Mark Scandrette

A week ago Saturday we celebrated Hailey’s good friend’s Bat Mitzvah. It was quite a moving experience for me. Bat Mitzvah literally means “daughter of the commands” and Hailey’s 13 year old friend led the entire two hour Shabbat service, including singing the liturgy, reading Torah and giving a sermon. She had studied since she was nine for this day, that culminated in a lox and bagels lunch followed by an extravagant feast with wine, cake and dancing in the evening.

I was moved by the reverence this tradition has for the revelation of scripture, the seriousnessness of the shema, and how it plays itself out in family life through daily and weekly rituals, meals and prayers. It is quite something to participate in a tradition that is so ancient. I was also struck by the similarity between the shabbat service and the Christian liturgical tradition. I want to do some research into this, but my assumption is that in the first century the disciples of Jesus simply incorporated new meaning into the common rituals and gathering rites of the synogogue. At the shabbat service there was even a breaking of bread and sharing of wine (Kiddush) that resembles Eucharist.

I later talked with some Jewish friends about how moved Lisa and I were by the Shabbat service– and their reaction was interesting. For them the rituals seemed tired and rather empty of true integrative spirituality– more a tradition preserved rather than a living faith. I’ve begun wondering if all religious traditions are akin to museums of spiritual experience. We go to these museums to remember or learn about the history of how people have sought to live life with God and one another. The best use of a museum, in my mind, is a place that inspires you to make your own art or your own history– and it seems that as people seeking to live life with God and in community with one another, we recognize those who have taken this journey before us and then improvise to create a way of life together to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

I’m not much of an institutional ritualist, but with this analogy to the museum I’m trying to recognize the connection between creating community and local culture and appreciating the historical traditions that also shape our journey with God and one another. I’ve wondered, for example, if it would be helpful to tap into the historical movements that have shaped the landscape for my own spiritual journey (Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist and Weslyan) and share the best of these traditions with my children– even though we primarily see our task as negotiating how to live in reverence today with the people that make up the tapestry of our lives.

I love the white powdered surgar beaches of the gulf of Mexico. Tonight the sunset was beautiful. I’ve considered making a resolution to watch the sun set thirty days in a row this year– only at this time of year San Francisco is often blanketed by the Pacific fog. Its been good to be here with long time friends trying to understand our common stories and imagining a future together. These are good days to be alive. I often tell Lisa that I would rather be in the now than any other point in life. The best is yet to come and life is only getting better.

We’ve been telling about where we’ve come from. Me– once a young evangelist obsessed with the immanence of God and the seriousness of life– seeing things in black and white. I still think there is a message worth proclaiming: Everything matters. And we are invited to collaborate with our Maker in bringing all things to wholeness– living with the existential awareness that a power greater than ourselves is at work within us and in the world around us. The call to conversion I most feel is the invitation to leverage all of my being– my body, my time, my mind, my resources and relationships to cooperate with the divine mystery who whispers “behold I am making all things new.”

I compiled an executive summary today for a friend who wants to make a donation to ReIMAGINE. He wanted to hear about our organizational goals for the year– and see some numbers regarding our proposed budget. As we bring on more staff with ReIMAGINE my role is quickly changing– and I am scurrying to get skills that I haven’t developed previously. I’m such an idealist that it is sometimes hard for me to take dreams and translate them into tangible goals. The goals never seem to measure up to what I imagined in my head. Although I like to imagine Jesus wandering around saying wise things and eating with marginalized people, he also had a clear sense of mission and a strategy for getting his message out. There were specific towns he intended to visit. And he sent helpers to those places to develop connections ahead of time. This all happened with a great deal of intentionality. I find myself suspicious of measurements– and yet we have to have some way of evaluating our effectiveness and determining our priorities. Is there a way to be both soulful and strategic?

The last thing we did in Seattle was going to a park overlooking the city and then getting a cup of coffee at Cafe Fiore. Very robust yet smooth flavored espresso. Both the espresso and the drip coffee had what I would describe as a foamy mouth feel.

We drove in bumper to bumper traffic from Seattle to Portland– to visit our friends Paul and Elizabeth. Paul is a Greek Orthodox priest serving a large parish in Portland. We always enjoy comparing notes about faith. Paul and Elizabeth grew up Evangelical Christian and after four years at a Baptist College decided that the ancient path of the Greek Orthodox tradition fit their sensibilities better. While we are together we often talk about the differences we find between the traditions we were raised in and what now makes sense as a spiritual path. I think alot of it has to do with personality. It might be easy for someone like me to look critically at more traditional or all american expressions of faith– as if people who find themselves in that realm have a more syncretistic relationship to culture. And yet how much of my own spiritual quest is marked by my particular personality? We all fit the archetype for something.

We weren’t in Portland long, but did get a chance to visit Powells Books– a bookstore covering an entire city block. They still didn’t have Ken Wilbur’s A Theory of Everything.

It was a long drive home. I spent the morning in the car planning our family budget for 2007– noodling with the numbers and trying to figure out how to be the most intentional and sustainable about how we manage our finances. I use to attend more closely to these things, but haven’t been as fastidious in recent years. We’ve been talking about money in our community and sharing our incomes, expenses and budgets. More people cried the night we talked about money than in any other meeting I’ve ever participated in. People embarrassed about debt or wealth– and lots of questions about how to relate to money. Should we act like it doesn’t matter? I believe that attending to one’s financial life is an important dimension to the spiritual life– noticing patterns of need, provision and abundance. I tend to feel like I am never quite comfortable about money. If we don’t have enough I worry. If we have a surplus I feel guilty. I do think it is helpful to talk more openly with one another about earning and spending.