 |
 |
|
|
| "Leisure in the Life of the City Pastor" | ||
| CityVoices
newsletter: August 25, 2004 CityVoices readers, Recreation and leisure are closely related and wonderfully intertwined subjects for us to focus on with this month’s edition of CityVoices. I do hope that this summer has provided you with some good opportunities to come away from your normal routine of ministry and find God in some special places. This month’s edition starts out with an offering of some rather practical suggestions for leisure time activity. We then highlight the words of German ethicist Josef Pieper who considers all that prohibits our leisure, and American Rabbi Arthur Waskow who offers some rather radical Sabbath concepts for our society. We also present just a few words from Thomas a Kempis’ devotional classic, “The Imitation of Christ” – a book that could aid nearly every urban pastor seeking spiritual re-creation. Bill Wylie-Kellermann concludes with an up-beat review of Heidi Neumark’s book, “Breathing Space.” Most of you already know about CityVoices’ move to SCUPE’s offices on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. While we continue to produce CityVoices newsletter and sell books and tapes, we are now a resource of SCUPE’s Association for Metro / Urban Ministry. If you haven’t already done so, please enter our new address and phone number in your contact list. CityVoices / SCUPE God’s grace and peace today, ******************** Leisure: Re-creating Ourselves for Effective Urban Ministry Many of us are coming off vacations and “down” time. Many more of us should have enjoyed those true leisure times – totally away from our work. If you haven’t had your own time away from the office, there are about 10 days between now and Labor Day. Get going fast! Realistically, leisure is a necessity within the context of urban ministry. Leisure isn’t about cultivating the slothful side in anyone. Rather, it’s the biblical design for periodic re-creation, re-invention, re-ordering of both our inner and outer lives. Commercial culture makes its appeal to our selfish motives: “Five Days / Four Nights at the Imperial Club and Spa: You Owe it to Yourself!” As servant ministers, let’s respond to another calling: “A Week of prayer, Bible study, fresh air, healthy food and exercise: You Owe it to Your Congregation.” Let’s be truthful about this much. Ministry is something you love
doing, otherwise you would have checked out of it long ago. And city ministry
is something from which you gain particular meaning. Most likely, you’re
enjoying the urban Periods of leisure and recreation: How long? How many each year? Extended sabbaticals? You’ll have to decide on the specifics that work (or don’t work) for you. My conviction is that extended sabbaticals are over-used and misused, even though touted and funded by reputable ministry resource agencies. Our city churches are often too fragile, our city neighborhoods too busy for ministers to absent themselves for 3 – 6 months at a time. The more important question is, “How am I going to intentionally refresh and renew my life on an ongoing basis?” In an age where planning, funding and traveling to and from vacations wearies many people, avoid those and other obvious traps. If you desire to come away with God for a week; go to an economical, close-by place that you already know and trust. That may be a camp or retreat house, or it may be a friend’s house in another city or town. Feel free to combine tourism and play with study and prayer. But let vacation be just that – vacation from your normal routines of ministry. No meetings, no sermon preparation, no calls or email to respond to. Major on inspiration and perspective. If you’re a reader, bring the books you’ve wanted to read. If you fish, golf or play tennis: play and enjoy. If hiking or biking gets you in touch with God and yourself, enjoy those things. Remember that you are a whole person. Listen to physical, spiritual and emotional needs; and respond to them all. If you’ve enjoyed authentic leisure and recreation, the results will be immediately evident upon your return home. The perspective you’ve enjoyed will give you a refreshed outlook on ministry, both people and program issues. You’ll start enjoying a new perspective on God’s Word, prayer and your interior relationship with God, and all that those spiritual resources can do for life in your neighborhood. If you’ve enjoyed true leisure, you’ll start planning on future periods of recreation, knowing the value they have for you and your ministry. ******************** Josef Pieper – “Leisure and Its Threefold Opposition” (The German ethicist Josef Pieper was one of the most astute and proficient scholars on human leisure and related subjects. His seminal work is “Leisure: The Basis of Culture,” published in 1998, a year after his death. The following section is excerpted from “Josef Pieper: An Anthology,” Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1989.) If leisure is not conceived as meaningful in and by itself, then it is plainly impossible to achieve. Here we should once again mention the celebration of a feast. Such a celebration combines all three elements that also constitute leisure: first, non-activity and repose; second, ease and absence of exertion; third, leave from the everyday functions and work. Everybody knows how difficult an endeavor it is for us moderns really to celebrate. Indeed, this difficulty is identical with our inability to achieve leisure. The reason that our celebrations fail is the same reason that we fail to achieve leisure. At this point there appears an inevitable consideration that to most people, as I have frequently experienced, seems quite uncomfortable. Put in a nutshell, it is this: to celebrate means to proclaim, in a setting different from the ordinary everyday, our approval of the world as such. Those who do not consider reality as fundamentally “good” and “in the right order” are not able to “achieve leisure.” In other words: leisure depends on the precondition that we find the world and our own selves agreeable. And here follows the offensive but inevitable consequence: the highest conceivable form of approving of the world as such is found in the worship of God, in the praise of the Creator, in the liturgy. With this we have finally identified the deepest root of leisure. We should expect, I believe that humanity will make strenuous efforts to escape the consequences of this insight. It may try, for example, to establish “artificial” feast days in order to avoid the ultimate and true approval of reality – while producing a resemblance of genuine celebration through the immense display of outward arrangements supported by the political authorities. In reality, the “organized” recreation of such pseudo-celebrations is merely a more hectic form of work. … It was the Greek Plato, long before Christianity, who in his old age formulated this thesis by employing the imagery of a magnificent myth. Plato asks whether there would be no respite for the human race, destined as it seems for labor and suffering. And he replies, yes indeed, there is a respite: “The Gods, out of compassion for us humans who are born into hardship, provided us respite by granting periodic cultic celebrations, and by giving us to join in our feasts, the Muses with their leaders Apollo and Dionysus, so that we may be sustained by joyfully conversing with the gods, and be lifted up and given a sense of direction.” ******************** Getting Time on Our Side: Reclaiming Shabbat (Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center with headquarters in Philadelphia, and the author of many books of Jewish and spiritual renewal. This piece is excerpted from his article in The Nation, January 1, 2001.) Several years ago, I went to a folk song festival in Philadelphia. Many of the singers sang labor songs of the 1930s, civil rights songs of the 1960s, songs of many decades. The audience sang along, nostalgia strong in the air. Then Charlie King began singing a song with the refrain, "Whatever happened to the eight-hour day? When did they take it away? When did we give it away?" The audience roared with passion. Not nostalgia. This was our lives, not something from the past. I was startled. Suddenly I saw that my own sense of overwork, of teetering on the edge of burnout, was not mine alone. Something was burning in the air. I began to talk with others, especially people whose religious and spiritual traditions call for some time to reflect, to be calm, to refrain from doing and making, in order to be and to love. … For all the traditions that take the Hebrew scriptures seriously, there is a teaching. For the sake of remembering and taking to heart the grandeur of Creation and for the sake of freeing ourselves from others' pharaonic power, we make “not-making.” We celebrate Shabbat, or “Sabbath.” The word comes from the Hebrew verb for “pausing, ceasing.”… The tradition of Shabbat taught a rhythm, a spiral of doing and being in which the next stage of doing was always to be higher, deeper, because a time of being had preceded it. … Imagine making Friday afternoons, into free time, with commitments from employers not to reduce weekly incomes or salaries. Imagine businesses setting aside seven minutes every morning and every afternoon in the midst of work as “Quiet Time”: no work, no telephone, no conversation; time to sit quietly, to meditate, to drowse, to dream. Imagine shutting down not only factories and offices but also highways and airlines, television and hotels. Imagine offering one “sabbatical” year of paid Social Security between ages 45 and 55 to everyone; in exchange for one year’s delay of Social Security retirement pay. Are these utopian ideas? Not at all. The approaches sketched above might be adopted by some businesses out of a sense that, in the long run, they are economically worthwhile and could reduce absenteeism from mental and physical illness; reduce anger, friction, and sabotage at work; build better business-community relations. All these approaches might help our society renew families, neighborhoods, grass-roots communities, and institutions, such as our congregations themselves. And they would give new breathing time to many overworked and ill-worked people to once more meet their neighbors, renew themselves, and rediscover their deepest visions of a sacred world. Contact Rabbi Arthur Waskow at The Shalom Center, 6711 Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia, PA 19119, (215) 844-8494, ShalomCtr@aol.com ******************** On Leisure and Recreation: Leisure time is time not spent on anything that has to be done, like employment, education, running a business and household chores. Also regular sleeping is not called leisure time. The distinction is not strict, since necessity can be larger or smaller, and things may be done for pleasure as well as longer-term usefulness. This time can be spent on two main kinds of leisure: active leisure (recreation, sport), or lounging (“doing nothing,” “reclining in the sun” type leisure). “Leisure is the growing time of the human spirit. Leisure provides
the occasion for learning and freedom, for growth and expression, for
rest and restoration, for rediscovering life in its entirety. By its misuse
the alternative to creative leisure is futility and despair, pointlessness
and meaninglessness. Never before have so many had to opportunity to choose
between the one or the other.” “The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for
the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense
of duty. It is the real living of life with the feeling of freedom and
self-expression. Play is the business of childhood, and its continuation
in later years is the prolongation of youth. Real civilization should
increase the margin of time given to play.” The story is told of Abraham Joshua Heschel who, in an interview of a young man applying to rabbinical school, asked him, "Where do you experience God's presence?" The young man answered, "Out in nature, Professor Heschel, in the mountains, or by the ocean." Heschel responded, "But what about on Broadway?" "On Broadway?" the young man puzzled. "Yes, on Broadway," Heschel insisted. "When you experience the presence of God in the face of the beggar on Broadway, then come back. Then you will be ready to be a rabbi." “… almost all studies have revealed that there are some people
for whom the work / leisure distinction simply does not apply –
research scientists, statesmen, doctors, professors, creative artists,
clergymen, et cetera. For them, work and leisure come together as a ‘way
of life’; time is not divided up and equated with money, it is opportunity
for discovery, creation, and service. “We need not be creative in the sense of original creativity in
order to re-creative. Too often we abstain from full participation in
leisure pursuits on the grounds that we have limited talents or native
abilities. … ******************** Imitating Christ? Perhaps a Kempis Has Something for Us Today “The Imitation of Christ,” was written back in the 15th century by the Dutch mystic Thomas a Kempis. His translated words are so plainspoken that they seem to address nearly all of today’s spiritual needs. He focuses on the outward life, the interior life and concludes with many practical applications regarding the sacrament of communion – which he felt most central to any Christian’s life. Hear his words on “Loving Jesus Above All Things”: Blessed is he who appreciates what it is to love Jesus and who despises himself for the sake of Jesus. … Love Him, then; keep Him as a friend. He will not leave you as others do, or let you suffer lasting death. Sometime, whether you will or not, you will have to part with everything. Cling, therefore, to Jesus in life and death; trust yourself to the glory of Him who alone can help you when all others fail. … You will find, apart from Him, that nearly all the trust you place in men is a total loss. Therefore, neither confide in nor depend upon a wind-shaken reed, for "all flesh is grass" and all its glory, like the flower of grass, will fade away. … If, however, you seek Jesus in all things, you will surely find Him. Likewise, if you seek yourself, you will find yourself – to your own ruin. For the man who does not seek Jesus does himself much greater harm than the whole world and all his enemies could ever do. Thomas a Kempis, born about the year 1380 and educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, was moved to join their community and later was then ordained a priest. His career was devoted to practicing the counsels of spiritual perfection and copying books for the schools. From both pursuits evolved “The Imitation of Christ.” As editor and translator he was not without faults, but thanks to him “The Imitation of Christ” has become, after the Bible, the most widely read book in the world. The Scripture themselves, and how they are to be read, was another topic upon which Thomas focused his thoughts: Truth, not eloquence, is to be sought in reading the Holy Scriptures; and every part must be read in the spirit in which it was written. For in the Scriptures we ought to seek profit rather than polished diction. Likewise we ought to read simple and devout books as willingly as learned and profound ones. We ought not to be swayed by the authority of the writer, whether he be a great literary light or an insignificant person, but by the love of simple truth. We ought not to ask who is speaking, but mark what is said. Men pass away, but the truth of the Lord remains forever. Find “The Imitation of Christ,” online at http://www.ccel.org/k/kempis/imitation2/htm/i.htm ******************** Worth Reading! “Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx,” by Heidi B. Neumark, Beacon Press, 2003. Reviewed by Bill Wylie-Kellermann. This book takes your breath away and at the same time gives it back. I have every suspicion, and say it with a sigh, that Heidi Neumark has written a classic to be. “Breathing Space” defies genre, or at least mingles them. Part diary of a city priest, part Bible study, part theological reflection on years of urban ministry with an undercurrent of journalized “griefwork,” part social analysis with patches of homily; yet always pure prayer and even pure poetry. All these are woven in centered self-awareness, by a concrete and thoroughly unaffected wordcraft. This is one way of saying that, as a pastor Heidi Neumark is the real deal – and as a writer, she has the gift. The title is only passing reference to the Louisville Institute sabbatical which occasioned its writing. It certainly names the contemplative process of penning pastorally on the run. But like the biblical notion of sabbath year itself, breathing space reflects worship infused with justice. It is the sanctuary of ministry and community constructed with residents of the South Bronx, whose dumping ground neighborhood was just surviving beneath the atmosphere of environmental racism and more, air violently stretched, literally toxic, inflicting countless cases of asthma. Which is to say, every pastoral act recounted here is political, an engagement of the powers that be. “In the eighties and early nineties, it seemed that whenever I sat down to pray, I was interrupted by gunshots. It has been said that prayer is easy when the bullets fly, but I’ve never found it so...I realize that my prayer life is of negligible weight when placed in the balance along with all that is lost through such violence. I would forego all prayer if I could bring back...any one of those whose names are written on our hearts or spray-painted on our neighborhood walls in so many colorful, graffiti memorials. On the other hand, without prayer we cannot stand against these powers that are greater than metal and flesh and blood. ... I refuse to accept a spirituality that functions as a silencer, dulling or blocking the sound of these shots in the dark.” Bonhoeffer says that intercession means feeling another’s need or pain or sin so deeply that we pray their prayer. In their stead. For their sake. If so this book is one ceaseless intercession. Readers grow to love a ragtag congregation they’ve never met. This is a peopled journal. There are parishioners you learn to know, watching them falter and transform into pastoral leaders. Others pass through as transient vignettes. And the deaths, far too many deaths. Funerals vie with baptisms, as though two sides of the same rite. And the women. What strong survivors and witnesses! Like those returning from the tomb and refusing to go quietly away. Sometimes we are privy to their Bible study conversations, around the widow of Zaraphath, say, or the obscure and agonizing text of Rizpah, the grieving mother. These demonstrate not only Neumark’s scriptural literacy, but the collective wisdom from below – like Gospel in Solentiname from the Bronx. (And small wonder: she received part of her own theological formation in Latin America, with Adolfo Perez Esquivel’s SERPAJ organization). At the same time, we get to watch her blunder and improvise and discover a ministry. Here is a white Lutheran woman learning the contrapuntal rhythms of call and response worship, in Spanish accents, and loving it as home. The great Pentecostal noise of worship spills out the door and into the streets, breathing both ministry and community to life. “Breathing Space” covers some 17 years, but hardly in linear fashion. In effect, you could open at any point and begin reading, though you’d miss echoes and the mindful layering which pervades the book. Neumark mentions doing research on structure, how to hold it all together in view. There is literally a construction project afoot – a new addition on the church, space for grace, with attendant bureaucratic delays, funding dramas, and plumbing disasters. Its development is part of the book’s frame and design. Behind is a larger skyline under construction: a groundbreaking community organization and their Nehemiah Housing project. The internal foreground is St. Theresa’s, well really Heidi Neumark’s, “interior castle.” Yes indeed, a layered literary geography. Another structure: cycling through the landscape is the liturgical year, scattering its texts and moods in rich providence. And Neumark opens them up right on time to illuminate the moment. Here’s where snatches of sermons may emerge, or etymologies get unpacked like found street objects. She knows her stuff and lets drop illustrative heresies, or sermons of Luther, and always the guiding voices of women mystics. And for all this thick complexity, these layered fragments, beloved paradoxes and structural sophistication – she writes nevertheless with a clean and straightforward simplicity. Guileless, honest, and unaffected. You needn’t be a theologian or a pastor to read this book. But like both, you’ll be edified of heart and mind. Don’t hold your breath, but this book just may mentor several generations of seminarians. I know the first chance I get; I’m setting it in front of some in Detroit and Chicago. I’ll bet they’re stirred like me, to life. Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a Methodist pastor who directs SCUPE’s Graduate Theological Urban Studies program (www.scupe.com) and is on the steering committee of Word and World: A People’s School (www.wordandworld.org). He lives in Detroit and can be contacted at bill@scupe.com. Reprinted with permission from Sojourners. (800) 714-7474, www.sojo.net. NOTE: Sojourners retains all rights to the above materials. ******************** Thanks for Reading CityVoices! Next month’s CityVoices newsletter focuses on the “New Urbanist” school of thought. For the past decade, leaders in the Congress for the New Urbanism have provided us with values and philosophies that have much to contribute to city ministers and how we think about the places which God has given us for our work. Look for some emerging voices with some provoking theological and practical concepts in our next edition. Remember to contact CityVoices for the very best in resources for city ministry. “Transforming Power” by Robert Linthicum ($14), and “A Biblical Word for an Urban World” ($10) by Ray Bakke can be purchased by calling CityVoices at (312) 726-1200. Also contact us to purchase Mike Snow’s very helpful piece, “Transition in Ministry in Declining Congregations.” It also sells for $10. Please browse through the Bookstore section of the CityVoices website (www.cityvoices.com) for a complete listing of all available resources. Thank You! |
Return to the Newsletter Index Page
Return to the CityVoices Home Page
Copyright 2004 CityVoices, Chicago, Illinois