It's Been a While ...

 

There are a whole lot of sayings about the apparently very human propensity to fail to keep up with our commitments:

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Never put off until tomorrow what you should have done two weeks ago."

It's even in the Bible:

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do ..."  (Romans 7:15)

My last posting here was on December 10th.  The one before that -- about a week earlier.  And before that?  Almost another month.  This despite my intention to write at least a little something every day.

I'm a busy guy.  Why would I want to write a blog post every day?  Narcissism?  A need to be noticed and affirmed?  Is it, in the words of shame researcher Bréne Brown, "the shame-based fear of being ordinary"?

I don't think so.  At least not entirely.  (I always leave open the possibility -- even the probability -- that I have motivations I'm not aware of and wouldn't like if I were.)  I think that there are some very good reasons for me, as a working pastor, to be a regular blogger, and maybe it'd help me to remind myself of them.

One of my collegial friends, the Rev. Scott Wells, in explaining on his blog -- Boy In The Bands -- why he does it makes reference to an old-time Southern Universalist (he thinks it was John C. Burruss) who "wrote and edited his newspaper because the printed word would go where 'the living evangel' could not go, and it would survive after he was long dead."  (Thanks for this, Scott.)

I am a preacher and a teacher by trade, vocation, and inclination.  Blogging provides a pulpit with a sanctuary that stretches as far and wide as the internet itself.  I know that all those "pews" will never be filled, but that's true in our brick and mortar sanctuaries as well.  And even if I simply look at the specific congregation I currently serve -- the wonderful Thomas Jefferson MemorialChurch - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia -- I believe that my blogging serves them.  Not all of our members can come to Sunday services each week, and not everyone can attend our faith development programs, or take place in one of our Covenant Groups, yet I dare say that all of us are looking for something to chew on during the week.  To reflect on.  To meditate on.  And, yes, to think about.  I have no delusions that I am some fount of wisdom, yet I know that I have something to say and as a preacher and teacher for this congregation blogging provides a forum for me to reach out to people both more frequently and more effectively.

And why try to post daily?  I once knew a painter who, when she'd finished with a canvass would immediately start to paint a new image over the one she'd just completed.  And when that one was done she'd begin a third.  There were sometimes five or six images beneath whatever she called her "final" piece, the one that would remain on top when she finally set the canvass aside and began on a new one.  I asked her once why she did this and she said, "I have so many images in my head and I just have to get them out."  So, too, the thoughts, reflections, and observations in mine.

At the same time, too, there's the discipline of it.  Besides, or along with, my being a preacher and teacher, I'm a writer.  And writer's write.  The only way -- really, the only way -- to hone one's craft is to write.  A lot.  And many of the writers I most admire have said that that means at least some writing every day.  So yes, I write a sermon most every week, and a bulletin article and a report to the Board each month, but the discipline of daily writing?  That's where the blog can came in.

Will I do this?  Live into this intention to blog each day?  (Or, at least, each week day?)  I don't know.  We'll see.  At least I hope to be back before March.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

This preaching thing

This is a piece for all my preaching colleagues, all the folks -- both lay and ordained -- who get into a pulpit or in some other way come before a gathered community and attempt to say something meaningful.

Each Sunday at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia there is a time during our offering when folks are invited to text and tweet and update their FB statuses as a way to reach out to those not in the room with us.  Yes, folks are encouraged to go digital -- we consider it another expression of the offering. 

This past Sunday, here's part of what I wrote on our FaceBook page:

"This preaching thing is not always easy . . ."

It's not always easy, is it preaching pals?
This past week, for example, I had an idea, a vision, of what I wanted the sermonic exploration to feel like.  And it just wouldn't come.  I tried several different approaches, and each time I hit a new wall.  I just couldn't bring into existence what was so intangibly present in my head.

One of the elements I was weaving into the homiletic tapestry was the anniversary of Philippe Petit's legendary 1974 high wire walk between the Twin Towers in New York City.  Watching the film Man on Wire again I was reminded that Monsieur Petit and his accomplices had made an attempt to stage le coup once earlier, before that incredibly August day.  They tried, but they weren't ready.  They couldn't get the vision grounded enough (and, yes, that pun was intended), couldn't create what they could see, and, so, they postponed.  That's what I did this past Sunday -- postponed the experience I so want to create for a time when I'm really ready to do it.
This preaching thing is not always easy.

In the days since I have had another reflection on why this vocation of preaching can be so difficult.  I was listening to the incredibly Playing for Change CD Songs Around the World.  One of the tracks is a really lovely choral interpretation of the Bono/Bob Dylan song "Love Rescue Me."  The second verse really jumped out at me:

Many strangers have I met / on the road to my regret . . .

Okay, maybe that one doesn't really resonate all that much.  At least the "road to my regret" part.  But doing this ministry thing I have met a whole lot of folks who were strangers to me, at least when we met.  That's a part of it all, isn't it?  We who preach put ourselves out there in front of folks we know and folks we don't.  And even the folks we know may be in some place that's different for them this week than we've known them before.  And as Woody Allen's character said in The Front, "can we ever say we really know anybody?"

Many lost who seek to find themselves in me . . .
There was a parishioner in the first congregation I served who said this nicely.  "Clergy," he said, "are walking rorschach tests on which people project their feelings about religion."  Over time, of course, we cease being such strangers to our congregations, and they to us.  We get to know one another.  And, yet, it's honest to admit that there's a whole lot of projection going on . . . again, in both directions.  People look at their preacher and see not only her or him but also what we want them to be; what we think they should be; what all of our previous exposures to preachers, and church, and religion lead us to expect of them.  Folks see to find themselves in our sermons.

They ask me to reveal / The very thoughts they would conceal . . .
And this might be the hardest part of all.  The Rev. Ken Patton once wrote a sermon titled "The Prostitution of the Clergy."  He said that preachers are, in some ways at least, like prostitutes who, he noted, sell something precious -- their bodies and their sexuality -- for money.  Clergy, he said, sell something precious as well -- their spiritual lives.  The song hadn't been written yet, of course, but I think Patton would have agreed with Bono -- our congregations often ask us to reveal the very thoughts that they, themselves, would rather not express out loud, they ask us to go places, to look at things, that they would rather avoid.

This preaching thing is not always easy.

Love rescue me
 And that's the prayer, isn't it?  When overwhelemed by the enormity of the task, it does us well to look to that spirit of love, that spirit of life, which both holds us close and sets us free.  This preaching thing is not always easy, but it is so worthwhile.

In Gassho,

RevWik