I can’t remember when the tradition started, but it’s usually the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend that my one aunt and some of her family make the trip from Columbus to the farm where she, my other aunt, and my dad grew up with my grandparents. She meets up with my mom and whomever else can join at one of the town cemeteries, where my grandparents, and other family from generations past, are buried. They bring flowers and take care of those precious resting places. Of course, it’s not only about pulling some weeds and planting in some natural forms of new life on the site of mortality. It’s about sharing stories and laughter and joy over memories and of on-going family love-filled moments.
Pastors are often asked about their call story: how they discerned spiritually or otherwise that public ministry was for them. Some might focus on a couple influential individuals or events where they felt God was reeling them down the ordained route. For me, several people and seemingly holy instances had me wondering if something was going on there. The final straw might have been the college choir.
Tomorrow (May 8), the wider church celebrates Julian of Norwich; considered one of the most important children of God in enhancing the spiritual life.You can obviously do your own research on her life from over half a millennia ago (although, unfortunately, we don’t know much), but from the Friends of Julian of Norwich based out of her native England:
Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) is known to us almost only through her book, The Revelations of Divine Love, which is widely acknowledged as one of the great classics of the spiritual life. She is thought to have been the first woman to write a book in English which has survived…[It] is based on a series of sixteen visions she received on the 8th of May 1373. Julian was lying on, what was thought at the time, to be her deathbed when suddenly she saw Christ bleeding in front of her. She received insight into his sufferings and his love for us.
Amidst the hustle and bustle a couple weeks ago was the annual Renewal of Vows service for rostered leaders (pastors and deacons) in our Northeastern Ohio Synod. Of course, if you ventured onto social media then, you would have seen our sister synods providing the same time and space for their church leaders: from our neighboring Northwestern Ohio Synod to the Northwest Washington Synod. The idea was for all these ministers to have a bit of…“be still and know [God] is God” amidst the Holy Week hustle and bustle, for starters. The actual renewal of vows was for these relatively new and veteran clergy and all in-between to hear, yet again, the vows they professed at their ordination. It’s a time of re-centering, a time of solidarity, a time of tending to the soil of our heart.
I remember being rather enamored with the last one. Granted, we Lutherans do some ministry and church things well, but with all the flack we have given to our Roman Catholic siblings in Christ the last half millennia, they do their fair share rather well, too. Of course, there’s their charitable organizations helping those in impoverished circumstances and many people who have been given up on by nearly everyone else, and they do some what we call “high church” worship experience fairly impressively with their beautifully crafted cathedrals and chanting and incense among other things (not everyone’s cup of Sunday morning tea, I understand). But the conclave, where the highest of higher ups in the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world gather in the Sistine Chapel to determine their leader…that’s a whole ‘nother level of organized religion interest that I’m not so sure anything else can quite touch.
