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this stinks

Up here in the mountains the few cherry trees on people’s properties are finally in bloom.  So is the serviceberry and balsamroot.  And the grass is coming up.

We have a patch of lawn here at the cottage the church provides for us–approximately 75 feet by 40 feet (I measured today).  The property is right next to the river.  Not only have I become more and more ‘organic’ in my view of how we treat and tend the environment we find ourselves in, I am even more aware of it now that we live right next to a water source and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking as to what it means to be a member of the watershed I live in (a sort of watershed examen, I guess).  The church is having the lawns and field on the church property sprayed this week (fertilized and sprayed for dandelions).  I asked the groundskeeper if we could prevent our lawn from being sprayed, and he said yes.  It was just hydroseeded last summer before we moved in, and as far as I know has never been treated with chemicals, so we’re starting with a good base.

I’ve spent the last couple week reading about organic lawn care (to be honest, my preference would be to actually remove the vast majority of the 75×40 ft. chunk of monocultured lawn grass, but, you know…).  So I guess one of the best things I can spray on the lawn is compost tea, which is the product of soaking a porous bag of compost in some water for a week, and all the good micro organisms and nutrients that leach into the water get sprayed onto the lawn, percolate into the soil and get it healthy and breaking things down and converting it to useable energy for the grass, etc.  But I can’t find a siphon attachment for our hose, and every place I go looking for one…no one knows what I’m talking about. 

So instead, today I went and bought 12 bags of steer manure at the hardware store.  I dumped 6 out over various areas of the lawn and raked it in.  It stunk.  And it didn’t go nearly as far as I thought (and really hoped) it would.  One bag is recommended for every 100 sq. feet…but it didn’t spread well at all.  I don’t know how many it will take.

Did I mention that I smell like crap?

I think the groundskeeper things I’m going overboard, but he’s a nice guy and he doesn’t say anything.  Just let me do my thing.

After I get the lawn covered in bull shite, my next project is to hang a clothesline.

And find a siphon attachment for the hose.

currently reading

    

on stewardship

Wow…has it actually been almost two months since my last post?

Been reading a lot lately.  I had some time to kill while in Seattle the other day and, after getting my obligatory bag of donuts from Pike Place Market, wandered up and into Left Bank Books.  I didn’t have near as much time as I wanted to spend in there…but I did leave with The Creation: an appeal to save live on earth by E. O. Wilson.  A naturalist, entymologist, and expert on ants, he begins the book with: “Dear Pastor…”  The entire book is written as a letter/conversation with a pastor, and is a call for scientists and religious leaders to work together in getting people to understand the importance of biodiversity and environmental conservation.

“…ecosystems and species can be saved only by understanding the unique value of each species in turn, and by persuading the people who have dominion over them to serve as their stewards.”

from the land of ice and snjoa

I’ve been thinking a lot about this season of Advent.  In a previous post I talked about how a prolonged winter affected me during Lent last spring.  And this fall, I found myself dreading the soon-to-come snow, especially in an area that receives more snow than where I had previously been.

Many of the things that fascinate me like moss and ferns and water pouring over dark rocks, well, they’re all covered up by snow during winter.  EVERYTHING is covered by the snow in winter.  Which leaves me staring out at the ‘great white death’ that blankets the landscape.  Last week we had 34″ of snow fall in a 24 hour period.  The killing came and it came fast.  And I’ve found my soul entering into a brooding period similar to Lent.  It’s lying fallow, just beneath the surface, waiting in hope and expectation for the thaw.  My Advent doesn’t last one month…but three (okay, maybe four or even five some years…depending on how slow the thaw is). 

The Norse and Germanic peoples believed that ‘the killing’ that came each fall when the plants and shrubs lost their leaves was caused by evil spirits in the forest.  Everything seemed to die…except for the evergreens.  They believed that good spirits must then dwell within and among the evergreens, so the people would cut boughs and branches from them and bring them inside, hoping that the good spirits would protect them from the evil ones in the forest.  So during the long, dark nordic winters they brought into their homes and surrounded themselves with vestiges of life in the midst of the bleak death that seemed to envelope them.

I’ve been thinking about this as we’ve been decorating our house this past week for Christmas, hanging bits of evergreen over doorways.  Life, lying fallow, waiting for rebirth.  Yesterday I went out into the surrounding mountains, trudging through the snow, and cut down a small fir tree.  I brough it into the house and we dressed it with strings of small white lights. 

A small reminder of Life and Light in the middle of a cold, deep sleep.

That’s where I’m at right now, lying dormant and mulling over things and brooding and waiting for green and color and sounds and standing shin-deep in a mountain stream.  But before we wake we have to slumber.  Before we walk we have to rest.  So I sit here, acknowledging the importance of the present, but looking forward to the tangible hope of the future.

Sigur Ros on vinyl is the perfect soundtrack for times like these.

sacred space

Space and atmosphere have always been a big thing for me…just something I always notice, I guess.  A few years ago I picked up a book, a table in the desert (making space holy).  I never actually made it further than page 5, so I don’t actually know what the book is specifically about, but just the title served as a launching pad of inspiration for me.  It opens with a quote from Pope John Paul II, from his letter “Concerning Pilgrimages…”:

“The spatial dimension is no less decisive than the temporal in the concrete accomplishment of the mystery of the Incarnation.  My meditation turns to the ‘places’ in which God has chosen to ‘pitch his tent’ among us.  God is equally present in every corner of the earth, so that the whole world may by considered the ‘temple’ of God’s presence.  Yet this does not take away from the fact that, just as time can be marked by kairoi, by special movements of grace, space too may by analogy bear the stamp of particular saving actions of God.  This is an intuition present in all religions, that sacred times and sacred spaces are where the encounter with the divine may be experience more intensely than it would normally be in the vastness of the cosmos.”

So this begs the question: how do we define and decorate our spaces?  Are they conducive to us being more aware of the direct presence of God around us?  Do they draw us into his Story and constant work of restoration and new creation? 

I try to surround myself with objects and symbols of this so that I am constantly being drawn in.  I have live plants mixed with bones and shells in a conjunctive display: life springing forth from death; newness from the old.  I like playing with light, and have found that a yellowish light seems to have a calming effect and give the idea of warmth, and since I hold youth meetings in the office and it often becomes a time for dialogue and discussion, I try to use lamps that give this effect and provide this sort of atmosphere.

I had the camera with me at the office today, and I was thinking about some of these things today as I messed around and took pictures of my office space:

I would be interested in hearing about or seeing images from your spaces and how you try to make them more conducive to ‘an encounter with the divine.’

the god’s aren’t angry [synopsis]

Below is my attempt to piece together my notes from Rob Bell’s talk a few nights ago.  Hopefully it provides a somewhat coherent translation of his message:

what do we do with the youth?

I’m now in the sixth year of being a youth pastor, and in that span of time I’ve thought and considered and observed quite a lot in regards to the place of youth within the greater church community.  Most of the time I have ended up completely frustrated and at a loss.

Occasionally I’ll pick up an issue of some popular magazine geared toward youth workers and ministries, and have read articles about how the youth of the church need to be integrated into the congregation, and not become some seperate entity that never interacts with the older generations of the church.  I’ve read various books by Emergent authors in which they talk about community, and how the generations needs to interact and the youth need to be valued and become an integral part of the community.  And it all sounds good.  Fantastic, even.

But exactly how does that happen?

I’ve just come on as a pastor of student ministries at a rural church and have already had multiple people approach me about various ”opportunities” for the youth.  All of the “offers” consisted of having the youth go somewhere to do free manual labor (chop wood, weed gardens, rake leaves, etc.).  And this isn’t anything new–at the previous church I served at, it was frequently the same. 

I live in a woodsy/mountainous area with lots of forests and lakes.  Subsequently there are numerous camps and retreat centers and lodges scattered throughout the area.  Yesterday after the church service, the director of one of them approached me and began by saying that a group that had planned on renting the camp a few weeks from now had cancelled, and that the lodge and cabins would be empty for that weekend.  I must admit that I was excited, and pre-emptively assumed that this person was going to generously invite the youth group to come use the camp for that weekend.  I had already thought of several things we could do up there over the weekend when they said it would be a ”great opportunity for the youth” to come up and chop wood and help clean the facilities. 

Now, I’m not at all against manual labor or getting students to engage in hard work.  In fact, I think it’s a great thing to help instill some discipline and teach them how to give of themselves and help people in need, etc.  But is that all people view the youth as good for…cheap labor?  Is that really the only place for youth within the church community, to be babysat and have their hands kept busy by raking leaves or pushing a broom?  How do we get beyond this pervasive mindset that they’re “too young” to really deal with serious matters and issues, to be an integral part of the actual rythms of the community and its gatherings?

I would love to hear from others how they have attempted this or what they’ve seen done, what worked and what didn’t.  Because I’ve heard a lot of people urging it to happen.  I’ve heard a lot of people hoping for it to happen.  But I’m not actually seeing it, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to do it.

’tis the season

I’ve been out driving a lot lately, familiarizing myself with the various backroads and dirtroads that twist in and around this area.  Today I hopped out of my car and walked along the road for a short distance…until I came across a bunch of bear scat, dropped in various places along the roadside and full of berries.

Apparently it’s “bear season” around here.  Not in regards to hunting them…but in the fact that they are now around and more common than other times of the year.  We had some snow in the mountains last week, and with the incoming cold at higher elevations, the bears gradually make their way down to lower ones where the berries can still be found hanging on to their respective bushes. 

 So when fall arrives, so do the bears. 

a journey to be more simple…I hope.

Well, we’re moved and settled into the new community.

We’re living in the church’s first parsonage, built in 1912 and affectionately referred to by many as “the Cottage.”  Evidently they didn’t need closets back then, as the house is compltely devoid of any.  Houses were MUCH smaller, too.  But we love it.  Just moving into it was an exercise in just flat out getting rid of stuff: furniture, clothes, trinkets, junk that we’d been holding onto and didn’t need.  But it took something like this to actually go through it all and get rid of a bunch of it, because we simply didn’t have the space for it.  It’s been a really nice step toward simplicity (how appropriate that I started reading Foster’s Freedom of Simplicity just as we started the moving process?).

I hope this continues to be a new path we take in regards to how we live, and how much we live with.  For a while now I’ve wanted to have a smaller footprint in regards to the amount of waste I create, how the surrounding environment is affected by our living structure, how much and what kind of energy I use, etc.  The Cottage is a good first step…hopefully the first of MANY I hope to take.  I want to live more simply and friendly, and I’m not sure if it’s easier or harder to do in a place like this (so far, it seems that many people who live this far out in the mountains tend to be of the ‘we need to fight and subdue nature’ mindset).  Last week I was mowing our lawn with a reel mower (which I’ve used and loved for three years now), and the church groundskeeper came by and said there was a tractor/mower in the garage that I could use.  I told him I preferred the reel and didn’t the little bit of extra time and effort it took to use it.  “Alright, if you actually enjoy it,” he said.  “But it’s there if you change your mind.”

I think I’d rather downsize my lawn (which we rarely use, anyway) before I upsized mowers.  Something that requires so much water and care and naturally goes into dormancy when it’s hot and dry out (which is when we ironically try to keep it the most alive)…is that really the best way creatively tend and order the creation?  I actually did some research this past summer on the history of grass lawns.  Evidently, they were initially a symbol of wealth and high social status.  At the time, most people didn’t own much land, and so the gardens they grew and harvested food from were often planted right outside their doors due to the small plots of land most people could afford.  As the wealthy acquired more land and the land was turned into an estate, lush grass lawns were put in place, and the subsistence gardens for the estate were planted at great distances from the house to communicate the wealth of the person and their ability to spread out.

I really started thinking about this, and I wondered if this is still at play in modern suburbia.  I mean, how much time do people spend manicuring their lawns?  Why is it so important for so many to be the ‘pride of the neighborhood’ with a green, lush lawn in front of their house?  When it came down to it, status and attention seemed to be the only real reasons I could come up with.  But what if we chose a different paradigm, once that took into account our specific locations and watersheds and environments?  What if we tried to create islands or bridges of habitat around our houses for populations of native wildlife?  No animals I’m aware of (including many insects and invertebrates) really thrive in a monocultured swath of manicured grass.  Short of playing tag and kicking a soccer ball and playing catch (which do have their place, don’t get me wrong), lawns aren’t really useful for much, and especially aren’t complimentary to the environment.  But what if we planted our lawns with various trees and shrubs, especially native ones that are well-suited for the native climate and didn’t require that much additional water (if any)?  What if we decided not to simply be encroachers on the birds and lilies….but neighbors?  What if we used water with native fish and salmon in mind (that require decent river flows in order to spawn and ‘produce more of their kind’)? 

This summer we had a clothesline.  I used to think those were for people who either didn’t know that dryers had been invented, or just couldn’t afford one.  But one day I decided to hang our laundry on the line (after reading an article in Better Homes and Gardens about how dryers don’t always get rid of viruses and germs and whatnot…but the UV and ozone from natural sunlight does).  I don’t know any other way to put it, but the practice of putting clothes out to dry just seemed…spiritual.  There was something almost worshipful about it, about the action of light through fabric and movement of sheets in the wind.

It seems this sort of life allows a greater awareness of the presense of God, and in the end, that’s my goal.  I desire an immense understanding of the weight of glory, an understanding that compels me to become an active and incarnational tool for God’s shalom, for the healing and restoration of His creation and our relationships to it and each other.  It’s such a huge thing, yet seems to hang its peg on something so simple as putting sheets on the line.