Storydwelling

A circle of womxn/women is forming this summer to create community and sacred space together. We’ll gather to connect over Shameless, the latest book from Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber. This circle is an invitation to sip and snack with new friends as we discuss sex, sexuality, queerness, bodies, reproduction and the cultivation of a faith that might free, rather than shame, us.

We gather on Tuesday evenings from 7-9 pm from July 9-August 27. Meet outside Bright Place Gallery under the tent on the south side of the building. Look for the friendly women-types in the garden! Sips and snacks available (but always optional) from nearby Bevel Craft Brewing and campus food carts.

Suggested donation of $0-$80 for the round, including the book. Sign up by July 2 if you’d like us to order your book; otherwise, just show up! No RSVP necessary. Email thatpastorerika@gmail.com to sign up or for more information.

The book and our leadership emerge from the Lutheran tradition, but all perspectives are invited and encouraged. This circle is rooted in the Storydwelling community, and you can learn more about our welcome and our values here. Trans, non-binary, queer, lesbian, cis, hetero and all beautiful varieties of womxn are warmly invited. The more perspectives around the table, the more wisdom available to us.

Musician in Residence
stipended position
$250 per week, approximately 10 hours a week
August-December 2019

The Position

The Musician in Residence will be the curator and innovator of all things music for the Storydwelling community. Storydwelling is an ecumenical and affirming community of faith committed to love, liberation and relationship. We are rooted in the progressive theology of the Lutheran and Methodist traditions, and we long to explore the beautiful and creative edges of what is possible as we curate new theological vocabulary and spiritual imagination. We are committed to taking action for justice and peace in our neighborhoods and world.

Responsibilities

The primary responsibility of the Musician in Residence is to craft new music for this community and to curate a tone and spiritual vocabulary that aligns with our values and commitments. We imagine the MiR working among us as she/he/they do the creative work of putting our commitments to music. These need not be master compositions; simple tunes and chants are our speed!

A secondary responsibility will be to lead our community in music at our regular gatherings and at special events, but these tasks should contribute to the creative work of the MiR rather than distract or consume too much time.

Of course, the MiR is welcome to be a part of our community in whatever ways feel right, but participation in all gatherings is not required. We are a community rooted in Christianity, but we love and honor all perspectives; in fact, the more perspectives the better!

Expectations

• Musical skill insomuch as one can craft new music for a community as well as lead music for a community
• Willingness to cultivate the musical gifts of others in the community
• Flexibility and adaptability
• A sense of humor
• Openness to exploring theological and spiritual language and practices insomuch as they connect with the community’s musical expressions
• Availability on most weekends and some holidays

Story Dwelling expects all of its staff and community to commit to our core values:

• Y’all means all: we affirm the identities, backgrounds, and perspectives of all people
• God is a relational experience, and so relationship–rather than doctrine or dogma–is of primary value; we cultivate relationship through listening and sharing our stories.
• Faith is intentional: curiosity, wonder, awe are encouraged and cultivated.
• We steward sacred texts: of our scripture(s) and the sacred texts of our lives and stories.
• Out of relationship, we take hopeful action for justice and peace.

Compensation

This is a part-time position. Compensation is a stipended rate of $250 per week with the expectation of working 10 hours/week, recognizing that some weeks will require less time and some weeks (Christmas, for example) will require more time. The position will begin August 1 and end December 31.

This position is brand new and will develop and adapt as community and musician need it to. If all goes well, there is a good possibility of this extending beyond December 31 and becoming a permanent staff position.

If interested, please contact thatpastorerika@gmail.com to set up an initial meeting. Please send a sample recording or video that shows you “in your element” musically. Applications accepted on a rolling basis until position is filled.

Storydwelling is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, documentation status or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

People of color, people with disabilities, and people of diverse sexual orientations, gender expressions and identities are encouraged to apply.

Each year, the church calendar invites us to spend a week reflecting on and embodying the cycle of death and life that is human existence. The calendar calls this Holy Week.

Friends, all days are holy; none more holy than another. But this week is meant to be a remembrance: of a life lived in G-d–the rabbi Jesus–and of all of our lives lived in G-d/Source/Mystery.

Our invitation is to spend a week in intentional reflection and celebration together through music, storytelling, hiking and feasting. During these holy days, we remember and acknowledge that the world crucifies those who resist, those on the edges; crucifies the edges of our own stories and lives. And yet: we trust this is not the last word. When we gather together, we remember how true it is:

life wants to live.

This evening gathering invites us to reflect on the shadow side of our human lives and the Love that was and is crucified in solidarity with crucified people and communities in our world. We gather at one of our homes for an out-loud reading of the story of Jesus of Nazareth’s betrayal and execution, blended with the music of Brandi Carlile. You can expect to gather for about an hour with singing, prayer, candles and a campfire. All are welcome. Send us a quick note to receive the address.

As Holy Week invites us to reflect on life and death, we commit to acts of hopeful resistance as our kin and neighbors seek life in a death-dealing world. The ability to drive legally is a core everyday need for Oregon families. The Oregon legislature has the opportunity to pass House Bill 2015 this legislative session, a bill that would help ensure that all Oregonians can access a license to drive and have
a legal way to identify themselves. No family should fear being separated for driving to work, school or their house of worship. Our elected officials need to hear from us! Join us for this town hall at First Presbyterian in Bend to hear stories about how equal access to roads would strengthen our community.

This is the celebration of Easter, Storydwelling style! The Easter vigil is the oldest form of Easter celebration, and it is a night of stories. Yes, the stories in the Bible are unbelievable. But on Easter eve, we reclaim them, tell them, honor them. These are old wives’ tales and we get to love them into something more powerful than any textbook. We begin the evening outside around the campfire and then we spend the next TWO HOURS telling stories from the Hebrew tradition, singing and doing art together. This is more coffee house than it is “church service.” The evening culminates with a big celebration: Preaching! Wine & bread! Champagne! It’s all here. Yes, this gathering is long, but there are treats and activities for families all along the way. Absolutely all are welcome. Thanks to Nativity Lutheran for letting us use the space! We gather in the prayer garden on the east side of the parking lot.

Join us for an Easter hike to the top of Lava Butte (https://www.hikespeak.com/trails/lava-butte-hike-newburry-nvm-bend/)! We’ll meet up for an outdoor adventure to fill our lungs with Life and walk with footsteps of persistent Love. All are welcome. Bring a lunch or some snacks with you to enjoy at the summit with breathtaking Cascade views. We’ll bring the champagne! What a way to share in communion on this sacred day!

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

— Excerpt from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail

This letter has always been one of my scriptures: for the ways it makes me weep and holds a mirror to my face and invites me to gaze with love at our world.

Just as all good scriptures do.

I have beloveds who have lately said to me: “I want to be loving. I want to be compassionate. I want to transcend the lines that divide us–political, religious, ideological. But people keep disappointing me. They keep choosing compromise over me. They keep choosing religious doctrine over me. They keep choosing ‘peace’ over me.”

I invited our community to reflect this past weekend on where, how and with whom we are longing to “make room” for relationship. How our communal “womb” is invited to stretch and grow and be challenged for the sake of new life. I think it’s a good question: few of us can say we have learned to love others with perfect hospitality.

And yet: so many of us have already had to “make room.” To stand aside and let our relationships be more important than our pride, our dignity, our talents. We have already been making room for family members, colleagues, local governments, the wider culture to struggle with our sex or sexuality, our race, our age, our dreams and our visions. You name it, many of us have already learned to make room for it. Often, we have done it out of love. Often it is under duress and by force for the sake of survival.

I say “we” and “our” and yet am aware that Rev. King’s invitation is to me and folks like me: white, middle-class spiritual leaders. I weep when I read this letter, because that is the feeling of my womb being stretched. Room must be made in my mind, my actions, my energy, my body for the humanity and freedom of every single one of my sacred siblings.

Because we are accountable to our relationships. We (particularly people with power/privilege) can say or think or tweet or behave or vote or pray however we want, but we cannot do it without expecting some relational consequences. There is a line.

It need not divide us forever, it need not dismiss someone or banish them outside of a community or a circle or from our lives entirely. For what it’s worth, my theology, my Bible and my relationship with the Holy do not send folks to an afterlife hell.

But we must ask, expect and–when the time comes–require from our relationships speech, actions, and behavior that are loving, respectful and humanizing. And, dare I say, awe-filled. We are invited to be in awe of one another by the Spirit who dwells within each of us.

So, yeah, there’s a line.

Among the community that is becoming Story Dwelling, we have that kind of line. We expect justice-love from one another. We will not engage in debate about whether someone is fully human, fully beloved, fully justified (to use that oh-so-religious word). That means LGBTQ+ folx are not “them”–”they” are us. Leaders. Organizers. Collaborators. That means women and people of color and young people and immigrants and refugees are not “them”– “they” are us. We will not debate our marriages, our leadership, our giftedness. We may experience tension about how best to strategize; we may realize we have messed up and forgotten to invite someone to the table; we may struggle with our own feelings of guilt that come with privilege or feelings of inadequacy that come with oppression. We will struggle with those things. But we will not debate our worth or our liberation destiny. That is not what beloved community does. The same good reverend whose life we celebrate today teaches us that.

There is a line. It need not separate us. But it does need to be a loving boundary–a trustworthy, hospitable and strong-as-hell container–that allows for vulnerability and deep belonging and loving story-telling. We deserve that kind of womb, and our neighborhoods deserve faith communities that respond to that sense of belonging by working, pushing, conspiring– until all belong.

What if there are lots of ways of making meaning of the life of that first-century rabbi? What if we could explore the story and find the ways it has bearing our lives, especially on the eve of an election? Those are my thoughts as I walk the path. Special thanks to Smith Rock for the gorgeous backdrop.

The Bible can feel so…what’s the word I’m looking for? Wounding? Irrelevant? Unbelievable? Here’s my attempt at starting a conversation on how we can claim the Bible in its wisdom in ways that make us better lovers of neighbor and self.

This is the fourth in our series on disrupting, reclaiming and expanding parts of Christian language, tradition and ritual for our lives and experiences here and now.

You don’t get assassinated for preaching about love.
A Good Friday sermon in eight words.

But! It is the Easter season.
My technicolor hard-boiled eggs sit uneaten in the fridge (I’ll get to them…tomorrow) and our family has left town and I need to take a break from mimosas for a little while for reasons that should require no explanation.
It is the Easter season. Christ is risen.
It is the Easter season. Alleluias everywhere.

And today is April 4, 1968, and my call is calling me back to Good Friday.
(Except April 4, 1968, was a Thursday.
That’s okay: betrayal works too.)

You don’t get assassinated for preaching about love.

This is the conviction that lies underneath #whitechurchsilent. #whitechurchsilent is an online movement started in the wake of the 2016 election. It describes the phenomenon that occurs when pastors, leaders and congregations that are mostly white, that belong to mostly white denominations, that were started by white people, choose not to speak explicitly about the injustices and violence done to black and brown people in our neighborhoods and country.

Instead, we talk about love. Which is almost like not saying anything at all.
Which is why you don’t get assassinated for preaching about love.
Which is why I, and many of my pastor-preacher-minister-type colleagues are going to be just fine.

We’re safe.

We are safe when we are being called to be bold.
Like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in Memphis on this day in 1968. For preaching about love–and how it cannot be decoupled from power and justice.
“We’ve worked hard to create a vision of King that is like a black Santa Claus,” says Charles McKinney, associate professor of history at Rhodes College. (I listened to his interview today on The Takeaway from WNYC; you can (and should) listen to it, too.) In other words, popular American culture memorializes Rev. King as someone who preached about love, and it has forgotten that he was called to Memphis to defend and affirm the lives of sanitation workers who were on strike, to challenge the city to give them a living wage. It was part of a campaign he was igniting to restructure the fabric of human life in the United States and to confront the reality of poverty.
You don’t get assassinated for preaching about love, remember?

Professor McKinney compares the popular culture version of Rev. King to Barney the Dinosaur singing “I love you, you love me”; he calls him “toothless.” He says we–and by “we” I mean corporate, political and religious forces who benefit (or at least remain safe) by promoting this sanitized version–have whittled Rev. King’s narrative down to one that is about love. The Hallmark kind. But the kind of love that King preached about was the kind of love that demanded we be in the streets; that demanded we work on behalf of and alongside the disinherited. It was the kind of love that got him killed.

So this is my commitment: to expand my imagination and my heart in ways that move me from safe to bold. To let you, my friends and neighbors, invite me into that transformation. It is not always easy to imagine what Rev. King’s work might look like in Central Oregon; at least three times a week someone tells me “how white” it is here. We can debate that informal (and changing) statistic, but the real question is: do we here in Oregon not still see the three main evils Rev. King was called to challenge?
Racism; militarism; poverty.
Those among us who are undocumented know these evils.
Those among us who are underemployed and unsafely housed know these evils.

How about #whitechurchbold?
How about #whitechurchlistening?
How about #whitechurchstandswith?

At Easter, I, alongside many others, celebrate the persistent life of the One who got assassinated for preaching about love that transforms the powers of the-world-as-it-is for the sake of justice on earth as it is in heaven.
May we listen to such bold calls and live by such bold examples.
Alleluia.
Everywhere.

– Erika

This is the third in our series on disrupting, reclaiming and expanding parts of Christian language, tradition and ritual for our lives and experiences here and now.

by Leigh DeVries

In my first couple years as a youth pastor I worked with and for a self-proclaimed “boy’s club” in the South. My fellow youth ministers all went to the same all-boys school in Nashville and then had gone off to big SEC schools for college. They loved football, beer, Jesus, and teenagers. And they did their best to love me.

We were required to memorize scripture as part of our job. One such verse was John 14:21, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he is the one who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I too will love him and reveal myself to him.”

Now… I don’t know if you were counting, but that’s five male pronouns and one male metaphor for God (Father), in one verse. I, as a woman, began to feel this twinge.

In response to the twinge, I looked up the verse in the original Greek (the language of the New Testament). In my endearing first attempt at understanding Biblical Greek, I understood that pronouns used were neuter, thus without gender (after having to take courses in Biblical Greek I realize I was mistaken, which is what happens when you use a free website for translation!).

So, I told my coworkers I would be using feminine pronouns. I was a woman, seeking to follow the commands of Jesus, and so I should use my own pronouns, just like they got to use theirs. And it wouldn’t be sacrilegious or ignoring the “authority” of the Christian Bible—it was simply a different interpretation.

Notwithstanding the fact that my translation wasn’t accurate, the logic still stands for me—why shouldn’t I be able to use my pronouns? They boys got to use theirs, why not me? Did Jesus really care which pronoun I used? What about Galatians 3:28, which we also had to memorize? It reads, “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus.” If we are all one then why is it only “he who will be loved?” and not she or they?

Their general reactions to my usage of feminine pronouns fell in the vicinity of shifty eyes, discomfort, and “uh, okay?”

We then took our high school seniors to a Passion, a conservative Christian conference in Atlanta that states their goal as “…uniting students in worship and prayer for spiritual awakening in this generation.” I remember sitting in the Georgia Dome, listening to the likes of Louie Giglio and John Piper, talking about the love of our Father God. Chris Tomlin and David Crowder leading us in songs about “how deep the Father’s love for us,” our savior, the king of kings, the prince of peace, oh how He love us.

I felt this twinge, this pinch, get bigger.

Coming back to Nashville, I heard our pastors using Trinitarian closing for prayers and blessings—“in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” I realized that the Trinitarian litany was, at best, two men and some form of non-binary being.

There was no woman in the Trinity.

The men I worked with, they all planned on being fathers someday… they could get the epitaph Father that we so often give for God, whereas I could not. I would be a mother… and a Mother wasn’t what Christians called God. That was reserved for “Father.”

After life as a Christian since childhood, four years at a liberal arts college, and plenty of privileged world travel, I was struck by a deep sense of wrongness.

Feminist theologian Mary Daly once said, “If God is male, then male is God.” Through using only male pronouns for God and Jesus and the Spirit, we have deified the male gender. The language we use for God has been a participant and perpetuator of patriarchy, of hegemonic masculinity, and contributed to devaluing of any and all non-male bodies.

It would be like worshiping a redheaded God—imagine praying, “dear red-headed God, thank you for your strength and provision …” It stands to reason that the red-heads in the room might sit a little straighter, knowing they have a big thing something in common with the divine, whereas folks with all the other hair colors would begin to feel somehow less. The red-heads could think they were naturally strong, that they should be the providers, that they were more, better.

I felt like the Bible, the Church, the entire Christian community, were all telling me, overtly or not, that I was “less” because I was a woman. My “less-ness” had been blessed and made sacred by my faith, who saw me as less because of my sex and gender.

I couldn’t help but wonder at this point how the hell I was supposed to fit into this religion, this world view, when I staunchly refused to believe I was less because of my chromosomal makeup, my self-identification, my body.

I have spent years, particularly my years in seminary, trying to figure out if I can fit in this thing called “Christianity.” There have been times when I have wanted to leave my faith almost hourly, due in part to this specific issue, and the trickle-down effects I see patriarchy enacting in the world.

But God, like the bully She is, just won’t let me go. Jesus, in and beyond all of his problematic “maleness,” just won’t leave me alone and I, for some unknown reason, can’t seem to walk away from my Christian faith altogether.

And in those same seminary years, I was introduced to feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies. I learned about the writings of women like Elizabeth Johnson, Kwok Pui-Lan, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Delores S. Williams, Emilie M. Townes, and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, women who saw God as more than a white man, even going so far as to identify God within their own experience—God as a black woman, as a chica joven in labor, as a mother bear, God as, a God who entered into my own and experience and saw it, saw me, as holy.

I learned about the necessity of viewing all things in context. Any reading of the Bible is a cross-cultural experience, meaning we will almost always misunderstand things because we are outside of the context in which it was written. The story of the good Samaritan really doesn’t mean much, until you learn that the Jews hated the Samaritans because of centuries of betrayal and cultural hatred. The story of Adam and Eve totally changes when you learn that adam can also mean “humankind” and that chavvah (translated Eve) means “life;” that when God makes adam a helper, an ezer, that same word ezer is most often used as a word for God, when God comes and saves the Israelites from various catastrophes. In other words, the “helper”—ezer—is sacred, potent, a part of God herself.

The greatest lesson that I keep returning to in terms of our language around God is that everything, every epitaph or curse or name, everything we ever call God is but a metaphor. No words can encompass who and what and how God is. Thus, I believe, we must be deeply intentional about our language for God, especially in church, and we must notice who and what is left out in our imaginings of God.

Using feminine imagery for God has become a deeply healing experience for me. When I hear God referred to with feminine pronouns I am reminded that I am included, loved, seen by my God. I am reminded that I have been given much, that I have that “much-ness” in common with my Creator, and am called to now live in such a way as to love as God loves—radically, empathetically, strangely, beautifully. I am reminded that in truth all gender is false, merely a helpful (and harmful) categorization for people.

I am reminded that I exist within God, that God exists within me.

A translation of Acts 17:28 is this (as I now have taken Biblical Greek):

“For in Christ we live, and move, and have our being; for we, as the poets say, are children of God.”

We are children of God, expressions of our Creator, regardless of our chromosomal makeup or identifications—we all reflect our Creator, uniquely, especially, intentionally. And as such, we must talk about Her, about Him, about Them, with language and words that recall us to our inclusion, our belovedness, and the vastness of God.

This is the second in our series on disrupting, reclaiming and expanding parts of Christian language, tradition and ritual for our lives and experiences here and now. This gorgeous reflection comes to us from Leigh DeVries, associate director of the Bend Youth Collective, youth pastor at Nativity Lutheran Church and Bend Church, and a person who brings a generosity of spirit to all she does as minister, friend, colleague and partner.

I remember one evening when I was seven, sitting at the dinner table eating Sloppy Joes with my family, when my parents asked my brother, a sullen teenager preparing for confirmation, if he had the Lord’s Prayer memorized. He didn’t. I perked up: a chance to be smug. And so I recited that prayer aloud to my family and felt thoroughly holy.

That was one of the last times I felt “Christian enough.” Since then, things have gone downhill.
I have befriended, dated and been family to people who identify as atheists.
I do not hear many (really any) of the “bumper sticker” passages from the Bible as “good news.”
I have been mad since I was twelve that Jesus was born a man.

Could I go to church? Could I go to seminary? Could I pastor a community?
Would I be Christian enough?

Well: yes, yes, yes and probably; at least, enough for me to live my life dwelling deeply in the ongoing story of the Holy. Which is Christian enough.

And so it is very good and right and meant-to-be that I have landed in the Northwest, where we talk about what is gained and lost when we use words like “Christ,” “salvation,” “church,” “Lord.” We do not take anything for granted. It is all on the table, up for debate. What happens when we die, how we find healing and wholeness, what constitutes good and healthy relationship, how we are to respond to sorrow and terror in the world: these are the questions of our time (and perhaps every time). And words like “salvation,” recited in unison from our bulletins, do not offer me any comfort. Rather, I, and I’m not the only one, might prefer to gaze at the Three Sisters on a first-of-Spring day, like today. There is salvation there, but I might not call it that. I might not need to call it anything.

And that, my friends, is Christian enough. IMHO.

Is it just me, or is there something in the water that has led us to believe that there are benchmarks and litmus tests for what makes people Christian enough? This is a problem, because I–and lots of people–do not feel like we hit those marks. I also do not feel welcome in the popular U.S. American, white evangelical narrative of who a Christian is and what a Christian looks like and how a Christian believes. I do not feel welcome and I am also not particularly interested in conforming to it. You can’t fire me; I quit!

The thing is, it is because I am a Christian that I am a feminist. Not despite it.

It is because I am a Christian that I long for tables in our churches and our world that are big enough to hold everyone, forming bonds of relationship and love across differences in belief.

It is because I am a Christian that I want to stand in solidarity with the people Jesus stood with: children, women, the ones the dominant culture calls “the other,” whether on the basis of race, orientation, identity, documentation status or wealth.

I long for community that walks together as we cultivate new vocabulary, or reclaim old vocabulary (and maybe even creeds), to express how our relationships, experiences, sorrows, joys and transcendent experiences with the Holy intersect with the wisdom of sacred texts, ancient rituals, and the teachings of our ancestors.

I am not the first nor the last to spill some virtual ink on this subject. But I want to do it, and I want to invite the people I love to do it with me. Because this is vulnerable for me–it is vulnerable to wear a collar and say I don’t know exactly what happens when we die; it is vulnerable to preach from the Bible and also feel repulsed by some of what the Bible says; it is vulnerable to occupy the liminal space between identifying with a label and yet rejecting the baggage that label carries–and I don’t think any of us want to do it alone.

So welcome to a series of writings, poems, videos, and whatever else our Creative can dream up, all with the hopes of dwelling deeply in ways that disrupt–or at least get intentional about–what it might mean to be “Christian enough” here and now. By which I mean, what it means to be imperfectly and beautifully human. What it might mean to go from the pew to the mountain, and from the mountain to beloved community. What it might mean for us to gaze with awe at the Sisters and into the faces of our siblings, friends, and neighbors in Love.

Gaze away.

– Erika

I have all the time in the world for you.
There is nothing more important than this.

I want to be the kind of pastor and friend who says this. I want to be the kind of neighbor and daughter and wife and colleague whom people know means it when she says it.

Someone said that phrase to me today in a training on suicide prevention, and she meant it.
“Everything else can wait. Put a pin in it. It’ll still be there,” she said.

Right now, we need to put a pin in it.
Whatever we are doing, it will still be there.
Seventeen people died in Parkland, Florida, yesterday, and, today at least, there is nothing more important than this.

I attended a suicide prevention training today. And I know suicide is different from homicide (suicide actually kills more people than homicide does), but the two have some common contributing factors: illness, isolation and access.

Oregon has one of the highest rates of suicide in the country. Nationally, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for young people (ages 25-34) and the third-leading cause of death for adolescents (ages 10-24). I am choked up just writing that.

And today at the training, I choked up listening to good people describe how so many of their [clients, students, patients, family members, children] couldn’t access mental health care because of long waiting lists. Illness.

I choked up listening to good, good people describe how so many folks, folks who haven’t yet reached experienced suicidal thoughts, simply need someone to talk to. Someone to listen. Isolation.

But I got angry at this statistic: Gun owners and their families suffer from suicide at a rate three times higher than those who don’t own guns. They are not sicker or more isolated. They have better access to lethal weapons. While we can debate whether guns cause suicides and homicides, we cannot debate that guns offer access. Guns are means to an end, and they are highly effective. There is little room for ambivalence or doubt with a gun. Access.

So I’m putting a pin in it. Rage can be productive, but it has its limits. I am in serious brainstorming mode about what moral people–spiritual people–of any background and persuasion can prioritize right now so that we can prevent more loss of life–more days of frustration and sorrow. Faithful response to the deaths of our fellow beloveds is necessary, political and spiritual.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Let your heart be broken by this. Every time. School and other mass shootings are now commonplace in the United States. That is not okay. We each carry the Holy within us; the Hebrew Scriptures tell us that God created humans in God’s very image. When we feel our hearts wanting to break, let’s let them. Then let’s use our sorrow as righteous fuel for what comes next.

Be in community. Listen to your neighbors. Create webs of belonging. Talk with other people about how to do that. We need one another when something hard happens: divorce, job loss, poverty & other forms of oppression, death. A national tragedy like a school shooting. I often take for granted that I have lots of people with whom to vent my shit. Not everyone has that. Put a pin in whatever you are doing. Tell someone that you have all the time in the world for them. This is how we can create resilient communities.

Get political about this. Not divisive. Not righteous. Speak truth to bullshit. Be public about the ways you are called to live into your [moral, spiritual, religious, parental, medical, etc.] identity. Jesus says: You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. So be that. Find out your congressional representatives’ position on common-sense gun laws. If your congressional representatives refuse to act in response to these shootings, and that includes amping up mental health funding in local, state and federal settings, find out who is running against them and when. Research those people’s positions. Give them money and vote for them and knock on doors for them. For folks who, like me, live in Oregon’s 2nd congressional district, know that Greg Walden is among the top twenty lifetime recipients of money from the NRA. He’s up for reelection this year. Just sayin’.

Let me know what other ideas you might have. I know the list can grow long, but this is what is coming to the surface for me today.

And, of course, I hope it goes without saying:

I have all the time in the world for you.
There’s nothing more important than this.