Shawna R. B. Atteberry

I will not be keeping my pastoral office hours this week due to the holidays. I am also changing my hours on Monday. I will still be at Cafe Mediterra, but I will be there 2:00–4:00 p.m. instead of in the morning. I hope this didn’t inconvenience anyone this morning.

Shawna

It’s not easy to write sermons with migraine-like sinus headaches, but I have done it. Hopefully, I won’t have an uber-headache while preaching it tomorrow. I’m posting it tonight because I have decided to take a Sabbath from the computer on Sundays.

Tables of Love

Scripture Readings: Psalm 100; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Philippians 4:4-9; John 6:25-35

When I think of tables, I think of eating with friends and family. Through the years these tables have taken different shapes and forms. Sometimes it’s just me and another person and at other times there could be 15-20 of us gathered around. Sometimes it’s quiet conversation and other times a cacophany of chatter, dishes, and someone yelling down the table to get someone else’s attention. I’m Irish-Italian; we tend to be a loud bunch. Of course that didn’t change when I headed off to seminary, and all of my friends were religion geeks like me. There was still a lot of talking over one another, around one another, and yelling at someone in order to get a word in edgewise. I felt right at home.

The table I normally think of is our family table growing up. Mom, Dad, my sister and me every night for supper. We didn’t have very many family rules set in stone, but eating supper together was one of them. When friends were over, they ate with us. Same thing if family visited: eating supper together never changed except when we slept over at a friend’s or had a school function. Some nights there was a lot of chatter, some nights we played Jeopardy more than we talked, and other nights we ate in relative silence because we were tired. The ebb and flow of activity may have changed but supper itself did not. We ate one meal as a family at the table everyday. Period.

One of the hardest things to get used to when I moved out and started living on my own was eating alone. It seemed odd, wrong. And not just because of family dinner. Before college I had always eaten breakfast with my sister, lunch with friends, and dinner with the family. In college I always ate with friends or a the family that adopted me at church. Eating by myself bothered me more than living by myself. In the movie Under the Tuscan Sunher neighbor invites Francis over for supper saying, “It’s not healthy to eat alone.” I absolutely agree with him.

In fact the Mediterranean people know how to do supper. I lived in Barcelona for a year as a Nazarene in Volunteer Service or NIVS for short. I loved their attitude about food. Food was something to be enjoyed, not scarfed down. I am a slow eater. I always have been and I will stubbornly remain so. I get teased because I refuse to scarf my food down in order to “do” something more important. What’s more important than nourishing yourself? And I don’t believe you can nourish yourself if you inhale your food. I fit right in in Spain and with the Mediterranean mindset: food is to be enjoyed and preferably enjoyed with family and bunch of friends. They take supper seriously. There it is a three hour affair with three or four courses and a lot of conversation. Talking, joking, sharing the day, getting caught up. It’s relaxed. Everyone is enjoying themselves. Everyone is enjoying the food. I fit right in. I found out the Italian genes I got from my full-blooded Italian great-grandmother ran true in my blood. They somehow skipped the rest of family.

How the Mediterraneans view supper is very much how people in both the Old and New Testaments viewed supper. Breakfast was some bread, probably left over from the night before. Lunch was at work and normally a piece of dried fish and what ever fruit or vegetables that were in season. But supper–supper was different. You were paid for your work at the end of the day. You went shopping then came home, and the whole family–and you have to remember in the Bible this would be three generations who lived close to each other–all of them would get together and eat supper. It was a relaxed, joyous time for the family. They had food, they had each other. They enjoyed their day’s labor at the end of the day. And they took their time. This meal was not to be rushed. It was to be savored and enjoyed. It was the only time the entire family ate together.

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Songbird writes: “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8, NRSV)

Friends, it’s nearly Thanksgiving in the U.S. and it’s the time of year when we are pressed to name things for which we are thankful. I want to offer a twist on the usual lists and use Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi as a model. Name five things that are true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent or worthy of praise. These could be people, organizations, acts, ideas, works of art, pieces of music–whatever comes to mind for you.

Michealangelo’s Pieta at St. Peter’s
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
A good meal with family and friends
A good massage
Chocolate

Bonus: Cuddling with my Hubby.

The picture is from our honeymoon in Rome.

Sally tagged me to do this meme last week, although I hope she doesn’t feel old when she sees how old I was in 1977.

1997: I was a volunteer missionary for the Church of the Nazarene in Barcelona. I loved it. I fell in love with the city and have never quite recovered. It was hard work, but I had a lot of fun and made some good friends. It opened my eyes to see that God could do whatever he wanted to do in my life.

1987: I was starting my senior year of high school and was looking forward to being “free.” I was so excited about turning 18 the next year and finally being all grown up. Of course I didn’t realize that being all grown up included things like having to pay your own bills. And yes, you have added correctly: next year is my 20 year reunion. Our class is gearing up for the reunion. I probably won’t be able to go since they will be meeting over Spring Break, which is Easter weekend. I plan on having to preach an Easter sermon in my new church plant that morning.

1977: I was in second grade. We lived in Prescott, Arizona (we didn’t move to Oklahoma until I was 13), and I attended Miller Valley grade school. I think this was the year I got chicken pox. I promptly shared the pox with my then 4 year old sister. But the good thing about that is she does not remember having them, and I barely remember having them. I have two aunts who didn’t get the chicken pox until they were in their twenties when their kids brought it home from school. I think it’s much better to have them young and not quite remember them than to have them all grown up.

I just heard from Beacon Hill, and they did not accept my book proposal, Spiritual Direction 101. Bonnie said they liked how I started in a conversational tone with personal experience, but then I would go into teacher/academic mode, and it wasn’t consistent. I need to be able to have a consistent voice throughout that engages the reader. I’m having this same problem with the Career Women of the Bible book proposal. Right now it has conversational/academic schizophrenia. I haven’t figured out how to have good scholarship in a conversational tone, and I really want to learn how. She offered to send me specifics of what the committee said, and I said yes! Hopefully, I’ll get some ideas on how to tone down the academia while retaining the scholarship in a conversational, reader friendly tone. I didn’t think it would be so hard! But I will keep trying. I think what I have to say is very important and needs to get out there, so I will continue to learn and write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite…. I may need to re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

I have been thinking a lot about nurturing recently. Part of it has to due with the clinical depression, but not all of it. Earlier this year I went through The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Every week it was stressed how important it was, not only to take care of ourselves, but to nurture ourselves–especially our inner artist. The child in us who loves to draw, color, paint, write and not be told what to do. It is also because of the command to love our neighbors as ourselves. We cannot love anyone else if we do not love ourselves. Sally’s Friday Five, Extravagant Unbusyness also brought this up. How do we take care ourselves? How do we treat ourselves?

Several of you wanted me to write poetry and post it this week. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t write any poetry (but it’s still a goal). But I did do two things on my list:: I took a long hot bath, and I started reading The Golden Compass. In fact, I got a good ways into The Golden Compass last night. The characters are great. I also like Pullman’s writing. He’s a wonderful storyteller. I think Wicked was the last novel I read, and that has to be at least three months ago. I need to take the time to read fiction. I love it. I get so caught up in the books I’m reading for my writing projects and launching the church, that I’m not reading something just to read it and have fun. I enjoy what I read for work, but it’s that: work. All reading cannot be for work. The same with writing poetry. Not all writing can be for work. Some of it has to be fun and just because. So yes, I intend to keep that one way of nurturing myself: writing a poem, just because.

My wonderings (and wanderings) about nurturing myself have clicked with the observance of the Sabbath. This idea that we need a day off to rest, to worship, and to recoup. A day where it’s okay to stop and take care of ourselves. I wonder if we kept a Sabbath, if taking care of ourselves and nurturing ourselves would be so hard. Because it would be ingrained in us to stop, to worship, to rest, to relax, and to have fun one day a week instead of being on a merry-go-round of always having to do something. And I’m not talking about a strict do nothing observance of days past where one did nothing except go to church and then sit for the rest of the day.

In her book, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, Marva Dawn says that not all activity has to cease. Just work: what we do to feel productive, make money, pretend to give meaning to our lives. The work we cease from doing is the work we do to live. The Sabbath is a day to trust God: to trust God to take care of our needs without us doing anything. The activities we can do on the Sabbath are those we enjoy doing and may be don’t do because we see them as frivolous: taking a walk through the park, playing in the park, gardening, sewing, crocheting, taking a nap and getting some well-deserved rest, or may be writing poems and reading a novel. It’s doing things that free us from the mentality that we are what we do and how much we produce.

It’s also a time to leave behind the world’s way of relating to each other in using people for what we can get or for what they can do for us. It’s a time to receive God’s unconditional love, knowing there is nothing we can do to earn it. It is a time of learning to give and receive that unconditional love from each other. It is a time of love and give as God loves and gives. It’s a day of feasting and celebration. It’s a day of worshiping God together and being the people of God without worrying about anything apart from communion with God and communion with one another.

The Sabbath makes it okay to stop. To stop and take care of ourselves. To stop and love and rejoice with other people. To stop and focus on God and his love. I think if we took the Sabbath seriously, we would not have such a hard time taking care of ourselves and nurturing ourselves. I think if we practiced the Sabbath we would not feel guilty of nurturing ourselves because God himself rested after creation on the Sabbath. Right after he created human beings in his image, he rested. We are made in God’s image, and we are made to rest on the Sabbath. Part of being made in the image of God is a day of rest, worship, nurture, and feasting and fun.

I’m beginning to think about this as I will begin to pastor and “work” on Sunday again. Marva published a book last year that I need to read: The Sense of the Call: A Sabbath Way of Life for Those Who Serve God, the Church, and the World. I need to get it because it is so hard to observe a Sabbath when you’re a pastor. I remember that. It’s doubly hard when you’re bivocational. I remember the burnout from that. I’m hoping I get a sense of how to keep the Sabbath while pastoring from Marva’s new book.

The picture is “The Risen Lord” by He Qi.

Sally writes: I am writing in my official capacity of grump!!! No seriously, with the shops and stores around us filling with Christmas gifts and decorations, the holiday season moving up on us quickly for many the time from Thanksgiving onwards will be spent in a headlong rush towards Christmas with hardly a time to breathe…. I am looking at the possibility of finding little gaps in the day or the week to spend in extravagant unbusyness revgal Michelle…(a wonderful phrase coined by fellow So given those little gaps, name 5 things you would do to;

1. to care for your body

Take a long hot bath with lavendar and chamomile oils. To be perfectly honest a good hot bath is a great way to care for body, spirit, mind, put a sparkle in your eye, and put a spring in your step. But I shall choose different answers for the rest of the questions.

2. to care for your spirit

I have been chanting the Psalms, and I have gotten the basic forms down. I would like to learn more advanced chanting. This means I need to get Chanting the Psalms: A Practical Guide with Instructional CD out and read the next couple of chapters and listen to the chants on the CD. If you want to learn how to chant the Psalms, I highly recommend this book and CD combo.

3. to care for your mind

Read a novel just ’cause. May be I should read The Golden Compass since the movie is coming out. The Hubby brought the books into the marriage. He really likes The Golden Compass, but he says the the rest of the trilogy isn’t as good as it could have been because of Pullman’s “issues” with the Catholic Church. I’ll guess I shall find out.

4. to bring a sparkle to your eye

Write a poem. I need to write more poetry. I love to write it, but it seems like I never “allow” myself the time. May be it’s time to give myself permission.

5. to place a spring in your step

Go for a walk along the lake.

Enjoy the time to indulge and dream…. and then for a bonus which one on the list are you determined to put into action?

Writing the poem. My goal this weekend is to sit down and write a poem.

As an added note: I agree with Sally. Can we please get past Thanksgiving before radio stations start playing Christmas music 24/7? One station here is already advertising all Christmas all the time. Puh-leaze.