A parishioner sent me an email today.  She encouraged me to hold fast to one of the many stones I brought home from the island of Iona.  During the turmoil of these days, while the earth is rumbling, waves decimating, and social fabric rending, she suggested that I carry with me always the hum of that holy place.

Icons are gift.  They are visual and physical reminders that every place and time in which we find ourselves is holy.  We travel no road unaccompanied.  There is in all things the breath of the Holy.

I know that she speaks strong and gentle good.  In this morning’s Star Tribune is an article speaking earth shake of sorts for the United Methodist church.  In the crumble that was once one of our most vibrant churches, one of our pastors is insisting that new life can and will be born through willful disobedience.  Serving as he does in a movement that specifically prohibits clergy from blessing same gender relationships based on the denomination’s statement that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching”, the Rev. Greg Renstrom has stated that blessing “responsible, mutually respectful and reverent relationship” is a natural expression of pastoral care for all of God’s children.  Serving as he does a congregation intentionally seeking to reach out to GLBT folk, pastoral care naturally includes the support and nurture of loving same-gender relationships.

It is a provocative proclamation.  It is a calling out in a movement founded on the inclusive teachings of Jesus.

We are a global connection, we United Methodists.  Our polity is crafted at quadrennial meetings.  We are a representational body; meaning there are persons sent to General Conference based upon the numbers of United Methodists in their region.  Larger numbers in more conservative regions – in the Southern United States and in Africa – means more votes.  Based upon numbers, some Annual Conferences send many representatives.

Some send precious few.  Minnesota will send three lay and three clergy representatives in 2012.

How to impact global policy for inclusion when the task feels Herculean?  How to shape a fully inclusive church when it feels crazy-making that it would be anything but?

The Rev. Greg Renstrom has said he will wait no longer, even though it means he may lose his standing in a denomination he has served for decades.

I am washed with compassion for him, for the too many who have been told that in the name of the church, blessing is withheld.  I am washed with compassion for our Bishop, who is charged with overseeing the living of UM polity in Minnesota regardless of her personal and pastoral convictions, and I am washed with compassion for the ache of the Holy that in the swirl and need that is living in these days, so much energy gets funnelled into policing bestowal of blessing.

So the presence of Iona will bless me in these days.  The wind of the Spirit is blowing.

We are held.  We are believed in.  We are movement.

Organized labor’s catastrophic decline has paralleled – and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated – an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality.  In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation’s income.  Now they’re getting close to a half.  The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980.  The super-rich – the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth – have been the biggest winners of all.  What is always called their “compensation” (wage workers lucky enough to have a job simply get paid) has quadrupled.” Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, March 7, 2011

While on vacation last year I read a book entitled “The Spirit Level”.  The book painstakingly assesses data from around the world and what was found was that in all cultures the greatest marker for misery for all people was the level of economic disparity found in the culture. Violence levels, health issues, quality of life, and general well-being was compromised when the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened.  Even those supposedly protected from angst by gated communities feel the pain.

The conclusion was clear and biblical.  Whatever is done to the least (or not done) is done to the soul of the whole.

Political commentators and each of us have been roiled by the unfolding of civic engagement in Wisconsin.  There is much at stake in this.

It seems there has been a willing sort of going-along with whomever it was who pushed the most effective fear buttons come election time.

But we are waking, each of us.  We are waking to an awareness that class skirmishes are real and chasms between haves and do not haves are becoming wider and we are whistling in the dark if we are not willing to acknowledge that we cannot go on this way.

As the gap noted by Hertzberg above widens, we are all of us made more fragile.

Collective advocacy – through voting, unions, churches, and all who are willing to voice conviction that the dignity and want of one is the dignity and want of all – cannot be quashed.

Jesus preached plenty about caring for all, insisting that the Hebrew Bible teachings were meant to be lived in community; teachings about living justice and kindness and mercy and humility and while we are playing at legislative smoke-and-mirrors tricks to triumph over “those people” whoever they might be, we are shredding the soul of our faith mandates.

“Whatever you do to the least of them you do to me”.

The number of the economic “least” is growing.

How will the movement of Jesus respond?

I read a great Facebook post the other day.  The man who spoke announced that his Lenten discipline was to fast from political wrangling on Facebook.  He seemed a bit anxious about it and made some rumblings about loopholes; when and what and if happened he allowed that he might have to break the fast. But overall, he seemed pretty interested in what he would discover about himself.

Fasting is like that.  So often we hear the word and feel the clutch of wants gone unsoothed and we flinch and run.  Fasting is actually a more spacious thing than that.

When we fast, we make more space for the Holy to sound.  Each of us has things that we fill ourselves with in order to dodge.  We do or distract in order to distance ourselves from the gnaw of anxiety that feels like constant companion.

The Holy calls us to “be still and know” that God is God and we are not.

Our world calls us to zoom around stuffing our lives full of busy.  Distractions make other people rich.

So this Lenten season, what is it you might fast from?  For the Facebook wise man, it is the hurling of muck via electronic community.  For others, it might be refraining from buying anything new.

The first step is to still ourselves long enough to ask the question:  what is it that I take up as my dodge of choice?  How can I let go of that behavior in order to be more available to God?

What sorts of learnings are in store?

It’s a journey, this spiritual season called “Lent”.  We journey in sacred company.  Perhaps it is time to be sure that we are present and open to the learnings along the way.

Well, the last “amen” has sounded and I’m off for a week in the sun.

I love packing.  It is intriguing to see what are the essentials of my life.  The first and most essential travel good is Cooper.  That one I have covered.  Next on the choosing roster is books.  Anticipating the perfect reads for unstructured time is a romp.  I almost always pillage a book store while away, since books bought in exotic places seem even more delicious.  But, leaving home without companion reads is unthinkable.  Next in importance are what it is I will wear that will free and bless.  Given that I am expecting to live with the maximum amount of sun on my skin, the clothes aspect is easy:  not much.

Get-to-know yourself gurus talk a lot about what it is we pack in the bag that is our life.  Vacations bring that whole issue to the front line.  As for me, what I pack for vacation is magnification of what I am blessed to live in my life.

I live in the company of people who remind me who I am.  I live in the company of ideas and poetry given voice by others.  I live in the company of my own being and I adorn it as I choose.  That’s life.

I live.  For the next week or so, I will live in the blow of the wind and the warm of the sun.  I want for every pore to be open.  Not just on vacation, but through every day I am blessed to live.

Today’s Financial Peace lesson was entitled “Buyer Beware”.

Some of the powerful and not so surprising tidbits are these:

• For each hour of TV watched, consumers spend $200 extra a year.
• In 1971, breathing humans were exposed to an average of 560 ads per day.  In 2011, that number has jumped to an average of 3 – 4,000 ads per day.
• We live in the most marketed-to culture in history.

Intuitively we know this.  We’re researched and profiled walking dollar signs for people who want us to buy our happiness their way.

As I listened, I had to laugh at myself.  After years of hearing my kids rave about their Apple computers and years of listening to the lovely sound of the Apple keyboard rattling ever-so-cooly under their fingers, I opted for an Apple MacBook Pro when my old lap top crashed.  And let me tell you, I would rave to anyone about the “Apple Experience”.  From the moment of walking in the door, the service is excellent, the vibe welcoming to even un-cool crones, and the sense of being a part of a distinct culture seductive and pleasing as heck.

I love it.  And, I’ve been skillfully manipulated to love it.

On of the other great bits I heard today was that lurking within us each is that screaming fit-throwing toddler we see regularly at grocery stores.  You know, the one who wants what he or she wants and fit throwing and want asserting commences until the embarrassed or frustrated parent gives in or throws that kid under their armpit and leaves the store.

We want what we want, don’t we?  And we can spin the most outlandishly indulgent and unwise purchase with great creativity; unless we summon the parent in us that knows well that getting everything we want will make us broken.

The list of things my inner toddler wants is so long and lovely.  So what I’m doing was begun by my daughter when she was here last.  She put a list on the ‘fridge (the high holy altar of home).  I add to it the list of things I figure I can’t (or really, the issue is I feel I shouldn’t have to) live without.

Something about doing that has helped me slow the purchase lust.  I look at the items on that list and they lose their power to make me “act out”.  Dining room set?  Lovely.  But crucial?  Nope.  It’s been fun, actually, to savor the making of decision and plan.

And since I am cool enough to have an Apple, I can be patient.