Awe and Wonder!

PREFACE: Bishop Elaine invited people to join her in reading and praying their way through We Make the Road by Walking, A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation – beginning last December with Chapter 14. If you haven’t begun, this is a great time to start at Chapter 1. If you have been journeying with McLaren since January, this is a fresh reminder of the purpose of the book study – to revive our connection and love for the beauty and life God called into being at Creation and to join Jesus in his quest for aliveness.

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CrossOver reflection for Week 40 • Beginning September 8, 2019
We Make the Road by Walking, Chapter 1

By Bishop Elaine JW Stanovsky

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The heavens are telling the glory of God. ———

Life is not boring! When I become bored, or so busy I don’t notice the abundance of life that hums everywhere, I know it’s time to stop, look, and listen.  

Last month Clint and I were camped at the Coal Banks Landing and Campground on the Missouri River in north-central Montana. We went out of our way to get there by driving many miles on a dirt road to cross the Missouri River on the FREE! two-car cable ferry at Virgelle. On a mid-summer weeknight following region-wide thunderstorms, the campground was mostly empty.

The sunset that evening with a full moon rising, crickets chirping and a silent, relentless river flowing … flowing … flowing. About 3 AM, I imposed on Clint to accompany me to the outhouse. After fumbling with zippers, shoes, and flashlights, we finally emerged from our tent and started the long walk to our destination.

We were not on a mission of wonder. Our purpose was mundane. But we were swept into the wonder of the universe. The moon had set. The vast spray of the Milky Way pierced the remote darkness above, and the stars were shooting across and falling out of the sky at a giddy rate. It was the height of the Perseid Meteor Shower, and the heavens were telling the glory of God!

On the following day, we made new bird friends and learned their names: Eastern and Western Kingbirds. And when we passed a lifeless Badger on the road, we turned around, stopped the car and paused with it. To honor. To marvel. Probing snout. Tough but nimble paws. Able claws. Insistent stripe. Noble cloak.

Along the way, we met a few of the sparse people in that wide land. Adventurers floating the river. An anthropologist preserving the prairie. A woman and her son tending cattle. An Amish woman tending store. Cheyenne mourners preserving a sacred way of life. Hispanic cowboys. People honoring their dead; embracing their living.

And at the end of the journey, we helped lay a dear friend to rest in the Cheyenne country of eastern Montana before the long, straight drive west and home.

Since we began the quest for Aliveness reading this book, The United Methodist Church has entered into a season of turmoil and uncertainty, as harsh prohibitions and punishments for LGBT+ inclusion were adopted at the February 2019 General Conference, with plans being made by some to implement them, and by others to resist them. The church cannot hold together as it stands right now. How deep the divide will be and how many local churches will survive intact is all unknown. We are still waiting, praying, and planning. For my part, I don’t see why churches, where people have learned to live with their differences, should have to tear in two. It’s part of the wonder and richness of the community of faith, and all human communities, that we can be very different, and yet find joy in our life and service together.

You, lovers and followers of Jesus, and you, local churches, YOU are tend-ers of aliveness, week in and week out. Nurturing life through love. Noticing the goodness of God’s creation and celebrating it. Protecting life when it is threatened by hunger, neglect, disease, loneliness, gun violence, deportation, or hatred. You are ministers of aliveness at the birth of a baby, or in the shadow of death at any age.

You are alive to nurture life. You are blessed to be a blessing.

Thank you. Don’t stop. God is opening a way for us to CrossOver.

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God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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Elaine JW Stanovsky serves as the resident bishop of the Greater Northwest Area including the Alaska, Oregon-Idaho and Pacific Northwest Conferences of The United Methodist Church.