Holy Week 2021

I didn't intentionally choose this week to begin my sabbatical. A collection of external factors coincided to make this the right time. I only realized this coincidence would be true a couple of days ago.

But it feels good. Around the world, this is a week of holidays for Christians. In some contexts, secular holidays - schools and businesses are closed. In other contexts, the procession from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, with special rituals of remembrance on each day in between.

• • •

Holy Monday was the overturning of the tables in the temple. A challenge to unjust economic systems. For me, this time of rest and creative activity feels like a direct challenge to the economic structures of our day. For me, this ten week period feels like a sabbath season. A time to make right the patterns of my life. 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will.

What do I will? And perhaps, not what I will, but what God wills. Not God's agents on Earth, not the church, not the government, but the Holy Creator, Source of All Wisdom, Beauty, Goodness. Not Caesar.

My main plan for this week is to begin by writing every day. To go swimming several days. And to schedule all the appointments that I put off until now. A haircut, a mammogram, new glasses, and more. It may take my whole sabbatical season to get to them all.

I already scheduled two - a deep cleaning for our house and our car. These fall into the category of things I could do for myself. However other people will be more efficient and right now I would rather pay someone to do it well and get it over with and not be exhausted when it is done. It will free me to think about other things instead of fretting about the housework. This goes against all my home training, but for once, I think it will be a good tradeoff.

• • •

Later in the week, Maundy Thursday is a reminder about community and service to others. Will I find ways, during this sabbatical season that overlaps with the Covid19 pandemic, to break bread with others and wash their feet? As a serious extrovert, I need to talk to other people for my own mental health. And as a human being and a Christian, I need to be of service to other people. Also for my own mental health. But I also need to practice some discipline around "custody of the eyes". The main purpose of this break is to bring forth that which is in me - to give to the world that which only I can give. Not to spend the time reading what other people have already written.

But recognizing the enormous privilege of having ten weeks in a row of paid leave, without even a newborn baby to take care of, I want to find some way to be of practical service to the community around me in this time as well.

• • •

Holy Friday and Saturday are about dying to self and waiting in the deep unknown. Am I able to give over my own longing to know or do or be anything and sink down to that seed that God sows in the heart? And to let that seed grow in me and breathe in me and be in me without striving to make myself more? For that seed to increase, I must decrease. In my striving and my desire for control and for fame and fortune and, and, and... everything. Not my will, Lord, but thine.

• • •

Then next Sunday, I will be going away. To an undisclosed location. For a week of self-denial of other people and the freedom to just write. A rebirth in some ways, maybe more like extended labor. I don't think it tracks to a resurrection. I'm afraid it's going to feel more like an extended Holy Saturday.

But we'll see. What freedom comes in that emptiness? What new inspirati­on or motivation? What will I be able to produce under those conditions? I have no idea.

Seventeen years ago, I went away for a solo retreat for a weekend. At that point in my life, what I most needed was for no one to touch me for 48 hours. I literally had to wean the baby in order to go away. The writing was just a serendipitous byproduct. But my life has changed ever since. And that baby is 19 years old now.

One of the things people keep telling me is not to have too high of expectations for myself in this sabbatical season. To not feel like I have to fill it with any particular kind of productivity or to set too concrete of a goal. That has been helpful advice.

But I am trying to establish the conditions for creative output to be possible.

I am trying to leave margins of time and energy to do what feels right in the moment.

To seek God's guidance in each day, each moment. And then to follow that guidance wherever or however it may lead.

• • •

This is the way.

That would be enough.

Amen.

My Three Words for 2017

Slow. Teach. Ask.

Slow, because I want to slow down and pay attention. Not speak too quickly. Not act too quickly. Not judge too quickly. Not fix it too quickly. I want to take the time to be more graceful, more patient. Most of the things I regret (was embarrassed by) in the last year/my whole life are because I spoke without thinking, leapt without looking.

In La Paz, Bolivia several years ago, at that high altitude, I learned that I could get along fine as long as I walked like a dignified Señora, and not if I scurried around like a little girl. If I tried to run up the stairs, I would be out of breath by the first landing. But if I just walked slower, I would get where I was going smoothly and with energy to do whatever I need to do when I got there. I want to remember that lesson as I approach 50 and beyond, even at sea level.


Teach, because it makes me happy. I like explaining things. I like sharing what I have learned. I like inviting people to consider new ideas and facilitating discussions. I want to accept more invitations to speak and to write when they come to me. I will look for ways to do this as part of my job, because it makes a better balance in my life with all the management/accounting stuff, so that I can continue to enjoy my job. And I want teaching to be part of my life at my monthly meeting and in my children’s religious education. For me, this will include taking time to write more articles, maybe even more blogposts! Invitations to teach do come my way every so often, and I want to remember that they are not a distraction from my real work – this is part of the work that God has created me to do, whether I get paid for it or not.

So, to start, I will be leading a discussion at Green Street Monthly Meeting on January 29, 2017 at 9:15 am, about a passage from A Language for the Inner Landscape: Spiritual Wisdom from the Quaker Movement by Brian Drayton and William P. Taber, Jr., pages 92-93, from the chapter on “Community and the Inner Life of the Meeting.” The discussion will focus on “What is the real purpose of our worship together?” And then, I will be writing a lesson for the United Society of Friends Women International 2017-2018 program book, Blueprints, on the same theme. I am grateful to the Friends who extended the invitations to do both of these.


Ask, because I want to be less bossy, less of a know-it-all. To ask first, do you want me to tell you more about this? Or not? Do you want help? May I? How may I help you? How would you like to be involved? How would you like to hear from me? What do you think? To say less often, “You know what, you should _____________!”

This is a life lesson, that maybe I can change and maybe I can’t. This is rooted in being an eldest child, so it’s a long time in the making. I am weighing this desire against the fact that girls with leadership skills are too often called bossy. But I think that I could be more effective in my leadership and my teaching and my interpersonal relationships if I were more thoughtful in my communications. Which makes this connected to my first word, slow, because if I thought for a second before I speak, I would find better ways to teach, better ways to lead, better ways to parent adult children, and be a wife and sister, etc.


I pray for God’s guidance and people’s forbearance as I move in these directions. I am grateful to Chris Brogan for his inspiration to choose three words each year. If you want to read some of my three words from prior years, here are 2016, 2015, 2012, 2010, and here are my prior attempts at new years resolutions from 2009 and 2008. If you write your own, use the hashtag #my3words so that we can find each other.

Conflicting Concerns

As I have said before, my paid work for Quakers at the very broad level and my responsibilities to my family at home are more than enough to fill my every waking minute. I already feel like I’m not keeping up.

But every so often, a concern arises in my heart and mind that doesn’t fit neatly into one of those buckets. Issues at my monthly meeting, in my yearly meeting, in my kids’ school. Things that have been laid upon my heart to care about but that I really don’t have time for.

Except that we all have time for the things that really matter. As Thomas Kelly says, even very busy lovers find time to write long letters to each other, because they care. I used to say, “If I have time to complain about it, I have time to do something about it.”

So we have to make choices. Every minute I spend on one thing is time away from another and this is true for everyone. I prioritize sleep. I make time to go to some but not all of my kids’ athletic games. I am not serving on any committees or teaching First Day School at my monthly meeting. So on the whole I have a reasonable balance.

And then come these special moments. I don’t know whether to call them temptations or distractions or openings. I am specifically not giving examples here because they are too personal and too much involving other people to get into in this space. I guess I can say they variously involve sex, money and God, but not all three at once, for which I am grateful.

So anyway, the point is that I’ve been trying to sort out what is really mine to do, and what I just need to let go of. Like I said last year, courage, serenity, wisdom, and the discipline to make myself stick to a decision and not keep fretting in the middle of the night over things that I decided are not mine to work on.

And the spark for putting this into a blogpost was an insight that came to me in worship this morning. A 100 year old Friend spoke about how grateful she is that 90 years ago, a Sunday school teacher made her memorize certain passages from the Bible. She still remembers the Beatitudes, for example. She was recently reminded of these because a couple of months ago she was temporarily blind after a surgery but she still had these verses, and some poetry she also memorized over the years. She is so grateful now even though at the time she wondered what good it would do.

So my new yardstick, among the others I have been using, is to consider what I’m going to care about 90 years from now. Ok, maybe 50 years is all the horizon I need to worry about. In any case, I need to ask not just what has the most heat and Light in it right now, but what will I care about later? What will I regret? What will my grandchildren care about? What does God care about? What will I be held accountable for in the long run?

This is helping me sort through the recent concerns with more clarity. And I hope that this reminder, like so many things that I’ve heard before but needed to hear again, will help me sleep better in the coming months.

Bivocational Ministry

So have you heard the term "bivocational ministry" before? If you have, there's a good chance that you've been to seminary, or known someone who did, or thought about going, or taught at one, some time in the last ten years. Or at least, I'm finding a strong correlation in the people I'm talking to.

So here's a short version of what I mean when I say "bivocational ministry":

God calls some people to work in ministry while also working either part or full time in secular jobs to supplement their income.  Bivocational ministry is when a person serves in a ministry while also being employed in a secular job, whether or not they get paid for their religious service. There is a growing conversation among those involved in the training and hiring of pastors, inside and outside the Religious Society of Friends/Friends Church (RSoF), about the need for bivocational ministry. Unprogrammed Friends have been talking more about preparing and supporting all the diverse ministers among us, but may be more familiar with the term “released Friend.”

Bivocational ministry was an essential part of the founding vision of Quakerism, when early Friends railed against the abuses of “hireling ministers.” Even where Friends have hired pastoral staff, we have sought to employ those who are called to the ministry by God, rather than relying on credentials or pedigree. We have acknowledged that a calling to a particular ministry may be for an undefined period of time, and yet not a permanent condition. Throughout our history, with variations depending on the region and the century, Friends have shared the burdens and the joys of ministry widely in our communities. As part of our uniquely Quaker spiritual inheritance, it’s a model that we can share with the world.

Bivocational ministry is quintessentially Quaker, but many meetings and churches are struggling today:

• Many meetings can’t find enough volunteers to populate their elaborate committee structures. 
• Even full-time pastors are not equally gifted in all areas of ministry assigned to them by the classic Protestant model. 
• Many Friends have a calling to do more for their meeting or for the wider Friends Church, but can’t afford the loss of income. 
• Many pastors are receiving the equivalent of part-time salaries yet expected to do full-time (plus your spouse) work. 
• Friends from the programmed and unprogrammed traditions are going to seminary to prepare for service to the RSoF, often incurring substantial student debt, but there aren't enough paid jobs in Quakerism to absorb them all.
• Many meetings and churches don't know what to do with strongly gifted Friends.
• Friends feel both guilt-ridden and dismissive of their part-time pastors instead of celebrating this balance. 

This conversation touches on many difficult issues for Friends: money, leadership, theology, qualifications for ministry, membership numbers, culture and religious language, to name a few. It is related to a broader economic shift in the world around us, involving both changes in employment and ecological concerns around sustainability. Our society values and rewards single focus dedication, not a balanced life, no matter how many self-help books try to say the opposite.

Many yearly meetings have approached the training and support for bivocational ministers in various ways: weekend workshops, spiritual formation cohorts, pastors’ conferences, support for continuing education. Some local churches and meetings have developed innovative approaches to calling, supporting and releasing ministers. However, most of the best practices among Friends are not well known outside of their immediate geographic area or branch of Friends. The divided branches of the RSoF have a lot to offer one another in tackling the problems and celebrating the strengths of bivocational ministry. Their different perspectives complement each other.

As just one example, an unprogrammed meeting in an unaffiliated yearly meeting that I know had burned out two clerks of their Ministry and Oversight Committee in a row. Several contributing factors were identified, but both of the individuals in question said, “I don’t even want to come to worship on Sundays. It’s not like worship for me any more, it’s just a time when people come to tell me all their problems.” It occurred to a member of their M&O committee that this was a situation that people who are pastors deal with for their whole careers, not just a 1-3 year term on a committee. By inquiring with personal friends who were pastors in evangelical Friends churches, she heard some of their strategies for coping. One said his approach was two-fold. First was to accept that Sunday mornings were his time of service to the community, not his time of communion with the Holy Spirit. Sometimes that happened too, but changing his expectations helped him not to be annoyed when people just wanted to ask him, “where is the big coffee pot?” And second, he had to seek out other times for deep contemplation of the Divine, and he found that in a midweek gathering with other pastors for what was essentially unprogrammed Quaker worship. And so an evangelical Friend had learned from unprogrammed Friends, and a liberal Friend learned from an evangelical Friend. But too few of us know each other to be able to benefit from this learning.

How could Friends address this in a way that would be useful to the whole Religious Society of Friends/Friends Church? To the local meetings and churches that are struggling? For all the people who are struggling to find a way to use their gifts and live into their leadings?

How can meetings and churches have an honest and  conversation with each other and with the individual Friends who are called to serve the RSoF about how to make the best match between gifts and needs?

How can we amplify the work and learning that has already been done about calling, training and supporting ministry, by individual Friends and Quaker institutions, to benefit Friends more widely?

Frankly, I think the survival of the Religious Society of Friends/Friends Church in this century depends on us figuring this out better.

Full disclosure: I am, for the first time in my life, blessed and honored to be paid a full-time living wage for Quaker work. But I know, from 20 years of experience, what it is like for that not to be true. Also, this post reflects my personal leading and not that of my employer.