"P" is for process, not product.[1]
Last Friday evening, my wife Izzy and I were but two among hundreds of signatory witnesses to Caryl Menkhus's wedding. A majestic setting: the interior of Portland, Oregon's Holy Trinity Cathedral at night; two lifetimes of family and friends massed on either side of the center aisle; soaring music offered up by the choir as a gift to their fellow chorister Jeff Creswell, now Caryl's charming and gracious husband; two proud and beautiful families standing before the altar with their parents as they took their vows. I began to feel as though weddings, like youth, might be wasted on the young. Such a depth and richness of relationship, something you can't manufacture for an impulse hitching or a Vegas quickie.
And I wondered, where are the products in what we do as Church? We don't pop out fresh-minted couples, baptized babies, confirmed teens, and eulogized funerary urns on an assembly line, do we? When I hear an earnest vestryman talk of raising the total number of pledging units I get a bit of that good ol' factory feeling. But in worship it seems that everything we do—by making an appeal to our memories and our imaginations and our present senses—calls us into the process of living and the slow building up of a love large enough to weather the walk we have been given. There was no mention of producers or production values anywhere in the order of worship printed for Friday night. But there were the words "processional" and "recessional": we gathered to bear witness to the comings and the goings, the tidal cycles, of our existence. As we began to sing "For the Beauty of the Earth," Jeff and Caryl walked hand in hand through our midst, first steps in a witnessed, committed journey together. And as the wedding service unfolded, one of Jeff's daughters read to us this poem of Mary Oliver's:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.[2]
How many times have you heard it: Trust the process? How many times have you said it? How often have you believed it? Every time I work up the courage to say it at a dicey moment during a training, a little warning bell goes off somewhere deep inside that starts a ripple of anxiety flowing through my brain. The ripple translates roughly as, "What if this time the process doesn't work? They're going to think that everything you've said is hogwash." (Well, that last bit might be true no matter what happens with the process.)
I'm continuing with a look around Dr. Rebecca Nye's Children's Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters. Specifically, I'd like to share some resources that have helped me with the concept of process. It might take a few posts to get it straight in my own mind. There are so many different processes with which we are dealing in Godly Play, and therefore so many different ways of approaching the work and refining it. At any given moment with any given child we may need to be aware of all of it. And that's impossible, of course, until we have achieved a godlike mastery of the art. (Message to self: ain't happenin' in this lifetime, bud.) But that's why something like the SPIRIT acrostic can be helpful: it represents a spectrum of approaches to problem-solving in our action-reflection process (to name one of the many). Together after the hour of Godly Play, we, storyteller and doorperson, can go through all the possible factors that might have contributed to our experience of the children's experience of the day. There is so much to discuss and mull over: in fact, we may need to come up with another acrostic just to parse out the many different aspects of process.
From my initial reading, it seems to me that Rebecca Nye highlights three processes for us to consider: spirituality as process, the child as process, and children's work as process. The sneaky thing about life in a Godly Play classroom is that all of this is happening at the same time. We decide to look at one aspect and so we run the risk of missing what's going on in another area. And what's really going on may be so complex that it's going to take longer than one observation period to figure out. And by the time we've figured it out, the child might have moved on. We really are going to have to spend a lot of time with many children to begin to find our way. And let's not forget that we as adults are also in process, in a number of ways. The opportunities for befuddlement are endless. But also, the opportunities for amazement. These are mysteries, after all. And not the kind you solve.
I'll never forget the short conversation I had with a retiring teacher as I got started in the work and was sharing my plan for definitively reforming education. Her blunt but gently delivered reply was, "You don't really think you're going to figure it all out, do you? You'll end with as many questions as you began." She allowed as how perhaps some of my questions might change along the way.
The good news is that we are not alone in the work: there's help out there for us, bread and companionship for the journey. There are the observations and research of developmental psychologists, of brain scientists, of educational theorists; there are educators (including religious educators), there are theologians, there are pediatricians and parenting experts (some of them parents, themselves!) who write, some of them remarkably well. Then there are memoirists, and novelists, and last but not least there are poets, who can quickly rehumanize the whole for us just as we are beginning to drown in the details.
So let's return to Mary Oliver for a bit. She has been thinking and writing about spirituality as process for many years, and there are beloved poems of hers that are even beginning to be read alongside scripture at church weddings.
Her poem "Wild Geese," above, raises some challenges to what I had thought, or had been taught, that my faith life was about. At the time of my young adult "conversion," such a poem might have scandalized me, or at least given me something to be conflicted about. The poem suggests that there are no pre-requisites to beginning a spiritual life, no standardized morality tests to pass, no initiation rituals to perform, no experts to please or appease. What I have to learn, instead, is to trust that the "soft animal" of my body—by which I understand my senses, my inherent human faculties, from simply meeting my daily needs to exercising what Montessori called "the flaming ball of the imagination"—was designed to show me the way to go. I have to learn to trust that my vulnerability, even my despair, is worth sharing: the faith life isn't limited to the Power of Positive Thinking. I have to open myself and allow the voices of the world, of the Creation, to startle me out of my culturally-manufactured radical individualism, so that I can hear the good news that I already belong to a great family, the family of Life. I have to begin to pay attention to a whole litany of "meanwhiles," the songlines of my fellow travelers on the journey. Echoing Rilke's famous injunction, I must change my life.
Oliver continues with the motif of journey in another oft-cited poem, one that continues to challenge my foundational Christian catechism:
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.[3]
When Jerome writes in Godly Play: An Imaginative Approach to Religious Education of the ultimate game that we are invited to play in Godly Play, he includes the following as players: God, our deep self, the others in the circle, and nature.[4] Both of these poems of Mary Oliver's help me to remember not to forget that it is not just my dense cog-in-the-machine body, the passive lump sitting in the circle, that is "me," but that I need to be anticipating a truer, an original self, who with the help of God and others might be called forth. And I need to see the process of Godly Play as set within a larger system of processes - the all of nature that the ultimate game requires.
While we're spending time with Mary O., maybe we could look at her suggestions for some of the tools we can bring with us on this spiritual journey, the kinds of habits and perspectives that turn life-lived, the product, into life-living, the process.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?[5]
Can you feel the difference in this, the movement from knowing "what" to knowing "how," the movement from the accumulation of nouns to actively engaging with being and doing? I'm reminded of how the first verse of the gospel of John is translated into French: Au commencement était le Verbe... My daughter's 4th grade teacher shares "The Summer Day" with her students near the start of every year. The mix of minute observation of the grasshopper with the wide-open but personalized list of questions is perfectly attuned to their ten-year-old imaginations. And off they go, mixing scientific and poetic method in that most magical of elementary years.
But what else do we need for our journey and our work, besides the many blessings that come from learning how to pay attention?
Messenger
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.[6]
Thirst
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour
and the bell; grant me, in your mercy,
a little more time. Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart. Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowly learning.[7]
We are just inside the threshold of a new church year, and some of us have had the opportunity to tell our circles about the Light of the Prophets. I do not have a Godly Play circle of my own at present and must rely on vicarious bits of eavesdropping. Last Saturday, the day after Caryl's wedding, as I was wandering through Powell's Bookstore in Portland, I got a phone call from an old friend, preparing to tell the Advent lesson for the first time back in Jenkintown, PA. After a few moments it became obvious he was working with the old Young Children and Worship version. But I was in Powell's, Mecca for booklovers, and could find what I needed on the shelves to lend him some counsel and encouragement. I love the language of the preamble to this Advent lesson, and the way it calls me out of the usual processes of consumerism with which this season bludgeons my soul:
The King who was coming is still coming. This is full of mystery. You know, a mystery is hard to enter sometimes. That is why this time of Advent is so important. Sometimes people can walk right through a mystery and not even know it is there. This time of year you will see people hurrying in the malls buying things and doing this and that, but they will miss the Mystery. They don't know how to get ready or maybe they just forgot.[8]
It always puts me in mind of a poem written almost 200 years earlier by William Wordsworth, so much so that I often include one of the poet's phrases in my telling:
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.[9]
My daughter Olivia leaves home in a month for New York City, for a five month internship at a very interesting journal, Lapham's Quarterly. In reviewing the latest issue called "The City," I came across this poem by Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet and mystic. I leave you with it because I feel that it is of special importance to us now, as western first-world Christians. Setting it beside Jerome's 21st and Mary Oliver's 20th and Wordsworth's 19th century words, we see how difficult this process of spiritual journey and transformation is, how persistent are the obstacles of our materialism, our product-hungry cultures, and our forgetful selves:
Luxury
In the city of Saba there is a glut of wealth.
Everyone has more than enough.
Even the bath stokers wear gold belts.
Huge grape clusters hang down on every street
and brush the faces of the citizens.
No one has to do anything.
You can balance an empty basket on your head,
and it will fill by itself
with overripe fruit dropping into it.
Stray dogs stray in lanes
full of thrown-out scraps with barely a notice.
The lean desert wolf gets indigestion
from the rich food. Everyone is
satiated with all the extra.
There are no robbers. There is no energy
for crime, or for gratitude.
And no one wonders about the unseen world.
The people of Saba feel bored
with just the mention of prophecy.
They have no desire of any kind. Maybe some
idle curiosity about miracles, but that’s it.
This over-richness is a subtle disease.
Those who have it are blind to what’s wrong
and deaf to anyone who points it out.
The city of Saba cannot be understood
from within itself, but there is a cure,
an individual medicine, not a social remedy.
Sit quietly and listen for a voice
that will say, Be more silent.
As that happens your soul starts to revive
Give up talking, and your positions of power.
Give up the excessive money.
Turn toward the teachers and the prophets
who do not live in Saba. They will help you
grow sweet again, and fragrant and wild and fresh
and thankful for any small event.[10]
What a blessing the church gives us in Advent, this time to get ready to come close, to tune in again to that long, ongoing conversation in our hearts.
Peace and blessings to you all, and a special blessing upon Caryl and Jeff as they turn together into a new leg of the journey.
[1] Nye, Rebecca. Children's Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters. London: Church House Publishing, 2009. pp. 46-48.
[2] Oliver, Mary. Dream Work. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. p. 14.
[3] Ibid., p. 38.
[4] Berryman, Jerome. Godly Play: An Imaginative Approach to Religious Education. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1991. p. 8.
[5] Oliver, Mary. House of Light. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. p. 60.
[6] Oliver, Mary. Thirst. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. p. 1.
[7] Ibid., p. 69.
[8] Berryman, Jerome. The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Volume 3. Denver: Living The Good News, 2002. p. 30.
[9] find at:
http://www.journeywithjesus.net/PoemsAndPrayers/William_Wordsworth_The_World.shtml
[10] Translated by Coleman Barks. Copyright, 2006. find at:
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/luxury.php
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