Water, Gravity, Grace...

originally published 12/31/2017

Last fall before moving to Bainbridge Island, my then-boyfriend and I had the chance to visit Iceland.  Of course, Iceland is amazing.  We rented a camper-van for two weeks, and spent our time on the southern coast.  There is more to see and I hope to return someday.  There’s a lot of good that comes with traveling alongside a photographer.  We spent days at some places, where most travelers jump out of their vehicles, snap photos, and race away to the next spot in the guidebook.  Not us.  Days at a sight.  Days.  So chill.  

N would hike off with his large-format camera, sometimes I followed to help (especially to hold umbrellas in case of rain!), but most of the time I could meander.  Walking slowly and letting thoughts come and go, I am good at.  Hustling, keeping a rigid travel itinerary, not for me.  So it was a near-perfect two weeks.  

At that point, I was 5 months into being on-leave from call.  I was just beginning to acknowledge inklings of truly leaving the church’s rostered leadership.  N and I had just finished a summer of sailboating Lake Superior, and you’d think I’d have had plenty of mind-wandering and discernment time there… but I had actually pushed away reflecting much about church stuff while we sailed.  Hours of silence and solitude in Iceland’s enormous landscapes cracked open my little mental box of someone-ought-to-process-her-leaving-the-ministry-already.  

The one pitfall of traveling with photographer: there’s a lot of gear.  To stay within the airline luggage weight limits, we had to trim down our personal gear - so I was without a journal, and that almost physically hurt as the days of solitude flowed by.  I typed little notes in my iPhone, and I’m glad I did, but it was a poor substitute for this pen-and-paper-loving gal.  

All of this introduction, enough!  I just wanted to share those raw notes from that time.  

note from near Seljalandsfoss: 

In Iceland, watching so many waterfalls, thinking about trust.  Water ultimately trusts gravity.  Plunges over the highest cliffs, unafraid of what awaits.  And it is that same force of trust that draws water, meandering for miles and miles of volcano-ash delta, as if but never actually lost.  Both waterways just as trusting, as faithful, as present to their reality every moment.  

note from Jokulsarlon: 

I tended my congregation the way I watch this glacial lagoon: intently, berg by berg, noticing the features of each.  Where one seems fragile, where another is buffered by its mass, where each may float next in the currents.  And here, one seems impossibly held together, pieces ready to collapse any second.  Transfixed, breath-held, I watch, knowing I can do nothing but witness.  I backtrack, picturing how this iceberg must have calved and melted and re-froze into now.  Endless empathizing imaginations.  But the tiny arches hold, for now, unfazed by my attentions.  While far off, beyond my focus, I can hear all kinds of cracklings and groaning and movement.  Clacking, grinding, and a whoosh-splash-ripple of water disturbed from some other iceberg’s change.  Always affecting the entire lagoon, but the specifics are impossible to anticipate. 

I tended my congregation this way.  Perhaps over-focused on what I could see at a given time, what I could attempt to understand.  While all around I did realize - all those distant booms and crunches - much was going on that I couldn’t witness or ever comprehend in detail.  This is both a comfort and great frustration.  The terrible fragile bergs that can actually hold up, and need no nursing or hovering from me.  Yet also the shattering of another (“you weren’t there, pastor”) that sends ripples throughout.  And the one that never allows itself to be seen breaking.  Congregations are full of these.  

So what can pastoring mean?  To witness and listen and love it all, and control nothing.  To describe with awe, anything I am granted to see.  Is it my work to do?  I do this everywhere anyway… 

another note from Jokulsarlon: 

Today I watched the end of existence for ices older than I can fathom.  Blocks great and small calved from this glacier, drifting through a lake and a filament of a channel, out to the Atlantic.  Bus-sized, house-sized chunks of ice tossed like dice in great long waves come to meet them from across the world; a communion of soggy saints.  Pushed ashore onto black sands, where sunlight and salt wears them down into handfuls of glittering shards in a few hours.  

note compiled over the second week of the trip: 

Upon watching waterfalls, of devastating height and power, could one ever have trust in God’s goodness, the way this water trusts gravity?  To plunge over the edge, if that is one’s course?

And watching endless ash-and-sand deltas, could one trust that this is your course, pulled invisibly onward by the same faith as the water that was called to dramatic falls?  To be silently absorbed, clarified in the sieve of particles, moving imperceptibly, letting go of what you carried all this way.  Nourishing other lives.  Still responding to gravity’s longing, though fewer tourists will photograph you.  

Watching enormous glaciers advance down the valleys.  Suppose one is stubborn in one’s watercourse?  Recalcitrant, grinding everything and everyone in your life to powder?  Resisting gravity’s graces until your own mass sabotages you into movement?  You will melt, pressed against the final stone that doesn’t budge.  Or perhaps you reach the sea, intact, self-possessed, calving defiantly.  What a shock you have to come: buoyancy!  At last and for all time, out of your own control, swept, no, carried, yes, even cradled, by the same substance as yourself, your life.  

Thanks for reading.  Have a beautiful New Year’s Eve!