The Irresistible Revolution

I've heard Shane Claiborne speak twice, the book was on my shelf for more than a year, I've even had dinner with him! I thought that I'd heard what he had to say and that I didn't need to read the book, until a conversation with one of my students who'd read Irresistible Revolution in High School. After reading the book, he and a few friends decided to honor the lunch ladies at their school with a special dinner, served by tuxedoed high schoolers. So I picked it up and read it over the past month on airplanes and buses. Sure, I'd heard several of the anecdotes from the book in his presentations, but there is so much more. Claiborne refers repeatedly to source material that inspired his own theological reflections on the relationships between Christians and poverty: Martin Luther King Jr, Dorothy Day, Charles Marsh, and others. He wrestles articulately with a lot of the things I've wrestled with in the years since I began college: how should Christians respond to sweatshops, violence, war, the church? His response to these questions is in many ways more radical than mine have been, but they have both encouraged me to persevere in ways that I've invested my life more deeply and challenged me in ways that I've made selfish choices. He reads the Bible as if Jesus really meant what he said, and challenges the reader to do likewise. I'm considering this as a text for a group of students I work with who will recruit volunteers from their residence halls to serve in various capacities, mostly within under-resourced communities. My hesitation comes with the sometimes political slant taken in the book, that may serve to alienate several of the students I work with. However, as I've now finished the book, I'm more convinced that his message and Biblical interpretation are right on. I'm recommending this book broadly, if you are a Christian who is serious about your faith, or someone whose not been convinced that the Christianity we see in America today is for you. I'm also wondering which other writer/speakers I've short changed by assuming that I know all they have to say after hearing them speak for forty minutes.

Urban Experience

Yesterday (Thursday, July 19), 231 incoming freshmen, along with their families, arrived on Calvin’s Campus to partake in Calvin’s orientation program, PASSPORT.  I think I may be feeling some of the same things as these freshmen and their families not because I’m going to college for the first time, or because my kid is going to college for the first time (though that is a really scary thought), but because I will be leading 6 of those 231 students on a special orientation trip today through July 26.

This new orientation trip is loosely modeled after the wilderness orientation trips, but will take place in Grand Rapids’ Creston Neighborhood and has the mission to “introduce new Calvin students to the ongoing efforts of partner organizations in the Grand Rapids area to do God’s work in the word and in Grand Rapids.”  This program has been one of the main projects I have been working on at the Service-Learning Center this summer.  But I’m not the only one to work on this project.  Thankfully, other students and staff have been working on the project proposal and setting up some of the basics for the week.  I only had to pick up where they left off and carry this project through completion.

Only. It’s been a lot more work than I thought it would be.  There are so many little details and logistical points to think through.  This is the first time our office has ever done an extended orientation program and I’ve struggled with trying to remember what it’s like to be an incoming student; to not know anyone at Calvin and to be experiencing Calvin orientation.  I know the Service-Learning Center and reflection materials like the back of my hand, but orienting new students to what college life is like?  Giving them the tools they’ll need to be successful at Calvin?  I can only hope and pray that I can fulfill this part of the trip.

In the S-LC we talk a lot about experiential learning.  I even spent last semester in Thailand as part of an experiential learning study abroad.  I love it.  And I love what this experience has already taught me.  Sure the week hasn’t started, but I have spent the past 46 days meeting with agency partners, Calvin faculty and staff, brainstorming ideas for T-shirts and ordering them, going on walking tours of the neighborhood and creating a reflection/reading.  I can’t wait to see what this week has in store.

Hannah Bechtold
Urban Experience Coordinator

"Voluntary Simplicity"

I love Grand Rapids. I've become quite comfortable here. The hot summers filled with fireflies and beach visits make up for the spiteful, stinging winters. There's something about comfort, though, that allows me to start thinking, "Yeah, I'm pretty awesome." In places of comfort, I often fool myself into a kind of blissful complacency when it comes to evaluating my own character. However, I've found I'm never allowed to remain happily ignorant for long...

More than one person has told me that I don't deal with change very well. In all fairness, I've experienced more than my fair share of "big life changes" moving back and forth from Colorado to Japan to South Korea. I would say I adapt pretty well, but those people are right; change in my life is usually met by great resistance and a shocking volume of tears. I'm moving into my senior year at Calvin, and as though I weren't facing enough change, my nineteen-year-old sister has moved in with me. Suffice it to say we have never gotten along.

At the Service-Learning Center, we have a summer reader filled with insightful articles that introduce old and new staff to service-learning as pedagogy and life philosophy. This week's article was titled "Preparing the Way for Justice." Lofty, right? "Here we go..." I thought as I dove into the reading. After skimming my way through a discussion of Kant's Metaphysics and Morals, my eyes and mind slowed down to read about the application of these metaphysics and morals through the lens of Thomas Merton's Life and Holiness. The spiritual discipline of "voluntary simplicity" especially caught my eye. Bradford Hadaway, the author, was presenting spiritual disciplines like voluntary simplicity as a teaching method for introducing students to a deeper understanding of service-learning. As always, such practices just as useful outside the classroom as inside. The author writes that, "simplicity expressed as a spiritual discipline is first and foremost an attempt to clear away things that clutter both our inner and outer lives." My mother, ever-ready with her piercing insights of my character flaws, told me yesterday the reason I don't get along with my sister is because we have inherently different value systems. Over 20+ years, she noticed that I value materials, while my sister values relationships. Both have their benefits and pitfalls, she told me. I take good care of my possessions but cling to tightly to them sometimes. My sister takes good care of her friends but sometimes can't see when helping them is hurting them. Needless to say, the fullness of both our personalities clash when my stuff is scratched, broken, or otherwise carelessly strewn around. I'm person that likes explanations more than coincidences, so as much as it makes me cringe to admit it, sometimes articles, conversations, rainbows, or what-have-you catch me at just the right moment and make me think hard about the space between who I am and who I'm called to be.

With all this change happening, I've had plenty of opportunities to be reminded that I'm not nearly as good, patient, understanding, and generous as I sometimes think I am. Hadaway writes, "The practice of the spiritual disciplines in their thick sense can develop the moral imagination necessary to break out of our narrow and limited perspectives about how the world operates and what people are like." Service-learning is all about discomfort. It's about the life-value-changing, world-rocking, headache-generating activity of making ourselves vulnerable enough for our flaws to be exposed and to be reminded that things aren't always as they seem. I honestly may never get along swimmingly with my sister, but her presence reminds me that I'm called to "lay up treasures in heaven" and not cling to desperately to my "stuff." As for being a senior, I still dislike the prospect of leaving the comfort I've found in Grand Rapids in less than one year, but maybe I can welcome the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of God's work in other cities.

Peace,

Anna
StreetFest Coordinator

In a Just World

Reflections on 'Vision,' in the document From Every Nation

Today, I read a section of the From Every Nation (FEN) document, which was released in 2004 as a "comprehensive plan for racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement at Calvin College."  The particular section I perused is called 'Vision,' and focuses on a vision of shalom in a multicultural community.

Each day as I stroll into work, I pass a poster representing the Multicultural Student Body of Calvin College.  There are faces in shades of peach, tan, olive, and golden-brown smiling widely at the camera, attached to bodies with arms wrapped around shoulders and waists.  They are unfailingly happy, perfect in community with one another.  What I'd like to tell you is that in this poster, I see a realized vision of the Kingdom of God.  Instead, I see an attempt to portray a Calvin College that does not exist.  We are not a community in which every person, no matter their ethnicity, culture, race or background, is accepted without difficulty.  Calvin is just like any other human institution: even with good intentions, it cannot achieve the perfection portrayed in that poster without a considerable amount of dedication to a goal, and the determination to complete it. 

In order to work toward the Kingdom of God, in which justice and shalom reign, we must first see ourselves not as we wish to be, but as we are.  By our nature as human beings, we are flawed.  Sin corrupts all we do.  Knowing this, we can address the conflicts, tensions and negative emotions that arise within the diverse community at Calvin College.

There are two ways to address tensions within a community.  The first is in the relationship between two individuals.  Even sincere and wholly self-aware Christians can fall into racism or prejudice when they fail to let go of pride in favor of cherished personal identities.  For some, this is due to a feeling of cultural superiority.  This feeling leads to prejudice against those perceived as 'inferior.'  In order to heal this prejudice, we must learn to take each person as they come.  This does not mean that we ignore the color of their skin or the background from which they have emerged - it simply means that we set aside preconceived notions in order to have an unclouded lens through which to see another person.  For others, a sense of injustice due to racism or other forms of prejudice plays into an inability to work toward shalom between individuals.  In both cases, these feelings must be put aside in order to truly engage with people from every tribe, language and nation.

The second way to work toward a just community is to grapple, as a unified group of believers, with the conflicts that arise.  We must together affirm the strengths of diverse traditions and cultures, and work to strengthen the weaknesses of the community in hope and preparation for change and renewal.  No single person or ethnic group can fully represent the Kingdom of God, and so we must become a diverse yet unified community always working toward a more just society.

Julia Hawkins
Summer Office Intern

A Letter, Looking Back

Dear 2011-2012 Service-Learning Center student staff:


This post is in some ways very poorly timed, given that it is the end of the academic year, and I highly doubt that even the most devoted of S-LC staff have traded in bike riding, park picnics, and fun in the sun for minding the blog updates. Nevertheless, I hope that if/when you discover this post, it will be of some blessing to you in the time of transition, uprooting, and general kerfuffle that accompanies the end of a school year. I’d particularly like to address the new graduates (although I hope that my words will speak just as well to the rest of you) and I’d also like to thank you for indulging me with the opportunity to reflect a bit on the journey since my own graduation one year ago, and how it is still being shaped by concepts from our 2010-2011 Staff Covenant. Although I could write about each patch of the covenant in turn, one in particular is beginning to surface: continuous beginnings.


Looking back, I realize that the end of the school year can be anything from exciting to routine to traumatic – it all depends on the individual.

As a student, you live for nine months enmeshed in the rhythm of the tick-tocks and tasks that crank the wheels of the academic lifecycle. The momentum of final projects, exams, theses, and preparations for What Comes Next keeps you moving right up to the eleventh hour when, suddenly, like the bird in a cuckoo clock, you’re propelled through the exit door into great, big Outside World. You pitch head first through thin air as the world shouts, “Congratulations!” and the next moment, the spring snaps and you’re flown right into what was always known as The Future, but which has suddenly and unrelentingly become Now. (Meanwhile, the hands continue to tick mercilessly forward as though nothing has happened.)

The question now is whose clock are you running on?


School, which previously lent the security of steady progression and a certain familiarity with What Comes Next, has finished. You’ve flown the coop, left the cuckoo clock’s prescriptive pace behind.


 Are you feeling a little out of place?


Thankfully, you aren’t a mere cuckoo bird without a rhythm. The good news is that you’ve still got a rhythm, and a soul and an identity. What I mean is that although you may have ended one chapter in life, you are still very firmly planted, securely, right in the middle of exactly where you need to be. Despite this Ending, you are still in the Middle of something greater, and also approaching a new Beginning (just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there). And the best news, most importantly, is that you are still you. The you that was on the inside of that exit door is the same you that is now hovering on the outside. Sure, over the next bit you might find that you have to fight harder, yell louder, and re-arrange a lot of the trappings inside that beautiful mind of yours. The changes might shake and rattle you. And sometimes, it might feel as though the only thing that is happening is… nothing at all. But these, the fits, starts, and periods of seeming stagnation – all these Ends, Beginnings, and Middles, in other words – are all sewn together in fabric much bigger than any one of us can see.


And nevertheless and all the while, the great God who has brought you this far, whether you realize it or even believe it, will continue to lovingly and mysteriously guide you, always.


I can’t think of a better conclusion except to borrow the words of a wise S-LC director: “Go forward now, without fear.”


Be well.
At your service,


Ashley Pace

Being Present Today

This morning when I woke up and looked at the date I could hardly believe we are already half-way through April! Where has this year gone? It seems like only yesterday we were sitting together as a student staff writing our covenant. I remember sitting in that room and being in complete awe of my co-workers. I realized I was surrounded by an incredible group of people and I couldn’t wait to get started with the year. Now, as I sit here and write this I cannot believe that our year is coming to a close. We have a month left and I know it will fly by. But as this year comes to its end I am starting to feel torn and a little bit confused.

As could be said by every member of our staff, the next four months are coming with a lot of change. For many, they are graduating from Calvin and are looking at the next phase of life, for others we are coming back to Calvin, but in a completely different way. For me, I will be student teaching. I am still a student at Calvin by my time on campus will be limited next school year and my year will look much different from my previous years at Calvin. With this being said, I find myself struggling with the idea of presence and what it means for me to be present in this community while continually looking forward and preparing for the community I am about to enter in to.

In our covenant we dedicated four questions to the idea of presence. Each one deals with a different aspect of this idea but the one that I am continually asking myself is the second question, “What does it mean to be fully present in a place? What does it look like?” This is what I continually come back to. What does it mean for me to be present in this office and in the broader Calvin community while also preparing myself to leave? How do I remain fully present here while anticipating my soon move to an entirely new community?

I have been asking these questions for a while now and have yet to reach any sort of conclusion. I have no idea. But, isn’t that what our covenant is all about, living the questions? I can honestly say I am living this question every second of each day. But I also know that I do not walk this journey alone. This past summer a friend of mine introduced me to this prayer and I find it fitting with where I am today:

May today there be peace within. 

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. 

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. 

May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. 

May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

This simple prayer by Mother Theresa reminds us all that we don’t need to worry, because we are where God wants us to be. So how do we remain present when we are soon leaving? I don’t know. But I do know and take comfort in the fact that God is walking this journey with us and although we are at a crossroads, He knows what will happen next. So, to my fellow staff members who I now lovingly call friends, may you find peace within and may you know that you are where you are meant to be. And even with all the uncertainty that comes with a new phase of life, you will continue to be exactly where God has meant for you to be.

~ Ana

Chris Appreciation Day 2012

Hi, my name is Cameron, I work in the S-LC. This is my first time posting on the blog.

There are so many things to say, about the Service-Learning Center, about the folks who work there, about faith and justice, about struggle. I could right a hundred posts, but you'll all have to settle for just one for now.

To begin, the leadership in the S-LC is the best there is at Calvin (probably the world). Noah and Megan Kruis, Fondse, Jeff Bouman. These names should forever be remembered in Grand Rapids for their commitment to service and student growth. For those of you who don't know, the S-LC has the most autonomous student leadership at Calvin. We do such a good job because we have great mentors and role models in the office to walk by our sides.

I am relatively new to the "official" staff members here. I was a transportation assistant last year and last semester, but was "promoted" in January. I always knew how special the office was, and how wonderful and close the community of students working there seemed to be. Now that I am officially in on all the fun, I have experienced their love and warmth first hand. (I apologize, to my co-workers, at my seeming inability to reciprocate this warmth sometimes.) I could list a thousand examples of this love, but I will keep it to just one (maybe two).

This week, in the S-LC, we planned the annual "Chris Appreciation Day." Chris is our lovely, beautiful, brilliant secretary. As anyone will tell you, she runs the office. She keeps all our schedules, she knows where everything goes, and the majority of the time when a student walks into the office and Chris ISN'T there, we look dumbfoundedly at the student and say, "Chris will be back soon?"

She totally makes it all hang together, and the self-consciousness of this fact in our office is a matter for rejoicing. We all know we couldn't do it without her, so once a year the student staff puts together a day, a random day, to show their appreciation for Chris. I won't divulge the details of this year's operation because she may be reading (she keeps up on everything). But I will say that I am very excited. An email went out last night discussioning ideas, with requests for a number of tasks to be done in preparation. The first three emails in the chain after this initial "request" email were essentially, not verbatim, "Oh yeah, I'll do that." "I'll do that." "I'll do that."

It was INSTANTANEOUS. I read them this evening and was FLOORED at the out-pouring of love and service. You' think in an office of what, 15? that somebody would be thinking, "Hmm, I'll let someone else do that." But no, not here; already busy students jump at the opportunity to serve a co-worker. I was inspired and uplifted, and to be honest a little shamed. I don't think I would have been able to do that. The more I interact with these wonderful, beautiful, lovers I am challenged to change and to grow.

And again, this all goes back to leadership. We have some darn good bosses. Can I get an amen?

Another quick example. Last meeting Jack Organ (you know him, you love him) suggested that we all start hugging each other upon entering the office. His rationale, "Well, you need 20 hugs a day to be healthy." Like it's a fact! What other office does that? What office would be comfortable doing that?

This post could have, probably would have been, a theological mess, from a person filled with doubt and struggling to see God in the everyday. I could have rambled about my personal story or my struggle this week with not seeing God. Or I could have LIED and written about how wonderful God is and how important it is to pray and fast and all that. But I didn't have too. I was genuinely struck this night by the human love I saw out-poured because of the pursuit of Jesus.

And I got to thinking, maybe that's the point. Forgetting for a second the fallacies inherent in most theology, the problem of evil argument, the actual problem of evil in the world, doubts about God's presence, and about his plan, forgetting all that "heady" stuff for a second that we (I) so easily get caught up in, and focus on these simple actions by these Christ followers. What an inspiration. It makes me think that the Gospel might essentially be about action, not merely conviction.