O Come, O Come, Immanuel

It's my turn to blog this week, and I'm sitting in an empty office trying to come up with a topic. Ordinarily I don't mind writing, but in the midst of this chaotic time of year (my foreign policy class is currently taking over my life, for example), it seems almost impossible to step back, take a deep breath, and look around for the signs of peace and holiness and goodness around us. I'm too busy frantically researching Clinton-era intervention in the Balkans, thank you very much.

But it strikes me as ironic that I'm behaving this way at the beginning of Advent. After all, Advent is the time of year where we pause to notice signs of hope--where we wait in eager expectation for the coming promise, our anticipation growing with each passing day on the Advent calendar and each week's newly-lighted candle in the Advent wreath. Unlike Lent, we don't fast during Advent. We carry on in our daily routines, busily finishing homework and papers, decorating for Christmas and baking cookies, watching the snow start to fall and the world gradually turn to winter. We carry on, busy and bustling, in eager anticipation of the coming gift.

Last year at this time I was in Romania. My Advent celebration was different there--the anticipation of Christmas was mixed with excitement about returning to the States and the relationships I had left there. It was a season of building anticipation mingled with deep sadness--a reluctance to leave behind new relationships, a sorrow over leaving the mountains, tastes, smells, and sounds that had grown so dear over four months. Bubbling anticipation and joy mixed with the weight of sorrow, bustling attention to the little details of daily life amidst preparation for a monumental shift in my world--this seems to always be the paradox of Advent.

I suppose I could make the obvious tie-in to our work at the Service-Learning Center here, and I might do that in a moment. But I think the first thing I need to remind myself of is Advent itself, this beautiful time of waiting and anticipation. Life doesn't stop as we wait for the coming of the Messiah. It continues on, buoyed by this hope, this welling-up of excitement, that the promise will be fulfilled! The Kingdom of God is coming, and all will be made well. Jesus will save and the world will be restored! Whoa.

Advent gives me goosebumps. It gives me this thrilled assurance and peace that amidst the chaos, there is hope. And the promise extends to everything--to our work at the Service-Learning Center, to our prayers for peace in places of war, to our hopes of reconciliation in neighborhoods and families full of brokenness. The Messiah has come, and is coming again. He will make everything new! What a wonderful promise. May He come again soon.

So may you live this Advent fully--with this anticipation and assurance amidst the busyness that Immanuel is coming, and coming soon.

~Kelly

Second Chances

As a staff, we have been reading from Common Prayer: A book for Ordinary Radicals for our devotions at weekly meetings. I recently was flipping through the book when I came across part of the reading for November 17. The passage comes from Forgotten among the Lilies by Ronald Rolheiser, and it states, “If the Catholicism that I was raised in had a fault, and it did, it was precisely that it did not allow for mistakes. It demanded that you get it right the first time. There was supposed to be no need for a second chance. If you made a mistake, you lived with it and, like the rich young man, were doomed to be sad, at least for the rest of your life. A serious mistake was a permanent stigmatization, a mark that you wore like Cain. I have seen that mark on all kinds of people: divorcees, ex-priests, ex-religious, people who have had abortions, married people who have had affairs, people who have had children outside of marriage, parents who have made serious mistakes with their children, and countless others who have made serious mistakes. There is too little around to help them. We need a theology of brokenness. We need a theology which teaches us that even though we cannot unscramble an egg. God’s grace lets us live happily and with renewed innocence far beyond any egg we may have scrambled. We need a theology that teaches us that God does not just give us one chance, but that every time we close a door, he opens another one for us.”

I think that the covenant that our staff wrote this past September fits really well with this.

S-LC Staff Covenant 2011

“I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."

- Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

Love

- What does it mean to live out love, in faith, through service?

- What made it so easy for Jesus to love the wicked, outcasts, poor, and sinners? How do we adopt this feature for ourselves?

- Are we willing to love beyond reason? What does this mean?

- How do we allow ourselves to experience 2-way love in our service-learning?

- What does it mean to love our enemy? Our community? Our work? God?

- How can we precede tempered impatience with love?

Justice

- How does mercy envelop justice? How does mercy shape justice in light of the coming kingdom?

- What risks must we take to pursue justice? What will we give up?

- How do we perpetuate injustice, willingly/knowingly or not?

- What would a just world look like?

- What is our responsibility as people of privilege in pursuing justice?

Hope

- What will allow us to persevere?

- How do we persevere toward peace?

- What does it mean to have Christian hope? Why is our trust in God and not in other things?

- For what are we hoping, as we understand that the kingdom is already but not yet?

- Is it necessary to hope beyond what is realistic?

- How do we have hope for shalom in such a broken world? Especially when we will never get it right?

Humility

- Do I see Christ in them? Do they see Christ in me?

- Acknowledging our privilege, how can we live with integrity?

- Are we using people for our own purposes?

- How do we do our work humbly, remembering from where our power comes?

Presence

- Do we choose our place or does our place choose us?

- What does it mean to be fully present in a place? What does it look like?

- Is there an important difference between living intentionally and just being present in our place?

- How can we become more incarnate in the work that we do?

As an outpouring of our faith, and with the desire to better understand love, justice, hope, humility, and presence, we as the Service-Learning Center staff of 2011-2012 commit to live these questions now and continually pursue faithful responses in our work and lives.

We are stating that we don’t have it all figured out. We have lots of questions about life, and about living a life of true discipleship. We acknowledge how hard it is to get it right. So then why does it seem so hard for us to see that in other people, especially when what they do affects our lives? I have been struggling with this particular question for years. How do we recognize that the faults of others, whether it be family, friends, churches, or organizations, may mean that they don’t have it all together either, and how do we work past that? I don’t suggest letting it go by and just saying things like that happen and moving on. I don’t think that is what the passage, stated in the first paragraph, means to say either when it talks about giving second chances. Problems and faults should be addressed, but then second chances should be given. Faults should not be held against others, as we wouldn’t want that for ourselves. So what then does that look like? Is it different in different situations and for different people? When is the right time to address the fault and give a second chance? Is it different if you were personally affected by it?

I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t have it all figured out when it comes to this topic, but I am living and learning. I am learning to live in the questions and learning to trust God that someday I may catch of glimpse of His kingdom through true forgiveness and second chances.

Allie

Blessed to Be a Blessing

‘Blessed to be a blessing’ is a quote that I love. I heard it at church over the summer and continue to find it more and more true in my life. And even though StreetFest 2011 wrap-up is officially complete as of October, 1, I will not soon forget this summer and how amazingly blessed I am to have had the opportunity to be a blessing to others in just a small way. For a short time following StreetFest, it was hard to see the positive outcomes. The evaluations that
flooded in were encouraging at times, but also discouraging at others- seeing what went bad, what didn’t run smoothly, what could have gone better, and so on.


BUT, Just a few days ago, a transfer student stopped in the office and asked me how he could get involved with StreetFest next year!! A transfer student! Who liked StreetFest! Who now wants to get involved! Ahh!!! This just about made my day. Ok not even just about, it DID make my day. Some days, the awesomeness of what was StreetFest 2011 still catches me off guard.

Anyways… this run-in was just one more reminder for me of how the work we do isn’t really about us and what we get from it, but rather it’s about inspiring other people to get involved – and that THAT is the best outcome. In the big picture things won't always go perfectly, and there will always be people who don’t enjoy StreetFest, but what’s more important and trumps all of that is that some people actually DO like it, or maybe even love it! Those stories are the ones that make all the work worth it, because in the long run it’s about helping people find the ‘on-ramp’ to the highway of living as a lifelong service-learner. That's what we do here at the Service-Learning Center and I will forever be glad to do so.

Now and always I am be blessed to be a blessing.

What about you?

Emily

Our covenant this year is composed of a series of questions focusing on love, justice, hope, humility, and presence. Two questions in particular have been swimming around in my mind since our written covenant was completed:

How does mercy envelop justice? How does mercy shape justice in light of the coming kingdom?

Let me start with a story:
In Matthew 20, Jesus tells the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. The owner goes out to the marketplace early in the morning to hire workers. He agrees to pay them a certain amount for their work. He hires more workers in the middle of the day for the same wage, and he hires more workers in the evening, again for the same wage. At the end of the day, as all the workers are receiving their wages, the workers hired in the morning begin to complain that the workers hired later in the day are receiving the same wage as they even though they worked for longer. The owner of the vineyard says this: "I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?"

I throw around the term justice a lot, partly because I think the theoretical idea of justice is such a beautiful ideal. However, I also recognize the need to think about what true justice means for Christians, for non-Christians, for the world.

My priest talked about justice a couple Sundays ago, and I found his thoughts insightful and surprisingly poignant. In human terms justice, or fairness, he said, comes in three types: the justice of common rules we follow, the justice of inclusion, and the justice of distribution. Common rules and distribution are familiar to us. We have a judicial system that, in its own way, attempts to ensure that wrongs are righted or at least that some form of payment is made for a breach of law. We hear all the time about distribution of wealth and the failures of distributive utopias.

As kids we probably all threw at least one fit saying, "It's not fair! She won't let me play!" As adults, injustice concerning inclusion holds more serious social consequences, so again we have laws with varying degrees of efficiency prohibiting discrimination. I think it's worth thinking about the justice of inclusion as it relates to Christians, though. The Christianity I was familiar with while growing up played by the rules of inclusion/exclusion. If I was "saved" I would be permitted to enter the pearly gates. However, if I refused God's free gift of grace, I would be separated from God forever in a very, very bad place. That was it. Yes or no. One choice. Boom. I have found this concept increasingly hard to swallow as I've met people of different faiths earnestly trying to live well in the world while seeking truth.

At this point some of you are probably thinking of Love Wins, but I hope you'll hear me out. How does mercy envelop justice? Is God not a loving and merciful, as well as just, God? Is this inclusion/exclusion rule what we mean when we say justice will roll down like waters? Call me an universalist, but I have a hunch that true justice means more than that wronged "good" people receive the satisfaction of knowing that those who trespassed against them were punished thoroughly or even that we "were elected" or said a certain prayer. True justice, perhaps, can be tempered with mercy.

How does mercy shape justice in light of the coming kingdom? Well, back to what my priest said. According to him, Jesus' parable of the vineyard workers may shed some light on the topic at hand. The owner of the vineyard chose to give the workers the same pay regardless of the time they spent working, and then he said, "Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?" God sees much that we cannot. Perhaps, our place is not in telling God what he can do with his own money, if you will; but rather to live well in love with the knowledge and wisdom we have been given.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know nearly enough to speak conclusively on this topic, but I hope I can speak from my own experiences and internal tousles with these questions of justice and faith. My intent was not to step on toes but to communicate the heart of openness to questioning with which we composed our covenant.

Peace,

Anna

Lesson in Humility

First of all, the start of the year has been wonderful. The new staff had 2 great weeks of training where we bonded, became experts on service-learning, and pulled off StreetFest smoothly as a team after Emily Wolffis spent the summer preparing. It was a blast.
We wrote a new covenant. Some of you may remember last year's two word phrases. This year is quite a bit different, as is typical with a tide of new people. We have picked 5 main words that we will focus on this year. They are love, justice, hope, humility, and patience. Along with each word, we have written several questions that we will seek to "answer." These questions will never be fully answered, but maybe someone else can expound on the covenant itself in another post.
I realize that the title "a lesson in humility" is difficult to gulp down in and of itself. It's not really an attractive heading and some people may have even stopped reading right then and there. Who really wants to learn how to be humble? That is certainly not our natural mode in life. We prefer pride and self absorption, don't we? It is a harsh reality. I would rather think about my day and the set of problems placed on my plate, rather than spend time trying to understand someone else's worries. And helping them? Boy, that's a stretch. I am a college student, a nursing student, in fact. I will help people the rest of my life, why must I set aside time now to invest in understanding and helping others? Right now my sole purpose in life is to grow and learn as much as I can.
Here's the thing, I grow through my experiences and interactions with other people and the attitude I take while doing that changes how much I will truly learn. If you really set back and think about how much you are learning from other people, versus how much you are putting into other people, it's often disproportionate. Disproportionate because they teach you so much more than you could ever hope to give back. This is true for many relationships in life. Professor to student is certainly like that. I would hope that some of your friendships are like that. What about parent to son or daughter?* Realizing this truth is helpful in intentionally taking on a humble mode of existence. It is helpful in being open to other worldviews (yeah, I was going to try and avoid Calvin language, but I can't help it.) It is helpful in finding a sense of peace about your own imperfections. It is helpful in so many ways, I'm sure you can think of more.
This is the Service-Learning Center mantra. Reciprocity. Learning to serve and serving to learn. It's become so engrained in the way I think, I am hoping I've said enough here to fully explain. If anything, I hope that this is just a starting point for peer conversations. Also, feel free to add feedback or correct me in the comments. :)
Thank you for reading.

*There are plenty of cases where this is not true, after all, we are broken people. I have not meant to be hurtful and I apologize if this is off mark for anyone. Perhaps your relationship with parents is not ideal. I hope that you have then found a mentoring relationship that serves a similar purpose.

-Melanie Roorda, ABSL Coordinator

Beautiful Brokenness

One of the themes of our staff covenant this past year was “beautiful brokenness,” the idea that God is present in even our deepest flaws and greatest weaknesses. This spring, I studied a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins in my Victorian Lit class that sums up “beautiful brokenness” better than anything I can think of. It’s dense, but I’ll unpack it a bit, just as my professor did in class.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The poem begins with two images for how God’s greatness is present in brokenness: God’s grandeur is like an electric charge in shaken metal foil, and it’s also like oil, which is produced by the action of crushing. Something to ponder: what does it mean that God shines through things that are “shaken” and “crushed”?

“Why do men then now not reck his rod?” means “why do men not regard or obey God?” The following lines give a description of our broken world and our separation from society. Linger a bit over these words. Hear how their sounds echo their meaning, try to see the images they describe, feel how their rhythm gives the sense of trudging through a devastated landscape.

“And for all this, nature is never spent.” God’s presence and hope wells up from the things that are broken. The sun sets in the west, but it rises with the morning in the east. God is present in our brokenness.

One reason I love this poem is that it offers hope, but this hope doesn’t come cheap. Hopkins was intimately acquainted with both personal and communal brokenness. When he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, he became estranged from his family. For years, he suffered from depression and doubt. It could not have been easy to see God in his brokenness.

The temptation is strong to avoid pain, to try not to see how broken our world is. As I leave this community and move into the unknown, I am facing the fact that my life will become less comfortable, that I will face challenges that will force me to confront the brokenness in society and in myself. What this poem communicates to me is that we can acknowledge brokenness for what it is and still possess a rebellious hope that God is restoring what is fallen. We will all feel “shaken” and “crushed” in life, but it is my prayer that we will be able to see, or at least trust, that God’s beauty is made manifest in our brokenness.

--Maria

Graduation and Saying Goodbye

For this blog entry I’m going to write about graduation and saying goodbye. Many of you are before or after that threshold so your perspectives may be keener and wiser than my own. The future works on my brain like a highway sign works on my eyes. As it draws closer my eyes fuzz over and zone out. When the sign is directly next to my car window there is not a good chance I’ll see that the speed limit is 70 (while I’ve likely been pushing 90). Now I can imagine what it would be like for a road sign to come closer and closer and then actually hit me in eye. I don’t think I would be able to focus on the sign or any other aspect of my worldly surroundings. Likely I would have closed my eyes and tensed up my muscles the moments before initial contact. Right now graduation is coming closer and closer and it’s about to hit me square in the eyes. Both of them. And it’s going to hurt a little bit. So naturally I have my eyes closed and my muscles tensed up. In other words, bear with my impaired sense of vision on my own future happenings.

I’ve been wondering, while considering how to go about saying goodbye to my dearest friends and colleagues, notably the ones in the S-LC, whether goodbye is actually a word. By this I mean, what does the abstraction actually imply? To me it sounds like “have a good bye”. A bye must mean something significant, but on Wikipedia it’s defined as a special kind of point one can score in the game of Cricket. That doesn’t make sense (maybe it does, but to say “have a good cricket point” is a bit too flippant a phrase for what a serious graduation ceremony requires). Whenever I say goodbye to someone I think, oh that was a formality—something to fill in the silence. So maybe it’s just a value-empty human grunt meant for little more than its utility in breaking silences. But in the context of a ceremonious and poignant departing (like leaving friends after graduation), something needs to be said that has meaning, not just a grunt. And for people to have used the word “goodbye” for so many generations, the term must hold some significance sufficient for such a circumstance.

All of this internal conversation, though, is getting old. I would rather spend time telling my revision of the Biblical parable, the Good Samaritan, as it takes place at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI. The story begins on an early fall evening, sometime in September, when college bound Jane Smith walks onto Calvin’s campus for the first time. She is beginning her first semester at Calvin. All alone and with high anxiety levels, Jane Smith finds herself in a void of healthy social interaction, a ditch of sorts. As she sits in her room, a local resident walks in her room to say hi. This person is very kind and outgoing, a modern “priest” of sorts. She is clearly high on some social ladder Jane isn’t aware of. “Hello” she says, and as Jane starts to talk, the priestly girl zones out and cuts off the conversation early. Later the resident Barnabas for Jane’s floor comes up to her. The Barnabas was clearly put into the position because of some great personal qualification, which she undoubtedly possesses. She is a modern “Levite” of sorts. This Levitical resident says hi, asks if Jane would like to become involved (a very kind gesture), then leaves with Jane’s appropriate response (“yeah, sure I’d love to. Let me know when you’re doing stuff”). Lastly, another girl walks in. Her name is Liz, and she’s not from around here. In fact, her situation is quite similar to Jane’s—lonely and alienated. After a brief introduction, the new girl walks into her room, sits on an unmade bed, and quietly the two go on biding their boredom together. >> FAST FORWARD >> It is now three and three fourths (?) years later and Jane is graduating. Jane recollects her first interaction with the priestly girl. Still very appreciative of that first encounter, Jane goes up and gives the priestly girl a big hug. The priestly girl, says, “Wow, it was great to know you. I hope you have a great future! Never change! Goodbye.” Then they hug and part ways. Jane makes her way over to the Levitical girl and taps her on the shoulder. The girl says, in a very spiritually tempered manner, “Thanks for everything Jane. God will bless you in your future.” They shake hands, say goodbye, and part ways. However, Jane doesn’t see Liz anywhere that day. No worry, Liz is her best friend. Goodbye isn’t necessary at this point.

Why do I relate to this story? Because I rarely say goodbye to my best friends. I say goodbye to the people for whom the formality of our relationship requires closure. But to say goodbye to a friend isn’t fitting. And then, why do I compare a friend to the subtly alluded Samaritan in the narrative above? Because the story of the Good Samaritan ends like this: “The next day [the Samaritan] took out two denarii [money I think] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have’.” It is important to note that the Samaritan left when the main character was not fully conscious and able to respond. But the Samaritan promised a return. And further, upon his return the Samaritan promised to pay off his debts. What is the content of their relationship? It is the closest friendship, one that is bound by service. The Samaritan left with the promise of a future where he would continue to serve, continue to care, and never really be gone from the side of his friend. When I leave my friends and colleagues after this year, I will not say goodbye and mean it (if I say it that’s because our conversation got to that awkward silence—sorry). Instead I’m leaving my friends with the promise of a future with them. And in this future I’m going to be there serving them, in whatever form service will present itself. I’m looking forward to that. And like Jeff Bouman playing whirly-ball, I say, bring it on!