to shake us up a little, pushing us to patiently uncover the ways in which the “other” makes God present to us, and no how we make God present to the “other.”

If you’ve been reading here a while you know that Sarah Miles’ book, Take This Bread has played an important part in my journey this past year. She knows something about how real hospitality transforms community, and not always in the most comfortable ways. I leave you with a story from the book…a reminder that the real impetus of being church lies not in how well we insulate ourselves from the world, and welcome others in, but whether we find the courage and openness to let that world make us just a little grumpy as we, and it, are changed by God’s amazing, incalculable love for us all:

From Chapter Four:

One evening in St. Gregory's kitchen, after everyone else had left, I heard a confession from a pantry volunteer, who'd brought me what she said was a 'secret' in a shopping bag. She had a cast on her leg, and kept looking over her shoulder anxiously, and she made me close the kitchen door. Her boyfriend, who beat her up regularly, had been threatening to kill her, she said, swallowing hard.

"I thought, this is a church, it'll be safe here," she said, unwrapping a dirty dishtowel from around a huge .357 Magnum revolver. "I took out the firing pin."

That's what church was for, I realized: a place to bring the ugly, frightening secret you couldn't tell anyone else about. I checked that the gun was disarmed, and stuck it in a cookie tin in a locked closet beneath the pantry shelves. I didn't mention it to anyone from the Sunday congregation. The woman moved away, to stay with a sister in Sacramento. A month later I did tell Steve.

"You must be kidding," he said.

"Isn't this what church is for?" I said.

"Uh, yeah," said Steve. He looked scared, and like he wanted to laugh at the same time. "Whoa, that's a really big gun." We drove down to the local police station, and I walked up to the officer on duty. I was wearing a crucifix and a fairly respectable sweater. "Excuse me, I found this in our churchyard," I lied. "Can you please take it?"

There's nothing like being a middle-aged white lady, I told Steve as we drove back. The cops had gathered around the officer who unwrapped the package. "Holy shit," said of them. "Excuse me, ma'am." They passed it around, gingerly, and let me leave after I insisted I didn't want to make a report or get a receipt. "Can you imagine if we'd been two black teenage guys walking in with that?"

"You just made the high point of my career as a parish administrator," said Steve. "I never imagined I'd show a cop something that could make him say 'holy shit.' "

"Yeah, well," I said. "I guess this is what you call the Christian life."

The Grace that Leads us Home

Charles T. Hein was the younger brother of my father, and one of the exotic birds of my childhood that flew in occasionally from far away lands, and just as quickly flitted off. Two of my father’s siblings found their way into international mission work: Uncle Chuck and Aunt Gaby in Africa, and Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted in India, and so the life of extended family when I was growing up was something like a Russian novel, with pages and pages of rambling set-up punctuated by flurries of activity when one or the other, or on the oddest of occasions, BOTH were “on furlough.”

Dad was clear that I was not “named after” Uncle Chuck, and indeed was insistent that my true namesake was Charlie Priest, whom dad had met in work for the Polio Foundation, and went on to build a solid career with Goodwill Industries in Milwaukee (Mom always equally insistent that I not be called “Charlie” but “Chuck”!) Still, Uncle Chuck stood tall in my childhood imagination, always nearly hyphenated with Aunt Gaby, whose gentle manner and lilting French accent provided such a marked contrast to the rough and tumble Hein way. Uncle Chuck was a man of ideas, of vision, one who would engage as 12 year old in a serious conversation and respect what the child had to say. You saw the Hein in a patience that could be quickly tried, and a perfectionism that could be exasperating, but in Uncle Chuck it seemed always tempered by a broad acceptance and easy manner that I came to associate with “the African way.”

Uncle Chuck was strong, and active, so as news of health issues started to surface it was hard for me to take it all too seriously. It was Uncle Eugene’s Facebook post of his visit that got me to thinking seriously about the need to this time take the roll of the exotic bird, and flit my way down to Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, and light on his bedside. Shorn of excuses of my own busy-ness or professional responsibilities, I could do that most un-Hein-like thing—leave without knowing exactly when I would return, to spend time with no greater purpose than to be together with loved ones.

The Chuck I met as I came to his hospital room was a stark study in contrasts. His mind and spirit were every bit as strong as I ever remembered. His voice quivered a bit under the oxygen mask, but still carried graceful authority. But his physical frame was diminished and diminishing. In hours of conversation spread over four days we moved from branch to branch, two odd birds, sometimes talking about Africa, sometimes the perils of the church in today’s world, sometimes remembering his childhood, sometimes reflecting on basic theological doctrines from incarnation to grace.

It was in one of these conversations, as Uncle Chuck remembered a time of study at Hartford Seminary in which he was first introduced to the theology and spirituality of Orthodox Christianity that we lit on the Lord’s Table, and the sad impoverishment of Reformed theology that resulted from a diminution of the place of the Saints in the life of the community of faith. So strong on the Word, we sometimes lost track of the Sacrament—the visible sign of an invisible grace.

As I’d grabbed what I thought I needed for the journey days earlier my book of Occasional Services and my bible had nested into the front pocket of my computer bag, and I wondered if we might find a time to make that invisible grace visible. Gaby whispered the question to Chuck as we were leaving on Saturday night: “Do you think you would like to have communion?” “That would be lovely!” And just as quietly, Gaby approached her pastor after service on Sunday morning. “Charles was wondering if you might be able to come and share communion with us.” Lovely, indeed.

Monday morning was set to be a difficult moment of transition. Dan and Karen had arrived, and the doctor was to come first thing to clarify just what this move to Hospice meant. The doctor was so blessedly kind and direct. That diminished body had reached as far as it could in this world. There would be morphine patches, and Chuck would slip away. Lungs scarred by dolomite in the Masai lands of Kenya could no longer sustain him. Chuck understood, and held Gaby’s hand firmly. It was time to trust in God.

Pastor Tom came not long after the conversation was ended, and the doctor, with a hug and a tearful smile went to write the orders. Setting bread and cup neatly in order, he invited us to share just what it was that we were coming to table with and for. Chuck spoke of his ordination, and of the deep and abiding sense of God’s presence that filled him. He talked of the privilege of breaking that bread and sharing that cup himself, and leading the people in remembrance. Gaby shared of her delight in the journey, and Dan of how this table had become for him a place of reconciliation and peace. I recalled a story of my mentor, Bruce Rigdon, that for me has always made the table a place where the saints are gathered.

And we prayed. And we supped. And I cried. This exotic bird, who had come in and out of my life at such odd intervals was now to fly on ahead. The nurse came in and affixed the patch, and I went out of the room to compose myself, wash off my face, and try to find equilibrium. As I looked in the mirror, at that face that mirrored so closely the one lying in the bed a few feet away, it occurred to me. That exotic bird was now taking flight once more, but if I listened carefully, I would still hear his song. And that song, mixed, and purged, and purified by the chorus of the saints, would, indeed, lead me home.

We are blessed, aren’t we? By those who share our journey…as much by those who cut us as by those who mend us? We’re all sinners, trying to make our way home, every now and then given hints, in a morsel of bread, a sip of wine, that there is so much more to this world than it lets on to. Uncle Chuck prayed me out of that room, though right now I am afraid I cannot remember a word he said. Within 24 hours, he’d made his passing; quietly, peacefully, I am told, with words of psalms and thanksgiving on his lips.

What a gift to share the hours I did, to be so powerfully reminded of the God who holds us most firmly when He seems the furthest away. What a gift, to share bread and cup, and know that each moment dwells in eternity, and eternity in its fullness is to be found in each moment.

Was it William Blake who wrote it? “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “Well done, good and faithful servant…enter into the kingdom that has been prepared for you!”

Too comfortable?

About the time that things were coming to an end at Memorial I had a conversation with Ed White, the consultant from the Alban Institute who had come to Appleton in January, 2009 to lead our annual Officer’s Retreat. It was Ed who first provided the “frame” around my experience, suggesting that in anxious times congregations sometimes mistake personnel shifts for the systemic work that needs to be done in order to maintain the health of the community, while anxious leaders can sometimes personalize the conflict, allowing what are systemic issues to grow into a challenge to their leadership. It was helpful at the time and still rings true today.

In the course of that conversation, Ed pointed me toward a book I am quite certain I would never have picked up in other circumstances. The Forgotten Ways, by Alan Hirsch, is a probing critique of the ways in which the mainline denominations have or have not dealt with the unique challenges of the 21st century—a topic near and dear to my heart! Hirsch is an Australian, and according to the back cover blurb, he is “the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network. His experience includes mission and church planting to the marginalized as well as leading at the denominational level.” That denominational grounding for Hirsch is Pentecostal—not a tradition that would normally have drawn me in, but Ed thought it was an important book, and so I read.

At the core of Hirsch’s analysis of the growth of Christian movements is what he calls “Missional DNA”, and for the most part the book is a fleshing out of just what this “M-Dna” is. It might be worth a series of reflections on what this is all about, but what pushes my pen along right now is the closing chapter on “Communitas not Community.” One of the central ideas he works with in this chapter is “liminality”, an idea he borrows from anthropologists to describe the way in which most cultures have rituals that push young people beyond the walls of the community before they receive them in as adult members (think in terms of Native American “Spirit quests” for example). It is understood, Hirsch explains, at the limits of our comfort zones that real growth takes place.

The problem with so many congregations in the 21st century is that they seem committed to avoiding the uncomfortable or unpredictable places where any real growth can occur. The sentence that struck me was “equilibrium is a precursor to death.” (The italics are Hirsch’s.) Striving for institutional survival, instead of adapting to the environmental changes and threats in the world around us, leave us literally defenseless. Hirsch has the church as institution squarely in his sights for the majority of this book (and I admit that as I read and appreciated his critiques I was never quite able to understand what might take its place that was not just another iteration of an institutional church) but I think he deserves a lengthy hearing at this point:

“In so many churches the mission of the church has actually become the maintenance of the institution itself. This was never Jesus’ intention. Our goal in organizing as a people is not to set up, preserve, and maximize an institution over its life cycle, but to extend God’s mission into the world. Our primary aim is not to perpetuate the church as an institution, but to follow Jesus into his mission in the world.”

I’m not ready to jump ship just yet, but I do think we need to take a good long look at just what it is that we are working so hard to maintain, and just what the relationship is between the astounding Good News of the Gospel and what it is that churches are about in this world. I suspect that if it does not draw us beyond our comfort zones, if it does not challenge too-easy community with a transforming and radically inclusive communitas, if it sees the fundamental dynamic of mission to be pounding the world into a church-shaped mold rather than allowing ourselves to be molded into whatever shape God might need in order to bring light and leaven into the world, then whatever it is that we are about will ultimately be frustrating and frustrated.

Here’s my guess for today: the church God is calling us to be in the 21st century will be found in the messy in-betweens of the world and the church, and not in the hard and fast walls we manage to construct between the two. It will be as we engage in the crisis of our identity, and walk out into the wilderness, that we will begin to see the outlines of the new thing God is doing in our midst. And, if my wager is correct, the result will not be a church-less society, but rather a society in which the church has grown into its own as a tool of God’s saving work.