Wait Without Hope

I've been reading NT Wright's Christian's At the Cross. And, this post might be better suited for Holy Week as the entire book is a retelling of Wright's messages from Holy Week 2007 with the parishioners of the Church of the Ascension in Easington Colliery, an abandoned mining town northeast of Manchester in the UK.

And though, I probably will reflect more on the book during Holy Week, I could not help but post on the section for Holy Saturday in the moment.

I have been struck in recent weeks by the idea of a language of lament, and posted about it previously.

In his reflections on Holy Saturday, Wright quotes from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, in which Eliot pushes us to think about hope and waiting:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing

As Wright then positions the poem on Holy Saturday and asks us to think through the lens of those trying to cope with all that has gone wrong, with the death and subsequent burial of Jesus.

And it is important that we think in terms of "all that has gone wrong", because I'm sure if we think "crucifixion" we cannot help, but reinterpret the moment through our our revisionist perspective and read a hope into the story that was not present for those who were waiting.

So, we retain the seed of the idea that something had gone terribly wrong.

And we rest in this moment. Something is terribly wrong.

I think Wright's meditation here is worth breathing in:

If you want God's hope instead of yours; if you want God's love instead of yours; if you want God's thoughts instead of yours - then you will need to go through a time of silence, of resting, of ignorance and dispossession.


Dispossession. Ignorance. Rest. Silence. To learn to hope with a hope that is not mine.

Going Public

As I have struggled in the past several years to reconstruct my faith, one issue has continued to be difficult to fit into place: conversion.

I've struggled to reconcile my own experience, with the tradition I received, and then my own awkwardness or inability to transfer what it means.

What needs to be understood? What does someone need to know? Experience? Believe? Have right? Submit to? Say? Do? What exactly is faith? Works? Fruit? Reconciliation? Atonement? Justification? Reconciliation? Adoption?

And then, what do we call it? Born Again? Saved? Converted? Accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior?

And the deeper we get into it, the longer we are enculturated to it, the more simplistic and monochromatic and one-dimensional it becomes for us. And we begin to think everyone understands. It's like lying in the middle of a merry-go-round...you can soon forget that you are spinning at all until you move toward the perimeter, then its hard to even gain a focus of the world around you.


There seem to be two things that are making more sense to me as I re-read the stories in scripture of people who became followers of Jesus:

1. When people were seeking God, God sent someone their way who could answer their questions
2. So the starting point of the story is never the same, but the stories converge with finding God in Jesus.

Ever tried to get on a merry-go-round when it is spinning very fast?! Imagine that merry-go-round never slowing down, never giving you the opportunity to jump in, even if you wanted to...that is how disconnected some of our language has become.

It seems like more and more what I see is students looking at faith, spirituality, morality, religion, etc...just spinning around them and their doesn't seem to be a good entry point. A point to jump on, even when some closer to the middle yell, "Come on, you can do it. Just jump on."

Further from the center, and especially from the outside, tt doesn't look possible or particularly safe.

Sometimes, rather than yell...we try to grab on. Ever do that?! Reach out and grab someone while that thing is spinning our of control? Never a good idea! Usually ends badly.

Sometimes from the outside looking in it looks like everyone is already having a good time and not really interested in slowing down to let you on board. That really sucks. Makes playing somewhere else much more appealing.


As I was talking with a friend of mine last night, he described how he had been coming to church, and how "your talks are great", I like the way "you guys do things" and how he's really "seeing value" in it. Then he said something I recognized in others, but they had never said in these words, "I just don't know where I am supposed to start."

Not everyone is standing on the outside waiting to jump on, but for those who are, I am convinced that God is calling us to jump off and stand on the outside with them and help them find the entry point. To slow that thing down...by taking the time to help them find the entry point.

We'll do more harm than good by trying to grab them on our way by.

Next post...a look at entry points.

Govenors to return unused funds in 2011...

How many states do you think will have unused money coming from the stabilization fund within two years?

Just in case...the following is from the department of education provisions:

(d) State Allocations. After carrying out subsections (a), (b), and (c), the Secretary
shall allocate the remaining funds made available to carry out this title to the States as
follows:
(1) 61 percent on the basis of their relative population of individuals aged 5 through 24.
(2) 39 percent on the basis of their relative total population.
(e) State Grants. From funds allocated under subsection (d), the Secretary shall
make grants to the Governor of each State.
(f) Reallocation. The Governor shall return to the Secretary any funds received undersubsection (e) that the Governor does not award as subgrants or otherwise commitwithin two years of receiving such funds, and the Secretary shall reallocate such funds tothe remaining States in accordance with subsection (d).

This is from the general overview from the department of education:

Invest one-time ARRA funds thoughtfully to minimize the "funding cliff." ARRA represents a historic infusion of funds that is expected to be temporary. Depending on the program, these funds are available for only two to three years. These funds should be invested in ways that do not result in unsustainable continuing commitments after the funding expires.

The allocations themselves are not intended to promote innovation as they are stop-gap measures to keep us from slipping backward because of funding. My optimistic side hopes these funds will create something innovative and sustainable. But, my cynicism leads me to think that special projects and already advantaged districts will be funded and rewarded. School districts that already have potential because of resources and potential ongoing resources will have the most to gain, and districts that struggle for resources and suffer more systemic economic problems will be left in the exact same place in three years.

Are there allocations for new schools, more charter and alternative schools? Are there incentives to actually reward innovation, and give innovation a chance to succeed?

Final thought from Obama's speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce regarding longer more time for children in school.

I am in favor of a full calendar academic year divided into four quarters with two week breaks in between. But, unless we use the time in school more wisely, more efficiently...it won't matter how many hours a day students spend in a building.

We were in a situation for a couple of years to be able to homeschool our children. We could accomplish in 2 hours what they spent the next year doing in a public school setting in 6 hours. Not because of poor teachers, but ineffecient and antiquated systems. Even our subject matter in many schools looks exactly the same as it did 20 years ago.

The larger the beurocracy, the less effecient the outcomes. If not funding for innovation and risk taking in education now, when?

language of lament

In the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about lament. I'm finding I don't speak that language very well.

My experience has been that we don't share our laments with just anyone. We typically don't throw our lament to the wind, that is too weak. (I know there are people who wear their lament as a show, a draw for attention. But, in those cases, I don't think lament is really the language being spoken.)

But, when it is an authentic language of lament, we ypically don't share them with everyone, in part because it is too transparent, too vulnerable, too personal. Lament exposes us.


And, I've not really thought about it in this way, but is there a greater indicator of trust and friendship than the sharing of our lament with another? Sharing our most vulnerable moment?


And if that is true, is there any greater loneliness or hurt than to hand someone your lament, only to have it handed back to you? To have no one willing to carry your lament? No one would share in our suffering?

I can't imagine a more isolated or painful moment - to suffer and look around, and find no one who cared enough to listen, or if they did, walked away unaffected.

Nor, can I think of many greater honors than to be entrusted with someone's sorrows.

I wonder if I love deep enough to be entrusted with someone's lament?

Rob Bell spoke on lament recently and posed the question this way, "What happens when a lament goes unheard? It turns to anger."

I wonder if that is this is the apologetic language of our age, the language of lament.

Buried Treasure

I was reading again in Alan Hirsch's, book The Forgotten Ways.

With all of the information available to us AND sources from which to attain it, we (our staff) continue to ask ourselves, "How can we communicate with our students and leaders without being just one more indistinct sound in the cacophony?" (OK, so we usually say it more like, "Why the heck doesn't anyone know what's going on?!)

So, as we have experimented with multiple aspects of effective communication...this thought from Hirsch has stuck with me this week:

"...because systems exist in a mass of disordered information, the task of leadership here will be to help select the flow of information and focus the community around it. Not in order to dominate and try to predetermine the outcome, but rather to supply accurate and meaningful information to the systems so that it can in-form itself in response to it."

SO, here are some decisions we've been thinking through within our own structure of a network of community groups:

1. What are the essential things to communicate?
2. How do we focus the whole community towards those things?
3. If we do get their attention, what does a community that "in-forms" itself look-like?
   

It seems my role as a pastor in an information age is to help students be more discerning in their inquiry to find more accurate and meaningful information, rather than give them more information...my role may be to point them to buried treasure.

Community Colleges & The Church: Innovative Necessity

Sandra Tracy, dean of the school of extended learning at San Juan, said she initially doubted that microlectures could be effective — they just didn't seem long enough.

"At first it's one of the most unnatural things," Ms. Tracy said. "But it's an intriguing concept — it gets you away from the idea of a talking head; it's more like snapshots of learning."

When I read the above to a friend of mine, his question was, "So, when are churches going to start doing that?"

Micro-messages.

1-3 minute messages, a list of resources, key concepts, key words and then turn it over to a guided collaborative community.

Get away from the talking-head...

Goodbye to Buyback?

How long before the rapacious practice of text-book sells and buybacks become a thing of the past?

Alternatives are emerging.

From BCHeights.com - student newspaper at Boston College last year:

While online music piracy has been prevalent since the late 1990s, a new ilk is emerging that affects publishers and college students everywhere: textbook piracy.

Check out Lev Gonick's blog about collaborative educational communities.

And, Seth Godin's recommendation for Amazon:

Demolish the textbook market as soon as possible by publishing open source textbooks for free.

Only 15 years too late.