Some Thoughts on the Church...Carretto

I found this modern "desert father" about seven or eight years ago.  He just keeps on pushing me to love and to understand and to grow.  Enjoy!  ~Jon~

“How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you! How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is. I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though not completely. And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another? I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry in me. And if I did establish another, it would be my Church, not the Church of Christ. I am old enough to know that I am no better than anyone else. …)

The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners! It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith. It brings a message of pure transparency but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world. It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics. It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful.

Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it.

When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor(…)He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility. (…)

And what are bricks worth anyway? What matters is the promise of Christ, what matters is the cement that unites the bricks, which is the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit is capable of building the church with such poorly moulded bricks as are we.

And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church…this in reality am I .(…)

The deep bond between God and His Church, is an intimate part of each one of us. (…)To each of us God says, as he says to his Church, “And I will betroth you to me forever” (Hosea 2,21). But at the same time he reminds us of reality: 'Your lewdness is like rust. I have tried to remove it in vain. There is so much that not even a flame will take it away' (Ezechiel 24, 12).

But then there is even something more beautiful. The Holy Spirit who is Love, sees us as holy, immaculate, beautiful under our guises of thieves and adulterers. (…) It’s as if evil cannot touch the deepest part of mankind.

He re-establishes our virginity no matter how many times we have prostituted our bodies, spirits and hearts. In this, God is truly God, the only one who can ‘make everything new again’. It is not so important that He will renew heaven and earth. What is most important is that He will renew our hearts. This is Christ’s work. This is the divine Spirit of the Church.”
― Carlo Carretto

Found here: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/64433.Carlo_Carretto?auto_login_attempted=true

Impact vs. Impact

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a planning committee for a project that has the potential to affect over 10,000 high school students in our area.  The project is huge, impacting multiple public school districts and their students.  The ultimate impact on the communities of these students is beyond our prophetic abilities, but the data indicates that the impact will be huge.  Being a part of this committee as we plan and plot and move forward is quite exciting, as one might imagine.

                            

Yet, something even more exciting happened this week.  As I sat in my office one morning, I was surprised to hear the shuffle of feet outside my door…and then a light knock.  When I looked up, Raul’s smiling face was peering around the door frame…and Thalia followed him in to my office.  Raul enwrapped me in his huge bear-hug…and Thalia embraced me as well.  The joy of seeing these two former students of mine is beyond words I can pen.  We sat and talked together for half-an-hour.  I listened as they recounted their summer adventures and travels, and I encouraged them as they told me of their dreams and hopes for the months and years to come.  We laughed together remembering times in class last semester.  And, when they left, it was with the promise to come visit again.

After these two experiences, I began to think about “impact” and what it means.  In both my teaching career and in my new administrative position, lives are impacted.  People are changed, bettered.  But, “impact” simply does not mean “impact.” 

Last semester as I taught a writing course on the Weslaco campus of STC, I had 16 students that I met twice a week, every week.  We dug into the excruciatingly painful (for them!) elements of grammar, examined and practiced various modes of writing, learned how to do research both on-line and in the library, and prepared for the exit exam that would come at the end of the semester.  Every week, we sent multiple e-mails as I sent assignments and the students responded with questions.  At the end of the semester, we knew each other—I knew about Raul’s immigration as a child from Nicaragua when his family fled the violence and unrest of the 80’s that were going on in his native country.  I learned about Thalia’s family…her work…and her dreams.  They knew when I got my motorcycle…new my children by name, and which one was studying where.  I had impacted their lives…and they had impacted mine.

                                            

The committee that is putting together this up-coming project may ‘impact’ far more than just 16 young adults—it would impact some 10,000+ students in six school districts!  Wow!  That is amazing…and it’s a good thing.  But….

…But, those 10,000 students will never know me…and I’ll never know them.  Lives are ‘impacted’…but in a distant and dispassionate way.

I now know what teachers go through who move up into administration.  We can affect so many more students, we can ‘impact’ so many more lives.  But…. 

Pastors and church leaders go through the same…more often in the growth of the church than by ‘promotion.’  The small, intimate, sharing group of believers grows…excitement builds…outreach happens…then the church builds…and numbers grow…and at the end , the now “successful” pastor finds that he or she is ‘impacting’ so many more lives…but there is a distance, dispassion and disconnect that these kinds of pastors may have a hard time putting their fingers on.

If these pastors and church leaders hope to keep their balance and joy in life and ministry, they are going to have to do something.  In a worst case scenario, the pastor will seek intimacy and impact in the wrong place, in the wrong kind of relationship.  But in a best case scenario, this pastor will seek a small group—a discipleship group (high school, college, young adults), a mission/church plant—where he or she can form again those intimate, life-changing bonds that will leave all involved forever and positively changed…impacted.

                                    

So, I’ve moved from being a teacher in our college to being a part of administration.  Thankfully, our college leadership makes administrator participation in the teaching arts a high priority.  Therefore, this Fall, I’ll be in the classroom again—an evening class, two nights a week.  I’m SOOOO excited to be heading back to the classroom, to connecting with students, to pushing them, challenging them…and to their pushing me, their challenging me. 

I’ll stay in administration, thank you—I’m having a blast in my new job.  But, I’m so thankful that I’ll be able to continue to impact the individual lives of young men and women, that I’ll be able to share my life with them, and they with me.  This is where the real ‘impact’ happens.

Sweet Relief....

I’m reading Carlo Carretto again (Letters from the Desert), an intimate work that follows Carretto’s feet and mind into the desert of North Africa. 

He had been very active in the Church for many years, and quite suddenly he hears God call him to leave it all behind in his homeland of Italy and follow God into the desert.

At one point towards the beginning of the book, he is contemplating his earnest, dedicated labors and activity in the church back home, his practice of running “continually from one project to another, from one meeting to another, from one city to another”.  While involved in all of that, he had been operating on a worldview that went something like this:  God created the world and then stepped aside to rest; Christ founded the Church and then disappeared in to heaven to let the Church save the world.  Carretto says he imagined that his frenzied life and work were somehow part of the column that was holding everything up and everything together.

I drew back suddenly, as though to fee myself from this weight.  What had happened?  Everything remained in its place, motionless.  Not a movement, not a sound.  After twenty-five years I had realized that nothing was burdening on my shoulders and that the column was my own creation—sham, unreal, the product of my own imagination and my vanity.

I had walked, run, spoken, organized, worked, in the belief that I was supporting something; and in reality I had been holding up absolutely nothing.

The weight of the world was all on Christ Crucified.  I was nothing, absolutely nothing.

What amazing relief…to know that it does not depend on me.  May I never again be suckered into the “sham, unreal…product of my own imagination and vanity.”

(All quotations taken from:  Carretto, Carlos.  “You are Nothing.”  Letters from the Desert. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002.)

How to Joyfully Survive an ‘Economic Down-Turn’ (or Recession, Depression, etc.)

Some thoughts on our present state of affairs...and times to come....

http://herrin-horizon.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-to-joyfully-survive-economic-down.html

To Live by the Sword…?

“Gun control” can be a very divisive topic. Just mention it in a group of 15 or more, and you’re likely to find passionate people of various perspectives. If someone says they favor gun control, some folks jump to the conclusion that one wants to make every kind of firearm illegal…and if someone says they are against gun control, folks imagine that one is fine if you want to park an M-40 tank in your drive and sell AK-47’s out of your trunk on weekends. Yes, the issue is usually one of extremes.

Opinions grow out of how one interprets or applies the second amendment of the US Constitution as found in the Bill of Rights. One problem is that there were at least two versions floated at the time the bill was ratified…Congress ratifying one version and States a slightly different one:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. (Congress)

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. (States)

The difference is in the way the sentence is punctuated and how things are capitalized—small but perhaps significant differences. So, part of the problem grows out of how one interprets this amendment.

However, a deeper problem for those of us who profess the Christian faith lies in our inadvertent tendency to confuse Constitution with Scripture. They are not one and the same (obviously). While the Constitution does and should guide our nation, the Scriptures should guide our personal lives if we claim to be Christians.

So, what does Scripture say about this issue? Well, Jesus speaks to it clearly in Matthew 26:32 where He says to his disciple, “…Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (NRSV). If Peter had had a Glock or an AR-15, I think Jesus would say something similar….

Jesus and His 1^st Century followers lived in a violent age. Some historians estimate that the average life-span of a male in the Roman Empire at this time was around 26 years. They weren’t all dying of head-colds and athlete’s foot—this was a dangerous and deadly time to live. When Jesus related the parable of the Good Samaritan, the people didn’t respond, “Oh my!! That’s terrible!! Someone beaten and robbed on the Jericho road?!?” They KNEW that this was a common, occurrence…something that happened all the time. And, of course, Jesus missed his great opportunity here—He could have said, “So, since these things happen, I want all my followers to arm themselves…get knives, swords and all kinds of things to keep you safe.” Nope, He really missed the chance to arm His followers.

In fact, when we look at the story of the early Church, we find that they are constantly abused, arrested, beaten, killed…and they don’t fight back. In the Old Testament, we see wars a plenty, but we are New Testament people and followers of Jesus—not followers of Joshua or David. It’s not until Emperor Constantine marries the church to the state (a ‘shotgun wedding,’ no less) that we find Christians arming and literally fighting for the faith. Nowhere in the NT do we find Paul fighting back, pulling swords and practicing any kind of ‘stand your ground.’

Our US Constitution allows us as Americans to “bear arms” (I prefer to do so at the beach…by wearing a tank-top). Personally, I feel we may have been a little broad as a nation in our interpretation (Do I or my neighbors really need to be able to buy AR-15 assault rifles when there is not state of war in our land? Should anyone be able to purchase 6000 rounds of ammo on-line?) While I have ‘rights’ as a citizen of this land that I was born into by chance, as a conscientious, self-decided Christian I must decide--do I really want to “live by the sword”…and teach my children to do the same?

Gathering and Remembering

My wife and I head to the coast to celebrate her birthday. As always, it doesn’t take long for our conversation to turn to our children. As we drive, we talk of their many experiences in life as part of a parsonage family…as MK’s (missionary kids) in Venezuela and Mexico…and now living along the US/Mexican border. As is the way of children, they are growing up and leaving home….

Jeanne, my wonderful wife of 22 years, remarks, “I hope they don’t forget all their experiences….”

My brothers, Timothy and Jeph, and I are PK’s (pastor’s kids) and MK’s (having grown up in Guyana, South America and Grenada, West Indies). Whenever we get together—even though we now have our own lives, our careers and our families—we always, ALWAYS, remember our lives and talk about our experiences as PKs and MKs.

We remember the Christmas in Guyana when we left all our toys to the side to have crapo (frog) races in the ‘bottom house.’ We remember Dad sneaking up behind Mom in the lobby of the Polynesian Resort Hotel at Disney World with the “old man” mask on…and kissing her…as she screamed! (Dad was like that…ha,ha.) We remember times around the house, in the jungle, in the Rupununi, on the beaches, at the waterfalls, with visiting mission teams, and on special holidays.

So, I doubt very seriously if our children will forget. They will remember. And, as we ride along, it suddenly becomes very clear to me: we gather to remember. Gathering IS remembering. Whether it’s three MKs, a family reunion…or a Sunday morning worship service, gathering is remembering.

We see the cross at the front of the sanctuary, and we remember what God did for us in Christ Jesus. We see the baptismal font or pool, and we remember that important step of faithfulness. The bread and the cup remind us that God loves us so, so much and has given us life through Jesus (“Do this in remembrance of me…”). A song carries us back to a VBS, a SS class, a revival or a youth-meeting campfire…or just to a difficult time of life that God brought us through. If we have lived well within the community, if we’ve invested our lives in the lives of others, just seeing the faces of others reminds us….

I only have to see Samuel’s face, I am transported back to mission teams and meals shared. Just a glance over at Andres and I’m back at that silly but passionate debate we had three years ago. We laugh about it now. I hear a baby cry, look over, and there is Carolina with little Felipe, and I’m back to the struggles that she and Jose suffered early on in their marriage…and the joy of their coming through it all.

With great wisdom, the author of the book of Hebrews calls and cautions us, “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to [gather] together…” (Heb.10:24,25 NRSV). To gather is to remember…and those memories are the glue that holds us together. In fact, no one person holds all the memories. At home and at church, one person starts to tell the story, and everyone jumps in with a detail, something overlooked or forgotten by another. The whole family, the whole community, carries the memories…and the memories carry the community. The only way we forget who we are, how we got here, Whose we are, what we have, and what we have to look forward to is if we don’t gather. If we gather, we remember….

Lost and Found

“We are more than what we do,” and “We are not our jobs.” I have taught, preached and passed on these words of wisdom to those who are “trying to find themselves.” Too often, we Americans do wrap ourselves up in what we do, in our vocations. When we do that, we have a crisis of identity if we are forced to change jobs, if we’re laid off or fired…or if we retire. Suddenly, we are no long who we were. In fact, if one or all of those things befalls us, we feel very lost. I know that because I’ve been there….


In the Bible, Luke 15 is a chapter all about ‘lostness’—a lost sheep, a lost coin…and a lost son. For many years, I would read or hear these parables and think, “Yeah, I guess that happens to some folks.” Then, I figured that the lost sheep was forevermore found; the lost coin now securely hidden away, never to be lost again; and, surely, that prodigal son would stay right there at home for the rest of his days. But, I think differently now….

Last year (2011), we moved from Monterrey, Mexico, to the US after having been out of the country for six years. My identity changed. I went from being “missionary” to “college teacher.” That was not too drastic a change because I had been an “educational missionary,” teaching and training church leaders in Venezuela and Mexico. In fact, in Mexico, my main task was teaching at the seminary and teachers’ college. So, the shift was not huge…but it did leave me floundering as I struggled to understand my new identity as “former missionary.”

Then, last month, after having made perfect peace with my identity as a teacher, it happened all over again. I was encouraged to apply for a staff position on the administrative side of things at our college…so I did. And, I was hired! (Now, the whys and wherefores don’t bear pursuing here, so you can e-mail me about it if you’re curious!) I went from being an English teacher to being—are you ready?—to being an “analyst” in the office of institutional effectiveness and assessment. Talk about a change of pace!

Suddenly, I was ‘lost’ again, trying to figure out who I was—Teacher? Analyst? I had wrapped up my identity in my work—doing the very thing I had cautioned so many against! When my work changed very suddenly, I didn’t know who I was. I was lost.

It was in the midst of all these changes that I came to realize that Jesus was not giving us cautionary tales by way of these parables in Luke. These parables simply tell us about how life is…IS. We sheep are often finding ourselves lost. We often misplace our values. We find ourselves far from ‘home’ time and time again. And, the good Shepherd comes to us; like the woman, we go to scouring our lives to find what we’ve lost; like the prodigal, we wander far away while the Father waits for us to come to our senses and come home…where He welcomes us again and again. These parables are not one-time events; these parables are all about how we are, how life IS.

So, if we don’t find our identity in our work, where do we find it? Finding who we are is important, because if we don’t, we’ll just get ‘lost’ all over again when we face those big certain-to-come changes of life.

I believe we begin to find ourselves when we peel back all the roles we play, take off all the hats we wear. There, underneath it all, we find the unchanging aspects of who we really are. For those of us who are Christians, our identities are built on this foundation—we are followers of Jesus, children of God, conduits of God’s Spirit.

Jobs may come and go, families may grow and shrink, friends my leave or stay, money and things are fickle and frail…but who I am—as opposed to what I do—does not change with the prevailing winds of life. When we grasp this, we will truly know that amazing feeling of having our feet “set…upon a rock” (Psalm 40).

~Jon~