Gathering Stones

My daughter, Greta, has a rock-collecting container. It looks like a miniature tackle box but instead of lures and hooks it is filled with rocks. To my eye, Greta' rock container holds a hundred similar stones. To Greta's eye, it holds treasure - not in the bejewelled, golden kind, but the treasure of memories. Greta gathers stones and the visible reminder of the shape and the color of the stone brings back a moment in life.

A few years ago, my family on a vacation. We decided that between my internship year and my last year of seminary that we would see as much of the North America as humanly possible. So, in a six week journey, we put seven thousand miles on the car (and the pop-up camper). Traveling from Iowa across to the West Coast, we visited incredible sites like Custer State Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite, Redwoods. We trekked up the coast through Oregon and Washington and finished by traveling from the Canadian Rockies to Lake Superior. All in all, it was an experience that we can't ever replicate not just because of the length of time (or length of journey for that fact) but because life is never the same. The girls were six, four and three and deep into experiencing the world one rock at a time.

Instead of being awed by the magnificent canyons or massive trees, the girls were always on the lookout for things that they could climb whether park benches, trees or rock piles. As Christine and I 'oohed' and 'aahed' over the magnificence of the created world, Elsa, Josephine and Greta had their eyes glued to the horizon for the next rock pile. So, every few hours we would have to stop and stretch while the girls fulfilled their inner spirit of mountaineering.

As I watched the girls do this, though, what I began to notice was that after each moment of rock climbing, Greta was picking up a rock and putting it in her pocket. We watched the pockets of her jeanshorts bulge like the cheeks of a chipmunk carrying seeds. By the end of the day she probably weighed and extra five pounds.

"What are you carrying in your pockets, Greta?"
"Nothing." Three-year-old logic is quite different than adult logic. Well, maybe not.
"It looks like you've got something in your pockets."
It's funny; she actually had to look at her pockets to see if something was in them.
"I wanted to take rocks."
"Can I see them," I asked.

You could see the light in her eyes. She wanted to share those things that she had picked up along the way. Pulling out handful after handful of pebbles, stones, pieces of rock not much bigger than a sand particle. Her little hands were like shovels digging into the earth; some of the rocks tumbled to the ground but she kept her eyes on them making sure not to lose any of them.

To my untrained eye all of the rocks looked basically the same. Smoothed by erosion and time, these gray stones, some of them with a white stripe or a distinctive crevice, looked basically identical.

"Greta," I said poking my way through the mound, "Why are you carrying all of these rocks around. They look all look the same."

Greta moved in between myself and the pile assuming I was about ready sweep them from the table. Protecting them like a mother lioness she looked up at me and said, "Daddy, you're so silly. These are my memories from my walk today." Then, for an agonizing fifteen minutes, Greta recounted every climbing episode that she'd encountered. One rock that was next to the picnic table. Another one from the place where we saw a bear in the distance. She pointed to a smooth rock that she actually tripped over. All of them were a reminder of what she had just experienced. She had gathered up the rocks to remind her of where she had been.

I have written about this in the past, but the same thing happened with the Israelites crossing the Jordan River. God tells Joshua that the priests must gather rocks with them and pile them up on the shore as a visible reminder of where they had just been. The rocks symbolized the difficulties of the journey but also the hope of the future. They piled the rocks on shore and in the middle of the Jordan River. In the midst of where the water just was they piled another set of rocks to remind themselves that God had spared them from death.

What about the stone rolled from the tomb? What about gravestones? These rocks are reminders of memories along the journey but they are also promises of hope for a future. Plans to prosper and not to harm. The stone rolled from the tomb leads to an awareness of the gaping hole that death brings but its emptiness leads us to hope - hope which does not disappoint. Hope which leads to faith and new life. This stone we carry with us - it rolls with us (a rolling stone) like the stone that Paul says rolled with the Israelites through the desert to provide water at a moments notice. (1 Corinthians 10:3,4)

So I asked Greta what she was going to do with her stone memories. She smiled. "I'm going to keep the best ones and throw the rest in the river." With that she picked up her rocks, put them back in her pockets and made her way to the stream where one by one, with great relish, she plinked and plunked the rocks in different parts of the fast flowing stream. With each toss she recounted what she was doing when she found the rock, but at the same time, without even knowing it, she was making room for more 'stone memories' in her pockets.

That was a good object lesson for me. There are so many 'memory stones' that I hold onto that limit my ability to move on. I become weighed down by the oppressive memories of the journey that sometimes I forget to cast them into the river, to let them roll on their merry way so that I can fill my own life journey with the things that God has planned for me/us/we/the world.

What memory stones will you keep and which ones will you cast into the river? Where will you go to gather stones and where will you toss them.

Ecclesiastes 5:5a a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together.

Laughter and Tears

Don Pederson writes in his book Mental Laxatives for a Constipated Mind,
"Most of us do not take laughter seriously enough. Too often, laughter is regarded as child's play. To be an adult is to be hardworking, responsible and serious. We need to revive our natural sense of humor."

Humor is not laughter, but laughter is our response to humor (or nervous or embarrassing situations). Sometimes laughter is not even intended - it just slips out - when someone falls and gets hurt - or at funerals, some people - although they don't find the situation humorous, laugh because their brain doesn't know what else to do. Scientists assume that laughter is an inherited response from our farthest back ancestors; they laughed when danger passed. When the sabertooth tiger missed them, yup - they started to chortle - that is, until the pterodactyl picked them up and took them away to the nest for supper.

Laughter is also a bonding experience. When one laughs and shares in the joke, the others are invited into the company of mirth. Usually, scientists say, the boss is the one who shares the most humor because when the boss laughs, it's going to be a good day. I'll have to keep an eye on that one.

The study of laughter is called gelotology. The ironic part of gelotology is that scientists have found that they can't actually study laughter. When it is forced, it doesn't happen. When they hooked people up to instruments, laughter ceases.

Physiologically, the front part of the brain decides what is funny. When humor reaches the brain, the immediate response is a forcing of pressure from the lungs back up the throat. The ha-ha-ha (or in Santa's case - ho-ho-ho) is the epiglottis closing over the opening of the trachea. When we laugh really hard, this causes us to gasp, some of us begin to cry - not because we are sad, but our body tells us we are suffocating. Even though we are happy and laughing, we cry because it feels as if we are dying.

Tears are a symbol of death. "Jesus wept" - the shortest verse in the Bible and perhaps one of the most poignant. That Jesus wept is a sign that he could feel the ultimate suffocation that the fear of death has on us. When we mourn, it is often a response to the death of something. We cry because someone has died, a dream has died, a relationship has ended. Our tears symbolize and reflect the suffocation that life sometimes has on us. We can't help but crying.

Laughter and mourning are different locales in the same mountain range. Most often, the Bible expresses mourning with visuals of sackcloth and ashes, tearing of clothes, shouting and wailing to the God of the heavens. In Biblical times, often the family of the deceased would hire professional mourners, those who did a good job of crying. Those who cry have an excellent sense of self. Some of us feel like professional mourners sometimes: we mourn people, events, oceans filled with oil, cities and villages imploding because of earthquakes - it seems as if the world will never be free of reasons to mourn.

But God promises us that a day will come when mourning is God - a morning of non-mourning. Revelation 21: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more... And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes; Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

No more mourning, crying and pain, but as of right now, there is a time for it: and it is healthy. We need time to mourn, to cry, we need time to dance and laugh. That is life.

That IS life.

Weeping - Laughing

A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.

It's sounds as if Solomon is painting the picture of opposites. Interestingly enough, weeping is made synonymous with mourning, and laughing similar to dancing. Mourning and dancing are the actions and weeping and laughter are responses to the actions. So:

Mourning necessitates weeping and laughter follows dancing.

I can definitely find myself in the latter. Every time I dance, pretty much the assembly begins to laugh. The use of the body to copy the rhythms in music is at the very core of how the world works. Have you ever noticed someone who is walking while listening to music through headphones? By nature, the body - even those who are rhythmically challenged - will gravitate to the beat of music. And once in tune with the music, we become one with the song and its meaning. I believe this is why people clap to keep the beat during a song or even move their feet. It's rare, I know, in Lutheran circles in the United States, for people to consciously become part of the music, but in certain places in the world, if you don't dance, you aren't really worshiping.

I have some really good friends who are Tanzanian. As part of the New Life Band, they witness through music and message to tens of thousands of youth and adults every year. Every three years or so, the band travels across the Atlantic Ocean to be missionaries to the United States and to gather funds for their ministries in Tanzania. They told me the story of their first experience with Christian worship in the United States. These are the things that struck them as totally outside their realm of experience in Tanzania:

1. Worship is one hour long. If it goes any longer than that, people start to look at the watches; they start to fidget. If they haven't gotten their God-fix by the time communion is over, they start heading for the doors. American worship services have tried to squeeze the amount of praise for God into one hour (sometimes less) and then move on to the really important things of the day like soccer practice, mowing the lawn, watching football, whatever kind of entertainment or work that might captivate a sabbath afternoon. In the last one hundred years, western society has lost all understanding of Sabbath. We no longer have a day of rest, to thank God for the peace of a day apart from work. We have an hour - an hour that many would say is simply 'putting in their time.' The Tanzanians were amazed by the lack of rest and reflection on God's abundant goodness to humans.

2. People don't dance. All the songs during a Tanzanian worship regard dancing as essential as much as the piano or guitar. To really understand the song, one must be one with the rhythm and the melody. They move back and forth. It seems coordinated, but it is more that they are completely in tune with their bodies and their congregation. God gave us bodies to praise. The New Life Band found American worship services so sterile that worship seemed almost a necessary evil rather than an expression of praise.

3. There is so little interaction between those that have come. Most churches have aisles, but they might as be walls. Most churches have permanent indents in the pews or chairs from the current residents who have been sitting in the same space for the last thirty years. We are creatures of habit and what the band noticed was that apart from the sharing of the peace (which lasted thirty seconds) there was no interaction at all between congregation members. I think we, as Christians, have lost the sense that we are a living body: what one person does affects all the others. Sharing the peace in Tanzania may take twenty minutes; they actually share the peace - find out how family members are doing - taking an interest in the lives of the people around you.

All in all, they (and I think I am included) would love to see a different type of worship that frees us from the starched repetitions that we have always done. Whether traditional or contemporary worship, a dose of dancing (which leads to laughter) might be just what the worship doctor ordered. I'm not saying that I'm all that comfortable with dancing, but that's because I don't often allow myself to be part of the Spiritual music of a congregation.

Dancing leads to laughter, and laughter leads to health.

That's where I will continue next week, I think.