The Pulpiteer

This mythological and mystical story comes to us from renowned storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw and is the first in our Smoke Hole series. It is a tale of dark energies and bewitchment, power and corruption, of bloodlust and unlikely allies, and ultimately about the victory of the simple and faithful over the complex. Join us around our imaginary fire as we spin a tale from the troves of old Europe.

Based on the Preface and First Chapter (Vision) of our Congregational Read: What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis Hemphill. Come listen as we explore and share. We'll see if we can't do some healing and cast a vision, together.

I've given myself a few weeks to begin to digest my experiences at the Orphan Wisdom School in Ontario. So this is the first part of sharing what I learned there.

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue. – Clearing by Martha Postlewaite

If we subscribe to this progressivist view of history, of evolution, of the unfolding of life in the universe – a view nominally supported by the hearts of the great wisdom traditions, by our own transient observations, and by the findings of science (at least in the human or Earthly near term – perhaps not on the longer galactic time scale). Well, if we subscribe to that – one element of our progress might be that our blessings get better and better, that we get wiser and wiser – In that spirit, let’s unpack this new benediction, a riff on the Davidson Loehr benediction from this summer: May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers. Play more Proficient than Mastery. Vulnerability more Powerful than Invincibility. Supplication more Productive than Control. And a Peace that Passeth all Understanding. Maybe it needs some more work, maybe you can help me out…

We often think of justice work as 'external' - we focus our attention on the parts of cultures and systems and institutions that lie outside of us, outside of our control or influence. But this focus makes two mistakes - first, it presumes that we are not implicated in systems and cultures we choose not to identify with, and second, it fails to recognize that our ability to replace the culture, system, or insititution with something better is contingent upon our having done the internal work to create a new possibility. We'll look at some emerging voices in the field of healing justice - voices helping guide us to do the internal work that makes justice possible.

This is the third of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding.  Is it a peace that is available to us? Even in the midst of the suffering of others? Even in the midst of our own suffering? Is it the answer to suffering, or the antidote, or the cure, or a balm, or what? Well friends, we'll have to agree to wrestle those questions together and see if we can't exhaust our way into a better understanding of this promised peace.

This is the second of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding. And here’s how we’re going to honor it: We tried it scripted, we tackled ‘questions more profound that answers’, now it’s time to go one layer deeper, It’s time for ‘vulnerability more powerful than strength’. 25 minutes of Q&A without the script.

This is the first of a three part sermon series based on the benediction. May you find: Questions more Profound than Answers, Vulnerability more Powerful than Strength, and a Peace that Passeth All Understanding. And here's how we're going to honor it: You Ask, I answer... well, probably more like ponder, speculate, ruminate, you get the idea.

A good covenant is easy to write and hard to practice. What can we do to better live the promises we've already made? How can we honor the spirit of a promise when its literal interpretation shifts from hard to impossible? If a promise can't be kept literally, is it worthless? What do we really owe each other anyway? These questions and more as our struggle continues.

We can't interrupt the transmission of intergenerational trauma without asking deep questions. In the research on play, on imagination, on unconditional love - we begin to see the shape of some similarly deep answers. But can we do the work? Can we relinquish our expectations of conformity and compliance in favor of a world made more chaotic by human expression released from traditional fetters?

In a sequence of five stories from three authors, we'll attempt to find a path through the forest of judgement, into the clearing of showing up for each other, and on to a seemingly mythical land of transcendent connection. Join us won't you? Thanks and acknowledgement to our three authors: Eckhart Tolle, Stephen Jenkinson, and Charles Eisenstein.

 I’m not asking if such a future is possible or plausible or what changes have to happen to bring it about. I’m asking a question about the present, a question about our own social and mental and emotional and spiritual state — I’m asking if we can, through the lens of our imagination, see such a place from here.

Could it be that the best thing about democracy is the part of it that we do the worst? After all, if you look back at the history of the idea, it only really had one serious precondition. A precondition that this country stopped taking seriously as soon as it extended the franchise. Could more attention to this one prerequisite be the linchpin for healing our ailing democratic institutions and culture?

I’ve long struggled to find an MLK Day tradition that I feel does adequate justice to his life and message as a modern day prophet. So, for the first installment in what I hope will become a long standing practice, we will use Dr. King’s spotlight to highlight the message of a lesser known but sympathetically aligned fellow prophet… one whose life was also cut short by intentional violence, dare we say, assassination. I call this practice, this tradition in the making, ‘Prophets in the Graveyard.’