Gathering Voices: Faithful Conversations from The Thoughtful Christian

Another Inauguration Day

                                A Gathering Voices post by Beth Pyles

Inauguration Day is the day of beginnings, wherein one is officially installed into 
office.

I wonder which was Jesus’ inauguration day?  Was it the wedding at Cana as 
told in John’s gospel, when Jesus performs his first public miracle, turning water 
into wine?  John certainly thinks so, heralding the day, as he does in chapter 1, 
with pronouncements of Jesus as the lamb of God, Messiah, Son of God, and 
king of Israel.  In that understanding, the wedding becomes a celebration not 
of the unknown bride and groom so much as a thanksgiving for the generous 
(albeit begrudging) providing by the king for the needs of the subjects.

But the more traditional understanding of Jesus’ ‘inauguration’ is more somber: 
the crucifixion day that we call Good Friday, when Jesus is given his crown of 
thorns and rag robe and mockingly named king of the Jews.  It is Jesus’ death day.

As the President of the United States today will walk in a celebratory parade post-
inauguration, Jesus walked in a parade of sorts as he was taken to his own death.  
Both are surrounded by guards: one being protected, the other being anything but.

One will have everything done for him, feted and presented with food fit for a king.  
The other received nothing but gall and wounds, being forced to carry the instrument 
of his own death.

One will be glorified; the other was mocked.

One will gather more and more hangers-on as his day progresses, the other will be 
left virtually alone by the time of his last breath.

Each has yet more work to do after all the festivities.

About the one, history will write.  The other writes the history.

To borrow from Chuck Shumer speaking into the present, as we consider the past 
of our own faith, we would do well to remember.

Jesus Shall Reign

A Gathering Voices post by Don McKim

We learned recently that the statement, “American is a Protestant Christian Nation” is no longer true.[1] According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the Protestant majority—a hallmark of U.S. demographics since the beginning of the Republic—has now dipped to 48% among those expressing a religious affiliation. On the rise—to 20%—are those who expressed no religious affiliation. This was an increase of some 15% from the data assembled five years ago.[2]

Interpreting this data involves many dimensions. If this is purely a “numbers game,” Protestants will be worried to see their percentages drop. If this is a sociological look at American society in general, the “Nones on the Rise” is a phenomenom of contemporary society to be explored further as providing clues for some cultural phenomena. If a theologically-laden perspective is adopted, Protestants may feel sorry that less people are experiencing the theological joys that Protestant theology provides. So the data is multi-valent and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

Certainly there are important questions for Protestants to raise. Is evangelism happening in Protestant churches where the good news of the Christian gospel is being proclaimed and shared? Are children of Protestants continuing in the faith of their forbearers? What new ways of sharing the Gospel should Protestant churches be engaging in while American culture continues to change? The questions throng. They all need to be considered.

What also needs to be considered is the theological perspective that is behind, beneath, and in front of us all. This does not lessen or negate the important questions the Pew study raises for Protestant Christians. But it does keep us focused on a reality that can sustain us in the midst of all questioning; and a reality that is an end toward which we move in the midst of all polls and questions and causes for despair.

The reality is found in Isaac Watt’s hymn: “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun.”[3] This hymn was first published in Watts’, Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719).[4] It was his way of paraphrasing or rendering Psalm 72. Watts’ hermeneutic was decidedly christological here. Some stanzas have rightly dropped out of this well-known hymn these days.[5] But the glorious truth remains:

            Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

                        Does its successive journeys run,

                        His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

                        Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

 

                        Blessings abound where’er He reigns;

                        The prisoners leap to lose their chains,

                        The weary find eternal rest,

                        And all who suffer want are blest.

 

Then, finally:

 

                        Let every creature rise and bring

                        Honors peculiar to our King;

                        Angels descend with songs again,

                        And earth repeat the loud Amen!

 

The hymn points us to the ultimate reign of Jesus Christ. It points us to the future, coming reign of God in Jesus Christ. It points us to the end toward which we move, when “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

In the midst of all the difficulties of life, the turmoils of society, and the vicissitudes of our churches, “Jesus Shall Reign.” “Jesus Shall Reign” no matter how things are going personally for me these days; no matter how faithful or unfaithful our churches may be; no matter who wins the U.S. Presidential election (though the choice is very clear!).

We need this word to lift us above our current situations. This does not exempt us from dealing with our situations. We are called by God to live out our vocations—as the church lives out its vocation—in the midst of the world and all its contours. But we have a vision that pulls us toward the future. We give of ourselves fully and totally, the church lives its mission, simply because “Jesus Shall Reign.” Christ’s kingdom pulls us ahead. The future is secure. So we give ourselves away for Christ’s service in the present.

This is the perspective of which New Testament scholar Paul Minear reminded us:

In his eternal plan God has appointed Jesus as the ruler over all authorities, placing all things under his feet. He has ‘filled’ him with the divine fullness, his austere authority and gracious love, his world-encompassing wisdom and all-reconciling power. In Jesus, God has chosen to accomplish all things ‘according to the counsel of his will’ [Ephesians 1] (v.11).[6]

“Jesus shall reign”!

Our vision of hope keeps us from becoming nervous when the results of the most recent religious polls get announced. It keeps us from giving up, throwing in the sponge when things are tough, or when it does not seem like God is pouring it on for my ministries or those of my church. We need a galvanizing vision to help us keep on keeping on. “Jesus Shall Reign” is that vision! In the midst of it all, we can look to the coming future, secure in the counsel of God’s will. Then,

                        Let every creature rise and bring

                        Honors peculiar to our King;

                        Angels descend with songs again,

                        And earth repeat the loud Amen!

---

[1] Jim Nedelka, “One Nation Still Under God?” in “News & Announcements from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), October 15, 2012.

[2]The complete study is available online at http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx.  

[3] The Presbyterian Hymnal, ed. LindaJo H. McKim (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1990), #423.

[4] LindaJo H. McKim, The Presbyterian Hymnal Companion (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 293.

[5] The imperialistic reference to “barb’rous nations” is an example.  

[6] Paul S. Minear, The Kingdom and the Power: An Exposition of the New Testament Gospel, rpt. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 33.   

Let's End the Generational Wars

Let’s walk away from pitting oldsters against youngsters, from the suggestion that Social Security and Medicare financial challenges be ‘solved’ by keeping my benefits intact while cutting the benefits of my children and grandchildren.

Let’s begin not with our young.  Let’s begin with ourselves.

Why don’t we Boomers think about how we might sacrifice for the benefit of those who will come after? 

Doesn’t the command to honor we parents presuppose that we are worthy of that honor?

The safety net is worth protecting for the generations.

So here are a few very practical thoughts/suggestions for ‘we the [old] people’:

1.    Stop – right now – any and all efforts to circumvent existing laws so that your savings will to go to your children when you die rather than to provide for your care right now.  It is immoral to require your fellow citizens to pay your freight so you can leave your kids a legacy.  A lot of current taxpayers have less than you do.  So how about leaving our children the legacy of duty fulfilled, honor instilled, integrity preserved?

2.    Treat your kids well so that they will be willing to help care for you in your old age.

3.    If you have the means, give some or all of the money back.  When you file your income tax return, pay more than you owe.  If you don’t need the Social Security, give it back.  Check out PPI for a proposal to codify the idea by giving retirees the ability to select a level of benefit to receive from Social Security.

5.    Pay attention to your Medicare benefit statements.  If they show a service that you did not receive, call the provider to have it removed.  Mostly, it’s probably just a mistake.  But sometimes it isn’t.  If it’s fraud, do not be a part of it.  If you know someone who is defrauding Medicare, report them.  This fraud is stealing from our own children.  Who steals from their own children?

5.    Make it clear that dealing with this problem for all the generations matters to you and your vote. Congress will not act unless you do.  Congress believes and rightly so that old folks (who vote way more than young folks do) will not stand for any of it.  We have to change in order for Congress to change.  Until we voters make it clear that we demand Congress act and recognize that it will require sacrifice on our part – a sacrifice we are willing to make – nothing will change.  And it will be our fault.  Not Congress’s.  Not the President’s, whoever that person may be.  Not ‘government’s’.  Ours.

Isn’t it time we started behaving like grown-ups and believe and act as if economic crisis means sacrifice for everybody?  Isn’t it time we cared about what happens to all of us and not just to me.  It’s time we acted like we are the solution to our problems. 

In fact, it’s past time.

 

___________________

Check out my blog entry of the same title for an expanded version of this post.

Why I love blogging and why I'm quitting

A Gathering Voices post by Lynne M. Baab

I’ve been blogging for 21 months here on the Thoughtful Christian blog. I’ve written a post almost every Thursday, which means I’ve written something like 80 posts. When David Maxwell, editor at The Thoughtful Christian and Westminster John Knox Press, asked me in late 2010 to be one of the bloggers here, I had written about 8 guest posts for three blogs: Christine Sine’s blog, Godspace; the Kiwi-made Preaching blog; and my friend Kimberlee Conway Ireton’s blog. Those posts were enjoyable to write, but blogging every Thursday has been more than enjoyable. It’s been wonderful. Here’s why:

1. I love thinking of one idea and developing it in a relatively small number of words. It took me a while to get used to the 500-600 word format, but I grew to love it. That length allows for one main idea and one twist on that idea, and it’s fun to try to figure out what that twist might be.

2. I love writing about the overlap of current events and Christian character/prayer/obedience/hope, like this post on the Olympics or the one last year on the tsunami.

3. I love coming up with (or discovering) a significant metaphor and developing it, like this post on “holding environments.”

4. I love highlighting something interesting that a congregation is doing, like this post on a church youth group where the girls are encouraged to ponder body image.

5. I love doing a short series on a topic, like these three posts on creativity (here, here and here).

6. I love highlighting books written by friends, like these two posts about my colleague Christopher Holmes’s book (here and here).

7. I love having a platform to talk about what it’s like to write my books, like the post about my novel, Dead Sea, and the one about my new book on communal spiritual practices, Joy Together.

8. I love being able to post excerpts from my books. For the past three weeks, I posted excerpts from Joy Together.

I could go on. It’s been fun to look back over my posts of the past few months and think about the joy I got from writing them. So why am I quitting? This will be my last post on the Thoughtful Christian blog for the foreseeable future. No, I am not rushing out to establish my own blog. I am simply going to stop blogging for a while. Maybe a short while, maybe a long while.

Ten percent of my reason for quitting is that I am afraid I’m starting to think in 500-600 word blocks. If I want to keep writing books, I need to be able to develop longer arguments.

Ninety percent of my reason for quitting is that I want the two hours a week I spend on my blog posts to be used for other writing. I’m revising a sequel to Dead Sea which will be called Deadly Murmurs. I long to get it finished and published for kindle, so I can get on with revising the other novels I’ve written (I’ve written five novels including Dead Sea).

I’ve also started a memoir about losing weight and keeping it off. I weigh 95 pounds less than my highest weight (age 49 to 51), and 65 pounds less than the weight I maintained for most of eighteen years (age 31 to 49, with a few short-lived excursions downwards). I’ve been at this weight for three and a half years, not a short-lived excursion! Since weight maintenance is harder than weight loss, and weight loss is hard enough, I figure people might be interested in what I’ve learned. But I need time for thinking and writing about it.

So, to those of you who have read my posts on this blog, thank you very much. To those of you who have posted comments, thank you as well. To David Maxwell and others at Westminster John Knox Press, a big thank you for trusting me and giving me this platform for my ideas. It’s been great.

Enough Shame to Go Around

A Gathering Voices Post by Beth Pyles

R. Cort Kirkwood, of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record editorializes that “Christendom” is on the path to sanctioning (presumably) Muslim behaviors such as honor killing, bride burning, genital mutilation (presumably he means female, as we do that to our boys with nary a thought already), and refers to Muslim immigrants to Western Europe as an “Islamic horde”, calling for the West to wake up to the fight it must wage against Islam itself.*

In an expanded piece at If Beth Had a Blog, I address Mr. Kirkwood in more detail.  Herein, I focus on violence against women and Mr. Kirkwood’s implicit, if not explicit, claim that this is a purely Islamic phenomena.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) originates not with Islam, but with Ancient Egypt under the Pharaohs and the Roman Empire.  Wikipedia: FGM.  Indeed, some Islamic scholars have issued fatwas (legal ruling or interpretation of Islamic law by one in authority to so rule) against FGM. 

The majority of so-called honor killings in the world today are committed by Muslims, until one expands one’s definition of ‘honor killing’ to include what in the West are called ‘crimes of passion’ (the husband who kills his wife in a fit of rage over her real or perceived infidelity, for example).  Then the shift is dramatic.  Moreover, there is a history of honor killings across Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism.  The Bible contains what modern-day feminists refer to as ‘texts of terror’ against women, one of the most notable being the murder of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19). 

In this story of a woman who is sacrificed by her husband for rape and murder in order to preserve his own honor and life, it is worthy of note that at the beginning of the story, the woman is identified as being ‘unfaithful’ to her husband.  Her offense?  She left him and returned to her father.  Why include such a detail in the first place?  Perhaps to suggest that her death and mistreatment by all in the story was somehow warranted or justified.

Do I support the mistreatment of women under any guise?  Of course not.  But please, please, please, do not make your arguments against Islam in general and believing Muslims in particular, on the mistreatment of women, which knows no religious, social or cultural bounds.  It is an issue of power. 

Your own heritage, indeed, our shared heritage, which includes burning women as witches, the torture and murder of Joan d’Arc for the ‘offense’ of wearing trousers, the exclusion and excoriation of women throughout history, the erasure of women from the history of our faith, and the systematic practice of rape as a tactic of war, as in the Bosnian War, where Serbian (Christian) men raped Bosnian (Muslim) women and girls LINK, is one in which you can take no pride, sir.


__________________
*Taken from a FB entry on We Are All Harrisonburg.  Best research indicates that this appeared as part of a blog post by Mr. Kirkwood in 2007 at Taki's Magazine.

Who are they really? Who am I really?

A Gathering Voices post by Lynne M. Baab

I have often pondered the kind of identity construction that famous people like movie and TV stars need to engage in. In the 1990s, Meg Ryan was one of my favorite stars. On screen, she cultivated a kind of girl next door persona, while at the time she was the mother of a young child. I’ve wondered about movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and famous people like Princess Diana. How much did their real personality, values and habits correspond with the public identity they (and the media) constructed?

This issue no longer affects only famous public figures. Anyone who has a Facebook page, a website, a webpage on business site, even a blog, deals with identity construction. How do I want to appear? Which photos shall I choose? What do I want to emphasize about myself? As we choose photos and words to describe ourselves, we not only reflect what we think about ourselves, we also shape what we think.

I find this overwhelming. Because I’m an author, I have a website. Because I live thousands of miles from many people I love, I have a Facebook page. I have a bio page on this blog, another bio page on the website of the university where I teach, and an amazon.com author information webpage. I recently got an email from amazon in the UK, asking me to create an author webpage on the amazon.co.uk site. I wonder how much all this self-publicity and identity construction is shaping the way I view my true self.

A few days ago a local radio personality, Nicky Rennie, wrote an article in the newspaper about Facebook. (The article was in our paper newspaper on August 25, but I can’t find it anywhere online.) She wrote, “It is a fine line however between communicating and performing.” Performing has always created the possibility of creating false personas that have very little to do with who we really are. And now most of us are “performing,” at least to some extent, as we create and present our online identities.

In the light of the pressure this creates, I want to advocate for Christian spiritual practices where we can rest in God’s love and allow ourselves to be ourselves without the need to perform. The Sabbath gives me that kind of space, as do various kinds of silent prayer. God knows who I really am, even if accessing that true self is a bit challenging for me. “Oh, Lord, You have searched me and known me” (Psalm 139:1).

When I engage in silent prayer, and when I observe the Sabbath, I lay down any need to prove myself, advertise myself, promote myself, or perform. I can just be.

I’m not sure that those spiritual practices make me more accurate in my self-perception. Perhaps they do, and I believe that would be a good thing. But even if all I experience in those moments with God is the freedom to stop having to create an identity, that alone would be a great blessing. And it is.

And I’ll enjoy that blessing tomorrow when my husband and I pray silently for 20 minutes, as we often do. God knows who I am. When I am aware of God's presence it's like taking a deep, fresh breath. I can rest in the wonderful reality that God knows me through and through and actually loves me anyway. But right now, I’ve got to go change the photo on my page on the university’s website. When I looked at the page and captured the link for this post, I noticed the photo is out of date. Can’t have that!

(The article by Nicky Rennie I mentioned was called "Facebook part of our daily routine," Otago Daily Times, August 25, 2012, page 48.)

Young, old, and other categories of people

A Gathering Voices post by Lynne M. Baab

“They’re a wonderful young couple, aren’t they?”

My husband said those words as we were getting ready for bed on the first evening after Susan and Zach arrived. Susan is the daughter of an old friend of mine, and she had emailed almost a year ago saying she and her husband, Zach, wanted to visit New Zealand. I replied, answering her questions about various tourist options she had asked about, and I told her that she and Zach would be welcome to stay with us and see the sights around Dunedin, where we live.

Over the intervening months, Susan and I had emailed several times as she kept me up to date about their trip. They did decide to come to Dunedin and stay with us. They arrived on a Sunday afternoon, and the four of us had dinner together and talked after dinner.

Susan is a Presbyterian minister, as I am, and Zach works on the staff of the same church as Susan. I loved talking with them, listening to them describe the church where they work, chatting about various issues their church is facing and the parallels with my time as an associate pastor in a congregation in Seattle. To me, Susan and Zach are simply people, not necessarily “young people,” as my husband referred to them that first evening. Just people.

I realized that for me, most people between about 20 and 70 are simply people. I usually don’t think of them as young or old or anything particular, just people. However, when someone is over 70, I do tend to think of them as old.

In her job as an associate pastor in a large Presbyterian Church, Susan is responsible for the ministry to seniors. She has always had a huge heart for seniors, and she has a lot of ideas about the best ways for congregations to minister to and with older people. But because she is in her 30s, she feels that her ideas are seldom taken seriously. During her visit with us, she said, “I wish I had a passion for ministry to young adults. That’s what people expect me to be an expert about, and it seems they would listen to my ideas there. But I have never felt drawn that way. All my life, I’ve cared a lot about seniors. But it appears that I’m too young to have an impact on that topic.”

I didn’t ask her if she thinks of seniors as “old people,” or if she simply views them as people. I bet she views them simply as people, not as old people.

I was a teen and young adult in Washington State, where there are lots of Asian Americans. When I’m talking to an Asian American, I often forget they have ethnic roots in Asia, while mine are in Europe. For me, Asian Americans aren’t a category of people, they’re just people. But I have never been around African Americans as much, and I am more aware of African Americans as a category of people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about categories for people ever since Josh and Susan visited. I’ve been pondering the groups of people who are simply people to me, and the groups where I tend to use various adjectives that create categories. Who in your life is just a person? Who belongs to a category? Does it matter?

The Olympics through New Zealand eyes

A Gathering Voices post by Lynne M. Baab

When you watch the Olympics in New Zealand, where I live, you watch a lot of rowing. New Zealanders had high hopes for those events, and indeed those hopes panned out.  New Zealand’s first gold medal at these Olympics went to Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan, double scullers, who are known for their amazing last minute burst of speed. They tend to lag behind for the first three-quarters of their races, then come from behind in the last 500 meters. That’s what they did in London in the heat I watched, and then again in the finals.

Cohen and Sullivan are striking for their size. On the awards podium they were dwarfed by the Italians and Slovenians who won the silver and bronze medals.

I pondered the pictures of those awards for quite a while. One of my two reflective moments during these Olympics came as I looked at that picture. Here are two men who are outliers in terms of size in their sport, yet they haven’t let their size stop them from doing their best.

There have always been so many ways I felt like I didn’t fit in, and so many times I have let those feelings stop me from doing my best. I was never as extraverted as my mother, and for much of my life it has been hard for me to see the gifts that introversion brings. I have always struggled with my weight, and at times I have let my sense of looking fat stop me from stepping out. I was always an outlier because of my analytical ways of thinking and my interest in math and science as a young adult, and my mind seemed to be more masculine than feminine. I found that hard to deal with.   

As I looked at pictures of those two rowers, dwarfed by their competitors, all my feelings of not fitting in came to mind. I want to be willing to work hard and risk like they did. I want to give God my best, rather than let myself be held back by the ways I feel like I don’t fit in. I want to follow the voice of Jesus, even when I’m not sure if I have the qualifications to do what lies ahead of me.

The other Olympics moment that made me stop and ponder came during the women’s quad rowing. It was a heat, not the finals, and the team from New Zealand was in the middle of the pack moving forward. I had already watched a heat with Cohen and Sullivan, and I wondered if coming from behind was a Kiwi attribute. I was rooting for those four women who were inching ahead, when suddenly the four of them stopped dead in the water and the other boats went on without them.  Within only a second or two the Kiwi rowers had disappeared from the TV screen and the race went on without them.

Later I learned that one of the Kiwi rowers had “caught a crab” and her oar broke. Did her oar hit something in the water or did she simply lose control of it because of the choppy water that day? In any case, the team of four women was finished at this Olympics.

I’ll never forget that moment when their little boat abruptly fell out of the moving picture. Boom. Dreams over. Those moments happen to all of us, and I wondered if I am willing to believe Jesus is on the boat with me when something awful happens. Or do I fall into the triumphalistic outlook that means I experience Jesus' presence most clearly when things are going well? Am I willing to look for the man of sorrows who partners with us in every kind of human suffering, who redeems human pain? Do I expect Jesus to be with me when I am dead in the water?

It’s great for me that so much rowing has been on TV. For some reason, God has used those rowers to speak to me.

Trying to Understand the Arguments Against Gun Control

A Gathering Voices post by Beth Pyles

It is from tragedies that our national dialogue on issues like gun control take their shape, more’s the pity. In the law, there is an axiom: bad facts make bad law. The events in Aurora, Colorado, are very bad facts indeed.

I’m pretty clear on my own point of view: I am in favor of gun control. The Brady laws make sense to me and do not ‘feel’ like an infringement to my constitutional freedoms. I do not own a gun, so it’s relatively painless for me to hold such a view.

But let me be clear: my friends who do own guns are not murdering thugs. They care about life and safety as much, if not more, than I do.

To try to get at a better understanding of why these friends are so passionately against many, if not all, forms of gun control legislation, I thought about our Constitution and wondered what provision(s) might strike a similar chord for me.

The amendment granting the franchise to women is fundamental to my own understanding of citizenship. Until the day that amendment passed, my kind were not true citizens.

Infringe on that in any way, and you have my attention, my committed opposition, my own personal version of the cold dead hands Charlton Heston moment, clutching a ballot rather than a gun.

Here, however, is where my gun buddies and I part company. The gun argument goes something like this: the framers of the Constitution invested a right to bear arms in the citizenry not merely to provide for a well-armed militia, but also, and more importantly, so that the citizenry could take arms against its government if that government moves toward tyranny.

The argument makes no sense to me in our times, given the great arsenal of weaponry at the government’s fingertips, but more fundamentally, I genuinely believe that the ballot box and the right to protest are far more effective weapons against tyranny than any gun will ever be.

While I can better understand what’s at stake for gun-ownership proponents by taking a look at my own ‘sacred cows’, I still have trouble connecting the dots between limiting access to weapons of mass destruction in the market places of our own nation when we go to war to protect ourselves against such weapons in the hands of other nations.

Maybe it’s how we define the term. Why isn’t a machine gun or rapid-firing weapon in a theater a weapon of mass destruction?

To go back to the place of beginning, I know none of us wants a tragedy like Aurora. And when it comes to our national conversation about gun control or its lack, I hope and pray that we can all refrain from framing the argument on the backs of those unfortunate enough to have been there that night. It is their tragedy, not ours.

Internet addiction and congregations as holding environments

A Gathering Voices post by Lynne M. Baab

I wrote last week about a Newsweek article focused on the changes to the brain in people who spent a lot of time online. One of those changes involves shrinkage of parts of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory and other information (Newsweek, July 16, 2012), which has scary implications for congregations. I wrote the week before about the notion of “holding environments,” places where horizontal relationships with people and the vertical relationship with God are nurtured. This week I’d like to juxtapose these two ideas.

The characteristics of holding environments include

• a safe and reliable physical space
• psychological holding, the ability to foster emotional growth
• thoughtful organization
• secure but adaptive
• care, honesty and trust
• calming emotional support

Keeping those characteristics in mind, now look at this quotation from the Newsweek article: “With consent of the subjects, Missouri State University tracked the real-time Web  habits of 216 kids, 30 percent of whom showed signs of depression. The results, published last month, found that the depressed kids were the most intense Web users, chewing up more hours of email, chat, video-games and file sharing. They also opened, closed, and switched browser windows more frequently” (Newsweek, July 16, 2012).

This Missouri State University research conveys to me a kind of frantic movement. Data flies from one computer to another, and on each computer, web pages are opened and closed with great rapidity. In my own experience, rapid movement is great for a while. For short periods of time, it stimulates my brain and makes me feel alive. But after a while, it’s too much.

So many of the characteristics of a holding environment are not rapid and do not involve quick movement. A “safe and reliable space” implies some degree of constancy. “Thoughtful organization” implies some slow and careful thinking. “Secure but adaptive” implies movement at the right time, not constantly. “Calming emotional support” implies something tranquil, still, placid, serene, and peaceful. All of these characteristics make me want to take a deep breath and slow down. And these characteristics stand in direct contrast to the paragraph from the Newsweek article.

Part of what we are doing in congregations is providing an alternative to people’s daily life experience. So much of daily life is frantic, and the online components of daily life may contribute to our sense of rapid pace. Providing an alternative experience is a good and right thing for congregations to do. Moments of quiet in services, slowing down the pace from ordinary life, allowing people to focus on one thing – prayer, scripture, the sermon – rather than five things, seems like a good idea and seems like something that might nurture faith in the God who is the still point in the turning world.

But how do we create a transition between the frenzy of daily life and the peace of God’s presence? Can we realistically expect worshippers on Sunday morning to sink quickly and easily into a placid and serene environment? Can we expect small group members to instantly leave behind the stresses and rapid pace of their lives and focus easily on each other’s needs?

And how do we help people bring a bit of that peace and serenity back into their everyday lives? Often when the minister at our church introduces the congregational prayer time, he says something this: “We pray on Sundays not just because congregational prayer is important. We pray here as a model for all of us to take back into our daily lives.” I wonder how we could do with respect to other aspects of the holding environment we create in our congregations.