-Morning-Lent-Community- a exercise in unmarked parentheticals

After the party on Monday, I got to sleep around 11:30, assisted by ye ol' stocking cap, with added caffeine molecule hoodie action, as ya might expect. Sam left the party at 8:17, which may have seemed early to you when you read about it in the Monday liveblogging, but this year, he's giving up sleep for Lent.

That is, he wakes up at seven every morning to pray, no matter how late he was up the night before. He also doesn't believe in naps, which makes the whole day more challenging. I'm a firm believer in naps. Naps and I are good buddies. We hang out whenever possible. Although I really enjoyed the potential hour of disconnected solitude the abandoned part of the office building afforded me, back before the far-flung subsidiary of our company moved in there last month, the lack of ability to go over, lie down under a cubicle desk, and zonk out for twenty minutes is my real sorrow. Mmm, naps.

Teaching at Turner, I had to be to work every morning by seven. Sometimes I'd nap from 7:35-7:55 under my desk with all the lights but the emergency row off and my neck cradled by a satin pillow the museJill made for me back in high school. This is back in the the days of the clear blue Nokia cell phone with the Nicholas-esque ten ninjas sticker on the back that I got when it was included with the ten ninjas hoodie I bought him. That phone had the best alarm ever. It started with a real quiet dong . . . . . . . . . . . . dong . . . . . . . . . . dong dong dong dong . . . . . . . . . . . . (a little louder then) dong, and so on. And right before it went off, it buzzed, so you could hit it before it even made noise if you were quick. It's nothing like the absurd and cacophonous and obnoxious rings that come with the Samsungs Jill and I both have now.

Most mornings these days, I'm up by seven. Of course, I got off work at 2:30 back at Turner. It's 6:00 when I'm off now, and I live further from work. But I only have to get up early during the week. Saturdays where I don't work or have second Saturdays, I stretch out sleeping as long as I can. Mmm, blankets. Sundays, I don't really have to get up until 10:30 to make it in time to hang out with the youths at eleven. The thirty-second walk to church helps there. lemme tell ya. I've even woken up after eleven and made it up to the third floor by the time everything got going. But Sam's got that seven hanging over him every day. No thanks.

Yesterday morning was an even earlier experience, as Sam had decided to participate in the lectio divina at Church at 6:30. Lectio divina is an hour-long prayer exercise centered around experiencing a chunk of scripture in various ways. And since Sam only lives eight blocks away, he couldn't in good conscience drive, so he walked. In the freaking cold. And because Jill and I believe in supporting the people we live our lives with, we were there with him at 6:30. Cold and early together in the dark.

I have always liked being awake when it's dark. Though, I think the reason I'm not a morning person is the same reason I get fed up with rain that quits after an hour or two, when the sun comes out and makes the super-happy-fun rainbows. Sun showers are one thing, but when it rains for real, I want it to rain. For days and days even. It feels more real for it to keep going like that. Short rain keeps you from forgetting the sun. Hard to get an aching appreciation for something that's only gone for a minute. It's pretty much the same for me with snow. Snow needs to fall long and deep and stay on the ground for a week, getting piled on by another layer after layer. That's what I think.

I want my life invaded by the weather. I want to feel it in my bones, fight to get out of my house, to feel hemmed in and then conquer it, or cow and stay in, enjoying seeing it through the windows. If it's gonna rain, let it torrent. Snow, let it drift. Hot, let it burn. Dark, let it stay dark. The worst part of an early morning is the dawn. The sun comes up and ruins the whole earliness of it all.

My sophomore year of high school, before I got embroiled in the world of high school drama (theatre and relationships, if ya believe it) I took an AM hour. Which was a voluntary 7:15 class. I'm not well self-motivated, and combine that with the really awful international school I'd gone to for a few months in Belarus, I'd fallen behind a whole year in the maths. I wanted to catch up, so I added in a Algebra II/Trig Class to my not at all burgeoning Geometry-centric math schedule. Geometry was a breeze, which impressed Charlie Pope enough to let me take two math classes at the same time.

This is also about the time that telling my teacher that I'd read War and Peace over the summer got me bumped up from no-one-cares English to Honors English with Teena Winter herself, author of Demystifying the Magic: Strategies for Creatively Teaching the Writing of the Narrative, the Essay, and the Poem, a photocopied copy of which I have somewhere in a stack of teaching paraphernalia in a clear plastic box down in the basement. Even thought I now can buy it for five bucks online. The English class switch also changed my gym hour, which became relevant the next semester when I couldn't run due to tendinitis and was able fit in early a required Geography class from Jim Rostello, the oddest little man who has ever taught a social studies class. What the crap, Tina Turner obsession.

So, me, being my just-back-from-Belarus-ride-my-bike-all-the-way-across-town-to-visit-a-girl-who-could-care-less-about-me-but-on-whom-I-had-a-crush-in-the-middle-of-the-summer-heat self, I'd get to school at 6. So, up at 5:30. I love a vacant building that's usually brimmed with people. It's got an expectant atmosphere kinned to a library. Only instead of the weight of all the potentially known knowledge lurking, swirling around and pressing down on you, it's the emptiness of no people.

So, yeah, I'm no stranger to early mornings. But that doesn't mean we get along. I don't think they get along with Sam these days either. But for a guy who works in theatre, I've got to say, it's pretty impressive to make it up by nine, let alone seven. I mean, there are nights I remember where Sam got home at six in the morning from serious all-night theatre business. All in all, a valiant effort, and something I hope is beneficial to his spirit.

As I mentioned before, I, too am observing Lent again this year. Last year, in an attempt to up my own personal conviviality, I decided to give up eating by myself. I only ate if I was able to eat with someone else. A couple of times I ate in friends' presences, when they weren't eating, but for the most part it was all about sharing meals. While this was fun and good for my waistline, I don't know that I could consider it to be a drastic change from how I live anyway. Yes, occasionally I have a banana in the morning all alone (wail and sniff), but I mostly skip breakfast. Yes, I know this is not good for my metabolism. But when you're watching your weight, there is a serious dearth of satisfying breakfast choices. And yes, I have soup at my desk at lunch, or occasionally make a fresco-style Taco Bell run on those very off days in which I have not pooled in a car out here to Olathe. But for the most part, my meals are communal. So having tried it, I can say that giving up alone-eating isn't really much of a good way to ritually and somberly prepare myself for Easter.

I've been thinking for a few weeks of what to do for Lent. I've never been big on giving up a thing for Lent that you ought to give up anyway. Like, back in high school, people I knew used to give up chocolate or pop or whatever, and I would say in a snarky tone that I was giving up drinking and smoking and cocaine and murder. You know, things I didn't do anyway. Part of it was that I saw Lent as a meaningless Catholic ritual, ala only eating fish on Fridays (a practice whose genesis come from a glut in the Italian fish industry), and part of it was that I saw a lot of Catholics that I knew who went to mass 'a week and didn't have a thing in their lives to show for it. All ritual, and no substance. I'm not trying to disparage Catholicism, a lot of people from all kinds of demoninations and e'en other faiths do these same kinds of rituals that have no meaning for them, but that's how I saw it at the time.

This is part of why I quit caffeine a week and a half before Ash Wednesday; I didn't want quitting something I wanted to quit anyway to be part of Lent. Last year, Tim gave a sermon agreeing with me about how Lent shouldn't be something you give up that you should anyway. That it should be a time or reflection and preparation. This year, Jacob's Well is doing a whole series on various practices and disciplines of the faith. And without any good ideas at the time, I decided to get all creative, and try to take on each of the practices the week following the message on that particular one. Now, I had no idea what they were going to be, and this week when Shayne came out and spoke on communion, I had no idea how to incorporate that into a week. I mean, we take communion already on Sunday, and on Thursday nights for the prayer thing, and on Saturday nights sometimes, so, where the heck was I going to fit it in in addition to those other times?

When we do communion at Jacob's well, it's an individual thing, pretty much. We're all doing it at the same time, of course. Well, one after another. But you go up when the line gets down to your row, and you take the bread from the person, and dip it into the grape juice that stands in for wine, and they tell you that it's the body of Christ broken for you, and the blood shed on your behalf, and then you eat it. A process called intinction, for those who care. And then you go back and sit down. Married couples sometimes take it together. On the whole, though, like in most churches, I think, communion has become this private matter where you get your face all holy-lookin' for a second and then eat and drink some morsels. Kind of uncommunal if you ask me. Sometimes we've been sneaky, and we grab all the people sitting in our row, and we all go up and take it together. Communally, you know. And on 'Conversations' nights when we pray, we get a big loaf of really good rosemary bread from Farm to Market bakery, and some wine which we pour in small amounts out into glasses, and then someone breaks the bread and passes it around, and reminds us to remember, and we munch on that for a while. You can get seconds.

Shayne focused in on the communal aspect of communion in his message, and then had us go up in groups of four, and really look at these other symbolic members of the body of Christ with whom we were symbolically taking in the body of Christ. I ended up with a couple people that I didn't really know, which was a cool experience.

But now I was stuck as to what to do for the week, seeing as how it's a very other-people sort of practice. Not like fasting or giving or prayer, which are all things I can easily and creatively come up with ways of practicing for a week on my own.

After church on Sunday, we went over to Amanda and Katie's for spaghetti, for the third night of four in a row of people over at there. You could tell it was wearing on Amanda by Monday; she does not get energy from being with people, and she was beat. We usually eat food together after church, and the Jill was getting her own introvert on, so we had to go somewhere besides our house, which, like I said, is a thirty-second walk from the church and so convenient. Brett and Jake brought the sauce and some noodles and ground beef, and so Ben and Mike and I collected some money and went to Dillons, which I hear is closing, sadly.

I grew up on the Dillons chain of grocery stores. I remember biking back and forth on my one gear red bike to the Dillons on Sante Fe to rent a movie one hot day when my dad was really sick. It took three or four trips before I got the signature and the money and everything sorted out and got back home with Back to the Future. Turns out I got a VHS instead of a Beta, so my dad actually got in the car and drove me back over there for the exchange. Another time, my History of Technology class walked over to Dillons and cataloged all the various magazines and their subsequent sub cultures. When Jill and I lived on Harrison, we even shopped there. We lived for two years next to that amazing Price Chopper on Roe, and I don't have a Chopper Shopper card any more. But I do still have the Dillons Plus Card I got back in high school. So, yeah, affinity.

Ben and Mike and I got some pies and some linguine and some low-cal non-carbonated soft drinks and some garlic bread and some cheese bread. And then Ben, because he has a weakness for baked goods got a third pie. Once we'd gotten back and were eating, I asked everyone what I should do this week to observe communion as my practice. Sam said, that I could only eat with other people again. But I didn't want to just run through same ol' same ol'. Steve said that I should take communion with people that I normally didn't take communion with. I was like, "What, like homeless people?" And he said, no, I wouldn't likely take communion with homeless people, it should be people that I really wouldn't ever take communion with. I said, "Oh, like Mike Bickley." The whole room laughed. Half because they thought I said Mike Bickle, who is the paster of IHOP, a really charismatic/fundamentalist church out in south KC. The other half laughed because they all used to go to the church with me that Mike Bickley pastors in south Olathe, and all of them now go to Jacob's Well instead for a variety of reasons.

Then Sam said he had a hard idea, that I should go have communion with Danon and Cara, who are people that Jill and I and Amanda and my parents and Nick and Martha and Lynn and Sam all performed with a couple of summers ago. They kicked Jill and me out of their theatre group a year ago December. It was a big to-do, and there were a lot of hurt feelings on all kinds of sides. And although we've patched it up a lot, we really haven't become friends again. We were accused of being divisive in the group, and we didn't think we were. So as hard as it might be, it seems to me to be a great group of people to get together with and take communion, sharing our common identify as followers of Jesus.

My goal, then, this week (and it may stretch further into Lent, depending) is to take communion with other Christians that I normally wouldn't. So far, I've taken communion with my mom, and my group of jr. high guys group that meets on Tuesday. So, not much so far. Pretty easy, really. On my list I've got Mike Bickley, Danon and Cara, my boss, and Mike Huckabee. I think I'll be able to get the first few. I'm carrying around a backpack with a bottle of wine, a bottle of grape juice, some pita bread, and some cups. So, I am action ready.

One of the other things going on this Lenten season at church, although not directly related to Lent, is a series of seminars and discussion groups they're calling Jacob's Well Institute. There is one about practicing Lent, and one discussing the physical aspects of spirituality led by this cool philosophy professor at a chiropractic college who is an elder at our church, and one that Steve's leading that is a read-through of Mark, and a couple that are just weekly chances to get out in the community and meet peoples' needs. I'm going to a book discussion on Tim Keel's Book Intuitive Leadership that Shayne is leading on Sunday afternoons.

This last week, we got into a discussion about community living that stemmed from Tim's story about how Jacob's Well is kind of based on this experience he had in a tight-knit community of people he went to college with. They ate and played and prayed together. And it had a huge impression on him. He didn't see that kind of shared life once he got out into other churches and locations, so he wanted to create it in the church he started.

One guy said that this kind of thing in college was very common, that his daughter just interned at a church and the group got really close. But after it was over, they just scattered and didn't do much together. That it was all very artificial, that communities like that are artificial, and that people stop living like that once they get out into the 'real world.' Another guy who comes with his grandfather, which (and who) I think is very cool, and he said that the only reason he lives with other guys and they share things is that they're all poor, and that he thinks this is the only reason that people end up in community-living situations.

I'm trying to learn to be a more organic and less strident in large group discussions, so I didn't, like, stand up and shout at these guys or anything, but I disagreed with both of them. Especially the guy who said that community was artificial. Another guy made the very good point that this idea that living in a close-knit community is artificial is only a post-industrial revolution idea, and that most of the rest of the world, and the rest of times for that matter, thinks differently.

I said that our culture strongly discourages communal living. Our culture thinks that people who aren't trying to be independent, to get a house for themselves, and a nice car, and a great job, and live without depending on anyone are weird. I told the story about how much resistance we got to trying to get a house to live in with a few people. How the financial industry doesn't have a niche for people who want to get a large house or an apartment building, but aren't trying to make it an investment. How people that we knew flat out rejected the idea of living together in a community with married people and single people.

I got kind of sad, because I like to believe that Jacob's Well is this progressive kind of place, forefront of the new kinds of Christianity, where people are trying to live out lives that are different, that break the status quo. Lives that only make sense if there is a God. That are less and less concerned with the trappings of our culture, and more concerned with believing the things that Jesus and Paul say about love. And here was a whole room of people that are dedicated enough to the place that they signed up for a discussion group about the book the lead pastor wrote, and most of them were locked into this mindset that community that makes you rely on other people is an artificial.

The grandpa guy said that he's been through a lot in his life, and he doesn't trust very many people anymore. Except his family, who had recently come together to help him through a tough time. And he gave his grandson a very grandfatherly sort of look. I wanted to be like, "YES. EXACTLY." Only I meant more the metaphor where Jesus says that the other people who follow him are family. That sometimes you have to give up your biofam to follow him. But the brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers you find can end up being even sweeter than the people who share your genes. But I didn't want to rain the guy's parade or anything, and twist his words to mean something he didn't mean exactly. Like I said, I'm getting better at group discussions.

Later, right before we started singing down in the service, I asked the grandson if he really thought that community can only come through economic hardship. And he said that all money does is alienate you, and turn you inward. Making you want to improve your station rather that help other people and be helped in return. Then we sang a song about being fellow travelers on the road.

I hope what he said about money isn't true. But I think that it can be for a lot of people. That the more money they have, the harder it is to give yourself up for other people. And that only by really being poor can you actually depend on others. Maybe that's what Jesus meant by the whole camel and needle bit. It's hard to enter into and live with a group of people if you're entirely self-reliant because you're so well off. I know it's hard for Jill and I to ask for help with things when we're not doing well financially.

I'm an extrovert, for sure. I get my energy from being with other people. But I think that there's something very special about being able to trust and rely on other people. To follow a road with others. To have a family, even if it's not biological. I don't think it's artificial at all. I think it's necessary to healthy living. I think it's paramount to mental health.

I went on a missions trip one summer to Belarus with a group of 11 other people. We taught Belarussian kids conversational English, and helped other, shorter-term groups do the same thing. We ate and slept and prayed and laughed and cried together. I came out of that with the idea that if you can sustain that sort of life for three months, you might be able to do it for longer. That's where the whole communal living idea genesised for me. Shane Claiborne's book Irresistible Revolution showed me that someone else had tried it and it was working. And Tim Keel's message that God honors choices you make spurred us on to action.

And I find myself now in the midst of the kind of community that depends on each other, even if they don't all live together. That when one of them decides to get up early in the morning, some of the others get up with him. And when someone goes on a trip, some people hop in a van and take him to the airport. And when someone's out of money, and need a deposit on an apartment, the others pitch in. When someone needs moved, they get moved quick. When someone's out of ideas for what to do for Lent, he can ask for advice and get something challenging. When a surprise party needs thrown, it gets thrown. When someone's out of money, and everyone goes out to eat, they get paid for. When one person makes a lot more money than a roommate does, they pay more for rent. I think community is possible. It's not just an artificial construct.

I'll take and eat and drink to that. Just lemme know. I've got a backpack.