Prayer for the Fourth Week of Easter

God Almighty,

We are a broken people.
You alone can make us whole.

We are a scattered people.
Only you can bring us together again.

May our brokenness be used to further your kingdom
as we scatter to our jobs, our families and our friends
to share Christ with all.

We return to you a broken people made whole
through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We return to you a scattered people united as one body
through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen

The Angst of Grading and Joy of Graduation

Grading is hard.

It is tedious and boring. It is life sucking. You hold a semester’s worth of amazing lectures in one hand and hold a red pen in your other, feverishly grading and crossing and placing question marks, all the time wondering did they learn anything?

All I feel is angst at this time of year, over how it seems impossible to manage grading with a full-time job, over how I would rather be outside, over how I would rather be reading a book—any book!—that has seen the wonderful pen of an editor instead of the jumbled hash from students who simply refuse to proofread, let alone use spell check.

Then you get a paper from a student who really gets it and all the angst fades away.

I had a conversation this past Tuesday with a student I had two semesters ago. He was a young veteran back from one of our wars, and he wanted to help people as a counselor.

He got really far behind in his work, as I have come to find out many veterans do. The ambiguity of college life is hard for veterans from war zones who live under the strictest and most regimented conditions to get used to. A college professor who accepts work late for a small deduction is not nearly as threatening as bullets or a commanding officer screaming at you.

Yet he persevered and made a mad rush to get his work done. He passed.

As we caught up before my class I asked him if he had applied to graduate school. We took the same subway after class, so we had discussed how he wanted to go to grad school for a Masters in Social Work (I told him I thought he was intelligent enough to get in, but first he had to turn his work in!). A grin came over his face. He told me he had applied to Fordham and NYU, and to his surprise he had gotten into both! I was shocked, but not surprised. He deserved it, and I am sure he will excel.

I am drowning in papers right now, but I keep thinking about how well this student did, the joy of graduation, and how it really is worth it to be a teacher.

A Christian Vision of Ethical Eating

I had the opportunity to give a special lecture at Nyack College to the Men of Letters group last Thursday. My lecture, “Being Stewards of Creation: A Christian Vision of Ethical Eating,” went well and the Q&A after the lecture touched on such diverse topics as eating kosher, Adam Smith’s economic philosophy and how food relates to Christian hospitality.

Abstract:

If we are to take our call to be stewards of Creation seriously, Christians need to re-think how we buy, eat and grow food. I will argue that food is an integral part of Christian spirituality and needs to be approached as a way we glorify God.

You can download the full lecture by clicking here: Being Stewards of Creation: A Christian Vision for Ethical Eating

An excerpt:

Food holds a central place in our everyday lives. It is essential to our long term health and short term sustenance. We feel hunger or delight or refreshment on a daily basis, all because of food. No matter how much life changes from generation to generation, from new technology to new technology, food will always be necessary.

Food has always been necessary, but it has not always been cheap or plentiful. Food is necessary but not a luxury. It doesn’t just happen. It is the product of a tremendous amount of manpower, horsepower, tractor-power, petroleum-power, water-power and solar power. To borrow from the authors of Scripture, food is toil.

Prayer for the Third Week of Easter

God Almighty,

You give us new grace each day
through the death and resurrection of your Son.

In the new life of the resurrection
we find the center of our lives:

Christ is the radiant light
shining love, compassion and mercy
into our bodies and souls.

In this same way give us the strength
to display the light of Christ to others.

Amen

Being an Alumnus 101

Alumni are a cranky bunch. They look back on college as this blissful time of unending fun and unending laziness. Strong bonds of friendship are forged in late night nerf gun fights and vengeful pranks. It’s the foundation for much of what happens in the rest of the college-goer’s life.

And there is the whole giving part. Colleges know that nostalgia does wonders, and they constantly churn out campaigns that let alumni bask in their glory years. These campaigns are effective, but the way that colleges are marketed to their alumni as steady-as-a-rock unchanging places of higher learning has a severe drawback: whenever a change does occur the majority of alumni usually go ballistic.

I went to Philadelphia Biblical University. The institution, like all institutions, has gone through a variety of complex changes over its 100+ year history. It has moved up in the academic world from institute to college to university. It moved, like so many Americans have always done, from the heart of Philadelphia to the safety of the suburbs. It has changed how it is organized, changed some buildings, added some buildings, changed the dress code, changed the student handbook and changed the curriculum dozens of times over its long history.  And probably each time the alumni have turned into frothing, raging lunatics.

My alma mater has now decided to change its name. It will be Cairn University pending a board review, but one can assume since the board asked for the name change in the first place that it will not be the most contentious of meetings. When it was announced the alumni went ballistic, leaving juvenile, nostalgia-dripping rhetoric lambasting the name change.

There are some alumni who like it, but most do not. They fear it is a trend to turn Philadelphia Biblical from the institution they love into a cookie-cutter diploma mill that is par for the course in higher education these days. While I think their fear is well founded, the name really has nothing to do with it. You can become a cookie-cutter diploma mill without ever changing your name.

The fact is, we attach our emotions to institutions. We always will. But the first part of being an alumnus should always be support, not critique. It’s easy to spout venom and disparage every little change. It is a lot harder, as we grow older and grow more in control of our lives, to cede control of our childhood and adolescent memories.

If anything, I credit Philadelphia Biblical with giving me an education that serves as the foundation for every major decision I make as an adult. I use the critical thinking, skeptical, hard researching and analytical mind that was forged within the confines of that institution. Most alumni feel the same way. So why can’t alumni ever seem to let the institutions act in the way as an institution the way the institution has taught us to act in the first place?

Being an Alumnus 101 is then summarized as this: if you value the education you received from an institution and care deeply about it as an alumnus, then you should probably let the institution that forged you make adult decisions the same way you make adult decisions.

Becoming Comfortable with Silence

Quakers worship in silence.

It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but I don’t know if I could handle it.

I love silence, but I wonder sometimes if I confuse silence with nothingness or a void.

Becoming silent means that instead of emptying ourselves we should be filling ourselves.

In other words, I think we are not comfortable with silence because we confuse silence with the total absence of sound and thought. Instead, we should think of silence as meditation.

The Bible doesn’t discuss silence in the way we often think of silence. Jesus went away to quiet places and David meditated, but this doesn’t mean they went to places that were void of sound. I know from times out hiking or hunting that the outdoors can become very noisy when you try to be quiet. So while Christ may have gone to quiet places to pray I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that you could hear a pin drop.

§

I relish time spent alone in a church pew, in the silence, praying, thinking, doodling. It’s a time of literal sanctuary. A time of meditation. But noise is everywhere. It’s so quiet I can hear the pew creak beneath me as I shift my seating position or shake my leg (it’s an awful nervous habit of mine…I need to constantly move). You can hear the wind against windows and car horns outside. Silence heightens the senses.

Silence heightens our openness to God.

§

When I am silent laying in bed the Jesus Prayer often comes to me. I match my breathing to the syllables and pray in the silence of the night. I can hear crickets and cars passing by. I can hear my wife voicing the subtle exhales of sleep. It’s a place I find refuge.

§

The world is silent when gardening. You can hear the shifting of dirt and the absorption of water.

§

I had a professor who would pause before he prayed to begin class.

Not a subtle pause. A long pause.

At first I thought he did this to be dramatic.

The more he did it though, the more I realized he was entering worship. He was being serious. He was choosing his words carefully and giving his words beauty and purpose.

Ever since, I now find myself pausing before I pray.

§

There is comfort in silence. Not absolute silence, just regular silence. The slowing of sound. The quietness of the world. The quietness of the heart.

I make a habit of this kind of silence. I enter into it when I write in my prayer journal sitting in my cubicle before I begin a non-stop work day that never allows me any quiet moments.

I make a habit of silence that fills the soul with the wonder and mystery of God. It is in this silence that I find holiness, power and peace. It is in this silence I find comfort that the absence of sound or thought could never bring.

Silence Is Uncomfortable, Period

In a rather informative yet business-specific training on the topic of managing virtual teams, the instructor touched on conference call etiquette. She glossed over one fact that piqued my interest from a spiritual standpoint: the average person becomes uncomfortable with silence during a conversation after three or four seconds. Some scientists believe our feelings of awkwardness are even hardwired into us. Even more scary, total silence drives people crazy.

So what are we to make of the paradox that we spend time in silence as an act of worship yet we become so uncomfortable with silence?

What ways do you try to deal with the discomfort or awkwardness that comes with silence?