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July 02, 2010
How Can I Keep From Singing?
This blog post was produced during our 2010 Leaders in Ministry Conference in Boston, MA
Today I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a workshop given by the Rev. Susan Briehl. Entitled "Bringing and Singing Our Whole Lives to God," our time together brought the ancient stories of the Psalms into conversation with our own lives and stories. As our workshop group read texts together, it was incredible to see how the story of God and the story of God's people--the stories "welling up from ages past"--brought new light and new meaning to our own stories.
Singing our whole lives to God. In a particular place and a particular time that puts such emphasis on success, on doing well for oneself, it can be a scary and a vulnerable thing to sing one's whole live to God. And to sing one's whole life in the presence of our churches? Our communities? Our fellow workers in the Spirit?
Terrifying!
With Rev. Briehl's capable leadership, some of that fear fell away, and we were able to co-create a space of sharing and vulnerability that, I hope, we can find being created in our communities and our ministries.
Here is something of what we are called to do--to learn and to grapple with how to tell our stories, to sing our songs, with integrity and with vulnerability, in such a way that those we are in ministry with will find themselves responding with their own songs, their own stories. It's a scary call in so many ways. Our whole lives, our whole selves, are so full of foibles and failures, and the lives of our churches our no different. We spend--I spend--so much time crafting elaborate structures to hide my whole life from God (unsuccessfully, of course) and from my community (also, ultimately, unsuccessfully). Won't singing our whole lives destroy all of that carefully crafted deception?
Yet at the root of all of the stories is God's story. And it is a story of grace and of reorientation, a story of love in the broken places, a story of justice and reconciliation. It is a story worth telling, a song worth singing.
And in the words of the Robert Lowery hymn -- "If Love is Lord of Heaven and Earth, how can I keep from singing?"
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