happy holy days

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a room full of alumni from various church-related volunteer programs. These were people who spent several years of their lives serving alongside people in extreme poverty - from the Southside of Chicago to the Horn of Africa. They lived in intentional community with fellow volunteers and found joy in living simply and together. These were some seriously amazing people, intent on continuing to commit themselves to sustainability in both their economic and relational lives. Plus, they wore gorgeous scarves and huge earrings. I liked them.

During a panel discussion, the conversation turned to Christmas gift-giving. For most of these former volunteers, acquiring more material things was no longer high on their priority list, and talking to their families about that was inevitably awkward. The conversation went on, and on, and on -  we talked more about gift giving than anything else all weekend. 

I get the awkwardness, and I've had my share of uncomfortable family interactions, most of them infused with my own youthful condescension and militaristic progressivism. I like giving gifts - I like getting gifts. And I'm happy to be a part of what has become a really important tradition for parts of my family. But it's still a sticky time of year, when I inevitably begin to think about which weighs heavier - living a life of integrity or loving and respecting the people who formed me into this kind of person. Life, it turns out, is always a constant negotiation anyway.

So. Here are some ways to think about this particular season of negotiation, faithfulness, integrity, and relationship.

Check out the Advent Conspiracy website for more resources and suggestions. Happy Holy Days.

in the meantime

I'm not a total slacker. It just turns out that blogging is in fact my job as well as my hobby:

Daily Discipline

The Cincinnati BVS House

BVS Volunteers + Vocation

CoB Young (and not-so-young) Adults Talk Theology, Church, and Culture

from the hills of Cincy

This is the fulfillment of my promise: a (minorly) anticipated and (majorly) disorganized return to blogging. A potluck episode of wit and wisdom, coming at you from the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati. Cincinnati, it turns out, is a hidden gem in the Midwest: the 10^th most walkable city in the country, beautifully set on hills overlooking the Ohio River, with a gorgeous (and free!) public art museum. Seriously, if you’ve thus far overlooked Cincinnati as a possible destination city, I advise you to change your perception. The most relevant attribute of the city, however, is that it is also home to the first intentional BVS community house. I am sitting right now on the couch of incarnation, the very place where an idea has indeed become a reality.

And, oh, what a reality it is, y’all. I lived in a volunteer house in Illinois for two years, a huge Victorian monster with cracked plaster and splintery floors and a big sunny kitchen where we created community around the dinner table. But this, THIS, is a recently renovated, tastefully gentrified three-bedroom bungalow furnished with donated desks and plush couches. There is a Jacuzzi tub in the master suite, and the (free!) art museum is literally right down the road. Not exactly simple living, guys.

My time here has been declared Dana’s Week of Pie. We have vowed to bake a pie every other day. Today’s pie is a much-anticipated buttermilk, not yet sampled but looking deliciously golden. Monday’s was an oatmeal chocolate, eaten hurriedly as everyone crowded around the front windows to watch the nightly entertainment: a young-ish gay couple who leave their windows open and lights on apparently for the express enjoyment of bored volunteers who like to watch other people eat dinner.

Aside from Jacuzzi tubs and pie baking marathons, things here in Cincinnati are relatively quiet. There are Halloween block parties and road trips to worship with the Brethren oldsters, of course, and right now some neighborhood kids are in the kitchen baking trail mix bars. We’re working on chore schedules and cooking rotations, and I’m attempting to institute regular prayer and some spiritual formation. But in general, things are quiet. And each day resembles the last. There is a daily routine, here, a hurried morning and nightly dinner with everyone present. No one jets off to the other side of the country and there are no airport runs because there’s no car to get there. Every morning, I get to wake up (at 8!) on the same couch, take a shower in the same bathroom with the same shampoo, make quality fair-trade coffee with organic milk, and sit down leisurely at the kitchen table to do the day’s work. Every night, I get to hang out with four awesome volunteers and eat dinner as a family. And I am telling you, readers of the blogosphere, that this normalcy is soothing to my rambling soul.

this little bit of bacon signifies a return to blogging. i promise.

you look anemic

under your bacon helmet

you're doing it wrong.

(www.baconhaikus.wordpress.com)

from the summer of perpetual displacement

jumping at Annual Conference in San Diego (picture from Kay)

with JoJo at FCoB church picnic, Roanoke (picture by Mike)

Jr. High workcampers in Richmond

Callie and Beth at BVS Orientation in Harrisonburg

with Heather, my co-groomswoman, at Russell's wedding in Mississippi (picture by Heather)

the fam at Ocean Isle (picture by another Mike)

with Jess and Katie after officiating Katie and Ernie's wedding in Santa Barbara

always knew Alex was a playa

"You should start an anabaptist dating website...www.MennosandMacks.org."

- the one and only Callie Surber

via the Schott's Miscellany 2009 calendar:

"The accent of one's birthplace lingers in the mind and in the heart as it does in one's speech."

- Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

i am not all the way capable of so much

"...and so Nathan required me to think a thought that has stayed with me a long time and has traveled a long way. It passed through everything I know and changed it all. The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: 'Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.' I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions."

- Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

songs in the night

I want everything all at once. I live life in greedy contradictions that threaten to tear me apart. To be at home and to be far from it; to love the church and curse it regularly; to live in community and to live alone; to spring into action and sit back in reflection; to take responsibility and live free of commitment; to have my cake and eat it too.

Most of this is simply a selfish instinct to hoard all the goodness of the world into my tiny little life. I want it all, and I want it right now. Like the Israelites in the desert, I can’t leave well enough alone and let the manna for today be the manna for today, can’t trust that tomorrow will bring its own joys and troubles and graces and sustenance sufficient to itself.

This is not a revelation. This is not some newfound truth. It isn’t mind-bending or paradigm-shifting. It borders on cliché, and might even be mistaken for bumper sticker philosophy: Carpe Diem, Life is Short, Live for Today. It has its expression in Buddhism’s awareness of the moment, in Judaism’s thousands of blessings for every thing from waking up to taking a shit. Jack Nicholson makes the point beautifully as the OCD grinch-turned-nice-guy in As Good As It Gets.

But beyond the selfish desire to amass as many blessings as possible and squeeze them all into one lifetime lies something else, something that I can’t quite begin to name. It’s something like the recognition that one of these things is not better than the other, that there are blessings in both, that life is life in whatever form it happens to take at the moment.

And that God’s grace is sufficient.

I guess that’s why I attempt to celebrate the gifts and graces of life-at-the-moment. I have to be continually reminded to take only what I need, that there will be plenty leftover for tomorrow, that this place and these people and this time are enough. And when I pay attention, I realize that in fact, they are more than enough. They are abundant, and overflowing, and undeserved.

What though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
What through the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging.
Since love is lord of Heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

on the eve of another new home

The trick, of course — and it is a hard one to master — is to think of home not as a place we go to or come from, not as something inherent in the world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

- Verlyn Klinkenborg