The first Chapbook!

It's almost ready...

I included some of your favorites, some prose, and some pieces that I haven't published online because the formatting ruins the linebreaks. So they'll be new to you!

Each book comes with a CD of readings by yours truly (you asked for it; you got it).

They're for sale: $10 each.
Proceeds from tomorrow night's Free Form sales will benefit
the Free Form Charity of Choice:
Collective Hope.

So bring your dollas--
Hope to see you there!

Mars Hill Graduate School
2501 Elliot Ave.
Seattle WA
11/20/2010 8pm

ordination examination

I just thought you should know this is where I'm at right now.

I easily confuse strengths with weaknesses. So, when my professor asked what I was going to do when—not if—I fail to bring order to chaos, I panicked. I thought that surely failure to order the chaos would be a sign of profound weakness. Then this same professor asked us to describe ourselves from the perspective of a friend. I thought back to the words of one of my more observant and attentive bosses. In my exit interview he told me that when I told him I would be okay, he believed me. He said, “I’ve always known you to be sturdy.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have panicked at the thought of chaos. Perhaps the idea that I may reveal a weakness should not scare me! I have a very high tolerance for both weakness and chaos. I know them intimately and, as a result, I tend to those in my care as though chaos is durable yet endurable.
As I look back on this professor’s class in particular I see that my time under his tutelage has paralleled the trajectory of my seminary education in general. We began by trying to minimize the chaos. We set out to do the work of defining ourselves and have found that we are very confused (and confusing). We have learned that we, the weak and befuddled, do indeed have power and must steward it gently.

Over these last four and a half years I have gained some practical wisdom (summed up by the professor of this class when he said “you will never satisfy all the people all the time… if you are doing your job well”). I also gained some impractical wisdom (e.g.: postmodern or no, leading means you have to land somewhere). And then, just when I think I’ll never remember this wisdom, it always dawns on me (again and again, as sure as a sunrise) that I’m not sure how I learned any of these things because they are not the kind of things that can be taught in the usual ways. Maybe they were in me all along and I just needed someone to help me dismantle all the carefully laid and mortared, well-ordered thoughts that had them entombed.

My time in graduate school has facilitated a re-entry into church leadership as part of a larger process. “Churching” (attending church, potlucking, becoming a member of a church, tithing, voting, singing hymns you like, singing hymns you don’t like, etc., …) is a process. It is a process of discovering how much order, how much chaos is enough for each created thing to thrive and then making a commitment to searching out ways for all to access that amount of whatever is needed. It is a system of exchange: churching is not only giving time, talent and treasure, but a system of exchanging tangibles and intangibles according to our capacity for restraint and justice.
Taking a leading role in the life of the Church requires us to accept only the order that blesses, while allowing for the chaos that edifies and that means we participate in discovery, discernment, and setting boundaries. It doesn’t mean we have to be perfect already—we will be perfected. It doesn’t mean we put an end to all chaos—it means we order the chaos we can and endure the chaos that remains, for the good of all.

There is no disputing that when I accept my Master’s degree in Divinity I am taking a step toward ordination. This degree will set upon me certain rights and responsibilities, one of which is to discern next steps. I have to face the possibility of Ordination and I have discovered that for now I will settle into what I like to think of as one of two very different types of ordination. The way I see it there are two kinds of ordination: 1) Traditional Ordination: This kind of Ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament is offered by the people in power. It usually comes with a title chosen from a short list of jobs. Certain rights and responsibilities are conferred on an individual after s/he has completed certain required tasks. The other kind of ordination is one I like to think of as Discerned Ordination: This ordination is realized through a process of discernment. For example, God has ordained each member of the church to accomplish a different task to the glory of God. This kind of ordination is akin to receiving a vocation that is discovered through a series of struggles and triumphs.

Each member of the body is tested, taught and otherwise prepared to live life according to the powers, rights and responsibilities only God can confer. There is plenty of power to go around but we rarely share it well. The politically inept or disenfranchised may never partake or participate in a way that would allow them to be Ordained as Ministers of Word and Sacrament in a traditional sense. The second definition of ordination, however is a broader use of the concept of ordination and so applies to those who remain socially or politically powerless or outside the narrow sphere of the mainline denominations’ influence.

You see, church is only Church when all the members of the body must come alongside one another in order to create opportunities for leaders to gain and relinquish power, to share and redistribute power for all of God’s people. For church leaders special attention should be paid to specific preparations. This should include fostering an awareness of the language and history of the God we attempt to serve and the people we live with and near—all of them. I work primarily with children who have their own ways of distributing power and so it seems only natural that I am choosing the second type of ordination.

I am choosing to answer the call to order the chaos for which I have already been prepared. Maybe one day I will do more to prepare for Traditional Ordination. But for now I do not see myself participating in the cycle of power distribution that bestows power on the few and neglects the ordination of the many.

This is my call to live in the liminal space, the space in which we may dwell so that someday we will know what to do with relationships that don’t move at the speed of Facebook; when my sense of time is different than yours; or
when industry or denominational changes keep pace with cultural changes that never seem to lead to transformation. These are not Holy Orders, but they have brought holy order to my life and so though this is not the kind of Ordination for which I thought I was preparing, it is nonetheless the orders and order I have been given.

too many of these lately

El Dia de los Muertos comes every year and every year it reminds me that I have been taught about death in certain ways.

I have a certain contribution to make whenever we discuss endings.

I wrote this piece in August last year and then uncovered it on the occasion of two very sad and very unexpected deaths. I didn't know the two who passed away, only the way their friends and families remember them. But I know a lot about death... more than I care to know, more than I thought I knew until it came pouring out last year and stayed relevant after all this time...
I don't know what you're going through but I do know this much...
and I hope that might be a little helpful.

080109:

There are days when I wish the story would end. Entire days devoted to frustration because the mystery of you is complete, but refuses to go away; I am haunted by the loss of you. And I have to live with memories that are just not enough.

Like this feeling when a relationship carries on with only a dead body, with a voice that I won’t hear again, with two arms that will never hold me again, two hands that will never pour out a beer or clutch the steering wheel as we careen down the highway,

the kind and hilarious things you said to me echo in my heart, but only there and it is proof that this heart is empty, cavernous, stone, cold and hardening with every throbbing pumping jerking motion, and it doesn’t stop just because yours has. You aren’t going to call anymore, you are not going to comfort me even over the phone anymore. I have missed you before, assumed your voice is enough, convinced myself it was but
now even that is gone.

And I am not ashamed (because you taught me to be proud of who I am) to admit that I am shrinking and filled with regret. Worst of all, sometimes I wish I had never loved you. I want to rewrite the story so it would end before you walked into that bar, before you jumped into that river to save a life more precious than your own.

And I am not ashamed to cry over it because that is all my body wants to do now. I can’t sleep or eat because I am somehow keeping vigil, holding on to the last meal we shared, the last restful night when I was assured I would see you in the very next day.

I can’t even hope anymore, not in the same things I used to, because all my hopes were wrapped up in you.

I can’t see the future because it was in your face and now we will bury it under the days that keep unfolding without regard for your disappearance and we will keep only photographs. And I will wake up tomorrow and stare at the photos and then
Perhaps I will start in with the yelling, the telling you off, the crying out to God or my friends or my lovers because it is not fair, it is not right, it is not ok that you aren’t coming around anymore.

So here we are, those you abandoned unwillingly, maybe. We are waiting for signs, for friendly faces, for warm bodies, for snacks and laughter and for it all to mean something again. We need something to boss us into hoping again. We need you.

And because all we have, is an already fading memory of what you would have wanted, I am clinging to it.

We begrudgingly admit that we know what you would have said. We know what you would have done because we know what you did:
you saw a choice and you made it.
You knew a risk and you took it.
You saw danger and you jumped right in.
You saw pain and you did all you could to end it.

Forgive us our anger—we know you can. And forgive us our sadness and our hopelessness—we know that if you could, you would hold us and tell us everything is going to be okay. We know you would cringe to see how upset we are and we know one thing for sure,
if you could you would rescue all of us from all of this.

I guess that is the work left for us to do now, in your absence, in your honor. We will keep you alive and with us by remembering
to rescue, to risk, to live, to play and laugh.
And when we forget the timber of your voice, or wonder what would have been,
we will remember, we will comfort ourselves with this fact:
you didn’t give up hope, you were unafraid of your own death, you were bold and loving and hopeful, and we can be too because you showed us how.

sensible of conditions

A professor sent this quote in response to the piece mi abuelito affectionately referred to as "the one about the baptismal fountain":

"...a favorite Annie Dillard quote: On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."

nuevo apellido viejo

As Basque I have learned to understand this: It's very important to know what you're fighting for, especially if you were born fighting... and it's very important to know that when you fight for freedom there are particulars that make the fighting and the freedom more and more real if the battle scars refuse to fade.

I spent the last long months fighting for two things that I see as indicators of freedom: a new name and an unknown future.

First, I fought because names matter to me. Your name is like a little poem written about you, just you, never forget that. I wanted the name of my living grandmother because it is beautiful and worthy and so is she and so am I. I didn't return to my mother's maiden name (I am no longer a maiden). I returned instead to the Bay of Biscay and the Basque shepherding ancestry that taught me the wonky kind of Vizcarra shepherding that makes me valuable in my community. I returned to the name you cry out in a crowded room because you can trust there will be at least one Perez to answer! If you want something done, ask a Perez.
I kept part of the name my mother chose for me because it is a tangible connection to her hopes for me to be known and treated as a Pearl of great price. But the latter half I replaced.

Now my name is half and half: a lovely blend of whole creamy freedom-fighting sheep's milk Vizcarra Perez with even-keeled, transparent and staunchly imaginative Abigail Pearl.

But I also fought because of inheritance. I fought for the pennies scrimped and saved and passed on to me so lavishly by the woman whose name I let go.

That is why this poem goes here. It is about moving on because you have to, it is about death in general but my mother's mother dying in particular... Funny, I put it here around this exact time last year... so if you go back in the archives you'll see another story about it... I take it to be proof that a helpful poem has more than one use, more than one story to tell, and probably knows the future better than it's author.

As soon as they called to tell me she had died, I called the hospital and told them I wanted to see her body; I wanted to see her one last time. The voice on the other end said, "it will all be all right." And the hoping poem began there...

The hope poem

When you died you were wearing a pink nightgown and looking quite vulnerable as the rigor washed over you.
Your pale skin had a power over us, what was left
of your thinning hair refused to rest
against the pillow.
You were the dead with a bed head
and you would have laughed at yourself, the way you always had.

They said you weren’t alone, and I suspect
there may have been a nurse in the room when the last little bit of life fell
out of you, rolled across the floor in search of another haunt,
across the hall perhaps?
Maybe a memory of family lodged in the corner of your quiet little brain
finally showed itself
a picture of you with your sister
keeping you company.

Then eventually
we arrived, gathering like seagulls on the cliff
Standing over,
your little brittle body, like a precipice and we, forced to jump toward
(your) death,
our life,
Suddenly unsure of my wings,
I began asking the questions:

Who will I be
now that you
are gone?
What will I do with the voice that sounds like yours bouncing around
in my memory?
When I say your name again you will not answer;
Will I be angry in your absence? Will I be anything at all?
What do I want now that you are gone, after my desire for your love defined me, your presence filled spaces and now those spaces are like wounds:
You cut yourself
out of my skin,
You widdled the edges of my self coming close to you
wielding guilt like a pocket knife.
Though Love has cauterized the edges
The pain is real.
Disappointment threatens to move in like an infection
If we deny the Lacrimal disinfecting.
There is swelling and throbbing but there is no emptiness here.

We are full and heavy with your presence among us.
The words for your leaving are caught in our throats
So we gave in to hope, not the big Hope
But the little hopes:
That we will each touch your hand once then
Look into your face then
Then go eat breakfast
Without you.
That we will sing your favorite songs and eat your favorite foods then
That we will remember you well, not fully but
With respect
fully.

Not for you
For ourselves.
We will hold onto what we enjoyed and sort out
The painful pieces of your presence remaining.
We will find a way to leave them behind,
In our own time
Not just because you died
But because we have been working on that project since the day we were born.

And all this time we must have thought we were doing this for you, with you
But now you are gone and we go on.

We go on in the ways you taught us
Saying the words you said
And laughing
Saying the words you said
And raging like a wild fire
cuts a swath through the forest of story.
but we are the forest people
loving the tall trees crowding the fueling dueling underbrush—we know what fire means
what fire brings:
the heat the seeds need
to tell them how the old is dying, drying and burning away
making room for (the new)
you.

We are the Phoenix seeds, rising slowly from the acid of the ashes.

You asked to be cremated, never knowing (how hot) our anger
was burning you alive all this time.
You shrieked at us, and we put the fire out with our tears,
now the tears come all salt and oil: splashing across the fire, sizzling, splattering and finally crystallized across the soiled floor,
You are the salt of the earth and we have salted the field crying over the loss of your dried marrow.

Looking across, bearing the pall, it seems all (hope) is lost
Just because you are lost.
But the truth is we are not lost
Just because we are losing you.

for the caretakers

Thank you

The rooster woke me this morning,
warning
the sun rise
while I laid still beneath the patchwork of memories.

Would the lambs and ducklings sleep all day
if the howl of the bantam were not fowl enough to wake them?
Oh cocky doodle-doo!
How many innocents, exhausted with a new life,
would miss this dawn and the next,
if you didn’t sound your barbaric yawp over the rooftops?

A city rain pools below:
the sounds of strangers bounce between raindrops,
their brash splashing tires screech out a counterpoint,

But the once-wild cockerel wakefully cooped inside my heart
scratched earlier than the boots against the sidewalk below
and I mistook it for a hope of my own.

The Shekinah Gory:

The Dangers of Worshipping and Other Reasons to Keep Children Close

Contrary to most assumptions, a person can drown in a puddle. You only need a little bit of water to drown the old self and that is why we had a shallow, open baptismal font in the center aisle of our church. It was pretty basic: a glass bowl tucked inside a wooden pedestal. Some churches use a font that remains covered all the time. These fonts are often placed near a back wall, where they safely stand their ground until we bring them front and center as needed. This story is not about that kind of font.
This story is about a font that stood right in the middle of everything, like a birdbath—always open for business of one kind or another. Whenever the congregation processed toward the altar rail to receive communion they peered into it or poked the waters with their fingers. I hadn’t worked for the church long before I saw a four year old dip his hand in and then straighten his eyebrows with the holy water on his fingertips. Parents carrying babies walked carefully around it on their way to sit on the altar steps for children’s word. I once tripped on the shaggy rug underneath, nearly falling right in, face first. There was even an incident involving junior high girls washing their faces in it during an overnight youth event.
This font and its big brothers (one medium and one large horse trough brought out and filled with warmed water for full submersion baptisms) were in constant use. There were lots of babies and even grown ups cycling through preparations to drown in front of God and everyone—Alleluia! The fonts were always there and always ready.
Late in Lent 2010 the pastoral staff realized that despite our best efforts some of the babies just weren’t ready for baptism at the Grand Easter Vigil that year. It would be the first time, in a long time, that we would simply affirm baptisms rather than perform them at this annual celebration. We were saddened a little, but only because we loved seeing the shock on a child’s face before the plunge. We loved watching a grown man rise drenched and happy as we sang and rang in the new member of our family. This year the shallow font would stand stalwart and lovely as ever, not to be used for baptism proper, but as a reminder that we had all been washed—Alleluia just the same!
We continued the usual preparations for a raucous and holy celebration of resurrection. The grown up choirs learned a song in ancient Hebrew and a Spiritual that brought tears to our eyes even during rehearsals. The children’s choirs learned a special dance. During rehearsals the older children partnered with the younger to hold hands, they wound themselves around the edge of the sanctuary and danced up the aisle. They raised their little hands, turned around and around, stepped lightly forward, and then carefully high-fived …the whole lot enjoyed themselves immensely as their beloved director gently corrected any missteps.
During one such rehearsal, just as I ushered the younger children into the sanctuary to join the dance, we heard a loud bang. I instructed the children to halt and we stood as still as we could to asses the damage. It wasn’t an explosion in the kitchen or a falling beam from the ceiling. The roof hadn’t caved in, as we might have thought from the volume of the boom. Instead, we saw the wooden pedestal of the baptismal font lying on its side like a felled tree and all around, sprayed out evenly across the carpet were tiny shards of glass. The bowl that had held the Holy Water had shattered and spread like diamonds thrown at the foot of the processional cross.
During the dancing one of the older girls had bumped the font and accidentally pushed it over. She cried from the scare, wounded only in spirit, not in flesh. The pastor scooped her into his arms as the children and I stood watching him calm her. We listened silently to him explaining that it is really all right, just an accident. Her tears were pouring out as a testimony to her love for the font and respect for the worship space. She sat in the lap of her pastor soaking up the truth that she is wholly forgiven. There were only four adults in the room with upwards of thirty children ranging in age from five to twelve… and thousands of shards of broken glass.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I have been warned that the sanctuary is not a good place to bring children to dance. And obviously I was worried for the children to be so close to the dangerous remains of the font. But in this moment the warnings and worrying were all for naught. Our attempts to protect our children from their own frailty, the sharp shards of the truth and the danger of dancing at the water’s edge were muted by the thunder of the falling font in which most of them had already been drowned.
Alan Hirsch writes in The Forgotten Ways Handbook about the rabbinical teaching that explains “a cosmic crash in which God’s glory was scattered into myriad sparks and caught up in all created matter.” He explains that this metaphor urges us to respond to creation in such a way that God’s glory (The Shekinah) will be loosed from it’s locatedness within each created thing, and that The Shekinah might explode all around us. If Hirsch is right, if this is really what the Rabbis taught us, and what God hopes for us, then safety is little more than an illusion anyway. God’s explosive, gory glory has always threatened to engulf each human ever exposed to it… just check the Old Testament for hearts that won’t stop burning and faces that won’t stop glowing.
Since the falling font incident I have begun attending a different church with a font of a seemingly safer kind: covered and stowed—not out of view, just out of the line of fire, so to speak. In this new church children are swept away to a safer more comfortable Sunday School room before the prayer concerns and sermon are spoken. But Hirsch hints that glory finds a way to wreak holy havoc on leaders and followers alike in spite of safety precautions. And that begs the question: if there is no way to protect our children should we attempt to send them somewhere safer while the adults continue with worship? Should they be excused from sitting in oversized pews against which they always bonk their giant heads? Maybe they should be excused so they can avoid a parent’s scornful glances lest they misbehave.
I work with parents of all kinds who want to sit still and undisturbed for a few brief moments during Sunday morning’s liturgy. Sitting through an hour-long service with their children is their worst nightmare. They want their children to be cared for elsewhere while they pray, sing and listen “in peace.” This may not seem like a scandal waiting to happen; perhaps Bonhoeffer’s Ethics doesn’t cover this subject directly, perhaps this dilemma doesn’t involve sexual misconduct or gross negligence but it is a hot topic nonetheless. It is a real problem because it is on every congregant’s mind and every pastor’s list of problems to solve and if its not, it should be.
To the chagrin of many parents I argue that the invitation we extend to all God’s children must be extended to the least of these. Hirsch writes that if we want to call ourselves “Missional” we will serve everyone and share everything as the apostles did and so we must dig deep in the treasure chest of the past. Hirsch reminds us that the churches in ancient Rome were not given over to Youth Groups, or Sunday School classes aligned with Public School grouping methodology. They worshipped together and so must we. When we allow parents to protect their children from the wilds of worship, when we teach parents to protect themselves from their disruptive children we may be allowing them to treat their children and subsequently any encounter with the Shekinah as optional. When we usher our children from the worship space we are passively communicating to parents and children alike that one ought to be comfortable in order to worship.
To exile our children so that worship becomes convenient, restful and well-ordered is to deny that the glory of God is threatening to explode from within each of us. Throughout his text The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, et al. encouraged leaders like me to do the difficult work of discovering what is most important and this is it. And so, I am compelled by Heifetz’ argument to point out that I am passionate about the presence of children in worship. As a result, I often wonder (silently, to myself) if we are no better that the Babylonians who dashed the heads of the Hebrew children against the rocks because that is what exile can do to the children of the church.
Leadership in the church must make space for rest but we also must make space for worship—messy, dangerous, life-altering worship. We may not be able to make worship safe and comfortable, but since when is worship supposed to be safe or comfortable? Worship is always a sacrifice. The sanctuary is meant to bring us into a worshipful context. It is not meant to protect us from all harm or alarm. A child may never have to consciously confront the threat of Holy Baptism but she will have to confront death and danger. The story of the shattered font demonstrates that leaders in the church can bring entire families into the worship space in a way that prepares even the youngest hearts and minds for just such confrontations. If we do our job, the families in our care will be better prepared to recognize God the next time they come face to face with the overwhelming Shekinah.
Of course I’m not encouraging the church to expose children to unnecessary danger or disruption. I am instead insisting that church is not always safe, convenient or comfortable. Glass shatters, candles burn, wood and stone surround tender bodies. And this is precisely why we must keep our loved ones close to us. We don’t keep our children or exile our children in order to protect them. We do so to encourage them to worship and to see God’s glory in myriad forms—especially when it all seems to be exploding into countless pieces all around us.