north by south

Posted on January 11, 2011 by emacaulay

The last week was spent vacationing. With many books, cross-country ski trails, and my beloved to create play and rest, I was nestled into our cabin in the north woods.

I slept. I ate. I read. I prayed. I laughed. I stilled.

So now, finding myself south of that north woods idyll, there is soul work waiting for my attention.

Namely, how to live that sleeping eating praying laughing stillness while pastoring and being in the midst of the bustle that is city living.

I am rarely caught up to my ideas of what is possible. I can see what ought be and know it as real in my belly and sometimes vision conviction can short-circuit serenity in ways stupendous. I forget that unfolding takes time and patience is must and laughter necessary and God knows, I forget that this thing called the Body of Christ is not saved nor lost without the Holy’s breath infusing each stumble and soar.

I take on too much. Maybe you know this way of being.

So this is what I hold as I reenter the non vacation life God has given me: there are ski trails through woods always. There is the ongoing amazing grace of my partner always. There is a hunger for learning and stilling and being that beat through my being always. There is midwife God, always. There is an unfolding of the Holy going on in the community I serve and it is powerful in its always-changing-what-the-heck-just-happened ways. It is beyond my control.

They are not just vacation treats, these knowings. Holy gifting is a constant. Great God of Life, grant me the serenity found in letting go.

fast

Posted on December 21, 2010 by emacaulay

I was visiting church members today. They have well launched children and umpteen grandbabies and what we agreed upon is this:

The lives of our children go so fast. One minute, they are handed to us wrapped in swaddling clothes and we commence to loving passionately and then, after countless breakfasts and shoe ties and recitals and games and wet beds and school conferences, they are grown and gone to the lives we helped ready them to live.

Watching my children unfold into their beauty is probably the greatest miracle I’ve been given to witness. I like them so much. I love discovering that they are funny and wise and interested and I love knowing that I will never be able to know them fully, these persons who resided next to my heart for nine months and who walk with my heart for the rest of their lives.

It goes fast. I watch families now. Cooper and I are those slightly creepy old people who ooh and ahh over the children of strangers. They interact with us, these kind parents, with a wary sort of appreciation. What I want to say to them is savor it savor it savor it savor it.

When your eyes are crossed with fatigue and you are not sure you can stand one more question or interrupted whatever, take a breath and take your babies on your lap and smell their heads and listen to their hearts because before you know it they are launched and gone and you too will be one of those people who tries hard to live in the present whilst mewling for the past.

It goes fast.

elves

Posted on December 3, 2010 by emacaulay

The tree is up.

The nativity sets are unpacked, the stockings are hung by the chimney and the house smells of sap.

The ritual of preparing living space as proclamation of hope is sacred work. There are musts in my home: Julie Andrews has to sing, the stupid looking elf must be at the top of the tree, and the Christmas village has to be arranged and wired to shine.

I wonder sometimes about the hassle of it all. Who has time for such nonsense, anyway? Why not skip the pine needles under foot and the clutter of it all? My kids are grown, the grandchildren not yet, and life is busy busy busy.

But what I have come to is that I need it, this ritual of hope. I need to unwrap ornaments made by my children in kindergarten. I need to remember Christmases past when dressing the tree for Christmas was a work of great excitement and joy. I need to mourn the passing of years and savor the richness of the now and I need to deck our halls with the familiar.

It matters greatly. When my children arrive from places far from home, they will know themselves wrapped in the good of a place where goofy elves straddle tree tops and rituals of hope are commenced and space proclaims through scent and sight:

Een so Lord Jesus, quickly come.

tender shepherd

Posted on December 1, 2010 by emacaulay

Music grew me.

Always in the house there was music playing. I learned the melodies of operas and symphonies through osmosis – they soaked into my soul as givens.

One of my favorite records was Peter Pan, the Mary Martin version. I can still see the green record cover with a Mary-Martin-in-tights and attitude. The songs were the very best to sing along with, since they were full of bravado and wistfulness, both.

One of my favorites on the album is called “Tender Shepherd”. It is the lullaby sung to the Darling children as they nestle into beds in the safety of the nursery. Their mother seems to intuit, as she sings this song with heart and soul, that her children are soon to fly from her into lands and life far from the power of her tending. It grabbed me then, and does now, as prayer: Dear God, watch over the sweetness of hearts precious beyond the telling. Please.

No one ever told me that having children would require such courage. To love so fiercely and know so fully that life has bumps that will jar our tender lambkins is impossibly painful.

And it is so, this pain.

So we sing. We conjure up days gone by when we could sit by bedsides and songpray our children to the warm of sleep. We remember the smell of their heads and the gentle of the love that wrapped our lullaby times.

And when they are grown, and the challenges they face are grown with them, we sing on, sure that the universe and our God hear the imploring of our hearts:

Tender Shepherd, guard our children, we pray. Please.

a day in the life

Posted on September 25, 2010 by emacaulay

One hundred and fifty people came to Richfield UMC today. Each left with two bags of food, a birthday bag, a children’s book, and please God, a sense that the community of Jesus followers do more than talk about justice and grace.

We have come to know each other through the years of fourth Saturday food ministry. We work side by side to unload the truck, sort food, bag potatoes and onions and today, briny hard-boiled eggs. We communicate with smiles and broken English and while we spend this time together there is so much we do not know about the lives lived outside the doors of the church.

People leave with bags of groceries. We feel good about that. But as important for the privileged that call our church home, we have a sense of who the often unseen neighbors are who are made in the image of our creator God.

One woman told me today of her dying husband, her incarcerated son, her battered body, and her sense of impending doom as the months tick by before she has to vacate her home. I watched English-speaking and Spanish-speaking youth work together to sort and distribute bags of goodies provided by the Richfield Rotary. They had a job to do and savored the work and the gift of partnership.

Following the food distribution I visited a member of the church who has been in the world of dementia for years. She had fallen and broken a hip, survived the surgery, and on the other side had begun to fail. When I entered her room her daughter was there and her eyes lit up and while her words indicated her presence in another realm, her eyes communicated joy and life and oh, to be witness to the love of a daughter and the spirit of a woman some ninety years old. I left blessed.

There are zillions of questions to answer, prayers to breathe, a sermon to write, chores to be done and wonder to be named.

This life called ministry is rich beyond the telling.

the beat goes on

Posted on September 1, 2010 by emacaulay

We bought our house at the peak of housing mania. We were blending families and making new life and what we wanted was a house that could hold and make space for all. We found an old beauty with lots of room and presence figuring that we could turn around and sell in in a few years once a new notion of family had been established.

Well, that was then. Home sales have stalled and with it our blithe sense of being able to downsize. For us, it is probably just as well because gone is the sense that we would only need the space for a few years.

Our children range in age between 20 and 28. They come and they go and they come again and they stay and they go and they come back.

Turns out we need this space. Last week we housed five of the six, provided a temporary idling place for in-between venturers, fed and slept and loved and savored the progeny the Holy one in all Her wisdom saw fit to send into our lives.

We send them out from this hulking blue launch site. It is exhausting, for sure. But being on the front lines to help them equip and venture is precious and rare. The world awaits them.

And home is here to welcome them back.

holy vexation

Posted on April 28, 2010 by emacaulay

When I came to Richfield UMC seven years ago for my introductory meeting, I was scared and fragile feeling and grief-full. Could I really make community with these folk, and how was it possible that I could leave beloveds in Duluth? Would this crazy and audacious process of pairing pastor and congregation to live Christ together really work?

One of the people at the table that night let me know that the Senior Pastor has always led the men’s Bible study, so of course I would do the same. I asked him if that would be so, given that for the first time their Senior Pastor would be a woman. He didn’t miss a beat as he assured me that such details didn’t matter.

And so I have gathered every Wednesday at eight o’clock with a dozen or so men who bless me beyond the telling. We talk about the seemingly unmentionables in church: politics and sexuality and change and challenge. We share insights about scripture and life. We read books and The Book and we laugh plenty, pray, and hold each other when life gets scary.

Today’s epiphany was delivered by the same man who informed me that of course I would lead the men’s Bible Study. We were finishing up Karen Armstrong’s drink-of-living-water book “The Bible” in which she says over and over that the lens through which we must read scripture is that of compassion and care. Bible bullets meant to mangle are antithetical to the gifting of God’s invitation to love sung over and over again throughout scripture.

I was bemoaning the ways that hate speech in the name of the Christian movement has moved my children from the lap of church community. My fellow scholar paradigm-shifted me away from my well-worn lament.

He asked about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Didn’t I suppose that she too worried about her son challenging and walking away from the organized religious community of his parents? Look what happened to the movement of God in the world when he set out, challenged, and proclaimed a new way.

I’m still grinning. Because of course he is right. Whew. I don’t have to flop around trying to convince the next generation that we (that would be those of us who claim kin called church) really ought be trusted and joined and worked through.

Maybe, like Jesus, they are listening to a deeper voice and following a broader vision than they have heard sung through the church.

I’m hoping that we listen to them and respect them and allow ourselves to be shaped by their challenges.

Worlds are changed by those who vex their parents.

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Celebrating the Sacred

Category Archives: women in ministry