‘Tis the season for Incarnational Mysticism
One of the core theological ideas of Advent and Christmas is incarnation. In sum, G-d took human form in the person of Jesus. John’s Gospel has no nativity scene, but does contain this one-sentence incarnational Christmas story: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” John 1:14 Some streams…
Advent and waiting / not waiting
Expecting. Hope. Waiting. These are words and spiritual orientations that come with the Advent season. They are each, on the surface, future oriented, looking to the time, not long off, when Christ will be born. Or when we get to open the presents. Or when we round the bend of…
Gratitude, an antidote to consumerism
If we could design a holiday that would double as the kickoff to the Christmas shopping season, I think it should be a holiday focused on gratitude. Practicing gratitude for the gift of being alive, for there being something rather than nothing, for wakefulness and breathing, for warm fires and…
Patience plus pizza and tunes at the polls
Yesterday our church building again served as a polling location and was full of our Clintonville neighbors. Really full. When I arrived in the morning the voting area in the fellowship hall was overflowing into a line that came down the stairs into the foyer and curved back to the…
Ritualizing transitions
What do a hornet’s nest, a self-portrait, a banjo, a philosophy book, and a narwhal stuffy have in common? These were some of the many items that showed up at the church last evening for the closing mini-retreat of the Transitions and Ritual group. Each participant was asked to bring…
Beauty Saves?
The headlines aren’t getting any prettier, but here in the remnants of the temperate deciduous forest you can’t take a step these days without encountering beauty. The fiery sugar maple in our backyard has let go of enough leaves to blanket the ground beneath it, still holding on to enough…
Indigenous People’s Day and the stories we must tell
This Monday was Indigenous People’s Day, a refocusing of Columbus Day. While in Minnesota last month, I had a morning to walk through the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul. I spent the most time in the exhibit Our Home: Native Minnesota. It focused on the long history of the…
Sacred listening
“Being listened to is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference.” – David Augsburger, Mennonite teacher and author Throughout the next year Central District Conference is conducting Sacred Listening conversations across the conference. The goal, as I understand it, is for conference leadership to get…
Sacred ground x2
This past weekend I was in Minnesota at the invitation of St. Paul Mennonite Fellowship. They have an annual retreat at a secluded retreat center an hour north of the twin cities. The time includes input from a guest and planning for the coming year. I presented about transitions. The…
Ritual and reality
“Ritual is a very ancient social technology and it fulfills the exact same roles today as it did for our ancestors thousands of years ago.” These were Dimitris Xygalatas’s closing words in an interview that aired on NPR’s All Things Considered last evening (8 minutes audio). Host Ari Shapiro had…
