Conferences

Rest, and Upcoming Events

I was hoping that the week after Easter would provide opportunities to rest and catch up a little. There are so many blog ideas in the back of my mind that I need to write, and so many upcoming events. Yet I’ve ended up with four meetings after work this week, some events I couldn’t make because of double booking, and Saturday I’m heading off to another event, while missing a second. As an aside, the weekend before Holy Week, I missed several events because of double or triple booking as well as because of my kidney stone.

On Saturday, I should be at a poetry group in the morning. Right now, I should be working on a poem for that group. Unfortunately, I’ll miss it, as well as their next big event. Instead, I’ll be going to Podcamp Western Mass. This is one of the longest continuously running Podcamps, and I think I’ve been to everyone, but I can’t remember for sure.

Podcamps are ‘unconferences’ originally around podcasting. These days, they tend to focus on all aspects of social media. As an unconference, there is no clear set agenda. People bring their ideas, their topics, then on a large grid on a wall they select rooms and times to get together to talk about the topics they are interested in. It is a great way for people to become more acquainted with social media, and there are often topics like Twitter 101. There are also topics that can get fairly esoteric. I try to go partly to learn new things and partly to give back to the community. I never know who will be there or what topics will catch my attention. Currently, I’m thinking about communities online as they related to learning, creativity, spirituality, and politics. I’d love to hear some of your thoughts about topics you’d be interested in at an unconference.

Then, in two weeks are two different conferences on my radar. One is the#WhatIMake conference. I’ve written a little bit about this earlier, and if I had more time I would dig out some quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s interview with Brene Brown which I mentioned yesterday, which are one of the best explanations about why #WhatIMake is such an important conference to go to.

Unfortunately there is another conference which is also very important to me taking place at the same time. Misisonal Voices is taking place at Virginia Theological Seminary.

A conversation about innovative ministries and missional communities in The Episcopal Church.

In my mind, this conference has a lot in common with Podcamp and WhatIMake, which very direct implications for the next few twists and turns on my spiritual journey. I am hoping it will be about creativity and innovation; about being a maker. I am hoping that I will arrive, not knowing what I will get out of it, and leaving surprised with new thoughts and ideas.

I’m thinking of listening to Podcasts on creativity on my drive down. I’ve been listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcasts during my commute this week. I’m considering staying at a hostel on my journey back, for several reasons.

But now, I’ve already spent more time than I really have writing this blog post and I need to get on with the rest of the day.

Imago Dei: #WhatIMake

On April 16th, the #WhatIMake conference is scheduled to take place in Somerville, MA. My daughter is organizing it and I would love to be there. However, I’ll be at the 2016 Missional Voices Conference in Alexandria, VA. In my mind, these conferences are very closely related.

My daughter speaks about her work as an artist in terms of “reconnecting art to daily life”. For too many people, art is something you go to museums to see. It is something you need to be incredibly gifted to produce or incredibly rich to own. She is on a mission to challenge this thinking.

I’m looking for ways to reconnect the divine to our daily lives. It seems like for too many people, experiencing the divine is something you go to a church edifice for. It is something that other, spiritual people do, but isn’t part of your own daily life.

Perhaps this is all related. We mass produce objects and experiences and lose touch with what it means to create. From Hegel and Marx among others, we find the idea of estrangement or social alienation. We become alienated from our creativity.

In Judeo-Christian thought, we are created in the image of our creator, Imago Dei. These days, it is important to think of the Imago Dei in terms of people that are different from us. Instead of building a wall to keep them out, we need to find ways to connect with those who are different from us. Yet it is also important to keep in mind that what we are created in the image of is a creator. Reconnecting art to daily life and reconnecting the divine with daily life are perhaps two different aspects of the same thing.

#LoveBadeMeWelcome – Random Notes

Slowly, I digest the thoughts and experiences of the “Love Bade Me Welcome” conference at Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Much of what happened the first two days, I allowed to wash over me, to fill me, and not get stuck in notes. Those thoughts and experiences will need to resurface in other ways, perhaps in poems or worship.

Yet I did take some notes on the second day, and more on the third day. Often, they were just of phrases that caught my attention, so I’ll share them here, mostly just as is.

“Agony of a civilization which seems to have lost its coherence.”

“Come to a conference on poetry and theology not to escape the world but to explore it more completely”

“The landscapes of the heart gave us great art as well as The Third Reich”

“The divinity’s in the details.”

“To teach is to learn twice”

“Embrace ambiguity, not vagueness”

“Addicted to certainty”

Another part of my notes are of people to read and resources to explore.

Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the day – Added this to Doggcatcher on my smartphone

A Year of Being Here “daily mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now”

Psalm 88

Mary Karr (particularly her Descending Poetry)

Anthony Wilson – Livesaving Poems.

Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac - Also subscribed via DoggCatcher.

Commonweal Magazine apparently often has poetry.

For theological sources, Frederick Buechner, Walter Brueggemann (particularly "Finally Comes the Poet") Garrett Green (particularly “Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination”) and Evelyn Underhill

Amos Wilder (Thornton Wilder’s brother)

#LoveBadeMeWelcome Day 2 - An Emotional Cartographer

During his plenary talk at “Love Bade Me Welcome” : Bringing Poetry into the Life of Your Church, Tom Troeger spoke about the “landscape of the heart” as a cultural context you understand God from. To illustrate this, he spoke about two churches he went to when he was young. One sang hymns like “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling” with very free interpretation of the music almost ad libbed from the piano, and the other sang hymns like “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” played precisely from the pipe organ. They both reflect different landscapes of the heart that we go back to when we think about God, worship and music. He suggested that the wholeness of God is not known if you stay within one landscape of the heart.

I thought about my own nomadic religious journey, starting off Congregationalist, drifting through Baptist, various evangelical and charismatic churches before settling down to currently being an Episcopalian. The idea of knowing many landscapes of the heart, or perhaps mapping the relationship between these landscapes to see one larger broader landscape is especially appealing to me. As our society becomes more multicultural, how do we map in the landscape of Jewish or Muslim hearts? What about adding in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism?

Pushing this idea of emotional cartography further, I had to wonder about those not brought up in the church, the unaffiliated skeptics. What does the landscape of their hearts look like? How do we map it? How do we find the connection between these landscapes and the landscapes of those brought up in the church?

As science progresses, how does this change the landscape of our hearts? Is science moving beyond the abilities of our imaginations to use it for good? How must the landscape of the heart change as science changes? How do we keep the idea of being good stewards of God’s creation in a world overheated by climate change?

A secular part of the landscape of my heart includes the great song by the Canadian folk singer, Stan Rogers, “Northwest Passage”.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;

What are the landmarks for a northwest passage of the heart, including various Christian landmarks, landmarks from other belief structures, landmarks from the skeptics, landmarks for scientists, to bring balance back to reason and imagination?

#LoveBadeMeWelcome – Compline Reflections, Day 1

With these first few words, I’ve already probably broken several times one of the most important messages of Christian Wimaan in his opening plenary talk the conference, “Love Bade Me Welcome” : Bringing Poetry into the Life of Your Church at Yale Divinity School.

Especially in light of the new Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life report, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, Wiman recommended that when we write, we should think of the skeptic in the audience. What are we saying that makes it harder for the increasing number of religiously unaffiliated Americans to access what we are saying, to cross, as it were, the sacred threshold?

I imagine that talking about poetry, a conference at a divinity school, talking about churches, and using words like “bade” is enough to drive off many of my readers, but if you’ve made it this far, thank you, please stick around. I will do what I can to talk about divine mystery in metaphors to make it more accessible.

Instead of focusing on Wiman’s talk, I will focus on compline. Compline is the final church service, a completion of the working day. As my wife and daughter prepared to watch the final two hour episode the current season of SHIELD, I joined with several dozen other voices singing the great hymn, The Day Thou Gavest,

I would describe my singing as that of a weak bass. I like singing the bass part of songs when it is easy to pick out. Unfortunately, like church attendance, harmonic singing seems generally to be in decline. Not so around Yale Institute of Sacred Music. There were several basses around me carrying the part firmly enough so that I could feel comfortable singing along in harmony.

It is interesting to read that the hymn was written for missionary meetings since it is such a wonderful close of day hymn. This idea of the day being given by God seems so foreign to how I believe most of my skeptical unaffiliated friends think of their days. Instead, it seems many of them live lives of quiet desperation, to borrow Thoreau’s words, in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, to follow on with words from David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is water” commencement speech.

Before compline, several of us stood outside in the warm May evening, as a strong but gentle wind caressed us and the sun provided spectacular end of day light. Yes, the day, the evening, the compline service, was a gift from God, and it is hard to remember these blessings in our desperate day to day battles. It is hard to remember these blessings as we read the news of man’s continued exploitation and oppression of their fellow men. It is hard to remember these blessings as the pinnacle of beauty or wit is too often thought of in terms of Facebook memes, or at best the season finale of a television show.

At compline, we listened to scripture, to the words of more great poets like Langston Hughes and Denise Levertov. We sang in harmony. We worshiped the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

How do we speak to the skeptical unaffiliated people of our nation? Perhaps, first we reconnect with the beauty of holiness, and then let the Lord speak through us.

When I ran for State Representative, I remember being struck by the importance of the verse from the psalms, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” It struck me that most politicians will say what they think is expedient and not what is rooted in their core beliefs to get elected. I wonder how often people in the church, trying to reach the skeptical unaffiliated do the same thing.

The title, “Love Bade Me Welcome” comes from George Herbert’s poem “Love”.

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

I entered this conference like the guest in Herbert’s poem, guilty of dust and sin, but Love did bade me welcome and made itself manifest at compline on the first day of the conference.

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