Wait List-It's Advent

So, it's Advent.

It's waiting time.

I've been re-reading some wonderful writings on the spiritual value of waiting, for example, see A Spirituality of Waiting by Henri Nouwen, also found as "Waiting for God" in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas.

I often describe myself as a patient person, but Nouwen really has me pegged this year—I'm tired of waiting: I want to be doing something. In particular, I want to be doing that which I spent the last five years in seminary preparing to do: I want to be a pastor. I want a church to call me to their pulpit.

Now, I'm not unemployed, for which I give thanks, and the work I do is important to the stability of the agency where I work, and we do good work on the behalf of elders in the community. But I don't know whether I am so unlike Zechariah and Elizabeth in some ways (Luke chapter 1): I've been doing good, but this isn't all that I want to be doing.

Perhaps you too are also waiting for something: for a job, for the economy to improve, for peace in the world, for love, for a child, for some project to come to fruition, for health care reform, for a cure, or even for Christmas.

As I often do I looked to music and the poets whose lyrics are set to music to hear what they have to say and I assembled this song list—a wait list. (Most of these are available on iTunes: see this iMix, except as noted.) The music led me on…

Wait list: It's Advent

Song		Artist
When One Door Closes		Carrie Newcomer
O Come, O Come Emmanuel		Sufjan Stevens (worth getting the physical box set for the graphics)
Holy Spirit Come To Us		Taizé
Come On Come On		Mary Chapin Carpenter
Sitting, Waiting, Wishing		Jack Johnson
Waitin' For A Superman		Iron & Wine
Waitin' On A Sunny Day		Bruce Springsteen
I'm Waiting for Jesus		Thomas A. Dorsey
Wait for the Light to Shine		Nashville Gospel Singers
Wait for the Lord		Taize
God of Still Waiting		Composer: Alfred Fedak, Text: Carl Daw (I have a personal recording and couldn't find a public one available, but this is a lovely piece of music)
For God, My Soul Waits in Silence		Marty Haugen
Love Is Waiting		Brooke Fraser
Wait and See		Brandon Heath
If Not Now		Carrie Newcomer On new CD forthcoming, but demo available now
O Come, O Come Emmanuel		Enya

I noticed that several of those songs were inspired by Psalm texts, so, in hopes of a word from God, I looked to one of the grumbling Psalms.

Psalm 27

Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!

If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up.

Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies.

Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.

That's right! Let's just call God to account!

Oh, but what's this in the next verse?

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!

Wait for the Lord… Isn't that what I'm having trouble doing??

Okay, maybe the prophets can help us have a little foresight about this time of waiting. Isaiah is very popular during Advent, after all. And prophets often get right in God's face about the issues that are on their minds.

Isaiah 40.26-31

Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? God who brings out the host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because God is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.

God does not faint or grow weary; God's understanding is unsearchable. The Lord gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Well, that's something at least: "those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength," but how does that happen? I'm glad that God is not weary, but I am.

My favorite passage in Romans chapter 5 then came to mind, as I memorized it in the King James version:

… we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope makes not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

Okay, but enough of the tribulation, patience, and experience, already. I need a little more help to get to hope. I pushed a little further ahead in Romans to chapter 8.

For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

I don't have so much patience anymore, and I don't even know what or how to ask at this point. But the next verse covers that.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs and groans too deep for words.

Okay, I don't know about you, but I can do sighs and groans. Perhaps gasps and shrieks as well—don't you think that's what happened when the angel approached Zechariah, or Mary?

In "Waiting for God," Nouwen writes,

Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her. Zechariah, Elizabeth and Mary were very present to the moment. That is why they could hear the angel. They were alert, attentive to the voice that spoke to them and said, "Don't be afraid. Something is happening to you. Pay attention."

But there is more. Waiting is open-ended. Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for something very concrete, for something that we wish to have. Much of our waiting is filled with wishes: "I wish that I would have a job. I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go." …

But Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary were not filled with wishes. They were filled with hope. Hope is something very different. Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. Therefore, hope is always open-ended.

I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and start hoping. It was only when I was willing to go of wishes that something really new, something beyond my own expectations could happen to me.

Is it that I have been wishing and not waiting? Yet I didn't include "When you wish upon a star" on my wait list of songs—insightful of me, don't you think?

Once again, I am reminded to turn it over to God, that I have been called by God, that hope is the journey I am on.

And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God's purpose. (Romans 8: 27-28)

May all of us be able to wait with this hope in this season.

Articulating Call: How are you called?

Grant us … in our direst need, the smallest gifts:
the nail of the horseshoe,
the pin of the axle,
the feather at the pivot point,
the pebble at the mountain's peak,
the kiss in despair,
the one right word.
In darkness, understanding.
Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold, (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 44

This week has included some of those small gifts in need for me: a conversation, the prayer, the one right word, the insights, the reminder: "We are all, every living one of us, doorways between the two realms, that of matter that gives us birth, and that of spirit into which we are born in death." Paladin of Souls, p. 385 (See last week's post about doorways...)

This past week I met with my association's representative on ministry and ordination. She asked, "How were you called?" Not, "where were you when you were called?" Not even, "what are you called to do or to be?" And not, "how are you confirmed in your call?" Those are all good questions to be able to answer, but they are not the first question.

People preparing for ministry or priesthood often get asked if they have "a call." For some, it's an embarrassing question. They think the pastorate or priesthood may be what they're supposed to do with their lives, but that word "call" suggests some kind of voice from heaven that corresponds to nothing in their experience. Perhaps it evokes memories of an old Bill Cosby routine about Noah's ark, in which a deep bass voice calls out from above, "NOAH! NOAH! THIS IS THE LORD, NOAH!" Cosby, a nervous grin on his face, looks upward and says, "Yeeeah! Riiiight!"

Is that what it means to have God call you? Could most of us imagine such a strange event happening to us?
William C. Placher, ed., Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005), p. 2

As I have been reviewing the facts, figures and stories about clergy and congregations, and in my own experience of being a part of the ordination process, something has become clear to me: in order to do "right" by clergy placement and retention, as well as by the congregations in which we minister, we need to provide ways and frameworks to understand, articulate and nurture our calls, both as clergy and as members of congregations, and as congregations as a whole.

How are you called?

In many traditions, calls—in the form of sounds—precede prayer, rites of initiation, spiritual healings, and major life events. The purpose of calls is to summon adherents away from their daily grinds to a new level of awareness, into a scared frame of mind, into communion with that which is bigger than themselves. The calls may come from bull-roarers, trumpets, rattles, wooden clackers, songs, bells, or the chanting of muezzins atop minarets.
In the primary creation myth of Western cosmology, the very first call came through the voice that said "Let there be light," and there was light, the words then becoming flesh. Every call since then has also been a call to form, a call to each of us to materialize ourselves.
Greg Levoy, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), p. 2

What is your trumpet, your bull-roarer, your song? How are you called? Since I heard this song by Mary Chapin Carpenter in 2007, it has been helpful in the way I understand calling, perhaps as "stumbling and falling," but as something that is deep, that I can't turn away from, perhaps as something in my blood that I can't quite articulate, even though people still ask. It's not certainty or lack of fear—that I know, even though I would like it to be.

Deep in your blood or a voice in your head
On a dark lonesome highway
It finds you instead
So certain it knows you, you can't turn away
Something or someone has found you today

Genius or Jesus, maybe he's seen us
But who would believe us
I can't really say
Whatever the calling, the stumbling or falling
You follow it knowing
There's no other way, there's no other way

There are zealots and preachers
And readers of dreams
The righteous yell loudest
And the saved rise to sing
The lonely and lost are just waiting to hear
Any moment their purpose
Will be perfectly clear

And then life would mean more
Than their name on their door
And that far distant shore that's so near
They'd hear the calling
And stumbling and falling
They'd follow it knowing
There's nothing to fear
Nothing to fear

I don't remember a voice
On a dark, lonesome road
When I started this journey so long ago
I was only just trying to outrun the noise
There was never a question of having a choice

Jesus or genie, maybe they've seen me
But who would believe me
I can't really say
Whatever the calling, the stumbling and falling
I followed it knowing there's no other way

Jesus or genie, maybe he's seen me
But who would believe me
I can't really say
Whatever the calling, stumbling and falling
I got through it knowing there's no other way
There's no other way
"The Calling" by Mary Chapin Carpenter, album: The Calling

How do you articulate your call or calls? Call is mysterious. Call is scary. I often think of the prophet Samuel as a boy, wakened from sleep, hearing his name called, "Samuel, Samuel!" and thinking that it was Eli whom he served, he ran into Eli's room: "Here I am, you called me?" Eli said, "No, I did not call. Go back to sleep." This happened three times, and then Eli, who was a priest, realized that perhaps some more powerful call was happening, a call from God, and told Samuel that if the call came again to answer, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." God called again, and Samuel answered, "Speak, for your servant is listening." God then told Samuel what would be happening to Eli's sons because they were not fulfilling their hereditary priestly duties. [1 Samuel 3]

Most of us though don't get the kind of call that Samuel got: God's voice speaking to us in the night. Or maybe we do, and we don't have an Eli nearby who tells us to listen and respond. Or maybe the Eli in our life doesn't appear for a long time. When I was a girl, I pretended that our high backed recliner was a pulpit and I was the preacher. Even then I felt silenced by the church where I was raised that didn't ordain women or even have women deacons, because I never preached a sermon aloud, only in my head, looking out the window. Was that God's call? Over the years, I forgot that I had ever stood behind the chair imagining…

God is patient, … and persistent. After college I left the church, sure that it had no place for the person I was. For a while, I stopped being involved with music and singing because music was and is a pathway to God for me. I sat at desks and computers and looked at numbers and systems and was disgusted by corporate politics. I learned to make presentations, and became more comfortable with public speaking. Then, one Easter Sunday, on a whim, I went to an ecumenical sunrise service in a park near where I lived. The minister was a woman who had brought along a portable tape player for music. Even at 6 a.m., I could sing out, "Christ Arose." I think the minister was surprised, because she only expected a mumble from the dozen of us there, as was I, for different reasons, that I found that song in my heart and memory. And, after a while, I joined a community chorus and started singing again. A year or so later I started going to church, mostly to sing in the choir. I left that church to look for one that felt more like home. My church home became a small, welcoming Baptist congregation with an emphasis on inclusive language and lay ministry among other social justice concerns. Once there, I began to participate in worship leading, and then occasionally as a summer preacher.

My Eli came along nearly 35 years after standing behind the high backed recliner in my parent's living room, in the person of Harvey Cox, theologian, author, professor at Harvard Divinity School, and member of that church, who came up to me after I preached one summer Sunday. "Nancy, do you know why you are walking funny?" I may have looked down at my shoes to see if I'd lost a heel or something. "No. Why?" I asked. Harvey replied. "It's because God is kicking you in the behind to get you to go to seminary and do this work that you are called to do."

"Speak, Lord, your servant is listening."

Who is your Eli? How do you articulate your call or calls? How are you called?

How do you nurture and clarify your call, as clergy and as a congregation? This is the work of the Spirit, perhaps the work of the church—to begin to know and understand what we really are to do, and then to do it. Frederick Buechner is often and aptly quoted,

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've probably met requirements (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you are bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, San Francisco: Harpers, 1992, p. 185-6

We need to find ways to know or find our deep gladness, our passions, and our joys, and then find ways to hear and understand the world's deep needs and hungers. In an individual, we might ask what are your gifts, and I turn to Ephesians 4: 7-14 or Romans 12: 2-8 for a list of the gifts given to members of the body of believers. From there, in a congregation, we might use a tool called appreciative inquiry, and appreciate those gifts.

Through structured interviews the process identifies the healthiest, most life-producing aspects of a congregation and then builds upon those strengths to create a new future. … Appreciative inquiry poses questions that ask us to attend to the best of the past and present to ignite the collective imagination of what might be. The aim is to generate new knowledge that expands the "realm of the possible" and helps members of an organization envision a collectively desired future. It enables them to carry forth that vision in ways that successfully translate images of possibility or intentions into reality, and belief into practice.
From the work of David Cooperrider, Appreciative Inquiry Consultant's Manual, quoted in Dennis Campbell, Congregations as Learning Communities, (Alban Institute, 2000), p. 27

What are your gifts and deep gladness? Where are your strengths? How are you called? I'd be glad to hear your comments about your calling(s).

Pastoral Listening, the Economy and Capacities for Ministry

Listening
In saying good-bye at my CPE site, I had a conversation with a staff member whose father, father-in-law and mother-in-law all had been American Baptist ministers. She said that one of the things she had always liked about being American Baptist was the ability to come together for fellowship despite differences about some issues, but she has seen that change. Her husband was the minister of music at an ABC church and they had been members there for 15 years when they called a new minister. They had asked how he would approach his first year and he said he would listen to people first.

Within a couple of months he introduced a resolution for a congregational vote that restricted any homosexual from teaching in the church. When she asked if there were any currently teaching or wanting to teach, he said no, but that the young couple running the youth group were concerned about the behavior of some of the young teenage girls who were sitting with their arms around each other and playing with each other's hair. [I have a teenager—that's what girls do in 6th and 7th grade, and in 8th grade they apparently start to pummel one another—looking for ways to have touch in a socially acceptable way, but these people didn't know that, I guess.] While this woman probably wasn't going to initiate a welcoming and affirming statement at the church, she and her husband were quite disturbed by this push to exclude and they ended up leaving the church shortly thereafter, using changes in her husband's job demands as an excuse. It wasn't clear to me if her family had looked for or found another church after that. So much for the minister's promise to listen to all of the people: 15 years of relationships tossed away by someone who wants to exclude for a case that didn't exist.

On Thursday, I had an hour and a half conversation with the manager of the American Baptist placement system. They've stopped doing research and the data in the clergy data base is suspect. So the gist of his anecdotal evidence is that if I were willing to move anywhere in the United States, I probably would get a clergy position as a woman in the ABC, even though the national placement statistic is at 7.5% for women as senior/solo pastors. If I am not able/willing to move, it's going to be tough. My first reaction: "Be not dismayed whate'er betides, God will take care of you."

I am somehow oddly unfazed by this at the moment, mostly because my research to date leads me to the same conclusion. He says that the placement system is broken because not enough ABC area and regional ministers support women in ministry, and if those gatekeepers block the way, or cave in to any one person in a congregation who says "I can't imagine a woman minister," then it's unlikely that women will be getting jobs, especially as senior or solo pastors.

This has perhaps gotten worse since the late 1980's when the denomination was making a push to get congregations to accept women. His success story from that era: the ABC region with the highest percentage of women pastors, and women pastors leading large churches is Puerto Rico at 35%. Women pastors lead two of the largest or most prestigious churches. Thirty or so years ago a Puerto Rican woman called to the ministry convinced the regional executive to give her a shot, and he gave her a little church up in the mountains. Today that church has 3,000 people. Seeing one women with success meant that at some point a regional executive (and apparently the region has been fairly authoritative in suggesting pastoral appointments—more like a typical Methodist than Baptist placement process) decided that getting women into churches was a good thing. The result has been vibrant, joyful and growing churches.

Side note: Here in Massachusetts, perhaps one or two, if any, of the Spanish-speaking ethnic congregations have women co-pastors, although several of the Brazilian congregations have women pastors or co-pastors.

He went on to say: If God is calling women, and GLBT folk, and women and men of color to ministry, and churches are not paying attention, then no wonder mainline Protestant churches are dying. God is providing leaders for these times and the church is ignoring what God is giving them.
I am reminded of this verse: "Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches." (Revelations chapters 2-3) How do churches listen to the Spirit? How do clergy articulate and maintain their call, so that churches can hear the Spirit in that call? More on this below about Capacity.

Economy
Whether or not I could live on the clergy salary that I might find if I moved anywhere is a different question. The constraints of location and economics are real for both men and women--lots of people with working spouses and partners can't move because the spouse couldn't find work where the churches are, or they have family caregiving responsibilities, and they can't live on one clergy salary. There's not a clergy shortage, there's a clergy salary shortage. Clergy are also impacted by economic labor market ills.

Last week at the library I picked up a copy of the February 27, 2009 Commonweal Magazine (Volume CXXXVI, Number 4) and a book review (p. 34-5) entitled, A Different Ponzi Scheme by Robert DeFina, caught my attention. DeFina writes: "If nothing else, our current economic crisis has exposed the financial system’s rotten core. The various claims of efficiency, dynamism, and innovation spouted by its most ardent boosters were, it turns out, simply a façade hiding unbridled greed, unethical lending, and unfathomable financial assets. … It would be remarkable if structural economic decay were limited to the financial sector alone. It turns out that it is not. The light shined by Steven Greenhouse's new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for American Workers, reveals a labor market rife with the ill-treatment of workers, a market that conjures up Dickens and the worse excesses of the industrial revolution."

Greenhouse describes five squeezes:
wages which have stagnated for the average American worker in the last 30 years;
benefits reduced or eliminated so that workers pay for their own health care and pensions out of shrinking wages;
thus causing debt squeeze for health care, especially catastrophic health care, for housing and for higher education;
so many workers are working more hours or more jobs creating a time squeeze with less time for leisure, recuperation and family;
and finally a dignity squeeze where workers are too often treated without respect and decency in a stressful, degrading or even dangerous workplace. See this excerpt from Chapter 1.

I suspect that bivocational or part-time clergy are squeezed in these ways just as easily or often as any factory worker or any other white color worker. And then we have this other way we are squeezed—how do we maintain our call?

Capacities
Since my directed study is on clergy placement and retention, I am looking at not only how people get into ministry positions, but also what it takes to stay healthy in a ministry position. I've found three important readings on becoming a pastor. One is an Alban Institute special report Becoming a Pastor: Reflections on the Transition into Ministry by James P. Wind and David J. Wood, available as a free download. This document focuses on the crucial first years in ministry and the Lily Endowment funded programs of the past decade that have tried to bridge the gap between seminary and the "real world" through congregational based community practice, peer learning and clergy mentoring programs.

A key feature of all of these programs is "reflective immersion," what we might call trial by fire or being thrown into the deep end with a buddy or coach on hand who help the new clergy person in a reflective practice on what worked and what didn't. (See the Ask the Matriarchs forum on the Rev Gal Pals Blog as one more mentoring forum.)

Lesson 1: Seek and find a clergy networking group and/or a clergy mentor who will reflect with you.

The second is Becoming a Pastor: Forming Self and Soul for Ministry by Jaco J. Hamman. Hamman outlines six capacities that you need to grow to nurture and maintain your calling as a pastor: the capacity to believe, the capacity to imagine, the capacity for concern, the capacity to be alone, the capacity to use others and to be used, and the capacity to play. A lovely blend of psychology, poetry, and theological reflection, I highly recommend this book. I'm only part way through, but can share a few good quotes:

Some theologians and religious leaders deny that our sense of being has any importance, arguing that what one believes in—the knowledge you carry about God—is the essential matter. Intellect triumphs over affect. Belief, however, needs to come 'home' to your self. And in what condition is the foundation of your inner being? p. 16

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once?
A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 27-28

One definition of imagination is having the ability to see what is not there and to know the unknown or the unuttered. Like the artist who sees a beautiful flower on her white canvas, or the sculptor who sees a mother and child in a piece of granite, you see God using you to tend God's flock, you see the Spirit of God moving between and among the members of your community, or you see the personal loss or relational pain behind the person who is criticizing your leadership. p. 41

Lesson 2: Find and use a spiritual director or a spiritual direction group. Read and go over the questions from this book with your spiritual director or group.

The third book I've just picked up is Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry by L. Gregory Jones and Kevin R. Armstrong. Since I am reading a book by each of several chairs, I just offer this précis from the back cover: "Resurrecting Excellence aims to rekindle and encourage among Christian leaders an unselfish ambition for the gospel that shun both competition and mediocrity and rightly focuses on the beauty, power, and excellence of living as faithful disciples of the crucified and risen Christ."

So far, I've gleaned an emphasis is on excellence as beauty. Imagine that!

Today at worship my church was treated to a lovely ballet piece by the young dancers of the Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre as the proclamation and to a gorgeous rendition of movements of a Handel sonata for baroque recorder and organ as our music for reflection after Lenten confession and during communion.

Lesson 3: Look for beauty.

My prayer is that we take time, especially this week, to listen to our own hearts and reflect on our own calls, to listen to the stories and be present with those suffering in economic and other distress, and especially to listen and attend to music and art and things of beauty, as we journey this week toward and through our celebrations of redemption and resurrection.

Awakening the "I can"

My new year's resolution this year was to read a poem a day. I don't like to set myself up for failure in choosing New Year's resolutions, but this seemed possible, and given that it's late February, and I'm still reading poems each morning, perhaps it was a resolution that "took." One of the ways I made this possible was buying several new books of poetry. I've been reading from Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley, (Hyperion, New York, 2003). One of this week's poems really caught my heart and I share it with you.

Variation on a Theme by Rilke
(The Book of Hours, Book 1, Poem 1, Stanza 1)
by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of the noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

My bookshelf also includes Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, New York, 2005), so I decided I would look up the inspiration.

The Book of Hours, Book 1, Poem 1
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Da neigt sich die Stunde and rührt mich an
mit klaren, metallenem Schlag:
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fühle: ich kann –
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.

Nichts war noch vollendet, eh ich es erschaut
ein jedes Werden stand still.
Meine Blicke sind reif, und wie eine Braut
kommt jedem das Ding, das er will …

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

One of the things that I like about this edition is that it has the German original on the facing page to the English translation and my two years of German in college feel useful. While I like these translations for the most part, what is missing in this translation that Levertov highlights in her poem is "ich kann" = "I can – I grasp and shape the day." Perhaps what rang true for me is that Levertov articulates calling: "it was I, a bell awakened, and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can."

This poem was a necessary antidote to some of the continued data analysis that I did this week. Letting the data speak: this graph represents placement and tenure in a given church, based on the 2008 directory of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. So there are two men still serving churches as senior or solo pastors where they were called in 1976, there is one woman still serving a church where she was called in 1989. In 2002 there were twenty churches filled, all by men. In 2007 there were nine churches filled by men and two by women, and in 2008 there were ten churches filled, half by men and half by women. In this data set, seventeen percent of the senior or solo pastors are women.



I also spent time this week writing the essay for American Baptist Profile System: 3000 characters that must fit in no more than 37 lines that give churches a reason to set up an interview.

"What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can."

My prayer is today is one of thanksgiving for those people who affirm that calling for me in the various places where I am ministering, those who edited my profile essay, those who remind me to pray for myself and who pray for me, and for poems and poets who awaken me to the possible and to the "I can."