Calling

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

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December 01, 2009

The Color of Longing

Greetings! This issue of CALLING comes just before Christmas with an emphasis on the lives of young people and their primary places of nurture—our churches and our families.

Christmas is often identified as a season especially for children. But doesn’t it also contain a call to adults to preserve our maturity and humanity through keeping alive within us the heart of a child? Pastors, teachers and parents, so educated in the language of God and in the right ways of nurturing, need to frequent the place where sophisticated language is mute and the wisdom of God lives not in tomes but in the flesh of a helpless baby and in the silence that invites expectation of goodness unforeseen. In a world that, as Jean Vanier describes, "has gone mad through bad leadership," (FAITH & LEADERSHIP, Duke University, Nov. 2008) we are brought to a place both of longing and hope—the manger that holds the divine child who leads us all (Isaiah 11: 6) and holds also the hopes we have for the lives of our children and young people and the leadership they will bring.

Writing over Christmas in 1903 to a young Austrian officer, a Mr. Kappus, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes for his fellow correspondent a God that Kappus wonders whether he, not unlike so many in our culture of spiritual impoverishment, has “lost” like a plaything from childhood. Rilke asks, “…What justifies you in missing God like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though God were lost? Why don’t you think of God as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?” “The fruit of a tree whose leaves we are…” so neatly describes what Christmas is: God has so organically united Divine being to the human family that there is no question of separation. Even the distinction between the two seems intentionally blurred. But it requires a certain holy simplicity to live into this expectation. It requires believing that God is always on arrival—not least through the lives of our children and young people but also within us.

One of our contributors, Steve Matthews, speaks about the discovery of his Beloved-ness while on the way to conveying the same to the youth of his parish. His account is a particular reminder of our need to enter fully into the same space of beloved-ness that we wish to invite young people toward. We celebrate this season of expectation and longing with the reminder that we are invited to that space—again and again.

Our features in this issue mark the places where we first learned of that infinite goodness: the family dinner table, a youth group or children’s service, or a relationship that inspired us to share what we know of the goodness of God in our congregations, among school children, and with the wider world. Our being grafted onto the Tree of Life—whose leaves will serve “for the healing of the nations”—is always through someone or some ones who trusted in those blurred lines of divinity and humanity. In turn, they trusted us—as does God—to carry forward the same good news.

The peace of Advent and Christmas to you, your families, and your church families.