We Like Sheep - Wandering Astray

I wrote this a few nights ago for a discussion the Hawthorne project was having about reports that there were people sleeping on the church porch and leaving trash around the building. As I thought about what to share, I was struck how useful the practices of the weekly circle I do were in making honest, aware, choices. A while ago a friend of mine from another circle commented that: "I come to Circle because it is the most profound time during my week – a time when I can try to put into words in front of witnesses what otherwise only haunts my dreams and rattles around in my unconscious." Reading the discussion, I was haunted by memories and choices I had made. I was struggling to focus at work, so I took an early lunch break and wrote this email. After I sent the email, I had a lot easier time focusing on the rest of my shift. Where do you find space to discuss the things that "haunt your dreams and rattle around in your unconscious?"

Frank,

Thanks for getting at the root contradiction here. Last week as Hawthorne was wrapping up it started to rain. It was 4pm and all of the adults had places to go. At that point the adults had to directly ask the kids to leave a warm dry place and go out to a cold wet place.

I know I faced a pretty stark choice. How much of my time do I spend here with them? What of mine do I offer? Where do we draw the boundaries? etc.

I knew enough to be troubled saying: "good luck, hope you keep warm and dry, see ya next week." I chose a way to handle something that was defined, finite, easy, and avoided addressing the hardest problem - I gave mimi, her kids, and the group of pregnant friends that stay with her a ride to star of hope, where they stay. It was a way easier thing then inviting the kids who did not have a place to sleep to wait out the rain at my apartment, a lot less risk.

That was a choice i made, I can try to justify my choice, but the reality I don't like to talk about is that kids I know staid outside in the rain and cold because I chose one way as opposed to another. I don't want to get into moral arguments or guilt here, I happen to think I made the best choice for me there. I just think that as we have to have these conversations we need to start by acknowledging the facts of our choices and their consequences.

Wanting to delude ourselves about these choices and their consequences is not a new thing, the second chapter of James addresses people making that same move, when the author writes: "15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?"

Those kids sleep outside because the church has made the choice not to let them sleep inside. Any discussion with the trusties should start from that context. Those kids sleep outside because our neighbors chose not to invite them to sleep inside. Any discussion with the neighbors should start from that context as well.

How do we do that? I would recommend this as a minimum, let's get a real plan together for doing some kind of night shelter together, with a real budget and a dedicated account to hold funds for such a project. Any neighbor who complains can be welcome to contribute towards the budget for this and to host fundraisers with their neighbors and the local home owners association to help fund such a project. I am sure the costs of said plan are smaller then the imagined hit to their property values. If they are not willing to help fund things, I suggest we come up with a plan b, that involves some kind of intentional space outside and visible where the kids can find shelter with our blessing. If the cops are called by the neighbors it would be for trespassing on the church grounds, if they are intended to be there, its not trespassing. I am willing to bet that given the alternatives funding for whatever realistic changes needed to happen and maintenance costs would be a lot easier.

These choices are not simple or easy, I have made the choice to withdraw from hawthorne for a time, as a way of not having to foreground the consequences of my own choices. I had a kid from hawthorne stay with me for six months, and I made the choice to kick him out. None of those were easy, but I think if I am honest, I can't deny any more that there are kids out there that can't go home, kids in our group who have been harassed for the sexual orientation and refusal to live in heteronormative patterns, kids who do not have a place to stay tonight, kids for whom sleeping on the floor, inside, out of the rain, would be a upgrade.

What we chose to do is ours alone to decide, the basic contradiction is not.

For me, I chose to finish my lunch and go back to my job.

Nate

This was a comment I made to someone else on their profile. I think my mind went some interesting places. [ed: extended for the blog a bit]

That your description of being embodied: "I like to feel my body move with purpose. Walking somewhere, dancing, building/creating something, running, shooting, even driving seems an extension of my body's will (which is an embodiment of my mental will). I love the fact that I have a body to direct; I see the body almost as a machine . I am working on improving/strengthening my personal machine, as apparently my genes aren't going to cut it forever. "

Was striking and deserved some comment. A friend of mine describes the feeling of using tools as an extension of the para-personal space. The idea that when you are eating with a fork, you don't consider how to angle the fork or move your fingers to grip it, you think about picking up the food, as if the fork were part of your hand. When I drive its a similar feeling, my car becomes an extension of my person.

My friend the dancer suggested that anything our bodies come in contact with can take on this mental conceit. In her mind dancing with a partner at its best, is about discovering a space where both of you experience the body of the other as part of your para-personal space.

Yet that also makes one have to ask if I understand your body as part of my para-personal space, have I lost any sense of you being other at all? It leads me to this essay: http://www.igreens.org.uk/bodys_grace.htm

Which has a very different take.

Harold,

I think you are asking a few good questions. Let me offer some general thoughts and then move into more concrete examples of what I have done with kids in the past and where our crc is up against this right now.

General:

First, don't lie - I tried to never speak of God or theology in ways that conflicted with what I understand now. So no discussions about god who is up there, etc. My goal was that would not have to unlearn harmful theology later.

Second, kids are not adults, trying to simply have them repeat and use the theological code words their parents use is just going to produce dogmatic eiers or crcers. We need a model of what spirit maturity looks like at every age. Fowler's stages of faith might be a way to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stages_of_faith_development

Third, on the whole on of the things I think is wrong with the current sociological structures of is the stratification of each person and need into groups with independent programs targeting each of them. As if a spiritually mature child can be nurtured by dogmatic fundamentalists. To think that lasting change can happen without the education of younger generations is a wish-dream. For most of humanities existence, we have nurtured children in multigenerational extended family groups. I posit that this holistic group (which is larger then a nuclear family) is central to well socialized, spiritually mature, young adults.

Fourth, this means that on the whole the engagement with children needs to be an every-person activity and not simply something for parents. As we envision the CRC as a alternative loci of faith, we need to distinguish between the form of a CRC liturgy and the body of people that meet. I can't imagine that I know someone who is a parent without knowing their children. If we conclude that the CRC liturgy is not the correct place for children, then we need to also consider how as a group of people who meet in a CRC we can support and nurture the children in our group.

Fifth, I think that with tweens and teens one of the most determinant factors in thriving is connections with other caring adults outside of the nuclear family. Otherwise as the strugles within the nuclear family to redefine roles they are left without connections they can trust to the world outside their peers. One of the best books I read when doing Youth Ministry was: Hurt, by Chap Clark http://www.amazon.com/Hurt-Inside-Todays-Teenagers-Culture/dp/0801027322 it lays out the isolation that I think is endemic within the adolescent period. Some of the most helpful things I did as a youth minister was taking concreate steps to form these relationships in 5th and 6th grade.

Sixth, I think we need to separate formation into christiandom from the nurturing of spiritual maturity. I think we need to lay out some basic values that are at the core of a healthy engagement with religious practice. I am speaking here of openness to new things and experiences; embracing their own creative spirit and expecting to have a voice; finding points of mystery and not having all of the answers; an aweness of others who are different; and practice uniting for co-operative action. These can be developed in a lot of different ways and this is not some little list of moral niceties.

Seventh, from 3-11 is really when the mind learns most of its language, so part of what we want to do is introduce children to the poetics of the christian symbol system. Not because they will totally understand it, but because it gives them words to describe what happens later on. One of the things I am most thankful for from my upbringing was a firm grounding in the phrases and rhythms of the bible. I was able to draw on these narratives later on, when I found myself in the middle of despair. Alan suggested a book about Brother Grimm fairy tails, which says that the goal of those fairy tales was to give children language when they met monsters in real life. The poetics of the scripture have this wonderful characteristic, they unwind themselves the more you study them. So for me starting to feed these disorienting parables and stories to children is about planting seeds. So take some time to sing and play and repeat the great poetic sections from scripture. A great orator helps do this and the retelling of these stories can be a communal activity.

Eighth, adults need interaction with children and to hear from children. The bible contains examples and promises of children as role models in many places. Our own lives reflect the times when a childs willingness to extend embrace, to ask the naive questions we dared not, to dream universal dreams when we are in the particular, to dance wildly, and to remind us of long term thinking - the world we leave for them - are all critical and irreplaceable. When we do not involve children at some level in our community we loose something deeply nurturing and we fail to live lives in awe of the sum total of reality.

So what does this look like in practice? Here are some of the specific things I have done that I think worked:

1) Involve kids in service projects. Our church was going to do a canned food drive for the local food pantry. I got a bunch of grocery bags donated from a local liquor store. I passed out a series of coloring sheets w/either bible story themes or pictures of nature / symbols. As the kids worked on coloring them I lead a discussion about the stories; mixing story telling with frequent breaks to have the kids ground specific parts. Then we assembled all the decorated bags w/shopping lists of needs for the pantry and the kids gave them out at the door each week. From start to finish we took time to explain why were doing this, who benefited from it, what it might be like not to eat for a day (the older kids actually fasted from sunup - sundown one day to tell us about it) and when the food came in we took pictures to show them of the food in the church and of the shelter when we delivered it. This starts to establish a link between organized action on the part of the kids and results for other people in the world. Other projects like this included collection a dollar a kid each week to start paying off specific named apportionment's in the church budget (with public announcements during the worship service to encourage other groups to do the same), making get well and birthday cards for use by the church office, ornament making during advent, and a school supply drive before the new school year. These crafts that echoed the church year helped to involve and explain the rhythm of the liturgical year.

2) Scavenger hunt improv days: When I had really restless kids, I would take them outside and ask them to search around for 10 minutes to find something to bring back. Then I would ask each of them to take a moment to share what they had brought back and quickly riff on the christian symbolism that can be drawn from what they bring. So if a kid brings back a dried leaf, we talked about Jesus' parable of being connected to a vine and being disconnected. Then I asked them what things give them life, what relationships nurture them, etc. When someone brought back a pine cone we talked about seeds and the metaphors that were used there. The goal here was to encourage exploration and curiosity, noticing things around them in nature, and to start to let some of these rich metaphors and images come to life in real things they can see and touch.

3) Sing, Dance, Move, Play: After my time with Interplay I wish I had done a lot more of this, but some of my lesson time was intentionally spent outdoors, playing games that involved working with partners, running around, jumping and moving. My goal was to break down some of the distance between adults and children by both being fellow players together, to give them time to get the physical energy out so sitting down to talk could come, and to find joy and fun together. Because its often during the games that bonding starts to happen.

4) Wander around the sanctuary and talk about the things you see. I would do a variant of the I spy game, where each kid got to look around the sanctuary, find something they thought was cool and then we would all walk over and I would talk about the symbolic meaning and the uses of the object in the church's life. Again I wanted to help them understand what was going on, but also to foster a spirit of noticing and curiosity, and to authenticate each child's noticings by having the entire group walk over to what they saw.

So as I move from general to particular let me finish with a quick narrative story, that for me is a touchstone I go back to when I consider what this might be like.

A few years ago I accepted a ride to a confrence with a family of missionaries back on furlough. My best friend who was going with me had bailed at the last minute and I had only started driving three months earlier so I was scared of driving from Houston to Santa Fe New Mexico alone. I had met the Jones family two days earlier as we worked together to setup the Doxology Art exhibit:

http://futuristguy.wordpress.com/category/culturology-case-studies/doxol...

They were going to the conference as well and Andrew (the dad) invited me to ride there with them (being his wife, their five children aged 15-4 and a friend of theirs) in their 15 passanger van. It was a tipping point in my life. It was also pretty scary. Even though I knew funds had been tight when they planned this trip, Andrew refused to accept any money to help with gas or anything else. He said it was important that this be a gift. I felt more isolated by this, unable to provide a meaningful rationale for my being there, in a really intimate space. I rode shotgun, at the front of the bus, for the first chunk of the trip. At the second rest stop one of Andrew's children (who was about 7 at the time) grabbed my hand and asked me if I would take her to the restroom (I think it was loo actually). So I walked her there and then waited for her to come back and we walked back to the van. As we got ready to load back up she looked up, smiled, and said: would you sit back here and play with us. So I did, we played some card games and spent some time. Then she promptly fell asleep in my lap. Looking back I am struck by how much that simple act of invitation, welcome, need, and embrace meant to me. My fears about being a leach, about imposing on a private space, the insecurity seemed gone. I was able to enjoy the rest of the trip together with the whole family. That long week, really was a turning point for me in how I approached my life.

In my mind that is the image of a spiritually mature seven year old. It is something I hope I helped to foster in some of the kids I worked with, and it forms the basis for some of my observations here.

http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2006/10/family_update.html

That is picture of the family from 2006 a year after I spent a few days with them. You can guess which one is the child I described.

A friend and co-worker Houston Markley (i.e. he of the awesome first name) in the Symposium shared with us this quote from a Paul Tillich sermon for his advent reflection:

Both the Old and the New Testaments describe our existence in relation to God as one of waiting. The condition of our relation to God is first of all one of not having, not seeing, not knowing, and not grasping. A religion in which that is forgotten, no matter how ecstatic or active or reasonable, replaces God by its own creation of an image of God. I am convinced that much of the rebellion against Christianity is due to the overt or veiled claim of the Christians to possess God; they waited for Him. For how can God be possessed? Is God a thing that can be grasped and known among other things? Is God less than a human person? Since God is infinitely hidden, free, and incalculable, we must wait for Him in the most absolute and radical way. He is God for us just in so far as we do not possess Him. We are stronger when we wait than when we possess. When we possess God, we reduce God to that small thing we knew and grasped of God; and we make it an idol.

Paul Tillich, “Waiting”

So the network I am part of has begun to focus deeply on the practice of our CRCs (Christian Resurgance Circles, not sure I like the name, but if it helps I think Resurgance came from reading: The Resurgance of the Real) and in developing leaders and tools to foster a network of CRCs (why I say a network of CRCs and not a network of House Churches is something I will tease out later).

Theological clairity and in particular the existential mode of theology is one of the distinctives of our CRC practices. To help support that we have been working on a few paragraphs that form a theological catechism, a few things we work off in our religious practice. At the last symposium, each of took the challenge to re-write them in our words, so this is my attempt to do just that. I am also hopeful it could form some kind of link I can use to explain to folks where exactly I am coming from. I have lately found myself having a hard time with simply saying I am a christian and leaving it at that.

Our first core understanding is: God as a Devotional Name for Reality.

Within our CRC circles, the subject of our discussion is our lives, our experiences. As such we do not spend time discussing the potential existence of some being or process. Nor are we really concerned with organizing ideas into a comprehensible worldview. Our experiences tend to be fragmentary, complex, confusing, scary, and ultimately mysterious. The experiences we prize - those times when our expecations, explanations, and systems are cracked, shattered, and left realing - are often the best examples of this. When we speak of Reality, we are not just pointing to matter or energy, we are describing at some level the absolute unknowable Mystery that is at the core of our being and at the edge of our reason, science, and culture. This Reality also encompasses the passions, desires, and dreams we have. We dream of shaping, changing, subdueing, and domesticating Reality. Reality confounds and subverts every attempt to do. We affirm and embrace both the ultimate limits of our ability to change things and our desire that has no limits. We live into that tension and call it good. By chosing to name this tension as God we indicate a devotion to it. We decide (and sometimes decide not) to live into the future in a trust that does not come from any evidence inside us, but is a pure leap of faith. In this we find kinship with Elijah, who affirms this same devotion in the name he took for himself. (Eli) My God is (jah) Reality.