Learning the Message of Christmas

Mother and Child

The most profound message of Christmas is that God came to be with us, that God entered the human experience as a baby born in a barn, that God meets us in our suffering and darkness. Part of my Christmas was learning the gospel anew, taught and led by two amazing people.

The first was my two year old nephew. We opened gifts this morning and I, if you know me at all, very predictably bought he and his sister story books—fairy tales, Santa stories, and a little Christmas storybook. We all sat down on the floor and Josiah was fascinated by the animals in the nativity story. Once we reached the end of the story, I pointed to the picture of a baby in a stable and asked him; “Who is this?” His eyes got big and he pointed to the baby. “It’s Abby!!!”

Abby is Josiah’s baby sister, born to my sister, a single mom and the bravest, most courageous woman I know. We nearly lost Abby several times, as my sister struggled through surgery while pregnant and then faced a deeply personal tragedy. This is Abby’s first Christmas and her darling little smile is a reminder of new life in hard circumstances, a reminder that light comes out of darkness, a reminder that God too became a baby born in the middle of tragedy. So, from the lips of my little nephew, I learned the gospel anew.

The second person was a man I spoke too while out on the street Christmas morning, myself and another priest friend, talking with folks. He and his friend sat behind some old buildings and we went up to wish them a Merry Christmas. He lit up and spoke like a prophet. “Let me tell you what Christmas is about,” he said. “It’s about grace.” We were sitting together on the ground, the sun peeking through the clouds, the buildings abandoned and old and full of graffiti. He smiled. “And joy.” I nodded and he looked at me closely. “You know we even find grace here in the alley of shame.” It was the first I had heard this term, referring to the area we now sat, a common hangout for folks on the street, a popular place to get drugs, and a place where some people slept. His smile was radiant. “It’s all about grace. Not condemnation. Not shame. Grace.”

If I had any idea that I was the one giving words of hope in the conversation, that went out the window. This man shared the gospel with me on Christmas morning. As we looked over a desolate city, struggling to survive, he saw hope in grace. On those who sit in darkness, the light will dawn.  

And so I learned the gospel anew this Christmas. From the lips of a little child. From the wisdom of a new friend.

On Being a "Worker Priest"

In the 1940s in France, a group of priests set out to find out what life was like for the industrial working class. Working class church attendance was very low and these priests wanted to know why. They quit parish ministry and took up jobs as factory workers, making their living alongside everyone else at the factory and writing to their bishops about the conditions of workers. Many of them became actively involved in union organizing. Others worked hard to raise up church leadership from the working class itself.

Much has changed since the 1940s. In Europe and the U.S., there are few factories left in which to work. In a post-industrial society, working class people now overwhelmingly work in a low wage service based economy—as Wal Mart greeters, hair stylists, part time truck drivers, housecleaners, and office workers. I think of this as I do ministry in a blue collar town and support myself (barely) while grooming dogs.  If the worker priests of yesteryear wished to understand the lives of working class people today, I would invite them to groom dogs or to take much less stable jobs in a fragmented and non-organized context (which, I am told, some European priests have done). The struggles and stresses of life on the edge are profound.

Probably 65% of Americans are working class, but most of them are not blue collar industrial workers and a good number of them are living on the edge. And, just as the French church recognized was the case in the 1940s, the U.S. working class, especially the white working class, is not very likely to attend church.

What sacrifices might the church and its ministers in the 21^st century be willing to make in order to ask why? In order to find the church anew among a post-industrial, deeply fragmented people?

Watching the Hunger Games in My Hometown

I’ve loved The Hunger Games since I was first introduced to the books years ago (a secret about me, if you didn’t already know it: I love young adult fiction and fantasy). Its apocalyptic tropes, its revolutionary message, its clear analysis of socioeconomic class, and its parallels to our own world led me to read it over and over as a welcome alternative to theological tomes in seminary.

This past weekend, I watched the double feature of the Hunger Games in our local theater, along with a gaggle of high school students and their parents. As the film panned the Seam in District 12, it struck me that parts of the town I was sitting in looked not at all dissimilar. All along the river just outside of the theater, dozens of people were sleeping in makeshift shelters. Just minutes before, I had driven past the giant old buildings, more like tenements, that houses the city’s poor, which might be a larger percentage of the population than those who are not poor. I’ve grown up around the old farmhouses up the valleys, which more often than not hide a great deal of economic struggle. The guy in front of me had been talking to a friend just before the movie about how difficult it was for him to find a steady income.

The story touches me particularly at certain points. Katniss and Gale’s overwhelming desire to do all in their power to protect their family and their siblings reminds me of my role as the oldest child in a rural and working class home. Katniss’ inability to dream of marriage in an unstable world, I think, resonates deeply with more and more poverty stricken young people, here and elsewhere. It is really hard to make a commitment to someone if you cannot see further than a few days or weeks into the future.

Since I watched the film (twice, of course!), I have noticed quite a few articles trying to connect young people with activism, using the Hunger Games as a tool. While I appreciate the sentiment, I have noticed that all the articles and videos I have seen promote a kind of altruism—we who have enough ought to help the poor, ought to support social programs that help the poor, etc. The social analysis—that more and more people are poor—is spot on. But something is missing.

The Hunger Games is not about how the Capitol and those who live in it should care about the districts. It is not about altruism. It is about a couple of poor kids from the districts who are desperately struggling to survive in a world stacked against them. It is about how the districts themselves take matters into their own hands and take hold of their own destiny and reclaim their own dignity. Please, yes, care about people who are poor. The Capitol should have cared.

But, never for a second imagine that things change unless people take power for themselves, unless the poor lead their own movements, unless the guy sitting in front of me at that theater gets together with a bunch of other people and says—this is enough!

Facing the End of the World: An Advent Sermon

It was the end of the world.

At least, it seemed that way. In 70 AD, the Jewish temple and the city of Jerusalem were sacked by the Roman Empire. The temple was burned to the ground, and the accounts that survive tell a story of terrible carnage. The survivors of this final battle were taken in chains to Rome as slaves. Countless people had died. Jerusalem, the great city, lay in ruins. The Jewish nation was no more--their homeland destroyed and multitudes exiled.

Our gospel this morning, from Matthew, was written in the shadow of this great community trauma. The people who first read our gospel today had likely faced this siege. And so Matthew, more than any other gospel, talks about what it means to face the end of the world.

So, just as we start listening the Christmas carols and buying gifts for our friends and family, our Advent readings start with the end of the world. It really gets you in the holiday spirit, doesn’t it?

But, honestly, it is an interesting place to start. Because, have you ever felt like the world as you know it was coming to an end? Like everything is going ok, going as planned, just before your whole world crumbles? Like those people in Jesus said were just minding their own business--eating, drinking, getting married, living life--and then (boom) the flood comes. I wonder if that is what it felt like for the folks in the Philippines not too long ago when that great typhoon hit.

In our time, in a time of great change and uncertainty, I think we feel even more strongly that we are facing the end of the world as we know it. So much is changing and it doesn't always seem to be changing for the better. Ever notice that so many of the new movies coming out are about the apocalypse? Whether by zombies or by nuclear holocaust, they are filled with images of the end of the world.

I am told that Aberdeen was once a thriving city, though I don't remember it. In my lifetime, I have only seen the slow decline of the local economy as the timber industry crashed. So many people lost a way of life. We have faced the end of the world as we knew it.

Sometimes the end of the world is more personal. We lose someone we love, someone who was the center of our world, and it feels like the world is ending. I know it felt that way for me when I lost my grandfather years ago. 

And sometimes change, even natural change, even good change can feel like an ending. We are losing Fr. Dale as our priest. Its not the end of the world, but it is an ending. As happy as we are for him and as strong as we will continue to be as a church, it is in a sense the end of his ministry here as we have known it. It will be an interesting Advent for us, a time of waiting, of expectation, and a time of loss too.

This is Advent, the beginning of the church calendar, the beginning of the church year. We celebrate it in a time when our days are getting darker and our weather is getting colder. Harvest is over and hunting season is over (unless you hunt with a bow). We see the sun less and less and our days grow shorter and shorter.

It is a time of waiting. Waiting in the darkness. Waiting for what the prophet promises-- the Sun of Righteousness to rise with healing in his wings. Waiting for the baby to be born in the manger, in the stable, in the barn; the testimony that God is indeed with us. Waiting, as Jesus tells us to in this gospel, waiting for the Son of Man to come in glory, which is our great hope.

Because, God meets us at the end of the world. When our homeland is destroyed and we are living in exile under Roman occupation, God meets us. When we look around and see the world changing and are afraid, God meets us. When we walk through the streets of our town and wish that shops didn't keep closing or that we could find some way to imagine a better future, God meets us. When we remember those we have loved and lost, God meets us. God meets us in the person of Jesus Christ, who entered our human experience. God meets us in Emmanuel—God with us.  

So, this Advent, we wait for hope. We wait for a baby born in a barn to save the world. We wait for the Sun of Righteousness who arises with healing in his wings. We wait for the sun to rise again, as it always does, and the days to grow longer, as they always do. We wait for the one that Matthew introduces to us, in the very beginning of the gospel; “The people who have sat in darkness have seen a great light. On those who dwell in the region of the shadow of death, on them the light has dawned.”

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Every year, with more or less success, I try to have an advent practice. That is, a devotional or a prayer practice that helps bring me into this season and time of waiting and expectation. This year, I want to share this practice with you and invite you to join.

I have been so grateful for the opportunity to come back home to the harbor and to do ministry here. I have met some of the best, some of the kindest people here. I am privileged to say that I am from the harbor.

 I also know we have faced some hard times here. I am reminded of just how hard things are for some people when I hang out under that bridge down the street and see so many people camping along the Chehalis River. Sometimes it can look like the end of the world.

This Advent, for the next four weeks leading into Christmas, as we wait for hope, as we wait for the baby born in a barn--I will pray for the harbor. I will pray remembering the beauty and gifts of this place. I will pray remembering the losses we have experienced. I will pray for hope. I will pray for the in breaking of the kingdom of God in our midst. 

I invite you to pray with me! Lets pray for our town and for our county. In the depth of winter, lets pray for the Sun of Righteousness to rise with healing in his wings, to rise upon us, to give us hope and a future.

I invite you to pray with me. I invite you to meet God at the end of the world.

Millennials in My Neck of the Woods

The short lived TV series Buckwild's stereotypical
rural young people.

My facebook page is constantly flooded with articles about millennials, that ubiquitous generation I was born into, just barely. About the people we call “young people.” Some of these articles are witty and humorous, most cater to our elders seeking to understand us and to our churches seeking to woo us. The picture that these articles paint is pretty uniform. Millennials are technologically savvy, they love tattoos, they are social justice minded, they are skeptical of religion, they are hip, they like indie music—and the list goes on. From the pictures and the articles and the interviews, we are led to believe that millennials are a very uniform generation and that most of them are white, middle class, college educated, and urban. In other words, they are hipsters.

These are the millennials we like to talk about. No offence to my hipster or my urban friends—all amazing people I am honored to know—but  they are not the only millennials. Statistics are vague because of our age, but maybe 30%, maybe 40% of millennials are getting college degrees. The rest are trying to get a job at Burger King. Now, I’m a first generation college student, and a lot of us are struggling to get jobs too. And, lest we forget,with high rates of immigration into this country, 30% of millennials are young people of color.

I can’t speak for all young people—and I am occasionally annoyed when I am asked to do so in settings that are majority over the age 50. But I can say something about the young people I know and meet here in rural and small town America. The kids whose parents could afford to send them off to a fancy college have left, yes. But the young people (20-30) who remain comprise roughly 20% of the population (another 25% are are under 20).

A lot of young people here do not have stable housing. They live with their parents, they live with their boyfriend’s parents, or they crash with friends. Or they live on the flats, in crumbling apartment buildings with three or four kids in tow. They, like their urban and middle class counterparts, tend to be unmarried. They also tend to have several kids and many have broken homes.

They work at Wal Mart and fast food joints and hair salons and feed stores. Or they work odd jobs, gardening or housecleaning or picking mushrooms. If they are lucky, they found a decent job fishing in Alaska over the summer or fracking in North Dakota for a year or two, traveling more than they are home. If they are unlucky, they camp out in the woods or stay in a shelter. A few may go to community college, searching for a bit better luck and an elusive but persistent dream.

They sometimes struggle with drug or alcohol addiction, often as a way to cope with the stress of their lives or to self-medicate for mental illness. I find some of them under the bridges, hopelessly addicted to heroin or meth, powerless but desperate to stop.   

They are not particularly cool or hip, even if they can navigate technology ok. They wear jeans and tshirts and dirty boots.They might listen to indie music and they likely have tattoos, but are just as likely to listen to country and drink cheep bear.

They are also not particularly attracted to church, having felt the searing judgment heaped on them in one church or another, but they are by and large religious people who believe in God and some higher power at work for good. For many of them, AA or NA may be their church. In this community, they are white, they are poor and they are working class, they are Latino and immigrant.

They are the products of a culture run wild with greed, leaving little for future generations, for their generation; the products of a culture that will not give them a break but is happy to label them wild, unruly, or lazy.

I should say, because I speak about my friends, my co-workers, my neighbors, that they are good and brave and courageous people. They are the young woman who raises her little girl with love and devotion, even if she can barely afford to put gas in the car and is in constant conflict with her ex. They are the young guy with a bright smile who has overcome an addiction and insists on being there for his kids. They are the kids who go dancing and laughing with music in their souls even when times are tough. They are the sisters who raise their several broods of kids together and scrape together enough for them to all have Halloween costumes.

These millennials may not make the high profile articles and may not drink coffee and smoke hookah at high end pubs, but they too live and breathe on this earth. Next time you read about millennials and American young people, think of us.     

A Candle in the Window

They say that my Celtic ancestors, in time before memory, would light a candle in the window on Samhain’s eve, so that the dead could find their way home again. For me, this day—All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of All Saint’s Day, Samhain, the Day of the Dead—is a time to remember my own dead. The faces and memories of those loved and lost. And not completely lost, for they live on in our collective memories and some of them live on in the memory of this place.

This is the day of thin places, of thin borders between the living and the dead, ever sacred to the Celts and to many peoples for its crossing of boundaries.

It troubles me sometimes to wonder if my dead have a home to which they can return. My ancestors are of a people who have wandered ever westward, searching for but rarely finding “a secure life in a land of plenty.” We moved constantly, amid landscapes both grand and marred by an industrial ideology.

My people came west for the jobs promised by a rising industrial power—to cut giant trees, to harvest fruit, to build vast cities that empty the desert of water, to mine rocks, and to lay railroad tracks. Of my great grandparents, one worked on the railroads, another build automobiles. None were every fully settled into place and thus, my ancestors’ final resting places are scattered across the entire west, from the Ohio River to Texas, from the deserts of Arizona and southern California to the forest land of the coastal west.

So, while my ancestors apparently cherished some memories of their respective homelands, by the time my generation was born, we had no idea where we had come from, nor did we have a homeland to speak of.  The memories of the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland, of Spain, or of northern France were only a faint shadow; so too were the more recent home of the Alleghany mountains or of central Canada or the southwest tip of Arizona.

And so my generation anew attempts to create home out of the transient heritage we have been given. My dead, those I personally have lost, lay scattered across several states, and yet firmly rooted in my heart. Somehow, in our random search for home, we have learned to make home on pilgrimage.

So, on this night, I will burn a candle in my window, calling my loved and lost ones home from the four corners of the west, home into my heart.

Sacrament and Desecration

My niece in the apple tree I planted almost 20 years ago.

In this corner of the world, it is harvest time. That means that, all around me, people are canning madly and harvesting the last of their vegetables. Guys and gals are standing around, talking about the salmon catch this year and how many deer they were able to bag. Having returned too late to plant a garden and being out of practice enough not to attempt hunting this year, I am an observer, though happy to sample the fruits of others’ labor.

And I am reminded of a favorite quote from Wendell Berry. “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.”

I am struck often by the reverence that those in this part of the world view the work they do. The care people take with the harvest, with the soil, with the preservation of food for the winter. The insistence that every part of a slaughtered animal be used and used well.

We cannot live without death—this is an incontrovertible fact of life. The forest would disappear if trees did not fall and die to nourish the soil and if animals did not do the same. Even if we choose to eat a vegetarian diet, we eat from plants whose life cycle we have interrupted, planted on soil that had to be cleared of forest and animals in order to grow. And, in the short growing season and long winters of this part of the world, if one were to try to live sustainably and relatively locally, the taking of animal life is a necessity.

Berry points out that, in this, we have no choice. However, we can treat this sacrifice of life for life as a sacrament. I know people who murmur thanks to the deer they have shot, honoring its sacrifice for their own sustenance. Most of us who have gardens large or small, know that such work is often deep spiritual practice, as we connect with the soil, with the nourisher of life. I remember, ages ago, long afternoons of slaughtering chickens for the winter. We would take the birds we had raised from little chicks, birds who had lived on the land, cared for and protected, and, gently and mercifully take their life. I remember an almost biblical sense of reverence on those days—a deep understanding that these birds gave their lives to sustain my own.

Or, we can take life destructively; in which case, such an act is a desecration. Factory farming is a case in point, of course. And there is also a tradition of hunting I encounter on occasion, often from people who live in cities and come out here only to hunt, that can be destructive, that goes beyond the thrill and skill of the hunt. That takes life cavalierly, without reverence. I have on occasion encountered a skinned and headless carcass left to rot.

Perhaps most of us live in between sacrament and desecration. The last hamburger I ate was likely from a factory farm. And the apples from the trees I planted in childhood taste amazing this year.

Sitting with Suffering

As I meet with people under the bridge in Aberdeen, as I minister on the street, I often think of how important it is to learn to sit with suffering. Sometimes the hardest thing we do is watch people we love suffer—be it friends, neighbors, family members, or simply another human being.

And we want to fix it. I want to get people off the street and into stable living situations—damn it, I would be ok if I could just find a few warm beds for the guys standing around in our circle with trembling hands in the cold. We are always looking for the right things to say and do, always looking for a fix. And, that is a good impulse. It is good that we are able to feel the pain of another and good that we want to fix a society where it is the new norm for a good 1% of our population to be on the street (that’s 3.5 million people in the U.S, folks!).

And, yet, sometimes our rush to find a solution, a fix, is a reflection of our own need to feel ok. Our own discomfort at suffering. An effort to make ourselves feel better. We tell our friend whose father just died nice platitudes because it makes us feel better that we have “done something.” We hand out supplies and coats and food to people on the street, perhaps even things they would not ask for or want, because we are the ones that can’t stand to watch someone else suffer. As I stood today in a little circle with a few guys, sometimes in silence, I realized again the value of just being with a person. 

I learned something of sitting with suffering early in life. I remember confronting death many times as a child, but it was when, in the course of a few shorts months, a dear 14 year old friend and my grandfather died that I learned most about grief. I was at my granddad’s bedside when he died and I sat with my dad afterwards, with his own great, silent grief between us. I got an early morning call that Ashley had died, a friend sobbing on the other line, two states now between us. Both times, I was overwhelming struck with my inability to do anything or say anything to assuage the grief of those around me—and I found myself deeply annoyed at the platitudes I was given about angels in heaven and drinking with St. Peter and God’ will.

This experience and others since have taught me that the best friends and mentors in my life have been those who have been willing to sit with me. Have been willing to feel my pain, knowing full well that they cannot fix it or fix me. Their example of selfless love has been my inspiration, because I would not be here without them.

And so I stand on the street in the cold, unable to fix anything. Unable to meet all the overwhelming needs that meet me. And the great paradox is this: in letting go of the need to assuage our own discomfort with suffering, we give our greatest gift. The gift of presence. The gift of standing with and alongside another in their greatest need. And sometimes it is the greatest gift that can be given.