Author: pilgenfritz

It’s the Longest Night of the year and in a few hours we will gather here at University Congregational United Church of Christ as people will do in many other places, to light candles for where we need hope on this longest and darkest of nights.

I wish I had something big to offer, something large enough to meet the holes and the losses that this season is for some of us.  And yet the gifts of these holiday seasons are small.  Gifts that can seem all so inadequate, yet all that we are given.

What can I offer, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.

If I were a wise one, I would do my part;

But what can I give you?  Give you my heart.

(In the Bleak Midwinter, verse 4

Christian Rossetti, alt.)

I have come back to singing “In the Bleak Midwinter” often this season.  It seems to be a carol written for times like ours.

And so I offer you a few small things, little things for the meeting of these days.   Mostly, and most importantly, my heart and prayer goes out to you and is with you this season, and will be with you these days. And I offer to you, all that I have, a few stirrings of my heart.

Like some of you, there have been years that I would just assume this holiday season be over.  Like many of you, there are years that I have looked back on many losses of many kinds.  Years that it feels a bit beyond me to imagine singing, “Joy to the World!  The Lord is come!” on Christmas Eve, just a few days hence.  How will I be ready to sing out “joy” this year?  In the Christian tradition, these weeks before Christmas are marked as Advent, a time of emptying as we prepare to make room for the Christ child.  And oh, we all have been emptied of so much this Advent season.  Lost so much.  Had so much taken from us and fear more being taken.  Deaths, job loss, terrorism, war, uncertainty, health crises, financial stresses…the list goes on.

In the various faith traditions of this season, little lights are lit – on the menorah, on the Advent wreath.  In Christianity, we traditionally light a candle each of the four weeks before Christmas – the candle of hope, the candle of peace, the candle of love, the candle of joy.  And finally the Christ candle on Christmas Eve, a sign and celebration that God is present here with us.   Just little lights.  And little words to meet the still growing darkness of these days:  “hope”, “peace”, “love”.  Words that seem all too fragile or even a little beyond us, like “joy”.

I remember this year, the little gifts that were given in times of crisis and change.

In time of war, enough oil given for the lamps.

In the midst of a season of oppression and death, a little child is born.

Little gifts that come in sad and trying days and times.

Not big gifts, but little lights and little words to meet us in these days. Little gifts I can often miss if I try to look for something too big these days.  Little gifts I can walk right by, stumble over if I don’t keep watch for them. Little things.   But little things that finally are what we are given, sometimes all we are given and that even can be enough.  Enough to meet us today.  Right now.  Where we are.  Not enough to take away the grief and pain now and forever, but enough for now.

And that is the hope and prayer of this season I fall back to.

That little things be given to us – little signs of holding and hope and love each day.

And that we live in the hope and promise that tomorrow little things will be given as well.

Enough to meet us for today.

Enough to meet us for tomorrow.

I pray that we all may keep our eyes open, our hearts open, our wonder open to the surprise that comes in little gifts.

Little gifts that even, and finally, may be the greatest gifts of all.   Gifts that are sparks of the eternal – those gifts of that hope, and faith, and love that cannot but spark out and be found in many surprising ways.  Even now.  Even tonight.

There are times when

all the stars are torn from our skies,

and the morning will not come.

We try to make our way in unlit passages,

frightened, desperate and despairing.

We cannot see,

for wherever we turn

the night continues.

And yet, it is

into this impenetrable night

that the Child is born.

Tearing through the seams of darkness,

the Morning Star appears

in our eyes and in our hearts.

The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great Light.

( “Morning Star” from Searching for Shalom by Ann Weems.)

Some of the best gifts of travel are the surprising gifts of the people I meet along the way.

And in this season of Advent when we are waiting for the One we are told is coming, I remember the short conversations, chance encounters on sidewalks, in fields, at the side of the road, over café counters – the surprising gift of who I have met along the way this year.

People like Justin staffing the famous “Elsie Volunteer Fire Department Biscuits and Gravy” Food Tent out in what feels like the middle of nowhere on the “Hood to Canal Relay Race.”

It’s early this Saturday morning, recovering from my last run, and while looking for something to eat, I spot an unusual sight – a small boy in a firefighter uniform.

 

Are you are a firefighter? I ask.

Yes, he says.

I’m Peter.

Justin.

We shake hands.

What year are you in school?

I’m going into fifth grade.

Fifth grade?  And you’re really a firefighter?

Yes!  And my sister Rebecca is too.  She’s going to be a sophomore in high school.  We’re part of the Elsie Fire and Rescue.  Our Dad is the Captain.

That’s just incredible.  You mean you really put out fires and all that?

He smiles.  Yes, car and forest fires and all that.  I can’t go into buildings until I’m older.

You must be the youngest firefighter around!

Maybe? 

He smiles.

Hey, I write a blog post and I wonder if I could take your picture and share your story.

Sure!

Later, just before we leave, Justin comes bounding down the field.

Hey Peter, do you like the Seahawks?

It’s meeting people like Mark Bryant – sitting next to me at lunch at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.  I’ve come here after the worship service is over to pick up Tsuneko – and indulge in the great coffee hour lunch they serve here including Mel’s famous chili today.

I sit down next to Mark.  I’m told he just won a national championship for weight lifting.

I introduce myself to learn not only that he won the national championship but had started weight lifting in his thirties and was now 58.  And had his hip replaced a few years back.

“You had your hip replaced and weight lift!”  I exclaim.

“Yes, most people say they can’t believe I do it.”

Mark does it.  And as I hear snippets, highlights of his life I hear about a man who keeps doing it – keeps moving forward into life.

“How did you find this church?”  I ask.

“Because of…” and he points out three elders in the room.  “They are all in an exercise class I teach in Rainier Beach. They invited me to church a few months ago.”

Connections, encounters, surprises at lunch or at the gym. Perhaps such meetings that can turn a day, open our imagination are around us every day.

He hands me his two medals.

“They weigh a ton!” I exclaim.

Thanks Mark!  Thanks Justin!  You’re for Real – and really inspiring to me.

Inspiring me to get out on the road and find the story, meet the one waiting to meet me in the faces of those along the way.

 

Jesus, help us this Advent to see you in the faces of those we meet out on the road today.  Amen  

 

 

I had Sunday’s Thanksgiving sermon all planned or as “planned” as mine usually gets by Sunday morning.

However, at the hour before worship when I was just about to sit down and go through it once again, the word came:  Sue had died unexpectedly last night.

We’d all been keeping Sue and Jerry in our prayers in the months since her leukemia diagnosis.  She’d survived a stem cell transplant and 100 days of treatment.  We were hopeful, she was hopeful, she would soon be back at church.  But then Saturday, trouble getting up and dressed in the morning led to a 9-1-1 call that led to the hospital emergency room, a heart attack and her death last night.

I had a sermon – and now the shreds of it before me – shredded in my own shock and tears as I talked to Jerry on the phone.  Shredded as I thought about sharing the heartbreaking news with the congregation in a few minutes. Whatever my sermon was all sounded too pat and too sure – a sermon that hadn’t been tested against a grief like this.  I hung up the phone and stepped out to tell the choir about Sue.

What to do for worship?  Cancel Thanksgiving?  Read together the texts that I read at memorials after times like this –The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want, (Psalm 23), I am convinced that neither death nor life… , (Romans 8:31-39), In my father’s house are many rooms…(John 14:1-4).  It all felt like too many words – too much, too soon.  Perhaps better to leave space for stunned silence.  Perhaps carry on – but how?  How to worship without just pushing through?

I shared the sad news at the beginning of worship greeted by gasps and tears.  I said a prayer and invited us to let worship carry us that day.  It certainly would need to carry me.

I stumbled into a sermon about vulnerability.  I wondered if the disruptions and dislocations in our lives are the best chance we have of meeting all we mean by Jesus.  Perhaps, I shared, we need to trust in staying here in our vulnerability – that place where we’d rather not be – I’d rather not be.

But as I struggled to find an ending, the sermon was already being lived there in the back pew.  Jerry and his son Peter had come to church that morning and were being surrounded by hugs and tears.

Whatever this struggling preacher was trying to say in so many words about the God who might meet us and remake us in our brokenness was a message long ago received in the back pew by two grieving men embraced by a grieving church.

As I joined others to embrace Jerry and Peter after the service, I fell into Thanksgiving.  In this most broken of places, Jesus had indeed been here all along – meeting us in that amazing grace we call each other.

We will not fear
though the earth shall change
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea
though the waters roar with its tumult…
Be still…(Psalm 46)

Join us tonight:

6:00 p.m.

A Post-Election Restorative Gathering

University Congregational United Church of Christ
4515 16th Avenue NE in Seattle

Amidst the changes of this election that we may long for or fear, we will gather tonight to begin the slow work of healing  after a bitter and tumultuous political season and as we face the road ahead for ourselves and our nation.

Tonight  amidst all the feelings we may hold,

we take time to be still,

light candles,

sing,

hear words of hope,

be together – a community of strangers and friends united across all that separates us.

May today be the beginning of the possibility that we might meet the weariness, anxiety, fear, sadness, anger in our land and within us with the larger holding of a wider love, a deeper grounding, a present hope.

We keep you and our nation in our prayers in these changing times.

 

While political pundits tweet
that on the day after the election
nearly half of America will wake
believing we are doomed,
I hold a wider dream.

The possibility that indeed we will awake
remembering our souls,
remembering who we are to each other,
that is, our need,
across all the bounds that keeps us apart.

The possibility that it is not on the results that we depend
but upon what is at work in the unfolding –
this fall containing the bright blooms of spring,
this death holding the surprise of new life,
these challenges and possibilities in this present now.

The possibility that this 240 year old experiment
called the United States of America
is an experiment worth remembering,
reworking, recalling to strength
to work together
for greater love, deeper justice, a wider hope.
Remember that it is in the struggle
that we are called to change.

Huddled here in the dug out
in the rain delay,
may we remember who we are
and what we live for –
that the game is not yet over –
perhaps, we’ve just begun
as on the day after the election
each must rise and ask –
What kind of person do I want to be?
What kind of relationship do I want with my neighbor?
What kind of nation do I pledge to dream together?

Peter Ilgenfritz
November 7, 2016

The monster showed up just after midnight.  As they do.  (A Monster Calls)

Perhaps, like me, you also had terrible nightmares as a child.

Nightmares like the neighbor’s Golden Retriever driving a red lawnmower, chasing me across our front yard.  I’m trying to run away, but can barely move, struggle to put one heavy foot in front of the other…

Nightmares of lime green alligators waiting with sharp white teeth at the bottom of my bed.  Nightmares that I never remembered but that sent me barreling up the basement stairs, sure that someone was ready to grab me from behind.

Of course these many decades later, they all sound so silly.

But it was my Midnight Monsters that kept me far away from the Horror section at the library. I’ve never read Steven King and watched “Rear Window” through small gaps in my fingers while blocking my ears.  And why in the world I ever saw “The Shining”….

Halloween alas, has never been my favorite holiday.

Perhaps it’s my vivid imagination that could conjure up Monsters down every dark stairwell and hiding beneath my every bed.  Or perhaps, the Monsters have been so powerful in my life and imagination because it’s taken me so long time to turn and face them – to ask what it is they want of me.

The Monster smashed his way into Conor’s room one night.  It was just after he’d turned 13, at the time when his Mom was in the midst of her treatments for some unnamed and terrible disease.

Conor.…Conor….Somone outside his window was calling his name.

It wasn’t his usual nightmare – the one with the abyss, her hands slipping from his grasp, the horrible scream.   No, this was different.  This time he was sure he was awake and he could see it clearly –  the yew tree on the back hill was morphing into a giant monster that was now stepping closer and ever closer to his bedroom window.  It wasn’t the monster he’d been expecting.  This monster insisted that he’d come walking because Conor had called him….

Perhaps it’s someone like Tyler Caskey, pastor of a small church in rural Maine, that’s the man that Conor grows into.   Now he’s old enough to not turn his fingers so quickly into fists, doesn’t bring to fruition his most terrible thoughts.  He’s too old now to even call them Monsters anymore.

And yet it is a Monster that shows up late one Saturday night in his dark study.  A Monster that inhabits him as he hammers out his sermon of rage against the people in his congregation that have been twisting lies into gossip.  Tyler’s Monster, like Conor’s, has come calling late this night to lead him to where he never wanted or planned to go – to his true sermon, to offer the only word he finally has to share the next morning with his congregation.

Conor is the main character in Patrick Ness’s young adult novel, A Monster Calls, and Tyler the main character in Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Abide with Me.   They’re two of the best books I’ve read recently about the Monster that lies hidden in us all in unnamed grief and repressed anger.

I now understand a bit more that northern European white males like Conor, Tyler and myself, are pursued by some particularly vile monsters that our ancestors have not known well how to meet.  Alas, our ancestors have carried out some particularly monstrous acts of violence born of repressed grief and rage, the fears that we have not been given tools to voice.  Other cultures than the one I have been born into, have met and named these matters better – as Monsters who are real and that need to be named and unmasked.

Last week I met a real life Monster Tamer.   Robbie Paul is a member of the Nez Perce Tribe and retired faculty member at Washington State University.  Paul’s life work and vocation has been to help find ways to meet the Monsters that dwell in our past histories – to help members of her community and family turn and listen to the voices of their ancestors.

As she explained to us, historically unresolved grief gets imprinted in our DNA, hides in a conspiracy of silence that keeps us stuck – what can’t be talked about can’t be put to rest.  In order for the Monster hiding in the silenced pain and abuse in our past histories not to come to life and lash out in self-abuse and violence in many forms against ourselves and others, we need to lie on the ground and listen to the ancestors.  We need to call forth the truth that has been hidden in our pasts and bring it to word in our mouths.  We need to do the rituals, transform the stories.  We need to bring our children and grandchildren to the broken, haunted places, tell them the stories, begin to meet and heal the wounds.  Robbie Paul knows our lives and the lives of our children depend on it.

On the way home from the lecture last Wednesday night in the pouring rain, Andrea told us over and over again the instructions she has driven into her son’s memory – what he is to say, if and when the police pull him over.  She recites the words over and over to us like an incantation, like a shield she prays will keep him safe when she knows all too well that she cannot.  She admits she prayed desperately when he was ten that her beautiful Black boy would never grow any bigger, never develop muscles and beard, never grow up, so that the Monsters could never find him.

The Monsters are real.  The monsters out there and within us all.  Oh, we post-modern and ever so rational people know better than to call them Monsters anymore.  We contain them and domesticize them, hide them behind fancy words like racisim, sexism – fear and hatred of “The Other” in whatever guise they are found.  We conceal them in our psychological jargon about unresolved grief, and unexpressed rage that lurk in the far corners of our silences and fears.

Call them what you will, they are Monsters nonetheless.  Perhaps we’d all be better off if we named then as such – monsters that need to be called out, turned and met, faced and known.  Monsters that will come again to lash and hurt, tear and rend us apart until we pay attention, until we put our ears to the ground and begin to listen to what they are trying to get us to hear and say.

Perhaps outside your window, tonight, you may hear your name being called.

Perhaps, it’s time, long past time, for all of us to pull back the covers and climb out of bed and go out and meet the Monsters.  Perhaps, they are not what we expected them to be.   Perhaps they really have come not to harm but to heal  – to break forth in us that which we all most fear to know and name – the truth.

As for me, while I’m not rushing out to read Mary Higgins Clarke, I’m actually looking forward to seeing “A Monster Calls” when it shows up at the movie theatre in mid-December.

Perhaps, now, at last, I’m a bit more ready to meet the Monsters, to turn and see at last what they’re trying to say all along.

Happy Halloween.

She asks me to join her for the lecture at the Japanese Studies Department.

She says she thought it might help us understand each other better.

We’re late and get lost on the way, winding our way down little paths between brick buildings.

At last we find the right building but can’t find the room.

We ask an old man in a tweed jacket for directions.

We walk down long gray titled corridors.

 

The halls echo with our footsteps.

We hear voices ahead, see the small flyer taped to the door,

“Translating in Two Directions:  An Evening with Jay Rubin and Motojuki Shibata.”

The small lecture room is full.  We see a couple of empty chairs in the second row.

We clomp down the gray steps, squeeze by knees, step over colorful shoes to the last empty seats at the edge of the room.

I help her take off her coat.

I take off my own.

I pull up the little wood swivel desk at the side of the chair.

I pull out my white lined pad, scrounge in my backpack for a pen.

The two old men sit on stools.

Rubin has translated the novels of Haruki Murakami into English.

Motojuki Shibata has translated Rubin’s novel, The Sun Gods, into Japanese.

The less you think, the better a translator you are, Rubin begins.

Shibata nods, Indeed, translation is not hard. Translation is merely a detailed recreation of what goes on in your heart.

Rubin nods, Yes, It’s intuitive. 

It’s a mystery to be in a relationship with someone whose first language is another language.  It’s a wonder to be in a relationship with someone who comes from another culture, another world.

The other day, we had just left a play.

I said, What did you think?

She said, I didn’t get it.

I thought, I bet she doesn’t understand 90% of what I say.  I bet she hasn’t understood a thing I’ve been talking about all this time.  

Later, I asked her about the play again. I asked her what she didn’t understand.

She told me she didn’t understand the strong Southern dialect.

She told me she missed some of the words.

Then she told me what the play was about.

She told me how all the characters were afraid.  She told me how none of them could understand each other.  She told me about things in the play I had missed and never seen.

Here, in the lecture hall, someone asks a question at the back of the room.

I turn to see who’s talking.

Almost everyone in the room is Japanese.  There are only a few other white faces here.

I didn’t notice that almost everyone was Japanese when we came in.

When we hurried in late all I saw was the back of many black haired heads.

 

I remember last January on the first morning in Japan, I ran around looking for forks.   Then I remembered, I’m in Japan, and that container of things that I’d mistaken as pencils were in fact chopsticks.

Oh, yeah, I laughed aloud, Japan.

No forks, chopsticks.  

 

I have traveled to many strange places around the world.

I have never traveled to as strange a place as Japan.

A place where every little thing you do is ringed with ritual – greetings and goodbyes, the beginning and ending of a meal.  Bows and blessings, palms resting gently together.

The otherness pervades every aspect of life.

I learned to take a shower sitting on a little stool and use a little blue towel to scrub myself clean.

I learned how to eat sushi and sashimi, shabu shabu, yakitori, and floating tofu.  I tasted many things I had never tasted before, an immense variety of textures and tastes.

Over my week in Japan, I eventually stopped looking for forks.

I quieted my longing for the familiar and let the strangeness of Japan speak to me.

I learned to embrace the uncomfortable wonder of being in another world where life in every detail is constructed differently.

One morning, for the New Year ritual, she knelt before the little altar for her ancestors in her family home.

She lit the incense stick, rang a bell, bowed.

Then we bustled off for Sunday morning worship at her Anglican Church built in the design of a Buddhist temple.

After church, we visited a Buddhist temple.

She showed me how to wash my hands, rinse my mouth using the bamboo ladle at the entrance to the temple.

We walked through parks and temple grounds.  She pointed out the green of the pine trees, the blooming pink camellias, the plum and cherry trees that will blossom in other seasons.  For everything, a season.  For every season, a flowering.  In everything the natural world is intertwined.

“What do you smell?” she asked as we walked through a dark concrete underpass below the roadway.

“Nothing” I replied.

“Exactly,” she said.  “Nothing.  No smell.  This is what I miss about Japan.”

 

 

The city streets packed, the trains full and everything is quiet.

So quiet.  No loud voices, or honking horns.

No angry fists raised from the white gloved taxi drivers.

No blasting music from the stores on the street.

Quiet. So quiet.

Once in a while, a little white ambulance passed.  It had a pleasant little siren.  The little microphone on the roof announced which way the ambulance turned.

In my week in Japan, I learned to say hardly a word.

I learned to bow, to bow again and again to all of the wonder.

On our last day, she visited her mother’s grave.

She bowed at the entrance to the cemetery.

Drew two buckets of water and a scrub brush and washed the grave.

Gathered leaves and pulled weeds and took them to the place where they will be burned.

Scattered water on ancient graves for those whose names have long been lost.

Bowed again.

I know the longing that we might speak the same common language, laugh at the same jokes, love the same food, understand the plays we attend in the same way.  And I am learning the wonder of the strangeness, the otherness between us.

 

 

Recently, I officiated at a wedding for a young couple.

I was reminded again how weddings are often full of the language of “two becoming one”, one heart, one mind.

I wondered if it every really happens.

 

Perhaps we are all mysteries to each other and will remain so.  Perhaps no amount of common life, shared experiences or mutual understanding can remove our “strangeness” from each other.

Perhaps yes, the hope of marriage, as with all of our relationships, is not to remove the “otherness” but to learn instead to live with it, be curious about it, and try to love it, the “otherness”, the “strangeness” in each other. (Arthur McGill, “Dying Unto Life: Arthur McGill on New God, New Death, New Life”, edited by David Cain, Cascade Books, 2013, pp. 143-45.)

The lecture is over.

I have been scribbling notes and drawing pictures.

I have been thinking of many things.

I put down my little desk.

Tuck my pad and pen into my backpack.

We rise to leave.

 

I wonder what she heard.

I wonder what she understood that I did not.

I help her put on her coat.  I put on my own.

We greet friends.  She bows.  I shake hands.

Maybe translation is not so hard after all.

Maybe it’s more like a dance, like a play, like the imagination that inspires the drawing of a picture, the writing of a poem.

Maybe it’s the detailed recreation of what goes on in our hearts.

 

We take hands, walk out into the night to find our way home.

 

On Sunday, October 2 Debra Jarvis, Catherine Foote, Mary Ellen Smith, Nancy Hannah, Kris Garratt, Beth Amsbary, Sean and Teresa and Lenore Owens brought St. Francis’ blessing to the streets in offering blessings to dogs and cats and other critters and the humans that care for them for the gift they are to our life and world.

Debra Jarvis also invited great groups working with pets in our community to join the festivity – Project Canine, Saving Our Seniors, and Old Dog Haven.

Accompanying the humans for blessings on Sunday were Birdie, Dash, Maggie, Marcia Jean, Mac, Tater Tot, Seraphina, Milo, Tinkerbell, Rufus, Pearlie and assorted others!

“Tater Tot, I bless you in the name of the Creator. And may you and Judi enjoy life together sharing love and kindness to all you meet!  Amen!”

It was church on the streets.  The church that has gifts to offer and share and give away.  Tomorrow’s church won’t be a place which you have to come into in order to receive the gifts that have been entrusted to us.

Today’s church needs to be the place like it was on Sunday that takes says, “Hey!  We have gifts to share!” and brings the gifts of blessing and presence, care and love out to the streets.

“People stood around and visited eating treats and feeding canine treats to their dogs. Just a great mood and the two hours flew by. We gave out the prayers of St. Francis in little rolls of paper – suitable quite suitable for fetch!”   Rev. Debra Jarvis  

Listen!  The dogs are still yapping about it!

Thank you Debra!  Thanks for inspiring us to get out and share a gift of blessing today!

AARF!

The Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much
Seek to be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

 

 

Perhaps, it was in Florida, at one of those large church conferences when I first met Charles.  Wherever it was, it was a long time ago, some twenty years, when I first heard this gray haired man in a tweed jacket put together words about the story of his life in a way that I had never before heard:  Scholar and Sculptor.  Artist and Activist.  Pastor and Prophet.  I remembered all these years later the ancient stories he re-imagined in clay.  I remembered those amazing faces he crafted – longing, hoping, despairing, and dreaming.  I remembered especially Charles’ hands, his large hands, as he shaped his stories and told of his craft and opened my imagination.

Years later, another coast and another time, we were looking for artists to come and share and teach with us.  I remembered Charles.  Thanks to our Artist in Residence Kris Garratt we found Charles, retired now from his work with the Office of Church and Society in the national setting of the United Church of Christ.  Two years ago, Charles and his wife Carol McCollough came to Seattle.  I took them to our Senior Retreat, I preached with Charles, I took them sailing.  That spring they invited me to visit them at their little farm outside of Princeton, New Jersey.

As spring warmth poured through the windows, we sat around their old worn table in their old farmhouse kitchen and shared wonderful food and many stories.  Charles walked me through the old barn that had become his studio.  I’d never seen a place like it.  It was like a museum – it was a museum, of one man’s craft of turning stories into sculptures, making stories into art, the way Charles had always seen and pictured and knew the stories.   A beaming young girl on ice skates.  A smiling pig with wings.  Crucifixes and parables – faces of wonder, agony, fear, hope.  It was the hope most of all, the hope that despite all that shown through.  The truth of life as Charles crafted it – not as it might be, but as it is.  I watched Charles hands as he led me through and shared the stories.

I told him that he had a story that needed to be shared.  I shared a dream of what a wondrous thing it would be to have a filmmaker follow him through and hear the stories he had shared with me.  That winter I returned.  We walked through the barn together.  Charles told his stories to the filmmaker.

Charles and Carol have shared that they have seen words put together here at University Congregational Church in ways they have never encountered in quite the same way before – art and faith, art and worship, art as a lived sharing at the heart of our life together as church.  They offered a loan of Charles’ sculptures, for us to use and to share with the wider community.  We made plans to receive it – a repository of art – enlivening, re-visioning, re-imaging of story as only art can.

From October 7-9 our Lecture Series is featuring Biblical scholar Stephen Patterson.  Patterson writes, “Charles McCollough’s art captures the drama, humor, and irony of Jesus’ parables that no prose interpretation can.”

We hope you will join us here at University Congregational UCC in Seattle for an art reception to view his sculptures and to meet Charles and Carol on Friday night, October 7 from 5-7 pm. 

He will also be speaking here after worship on Sunday, October 9 at 11:30 as well.

I am grateful for the blessing of my friendship with Charles and Carol.  Grateful for the blessing of words that are generous gift, gracious hospitality, dear friends, amazing grace.

Here, at the river,

I taught you to swim.

 

Held my arms out to you

as I stepped slowly,

ever so slowly away,

testing the tension

between courage and fear.

 

You pushed off,

exuberant splashing

as I called confidence

to you across the water.

 

Listen –

I am calling you still.

 

Peter Ilgenfritz