Conspire Volume 6 Number 2 Body & Soul

VOLUME SIX NUMBER TWO FALL 2014

BODY & SOUL

At first, I think that I might have something on my shirt or that I might be wearing my shirt backwards, or something silly like that because, yes, I am absent minded enough to have done that before but that is not what you are looking at When you stare I walk and stand before you as a soul, a spirit inhabiting a distractingly broken body a body that you have labeled disabled with a brain that is not quite functioning as it should be, one that is damaged and consistently mixing up the signals that tell these hands and feet where and how they should go some days I’m lucky I’m standing because this body is so distractingly broken and because some days I don’t successfully stand but fall In a vulnerable, awkward pile of broken skin and bones arguing with this broken brain to do something as simple as putting one foot in front of the other there are people, in this perfection obsessed and image consumed culture who squirm and think (or even say) fix it pray harder exercise more have another surgery

just have more faith and some days I listen to them and think this really should be fixed and other days I just pretend that this vulnerability is just not there that I can stand and walk just like the rest of you but that is a lie what is more of a dangerous lie though, I think, is the need to fix this because why bitterly argue with a God who knew me in the secret place and who wove this body together Why consume my energy with the ‘why me’ on the painful days when I trip over my own feet and the ‘why not me’ when reading the Biblical stories of healing But instead I choose to place these trembling feet on a foundation and an understanding of the character of a God who makes no mistakes Who loves deeply Whose greatest miracle is the restoration of hearts and though I hold on to hope to be healed in the land of the living because I know that he can and does choose to do that I find joy in knowing he has healed this heart and that he has set me, standing, on an assurance of his unfailing Love and that same Love inhabits my heart So let that Love be what is distracting and not this broken body Let that be what you see When you stare

volume six number two : fall 2014 Columns 14 Contemplative Activism Phileena Heuertz

Art 9, 51, & 52

Matthew Whitney

16 Jeremiah's Vision of Shalom Vince Bantu

Features 22 Crazy, Mixed-Up Redemption Lori Ventola

Matthew Whitney is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and practicing pedestrian. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington, and enjoys going for walks with his family. www.matthewwhitney.com.

10 & 45

Clint Reid

30 Birth: The Conspiracy of Body and Soul

Clint Reid, of the Tillman Project, is a designer, an illustrator, a coffee drinker, a bicycle rider, an occasional screen printer, an over-analyzer, a beard grower, a music lover, an enthusiastic dad and husband, a worrier and a lister-of-things. www.tillmanproject.com

33 Infertility: On Compassion, Boundaries, and Faith

15 You Are Also Pschye

Lydia Wylie-Kellerman

Sarah Asay

36 Theology on the Long Run Ragan Sutterfield

44 Forgiveness Set Him Free Mike Kelley

46 Community Canvas Josh Rockett

50 Bury the Dead Laurel Dykstra

53 The Lord’s Supper Valerie Anderson

55 The Body Industrial Complex Trudy Smith

60 All the Candy You Can Eat Anthony Easton

Poetry by Scott Cairns 8 Speculation along the Way 19 Draw Near 25 Erotikos Logos

Carolyn Pyfrom

Carolyn Pyfrom studied painting at the Florence Academy of Art, Troy University, and Obirin University, Tokyo, Japan. She divides her time painting between rural Alabama, where she grew up, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches one day a week at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. www.carolynpyfrom.com

20, 32, & 58

John Freeman

John trained as an artist and a teacher. He taught in a number of Australian educational institutions for over a decade before venturing into the commercial environment. As a Christian image maker, John attempts to re-tell The Story in a modern idiom and synthesized through his own life experiences.

26 Resurrection Kari Gale

Kari Gale is a watercolor artist from Portland, Oregon who loves illustration and telling stories with pictures. Her latest passion is sketching in her journal, documenting life as it unfolds, and learning to see the beauty in the everyday. www.karigale.com

41 Man

Taylor Poole

Taylor Pool is a photographer from Wichita, Kansas but currently living in NĂźrnberg, Germany. He uses medium format film to capture his subjects and their stories. www.piratepool.com

Departments

54 Rosie

63 Reviews Books on the embodied way of Jesus.

Samantha Ornellas is a fine artist that grew up in South Africa and now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She uses a self-taught realist painting technique, with surrealism influences, to capture the human story with emotion and clarity. www.samornellas.com.

67 Notes From Scattered Pilgrims

Sam Ornellas

News and photos from our conspiring communities.

Find more stories, a study guide for this issue, and our blog of word & image at conspiremag.com

Conspire magazine celebrates creativity, connection, and faith amongst a growing network of subversive friends.

Plot Goodness.

Conspire is a publication of co-conspiring communities that has been published in the past by The Simple Way. If you are interested in joining a conversation about continuing to publish Conspire, send an email to editors@conspiremagazine.com. front cover photo by Taylor Poole back cover: This Is My Body (Which Is For You)

by Brianna Kelly, an experimental musician and mixed-media artist living in intentional Christian community in Cincinnati.

All poetry in this issue is by Scott Cairns, Professor of English at University of Missouri.

His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Spirituality and Health, The Christian Century, among other publications and the author of numerous books. His memoir, Slow Pilgrim, will be published by Wipf & Stock in 2014. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.

Our deep appreciation to the many artists, writers, and coconspirators who offer their work for this issue as a gift.

Conspire would not exist without the many people listed below, most of whom work as volunteers.

Developers Shane Claiborne Darin Petersen Publisher The Simple Way Executive Editor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Managing Editor John Pattison Poetry Editor Michael Toy Art Director Beth Rhodes

Accounting Manager Erica Mouliner Video Guru Dan Brearly Editorial Team Becca Griffin Megan Jackson Richard Pendleton Shana Scudder Editorial Advisory Committee Chris Smith Study Guide Designer Jason Williams

CONSP!RE origin: from Old French conspirer, from Latin conspirare ‘agree, plot.’ From con- ‘together with’ + spirare ‘breathe.’

We are breathing together, plotting goodness.

Volume 6, Number 2—Fall 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Simple Way. All rights reserved.

P.O. Box 14668 Philadelphia, PA 19134, 215-423-3598 ext. 109

www.conspiremag.com

F

ive years ago we had this idea to do a magazine. After lots of brainstorms and flip-charts, we came up with the name Conspire. That name captured the edge of what we hoped for—“subversive friendships” plotting goodness together,—which is what we have been about. And it shares the same root as “inspire” (or “perspire”!)… so it is about breathing together (spirit means “breath”).

In some ways, Conspire was a way of going beyond newsletter updates—it has been about connecting the dots, harmonizing our voices, unifying a movement.

Folks told us magazines are on their way out, just do a blog. But we were convinced—and still are—that there is something special about holding a carefully-crafted, meticulouslyedited, beautifully-illustrated periodical artifact in your hand. And there is something about reading together that goes deeper than catching the latest buzz on the web. Five years later, we have seen the power of a magazine, even in the age of the blogosphere.

Even though we at The Simple Way have been the midwives of the magazine from its conception… we did not see it as only ours and we certainly have not felt the need to brand it as “a publication of The Simple Way”. Thankfully we saw folks join this conspiracy from around the world—from the US to Australia, folks living in prison, even on death row.

We are so proud of the twenty-one issues that we have created and the countless authors, photographers, illustrators, editors, and administrators that have conspired to create each of these masterpieces. Over twenty-one magazines are now in print and being passed around from hand to hand all over the world. One of the great gifts has been cross pollinating between our “Co-Conspirators”, the many different groups that contribute and distribute—from the onset we said it is a literary coop.

So now for the big news.

As you may have noticed, our most recent issue, which you now hold in your hands, is late. We’ve been in the midst of deliberations about the future of Conspire, and I am proud about the decision we have made, though it has taken much time and prayer.

Like a bird from its nest, we at The Simple Way are going to be releasing the magazine, and watch it fly. We believe the wings are strong enough, and we are excited about what is ahead.

No one has put more energy, imagination, and sweat into Conspire than our friends Darin and Meeghan Petersen. They will be carrying on the work of Conspire through Rewire Labs. Many of the familiar people you know and love like Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, John Pattison, and Beth Rhodes will continue to work for Conspire, and we hope that all of you will continue to contribute and support this work with even more passion and intention.

This will be the final issue of Conspire that The Simple Way are directly responsible for, but we are looking forward to all that is ahead—for the magazine and for the movement. We are as delighted as ever to continue to be one of the many Co-Conspirators, and we look forward to working with Rewire Labs and all of you as we breathe together and continue to plot goodness.

Shane Claiborne Co-Founder of The Simple Way and Co-publisher of Conspire Magazine

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photo by Melissa Santiago

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Speculation along the Way "The roaring alongside he takes for granted."

—from “Sandpiper” by Elizabeth Bishop

When of a given evening, say, an evening laced with storm clouds skirting distance parsed by slanting light, or when the thickening air of an August afternoon by the late approach of just such a storm turns suddenly thin and cool, and the familiar roaring for the moment made especially unmistakable by distant thunder may seem oddly to be answered from within—that’s how it feels, anyway—and when, of a moment, that roaring couples as well with sudden calm—interior, exterior, it hardly matters—in that fortunate incursion whereby the roar itself is suddenly interred, you might startle to having had a taste of what will pass as prayer, or a taste, at the very least, of how fraught, how laden the visible is, even as you work to find a likely figure for its uncanny agency. Sure, I’m making this up as I go, hoping—even as I go—to be finally getting somewhere. And maybe I am.

Maybe I’m taking you along. Let’s say it’s so, and say however late the hour we now commence. [from Idiot Psalms, originally published in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery]

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Aftermath by Matthew Whitney oil and acrylic on canvas 36” x 26”

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You Know How It Goes by Clint Reid pen & acrylic on wood block 3.5"x3.5"

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Contemplative Activism: A Transformative Way

By Phileena Heuertz

W

e are complex human beings created in the image of God—daughters and sons of the most high God. We are the beloved of God. This is an extraordinary identity. But we don’t often reflect this heritage. Instead of living from a place of knowing in our core that we are loved, which fuels our ability to love God with our whole being while loving others, we live at a lower level of awareness. In some cases we become too egocentric. In other cases we think too poorly of ourselves.

The human condition is anchored in our search for God and for ourselves—to know and be known. When we awaken to the spiritual journey, we find that surrender and letting go are the surest ways to find out who we truly are, who God is, and who our neighbor is. The spiritual journey invites us to come into fuller understanding and acceptance of our belovedness

so that we can love others and become co-creators with God. Fr. Thomas Keating, a seasoned Cistercian monk, promotes contemplative prayer as a way to surrender to Christian transformation. In his book The Human Condition, Keating offers contemporary wisdom by identifying three emotional “programs for happiness.” If we’re honest, we can find ourselves interacting with the world primarily through one of these three programs: . Power and Control . Affection and Esteem . Security and Survival Keating says these programs for happiness emerge from basic instinctual needs. It’s a natural part of our human development to seek a degree of power and control, affection and esteem, and security and survival. In time, however, we over-identify with one by compensating for a basic need that may have gone

The “false self ” term is generally attributed to Thomas Merton who encapsulated the “true self ” and “false self ” in reference to the Apostle Paul’s teaching on the old and new creation.

1

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largely unmet in our childhood.

Thus, the false self1 gains fuel for its existence. In other words, our program for happiness becomes the archetype of our false self.

As we grow in self-awareness we realize that some of our reactions to present circumstances are actually reactions to past events that are buried in our unconscious. Self-awareness is a central aspect to the Christian life.

Self-knowledge paves the way to becoming whole and connected to God and others.

A first step toward self-awareness is recognizing the immanent (all-pervasive presence) as well as transcendent (independent of the created world) nature of God.

2

Ephesians 4:1718, 20-24 TIB

Socrates’ guiding philosophical rule that holds both spiritual and practical wisdom 3

The Christian doctrine of the Divine indwelling affirms God’s immanence—we believe that God dwells in our soul. It seems, however, that we relate more often to God’s transcendence without affirming God’s immanence. When we don’t hold God’s immanence and transcendence in tension or balance, our sense that God is distant from us—somewhere out there— can increase relational distance between God and us.

A lack of experience of God’s indwelling presence further

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propagates the notion that God is looking down on us, keeping a checklist of our rights and wrongs. The burden of living the Christian life falls on me to do and behave appropriately, a task that becomes burdensome and dreadful—far from the abundant life Jesus invited us into. We need a spiritual revolution like the Apostle Paul wrote about in Ephesians: …Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution, so that you can put on the new self that has been created in the God’s likeness, in the justice and holiness of the truth.2 This kind of revolution starts with a commitment to “know thyself.”3 For a transformational revolution to take place in our lives, we must submit to a spiritual journey marked by contemplation and action.

CULTIVATING CONTEMPLATION

Few of us struggle to be active enough. More common is the struggle to know when to say “no” and how to live a simpler life. We are active people, and maybe over-active. While some actions may be cloaked in the name of righteousness and justice or “loving our neighbor,” other actions are rooted in selfishness, or at least short-sightedness.

While our behavior, conduct, initiative, and enterprise can be well-meaning and good intentioned, many of our best good acts are not good enough.

And some of our well-meaning intentions even cause more harm than good. Time and time again, action without contemplation leads us off course in the journey of life.

Contemplation affirms our need for a spiritual revolution. It reminds us that God is God and “I” am not. A lifestyle of contemplation fosters personal and communal transformation.

Contemplation, in its broadest sense, means creating sacred space to be still, to rest in God, to reflect, to look inward; to attend to the inner life; to simply be with God in solitude, silence, and stillness.

Solitude, silence, and stillness are, in fact, the qualities of contemplative prayer.

So how do we cultivate contemplation?

It takes discipline. Contemplative prayer practices are more like disciplines than prayer as we’ve been accustomed to understand it. That’s because the type of prayer most often taught in modern Western Christianity is cataphatic prayer—prayer

that makes use of our faculties (reason, imagination, memory, feelings, and will). Cataphatic prayer corresponds with ordinary awareness and our ego.

By contrast, apophatic prayer transcends our normal faculties. The center of orientation for this kind of prayer is not “I” but abandonment of self and attentiveness to God. This prayer makes use of different kinds of faculties, faculties we are less in touch with—the “spiritual senses.”4 Contemplative prayer starts from the orientation that we need to receive from God. Contemplative practices teach us how to surrender to the presence and action of God within us and within our world. The fruit of contemplative prayer is not looked for or found during the prayer time. The contemplative space we allow to be cultivated by the Holy Spirit within us over time, produces a garden of abundant fruit in our active life—fruit produced by the Master Gardener.

For more exploration of cataphatic and apophatic prayer, see Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 2004), chap. 4.

4

A TRANSFORMATIVE WAY: CONTEMPLATIVE ACTIVISM

Action without contemplation can be a dangerous road—leaving us blind to the pitfalls of the motivations of our false

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self. Action without contemplation doesn’t allow for the space and awareness needed to let God introduce God’s self to us— free of preconceived notions and biased filters.

reach, and his admonition that we would do even greater things than he seems impossible.

Contemplation leads to just and compassionate action; action born from the heart of God leads to conA life of action without contempla- templation. A commitment to contion is characterized by: templation leads to radical action. . Activism instead of acts of love Contemplative activism makes us . Criticizing without energizing supple in the hands of God. By way of Christ’s ongoing, transfor. Despair instead of hope mative work in us, we are able to . Disconnection between love and serve more freely, purely, “doing” and “being” and unconditionally—like Jesus. . Fundamentalism and judgmentalism In a world plagued by human exploitation, violence, and destrucAction without contemplation tion of our ecosphere, we owe it is not an obedient life. Without to the world to develop contemplacontemplation, the liberation and tive activism. fecund life Jesus taught is out of

Phileena Heuertz is a spiritual director, yoga instructor, contemplative retreat guide, and the author of Pilgrimage of a Soul. For 20 years she and her husband Chris served with Word Made Flesh in more than 70 countries building community among victims of human trafficking, survivors of HIV and AIDS, abandoned children, child soldiers, and war brides. She lives in Omaha.

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Gravity, a center for contemplative activism, offers annual retreats for people working hard to do good but wanting to do good better. Learn more at www.gravitycenter.com.

You Also Are Psyche by Carolyn Pyfrom oil on linen 40” x 40” CONSP!RE 15

...And You'll Find It Was Already There by Clint Reid pen & watercolor 5"x7"

Je re m iah’s Vision of Sha lom

by Vince Bantu

This essay is a new collaboration with the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), a network of Christians committed to seeing people and communities holistically restored.

My dad always says, “It’s all about moderation.” I agree. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the path we follow Jesus on is a place of tension that embraces seemingly opposing ideas and avoids extremes.

One issue that has often resulted in various unhealthy extremes throughout the life of the Church has been its response to wealth. While it is the practice of some to venerate masochistic practices of self-inflicted suffering, others have fabricated a theological rhetoric that equates socioeconomic status with divine favor. The biblical concept of shalom, however, is an invitation to flourish through the Lord’s provision in the context of wholeness and justice.

The prophet Jeremiah encouraged his Judean community to seek shalom in a short letter he sent to the citizens of Jerusalem exiled to Babylon: “Seek the peace and prosperity (shalom) of the city to which I have carried you into exile” (Jer. 29:7a). I think the NIV translators used two English words to translate one Hebrew word because “shalom” is too rich of a concept to easily pin down in English. For example, we often think of “peace” as the “absence of conflict,” which is why many leaders have had to remind us that this is precisely what peace is not.

Shalom is a profoundly abundant concept. Here are a few other ways the word can be translated: completeness, soundness, welfare, wholeness, contentment, health, wellness, safety,

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and friendship. Jeremiah prescribes the pursuit of shalom because it is God’s desire for His people: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you (lit. plans of shalom) and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jer. 29:11). This attribute of God as presented in Jeremiah’s letter is consistent throughout Scripture: God desires prosperity and abundance of life for all creation.

Throughout the history of the Church, well-meaning Christians have missed out on the full enjoyment of God’s provision out of a laudable effort to promote justice and simplicity. From its beginnings, the monastic movement has placed great emphasis on monks giving to the poor and living in difficult circumstances. While inspiring figures such as John Chrysostom, Evagrius Ponticus, and Anthony the Great attest to the immense value of this movement, sometimes it went too far. I’m reminded of a sixth-century Egyptian monk named Apollo who was praised for his extreme ascetic practices, which often included fasting until the point of fainting. Apollo spent hot summer nights praying on top of a steaming oven, and in winter he prayed all night wearing a wet garment and standing in cold water. That’s just crazy.

There have always been Christians who, out of an understandable reaction to the injustice and oppression of the poor, neglect to find joy in the Lord’s provision. They engage in measures of simplicity that often do more to serve a spiritual ego than enact justice. In contrast, Jeremiah’s letter declares that shalom is something God’s people are to “seek” (or study, search out, frequent, require, practice, demand). Jeremiah’s vision of shalom is one in which all God’s children can joyfully flourish in all His creation. And yet, God’s desire for wholeness cannot be restricted to only one margin of society: “Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7b). This can be translated literally as “in its shalom will be your shalom.”

Jeremiah was concerned about the false prophets and diviners mentioned in verses 8 and 9 who were most likely giving the captive Judeans false hope of a quick exile or even attempting to incite a rebellion. Jeremiah instructs the exiles to make themselves at home in Babylon, the home of their enemies.

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Moreover, the Jerusalem exiles are informed that their prosperity is intertwined with that of the Babylonians. It is evident here and throughout Scripture that God’s call and blessing on His people are intended to go forth to all the nations.

The problem with prosperity theology is that it promotes an empty notion of shalom in which believers are encouraged to pursue a self-obsessed version of the Gospel that doesn’t concern itself with the welfare of the poor. One of the most damaging aspects of claiming that divine favor equates to material possession is the spiritual and social shame this causes the oppressed. One day our church was doing outreach in our neighborhood and we were talking with a single mom with two jobs and three kids. When we asked how we might pray for her, she said she must not be trusting in God enough because she was struggling so much.

This is not an uncommon sentiment in under-resourced communities. Prosperity theology generates a destructive self-hatred among the oppressed. Jeremiah told the exiles that God wanted them to labor for the flourishing of their foreign neighbors; from this, they too would flourish. True shalom exists when communities are made whole, when everyone is able to flourish in the abundance God intends for His people. The balanced vision of prosperity presented in Jeremiah 29 is one in which wholeness exists everywhere because we are all looking out for each other. That is a vision of shalom that is indeed worth seeking, requiring, and demanding.

Vince Bantu is a graduate student in Semitic and Egyptian languages at The Catholic University of America.

Vince and his wife Diana live in north Newark where they pastor Messiah Church of Newark. Vince is a professor of church history with Bakke Graduate University and is a member of CCDA’s Theological Committee.

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DRAW NEAR προσέλθετε For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see how far the near obtains. In the dark καθόλικον the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye a more than common sense of what lay flickering just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us a figure for when time would slip free altogether.

I have no sense of what this means to you, so little sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

[from Idiot Psalms, originally published in Poetry]

photo by David Bley

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CONSP!RE 21 Bourke by John Freeman acrylic on canvas 70cm x 50cm

CRAZY, MIXED-UP REDEMPTION

by Lori Ventola

I

was 12 years old. Shy, bookish, dreamy. My parents ran a charity, taking in children whose parents couldn’t care for them. Most of those kids were from “broken homes.” My home was not broken—a source of great pride to me, I now realize—until it was. My mother got us kids on a plane while we were supposed to be in school.

We moved from L.A. to Denver, and I settled in to wait. Any day now, I was sure, my Dad would arrive and fight to have his princess back.

While I waited, I watched the boy next door through the bedroom curtains.

I rode my bike alone around the neighborhood. I started a journal and found out I could write. And I discovered the cookie jar in my aunt’s kitchen.

I was 28 years old, and I weighed over 350 pounds. I set type at a printing company, but didn’t write. Except for a real disaster at the age of 19, I had never dated. Two false starts at college were the extent of my education. I lived alone, with no real sense of direction except to follow God, whatever that meant.

I knew I had tremendous potential—my parents had made sure of that. The world was a blank slate and I could write on it anything I wanted. And I would. Right after I lost the weight.

After I lost the weight, I’d finish my degree in...something. I’d meet a wonderful man and have a family. I’d travel. I’d ride a bike again. Most important of all, I’d be a force for good, a force for Jesus, and I would change the world...after I lost the weight.

I couldn’t lose the weight, and I didn’t know exactly why, though I’d invested plenty of hours in therapists’ offices. Every day was a new opportunity to try,

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to fail, to hate myself. Of course I was the problem.

God was all-powerful, and of course he hated my gluttony. If I would only let him, he would change me.

One evening I drove across town to a seminar at the Christian university. I don’t remember what the class was about, but I keenly remember looking through the windows and seeing the only seating in the room: desks with attached seats. I knew I wouldn’t fit into them. I walked back to my car, sobbed all the way home, turned on the TV and stuffed down pizza and ice cream.

It was only one of many similar experiences, but this time my heart broke, and a desperate little voice cried through the cracks. I was not being rebellious.

I really couldn’t do this one thing, but I longed to serve God and I knew I could do something, be something in the Kingdom of Heaven. Could it be that the first thing the world always saw about me might not be the number one thing on God’s priority list?

I called everyone who loved me and told them I was no longer going to try to lose weight. I might die younger, but I was going to live. Oddly, none of them argued.

Now I began to pray earnestly about what else God might want me to do. What else might obedience mean? If he was my Redeemer (oh, how I have always loved that name for him!), what could he redeem me to be if my body size didn’t change a bit?

Little miracles began to occur, too many to describe here. I met people, learned things, heard the Spirit’s voice. Within a few months, I found myself living and teaching in a little cottage school in the country, and that was the beginning of clarity as to my calling.

In my 30s I went back to college, which meant getting to each class early, turning a desk sideways and hunting down a separate chair to put next to it. Of course people stared. “Crazy skinny-butt desks!” I’d say. That’s how God taught me courage, and how to laugh at shame.

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I worked as a preschool teacher for a couple of years, which required getting down on the floor with the children (and, more significantly, back up again!).

That’s how God taught me I could do hard things. At another school, I overhauled an afterschool program, though I’d never done anything like that before, and I learned that the Holy Spirit lived in me and I had a lot of great ideas.

For eight years I ran a small school that didn’t have a home base, so I took my students to libraries and museums. Together we learned that learning and growing looks different for everyone, including the teacher.

At 40 I was blessed with a 12-year-old girl who needed a home— and God showed me he knew my heart. Three years later, we moved into a transitional housing program and lived with people who had been homeless, and I learned how to work with a team.

I am 53, and I weigh over 350 pounds. I know exactly who I am, and exactly what I am called to do. Two years ago, I started a nonprofit organization that brings remedial tutoring to children in poverty. I’m not perfect, but shame has no place in my life. Every day is spent trying, and failing, and getting up and trying again, because ultimately I know I cannot possibly fail.

I’d still like to ride a bike, and I dream of spending my 60th birthday walking the 500-mile Camino Del Santiago in the north of Spain.

And yes, as I get older the weight is harder on my health. I’d love to see what’s possible with my body, so I think I’ll go ahead and lose the weight now. Or maybe I won’t, but now there’s no harm in trying.

Lori Ventola is the Executive Director of Plumfield Learning Systems, a nonprofit that brings remedial tutoring to kids who are failing in school because of poverty.

She lives in a 250-square-foot studio apartment in downtown Denver and loves it.

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EROTIKOS LOGOS I like very much how you lean just now clean into the book, beginning the day. in such charitable expectation.

I like how you are so nearly smiling.

I almost see it—and your eyes seeming lit from within. We, all of us, have been disappointed in the past. Already I fear your being disappointed now.

So much, of course, depends upon your own willingness to find something worthy here, even as you bring—as you must—something worthy to the effort. So much of what is worthy wants always two struggling toward agreeable repose, requires grateful coupling of a willing one with an also willing other. I would like for us to find again the faculty to apprehend this eros honestly, and so to find a way to meet in eros a likely figure for most of what we do worth doing.

[from Idiot Psalms, originally published in Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression]

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Resurrection

by Kari Gale

After walking through my darkest valley, I celebrate the resurrection of Christ with the knowledge that I, too, am being restored and resurrected with Him, and that is true freedom. Freedom that overcomes grief and brokenness. Freedom that heals and brings hope.

TOP: Refuge watercolor and watercolor pencil on paper 22" x 30" LEFT: Metamorphosis watercolor and watercolor pencil on paper 22" x 30"

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TOP: Wet Wings watercolor and watercolor pencil on paper 22" x 30" RIGHT: Wounded watercolor and watercolor pencil on paper 22" x 30"

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BIRTH: THE CONSPIRACY OF SOUL AND BODY

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann It was unseasonably warm as I carefully stepped onto the next wrung, balancing the extra weight and size.

My body called me into those trees as I deliberately and gently trimmed the small, sucker branches. First the apple tree, then the peach, then the plum. Being past my due date, I knew I probably shouldn’t be on a ladder, but I kept climbing higher and higher. I felt the breeze on my cheeks and breathed in the smell of spring. While I clipped away, the fiddle and the accordion played. What a beautiful world and community this child would soon come into.

I have never been a body person. My being has always felt rooted in my mind and heart, using my body only as a tool to accomplish what I need.

I have been grateful for my body, but it is not who I am. And I certainly don’t want others to see me as my body. In a world filled with sexism, I would prefer to hide my body and be given respect for the workings of my mind and the depths of my spirit.

But then I gave birth. I was brought face-to-face with my own narrow mindedness. I had not only been living with a harmful understanding of my own personhood but I had limited God. As I prepared for labor, I heard story after story of the ways our minds 30 CONSP!RE

can interfere with birth. I knew I was capable of that. I spent those months trying to honor my body and learning to trust it. Looking towards the moment when I would work to calm my mind and make way for my body to do what it knew how to do. My mind knew nothing about giving birth. This baby relied upon me to trust my body.

I marveled at the mystery and miracle that a human being could be growing inside me. Spirit and body worked tirelessly in creating each hair and fingernail, painting the lips I would soon love to watch smile. God was in the workings of my body.

As the contractions began, I felt the deep ache pulling at my cervix, calling it to open. I calmed my mind. I breathed long, slow breaths.

Taking in the pain. Feeling the child at hand. Often with gentle, loving reminders from my partner, I kept breathing. I kept grounded in the work that was happening within me. I repeated in those breaths: “Be still and know that I am God.” The hours dragged on, counted out in four-and-a-half minute segments.

Moments of normalcy followed by pain and breath and then normalcy and then pain and breath and then normalcy. For a while, we sang. Songs of my childhood. Chants calling forth this child into the world: We all came to welcome you, we all came to your birth.

We all came to welcome you, to welcome you to earth.

I was there to love you. I was there to love you.

To give my body for your quick and easy entrance here Through heaven’s open door.

Again and again we sang. “I was there to love you. To give my body for your quick and easy entrance here.” My voice cracked and I stopped singing with tears running down by cheeks. Part pain. Part exhaustion. But mostly at finally understanding the words.

This was the greatest act of love I could ever give anyone. I was giving my body for this child. A wise friend once said to me, “It wasn’t until I gave birth that I understood ‘This is my body broken for you.’”

Isaac was born in a great leap. His whole body emerged in one final push—head to toe. And then…the great breath.

Inhale and exhale. I will never forget it.

It was the most beautiful breath I have ever taken. He was here. It was over.

My soul and body breathed as one.

Con-spire—“to breathe together.”

Giving birth was long, slow, painful, wet, bloody, hard to the point of breaking, ordinary, earthly, beautiful, miraculous, lonely, loving, communal, awkward, and awesome. I touched a deep power that runs within me and all women. A history and force that lives in our bones. The place where body and soul are one. Where God dwells.

Conspiring even now.

Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is a writer and activist. A native Detroiter, she lives in the Jeanie Wylie Community focused on urban agriculture, immigrant rights, and nonviolence.

She is the Program Coordinator for Word and World: A People’s School, an experiment in alternative theological education, bridging the gulf between the seminary, the sanctuary, and the street.

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32 CONSP!RE Newborn Child by John Freeman acrylic on canvas 66 cm x 84 cm

Infertility: On Compassion, Boundaries, and Faith

by Sarah Asay

Infertility. What a brutal and sad word. If it were a color, it would be grey. It sounds so definite, so empty. And yet, my Father takes grey things and gives them color. He takes dust and creates beauty.

My husband and I have been married for nearly eight years.

Thus far, we have been unable to have biological children. In my mind (and in reality) this is so linked with my physical pain that it is impossible for me to separate the two. I have a condition called endometriosis, which affects an estimated 170 million women. When I sit down to think about my life, and about being unable to bear children (see how far out of my way I go to avoid

that word—infertile), the lessons from endometriosis and childlessness are intermingled. I have gained so much though. While I would never choose this path, I would not undo the past, because dear to me is the beautiful grace I have known.

I have also learned a few things.

I’ve learned to be sensitive. I have heard it said: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle,” and I think, “Yes! People should be kind to me! I’m in pain, and I don’t have a baby yet!” But chronic pain and infertility have taught me to think larger than myself. If something

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comes easy to us, it can be hard to imagine that it might be difficult for someone else.

How often have I shot my mouth off thinking that I’m being helpful, when in fact I’m hurting someone’s secret wound? I’ve learned to think a little more before I speak, and I hope that the listener will have grace for me if I stomp on their pain.

I’ve learned to be an interpreter. Though their words can hurt, people don’t mean to be insensitive. When wellmeaning friends and strangers tell me a story about someone who got pregnant right after they adopted, I interpret those words as, “I want good things for you. I want to give you hope.” When they tell me, “Just adopt!”, I’ve learned that what they mean is, “I want to fix your pain!” I don’t need to say that I’d always planned on adopting, even before I knew what a struggle this would be. When people say, “Why don’t you have kids? Do you want them?” I know that they probably mean is, “I’m interested in you. I want to know more about your life.”

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One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that being an interpreter has a lot in common with setting boundaries. While it’s good for me to interpret people’s comments and questions as being based in good wishes, the reality is that sometimes people are nosy, or insensitive, or rude. I know now that I am the only person who can protect myself from those statements. I‘m private about my endometriosis, and I definitely don’t discuss the pain of infertility with many people—but they can come up in conversation. When friends— or, oddly enough, practical strangers—offer me medical advice or probe into my health, lack of children,etc., I’ve found that this goes a long way in setting up safe boundaries: “I appreciate you thinking of me. I have doctors that I’m working with…” Healthy boundaries mean keeping the negative out and letting only the good in. When someone starts to pry and I feel unsafe, it helps me to think, “I’m not going to let you into this part of my life right now, and that is okay.”

Boundaries can mean temporarily blocking some people from social media feeds. A Pinterest board full of pregnancy clothes, or Facebook pictures of toddlers holding signs announcing a new sibling, can be enough to make me scream some days. When I hear someone complain about how fat they feel in their eighth month of pregnancy, it can take a lot of patience to listen without throwing something. I think it’s totally fine for pregnant women to complain, of course. But at this stage in my life it’s difficult for me to be the sounding board for that.

Growing up as the eldest in a large family, surrounded by other large families, I naively viewed women without children as selfish, or defective, or both. This has been a hurdle for me to work through.

Have children or don’t have children. Not having kids, even if you are physically able to, doesn’t make a woman

selfish. And not being able to have them doesn’t make a woman defective.

Oh, but I feel it! I have felt a disdain for my body. Not in the “I hate my hips” sort of way, but in the “Why are you failing me?” way. Everything I set my mind to, I accomplish.

But I have not been able to carry a child.

But I am not a failure. And God is near to the brokenhearted! My husband and I have grown closer this past year as we’ve been honest about how this situation hurts us. The honesty has spawned action—being proactive about pain management, making efforts to talk about this fragile topic. And the most exciting thing is that we have turned in our first stage of adoption paperwork.

So. Infertility. It is a sad grey word. But my God has a way of taking broken things and giving them life.

Sarah Asay lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Trevor, and her German Shepherd, Colt. This piece originally appeared in slightly different form at www. lishaepperson.com, as part of the series “Last Girl On the Hill.”

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Theology on the Long Run

By Ragan Sutterfield

T

he sidewalk descends, curving over a creek crossing bridge and down to the path—a connector trail that will lead me to the Potomac.

Today is an out and back run, 15 miles on a Friday morning before I head to seminary for an afternoon to discuss the letter of Paul to Philemon.

In a few weeks this run will be 20 miles, in a few more 30. Come Holy Saturday, I’ll be running through the rocky landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains on my way to a finish line 50 miles in the distance.

It’s hard to fit in long runs while being a seminary student. There is reading to do and papers to write and classes to attend on top of the normal responsibilities of life. To get my training in I sometimes have to multitask. Today that means listening to St. Athanasius’s treatise “On the Incarnation” while

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I run. The words of the 4th century Egyptian bishop come channeled through a man with a deep voice and a southern drawl. “Now, Macarius, true lover of Christ, we must take a step further in the faith of our holy religion, and consider also the Word’s becoming Man and His divine Appearing in our midst,” he begins.

Athanasius is concerned with explaining why God would take on a body.

It’s one of the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, the enfleshment of God, not as some avatar, but as a fully bodied person. This mystery has always been a hard one for me to accept because for so much of my life I’ve been troubled by my own incarnation. I didn’t grow up an athlete. I played sports, a season here and there, but I never excelled at any. I was drawn to books and

hikes in the woods, but in those I didn’t feel embodied. My body always felt like this disconnected skin—a vehicle for the real person inside.

The theology I haphazardly picked up in church didn’t help. There the body seemed to be a temporary shell that we would shed for some other place—a hermit crab theology. We would wonder sometimes in Sunday School at what kind of bodies we would have in heaven. We imagined them as ethereal and perfect, so unlike our current flesh. We spoke of resurrection, but really we believed in a kind of heavenly reincarnation. These bodies we had now weren’t a part of the self that had any hope for a future—our souls would go on for an eternity, but our

bodies would be shed along with the earth that would disappear in the fire that would consume the Left Behind.

“He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only,” writes Athanasius, “for the salvation of us men.” The incarnation of God is then the source of our salvation. Why would God become a human, share in our flesh and soul, if it is only the soul that matters? The answer can only be that God came to save people, not souls only, but bodies. God came to save your skin and muscle; he offered his flesh and blood to save your flesh and blood.

For Athanasius, Christ not only becomes human, but also reiterates CONSP!RE 37

the fullness of the human form. In other words, Christ is the most fully human being that exists. We who live in the lineage of Adam have moved into a kind of inhumanity.

With the fall the human person has been in a state of de-creation, our lives marred by our own inhumanity and the dehumanizing powers that bring us toward death. What Christ did was to become human so that we could become human. And in that Christ didn’t come in a spiritual form of human life, some Gnostic Sophia who could lead us to a higher plain of being. Christ took on flesh, bled with the same mix of plasma and oxygen rich cells that we do.

Blood is moving, through arteries and veins, my heart pumping fast, my breaths deep and steady. I look at my heart rate monitor, I’m steadily in Zone 2—the aerobic heart rate that will allow my body to move for miles at an endurance pace. It’s taken me time to learn how to run long or even run at all. I started after years of ignoring my body, letting it fall apart with bad food and bad habits.

I started to run and bike and swim because I wanted to find health. I found myself seriously overweight and experiencing the consequences. I tried ellipticals and treadmills, watching the calories burned number click away as CNN blared on the big gym TVs. But then I met my wife and learned to move my body as a spiritual discipline. For her exercise isn’t some chore to do for an abstract value like blood 38 CONSP!RE

pressure. Moving her body through swimming or pilates or dance is a way to pray, to turn her whole self toward God. She especially loves endurance—long swims that take hours to complete. It is through that distance that she begins to feel her whole self drawn together and led toward God. With time I started to experience that same integration. Long bike rides, long runs and hikes and swims—in all of these the disconnections of myself would fade with the distance. Body and soul, mind and spirit would blur because to complete the distance took every part of myself. It took prayer too, because over a hundred-mile bike ride or thirty-mile run there was always a point at which continuing became more than a matter of calories and muscle, more than oxygen and the size of my heart. I had to realize that this self that was both body and soul, was also a self that could only live into its fullness with God’s grace. I found myself in the later miles of an endurance race praying the Jesus prayer so treasured in the Orthodox tradition: “Lord Jesus Christ,” breath in, “Have mercy on me a sinner,” breath out. “[God] willed that humankind should remain in incorruption. But humanity, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely,” the voice drawls on my iPod. For Athanasius, death and decay, the dissolution and unraveling of our

bodies are the result of corruption and sin in the world. The solution though is not to forget the body, because the body is not the source of our corruption. Through Christ, humanity reiterated, we are to turn our entire being toward God. God is as essential to our bodies as food and water.

We have to learn to live on God. The Potomac is spotted with patches of ice, gulls and ducks gathered on its waters. I watch the tree line for the bald eagles that frequent the shores, massive and majestic even if in reality they eat carrion and would rather steal fish than catch them. I look at my watch. I’ve been running over an hour.

I pull a small flask of a carbohydrate mixture from the pocket of my hydration pack, taking a couple of shots of it and then washing it all down with water. This drink will help my body maintain its energy over the distance, providing direct energy but also allowing my body to use the fat reserves that could keep me going for days. I have to train my body to rely on fat, the best fuel for endurance. In order to do this I have to avoid sugar, fast occasionally, put my body into a state of fat burning rather than carbohydrate burning.

To learn to live on God is like training the body to run on fat. We have to develop a metabolism for the holy. Athanasius was bishop to many of the early desert monastics, people like Abba Anthony of whom Athanasius wrote a hagiography.

These desert fathers and mothers left behind the corrupt society of Rome

and a Christianity that was becoming too comfortable with empire. Their purpose was to start the process of moving toward the fullness of their humanity, turning their minds to God so that they might move into Christlikeness. They were called ascetics, a term that came from the Greek word askesis—to train or exercise.

They were athletes, working their bodies into a new kind of shape. But these desert monastics weren’t training for the new body of a marathoner or wrestler; they were training for the new humanity of Christ himself.

The historian Peter Brown describes the program of the Desert Fathers and Mothers as one of “bleak and insistent physicality.” Fasting, all night prayers, subsistence nourishment— these were a few of the bodily tools the Desert Fathers and Mothers, these athletes in training, used in disciplining their bodies. The reason for these disciplines was not, as has been often mistakenly suggested, because they denigrated and hated the body.

Rather Brown says that, “The ascetics imposed severe restraints on their bodies because they were convinced that they could sweep the body into a desperate venture.” This venture was guided by a vision of the “eventual transformation of their own bodies on the day of the Resurrection.”

I understand the work of living into a future body. There is no way, as my legs tire at the halfway point, that this body running along the cold Potomac will be able to go 50 miles today or tomorrow. But I know that with each CONSP!RE 39

mile, each cycle of training, I am getting closer to the body that can. On Holy Saturday, if all goes well, I will be a person—body and soul—that can run 50 miles. And in this exercise of my body, I am also drawn to the hope that through exercises that put my whole self before God and require me to learn holy dependence, my self is being transformed. It is the aim of my life’s training that I will move more and more to the fullness of humanity that will find its consummation in my final resurrection.

That is the hope I now find in the body, not the sloughing off of skin so that my spirit can be free, but a slow and steady movement of my body toward its fullness. But what does that fullness look like? It is said that when Saint Anthony, after years spent disciplining his body and spirit in the desert, appeared in a nearby village the people were struck by his remarkable health: “When they beheld him, they were amazed to see that his body had maintained its former condition, neither fat for lack of exercise, nor emaciated from fasting and combat with demons, but just as it was when they had known him previous to his withdrawal. The state of his soul was one of purity.” His face, many remarked, was like that of a child—completely transparent and open, honest yet good, with nothing to hide. Anthony had begun to be, in his body and soul, that new humanity that Christ opened to us all.

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I’m in my final miles; the book is almost finished. “He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God,” Athanasius says through the speakers of my ear-buds. Put another way, God became human that humanity might become God. That’s a bold statement, but in Christ’s incarnation he opened up that potential. By being fully human and fully God, Christ opened a bridge of possibility.

If God is the new fullness of humanity then the only path for humanity to find its fulfillment is to move more and more into the life of God. I hit the 15 mile mark, eyes crusted with salt, my back and legs aching from the distance. I am tired and I need a rest day to recover, but I also feel a kind of glory in my body.

This gift of skin and bone, muscle and blood isn’t going to disappear, but only be transformed. My work now is to let God live here, to permeate my flesh. Christ, not some magazine rack model, is my ideal. It doesn’t take a long run to discover this, but for me it helps remind me of myself—created, re-created, running toward the day of resurrection.

Ragan Sutterfield is a native Arkansan currently sojourning in Northern Virginia.

He is the author of Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline, and the forthcoming This Is My Body: From Obesity to Ironman, My Journey into the True Meaning of Flesh, Spirit, and Deeper Faith.

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Taylor Pool is a photographer from Wichita, Kansas but is currently living in Nürnberg, Germany. He uses medium format film to capture his subjects and their stories. African and European portraits and street photography are his main subjects.

These images are from his series"MAN" that focuses on how culture can define what men are. Every culture and country requires men to be something different from, but also similar to, the next. All of these photos were made with a Mamiya RZ67 and flash system. view more of Taylor's work at www.piratepool.com

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FORGIVENESS SET HIM FREE

BY MIKE NEELLEY Ramon grew up in a Mexican border town. Drug and gang violence claimed many in his family, including his brother. When he was twelve, Ramon’s father moved the family to Washington’s Skagit Valley to get away from the violence. But for Ramon the hatred toward his brother’s killer grew in him until it produced its own violence. He joined a local gang where he developed a reputation as a fighter. By the time he was twenty, Ramon had committed crimes worthy of jail time. But it was a crime he didn’t commit that landed him in prison. He was charged with rape, burglary, and kidnapping. He was facing a thirty-year sentence.

This is when Ramon cried out to God for help.

Ramon had lived across the street from our ministry and our little church. He had mocked it for years, saying it was full of hypocrites. When one of our chaplains, Chris, came to visit him, he started crying and asked for forgiveness. Not long after, Ramon heard God tell him to forgive the man who had killed his brother.

None of this made sense to Ramon, but he decided to try. The next day, he learned that his accuser had changed her story, saying that everything was a lie. Even though the state had taken up the case, it wasn’t long before the judge threw it out. Ramon was set free.

Ramon moved into our ministry building, and for the next four years he lived there with his two kids. He helped lead our gang ministry, bringing other single dads, former and active gang members, into the same adoption he had received.

We see this more and more. When we forgive those who have wronged us, the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of the human heart come together. We see prisoners being set free— body, soul and spirit—and as they lead us into the ministry of reconciliation, we find ourselves being set free too. A new life is possible for all of us—this life called “the body of Christ.”

Mike Neelley is the head of staff/director for Tierra Nueva. As head of staff, Mike “pastors the pastors” in all levels of leadership–apprentice formation, staff development and discipleship, and community council leadership. Mike also helps lead Tierra Nueva in worship and teaching, and partners with various staff in their areas of calling.

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Awake O Sleeper by Clint Reid pen & watercolor 5"x7"

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by Josh Rockett

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T

he Bibles the men brought to the Dupage County Juvenile Detention Center were titled “Free on the Inside.” They were marketed as “easy to understand” and promised to provide content relevant to the inmates.

The well-meaning Bible study leaders thought that reading a handful of pages would fix the kids’ lives. They expected the scripture to work alone, failing to invest in or listen to the residents. It was Therapeutic Deism According to the Gospel of John.

The leaders thought that if the inside could be fixed the outside would be fixed as well. If the soul is free the body will be too. After all, these leaders thought the kids were in a detention center because something was wrong with them.

Having a personal relationship with Jesus would fix everything.

During one Bible study about Jesus’s calling of the disciples, a resident said, “So Jesus was an O.G.” “A what?” an older man asked.

“He was a leader,” said the resident. “He had goons.” Confused, the man slid a Bible closer to the resident, closed with prayer, and left feeling good about himself.

The detention center defined its inmates by their uniform dress (blue pants, maroon sweatshirts) and their designated letter and number. My radio would ring out, “Can you get I-8 some toilet paper?” Sure. The external was well attended to. The kids were

formable objects, not whole beings.

They were part of a dehumanizing system that was ignorant of their individuality and humanity, making them utterly forgettable. Straight lines, perfectly made beds, cold brick walls and slamming metal doors—outward signs of discipline and structure.

If you can control the outside you can forget about the inside.

The disunited spaces in this environment acted as tectonic plates that caused seismic shifts of both soul and body. Anger, frustration, and aggression would shake out from within, producing acts of rage and intensity in the body. Once I held a body down after it threw a chair at another detention officer. I felt the body’s tension and heart rate. I whispered to our souls, “Breathe.

Breathe.” Our two bodies prayerfully breathed together in unison.

Detention is a factory that makes itself feel good. But the living, breathing kids of Dupage County refused to let the staff become part of the assembly line. They were inspiring, and in the spaces where they could escape the separation of inside and outside, peace and grace transcended. I witnessed this most clearly in the art room and in the community service program.

In these spaces of creation, the unity of body and soul flourished.

Clay, paper, yarn and canvas came alive in the art room. As their art teacher, I required only one CONSP!RE 47

assignment. I gave them a 5x7 blank canvas board and instructed them to show what hope meant to them. I hoped this assignment would offer some grounding after being torn from their families and neighborhoods. What I found was that it centered the residents, bringing them from a place of survival to one of reflection. The residents produced pictures of families, cars and money. They expressed dreams of being athletes and parents. After this initial assignment the kids were free to create as they pleased. I provided them with materials and ideas—make candles, paint pictures, sculpt, or braid hemp. I even taught one member of the Gangster Disciple street gang how to knit. He knit a purple scarf and said, “Don’t tell my boys about this okay?”

dirty. Daily watering and tending resulted in over 200 lbs. of tomatoes, broccoli, green beans, and other vegetables. The kids beamed proudly as we made fresh salsa and donated our harvest to the local food pantry. Watching food appear, bursting forth from the seed below the soil and into the air above, reunited their bodies and souls.

Creation is the place of resurrection. It is the place of canvas and earth, clay and crop. Creation united what the detention center tried to separate: soul and body, staff and inmate. Jesus’s resurrection is the new creation, a living experience that unites what has been separated. To be free on the inside and free on the outside are the same. Resurrection overcomes false dichotomies of self and the combative “us vs. them” The community service program culture that incarceration perpetuallowed kids to complete their ates. The Bibles that were given community service hours while in to the inmates do not contain detention. They cleaned bathrooms freedom but reveal it. As the and classrooms, and made housepages are not just text, people are hold decorations for residents at neither just body nor just soul. the nearby convalescent center.

The act of creation ushers in the They also tended the on-site wholeness of life. It makes growgarden. Master farmers from the ing a garden, painting a picture, University of Illinois came once a picking a tomato and knitting week and taught the kids how to a scarf sacred. The following make things grow. Most of the resi- poem describes that new credents had never seen a seed before, ation. A 15 year-old young man let alone pick weeds or water who was facing adult charges plants. They worked the soil slowly and is now serving 30 years in at first, like a child taking his first a state penitentiary wrote it. It steps. They were tentative about shows where true freedom lies. getting their hands and shoes 48 CONSP!RE

god will set me free I believe Just like Mar tin Luther K ing That one day I will be free Instead of sitting here in miser y Instead of dwelling on sad things I’ll look for ward to where the lights gleam All the way to the end Until I see God, my best friend He gave me many gifts that I took 4 granted And he forgives me and won’t have me banished God gives love and compassion But we still act like asses God gives us gifts like becoming a singer And we turn around and give um the finger Why can’t we treat each other like brother and sister But in life we have difficult tests It doesn’t matter who’s the best Because in the end we will all be put to rest S ome of us will awaken in heaven or hell Or someone like me will awaken in a cell And have to keep looking for ward even in jail This life is nothing to the life God wants to give Sure it ’s nice to get married and have kids But don’t you ever think what happens after this Just something to think about before you sin.

God wants you to be strong, so don’t give in.

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Laurie, I knew you the least but you are probably the hardest to write to.

We told jokes at your memorial at the women’s centre–bad jokes, the kind you told: “What’s a thumb tack?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“A Smartie with a hard-on.”

And a long complicated one about a flea transferred from host to host in the hair on various body parts of animal film stars and country and western singers.

Everybody knew you, you walked around the neighbourhood like a politician, joking, throwing fake punches and telling stories, you got some kind of response from everyone. A walk around the block could take an hour.

You spent some of your last days at the Tent Village during the anti-olympics protest tending the sacred fire, talking, singing, telling jokes. I was there too, some.

But damn it was cold, February, and wet. And you so skinny from what you used to be. Human interaction must have kept you warm, cause the fire was small, the coffee lukewarm and there was no fat on you. I don’t know how you did it.

I don’t know how your girlfriend is doing, or the little ones, you were smart, I think, to move them out of this part of town.

I miss you. We never talked a lot, just a “hey” and the butch nod, but I was so glad you were in the world. When I saw you, I would think, “yeah.” Fat, loud, laughing, in everybody’s face, making no apology for any part of your self. Nothing about you curled up, or hidden. Taking up space like you deserved it.

I was mad when you died. So mad.

Afterward, I was praying and I dared Jesus to show up. “Where the hell are you Jesus, when women keep dying all around me? You better have something to say for yourself.”

I was walking around in the rain, bare-headed and crying, Laurie, when Jesus finally showed up it was you. And you were laughing.

Jesus is a drug user, Indian, dyke with AIDS and her girlfriend sells sex— Joke’s on me! Because really, who can I tell about when Jesus came to me, without sounding like I picked through every stereotype I could think of for the ones that would piss off religious conservatives the most?

Good joke, Laurie.

I’m leaving this letter with some tobacco in the empty lot where the tent city was.

An excerpt from Bury the Dead: Stories of Death and Dying, Resistance and Discipleship, edited

by Laurel Dykstra. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. www.wipfandstock.com Laurel Dykstra is Assistant Curate at St. Catherine’s Anglican Church in North Vancouver.

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Buried by Matthew Whitney oil and acrylic on canvas 42” x 30”

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Breakfast by Matthew Whitney Oil and acrylic on canvas 24” x 18”

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The Lord’s Supper

by Valerie Anderson

T

his is how I want to take communion. I want to hold a loaf fresh from the oven, the dough kneaded by the rough hands of a friend, warmth rising, infused with its sweet scent. I want to take this bread in my hands and break it open with my fingers, releasing its aroma. I want it to leave my hands and fill the hands of the one next to me. I want to take my communion in chunks. I want to indulge in it. I want to fill my mouth with it and I want it to satiate me.

I want to hold in my left hand this meal and, after the moment of its recognition, I want to keep dipping it into olive oil and a little salt—raising it to my lips again and again. In my right hand, I want to hold a glass of red wine. I’ll sip it and swirl it and savor it—drawing out the rich breadth of it before swallowing. I want it to be filled to overflowing. I want the flavor to remind me that this is everlasting. That it is good.

This is how I want to take communion. In homes and before fires, on beaches before waves, on mountains before open skies, in fields before sunsets. Around tables and around friends. In crowded rooms filled with laughter and in quiet corners filled with tears. And even in churches.

This is how I want to take communion. With loaves of bread that fill me, not wafer thin crackers that remind me I am empty.

With glasses of remembrance, not sips of observance. I want it to be abundant, not scarce. I want it to fill my being, not dissolve on my tongue before I can even taste its goodness. I want it to satisfy my thirst, not wet my tongue leaving me desiring more. I want it to be sacramental, not sentimental. I want it in spaces sacred and profane, but not in abstracted places. I want it to be intimate and accessible, not isolated and exclusionary.

This is how I want it to be when I remember. This is how I want it to be when I sit with that sacrifice. This is how I want to know those words. This conspiring; this breathing-together.

This community; this gift-together. This communion; this sharing-together. This covenant; this coming-together. I want it to merge beautifully with my everyday, not stand apart from my lived-experience. I want it to fuse my laughter and my crying, my sacred and profane and profound, my before and my after.

This is how I want to take communion.

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Rosie by Sam Ornellas acryllic on canvas 45"x67"

I

’ve seen the massive banners advertising expensive whitening cream hung on the walls of houses in rural Laotian villages, where brown people spend their lives getting browner under the sun as they toil away in their fields. I’ve seen those same oppressive whitening cream ads looming over the Asian slum where I live. My beautiful neighbors sit helplessly under those billboards, lamenting their brown skin, assuming that their “ugly color” must be a defect caused by dirty water or some other aspect of their poverty.

They stare up into what seems to be the good life: wealthy, successful women wearing fashionable, modern clothes and sitting in comfortable surroundings. All of that glamor and success is connected to being fair-skinned.

Beauty is equated with the features of another race entirely—my race.

These women assume that as a representative of that other world of glamor and paleness called America, I must be living the dream. I try to explain that over there, the make-up and facial cream companies still have to make a profit, so they tell us light-skinned people other things to make sure we don’t feel pretty either. My neighbors are shocked to learn that women in my culture buy bronzers and even lay out under the sun or artificial lights to make their skin a deep, beautiful brown! They also wonder at my revelation that women in the West want to be as thin as possible. My neighbors are always encouraging me to eat more so that I’ll get “nice and fat.” I tell them I think we’re all crazy, buying those lies when they’ve just been made up by advertisers to goad us into spending more money. Didn’t God make CONSP!RE 55

all of us? If He finds us beautiful, then who are we to argue? At this point, all of us are usually laughing, and the giant billboard overhead is forgotten, if only momentarily. But it will take more than a single, lighthearted conversation to detox any of us.

The truth is that in spite of my firsthand experiences with the sometimes humorously conflicting standards of beauty across different cultures, I struggle myself to see the beauty in my body and to recognize its inherent goodness. I’m not sucked in by whitening creams, but in my own country there are other kinds of images which all march in lock-step communicating a single image of beauty: the magazines at the grocery store check-out, the pornography that sucks so many into addiction even before they ever enter a real sexual relationship, and the ads that assault us everywhere. For a nation and a world populated with such vibrantly diverse people of all shapes, sizes, and colors, the not-quite-human projections which populate this virtual world are strikingly, monotonously uniform. More often than not, I find my real-life, un-airbrushed human body to be outside the bounds of what these images promote as beautiful.

In every era of human history, there have been absurd categories of what is and is not considered beautiful— we have only to think of corsets in the U.S. or foot-binding in China to remind ourselves of the arbitrary

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(and opposing!) ideas of beauty that various societies have held over time.

But perhaps no other generation in history has had to deal with the scale of institutionalized standards of beauty that we face now. In today’s globalized world, all the machinery is in place to maintain the unprecedented monopoly of a single, universal ideal.

Nobody really wins in this caste-system of beauty, but Western, developed countries exporting their view of the body now means that the beauty industrial complex has also taken on the features of an oppressive, international empire with all of the racist and ethnocentric tendencies that entails.

This impossibly limited standard of beauty is bad enough, but behind it lurks an even deeper deception: that our bodies are primarily for looks anyway.

Before we even learn to evaluate the appearance of our bodies and compare them to others, we’ve already swallowed the assumption that our bodies are artistic objects to be observed and appraised. Our cultural lens teaches us that our sexuality and our physical appearance are the most important part of ourselves; they are the main thing we have to offer, the source of our power, or the basis of our worth. That puts us in a precarious position, because once we have reduced our significance to our bodies, then falling short of the standards our society has set for them is likely to lead us to the conclusion that we aren’t worth much at all. Popular

culture simultaneously over-emphasizes and under-values the human body, and especially the female body.

By the time we’re measuring ourselves against these standards, we’ve already forgotten that God has given us bodies to run, jump, play and work in rather than to merely put on display. Our bellies are for laughing, our voices are for singing and speaking truth into the world, our arms are for cuddling children and embracing lovers and reaching out to the lonely. Our bodies are beautiful as they give expression to our hearts and the workings of our minds; they are beautiful as they receive the warmth and goodness of the world through touch and taste and smell.

There is certainly beauty in the physical form of our bodies, but it is sacrilege to reduce such a complex, embodied soul to a combination of any number of desirable or undesirable physical traits!

So how can we free ourselves and our world from the stranglehold of such a destructive way of thinking?

The range of physical acceptability is primarily communicated to us through mass media in the form of advertisements and entertainment, but because we have come to believe them ourselves, we also repeat these messages to each other: mother to daughter, husband to wife, friend to friend. Encountering hundreds or even thousands of repetitions of our culture’s message every day is enough to cause anyone to begin slowly internalizing

these cultural ideals as universal truths which span all cultures and centuries.

Having grown up soaking in these messages myself, I’m still learning what it means to grow into an acceptance of myself that includes my body (that same body that I have been taught to criticize, discipline, modify, and reject in pursuit of an impossible ideal). I think the healing begins by speaking the truth against the roar of the lies.

We need to hear the truth reflected back to us from our community and our Creator as many times as we’ve heard the lies. We can begin dismantling the system by beginning to speak acceptance and love over ourselves and one another, passing on this sense of indestructible, God-given worth to our mothers and daughters and sisters and friends. We can begin to call out those attempts to manufacture insecurity for profit when we see them at the check-out line, or seeping into our own thoughts and conversations.

When we decide as individuals and communities to affirm the goodness of all of our bodies, the change we create is sure to begin slowly, on a small-scale. That’s how the coming of the Kingdom usually is. But like tiny mustard seeds growing into an unruly plant with surprising reach, this Truth quietly taking root in our hearts has the power to grow into something which will truly transform the landscape of our lives and of our world, whether or not it ever takes over the whole garden.

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All is Vanity by John Freeman acrylic on canvas 100cm x 75cm

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ALL THE CANDY YOU CAN EAT The Eucharistic Potential of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

by Anthony Easton

T

wo friends of mine visited the Art Institute of Chicago on the same day within just hours of each other.

That same day, both friends emailed me to discuss the same piece of art.

This isn’t that unusual actually. I spend a lot of time with artists and curators, and a lot of time talking about art— mostly a rarified form of shoptalk, a commentary on how a piece was interesting because of this idea or that tradition, or how it played into or against a work that had been done before.

But the conversation with my friends visiting Chicago was uncommon for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was more about what they felt than about what they thought.

The other unusual thing was the disparate backgrounds of my two friends.

Rachel has an MFA from a prestigious West Coast school. She shows art regularly in the United States and

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Canada. At the time, she was exhibiting at an apartment in Chicago, a show curated by two people who spent time at Yale. And the apartment was at the Drake, one of the most exclusive addresses in America. My other friend, Josh, is the son of a Lutheran minister, and he himself is a Lutheran organist and choir director. He lives with his wife and two children in a small suburb of Chicago. His wife and kids were with him at the Art Institute.

The artwork was a pile of spilled candy produced by Cuban American Queer artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Gonzalez-Torres constructed nine such piles to explore the nature of AIDS. Each candy spill was the weight of someone he loved. Some were the weight of he and his own lover, Ross Laycock, together. Others were just the weight of Ross. The piles of candy are meant to be taken, piece by piece, and eaten by those who view the art.

The installation in Chicago was Laycock’s healthy weight. As viewers take the individually-wrapped pieces of candy, the pile slowly shrinks. One would think that the candy would disappear, wasting away like physical death. But the candy is replenished.

Gonzalez-Torres specified which Chicago company should make the candy, as long as the company existed.

Then Laycock died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991. Felix died of AIDS in 1996, and the original candy company died too. Nevertheless, there is still a pile of candy in a gallery in Chicago that people I love can tell me about. They bring me candy from this pile and I can eat it.

I was worried about Josh’s kids when they saw this piece. I was worried that they wouldn’t understand wasting, or death, or politics, or the plague, or bodies, or about all of the other adult things that occur in this work—how

the wrapper on the candy was like a condom, for example. I was worried they wouldn’t have the gravitas to see the work like Rachel saw it or like I saw it. But Josh’s wife sat down and read the work and answered the kids’ questions. There was a pile of candy, and it was free candy, and it was complicated candy. It reminded me of the gospels: “Jesus said, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’” The candy was to be eaten. The tension between joy and sorrow, of eating and what was being eaten, was literally palatable.

Gonzales-Torres had inhabited Cuba’s revolutionary atheism and its exiles desire for traditional religion. This particular art piece can be read through a trend in his artwork—reciprocity, community building, gift giving—big spectacles in foreign places that might have failed at the small and humble goals that they lived with. There were

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nine candy sculptures altogether. Was there a problem of making a spectacle out of a commodity that was not supposed to be so large? Josh and Rachel provided two ways of working through what this meant. I kept thinking about this for months, kept working on the meaning of renewal, and on what to do with the small green candy waiting for me when I returned to Montreal.

I thought about the Eucharist.

If we think about Felix GonzalezTorres prophetically, it is a metaphor for a radically open table. A sacramentality that rests on the belief that the spirit will continually renew that which is wasted. Following Annie Dillard’s idea of nature as profligate in her gifts, perhaps we can think of ourselves as profligate in ours. Rachel and Josh and Josh’s kids can each get something from the act of taking and eating—the desire to take a candy or not take a candy, was based on the message that was received.

There are other ways that the Eucharist might be interpreted through Torres’s work. Think of the body of Christ and think about how in language, in the creation of ritual, we make palatable the leaking, the rotting, the seeping. The sacrament has a way of making the horror of the body palatable for human appetites. We think of Laycock as a pile

of candy, we think of his body falling apart. But Torres’ work, like the ritual of the Eucharist, allows for the wasting, the falling apart, to be wrapped and made palpable. Sanctification is a problem of palatability.

Torres’ work is tragic work. It is the work of plague. It is an object of ritual devotion, of saints’ bodies, a kind of postmodern commercial reliquary that is marked as an AIDS body—but it embraces hope that the AIDS body might be returned and restored. The Eucharist is a sorrowful and tragic act. A pile of candy that has no limits, that can be forever given away, has a kind of joy. It is pretty much the perfect ideal of joy. Josh’s kids stand in front of this pile (let’s make them conveniently innocent) and they see this pile, and they can take as much as they want.

The lesson is different for Rachel— with her art theory, working in the midst of rarified wealth—and for Josh, with his Lutheran heritage of low eucharist. They know that this pile of candy, this catholic act, represents everything that is written on a body that is dying—the government’s neglect, the hopedfor cure that doesn’t come, the loss of Laycock, the ideal body that can never be made ideal—but that it is still a gift fit for everyone.

Anthony Easton is a graduate student at Concordia University, Montreal.

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Reviews

Books to Engage Body and Soul.

Editor’s Note: Conspire is pleased to continue its collaboration with the Englewood Review of Books.

A

s we reflect on what it means to follow Christ with our whole person, a good place to start is with the incarnation, Jesus himself, God-who-became-human-flesh. One particularly helpful new book is Michael Frost’s Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement (IVP Books).

Frost underscores that religion is indeed an embodied experience. We should emphasize the kinesthetic. A communal hermeneutic would play out with people, at events, from liturgy, through sacraments, for daily rhythms. Chapter Six, “Learning Embodiment from the Master,” is Frost’s high note. He connects the testaments, shows the embodiment of Jesus in us, gives great examples, and quotes voluminously from Scripture. Frost mourns “slacktivism” where our involvement with issues is little more than a mouse click. As he should, Frost believes activism is physical, local, personal, and costly. Our mission is not a trip away but a hike down our sidewalks, within our congregations, and dare we say it, within our own homes (Mark Eckel).

We cannot speak of the incarnation, however, without considering the church as the body of Christ. One classic book that has been helpful for me in this regard is Gerhard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community (Fortress Press). Lohfink’s central theme is that at the heart of the mission of God is God’s work of gathering a people. This work began in ancient Israel, and continued as Jesus gathered a little community of 12 disciples. After Pentecost, the community of God’s people was no longer defined by ethnicity. The church, Lohfink observes, is a “contrast-society,” a community that embodies the way of Jesus. Lohfink describes in much detail what it means to embody the way of Jesus: CONSP!RE 63

living out the Sermon on the Mount, love for our sisters and brothers, renunciation of domination and violence, etc.

Another book that is especially helpful in understanding embodied apprenticeship to Jesus is The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson (Eerdmans). Peterson launches into the book with an observation about disembodied faith: “[So] many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living ‘in Jesus’ name.’ But the ways that dominate our culture have been developed either in ignorance or in defiance of the ways that Jesus uses to lead us.” Peterson’s work is essential because it reminds us that it is not enough simply to care about the same things Jesus cared about (love, peace, justice, for instance), but we must also seek these things in the same way that Jesus did, by denying ourselves and our selfish ambitions, and offering ourselves as living sacrifices for the Kingdom of God. Two superb novels that help us wrestle with embodiment are The Greek Passion by Nikos Kazantzakis (Simon and Schuster) and Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks (Ecco Books). In The Greek Passion, Kazantzakis – the author of The Last Temptation of Christ and Zorba the Greek—tells the tale

of a Greek village that is transformed by putting on a Passion play, by embodying and enacting the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. As the story progresses the actors begin to take on in real life, their roles in the Passion play, which leads to a conflict between Jesus and his disciples and the authorities of both church and village. Written in Kazantzakis’s blazingly vivid style, this novel stirs our imaginations with the possibility of embodying Christ in our everyday lives.

Russell Banks novel Lost Memory of Skin is recommended in the above book by Michael Frost. Frost describes it: “In his wrenching vision of American moral life, Lost Memory of Skin, novelist Russell Banks takes to task the plugged-in, tuned-out Internet culture lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference, and explores the terrible, dehumanizing consequences of choosing to live this way.” The novel laments the shift from flesh to little 1’s and 0’s, screens, and visual stimulation through pornographic images. (Mark Eckel) I love the images of embodiment that the poem “Christ has no Body but Yours,” attributed to St. Teresa of Avila, conjures: Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours, Yours are the eyes with which he looks Compassion on this world, Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours, Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Another particularly helpful book as we think about embodying faith, and especially the costs of our disembodied faith, is Sallie McFague’s The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Fortress Press). McFague describes this work, in the introduction, as an attempt to “Look at everything through one lens, the model of the universe or world as God’s body.” She proceeds CONSP!RE 65

over the remainder of the book to envision a rich theology for our age of ecological crisis that is built on this initial conviction.

In a similar vein is Ragan Sutterfield’s recent book Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us (Cascade Books).

Sutterfield offers here a poignant reflection on what it means to be human and to live in humility. It is no coincidence that both of these key ideas share the same Latin root, humus, meaning earth. In the opening chapter of the book, he notes that “The church has lived in a constant struggle throughout its history to escape from the grounded realities of dirt. The ‘spiritual life’ has become its domain and whether explicitly stated or not, salvation has come to mean the deliverance of souls, not bodies, persons not planets.” Cultivating Reality calls us to return to a Christian life that is firmly rooted in the soil underneath our feet. Sutterfield also reminds us of Paul’s metaphor for the body of Christ as composed of many members, with different gifts, given to us by the Spirit for the common good; an “ecclesial ecosystem” in which the values are love, mercy, compassion and gratitude. (Margaret D’Anieri) And lastly, no list of book recommendations about bodies and embodiment would be complete without Rachel Marie Stone’s recent book Eat With Joy: Redeeming God’s Gift of Food (IVP Books), which deals frankly with the images of bodies that we are fed in Western Culture, and how we can begin to resist the power of these images and to make peace with our bodies, eating in ways that are restorative.

Compiled by C. Christopher Smith, editor of The Englewood Review of Books.

The Englewood Review of Books is an online and print magazine that reviews a broad range of books on the themes of Community, Mission, Imagination and Reconciliation for a diverse, socially-engaged Christian audience.

Online at:EnglewoodReview. org or on Twitter at @ERBks. 66 CONSP!RE

Notes from Scattered Pilgrims: News from our Conspiring Communities

The heart of Conspire are the communities and groups who sustain us. Here, our coconspirers share what’s happening on the ground— many stories of redemption. For contact information and description of each community’s mission and activities, check out their websites.

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The Simple Way Philadelphia, PA In January this year, we found ourselves invited into a space to pause and look at who we are, what we are doing and where we are going as both an organization and a community. We’ve cleaned, and moved, we’ve talked and cried, we’ve farewelled coworkers and community mates, and we’ve celebrated and grieved over many things. But what a true gift this time has been for us because it’s helped us see with new eyes, and hear the whisper of the Spirit in a new way.

Over the past 15 years we’ve been so busy with a myriad of good things to be doing, or helping with that we have not always given as much attention to the spaces in between that we might have needed to. Spaces to cultivate and nurture healthy rhythms, to tend to and a reconcile relationships, to strengthen foundations and structures, and be fully present to our neighbors and own experiences.

So that’s what we’ve set out to do for the remaining months of 2014 and beyond. To intentionally create open spaces to allow room for us to return to our roots, sharing food through our food distribution

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program, hanging out with kids and supporting our scholars as they attend Eastern University, planting gardens and providing safe places in our neighborhood to spend time, and continuing to challenge the systems that hold people down.

We feel reenergized in our sacred call to love God, love people and follow Jesus in our neighborhood. www.thesimpleway.org Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Elkhart, IN AMBS is planning a conference Sept.

18-20 called “Rooted and Grounded: A Conference on Land and Christian Discipleship.” Featured speakers are Ellen Davis, S. Roy Kaufman and Barbara Rossing, along with more than 50 workshop and paper presenters. Worship, immersion experiences, and time to work in the seminary’s gardens will be included. The seminary welcomes all who want to engage in a theology that cares for God’s creation, the land, and all that lives on it.

Information and registration is online at www.ambs.edu/rootedandgrounded.

The GAPS Community Downey, CA

These days, we have been keeping up with our usual busyness of rescuing food (pre-dumpster) to give out to hungry neighbors, sorting and displaying clothing donations for our pay-as-you-will thrift shop, and teaching/mentoring youth at our afterschool kids program. We have also been enjoying eating food we have grown in our yard. A neighbor actually scolded us the other day for having “weeds” in our yard, because “This is a nice neighborhood and it needs to remain that way.” Little did this neighbor know, we were growing our salad greens!

Also, our Psalmist in residence finished her year with us recently and we miss her! Lastly, we ask for prayers as we are entering a time of transition an re-imagination.

The Nehemiah Community Springfield, MA

We had an amazing spring. In May, we had six visitors from the Platte Clove (Bruderhof ) community located in New York State. We were deeply blessed by their time with us, and we intend to stay in close contact with them in

the days ahead. Our community has also hosted two guests, Terri and Callum Sutherland, who are originally from Scotland now living in England. Callum is in the midst of graduate work to obtain his Ph.D. They are visiting intentional communities in the U.S. as part of the research for his thesis.

Debbie and Pat’s grandchildren have been visiting from Hawaii, as well. Our time with them has been a great blessing. www.facebook. com/NehemiahMinistriesInc Dathouse Indianapolis, IN The summer has made life very busy; the community center is in full swing remodel and coming to crunch time, kids and gardens are growing like crazy, and people are taking trips here and there! We are hopeful and desperate. Maranatha! www.dathouse.wordpress.com CONSP!RE 69

First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights Pittsburgh, PA Our community continues to enjoy and appreciate God’s gift of children. We celebrate the children in our families, as our worshipping community (which averages about 115 each week) has celebrated the baptisms of seven children in the past six weeks! We celebrate the children in our neighborhood as we engage in our annual summer camp, called “Cross Trainers”. Every day for most of the summer, kids in our west Pittsburgh neighborhood come together for breakfast, lunch, music, art, Bible stories, field trips, and even a chance to go to “sleep-away camp” outside the city. We are incredibly grateful for the ways that God has allowed this camp to continue for the past sixteen years, and rejoice at seeing former campers emerge as adult leaders in this context. www.chup.org Tierra Nueva Burlington, Washington In October 2014, The People’s Seminary will pilot its first cohort Certificate in Transformational Ministry at the Margins. This

18-month course of study is designed for Christian pastoral workers called to pioneer holistic ministry among the poor and marginalized.

The foundation of the certificate is Tierra Nueva’s more than 30 years of ministry and reflection. Its objective is to train ministry leaders, missionaries, theology students, and pastors in transformational ministry that includes Word, Spirit, and Street categories. The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology is considering co-sponsoring this non-accredited certificate.

Tierra Nueva will host the course at its ministry center building in Burlington, Washington, an hour north of Seattle. New Earth Refuge in Mount Vernon will provide lodging for up to 20 participants during the on-site sessions. A separate cohort based in the United Kingdom will begin at All Saints Woodford Wells Church in London in January 2015. Partnerships for cohorts in Paris, Seoul and Bangkok are also being pursued.

For more information, please visit our website: www.tierra-nueva.org (under “Upcoming TPS courses”)

Alfredo works in Tierra Nueva’s permaculture garden

thanks to all of our conspiring communities Alternative Seminary Philadelphia, PA www.alternativeseminary.net Alterna LaGrange, GA www.alternacommunity.com Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Elkhart, IN www.ambs.edu Another World Is Possible Philadelphia, PA Anthony's Plot Winston-Salem, NC www.anthony'splot.org Blaine Street Community Detroit, MI Camden Community Houses Camden, NJ Caritas Village Memphis, TN Carpenter's Church TX Castanea Nashville, TN www.castanea.org Church Communities International Centurion's Guild Cincinnati, OH Chicago Catholic Worker Chicago, IL www.ambs.edu Church of the Sojourners San Francisco, CA www.churchofthesojourners.org Circle of Hope Philadelphia, PA Come Together Canton, TX www.cometogethertrading.com Common Change Oakland, CA www.commonchange.com Community of Faith Church Fallbrook, CA www.ambs.edu Compost Boulder, CO www.compostme.org Conspiring for Coatesville Coatesville, PA Coral House Community SC dathouse Indianapolis, IN www.dathouse.wordpress.com DC Area Community Washington D.C. Detroit Villages Detroit, MI www.detroitvillages.org Downstream Project Harrisonburg, VA Dwell VT East Central Ministries, Inc. Albuquerque, NM www.eastcentralministries.org Eastern University St. Davids, PA www.eastern.edu Esperance-Sloansville UMC Esperance, NY Family Tree Charlotte, NC Faith and Deeds CA Faith & Justice Scholars Jefferson City, TN First United Presbyterian of Crafton Heights Pittsburg, PA Forming (in) South Lake Union WA George School PA Georgetown College Campus Ministry Georgetown, KY www.georgetowncollege.edu/campusministry

Grace Community Church Maryborough, Queensland, Australia Incarnation Station KS Jubilee Food Pantry Hubbard, OR www.jubileefoodpantry.wordpress.com Jubilee Partners Comer, GA www.jubileepartners.org JustUs Ontario, Canada Lahash International OR Likewise Books Westmont, IL www.ivpress.com Maitland Baptist Church NSW Missio Dei Community St. Petersburg, FL www.themissiondei.com Mission Year Atlanta Atlanta, GA Mission Year Chicago Chicago, IL More Than Thursdays Oakland, CA Mulberry House Springfield, OH www.unlikelyinsurgence.blogspot.com Nehemiah Ministries Springfield, MA www.nehemiah-ministries.com New Providence Community Church New Providence Nomad's Land Birmingham, AL Numana Inc. KS Raising Micah / Ascension Lutheran Church Thousand Oaks Reba Place/Shalom Mission Communities Evanston, IL www.rebaplacefellowship.org ReIMAGINE! San Francisco, CA www.reimagine.org SAC Denver, CO Salado United Methodist Church Salado, TX San Rafael First UMC San Rafael, CA www.sanrafaelfirstumc.org School for Conversion Durham, NC www.schoolforconversion.org Servants Vancouver Vancouver, Canada www.servantsasia.org Solomon's Porch Minneapolis, MN Third Street House KY The Book Parlor Spokane, WA www.thebookparlor.com The GAPS Community Downey, CA The Simple Way Philadelphia, PA www.thesimpleway.org The Vine Haverhill, MA www.thevinehaverhill.com Tierra Nueva Ministires Burlington, WA www.tierra-nueva.org United Church of Milton Fairfax, VT Western Boulevard Presbyterian Church Social Justice Forum Cary, NC