I am. We are. They are…going to wreck the car.

Read this! John 17:6-19

So for those of you who weren’t here last week, you missed some embarrassing details about my teenage years. You missed some pretty ridiculous measurements: I was too short to ride the “King Cobra” at King’s Island, our closest theme park, I was small enough that whether I had any actual skill as a cheerleader was completely irrelevant. And, if you’d been listening extra closely, you would have heard me slip in a tiny, but important detail, about my ability to drive a car. I barely, I mean, miss-one-more-question-and-fail-barely, passed my driver’s test. I knew I was nowhere near ready to get my drivers license, my drivers ed teacher had his window down and got hit in the head by a branch as I slowed to a stop sign, I panicked and didn’t even look when I was merging on to the highway, and I’d gotten a C- in driver’s ed for gosh sakes. But it just so happened that I accidentally left my learner’s permit in my jeans pocket as they went through the wash around the same time when most kids my age, who are much more proficient drivers, step into the DMV, answer a few written questions and drive some poor DMV evaluator around while they tried to remember right hand turn signals, yielding on left turns, and how to parallel park. So I walk in to the DMV with my mom, I take one of those numbered arrow paper tickets, and settle in for the long wait. When it’s finally my turn, I pull out the remaining wads of torn and washed paper that was once my learner’s permit, I show it to the clerk, and I say, “Hi. I’m here to get a new learner’s permit so I can get my license.” Now, I’ve gone over these words in my mind for years, trying to figure out whether or not it was my fault that this major event of miscommunication had transpired. The clerk simply waved me over to the box that you stick you face in to test your eyesight. She told me to read the third line. Thinking this was a bit odd, but always being one to do what she was told, I stepped over, read the letters, and came back. “Ok,” she said, “go over to that table and put this code in the computer. They’re going to ask you twenty questions. If you miss more than three, you fail the test.” ‘Uhhhh. Ok?” I said. Again, I was just there to get a new copy of my learner’s permit, not to get my actual license. But I walked over there anyway, missed my three questions, came back up and she said something about me “cutting it pretty close there” and then to “go stand in front of the red curtain.” Now, I’m really starting to wonder what in the world is going on here. I don’t need my picture taken for a learner’s permit… But I go over there, give them an awkward smile, squint at the flash, and she tells me to go pay $36 at the teller in the middle, give them a few minutes, and the license will be ready shortly. So, I don’t question it. I just go over there. Pay my $36 - luckily I had $36. Sit and wait. And about twenty minutes later I’m walking out of there with a certified bonafide Indiana Drivers License. I never took the actual driver’s test, just the written one. I never had to parallel park (which, I’m still pretty bad at), I never had to count my following distances under my breath, I never smelled the tobacco on the examiner’s breath, never accidentally sneaked out into the middle of the intersection while waiting to turn left and then have to run the red light because it never got clear enough for me to turn, which, I’ve been told, would have been an instant fail. I walked out of that sticky nondescript linoleum lined office building with a drivers license I had not earned. Go to it kid. Good luck. Be safe out there. Wear your seatbelt.

There are lots of times in my life when I don’t feel ready for something. I haven’t studied enough for this test, or I haven’t exercised enough for bathing suit season, or I get the job that I keep thinking I’m really not qualified for. In those situations, I usually do have what it takes to get the job done, even though I’m doubting myself the whole time. It’s called ‘imposter syndrome’ and it happens to me all the time.

But sometimes, sometimes we get thrown into the deep end before we’ve even learned how to swim. Sometimes, we get pregnant too early, or we fall in love too fast, or we make that big impulsive purchase, or someone hands us a free drivers license, and suddenly, it’s sink or swim, learn on the job, ready or not, here you are. It’s not just our lack of self esteem that makes us feel inept; it’s the facts - I don’t know enough Spanish to pass this class, I have no business turning off the breaker and rewiring that light switch, I am in no kind of emotional space to coach this person through the hardest day of their life. 

But. In this passage, Jesus is handing us the keys. I mean, sort of, in this weird passive way, by basically telling God, “Hey! I’m done here. Let’s leave the rest to the kids and let them figure it out. It’ll be fine.” Jesus does this sort of strange new math: he’s like since I have made your name known to them, and you gave them to me, and I told them everything I have comes from you, then, basically, they’re as good as me, which means they’re as good as you, but not really because they’re sinful humans, but they’re still yours, and I am in you and you are in me, so that makes them in us, so yeah. Ok. It’s good. No problem.

Maybe Jesus is just tired of driving us to school and then to soccer practice and then to pizzeria Uno’s where we welcome guests and seat them at tables and flirt with the bus boys and get yelled at by the servers and then have to call him too late at night to come pick us up and take us home and stay up with us while we cry over our Calculus homework until three in the morning. Maybe Jesus is like, “I am. Tired. Y’all are totally capable of doing all of this for yourselves.” And, then also like a parent, he is filled with trepidation and burdened by exponentially rising insurance costs when he hands over the car keys to the rusting 1986 baby blue Ford Escort, and says, “sure. Go to it. Wear your seatbelt. Don’t play the radio too loud.” 

And so as we adjust the mirrors and move up the seat and turn the radio dial and slowly back out of the driveway, with our hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and amazed by this new power that we have been given, Jesus prays, Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one..I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 

Set them loose. Trust them. Give them freedom. But protect them. Don’t let the world separate us. After prom and parties and heartbreak and football games and band practice, bring them back home to me, to Us.

It’s a terrifying responsibility when we’ve been given the keys to the good news, when it’s our job to be the hands and feet of Christ, when we have to navigate this scary and confusing and often gridlocked world while bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives and telling the story of a God who turns everything upside down in order to right it back up again. 

I can’t help but think, God, I am going to wreck this car.

I don’t have enough training. I don’t have enough Greek or Hebrew. I don’t even know where my Book of Confessions is, let alone all the rules of Roberts Rules of Order. I need better listening skills. I need more focus. More discipline, more humility and more sacrifice. I should learn more about community organizing and biblical exegesis and the difference between sanctification and justification. I need to know how to avoid falling in to the heresies of Docetism and modalism and gnosticism and Patripassianism. What if I say trespasses instead of debts and get caught going over the speed limit and I get confused which way to flip the turn signal when I’m turning right and turning left? When am I allowed to turn on red and what if I go down a one way street the wrong way and what if there is only one parking space left and there’s a line of cars behind me and it takes me forever to finally fit it into the space? Why are you trusting someone like me to transport this precious good news to the rest of the world? 

Yup, dear ones. We are going to wreck the car. We have no business getting behind the wheel. It is a dangerous world and we are under equipped and some of us have barely passed the prerequisites in this thing we call life. 

And. That is where we are called. 

And. Like a parent who prays for the safety of her child as he pulls out of the driveway, she really isn’t thinking all that much about the car.

She’s thinking about her child. She’s praying that he will stay safe. And that others will be safe. She’s praying that there be a shield of protection around that car so that when people do come racing into his lane or cutting him off in traffic or tailgating him too closely, her child will be ok. She is praying and hoping that he will get to where he needs to go, and then come back home again.

The amazing, mind-blowing, almost incomprehensible thing about this prayer that Jesus prays is that he doesn’t seem so much to care about the car. He could have said, “Oh God, help them to deliver these words perfectly, so that everyone can hear and understand.” He could have said, “God, let’s build some schools to help these folks carry out my message in the ‘right’ way.” He could have said, “let’s make more rules for them to follow so that we can measure whether or not they’re doing this right." He could have prayed, “Lord, let’s just suck up all the good ones that are yours right now and leave the rest of this world to rot.” Nope. He knows we are going to get this wrong. The message is going to be skewed and blurred and confused and conflated. And still, he says, “They have enough. They have your name. They have an understanding that I came from you. They have your words and your protection and my joy. And they’ve been set apart. That’s enough. That’s all they need. Let’s set them loose. Let’s see what happens. Let’s give them the keys to this thing, and see if they can open ‘er up. They are going to wreck it. But let’s give it to them anyway. They will only come to realize how much they need us after they’ve wrecked the car. Just keep them safe so that once they do slide into the guardrail or spin out on the ice, they’ll know who to come back to, they’ll know they aren’t alone, they’ll know that I am in you and you are in me and that means that they are in us, and who cares about the increase in insurance premiums.”

Thanks be to God.

Taking Up Spiritual Space

John 15:9-17

 Somewhere in my boxes of old yearbooks, soccer trophies, scrapbooks and running spikes is a drivers license. On this drivers license is a picture of me, long hair, looking somewhat surprised, and smiling and showing a full row of braces. I really wasn’t supposed to get my drivers license on that day. I was nowhere near ready to be given the keys and sit behind the wheel of a one and a half ton clump of metal that could go over seventy miles an hour and have full reign over the radio dial.  But after I barely passed the drivers test, they ushered me over to the red curtain, told me to smile if I wanted to, and then wait ten minutes. Thirty-six dollars later, I was the proud owner of an Indiana Drivers License, and on that license was all of my important information that made me me: brown hair, brown eyes, birthdate, no corrective lenses (at least, not yet), and most importantly, my height and weight measurements. On this state issued, official documentation and summary of who I am, on this piece of evidence that supports my citizenship, my voting rights, my ability to enter a bar (or not), it said Jennifer Ellen Frayer, height: four foot eleven inches, weight: eighty-five pounds. By today’s standards, according to my height and weight, I would have barely graduated from riding in a car seat in the second row, when they said, sure, go ahead, take her for a spin. In all seriousness, I probably should have had a couple of phone books under me so I could see over the steering wheel, but instead, I lied and said I could see just fine.

See, I was always the tiny kid. I was always on top of the pyramids, always standing in the front row for the class pictures, always asking for help to get the markers off of the top shelf. I was thrown around on the playground, carried via piggy back during recess, and chosen first for “red rover red rover send Jennifer right over,” which was really just a way for the big kids to clothesline me right in the neck as I tried to break their grip. It's a gruesome game. I shopped in the kids section long after everyone else had outgrown the character t-shirts and footie pajamas and moved on to cooler things like hyper color t-shirts, stone washed Levi’s and this strange store called “Victoria’s Secret.” Sometimes it was really frustrating. I just wanted to be able to be like all the other kids, but I was always told I had to sit in the middle seat, I was always given the smallest piece of pizza, and always carded at the movies. Being so much smaller than everyone else made me different, made me odd, and made the teachers have to make adjustments to my desk height, bring in special sized chairs, and worst of all, make me stand on the stool at the lectern when it was my turn to read the gospel reading for Wednesday morning mass. It was what I was “known” for both in and out of the doctor’s office; I was the kid who could barely make it on to the growth chart, was always chosen first for the trust falls and even made the parents on the sidelines chuckle when I came to the line and prepped for my underhanded free throw. 

But eventually, it sort of became my signature. I was the tiny one. I was the one who could squeeze through tight spaces to get the wallet dropped underneath the bleachers. I was the one who was enticed to join the cheerleading squad even though I hated bows and memorizing and coordinated dance routines. I started running cross country, and being small meant that I could be fast. Being small meant I could spend less on clothes, get out of riding those terrifying roller coasters, and eat all the pie I wanted and never gain a single pound. I was the last in the line of nesting dolls, the one safely nestled by all the others, the one who only had to stand out on account of her smallness and nothing else. I didn’t take up space. I didn’t occupy a place where I didn’t belong. And if somehow, if I accidentally did trespass somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, I could quickly sneak out the back door, and no one would be the wiser. Not taking up space became my identity - a sort of non-identity. I was always asking myself, “How can I confine myself, limit myself, compact myself into something smaller, something less burdensome, something easier to carry?”

This translated itself into every aspect of my life. Work harder, so that my manager at the pizza joint wouldn’t have to complain. Stop asking questions, so my youth group leader wouldn’t sigh with the interruptions. Get good grades, so my teachers wouldn’t be disappointed. Run faster so that my short legs could no longer be an excuse. Keep quieter, so I don’t end up saying something embarrassing. Stay little, stay tiny, get smaller, get quieter, quit taking up so much space. Stop taking the risk of being seen. The tinier self, the tinier the mistakes.

And then, of course, college came, and I was a late bloomer, and I promise you that my drivers license no longer says that I am four eleven and eighty-five pounds. But that fear of taking up too much space was still there - just translated into places like the classroom and the dining hall and the Bible studies. Stay small. Keep quiet. Look down. Be agreeable. Don’t ask hard questions. Shut down those desires. Stop being hungry. Draw attention to yourself only by being minuscule, by being perfect, by knowing the right answers even before the question is asked. 

But today, we have this passage of nesting dolls. My sister used to collect them. You know those wooden doll shaped containers, that first one painted with gold filigree in amazing detail, right down to the eyelashes and tiny flowers on her scarf, and you’d open that one and there’d be another one inside of it, and you’d open that, and there’s another one, and on and on with less and less painted details until you got to the tiniest little doll, smaller than your fingertip, with just a few strokes of the tiniest brush to indicate eyes, nose, mouth, maybe her hands clasped together in front of her plain red dress. The tiniest ones were the ones that always got lost because we’d separate them and line them up and watch them get smaller and smaller down the line.

 

Like nesting dolls, Jesus tells us that the Father holds the Son and the Son holds us, that we abide in the Son just as the Son abides in the Father, concentric circles of holding, of embracing, smaller and smaller as we go from the grandiosity of the ever expanding multiverse, to our own universe, to our solar system, our earth, our country, our town, our church, our families, our bodies, our cells, and smaller and smaller down, all abiding in the One who made us all. One doll, snug inside the other.

But I think, my whole life, I’ve been trying to be the tiniest nesting doll, to take up the least amount of space, to wear the plainest dress so that when we’re all separated from each other, when we’re all lined up in a row, I can’t be accused of offending or demanding or taking more than my share, and when we’re all lined up in a row, I won’t have to hold anyone else, and when we’re all lined up in a row, it’s no big deal if I get lost or cracked or if my paint starts to flake off. And when we’re all combined together, I get to hide behind all the others. Not much is demanded of the tiniest doll. Her mistakes are hidden behind all those petticoats. Her missteps are made with tiny footprints. Her whispered truths are hidden behind layers and layers of gold filigree. The littlest one doesn’t have to step out into the unknown; she just gets to be carried by all the others. 

The hard part, though, as all of us who have tried to fit back into our wedding dresses can attest, is staying tiny. If we get any bigger, we might not fit in with our other nesting doll families. If we get bigger, we might not be hidden inside and behind all those others who seem to look as if they have their lives figured out. If we get bigger, if we start to grow, if we start taking up some space, we might find that we have outgrown the creeds or the belief systems or the traditions or the right answers that have defined us all this time. "Just abide in God," they said, which meant, abide in Christ, which meant abide in the church, which meant in tradition and in belief systems and creeds and how things have always been done and in expectations that our values should be their values and in arguments over the color of the sanctuary carpet. Stay safe in the sheep pen. Don’t wander away. You might never be found. You might escape the yearly shearing and grow too much wool, enough for forty men’s suits.

I think this is where the nesting doll metaphor breaks down, and I think this is where the church has always broken down. In our attempts to belong, in our attempts to “fit in” we have made our spaces smaller and smaller, we’ve clotheslined those growing in their faith because they tried to break through all the spoken and unspoken boundaries that we have built in order to keep ourselves safe from all that big, grand, outside, ever expanding, unknown. 

See, at first, I read this passage as the tiniest doll in the series of ever expanding nesting dolls. Stay small. Stay in the middle. Stay where you belong. Fit in. Don’t push against the boundaries of the defined walls we have built to keep us safe and secure and relatively risk free. You are the numbers on your spiritual identification card. You are four eleven and eighty five pounds. Stick to that. Stay there. It’ll get you in. Nice and safe in this pen we have built for you.

I’d come to God like that, especially in prayer. Ready to receive whatever God had to give me, as long as it fit in my confined spaces of logic and reason and tradition and creed. I’d pray for God to come as long as God was willing to fit somewhere inside of my tiny definitions and expectations and in the tiny space I had set aside somewhere inside of myself for God to occupy. But taking up spiritual space, letting my spiritual world and spiritual self get bigger, means that I can be surprised, I can be amazed, I can have wonder and play and an ever expanding experience of who God really is. Taking up spiritual space means that I’m leaving room for God to be inside of me, just as I am inside of God.

I don’t think it’s as simple opening up the Father, and finding the Son, and then opening up the Son and inside we’ll find us, card carrying, certified, Jesus-approved. Because the Father is ever expanding. God is not limited to the confines of the biggest nesting doll in our curio cabinet. And that means the Son is ever expanding, too. And so that means we get to stretch out, as well. We get to take up some space. We don’t have to be the size written on our first drivers license. We don’t have to confine ourselves to a building or Sunday mornings, or hide our questions, or crawl to God like an unseen street urchin asking for just a little more bread. We are no longer servants, but friends. We get to ask God for anything in Christ’s name, and God will give it to us. We get to be big, bold, loud, laughing. We don’t have to keep spiritually dieting, restricting ourselves of the fruits of God’s goodness so that we can fit in to the same spiritual dress we wore when we were fourteen. We don’t have to stay small. 

God wants us to expand, to grow, to change in our faith. And we do that by asking questions. We do that by bringing in more people and more ideas and more confusion and more diversity and more perspectives. We do that by dismantling the separations between the dolls. We do that by enduring and surrounding and holding each other. In other words, we do that by loving each other. Loving each other means we’re laying down our lives for each other, we’re giving our lives to each other, which, I think, is just a way of saying that we break out of our own boundaries and our own defined rules and our own classified ciphers and secret handshakes in order to connect, to build bridges with each other. The boundaries are disappearing. There is fluidity between me and you and God. What affects me affects you. What hurts you hurts me. My life is no longer my own; it’s yours too. My life spreads out and is morphed into yours. The lines that separate what is “me” and what is you start to weaken, because we’re all a part of Christ, who is a part of the Father, who is in and around and breaking through every single boundary we set up for ourselves. 

We don’t have to limit ourselves, and we don’t have to limit each other. We don’t have to get smaller so that God can get bigger. It’s not pie. Or if it is pie, it’s this ever expanding, ever growing, ever changing pie with a perfect flakey crust. Preferably cherry, but you can have whatever you want and as much as you want. God is in through and around it all, breaking down all the barriers we try to set up for ourselves in order to make this life make sense. I can take up spiritual space. You can take up spiritual space. There is room in the womb of God for us all.

Thanks be to God.

Abiding. Shoshin. Mushrooms.

Read! John 15:1-8

  The thing that gets me in this passage, at least, this time around, is that nobody escapes the pruning. Whether you are failing to bear fruit, or whether you are actually bearing fruit, you are going to get the axe. God is that gardener who cuts off every branch in us - even in Jesus himself - that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, God prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. So just when you think you’re on your way, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, just when you think you’re on the cusp of something new, just when you’re ready to stretch out your branches and take your place in the world, in comes the gardener with his pruning shears, and thwack, we’re back at square one. Jesus in this passage is prepping his disciples that things are going to get hard. They are going to lose important parts of themselves. They may think they have finally “arrived” because they have found Christ, but this is not the end of the story. Even the Church, even this church, is never complete. We are never done. The pruning never ends. We, as Christians, are always in process; we’re always arriving but never “arrived.” Our dying, unfruitful and callused parts of us are always being sloughed off and shaved away, and our life-giving, hope-centered, so-called “answers” are always being pruned so we can grow more life, more hope and more answers. This is the call of the church. This is the image of the Triune God: The one emptying into the other in communal self-giving, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit forever abiding in each other in mutual creating and recreating, a forever cycle of emptying and filling and emptying again, over and over again, in and out of each other, encountering one another as if for the first time. The vine and the branches, the trimming and the growing and the trimming again, always new, always sprouting, cutting back, and sprouting again so that new life can grow. The only thing that we can count on for sure, the only thing that remains the same, is change. Being a Christian means opening ourselves to being pruned, letting ourselves be vulnerable to the threshing floor even when, or maybe even especially when, we think we’ve got this whole Jesus thing figured out. We only need one thing: to abide in Christ as Christ abides in us, and as Christ abides in the Father and the Father abides in Christ. To abide: to stay. To show up. To return to. To let go. To strip away preconceptions. To get back to the heart of it all. To give in to. To gain your energy and nutrients and very life force from. To stay plugged in. To tether yourself. To dance together in mutual self-offering. To create and recreate. To be created and recreated. To participate. To live in to. To survive, even as we trim off the dead ends and cut back the overgrowth so that we can bear fruit. If we don’t abide, we simply won’t survive the cutting. We need to think hard about this as a church, as “The Church.” There’s a pruning going on in Christianity; we have to remember that nothing is exempt from the fire: not our buildings, not our rules, not our expectations, not our high walls or our thick lines that define who is in and who is out. 

We were taking our usual walk through the park the other day. It was raining, but we’d been too  busy for a walk the day before, and our nine month old miniature golden doodle, Eliza, was driving us crazy. She’s used to a walk and a fetch at the dog park every day. And if three o’clock rolls around and she’s still waiting, well, we are going to hear about it. Somehow, what with planning a wedding ceremony and reading for class and relearning second grade phonics and teaching the fifth grader the beauty that is the five paragraph essay, (complete with the three point thesis statement), we’d somehow gotten by with skipping a day of walking through Dormont Park, around past the playground, then up to the tennis-court-now-dog park for a good fifteen minutes of long distance fetching. But this day, there was no getting out of it, not if we wanted to keep our shoes, our carpet, our favorite second hand couch, or our sanity intact. So we grabbed her leash, a handful of plastic bags, and her favorite tennis ball, and with a slam of the screen door, dragging our reluctant seven year old along with us, we were off. It was just drizzling by that time, so we thought we had hit our window of opportunity: we could get this walk done as quickly and as efficiently as possible so that we could exhaust the dog, exercise the child, and get back home to our more pressing responsibilities of paper grading, bathroom cleaning, laundry folding, and sermon and worship planning. We were focused. We were gonna get it done. And we were getting wet. We had a list of things we needed to accomplish before bedtime, and had no time for distractions, detours, or any monkey business. So we walked down the same street we always walk down, past the elementary school, and through the park, Levi chasing ahead of us and then lagging behind, until he called out to us, “Mom! Dad! Look what I found! You gotta come see!” “Ugh!” I said. “Levi, it’s raining, can we just get this done? Can we just keep walking?” “Yeah, Levi, buddy, it’s starting to rain harder and we’ve got to get home,” Dan said. “But it’s something really cool!” Levi said. “It’s this giant mushroom! Come see!” Well, we’d spent more time arguing about it than if we’d just entertained the boy’s curiosities, so I gave in, and walked off the path and through the wet grass towards him.  “Look!” He said. “Isn’t this crazy?” And we looked. And it was crazy. A beautiful, perfect, fresh, white morel mushroom, growing there right in the middle of a city park, next to a cigarillo filter, a coffee cup lid, and someone’s discarded face mask. Dan and I were amazed. I’d never seen one “in real life” before. I’d heard about them, of course. They were a delicacy. They were served in the fanciest of restaurants. They’re really hard to grow. The growing season is super short. And they’re sold for somewhere around a hundred bucks a pound. So we plucked it and carried it home. It was pizza night, so Dan sautéed it up and threw it in with the pepperoni and the mozzarella and tomatoes. It was so good. Woody and earthy, hearty and layered. 

The next day, we all went to the park again, and this time, we were on the lookout. We slowed down, circled each tree, looked down, and found about five morels with a street value of about forty bucks. We had hot dogs and sautéed morel mushrooms that night. Levi even tried them. He was sort of awed and thrilled by the fact that we could eat something that had been randomly growing and randomly picked from the ground, right in the middle of the city. 

We go on this same walk everyday. Eliza has memorized the route. She grows more insistent and the leash grows more taught at the same spot each day, right when she realizes that we are getting close to the dog park. We walk past my favorite pair of trees in the whole world, and we make sure to say hello to them each time. But because of the keen eyes of a seven year old, always ready to discover something new about the world, we found a treasure, growing randomly amongst the weeds and the dandelions, a meaty and earthy and delicious morel. 

There’s this concept in Zen Buddhism called “Shoshin” or “Beginner’s mind.” It’s this idea of encountering everything as if you were experiencing it for the first time. It’s an experience of openness, eagerness, and a lack of preconceptions. Even if you are an expert at something, coming at that thing with a beginner’s mind frees you to explore, to be creative, to understand more deeply, and to participate in it more fully in that thing. Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist teacher and author of the book, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, says, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” Cellist Yo Yo Ma says that he tries to occupy this beginner’s mind every time he performs. When we approach things with a beginner’s mind, we encounter the everyday - the same walk through the same neighborhood to the same park - as if it is our first time to that park, our first time through that neighborhood, our first time taking precarious and tentative steps into our parent’s arms. This is an approach to life that sheds away preconceptions, that adopts an open, unbiased and curious mind, an approach that helps you find morels in the city park.

But to have a beginner’s mind, you have to be willing to let some things go. You’ve got to prune away and cut back the dead so that new life can grow. There’s no resting on your laurels when it comes to beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind requires that we consistently tap in to the heart of the reason why we became so called “experts” in the first place. Beginner’s mind requires that we truly abide in the places that have become mundane and routine and rote. It requires that we go back to the heart of why all this matters in the first place, even if we’ve been over it and through it and done it a thousand times before. It requires that we look for morels in the city park. 

To reclaim a beginner’s mind, or to get back to the taproot or the heart of what is life-giving, or to abide in Christ, we need to peel away layers of preconceived difference and constructed identities and supposed “expertise” and remember that we are just human, remember that we belong to God, that we need to cut away the parts of ourselves that don’t abide with Christ, and to even be ready to let go of those parts that do. It means going back to the beginning. It means going back to the heart. It means approaching life with a newness and a sense of curiosity and wonder that helps you find rare delicacies next to the hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts in the city park. 

See, I used to think you had to be a monk and live in a closet kneeling on a board of nails wearing a hairshirt and praying every hour in order to truly have a spiritual experience.  I thought encounters with God required a special sixth sense, a truly mystical outlook, an asceticism, and lots and lots of discipline. I had resigned myself to just hoping that all this stuff about Jesus and God is true, but accepting that it was just never going to feel real to me. But then one day, I think maybe I might have started over. I just showed up. I just came to God, whoever, wherever that was, whether it was just my imagination or a delusion or a hope against all hope that some small thing in all this faith stuff was actually true. I said, “I don’t know if I believe in you, or if you’re really real, or if this is just an opiate I give myself to get me through this day, but here I am, as I am, and I’m listening. Or. At least, I want to listen. Or. At least. I need to learn how to listen.” I entered in with a beginner’s mind, with no preconceived notions about how God ‘should’ show up, I’d cut off the weighty branches of doctrine or creed or shoulds, I let go of these deadened expectations about what it will mean if God shows up, or if it was really God who shows up. I had to cut all that out. I just walked through my familiar steps in the rain, but this time, I slowed down, I looked hard, and this one time, I found something. And it was good. And it was nourishing. I was meaty and woodsy and rich and delicate. And it made me want to come back the next day to look around for more. There was more to explore on that well-trod path; I just had to cut off all of the distractions that were keeping me from abiding in the heart of it all, and I had to enter in and explore as if it was my very first time.

T.S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets, said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Let’s not stop looking and searching and exploring, even in our own backyards, even in our mundane chores or our often traversed sidewalks. With a beginner’s mind, we will always find something new; with a beginner’s mind, we will always go back to the heart of what matters, back to the taproot that gives us life, back to the Christ in whom we abide. No matter how many times we’ve been pruned, no matter how many of our branches have be thrown into the fire, if we abide, if we stay, if we keep going back and participating, keep showing up, keep plugging back in to the giver of life, if we keep abiding, we can always begin again. We are all going to get the axe one way or another. And oof, does it hurt. But, if we keep abiding, we will survive the cutting.

Thanks be to God.