The great, unearned beauty...

Here's something I read that I resonated with...

I said what about my eyes?
“Keep them on the road.”
I said what about my passion?
“Keep it burning.”
I said what about my heart?
“Tell me what you hold inside it?”
I said pain and sorrow.
He said:
“stay with it.” ~Rumi

from a thought provoking site in Oz.

And this: ‘Believers in Christianity are called in this age to become once again wanderers’

I've been thinking a lot about exile, and return. About longing for change, and being lost in the wilderness. About grace and suffering all in the one.

I am still gurgitating the conference in Amsterdam, but some of the hope-for-change seemed to me to lie in the older, white, male, north-american leadership both BEING THERE and GETTING IT. That is a funny thing for me to write, but I have experienced it over, and again, that for instance, as a female in ministry, for me to 'fight that corner' always appears to be agenda laden, whereas for some of my dogged, male friends to do the same... or to call me 'pastor' seems to provoke thought. There are such issues of POWER at work in that though.

[That is not to say, incidentally, that I don't defend, or believe in the need to defend women in ministry, or that I leave it to the boys, just that it is so difficult at points to believe that people take seriously the person 'from below.' Vive liberation. This is a huge question, but it is almost impossible for me to explain fully how it feels, subjectively, to have the heart-of-yourself called into question so casually... 'Women shouldn't be in the pulpit', or 'I'd have you as a server' or ... you get the picture.] The grace in suffering theme is one that keeps echoing you see.

Here are other things I've thought in no apparent order - all related to Amsterdam [or GTII as it was affectionately dubbed]:

*That giving away power is liberating. But hard to do.
*That my generation still wants permission to ask questions, but will ask them regardless. That we care about Authentic answers, not just answers. [I'd rather be told an unpalatable truth, than be lied to, or hear duplicitous responses]
*That restructuring any church is an enormous task, but that a holy subversion of any wedded-to-the-wrong-powers structure that exists is part of the calling of people in covenant with Christ
*That the issue of diversity seems to me to be often associated with control and fear of compromise...
*That being proactive in 'bringing people to the table' has to be balanced with genuinely giving people voice, not just making people 'tokens'
*That the question of magesterium is a huge one for any church [bar the ancients, I guess]... Who determines what is essential and non-essential?

I/we the conference heard [I nearly wrote herd, that was a funny slip!]- via Sam Vassel [quoting Longfellow (?) I think]: that 'fear of death' is the thing. That struck so many chords with me, I can hardly describe it.

And, I'll [nearly] leave you with Wendell Berry from Jayber Crow & the thought of our beingness:

Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life... I begin to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realised and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to, and I went ... to see if there was any room left besides my parents' graves. I learned that there was room for one more; if it belonged to anybody, it belonged to me.

We've been at the allotment a lot. It seems a prerequisite. What a joy. We have friendly birds, ladybirds galore, worms, a great spider [I like it, Andrew not] and serious planting happening... kohl rhabi, cauliflower, beans, peas, leeks, onions, carrots, herbs... rhubarb. It's great. And, although our greenhouse blew away/over, and we have almost no glass left in its sadly twisted little frame, we have high hopes that it too can be rescued. The notion of such beauty, and work, cojoined, being part of being fruitful seems wonderful to me, and grace-full...