In Potter's Hands

Potters know that not only does each kind of clay respond differently to shaping, but each individual pot responds differently. A potter's hands have to pay attention to the feel of the clay and adjust the kind of pressure they're applying accordingly. The act of shaping a pot is as much an act of listening and attending to the clay as it is coaxing it into a pre-visioned shape. The best potter is a master of improvisation. She has to be ready to revision the shape of the piece, and pull back some of the pressure if the walls begin to get too thin in places. If she tries to force a shape that the clay won't support, the whole piece just flops and it's back to the kneading board. Patience and openness to change are as vital to beautiful art as the technical skill required.

Envisioning our vocational life is much the same process. The pressures of life can bear down on us and shape us often without our even realizing it. The further we move into adulthood the more we are asked to choose, not between a simple good vs. bad, but rather between multiple goods. We want to provide good things for our family; we want to support the dreams of our spouses; we want our parents to be proud of us; and we want to belong to a good community. Parker Palmer claims that our efforts to respond to such pressures can lead to a "divided life, He says, "The instinct to protect ourselves by living divided lives emerges when we are young, as we start to see the gaps between life's bright promise and its shadowy realities...As the outer world becomes more demanding--and today it presses in on children at an obscenely early age--we stop going to our rooms, shutting the door, walking into the wardrobe, and entering the world of the soul. And the closer we get to adulthood, the more we stifle the imagination that journey requires...Because imagining other possibilities for our lives would remind us of the painful gap between who we most truly are and the role we play in the so-called real world."(A Hidden Wholness, pp. 14,15)

I find myself at just the juncture to which Palmer refers--between the realities of the world, which make greater demands on both our time and finances, and the vision I imagine for myself when I let myself really dream aloud. It's exciting to offer my own particular gifts. But it isn't always easy to use those gifts and be present for my family in the way that they need me. So now I have a choice. I can flop, or I can improvise. The proverbial walls may seem a bit thin, but life is like clay after all; It is malleable and yearning to find a shape, if I'm open, patient, and creative enough to listen; if I can attend to the emerging shape of things; if I am willing to improvise.
Sometimes the hidden gift of dead ends is that they force us to turn around, to change direction, and to look for other access roads. The hidden gift of the "thin places" is that we are forced to mine our own creative resources in new ways. As potter and theologian Marjory Zoet Bankson notes, "As the wall gets thinner, my options narrow because certain moves cannot be reversed without collapsing the entire form. Each decision, each direction, makes a difference. As my hands keep the clay in tension, the body of the clay takes on an individual shape. My vision of the finished pot is especially important...even though the pot is far from finished. While there is still room for change, my intention comes strongly into play, giving the pot identity and purpose." (This Is My Body, p 96)

Improvising when much is at stake is never fun or easy, at least at first. It's nerve-racking and unsettling. But sometimes we need to be unsettled and disoriented in order to pay attention to our lives, to hear the whispers of our souls, and to discover the source of real strength. Real strength is not the bill of goods the world has sold us. Real strength isn't about coming up with a plan and stubbornly clinging to it, despite the collateral damage. Real strength emerges when we not only embrace our gifts and aptitudes, but our limitations as well. Real strength emerges when we know how to ask for help and can accept help as a gift, without worrying about how we will repay it. Real strength emerges when we hear a host of voices in our head telling us why we aren't enough, but we can listen to the One voice that reminds us we are more than enough, just as we are. Real strength is not a big concrete, steel-reinforced wall, but a handmade pot that has been fired, survived, and was made stronger. It's not indestructible, but it is open. Its identity is not grounded in what it keeps out, but rather in what it holds. It's not perfect, and it very likely isn't the shape its potter originally intended, but the bread it can hold is no less than life itself. The water it can contain is no less than Living Water. In its simplicity it calls us to partake; to eat and to drink, and to become just what we were intended to be. 

Claiming, Not Shaming (Reflection on Mark 12:38-44)

Every single one of us, at one time or another, has had that classic anxiety nightmare. You know the one. You’re standing in front of a crowd of hundreds, expected to make a speech, and you realize you forgot all of your notes. Or you’re the new kid in a new school, and you look in the mirror at the end of the day and realize you were wearing your shirt backwards and inside out all day. Or you walk up to receive a prestigious award, totally unaware that you have toilet paper trailing from the heel of your shoe. All of these nightmares have something powerful in common. They are all about our universal human fear of shame. Dr. Brene Brown, an author and research professor who teaches in the graduate department of Social Work at the University of Houston, wrote a book called Daring Greatly. This book grew out of her extensive research on the subject of shame. In it she explains that “shame is the fear of disconnection.” Since “connection, love, and belonging give meaning and purpose to our lives, shame is deeply painful because when we are ashamed we fear that something we have done or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection. It’s that inner voice that says, ‘I’m unlovable. I don’t belong.’ Shame makes us believe that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.’” If we want to avoid shame, we only have two real options, right? Never fail at anything; or—the more realistic option—hold your cards close to your chest and avoid making yourself vulnerable. Have enough dignity to keep your flaws hidden and private. Growing up we all learned that, while it would be nice if the world we lived in were more understanding and compassionate, people can be cruel. So our best strategy is to protect ourselves. If we don’t put all of ourselves out there, we won’t get hurt, right?

            In the Fall of 1994 my husband attended a service at Oakhurst Baptist church in Decatur, Georgia. Something happened that day that flew in the face of our conventional response to shame. One Sunday, during the time for shared prayers of concern and thanksgivings, a man stood up in front of the whole congregation and shared that he had been diagnosed with AIDs. He spoke through tears while looking down at the ground, so he couldn’t see what people were doing. When he finished, he began making his way back to his seat, his eyes still downcast. He only made it a few feet before he realized people were coming toward him. He looked up and saw hundreds of people in the congregation lined up in the aisle waiting to hug him. The service ran long that day because they would not let him sit down until they hugged him. When he finally took his seat he was weeping, not out of shame, but in response to shame’s opposite—belonging. His diagnosis had taken his health, his future, and his independence. But when he shared this painful and personal news with the church he risked losing everything else: his dignity; his reputation; his relationships; and his community. He put everything on the line, and gave everything he had, making himself completely vulnerable, and they did not shame him. They claimed him. What started out as a walk of shame became a pilgrimage of grace. His congregation taught him that, if he wanted to avoid shame, there were more than two options. He was no longer forced to choose between being perfect or being guarded. They showed him that it is possible to risk everything and be loved, just as he was. I have no idea what music they played in the service that day, but as I read this story I thought of the old Baptist hymn “Just As I Am.” In the church my husband grew up in it was played during the altar call. It was the “come to Jesus” song. I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, so I never quite understood altar calls. But this man’s experience with his church family makes me hear this altar call hymn in a completely new way. I hear it as he must have heard it:  “Just as I am, though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without, O Lamb of God, I come, I come. He felt claimed. He felt welcomed. He belonged.

            The widow in today’s reading from Mark’s gospel knows the shame the man with AIDs must have felt. As a widow in 1st century Palestine there was nowhere she could go that shame didn’t follow her. Without a husband she was financially destitute. She had no social status, no protection, and no power. She faithfully went to Temple to worship God but, unlike the man at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia, she received no grace. The gospel reading tells us that Jesus sat down in the Temple with his disciples and watched her. Just before this incident he had been teaching his disciples about religious hypocrisy. Now let me be clear, Jesus wasn’t saying the whole Temple was corrupt. But he did criticize the nature of giving within the religious legal system of the time. Jesus wasn’t concerned that religious law required people to give. He criticized a system that was using God’s law in a way that glorified some people while shaming others. So he took his disciples into the Temple for an object lesson. It’s a bit like an episode of Undercover Boss, where CEOs disguise themselves as trainees in their own company to get a true sense of how the managers run things. The Temple offering wasn’t taken up the way we take up our offering. The collection box at the treasury was a copper funnel shaped container which resounded according to how much was put into it. So when the wealthy gave, everyone gathered could hear the loud rush of coins echoing around. So when the widow put her two small coins in, the barely audible little pings resounded, not with sound, but with shame—the shame of poverty. The shame of belonging to no one.                            

 What Jesus points out to his disciples, in this painfully embarrassing moment, is not how ashamed the widow must be, but rather how ashamed the scribes and judicial religious experts ought to be. As he witnesses the widow’s giving, he shows the disciples that she is a hero—a shining example of faith. But she’s not a hero of the faith because she gives everything she has financially. This text is not meant to be a holier-than-thou stewardship plea romanticizing poverty. What makes her a hero of the faith in Jesus’ eyes is that she gives everything she has spiritually. She is not afraid to make herself vulnerable. People as poor as she was weren’t required to give. She could have avoided the public shame that rung out in the puny pings of her coins. But she didn’t avoid it. Faced with a worldview that offered her only two options—don’t fail, or have the decency to hide your failure—she showed the scribes, the judicial religious experts, and everyone in the Temple, that there was a third option—God’s abundant love. 

What was clear as a bell to Jesus, as she made her way back to her seat after making her paltry contribution, after those around her cast shaming glances her way, was that this widow understood God’s kingdom. All that Jesus had been trying to teach through his feedings, healings, and sermons, had just been embodied by this status-less, powerless, penniless, vulnerable woman: God’s love, the love that took on our human body, walked among us, ate with sinners, gave sight to the blind, mended the brokenhearted, and loved us enough to give His life, wants nothing to do with shame. The voice that uses God’s law to tell people they are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging does not reflect the voice of God. A church that is built on shame, ridicule, elitism, and exclusion, is not God’s church. God’s church is built by hands willing to get dirty, calloused, and worn; open, giving hands. God’s temple is built by ordinary flawed people who know what it is to fail. God’s dream is that churches are filled with people who walk to up to the altar week after week, not because they need to show everyone how holy and together they are, but because they know how fragile and vulnerable they really are; how aware they are of their need for God’s abundant and sustaining love.

The great good news of the gospel today is that God calls every one of us to be his church in the world. You are called, and I am called, to become a community of ordinary saints who are courageous enough to extend God’s extraordinary love and belonging to everyone we meet. In Christ, God has equipped us with every good thing that we need to be His temple of love in the world. When people show us their weaknesses—in their work, in their parenting, in their spiritual lives, in their friendships, or in their family’s life—we are called, not to shame them or turn away. We are called to claim them. As temples of God in the world, we are invited to run down the aisle to meet them; to look them in the eye, and to open our arms to them. Christ invites us to be the community the widow never had. He calls us to make the altar a place, not of shame, but of belonging. So when you come to the altar today, may you hear the invitation to come, just as you are, “though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without,” the Lamb of God says come, just come. Be claimed by Christ’s abundant love for you, then go and carry it out into the world. Amen.