Thoughts

I am in the midst of facilitating a team that will be starting a new church service this fall. One of the most difficult things for us has been deciding on a good name. I am humbly requesting assistance from those of you who read this blog (all 4 of you).

Some of the distinctives of this service that may help you in your brain-storming:

• Liturgically-focused worship
• Incorporating both ancient and modern practices
• Authentic, but not hyped, spirituality
• Regularity/consistency combined with creativity/spontaneity
• Valuing silence and quietness
• Valuing the community-at-worship, not just isolated individuals worshiping
• Weekly rhythm of Word and Sacrament (Scripture and Eucharist)
• Participation in mystery rather than explanation of it
• Comfortable with paradox and truth-in-tension

I’ve also been drawn to themes of light and illumination in thinking about this service, our whole lives (good and bad) being brought into the light of God’s presence, which is paradoxically both comforting and blindingly bright, warm but frightening.

So: send me some ideas! You can leave comments, or if you’d like to send me an email, use the link right under my picture on the left. The person who comes up with the best name will receive a brand new car! Just kidding.

Thinking outside the box is vital to human life. Yeah, I know I said it was over-rated yesterday. Welcome to my head. I see things from both sides, to a fault usually.

While I maintain that life does have limits, and that you really can’t just do whatever you’d like to do, we desperately need creative, lateral thinking to help us see possibilities we didn’t know were there, to break us out of the soul-killing machine of commercializing and monetizing everything. We need to play, and be inefficient, "unproductive", at least sometimes, so we remember that life isn’t just about being "functional" in society.

There are real limits in life – this keeps us humble. But there are some boxes that we need to get outside of. The one I’m thinking about today is the box of "Everything-Is-A-Product-To-Be-Consumed".

What boxes do you want to think and act outside of?

Thinking outside the box is overrated. Sometimes I grow tired of the "throw off the restraints" / "no limits" / "boundless freedom" / "unlimited growth" message. I know that sometimes a good kick in the pants is good for kick-starting creativity, but creativity actually doesn’t thrive in a truly "no limits" atmosphere. Creativity needs structure to grow up and become a blessing. And sometimes in our desperation to "Think Outside the Box™" we just end up creating something flaky and flimsy that is discarded after a few months in order to chase after the shiny new "Next Big Thing.™"

So lately I’ve found myself seeking appropriate boundaries, helpful limits, quiet consistency, and simple, sustainable structures. But it’s hard to find books on those subjects at the Christian bookstores. But I suppose a publisher would have a hard time selling a book titled Life Actually Does Have Limits, And The Reason You Have A Bloody Nose Is That You Keep Ignoring Them.

Community is not what happens to a group when they finally feel warm fuzzies toward each other. Community does not "happen" at all. Community simply is, or is not. If I am in community with you, I may or may not experience warm feelings toward you, but it has no bearing on whether or not we are in community. We either are, or are not, regardless of how we feel about one another. It’s about ontology, not phenomenology.

Now healthy community is another matter, one of confession and absolution and forgiveness and grace, but one cannot learn to live and move in healthy community until one decides to be in community. And real community is the playground of hurt feelings, misunderstood motives, annoying idiosyncrasies and growth in grace, which is probably why so few actually decide to do it.

Remember when you were a kid, and bubbles were the most amazing things? Every day was a new torrent of wondrous experiences, tastes, sensations, adventures. No wonder they never want to go to bed. Life is just too exciting! Children know what it is to stand in awe of creation (not just the big stuff, like Niagra Falls, but the little stuff, too, like bugs and zippers and puddles and mulch and yes, bubbles); their capacity to be amazed hasn’t been dulled by competence and information.

We adults have a harder time at wonder, because we are competent, we are informed. It would seem we are doomed to a life of bland functionality and mathematical predictability. The answer is not to become stupid and inept, but to re-discover wonder without becoming incompetent or ignorant.

But perhaps there is something wrong with us if we cannot find a way to be stunned anymore. Maybe if we don’t know how to marvel, we are in fact incompetent, dysfunctional. If we cannot be amazed, then perhaps we are in fact ignorant, not seeing what the child sees when she squeals with delight at a floating bubble.

Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from a precocious two-year-old.

(photo by chris)