Space Enough, and Time

Transformation and Change

Posted on January 20, 2021 by awtraughber

I mentioned a few days ago that I had gotten Andrew Root’s new book in the mail. I’m about 50 pages in now, and it’s presenting a good challenge. The folks at Outreach Magazine recently posted an excerpt from the book about the church and change. It’s a nice clip. Here’s a quality snippet to consider:

Change is almost always considered to be some kind of growth, and in late modernity that which grows must continually grow. Modernity is about change because it is about growth. It takes a lot of work, and a whole different imagination, to disconnect change from growth. Untying the two leads to something completely different: transformation in the Spirit. Being the church is about transformation, not change. Though on first blush these seem synonymous, transformation and change are quite different.

Transformation, in the Christian tradition, comes from outside the self, relating to the self with an energy beyond the self. Because transformation comes from an energy outside the self, it invites the self into the new as a gift, as grace. It demands no increase for continuation, no energy investment to receive it. Transformation is the invitation into grace; it comes with an arriving word, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). Transformation is not the necessity to speed up but the need to open up and receive. Change, on the other hand, comes from within the self. Change makes the self into something new, using the power and the effort of the self: it is produced by the energy of the self.

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Winter Winds

Posted on January 18, 2021 by awtraughber

Today was a wintry day in Honolulu. The winds whipped down the valley bringing sheets of rain. We might have broken 70 degrees, but I’d be hard-pressed to say when. I did make it down to breakfast before the rain set in. To the dentist, too. But the afternoon was a real mess. It might actually be blanket weather tonight. The rest of the week should be a little warmer, but it’s really wait and see.

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It’s been a four-day break from the classroom. Friday was a professional development day. Today was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I’ve mostly stayed away from email for the weekend, will probably check it once before going to bed. The next couple of weeks might be relatively normal. I’ve got to get ahead on chapel, I think. Plus, because of concurrent learning, I need to have one whole unit planned and printed out as much as possible about a week before the current one ends, which can be intense. It’s crazy to think that we’re already/only two weeks into the semester. Things just keep flying at you . . . I mean, flying by.

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Yesterday was one of those rare Sunday’s where I received a package from Amazon. Pretty excited about both of them. (Many thanks to Hearts and Minds Bookstore in PA for the order and quick shipping.) Top of the list: Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age. It’s the third of a trilogy. I didn’t see this one coming, for some reason, at least not the congregational focus. I’m about forty pages in and loving it. I’ve been surprised by Root’s thinking at almost every turn; it seems to be coming but a truly different but necessary place when it comes to understanding culture and ministry. The whole series is a response to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I learned about from James K. A. Smith, so it’s charting its own course while weaving many different threads together. The other book is a general theology book that might help me think through some curricular changes for next year.

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Paul and Purpose

Posted on January 15, 2021 by awtraughber

Sometimes you’re just reading along using your Bible plan and you find yourself in a passage you think you know well and then you come across a line or two that stands out because it reflects something that you talked about recently. This time it was the idea of living a purposeful life. And this morning it was a section of Paul’s Ephesian letter that made the connection. What a great “purpose statement” from Ephesians 3 (ESV):

to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, ⁹and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, ¹⁰so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. ¹¹This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, ¹²in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.

It’s also cool that Paul is able to articulate this purpose in the context of God’s own greater, eternal purpose. A nice way to end the work week, I think.

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These Unpredictable Days

Posted on January 12, 2021 by awtraughber

While this week has not been as packed as last week, there has been an unpredictability that has been both challenging and tiring. It comes from all sides, really, and can be good as much as it can be bad. It’s things like four-day weeks and changes in schedules and things like Covid creeping into the corners or the center of daily life. It’s having to make big decisions in shorts spans of time. It’s seeking out wisdom for the moment when regular companions for the journey aren’t around. But I’m grateful.

This afternoon I had the pleasant surprise of finding a Starbucks that actually allows you to sit for a while. Such locations have mostly been closed entirely or open for take-out only thanks to Covid. But on older downtown store has gotten a new location and a good amount of space. I knew it was on the way, but I thought had construction had delayed it. I went down after work this afternoon just to check it out. And there it was, all shiny and new and open. It was nice being welcomed by a familiar barista and then getting to sit and read and write and reflect some. “Third spaces” are really important to me, have been a necessary way for me to make the most of my time that isn’t work and isn’t sitting at home. It’s nice having more of that option now (along with the gym).

This afternoon I finally got around to the Daily Office readings. The Old Testament reading was from Isaiah 40, a passage of significance for my workplace. For some reason this time I realized a bit more of the context (or at least it hit closer to home than usual). The chapter begins with that great “Comfort, comfort my people” line. There is much Messianic hope there. And then it’s back and forth between God (with His character) and His people (with their issues of faithfulness and abandonment). And then this:

²⁷Why do you complain, Jacob?
Why do you say, Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord;
my cause is disregarded by my God”?

Why do you speak as if abandoned, He asks them? Do you think your way is hidden? And if not, why do they find no comfort in Him? And then the part I’ve known the longest thanks to an old song by Truth:

²⁸Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
    and his understanding no one can fathom.
²⁹He gives strength to the weary
    and increases the power of the weak.
³⁰Even youths grow tired and weary,
    and young men stumble and fall;
³¹but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint.

It’s easy to take the last part of the passage and make it all about people and our strength, soaring, running, and walking. But it’s rooted in the everlasting God, the Creator, who does not grow weary and who gives strength. We would be wise to remember that. And we would be wise to ask what he gives strength for, what we are to be about and to accomplish. I can’t imagine that it is simply work for work’s sake.

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For what it’s worth, I’m typing this on my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard. I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to get my laptop to install Big Sur. Maybe even computers that should be able to run such an operating system just can’t? Here’s hoping that it works this time around.

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Vistas Great and Small

Posted on January 11, 2021 by awtraughber

I have to confess, it was a little different watching a show with a relatively humane sense of humor and a low rating on violence. But there was something very good about the first episode of All Creatures Great and Small. Moments of tension still existed. Humor was still there. The stakes felt much smaller, but also more tangible. Plus it was well-shot. Here’s a scene from early in the episode, when the main character makes his way from Glasgow, Scotland to Yorkshire.

The show airs Sunday evenings on PBS. The first season runs about nine episodes (with the last being a Christmas special). The show has already been picked up for a second season.

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Go for the Landscape, Stay for the Landscape

Posted on January 9, 2021 by awtraughber

One of the side-effects of lockdown has been the transformation of my Twitter feed into a running journal of hiking through the Lake District and the highlands of Scotland. Which means I’m pretty excited about All Creatures Great and Small starting up on PBS this weekend. I imagine it will be light on the drama and heavy on the beautiful landscape shots of Yorkshire, which sounds great to me.

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We Are Not Stretch Armstrong

Posted on January 7, 2021 by awtraughber

stretch Today was the first day of the week that I didn’t go home nursing a headache. Each day has been packed. Things came to a bit of a respite today now that my chapel talk for next week has been recorded. I can at least go to school tomorrow morning not worrying about an assembly or a professional development meeting.

Years ago (in the last century, even) Jewel had a song that posed the question “Who’s Will Save Your Soul?” This afternoon I find myself asking another question: who’s going to shape your soul? Blame it on my recent re-read of The Screwtape Letters, but it’s clear to me that even as a Christian there are forces at work (both aware and not) that are constantly pushing and pulling us into this direction or that. Covidtide has been a powerful force in this as well, often amplifying already-difficult tasks and relationships. Do we end up feeling like metal folding chairs that a weightlifter threw against the wall? Or do we think that we’re Stretch Armstrong, able to be pulled in every direction and still able to retain some kind of basic (unhappy looking) shape?

It’s worth thinking about, and not because you want to lay blame on those who may or may not be doing the shaping. We have ourselves to blame for our misshapen selves, too. But it is another opportunity to check ourselves, our situations, as we move forward into what could be a very “unknown” 2021. Weeks like this one remind me that I’m not Stretch Armstrong, no matter how flexible I might seem. And I really don’t want to be the metal folding chair left to rust after being thrown against the wall. We need to be mindful of what is shaping us.

(image from Walmart.com)

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A Bit on Meaning

Posted on January 6, 2021 by awtraughber

I’ve been thinking a lot about meaning these last few weeks, these last few days in particular. It seems to me that meaning comes from many different sources: God, family, friendship, and work, to name a few. It also seems to me that meaning is tied to frequency. That’s something that the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes seems to be pointing to, how the ocean never has its fill of water.

Different sources of meaning might carry different weights depending on time and frequency. As a young teacher, much of my meaning came from the students that I had know for years, that had seen me at my worst and inspired me to my best. Now, though. these many years on, I seem to be looking to co-workers for more meaning at work. That can be tricky because I’m not whether or not most adults look to work for meaning. In fact, they may be actively told NOT to look for meaning there. I understand the warning. But if that’s the case, work or vocation or calling is almost evacuated of all meaning on a necessarily professional level. It’s not God, nor is it family, therefore it is just a means to an end. That sounds a little scary to me (and more than a little sad). That’s a sobering thought when you think that you might have two more decades of work ahead of you.

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On the Twelfth Night

Posted on January 5, 2021 by awtraughber

Today is the twelfth, and final, day of Christmas. The older I get, the more I like the idea of twelve days of Christmas following the season of Advent, and not just because it “prolongs” things. There’s almost no way of keeping Christmas from seeping into Advent. But once Christmas is “done,” it’s done. People are ready to take down trees and clean up sanctuaries and to get on with things (and no real decorations until next year!). Twelve days allows the truth of things to linger.

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I haven’t written much about the beginning of the liturgical calendar except for at the beginning of Advent. I think it’s because I “feel” my way through Advent (and maybe even Christmas) a little differently than others, even my more liturgical friends. Advent is about longing: putting ourselves in the place of those who longed for God’s covenant promise fulfilled so that we may better long for Jesus’ return at the consummation of history. And I’ve come to believe that even the most basic longing, on some level, is rooted in the lack of fulfillment of the greater longing. And for whatever it is good at, the church doesn’t have much to say about longing. And yet it’s there, at the very heart of the human condition and the stories of history. And if we can’t talk about longing well, how in the world should we be able to say something good about hope fulfilled, which is the great turn of Christmas?

But say it we do. And we mean what we say. But I can’t help but think that a depth of lasting joy might reveal our depth of genuine longing. And a big part of church is how we learn to communicate those things to one another in the framework of faith, which is another reason why it is good that we revisit not just the themes but the stories rooted in Advent and Christmas.

And, thankfully, the church calendar doesn’t simply leave us there. Next is the day of Epiphany, something that many of us (particularly Baptists) don’t really know what to do with. But it is the reminder that the story of Christmas continues on beyond the shepherds and the wise men, and that is a good thing. Because even there, as the stories and writings of the New Testament are true, longing rumbles just beneath the surface of things. And with that longing, hope.

Happy Twelfth Night, everyone!

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Christmastide’s End

Posted on January 4, 2021 by awtraughber

The twelve days of Christmas are coming to an end. And while I do have some reflections on the season, I thought I’d share one more song clip before the clock marks the end of the first day of the semester.

Last week, when I discovered the clip of U2’s Bono and the Edge singing “Walk On,” I also found the following clip of the pair busking “Oh Holy Night.” As with “Walk On,” the song really picks up when the harmonies kick in. And then, as with any U2 song, things move to another level when the crowd starts singing along. Even (maybe especially) off-key, it’s almost like being there.