most hopeful

Feb 16 2013

grief and trauma, learning to live, the calendar

a people who tell the truth | thoughts on ash wednesday

It occurred to me while getting a cross of ash smeared over my brow, hearing the words, “from dust you came, and to dust you will return,” that one of the things I appreciate the most about the faith I’m finding myself leaning into more and more is that we are a people not only allowed to tell the whole truth, not only even encouraged to do so, but ultimately demanded to do so.

We must tell the truth: the good, the heartbreaking, and the completely unexplainable.

And so we operate in a season of lament and reflection. We begin it by marking ourselves with the dust we come from and the dust to which we will return. We take time to fast from things to remind us of our desperation and dependence on the king of the coming kingdom for anything to be worth telling in the end.

And even when shiny churches and slick preachers grin and tell us how to be happy, we must tell the truth that the world goes not well. Injustice abounds and work toward justice often feels like tiny drops in an enormous ocean. Hearts ache with broken families and open wounds. Loss stings years later like the day death stole life from our fingertips.

And so we tell the truth. All of it.

The hope of the kingdom coming is only truly hopeful if it is the refrain after the we see the deep gray all around us, and admit that we are both broken by it and perpetrators of it.

Until all is made new.

And so, for lent, we remember that from dust we came, and to dust we will return.

djordan
Washington D.C.

Tagged acting, Ash Wednesday, church, grief, hope, hoping, justice, kingdom, lent, liar, lies, loss, people, truth, waiting

Feb 12 2013

to those people, and you know who you are

to those people
and you know who you are
who offer homes and spaces
of safety and honesty and freedom

to those people
who make it okay to stumble out in the morning
with hair twisted in all the wrong ways
eyes stuck together
and thoughts jumbled up
still to say, “good morning.”

to those people
who have encouraged me when
I’ve been at my best
and put up with me when
I’ve been at my worst
and who’ve allowed me to be
both my best and worst
most of the times…

to those people
who have become the safe, honest and free places
to make it clear who I am not yet
and also who I desperately hope to be
until all is said and done
you will offer the clearest notion
of what it means to be loved well.

so to those people
and you know who you are
who offer homes and spaces of
safety and honesty and freedom,

thank you.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged communion, community, friends, friendship, honesty, life, party, safety, together, truth

Feb 11 2013

2 Comments

learning to live

the threat of ambition, the need for obedience

while there’s nothing we’ve been taught to avoid like disobedience
there’s nothing we’ve been taught to value blindly like ambition.
and we assume that our ambitions result in our best
and that our best results in the best of those around us
but our ambitions are challenged by all the things which pull us away
from simple, longstanding obedient commitment
to be who we are and where we are and why we are in the world.

there are always shinier places
and loftier goals
and fancier titles
there are always more noble causes
and more remarkable feats
and more impressive benchmarks

but there is nothing like long and simple obedience
proving to be anything but simple
proving to require a holy trust and an unwavering commitment
even when the story is over but the people carry on.

so there is nothing like long and simple obedience
which challenges great ambitions like nothing else.
so there is nothing like long and simple obedience
to family
to vocation
to community
to justice
to beauty
to freedom
for others and therefore for ourselves
that drives a dagger through the lying heart of great ambitions
to show the selfish, insecure desires which so often create them.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged ambition, arrogance, commitment, God, good, lies, obedience, truth, untruth

Feb 07 2013

1 Comment

learning to live, poems, Quotes, what they are teaching me

small circles

small-circles

I sincerely hope for good results,
but I have become a good deal disillusioned
over ‘big’ conferences and large gatherings.
I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles,
in which vital and transforming events take place.
+ Rufus Jones

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself in small circles,
I’ve been sitting around high-top tables and around piles of plastic bottles and stickers.
I’ve been sitting around conference room tables and around coworkers’ offices.
I’ve been kneeled around communion rails and sitting around workshop training rooms.

There has been good intention in planing and good work in presenting
There has been insight and growth

But the magic happens after
in the conversations we find ourselves stuck in
the new acquaintances who will become our partners in the work
the faces paired with names who will become our collaborators
the other small circles on whom our small circles will become dependent.

And in this magic
there’s the promise of
the upside-down kingdom
lights out
curtain closed
microphones off
ties undone
shirts untucked
shoes kicked off
clinking of glasses and
laughter that steals our breath

And in this magic
there’s the promise of
the upside-down kingdom
and what has
always been done like only God does
when the small circles take on
the principalities and powers
the systems and the injustices
the sicknesses and the ignorances
in ourselves and in others
and we see
a little bit clearer
the reflection in the mirror of who we’ve been made to be.

In the small circles and quiet processes
we pin our hopes.
This is what we’ve always done.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged advocacy, alone, change, Circle, communitas, community, conferences, God, lost and found, Magic, meetings, planning, truth, truth telling, work

Feb 02 2013

this is good | the mash | february 2

When finding themselves in those moments, at those events, in those questions, at those meals, inside the conversations where you feel art and justice and work and play and faith all coming together in both profound or incredibly simple ways, a few other friends and I will often look at each other, pause, and say, “This is good.” I’ve been thinking about that this week, so the mash is back, and here are a few links from the week of the “good things.”

1 | Craft Brewed Opens its Taps

2 | Resilient Community Through Design & Advocacy

3 | Ring the Bell | Indian PSAs Addressing Domestic Violence

4 | Want to help? Shut up and listen! TED TALK

5 | Kid President Gives a Pep Talk

Tagged advocacy, community bar, craft beer, craft brew, design, Domestic violence, good life, good things, graphic design, helping, helping without hurting, kid president, listen, listening, pep talk, ring the bell, soul pancake, this is good, Violence and Abuse

Feb 01 2013

1 Comment

grief and trauma, learning to live, Quotes, social work, what they are teaching me

and once again we sing

Throughout my last two jobs, I’ve had the same folded-up xerox copy of the first page of a memoir which has the following lines attributed to an anonymous Vietnamese poem taped to the wall above my desk:

We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders.

These words struck me when reading the memoir, but these days I don’t remember why. Over the last three years, I’ve thought a great deal about trauma and grief. First motivated to begin understanding it more while working with the survivors of homicide-loss, and then through my own personal journey through difficult work days, and now in the context of the lives of my individual clients as well as communities in which we work for transformation and development.

The notion that suffering and pain, while seen to be inherently private and uber-personal, is in reality communal and fundamentally social, the words are becoming more and more haunting.

As the church moves into communities of violence, systemic injustice, stigma, poverty, materialism, greed, addiction and isolation, we are often afraid to sing songs that the people waiting for the kingdom have sung for hundreds upon hundred of years…

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
    when we remembered Zion.
²There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
³for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
(from Psalm 137)

As a people waiting and working for transformation, before we fill the craters, before we take on life again, we must tell the dirty truth about our loss and despair and all that is wrong and evil and messy and undone in the world, in our private and personal worlds, and in our communal and social worlds. If we, those who hold the promise that life never surrenders, can’t tell the truth about the mess of it all, then we aren’t yet ready, aren’t yet brave enough, to sing and sow once again.

djordan
Summar Dr.

Tagged death, grief, Grief Loss and Bereavement, honesty, hope, hopefulness, Israel, Jerusalem, justice, loss, pain, Psalm, psalm 137, Singing, truth, truthtelling, War

Jan 28 2013

2 Comments

poems, Quotes

we must beware

We must beware lest we violate the holy,

Lest our dogmas over think the mystery,

Lest our psalms sing it away.

The right of interpretation

is given only to the one who covers his face,

“afraid to look at God,”

to the one who, when the vision is forced upon him, says:

“I am undone….

for mine eyes have seen the King.”

We can only drink the flow of thoughts

out of the rock of their words.

+ Abraham Joshua Heschel

Tagged Abraham Joshua Heschel, Arts, beware, creed, doctrine, holy, humble, humility, Network of Spiritual Progressives, people, pride, Religion and Spirituality, theology, theology and humility

Jan 21 2013

5 Comments

on, the calendar, what they are teaching me

“it’s dark in here” | reflections on MLK Day

It’s no secret that racism is not okay.

Most people know it. A lot of people pretend like they agree with it. Some people fake it. Everyone deals with it.

But we all know that racism is not okay.

And so we think of ourselves as matured. As evolved. As just and honest and good and lovely.

But we are, all of us, racist, of course.

+++

I was walking through the mall a few weekends ago with a guy who used to be a college student in a small group of mine. We were there for me to run an errand, and this guy, a man who is soon to be a youth pastor in a church, made a comment that has been haunting me since that day.

“It’s dark in here.”

I looked around, looked up at the skylights, around at the stores and back at him.

“What?”

“It’s dark in here.”

The same again.

I looked around, the sky is blue, the light is shining in through the skylights, the mall is brightly lit, and at the same time as my head is turning back toward him in confusion, I understand what he is saying. I feel my heart break the moment we make eye contact, and I wish I could control anything but in that moment I realize that I can control nothing.

“There are lots of black people,” he whispers.

I have no idea what I said. I’m sure I was a jerk. My memories of that day go back to me as much as they do to him.

And today, both Inauguration Day and the day we celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr., I find myself speechless, still.

I grew up in a world where racism was acceptable, and in a home where it was not. I grew up in a faith where if you are poor and on drugs, it’s because you don’t know Jesus, not because of personal, systemic and global injustice.

More than this, I grew up knowing that it’s not okay to be a racist, but seeing those around me make it okay to be a little racist. At the right time, with the right people, in the right way.

As an upper, middle-class white male, that means that many around me, outside my home and often in a family of faith, think that those who are not any of those things are likely not Christians, so we should pray for them, and that they are both irresponsible and dangerous, so we should be afraid of them.

And whether I admit it or not, that same thought is buried deeply in me somewhere. Thank you, Southern, wealthy, Christian United States.

+++

And today, I show up for work each day with brothers and sisters of faith, both black and white. I show up for work with men and women seen as equally bringing the truth of the faith and the work of the kingdom. I show up to work each day and hash out the difficulty of what it means to work and live and laugh with those who are both the same as well as different from me, and I am a better man for it.

I am still racist. I still make assumptions about others who look like me that I would hope to never be associated with. And I know, in turn, that I am still seen as someone who makes those assumptions.

It is not completely unfair.

So on this day, when I think about the black pastor in the southern US who wrote letters to white pastors in the Southern US saying this must be the time––when I think about a pastor who wrote those letters from a Birmingham Jail–I hear them now in a deeper place than I have heard them before. I see and feel those white pastors listening who are convinced that the calls are untimely. And the challenge is more personal than it has been before. And in the global world, in the polarized world, in the rich and poor world, I hear the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. say “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and I hear my King say, “The kingdom of heaven belongs to them.”

+++

To my buddy in the mall that day, as I felt my jaw drop and my eyes broaden and heart sink, I wish I had told you, “There is so much of the kingdom you are missing.”

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

the illusion of the one thing

Privileged, I sat and listened to seven different people today, varying in ages and colors and backgrounds and struggles, all sharing the clouds in which they find themselves. I saw myself in them today, all of us looking for the one way of thinking about it or labeling it or diagnosing it that would set them, set me, set all of us free. If that one thing was found, they could get the right medicine or the right outlook or take the right action or make the right choice to fix it all.

“Fixing it all” is of course the goal they hurried in with, and the goal I hurry in most places with. It is, of course, the goal that all of us most often run into the cloudy situations with. Tell me the one thing that will fix all of this.

We scramble and wrestle and our ears turn red and our voices raise and tears fall and our heart rate takes off. Everything in us is trying to churn together to locate, isolate and intervene on that one thing.

Our inevitable not finding it leads to our heartbrokenness, growing frustration and often to our hopelessness.
And there is in the places where we sit quietly, listening to the clock tick, watching the moth walk across the window, feeling that part of our sock that isn’t fitting right, we begin to let go the illusion of the one thing. And we take a breath, and we see that in the middle of the cloudy struggle, there is still a ticking clock. Still across the window a walking moth, still a tangled sock buried deep down in our boot.

And in those moments, we realize the cloudy struggle isn’t all that is true. And there, our hope begins.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged Clocks and Timers, controlling, counseling, doubt, hope, listening, optimism, running, social work, stress, therapy, wanting, Windows, wondering diagnosing, worry, Wrestling

Jan 12 2013

2 Comments

what they are teaching me

when thirty was old

There was a time, of course, when thirty was old.

It was not that long ago, and I remember it well. My parents were, then, in their late thirties, and were, of course, ancient. Then, as I grew older, the forties became cool, and thirties were early old-age. Then, I hit my twenties, and the fifties were prime, and the twenties were young, and the thirties were when I became an adult.

Now, of course, as I am pushing the hands of the thirty clock into their final destination, the sixties seem young, and the eighties seem old.

Until lately.

My grandfather died in his early eighties, and it seemed completely unfair. He had more traveling, more reading, more drinking, more laughing, more teaching and talking and leading to do. So suddenly, the eighties seemed like when people had it all together and could tell those of us who were young, (thirties) what choices to make that we would regret.

Tonight, I left my neighbor’s 80th birthday party before she did. I was sweating from laughing, stuffed from eating, and thoughtful from conversation. As I walked the fifteen yards back to my front door, I realized how quickly time flies, how young eighty is, and how, at thirty, life is only beginning.

Cheers, Ms. Coleman, on hitting 80. And thanks for the reminder.

djordan
Pine Tree (one house over)

Tagged Birthday, birthday parties, birthdays, family, Home, learning, neighborhoods, old, Pine, remembering, young

choosing to be most hopeful