pat loughery

I didn’t get much sleep last night. My cheapass Walmart watch got its alarm turned on, to 5:08AM, and I the three times I thought I was turning it off, I was actually just hitting snooze. Since my labyrinth timeslot was 7:20AM, I thought seriously about skipping it.

I’m glad I didn’t.

All the angst, self-criticism, weakness that I was seeing in myself was stipped away in the contemplative journey. I deeply felt both my hurt and also the joy of Christ’s love in the center of the labyrinth. I can’t explain it beyond saying that there was a wonderful, tangible understanding and experience of acceptance, joy, love flowing into me from the trinity. Good timing.

So after this experience, I grabbed breakfast, sitting at the table next to the Godfather, and journaled my experience. I ame back to my room for a quick shower and headed off to the mornign learning community – this one on the topic of humanity, led by Kara Powell who works at Fuller and LeRon Shults who teaches at Bethel. They worked on the concept of face – facing others, our face in community, the ongoing theme of God’s face (face == presence) in Scripture’s story. LeRon made the interesting point that the Genesis account of the fall of man doesn’t imply that the image of God was lost in that event – in fact, Moses goes on twice more in the next bit of the story to talk about us being made in the image of God. It’s an interesting note, and it also probably complements McLaren’s note in The Story We Find Ourselves In that God made creation and it was good, but that was a Hebrew understanding of good (which could continue to improve), not the Greek understanding of perfect.

Lunchtime came – I decided to attend the Emerging Women’s Lunch, sponsored by EWLI. That was a good time, partly because I got to corner Jen Lemen and talk to her for a good while before the festivities began. That was a blast – Jen is just as you would expect her to be, charming and transparent, easy to be around and focused. For the post-lunch talk, we gathered around tables, and us guys listened as women shared their stories with each other – our role was to observe and listen. For some this role was harder than others.

I had signed up for an hour appointment with a spiritual director so I had to head right out after the lunch for this appointment. I’ve felt for a while that I needed to find a spiritual director to help me process my journey, and this experience helped convince me of that. It was a wonderfully gentle conversation, simply guided by the Holy Spirit.

Next up: Sally Morganthaler in a workshop on emerging worship. I missed the first half hour but Sally demonstrated from other churches’ experience doing interactive worship. She had a really nice handout with 4 pages of resources – books, URLs, etc. I’ll work through that one for a while.

We have a half-hour break now, and there’s a drum circle in the courtyard out front of the main building. Tribe LA is doing a preview of their worship set for the evening gathering, and it’s electric. Their house rule is “no observing; participation only”. They get a little boy, maybe 9 years old, plugged right in. Godfather McLaren stops by and they give him a shaker. I shot 3 rolls of film at the drum circle. I also got to tell Brian how much I appreciated their worship the night before with Harp46. I think I’m getting healthier…

The late afternoon workshop I attended was Rachelle’s, on ritual and worship in her abbey. She rocked the house, did a great show n tell, and put us through a lectio divina with arts & crafts attached (for art-challenged individuals like myself) done to a prayer from another tradition. I’ll let her describe that one; she’ll enjoy blogging that I’m sure.

Rachelle had good turnout too – especially given that Dan Kimball was presenting a worship on creating prayer stations and interactive art worship just across the walkway. It’s too bad those two workshops conflicted in time. I picked up the CD and hope it’s helpful also..

Dinnertime comes, and Dave Paisley and I go to Cheesecake factory for beers and food, but we had to leave before cheesecake. &!*)(^@#@). oh well.

Worship is interactive, again with Tribe LA. They do participatory worship in the form of drum circle with dancers and chants/songs that are simple and easy to pick up. It’s a cool vibe, especially how the do vocals. It’s probably not for everybody, but as a huge fan of hippie jambands and the Dead’s parking lot drum circles, it was a lot of fun. They had a painter do a very intriguing work during one song. They also found the little boy again and brought him up with them.

The keynote speaker was Bishop Ulmer. Very intresting to see preaching styles and the differences therein around this place.

I bought Tribe LA’s CD, picked up CDs of the talks I missed and wanted to hang onto, and then caught Doug Pagitt out in the lobby and told him how much I liked Reimagining, how we’ve used it in our leaders group and also how much I was looking forward to his books on preaching and kinetic prayer. Nice little loop closed there from last night’s angst.

Last up for the day: Dinner 2 and beers with Rachelle ex-Monkfish Abbeyite Lindell (now with Tribe and Fuller) and Lindell’s friend Michael/Mischa who’s working on a book on Jesus & contemporary culture. We went into Oldtown for Mexican food, Sol and conversation around a dizzying variety of topics.

I’m sleepy. But today was awesome.