Every thing that has breath

Every thing that has breath.
That’s the first part of the last sentence of the last (150th) Psalm: “Let every thing that has breath praise the Lord.” It’s one of the prayers/mantras I use as I run or bike on the lakefront. After the lung-heaving sputtering that marks the first mile or so of my exercise, I eventually settle into a rhythm, and this little sentence marks the miles.

People ask me all the time: how do you learn to pray? There are all kinds of ways to be in conversation or communion with God (that’s the heart of prayer), and one way is simply to be aware of your breath. That may sound “too easy to be real prayer” (as one friend told me), but whether you’re exercising or just sitting on the couch, paying attention to your breath is a way of clearing space for God in the midst of a frenetic, over-scheduled life. Just the sound of your own breathing will work, or you can add in a little thought or spoken fragment (the Psalms have lots to offer if you’re not feeling creative).
 
And as for whether this kind of praying is “real” or not, well, that God created us by breathing God’s own breath into our bodies (Genesis 2.6-7) and that Jesus gave the disciples the Holy Spirit by breathing on them (John 20.21-22) is good enough for me.

In peace, Trey

P.S. After reading this note, a friend sent me a link to video above, which he calls “oddly beautiful.” I definitely agree.

P.P.S. Join Urban Village Church this Sunday as we communally try breath prayer and BIKE TO WORSHIP!

Urban Village video

Check out this little film about our emerging congregation.

What are you living for?

The Talmud — an ancient collection of Jewish conversations on religious law, customs, and ethics — contains this admonition: One will have to give account in the judgment day of every good thing which one might have enjoyed and did not.

If you left your house at all yesterday, you probably saw some people walking around with charcoal smudges on their foreheads. Many (but not all) Christians were observing Ash Wednesday, the beginning of a season of rigorous self-examination and spiritual honesty called Lent. The dirt smudge is actually a little cross of ashes: a reminder that we are finite, that each of us has only a short stretch of time on this good earth, and that we should therefore live it well.
 
Any legit journey of faith involves internal house-cleaning. We must find the courage to look in the mirror and ask: how am I doing, really? What have I made a mess of? What am I living *for*? Some theologies (and not only Christian ones) unfortunately underscore this house-cleaning with the worn “religious” script that human beings are pitiful, desperate worms, and that there’s nothing good in us, nothing worth using.
 
We don’t believe that at Urban Village Church. We trust that under and in all our stuff there’s a deeper truth: that humanity is created in the image of God. The goal of faith is the renewal and restoration of that image. The house is not only cleaned, but rearranged — there may even be some unexpected but fabulous new furniture.
 
Part of any Christian journey involves being honest about our brokenness and trying to let it go, trusting God to remove it. But another part is, as the Talmud says, an accounting for the full, good life we have been offered and so far have neglected to accept. And a decision to say yes to it. In the process (most of the time a slow process, if we’re honest), we receive a new way of living — one that is more bold, more joyful, more peaceful, and more interesting that we ever fathomed. This, we believe, is the life God’s calling us to in every season.
 
Peace,
Trey
trey@urbanvillagechurch.org

Marked

We went to my daughter’s school on Tuesday night for a Fat Tuesday celebration and, of course, when you gather lots and lots of kids in a gymnasium with pizza, sweets, and a D.J., it’s a jolt to your senses (at least to my 42-year-old senses). One of the highlights for our kids–as it often is at an event like this–was getting their faces painted. I was grumbling a bit because the line was long and the artists seemed to be taking their sweet time about it, but I must say that these were some pretty cool designs. Caroline had a kind-of Mardi Gras design and Ethan had a dragon on his face. There was no way they wanted to wash these marks off when we got home so they slept on towels over their pillows that night. Ethan was a particularly careful sleeper, I think, and may have slept on his back the whole night.

Yesterday hundreds of people were walking around downtown with a different design on their faces, or, specifically, their foreheads. Ash Wednesday. Many people heard the sobering yet important words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I was marked with my ash cross over the noon hour and received a few double takes, including a woman on the L who asked about it.

The kids on Tuesday night and the many yesterday were all marked for different reasons and the passage I was reading this morning really jumped out at me as a great text to relate to these marks. Romans 12:9-21 is often entitled “Marks of the True Christian” and it’s a powerful list of entreaties written by a man named Paul. Depending on how you break them up, there are 25 or so ways to measure whether we have these marks. Let love be genuine. Do not lag in zeal. Be patient in suffering. Persevere in prayer. I think I may use this as a key text during these next 40-plus days of Lent as I wonder about the marks in/on my heart and whether people can see them as easily as a dragon or an ash cross.

Saying yes again and again

The first time I went into their home, I immediately noticed the pictures on the wall next to the staircase. I had been invited over to have some coffee with some new acquaintances and there on the wall leading upstairs were a series of pictures. They were all of the couple, but you could tell that in each picture they were each changing ever so slightly. I asked them about it and they told me that every year on their anniversary, they renew their wedding vows and they take a picture to commemorate it. I kind of liked that sense not just of commitment, but also of recommitment.

It’s a big decision to commit to someone or something, but it’s an even bigger decision to make that conscious commitment day after day after day, whether you give yourself to another person or a job or a personal goal. Or God.

There are lots of stories in the Bible where God asks for a commitment from a person or a group of people and there are just as many stories in the Bible of these same people who either flee from this commitment or who simply say, no thanks. It’s not always an easy thing to say yes to God because usually that means our lives change. I believe they change for the better, but, still, they do change.

I also believe that God asks all of us for some kind of commitment. Sometimes we name that a “call,” either to a vocation (everything from a teacher to a small-business owner) or an action (maybe raising money for Haiti or working to reform our country’s immigration policies). But I do believe that the request is made and it’s always a request that’s based in God’s deep and abiding love for each of us.

It can be a scary thing to say yes to God’s call. But once we do, it helps to say yes each day, even on the days when our heart’s not in it. God’s heart can make up for the rest.

The Holy El

Some of the holiest moments for me happen on Chicago El trains–maybe because trains are among the few places that I can’t connect to my voicemail or email, and so I’m forced to pay attention to something besides what’s coming across my Facebook newsfeed.
 
Most of the time the experiences are little things. I notice the way a man is holding his face in his hands and I wonder what’s going in his life and I feel a discernible nudge to say a silent prayer for him. Or I laugh out loud at a paragraph in a David Sedaris essay and someone asks me, with a smile, “what are you reading?” and we have a short conversation. Or I’m sitting in an extremely smelly seat, it’s wet and moldy and close, the guy next to me is eating a salmon and onion bagel, it’s very uncomfortable, but an old woman opens her purse, takes out a bottle of lotion, and rubs it into her tired hands and in so doing fills the space with a wonderful lavender scent. And I say: thank you God.
 
Sometimes the experiences render me speechless and make me think differently about ministry. Like the time, a couple summers ago, I was sitting in the catacombs of the city, waiting on the redline train downtown. I’d finished my first meeting of the morning and was on my way north for my next one, and I sat there forever, on a bench in the hot tunnel, waiting, and a man walked down the stairs, disheveled, a few plastic bags on his arms, and I heard him say to himself, It’s so hot down here.  Why is it so hot down here?  He was walking down the tunnel, and I was praying: please, please, please don’t sit by me.  I don’t want to talk. And of course he sits by me, and says hello.  I say hello. He says: Are you on your way to work or on your way home from work already?  I said, I’m actually between things right now, and he says, almost relieved, Oh, me too, me too. It’s so hard, isn’t it?  I mean, sometimes I deliver pizzas in Rogers Park for some money, but I don’t have work now either.  If you want, he said, I could put in a good word for you at the pizza place…maybe they need someone else.
 
That was a holy moment of an entirely different order, when Jesus was talking right to me, out of his poverty, seeing me as a fellow human being and actually caring about how it was going for me.
 
We all have our shadow sides, and part of mine is that I can live too much inside my own head. I dwell there and worry there and try to fix everything there. But when I can get outside of myself, or better put, when something else gets me outside of myself, I am every so often met with something better than I could ever expect or imagine or manage: the extraordinarily ordinary presence of God. And that presence makes my life so, so much better.
 
Peace,
Trey
trey@urbanvillagechurch.org

Fully human life

It’s hard to believe that Christmas is over. Just yesterday, it seems, we were opening gifts and drinking eggnog and cooing at the baby Jesus.  How cute he looks in diapers and all. One of the inevitable practices of my family’s holiday tradition is retelling the embarrassing stories from me and my sister’s childhood. “Remember that time?” my mother will start, and I roll my eyes but eventually join in the laughter at how simultaneously cute, uncoordinated, and ridiculous I apparently was (there are videos to prove at least the last two of those things).
 
I wish there were more stories about Jesus’s childhood in the Bible. I’ve always wondered: did he cry for his mom or his dad when he was scared of the dark, was he better at spelling or soccer, who was his first crush? I’d love to know because I wonder what experiences helped to make him the adult that he became: a fully human being who lived life with great courage and rigorous honesty and audacious love. A teacher who not only taught lessons but lived them out in ways that made people think, “Hmm. Maybe this is how life really is, or could be.”  A true friend who helped people trade in obsession and moralizing for freedom and joy.
 
So we don’t know what he wore to his middle-school dance, but we do know that when he grew up, he invited us to grow up, too. To begin again or for the very first time the journey of real life, a “way” that holds together deep self-awareness with genuine care for others — and all of it undergirded by the unbelievable love of God and a community of people who are committed to it right alongside you.
 
It’s a New Year. It’s a new day. Welcome to the journey of becoming fully human, or to another leg of the journey, at least. Who knows what you’ll pick up along the way, and what you’ll throw out. Discovering that is part of the fun.
 
Peace,
Trey
trey@urbanvillagechurch.org

Mothers and fathers of God

I’m writing this on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and reflecting upon how different Christmas must feel for those who are unemployed, cold, anxious, or far from home. I remember a quote from the thirteenth century mystic, Meister Eckhart: “Let us all become mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”

Beyond the intoxicating consumerism and sentimentality that work on us constantly in this season, I believe that deep down we love and truly need Christmas because the stories, odd as they are, stir up in us some profound hope that we hadn’t known was there. Hope for a world where “imperfect” families are fully included in the community. Hope for a world where the air is not polluted and we can actually see the angels above and the star in the sky that the wise men were following. Hope for a world where good news, not dread, is the message and the measure of society.

I think we need Christmas because its stories are some of the most vocational in the Bible. If we really listen to them, we realize that it’s not just Mary and Joseph, or the shepherds, or the wise men, who are being asked to do something.  It’s us, too.  We’re being asked. 

I love a candle-lit Christmas Eve with carols–to the extent that candles and carols are more than “pretty” or “elegant” or “sweet”.  To the extent that they shine light on the manger and the world Christ was born to change, to the extent that they call up in us some desire to act and live differently for the sake of this broken and beautiful world, to the extent that we are convinced that we can be “mothers and fathers of God,” I say, well, then, let’s light a candle and sing some songs. 

Wherever you will be this year, Merry Christmas to you, to those you love, and to those you’re trying to love, even when it’s difficult. 

Peace on earth.

trey@urbanvillagechurch.org

Grabbing the baby Jesus

I went to my son’s preschool Christmas program this morning at Old St. Mary Church on south Michigan avenue.  He was very excited to have us see him in his elf costume, but the real excitement came from a little boy who was probably about 3 years old.  My wife and I were chatting with another parent waiting for the program to start when this boy came sprinting down the aisle of the sanctuary.  He had his eyes and feet focused on the little barn that was constructed in the front of the church.  More specifically, he was dying to get to the baby Jesus.  He grabbed the doll and started looking at him and about ten seconds later the boy’s mom grabbed him and whisked him away.

We’re told to wait during the Advent season.  Children are told to wait as they count down the days until Christmas.  Adults are told to wait and use this period of waiting as a time for spiritual growth and reflection.  But we don’t often hear how we are supposed to wait.  I don’t think it’s a passive waiting, but an eager one, like a boy who simply cannot control himself because of his desire to see the baby Jesus.

Faith in God through the living Christ enables us to engage in active waiting and anticipation.  Something sacred and abundant is always in our midst because God is faithful and has surprises and adventures in store for us every day.  Let us then throw off the covers in the morning and, like this little boy, run into the day actively waiting and watching to see where Jesus might be.

Peace, Chris

Thanksgiving for every wrong move

In guitar lessons this year, I learned a song called “Thanksgiving” by the Chicago band Poi Dog Pondering. It’s got a great melody and it’s fun to play, but its words are what made me fall in love with the song. Reflecting on a life that has twisted and turned from the planned path, the writer gives thanks for the experiences of pain and trouble that have brought him to where he is today. “Thanksgiving for every wrong move: that made it right,” he sings. (You can listen to the song here).

Everybody’s different, but sometimes I can get fixated on and overwhelmed by the various and plentiful missteps I’ve taken in the past (and the present). Or—the other end of the emotional spectrum—I can self-deceive and cover them over, thinking, “actually, I’m not to blame at all.”  This song refuses to inhabit either extreme; instead, it stays attentive to the truth that our humanity is a mysterious thing: full of both beauty and shadow. And the way to more authentic life is neither by dramatically or fearfully wallowing in our imperfections nor by tricking ourselves into believing that we are always right, but by coming to believe that God is moving in the midst of wherever we are. Right moves, wrong moves, God takes them all and is working to bring good out of them. To that God, and for this opportunity to live life with joy and freedom, I say: thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I hope that whether you’re eating dinner with family and friends, at the Subway or KFC, or alone in front of your television, you’ll be able to give thanks with a truly grateful heart for the life that is yours.

Trey Hall