Emily Owsley

December 7, 2014

Text: Mark 1:1-8

Hello, thank you for having me here today.  I feel blessed to be able to share with you.  I’d like to start by re-reading the Mark passage.

‘Watch closely: I’m sending my preacher ahead of you;
He’ll make the road smooth for you.
Thunder in the desert!
Prepare for God’s arrival!
Make the road smooth and straight!’

John the Baptizer appeared in the wild, preaching a baptism of life-change that leads to forgiveness of sins.  People thronged to him from Judea and Jerusalem and, as they confessed their sins, were baptized by him in the Jordan River into a changed life.  John wore a camel-hair habit, tied at the waist with a leather belt.  He ate locusts and wild field honey.

As he preached he said, “The real action comes next: The star in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will change your life.  I’m baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life.  His baptism – a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit – will change you from the inside out.”  – Mark 1:1-8 (The Message)

I’ve always been curious about John the Baptist.  He sounds so alternative and odd.  Not afraid to wear strange clothing, eat locusts and raw honey.  How cool that this is the person who introduces Jesus to so many.  And he calls himself a mere stagehand in the drama.  I wonder, isn’t this also our part in the play, a stagehand?

As some of you know I’m participating in the Discipleship Year program, which is a volunteer service year here in DC.  Participants work at local not-for-profit organizations and ministries focusing on social justice work.  Another part of the program is taking classes at The Servant Leadership School.  I got to take the Bible Made Easy and Dangerous class there this fall taught by Fred Taylor.  We focused on the gospel of Mark and how it presents the story of Jesus as the biography of a movement, or the beginning of a movement, with Jesus as the climax, but tying it with the story before him and continuing after his time on earth.  One exercise we did was to think about our lives as a river, joining the greater movement, but also what our lives are made up of, what people, events, and significant changes contribute to forming the person that we each are.  This was particularly fun for me, because it was an art project!  What I learned was that I am very much formed by the people who have been in my life.  And now, this year, I have the joy of expanding the ground waters and streams that nourish and teach my spirit.  I think that actually it takes a village (or city in my case) to raise a twenty-something, and I’m so grateful to have willing people around me to continue this process.

My story of the past few years in many ways begins at The Potter’s House.  I had heard about the Church of the Saviour from an old family friend and was intrigued.  So when I moved to the city, I looked it up and visited 8th Day.  I walked into the Potter’s House on Sunday and immediately felt welcomed.  Carol Bullard-Bates asked me what I did and I told her that I worked for an architecture and interior design firm doing design work.  I immediately was introduced to people as someone who could help with possible renovations for the space!  I guess this is what you’d call ‘being in the right place at the right time’, or ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’….  But for me this kind of work was a dream.  It doesn’t get much cooler than this project- design with a community for a space that is practicing radical hospitality, working for social justice through the arts, and serving great coffee and food!  Learning about the community through this lens was quite interesting, and it only revealed further to me that I did not want to be a part of the corporate, profit-driven, fast-paced, self-conscious world that I found myself in after college, or I at least wanted a break from it.  By seeing so many others participating in this alternate form of work and community I began to re-imagine what part I might play.  So thank you for the opportunity to see this.

I’ve been so blessed to be a part of one of the l’Arche houses here in Adams Morgan as my placement in the Discipleship Year program.  l’Arche is an organization that builds inclusive communities for those with and without intellectual disabilities.  Each of the core people (who are the people with disabilities) meets me with the necessary openness and vulnerability that they must so that I can walk with them in their morning, afternoon, and evening routines.  This may mean supporting to brush teeth, assisting in the bathroom and shower, making breakfast, driving to their day program, singing a song together, doing an art project, or making dinner together.  It is daily life.  And it is the pieces that make up each of our lives.  And we do it pretty much the same way each day.  It is about being present to each other in each of these things.  Otherwise it is just completing tasks.  But really it’s about how we spend our time, and share it. 

The trust that each core person and assistant must place in each other is one of the integral pieces to our life together.  Without this trust it wouldn’t work.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m worthy of the trust?  I think each of us does, and that place is where we meet our fears and weaknesses.  I’ve had to come up closer to see my shadow-side since being at l’Arche.  This is scary, because I think I’ve sort of ignored it for a while.  Because of the intense trust, openness, and vulnerability that being at l’Arche pulls forth, I can’t ignore seeing my shadow.  Joyce Rupp writes about recognizing this darkness in The Cup of Our Life:

“Whatever stands in the light casts a shadow."  We’ve probably all heard various versions of the story about a person who wants to escape his or her shadow and cannot outrun it.  There is obviously a parallel with our inner life.  We, too, discover parts of our personalities that we do not want and that we hope we can outrun or escape in some way.  Well-known Swiss psychiatrist, C.G.  Jung, described the “shadow” as anything in our inner world that we do not know or that we know but refuse to accept.  It is the part of our psyche, or self, that is in the dark.  The shadow can be a positive quality.  It might be self-esteem in a woman who has never believed that she is of worth.  It might be the gift of honesty in a man who has always felt compelled to practice deceptiveness.  It might be compassion in one who tends to be self-centered.

The shadow can also be negative characteristics that we refuse to believe are a part of us, such as stubbornness, greed, jealousy, lust, hatred, or self-pity. 

The negative characteristics of our shadow are not sinful any more than our flaws are sinful in themselves.  These things only become sinful if we deliberately make them a source of harm for ourselves or others.  Our flaws may simply be that part of us which consistently rises up unexpectedly in our lives and seems uncontrollable.  It gets in our way, causes discomfort, and reminds us that we are not perfect.  If we are to grow in wholeness, then we need to know and claim our Shadow as much as we can.

In Make Friends with Your Shadow, William Miller reminds us that Jesus was one of the greatest supporters of getting to know the shadow side of our personality.  He points out that Jesus’ wise and insightful teachings are “an understanding of wholeness” that includes both the known and unknown, or unwanted, parts of our personality.  Jesus was a promoter of truth.  He often pressed others to look deeply and to discover their true identity.

What wants to come out of your shadow to help you become more whole?  Are there any parts of your personality that you do not accept?  How can you befriend them in order to learn more about your life from them?”

Gentleness and patience will be called out of you pretty quickly at a l’Arche house.  I didn’t think that these qualities were necessarily areas I needed to focus on for this year, but they have been opened up to me in unexpected ways.  In the act of being gentle with the core members, I realized how ungentle I can be to myself.  How harshly I judge myself.  What I’m learning is that how I judge myself is also how I judge others, whether I’m aware of it or not.  And others can feel this too.  We cannot really give grace if we have not accepted it for ourselves.  Accepting the grace within ourselves also calls us to that place to grow. 

I’ve also been confronted with similar joys and pains with intentional community and relationships with my fellow volunteers (or disciples, as we jokingly call ourselves) in the Discipleship Year house.  We are still finding our rhythms and learning more about each other.  One question that seems to arise within all of us is how to care and love each other, making the life of the community a priority, while also respecting ourselves and being faithful to our individual responsibilities, relationships, and plans for the future.  How do I open myself to a more interdependent lifestyle but continue to grow individually?  I don’t have an answer for this.  But I know that it is question to continue working with.  I appreciate these words from Wendell Berry (from The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture) about this:

“There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy.  Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”

So, we’re still figuring it out.  I am so grateful for each of the fellow members of the community, their willingness to share life together, and wrestle with hard issues in the world today like climate change, racism, economic injustices, religion, spirituality, sexism, etc.

As this year seems bountiful with relationships I’m finding that each person is calling me more to be myself, to allow the life to flourish.  Eileen, one of my friends and core members at the l’Arche house, embodies this so well.  She is a very free person.  She has incredible rhythm and loves to dance and sing.  Earlier this week we got to go to the Christmas Revels play, which focuses on the story, musical, and dance traditions of a particular culture or country.  This year the story was about Ireland and their struggles with oppression and emigration.  There was much Irish dancing!  At one point in the show the dancers came out into the aisles inviting the audience to join them by dancing out to the lobby for the intermission.  Eileen had wanted to sit as close to the stage as possible so when the dancers came down inviting others to join, Eileen jumped right up and joined hands with the first dancer, leading the way.  I jumped up too, mostly because I felt it was my responsibility to stay close to Eileen, rather than to join in on the dancing.  But as I followed her and the other dancers I saw Eileen so happy, jubilant, and free.  And as is usually the case with l’Arche core members, everyone wanted to meet her, and shake her hand, and thank her for being there.  How sweet to get to experience this with her, and to get to be freed from my own self-consciousness by dancing.  Each person is a gift.  My prayer is that I learn how to receive them. 

If we are stagehands in a play as John the Baptist describes, then what play is it?  It can be so confusing to have centrality and focus in a constantly distracted (and distracting) world.  What I’ve concluded so far is that simply we are called to be present to those around us, whoever they are.  And if we have the joy of being with others who also recognize this then we just might join in the movement of the Divine. 

I will close with a passage from Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain:

When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal.  And when God’s infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place.  And that is the life called sanctifying grace.

The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness.  It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself.  But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it. 

So the natural goodness of man, his capacity for love which must always be in some sense selfish if it remains in the natural order, becomes transfigured and transformed when the Love of God shines in it.  What happens when a man loses himself completely in the Divine Life within him?  This perfection is only for those who are called saints – for those who are the saints who live in the light of God alone.  For the ones who are called the saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness.  For as far as the light of God is concerned, we are owls.  It blinds us and as soon as it strikes us we are in darkness.  People who look like saints to us are very often not so, and those who do not look like saints very often are…

Christ established His Church, among other reasons, in order that men might lead one another to Him and in the process sanctify themselves and one another.  For in this work it is Christ Who draws us to Himself through the action of our fellow men.”

So, here we are with the Light, ourselves, our shadows, each other, and the earth; my prayer is that we care for each of these, joining in the story that has been happening for a long time.  Thank you.