Let’s Go Get Shwarma

After the climactic battle scene in the movie “The Avengers,” Tony Stark (a.k.a. Ironman) thinks it’s  a good idea if they all go out for shawarma. He’s not sure what shawarma is, but he’s heard that it is good.

Well, I know what shawarma is! I was raised in North Dakota where food was not exactly adventurous. But at the age of eighteen I headed off for college in Minneapolis. I was experimenting with all sorts of new food now that I was on my own. I discovered that bell peppers were not poisonous,  and that there were more spices worth using than just salt and pepper. Feeling quite daring, I noticed  an interesting-looking restaurant a couple of blocks from the college. It was called “Abdul’s Afandy.” And the very first thing I tried at Abdul’s was a chicken shawarma sandwich.

It was a totally new flavor experience for me. That sandwich was the first food I had ever tasted that I could not compare to something else. It didn’t taste like meatloaf, or pot roast, or scrambled eggs. It tasted like shawarma. And it was great!

I’m told that more and more people are abandoning Christianity because of the bad taste it leaves in their spiritual mouths. Sexual abuse and cover up, misappropriation of money, closed mindedness, willful ignorance of scientific knowledge, and the inconceivable demonization of homosexuality all seem to epitomize Christianity in our day. All the voices and faces of Christianity that the mainstream media seems to show are either the charlatans and their televised circuses or the narrow minded “experts” espousing hatred and intolerance on what used to be news shows. I believe most people don’t know that there is more than one flavor of Christian. They think it is all meatloaf or pot roast. They’ve never had shawarma.

The Urban Abbey celebrates a shawarma kind of Christianity.

1. It is not built on dogma or doctrine.
2. It is based on Jesus’ teachings that love of God and love of neighbor (and implicitly of self) are intertwined and the beginning and goal of the journey.
3. It can be embodied in billions of different ways, just as there are billions of people.
4. Its flavor is that of hospitality and peace and deep, unconditional love.
5. It is open to the movement and inspiration of the Spirit doing new things, creating new flavor combinations, so to speak.

One of the great challenges for the Urban Abbey and all voices of a different flavor of Christianity is to tell others  that we can go get shawarma and that it is great. Our silence simply reinforces the impression that there is only one kind of Christianity and it is all judgmental and angry. In the Christian universe there is indeed meatloaf and pot roast but also shawarma and sushi and more. The Urban Abbey is a full flavor experience.

A Mad Men Kind of Approach

We’ve been catching up on some TV series at our house. One of those is AMC’s “Mad Men.” First of all, let me as a male apologize to women everywhere if the attitudes and behavior of those men are at all indicative of the real behavior and attitudes of men in that era or our own. Even if those characters are just caricatures, I still apologize.

I was watching one of the episodes where the company is working on the Nixon presidential campaign. They are struggling to keep up with the hip and innovative Kennedy campaign. The boss comes in and tells the creative team: “You are not watching enough television. That’s your job, you know.” He understands that television was the barometer of American culture and that they had to be current with their culture to do their jobs, to communicate to their audience and sell their products.

When I was ordained, I was asked this question (among quite a number of other, historical questions still asked since the founding days of the denomination): “Will you observe the following directions? a) Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Never trifle away time;” The presiding bishop went on to expound on what he considered to be trifling: video games, playing cards, and watching TV. Really.

And it seems to me that this one example of how the Church went off the rails. The Church forgot that in order to speak to a culture, you have to know that culture. Even worse, the Church got to the place where it assumed that it actually defined the culture. All the while, the real world culture went merrily along on its own very different way.

The Urban Abbey is an intentional shift of cultures. It is a bit of a mental and spiritual emigration. We are going from a place and space where we know the language, the images, the symbols and secret codes to a place that speaks, thinks, and acts differently than we do (if “we” is the church). It is a bold declaration that there is real value in the culture of today. We at SCUCC have always said that we believe that God is as present out in the world as God is in the sanctuary. Yet too often we say that in the sactuary.

So I think we need to watch more TV, and spend more time reading blogs on the Internet, and drink a lot more coffee in coffee shops. The Urban Abbey will be built not of block and mortar reinforcing our own comfort zones, but of relationships and encounters with people. Just as the residents of abbeys in the Middle Ages became students of philosophy and science and art, we must study the philosophy and science and art of our present culture. To invoke a very churchy image of baptism, we need to immerse ourselves into our culture again. That’s our job.

No Objective, Mutually Agreed-upon Definition. Yay!

CG image by Doyle Burbank-WIlliams

I get so damn tired of questions like these: “Can a Christian watch Game of Thrones?” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2013/06/04/game-of-thrones-christianity/2389553/) Can a Christian play Magic the Gathering? Can a Christian be a fan of Doctor Who and wear a fez? Can a Christian cuss? The assumption underlying the article headline and questions like these is that there exists somewhere an objective, mutally agreed-upon definition of “Christian.” Guess what? There ain’t one! And we get into trouble when we act like there is, because the definition that we begin to treat as objective and mutually agreed-upon is the definition that we personally like. And lots of times that is the same definition that makes me, personally, look like a mighty fine Christian!

And that tendency points to another sink hole for Christians (in general): we think we have to set the definition for everything and everybody. It’s kind of like the popular vampire mythology that says a cross holds power over the undead. What if Dracula was a Hindu? Or a positivistic materialist? We get so busy defining the way the whole universe works that we can lose track of how we ourselves function in it. If there is not objective, mutually agreed-upon definition for what a Christian is, then how is it that Christians can set about the business of defining everything else?

I have a friend who, when she was in college in New York, was (for lack of a better term) a Sabbath goy. My friend was then (and I believe still is) a Christian, not Jewish. So this Orthodox Jewish family hired her to come into their home on Friday afternoon and stay with them throughout the Sabbath so that she could all the things for them that the Sabbath restrictions prevented them from doing. She would turn the lights on and off. She would answer the phone. She would wash the dishes. When I tell this story, I often get the response, “That’s cheating!” Why? The family adhered to the restrictions of the covenant they were bound by. My friend was in no way bound by that same covenant. I think the sense that this was cheating comes from our Christian culture that says everybody should behave by our standards and rules. That family had a clear sense of who the rules applied to and who they didn’t.

And I think that is where we need to start with a definition for who is a Christian. There is no objective mutually agreed upon standard (am I clear about this?). So we have to be clear about our own standard. What does it mean to call myself Christian? It is not my job to decide if anybody else is or is not a Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or positivistic materialist for that matter). It is my job to be as clear as I can about what I believe it means to follow Christ. Without an objective standard to fall upon, the onus is mine, and yours, to wrestle with and create a standard that fits who I am and who you are.

Can a Christian watch Game of Thrones? This one does (when I have access to HBO). Can a Christian play Magic? I never have but I could. I also think that for me being Christian is not about what I play or watch as much as it about how I love a stranger, a neighbor, myself, the world, and whatever is Holy out there in the universe. And yes, I have a fez sitting on my desk. And I think the opening sentence of this rant answers the last question, too.

Ping Pong Theology

                My dad played a wicked game of ping pong. He had incredible patience. He would watch the ball come to his end of the table, take its bounce and then wait until the ball had dropped below the level of the table. Then he would caress the ball with a scooping motion, in so doing applying an amazing amount of English. The ball would come looping back at me, taking what seemed like a lackadaisical pace. It would bounce on my side of the table, and I would already be in place for where the ball would be on completion of its bounce. Except for that English. Instead of going where it was supposed to go, the ball would ricochet at crazy angle, and if possible pick up speed like it had just engaged warp drive. It never went where you thought, and I never, ever beat my dad at ping pong.

                That was frustrating to be sure, but Dad never gloated. OK, maybe he grinned pretty widely, but he never did an end zone dance. In fact, most of the time he was gracious enough to keep me coming back. He always had a tip to offer. He was happy to help me (or anyone he was playing) play better. I never got good enough to beat him but I always had fun playing.

                Now I know ping pong is a thin analogy for the spiritual life. But what catches my attention here is not the game itself, but the way my dad played it. He never played down to my level (at least obviously) but he never made me feel bad for playing. How many times have you had an encounter or a spiritual conversation when you felt like you were being talked down to? Or how many times have you walked away feeling like you never want to play that game again? Somehow we have to figure out how to play our own game but in a way that makes others want to keep playing.

                And that is what the Urban Abbey is all about. I my own self am looking for a place (metaphorically) where I can explore ideas about God and the world and the Spirit where I don’t have to translate the language to make it acceptable. I don’t want to hear about the blood of Jesus washing me whiter than snow. I don’t want to argue over the parts of the Bible I just can’t buy. I want to be able to ask questions about who wrote it and why and not just that God said it so quit quibbling. I want to hear about Humanity and not just Man. And if you don’t agree with me, that’s OK, too. Can we ask the questions we are both asking and not get bogged down over the stuff we see differently? Can we find a game we can play even if we don’t play it the same way but so that we both want to keep playing? Even if it is just ping pong. And at the Urban Abbey wants to be that kind of metaphorical place: a safe place to ask deep questions and be honest about who we are, and a sacred place where we can connect with each other and with a Spirit that is more than us.

Being Known for What We Do

I am fascinated by how many names (at least European names) originate with the activity of their bearers: Baker, Chandler, Fletcher, Walker, Carter, Teller, Weaver and so on. And in many ways we continue to be known by what we do, even if we do not bear the names that say so. I am hoping that we who form the Urban Abbey will indeed by known by what we do. So, what is it that we will do that we will be known by? Time for a PSA.

There are three primary paths that weave together into the Urban Abbey: Hospitality, Our Christianity, and Outward Mission. It is along these paths that we will find our PSA.

P.   Hospitality is more than just being nice to a stranger (or even to somebody you already know). It is much more than a technique of greeting someone at the door. It is a damn sight more than an industry of hotels and restaurants. The kind of hospitality that is the foundation of the Urban Abbey is a spiritual practice: it is a discipline that when practiced changes us, opens us to the ability to love even our enemies. It is a practice that can change the world by offering an alternative to hate, fear, and intolerance.  Hospitality is a life changing “P”ractice.

S.   Our Christianity will be a thoroughgoing exploration of our own tradition, as well as considering a global family of spiritual expressions and our place among them. Our Christianity will engage the intellectual aspects of our being. It will mean study, becoming students of our own writers, thinkers, pray-ers, and pupils of the great philosophers and theologians of the world’s religions. Our Christianity is an intensive and spiritual course of  “S”tudy.

A.   Outward Mission takes our other two paths and twines them together and puts them into action. We take our growing love for the stranger and the other and combine it with our evolving understanding of who we are as followers of Christ. This will move us out into the world and into action. We have set ourselves a goal of finding people that we can look in the eye, people that we can fall in love with that we can fall in love with, learn from, and build a relationship of mutuality and grace. Outward Mission will put us into “A”ction.

These are ambitious goals, ambitious directions. But we don’t want the Urban Abbey to be business as usual. We see this as an experiment embracing the evolution of faith and spirituality that can respond to the changes in our culture and society. This “PSA” of Practice, Study, and Action will be first self-transformative, and hopefully then begin a process of making a positive difference in our world.

Giving Bearings in a Fearful Forest

    Pieces of our lives come together in fascinating ways; lines of a web intersect, gears we haven’t even imagined fit into cogs we take for granted.

Those living in the abbeys years ago stopped whatever they were doing (even sleeping) to worship at regular intervals, eight times a day. Not having cell phones (how’s that for a pun!) or alarm clocks, a bell was rung to call the inhabitants of the abbey to prayer. Eight times a day the bells was rung, day and night.

A story is told of a young woman who for whatever reason found herself lost on a day’s traveling. Being alone, she afraid of who she might meet on the road, so she took off through the woods, thinking that she could cut through as the crow flies and arrive at her destination. Once off the trail and into the trees she soon lost her sense of direction. The sun began to set and in the fading light her fears began to dawn. She was convinced that every sound was a wolf hunting her or a bear stalking after her. She ran, not knowing what direction, having lost all her wits and wisdom. Finally she stopped, realizing her mad dash was doing nothing to save her. She closed her eyes and prayed for guidance. In the gloaming light she heard the gentle peel of a bell. The residents of a nearby abbey were being called to their vesper prayers. She was able to follow the sound of the bell to their abbey and to safety.

We live in an age where wolves of prejudice and bears of hatred stalk us constantly. While we may not practice the Liturgy of the Hours (as that ancient practice is known), we must regularly ring the bell of unconditional love for LGBTQ travelers who have been ostracized and vilified by the traditional church. We must ring the bell of a spirituality that loves and cares for life on this earth in all its richness, despite years of church teaching that says this life doesn’t matter because the next one is what counts. We must ring the bell that Jesus’ life and teaching are just as important (and maybe more so) than his death. When we ring the bell for our own patterns and practices we never who might be lost in the metaphorical woods hoping for a sense of direction to safety.

We don’t have an actual bell in the Urban Abbey, but when we speak of creating a safe and sacred community in the midst of a fearful and intolerant society, we ring a bell that others can follow home. The Urban Abbey is being created to sound exactly that kind of bell. What peels is your heart longing to hear?

The Mystery of a Really Good Brew

                True confession time again: I’m a coffee geek. Lots of mornings I’ve sleep too long or took too long trying to get the point of resembling something human and so like the rest of things even drinking coffee (something I can truly relish) gets rushed and I can down a couple of cups without hardly noticing it. Now if it’s crappy coffee I will notice, but I’ll drink it anyway. Maybe the coffee started out crappy: mass-produced poor quality beans harvested, roasted, and packaged who knows how long ago, bought on sale and stored in the pantry for months if not years before somebody opened the can and made the stuff in my cup. Or maybe it’s just made crappy. Maybe the coffee maker hasn’t been cleaned since the first Roosevelt administration. Or maybe they still make it in one of those huge urns that boils it to death. We have served crappy coffee for so long to so many people that lots of folks think that coffee is supposed to have that film floating on the top.

                But every now and then, even when I am rushing around at top speed desperately trying to catch up to whatever it is that pulling away from me, I’ll get a cup of really good coffee. No, not really good, but truly great. Good enough that it makes me stop still and take another sip, hold it on my tongue, close my eyes and inwardly sigh. For those few seconds time stops and I am transported to an ephemeral Eden where all of life is gratitude, peace, and joy. It doesn’t happen often, but thank God for those couple of sips, for those few seconds.

                I think that it is moments like that which we long for; not just coffee but moments when the Mystery reaches out of the ordinary and touches us. I also think that is why after so many hundreds and thousands of years we still worship. We want a touch of the Mystery. And so what can we learn about worship from coffee?

1. Both should be rich, not thin. Too many times worship is watery, thinned down, and even if there are a few good beans involved they’ve been stretched far past the point of brewing up anything tasty.
2. Both should be what they are: not caramel hazelnut macchiato infused with a hint of Bavarian mint. For me, if the cup of coffee is really good it need nothing else to enhance it, not even cream or sugar. Worship likewise should be honest and genuine.
3. Both should be fresh; not stale, old, or overcooked. Worship should be relevant, speaking to current situation of our lives, not cold leftovers of yesterday’s brew.

One of our quests in creating an Urban Abbey is to provide each other these moments when we can be touched by the Mystery. Maybe it will be over a cup of coffee, maybe a glass of wine. But when we gather together, it is with the hope and the faith that the Mystery gathers, too.

Can We Turn Down the Volume and Turn Up the Listening?

My grandparents’ Christianity seemed to be defined by the things they didn’t do. for them, a good Christian didn’t dance, didn’t smoke, didn’t cuss, didn’t gamble, didn’t go to movies, and most of all didn’t drink. The funny thing about all these “didn’ts” was that they got them from the bible. The bible was God’s word, complete, infallible, and irrefutable. If the bible said it was bad, they didn’t do it. And the bible has a lot of bad things to say about drunkenness. Now taking the bible so literally also occasionally painted them into a corner. My grandmother was an adamant tea-totaller. Still, the story of Jesus at the wedding of Cana irked her no end. She understood that this story has Jesus demonstrating miraculous power. But she thought if Jesus wanted to show his miraculous power by changing water into wine, one glass would surely have sufficed. She thought it was irresponsible that he filled the six stone jars with gallons and gallons of wine. On the other hand, she reasoned, the bible doesn’t say it was alcoholic wine. I don’t think homosexuality was even on my grandparents’ radar screens, but I’m pretty sure they would’ve thought that good Christians didn’t do that either.

I think that it is this kind of thinking that has caused a major disconnect between a lot of people today and Christianity. While my grandparents’ generation and quite a few Christians today still insist that the bible is God’s exact words and thus irrefutable. But our culture has moved past those words on any number of issues: slavery, divorce, unmarried sex, and the issue of today is of course homosexuality. Just yesterday Delaware became the 11th state to legalize marriage for all couples. The bible simply does not hold irresolute sway over people anymore, if it ever did. I wonder if a lot of those people have come to the conclusion that if the bible really is God’s words, then that is a god not worth listening to.

So what are we to do with a Christianity defined by “don’ts” and a bible rendered meaningless by the insistence on infallibility? Well, I certainly don’t have one definitive answer for that question but I might offer some guesses:

• The bible isn’t God’s words, it’s our words. It is a collection of people’s writings about their relationship with and understandings of God. It’s their (the ancient authors’) story.

• These people’s stories are rich and troubling and honest and misguided and somehow God still reaches out to us through them, even if only through wrestling and arguing and getting angry with them.

• Which means OUR stories are rich and troubling and honest and misguided and somehow God still reaches out to us through them.

• Being a Christian isn’t about following the bible’s rules, or anybody else’s, but for me it means allowing my life to shaped by the story of Jesus – even as it continues in our own day and time.

The Urban Abbey, hopefully, is a place where we can experiment with our lives and our faith to find what fits us. That’s part of what we mean when we say “safe and sacred.” We even want our Christianity to be safe and sacred. It is not about not doing a bunch of don’ts or doing a list of do’s. It is, in part, about listening for where God is still speaking through your life and my life and all the changes in our world.

A New Normal You Can Live With (and For!)

I don’t know about you, but I’m not wild about the new normal. We are told that this era of reduced wages, increased costs, sparse employment outlooks and meag investment possibilities is the new normal. Instead of hoping for a return to better days, we are supposed to get used to this. “It is not going to change,” we are told, “this is the new normal.” but this is about more than just economics. We are told the same thing about warfare in the world, about violence of all kinds, about poverty, and the environment. There’s nothing you can do that will make a difference so get used to it. This is normal. Except that I really want a different normal.
The name of this blog should tell you that I am fan of “Young Frankenstein.” if you know the movie, you know where the name comes from. After having been attacked by his newly reanimated creature, Dr. Frankenstein calmly sits down with Igor to discuss the situation. Igor admits that the brain did not belong to Dr. Hans Delbruck, an esteemed and wise scientist. So Dr. Frankenstein asks whose brain Igor did bring back. “Abby someone.” “Abby who?” asks the patient doctor. Igor responds, “Abby Normal!”
It is natural for me that when searching for a name for a blog about the Urban Abbey that I would land on “Abbey Normal.” A lot of our ideas about the Urban Abbey will seem abnormal in today’s society:
+treating strangers with honor and value instead of fear and suspicion;
+defining our kind of Christianty as open-minded and open-ended, and as an equal sibling of other world religions;
+discovering people in our community that we can serve and love (without proselytizing or evangelizing);
+and creating a safe and sacred intentional community where we can share our spiritual adventures together.
Those are very different aims than much of the world holds. To others, this might seem abnormal. But for us it is going to be Abbey Normal, the norm and the dream of the Urban Abbey.
A new normal, an Abbey Normal, dreams big enough to envision a changed world. Yet it is practical enough to begin locally, personally. We are coming together in this safe and sacred community to support each other as we challenge the world’s truly abnormal virtues of violence, fear, and hate. We come together to bind each others’ wounds, to celebrate each success, to combine our vision and dreams. We’ll guard the space to be creative, encourage the practices that open us to the Divine, and offer to each other a truly new normal.
So maybe in the process of creating new life, somebody might ask us, where did you get all this stuff? And maybe in a voice reminiscent of Igor we can say, “Abbey Normal…”

Now, Where Did We Put That God?

We live in an age when God needs GPS. Or better put, we need God to use GPS. Our day and age is out of touch with the Divine, the sacred. We have to go looking for it. And the search is made all that much harder because we don’t even know what we are really looking for any more. It’s kind of like when you move from one house to another and you remember where you kept the colander in the old house, and you’re pretty sure you kept it but you don’t know where it is now. But maybe not. Did we ever have a colander? When was the last time I saw it? I’m not sure. Too many times that how looking for God feels these days.

In ancient days, the monks who lived in the Abbey didn’t have to go looking for God. Their whole day was centered on living in God’s presence. They stopped what they were doing at regular intervals to remember that they were in the midst of God. They prayed, they read and recited the scriptures they loved, they meditated, they heard sermons and homilies, and they sang. Their rhythm helped them create some of the most beautiful art. They illuminated the pages of scripture with gold and silver and colors of every kind. Some of them created Gregorian chants whose power and awe still haunt us today. Poetry and science were generated by this day to day dwelling in God’s presence.

It is one of our greatest shames that we took what was so inspiring of an experience of worship and drained it and desiccated it to the point that in our generations worship has become one of the LAST places people seem to find God.

Which begs the question of what worship, seeking to be in God’s presence, will be like in the Urban Abbey? How to we recapture that inspiring, creativity-generating encounter? Here are a few ideas in that direction:

1. A Safe and sacred encounter:  open to bringing a person’s full being along.
2. A Creative time: using imagination, excitement, all five senses, mind AND heart.
3. Relevant and authentic: addressing life where we are and who we are.
4. Communal and intergenerational: like the best of family meals of times past, everyone is welcome at the table.
5. Intentional: It takes practice coming into God’s presence. We set aside time that is free of all the other distractions in life to focus on our center and our Life.

There are lots of forms and ways and places this can happen. Since ours is an Urban Abbey not confined to cloistered walls, we are free to seek God anywhere. And while we hope to glean some valuable treasure from the ancient spiritual troves, likewise we are free to create our own methods and songs. We truly are in an experimental age again; free to seek God in innovative and creative ways. It is an age for artists, revolutionaries, and those on an evolutionary journey. Those of the Urban Abbey will continue to seek God, and to discover this generation’s ways of living in the Divine presence.