Living the questions... still.

Last Monday, I gathered with the group of student leaders who facilitate service-learning in the residence halls for our biweekly meeting and asked them a simple question: "What do you want to talk about this semester?" Our meetings happen late at night due to the obnoxious complexity of college student schedules, and I'd been feeling at a loss regarding what topics would be worth their time and attention. So I asked. (I'm a big believer in democracy.) And I was astounded by the response.

My CPCs wanted to know how to communicate a vision to people. How to encourage other people to care about the things they already are passionate about. How to integrate service and intentional lifestyles into a variety of different careers and lifestyles after they graduate. How to balance--or juggle--the tension between witness and service and evangelism. You know, small questions.

I was really proud of them, on the one hand--and terrified, on the other. I'm only two years older than they are, after all. How am I supposed to speak into any of those amazingly profound and wonderful questions?

But that's the wrong question too. Because the point isn't that I have the answers. The point is that they are asking the right questions, and we can ask them together. Together, we can look for faithful responses to those questions--because there aren't clear, simple answers, and we might never arrive at resolution. But that lack of resolution is no reason not to search for truth.

So my plan for the next meeting is to tell stories--parables, like Jesus did, that point us to the Truth of the Kingdom, and that leave room for the shades of gray that exist in our life now. I'm going to talk about immigration reform, and introduce them to the people I know and love whose lives have been messed up by a broken system, and I just might get all riled up and teary-eyed. But in the process, I hope and pray that they'll glimpse my passion and maybe develop a bit more of their own. And that's the best I can do, right? Because just like Jesus did when He spoke to the woman at the well, we're invited to "come and see." Just like God did when He put on humanity and became incarnate, we're invited to become more human by learning and knowing each other's stories--and in the process we see a bit more of the truth. Like Karl Barth writes, we only are truly human when we're in relationship--when we look into another's eyes and really see her, or listen to him speak and really hear him, and therefore know Another. Then, as we see the truth about this world, ourselves, and each other, we come to care, because all of a sudden this brokenness is personal. Then, all of a sudden, we realize that we've lived into the questions with passion and that there's still room for grace, and that God is faithful even in that chaotic search for truth, and that ultimately His Truth will set us free.


-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