IMPORTANT :: Five-Minute Friday returns
This year, once again, I hoped for a day or even a few hours of time that felt clear and focused to gather what I’ve learned in the past twelve months and what I desire for the next twelve. It never came. On Thursday (yesterday) I facilitated a two-hour virtual retreat for A Sacramental Life Community and still, the clarity didn’t really arrive.
What did happen, instead, was a sense of wellbeing. We continue to move collectively through the unknown days and months of this health crisis, trying to pace ourselves to the herky-jerky stop and start rhythms of a global pandemic. As much as I’d like a period to come at the end of the sentence of this frustrating, agonizing, bewildering era of human history with the turn of a calendar page, that’s not the reality. During our retreat, I was reminded of what one of my spiritual directees told me once “God is in the reality.”
Want to know where God is at work? Look to the reality of your life.
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GRIEF in Advent :: Five-Minute Friday
Oof. 2020 has been one for the books. I think one of the best gifts we can offer in response to this year is to keep telling our stories.
It's natural for humans to remember the details surrounding global-scale tragedies and to tell the stories over and over for the rest of their lives. It's the stuff of family histories as well as the plotlines for society's retelling of itself archived in books, documentaries, and movies.
Where were you when it happened?
Where were you when the president was shot, the bomb dropped, the towers fell?
So, friends, where were you when coronavirus hit? It's a bit tricky to piece together these details into a shareable story, right? Especially since we're like 9 months in and the tragedy is still unfolding. We're still in the part of the story where we're frantically trying to find out if our friends and family are safe and if they've heard the news yet.
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AHEAD :: Five-Minute Friday
Well, what do you know? 2020 could get weirder. I need to say that imagining the gazillions of ordinary people working behind the scenes to do the tedious work of counting ballots goes near the top of the list of "unexpected delights" about this year.
About mid-October this year I begin to feel the warm whisper of anticipation for Advent. It says "Good prayer time is ahead." in my ear. Every early summer I wait for Ordinary Time like the last day of school when I can throw off the structure of the liturgical calendar but by late autumn I'm so ready for the rhythms of prayer and worship Advent ushers in.
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VOTE :: Five-Minute Friday
There's a specific proper noun I've refused to use for the past four years. On Tuesday, I'll find out if I need to keep up my little private resistance for another four. That's the smallest scope possible to view Election Day in the United States, but the narrowness of my focus is helping me keep the whole thing in perspective.
I grew up in the Moral Majority, picketed health clinics as a high-schooler, watched my Dad get arrested for peaceful protest, and then visited him in jail on my eighteenth birthday. Recently, in a robust conversation about politics and theology with my son, I said "I'm not a one-issue voter, but if there were one issue I'd be willing to die for it'd be that one."
But the platform and the rhetoric and the hubris has become untenable. My scope for understanding what it means to be "pro" something has had to expand beyond all the false dichotomies I was taught in my political, social, and theological formation. I am politically homeless, voting one way so that I can give up my tiny resistance refusing to name those who don't deserve to be named.
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BREATHE :: Five-Minute Friday
Has the word ever held more meaning?
In mid-September Brian and I took a four-day retreat to study and pray - an intentional time set aside to breathe, if you will, between the end of summer and beginning of a new ministry season. We've learned the hard way that this transition between summer and fall is particularly tricky. This year, the need felt wonky. After six months of living this bizarre "together but apart-ness" with our community it felt a bit strange to have to add further isolation by getting away to another place.
The solitude of the little kitschy cottage on one of New York's glorious Finger Lakes felt simultaneously welcoming and oppressive. We walked around a lot, looking at the water, trying to settle into the study projects we'd each brought along. The waves were too choppy to spend prolonged time on the boat. The weather snapped from summer to fall within twelve hours of our arrival and we took to walking along the shore with giant fluffy blankets cocooning our heads.
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YOUR :: Five-Minute Friday
What can you call your own these days?
I know many of you have found your schedules and personal space trampled by the unexpected changes of this pandemic. Our house was a bit fuller than usual throughout the past 6 months as well, but we're in the season of life where, slowly but surely, the capacity of our home has shrunk to just Brian and me. It's a day I dreamed about for years but then grieved at the way it felt when each of our children moved out. I've learned what lots of folks tried to tell me is true. The doorway to an empty nest is constantly revolving.
I'm terrible at transitions. I like to hunker down in one rhythm and live there until I decide to make the shift. That's not how the world works, of course, and definitely not how the world works for parents of younger children. Your time is almost never your own. And while the spaciousness of what feels like my own has expanded, I'm still figuring out how to move gracefully between what I consider my own and what I give away.
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COULD :: Five-Minute Friday
The word evokes possibilities. The often-quoted and ever-hopeful statement "She thought she could, so she did" comes to mind.
It's normal to get bogged down with a "couldn't" mindset. Heck, right now, it feels almost virtuous to meditate on all that we couldn't and shouldn't do. But what if we flip that mindset on its head? What do these constraints make possible? We know what we couldn't do, but what does that mean we could?
My daughter was supposed to be married in a big wedding in the middle of Fairfield County's famous dogwood blossoms on April 25. We couldn't hold that wedding. What we could do is hold a private ceremony with her dad, the priest officiating, and nine people watching from the empty sanctuary. We could invite friends to secretly decorate the newlyweds' car while we tried to reenact a somewhat sad replica of a wedding celebration with a miniature cake and cheap champagne. We could stand outside and blast confetti guns like a little revolt against the death droplets flying through the air.
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LOUD :: Five-Minute Friday
For someone who spends her life inviting people into the goodness of silence, I've lived a loud life. I try to explain this to people when I feel funny about moving away from the crowd or holing up in my bedroom for a few hours of alone time. I wish I had a card to pass out every time I'm feeling judged.
The card would read:
Tamara Murphy
oldest daughter of six
mother of four children who were at one time all ages six and under
wife of an extraordinarily energetic man
pastor's daughter turned pastor's wife
occasional city dweller
Give me a pass on any more noise, please!
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Mercy :: Five-Minute Friday
We've been calling it "silly good", as in God, you are being silly good.
The rental home in our dream neighborhood we found on a last-ditch effort last fall, the location for our church to worship after too many years being in an ill-fitting building, the ridiculously cheap airline tickets we found for our kids to attend my daughter's makeshift pandemic-era wedding in October, the acquisitions editor contacting me out of the blue to ask for book proposals, key vocational invitations pointing me toward my truest callings, some beautiful ministry relationships blooming from the most unexpected places.
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RIGHT :: Five-Minute Friday
A few weeks ago I wrote a reflection on the Sunday lectionary readings for our Diocese. The New Testament lesson included the Apostle Paul's classic conundrum: I can't do what I want to do, but somehow manage to do what I don't want to do. (Romans 8:15)
Can I get a witness?
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That Time (last Sunday) I Left Christmas Caroling in Tears
Ah, December.
How's that song go? "If we make it through December / Everything's gonna be alright, I know".
Any month of the year ask me how I feel about this month and I'll tell you it's one of my favorites. Advent is definitely my favorite liturgical season (as a proper Christian, I should probably say it's Eastertide. Eastertide doesn't come with crackling fires and cozy blankets, though.)
And then the real December arrives. The one everyone is actually living and my heart shrinks a couple of sizes. The crux of the tension lives on the pages of our calendar. It's not that we have so much to do anymore. In this season of our lives, we've got just the right amount of things to do to prepare for a festive Christmas.
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