Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Casting our nets

The message at the weekly Pacific School of Religion’s worship service yesterday was based on the Biblical story of Jesus on the banks of Gennesaret. There he asked fisherman Simon to cast his boat off of the shores and preached to the people gathered there. He then asked Simon to cast his nets deep and wide. It was morning and Simon and his fellow fishermen had been fishing all night and had caught nothing. Certain that it would be useless, Simon agreed. Instead of coming up with nothing, the nets were filled to bursting with fish to harvest.

The lectionary encouraged us to take that story as impetuous to move beyond our comfort zone, to cast our nets deep and wide, in an effort to fulfill the calling of our true selves. She encouraged us to seek beyond what we know and push ourselves beyond what is comfortable.

Letting go of what is comfortable in search of greater truth is a basis of faith. It asks that we trust our instincts, our talents and the fundamental beliefs that we hold about our self-competence and worth. It presumes that we have great things to offer the world.

And while some of us might be tentative about trusting our fundamental competence, in today’s world there is nothing else more important to do.

Howard Thurman, a minister whose guidance provided Martin Luther King Jr. with his faith in non-violence, urges us all to be responsible for ourselves. That, he says, was the original tradeoff for knowledge. Casting our nets deep and wide is the actualization of that responsibility to ourselves and to our troubled world, which needs us to be as authentic as possible.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

A sea of change

One of the unique elements of being in school in Berkeley is that I’m never quite sure how my day will shape up. While preparing lunch on Friday, I heard that there was a lecture at the Sophia Center in Oakland that a mutual friend was going to. Entitled “Our Place in the Universe, a cosmic reality,” the two-hour lecture was to be presented by Alexandra Kovats, a Catholic sister. So, with nothing else to do, I attended.

The concepts presented were familiar to me. The good sister explained, among other things, that interpretation of the Biblical instruction that we had “dominion over the world” had been misinterpreted. She said that the web of life needed to be respected, honored and protected if our planet would continue to be habitable. She said it was not necessary to demonize that other understanding, it was simply imperative to move beyond it.

And while the message was seemingly neutral and certainly not earth- or faith-shattering to me, she went on to explain the birth of the cosmos; bacteria forming some 3.4 billion years ago, and animals and plants emerging on the evolving earth before the first human. From my inexperienced ears, I thought it was in direct conflict with the creation story and I wondered what the rest of the Catholic audience was feeling with the information.

“A lot of people are eating it up,” visiting Catholic theologian Mary Margaret told me as I sleepily stumbled in the communal bathroom this morning. “People think it makes a lot of sense.”

Episcopalian priest-to-be Molly, the fellow dormer who told me about the lecture that afternoon, seemed agitated on the way home. “There is an Anglican workshop going on all this week and there is talk that some of the issues that are causing division in the Anglican church, which include homosexuality and the ordination of women, are threatening the wholeness of the “communion” or the Anglican organization. “In the name of democracy, factions are being encouraged to stay in the organization,” she said.

As part of the closing worship of the Earl Lectures, a yearly conference put on by the Pacific School of Religion, a non-denominational Christian seminary here at the Graduate Theological Union, entitled this year, “All the Rivers of Paradise: Christian Responsibility in an Interfaith World,” the celebrant said that it was no longer acceptable to hold the understanding that one religion held all meaning, while another religion was simply wrong.

While a part of me celebrates that main-stream religious thought is making its way toward a more tolerant or seemingly Unitarian-Universalist theology in order to encourage peace in our world, I understand that this new thought is shaking the foundations upon which people have built their faith.

The world, our faith traditions, and our perceptions of good and evil are being forged and tempered with a new understanding. It’s great news to many of us, and terribly frightening to a good many more.

I remind myself that a vitriolic response is limited and I offer compassion and support to those who are being challenged to change their views and long-held interpretations.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Spiritual assessment

Imagine that there are three Volkswagen owners who all parked in the “red zone” in San Francisco and received tickets for illegal parking.

The first owner’s reaction will be to be angry with the police. “Don’t they have anything better to do with their time then ticket law-abiding citizens like me,” he might exclaim.

The second owner will consider the lessons to be learned from the experience. “Maybe I should simplify and get rid of my car,” he might wonder.

The third owner will smack the palm on his hand on his forehead. “What an idiot, I am,” he will say, “I knew that that was an illegal spot. The poor police; I’m sure that they had more important things to do with their time then give idiots like me tickets.”

And so was the example of a spiritual assessment technique that my teachers in my “Introduction to Clinical Pastoral Education” explained on Tuesday.

Everyone, they say, when pressured by crisis will fall into these three categories: blaming others and feeling powerless in the situation, seeing every possibility and thus lacking clarity or the ability to prioritize, or not considering themselves as equal part of the human family.

And each one would need a spiritual counselor, or an adept friend, to counsel them that they have power and need to take a little responsibility for things that happen to them, that they need to prioritize in order to find meaning, or that undoubtedly there have been times that their contribution to the conversation has been useful and that they are equal members in the community.

Of course, we all fall into all of the categories, my professors said. But in crisis, we pick one.

When I think of myself, I think I fall into the second scenario of “What can I learn? and hence am often confused by the multitude of choices and lessons that I could make or learn. But when I was relating the teaching to my fellow seminarians as I was making a potluck dish for a departing seminarian’s last supper, my colleagues suggested that, from their standpoint, I was totally clear but was functioning in the third category of thinking myself unworthy.

Whoosh, it’s a tough call!

One professor had been self-deprecating about the system. “Maybe,” he said, “you will leave this classroom and say what a bunch of hogwash!”

“Maybe,” I told him on break, “We will find a useful tool that will serve us when we listen to anyone telling us the stories of their day.”

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Back to Berkeley

There were no tears when Stephen dropped me off at Newark Airport this morning. We had made the two hour trip with no delays and I was about two hours early for my almost noon flight back to Berkeley, following my semester break from classes. Checking my bag at the street, guitar in hand and laptop weighing my purse down considerably, I made my way to the gate. Once past security, I found that I had lost my boarding pass. Miraculously, another was simply issued at the gate.

Arriving in San Francisco some five-and-a-half hours later and 35 minutes early, I made all of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and bus connections without delay and was unpacking my suitcase some two hours after touchdown.

Prepared for driving rain and cold temperatures, I was shocked when the weather was a sunny balmy 60 degrees. The roses still bloom on the green roof outside my room.

Donning a sweatshirt as the sun was setting I walked to the grocery store. The food service is not serving this last week of Intersession. I will be across the University of California at Berkeley campus tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. at the American Baptist Seminary of the West for a four-hour, five-day intensive called “Introduction to Pastoral Care.”

The conversations in the third floor kitchen, as I unpacked my groceries and heated some pesto pasta that I had frozen before I left, included the plurality of Christianity and the universal aspects of pilgrimage.

I settle into the routine not dissimilar to being home, happily greeting and being greeted by friends.

I am pleased that I found that I could go home, and that I have returned to continue on my spiritual journey.