City of...

This is a bit late, but figured I'd update anyway....

 Last Tuesday Emily and I left for Charlottesville to visit my good friend Mali Royer, who is at medschool at UVA. After a bit of a sidetrack, we got on the road and made it there sometime in the afternoon. Charlottesville is really pretty but the traffic is a bit crazy...lots of long lights.

We got to see Mali's place, which is like a house built on top of another house and then converted into an apartments. She has a kitchen, living area, and a big room, and a roommate who seems really nice. It was great to be hanging out in Mali's room again--such a big part of my Washington College experience, topped off by her being gone senior year but Adam and I living in her and Terri's old room in Middle Hall.

We went out to dinner at the Mellow Mushroom, ate good pizza and drank good beer. Back at Mali's place, Emily took a nap and then looked at puppies on the computer. Mali and I got into a long discussion about God. She had read Sam Harris' Letters to a Christian Nation, which she said spoke to a lot of her frustrations with religious folks in this country, including her own Quakers. And that was bound to start a discussion, since Harris' outlook on what I am about to depart to do for 16 months would be quite dim, to say the least. We talked about belief, about hypocrisy, about God, and it was really good, I think, for both of us. Mali is at a point in her life where she is really frustrated with religion and finds herselve unable to believe in God. And it was good for her to be able to say that to me, and for me to talk about my own faith. It was a good reminder that Jesus is frustrated with hypocrisy and unbelief by those who call themselves religious, but lends a listening ear to those with doubts and pain. And it was a good reminder to both of us of why we do what we do. We both want to spend our lives in loving service. I think if we both do that, we'll get this faith thing figured out, eventually.

We watched some scrubs, but we were all pretty beat, so we went to sleep. Mali left early the next morning for class, and I said bye to her before she left. I will miss her a lot, but we have continued our discussion by email, which is really great. And she, like all of my friends and people who care about me, will be with me on my journey.

Em and I headed out for our trip to Charlotte, and after a stop for coffee we were on our way. We got some directions from a girl working at Panera, and made it to Charlotte in pretty good time. I got the tour of the apartment, we took a nap, I got a shower, which felt glorious after the long car ride, and then we went out to dinner at a local bar, where I had a difficult time not looking at the million and a half TVs everywhere. Emily told me a fairy tale about a werefox and an illicit affair to keep me from watching TV. It was hilarious.

After meeting Emily and Heather's third roommate, Rachel, who, like Heather, is teaching elementary school in Charlotte, we headed to target. Heather's friend Leah was also in town, so the five of us hunted for supplies for Heather's classroom. Also, I called Abby Huggins (!!), who's trip to Grenada had been delayed by Hurricane Dean.

The next day we helped Heather put together her classroom for her open house with parents that night. Abby came and helped! We went out to dinner later at an uptown restaraunt in Charlotte, had delicious food, and then it was time for Abby to leave. Sad day. We prayed with her, watched some of "Dangerous Minds" with everyone, and then went to sleep. We had to say goodbye to everyone early the next day, and then it was back to Calvert County so that Em could make it to a Lynard Skynard concert with her brother! Fun times.

Since then, life has been a blur of visiting as many people as possible before I leave. Lisa at her house in Severn, Shannon and Kate at Kate's new home, Lebanon Valley College, etc., etc. I saw Sandy Phillips, our pastoral intern, preach on Sunday, which was good, and have spent a lot of time with Emily. Today it's back to Calvert County for an end of summer and going away party. Life is crazy, I'm starting to freak out a little bit, but I'm really excited for this new adventure to begin! Also, I've heard from Sabeel and now know where I'll be staying and how I'm getting there. What a relief.

Sorry about the whirldwind updates, but that's the way the cookie crumbles right now. Hope whoever is reading this is well, and that peace and blessings follow you on your way.

Hmm....once a week entries is likely to mean long entries. I'll do what I can.

Last Friday, my mom and dad and I went to support Bill McDannell and his wife Jonna, two former United Methodist pastors who have been travelling across the country with a petition to bring troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. They sold most of what they own, bought a 23 year old camper, and set out from San Diego. Bill walks while Jonna drives ahead (their two dogs keep her company). He has walked the entire way from San Diego to D.C. (For more details, see their website: www.wtetw.com).

We met up with them in a CVS parking lot in Falls Church. After some introductions and dog petting, we set off--Mom driving and meeting up with Jonna down the road, while Dad and I walked with Bill. We talked, and told stories, and laughed, and dodged traffic, and found sidewalks when we could, and shared. Bill told us stories about his walk, about the people he has met. He told us about staying with a crazy commune in PA, who believe that the world will end soon and that they will be the only ones saved; and also of staying in a Bruderhof community, which was a much different experience. He told me why he and Jonna had left the ministry, about the challenges and the loneliness and about the difficulties of being pastoral and prophetic in a largely middle class church. We talked about liberation theology and peace and the war and government. And we walked.

Thinking back, many of the times I have felt closest to my dad have been walking in DC. Seeing him at the Vietnam War Memorial. Walking next to him as we talked with Bill--two Vietnam-era vets (my dad was actually in Vietnam, Bill wasn't as far as I know) sharing their frustrations and their visions. My dad seemed really heartened by Bill, and for someone who has been celebrating getting out of bed every day, he did so well with the walking. It was healthy and it was good, and it was in support of someone who is doing something concrete to express his beliefs, and it makes me wonder what I am doing--not in the long haul, but RIGHT NOW--to express mine. And it makes me wonder--how difficult is it, really, to just sell it all and set out walking? If we can do it to protest a war, can we do it to spread the love of God? I don't mean in the convert-them-by-the-sword, you're-going-to-burn way. But what about in the way of walking to places where there seems to be darkness and cynicism and no hope or way to love, and speaking and living Jesus into those places? How hard is it? How hard is it if we really have faith?

We left Bill and Jonna in another parking lot later that night. I told them about Koinonia, where they would be welcomed if they are ever in Georgia. And they told me to keep in touch. I think I will.

Saturday, I took a trip to Calvert County to see Emily. We visited her friend Allie, who has been going through a lot of surgeries (she's so young to have to go through all of this). And I saw Emily's camp kids put on their play, which was a lot of fun.

Sunday, I preached. If you want a copy, let me know. It went well, and I tried to tell some hard truths about myself and about our church and about our nation, and then to talk about how much God loves us that we are not left alone in our brokenness and despair. People seemed to like it, but I can only hope that maybe a little of God's voice came through my own, if that makes sense.

Afterwards, everyone who had come to hear me talk came back to my house, which was crazy. Family and friends of the family, my godfather Pat, Emily and her mom, and FOUR of my fellow young missionaries came! Jamie, Katy, Lindsey, and Beth came, as did Beth's mom--awesome! It was chaotic and lovely and fun and it was great for the house to be filled with laughing and talking instead of tension and depression.

And then I went into DC to hang out with Jamie and her parents, and Lindsey, and Pat. We had dinner and went out for drinks at the Brickseller (400 different kinds of beer. Whoa.) and even though they didn't always have the beer we ordered it was a great time. Then up again on Monday morning to wish Katy luck on her first day of work and then off to College Park, to hang out with Shannon and Dan and to talk about helicopters and movies and John's gospel. Then back home to have dinner with Ms. Parker and Erin and Mrs. Linnell at Lee's, my old Chinese food hangout. THEN to Calvert County again, to plan our trip to Charlotte and Charlottesville.....which is my next entry.

Phew!

"You kept your distance out of fear you'd break

but what good's a single windchime, hanging quiet and alone?

The music our collisions make

is the sound that turns the road-that-leads-us-back-home

into Home." --from "In A Market Dimly Lit," by mewithoutYou

I leave September 9th for Jerusalem. Please pray for me, and for my sister who is in Peru. And for all of us, that we may overcome our fear of colliding.

Ah, Washington, D.C.

So, I took the Metro from New Carrolton into DC on Saturday. I love the Metro--good people watching, always get to catch up on some reading, and occasionally some interesting/funny interactions, like the truck driver who told me he had read the whole bible mutliple times and then proceeded to tell me how John Kerry was a communist, or the woman who read my Bible with me all the way to our stop.

This trip, though was relatively uneventful. Jamie picked me up at the Rhode Island stop, we went shopping (thus demonstrating once and for all Jamie's inability to multitask. Me: "So, tell me about work!" Jamie: "Work.....juice....where's the [stops in the middle of the aisle, confused] I need juice"), drove back to her house, where Lindsey Kerr was busy working on her sermon. We moved some stuff in that Rebecca's supervisor and his wife brought, hung out, had wine, had Lindsey's car stolen, and then went out for a night on the town.

Wait. No we didn't. Lindsey's car got stolen. From right out in front of Jamie's house. In broad daylight.

So, after an exciting night of frustration, being on hold, trips to the police station, waiting in line behind people who were just getting out of jail, etc., we went to sleep while Lindsey went to her parents' hotel room (oh yeah, her parents were in town to hear her speak).

Luckily, I feel, for all of us, Lindsey's friend Mark, the Methodist chaplain at American University, came over to assist us, thus providing some guidance to us in our general lack of ability to handle a crisis situation (Should we call the police? Probably. What do we call? This isn't reallya 911 situation. Crap, we have no idea what to do).

All crises aside, it was amazing to see Jamie, Lindsey, and Beth, and to worship together at Lindsey's church. I fell in love with Dumbarton instantly, and Lindsey's sermon was amazing, although it might get her labelled as the resident evangelical at Dumbarton. From the standpoint of a progressive Christian, Lindsey asked an important question: What does conservative Christianity (as Kerr says, that kind of Christianity that we always have to say we're not) have to teach us? A lot, as it turns out, but Kerr summed it up well: "What's wrong with a little fervor?"

Kerr asked all of us, if social justice is the backbone of our faith, what makes it different than social justice without faith? Her argument, that God's justice is so much BIGGER than ours, that it stretches to include the oppressor, the racist, those we would arrogantly declare our enemies, led to my favorite point of her sermon. "As you go about doing the work of justice," she said, "Don't get caught up in the work. Get caught up in the justice!"

Get caught up in the justice. Get caught up in God.

This message, and the car thievery, stuck with me as we gathered after the service to chat with many of the Dumbartonians, followed by a nice lunch with the Kerr family, Beth, Jamie, and Mark. What are we caught up in? How do we respond to those who we often think of as our enemies, whether they are oppressors, people we consider intolerant, or people who steal our car? Of course, I'd like to think that the car was stolen because someone needed it for a triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Or D.C. But, probably, it has been taken apart for parts in a chop shop near Jamie's house, profit for people driven to criminal activity by the pressures within their community, by the inability to get steady employment--injustice created by injustice.

And the question remains. How do we take the circle, formed by the Dumbarton community after communion, and extend it outwards, without ceasing? How do we extend it to car thieves and boardroom executives, to the oppressed and the oppressor, to the poor and the rich, to the neighbor and the enemy, to the Christian and the non-Christian? How do we extend it? And how can we ever do it if we are not on fire with God's dream for us? How can we ever do it if we're not caught up in God?

These are some questions that have stayed with me as I hung out in Calvert County these past few days, spending time with Emily and trying to figure out when I'm leaving (no date yet, although I have gotten an email from Sabeel and am now at least in contact with the person who can tell me a date). And they remind me of a poem that Mother Teresa is said to have had written on the wall of her room in Calcutta:

This has been a crazy couple of days, but crazy in that good, so-much-has-happened sense.

 Here are some things that have happened/I have done:

1) Chatted with my sister, who I miss already, who is back safe and sound in Peru, and who had a dentist appointment to get her pirate tooth filed down

2) Went with my parentsto see Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, speak at St. Franics of Assisi Catholic Church in Derwood, MD

3) on the way there, stopped to see my younger cousins Kelly and Ryan and their puppy, Abby, who stayed at our house for a little while

4) to get there, took one of my dad's patented "shortcuts" which are always twice as long, always involve getting lost, always involve my dad driving too fast down heavily wooded back roads, and thus always bring me closer to God

5) drove with my best friend Dan to Ocean City to meet up with Katie Kinne (!!), after accidently ending up in Virginia despite Dan and my combined total of 200 lifetime hours spent driving to Ocean City, met her family, hung out at their Assateague Island campsite, watched horses engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and try to eat our tomato, traded books, and forced Katie to hug me multiple times

6) drove all the way back across the Bay Bridge, met Emily at my house, drove up to Owings Mills to see the Bourne Ultimatum with my roommate Adam and his friend Grant, and thought the movie was frikin' awesome

7) fought off a Black Ops CIA assassin using only a piece of parking lot trash and a hamster

8) no, just kidding, but dammit if I was Jason Bourne I could have

 And today I'm going in to DC to hang out with Jamie, Lindsey Kerr, and Beth T, and to hear Lindsey preach tomorrow morning at Dumbarton.

Also, I found out that I"m preaching on Aug 19 at my church...the text is "I came not to bring peace but the sword," which is always a fun one for peacenick me to talk on! I'm excited...maybe THIS time I can get kicked out of my church!!!

Phew. Tired just thinking about it all.

It was all amazing, but I especially wanted to share a few things that Rabbi Ascherman said. First of all, he said that the first time he went to Jerusalem he was upset because there were no bagels, but now there are, so I now know something about my placement site: there will be bagels.

Also, Rabbis for Human Rights works with Sabeel a lot, so when I introduced myself he gave me his card and said "I'll see you over there."

Ascherman's talk was amazing. He told stories, talked about the Torah, Talmudic, and Mishnah inspiration for his work, and took questions, including a really amazing exchange between himself and a Palestinian woman in the audience.

Here are some things from his talk that I especially liked:

--"The Torah tells us that we are not to stand idly by while our neighbor bleeds."

--"What kind of Jewish state is that if you can't get bagels?"

--"religious Jews have increasingly been socialized into particularism and nationalism...[but] there is a humanistic reading of the Torah that is equally valid, eqally textually based, equally Jewish as the nationalist and particularist reading"

--quoting Abraham Joshua Heschel: "In a democracy, few are guilty but all are responsible."

--Economic justice is a human right

--"Whenever you hear someone say, 'Judaism says...' a big red flag should go up. Our tradition is too multi-layered and too based on debate and discussion to ever say 'Judaism says' about anything." (I think this applies to Christianity as well, something I ought to keep in mind!)

--"It all comes down to hope"

--"We're either going to live together or die together"

--"Our only security, according to Judaism, is to live up to our moral standards of ethical treatment for humans and creation. Protecting the rights of Palestinians is the moral thing to do, the Jewish thing to do, but it's also the self-interested thing to do, the truly Zionist thing to do."

--"Whenever people put on uniforms, that so often tells them that they have the right to violate the very laws that they are required to uphold."

--"You can be sitting around a negotiating table and there can still be a lot of coercion going on."

--And, finally, from a Jewish text: "The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied."

So much to think about, so much to learn--so much becoming still to do.

My sister left this morning, she is off to Peru to finish out the last 3 years of her Peace Corps term. It was hard saying goodbye to her--I won't see her for a long time. For that matter, it was hard saying goodbye to everyone after this weekend's family gathering. Next year will be the first time I won't be at the Hosey Family Reunion in the 16 years since we started this crazy shindig. It was a lot of fun, as usual--eating too much, playing with kids (making a few of them cry, because I'm a horrible person), playing cards, playing Balderdash, getting updates from everyone, and--in my case--tactfully avoiding political discussions. This has not always been the case, but I managed to avoid getting sucked in this year.

My family is amazing--so loving. The love that's there is one of the things that makes me believe in nonviolence, which is ironic because very few of my family members, if you asked them, would say that they believe in nonviolence. I remember one year, though, that my cousin Dan, my uncle Denny, and I were arguing vehemently over some issue or another, and my cousin Sherry came around to ask if we still had our tonsils. I doubt she was thinking "how can I use the power of nonviolence to creatively transform what is rapidly turning into a non-constructive conflict?" I'm pretty sure she was thinking: "These are people that I love," or maybe, "How can I get these over-serious cousins to laugh?" If we could all simplify it like that, how much easier our faith practice in this world would be...

"These are people who are made, who are designed, to love each other. How can I remind them of that?"

Of course, it's difficult to take the love that I'm lucky enough to feel in my family and extend it to the world. I've just finished reading Naim Ateek's book (the founder of Sabeel, where I will be working in a month or so). Ateek discusses the difficulty of living out Jesus' message of enemy-love for the Palestinian people:

"In the face of such mounting hatred, what should be the attitude of the Palestinian Christian? Some Christians would deny the possibility of love and forgiveness in such circumstances....Others would pronounce pious platitudes about love and forgiveness....I believe that neither of these two groups is being faithful to the true Christian calling."

Ateek goes on to say: "Therefore, the challenge for Palestinian Christians, and indeed of all Christians faced with situations of bitterness and hate, is to keep up the struggle and never to succumb to despair and hate....Keep struggling against hate and resentment. Always confess that the struggle goes on and the battle is not over. At times you will have the upper hand, at times you will feel beaten down. Although it is extremely difficult, never let hatred completely overtake you. By the power of God the struggle will go on until the day comes when you being to count more victories than defeats.

    Never stop trying to live the commandment of love and forgiveness. Do not dilute the strength of Jesus' message: do not shun it, do not dismiss it as unreal and impractical. Do not cut it to your size, trying to make it more applicable to real life in the world. Do not change it so that it will suit you. Keep it as it is; aspire to it, desire it, and work with God for its achievment.

    Remember that so often it is those who have suffered most at the hands of others who are capable of offering forgiveness and love."

Wow. I should have cut that shorter, but there's so much good stuff in there. I think, though, that the best expression of this idea comes from a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hahn. Like Ateek, he does not speak of forgiveness from a distance, but from a life of struggle, from a lifetime of trying to live out nonviolence in violent situations. He was exiled from his country for speaking for peace (and was just recently allowed to come back). In 1965, he wrote a poem to young people in the School of Youth for Social Service which he started, young people who struggled for peace in Vietnam and had so much violence directed against them. The poem is called "Recommendation":

Promise me,

promise me this day,                                                                                                                                               

promise me now,                                                                                                                                                         

while the sun is overhead                                                                                                                                        

exactly at the zenith,                                                                                                                                                    

promise me:

Even as they                                                                                                                                                              

strike you down                                                                                                                                                            

with a mountain of hatred and violence;                                                                                                                    

even as they step on you and crush you                                                                                                                       

like a worm,                                                                                                                                                                

even as they                                                                                                                                                              

dismember and disembowel you,                                                                                                                       

remember, brother,                                                                                                                                                

remember:                                                                                                                                                                   

man is not our enemy.

The only thing worthy of you is compassion--                                                                                                          

invincible, limitless, unconditional.                                                                                                                           

Hatred will never let you face                                                                                                                                        

the beast in man.                                                                                                                                                         

One day, when you face this beast alone,                                                                                                                  

with your courage intact, your eyes kind,                                                                                                             

untroubled                                                                                                                                                                 

(even as no one sees them),                                                                                                                                        

out of your smile                                                                                                                                                            

will bloom a flower.

And those who love you                                                                                                                                                

will behold you                                                                                                                                                             

across ten thousand worlds of birth and dying.

Alone again,                                                                                                                                                                      

I will go on with bent head,                                                                                                                                         

knowing that love has become eternal.                                                                                                                         

On the long, rough road,                                                                                                                                               

the sun and the moon                                                                                                                                                   

will continue to shine.

yes.