Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

by Pat Patterson

I have a deep sense of sorrow and depression.  Our country is, I believe, in a period of profound criminality and loss.  It is an era marked by war, murder, and the unleashing of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan; increasing control and exploitation by corporations in the global economy resulting in bourgeoning poverty; denial of devastating assaults on the environment; and erosion of constitutional, civil, and human rights.  The escalation of destruction on every side gives me a sense of despair, and I wonder if redemption is possible.

We drove through the gate into the school yard on that cold New Year’s Day of 1944. All our possessions were loaded into a pickup truck and our 1934 Chevrolet sedan. On our left was a small white building with windows across the side and wooden steps leading to a doorway. On the right was a tiny white frame house with a pile of coal near the door. Farther ahead were two out houses and a fenced corral. Two small trees graced the property. The school yard was surrounded by open fields, this time of year brown with skiffs of white from the most recent snow. Open space greeted our eyes in all directions leading to the majestic Sawtooth mountains in the distance. Our forty mile trip had brought us to Roseworth.

It was a day in May, 1960 and we were now living in Pullman, Washington. I was in my first year as a faculty member of WSU and approaching my twenty-seventh birthday. As a staff counselor my office was in a remodeled barn, which explains why the offices were on the third floor and the restrooms inconveniently located on the second floor. It was a normal morning of counseling and I had quickly walked downstairs to “prepare for my next appointment,” our euphemism for saying, “I am going to the restroom.”

God is an integral part of the center of creativity and it is here that I wish to focus. I wrote the story of God’s role in the motorcycle accident twenty years ago to illustrate God’s intimate and persuasive presence. I have deepened and enlarged my vision of God since then, first in a book, Eight Paths to Forgiveness, and more recently in a sermon I offered at Trinity United Methodist Church in East Wenatchee. This enriched vision follows.

I will now relate what I learned as I read that book years ago in preaching class, a book which still resides on my bookshelf bearing within it all the underlining in red ink. I cherish it because it was my source of hope which kept the original light bulb burning. There would be many more books read and presentations heard to bring me to the present.

I did find a job in southern California. I was to be an assistant minister at the West Covina Methodist Church, located some twenty miles from the school of theology. I would devote thirty hours a week calling on families and cultivating new members. I would join an impressive staff: senior minister, Rev. Miles Acker, minister of Christian education, Rev. Max Graham and Paul Biering, another beginning seminarian from the Northwest. The salary was slightly over half of what I was earning as a faculty member, but it included a pleasant parsonage several blocks from the church on Cherrywood Street. I was content. I was where I wanted to be.

I was the only graduate of Buhl High School to enter Idaho State College, indeed, one of a handful of young men who even went to college. So I enter alone and scared! There I was a sixteen year old walking from Ferris Hall, the freshman dorm, to classrooms around the campus wearing one of my home-made polka dot short sleeved shirts–green, yellow, or blue– tucked into my white cord trousers with rolled up cuffs. The Kid had arrived!

I was born during the Great Depression in the community of Twin Falls in Southern Idaho, surrounded by Harrys, my father, older brother, and uncle. Some would add my younger brother also, who was named Harold. Earlier I had been accustomed to saying that I was the middle of three boys until I remembered that there had been an earlier stillborn infant whose gravesite bears the simple name, Baby Brizee.

This is a story of a theology and a life and how they came together. The theology is process relational theology. It is a personal story told as clearly as I can remember.

Christmas is the season during which the whole church celebrates the theme that is most central to process theology: God’s incarnation. That God is present in us and in the world, working for our healing and growth, our direction and our comfort, our reconciliation and our redemption, is our message. The church historically has been somewhat ambivalent about how fully to affirm God’s presence in the world, sometimes limiting it to Jesus or to the church. It is to Jesus and the church, and the understanding of God that these gave us, that we owe our awareness of God’s immanence. Also in Jesus we see a distinctive, perhaps even unique, working of that presence. But the God we know through Jesus is always with us and in us whether we recognize that presence or not. We discern it and celebrate it in all people, indeed, in all living things. The awareness of God’s immanence, aided by the church’s teaching of incarnation, enables us to respond to God’s call more fully. Our faith enables God’s enlivening presence to work more strongly within us. Our understanding of incarnation strengthens our respect for all creatures, and especially for all people. The story of Jesus’ birth in a stable checks any tendency to think that God’s presence in the world supports the structures of authority and prestige than humans construct. God is present in the CEOs of great corporations. But we are called to attend in particular to God’s presence in beggars and prostitutes and lepers. ~ John B. Cobb, Jr

One of the things that has always struck me about the Christmas story is the way it is a mass of contrasts: there is squalor, and there is splendor. There is the stinkiness of the stable, and the aurora of angels. There is the violence of the Roman imperial overlords, and the peace proclaimed to God’s people on earth. There is the exclusion of the “socially unacceptable” shepherds, and the utter and ultimate inclusivity of God’s justice. There is the way Mary and Joseph are pushed off to the sidelines of things in the stable, and the way the birth of Jesus makes that stable the very center of the world. The Christmas story Luke tells us is a mass of contrasts. And I think that is why the story has such power for us; that’s why we keep coming back to it year after year after year: because our stories are masses of contrasts, too; and Luke’s story tells us that it is precisely into those contrasts that God’s embodied love always comes. God’s love isn’t just for the pious and the perfect, God’s grace doesn’t come only in moments of quiet contemplation, when everything else is all wrapped up and all settled down and all put to bed—but God’s love breaks in on us precisely when everything else is going on, precisely when everything else is chaos and commotion, precisely in those days when it is the last time and place we would expect God’s love to be: in the emergency room, in the homeless shelter; where people’s hearts are breaking, where people are struggling for justice; in the choice between war and peace, in the decision between generosity and greed; in the moment of love when everything seems loveless, in the flash of hope when everything seems hopeless, in the sudden joy that breaks through even the deepest sorrow. It is precisely into these contrasts that God’s love comes, it is precisely these contrasts God’s love holds together, just as it did in a stable in Bethlehem; and suddenly the world is hushed, and the chaos pauses for a moment, and the angel appears, and the heavenly chorus sings, and the Savior is there, and new life begins. That is the story of God’s Incarnation; those are the days in which God’s love is embodied for us. ~ Paul S. Nancarrow

The best thing I ever did was to take the newest baby in the congregation on Christmas Eve [could be any Sunday near Christmas], when no one is interested in the sermon, frankly, but the STORY says something to us . . . in some deep way. So you say, "if our story says to us that God comes to us in the form of a baby, then what does this baby say about God . . . and our relationship with God?" And they get it. You get answers like: tender . . . need to take care of each other . . . not almighty but compelling, etc. Once I did this, I did it every year.  It really makes a lovely and deeply moving—and brief!—reflection. ~ Mary Ellen Kilsby