With Great Rejoicing!

Welcome to my web log! (blog) I hope that these entries will give you a glimpse into my world and the spirit I bring to my ministry. I write new entries every couple of days, so check out the archives and check in again soon. Looking forward to meeting you in person…

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Last night I partook in one of the great pleasures of church life: hospitality. My home congregation participates in a program that provides resources for homeless youth in Chicago. The average age of the homeless American, if I remember correctly, is nine years old. The community of my home congregation is in the seat of our country’s homeless youth population. If you are a teen who needs to leave an abusive household, been kicked out because you are transgendered, or have fallen through the cracks of “the system” for our children, Belmont is the place to be. A 24-hour neighborhood, one doesn’t stand out as homeless if you can keep yourself looking good.

So at our church, in the midst of terrible wind and wet snow, church volunteers gathered in our very modest kitchen. Sally made her mother’s ham and navy bean soup by the gallons. Cameron, Adam, Paul and I joined with Sally in making 150 sandwiches. We then met with the staff of the agency called the Night Ministry and learned more about homeless youth and some of the folks we would be serving. I have encountered homeless youth when I volunteered years ago at the National Runaway Switchboard as a liner, trying to hook them up with resources around the nation, or even a bus ticket home if the situation was safe and stable (rare).

Yesterday was such a dismal weather day. But to get into that kitchen just injected me with joy and gratitude. That kitchen was my point of entry into the church. I have always loved to cook, so I was recruited to strap on an apron and join the kitchen brigade for all-church events. In that simple act, I was drawn into church life. Hospitality, when I needed it most. I was out of college and scared about the vast future yawning before me.

What would I do with my life? (Chop carrots! ) What would I do when I grew up? (Learn about the inner workings and conflicts in the church while browning onions!) With whom would I share my life? (Come over to my house and help us make a tagine!)

So last night we made sandwiches and extended hospitality to one another by learning more about who we were. Then we went to the streets with the Night Ministry, serving up that hospitality. After most of the folks had gotten soup and sandwiches, I got the chance to mingle with folks. One man had just restarted the twelve-step program. He was homeless. He thanked us for the food. He said, “God is good!”

It is one thing to sit in a theology class and struggle with theodicy versus the benevolence of god. It is another to hear a homeless alcoholic man tell me that God is good. But church, along with other structures that care about human beings, is an agent of hospitality, of that goodness. God is good? In my book, our human hands and hearts have the choice to express that larger goodness that lies beyond our total comprehension. Hospitality is a path toward that greater good. And everybody understands it! Come in, sit, eat. Come in, sit, chop vegetables. Come in, sit, and be who you are. Come in, sit, and be nourished.

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a poem to nourish you today…

one of my very favorites

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“Love after Love” by Derek Walcott

The time will come
When, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Welcome to my web log! (blog) I hope that these entries will give you a glimpse into my world and the spirit I bring to my ministry. I write new entries every couple of days, so check out the archives and check in again in a couple of days. Looking forward to meeting you in person…

Today is a gray day in Chicago, the kind of day where we are reminded once again who has the upper hand in deciding on the weather. The spring limps along in the slushy, cold reality of March in Chicago. Would that April would come! Of course April, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, is the cruelest month!

Karate training today limped along. Many of us had trouble remembering our forms, partner work was sometimes strained in our frustration, and some of my fellow classmates are training with injuries that bring the art of karatedo to a whole new level of spirit challenge.

We have a phrase that we use in karate that you would hear all over our dojo: OSU! It is a contracted version of a much longer phrase which means, “striving with patience.” Osu is used in a number of ways..a greeting coupled with a bow, a reponse to instruction from a senior student, or an utterance similar to “Oy” or “Uff Da!” Osu is the reminder that we must keep our spirits focused and allow the clatter of the mind to fall away. Tighten the fist. Deepen the stance. Block the punch.

Osu translates into everyday life. As I prepare my sermons and anticipate worshiping with you, I resound my mighty Osu from the rooftops of the world å la Whitman. I breathe in, I breathe out, I wait. In the spaces between the breaths, I listen for what needs to be heard and focus. (And then drift to blogging!)

Of course, you are likely enjoying a sunny day today. But it may be limping along. I invite you to come up with your own phrase that will remind you to strive with patience. And if you are feeling grand, please do sound your barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world!

Osu!

Welcome to my web log! (blog) I hope that these entries will give you a glimpse into my world and the spirit I bring to my ministry. Looking forward to meeting you in person…

Your dear search committee asked me about my strengths and weaknesses. Perfectionism is a weakness of mine. It sounds like a great weakness to have, but perfectionism can wreak havoc on the human spirit. I still can look at a room and yearn to put all of the objects in right angles and symmetrical relationships. And perfectionism in terms of ministerial expectations is just plain crazy. Seminary (thank god) has beaten into me (in that loving & pastoral sort of way) the notion that we are not (thank god) perfect. In striving for perfection, am I not just serving my own ego, an idolatry of “the perfect?”

The joy of ministry is its imperfection. I get to be human. I get to be who I am, and you get to be who you are. And we need to tell one another when things are not going so swimmingly. Will they ever be perfect? No. Because (thank god) life is not perfect.

I spent my high school years listening to Ani Difranco, a brash, fabulous feminist folk singer. In one of her songs she writes about the risk of being real while in love:

when you’re pretty as a picture
they pound down your door
but I’ve been offered love
in two dimensions before
and I know that it’s not all
it’s made out to be
let’s show them how it’s done
let’s do it all imperfectly

I know some of you are concerned- will it go right this time? what if she isn’t the one?

Well, there will never be “the one.” But what we can decide to do together, is to do it all imperfectly. None of us are perfect, yet we have the ability to receive one another for who we are, with all of our guts grudges and glory. That is what a covenanted community gives us the right and the responsibility to do. Yet in our imperfection, we must still strive for excellency, for change beyond the horizon of our imaginings.

And we can serve this imperfect world together.

Today we celebrated the second day of spring in Chicago with six inches of snow! Springtime is always a time of great expectation here. It certainly is in our household as we prepare to visit with you again in April.

In Chicago, by mid-March you will see a few brave (perhaps crazy) folks in shorts and tank tops if the sun is shining. (Nevermind that it is 45 degrees outside.) Once the days grow lighter, Chicagoans pretend that it might actually get warm. People come out from their apartment caves and go jogging and play frisbee in the park. (Nevermind that it will not really be warm until June. And then it will just be doggone HOT until September or October). I am glad I get to meet some of you snowbirds before you migrate north again, to the land of four seasons. I do not think I will miss the seasons. I love hot weather- humid, wet, stormy, dry. I like it hot.

Andy & I head off to Davenport, IA, tomorrow to visit with his family. We will likely celebrate at the Unitarian Universalist church in Davenport. I know from our last visit that the minister will be glad to know of my candidating with you.

Enjoy celebrating Easter together, whatever Easter means to you. For those who suffer, the story of Jesus’ resurrection is powerful and inspiring. Ostara also reminds us of the fertile power and creativity with all of us, that we might take time to renew it, to resurrect it.

Blessings to you!

Allison

Today is a day for gratitude!  The sun is shining.  The ice and snow banks melt to create mud.  Daffodils brave the crusty soil and shoot up.  It is a friendly Universe!

In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins is loath to make any connections between science and religion.  His idea of religion, however, is not ours.  Religion, to him, is one of those taboo subjects that one cannot question.  And for many more fundamentalist sects, this is the case.  But ours is a religion that embraces ambiguity and mystery.  Inquiry is integral to our faith.  Science is a method of reverence.

 At the end of his book, Dawkins himself becomes reverent at the wonder of this friendly Universe that somehow created an atmosphere amenable to life.  Today I am grateful that Life just happened to be possible on this small planet, in this tiny Milky Way, nestled in an immeasurable quadrant of space.  

I am grateful for the mysterious turns of life that have given me the chance to meet you and hear your joys and sorrows about life on earth.  I do hope you find it a friendly Universe. 

A passage I love from Cosmic Evolution by John Elof Boodin (1869-1950) about human life and the grand scheme of things:

We do not understand, but somehow we are a part of a creative destiny, reaching backward and forward to infinity— a destiny that reveals itself, though dimly, in our striving, in our love, our thought, our appreciation.  We are the fruition of a process that stretches back to star-dust.  We are material in the hands of the Genius of the universe for a still larger destiny that we cannot see in the everlasting rhythm of worlds.  Nothing happens but what somehow counts in the creative architecture of things,  we fail and fall by the way, yet redeeming grace fashions us anew and eliminates our failures in the larger pattern.  The pangs of pain, of failure, in this mortal lot, are the birth-throes of transition to better things.  We are separated for a time by the indifference of space and by our blindness which particularizes and isolates us.  But in us in the longing for unity.  We are impelled by a hidden instinct to reunion with the parts of the larger heart of the universe. 

 Andy & I are delighted to be coming back to Fort Myers for a full-length visit with all of you, in hopes that we might join you.  The search committee has already been preparing the way.  Just yesterday we received a care package with UUCFM t-shirts for the both of us.  Included in the package were materials such as boating guide, arts information, and the bike path guide for Lee County.  

Guides in hand, there is so much to explore about you and the community.  I look forward to visiting the ocean, paddling canals, and cycling here and there.  But I also expect to learn more about you.  Candidating week is a time of questioning one another, much like how many of us develop our faith.  The questions are asked in good faith, as a way to become acquainted with one another. My focus will be on the following deceptively simple questions:

•  Who are you as a church community now?  
• Who do you want to be, i.e. what are your dreams?  
• What are the most important issues in our emotional and spiritual lives right now?  

 As we meet one another, I look forward to your questions.  Ask me about my theology!  Ask me about spiritual care and practices!  This is not a test, it is a conversation.  The only prize I might earn is your trust, and the opportunity to walk with you for some years and serve the community.