The Essence at the Pub has been meeting for just over a year now, and has done some wonderful things in bringing folks closer to God in their own faith journeys. However, several weeks ago, the pub became no longer available to us, and we have attempted to meet in the chapel of Messiah.  This Sunday in the Chapel - all were invited to a special gathering once more.

The purpose of The Essence was to be outside of the church walls, and this does not seem possible at the present time; therefore, the Leadership Team for the service has recommended a “pause” for a period of time to pray, study, and plan for the future. This means that The Essence will not be meeting on a regular basis after tonight, but will invite those current participants into some special gatherings over the next few months.

The first special gathering will be Sunday, November 2nd at 6pm at Lindsay Smith’s house (Lindsay will email directions and details the week before).  We will have devotions, scripture discussion, a meal, and conversations.

We will continue our blog here which will give a chance for us and you to blog and respond to feelings and scripture.

We hope and that you will find another worship service here at Messiah or someplace else that you will feel a part of and fit into.  I also invite you to breakfast Sunday morning and the Connection Study at 9:30am that I and Bonnie Leonard are co-teaching.  I recommend, if you enjoy evening services, our Saturday evening service at 5:30pm in the sanctuary.

Please join us in prayer as we seek to discover our next steps.

I’ve been struck recently by the linguistic similarity between a couple of word pairs:

• “Holey” and “Holy”
• “Hollow” and “Hallow”

The former words in each pair have something to do with missing space, emptiness, vacancy.  The latter words in each pair have something to do with sacredness, spirituality, divinity.  Is there a connection?

Has anyone ever said you have to make room for the Spirit to work in your life?  Ever realized you have too much ego to allow God to work through you?  I think there’s a strong connection between these ideas, a connection that Eastern religious traditions highlight as well as Christian monasticism and mysticism.  Here is chapter 11 of the Tao te Ching:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

(translation by S. Mitchell)

Keep this in mind as we approach Halloween.

Let’s see how fun the year REALLY will be!  Put these on your calander:  January is ”Oatmeal Month”, with the 29th being ”Bubble Wrap Day” and the 30th being ”Inane Answering Machine Message Day”; February is ”Return Shopping Carts To The Supermarket Month”; March 18th is ”Awkward Moments Day”; March 31st is “Bunsen Burner Day”; April 21st is ”World Cow Chip Day”; May 2nd is ”Crazy Pants Day”; May 16th is ”National Sea Monkey Day”; June is “Potty Training Awareness Month”; July 6th is ”Take Your Webmaster To Lunch Day”;  August 10th is ”Duran Duran Appreciation Day”; September 22nd is ”National Hobbit Day”; October 12th is ”International Moment Of Frustration Scream Day”; November 15th is ”National Bundt Pan Day”; December 15th is ”International Cat Herder’s Day”.  And ALL year long we can be grateful for an abundence of joy and humor in each of our lives.

I just picked up a book: To Work and To Love by Dorothee Soelle with Shirley A. Cloyes and began reading.  I read the first paragraph and was so inspired I didn’t get any further.  Can I quote it for you?

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).  This is God’s pronouncement on humankind and the rest of creation.  It is difficult to agree with God’s perspective on creation.  Is creation good?  Is all of it, everything that God has made, good?  Is it “very good”?  This book has emerged out of my own struggle to agree with God and to learn to praise creation.  Although my own struggle persists, I have come to realize that our capacity to praise creation hinges on our capacity to involve ourselves in creation.  No genuine affirmation can arise apart from participation.  Only through participation in creation can we affirm it, cherish it, praise it.

The sentence that held me was “No genuine affirmation can arise apart from participation.”  Is this true for God as well as creation?  Can we say that our capacity to praise God hinges on our capacity to involve ourselves in God?  Can we say that only through participation in God can we affirm God, cherish God, and praise God?  I think so.

This just sends my mind a-working, brain-storming: to know God is to love God, therefore through loving God you will come to know God.  To know God is to do justice, therefore by doing justice you will know God.  By being loving you will come to know God because God is love.  Wherever two or three are gathered in God’s name God is there among them.  You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.  Jesus came to bring freedom and release.  As we work to bring about the Kingdom or Dream of God’s beloved community we are caught up in that dream and by participating in it as citizens and members of God’s family we can most certainly affirm the reality of God, cherish that Presence, and praise God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength.

We just need to get more involved in God.

“Your interests in Quaker life, while living in a frat house…seems like an interestingly good combination (I accidentally at first wrote “God Combination” instead of “good”…hm…sometimes I wonder if such “mistakes” might sometimes not be.”

“You know, I too have thought such things–the word coincidence comes from Latin, translating roughly as “an incident with God”.  So as surely as He watches us, He is in our lives, revealing His presence. And you know, it’s not a whole lot of difference. In the end, it boils down to speaking openly, and sharing with a community in a spirit of fellowship and love.”

We were asked this question tonight in response to the reading from Romans.  It stirred a brainstorm within me and I started jotting down all the various ways we might interpret that statement.  To “put on Christ” is a metaphor, and here is what it might mean to me.  What might it mean to you?

• To become more Christ-like
• To do what Jesus would do
• To live out the ways of the Kingdom of God
• To love others as much as you love yourself
• To allow Christ / The Spirit to work through you
• To live authentically, up to our potential
• To see the extraordinary in the ordinary
• To be present to people in need
• To plant seeds of kindness, generosity, love
• To wear your faith / convictions as close (and as obvious) as you wear your clothes
• To do all the good that you can, without causing harm
• To be willing to give everyone (including yourself) a second, third, fourth…  chance
• To love life in all its shapes and forms
• To be God’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and feet in the world
• To find the third / middle way between violence and passivity

I like that some of these are also metaphors and some are actually concrete suggestions to “put on Christ” in our daily life.  What do you think?

I’ve been thinking about the nature of fear, and how we all interact with it—trying to figure out our relationship with it. Such as, fear being the opposite of faith…And it seems like I heard, read, or thought somehow that fear doesn’t exist in the “now”, but only in the future. Fear is only ever a possibility—it’s never “what is happening”. Fear is anticipation of the unknown. But once you’re there, it’s no longer unknown—with “there” being the here and now.  If that even makes sense. It made sense to me today at three in the morning, who knows! Things don’t always have to make sense, right? Sometimes it’s just good to sit and wonder. So thanks for sharing this moment with me.  -–Jess Hilliard

These are the group responses from tonight’s Essence gathering, Sunday August 24th 2008:

Son of God, Messiah, Living Water, Redeemer, The Way, Guide, Gospel, Hope, Sinless, Bread of Life, God with Skin, Divine, Human, Saviour, Teacher, Light, Truth, Life, Good Shepherd, Friend, Co-Pilot, Long-Sufferer, Faith, Healer, The Vine, Lamb of God, Love, The Word, Son of Joseph and Mary.

So that’s the list we came up with. Think of some of your own to add to the list!  (in the comments section at the end of this entry)   –Jess Hilliard

“Believe It OrNot,  Living In A Pickup Is Not As Glamorous As It May Sound”

by Jess Hilliard

This is a response/reflection I wrote after reading Matthew 15,that I interpreted as being at least partly about taking a second look–a deeper, more considerable look at how we perceive, categorize, and distance ourselves from that part of our population we call “homeless“–almost as if they are their own ethnicity.  Because we sense somehow that there is a cultural difference between those who:  1) live on the street and–2) the “rest of us“–but we also don‘t usually allow ourselves to get close enough to break down that social barrier, to try to see in them what God sees in them.  And that (to quote Matthew), “To eat with unwashed hands does NOT defile…” Which for me, seems to level the playing field of social rank and class–and that what’s wrong, bad or distasteful can come from the “clean” hands of mainstream society just as much from the unwashed hands of those who live “beneath” us in boxes or under bridges.  This passage in Matthew reminds me of how easy it is to be suspicious of these outsiders, who inspire some of us to ask that great “American Dream” question, “Why DON’T they just get a job?”  Well, about 20 years ago I got my chance at taking a second (and deeper) look–when I ended up living for over three years in an old pickup truck in San Francisco:  at first it seemed pretty cool that I’d found a way to live “for free”. And, sure, I didn’t have curtains, and anybody walking past could watch me sleeping–my doors didn’t lock and were only as secure as the thin glass windows inside them, and drug dealers were everywhere.  But this would only be temporary, I told myself.  Yet the longer I remained separate from a mainstream way of living, the harder it was to find my way back–because you really can get lost within the homelessness–without the routines, solid connections to other people and even the simplest of modern conveniences–all of which we take for granted–all the small stuff that we don’t even bother thinking about because they’re always there to carry us through–running water, a bed, shoes–and a place indoors where somebody won’t steal your shoes–these are the invisible building blocks of our day…all the little things that remind us of who we are and where we belong–keeping us grounded, centered, secure and connected.  I think sometimes we forget just how much we all depend on one another to for the flow and consistency in our lives–but for those out of the loop, it’s like being in a foreign country without the language. But it’s also like being a ghost.  Basically it’s pretty easy to slip through the cracks and become a stranger in your own town.  Without a home, a base, someplace safe and stable, it’s hard to sometimes be “presentable”, reachable, or even CLEAN if your lifestyle is “inconveniently mobile”–always trying to be the first one in the dumpster behind the bakery that DOESN’T poison it’s thrown-away food, or the dumpster behind the store that DOESN’T shred their leftovers. There’s a lot of waste in this country, and a lot of companies would rather shred and poison their surplus than just “give it away”–as if by keeping their extra and unused foods out of reach, the urban scavengers would be forced to come in and spend some of that spare change they’ve been hoarding.  And being homeless is not just a situation, it’s a process.  It doesn’t happen all at once, and doesn’t have as much to do with not having a home as it does of being a state of mind, a personal perspective (ie: Willie Nelson is not homeless just because he lives in his constantly touring caravan)–and is only one of the many possible realities in life–and when it happens, you can actually feel yourself shifting into that alternate dimension of culturally-invisible people–of crossing that strange border between “normal”, and however it is we define these less fortunate–often as more of a statistic than a person.  So after having lived without a home during that period of my life, I began to sense that the “chronically vagrant” are almost a kind of surreal commodity–a product of “modern life”.  Like cigarette sales and their taxes are to the government–(nobody wants the 2nd hand smoke, but our roads and schools are funded by it)–the homeless population also offer a bizzare kind of balance:  of some people getting far less than they need…so that others can get far more than they need.  So–what would Jesus have us do?  Probably not to give up what we have just to feel what it’s like to be without–but perhaps to look beyond the struggles, beyond the “dirty hands”…to find the beauty and purpose of one another…to find the “clean hands” within each of us–and to know that with God’s grace and love working through each and every one of us–lives that’ve been torn down can be lifted, welcomed once more, and re-found.

You could say I was suffering from temporary insanity the day I signed up for the triathlon now only three weeks away. After a trip to DC in May when I walked 35,000+ steps in $12 shoes, I was diagnosed with tendonitis on my right foot, which meant I should neither walk on it excessively nor continue with my classes at the Rec Center for at least two weeks. Worried that the level of fitness I had worked so hard to attain would vanish in the tenth of time it took me to build it up (doesn’t it always work out that way?) I took to cycling and swimming as a replacement, both gentle enough on my feet that I would not jeopardize the healing.

While at the pool one day, I decided I would not stop between laps, but try to swim nonstop as many laps as I had heard triathlons covered – about 20 (that is laps meaning there and back, not just here to there). Considering how out of breath I usually was after only one lap, my goal was, you could say (and I thought) ridiculous. And yet, I did it. I felt about a foot taller walking out of the Rec Center – untouchable. Then the idea infiltrated my mind – I could do the swim, and I was already riding about 11 miles a week (I could certainly bump that up to the 14 miles of the triathlon). The run, though … but 20 laps! Come on!

I signed up for the triathlon that night. As I watched the ‘we are processing your order’ progress bar advance I felt suddenly cold, like in those dreams when you get to high school on the first day of class and realized you aren’t wearing any clothes. “I can’t run!!!” The next words on the screen, ‘Congratulations, your registration is complete’ gave me only slightly less dread than the ones in finer print at the bottom of my receipt – ‘non-refundable’.

Run 9 minutes, walk 1 minute, repeat three times. That is where I am in my running training. While building up the swim (my strongest ‘event’), and the cycling (my alright ‘event’), I have been following a training schedule a friend of mine recommended as a guaranteed way to get me running 30 minutes nonstop in 10 weeks. My initial reactions to her offer teetered between “I will never be able to run 30 minutes straight” and “10 weeks?!?!” Then, immediately, “non-refundable”.

The ‘non-refundable’ landed me at Inniswood Park, the trail at the end of the parking lot right before the restricted area. It’s a .6 mile path, partially in the shade, partially in the sun, perfectly bite-sized. The first week consisted of 2-minute run/4-minute walk intervals, repeated 5 times. Time may fly when you are having fun, but it crawls at warped slow speed when you are running for the first time in your life. I think I may have prompted other path users to reach for their phone so they could promptly dial 911 not if, but when, I collapsed, and an old man on a bicycle about 30 years my elder encouraged me with a “you’ll get fit” as he passed me. “If only I had the strength,” I thought, then checked my watch hoping the walk part was coming soon. “45 seconds?!?!”

At about week 3 of my training, I gave up complaining. And I don’t mean verbally, I couldn’t talk during the runs even if my life depended on it, but in my head. I realized that I needed every ounce of strength and energy I had to get from one end of the path to the other. So I turned on my iPod, stretched, and got running. My friend who gave me the training plan shared with me the breathing pattern that helped her when she started running. So I focused on the breathing, synched it up with my steps.

By week 5, I was, are you ready for this, enjoying it. My breathing still sounded like I was about to collapse, and the alarm on my heart rate monitor, had I not silenced it, would be announcing the end of the world, but I finally believed it – I may actually one day run 30 minutes nonstop. Because I realized, all it took was one foot in front of the other, over and over and over again. The more I visited the path, the quieter my breathing got, the stronger and longer my strides, the quicker the 30 minutes seem to be up.

I was on one of my runs that week when the sky got suddenly dark. It misted at first, then it poured. I was the only one on the path, and about half way through between Sunbury Road and the end of the path that lets out to the parking lot. I looked down at my watch – I was only 20 minutes into my training. When I reached the parking lot I took off my headphones, turned around and kept running. I completed the 30 minutes in the pouring rain. The feat? 5 weeks before I would have canned the training altogether because of the high chance of rain predicted by the weather guy earlier that day. Had I ignored the forecast, I would have run for cover after the first droplets.

Maybe it’s the 3-count inhale, 2-count exhale breathing that leaves me light-headed at the end of the 30 minutes, but that day, and every day now that I get on that path and run a minute longer each week, I walk off that trail with a feeling of possibility. Because every step ahead is easier because of the one that came before it.

What has made the difference for me? A good training plan, supportive friends, a positive attitude, and consistent hard work. One foot in front of the other will get me there.

So why am I sharing my sweaty running stories at the Essence? Because it occurs to me that this plan I am following, created by an ex-smoker for running 30 minutes nonstop may apply to much more than just running. He says,

“The trick is to start slowly, stick to the plan and keep it. If you have a break, don’t give up, just go back a stage or two and you’ll soon recover. It can be tempting to reduce the walk recovery period, but this just makes it harder and more likely you’ll be too tired to continue. The important part of this plan is to take it slowly (…) Since you’re just starting to run, muscles, ligaments, and the cardiovascular system are unused to the sorts of demands being placed on them and they take time to adjust, recover, and strengthen. Don’t push too hard too soon. That doesn’t mean stopping because you’re a bit breathless or because it is hard work, just be sensible and don’t rush.”*

* From http://www.beginrunning.com/plans/easy-running-plan-to-start-on/