Vacation Bible Brought Me Back

I have been absent from my blog for a number of years because adjusting to retirement has been a long process but not difficult.  Not ever having done it before I explored every facet that arose and they are still coming.  My personal perspective has shifted, but am not sure how much has changed but refined and lots of the anger is gone.  In fact most of it.  I still have some and I am more in control of it that it is of me now.  A big shift. My work was not so demanding, but I overworked myself as I can now see.

To start back with my blog, I will share some reflections on a recent Vacation Bible School that Saint John's Episcopal Church, Bisbee, Az. participated in via a grant from the Episcopal Community Services.  The program was done in cooperation with an independent evangelical congregation in Naco, Sonora, Mexico.  There were about 150 children involved ages from about 2 years to 16.  They all came dressed as if going to special event and the program didn't start until 4 pm because the parents had to work.

There was staff from the church in Naco and St. John's and other American congregations when other staff members brought them along.  I presented a bible story one time and then observed from location and also from a distance listening to other staff talk about it.  It was a whopping success from fun to learning to relationships.  There was no whining, no crying nor glum faces.  A lot of gratitude expressed through the eyes, and mouths and behavior of participants and staff.  It was a model of community at its best.  Hard work and the staff was energetic and then tired at the end of the day.  

It was a success but we will not know the results because life lived like that impacts each individual in specific and subtle ways.  They may know what they are now, later or much later.  What I got from the experience is that this was faith at work.  I trusted what we were doing was going to have a graceful impact on all who took part.  I am so glad that a formal evaluation was not taken because it would not tell us anything worth.  How do you evaluate faith or works of faith.  I don't know.

New Things

This season of the year and I meant ADVENT stirs many feeling of hope within me.  I should never act on anything leaning toward the negative or depressed until I run it through Advent.  This is the season to consider the ends.  The end of the past, the end of now and the end of the future.  The past is gone.   I can live a new now.  The now is fleeting so get on with it.  The future is not ever here so make the now the best you can and rejoice.

Self-God

On reflection, it has occurred to me that in my 40 years working in the church that my serious conversations about God came after exhausting a discussion about the person.  Start with us then go to god.

I encourage you to write your own.

Faith Statement of Ben Somerville

12/16/11

God is a name;

and I believe in God.

I use the name to express the source, being, or non being, creator, sustainer, redeemer, forgiver, lover, abstainer, and judge;

and everything which is in charge of life animate and inanimate that we know or don't know about.

I intend to cover all bases, good and evil because this understanding of God is the only way that my faith statement makes sense;

And any limiting or confining statement of God makes God less than God.

My faith is what I trust to be true as if there were no question about it;

and I question a lot.

My faith allows and encourages me to question;

and my faith depends on the truth as it is, not as I want it to be.

When I have illusions;

and I am disillusioned, I come closer to the truth.

I believe Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who became the Christian Messiah, is the best expression of God being fully present in a human being;

and a witness to God's full presence within each human being.

I believe God is present where there is life of any kind;

and everything contains life.

I believe that every human contains the gift of the full presence of God;

and we are responsible for how we live out that gift.

We are all in this together;

and the way we treat one another is the actual way we treat God.

Our struggle is to have our behavior be congruent with our words;

and the way we feel will fall in line.

We will know the joy of compatibility, even if it takes years;

and we are free to choose the way we live.

We are within the sovereign reign of God;

and loves abounds.  

A Letter To a Friend

The story you give concerning your faith and spiritual community sounds so much like the development of a movement turning into an institution and then being reformed in the second or third generation.   The Christian Church went through this in the early years, and has continued reforming ever since.  It is important to return to the origin and take the fundamentals and use those in reforming, knowing that you will never recapture what was, but you can establish something new based on your understanding of the beginnings.  The number of denominations and independent churches of the Christian tradition are too numerous to count.  

We have spiritual longings and needs to be met, and it is important to seek out what will help us grow and continue walking a path that is fulfilling and compassionate. I chose the Episcopal Church early in my life because it was open in thought and had a beautiful worship format. It has teachings,  but the primary focus is to have common worship.  I have gone through a million changes in beliefs, practices, and journeys in the last 50 years and the Episcopal Church has encouraged, tolerated and facilitated them for me, and that is why I stay with it.  I also think it is important for us to be part of something that is bigger than we are to help correct us along our way.  All corrections are not necessarily conducive or important or good, but they at least give us another perspective and call us to be accountable to ourselves and others.  So, my friend, if you have a call to reform, do it with humility and boldness.

Walk number 2 with Shadow my dog.

There is a shot in the movie, Edward Sissorhands with Johnny Depp, which shows the suburban residential street where all the houses are from the same model and the shrubs and lawns are manicured and all the trash cans are lined up like soldiers beside the driveways.  A model of order and cleanliness.  Walking through my neighborhood on trash collection day, we resemble the Edward Sissorhands shot from the movie.  Edward comes along and disrupts the order and seeming serenity of the neighborhood.
 As I continued my walk, I noticed one house where the youngest son had almost drowned in the swimming pool and suffered severe brain damage.  I see him once in a while and he is smiling and happy;  his parents have a big job caring for him and his older brother who is just fine, and they do very well. He is an Edward who has disrupted the seemingly ordered and serene neighborhood.
Down the street a little farther and I greet the man from a house that is very well taken care of and he has a Jeep, Motorhome, and Trailer in his yard.  He and his wife travel  and play in all their RV's.  They also go to funerals " back home".   On farther down is another immaculately kept place, their neighbor's pressured them into cutting their trees way back because all the leaves blew into the neighbor's yard.  Another one has had several strokes in the last couple months.  Another one is a Veteran with P.T.S.D. who is brought to his house once in while and he spends the day watering his yard which is mostly dirt then becomes mud.
So, this is just a small sample of my neighborhood which appears quiet, orderly and serene.  We actually have a lot of Edward Sissorhands living among us.  Sometimes I notice and other times I don't.  When I do notice, my life is richer.

Shadow and Me. Shadow is the name of my mix breed dog of Dachshund and Pit Bull Terrier. He takes me for a walk each morning and I think as I walk. Organizing my random thougts is an exersize which is fruitfull. Rather than letting my thoughts be what I think. I organize them and then choose what I actually think. Having a thought is not thinking. Thinking is processing throughts.

There is a new neighbor who has a sign hanging on the front porch which reads "Do you believe in life after death?  Trespass and find out."  This prompted a lot of thoughts, the first was "how hostile, it might be cute on an adolescent's bedroom door, but not on a front porch."  Do I want to meet this new neighbor or not?  How about keeping enemies close?  People who think this way are enemies and I'm a christian who is called to love my enemies.  How do I love this new neighbor. I'd like to avoid him.  Is that loving him?  I really do not know. 

I think that there is fear and anger behind the sign and I wonder what it is about the person's life that creates such fear.  It can be a multitude of things in a person's life such as being abused as a child or being bullied as a kid.  It can be a chemical imbalance in the brain or some kind of mental illness or emotional disability.  The variety of possible causes remind me that there are so many people who do not have access (even though it is available) to proper diagnosis or treatment, and there are those who do have the access and don't seek it or don't till late in life.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is primarily a social and cultural issue and then a personal one.  We have the culture we want because we are the ones who create it.  It may not be what any of us individually prefers but it is a result of what we as a group produce.  There is still too much in our society that encourages fear of one another and violence as the answer for security.  Something happened after Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that "all we have to fear is fear itself".  We have progressively become a more fearful society since the 1950's.   I personally think that with our climb to the top powerful nation, we turned our fear in on ourselves; with the recent 9-11 event in our lives we also now have fear of ourselves and others.  We have moved into a nation of people who know no safe place except behind force.  This is false security because there is always someone else who will come along with a bigger or better gun.

My neighbor and I live in this social environment together and I choose to leave him alone.  If we are brought together somehow, I will do my best to love him as myself, and do unto him as I would want him to do to me.  Not be fearful of him and not try to change him and not be bullied by him.  I have been referring to him and it may be a her or a them.  At this point all I know is the sign.