February 14, 2012

Birds of the air, lilies of the field

In yesterday’s blog post on ECF Vital Practices, Richelle Thompson shared an effective practice for starting a meeting. She described how one facilitator asked each person to share their favorite story from scripture. This simple practice turned out to be surprisingly revealing:

“The story of Abraham greeting the three visitors was the favorite of a staff member whose primary responsibility is hospitality. The youth director’s story was the parable of the Good Samaritan and the theme of helping others. A priest who is focused on the emergent church and young adult ministries named the walk to Emmaus and the importance of joining people on the journey.”

Reading Richelle’s post, I wondered what I’d have said in that meeting, which scriptural story I’d have chosen, and I wondered about the extent to which that story has shaped the work that I’m doing today.

My favorite scriptural story is when Jesus speaks about scarcity, abundance, and worry. In Matthew 6, Jesus turns his followers’ gaze toward the birds of the air, how they neither reap nor sow, and toward the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor spin. “Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” As a fairly anxious individual in a denomination that is frequently and publicly worried about scarcity of resources, I love the way Jesus zeroes in on how anxiety can separate us from the larger vision of the Reign of God. “But strive first for the Reign of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Lest I be accused of believing in pie-in-the-sky Christianity, or even offering up a thinly-veiled gospel of wealth, I want to briefly mention the context in which I have seen this scripture lived out. When I was eighteen I began attending a small, Roman Catholic university founded by the Sisters of Divine Providence, an order of nuns who took this passage as a descriptor of their mission. Their order was founded in the late 18th century when a group of schoolteachers set out into the most rural parts of France to open schools for young women. The townspeople called them Sisters of Providence because they set out into treacherous areas without a great deal of planning, though with remarkable clarity about the value of their work. As a junior in college, I had the privilege of spending a semester in Mexico with the Querétaro branch of the Sisters of Divine Providence and of meeting women who were continuing the legacy of the sisters by traveling into the furthest, most rural parts of Mexico to offer education for women.

A final story about these sisters. One of the nuns whom I befriended while in college, Sr. Katharine Keefe, told me about a young college student whose education was cut short by the Vietnam War. He’d been a talented painter but returned from the war severely maimed; he now had a hook for a right arm. Upon his return, his former art teacher - another sister - asked him when he would be returning to her painting class. When he pointed out the obvious, that his right arm was entirely missing, she responded in a way that only a Roman Catholic nun could, noting that he still had his left hand and that God had given him his gifts to be shared. (The artist, Jesse Treviño, went on to become a very successful Chicano artist.)

Considering the lilies of the field can be the ground from which we take remarkable leaps of faith, and an abiding trust in God’s providence can help us see abundance in apparent scarcity. As with the entirety of Jesus' teachings, it's a hard example to live up to - yet the need to do so is more and more apparent to me.