The Community Garden: March 4, 2024 @ 4:44am
It has taken me over 7 months to process this reflection and prepare it for sharing. I guess now is the time… ;)
On the 4th day of March at 4:44am, I’m awake. I wish I wasn’t. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were filled with emotionally charged experiences. This means I’m the opposite of charged. On March 1st I submitted my doctoral dissertation as a six year run has (finally) reached its end (almost). I have all kinds of fears about if it's good enough, worth the energy I put into it… why did I even want to get a doctorate?
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I began my program at Fuller Theological Seminary for a few reasons, but I don’t really remember what they were. It all seems like a blur. On some level, I retreated into the program. On the run from ego-leadership, in search of something, as if in a vision, that might be “humble, loving, and kind.” At the end of it all it turns out I found it living in me. Humbly speaking.
But damn. The heartache along the way. Hindsight is filled with reflections on where I’d been, mired in a revolving door of “typical white male pastors,” which is actually a wide-ranging ilk even if we are a dime a dozen. Even if we don’t all cause harm without reconciliation. Most are busy and blind, tragically so… and the embracing never comes.
The initial experience, at a church “in the urban core of Phoenix,” that I was running from (running in the sense of no way in hell can I stay here) was much more toxic than I realized and on some level I still resent it. Or maybe I resent the leadership and all those who continue to enable them. To be clear, I’m a work in progress.
I showed up at Fuller wounded. And while there, get this, I learned about the Spirit. But by the time I was done I learned about a Spirit hawking the margins and that Spirit is way less hyped up than we thought in our second year of study. In fact, the Spirit I met is earthy, formed to look like any who, as I learned outside the classroom, have their backs against the wall.
But before I learned this I thought I could go back home. And I’ll be damned if Jesus wasn’t right about going home, too. He was right twice but I didn’t really know I might be a prophet so that’s why I was surprised. My name is Chris and I’m a prophet… which is what Jesus deemed to be the first problem in this path back home.
Turns out I’m the kind of prophet who keeps trying to show anyone with ears or eyes that things are not as they should be. And when you are a prophet, as a job description, you do prophet-y things. And when you do that, well, like Jesus said to be the second problem, you tend to not be welcome in your own hometown.
Funny enough, compliments of a Spirit-inspired epiphany, I learned I am welcomed in my hometown. Welcomed by the mountains and rivers and deer and wildflowers and trees and trout. The welcoming Spirit of the wind.
Eventually, sooner than originally thought, I took my prophet-y ass back to the desert, where prophets belong. And there I found, in the desert a second time, pain stalking me like a mountain lion. I never saw it coming. But that’s a tale for another time.
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When I take the time to reflect, root around in my life and the way it has unfolded pastorally, I am a bit surprised to find that I am not currently searching. To be fair, I’m not sure what all I was searching for in the past, but when I keep it within the confines of the metaphorical garden I strive to steward and live in, it is intriguing that I am not searching, anymore, for a pastoral leadership that is “humble, loving, and kind.”
I am four months away from leaving Kaleo and the title of pastor. But this leaving is not because I am still in search of a church leadership that embodies something I could never find. At some point in time I became what I was looking for. We became it, together. They still are. And it was not what I thought it would be. Better, even, in a gritty sort of way.
It is hard to remember what “I thought it would be” after all the years of chasing, being wounded (self-inflicted and otherwise), fighting for something better. What did I think would happen if pastoring was done with humility, love, and kindness?
I thought it’d be “successful.”
The type of success the pundits label “stable and sustainable and growing bigger.” I’ve come to learn this growth is not what happens to the ministry of the prophets. Turns out one can be humble, loving, and kind (most days) and still be called a heretic, progressive, or some other smattering of words intended to send such a ministry to the margins.
Thank God.
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At the outset of the Kaleo Phoenix journey I got my first tattoo. It was a tattoo of Francis of Assisi holding a brick, standing with our first dog, Kula, and Francis’s eyes were covered by a glacier lily. Why would I be surprised that this permanent ink was a foreshadowing of things to come?
Today I am where I have, maybe, always been. Like Francis, like so many of my spiritual guides, I am on the edge of the inside. I am on the margins, full of the Spirit. To be clear, I am not marginalized. I have chosen, like Francis, to be where I am but that does not mean the journey to the edge and the journey on the edge weren’t full of pain and confusion, blessings and hope, turmoil and lament.
If I align my calling with the words Francis claims he heard, then I think I’ve done well. I, too, sought to heed the calling God beamed to Francis when God uttered, “rebuild My church.” Turns out it looks a lot like a small garden full of sacred soil and life, but also often struggling a bit for water and light.
Today is the first day I ever thought to merge the metaphors that so define my life: Church and Nature. Today is the first day it dawned on me, which is its own beautiful metaphor even if it's a colloquialism, that whenever I aligned my life with Francis I like, reallllllly meant that shit. And now I’m on the edge, not teetering, but living my veneration of “rebuild my church” status, which has me, like Francis, shouting out Brother Sun and Sister Moon and preaching with the grackles and finding out your church can’t have any money if you give it away. And finding out your church can’t have any money when you encourage others to give it away. And finding out your church is actually the type of church you set out to build and that’s why it doesn’t have any money.
No one owns the community garden. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
*P.S. — Kaleo Phoenix is being tended, still, by the most humble, loving, and kind people I’ve known.
