Life on Mars

According to Facebook, this was the first picture that the rover Curiosity took after landing on Mars in August.  (And for those of you who did not have a 1970s childhood which included Saturday morning reruns of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, that's Marvin the Martian peering into Curiosity's camera.)

The Oh family of Pasadena, California had their own taste of life on Mars this summer.  David is a NASA engineer and the flight director for Curiosity.  During the month of August David and his entire family structured their schedule according to Mars time.  A Martian Day is 24 hours and 40 minutes long, so after a short while the Martian day, or sol, was out-of-sync with an Earth day.  In trying to follow Martian time, the Oh family found themselves having a picnic on the beach at 1 AM Pacific Daylight Time, or going bowling at 4 AM.  David's thirteen-year-old son Braden blogged about the family's experience of living in Martian time.  http://marstimr.tumblr.com  When school started again in September, the Oh kids reset their clocks to Earth time.

I loved reading about the Oh family's experience of living on Martian time last month, but it also seems to me that 4 AM excursions to the beach or to the bowling alley fail to capture the sense of actually living on Mars.  Somehow I imagine that life on Mars would be more like living in a rust-colored Antarctica with no penguins.  (And no Marvin, either!)

Belden Lane, in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, speaks of the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century who withdrew to the desert "to seek the face of God in a landscape of emptiness." (p. 186)  Compared to the empty Martian landscape, the Libyan desert west of the Nile must seem like the rain forest.

Part of me wonders whether space pioneers of the future will intentionally choose the desert landscape of Mars as a spiritual refuge.  What would it be like to live in a cold, rust-colored desert in which your former home--your former life!--appears no larger than the evening star?  

I also know that we don't always choose our desert experiences.  Not too long ago I visited a member of our congregation who has been undergoing a long and difficult rehabilitation.  "The days are 36 hours long," he told me.  That's significantly longer than either a Martian day or an Earth day, but the salient and poignant point is that his days are radically out-of-sync with everyone else's days.  (No one goes bowling at 4 AM pretending to be a rehab patient who can't sleep.)

To quote Belden Lane once again:  "Desert and mountain places are often associated with the 'limit-experiences' of people on the edge, people who have run out of language in speaking of God, people whose recourse to fierce landscapes has fed some deep need within them for the abandonment of control and the acceptance of God's love in absolute, unmitigated grace."  (p. 6)

What lessons have you learned in the desert?  What has it been like to "seek the face of God in a landscape of emptiness?"

Ash Tuesday

There was a story on NPR this morning about the lower-key ceremonies that were marking the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  In New York City, for instance, no big-name politicians spoke.  As the names of the victims were read and the bagpipers played, there were hundreds gathered, whereas in years past there have been thousands gathered.

One surviving family members said, "Somehow, I feel more normal this year," and Charles G. Wolfe, another surviving family member, said, "We've gone past that deep, collective, public grief."  (As reported by Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne).

Perhaps it is time for quieter commemorations, for lower-key ceremonies evocative of Ash Wednesday worshippers donning ashes in remembrance of their common mortality and in acknowledgement of their collective grief, which might be less public but is still just as deep.

How have you commemorated this anniversary?  If you were to adopt a Lenten-like discipline or practice as a way of safeguarding the memory of 9/11, what would it be?  What would you (or have you) resolved to do?

Some Food (no pun intended) for Thought on the Chick-fil-a Day

My facebook feed has been full of Chick-fil-a comments today, both pro and con.  I found the following blog post by Rachel Held Evans to be particularly helpful and potentially healing:

http://rachelheldevans.com/chick-fil-a#.UBlDiawaqzU.facebook

The last two paragraphs alone are worth the price of the blog (which is free):

"As Christians—conservative and progressive, gay and straight, activists and slacktivists—we must direct our efforts instead toward bridging this divide, which is going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of disappointment, a lot of tears, a lot of compromise, a lot of honesty, a lot of mistakes, a lot of apologies, a lot of listening, a lot of forgiveness, a lot of meal sharing, a lot of gospel. 

In other words, it’s going to take a heck of a lot more effort than either eating or avoiding a chicken sandwich. "

Summer Reading 2012

My wife Emma and I are about to spend a week in the mountains near Keystone, Colorado, thanks to a generous cabin loan from some longtime friends.  So, it's time to begin the summer reading in earnest.  This is the first summer that I do not have to do specific class readings for courses in Chicago, so I have the luxury of choosing my own summer reading.

This summer I'd like to begin with Marilynne Robinson's latest book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books:

Then I'd like to erase a deficit in my classic repertoire by reading Crime & Punishment:

In honor of the ongoing 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, another one of my goals is to read through the events of the summer of 1862 by following Shelby Foote's epic Civil War narrative:

This year's Western National Leadership Training event in Jackson, Wyoming, sponsored by the Synod of the Rocky Mountains of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be partly based on Rex Miller's book The Millenium Matrix.  I don't think I'll be able to attend WNLT, but I would like to be able to join the follow-up conversations about the kind of leadership that will be required to lead the church forward:

Finally, I'd like read Tom Long's latest book What Shall We Say?  Evil, Suffering, and The Crisis of Faith, partly in the hopes that it will give me some fodder for an October sermon series on the Book of Job:

What about you?  What will you be reading and feasting upon this summer?

Why Church? What a congregation is for . . .

One more entry in the Why Church? discussion.  Here's a reflection from Lutheran pastor and blogger Diane Roth:

http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2012-06/what-congregation

Why Church? Ten Reasons . . .

This ties in with our current "Why Church?" sermon series.  This is from the blog of the Argenta Presbyterian Church in North Little Rock, Arkansas:

http://argentapres.org/2012/05/18/ten-reasons-why-you-should-be-going-to-church-2/

Why Church?

These days I've started a new sermon series entitled, "Why Church?"  Why do we gather as a church?  What keeps us coming to church?

I'm also exploring the 102-year-old "Great Ends of the Church," which are a part of the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

The Great Ends of the Church are:
(1)  The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind.
(2)  The Shelter, Nurture, and Spiritual Fellowship of the Children of God.
(3)  The Maintenance of Divine Worship.
(4)  The Preservation of the Truth.
(5)  The Promotion of Social Righteousness.
(6)  The Exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the World.

How well have those statements weathered through the years?  Just today there was an article in the Washington Post about how millennials are leaving churches in droves.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/young-millennials-losing-faith-in-record-numbers/2012/04/19/gIQA9QoxTT_story.html

But this also begs the question, why do some people stay?

I recently came across the following Blog Post by blogger and writer Rachel Held Evans:

15 Reasons I Returned to The Church

What about you?  What draws you to church?  Why have you stayed in spite of all of the frustrations?  Of if you've left, why have you left?

Prayer of the Day

Prayer of the Day, April 4, 2012, Colorado House of Representatives

Forty-four years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  This morning I would like to combine and adapt two of Dr. King’s prayers.  The first is entitled, “In the Moment of Difficult Decision,” and the second is entitled, “A Great Nation.”

I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer.  Let us pray.

Eternal God, out of whose mind this great cosmic universe came into being, we bless you.  We thank you for the privilege of assembling here this morning.  We thank you for all of the opportunities of life, and as we stand together today and discuss vital matters confronting our [state, and indeed, our] nation [and our world], we ask your guidance to be with us in all our deliberations and help us at all times to seek that which is high, noble, and good.  Help us in the moment of difficult decision.  Help us to work with renewed vigor for a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood and sisterhood that transcends race or color [or any other division].  Help us as a people to follow all the noble precepts of democracy.  Grant, O God, that as we move on we will move toward that city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God.  Amen.

Prepared by the Rev. Jack Cabaness, Pastor, Westminster (Colorado) Presbyterian Church.

Prayers adapted from Thou, Dear God:  The Prayers of Martin Luther King, Jr.