ordination!

prayer of ordination and laying on of hands

What an honor it was to be able to have so many friends and family join me for my ordination service on Sunday, October 18!

Though I don’t yet have the video of the service (I hope to have it soon) I do have many wonderful photos, as well as the text of some of the pieces of the service:

Ordination photos – thanks to Leanna, Arturo, Trish, Dave, Deb, Tommy, & Marty

Order of service - this is a full list of the service order, with links to the various parts, including photos

Opening Prayer – Rev. Erica Thompson

Opening Words – Rev. Candie Blankman & Rev. Dr. Steve Wright

Passing of the Peace – greetings of peace from around the world

Ordination sermon – Erin Dunigan

Ordination charge – Gary Wilburn

Presentation of gifts – Los Ranchos Partnership, La Mision, family

place

How do you experience a place? An esoteric question? Perhaps to those who sit at home. But it is a very real question to those who would venture out to travel the world.

When I was in college I took my first trip ‘across the pond’ to visit a friend who was working as an au pair in Switzerland. Not only was it my first time stepping foot off the North American continent (I had grown up visiting my grandmother who lived in Mexico so travel was hardly a foreign concept) but it was also the first non-family, non-youth group expedition. With my brand new guide book in hand, a camera and a few rolls of film (yes, I am old enough to have used film in college) I was prepared. The only problem was, I did not know what to do. So I diligently searched for every item pictured in the guidebook and tried to copy them as best I could with my own camera.

More than a decade and 25 countries later I have overcome this awkwardness in being a tourist, but I still am left to wonder—how does someone truly experience a place?

The question has arisen once again as I am the only under 50 member of a barge cruise up the Rhine river. Each day brings a new town and with it the question. For the retiree crowd at least, it seems that the way to experience a place is to go on a walking tour, complete with headsets that allow an all-knowing guide to regurgitate his knowledge something like a mother bird feeding her young. The point is information—to be informed about the place is to experience it. When was that cathedral built? What is the significance of the statue on its spire? Who founded this city and how many years ago did it happen?

Perhaps its not entirely the retirees fault. The guidebooks and tour companies must shoulder some of the blame for the misperception that information somehow equals experience. Its not altogether surprising in the midst of a consumer culture. To experience a place must be to consume it in some way, mustn’t it? What better way to conquer a locale than to know its important facts and figures? Cologne? It’s the fourth largest city in Germany. It’s cathedral is the largest in Germany and in the top five largest in the world. It sits along the Rhine river. Check. Next?

But what if there were something more? Shouldn’t there be? Is that the big secret surrounding travel, that it is little more than being able to check places off a list or add them to your countries visited map on facebook?

Today we stopped at a town called Koblenz. It is a small, ‘cute’ German town along the Rhine, at the intersection with the Mosel River. The optional excursion was to tour a castle. I chose to opt out and instead found myself sitting at an outdoor café, sipping a cappuccino, and reading the English language International Herald Tribune. The sun was warm but not too hot, the sky blue, the apple strudel delicious. To be honest, I felt a bit guilty for opting out of the castle tour, where all of my group of retirees were to be found. But I was absolutely content to sip my coffee and enjoy the town square from my seated vantage point. After taking the last sip I got up and walked around town a bit, even doing some shopping along the way, and arrived back to the barge just as the buses were dropping off the castle-goers.

As I boarded the boat I was chastized by the tour guide. “You missed out!” she accused. But I’m not convinced. Granted, I did not spend 33 Euro to have a guided tour of a bunch of old stones on a hillside. I’m sure it was interesting—I’m not arguing with that. But what I wonder is, can simply enjoying being in a place count as experiencing it? Or, to put it more directly, can I travel without a guide book and without an ‘expert’ informing me and still consider it worthwhile? It’s not that I will never visit another museum or photograph another landmark. I’ll probably just make sure to do it after having coffee and reading the morning paper along the town square.

it’s official!

At the presbytery examination, answering questions (and apparently demonstrating a new pilates stretch)

After ‘languishing in the process’ (well, not actually, but having been ‘threatened’ with the category…) for the past six and a half years, believe it or not, I am finally going to be ordained!

Details are still TBD, but consider yourselves invited October 18 to a late afternoon service, followed by a reception/party.

For those of you from out of town, there are plenty of folks with whom you can stay if you’d like to make the trip–you are invited!

waiting to go before the presbytery

prayer following approval for ordination as Minister of Word and Sacrament

practice what you preach

“Most good things have been said far too often—they just need to be lived.”  -Shane Claiborne

It’s been bugging me for a long time, actually. But it has taken that long for me to give voice to what the ‘it’ is that has actually been nagging at me.

I remember having the conversation out loud for the first time, about ten years ago. I say out loud because it had been rolling around in my head before then.

“What happens next?” I remember asking a friend of mine, in the midst of a conversation. Upon seeing his blank stare at the question I realized a bit more explanation might be helpful.

“I mean, so much of what you hear in sermons is all about what you ought to believe or ought to be doing—but when you get there, then what? It feels as though so much of preaching is about convincing—once I’m convinced, then what?” Still the blank look. Clearly the question had some more percolating to do.

About three years ago I ran into the quote from Shane Claiborne. Most good things have been said far too often—they just need to be lived.  Exactly.

I used to have this problem—I’m getting better at it, though not entirely cured—that I’d go to the library and check out a stack of books. I would be excited at the prospect of reading them. Sometimes I needed a bag to put them in, there were so many. But inevitably, the two weeks or, if I renewed them, the four weeks would come and I would have not even made a dent in the stack.

The same basic premise gets played out in other areas—if I have new running shoes, then I’ll actually start running again. As a teenager very involved in my church’s youth group, I reasoned that if I had a new Bible with cool maps in the back and various study notes, then I’d actually read it regularly.

Around the same time as the ‘what next’ conversation I remember telling my therapist that I thought it would be good for me to run a marathon because I felt as though I lacked self-discipline. She looked at my (then) workaholic, driven, over-achiever-self sitting there on her couch and gave me a blank stare not unlike my friend’s.

What I tried to explain to her was that the thought of setting out upon a goal that could not be accomplished easily or overnight, but had a clear destination and proscribed route to get there, was very compelling to that part of me that continued to ask, “What next?” and “Is there something more?” It was tangible, definable, and required me to act—and not just think—bit by bit, if I were to be actually run all 26.2 miles.

Recently I was on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with a friend and a friend of hers. Over the course of the seven days we spent many hours in silence as we hiked over passes and walked through valleys.  One day on the way back from a 14 mile day hike I asked Katy, whom I had just met at the beginning of the trip, about the yoga practice she had made reference to earlier in the week.

“I’ve been practicing now for seven years,” she said. Over the course of the next five miles she shared what her practice meant to her, the basic tenants of practicing yoga, and the fact that she had even moved to a new apartment to be closer to the yoga studio. Though as a schoolteacher she does not have a lot of extra income, she’s been on multiple yoga retreats to continue to refine her practice.

“That’s what’s missing,” I thought to myself. That’s the link between the ‘what next’ and the Shane Claiborne quote, the library books checked out but never read, and the disciplined plan of the marathon—the actual practice of a faith that for me had for most of my life been relegated to the realm of belief. That was what I had been longing for, what I couldn’t find a language to express, but that I sensed I was missing.

But what might that look like? What would an embodied, practiced faith, do differently?

It was not that I thought the Christian church lacked in the area of practices—I remember enough from my Church History courses in seminary to be familiar with the desert fathers or monastics who separated from life in order to devote themselves to the practice of their faith.

But what about now? What about those of us who choose, intentionally, to remain a part of the world around us? What about regular, normal, day-to-day life? What about the time that happens outside of the four walls of the church, that happens in between ‘spiritual retreats’ in the normal messiness of life?

In the midst of this wondering I happened upon a new book, Finding Our Way Again, by pastor and author Brian McLaren. Though I’m an avid reader of McLaren’s work, I had no idea about this book.  The subtitle “the return of the ancient practices” made me realize that perhaps I’m not the only one that’s been asking these type of questions.

In a move reminiscent of the stack of library books and the study Bibles choc-full of colorful maps, I ordered the book on the spot.  I’m hoping that when Amazon.com delivers ‘Finding Our Way Again’ in 5-7 working days that perhaps I’ll find some of the answers I’ve been looking for over the past ten years.  Though, I’m wondering if the answer I’m seeking might just need to be lived.