Drive-Thru Communion

Sometimes, as I'm hunting for a church home, what I really need is drive-thru communion.

This is what I mean by those words: I slip in just before the service starts, taking one of the aisle seats in the back of the church. Conversations bubble up around me, between people who have known each other for years; I stay silent. The service starts and I sing and pray with the rest of them, but I doodle during the sermon, and read the bulletin during the announcements. During joys and concerns I flip through the hymnal finding my next page.

When the time comes to pass the peace, I stay in my row. I shake hands with the people in front of me, behind me, next to me (if I'm not alone in my row). And then I sit back down, while the permanent parishioners wander in and out of every aisle, greeting everyone they know. At the end of the service, I slip out the side aisle. I shake hands with the pastor if there's not too much of a line, but otherwise I duck around the chatty folks and head straight for my car without stopping by the fellowship hour.

In short, I step aside from the community aspect of the service.

And I know this goes against everything that church is supposed to be.

This is not to say that I ignore people entirely. I greet people who pass the peace when they wander toward me. I smile at kids as they fidget in their seats or try to zoom past me after worship, the faster to get to the cookies. Lately, though, these brief interactions have been all that I can handle. Since coming to California I've been looking for a church home with varying amounts of success. I know I'm not alone in this. Juggling life transitions and coming into Most of my friends graduating from college have experienced something similar—in the midst of a church that's changing, and in the midst of a life that's changing, it can be exhausting.

For me, it's been tricky to make sense of what church means to me now, as an adult and not a child, as a wife and partner and not an ecclesiastical free agent. I've supported my partner in faith transitions and struggled with my own call to ministry. And I've stumbled into churches that were on the verge of collapse, found myself in the middle of turf wars that I didn't know how to fight.

I was tired. And so I took a "church sabbatical." I prayed the psalms alone in my room, and slept in Sunday mornings.

Source: khrawlings on Flickr

But after a couple of months of that, I started to get antsy. I started to crave the bread and the wine, the words and the music.

Learning about the Reformation and different views on the Eucharist, I remember hearing that this gathered community was one of the things many reformers insisted upon. A priest saying Mass alone in his room, they said, was not really Mass at all. If the bread and the wine hold meaning, if they hold something I need, then the gathered community is part of what gives them that very meaning. How can I come to be filled by the bread and wine but stay on the sidelines of the community?

Here we pray some prayers I've never heard before, and some I'm starting to forget—my tongue tangles on the words I used to know by heart. And for other prayers just hearing them makes me feel like I've come home. "O God, our times are in your hand," I say, along with everyone else, while the birthday boy in a Transformers t-shirt scuffs his feet and trying to pretend that he's too cool for this blessing, with a smile flashing toward his eyes that belies his devil-may-care attitude.

I am part of community. I am held and I am welcomed. Even if I can't handle the next step right now.

That gives me hope: drive-thru communion is only a resting-place, it is not an end. It's not a place I intend to remain. Two years into this church-searching journey, I have some idea of what comes next: saying a shy hello to someone who looks young or friendly or welcoming. Wandering over to the fellowship hall, standing around the edges of conversations already begun, sipping my tea. Perhaps then I'll move to sitting down at a table, starting up a conversation of my own. This starts to open up the scary parts of community—being accepted, accepting, getting ready for expectations and the possibility of hopes broken or denied.

Right now those are still far off.

I'm dipping my toe into the waters. And if I stopped here, planned to sneak out the side exit every week—I'd be missing out for sure. But for now I remind myself of the feast that waits for me. I got up on Sunday and came to church. I received the bread and the wine, I sang the Gloria and the Doxology. I received the peace from people I've never met. Maybe my body will remember, next week or the week after. Soon I will come home.

***

This post's been sitting in my queue for several months now... because by the time I revised it and got it ready to post, I realized it didn't quite apply to me any more. Drive-thru communion has slowly been replaced by coffee hour chats, potluck brunches, even Lenten soup suppers. I'm starting to talk about "my church" again. But I'm still thankful for people who welcomed me into the back pew and let me take things slow. And I hope in our conversations about the exodus of young adults from the church, we can make space for wanderers like me.

Singing the Refuges: Worship and the Interreligious Family

Source: Thoradin, via Wikimedia Commons

About a month ago, just like every Sunday, I slipped into the worship space just before 10am, bowed before the altar, and found a seat in the back row. I leafed through the service bulletin to take a look at what songs we’d be singing that morning. And after a few brief announcements, I joined in singing the morning’s first song.

I’m no stranger to “church-hopping.”  This was in many ways a familiar process for me. But on this particular Sunday, things were a bit different than I was used to. When I bowed to the altar, I faced not a cross but a golden statue of the Buddha. The song we sang was not a Christian hymn, but a chant.  This was my first visit to a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist temple, alongside my Buddhist/Christian husband, trying to make sense of our family’s interreligious identity.

Read the rest of this post on State of Formation!

Valentine's Day, Ash Wednesday, and the Lover-God

Happy Valentine's Day, all! I hope you're reading this with a glass of wine in hand and a box of chocolates within arm's reach...

Image via Stewart on Flickr

...unless you gave up chocolate for Lent. In which case you may be cursing the calendar that placed Valentine's Day right after Ash Wednesday this year.

The juxtaposition of these two days has got me thinking about the the tension I find in "celebrating" this season of penitence: the tension between sin and grace. Though Lent has only just started, already I've had countless conversations in person and online that reveal this tension. What are you doing for your Lenten discipline? Are you giving something up or taking something on? Are you choosing a discipline of asceticism and self-sacrifice, or whimsy and creativity, or compassion and service?

Valentine's Day certainly seems to push back against the self-sacrificial side of Lent. Today is a day about love, to be sure, but it's also a day about indulgence. Just think of the images surrounding this holiday: kids bringing home boxes full of Valentine cards and candy, lovers surprising their beloved with roses or chocolate or a fancy dinner. A stark contrast to yesterday's Ash Wednesday tradition, where many of us smudged our foreheads with dust and remembered our own mortality.

I have to admit, I like Ash Wednesday. I like the idea of original sin. And by "like" I mean "experience." I am a person made of dust, a finite creature who tries to do right but more often than not gets tripped up by laziness or fear or social structures. That's one of the most valuable insights I've learned from the Lutheran tradition: every time I show up to a Lutheran service and join the community in confessing "that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves," I feel the ring of truth in it. Just as I feel the ring of truth in Ash Wednesday's proclamation: "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." 

On the flip side, this emphasis on sin and self-denial can go too far. For instance, Amy Laura Hall points out in this article from a couple of Lents ago, that many women are already encouraged to deny themselves. They already internalize enough of a message of their own inadequacy. Eating chocolate, rather than giving it up, could be a reminder of God's overflowing grace: 

As a Lenten practice, in order to habituate toward the mean of temperance, some women, and perhaps some men too, might need to eat exactly what they fear, but should love, in order to open themselves to God’s blessing in their student kitchenettes.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian

Part of finding the balance between God's grace and our nature might be to remember that being dust isn't such a bad thing. My friend Beth points out that from a scientific perspective, we're made of stardust - the stuff that makes up suns and galaxies. We may be flawed and finite, but we have also been created with ultimate beauty and potential. 

I find another token of hope in the work of Sallie McFague (which I'm reading for a theology class right now, and it's blowing my mind just as much as it did three years ago). McFague looks for new metaphors that can represent God's relationship with the world. And one of those metaphors is the lover, the one who loves not in spite of but because of who the beloved is.

Lovers love each other for no reason or beyond all reasons; they find each other valuable just because the other person is who he or she is. Being found valuable in this way is the most complete affirmation possible. It says, I love you just because you are you, I delight in your presence, you are precious beyond all saying to me. In the eyes of the beloved, one sees a different image of oneself: one sees a valuable person. Perhaps for the first time in one's life one realizes that one might be lovable: to see with the lover's vision is to see oneself as lovable.

If God loves us as deeply and as truly as a lover does - ashes and all - maybe that love can help us see our own potential, our own beauty.

So this Valentine's Day, and this Lent - however you plan to celebrate - may you know God's love that sees you as you are, and loves the dust in you.

On writing, conversation, and public faith

How public is your faith (or lack thereof) on the Internet? According to a recent survey, most folks in America may espouse some sort of religion, but you wouldn't know it by looking at their Facebook or Twitter.

I recently read an article at Good Letters (a Christianity+art blog) by a regular contributor who keeps his blogging quiet at work:

Simply put, four years and seventy-six posts since this blogging gig started, I am still something of a closet Christian around friends and colleagues who don’t know this side of me, or a mealy-mouthed one around those who do.

The author of this post is a screenwriter, and he feels it might be detrimental to his career to publicize his faith in a largely secular industry.

I find myself reflecting on this as I start my new program as a MA in religion at Claremont School of Theology. I'm entering a program of Christian study at a Christian school. So far in my blogging life, what I write has flopped back and forth between explicitly Christian stories and pieces more about the writing/creative process. As I dig deeper into my studies here, Jesus may start showing up in my posts more often.

Photo via Claremont Lincoln University

Is that going to alienate my audience?

How public of a Christian do I want to be?

On the one hand, I want to write about what I love. I am passionate about stories, in all media—writing, music, film. Religion fascinates me, in part, because of the web of stories it represents: tales told and retold since ancient times, tales that have served as frameworks for people as they live their own life stories. And in the end, I do believe that my story makes more sense when written between the lines of this great Story. I believe that the story of Jesus is a story worth sharing.

On the other hand, I don't want to abandon talking about art in ways that are not explicitly religious. Maybe that's what the screenwriter meant: he didn't want to be typecast, pigeonholed, written off as a "Christian" writer who only writes a specific type of film. I don't want my writing about art and creativity to suffer.

I also can't deny that writing has consequences. Christians have a reputation for talking over other people, especially in this country where Christianity is often considered the "default" religion. That same Story that has changed my life has been used as a weapon. The last thing I want is for my words to contribute to that pain in any way.

So what do I do?

I've been doodling versions of this question in the margins of my notebook throughout my first few weeks at CST. For those of you who don't know, in the past couple of years CST has begun a Claremont Lincoln University, a new school dedicated to bringing together scholars/practitioners of all faiths and none, to learn from each other. CST is the Christian partner of this new consortium. I'm still in Christian-specific classes, but my core courses are shared with people of all different backgrounds.

This means that I'm in class with Muslim and Jewish and humanist students, as well as Christians—prospective scholars and ministers of many traditions, not just one. Here my fellow students and I are not asked to hide our faith or try to pretend it doesn't matter to our lives. Rather, we are encouraged to claim our own faiths proudly, while talking with others with different beliefs in a spirit of respect and friendship.

CST/CLU's whole experiment is rooted in the belief that this is possible: that interfaith conversation is sustainable, and that claiming your story in that conversation can be not a hindrance but a help.

If it's possible at school, it may be possible for me as a writer as well.

One could say this is part of my responsibility—what I can do as a Christian in a world where Christianity shouts loudly. Because if progressive Christians on the Internet keep quiet about their faith, then those who disagree with them will be the only public voices of Christianity that anyone ends up hearing. Can I be a public Christian who tries to listen and participate in conversation, rather than talk over people of other faiths? I certainly mean to try.

As for keeping my passion for creativity in my work--I hope I'll be all right. Because from my vantage point, faith and creativity aren't disconnected at all. It's not just the stories of my faith that I find inspiring, it's the faith itself, what it says about who I am and who God is. The God I believe in created the world and called it good, and created humans with the gift and responsibility to create themselves.

Plus, I bet Jesus would find plenty of things to geek out about, if he were here today. And I'm not just talking about gossip about his marital status, either.

So I'll keep studying, and writing, and trying to co-create. I'm excited to see what conversations the next two years have in store for me!