This is something that is born out of three years of serving in the rural North Carolina and is dedicated to all pastors who faithfully hold lives entrusted to them in their hands.

Holding in My Hands

They come to me and place

Their lives like broken toys

Into my hands and look expectantly

With that child-like faith hoping

For some magic glue that will make

All things as they have been

Before, no better than they’ve been.

And they fervently empty their pockets

Of the secrets they never knew they had

Some, deliriously for the seventy seventh time

Revisiting the dead who refuse to die

And the living who refuse to live

Telling me about them good old days

When their daddy used to go hunting

For squirrels because there was nothing to eat

And about the way cornbread tasted after

A long day in the tobacco fields

(Actually, nobody in their family

Of twelve ever smoked – Lord forbid! – but everybody

Loved the way tobacco smelled

When it was cured and dried and hung

In the barn over there at the edge of the field)

And the way he left for war

And she was left without him but with

Hope that one day he will return.

(And he did). And fifty, no, more,

Years of living together now dissolve

Like sugar in sweet ice tea

And they tell me about how

A truck ran the light and ran into

A car that the mother of their best friend

Drove without knowing to death (do we ever

Know the hour or the day?)

Or how, see those black ruins, where

The road bends right much

Once used to be a house where their cousin,

By law, lived and how the Lord

Brought him alive out of all that mess

(But he never was the same after that, was he?).

And how, Lord bless her heart, she

Used make the same pound cake for

Every function in the church until

She could no more – see how the fingers

Are knotted with life and years of work?

And they talk, forgetting all, forgetting everything,

Until slowly they don’t know anything

And sit – or lie – mumbling something

I will never know under their breath

Then we hold hands looking at each other

And I recognize the same child-like faith

Now taking their lives into our hands

Together we begin to pray into the day

When all things shall be well and

The manner of all things shall be well.

Here are some haiku inspired thoughts in verse.

Unrequited

You appear like a falling star:

Long enough to make a wish

Short enough for it not to come true.

You speak about the sensible things:

Rational, quantifiable, concrete.

Meanwhile, I am going crazy.

You walk out of my life effortlessly

As if through the sliding doors:

You leave and I remain empty.

You will not think of me again

Until I will be of some use to you.

That’s not my definition of friendship.

It's been a while

A Communion Meditation (Based on the Gospel of Matthew)

My life is a cup.

Empty me until

I am poor in spirit.

My life is a loaf.

Bless me until

I am broken and given.

Your cup is my life.

Let me drink it

Until I am full.

Your loaf is my life.

Let me eat it

In remembrance of you.

Sprained anckle, ministry and theological reflection

So after more than a month of intensive ministry I found myself flat on my back with my anckle swollen and painted in every color of the rainbow. I am still interested to see how I will lead a Bible study and preach on Sunday in the two churhes that have been entrusted to me for three weeks. Nonetheless, I found this time of forced Sabbath to be a rather fruitful time of theological reflection.

My most faihful companion has been dear John Howard Yoder whose book I was supposed to have read this academic year but for many reasons have not. Thus now I am silently arguing with him and furiously scribbling my notes on the margins. I hope that at the end of my reading I can write some more structured reflection. Actually, I find myself agreeing with Yoder most of the time but it is the learning to read in another tradition that throws me off. I have been trained to read and argue in the orthodox or classical theological thought and when I am reading something that comes out of radical reformation I have to read beyond theological vocabulary into the deep structure of his thought and to see where Yoder essentially agrees with Luther, Melanchton, Calvin, or Wesley and where he is really different, not just names things differently. If I come though with what I want to do now, I want to take Yoder's notion of the church and his four notes and contrast/compare them with the classical notes of the church.

I have also found myself totally absorbed into another historical - theological read, History of Christianity in Lithuania. It is a compilation of essays by the young generation of Lithuanian historians covering the 1000 years of Christianity in the country. I am missing women's voices in the book but otherwise it is worth every cent I spent on it. As I am preparing to give a lecture on Lithuanian reformation for lay leadership of the Lithuanian UMC, it has definetely been a find.

So far so good.

Hijacking Reconciliation

In response to the series of posting on race and reconciliation that my good friend Danielle has started doing on her blog, I thought I would offer my pennies worth of thoughts here as well.

I find it very peculiar how different institutions and structures become identified with a certain idea or word. My college, LCC, for example, was obsessed with "community." Everything we did was community this or community that. I will not deny that community indeed was an important and very real aspect of our life together, but by the time I graduated I had  developped a strange twitch as a refelx to that "c" word. Now that I am Duke, everyone is talking about reconcilliation. Big time reconcilliation. And on top of that I am working at a "reconciling" church. And everyone is using that word to suit their own agenda or syllabus or theology or whatever else that has captured their imaginations and hearts for the time being.

So reconcilliation at Duke has to do with race, and 99% of the time it is in black and white rekational dynamics. It is about the walled campus of Duke - the epitomy of the white institution in the New South - in the middle of black Durham. It is about the lacrosse scandal and white boys' privilege and black girl's body. It is about our dying white churches and the need for us as pastors to engage in the work of reconcilliation to save the churches from dying inself-absorbtion. It is about the Jim Crow laws, segragation, Tim Tyson, biracial couples, the racial make up of our faculty and our housekeeping staff. It is a bout black and white as if they were clean cut easily defined categories in which every person comes.

Without denying that those are issues worthy of our attention, I cannot let this rhetoric trick me into believing that the need for racial reconcilliation is bilatteral. As an intern at a Hispanic church I have quickly learned that my students that I tutor are the blacks of the blacks: in other words, the pecking order in the public school system goes something like this: whites-blacks-Hispanics. White and black tensions have progressed into a whole new level where discrimination is subtle and systemic, almost invisible, more felt and intuitively detected than obviosly screaming into one's face; the discrimination against Hispanic kids is blatant and raw. It is as if the history is being re-written with one race replacing the other. North Carolina, I believe will be soon known as the state with the fastest growing Hispanic population and the state that is blindest to it. Somehow, though, the questions of reconcilliation raised at Duke Divinity School do not take that piece of the racial puzzle into account, to say nothing of the Korean, Montangard, white-non-English speaking and other groups.

So now on to my recinciling church. When in the United Methodist circles we say "reconciling" we mean intentionally inclusive of the LGBT community. And we are so inclusive of it that if we quit doing that we would need to lock the door of the church and go home and find another place to worship. as the church is going through the visioning process now and deciding whom it is going to reach, the primary questions circle around whether we will be safe within our church if we open it to people who are different. So we are willing to be reconcilling amidst ourselves, but we are unwilling to be reconciling to the rest of the world and take the risk that some people took when they decided to open the doors of the church to them. As a straight girl, i cannot but wonder if the church's doors are as widely open to me as they would be to a person from LGBT community.

So here is reconcilliation as I have seen it. But I am still thirsting to see the ministry of reconcilliation that Christ has entrusted to the church lived out fully...

2 Corinthians 5:13-20

13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14 For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. 15 And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. 16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.