So I have a confession to make...

Yesterday I was supposed to be in Guttenberg, NJ, but my part-time employer told me that she was ill. So, having already announced that I would not be at the office, I decided that I would spend the gorgeous day out of the office since I was locked in all weekend with a nasty cold. And it was truly gorgeous out there. I wandered the length of Hoboken's (where I got to see my All Saints kids playing some basketball in the Steven's park area) and Jersey City's waterfronts. I was very much set apart from the suits and corporate types in my shorts and United Nations t-shirt, and those white and brown Adidases I love so much because they look like spatz. :-)

 Uptown Hoboken

View from Uptown Hoboken

Anyhow, I was doing my natural meandering, marveling at the NY skyline down along the Jersey City waterfront when I ran across a couple from the shelter I used to work at. Amid all the afternoon bustle in a section of Jersey City where I was not expecting to know anyone from Adam, a familiar voice called out, "Rich, is that you?" I was caught so completely off guard! I caught up with them both, and their new son, while the sun shone so brightly on our brief encounter.

This struck me because this passing week has brought a number of things to my mind that haven't been on the forefront of my thoughts in some time. Besides some of the things that happened in the shelter, my mind wandered into someone I used to drive door-to-door from Temba Home in Mthatha, ZA.

A small section Itipini (in Xhosa literally "the dump")

Temba Home was a facility for the most desperate cases of HIV infection. There must have been 40 people,  men and women, who were placed in a small compound on a southern hill facing Mthatha's downtown, which was actually a better view than it sounds. In any case, one man in particular needed a ride most days a week from Temba to an acute care station in downtown Mthatha. He was a walking skeleton, with only the grip on a cane to hold his wait down, otherwise I swear the winds would have taken him away long ago. His name no longer finds itself in my thoughts, but he does. He moved so slow the first time I picked him up. You could tell he was in agony, every movement an aching push toward another painful twist of muscles and tendons near the brink of total loss. His face was more skull than skin, his teeth larger than his shrunken lips, cheek bones like jagged outcroppings from his drained expressions.

But for many weeks we did our routine, and each week he picked up a little steam, looked a little healthier, and moved a little faster. He never lost the cane during my time there, but he definitely found some will to keep living, and it made him in part if not completely whole again. I do not know where the strength came from, but it was there. The memory of this man will surely live with me forever.

Sometimes it takes time, movement, and a slow, near silent friendship to see God out there, to see resurrection. If I ever saw it, it was with those individuals at Temba Home and the soot-red dusty hillsides of Itipini in Mthatha.

So as I bounce along whatever path I happen to be taking from day-to-day, I try to keep my eyes peeled and my ears open for the voices and faces that seek me out, so I don't miss these chances at real relationship and the hope of an even brighter tomorrow for all of us.

Reflecting for the Longview

This week has been a great boon to me. Despite the cold and general yuckiness I'm fighting right now, I've been able to really sort through myself.

The first thing I realized is that not wanting to go back to school is neither a good reason not to do so but also lazy. No matter what, I still have to go through the complete discernment process (through which one becomes ordained in the Episcopal church) and then take the damned GRE, but I feel it's time to go for it. Why not live by the faith I already have been. At one point I actually put some of the pieces together, the sick and poor in South Africa, the homeless here in New Jersey and now trying to build and wield leadership in my current position here at St. John's.

There is an arc here, and I'm learning to embrace it. I want to become an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. Few would be surprised by this, as it is not news that I have been considering it for nearly a decade. I've taken a look at it from so many angles, and I feel it is time to jump in and do it.

Now I'm looking forward to discernment day here in the Diocese of Newark, and I really look forward to a few days following in which I hope to go to Berkeley, California to visit CDSP, Church Divinity School of the Pacific. The more I read about CDSP and the Graduate Theological Union the more I feel something in me calling out, and that makes me excited. Also, it reminds me of this song by Green Day, which is really written for the city of Oakland, but whatever.

The other thing that has been going on is that I have been reading Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer. It is essentially Nouwen's attempt to articulate the paradigms of the minister that he felt the church needed then and into the future.

"But for a man with a deep-rooted faith in the value and meaning of life, every experience holds a new promise, every encounter carries a new insight, and every event brings a new message. But these promises, insights, and messages have to be discovered and made visible. A Christian leader is not a leader because he announces a new idea and tries to convince others of its worth; he is a leader because he faces the world with eyes full of expectation, with the expertise to take away the veil that covers its hidden potential. Christian leadership is called ministry precisely to express that in the service of others new life can be brought about." (The Wounded Healer, pp 74-75)

And that fits so much with how I view the idea of resurrection and my experiences in life so far. My deep-rooted faith has carried me through a number of dark and troubling places and situations near and far, and I've seen that the sun still comes up and the new day shines with forgiveness of forgetfulness and grace. So now I want to say that so you can see it, and then help you live it too. The idea of this makes me feel whole and in touch with myself, and it gives me such immense joy. What makes me very hopeful is that I think I see a way to carry all of it out. Between all of these mini-but-major revelations and what vision I have I feel more relaxed, confident and excited than I can remember.

I think I got my swagger back. Thanks be to God.

Ash Wednesday 2012

Well, it's Lent again, and we begin the long march towards Easter. This morning I got my coffee and decided to begin thinking about the past year, as well as the one ahead, and I have to note some things that have happened or just things I've noticed since Lent last.

1. This winter is not nearly as snowy as 2011's.
2. I love that it is not that cold at all, much to the surprise of a few. I'm done with the cold, for three years I have lived in what is a relatively warm place in comparison to where I come from in Wisconsin. I have become a total wuss, and I want more sunlight!
3. I miss a lot of people. Some moved, some I moved from, but there are a huge amount of people who I no longer speak to regularly that I wish I could. Life moves on, I just hope I catch up with some of yours eventually.
4. I still have little to no idea about what I'm doing. But the good news is that I have some possible safety nets, all here in Northern NJ, and that makes me happy. (Crossing my fingers that I can stay in the immediate Hoboken area.)
5. This Lent I will go pescatarian.
6. This will be a rolling Lent for me, meaning I will attempt to add stuff as things go on (I'm looking at you, my running shoes, and all the long stair ways down the Palisades).
7. As always, I have a lot to reflect on. I'm holding many of you in my thoughts and prayers. Peace and blessings to all.

Why I feel like Jonah

So, it's been a while... As some of you may know, the last six months of my life can best be described by this piece, the Panic Song, by Green Day. All sorts of twists and turns in my personal life, from my dog's death to dying relationships combined with that impending sense of doom some in their mid-20s get when you suddenly realize you actually need to get your career together if you want to do anything meaningful with your short time on this planet (run-on sentences much?) has led me to this point: what's the next step?

For the longest time, I've been absolutely trying to weasel my way out of the path my life has been headed on. Much like Jonah, in his worst state in the belly of the big fish, I've been lounging in my own muck and lack of direction, seemingly willing to do anything but what I know I am led to do. But the fish is still headed to Nineveh, and I've had enough of the funky smell in this place.

Since October, I've contacted some friends and told them how and why I didn't want to work for the Episcopal Church any longer. My perspective was that I had to become some sort of miracle worker at a church with no real leadership and a dying community, the walls of the church quickly becoming a vast tomb for what once was on the corner of 16th Street and Palisade Avenue in Union City. I'm pretty good at leadership myself, but resurrecting Lazarus? The water into wine thing is a heck of a lot more fun than bringing dead things back to life, would that I could.

I found myself at a crossroad: the church next door a symbol of my inability to perform miracles on one side, and the promise of security and the chance at bigger paychecks lying in the promise of further education either in business or some sort of tech field. For a while, I seriously considered going back to Wisconsin, earning another bachelor's, and trying to hit the "reset" button on life and opportunity. My whole rationale was based along these lines: the church is dying, God doesn't care if God exists, life would suck continually working for the church, there's no money in it anyway, I have far too many skeletons in my closet to even begin the process, I want to have fun on Saturday night and not worry about early morning sermons and the like, this whole church thing is not for me in my professional life. Jonah blah Jonah Jonah blah blah.

So I tried to take another boat. I began applying for school, prepping for another quixotic charge at my hoped future. I even went as far as to talking to my parents about coming back to the MidWest, asking friends how much their apartments were costing them in Madison, searching out the best neighborhoods around UW Milwaukee. Things seemed so neatly able to fall into place if only I could reach the shores I was shooting for.

Ah, but for the storm. It wasn't a real physical storm as in the tale of our fish beleaguered friend from the Bible, but rather one that whipped up quickly within my own mind, and it all started with this: Wait a second... Where's your heart in all of this, and more importantly, where's your faith that lies within your heart in all of this?

That blew me away. It came, it got the water frothy, and the crew manning the new course for my life through me overboard... I chose that direction, and then all those real questions came up, those gritty questions where you have to stare into nothing for a while to really focus and listen and try to filter out all the world's noise so that you can hear what the birds and trees and critters are doing and breathe for a while those deep in-and-out breaths that cool the mind.

The belly of the fish is where you confront those things that the world has dumped on you: the American expectations of wealth and prosperity with the backyard three cars, the demand of the world for you to be productive, potential, your own fears that we wallow in and stop us from action and the stinky muck that is the dross of our lives, the things we'd like to take out and not claim. It's at those moments you realize you were never really in control of anything but you, and the blessings you've had are the things you must be grateful for, and wherever the fish dumps you out you just have to hope for the best, because that's all that was really ever happening anyway.

When things really came into focus for me was when Rev. Curtiss sent me to a week long seminar in mid-January on community organizing hosted by Drew University and ran by Metro IAF. The whole experience demands its own post, and I will write on it soon, relatively. What's important for what I'm writing about right now is that it showed me that I'm not the only one with these struggles. Pause was given to me, everything in this process is struggle and strife, and what you do with what you can control ends up being your life.

Then I realized something else: I love this part of the world, Hudson County and the NYC metro area is where I love to live. There's never a dull moment, for better and worse, and the whole world is accessible from here. Creativity, diversity, the clash of the sacred and the secular, cement and steel mountains overlooking a sea of humanity, I get big kicks from that.

Our NEWARK ACTS program director asked me to give the speech at Newark's Diocesan Convention, and the fish spat me out in a big way. I cracked, too much was falling into place on the path that I've been on already for several years. Here's what I said.

One correction from the speech, and it's a fairly major one; I do not know as yet whether I am going to do ordination track for the deaconate or the priesthood. I do know I want the backing of a sacred institution. In a day and age where I see fewer of my generation trusting in major institutions, I feel that still do and will continue to perform more change in the world than various individuals scattered here and there with their own agendas. We need these large groups, fallible as they are, to get numbers rolling as we confront the issues and adaptations that the world will need if humanity is to survive in any sort of meaningful way in the 21st century and beyond. I'm crossing the Rubicon, or rather diving into it face first. The Episcopal Church has been my home and family, and while it can be slow to move and awkward to navigate sometimes I feel I've been afforded too much by it and see too much good coming from it to walk away, and I want to help bring about some of the good things that it does give to the world.

So now my life is closer to this song by Common. Faith and dreams are propelling me to take my next step now, so I'm putting my foot out, closing my eyes, crossing my fingers, and learning to let go of what the world's standards are. What happens next I'm really not entirely sure, and you know what, I'm totally at peace with that. All you other Jonahs out there, I'm with you in prayer, please say one for me sometime too.

Hitting That Stride: Life Gets Busy

I've been working a lot lately.

As some of you know, a few weeks ago I was a sad little man who had no idea what to do, where things were going and what the heck I was supposed to do with my ministry site. So, the sentence "I've been working a lot lately" is seems like a total 180°. It is. Things have mounted, and fast. My Google Calendar is now chock full with few breaks straight into January.

One of the reasons is that I have decided to expand my already vague occupational title of "community organizer" to include setting up an alumni network for my alma mater in the NYC metro-area. This has taken over a small portion of my life, but I feel it fits into the schema of my life's story. Chalk it up to practice for my day job. Can't wait for Monon, it will be and always has been exciting.

Back to that day job.

Last Thursday morning as I was shamelessly handing out coffee in front of St. John's at our bus stop. Three cups of coffee later and with the mega buzz that inevitably follows, my supervisor Geoff Curtiss, priest at All Saints Hoboken, and I began percolating ourselves. How do we serve the community from where we are now? We've been taking a look at that through the lense of the immediate neighborhood since I got back to Jersey five weeks ago (has it been longer? I've lost all track). When you walk around here you notice some things: kids everywhere, a HUGE construction site(future school), playgrounds dotted here and there, and schools. It doesn't take a look at the city's master plan to figure out what is envisioned for this space: youth district. There are in fact six schools within a 15 minute(most much closer than that) walk of St. John's. We don't need to come up with new ideas, they are all sitting right in front of us, our ministry focus is right in front of us: kids. Some of what I'll be doing this week will be designing and formatting a youth service for Sunday afternoons at St. John's. The first group that this will be "advertised" to is the after school program Puerta Abierta ran out of St. John's parish hall.

Wednesday mornings are now occupied by morning prayer and then shameless-coffee-moments in front of All Saints in Hoboken. It is a rather cold session, personally rigid, as most people (yuppies of the millennial generation for the win!) want zero human interaction in-transit to work. Too bad, I offer coffee and an overly cheery disposition with a toothy smile for free in the name of Jesus. The feel is altogether different from the time spent doing the same thing in Union City. There people grab up the coffee and make small talk before they hurriedly hurdle to the bus, coffee spilling and cookies a-crumble whilst garbling "Thanks for the coffee bye bye!" Much more laid-back. Much like the Wednesday morning, the Thursday coffee-giving will begin following a morning prayer service for those who need a spiritual gassing up before they roll into the Port Authority.

Combine all of this with the NEWARK ACTS scheduling, house activities, and an ever present sense of impending doom that thus makes the "do everything you can now or it will never happen" mindset explode in my skull, you can see how life is about to pass before my eyes in a blaze of mounting meetings and a scheduling conflict bonanza. And thank god. I'm grateful to feel useful and forward moving, it makes life beautifully un-graspable and helps me enjoy the duller moments.

As always more will follow. Stay tuned.

So, I should have started this a year ago...

But I didn't, life is hectic and crazy in mostly the best ways, usually. Let me catch you up...

Since getting to New Jersey after a year in South Africa, a short bout at home in the Fern Gully of my home in Wisconsin, I've found a new home in several ways. I've made a number of friends, found a new parish to be a member of, worked in a homeless shelter through a new program, taught creative writing and art classes, went on dates, got rejected, tried new food, loved all of it (no surprise there), gotten mugged (best ways, usually), fell in love with the midtown skyline, learned to hate to drive, shrank my world's size (started seeing Brooklyn as the other side of the known universe), use broken Spanish (daily), moved from Jersey City (Heights Heights baby!) to Union City, one-and-a-half-miles up on Palisade Ave. and on the same side of the street, amazingly, where I write/type from this morning.

That was the fast version, we'll let that stick.

Anyway, now I find myself work for NEWARK ACTS again, this time under the banner of my parish home, All Saints Hoboken, at a brand new ministry site, St. John's Union City, which is 20' from my front door. It is a remnant church (the few parishioners who attend are no longer from the immediate neighborhood), but All Saints, the Diocese of Newark, and NEWARK ACTS see this as the tip-of-the-spear for renewed urban ministry.

Mi español es muy malo, though, so this is going to be fun. Union City is Hispanic and Latino, with few exceptions. The church already has one great community program: Puerta Abierta, an after-school program for 40 local school children that runs from 3-6PM. Aside from this, the congregation is essentially unknown to those closest to it physically. Part of my job is to change that.

As I stated previously, my Spanish is bad, and while most people speak at least some English, I would prefer to meet everyone halfway. It's kind of funny, having gone from a "missionary" in South Africa to being a "missioner" up the street and around the corner here in Jersey. isiXhosa doesn't get you far 'round these parts. Still, I welcome yet another challenge, and this will be the best test yet of whether I have the mettle or not to continue in my pursuit of ministry of one-sort-or-another.

The first big project that I have to work on is a conference scheduled at St. John's this November. The first things I hope to have done by then is a complete physical revamp of the building, a better relationship with all of the neighbors, as well as learning more Spanish.

Stay tuned, more to come, and as always, it'll be exciting ;)