Neighborly Anxieties: Part Deux, or The Outcome

by Tom Pappas

I recently wrote about two situations that were hard for me to address involving neighbors. The outcome is worth mentioning and so I will. 


The troublesome rental: I contacted six of the neighbors who had signed a letter of concern – one in person and five by phone; that situation seems to be smoothed out. My energy was boosted to approach the people west of my house about the bushes that encroach on the sidewalk.


The trespassing bushes: It took three tries to catch the “Wests” but I looked over the fence and they were having lunch outside.  I scurried around to the gate unfolding my picture of the dangerous fallen branch suspended by their foliage over the sidewalk.


Their response is worth quoting.  “We never go out there. [duh] Thanks for telling us. Someone was scheduled to take care of that in May. We’ll call today.”  Clearly I went through a lot of anguish imagining possible negative responses.


Get ready for irony.  A week after the Wests liberated the sidewalk from overgrowth I received an official letter from the city engineer indicating that I would need to trim the junipers that crowded the sidewalk in front of my property. YGTBK. 


Laurel and I made separate trips to the end of the driveway and came up with this scenario that was agreeable to the city engineer. The violation belonged to the neighbors to the east.


We share a double driveway with them. Our house numbers appear two times - on both our side, and in between the driveways where they are separate. The East’s don’t have house numbers posted. The inspector assumed the address on the sign between the drives belonged to the Easts.


I shielded the Wests from a letter by my intervention, but I got the letter that should have gone to the Easts.  No good deed goes unpunished.


God is the God of everything. God is with my anxiety about the possibility of disappointing. God is with me in the tension that comes with confrontation. God is with me through the consternation of injustice. God gives me the satisfaction of looking back with a smile of contentment and being able to eventually laugh at this good and crazy world given to us to experience.

Drive

by  Doug Wysockey-Johnson

Daniel Pink has a new business book called Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  The book is well written and the research and examples are fascinating.  That said, the ‘surprising truth’ isn’t all that surprising—it is meaning and purpose that motivate us.  He ends the book with this sentence:  “…we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.”


Money and acknowledgement are important to a point, but that point is probably less important than we thought. Using our time and energy on the things that matter to us, and making the world a better place—that is what motivates us. It sounds an awful lot like listening for call to me.


This past Sunday I cried my way through the memorial service for my good friend Susan.  Listening to the eulogies, and rummaging through my own memories, a clear picture emerged of Susan.  Here was a woman who was motivated by her own values and her faith.  In her work, relationships, and volunteer activities, Susan’s “drive” was to use her gifts and experiences for the good of others. (She also loved her week at the spa, nice dinners, and a good show on Broadway.  She would cringe at being turned into a saint.)


How about you?  What drives you?

A World of Need by Doug Wysockey-Johnson

This is one of those weeks when there are a lot of people who need help. It follows then that this is one of those weeks when there are a lot of people who want to help but aren’t sure how, or when, or if they can. 

Here in Vermont where I live this is certainly true. I spent yesterday carrying buckets of water and mud out of a friend’s basement. But this equation of people needing help and others wondering about if and how to help is also playing out in Chicago and Atlanta and Seattle and Des Moines.  Bad things happen every day and everywhere.  When do we drop our schedule and go?  When do we trust that it is right not to go?

There are times when a need presents itself, and we just act.  Because of who is involved or the urgency the matter, it is a no brainer.  Most of the time though, taking a moment to pause, to pray, to reflect, can help us discern whether or not we should go.  

I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by this, but prayer made a difference for me this week.  I was stuck, trying to figure out how to juggle helping neighbors with work and childcare obligations.  After spending some time praying, the way just seemed to open.  An email came from a friend stating what they needed and when.  A neighbor and I figured out how to share childcare.  Loaves get multiplied, time extends, and things just work out.

Following call (which this was) always involves a cost.  So we were woefully unprepared for our arriving guests last night, and the email box is a doing some flooding of its own.  It is a part of the deal.

Another day the leading might lead to a “no.”  I don’t believe that all of us are called to attend to all needs all the time.  I do believe that in the face of need, each of us in our own way can ask the question:  God, do you want me there?  If so, will you make a way?

Call and Recall

It has struck me that often we use the terms disciples  and apostles  for the twelve as if they were synonymous, but first they are called to be with  Christ, to learn and grow in that relationship, as pupils or disciples, and then they are sent  as apostles.  And still they are not ready for Good Friday, and even after Pentecost there is a period of learning together and coming to understand their continuing call.  It seems that the call to discipleship precedes and continues beyond any particular task, and yet we often use the term “call” to describe a task, work to be done, even the choice of career, putting the cart of mission before the horse of discipleship. 

An alternative approach would recognize every form of service as a way of learning Who it is we serve.  The Easter season is all about a series of recognitions, an essential and continuing sequel to the resurrection that allows the disciples, recalling what they have seen and heard, to reflect on its  meaning, reinterpreting it in the light of familiar scriptures.  They will continue as apostles, responding to a continuing call that becomes clearer and more meaningful as they go along  (“Did not our hearts burn within us. . . ?”). The process of learning is part of the call. 

Often too, looking back and finding new meaning in the past, recognizing the role of grace, becomes a kind of retrospective call.  I was away from the Church for some twenty years, and my  return meant extended reflection and self-examination.  There seemed to be no way to calculate the sins of omission -- the tasks I might have been called to do if I had been listening -- but a wise priest said, "it seems to me that you have been trying to be a good person," and instructed me to go and sit in a quiet church and spend some time reviewing what I had to be grateful for. In the end I made a kind of project of it over several weeks, thinking I should spend at least as much time, thought, and prayer on gratitude as on repentance, and gradually I realized that part of what I was grateful for was having worked in various ways that I had thought would be "helpful" and expressed my ethical concerns.  I realized that without seeing these as calls I had been allowed to serve.  (How many "former" Christians do we all know, working hard in the non-profit world for social justice or peace?)  That in turn made me realize that God had been with me all along, grace not only bringing me slowly back but guiding some of my choices in ways I didn't recognize.  At that point I was called – recalled – to a new understanding and recognition that I could offer to God the work I had done during those years of absence, not as compensating in any sense but as a usable foundation for responding to what would come next.

Sometimes we do things without knowing why but simply because "it is time" or part of a current job or role description.  Parenthood is like that.  We work and love, thinking "of course," as if what we are doing just came naturally, but at the same time we are learning love and caring and attention that can be turned outward and made more inclusive as time goes on.  Part of the continuity to discover in later adulthood is to discover the grace of God's call in whatever good we may have done along the way, as a guide to the way forward, called and recalled.

Mary Catherine Bateson is the author of Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom, and a Cultural Anthropologist.  For more information about her, and the other books she has written, please go to her website: www.marycatherinebateson.com

A Boy, A BB Gun and a Bird

First, the boy. Though I do not know his name, he is not exactly a stranger, for I have often seen him on the vacant lot adjacent to my back yard. He is the son of the lot owner’s girlfriend, a nice-looking young man, about fourteen, rosy-cheeked with dark hair and eyes.

Next, the BB gun. The first time I saw it, it was in the lot owner’s hands. However, the boy is the one who had possession of it the day a Catbird appeared in my yard, alive but suffering from a head wound. It was also the boy who used it a week later to kill a Robin—while his mother and the lot owner looked on.

The bird the boy killed yesterday was a Slate-colored Junco. Like Catbirds and Robins, Juncos are common—but like Catbirds, Robins, and most other birds, they are nevertheless protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Even on private property. While the boy and his mother may not know that, the lot owner does.

I should explain that I am former English teacher who, in retirement, has felt called to participate in citizen science, wherein ordinary people gather and report data to scientists who study the information thus gleaned. As calls go, this was a small one, involving no angels with their “Fear nots,” no long journeys, no dramatic confrontations with the Powers That Be, no astonishing pregnancies. This call came quietly through the invitation of a friend. It was easy to say “Yes” to a new way of observing small portions of God’s creation.

One instrument for that “Yes” is the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. One irony of yesterday’s Junco shooting is that it occurred on Day 3 of this year’s Count. I had just set up my camera at the back door, placed my binoculars nearby, and begun to watch—and count—the birds at my back yard feeders when the lot owner and the boy arrived. The lot owner scattered bread crumbs. Thirty minutes later, the boy had shot the Junco dead. I have pictures.

The neighborly thing to do, of course, would be to talk to the lot owner. But I have done that, as have others with more authority than I. I know from our conversations and from observing him at civic meetings that he is big on the rights of property owners—and that even on his vacant lot, he considers birds nuisances. “If you didn’t feed them, we wouldn’t have to shoot them,” he said to me once last summer.

Another irony of the Junco shooting was that the bread crumbs he threw down were directly in line with my back door. Given our divergent political and philosophical leanings, I cannot help but wonder: Was he merely baiting birds, or was he also baiting me?

Shaken, yesterday I did what I had previously been advised to do: I phoned the authorities. Today, this fourth and last day of this year’s Great Backyard Bird Count, I continue to watch and count—but also to watch and pray. Is there something else I should do? Today, Red-winged Blackbirds have come to the feeders, along with Blue Jays, Cardinals, Goldfinches, Sparrows, a Tufted Titmouse, a Carolina Chickadee, Mourning Doves, and yes, Juncos. Today I wonder: could any of them be angels? If so, what would they call me to do if they could speak?

By Angier Brock

When Ideas Flow

What do you think about when given a free moment? Are there problems you find yourself solving whether or not you are asked? When do ideas flow, and what are they about? The way you answer these questions can tell you a lot about the direction your life wants to take you.

Recently in a Make a Living, Have a Life Group a 30-something woman named Katie was talking about an invitation she received to be on a web committee for a local nonprofit. Even as she was deciding whether or not to say “yes,” she had all kinds of thoughts about the work of the committee. Almost as an aside, she said to our group, “Yea, the ideas always flow around that stuff for me.”

As group facilitator, I subtly blew my air horn and sent up a signal flare. These Have a Life calls are designed to help people find work that is more connected with their meaning and passion. Katie had just identified an important trail marker on that path.

Ideas usually flow most naturally and abundantly around things to which we feel called. It is as if there is a spring of creativity that is constantly renewing itself. We don’t even have to try—as Katie says, the ideas just come. The opposite is true as well.

Yesterday I was in my back yard doing a simple carpentry project. It didn’t take me long to get in trouble. I just don’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to building projects. I can usually stumble my way through without stapling myself to a fence, but clearly the idea fountain is neither abundant nor renewing when I am doing carpentry. But today when it came time to think about a retreat and writing project, the ideas came rolling out. I didn’t really have to even try—they are just there gurgling up.

Implementing ideas is a whole other topic, and one that usually does involve blood, sweat and sometimes a few tears. But paying attention to the places in our lives where we have ideas flowing without even trying—that is a trail marker worth noticing.