Friday, January 07, 2011

Holy Mourning

Living in a social networking world I think it is interesting that mourning continues to be a private matter. For the most part people don't know how to interact with mourners. The setting is akward and unfriendly. While working at DMH and even at UMCH I dealt with mourning in different settings. The first of course was in a hospital setting. Mourning happened and as an intern I glimpsed into the sadness of the world. Unfortunatley I carried that sadness around with me. Wondering when the last hug would be or the last meaningful conversation. I was not good at seperating myself from the grief.

At UMCH I worked with a different type of mourner. Since I was working with emotionally sick teenagers the mourning was more like a living state of being. These kids were stuck in a stage of mourning. Mourning their lives because they wern't 'normal'. Mourning because their mom's and dad's abandoned then, abused them, or ignored them.

As I was reading Winner's chapter on the discipline of mourning I found myself opening this discipline to all kinds of mourning. Mourning a lost job, a lost dream, a lost faith, a lost role, a lost identity. Winner recognizes that mourning is not a strong point of the modern day church.

The church is bad at mourning because, "while you the mourner are still bawling your eyes out and slamming fists into the wall, everyone else, understandably, forgets and goes back to their normal lives and you find, that you are left alone. You are without the church, and without a church vocabulary for what happens to the living after the dead are dead."(27-28).

The church has never dealt with mourning. Part of it is the way the church is structured. I know that our church has a commitee to organize funeral dinners, but beyond that, we are unequipped to deal with mourning. We don't have a follow up program, or a team of people who attends to the mourner.

The Jewish people were intentional about their mourning. While the mourner was struck by the shock of their family members death, the community came in and took care of everything. Everything seems intentional, even the mourner's process of grief. The mourner's "neighbors bring food. At the first meal after the funeral-called the seudat havra'ah, of the meal of recovery-the mourner is meant to eat an egg, whose obvious circular fertility is to begin the slow work of reminding the bereaved that she will live."(30)

The Jewish mourner has a calender which they stick too. The first week, the first month, and the first year. All these times are intentional for the mourner as they continue to seperate themselves from their loss and back into a more ordinary routine of life.

Through this year the mourner is required to say the Kaddish twice a day. The mourner cannot say this prayer alone, he/she has to be within the community.

The prayer is this, "Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, unpraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, Blessed is He, beyond any blessing or song."

The mourner is called to do the Kaddish so that "even in the pit, even in depression and loss and nonsense, still we respond to God with praise. This is not to say that the mourner should not feel what he feels-anger, disbelief, hatred. He can feel those things (and shout them out to God; God can take it). You do not have to feel praise int he intense moments of mourning, but the praise is still true, and insisting upon it over and over twice a day every day, ensures that eventually you will come to remember the truth of those praises."(36)

The church can learn a lesson or two from the Jewish discipline of mourning. We can start being more involved in the loss of our Christian brother's and sisters. We can start to admit that the loss of a person, a job, an idenity, a role, or a relationship can truly damage a person's faith. We can start being the community that can take a damaged person and help them find healing.

Let us not let the akwardness of pain and grief come between our love for the church.

Creation Returned


"'What happens when we stop working and controlling nature?" Moishe Konigsberg responds. "When we don't operate machines, or pick flowers, or pluck fish from the sea?...When we cease interfering in the world we acknowledge that it is God's world.'" (6-7)

I love this imagery. When we stop working, playing, eating, we become to a still sense that we are not alone. I found this when I worked for Decatur Memorial Hospital and Hospice. I would walk into patient's rooms and find a uneasy silence. Through being sick these people were required to stop. Stop working, stop eating, stop fighting, stop driving, stop everything that was ordinary in their lives. They were found dependant on other people where they had the chance to sit in stillness and review their lives thus far.

Whenever I visited hospice patients I found storytelling. My first visit was with an elderly women who lived in a assisted living community. She came to tell me her life story. Who she was married to, who her children were, how they came and visited for Christmas, who took care of her, where she used to live, what she used to do, how she used to serve within the church. This woman's struggle with the church was herself. She could no longer serve, take communion, attend weekly worship meetings. She felt her faith had teetered and was fading.

I found this need to tell stories was great within all hospice patients. The more you inquired the deeper the story went.

The first discipline that Winner discusses is keeping the discipline of keeping the Sabbath. Sabbath keeping was not a part of my upbringing. Actually 75% of my family was active on Sunday mornings within the worship band and by the time Sunday afternoon we were all exhausted. I heard about Sabbath keeping in college but I was in college. Discipline was not necessarliy on the top of the list, even though it should have been.

While reading this first chapter I kept coming back to creation. As Christians we are not required to keep Sabbath. We are not even commanded to keep Sabbath. However, when we choose to let our time point our lives to Jesus we have found Sabbath.

My preaching professor said it best, "Get to your calenders first." Often times we find we have no time for new things, like excercise, friendly dinners, family time, or date night. I think that is because we let our calenders ruin our lives. We forget to surrender our time to Christ. And the best part is that we don't even have to make up some new trendy way to surrender our calenders; the Sabbath!

The reason that we surrender our time is not so that we can be more productive or so that we can rest from our crazy schedules, but so we can recognize our stories within the Kingdom. We can have a chance at reflecting on God and who he is and what he has done. We have the chance to stop creating, to stop worrying, to stop consuming, and to start reflecting on creation and resurrection. We shouldn't wait until we are at the end our of our lives to recall and reflect. We shouldn't have to be forced into a stillness through sickness or loss to find our time is important and is fleeting.

As Christian we are called to live radically different than the world. Why don't we start with surrendering our time to Christ?

Thursday, January 06, 2011

Mudhouse Sabbath



One of my Old Testament professors recommended Mudhouse Sabbath my Junior year of college. I went to the bookstore and only found it on c.d. So I passed. Well about a month ago Waylon and I were in Barnes and Noble. We go there and walk around, even though we know that we can get any book for half the price on amazon. What can I say, we like the smell of new books.

While we were walking down the Christian spirituality section, I saw mudhouse sabbath. I was so suprised to see it in Barnes and Noble and I had to snatch it up. I started reading it while we were waiting on frieds at a restraunt and felt my soul stir.

The author, Lauren f. Winner, is a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity. The book is about 11 Jewish disciplilnes that she considers valuable for the Christian life. The introduction fascinated me, because she considers discipline essential to the Christian life.

Growing up I enjoyed lovely, and emotionally driven mountain top experiences. I felt on top of the world. I usually found these mountain top experiences at church camp, or at an emotional church service. I lived, and still live a chaotic, messy, and unorganized life. I would feel great for about a day and a half and then doubt would creep into my life. These days of doubt would be enforced by my own insecurities. Even now, as I have been making conversion decisions to follow Christ, I have had my doubts. I was called to quit my job and go back to school, and in that decision, I have worried about money, transportation, whether I am making the 'right' decision.

However, when I finally make the decision I feel wonderful. I actually did feel wonderful for about a week. I was on the Mountaintop! In that week I decided to go back the gym, to develop a discipline for excercise, housecleaning, and eating right. I also made a pact to myself to be a good wife, whatever that means. I felt wonderful. I felt like I could conquer the world and that Satan would fall beneath my 'oh so righteous' feet.

Then Saturday came, and I fell into a weepy mess. The reason I like Winner's introduction is because she finds "mostly [spritual practice/discipline] is about training so that you'll know the moutaintop for what it is when you get there."(xi)

I have always thought spiritual disciipline was for the wilderness times. The times when you feel lonley, desperate, in doubt, and full of insecurity. I figured if you could discipline yourself in those times that the mountaintop experiences would just be a break from your grueling disciplined life. Like going out for cake when you have good news. Or treating yourself to some new clothes when you get some money in the mail from a relative.

I just figured the mountaintop experience would be a chance for a bit of freedom from the discplined life. I have found however, that the disciplined life is supposed to be a life of freedom. We are called to followw Christ, to carry our cross towards our own death. We are called to a life of freedom from death and sin!!!!!

But, how can we even pick up our cross if we do not recognize what we are enslaved to? Discpline allows us to uncover our wonderful impulses. It allows us to find what we are addicted to and how to stop our addictions. It gives us the choice. The choice whether to eat the cake or not. The choice to spend the money or not. The choice to stay silent or to speak.

Discipline finds our sin and allows us to choose who to follow. Do we follow our impulses or do we follow our Lord?

And as I have grown, and gotten older, I have found a discpline for almost everything. Just as I have been reading in the Mudhouse Sabbath, there is a discipline for rest, a discpline for grieving, a discipline for body, for food, for spending money, for suffering, for speaking and staying silent. Wherever you start your discpline life you will not be disappointed when the Holy Spirit uses the practice to uncover more sin within your heart.

So, when I am atop the moutnain, I can feel free knowing that when I descend back into the lonley pits of misery I will be free.

Understanding Eternity

I have found Facebook extremely boring. I actually made a post about it the other day. There are just too many people, half of which I don't remember. But, today I got on facebook and started to look at pictures of families that made a huge investment in my life throughout the years. I looked at pictures of the communities they are involved in with now and how they are continuing to live within the Kingdom of God.

As I continued to look at pictures it would be very easy for me to get depressed and say, well how lonely am I know, I don't feel like I have community like that, I don't know of anyone who knows me like that anymore. But how can I get depressed when I see pictures of small groups, worship settings, and people feeling the impression of Christ. These families that have made an impression on me are continuing to make impressions of Christ on the people that they are surrounded by. Even though life has so drastically changed, these families have continued to run the race of perserverance.

They have not let change, death, sadness, frustration, or anger overcome their love for Christ. While these fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters have gone to college, moved, started new churches, they are still influencing and making an impression on me. I come to find a glimpse of eternity in these pictures because I see the Kingdom living. I don't have to feel sad or loneley because I get to spend eternity with these wonderful people.

I get a glimpse of understanding an eterninty that isn't boring, it is full of personalities, wisdom, love, and care. Eternity is not going to be a place where we have to sing all the time, and where we have to do it a certian way every week. Eternity is going to be full of people and that is the best kind of Eternity!