The Mirror

One of my favorite movies is Big Fish, a movie rich with colorful images and thoughtful metaphors - but a film that is mostly about myth and the stories that we tell to interpret our lives as individuals and communities.

I have been doing some reading in psychology lately and I was reminded of the pragmatic truth (and perhaps philosophical as well) that there is no reality, only perception.

Put another way, we write our own stories as we can tell the stories of our lives by overlaying these details with the deep meaning of our profound experiences.

I found myself telling a priest recently that my job-hunting process was yielding such fruitful results, even as I have not yet come across the right fit yet. I realize that the factual incidents that brought me here could be seen as data - or they could be seen, and are best seen, as part of a story.

My story, like your story, is still being written. If you are like me, your story is one in which you have unintentionally made wrong turns, done embarrassing things out of ignorance, and remained blind to the very plain truth always in front of you.

I talked a bit with a close friend the other day about these times where I have been very human and made many mistakes. I used the analogy of feeling like I had missed the train - made mistakes and otherwise screwed up opportunities - all the while being aware of the ticking clock of life that says that one does not have forever to wait around for the next one.

My friend offered that if you miss the train, there is a bus following behind that will take you on a different route, but you'll end up in about the same place. He also reminded me that God's watchfulness and guidance hovers over us like a cloud, even if we mistakenly (or intentionally, for that matter) run out from underneath it through our own ignorance.

And should we do this again and again, this loving cloud always quickly reroutes itself to cover us again.

This type of concrete guidance makes the difficult struggle of job hunting and discernment not easy, but worth it.

Perhaps the best part of the process has been my meetings with many clergy of a variety of denominations, listening to their stories and the stories of their churches here in the Puget Sound area. I have been energized by many of them and what they are doing. More than this, I have been captivated by their own stories of their call to ministry and how these came about - how they made these choices to serve the Church in a full-time, professional way, and how they took this call seriously.

In this search, I also happened by a helpful website from the vocations office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, that outlined a few "signs of a call". (Obviously to an exclusively male, celibate, Catholic priesthood, but still very much useful.) One question I found very piercing was this: "If those who are called don’t respond, how will our faithful people receive the Eucharist in the future?"

One could substitute Eucharist with just about any type of ministry to which one can be called.

I am reminded in this question of Romans Chapter 10 . . . How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?

Every now and then, one has the opportunity to meet an individual who not only has answered God's call, but who is deeply gifted with a surprising ability to see and tell forth. I had the rare good fortune to encounter this type of pastor today. I've only met a handful of these, but it seems like when I do, they have very important truths to share.

He told his story, and, with different language but familiar ideas, spoke of the sense of not just internal call, but the external call that culminates in ordination, bringing conclusion to the discernment process.

And then this pastor listened a bit more to my story, and then held up the mirror.

A friend of mine tells me that priests are those who hold up the mirror and gently ask you to look deeply into it to see yourself as you truly are . . . and, I would think, to also see the potentials of who you might be in Christ.

As I tell my story, and others listen to my story, I feel as though I am beginning to hear what that story is saying more and more clearly each time I share it.

And as the mirror is held up to me, I pray for courage.

Just feeling it

Last Sunday night, I had an opportunity to hear Rob, a priest from the UK, speak at Church of the Apostles, a congregation known for its attractiveness to 20 & 30-somethings and its postmodern, emergent structure and risk-taking. The priest was speaking about a new initiative in the Church of England called Fresh Expressions, exploring unorthodox ways of doing church to reach out to those people for whom traditional types of church seem irrelevant or otherwise uninteresting.

I took several things away from the conversation that evening. First, that church planting here may far more resemble missionary work overseas than more typical ways of starting new churches that perhaps attract people who are more familiar with terminology and church lingo, having some history in the church.

When hearing in particular from Rob, this missionary (or "pioneer") priest as he called himself, he spoke of sitting down all morning in a local pub after praying and walking through the neighborhood, asking where God would have him go. I asked him, "How do you know that it was God who led you to go to this place?"

Two answers came back. The first from the pastor of the Apostles congregation, who said very matter-of-factly, "You just feel it!" The second was from Rob who said something like, "I pray that God would show me where to go, and then I trust that God has guided me to the place I'm drawn to. I trust in God's work and not my own efforts."

Earlier last week, I had a conversation with a UCC pastor, when I asked him about how he knew it was God calling him to be a pastor and not his own ego. He remarked that his own father had asked him the same question, and the conclusion he came to was that it was both his own ego and God who led him in that direction - but it took him a long time to get to that place of the dialectic- arriving where he found truth to be.

Yesterday at a job interview, I was asked questions about my own journey and how work for this particular congregation may fit into that place - they asked me where I was, and the only thing I could offer was that I was in a place of discernment. Much of me wanted to cheerfully say something along the lines of, "if you can figure this out, let me know, and then we'll both have an answer!"

My new UCC acquaintance reminded me of the prayer I've often offered - that my will would be molded to God's will - that I would be given the intuition and sense to know the right path to walk.

This attitude of prayer and careful decisions was the attitude I've practiced during all of my time in Seattle, and in my decision to come here. This attitude of prayer and discernment was the attitude I earnestly sought during my years in Phoenix and at Trinity Cathedral and St. Augustine's.

The road has been difficult lately, but I still feel I am on the right road somehow, because I feel as though I am making very tough decisions, guided by the very subjective "you just feel it" methodology.

When I think about my frantic search to gather all of the data relevant to a decision, and then make decisions based on trying to crunch all of the information, I think more and more that such things are very complex distractions. My head swirls in the clouds with possibilities, theories, contingency plans, and all manner of confusion.

Perhaps the best advice is the one that rings richly with truth - the one that pierces so deeply: "You just feel it".

I pray that God would guide my intuition and give me confidence in it as I try to make the best decisions for myself and others I may be called to serve.

The Long Process of Hello

A beloved new friend tonight took me to see the Seattle Men's Chorus perform, and the whole evening was a treat from start to finish. I was very thankful for the experience - one of so many new things I'm encountering here.

I was surprised tonight in a few ways.

Benaroya Hall downtown was so very acoustically dead compared to other performance halls I've experienced. I remember Symphony Hall in Phoenix being far more live, and Gammage Auditorium on the campus of ASU to be even more reverberant yet. I wondered why this fairly new performance space, that I'm assuming was designed for musical performance in mind, would have such an un-resonant acoustic.

The hall also was much smaller than corresponding places in Phoenix. Why is this?

I think both of these things reminded me that Seattle and this metro area in general are much smaller than my sprawly and populous hometown. I know I've heard some people criticize Seattle as being a place that fancies itself a major metropolis, when it's really just an overgrown mid-size city. I think there is certainly some truth to this, as it does seem at times that Seattle is perhaps still in its adolescence in many ways.

As we were driving back and forth to the concert hall, crisscrossing the complex tangle of streets in the central part of town, my friend again pointed out various landmarks and spoke a bit of the history of them. He was a person steeped in his knowledge of this place, although he was not a native of the area.

At the concert, I also thought back to my habits of attending concerts of the Phoenix Symphony on many weekends, and how I would always recognize many audience members - often fellow musicians or music afficiandos that I knew from what became many years of living and working in central Phoenix.

This experience of unfamiliarity with the players invited more and more of my typical comparisons to my hometown. Again, not in a way that makes me want to go back, but in a way that makes me realize how much time and labor it takes to get to a level of familiarity and experience with a life within a place.

When will I come to the point where I can walk about the audience at a concert like this and know many people both on stage and off? How many years will that take? How will I get "plugged in" so that I know deeply who in town does what, where one can go to best do certain things, who the players are in various realms that my professional endeavors will inevitably touch?

The truth is that it happens person-by-person and relationship-by-relationship - just as familiarity with a place happens street-by-street. And, in the case of Seattle, neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

I found myself today wanting to hurry this process along - to introduce myself to 50 different people at once in hopes that we would both have an accurate and respectful thumbnail summary of ourselves to draw upon should a scenario warrant our deepening our connections to each other.

But no - this is a long process of hello, of introducing ourselves, perhaps several times over, until we begin to move into some type of relationship with one another - some type of profound, simple (not simplistic) true knowing instead of simply seeing and hearing one another.

I think tonight that this is another experiential reminder that efficiency is the opposite of love, as a former priest of mine used to say.

... but I so love efficiency.