"The Deep Breath Before the Plunge"

As many of you have likely noticed, cool temperatures and rain have arrived just in time for the start of the Fall semester of school. I've always loved this time of year; the outdoor energy of summer sunshine is redirected to the activities of the Fall, like planning for the new school year, getting ready for indoor sports, and taking out warmer clothes. Cooler weather drives us indoors more of the time, and that opportunity allows for less running around being busy with either work or holidays, and instead invites more reflection, more thought, and maybe more prayer.

This is my last day on campus before new student orientation on Thursday. In the 2^nd installment of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the Wizard Gandalf is standing with his frightened hobbit friend Pippin before the beginning of a great battle. Gandalf says to Pippin about the quiet before the war breaks out, “It’s the deep breath before the plunge”. And that is certainly where I am situated right now, taking a deep breath before the plunge of thousands of students and the energy of a new semester crashes into the campus in the coming weeks.

I really have little idea of what it will all look like. Of course I have a general sense of direction and purpose on campus, but there are unknown faces, unknown stories, unknown adventures that all await me and which I also know nothing about. It is both thrilling and slightly nerve-racking.

But standing before the possibility of the “new” is the continuing task of the Christian. Who knows how God will show up? We can trust that God will appear in the likeness of Christ through the Holy Spirit, and that gives us a clear guidance of what to watch out for. But at the same time, when Christ was on earth, he unsettled what we think about “God”; so I think we should continue to expect that. Christ doesn't close things down, he opens things up – new possibilities for life, love, and joy.

So it truly is a “deep breath before the plunge” on this cold, rainy day at Kwantlen. And the plunge into God’s future, as usual, is filled with the excitement and thrill of encountering Christ in the unexpected openness of new relationships, new stories, and the “new” in itself. For Christ himself is “the new”. 

Christian Companionship

Starting my job as a Christian Chaplain at Kwantlen has meant that I am now joining a tradition of Christian Reformed Chaplaincy, one that is respected and appreciated in University settings across the continent. This tradition continues to be rich and interesting, and there are currently many other campus chaplains scattered in those universities, chaplains who have now become colleagues, companions, and friends in this exciting job of being a Christian presence in a centre of learning.

Today I met one of these colleagues of mine over the phone. The beginning of this job has brought with it many challenges, some of which were expected and some of which were not. I was in need of someone to share these struggles with and so was truly blessed by the 30 minutes of conversation I had with someone who I now call a colleague, friend, and mentor. I was able to describe and “unload” the stories and challenges that have arisen in this first summer of chaplaincy; a listening ear, some words of wisdom, and some encouragement for the future were all occasions for this new friend to be the presence of Christ to me. It was a simple conversation, yet full of the significance that comes through Christian companionship.

Christian companionship is significant. We dare not neglect it, I think, or we run the risks of isolation, self-sufficiency, or even despair. Becoming who we are in Christ involves a community, involves relationship with others. I have been gifted with many rich Christian communities: family, schools, universities, and churches. Now I get to experience a new dimension of Christian community, the companionship of co-workers in a similar career, wrestling with and enjoying different yet similar situations.

This is certainly not limited to those positions more formally known as “ministry”. To be a follower of Jesus is to be in “the ministry”, no matter what your career calling. In every moment we are called to witness to our faith. So this collegiality I experienced today is not confined to “chaplains”; we are all co-workers in Christ and so we can all find ways to allow our work to be “ministry” and then find ways to connect with each other for prayer, encouragement, and shared hope.  If we ignore this sense of Christian companionship in our careers and lives, we miss out on a vital dimension of the Christian life. Jesus has summoned us into relationship with each other, a relationship that does not neglect any area of our lives, careers, family, or anything else. Encouragement and companionship is needed in all of these dimensions. “Therefore, encourage one another and build each other up, as indeed you are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). 

Dirty Dishes

I'm in a messy office today! Some students stopped by for the weekly Multi-Faith Centre tea-time I've been hosting through the summer, and so I stacked the coffee table with cookies, kettles, tea-pots, mugs, lemonade, all sort of social, summery goodies. The conversation was relaxed and enjoyable; the result was a pleasant few hours and some dirty dishes.

Some dish-washing is a pretty small price to pay for the chance to build relationships. In fact, dish-washing is often a hugely beneficial thing for community building. After a meal and conversation, the menial task of washing up can become the place where a common task becomes a common source of friendship, openness, sharing, and love. This is so crucially important for what it means to be a community, to develop love over common objects, common tasks, a common vision for our community and our world. For the Church, the common object, task, and vision are all summed up in Jesus Christ, in his life and person. We look to the one who brought healing and comfort, love and justice. He is the one whom we love (the object), he shows us the tasks to act out in love (the task), and he reveals to us a future for a world held in the love of the Father (the vision).

Of course, dirty dishes are not the only common task the community of the church is called to. We are summoned to a common task of confession to and forgiveness of each other. The church is filled with much more than dirty dishes; we all carry personal problems, we all find ourselves frustrated with difficult personalities, we struggle with negotiating the different goals we each hold for the direction of our Christian community. “Doing the dishes” might not be such an easy thing; we need to bring to the surface the dirty, difficult, uncomfortable, and challenging things that we would rather avoid.

Can the church dare to be a place where that sort of honesty and vulnerability takes place? Can we bring all the problems we would rather keep hidden out into the open air of confession, of mourning, of lament, trusting and hoping that doing so guides us towards a common object of love? It is difficult, it is hard, it may be unsettling.

But the presence of the Holy Spirit urging us on in our communal imitation and love of Christ will aid and comfort us in the task. And our hope in Christ is that all of the churches tasks, from the pursuit of justice, to the confession of sin, to the washing of dishes, may be occasions for God’s presence to break into our world in fresh, new, and sparklingly clean ways. 

The Quiet of the University

Since I stepped into the Multi-Faith Centre office a few hours ago I haven’t heard or seen a single person. The quiet of the summer semester is particularly evident on the top floor of a corner building on campus (where the MFC office is).

I’ve written about this in previous posts, but I can’t help returning to it: the summer quiet of a university. It feels very fitting, very in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. Right now the weather is warm, the sky is clear, and most students and faculty are doing all manner of summer activities: leading summer camps, enjoying creation, gardening, working outdoors, or anything else that beckons the human spirit outside its usual walls and into creation where the ceiling is the sky and the walls are oceans. The hard work of thinking and school can be rightly put on the backburner for these months.

And yet, the university remains. Libraries are shelved with books, classrooms stocked with desks, chairs, and blackboards. The task of learning and exploring through the life of the mind still invites us, even though it rightly releases us into the summer joys of a different sort. The fall will soon be here, the hallways filled, library carrels occupied.

I, admittedly, am a lover of school. The quiet waiting of the university intrigues and excites me. When the temperature cools and the rain (hopefully!) returns, the task of learning is always eager to open itself up to the human spirit which returns to books and lectures with new experiences to reflect upon. It’s sort of a natural progression of exploration and reflection; we go “out” to gather experiences, to test our learning in concrete realities, and then return “in” with fresh material of life to reflect upon.

As I enjoy the quiet of these summer semester hallways, though, I am reminded of both my own desire to invest my life in the “inward” movement, but also how these two movements of exploration and reflection bleed into one another and are not so easily isolated from each other. We gather experiences in the process of reflection, and we reflect in the process of having experiences.

So for that I treasure the university, not only for its ability to reflect on experiences but also how it provides its own experiences. The university is not just an “escape” from reality, it is its own reality, with its own rhythm of experience and reflection.

In some ways this mirrors the rhythm of the Christian life; prayer and worship leads to action and service and back again. However, here, too, the boundaries are not so neatly defined. Paul encourages believers to “pray without ceasing,” indicating the fluid nature of departure and return; prayer is an act of service, and service is a form of prayer. We ought not abandon either concrete practice, but realize that the Christian journey is one movement with different emphases at different moments of life. We are on one continuous journey of conversion, a conversion of our desire away from idols and towards the living God made know in Christ. 

Unceded Territory

Today I had the chance to give an interview with Kwantlen’s student newspaper, “The Runner”. The inside front page offers a short description on their name:

“The Runner recognizes that our work, both in and out of the office, takes place on unceded Coast and Strait Salish territories, specifically the shared traditional territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, Semiahmoo, Sto:lo and Tsawwassen First Nations. Our name is inspired by the hun’qumi’num meaning of Kwantlen, which is tireless hunters or tireless runners. Just as Kwantlen is adaptable and changing so is The Runner.”

“Unceded” means that no formal treaty has been signed, no agreement has been reached between the First and Second nations occupying the same land. We ought to remain attentive to this; Christianity was deeply implicated in colonial expansion which sometimes took an aggressive form. This doesn’t mean we should feel unbearable shame and romanticize about North America free from the infiltration of Christian or colonial influence. But we do need to confess our implication in what was and still is a painful journey for First Nation’s people across the continent.

I feel a bit like a “runner” right now myself (though I can’t really claim to be “tireless”). This interview with the student newspaper is another attempt at reaching out (“running” into) to this university community, spreading awareness about the Multi-Faith Centre and my Christian chaplaincy working out of it. These attempts have been rather scattered and seemingly unrelated: coffees and lunches with staff and students, l meetings with Multi-Faith centre staff, some regular conversations with particular students, a bit of low-key programming (a weekly ‘tea-time’ at the Multi-Faith Centre office). Right now I can’t really see a deep connection or continuity between my efforts; they are rather scattered, which makes the ‘running around’ metaphor an appropriate one.

I acknowledge, though, that I am on unceded territory, both in an official sense regarding our First Nation’s communities, but also in a broader sense of trying to set up camp in a somewhat foreign territory. The aggression of some colonialism is not to be recommended on this score. I am tentatively trying to set up a temporary shelter, a spiritual oasis where I can receive and welcome travelers with the hospitality of Jesus. “I am not of this World,” Jesus said (John 8:23). In acknowledging our pilgrim journey through our lives we realize that absolute comfort and homecoming is not for us to establish in the World, in separation from God. Instead, we make our home in Christ himself. By doing so, we are invited to care for people, the land, creation itself in a way that offers a place of rest and sanctuary that is real, but not of the world; it is of God. It points to the end of all creation making its home in God and God in it, resting in the divine nature and freed from “the world”, freed from separation from God.

In that sense, as Christians we are runners, “running the race, pressing on towards the goal” as Paul put it. I will keep ‘running’ around on this ‘unceded’ territory, as a stranger in the world, attempting to offer hospitality and rest in Christ, who is not of the world either. I won’t do it perfectly. Sometimes this ‘unceded territory’ will be a place where I regretfully push my own agenda and try to set up a firm foundation on my own. But by being attentive to the pilgrim life of Jesus we can be drawn back into a journey that calls us to hospitality and peace against a world that all too often interprets ‘unceded’ as ‘empty for domination’. In opposition to this, we as Christ’s follows must reverse this interpretation, and instead offer ourselves to God’s service. 

Small Fry

The summer semester on Kwantlen’s Surrey campus has been quiet, but has generally had a bit of a buzz of students and staff making their way through their various tasks. Today for some reason, though, the campus has seemed utterly empty. A student who stopped by said that his class which is usually 15 people had dropped to just 3.

This was my first week of hosting a Multi-Faith Centre Summer tea time that has been advertised around campus. I took time to set up the office with little trays of treats and candy, with mugs and water for tea or lemonade. Such a set up in the quiet Multi-Faith office up in a top corner of a building felt a little small, a little unnoticed. I was hoping for a some student traffic and energy, hoping that some of the advertisements had been noticed and a new student or two might show up. 

That wasn't the case, though. Instead I had the privilege of sharing a simple conversation with a student who I have enjoyed getting to know quite frequently. Instead of being blessed with the new, I was blessed with continuity, a deepening of an already established relationship.

Though I don’t always sense it, I do trust that slow and continuous deepening of relationships always carries within itself the possibility of energy and excitement. In fact, with our limited perspectives we often simply can’t see what sort of “newness” might emerge from attending to the continuities that we inhabit through pattern, routine, and comfort.

There was no fanfare around my little tea-time event. Most of the cookies remained uneaten, the lemonade untouched. No one will write about it in the school newspaper next week. But the chance to sit and talk with a friend in a quiet corner of this campus is evidence enough of God’s sustaining energy. I trust that with faithfulness and attentiveness, God can bring to life a new energy out of very small pieces of old stability.

John 5: 5-13

⁵ Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” ⁶ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. ⁷ Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii^[a] worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” ⁸ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, ⁹ “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” 

¹⁰ Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. ¹¹ Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. ¹² And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.”¹³ So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten.

Contemplative Emailing

I never thought or anticipated that this job would involve so much emailing! But email, I suppose, is basically the preferred method of communication these days; whether it’s students on campus, colleagues at the church, or former professors, the primary way I get in touch with them, near or far, is through the tap-tap of a keyboard which magically produces words on a screen and instantly sends them firing through microfibre cables to their intended destination. And as I continue to establish connections with a variety of people on campus, it is an important and useful tool. 

We should be cautious, though, about email and electronic connections. I don’t want to necessarily ultimately condemn or condone simply making use of them; what we need to be attentive to is what kind of mind, body, and spirit they are shaping in us the more we make use of them.

Email is fast. Email is convenient. Email is efficient. Speed, convenience, efficiency – these can be and often are all good things. But they are good things in moderation. They are good things if we don’t let them dictate every part of our life. However, it is fairly easy for them do just that; we might subtly and without noticing it look for fast and efficient meals, fast and efficient conversations, fast and efficient reading, meetings, church services, etc...

But my conviction is that we are not only created for speed. We are created for silence, stillness, and slowness, created to be attentive to things, places, and people that can easily get caught up in the flow of a fast-paced, email-dictated day. God is always present, always available, always wanting deeper communion with us; but fast-paced technological lives can sometimes paradoxically make us fast asleep to God’s creative reality.

So maybe we need to effect a sort of reversal; instead of allowing an efficiency-based thing like email to dictate those parts of our lives that require more time, like food, friendship, and reading, maybe we can also let those slower activities affect the way we do our fast-paced activities. Instead of making dinner into an email event (quick, convenient, microwavable) we can make email in a dinner event (slow, careful, over-baked for a few hours).

Of course, I don’t mean to deprive us of the convenience and efficiency of email. This is an attitude change, not a literal change. Spending hours on a simple email might not (though it certainly may) be feasible or possible. But maybe it is possible that a slow, contemplative dimension can work its way into the seemingly most un-contemplative activity, like writing a short email and sending it off through the internet at the speed of light. If we take conscious-time to slow down, maybe for a few minutes at the beginning and end of the day, then that attentiveness to God’s presence in those few minutes can open us up to God’s presence in those emailing-type activities that can threaten to dominate our outlook on life. 

And if we do that, then we are truly following Jesus, who not only embodied God everywhere but saw God everywhere; “Consider the lilies of the field…”