The Best Thing Out of Lambeth So Far -

I have spent way too much time this last week reading blogs and news reports out of the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion’s every-ten-year convocation of all of its bishops. This wonderful picture is from Sunday’s Eucharist – click on it to see a bigger version. These Malaysian Christians, singing and dancing and playing shakers and panpipes, have brought forward the Gospel book in a miniature canoe decorated with flowers. Every time I look at this I feel a surge of joy!

Telling Tales at Waycross

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of the day at Waycross [the summer camp and conference center of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis] leading two storytelling workshops. Beautiful place, beautiful young people, and a beautiful spirit – the campers seemed calm and mellow. Something in the water, maybe?

With each workshop I talked a bit about reading vs. telling. I told them a very bare-bones Goldilocks and the Three Bears and then we had fun elaborating on it using details, voice, and body.

On Providing a Refuge from Secular Modernism

Secular modernism is the cultural frame in which much of my life, and yours, takes place. I get my medical care there. My husband works inside that frame – also my son and son-in-law. Secular modernism delivers to me this fine fruit-flavored computer I am using, and resources to do the kind of study and thought I like to do. It causes groceries to arrive at the supermarket where I shop and provides useful ant, flea, tick and spider control products. And so forth.
But there’s much more to humanity – things that don’t fit very well into the frame of secular modernism. Storytelling comes to mind – also art, music, and the life of faith community. And anyone with a modest knowledge of twentieth-century history knows that secular modernism has had significant and terrible failures.
As I’ve traveled around this summer I keep stumbling into places that invite children to step outside the cultural frame of secular modernism. I didn’t start out looking for these!

New Verse for “O beautiful, for spacious skies…”

Here’s my additional verse for “O beautiful, for spacious skies” which we’ll
be singing as our closing hymn on Sunday, July 6. Click on the music thumbnail and you’ll get a high-resolution jpg of the whole song – you are welcome to download and use it.

O beautiful, for those who heal, who teach and build and mend,
and serving, make their visions real as citizens and friends!
America! America! May God thy hope redeem,
may justice like thy waters roll, compassion like thy streams!

A long silence…

It doesn’t look so good when somebody doesn’t blog anything for four months, does it? Here’s what I was doing.

Liturgy was extremely complicated for a while. I am deeply involved in liturgical planning for our church, Saint David’s, and here came Palm Sunday / Holy Week / Easter Day / Easter Lessons and Carols / Pentecost, just booming right along, with the earliest beginning to Lent that I remember. I didn’t really get my feet under me during this time – just kept skating right along.

What do we pray for when we pray for peace?

This week I’ve handled every book in my office at least twice, and as I have waded through them I have noticed how many books there are about praying for peace. I’ve thought for a long time that as global communication has improved – and grown more visual – my faith tradition’s way of creating prayers for peace, for God to act, has undergone transformational change. Now I realize I can track and describe that change right here in my office. I have set aside those books as they have gone by and I’m thinking about a new workshop, titled as this post is titled. There are other resources in here as well, like Willard Swartley’s magnificent Slavery, Sabbath, War and Women on using the Bible in rhetoric. A tiny pocket Book of Common Prayer once owned by a soldier in the Second World War.

Summoning Chaos

It’s Thursday evening and since Monday I have been working along on reorganizing my office. Monday or forever – I forget which. I was space-deprived for quite a number of years and having a room of my own is a puzzling new reality. I don’t even know what to call it…’office’ sounds so…productive. Not reflective enough.

Here’s Lyla, hiding out under my prayer desk.

I was promising myself the diversion of writing along on my blog as I worked along on organizing, but something I did early in the process took me off line. Also, I had planned to take evocative pictures of the chaos to share with my readers (both of you) but the ambient chaos includes the camera upload USB thingie.

A Chair Wrapped in Stories

February seemed like a good month to try (again) to organize my office, so I have been working away on the job. I’ll get it right someday. I have one of the chairs that sat on the sunporch of my parents’ last home – not the chair my father liked to sit in, but the chair to sit in if you wanted to talk to him. It’s an aluminum lawn chair, pawky-looking the way old aluminum gets, and I want it for a guest chair in my office. Also, I suppose, for a place to sit if I want to talk to my father.

The January mailing has gone out…

 …so now I just wait for your phone calls and emails!

Publicizing this enterprise is always such a shot in the dark. People  don’t quite know what to think of the biblical storytelling idea – an unsettling combination of two already slightly peculiar flavors, like the blue-cheese stuffed olives in the deli at Bloomingfoods.

Well, we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I’m telling at the Bloomington Storyteller’s Guild WINTERTELLING on February 8 at the Monroe County Library.  And I’m working again on reorganizing my office, which is where this blog started last year. I’ll get it right sooner or later.

Putting Down the Great Story, Picking Up the Other Stories

The tree is down, the ornaments are put away, the Christmas cards are done, and I’ve made a start on the thank-you-notes. I remember with considerable chagrin all the years when I thought the Nativity stories were sentimental and boring – this was before I got whacked upside the head by the interpretive genius of Raymond Brown. Now I look forward to recollecting these stories at Christmas, and to being stirred by the passion for justice and renewal that breathes through them.