Member Mission Newsletter #50 – More Living Pentecost     

“I used to be a Sunday Christian; member mission has helped me to live my life daily as a Christian,” said
a high school phys. ed. teacher after working through these questions.
Have you seen them?
They will lead you to your missions in each of your daily mission fields – in
your home, your work, your local community, the wider world, your leisure, your own spiritual health, and your part in your church’s life and its outreach.

 

1.  What has God been doing in (this mission field)?  What message am I getting about it?  Try a response beginning with: "I believe God is . . ."
2. As I think about God's message, what is my vision or goal for how I want life to be (in this mission field)?
3.  What am I doing right now to make this goal or vision a reality?
4.  What do I still need to do?  As a good starting point, think of where you need to bring or to increase caring or love, fairness or justice.  Take into account your gifts, limitations, and convictions. 
5.  What, specifically, will I do or continue to do to make my vision or goal a reality?  Limit yourself to just one positive change.  This is or will be your mission (in this mission field).
6.  Whom do I need to work with me to achieve this change; and how will I talk about the change I want to make?  Think of this task as a team effort.  For the best results, you will probably need to work with another person or with several other people to achieve this change.  Consider how you might word this mission in a way that will appeal to a specific potential teammate.  Answer with the person's name and words you might actually use.  
7. As I recruit and work with my teammate and when the time is right, what could I say about how I see that what we are doing is or can be part of God's mission?  Answer with words you might actually use.
8.  As we work together for this needed change and when the time is right, how could I encourage my teammate to seek help in church life?  Answer with words you might actually use.

 

This month

FOUR STORIES

•  “Thanks for encouraging me!”
•  A judge pays attention
•  A leisure-time mission in a barbershop quartet
•  Will you join a pilot project for “On-The-Job Prayers?”

RESOURCES

•  “At Commencement, a Call for Religious Literacy”
•  Help with budgets for home and church
•  “Member Mission: a Way into a New Future”
•  One-time activities on living your daily missions
•  “A Time for Heresy”

FOR MEDITATION

•  A fresh way to witness

 

STORIES

 

“Thanks for encouraging me!"

The young campers were eagerly boarding the sailboat.  But one, never having experienced open water, was holding back.  She was frightened about getting on board.  My impulse was to let her stay on shore – but her friends were determined to encourage her to experience a new adventure. Finally, they persuaded her to give it a try.  After all, she could swim and she was wearing a life jacket.  Reluctantly she boarded.  Once the wind caught the sails, her timidity melted away, and soon she loved it!  That afternoon, when campers were given a chance to volunteer to go for a sail, she was the first to raise her hand. 

This summer, within reason, encourage your friends to try new things.  It's a special kind of leisure-time mission.

Contact: Peyton Craighill, (peyton.g@comcast.net, 610-667-9298) 

 

A judge pays attention

Charles Reynard was elected a circuit judge, a trial court position, in McLean County, IL in 2002.  With Judy Valente, his wife and a broadcast journalist, he has also written Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005). [Last month’s MMNews told her story.]

“I handle a variety of cases and I have written poetry about some of those experiences.  I regard my work as a form of ministry.  I have been able to harmonize the desire to serve with being a judge.  Many times the law is fairly clear and, as a result, there isn’t a difficult moral decision to be made.  Yet, every day there are close cases where the decision is guided both by the law and by spiritual principles.  I believe it’s important that all of the participants in the court room are heard.  Also, that I don’t jump to conclusions even though the answer seems to be apparent.

In juvenile court, where I used to sit my first year, there is an overpowering need to fix some of the worst imaginable situations afflicting young people.  For abused and neglected children who have been removed from their homes and placed in alternate care, the intention of the courts is to find a solution to their problems and to set them on a course of healing.  It is very difficult to respond with the ‘right’ answer that fixes the situation.  I have learned in my experience, in my poetic discipline, and in my religious discipline to slow down, to pay attention, and to listen as non-judgmentally as possible.  In our book, I tell of an abused and neglected young man who presented a desperate situation.  He was in a hospital’s psychiatric ward after many years of bouncing around the substitute care system.  There weren’t any right answers.  I learned that he did not need a judge to ‘fix’ his problems.  That is an egotistical expectation that focuses on the judge or the lawyer – on everybody but the youth.  What he needed was someone simply to pay attention and to respect his presence in the courtroom as a human being.  I am not just a legally trained person, but also a religiously, spiritually, and poetically instructed person.

We are Christ for one another and we are one in Christ.  I learned that in my Catholic upbringing and other Christian sources.  That is an indispensable insight for paying attention to this other person who is one for whom I am ministering the Gospel.  It is preaching the word without using words.  I am present to that person because I am him and he is me.  We are one in Christ.  If I neglect to treat him that way, I am violating the terms of my ministry. 

Anyone accused of any crime – embezzlement, child abuse, sexual assault, any crime chargeable under the criminal code – is entitled to the same treatment.  He may be possessed by the Devil but he is still a child of God.  He is still one in Christ with me and deserves respect and attention. 

And so does the victim.  Victims are forgotten in the criminal court process.  As judge and during my sixteen years as elected State’s Attorney, I found that victims need to be put in parity with the other parties.  The victim is entitled to be heard and to make statements at the time of sentencing.  The constitutional rights of the victim are often forgotten with the attention given to the defendant.  The victims are an instrumental human presence in the proceedings.  For one faithful to the word, they are not to be forgotten.  The same is true for attorneys, the other witnesses, the probation and police officers.  Any who come into my courtroom are to be treated with that kind of attention.  A Mary Oliver poem says, ‘I don’t know what a prayer is.  I do know how to pay attention.’  Prayer is not just intercession or petition.  It is paying attention.

How does God help you to pay attention?

I see God helping me to pay attention as already in me.  We are infused in our entirety with God.  That does not make us God.  I might only be a single cell in God’s presence but God is love and love, God, is in me.  God is not separate from me.  I don’t have a white-haired, old man image of God.  I believe in the mystical Body of Christ.  I am, literally, a part of the physical Body of Christ.  We are one in that mystical presence of Christ.  That is the sum and substance of my capacity to be attentive to the next person.  God has gifted me with an awareness and a faith that I am part of God.  I start and end with the ability to be attentive to others because we are all part of the same identity – part of the mystical Body of Christ.  We are not going to abuse ourselves – to be inattentive to ourselves.  We are all literally connected.  I am connected to you.  With that as an objective reality for me, it is easy for me to respect, to attend to you, to minister to you, to receive from you the ministry that you offer.

How do I stay attentive?  So much of life we go through asleep.  I choose to return to the reality that God is in me.  I cannot escape God.  When I try to deny that reality, I must choose to come back to it. 

And God helps you to do that.  Our freedom is a mysterious interplay of God’s work in us and our own work.

I believe that.  It’s quite mysterious.  I can’t begin to describe it very meaningfully.

What is the poetic discipline you mention?

It’s the discipline of slowing down and paying very close attention to what is here and now.  It’s a process of waking up to the here and now.  In the poetry I find the most moving, I find it has slowed to see the finest points of reality.  That’s what poetic discipline does.  It does not have to be religiously inspired.  It can come from something entirely different from the spiritual, marry the spiritual, and lead to very productive spiritual outcomes.  Slow down and pay ever closer attention.  People say to Judy and me, ‘I’ve never been a poetry person.’  They like the poetry in our book.  They thought poetry had to do with rhyme and meter.  They were never told that poetry is just looking at something so closely that it is transformed in a larger and more meaningful universe.”

Contact: Charles Reynard, 7 Payne Place, Normal, IL 61761; 309-452-4733; judge.reynard@mcleancountyil.gov