Outside the walls

A few months ago I overheard my husband counseling a friend who was going to accompany us to a party thrown by a bunch of my colleagues in anthropology.  “You don’t have to worry with them,” my husband assured our friend, “anthropologists are interested in everything.  Watch, whatever you say they’ll find it interesting, they’ll talk about anything forever.”

It’s evidently what makes us quirky party attendees or hosts, but I like to think that our curiosity as anthropologists is also one of our best qualities.  We find the world more interesting, more beautiful precisely because of diversity and difference.  Life is more intriguing because of culture, because your corner of the world doesn’t look talk, or act, like mine.  And yes, I could talk about those fascinating differences in culture, well…forever.

A foster mom in Anhui, China embraces her foster son. Photo by Jason Fouts.

On the last day of the class I was teaching at the seminary this semester, when I felt like I’d earned the right to speak a little of my own passion into my students’ lives, I challenged them to believe that they might learn just as much about God outside the Church walls or the seminary campus as within.  I asked them to dare to believe that pushing their faith to include, behold, embrace, and learn from people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds–pushing their faith to be real outside the Church might actually make it deeper, more powerful, and more poignant.

You see, I think that while it’s human to be curious, it’s also human to be really freaked out by difference.  And when we Christians get skittish, we often take a lot of the beauty and truth and goodness that God has blessed and made and called good and try to cram it into our manmade boxes.  I think good theology and good anthropology teach us to do just the opposite (like reminding us that Jesus blew the chains off women, tax collectors, diseased men and women, and prostitutes,  and included us Gentiles in salvation) (or anthropology that shows us how insightful, productive, and healthy cultural differences are), but we humans also like to be in control.

Anyway, I said these things to my students not only because they’re my truth but also because the next generation of spiritual leaders just might be our politicians, professors, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, non-profit managers, prison wardens, and community organizers.  A friend of mine had a conversation last week with a faculty member at the seminary who said her greatest concern is that we are preparing seminarians for jobs and a world that doesn’t exist.  A few days later, that same friend asked me whether I claim my Christian faith in community and what that means.

Being introduced this fall by my professor at the university for a presentation. Photo by Evan Schneider.

And I realized for the first time in years of discerning and seeking and praying that I can say that I’m “out,” for lack of a better term, in my department at my university, as a Christian, a minister, a person of faith, and it finally feels right.  My colleagues happily introduce me as their resident pastor, they call on me for counsel in difficult situations because they know I’m not afraid of the messiness of life, and they even appreciate being told they are prayed for.

But it doesn’t just go one way–these same colleagues hold me accountable when I begin to complain or gossip, they counsel me through life’s big decisions, and they rejoice and grieve with me.  Both these experiences close to home and those afar of being ministered to by those supposedly outside the fold have taught me that the Spirit isn’t limited to the walls of the Church despite our unconscious, subversive efforts to confine it.  The prophetic isn’t limited to God-fearing people, and Christians don’t have a monopoly on Truth.

A temple in Luang Prabang, Laos. Photo by Ben Robinson.

Perhaps this is where my anthropology meets my theology so nearly, neatly, and dearly–in the enmeshing of the sacred and the profane in the everyday lives of people in culture, relationship, and meaning-making.  Real salvation is transcendent in that it seeps out of our pores to touch everyone we meet and everything we do.  And so I think theological education has to change to respond to not only this reality, but this Truth.  It has to equip all these people who are going to be outside the walls of the Church institution, and who will be ambassadors of faith and hope and love in this world.

I look around and I value and am inspired by both forms of leadership, service, and ministry–those inside the Church and out–but I believe the Church and seminaries have often been focused on internal ministry at the expense of the external, and our lives are lived, made, and redeemed in the everyday.

A Lahu church congregation in Yunnan, China. Photo by Evan Schneider.

Thanks for letting me talk forever and ever this morning about what I really find interesting in this beautiful, strange, sacred world.

P.s. You may notice the blog has a new look.  About time, right?  Everything’s pretty much the same except some of the links are to the right and on the bottom.  Thanks for stopping by and let me know what you think of the facelift.   —Erin

What it means to be a child of God

Yesterday the minister stood in the pulpit putting plainly the state of this world, from attacks in Boston and Syria, gun violence, earthquakes in China, and buildings collapsing in Bangladesh, and the words rippled and reverberated like aftershocks through my fragile heart.

And on top of all these things, the passage for the day (John 14: 23-29) was one in which Jesus speaks about leaving his disciples and the world behind.  At a moment of great uncertainty not unlike this one in our own world, what must it have felt like for the disciples to hear that Jesus was leaving them far behind?

Sure, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit and peace, Jesus says, “I am going away, and I am coming to you,” and Jesus urges them to not let their hearts to be troubled and to not be afraid.  I’m sure they felt like very empty words and promises to those left behind.  There are times when the most brilliant, comforting words feel hollowed out of all holiness, because life has delivered such a bitter blow.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus sends his Holy Spirit to advocate and to teach, and leaves a peace that’s unlike the hollow, bitter circumstances of our lives.  I’m sure the disciples didn’t realize it at the time, but Jesus’ leaving, his death, would unlock for them a new identity, a whole new life.

I feel like I’ve been picking on Tanya Luhrmann a bit lately, but she’s right about this: being a child of God makes all the difference in the world.  When darkness enfolds you and nothing in the world speaks of grace or hope or beauty anymore, it is an enormous truth to know that we’re not defined by this world, but by God.  We’re not only created in God’s image, and children of God, but we’re being made new.  We are new creations in the midst of destruction, desolation, and brokenness.

As the minister spoke this Sunday he encouraged us to reflect on the grandeur of the gift of peace.  It’s been said many a time that peace isn’t the absence of war or violence or pain, but the presence of God in the midst of these things.  But I think it’s even more powerful to reflect on what a gift peace is and those in our lives who give us this holy peace and not as the world gives.

The minister spoke of peace as what allows you to keep your footing in the midst of the tremors.  Peace is the people who sit beside us, taking deep breaths with us when even breathing feels like work.  Peace is companionship and grace and abundance in a world of scarcity.  But most of all, I think peace is the eternal Spirit that allows us to marvel at ourselves as children of God even when the world is crumbling.

Amen.

God behind the scenes

A few weeks ago a well-known anthropologist whose most recent book is about how evangelicals hear God speak came to campus.  It was pretty thrilling to hear scripture read in the lecture hall where I’ve given fieldwork proposals and heard anthropological theory, and it was exciting to see my colleagues take seriously questions of faith and practices of prayer.

But seeing as how evangelicals are claiming to hear God speak into their lives, and this has prompted Tanya Luhrmann to develop a new theory of the mind, in which people of faith train their minds to hear voices outside of their pysche, friends and colleagues eventually did ask me whether I hear God speak, audibly, as well.

Spring on the Princeton campus.

I don’t really.  Not audibly.  No burning bushes…yet.

Sometimes, in fact, I don’t feel God at all, and I wonder if I’m “doing it all wrong.”  If my faith tells me that God doesn’t draw lines between sacred and profane, like anthropologists, but that the Holy Spirit is in everything and everywhere, then why don’t I hear God speak like my evangelical friends?

It probably has something to do with my prayer practices, as Luhrmann has posited, but it also probably has something to do with God’s great, unchangeable nature, a theology of waiting, and God’s work being not only life-changing, but counter-cultural.

I’m not contesting a God who speaks–the Bible gives us plenty testimony to that effect, but I’m attempting to testify to a God who also speaks in the silences, in the pauses, through others, and behind the scenes.  Did you ever wonder what happened in between Moses and God’s holy rendezvous, or Peter’s visions, or John’s breakfast with Jesus?  Oh yeah, that’s right, the Israelites built a golden calf, Peter’s faith failed him in God’s darkest hours, and John and the others were straining to see the future of a movement that had lost their leader to death on a cross.

But God, God hadn’t forsaken them.  God was behind the scenes.  And so, even as the Bible tells the story of God’s relationship with God’s people, our humanity makes us gravitate toward the loudest voices, the greatest triumphs, rather than the trials, the silence, the humility, the work behind the scenes.

Water lilies in Kunming, China. Photo by Evan Schneider.

What God does behind the scenes, however, is great, too.  When we release ourselves to both God’s on stage and off stage work God subtly equips us in ways that go unnoticed until we find ourselves in our times of greatest trial, need, or joy.  God’s work is not always showy or attention-grabbing, but if you look for it, it’s everywhere, in the little acts of kindness and justice that people lend to one another without fanfare or media blitzes, but with great humanity and care.  There were handfuls of people healed in the Bible, whom Jesus had humbly go on their way, while he continued his own humble journey to the cross.

I’m not suggesting that the God who speaks to you in prayer isn’t the same one that heals in secret, prays for us with sighs too deep for words, or equips with patience and diligence.  Quite the opposite– they are, miraculously, one and the same.  And yet, it’s simply clear why the loud, thunderbolt one gets our awe, astonishment, and praise.

A view of Cairo, Egypt. Photo by Evan Schneider.

For me, God, especially of late, is more behind the scenes, subtly, yet faithfully equipping, and speaking through those around me in voices of care, concern, and affirmation.  I imagine that God was very much behind the scenes those horrific hours after the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon.  I pray deeply that God is behind the scenes for families in China who struggle to care for special needs children, or for places where bomb blasts are the stuff of everyday life.

For me, knowing and believing that God is behind the scenes is the hardest part of faith and prayer and life.  But it can also be the greatest comfort to find that even when God isn’t speaking, God is always there, behind the scenes.

Holy everything

Nearly a week has passed since Christ rose from the grave, since we celebrated Easter with trumpets and sunrise, communion and hallelujahs, feast and fanfare, and I still feel resoundingly full.

It’s not just the ham that’s still in the refrigerator or the earnest celebration of new life that felt so different from the traditions of revering the ancestors and sweeping the ancestors this time of year in China.  In fact, it’s the same story, from my youth, of Jesus riding in triumphantly on the donkey, of black Friday, of brutal death on a cross, and an empty tomb.

Nothing has changed in the Biblical story, so how do I account for what feels so different, so breathless, so heavy, so alive about Easter this year?

First signs of spring on the Princeton University campus.

Last Sunday as the pastor stood in the pulpit, she reminded us that for Christians, we have no tomb, no cross, no holy place, hill, mount, or edifice to go to pay homage to Jesus, but that we ourselves are the embodiment of the resurrection, the Living Stones (1 Peter 2), the Easter people.  There are no holy places and so in resurrection, we are made holy people.

But our pastor also stepped off a white-cloaked altar into the sea of faces dressed in their best that morning and invited us to share our joys and concerns like we do on ordinary Sundays.  We were reminded that in earnest celebration there is still loss, and fear, and pain.

I think it’s this fact that accounts for the fullness of this season for me, the fact that the communion we take symbolizes not only life, resurrection, and the miraculous, but human brokenness, betrayal, and violence.  Likewise, the Easter story we celebrate leaves the women and the disciples not only full of hope and promise, foreshadowing the incredible growth of the church in history, but also anguished by the death of their savior, and bewildered and fearful at the sight of an empty tomb, a dwindling faithful, and an impossible truth.

This Easter I’m reminded that God doesn’t change, but the resurrection changes us, often and endlessly.  

C.S. Lewis wrote, “I pray because I can’t help myself.  I pray because I’m helpless.  I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.”

We don’t become Easter people in a flash, jubilant and freed from this world, but we become Easter people when holiness leaves the altar, the cross, the tomb, and steps firmly into our midst and settles into our bodies and life rhythms.  Our circumstances don’t necessarily change, we still look like the flawed people that we are, but we become Easter people when our hearts, our eyes look upon this world and find everything holy.  We become Easter people when we behold what is holy in one another as though we are making a pilgrimage to somewhere sacred, because the Kingdom of God is here, in you and in me.  We become Easter people when we stop parsing what’s God and what isn’t and relish that the Earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.  We become Easter people when death is always with us, and yet, we experience life anew.

We become Easter people each time spring and hope return to a desperate world, and we’re left full, changed, and holy.

Your life starts now.

A month or so ago I heard an academic who’s written well-respected books, gotten tenure, traveled the world, and shot films say if she had it to do all over again she would have realized that her life wasn’t waiting to start after the dissertation, after she graduated from associate to full professor, after she got tenure, etc., etc., etc., but in fact, “your life starts now.”

This phrase isn’t just relevant to the academic world where we trick ourselves into thinking life and all that is good is marked by dissertations and tenure-track positions, but in all vocations, and the ministry that happens betwixt and between.  The words of those faithful brothers and sisters from my church this past weekend, proclaiming that they’d always been a church made me think about my own ministry, and the ways in which, I’ve always been ministering.

Now it doesn’t always look like archetypal ministry, but I’m guessing yours doesn’t either.  I’m guessing most ministry happens in snippets and soundbytes and sewers, not in pulpits and with pastors or priests.  We minister wherever we are and with what we have to one another, and the efficacy of that ministry isn’t dependent on our education, our status, or even our resources, but rather our reliance on the Spirit.

Sonoran Desert, Arizona.  All photos by Evan Schneider.

But there’s another lesson in counter-cultural living, right?

Sometimes when people ask me what I’m really going to do with my life, when I finish these Ph.D. studies, or what the dream job I’m really aiming at looks like, and I can’t answer them, I feel afraid, embarrassed, and anxious.  But I’m learning, slowly but surely, to be so grateful and so secure in what God has given me in this life and who God is that I can live without certainty about the next step or a linear trajectory, and yet with great faith that God will provide for me and for others and nurture my call.

When my mother took me with all my heart problems to Mexico with the youth group in high school, she had reason to believe she should leave me home.  But if she had, I wouldn’t have felt the Spirit move in my heart in a familiar way but toward unfamiliar places, calling me to ministry on that US-Mexico border during college, and to Puerto Rico, Washington, DC, Princeton Seminary, China, and Princeton University.  My mother showed me first what it means to have faith in who God is rather than yourself, someone else, or logical processes and trajectories.

Yong River. Guangxi, Nanning.

Living as though your life starts now often appears irresponsible, because the steps of your path are connected by the movement and provision of the Spirit rather than your own professional progression or enrichment.  But when you realize how much you’ve been given by that Spirit, how faithfully that Spirit has provided, and how meaningful it is to surrender the control we delude ourselves with, you get really grateful, glad, and confident.

So I’m learning when people ask me that snarky question, so what are you really going to do with your life? to smile with blessed assurance and to say confidently, “this is it, I’m doing it.”  There’s ministry enough for all of us if we can just find a way to live by the guidance of the Spirit, to live as though our lives start now.

I’m not busy.

I had a week off from teaching last week, which I’d made plans to fill with rest and dissertation-writing.  And then people started showing up in my life in tears, in shambles, wanting to talk, and asking for my help.

Sonoran Desert, Arizona. All photos by Evan Schneider.

In some ways the hardest part of these conversations wasn’t the real suffering in the midst of this world, but the ways in which each person couched their requests with, “I know you’re just as busy as the rest of us, but…” or “You must be so busy, but…”  But the fact was, for once, I wasn’t all that busy, I had space and time, more ample than in any other week, to listen, to soothe, to pray, to drive someone around.

I was so grateful to God for filling that break with ministry, for using my time so much more wisely that I would have, and it’s led me to think whether this “I’m not busy” thing could become a way of life.  You see, I started to like the way the words felt on my lips, the way the extra time, space, and the whole mentality made me a more careful listener, a more gracious friend, and a willing servant.  In the end, I’m pretty much convinced that there are only two ways to live this life: “being in control,” which amounts to swimming desperately upstream, kicking ferociously against all that we’ve been given, or well, going with the flow.

Paddling on the Yong River, Guangxi, Nanning.

What’s so interesting is that we, in all our foolishness, often call this gasping for air and feverish kicking, living.  We call it busyness with self-important sighs and cluttered calendars, and we trick ourselves into thinking that it’s some pinnacle of achievement.  But when we retreat to our homes and our families and our friends who actually know us, we find that “being in control” is inordinately heavy.  These calendars and commitments– they weigh us down, sapping the life out of us, one forced smile at a time.

These past two weeks, I was forcefully reminded that I don’t want to be in control of my life, because God has other plans.  As people of faith, we are invited to experience the opposite of control, we’re invited to feel weightless, in that we’re to collect burdens for one another and cast them all onto Jesus.  Of course, it’s an idealistic vision of this life, but it’s true–it’s what God wanted for us.  We Christians are so passionate about ridding the world of sin, but perhaps it’s no wonder that feels so heavy and so busy and so burdensome when we take it all upon our shoulders.  We hardly have hope of weightlessness when we’ve become so competitive about who’s carrying the heavier load.

Now it’s possible you’re reading this today and you’re feeling out of sorts, because I’m talking about lightness and your load is heavy: you’ve got three mouths to feed and two jobs, or family members facing cancer and death, or uncertainty and pain in your marriage, or children doing drugs and hurting themselves in heartbreaking ways.  I’m not in your shoes, and I can only imagine how hard, unjust, and stressful any and all of those real life situations can be.

But I’m also not hoping to turn being available, open, and free (like being busy) into a competitive sport either.  The fact is, if you’re working two jobs because you’ve got three mouths to feed, or your thoughts, prayers, and time is with a family member who’s sick, a spouse who needs you, or a child, life probably is pretty heavy right now, and you’re probably right where you should be.  In fact, what I’m proposing is an economy of mercy, where we who are choosing to be busy and distracted, stacking up appointments and zillions hours of work a week, might hear and honor the people in front us who need us in these real life moments.  And someday they’ll do the same, and we’ll all be a little more aware that we need Jesus and forgiveness and grace, and that’s the stuff life’s really all about.

Sonoran Desert, Arizona.

For me, one week of really not being busy turned into a second week of believing it.  Many times when I said, “Oh I’m not busy,” people didn’t really believe me, and at first, it felt awkward and trite.  They thought I was mocking them, which is sad, because even when I was full of joy I think the reason they couldn’t believe me is because we’ve all made connection and caring and time slaves to our schedules.

But I kept at it, I kept believing that God had brought my friends to me and God was going to be faithful to worrying about those details of scheduling, dissertation writing, lesson planning, and proposal writing, if I could just be present with that person in front of me.  And I could tell that my friends knew I meant it at some point, that it wasn’t that I’m not busy, that I don’t have things I could be doing, but that I was exactly where I wanted to be, and that when we’re there for one another, this world gets a little bit more graceful and that little bit is God in us and with us.

Hiking in the desert wash.

So I’m proposing a mini-revolution of sorts, a big screw you to the idolatry of calendars and appointments and modern life, and an invitation for you to tell someone this weekend or this coming week, “I’m not busy.”  They may not get it– after all, you may be the busiest person they know, and probably then it will mean that much more.

But the best thing will be that when they see that you’re really serious about not being busy, that you’d rather listen to them than do anything else with your time, they’ll not only feel free, but so will you.  You’ll find that God is faithful to carry all our burdens and so much more, and somewhere along the way, you won’t actually feel busy anymore.  Even though you still have a million things you could be doing, you’ll feel so miraculously weightless, and best of all, you’ll find God leading the way.

The resurrecting in between

I remember that moment in my college studies when it was pointed out to me that history was hardly static and that periodization, the act of splicing history into reasonable, succinct bites, necessarily altered the meaning of those events it sought to contain.

Mind blown.

The stories of our own lives, our own journeys, are told and retold.  We re-imagine the significance of certain events in light of others, and every once in awhile we feel blessed to look back and see what we believe to be the hand of God.  That type of perspective is other-worldly, not because God only blessed us with bite-sized intelligence, but because God and life only lends each moment with bite-sized grace.

If you’re like me, you try to gobble grace in bigger bites.  You get really gluttonous and really greedy, and you think you could live life a bit better, certainly more faithfully, if God would just give you that kind of landscape, big-picture, historic panorama vision.  I feel like this most of the time.

All photos by Evan Schneider.

And then there are the days when I sit in silence and listen for God, and I know, fully and with great freedom, that these seasons that supposedly lie in between that we all feel, these days of waiting, these are God’s, too.

I know this because other faithful people around me confirm it and live it, and they struggle, too.

I read a line on facebook the other morning that said, “Perspective: Abraham waited 25 years, Joseph 13 years, Moses 40 years, Jesus 30 years. If you’re in a waiting season, you’re in good company.” 

What a comfort to know that we’re not the only ones who wait and wonder and…stumble.

Just the other day I mentioned to a professor that a paper I’d written and been proud of had become a stumbling block toward developing my dissertation.  The realization of the fact was freeing–perhaps I could now move forward.  She responded differently, jubilantly, with a line I’ve never heard or thought I would, “Oh that’s good, stumbling blocks are good!” she purred.

We can’t really learn anything if we don’t stumble, but we’re also remiss if we think we’re bound for a life where we stumble no more.  This morning a friend of mine told me that after a loved one died, she was told there’d be suffering, followed by healing, followed by victory.

We began to muse together that, what if while we’re stumbling, while we’re waiting, there is also resurrecting?  What if what’s in between is victory?  What if this moment isn’t between what’s next, what’s holy, and what’s God’s, but this moment accepted, embraced, and faithfully swallowed is grace incarnate?

On Wednesday I wrote that the world seems so full of saturated with pain and heartache lately I feel as if it would burst.  If anything, over the last few days the messiness of life has started to seep out of those seams with even greater gravity.  And if you’re like me, despite the above revelations, at moments like these you’ll continue to yearn for God’s panoramic vistas, you’ll be tricked into trusting in your own powers of perspective, into concluding that victory is a sham and resurrection fleeting.

But all the while you’ll have been looking to the horizon, to the mountains, onward and forward, when God was right beside you offering a hand, a shoulder, and rest for your weary head.  Friends, look around–you’re in good company, you’re already victorious, you’re being offered a sliver of grace.

So don’t miss the resurrecting in the waiting, the stumbling, in the seasons between.

Why we pray

Sometimes it seems as though the world is so saturated with pain and heartache and disease and fear that it might burst.  

It’s in those moments that we put our hands together, we bow our heads, we bend our knees.  If we’re honest with ourselves, sometimes we do it less out of faith and more out of desperation and perhaps a little bit out of habit.  We go to God to find solace from the scary world, to test that God is still there, to cry out to someone who we want so boldly to trust, cares.

If you’re like me, you may have circles of friends who aren’t people of faith.  Do you pray for them, too?  Do you tell them?

The Giant Buddha on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. All photos by Evan Schneider.

Despite my shoddy track record as an evangelist, I almost always do.  I almost always tell them that I’m thinking of them, that I’m praying for them, and of course, being a former seminarian, I’ve wondered a bit about the theology in all that.

But I’m pretty sure God doesn’t.  When we’re on our knees and lifting our friends in prayer, it isn’t theology that grounds us, but the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit doesn’t merely speak the language of Christianity or faith, but the language of the heart.  So the language of the heart tumbles out of us, knowing no boundaries, no colors, no sects, no creeds.

When I’ve told my friends who aren’t people of faith that I’m praying for them, I think they’ve found it meaningful, perhaps even more meaningful than those in the church.  They don’t have to be Christian to know that interceding for someone is the work of desperation, habit, and perhaps a little bit of faith.  They do it, too, in their own ways.

As I read this little book by Anne Lamott on prayer these days, I am reminded how simply prayer is about communion with God.  I like how she believes that honesty before God, all of our anger, frustration, and fear, can actually lead us toward, rather than away from God.

And I wonder if we in the Christian community have spoken too often about what prayer isn’t, so that we’re hardly left with anything that prayer is.  The funny thing is, my non-Christian friends want to pray, too.  They sit there before a meal, waiting on me to bless it.  They ask me when and why I pray.  In fact, they’re not nearly as skittish about prayer as we Christians are sometimes.

And what if I leveled with them?  What if I told them that I don’t pray because I have great faith, I pray because I need great faith?  What if I told them, I pray to hear my own voice saying that God is there, because sometimes I myself have a hard time believing it?  What if I told them that I pray because I simply wish I could feel God a bit nearer all the time?

When it comes down to it, I do believe that God meets us in prayer.  But I also believe God intercedes when we don’t have the words, that God hears the prayers that ruminate in our minds whether we choose to speak them or not, so that prayer is not so much about what God is or isn’t doing, but our need for God.

A pagoda peeking out over the trees in Hong Kong.

But when the doors to the church are shut so tight, I’m pretty sure those outside can’t see that we’re actually just a bunch of needy people, people just like them.  So this morning, I’m praying for friends, Christian and non-Christian alike, and I’m praying for God to shine brightly through my cracks, my weaknesses, and my neediness.  May it truly be God who is glorified, praised, and honored…in prayer, in life, inside the church and out.

Fallen limbs and crevices

It hasn’t been a particularly harsh winter here in New Jersey.  I suppose it never is when you grow up in Wisconsin.

I hadn’t been out to one of my sacred spaces–the Delaware Raritan Canal path–much since Hurricane Sandy passed through these parts in October.  When my husband and I walked the canal path on New Year’s Day, I kept thinking of a friend of ours who took a walk with his toddler through the streets the morning after the storm.  When his son asked what had happened to the trees and if someone was going to fix them, he didn’t have the heart to tell him that the uprooted trees, the cracked bows, and the bare stumps were now a permanent part of the scenery, and that trees are breakable, fragile, and mortal, just like you and me.

Some local damage after Sandy. All photos by Evan Schneider.

As I run on these slightly colder days down the path and my eye takes in these changes to the scenery, I think of how hard it is for we as humans to accept such destruction, and what kind of fear it drives into our hearts.  Suddenly as we look at the world around us, we feel everything’s brittle, nothing is for certain.  The bare insides of great trees are marked by great scars, and some of the loftiest, burliest ones plummeted in the storm.

If we can hardly trust that the same tree bows that framed these lovely paths won’t crumble above us, in what can we trust?  Is there no permanence on this earth?

Snow in Princeton, NJ this winter.

My generation’s experience of such vulnerability is marked not only by storms (we’ve seen some of the greatest destruction done by tsunamis and earthquakes in our time), but also a terrorist attack on our own soil.  Shortly after 9/11, I read an essay by Rabbi Arthur Waskow in which he preached the scary truth that what the attacks taught is that not even the steel towers we stretch to the sky can protect us from destruction, heartache, and pain.

Waskow reminds us,

There are only wispy walls and leaky roofs between us. The planet is in fact one interwoven web of life. The command to love my neighbor as I do myself is not an admonition to be nice: it is a statement of truth like the law of gravity. However much and in whatever way I love my neighbor, that will turn out to be the way I love myself. If I pour contempt upon my neighbor, hatred will recoil upon me. 

When my husband and I walked that path on the first day of a new year, I grimaced at the branches laid bare and broken around us.  He remarked that animals and insects had found new homes in their fallen limbs and crevices.  Yesterday when I ran along the canal waters, the geese jubilantly honked at me and took to flight, their bulbous, awkward bodies somehow capable of both buoyancy and soaring into the skies.  Later a bluebird fluttered alongside me and took shelter in one of the tattered trees.

Fall on the D&R Canal, Princeton, NJ.

Life buzzes amidst the changed landscape with an audacious, oblivious vigor.  Where we see scars and imperfections, animals and insects make their homes.  Death will eventually give birth to new life, and yet, how we remove ourselves from this interdependence!  How we seek to believe that if we just build bigger, better towers, stronger, sleeker fortresses, we can insulate ourselves from the pain, the destruction–the humanity of it all!  

When we let fear drive how we live, we seal ourselves off from one another, from the fragility, yet also the incredible resilience of interconnectedness.  We forget that the lessons from nature, the way she rebuilds with the scarred timber, the tattered landscape something even more beautiful, are demonstrative of the fact that we need one another more than we know.

Summer on the D&R Canal.

What if we accepted the fact that we can’t do anything to protect ourselves from storms and began to worship vulnerability rather than permanence?  What if we found salvation in the new life springing from brokenness and accepted brokenness as our common bond?  What if we found our strength in a God who offers us not permanence or immortality or insulation, but deep vulnerability, interconnection, and communion?

Advent and Breaking In

My husband and I attended an Advent service on Sunday evening: candles were lit, we sang “This is Christ the King,” and there were repeated prayers that God, hope, and power would break into our lives this season.

Stones for the foundation of a church in Yunnan, China.

For some reason these words, these prayers for “breaking in” caught my ear.  As I’ve ruminated over them the past few days, I’ve come to see that there’s inherent violence to the language, the request, and the action: we’re asking for God to shatter our present reality and its comforts and even our sense of justice.

In reality, being broken into is a terrifying experience: I recently retold a story to family and friends about a time I awoke at four am in a strange hotel room in Yunnan, China to see a hand reaching out of the curtain towards me!  And brokenness, the type our God suffers on a cross all because we could not receive him as King, is the shattering of bones, spirit, and blood.

So why do we pray for brokenness?

I think while we ask for our worlds to be turned upside down, we’re often a lot more like Herod in the Biblical story than the shepherds who make their way to the manger.  We don’t like to think that when threatened we’d come up with some power-hungry, violent plan to preserve ourselves, but the flesh in me questions just how open, how cognizant, or how hospitable we might really be to a new order, a new truth, a baby King.  

Something tells me we’d be more likely to go kicking and screaming to the manger, if at all.

Sometimes I went kicking and screaming to the people I came to know in China.  I resented that my time had to resolve around them, I got hungry and tired walking from house to house, from field to field, and I dreaded those hours of buses and trains with little sleep or comfort.  I tried to put up walls that would preserve my sense of control, my time, and my culture.  Because to me, the Chinese life felt incredibly inconvenient and uncomfortable at times, and I didn’t want to let my sense of culture, right and wrong, or justice be disrupted by their messy worlds.

P

But in breaking is a lot like living in China, I think.  

It’s the opposite of convenient, because it’s revelation where God doesn’t ask us to give way–God simply shoves us and all our convictions aside.  I saw a meme this week that said, “the world needs a stable influence,” but as long as we think of the stable as stabilizing, quaint, or even hygenic, we lose sight of the meagerness of the manger, the upheaval of nations and kings wrought by it, or the savior that made his way into the world only to be rejected, broken, and burdened by our sin.

It’s not that this season isn’t about joy and hope and power–the Christ story is ultimately a story of redemption from sin and evil when all seemed to be lost.  But given what God has done, I’m not so sure we need to pray that God breaks in.  Instead, I wonder if our prayer shouldn’t be that God make us willing and able to recognize and receive revelation, inconvenient as it may be, or seemingly out of place in a season we’ve chosen to decorate with candles and Christmas.

Bringing the water buffalo home for the day in Yunnan, China. Photos by Evan Schneider.