I’m growing in my appreciation for poetry. Maybe it’s living long enough to see the beauty that’s in the world when I leave the security of the logical left-side of my brain to explore words, images and notions with the intuitive, creative side of my brain where poetry has a place along with the ephemeral glimpses of life that are easily overlooked and lost.

A while back, while reading from the monthly newsletter of the Alliance of Baptists, I paid close attention to the story of Dorothy Barr, a load-bearing member of the Alliance who had lived her life in pursuit of her calling as a minister. After finally reaching her goal of being a woman in ministry, she had a near-fatal car crash that altered the trajectory of her life so that active ministry was no longer possible. She was depressed because she had worked for years striving through male and congregational resistance, through the long years of study in seminary, until she had at last reached her goal. She was a woman in meaningful ministry in a place that made her happy and that was an adequate response to her calling by God.

After the wreck when she was going through rehabilitation, she not only had to deal with her broken body, she also had to deal with her broken spirit. It dawned on her in that challenging time she needed to quit feeling sorry for herself. In response to the questioner of how she changed her feeling of helplessness and grief over her ministry into a more peaceful way of living, she replied, “I had to learn to live into a new life.”

Maybe that’s the hope of Lent. Maybe that’s the sense of gratitude one can share with God that spills over into every fiber of being, even into those places where loss and grief dominate.

This week’s Christian Century has a poem worth sharing. As I said, I’m developing a taste for poetry intrigued by the ways the words and images can create a place of solitude where the soul can relax and be refreshed. I believe the poets have an artful gift to describe a world that most of us need … a desperate glimpse into the world beyond words.

Jeanne Murray Walker is an oft-published poet who lives in Minnesota. Here’s her poem, “Easter Week”:

Speaking of Houdini and escape,
of Spring, this Spring, there being
no General or Eternal Spring.

yesterday I saw a blue pickup
pull out from a stoplight with eight trees
swaying and gesturing, sentenced to a life

they never chose. We know the cruelty
of mathematics, the bottom line,
how it can cancel the exactitude of longing.

How bereavement can sound like
the plunking of a piano tuner through an open window,
notes trying to break free

but staked to the tonic scale like greyhounds
tethered to a doghouse
in the killing heat of summer.

As the truck accelerates, the wind
ruffles the trees’ feathers. They could be five year olds
in an Easter pagaent, trying to slough off wings

and other baggage. They are that filled with
the Holy Ghost. Oh, the beauty of green!
Oh the rumor of another life!

[From Christian Century 4/7/09, 34]

The first day of spring arrives this weekend and while we’re halfway through Lent, my thoughts have reached out to a favorite pastor-writer of mine, Forrester Church. Last year at this time, he resigned after 28 years from being the Senior Minister at the Unitarian Church of All Souls of New York because of the recurrence of his cancer. Now his title is Minister of Public Theology where he serves a place of honor in that good church.

Here’s a piece he wrote a few years back that’s included in his book of meditations, Everyday Miracles, Stories from Life, gathered from his long-standing column, “Fundamentals,” in the Chicago Tribune.

A Brush With Death - and Life

A couple of weeks ago, my children and I were almost killed crossing the street right in front of our apartment building. I was walking them to their last day of school. Three-quarters of the way across, with the light in our favor and all of us dutifully holding hands, a car burst out of nowhere, hurtling around the corner at breakneck speed, ricocheting off the curb, and swerving into our path.

I saw the driver clearly. We were so close we could have kissed. She was a beautiful woman with wild eyes. Missing us by inches, her car skidded, fishtailed back into control, and disappeared. I could barely breathe, my knees buckling, my heart beating like a pile driver. In stark contrast, my kids just laughed, romping blithely down the sidewalk, jumping from tree to tree as they always do, trying to touch the leaves.

Deeply shaken, not knowing what to think or say, I did the obvious thing. I got angry. Not at the driver, of course. She was gone. I vented my anger at the children. I decided to teach them a lesson they obviously had failed to learn from the experience.

“Never, never let your guard down when you’re crossing the street. Did you see that car? It almost hit us. It really did. We could have been killed.”

“Come off it, Dad,” my eight-year-old son replied nonchalantly, jumping a second time at a branch that had eluded him. By this time, my six-year-old daughter was skipping around the next corner and was almost out of sight.

That did it. I exploded. If they remember anything about our somber walk to school that morning, it is that their father sometimes, with the slightest provocation, lapses into fits of wild irrationality. And they were right. Neither of them was doing anything wrong. They were holding my hands, walking with the signal. I had no lesson to teach them.

Only this, perhaps: Our lives are beset with trapdoors. Whenever the ground seems more secure, someone out there has his hand on the lever. A massive coronary, an embolism, a drunk driver, a strung-out addict drawing a pound of flesh for an ounce of crack. When the trapdoor springs, we haven’t time for regrets or second chances, for anger or recrimination. It just happens. Swoosh. No good-byes.

I try to teach my children about life’s dangers. We all do. Look both ways. Wear white after dark. Don’t take candy from strangers. We answer their questions and dearly wish they’d ask us more. But put a mad driver behind the wheel and our lessons mean nothing.
Trapdoors have one saving grace: They add to our appeciation for life, even as they threaten to extinguish it. That very afternoon, walking my son and daughter home from school, they looked different to me, more vulnerable and precious. As we talked about their day at school and our summer plans, I loved them desperately.

It reminded me of something that I keep forgetting: Life is not a given, but a priceless gift. One day something will steal it from us, a seizure in the night or a driver in the morning, but that doesn’t diminish it’s value. On the contrary, fragility and impermanence ensure life’s preciousness. We can truly love only that which one day we must lose. It took a trapdoor trembling beneath my feet, and a crazed woman casting the shadow of death across my family’s path, to awaken me once again to the wonder of life and the blessings of love.

But that’s the way it is. Often, the most precious gifts come wrapped in odd packages. So odd, in fact, that if given a choice, almost certainly we would choose the wrong one. The one in fancy paper and topped with a bow. Never the one in brown paper wrapping tied with a string.

They didn’t know it, but my kids had the right idea. We had just escaped from a brush with death. Why didn’t I think to jump and touch the leaves?

[F. Forrester Church, Everyday Miracles, Stories From Life, New York: Harper and Row, 1988, 3-5]

The oldest newspaper in the great Northwest (and Seattle’s oldest business) rolled off the presses for the last time Monday night – meaning Tuesday’s paper will be a collector’s item for the future – the last print copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Hearst Corporation announced it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper. On Wednesday, over 100,000 subscribers walked out to their front lawns and discovered no paper in their yards. For newspaper junkies like me, the withdrawal would be tragic. I read both print and online versions of the news on most mornings and feel out of kilter if I don’t do it.

The Seattle paper, like other publishers who have done the same thing, will not go completely out of business, as it will continue as an online source for news, www.seattlepi.com. Not too long ago, the Kansas City Kansan did the same thing by ceasing its print version to go completely online. That’s happening more and more with the smaller news companies but the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the largest paper in the country to do so thus far. The bigger papers are all anticipating the need to make this same decision sooner rather than later as it’s becoming more difficult for papers to sustain their profitability with so many getting their news from an unbelievably wide range of other sources.

The Post-Intelligencer lost $14 million last year and efforts to find a buyer for the paper failed. The transition from print to online is tough as you might imagine. News reporters, editors and other staff have been in limbo for the last few months as the Hearst Corp. sought a buyer. Now, they’re facing layoffs with no other papers in the area to hire them.

Declining subscriptions are the culprit as more and more Americans go online for their news. Baptist papers are in a similar quandary. Bill Webb, editor of Missouri’s Word & Way, said in an email to EthicsDaily.com “Printed periodicals like newspapers are still preferred by a lot of people who weren’t necessarily born with a digital mouse in hand. Another generation can’t imagine why anyone would pay to receive a newspaper when the Internet offers almost immediate access to information for free.” Journalist Brian Kaylor calls this, “the digital divide.”

No question we’re in a transitional time for issues other than newspapers trying to survive in a soon-to-be outdated form of delivering the news. The church is also trying its best to make it through this time with the vibrancy we hope would mark the work of God in our time. In last week’s Wall Street Journal, it was reported what others have been noting that the number of Americans claiming no religion is on the rise, while religious attendance among persons 21 to 45 years old is at its lowest level in decades (citing data from Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow). The numbers of young adults who are noticeably staying away from the church marks the trend.

This is a topic that’s hard to wrap our minds around and to even talk honestly about. Why is it we graduate high school seniors every spring and send them off to college or the Armed forces or to trade schools and seldom ever see them again? They usually aren’t active in another church and would continue to call this, “my church,” but they aren’t actively participating in a church where they live, and worship is not a part of their typical week.

The question is obvious … will the traditional church die a slow death like the newspapers? What would an online church based on a model of Facebook look like? Would we call it a virtual church? Would you join a virtual community for the practice and nurture of your faith?

We need to rediscover that Christian community exists almost exclusively in the form of significant relationships with real people with whom we share the journey. We do that by venturing a risk with one another, meaning we value our relationships with one another as a form of need. We recognize we share the faith with one another every time we gather with our Bible study groups or whenever we gather together to worship or engage in missional living inspired by a passionate sense of calling. It seems these are rare gifts in the world of virtual relationships today. Those gifts are the gifts of a personal God who loves us deeply.

Some would suggest life is marked and measured almost entirely by the decisions we make. Every day offers countless decisions that must be made and even the most insignificant decisions go into the mix in forming the stuff of the larger ones. Conversely, the larger decisions then define what options exist to make up the smaller ones … and so on and so on and so on. Appropriately, the wizened old knight in the Temple of Doom would hold up a bony finger in this moment and whisper hoarsely, “Choose wisely.”

So we go through life making our decisions and making what peace we can with the results. My old psychology of religion professor would often say in class, “You pays your money, and takes your choice,” affirming that our ability to make a decision and live with what happens as a result of that decision is a defining characteristic of maturity and personal growth. So perhaps it could be said with profound apologies to Descartes, “I make decisions, therefore I am.”

But what of all those options we didn’t choose? What about the paths not taken?

For a brief time as a college student, I worked for the M.E. Moses Company, an old-time dime store chain in Texas. What would my life been like had I decided to become a dime store manager for the M.E. Moses Company? Looking back that would have been a short-lived career as dime stores have virtually disappeared.

Instead, I made a decision to go to college and worked all the way through school with a variety of part-time jobs. I shelved books in two university libraries. For a season I delivered mattresses for a mattress company. I drove a school bus for a local school district. I delivered tropical fish to stores like the M.E. Moses Company that sold them. I worked for the Corps of Engineers for a summer. I painted houses with another Baylor student for a couple of years and we even had our own business cards! I even worked at the only elementary school in the Waco Independent School District that had no bussing, as it was the only racially balanced school in the district. There I was the only man in the building other than the toothless old man who was the school custodian. While teaching second graders to read, I also served as the school bouncer breaking up fights in the cafeteria and handling the big boys in the sixth grade.

Get the picture? These were decisions about work that allowed me to make other foundational decisions that went into pushing me in a specific direction in life. All of those piddly jobs gave me important life experiences that contributed to my ability to know a wider world.

Some seemingly insignificant decisions we make fly under the radar and we don’t see them shaping and forming the future. At Baylor I decided to ask a girl out after she flirted with me by tickling me with her sock feet. I happened to be on a date with one of her girlfriends while we watched a movie as a group. There was not a second date with her friend; instead, I called this sock-footed girl the next week and we had our first date. Her name was Wanda and she was not five years old at the time, as some of you mistakenly believe.

The paths not taken can be another way to view life. Some psychologists have focused attention on this kind of reflection as a rich way of reflecting upon what we might call the unlived life. One can, however, be consumed with thoughts of “what if” as a form of regret. For some, they’re experienced in the form of a grief over a life that could have been lived but was not.

What paths have you taken that have surprised you at how important they were? Can you look over your shoulder and see the power of your choices?

One aspect we share as people of faith is the belief that we have a traveler with us who both cares about our choices and is with us to help make those decisions when they are made. The one with us is also with us when those choices don’t deliver us where we want to go. That’s the journey of faith …