We celebrated the birth of Christ Jesus last night at our meeting with a reading of Mary’s song in Luke (ch 1.39-55 in Greek, with English on-screen), and a participatory candle lighting that slowly illuminated a nativity scene. I resisted the urge to Photoshop the dirty plates and cups out of the above image … because that would make the incarnation less real. To paraphrase: while we were yet unwashed and sloppy, Christ came to live among us.

We shared some art and listened to some of Bruce Cockburn’s beautiful Christmas album. Michael read “thoj” …

kevin asked me to write a poem about humility
which is like asking a speeding freight train
to write a poem about the sound made
by a butterfly’s wings

the oxford american dictionary
defines humilty as
“the quality of having a modest view of one’s importance”
then defines modest as
“viewing one’s abilities or achievments in a humble way”
which means that despite probably having multiple advanced degrees
in english language smartness
they have no clue what humility or modesty means
and hoped that nobody else would notice

discovering this little spinning dance
would normally be all i need
to wind up a good rant about the stupidity
rampant in people who aren’t me
inviting you to join my special club of people
who are above that sort of thing
because we notice it

but i am writing a poem about humility
which pauses the snark express just long enough
for a moment of silence to be heard
it washes over me like a wave,
or am i feeling it echo in my bones
sitting
perfectly still
trying to hold this …. thing … long enough
to tell you about it,
an invitiation that has nothing to do
with rising above

if the current holders of the nobel prize for lexicographic ineptitude
at the smartypants oxford american dictionary writing company
got their act together
and wrote an entire volume on humility

it would still be the beat of an insect’s wing
against the waning stillness of morning air
drowned out by the cosmic freight train of humility
infinity just became finite
eternity just appeared now
the creator of space and time
lying in a manger, trying to find his hand
so he can put it in his mouth

for extra credit, identify the common theme between this and the previous post.

Taken on its own, this post might seem out of place, but I see this as the first in a series of posts on creativity catalysts, inspiring perspectives on people making new things in ways I had not considered. (It’s the first in the series because it’s the last in a long list of collected videos and other sources I’ve been collecting over the last couple years … stay tuned for more.)

And He has said to me,
“My grace is sufficient
for you, for power is
perfected in weakness.”
Most gladly, therefore,
I will rather boast
about my weaknesses, so
that the power of Christ
may dwell in me. …

For indeed He was
crucified because of
weakness, yet He lives
because of the power
of God. For we also are
weak in Him, yet we will
live with Him because
of the power of God.

(From 2Cor. 12 and 13)

From the inside cover of my last notebook (I cover the outside of my notebooks with homemade art, collage, etc. and sometimes the inside too). This one is called Carefully Follow Instructions.

Been thinking a lot about how much easier my life would be if I had instructions, rules, a path to follow. But then I remember I chose to walk off the path. I’m often torn between anxiously wishing I had a book of rules for my life … and patiently looking for signs that God leaves for me to follow.

It’s hard because God doesn’t put up permanent road signs. God drops bread crumbs, and they can get snatched up by birds if we miss them the first time through the forest.

At least I know that if I see a bread crumb, it’s fresh.

It’s by Anghelika’s grandpa, Spyros Vassiliou, and it’s a good representative of his style. He was a great painter, trained in traditional Greek styles: he painted the inside of some important Greek churches, as well as his share of icons. But what’s more interesting are his paintings of ordinary life in Greece. He’d take iconic conventions, like a gold background, and put an image of street life in front of it, like flowers, or a lunch, raising his subjects to the level of the sacred. In the above painting, of spring flowers and new growth in front of a gold-colored wash, he’s chosen to include the powerline that marred his view. Now, this is a painting, not a photograph: he didn’t need Photoshop to remove the powerline, because he could have just left it out. But that was never his style: many of his paintings of Athens are a crazy mix of beautiful scenery and ugly stuff usually left out of cityscapes, like scaffolding. So, above, what might have been a sweet (and inconsequential) painting of spring flowers is made more significant by the sense that you are seeing something true, not imagined or dreamed of. Compare that to certain popular religious-themed art, where the ideal trumps the real every time.

In this moment (because this was a moment’s inspiration, one that came as the community was praying and listening), I immediately thought of myself. In particular I thought of the me that God sees. In the New Testament, we’re called God’s works of art, made to work for good in the world. And by grace, in Christ, we are judged to be good and beautiful works of art (God’s ‘masterpieces’ in one translation). But this is weird, because even if I’m experiencing that divine spring of restoration, I still have powerlines criss-crossing the landscape of my heart: each one another attempt by me to circumvent the created order in my life, to control my existance. More light! More power! My portrait is marred by my attempts at self improvement. But God doesn’t seem to be bothered by that. I am what I am, and while there is only a very slight upward trend towards perfection in me, God is pleased to call me a work of art today … all of me. It’s true I always experience God as a refiner, burning off the dead wood and pruning the diseased … but God doesn’t wait to call the real me beautiful. God values the real us, doesn’t hold out for the ideal us. “Masterpiece” doesn’t mean perfect, pristine, or even finished. It means “True”.

When this project was just a gleam in our eyes, we spent considerable time asking God to speak to us and to our friends before we took any steps forward. Some of the ‘answers’ we heard/saw/perceived were directly related to the choices we were making then, and some were more obscure. But we wrote everything down, and have now begun to work our way back through the list, in order to take seriously the things that came when we chose to ask, seek, knock.

One of the things we recorded was a picture that a praying friend saw in her mind’s eye: a pincushion with pins part-way in, stopped at some hard barrier. The person who saw this, also saw a thumb ready to push and heard a voice say, “They need to go all the way in!” and then heard, “The pins are people.” There were some immediate responses to this, as we asked God to help us understand … that pins just pushed into the outer surface of a pincushion will easily fall out; but not if they are pushed all the way in … that a pincushion is a metaphor for people: our interactions often stay on the ‘soft surface’, and this is one of the reasons we easily “fall out” of each others lives … that there is a kind of hard barrier that stops us from going deep. To go past this hard barrier (with a person’s permission) is to go into the deep mystery of life, into the dark, the unanswered questions, the doubts, the fears. To pass the barrier is to become anchored, more firmly fixed, less likely to fall away when tested.

Today, we’ve been doing some spiritual listening around this word-picture, to hear more about what it means to our community. We heard more in the way of confirmation that this is a story about how we relate. “We’re the pins.” … “The cushion is like my heart: I have to choose to let you in, even knowing it will hurt at first, into the deep parts of me.” … “The hard barrier is important–at least it’s to be expected–and while it is a kind of resistance at first, it becomes necessary to the holding.”

While I was noodling on these things, and trying myself to stay open to what God wants to say, I thought it would be fun to bring it all to life with a little participatory art. I went out and bought us a pincushion and a bunch of pins. The story I shared when I brought it out at a recent gathering, was that I was going to put a pin in the thing for each choice I had made to be honest, transparent, and real with Christ and my community, because when I made those kind of choices, I was also accepting that I was going to be pierced, as it were. During a reading of the story of Simeon’s prophecy (in Luke’s chapter 2) and silent response following, there was a chance for the each of us to press a pin or two into the pincushion. One for our original choice to be in community, and another pin for any other choice to offer ourselves for this kind of ‘piercing’.

It’s risky to let people in, past our hard shells. I let myself be wounded when I choose to let you in to my heart. And that’s also the inevitable piercing that comes from bearing Jesus into the world–he’s not just some fancy pants we put on to impress the photographers. He is the original deep place that calls to our deep places. We can’t bear him into the world without having experienced him in the deep places of our heart. And we can’t very well walk the same road he walks without exposing ourselves to pain. He never shied away from the pain that comes from loving people. And he gave us a heads up: the student never has it easier than the teacher. There is one consolation: when we willingly open our hearts to the piercing, the pain of being known is our choice. That makes it bearable, and more. The pain we willingly choose is part of the way we become more like Jesus.

A couple of weeks ago, I told my ship-mates that I was feeling a little at odds, sort of in limbo, like I’ve had one foot each in two worlds. Here’s what I began to understand. When I committed to this journey, I had a pretty strong conviction that I wanted to share leadership, to trust the community to discern direction together, to hear from God together, and to move together. But as we started out, I had some items on my agenda, if you know what I mean, and so I asked for permission to lead the first bunch of meetings. We were going to meet every other week for a season, and, even though I knew I wanted to share the planning, we easily settled into a kind of rhythm, one that anyone who’s ever been in a church group would recognize. I was planning and running the meetings. I was becoming the executive-pastor-leader-administrator-visionary etc. etc. You get the picture.

But here’s the thing: I think that might have been fine, if that’s what I’d set out to do, or if that was the thing that I had felt God nudging me towards. But it wasn’t. And so there I was, doing what I’d seen modeled, doing what I had learned, doing what is pretty normal in churches (and might be really fine and good if that’s what God and the community have chosen), but I felt no blessing. Another word for the thing I wasn’t feeling is anointing. Both these words are used in churches to describe that thing that comes from God when we are in the sweet-spot, oriented, aligned, in-sync, flowing and grooving. I wasn’t so much feeling any of these things.

I also have a feeling that it had become hard to hold on to other convictions because I was outside of that sweet spot. Thankfully, when I raised the issue during one of our gatherings, others were not so clouded and were able to speak clearly from their perspective, bringing certain commitments back into focus. The good conversation that followed led to a course correction that I am very thankful for, and that I think will save us from going way off the path later.

We’ve decided to meet every week now, alternating our weekly content between talking (about what we want, and what we are doing, and will do) and practicing (the life rhythms and liturgies that help us grow in strength and knowledge). I don’t have to bear the weight of every decision, and I don’t have to take time away from our liturgical practices. And I get to take my place as one member of the crew again: yes, one who holds a leadership role, but who nevertheless doesn’t have to do everything himself to keep the ship moving. Ahh.

So there’s this big sea out in front of us. What direction will we sail? How will we handle the big waves when they come? How long until we get to feel like we know what we’re doing … and will that be the day we get humbled by some great white whale? I’m actually excited by all these questions, and happy to be on this ship, at the edge of this sea, with these people.

There was plenty of good conversation, and a measure of inspiration. We listened well, to each other and also for God’s still small voice, and came up with a reasonable mission statement for our community at the time. (Regarding definitions, vision statements are different from mission statements and also from values and objectives … but I’m not always sure how, because I’ve heard all these things described in too many different and overlapping ways, so don’t look to me for clarifying definitions.)

But when, after several months of meetings, we got to the point of crafting the actual Mission Statement, I got restless. What I would have liked at that point was for each of the team members to craft a statement that expressed the things that we’d discovered, but in their own words. There would have been a messy beauty (to my eyes!) in bringing ten versions of the Mission to our church. They all would have expressed the essential things, but in a diversity of ways that would have been electrifying to the diverse population that our team represented. I know that that isn’t how it works (nor did it then), but I think it might have been a powerful experiment.

Clipart classic: I have vision! See my binoculars and bowler hat! I'm in the water!

Fast forward to today. As I do all the normal thinking about the new project I’m a part of, every week brings another moment when someone is asking about The Vision. I struggle to answer, explaining that my conviction is that vision for our project has to come out of the shared life of the community and in shared communion with God, not from one guy. But even on the day when our shared life begins to produce shared perspective (I won’t say ‘vision’ here), I will not be the one advocating for short memorable statements. I know some good organizations (and good people) are served by short, meaningful statements, and this new community may one day find a value in them that I can’t yet see.

What bothers me so much about vision and mission statements? I know they have a value to much of the population. I know “Vision” is important – clarity of foresight, ability to articulate intent, etc. But my suspicion has always been that vision/mission statements are a product of an impatient, technology-obsessed culture. Here’s my cheap theory: vision/mission statements are like videos of a family vacation. Huh, how exactly is that?, you say.

Consider the vacation video. Ask a parent about their recent vacation, and if their answer is to show you a video of their family walking around the Famous Place, then I’m willing to bet that the person who held the camera will have very little actual memory of the moment, and neither will you after 5 minutes. Oh, you’ll see some stuff, but you will not be impressed. That’s a fact. The video captured it, but the videographer probably didn’t experience it, and neither will you. Every beautiful or important place on earth has its pilgrims and some of these are determined to experience the grandeur through a tiny LCD screen.

If on the other hand, you ask someone about their vacation and their response is to tell you stories of what it was like to walk through the Famous Place, to touch the stone, to breath the air, to sip the popular local beverage on the square, then you will be much more moved by the experience, even if their memory is less precise than the images a camera could capture.

A vision/mission statement is accurate and packaged for quick delivery (in, I suppose, the proverbial elevator). They are precise in the same way a picture is, and, like a picture, prove you’ve actually made a journey, of one kind or another. But sharing a short, packaged statement, like sharing a video or slide show, can’t really bring a person along quite like the story you could tell about what it’s like to breath the air in the place you’ve been, or in the place you dream of going.

Wouldn’t having both be beneficial? The story of the journey and the technically precise record of it to refer to forever? Maybe. But like the videographer’s vacation, how well can you tell a story about a place if you were focused on capturing the perfect image (or expression) of it?

I have heard that literacy has done irreparable damage in societies that once relied on oral history. … Sure the ability to write things down preserved some of their stories forever and made them easier to share, but it also released people from having to remember them. The result? The end of memory, in one sense: people lose the ability to remember. I think photography and videography has the same effect … why pay attention to your surroundings when you can just capture an image? And how could you pay attention anyways when you’re concerned with the technical aspects of operating your device?

Is it possible that mission statements have a similar effect? Can a short, precise, intentional statement release people from the need to remember, to think, even to dream? The real danger is that they also reduce our ability to remember, to think, or to dream.

I recently spent a couple hours with a friend over a pint of a popular local beverage, talking about work, his and mine. He’s a CEO who’s logged plenty of time in front of venture capitalists who, I imagine, don’t have time for stories–they want to hear clear vision expressed succinctly. This friend of mine asked me The Question, and I tried to explain what I dream about, where I expect vision to arise from, and why I was reticent to boil down what-I-saw-when-I-looked-ahead into a single sentence. Then I half-heartedly admitted I could probably generate a pithy statement that summed up all I had said, and gave it a shot. His response was a bit of a surprise to me: he said that the pithy version “did absolutely nothing for him”, but that he was moved deeply by the story I told about the process.

Maybe in a setting where a group of people is motivated by progress, profit, and growth, you need to communicate with a kind of hyper efficiency. But when a group is motivated by a dream of shared stories about God, relationships, and love, room has to be made for a kind of inefficiency … where we listen to, and respect, the perspectives of many people who’ve wrestled with God. I’m not ruling out that a good short statement can sum up an idea, just as a great image can capture a moment. But even as we come closer to knowing who we are and what we’re here for, I will always want to hear people reflect on those things by telling the story in their own words, not by reciting an easily memorized phrase divined by a few people.

Richard Avedon, the great portrait photographer, once said that every photograph is fiction … a frozen moment of a life abruptly stolen out of it’s vital context. Killed, in essence. His photos were haunting and beautiful. But they were no longer about the people who’d given their images to the camera. They had gone on living and were no longer bound to the two dimensional image that had been captured. I think mission statements are like that: if you sell a piece of plastic, maybe you can sum that story up in a few words. But if your business is life, be careful lest you kill the thing you’re observing through the violence of capturing it.