On Being Still…

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Advent, church, consume, God, presence, quiet, resources, still, stress, the Lord, time, watch

Photo credit:  https://www.atonementfriars.org/second-week-of-advent-in-home-retreat/

One of the things I regularly try to teach and model for our family and parish is the value of reining in consumerism during Advent.  It is so easy to get caught up in all the things we want to get our loved ones – creative, funny, thoughtful gifts to show our family, colleagues, and friends how much we appreciate them.  But too often we spend too much, straining our budgets and our emotions instead of creating the spirit of joy giving the gifts intended.

This Advent, I have noticed the same pull happens with our time during Advent.  Between shopping, work parties, school-related events, performances, and community events, we could be busy from sunup to sundown every weekend in December, not to mention weeknights.  Just this past weekend in our town, there was a parade in the morning, events all day, a boat show in the evening, and fireworks on the second evening.  There is a constant invitation to allow our time to be consumed, just like there is an invitation to allow our financial resources to be consumed.

So this past weekend, we chose one thing.  Just one out of the four or five things we wanted to do.  And you know what happened?  Nothing!  We reveled in the one event, savoring and enjoying it.  And then we rested.  We came home and trimmed the hearth, spent time together, and took naps.  It was glorious!

Every year, the church invites us into a quiet, reflective Advent.  Every year it sounds awesome.  I get devotions, or activities to center the family, and about half-way through Advent we fizzle out because we are so exhausted from the running and stress.  It wasn’t until this year, having taken the quieter weekend option that I realized what the church (and yes, even me from the pulpit!) has been inviting us to do.  Be still.  Keep watch.  Take rest in the Lord.  Not just for an hour on Sunday, but the whole of Advent.  How might you make space this year, say “no” to a few things, spend less, and just be still, alert for the presence of God acting in your life?  I suspect if you do, your new favorite season might just become Advent!

The gift of role models…

Tags

anxiety, gifts, glorify, God, non-anxious, role model, stress, tension

This Saturday our parish has its Annual Fall Fair – a festive gathering with vendors, food, children’s activities, raffles, and other fall merriment.  We are blessed with an 11-acre property, so the event is a wonderful way for us to welcome people to our grounds and remind the community that they are welcome here.  Having done this event for so many years, most of our parishioners know what needs to be done – signs, publicity, donors, coordinating vendors, setting up the property, making baskets, bringing in donations.  The list goes on.  But even though we all know what needs to be done, there is usually a bit of anxiety and stress to make sure the event is a success, especially in the week leading up to the event.  As someone who can become easily stressed, I totally understand the reaction.  Though I am not involved in the execution of the event, I always empathize with our parishioners as the tension builds in this final week.

But this year, something has shifted.  I do not know if it is due to their personalities or if they are being intentional in their behavior, but our co-chairs for this event are being the epitome of a non-anxious presence in the community.  Don’t get me wrong, they have had plenty of reasons to become anxious: several key volunteers are unavailable this year, leading to some out-sourcing; the vendors are coming in a little more slowly; and we are trying some very different, new things this year.  But the co-chairs seem to be rolling with the punches, creating solutions, and keeping their cool.  And although the church is abuzz with activity, I sense that the non-anxious presence of the co-chairs is rubbing off on others.  People are doing their assigned tasks, and there seems to be much less tension going into the event.

It is in moments like these when I am grateful to be in a community with a wide variety of gifts.  Being a non-anxious presence is one of my primary goals in my role as pastor and priest in this community.  I feel like that action alone reduces challenges significantly and enables the body to live out its ministry in a healthy and God glorifying way.  But being non-anxious takes work and intentionality, and some days I exude that calm better than others.  This week, I am grateful for parishioners who are serving as healthy role models, and who invite me to live into my call in a more healthy way.

Courtesy of http://collegesoup.org/2011/03/31/reducing-college-test-anxiety/

Light at the end of the tunnel…

Tags

gift, God, joy, stress

I am traveling this weekend for a friend’s consecration as Suffragan Bishop and for a week of spiritual retreat.  Because my daughter is traveling with me and spending the week with her grandfather, the logistics planning has been a bit of a nightmare.  At points over the last two weeks, I have been longing to just get there and be done with all this chaos.  The trip itself is sort of the light at the end of a dark tunnel of details.

courtesy of http://www.dudelol.com/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel

How often we do this with any sort of getaway.  We spend so much energy getting ready for the trip – settling details at work and at home, packing, and securing plans for the trip – that our time in the present is a bit of a blur.  That has been my reality lately.  In the midst of my tunnel of details, some pretty incredible things have been happening.  In the last week alone, I met with a group of aspirants, considering a calling to ordained ministry, I watched my daughter perform in the end-of-year concert at school, I went to my daughter’s first musical, I celebrated a fantastic year of service from our devoted Altar Guild, we recognized our choir for all their hard work this year, I finally met the first rector of my parish who has shaped the lives of so many of my parishioners, and I spent some time with a couple preparing for marriage.  Add to that a date night – the first one my husband and I have had in about six months – and it has been a pretty fantastic week.

I wonder how often we do this in life.  We get so caught up in the routine, or our full schedules, or our worries of the day, that we forget to see God at work in our lives, blessing us abundantly.  That tunnel of darkness can create tunnel vision.  Our eyes become so focused forward that we miss everything around us.  But God is in the midst of everything around us, beckoning us into a life of joy and celebration – a presence of mind that can recognize God’s presence.  Though I am very much looking forward to this coming week, I am especially grateful just for today.  I am grateful to God for the abundant blessings in my life and grateful for the God who has enough patience and grace for a busybody like me.

If you have spent much time with me, you may have noticed that I begin most of my prayers with these words, “Gracious God, thank you for the gift of this day…”  Today, I am trying to live into that prayer, being grateful for each and every day God gives me.

Reflections on the Storm…

Tags

anxiety, Christ, grace, hurricane, love, serve, stress, suffering

I have been pondering for the last ten days what to say about the experience of Hurricane Sandy.  I think I felt overwhelmed because I knew that my experience was not as bad as thousands of others in our area.  My experience felt superficial somehow, as if I did not earn enough credit to have something to say about all of this.  But what I realized these last couple of days is that although I cannot speak for places that were utterly devastated by this horrible storm, I can speak for what life has been life for the rest of us, tied to those who are suffering more while suffering ourselves.

As background, we lost power for seven days.  We have a fireplace (although it took us several days to secure wood) and we had hot water.  But we did not have heat, the ability to cook, or the other conveniences of electricity.  We had filled our cars with gas before the storm, but we knew we had to be careful about the number of trips out of the house.  We also have a three year old daughter.  We had several trees fall on the property, one damaging the church, but mostly we were spared significant damage.

Over the last ten days, several reflections have occurred to me.  First, I used to work with Habitat for Humanity, and in our work there, we told personal stories of homeowners to potential volunteers and funders.  I remember telling stories of families whose only heat source was their gas oven, who could not afford their electric bill and just went without power, or whose children suffered in school because of poor heat, comfort, and nutrition at home.  I told those stories and my heart broke as I imagined the faces of each of those homeowners.  But I had never experienced those realities, especially as a parent.  As we struggled this past week to warm our child by bringing her into our bed; as I slept by the dying fire (making sure to avoid accidents), realizing that although my body was warm, the frigid air around my head was keeping me awake; or as I found that despite my two layers of clothes, long robe, and a blanket, I still could not keep warm during the day, I began to see those Habitat stories in a whole new way.  There are neighbors who suffer this pain everyday, and yet we are blind because they are hidden in homes we do not notice, in sections of town we do not frequent, or in coworkers whom we do not know well.  Despite our suffering for seven days, or the continued suffering for people up to ten days so far, there are people who live this suffering everyday.

Second, there is a way in which the varied experiences of a disaster make you feel like that if you do not suffer in a particular way, your experience of suffering is not valid.  You feel shallow or weak or insensitive for complaining if your experience is less burdensome than others.  And in a way, I think that is appropriate.  We should always be grateful for our blessings and recognize that there are many ways in which things could have been worse for all of us.  But stifling our pain for the sake of honor others’ pain has begun to feel corrosive to me.  Despite the fact that my suffering or even the suffering of my parishioners was milder compared to other areas of Long Island, our suffering is still hard.  The experience of long periods of cold, of worrying about the health of yourself and your child who cannot stop coughing and wiping running noses, of worrying if the mental health benefits of getting out of the house are worth the anxiety of the uncertain gasoline situation, of feeling cut off from the rest of the world, of worrying about those whose suffering is worse, of being frustrated about not being able to reach those without power to see if they are okay – all of that takes a toll on the psyche.  And even when we got power a week later, about half of my parishioners were still without power.  So any sense that things just go back to normal is false.  The frustration of just wanting to get back to work without the ability to get back to work can be overwhelming.  It was not until the snow hit and the schools closed yet again that I realized how much of this emotion and anxiety I have been stuffing.

Finally, I have been struck by the overwhelming ways in which this storm has brought out the goodness in others.  My parishioners have been running extension cords across the street to share power with others.  I observed all of us talking to one another more – learning more of each others’ stories – caring more about the welfare of each other.  People without power themselves have bent over backwards to make sure my family was okay.  Friends and parishioners have taken us in for hot meals and for washing laundry or for simple camaraderie.  People long to help others even when they are suffering.  There is a sense of abundance in the face of devastation.  There is joy watching a toddler find creative ways to entertain herself.  And the outpouring of love from all over the region is even more overwhelming.  I have felt like that wall that keeps us from sharing Christ with one another has been decimated, and Christ is found all around us as we love and care for one another.

This last week and a half has been an emotional rollercoaster, and the end is not necessarily in sight.  I ask that you pray for one another.  I ask that you seek and serve Christ in all persons.  I ask that you love and give yourself grace the same way that you are loving and giving grace to others.  And I ask that you remember the ways in which you are opening yourself to others and not to forget that new way of being when we finally do get back to “normal.”