Journey
This is about my spiritual journey and trying to find what God is calling me to next.
Personal Reflections CDSP Summer Intensive 2019 - Early Sunday Morning
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/16/2019 - 09:06It has been a very long winter and spring. I’ve done almost no personal writing since the beginning of the year. It’s been over three months since I posted here and even longer since I wrote any poetry or an ember letter. Today, however, I am on the west coast, but still on east coast time. So, I’ve gotten up early, started updating stuff online, spoke with my eldest daughter and now I am taking a moment to write.
Today is Father’s Day. I had a good chat with my eldest. However, the day is about to start, and we’ll see if I get a chance to connect with other family members. In the Episcopal Church, June 16 we celebrate the life of George Berkeley. I am celebrating by being in Berkeley, CA. Last night, I had dinner with some of my classmates. At times, I would sit and just soak it in. This is one of my happy places, surrounded by some of the people I love most in this life, talking about things that bring me great joy.
Soon, I will shower and prepare for the day; church with friends, finding some time to read, maybe even catching up on my sleep which has been thrown off by my travels. Life is good.
Faith Formation Networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/14/2018 - 16:41One of the most exciting ideas I’ve come across so far in my studies at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) is the Faith Formation Network. John Roberto, in chapter 3 of his book, Reimagining Faith Formation for the 21st Century presents this idea of Christian education in the context of digital media, connected learning, and personal learning networks. This is an idea I’ve had that I’ve been trying to find words for and an example of for a long time.
For me, this is something very different from parishes using social media to market their churches or even organizations using digital media to create and curate content. These are both components of a faith formation network, but merely components. The Faith Formation Learning Exchange gets us much close to finding faith formation networks, but if a faith formation network is based on a personal learning network, then it must be something individuals create for themselves.
There are various starting points for a faith formation network, and it seems as if many of the starting points right now seem to be focused on extending existing resources, like a church or seminary webpage or social media presence. It seems like we need some other starting points.
To illustrate this, let me relate an old marketing adage. People don’t by shovels, they buy holes. People buy things because they want or need it. They don’t need a shovel. They need to get a hole dug. The shovel that will be most helpful getting that hole dug is the one they will buy. We need to be thinking about experiences of the divine the same sort of way. People want to experience God. They want to experience forgiveness, acceptance, love, community, and many other things that we associate with God. For many people I know, church is probably the last place they would look for these sorts of things, with seminary coming in a close second.
Those of us who are drawn to God who wish to draw others to God need to think carefully about how people are invited into their faith formation network. To illustrate this, let me explore a little bit of my faith formation network.
I will start with one of the churches I currently attend, Grace and St. Peters in Hamden, CT. While not everyone will start there, and where you start probably doesn’t especially matter, especially if you are thinking of a faith formation network in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, it is where many people start. There are a few important things to point out about the church I attend on most Sunday mornings. We started attending that church because my wife was friends with someone from that church in an online community and that friend invited us to church. It was an example of someone from one online network inviting another person to another network, which in this case was not online.
Another thing to notice is that I mention Grace and St Peters as one of the churches I currently attend. On Thursdays at lunch time, I attend a Eucharist service at The Church of the Holy Trinity in Middletown, CT. On Saturday evenings, I attend vespers at Three Saints Orthodox Church in Ansonia, CT. I also attend a dinner bible study and worship on Thursday evenings with people from Andover Newton seminary at Yale Divinity School and participate in their closed Facebook group. In a faith formation network, people find many similar and competing resources across the religious spectrum.
As part of being a member of the CDSP community I help maintain and participate in the CDSP Virtual Daily Office. This is a digital resource which ties back to digital communities. I’m in a small closed Facebook group with a cohort of students who first arrived on campus in the summer of 2018. We talk about the daily office there and the cycle of prayers that is currently being used in the daily office comes from that group.
I am also part of a small group that I started on Facebook for people seeking discernment. Given the difficulties of my own journey, I started the group and it has grown. One person from that group has started studies at CDSP. All of this illustrates the interconnectedness of groups and resources in a personal learning network.
There are numerous other resources that are part of my faith formation network. A high school classmate whose blog I subscribe to. A friend from my young adult days in New York City has a blog, Water Daily that I subscribe to. I subscribe to some of the better known resources online, like Brother, Give Us A Word from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist and Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. There are a lot of resources like this that I subscribe to and I should probably find time to curate this list and make it more available.
There are also the various live streams on Facebook that are part of my faith formation network. Right now, one that I especially appreciate is Pop-up Prayer with Canon Katie. She identifies herself as ‘your Facebook priest’ and ends each pop-up prayer reminding people that they are “so loved by God”. It is a wonderful ministry and exemplifies much of what it means to be a node in a faith formation network. Another group of Facebook resources that I subscribe to is live church streams, perhaps best exemplified for me right now with Dallas West Church of Christ. This is the church where Botham Shem Jean attended and I started watching their streams as they remembered Botham’s life and called all of us to action.
Dallas West Church of Christ illustrates my point about shovels. I started watching their stream, not because I was looking for a church. I started watching their stream because I was praying for justice and their prayers and my prayers came together.
Next week, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry will be preaching at Western Mass Revival. I have been talking with the organizers about what happens after the revival. I’m particularly interested in this in terms of faith formation networks. We’ve set up a Facebook page for people who will be attending the revival, either in person, or watching the live stream. If you are attending the revival and want to join with us in a faith formation network, check out WMA Way of Love.
I hope to build upon some of this for a project for Postmodern Christianity and learn more about the role faith formation networks will play in my journey and the journey of those around me.
Hineni and Seeking to Please God
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/28/2018 - 08:36At the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, I heard various singer-songwriters talk about being part of songwriting circles. They introduced various songs as ones that had started as a response to a songwriting prompt. I thought about how much I would enjoy being in a sermon writers circle following the same sort of idea. It would be easier because most of the sermon writers I know have a weekly prompt called the Revised Common Lectionary.
When I returned from the folk festival, I contacted a few close friends who I thought would be interested and we set up a little group on Facebook. It was partly for this group that I wrote my recent blog post, Humbly Confessing our Participation in Abusive Systems of Power.
As the summer winds down and my wife and I begin discovering what it is like to be empty nesters, we went to the beach Saturday afternoon followed by an early dinner at a local clam shack. While I was waiting for the meal to be ready, I checked Facebook and found a discussion about my blog post.
One of my friends asked a question I was struggling with in my blog post and a question that we all need to be asking ourselves, how do we as members of cultures that allow things like this to happen respond?
I’m not sure there is an easy answer. Part of the answer in the Episcopal Church was to have a Liturgy of Listening at General Convention. I encourage everyone to check out that liturgy.
In the online discussion, my friend mentioned the Hineni prayer. I don’t know that prayer and went out to find more about it. The first version I found was from Velveteen Rabbi. (What a wonderful name for a blog!). The blog posts links to a more traditional version of the Hineni prayer. Another version I found was at A New Translation of the Rosh Hashanah Hineni. Others link to Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.
Since I took Biblical Hebrew this summer in seminary, I thought I’d try to find it in Hebrew which led me to A Chazan Sings: Hineni. This, in turn, led me to Hineni He'ani Mima'as, which then led me to Piyyut and finally to trying to find various
Readings and Prayers for Jewish Worship in the Biblical Studies software I use. (If any of you know any good sources for such readings and prayers online, please let me know.) I also read briefly about Jewish Prayers in Jewish Prayers and Liturgy 101
All of this also reminds me of the Merton Prayer
I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing
One of my hopes for the sermon writers circle is to find people that I could engage in discussions with about my sermons and other people’s sermons. Hopefully, I can use my blog and social media to make some of these discussions more broad based.
Fallow Lands
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/21/2018 - 11:08After I handed in my penultimate assignment for the summer intensive semester of seminary, a translation from the Hebrew of the first chapter of Ruth, I posted on Facebook about it. A friend and classmate who took the course on Sabbath responded, “Your time of fallow/exhale will be well-deserved”.
It got my thinking of fallow ground. Things still grow in fallow ground, things the ground needs to replenish itself as opposed to things needed for others. Sometimes it might be a volunteer plant grown from the seeds of an earlier plant or that a little bird dropped from somewhere far away.
What will grow in my fallow mind before the next semester starts? I think of my classmates who had it much rougher than I; one who had to take a leave of absence due to a health issue, another who lost a loved one. I wish I could go hang out with them for a little bit.
Others have started posting what they will be doing to celebrate and unwind; trips to Tanglewood and Maine. I wish I could grab my grieving classmate, drive up to Tanglewood to meet another and then the three of us drive up to Maine to gather with a couple others.
I think about my time at the beach. Most years, my family and I head out to Cape Cod for a week. I think of the long walk out to Race Point beach. We would take off our sandals and walk down to the water and I think of Moses and the burning bush.
“Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”
I often quote a piece of Jewish wisdom I heard a couple years ago. The miracle was not that the bush was not consumed. The miracle was that Moses noticed.
As we walk down to the beach at Race Point, we look off across the water. Will we see seals today? Whales? A flower floating on the waves? The miracle is every time we take off our sandals to walk on holy ground, noticing the beauty around us.
My classmates are beautiful. My family is beautiful. My coworkers are beautiful. I am blessed.
I take a moment to look at Exodus 3:5 in Hebrew. וַיֹּ֖אמֶר Qal imperfect third person masculine singular with the vav consecutive of the verb “said”. “And He said…”. My friends who know Hebrew grammar can correct me if I conjugated that wrong. It feels good to read the Hebrew even though for this first word, there aren’t any great insights.
There is a difference between studying something because you have an assignment due and studying something for the love of studying it, even when what you are studying for an assignment is something that you love studying. Now that my classes are over, I can return, more leisurely to topics of interest. I can start preparing for my fall classes leisurely, exploring those areas of most interest to me.
I’m planning on taking Theology 1 and Post Modern Christian Education. I’ve started downloading some of the books for these classes and looking at the prefaces, introductions, and additional resources.
I’ve also been thinking about what I do with my papers so far. Do I put them up online somewhere? Linked to in blog posts? A page of their own? Perhaps a page with papers from some of my classmates, if they’d be interested in sharing? A sort of open journal of my classmates? How much editing do I do of the papers I handed in before making them available this way? Do I share some of them on ResearchGate? I wonder how many of my classmates or professors are on ResearchGate. As I stopped to see what was going on, I found that one of the theologians I stumbled across last fall whom I really like, Musa Dube has followed me on ResearchGate. Maybe I need to up my game there. I find two of my classmates there and see how I can upload my working papers.
Meanwhile, at work we recently had Saichin Jain, CEO of CareMore Health. One of the topics that was discussed was the loneliness epidemic. He spoke about how CareMore was addressing this epidemic. It made me stop and wonder how churches might address this epidemic as well. We talked about it briefly during our dinner ministry last night.
There are lots of other things to think about, read about, and write about, but for right now, I am preparing to be offline for a little bit.
2018 Summer Intensive at CDSP: Day 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 08:44This morning, I woke up at the usual time of five. In the distance I heard a train whistle, reminding me of the train whistle I often here in the mornings back in Connecticut as well as the train whistle of long journeys.
Unfortunately, it was five Eastern Time. I tried to get back to sleep without success so I got up, did a little work, and then managed to go back to sleep for a little bit more. On the first day, we moved from the orientation to the academics and the daily schedule of worship.
I started off with a walk, playing a little Pokemon, shower, and then breakfast. Morning prayer was beautiful. The chapel was filled with strong faith filled voices. I then headed off to my first class, Hebrew.
Hebrew is a small class and everyone was feeling a bit overwhelmed with what we had been studying so far. The professor talked about different approaches to the class. Some people are talking it to check it off the list. They may not remember use much Hebrew ever again. Others may be taking it to strengthen their exegetical skills. I’m aiming for that, as well as trying to use Hebrew in my daily devotions.
We did have some good discussions about theological implications of how different texts are translated. We also managed to have some fun. All in all, it was a really good first day of Hebrew. I arrived expecting Hebrew to be the more intellectually challenging class. It currently feels like a large but manageable challenge.
Like Morning Prayer, the noontime Eucharist was also wonderful. The food and fellowship at lunch was very good. Not much more to say about that.
My afternoon class, Foundations for Ministry, is going to be much more challenging spiritually. I believe I am the only person in the class that is not a postulant in the Episcopal Church. I am also, perhaps, the person most inclined to challenge underlying assumptions, especially around binaries, hierarchies, boundaries, etc. We also talked a bit about intercultural issues and ideas about adapting to different cultural contexts.
All of this fits together for me in terms of living in liminal boundary spaces. There is something about welcoming and accepting fellow travelers into these spaces. I remember something the Dean of the Chapel said on Sunday about creating and holding a space for worshippers to experience the divine.
There is a tension between welcoming people and holding space for those welcomed to experience the divine. We talked about this around issues of Baptism and Eucharist. There is a lot more to explore around this.
Evening prayer was also wonderful and then I went and had dinner with some of my classmates. I have spoken about some of my struggles and others are sharing parts of their struggles as well. It is a wonderful group of people I look forward to travelling with.
