The Time has come...

This will be my last post to "Pastor Beth at Covenant" since my last Sunday serving this "little church with a big mission" Church of the Covenant in Arlington VA was May 31, Pentecost 2020. I am also retiring from pastoral ministry on that date.
My oft-stated goal for the end of my pastoral service here was "to retire normally."  I am only the fourth installed pastor of this congregation, started in 1958 during the post WWII boom in the federal government's expansion. Arlington was and is such a 'company town' where the company is the federal government of the United States. The fortunes of Northern Virginia in general rise and fall with the government's. Now during the current pandemic, the area is poised to decline, if not fall. Fortunes of congregations all over this area in flux. The pain of the last few days upon the death of George Floyd have plunged us into deeper peril as a nation.
I had chosen this date for retirement long before the current situations. I still am grateful for the opportunity to have served this small congregation, and hold onto hope for its future, only because I know who holds the future.

Almost time to say goodbye

As the time winds down for me to say goodbye to the 'little church with a big mission' I find myself alternately excited to push ahead to a new kind of life, and at the same time, extremely sad. The grief comes up with waves of actual crying, the sobbing kind that overwhelms me at times. I can't really tell if its related to our extremely strange life inside a pandemic or just the grief I find in leaving a congregation I have known and loved for nearly twelve years. Probably a bit of both.
I have to clean out my office at the church. Each paper and file bring back memories of the people who have guided me on this journey and the people I have helped guide...all of which give me opportunities for thankfulness and joy, as well as times for crying. 
I have to admit, I'm a bit of a packrat when it comes to keeping meaningful (to me) bits of paper. I started my file and book collection in the era before the internet gave us unlimited access to information. If I were doing it now, I probably wouldn't have saved so much paper. Now I'm re-examining the collection for what will be appropriate to save. What will I be passing along? How do I decide what to keep and what to discard? How do I organize all the ephemera I keep to tell my own story? Who will care if I do or don't? In any case, I find that I have to answer all those questions in about a week, before I vacate the premises of the church on May 31.
When I picked May 31 as a retirement date, I did so with the happy realization of the coincidence of Pentecost with the last Sunday of the month. (How often does THAT happen?) Little did I know that this year in 2020, Pentecost would fall in the middle of a pandemic. Our little church hasn't met in person since the middle of March. It doesn't look like it will meet in person any time soon.  So much to grieve in so short a time, at at such difficulty!
As I bid farewell to the congregation with my own legacy, I look back on their journey and mine, with bouts of grief and thanksgiving, for our joint moving with the Spirit.
Back to cleaning out the files and bookshelves.
To God be the Glory.

PPE for the Soul

While commenting on the practices that we're all trying to incorporate now to stay healthy in our quarantined environments, it occurred to me that our spiritual practices are our own versions of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for our souls. We need the disciplines of prayer, worship, meditation, bible reading, on our own and with others in virtual space to provide the framework to interpret our actions and feelings and to connect them with the purposed that are beyond ourselves. This is how we'll survive, and even thrive. Our fore-bearers in the Christian faith knew this, as do all prior generations of people who survive crises like ours.  This is the wisdom that has been passed down to us: Spiritual health is a matter of regular devotional hygiene, faithful discipline in the practices that put boundaries around our human tendencies to wander. Faith matters. This is not the time to jettison the spiritual practices we know and understand. It is definitely the time to engage them in much deeper ways.
I do feel some sorrow for those who have no faith traditions to appeal to for such wisdom.  Those unmoored from any faith community--the 'nones' and the 'dones'--may be struggling now to reinvent spiritual exercises for themselves, maybe searching the internet for sites devoted to coping mechanisms with whatever is available to fill a felt need. Some may do well, others not. It's hit and miss. It's difficult to discern what works, and what has stood the test of time when one doesn't have the benefit of the long history with a tradition in which to make such a judgement.
Now I am grateful for the many years of experience in my own Christian practices...not that I'm an expert in any of the them. But I do have the examples of generations of saints who have gone before me--the Desert Mothers and Fathers, the mystics of the European middle ages, the Pilgrims who have progressed--all of whom survived with their own PPE for the Soul and handed on to me.
Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola.

Earth Day 2020--Taking time out for something important

I took this morning off to travel less than a mile with my wagon and garbage bags around my neighborhood. In years past, I have always wanted to take part in the annual Earth Day cleanup of trash in parks, streambeds, and public lands. Unless April 22 fell on a weekend, it wasn't easy to take the time.  This year, with my home schedule much more under my control, I was able to spend three hours outside in a nearby park, criss-crossing a streambed in underbrush where locals go to hang out and drink. A major thoroughfare borders the woods, too, and a busy corner with a stoplight provides an opportunity for folks to throw all kinds of trash out their car and truck windows.
Litter has always distressed me. Besides despoiling the landscape (Have you seen how many shopping bags the wind deposits in trees?) the toxicity of chemicals and plastics that deteriorate and drain into the watershed makes me angry.
So today was prayer and pickup day. There is so much that needs the attention of prayer: all our front line medical workers, all those suffering near death and their families, all those essential workers and those deemed so unessential that they have been let go of their jobs. Each bottle or can or piece of trash I spotted was an occasion to pray. And I'm including prayers for all those cleaning up after someone else's thoughtlessness. There will be many of us in the coming months.

Coping With Advice Overload Now

Every hour that I've opened up my email, there are some new ideas and resources for pastors for coping with our current pandemic situation. There are those from folks wanting to sell me something--"get this online platform for doing online ministry"--and from others who seem to actually care about my situation. I am a small congregation pastor, learning a ton of new protocols and technology, but still trying to lead for the benefit of congregants, most of whom are woefully naive as to digital media and communications techniques.
Some of the advice is helpful, if a bit pedantic--"keep exercising," "keep up your at-home discipline," "eat healthy stuff." Some of it has genuinely helpful insights. Colleagues I know and trust are sending me something just about every day. I try to read at least a sampling of it every day.
But the volume is getting unmanageable. My inbox has grown from under 100 messages to over 200 an I can't seem to whittle down the messages to a manageable amount. How to turn off the fire hose of information? 
I could just unplug. I did that last week--Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
I could just wholesale delete, letting go of every message over 2 weeks old. If I haven't gotten to dealing with it by then, it's probably unimportant. The idea that I will get to all messages is impossibly naive on my part. Turn it off!
That's the only piece of advice I need to hear now. God's way of reforming us is certainly upsetting, but necessary.

Being Set Apart

Holy Week is "holy" for Christians because it is set apart. That is the literal meaning of "holy"--"set apart."  Yesterday I mused with the congregation I serve that we are all "holy" because we have all been set apart, in these days since being isolated because of Covid-19. We are set apart from each other, set apart from daily routines, set apart from the structure of time we once knew, set apart from what had considered "normal."
We are indeed set apart from some things, but are we are also set apart for something? I have seen numerous writings and essays about being set apart for this time, urging us to be aware of what we have been set apart for:

• more intense awareness of our interconnectedness
• a sabbath for renewing our relationship with God
• time to breath and pay attention to what's important in life
• time to pay attention to the needs of others
• etc.
  

This week is indeed Holy Week for Christians, and perhaps Holy Week for the whole world.
Blessings on your use of this time as Holy.

Can reading save our souls?

I have been listening and reading to the torrent of Christian writers and thinkers that are out there in this current moment of "what do we cling to now?" during this pandemic. It is a fire hose to drink from. I must admit that I'm a bit weary of the advice, even as I'm fascinated how the best and the worst instincts of Christians (as well as others) are on display. There are a few reliable sources in the Christian blogosphere (here I disclose my own proclivities):
NT Wright, Miraslav Volf, Richard Rohr at the Center for Action and Contemplation, most of the writers for Christian Century, and the community of good writers in my own Presbyterian tradition.  If I could only just read for 12 hours a day, I could work my way through the endless monotony of my own routine.
But I can't.
I'm an embodied human, not just a brain. I need sunshine and exercise and good food, and laughter and companions who can converse. I need my husband, the only other human I've been within 6 feet of in the last 3 weeks.
So going into this Holy Week, I will contemplate the holy body of Jesus, how he also needed everything any human would need. "Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us, embodied humans."