Nightshift

I mostly worked nights when I was a hospital nurse - 7pm-7am.  This worked well for me barring the sleep confusion. I liked the quiet. It was just a skeleton crew of staff. I'd get my shift change report and get moving. There was the occasional nurse's report that included something like, "This family is really difficult." These words meant it was going to be a good night. Truly.

When those words were said to me, I added more sentences in my head.  Something to the effect of, "Of course they're difficult, their kid is really sick."  And I knew that at some point in the night, when things were quiet, that the parents and I would end up talking.

I later learned in pastor school about Martin Luther's "dark night of the soul." A middle of the night time filled with despair, anxiety, and fear so thick you taste it. I thought about those parents on my nightshifts. The Germanwings crash seems to have kick-started these memories. As a parent of teenagers, those high school friends who were murdered by plane crash and their parents' grief are haunting. As a Jesus person entering Holy Week, the week before Easter, all that makes sense to me in the face of their deaths is the cross.

For me, the cross isn't so much a way of living as it is a way to describe how I experience life. There are dark nights of the soul and the cross holds the weight of them because it is not falsely optimistic about my own pain or anyone else's. My lack of actual control over much of anything somehow finds space to grieve and to rest. Defiant alleluias will come with Easter. Today I'm letting the cross name the pain.

"How did you make the switch?"

"How did you make that switch from nursing into being a pastor?"  This is a question that I get a lot.  I've answered it twice in the last four days.  Once for a young man I've known for a few years and once for someone I just met yesterday at a party (yup, party talk).

The short answer is that I married a Lutheran.  At the time, I had no idea what 'Lutheran' meant.  Now, of course, I see it for its quiet subversion as one expression of a 2,000 year old story.

A cool part of being asked the question is that I usually get snippets of someone else's story.  The young man who asked it gave me bits of his story as we talked.  Things I wouldn't know otherwise across our almost 20 year age difference.

My bio is elsewhere so I'll spare you the details here (caitlintrussell.org).  Suffice it to say for now that having a religious commitment that pushes in on me from the outside is a good thing.  But first, before that push, there was and continues to be space.  Space to acknowledge flaws and fatigue as well as gifts.  Space to wonder, think, and doubt.  Space to know, experience, and learn.  Space to drop into the 2,000 year old story and figure out my part in it.

When I made the switch from nurse to pastor, my brother started calling me a "nurse of the soul."  My own soul needed some serious healing well before that switch was flipped.  Those are stories for a different day.

Writing mojo, blogs, and paradox

I read blogs.  I don't follow them religiously but drift over to them to check out what some of my favorite thinkers are thinking.  I've been thinking about my own blog and wondering about the things I think.  This blog has seen some spotty authorship from me at best.  Partly because a lot of my writing mojo is poured into sermons that are posted elsewhere.

I'm also biased toward in-person conversation, literally bodies hanging out together.  Talking while working together, playing together, making the world better together.  You get the idea.  Occasionally I'll sit with someone or a few someones and one of them will ask why I don't blog.  I point at them and at me and say, "This, this is what I do, I'm an in-person kind of person."  That makes the blog world trickier.  But I also like the bigger conversation of the blogosphere - getting to be in a conversation with people that I don't get to meet in the general flow of life.  In-person is cool and being connected into a larger conversation is cool.  Let it be known, paradoxes are also among my favorite things - two things that get to be true at the same time.

  

Rick Warren's son...

My heart broke this week for Rick Warren, his son, and his family on hearing the news of his son's suicide. Rick Warren is well-known in Christian churches as a pastor and writer.  One of my fellow seminarians is a pastor in her native Appalachia.  Her thoughts offered to the Warren family from her own experience of depression are heartfelt and powerful.  I offer them to you by way of her open letter.

http://appalachianpreacher.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/an-open-letter-to-rick-warren-and-all-parents-who-have-lost-a-child-to-suicide/

Peace,
Caitlin

Ordination, an invitation

It's finally happening!  Augustana Lutheran Church in Denver is calling me as one of their pastors.  If you are looking for the party place on Saturday evening, February 2nd, my ordination is an option.

Ordination details
Saturday, February 2nd at 5:30pm
Augustana Lutheran Church
5000 East Alameda Avenue, Denver

Light refreshments will follow the service.

Rostered Church Leaders, Clergy, and those who have prepared for ministry and are awaiting call are invited to vest, process and be a part of the laying on of hands.  Stole color is red.

The color of ordination is red to symbolize the Holy Spirit who is in charge of ordination.  You are all welcome to wear red if you have any and you like to wear it.  Of course, all colors are welcome!!!  :)  I just want to give you a heads up in case you show up and wonder why red seems to be abounding on people and in the sanctuary.
 

"Do you have any pastoral words...

...to help in this tragic time of ct?"  This question came to me via text the Friday afternoon of the killings in Newtown.  My heart, already broken open, dropped into my feet.

The texter went on to say,
"It's so hard to comprehend.  I'm trying to focus on the majority of love and good in our world." 

My answer?
"That is a good place to focus.  Any words of explanation are insufficient for the loss of life and the loss of innocence for those who survived and those grieving.  I just know that, for me, believing in a God who died on a cross gives me hope that God is there.  Where else would God be but with those who are suffering and dying at the hands of an evil act?  At the end of the day, the "why" question is unanswerable.  So we are left with turning to each other with love and hanging on...because, as you say, love is still out there too."

Insufficient?  Absolutely.  Honest?  Yes.  Pastoral?  Don't know.

I simply know that God's presence, God's power, baby-sized into skin and solidarity among us, is the hope I defiantly celebrate during these 12 days of Christmas.

Disagree in Love [or, 'Oh that beloved Vincent Harding']

One of my professors during my time at seminary is a man named Vincent Harding.  He was a colleague to Martin Luther King Jr., occasionally his speech writer, and also his friend.  When my fellow students and I talk about Dr. Harding, it has that slightly whispered quality of reverence and maybe a little sigh thrown in for good measure.  I was sitting in a class taught by someone else who brought in a few other professors including Dr. Harding.  They sat up front, panel-style, and were asked questions – proceeding to answer them in ways that revealed obvious areas of agreement and also exposed the fault lines among them.  At one point, Dr. Harding turned to one of his colleagues, spoke the professor's name in his usual quiet way, softness around a steel core, and said, “I’m going to disagree with you in love..."  

"I’m going to disagree with you in love.”  Who says stuff like that?!  Who even stops to think it before they dive into a disagreement?!  

As we move towards November, we could use a little more of Dr. Harding's disagreement in love - not as a way to avoid conflict or to give each other an artificially cheerful thumbs up that keeps a superficial peace.  This disagreement in love takes us more deeply into the disagreement and possibly through it.