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!

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

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

Be awake, my beating heart

At a retreat a few years ago, the leader told us a story about having to undergo unexpected surgery to have one of his heart valves replaced. He woke up in the hospital room and heard what he thought was construction work on the street outside, but slowly realized that the loud, rhythmic noise was the sound of his refashioned heart beating. The new valve had somehow amplified the churning of the blood and now the man could hear — and feel — the process that had been keeping him alive without his even thinking of it.

I’ve not had heart surgery (though my doctor reminds me that if I don’t lay off the butter, I will be a prime candidate at some point), but I know from my own journey that it is difficulty, even pain, that awakens me to the undeserved gift of life I’ve received and challenges me to do something with that gift. To make a difference with my life.

So, whether your days are filled with happiness or uncertainty or some mixture of the two, whatever kind of “surgery” you’re undergoing this season, take some time to listen (literally) to your life. I try to remember, in the mornings before I throw back the covers and grind the coffee beans and turn on the computer, to put my hand on my chest, to say thanks, and to remember that it’s today that I’m called to do something — not yesterday, not tomorrow — but today.

Trey Hall

The Things That Make For Church

One of the questions Chris and I get asked about Urban Village Church is “so where will this new church be?”

I totally understand the question: “location, location, location” is a strategic decision. But whenever I hear the question, I think of a congregation in Atlanta that I came to know during my seminary years. Oakhurst Church is an amazing, inclusive, growing church that ministers across all the human boundary lines, at the crossroads of where we live our lives.

The sign on the front of the church reads “Oakhurst Church *meets* here.” Not “Oakhurst Church” but “Oakhurst Church meets here.” I love that. The church hasn’t confused its community with its building. You can see the meeting-place, the building, any day of the week, but if you want to meet the church, you have to show up on Sunday. Oakhurst understands that what counts in faith community is life together, relationships formed with each other and with God — not so much the bricks and mortar.

Soon we will choose a place for Urban Village Church to worship on Sundays–it may be a theatre, an art gallery, an event space…who knows? But the church will also meet throughout the week in small groups–friends gathering to study a book at the coffee shop, or to listen to music over a picnic at Millenium Park, or to serve poorer sisters and brothers at a community meal. The call is to be, in the words of another faith community, “Monday-Saturday followers of Jesus who meet to worship on Sunday.” The goal is always to remember that what makes a church is the people.

Peace,
Trey

A Church Of Resident Aliens

When you’re planting a new church, you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the question: what is the church? Or more to the point: why is the church?

People from different “camps” answer the questions in different ways, but one of the best (and most provocative) reflections I’ve read is “Resident Aliens: Life in Christian Colony” by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. Their central claim is that the Church is not a national or “ethnic” or ideological community–not a sequestered group of settlers of any kind–but a community of resident aliens, of pilgrims on a journey. Church is a group movement of imaginative, risk-taking people called to stay flexible so that we can be responsive to the needs and visions of the communities we serve. (more…)