Momentum

I knew, in theory, that being a full-time student while working 30 hours was going to be a lot. Now I’m in it and I don’t think I’ve ever been this busy in my life. I’m multitasking all day long; eating while emailing, doing laundry with lectures. I tracked down the handsfree leash so I can do readings while walking the dog. I’ve been busy, busy, busy. And anyone who knows me knows this is absolutely not my preferred pace. If I were doing this alone, well, I wouldn’t be doing this at all.

That first week of combining work and school, I felt like I was drowning. I was trying to get a grip on my class schedule and a flood of homework while also entering one of the busiest seasons at work. I must have looked as frantic as I felt because a coworker saw me scrambling to get my tasks done before a class started. Recognizing I wasn’t going to have time to make lunch, she made me a plate of food and set it on my desk. Care like this has been constant.

The first couple days I was so swamped I told my husband I was sorry I hadn’t had a chance to even share a meal with him, but I just had so much work to do. He said, “Well I wouldn’t mind learning some Greek,” before sitting down to go over vocab with me, our first quality time of the semester. There are encouraging cards on my shelf, a hand carved cross I work over in my hands like a worry stone, a soft prayer shawl from my congregation on the office chair where I now spend most of my days. I keep thinking the rest of my career will have to be my thank you card because there’s no way I can express how grateful I am for the people seeing me through this transition period. What a wild privilege. What a gift. I get to walk with people who say and show, “I’m here with you,” and, “have something to eat,” and, “we will carry you.”  

I love what I do every day. I love my work and the people I get to know, the old friends who call me up, the new friends who chat every day, the ideas I get to study, all these wonderful people and kindnesses and inspirations refreshing me constantly, carrying me along. I have to stop sometimes, because I need to eat and shower and fold the laundry, because my eyes start to glaze over the textbooks, because my husband says, “honey, you seriously need to get some sleep,” but I’m not sick of this. I’m in a real spirit-is-willing-flesh-is-weak situation. I’m caught up in something good. I’m moving constantly, but hardly by my own power. This is a good momentum.

It’s busy, it’s totally overwhelming, but I realize this is becoming less like drowning and more like marinating. My world is transforming and I’m just buoying along, watching this new reality unfold. The fact that I chose this moment to launch a blog isn’t a testament to how much free time I have, but rather how much input is coming in at once. I needed somewhere to process. And I wanted to share this publicly, because I believe, fundamentally, seminary is communal. It’s not just a student and teachers, students and peers; it is family too, and friends, and congregations, and community. I’m not walking alone. If you’re reading this, then you’re somehow walking with me too.

~

Now why would I want to try and become a pastor? Great question. Probably one for another post. The short answer is: I didn’t. Nothing about public speaking or trying to appear more pious and worthy than I actually am appeals to me. But as I’ve learned, that’s not really the job description.

My call came from my community and Lord, I am a sucker for my community. Other people saw this in me. They named this, then supported and encouraged me so that I could imagine it too. And I trust my community. I believe in them. This whole pastor idea, this is about mutuality.

So as I began to seriously consider this call, as outlandish and daunting as it was and is, the next question I had to ask was: how do I go about becoming the kind of person I hope to be? I had to pause and take an honest inventory. I began measuring the gap between where I am and where I want to go. I believe we go where we’re looking. One of the first adjustments I’ve had to make is to my attention.

It’s been a little over six months since I downloaded an app to reduce my time spent scrolling on social media. It was a cold-turkey switch. I knew social media wasn’t good for my mind and I finally admitted my self control was no match for the algorithms, so I downloaded the app (ScreenZen, which is currently free) and now I can only log on for 5 minutes at a time. That’s enough to check in, stay in the loop, maybe even post something, but as soon as my scrolling gathers mindless momentum, I’m kicked out. 

I know we’ve all heard the pitch for logging off, advice that can feel so condescending and unrealistic, but still, I need to join the chorus: this decision has changed my brain. The pace and depth of my thinking has changed. I don’t get a flush of adrenaline or anger or tumble into despair so readily. I can take on one feeling at a time instead of experiencing the whiplash of juxtaposing horrific headlines with cute puppies with family updates with product placements. I am emotionally pacing myself. My attention span is improving. It’s easier to maintain some perspective.

The internet cannot be the primary means by which we encounter one another. Too often these interactions are framed by the stilted opinions of others and juxtaposed with calls for immediate reaction. This is not how we listen to hear. This is not how we connect and understand.

The world shouts a lot of messages. In an age when information is flooded and AI offers to outsource the sacred activity of pondering, I believe maintaining our humanity requires us to be intentional about our exposure. We are not equipped to consume constantly, indiscriminately, and in massive quantities without time to digest. If we are everywhere at once, we lose our point of view.

Real understanding often builds up in us slowly, not conquered and planted like a flag after heated arguments in comment sections, but absorbed and integrated and recognized over time. For months before I committed to seminary, I had this Upanishads quote on my wall: 

We are like the spider.

We weave our life and then move along in it.

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.

I asked myself: what dreams do I want to live? What might I be capable of that I haven’t yet imagined? It took me years to decide to go to seminary, to imagine the life I am now living, and that decision has already carried me to wonderful, uncomfortable, growing places I didn’t expect, much faster than I thought was possible. Now I get to be caught up in this wonderful thing. To make thoughtful decisions that lead our lives to better places, we must maintain space for our imagination, for our dreams.

Now I have a question for my country: what are we dreaming? Where are we being carried?

~

This fall we’ve been reading Mark Love’s “It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us.” In describing the events leading up to the murder of Jesus, Love notes, “Luke makes it clear his killing is a group effort. As Luke reports, ‘Pilate then called together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people.’(Luke 23:13) The killing is bigger than the decision of an evil person or group of people. The momentum that leads to Jesus’ death sentence feels more like a social contagion.” 

During my second week of studying the history, mission and practice of Christianity, Charlie Kirk was publicly murdered. It was far from the only violence to smear blood across our headlines, but the reaction was not our nation’s usual response to gun violence: lukewarm calls for peace followed by distraction and disengagement. This manifested something more like a contagion. I have watched, in headlines and comment sections, the frenzied momentum that has followed this killing. There are public calls for more blood, for war on our neighbors, made in the name of Jesus. There were cheers and justifications for violence. Stepping back and watching the discourse spread and devolve was alarming, especially knowing that, had I not stepped back from social media, I would have totally joined in the fray.

Mark Love continues: “The innocent death of Jesus and his subsequent resurrection pulls back the curtain on the myth of redemptive violence, revealing what it truly is- injustice.” So the crucifixion is not just the moment Christians believe Jesus died for our sins: it is a moment when the sacred points to the ways of the world, the mindless mob that carry us into death, and says, “See where this takes you?” God holds up a mirror to the world, how we carry ourselves away, lost in the momentum of our own selfish ideas of what justice looks like.

Two weeks before Kirk was killed, children were attacked and killed while praying at Annunciation Church. The church is located a little over an hour’s drive from my home. I cannot help but recall how profoundly different the response to this violence was; the same cadence of thoughts and prayers that are extended to natural disasters, as if this kind of thing must happen, as if children and bullets simply collide by chance, as if it has always been and always will be this way.

Mary Oliver wrote, “Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them.” These children arrived into a culture they had no hand in designing, were caught in the cycle of violence they had not started, without the ability to change their circumstances, and with their little slice of power, they were asking for the world to change. They were waiting, actively, for God’s peace to come.

There are a lot of Christians making claims about what their fellow Christians ought to do in this time, in this country. If we’re going to talk about what Jesus would do in this political moment, I can’t put it better than Father Gregory Boyle: 

 “Jesus defied all the categories upon which the world insisted: good-evil, success-failure, pure-impure. Surely, He was an equal-opportunity ‘pisser off-er’ in this regard.

The Right wing would stare at Him and question where He chose to stand. They hated that He aligned Himself with the unclean, those outside — those folks you ought neither to touch nor be near. He hobnobbed with the leper, shared table fellowship with the sinner, and rendered Himself ritually impure in the process. They found it offensive that, to boot, Jesus had no regard for their wedge issues, their constitutional amendments or their culture wars.

The Left was equally annoyed. They wanted to see the ten-point plan, the revolution in high gear, the toppling of sinful social structures. They were impatient with His brand of solidarity. They wanted to see Him taking the right stand on issues, not just standing in the right place.

But Jesus just stood with the outcast. The Left screamed: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” And the Right maintained: “Don’t stand with those folks at all.” Both sides, seeing Jesus as the wrong size for this world, came to their own reasons for wanting Him dead.”

There is a form of Christianity that likes to claim Jesus is on their team, but to claim that Jesus would stand on any “side” is a fundamental misunderstanding of the reality of Jesus. This reality demands so much more than jostling to be on the winning side, to be right, to get the last word. The practice of Christianity calls believers to navigate an unpopular path, the wrong size for this world. A path of nuance, a path of solidarity, stretching our hearts farther than we want them to go. It is a biggest-picture practice one with no interest in appealing to, justifying, or climbing the world’s hierarchies or expectations. There is no domesticating God. Jesus routinely confounds us.

~

How do we change the world? We have to start by being in it. We have a real talent for avoiding the present moment. The rhetoric often gets there before our hearts can. More and more, we are skim reading our own reality, accepting breadth over depth, reacting and moving on. We need to arrive here and see ourselves and this moment as it is: not in the narrative packaged and distributed by corporations, not in the comments and forums and headlines and alerts, not even in our own, small ideas about who we are and what we can or can’t do.

It is a ritual for Christians to admit we are lost. We confess it every week. The trouble with ritual is that it can become routine. We grow numb to our own words. We become numb to the suffering of the world. We accept the lie that we are bystanders rather than active participants in reality. We neglect our ability to change. We must renew this confession: we are lost.

One of the great gifts of faith is the context it gives to those who believe: it says, here is who God is, here is who you are, and here is what this relationship means. One important aspect of Jesus’ identity is teacher. To follow, then, means we are students, that our learning is life-long. I have gone to enough school to know I don’t learn when I come in weighed down with my own preconceptions, defensive and disinterested in change, hoping the teacher will just confirm what I already believe and give me my gold star. Great students come in fully aware of their limits and need for growth. They come hungry for learning. They are open to what they don’t know, what they can’t yet imagine.

We arrive here, honestly, and try to find the stillness where possibility can enter. As Mark Love wrote, “There are no spiritual practices designed to speed us up.” We pause so our better selves can arrive. We pause so we can open. We pause so we can remember who we are, who God is, and how we are being called to cross the distance between the way of the world now and the way the world can be.

I know there is so much to say and do and the moment feels so urgent. That’s just the way of the world. As one professor put it as we began this busy semester, “Jesus did not take time to go off to pray because his schedule was wide open.” Despite the urgent world, we resist and we wait. We arrive where we are so we know where to go. We make way for imagination. We become, as the poet Deborah Keenan says, “active dreamers.” 

~

In the time between when I began writing this and now, there has been more violence in places of worship. Last Sunday the LDS Chapel in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan was attacked, leaving four church members and the gunman dead and many injured. Yesterday we woke up to the news of the Manchester synagogue attack on Yom Kippur. We exist in this moment when worship assemblies experience violence. How are we to respond?

In this post, I wanted to say something about reactivity. I wanted to speak to discernment, for the practice of thoughtful decision making. I do not want to live in a world with more locked doors, more paranoia, more safety protocols and bloody headlines. I want, in the midst of my own fears, to reorient, to keep my eyes on better dreams. I am waiting, actively, for the world to change.

After the LDS shooting, a member of the wider LDS church began a fundraising campaign for the family of the gunman. Dave Butler could not have known that they would raise nearly $300k in two days. He said he felt compelled because he recognized the family of the gunman, the wife and children, were also victims. This recognition sparked a new momentum, and the donations began to pour out.

Publicity means criticism, and the critics have done what they will with this story. There are conspiracy theories weaving, questioning the motive behind such generosity, anger and incredulity. Dave Butler says the donations show that the donors, “believe the Bible and try to live by the Bible.”

I see, in the heart of this development, a message about the counterintuitive ways God moves in the world. I see the kind of radical forgiveness and humanity that can replace our fearful, distrusting, indignant reactivity. I see a knee-jerk kindness. I see the contagion of goodwill. I see momentum. If we orient ourselves towards peace from the outset, if we calibrate for love, we can get carried away to better places.

These are the kinds of prayers that tick people off. They’re hard prayers. They stretch our hearts farther than we want them to go. We pray for all the harmed and the suffering. That includes the victims. That includes the gunman’s family. That includes the gunman himself. Activist Danielle Sered said, “No one enters violence for the first time by committing it.”

We are in this broken world, harming and healing one another. There is danger and there is opportunity. We are waiting for God’s peace to come.

~

I recently received a prayer shawl from my congregation. A prayer shawl is a good, easy metaphor, like the vines or a tree: look at us, all woven together, caught up in one another. I’ve never felt so busy; there is so much to do and I have so far to go. But beneath all that, I feel so calm and comforted. We are together. I’ve never felt less alone.

I recently reconnected with an old friend, a pastor and writer, who gave me the gift of good book recommendations, among them, Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind. Last weekend, despite all the busy, I made a little time to pause. I took this collection of poetry on a walk and I got to meet this line while walking around a pond dotted with swans after the rain: 

Between the ground and the feast is where I live now. 

Let’s arrive. We are here, now, together, sharing life together between the ground and the feast. From here we are turning our attention toward our best shared dreams. We are measuring the distance, navigating the way.