Sunday, October 23, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Streetcar Wedding
This photograph is from a wedding I did a few weeks ago. Most people from Toronto will recognized City Hall in the background. I met the happy couple outside the main entrance shortly after their civil ceremony, and led them in procession with their guests with a giant processional cross to a Streetcar stop on Queen Street. From there we hopped aboard a vintage streetcar that had been chartered to take us to the reception site. While we travelled, I blessed the marriage using the "Blessing of a Civil Marriage" rite. Leading the group of people while wearing full vestments (cassock, surplice, stole, cope) through the streets of Toronto was exhilarating. We got lots of attention from by standards with cameras--all of it positive. The groom and several of the male guests were wearing kilts (mine was hidden under my vestments when the picture was taken), and that just was icing on the cake as far the visual delight of the day goes.
I preached about love on the streetcar--short and sweet--but I could have also preached about intersections. Things have a way of coming together in people's lives, and here we had a heady post-modern mix of civil/religious and public/private happening. How fitting it was to bring all these things together in one shining moment with my friends who live this same tension daily. Because so much of life is dominated by the pastoral persona, I forget how complex that interface can be for people who are faithful, but don't wear their religiosity on their chest the way I do.
When we arrived at the reception site I took off my vestments and spent the rest of the night rocking my new kilt. It's worth a blog entry of it's own, in truth, as it is a garment of epic coolness!
-t
Monday, October 10, 2011
"Reach"
This is the first of three videos that I produced for the Diocese of Toronto. I co-supervised Matthew Carter, an summer intern working as a Diocesan Videographer. Matthew did all the shooting and editing, and I think he did a great job. This first video, "Reach," focuses on a micro-grant programme that provides relatively small grants ($500-$5000) to churches that are looking to try new things to reach new people. Mad props to Matt who did such a great job with this and the other three!
This is part of of my work with FEWG - The "Fresh Expressions Working Group" - a committee of folks reporting to the Archbishop that work to promote new church planting and mission work in the Diocese of Toronto. We decided last spring that we needed to do more to tell the story of the what the Holy Spirit and God's people are doing in Toronto, so we came up with this video project.
-t
This is part of of my work with FEWG - The "Fresh Expressions Working Group" - a committee of folks reporting to the Archbishop that work to promote new church planting and mission work in the Diocese of Toronto. We decided last spring that we needed to do more to tell the story of the what the Holy Spirit and God's people are doing in Toronto, so we came up with this video project.
-t
Sermon - Harvest Thanksgiving 2011
I preached this sermon for "Harvest Thanksgiving" Sunday. I was pleased with how it turned out. Usually I spend some hours reading some commentaries and engaging the text in a scholarly, post-critical way. But the Gospel lesson for this Sunday, Matthew 6.25-33, just didn't seem to ask for that from me, this time around. I did consider giving a meditation on gratitude, per se, and basically just take delight in cataloguing all the things people should be grateful for, but the real question for me was somewhat deeper. What is the relationship between detachment and gratitude? It would seem that they are somewhat contradictory, and I wanted to explore that.
In preparing for this sermon, I spent a long time puzzling over how to tell the stories that begin the sermon--particularly the first story. I didn't use a text, --that whole section appeared as a mere phrase on the mind map I was using as notes. But I had rehearsed telling the story multiple times and refined the exact language and details I would use. I was pleased with the results. Those of you who preach, I would highly recommend trying this method of honing a story--simply tell it again and again and find those details that ring most poetically. Another key, in my opinion, to good story telling in preaching is to be reading some fiction you find compelling. Right now I'm working my way through A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. If you want to be a better preacher, expose yourself to good narrative.
By the way, the image of the people preparing the funeral pyre by the river was based on my own experience of seeing such a cremation done in Nepal. I sat on a smooth river boulder, soaking my sore feet in the cool water, and watched the funeral rites about two hundred metres away. I was alone, and no one from the village spoke to me, but I found out later that our group's language teachers had asked after me, and that villagers had been moved by my quiet, respectful attention. Just watching, sometimes, is all we need do.
-t
In preparing for this sermon, I spent a long time puzzling over how to tell the stories that begin the sermon--particularly the first story. I didn't use a text, --that whole section appeared as a mere phrase on the mind map I was using as notes. But I had rehearsed telling the story multiple times and refined the exact language and details I would use. I was pleased with the results. Those of you who preach, I would highly recommend trying this method of honing a story--simply tell it again and again and find those details that ring most poetically. Another key, in my opinion, to good story telling in preaching is to be reading some fiction you find compelling. Right now I'm working my way through A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. If you want to be a better preacher, expose yourself to good narrative.
By the way, the image of the people preparing the funeral pyre by the river was based on my own experience of seeing such a cremation done in Nepal. I sat on a smooth river boulder, soaking my sore feet in the cool water, and watched the funeral rites about two hundred metres away. I was alone, and no one from the village spoke to me, but I found out later that our group's language teachers had asked after me, and that villagers had been moved by my quiet, respectful attention. Just watching, sometimes, is all we need do.
-t
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Vital Church Planting Conferene 2011 Video
Every year I find the Vital Church Planting Conference to be a wonderful opportunity to be inspired by the new things happening in the church. This year's was no exception, and this video produced by Andy and Sue Kalbfleisch will give you a little taste. Incidentally, a few of these shots were taken by me! Lol.
-t
-t
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Massasauga!
A few weeks ago I decided to introduce Betsy and Henry to canoe camping. Betsy had a little experience camping, but nothing quite as rigorous as what I had in mind. My experience is not terribly broad, but does include a week-long epic trek in Algonquin a few years ago.
We first got our feet wet (figuratively, not literally, thankful) by borrowing a friend's sweet 1950's era Peterborough Canoe on Toronto Island. It's a sweet canoe: wood-and-canvas--tracks and handles beautifully. Smooth and much quieter than a fibreglass tub. We took it out for two trips with Henry. Paddling around in the quiet waters of the channels, Betsy in the bow and Henry napping between us, was like something out of a Victorian Romance. But my favourite memory was when we tied up under the shade of a tree and a three of us took a nap, gently rocking as the boats went in and out of the QCYC marina. This was an important proof of concept. It gave us confidence that Henry would do well in a canoe and not try to crawl out.
Betsy, Henry, and I at Toronto Island on a day trip.
Henry slept well under his improvised sun-shade
So I went ahead and planned a "real" trip. I chose Massasauga Park because it's close enough to Toronto that we could leave after church on a Sunday and get into a back-country campsite before sunset. I borrowed a friend's canoe--a tripping monster that has seen the watersheds of three oceans! We borrowed some other gear and bought a few things. (Many thanks to Dave and Keith for the loans.) Betsy's parents gave us a tent and some ground pads. Gear-wise, here are some recommendations for those of you thinking of camping with your little ones...
A Five Gallon Plastic Bucket
We used this from dirty diaper storage (and other trash, too). It's airtight and cheap and you don't have to worry about cross-contamination. Plus, it makes a very handy stool for sitting on. I found that it bit nicely in the space behind the stern seat of the canoe.
Platypus Gravityworks Water Filter
When I went on my trip to Algonquin our group used an MSR MiniWorks EX Water Filter. It screws onto a standard Nalgene bottle and then you hand-pump water through the ceramic filter to fill the bottle. It was a real chore, to be honest. But the Platypus Gravity fed system is pure awesomeness! You fill up the "dirty" bag with four litres of water and then let it drain through a filter cartridge into a "clean" bag. In about 2.5 minutes, presto, you have clean water! With this system it was easy to have more than enough water in camp our whole trip.
MSR DragonFly Stove
We borrowed one of these camp stoves from an experienced tripper-friend. This is far easier to cook on than an open-fire, and much kinder of the environment, too, when you think about the impact of gathering wood around well-used sites. It can deliver 8700 BTU, which will bring a litre of water to boil in less than four minutes! Coupled with one of these coffee makers, it made mornings far more civilized! Oh, and the flame can be turned down to a bare flicker, which means you could simmer as easy as kiss-my-hand.
Seal Pup Elite Knife
I've always found a multi-purpose camping knife to be handy gear on the trail, and this sweet knife got plenty of use preparing kindling, cutting food, opening wood bags, etc. It might not be essential gear, but it is surprisingly useful. For example, for dinner the first night we had campfire-grilled steak. The "camping" utensils we had were useless at cutting it. This bad boy carved through the meat like butter. It's extremely comfortable in the hand, and so sharp that I could shave off arm hair straight out of the box.
Child-Sized Sleeping Bag
One of our biggest questions heading out was how Henry would sleep in the tent. We were out for two-nights, and on both occasions he did quite well. He did move around a lot, which I suspect he does in bed at home, too. So even we started out with Betsy in the middle and Henry on one side, half way through the night Betsy and I would switch places to put me in the middle with Henry to my right. I'd leave my bag mostly unzipped so I could get to Henry and he could get to me. Sometimes he managed to sleep in or on this adorable sleeping bag. Other times, when it seemed especially cool, I simply pulled him in and spooned him for a few hours. He liked that. When he got too warm (he was wearing two layers just-in-case), he'd simply crawl away from me into the corner of the tent.
I brought along two maglight flashlights, storm-proof matches, a length of rope, a compass, and other odds and ends. One thing I forgot to bring in all my careful list-making and planning was toilet paper. Luckily I had brought along extra baby wipes, so they substituted just fine.
Just like at home, one person needs to watch the boy while the other does anything require concerted effort, like setting up camp or cooking. Henry was thrilled to find so many sticks to play with and new things to point at. "Mah? Mah?" he kept saying at each new thing, looking back at us to see if we saw the bird, or tree, or cliff, too.
We ate well. Here's the menu:
Day 1 - Supper
Steak
Potatoes a Gratin
A pre-made toddler meal (I think it was ravioli with red sauce)
A Tretra-Pak of red wine
Popcorn for dessert
Day 2 - Breakfast
Coffee
Mexican-style eggs (basically just scrambled eggs on tortillas with salsa and cheese)
Milk for Henry
Apples
Day 2 - Lunch
Beef tacos (with taco meat I made the day before we left)
Applesauce and other goodies for Henry
Day 2 - Supper
Pasta with meat sauce and cheese (using dehydrated beef I made a few days before)
Red wine
Milk and other goodies for Henry
Apples
Popcorn for dessert
Day 3 - Breakfast
Coffee
Oatmeal with brown sugar and milk for everyone
Apples
I was quite proud of my menu planning. Opening up the cheese in the morning and then using it up across three meal works quite well. So did pre-measuring the butter I would need and the coffee for each morning's brew. Probably the best meal was the first night. Few things in this planet can match the experience of eating campfire grilled steak with red wine after a few hours of paddling. Loons in the background and the most purple sunset you've even seen complete the picture.
Speaking of pictures, here are a few... the pictures from the trip!
By the third day Betsy, Henry, and I had really found our rhythm and felt as though we could easily have handled a longer trip. As we paddled back to the boat ramp at Pete's Place we felt strong and fast through the water. Henry spent part of that last paddle peaking over the gunwales and part of it sleeping on a blanket between dry packs and Betsy's seat. We got to Pete's place with plenty of time to spare, so we deliberately hung out in the middle of the lake taking pictures and messing around.
I grew up as a country kid, exploring the wheat fields and rail road tracks of Kansas. I have a lot of wander-lust in me, and getting out into the woods reminded me of that part of myself. I felt so alive, so in touch with myself and comfortable with the challenges in front of me. I'm really a different person in the field, and I had forgotten that. I like who I am when I'm preaching or presiding and I like who I am when I'm sailing, but this back-woods Tay that used to sleep on the chicken shed and walk for hours down a creak bed has rarely gotten to shine this last few years. I'm hoping that as Henry grows up I can introduce him to the pleasures of waking up with the previous-nights smoke still in your hair, or the satisfaction of building a fire from a small, still smouldering ash from that day-old blaze. I love the way my muscles ache after a long paddle or how my soft my sleeping bag can feel. It's even more rewarding to share these experiences with my family, which is one more pleasant surprise of fatherhood.
-t
We first got our feet wet (figuratively, not literally, thankful) by borrowing a friend's sweet 1950's era Peterborough Canoe on Toronto Island. It's a sweet canoe: wood-and-canvas--tracks and handles beautifully. Smooth and much quieter than a fibreglass tub. We took it out for two trips with Henry. Paddling around in the quiet waters of the channels, Betsy in the bow and Henry napping between us, was like something out of a Victorian Romance. But my favourite memory was when we tied up under the shade of a tree and a three of us took a nap, gently rocking as the boats went in and out of the QCYC marina. This was an important proof of concept. It gave us confidence that Henry would do well in a canoe and not try to crawl out.
Henry slept well under his improvised sun-shade
So I went ahead and planned a "real" trip. I chose Massasauga Park because it's close enough to Toronto that we could leave after church on a Sunday and get into a back-country campsite before sunset. I borrowed a friend's canoe--a tripping monster that has seen the watersheds of three oceans! We borrowed some other gear and bought a few things. (Many thanks to Dave and Keith for the loans.) Betsy's parents gave us a tent and some ground pads. Gear-wise, here are some recommendations for those of you thinking of camping with your little ones...
A Five Gallon Plastic BucketWe used this from dirty diaper storage (and other trash, too). It's airtight and cheap and you don't have to worry about cross-contamination. Plus, it makes a very handy stool for sitting on. I found that it bit nicely in the space behind the stern seat of the canoe.
Platypus Gravityworks Water FilterWhen I went on my trip to Algonquin our group used an MSR MiniWorks EX Water Filter. It screws onto a standard Nalgene bottle and then you hand-pump water through the ceramic filter to fill the bottle. It was a real chore, to be honest. But the Platypus Gravity fed system is pure awesomeness! You fill up the "dirty" bag with four litres of water and then let it drain through a filter cartridge into a "clean" bag. In about 2.5 minutes, presto, you have clean water! With this system it was easy to have more than enough water in camp our whole trip.
MSR DragonFly StoveWe borrowed one of these camp stoves from an experienced tripper-friend. This is far easier to cook on than an open-fire, and much kinder of the environment, too, when you think about the impact of gathering wood around well-used sites. It can deliver 8700 BTU, which will bring a litre of water to boil in less than four minutes! Coupled with one of these coffee makers, it made mornings far more civilized! Oh, and the flame can be turned down to a bare flicker, which means you could simmer as easy as kiss-my-hand.
Seal Pup Elite KnifeI've always found a multi-purpose camping knife to be handy gear on the trail, and this sweet knife got plenty of use preparing kindling, cutting food, opening wood bags, etc. It might not be essential gear, but it is surprisingly useful. For example, for dinner the first night we had campfire-grilled steak. The "camping" utensils we had were useless at cutting it. This bad boy carved through the meat like butter. It's extremely comfortable in the hand, and so sharp that I could shave off arm hair straight out of the box.
Child-Sized Sleeping BagOne of our biggest questions heading out was how Henry would sleep in the tent. We were out for two-nights, and on both occasions he did quite well. He did move around a lot, which I suspect he does in bed at home, too. So even we started out with Betsy in the middle and Henry on one side, half way through the night Betsy and I would switch places to put me in the middle with Henry to my right. I'd leave my bag mostly unzipped so I could get to Henry and he could get to me. Sometimes he managed to sleep in or on this adorable sleeping bag. Other times, when it seemed especially cool, I simply pulled him in and spooned him for a few hours. He liked that. When he got too warm (he was wearing two layers just-in-case), he'd simply crawl away from me into the corner of the tent.
I brought along two maglight flashlights, storm-proof matches, a length of rope, a compass, and other odds and ends. One thing I forgot to bring in all my careful list-making and planning was toilet paper. Luckily I had brought along extra baby wipes, so they substituted just fine.
Just like at home, one person needs to watch the boy while the other does anything require concerted effort, like setting up camp or cooking. Henry was thrilled to find so many sticks to play with and new things to point at. "Mah? Mah?" he kept saying at each new thing, looking back at us to see if we saw the bird, or tree, or cliff, too.
We ate well. Here's the menu:
Day 1 - Supper
Steak
Potatoes a Gratin
A pre-made toddler meal (I think it was ravioli with red sauce)
A Tretra-Pak of red wine
Popcorn for dessert
Day 2 - Breakfast
Coffee
Mexican-style eggs (basically just scrambled eggs on tortillas with salsa and cheese)
Milk for Henry
Apples
Day 2 - Lunch
Beef tacos (with taco meat I made the day before we left)
Applesauce and other goodies for Henry
Day 2 - Supper
Pasta with meat sauce and cheese (using dehydrated beef I made a few days before)
Red wine
Milk and other goodies for Henry
Apples
Popcorn for dessert
Day 3 - Breakfast
Coffee
Oatmeal with brown sugar and milk for everyone
Apples
I was quite proud of my menu planning. Opening up the cheese in the morning and then using it up across three meal works quite well. So did pre-measuring the butter I would need and the coffee for each morning's brew. Probably the best meal was the first night. Few things in this planet can match the experience of eating campfire grilled steak with red wine after a few hours of paddling. Loons in the background and the most purple sunset you've even seen complete the picture.
Speaking of pictures, here are a few... the pictures from the trip!
By the third day Betsy, Henry, and I had really found our rhythm and felt as though we could easily have handled a longer trip. As we paddled back to the boat ramp at Pete's Place we felt strong and fast through the water. Henry spent part of that last paddle peaking over the gunwales and part of it sleeping on a blanket between dry packs and Betsy's seat. We got to Pete's place with plenty of time to spare, so we deliberately hung out in the middle of the lake taking pictures and messing around.
I grew up as a country kid, exploring the wheat fields and rail road tracks of Kansas. I have a lot of wander-lust in me, and getting out into the woods reminded me of that part of myself. I felt so alive, so in touch with myself and comfortable with the challenges in front of me. I'm really a different person in the field, and I had forgotten that. I like who I am when I'm preaching or presiding and I like who I am when I'm sailing, but this back-woods Tay that used to sleep on the chicken shed and walk for hours down a creak bed has rarely gotten to shine this last few years. I'm hoping that as Henry grows up I can introduce him to the pleasures of waking up with the previous-nights smoke still in your hair, or the satisfaction of building a fire from a small, still smouldering ash from that day-old blaze. I love the way my muscles ache after a long paddle or how my soft my sleeping bag can feel. It's even more rewarding to share these experiences with my family, which is one more pleasant surprise of fatherhood.
-t
Sunday, August 21, 2011
What is Prayer Like?
This poem by Mary Oliver (from her collection Why I Wake Early) has been on my mind for a week and half or so. The best way to get a song like this out of your head is to share it:
Mary's poetry really does evoke me in the same sort of feelings I get where reading Rumi, David Whyte, or the Desert Fathers. Amazing stuff!
-t
Where Does the Temple Begin,
Where Does It End?
There are things you can't reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the gold fiches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree--
they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unloosing snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky
of God, the blue air.
Mary's poetry really does evoke me in the same sort of feelings I get where reading Rumi, David Whyte, or the Desert Fathers. Amazing stuff!
-t
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Contemplating Canoe Building
The guy I sail with (Dave) and a few others of us are considering taking on a winter project this year while Peregrine is out of the water--building a canoe. Dave and a friend of his both have a lot of experience building canoes, and it turns out that this is a do-able garage project. Here is a five minute video that shows what the process looks like for one type of home-built canoe:
Pretty, isn't she? So I'm thinking of building something like this this winter...
-t
Pretty, isn't she? So I'm thinking of building something like this this winter...
-t
Here's a Koan for You...
I find myself with a little time this afternoon (a very unusual circumstance), so I can finally do a little blogging. Mostly just some updates and reflections at the end.
Betsy, Henry, and I have had a nice summer. We went down to New Jersey for a little family reunion with my mom, sisters, and their families. Some of my cousins also came around. It was wonderful to spend so much time with them, particularly with my two brothers-in-law. We spent many a late night sipping bourbon on my mother's porch and talking about mutual interests. I even introduced them both to Cuban Cigars (contraband in America, I know, but living in Canada does have it's perks). Henry has four cousins, and it was rewarding to put them all together and let them play. We even organized a "Pirate" day complete with treasure hunt. My birthday included lobster (a family tradition) and we celebrated the 4th of July with BBQ and fireworks!
After New Jersey we headed over to Pennsylvania to see Betsy's parents, sister, and her family. More eating (I was taking a sabbath from my diet) and talking.
Back in Toronto Betsy and I have managed to go for canoe picnics on Toronto Island twice. A friend has a canoe at QCYC (the sailing club where I race on Wednesday nights). It's a beautiful wood-and-canvas vessel made in the 1950's. She tracks gracefully through the water and turns heads. Betsy and I have found that Henry does well in the middle position, and he has taken naps in the canoe on both trips. We put a picnic blanket down for him and rigged a sun screen across the gunnels.
The first time he fell asleep in a canoe we decided to take his cue. We pulled up to the bank of the channel and tied off to a shady branch. Betsy and I got comfortable and drifted off into family-nap time. Bliss.
Another time we ended our picnic-day by meeting up some friends with a boat for BBQ. After we ate we motored over to the Wards Island Beach, anchored, and went swimming off the back. Henry was a bit freaked out by the depth of the water, but I think we'll cure him of that fear with practice.
Canoeing is a real art form. I much prefer to kayaking, to tell the truth. A old joke goes like this:
Ha. Drifting along with Henry gazing at the wild life, towing a bottle of wine deep enough to get the cold lake water, glancing at Betsy's blonde hair in the breeze... that's summer in Ontario for me.
In truth, these two canoe trips where a test to see how reasonable it would be to take Henry on longer-trek in September. Things went so well that we're planning a three-day (two-night) paddle in Massasauga Park. This is backcountry camping--a seriously ambitious undertaking with a 20-month old! But I'm thrilled. There is something incredibly liberating about getting back into the woods.
I'll have to post separately about the goings on church land. I start to get really intense when I talk about it. The complexity of parish ministry in mind-boggling. I think all pastors probably experience this. The longer you are in a place, the more complex the problems and the joys seem to be. The questions that occupy me now are both the same and different from when I first started. I feel like I've aged a decade in ministry.
Some days I'll have great experiences that make me feel like I am doing exactly what I was put on this earth to accomplish. These are wonderful, joy filled times. Then there are days when I feel like I am an awful person who is wasting everyone's time. Yes, there is some real dark places I can go when I think about all the problems my community faces. We are making progress, and I do believe the church is far better off now than when I first came. Slowly, so slowly.
For example, today I held my monthly "Traditional Communion Service." Usually I get about eight folks attending. We celebrate the Eucharist using the old language from the Book of Common Prayer. I even use the collect that prays for the Queen! It's sweet and unapologetically old-fashioned. After mass we have lunch and chat. But today only one person showed up. The others, unfortunately, had made a commitment to something else before they realized the scheduling conflict. Oops.
So I spent about 30-45 minutes getting the church all ready. Candles on the altar, chairs put out and arranged, lessons marked, etc. I was vested in my number two cassock (number one needs a bath), surplice, and stole. And one sweet, sweet lady arrives. She is hard of hearing, so I gave her one of the wireless headphone sets and put on a wireless mic to help her out.
In my homily I said that such a liturgy was a chance to recall that worship is about an offering made, not a service received. Saints and angels attended, no doubt. But the feelings that this kind of thing stir up are pretty intense and pretty varied. You can feel good about the "craft" of your ministry, the way you smoothly go through the liturgy and make prayers with your hands and even the way you hold your shoulders. And then you feel disappointed that on one wants to see that. Not even free lunch is enough to lure them in! But then you find yourself giving over to the prayer... letting it flow.
A priest I knew once told me that when I prayed the Sursum Corda (the call-and-responses that begin the Eucharistic Prayers), he could sense the energy coming out of the palms of my hands. He said it was like love. That's a nice compliment, but it is also a pretty scary reality to contemplate. What he didn't know is that many years ago, when I was college, I spent many nights praying in a chapel on campus. Usually I would end my prayers by asking God to bless my hands for healing, and I would put them on the smooth, varnished top of the altar. It was an electric and exciting way to pray, and suspect it effected the way I preside at the Lord's table to this day.
Interesting that I would write about that now, I've never told anyone that story.
One time a few weeks ago, when I was feeling particularly discouraged about some crisis or other. Might have been about money or it might have been about the music ministry or it might have been about some programme I was trying to launch without success. Anyway, I was keenly feeling my lack of ability and the thought occurred to me, "They don't pay you for what you do; they pay you for who you are." That's not entirely true, of course, but it's a useful koan for meditation. It's an antidote to the flawed thinking that ministry, or "church", even, is about accomplishing something. It's not about accomplishing anything--it's about the relationships that we are creating and sustaining horizontally and vertically.
"The church rolls on," they say. Indeed she does. And yet the struggles remain essentially the same. For me, the hardest part of this vocation is balancing my own spirituality with the practical stuff that just needs to get done. Floating down a stream in an old cedar canoe is a luxurious indulgence in world of broken, flooding pipes, reports and committee meetings! How to balance? Something about noticing when we go out of balance, I suppose.
'Nough rambling for now. Just wanted to share a bit of what's going in my world this summer!
-t
Betsy, Henry, and I have had a nice summer. We went down to New Jersey for a little family reunion with my mom, sisters, and their families. Some of my cousins also came around. It was wonderful to spend so much time with them, particularly with my two brothers-in-law. We spent many a late night sipping bourbon on my mother's porch and talking about mutual interests. I even introduced them both to Cuban Cigars (contraband in America, I know, but living in Canada does have it's perks). Henry has four cousins, and it was rewarding to put them all together and let them play. We even organized a "Pirate" day complete with treasure hunt. My birthday included lobster (a family tradition) and we celebrated the 4th of July with BBQ and fireworks!
After New Jersey we headed over to Pennsylvania to see Betsy's parents, sister, and her family. More eating (I was taking a sabbath from my diet) and talking.
Back in Toronto Betsy and I have managed to go for canoe picnics on Toronto Island twice. A friend has a canoe at QCYC (the sailing club where I race on Wednesday nights). It's a beautiful wood-and-canvas vessel made in the 1950's. She tracks gracefully through the water and turns heads. Betsy and I have found that Henry does well in the middle position, and he has taken naps in the canoe on both trips. We put a picnic blanket down for him and rigged a sun screen across the gunnels.
The first time he fell asleep in a canoe we decided to take his cue. We pulled up to the bank of the channel and tied off to a shady branch. Betsy and I got comfortable and drifted off into family-nap time. Bliss.
Another time we ended our picnic-day by meeting up some friends with a boat for BBQ. After we ate we motored over to the Wards Island Beach, anchored, and went swimming off the back. Henry was a bit freaked out by the depth of the water, but I think we'll cure him of that fear with practice.
Canoeing is a real art form. I much prefer to kayaking, to tell the truth. A old joke goes like this:
Canadian: How can tell an American from a Canadian?
American: A Canadian knows how to have sex in a canoe.
Canadian: Nah, any fool can do that--a Canadian knows to take the thwart out first!
Ha. Drifting along with Henry gazing at the wild life, towing a bottle of wine deep enough to get the cold lake water, glancing at Betsy's blonde hair in the breeze... that's summer in Ontario for me.
In truth, these two canoe trips where a test to see how reasonable it would be to take Henry on longer-trek in September. Things went so well that we're planning a three-day (two-night) paddle in Massasauga Park. This is backcountry camping--a seriously ambitious undertaking with a 20-month old! But I'm thrilled. There is something incredibly liberating about getting back into the woods.
I'll have to post separately about the goings on church land. I start to get really intense when I talk about it. The complexity of parish ministry in mind-boggling. I think all pastors probably experience this. The longer you are in a place, the more complex the problems and the joys seem to be. The questions that occupy me now are both the same and different from when I first started. I feel like I've aged a decade in ministry.
Some days I'll have great experiences that make me feel like I am doing exactly what I was put on this earth to accomplish. These are wonderful, joy filled times. Then there are days when I feel like I am an awful person who is wasting everyone's time. Yes, there is some real dark places I can go when I think about all the problems my community faces. We are making progress, and I do believe the church is far better off now than when I first came. Slowly, so slowly.
For example, today I held my monthly "Traditional Communion Service." Usually I get about eight folks attending. We celebrate the Eucharist using the old language from the Book of Common Prayer. I even use the collect that prays for the Queen! It's sweet and unapologetically old-fashioned. After mass we have lunch and chat. But today only one person showed up. The others, unfortunately, had made a commitment to something else before they realized the scheduling conflict. Oops.
So I spent about 30-45 minutes getting the church all ready. Candles on the altar, chairs put out and arranged, lessons marked, etc. I was vested in my number two cassock (number one needs a bath), surplice, and stole. And one sweet, sweet lady arrives. She is hard of hearing, so I gave her one of the wireless headphone sets and put on a wireless mic to help her out.
In my homily I said that such a liturgy was a chance to recall that worship is about an offering made, not a service received. Saints and angels attended, no doubt. But the feelings that this kind of thing stir up are pretty intense and pretty varied. You can feel good about the "craft" of your ministry, the way you smoothly go through the liturgy and make prayers with your hands and even the way you hold your shoulders. And then you feel disappointed that on one wants to see that. Not even free lunch is enough to lure them in! But then you find yourself giving over to the prayer... letting it flow.
A priest I knew once told me that when I prayed the Sursum Corda (the call-and-responses that begin the Eucharistic Prayers), he could sense the energy coming out of the palms of my hands. He said it was like love. That's a nice compliment, but it is also a pretty scary reality to contemplate. What he didn't know is that many years ago, when I was college, I spent many nights praying in a chapel on campus. Usually I would end my prayers by asking God to bless my hands for healing, and I would put them on the smooth, varnished top of the altar. It was an electric and exciting way to pray, and suspect it effected the way I preside at the Lord's table to this day.
Interesting that I would write about that now, I've never told anyone that story.
One time a few weeks ago, when I was feeling particularly discouraged about some crisis or other. Might have been about money or it might have been about the music ministry or it might have been about some programme I was trying to launch without success. Anyway, I was keenly feeling my lack of ability and the thought occurred to me, "They don't pay you for what you do; they pay you for who you are." That's not entirely true, of course, but it's a useful koan for meditation. It's an antidote to the flawed thinking that ministry, or "church", even, is about accomplishing something. It's not about accomplishing anything--it's about the relationships that we are creating and sustaining horizontally and vertically.
"The church rolls on," they say. Indeed she does. And yet the struggles remain essentially the same. For me, the hardest part of this vocation is balancing my own spirituality with the practical stuff that just needs to get done. Floating down a stream in an old cedar canoe is a luxurious indulgence in world of broken, flooding pipes, reports and committee meetings! How to balance? Something about noticing when we go out of balance, I suppose.
'Nough rambling for now. Just wanted to share a bit of what's going in my world this summer!
-t
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Sermon - Pentecost 2011
In this sermon for Pentecost I explained a new way of approaching the "problem" of church. Rather than looking at it as though it were a recipe with some missing ingredient, I looked at it like a piece of Origami. Church-as-folding problem means that we can assume that we will still have all the same elements, but we seek to arrange them in a new way. Folding is getting a lot of attention in the world of science because it is a fundamental piece of conceptual architecture necessary for understanding String Theory in physics and protein formation (DNA) in biology. In turns out that that "folding" is something that happens a lot in our universe, and working with that knowledge has born fruit in the "hard" science.
So what does our theology (particularly our understanding of liturgy and ecclesiology--that is, worship and church itself) benefit from this framework? Well, for one thing, it helps move us past the confetti of post-modernism: the bits and scraps and fragments that we, in church land, keep trying to arrange into some kind of mosaic that makes narrative sense our a fragmented world. The old prayerbooks and bibles have been shredded, and we put the pieces together to create a meaningful experience by taking a little from this book and little from this other one. The problem is that in liturgy, to take one example, the effort to create a mosaic sometimes devolves into "Fraken-Liturgy"--a grotesquely imbalanced creature whose un-natural origin is evident to all. In an Origami approach, it is understood that the entire tradition is still present, only it's been folded around into a new arrangement.
For example, imagine an origami leaflet. The congregation receives, when they arrive at the church site, a single piece of paper that has been folded into some kind of a shape. As they unfold it, the liturgy itself is revealed. But perhaps this is not a linear liturgy like we are used to. Maybe instead of flowing, temporally, from gathering to word to table, people flow physically from one area to another. This kind of stational liturgy is in our church DNA, actually, and certainly evident in larger churches where you might find little chapels and prayer areas and votive stations and displays set up. This is worship as environment rather than worship as event. The secular analogue would be architecture rather than drama. People have plenty of experience encountering spaces and inhabiting them, even spaces with a strongly pedagogical intention (think of class rooms, museums, and art galleries).
So once this origami leaflet is completely unfolded and laid flat it functions as a map of both the conceptual and physical space. Suddenly the unity of the liturgy becomes available in a new way. Rather than merely repeating a cyclic story attempting to create drama by suspending our own knowledge of how it ends, the participants are never asked to surrender that knowledge at all. The power comes not from the sequential build-up of tension and then climax as in drama, but in the depth that comes from going down, down, down deeper into knowing a space on its own terms.
Epistemologically speaking, we might expect more change out of people with this approach. There is much more discovery in it, much more participation as the group cooperatively makes worship together. It moves us in the exact opposite direction of movie-theatre style worship with its hierarchies of knowledge and provider-consumer dialectic.
Another appeal of this approach is that it lends itself to adapting another important conceptual framework: fractals. Fractals are a phenomenon where the smaller parts of something resemble or repeat the pattern of the whole. For example, if you look at branch of lightening, you will see a similarity between a very small branch and the entire structure. Snow flakes are also a common example. When we start talking about the Holy Trinity, we quickly get into fractals as we grab examples from nature to show that the fingerprints of Trinitarian thinking are everywhere.
Another thought has to do with the way that mutation works. As we disassemble and reassemble the Gospel, we are actually encoding it and decoding in such a way as to produce variations and mutations. Most of these will be dismissed as noise in the process, but a few of these mutations might be good enough to spur evolution.
So this is something I'm puzzling through right now. Not abstract at all, since I can easily how these concepts find application in parish life. If I want to create a transformational experience of church community, than I need new tools to configure the elements that I've got. I can't assume that some magic element is going to be added into the mix!
-t
So what does our theology (particularly our understanding of liturgy and ecclesiology--that is, worship and church itself) benefit from this framework? Well, for one thing, it helps move us past the confetti of post-modernism: the bits and scraps and fragments that we, in church land, keep trying to arrange into some kind of mosaic that makes narrative sense our a fragmented world. The old prayerbooks and bibles have been shredded, and we put the pieces together to create a meaningful experience by taking a little from this book and little from this other one. The problem is that in liturgy, to take one example, the effort to create a mosaic sometimes devolves into "Fraken-Liturgy"--a grotesquely imbalanced creature whose un-natural origin is evident to all. In an Origami approach, it is understood that the entire tradition is still present, only it's been folded around into a new arrangement.
For example, imagine an origami leaflet. The congregation receives, when they arrive at the church site, a single piece of paper that has been folded into some kind of a shape. As they unfold it, the liturgy itself is revealed. But perhaps this is not a linear liturgy like we are used to. Maybe instead of flowing, temporally, from gathering to word to table, people flow physically from one area to another. This kind of stational liturgy is in our church DNA, actually, and certainly evident in larger churches where you might find little chapels and prayer areas and votive stations and displays set up. This is worship as environment rather than worship as event. The secular analogue would be architecture rather than drama. People have plenty of experience encountering spaces and inhabiting them, even spaces with a strongly pedagogical intention (think of class rooms, museums, and art galleries).
So once this origami leaflet is completely unfolded and laid flat it functions as a map of both the conceptual and physical space. Suddenly the unity of the liturgy becomes available in a new way. Rather than merely repeating a cyclic story attempting to create drama by suspending our own knowledge of how it ends, the participants are never asked to surrender that knowledge at all. The power comes not from the sequential build-up of tension and then climax as in drama, but in the depth that comes from going down, down, down deeper into knowing a space on its own terms.
Epistemologically speaking, we might expect more change out of people with this approach. There is much more discovery in it, much more participation as the group cooperatively makes worship together. It moves us in the exact opposite direction of movie-theatre style worship with its hierarchies of knowledge and provider-consumer dialectic.
Another appeal of this approach is that it lends itself to adapting another important conceptual framework: fractals. Fractals are a phenomenon where the smaller parts of something resemble or repeat the pattern of the whole. For example, if you look at branch of lightening, you will see a similarity between a very small branch and the entire structure. Snow flakes are also a common example. When we start talking about the Holy Trinity, we quickly get into fractals as we grab examples from nature to show that the fingerprints of Trinitarian thinking are everywhere.
Another thought has to do with the way that mutation works. As we disassemble and reassemble the Gospel, we are actually encoding it and decoding in such a way as to produce variations and mutations. Most of these will be dismissed as noise in the process, but a few of these mutations might be good enough to spur evolution.
So this is something I'm puzzling through right now. Not abstract at all, since I can easily how these concepts find application in parish life. If I want to create a transformational experience of church community, than I need new tools to configure the elements that I've got. I can't assume that some magic element is going to be added into the mix!
-t
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sermon - VCP 2011 Jenny Andison
This is Jenny Andison, the Canon Missioner for the Diocese of Toronto, preaching at the Vital Church Planting Conference (East) a few weeks ago. I shot this video, it was edited by Susan & Andy Kalbfleisch.
-t
-t
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