Telling My Holy Story: Finding My School

When I was younger, a faith community was a gym for me.  It was a place to hang out, shoot some hoops, occasionally play some games, even lift weights or work out.  As I grew older, it took the form of a classroom, a place where knowledge was imparted, lectures given, quizzes taken.  For a long stretch, the churches I was part of felt more like garages, a place to house things while not in use, a place to even tinker or fix a flat or a leak.  When I had a metanoia, a turn towards, just about ten years ago, my faith community was like a neighborhood dive, a TexMex or BBQ joint where great food was shared & friends hung together, shifting in & out as their days allowed.

All of these experiences of church, of faith communities, are as nouns, as places, planted in a location or a hub or a gathering place.

These places - a neighborhood that goes from St. Matthias to Journey IFC- all have a physical address, a facility that people pledge money for, a roof and doors & A/C.

But that is not their point - that is not the end or even the means.

It took me a long time, but I experience faith communities more & more as verb, as a communal action of "faithing our practices", as Brian McLaren says in Finding Our Way Again .  And more & more, I experience this verb, this process, as incubation:

In`cu*ba"tion\, n.
1. A sitting on eggs for the purpose of hatching young; a brooding on, or keeping warm, (eggs) to develop the life within, by any process. --Ray.
2. (Med.) The development of a disease from its causes, or its period of incubation.
3. A sleeping in a consecrated place for the purpose of dreaming oracular dreams.   
origin:  Latin incubāre, incubāt-, to lie down on : in-, on;  cubāre, to lie down.

Developing the life within, to lie down, even the medical aspect - that is what faith communities are all about right now for me.

But especially - the shared act of sleeping in a consecrated place for the purpose of dreaming oracular dreams.

Dreaming oracular dreams - this is the very thing that is written in יואל, what we call nowadays the book of Joel:

Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions.

It excites me to be an old - or older - man today, to dream dreams, to hatch schemes & be there as something develops.  When I was younger, it was all about vision, all about speed, all lost in the blur.

I also excites me to begin, as an older person, to experience wisdom, particularly as it is described in this piece Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain:

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.

“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”

I realize that this did not just happen, that all that time in gyms, garages, TexMex joints and classrooms has formed me in the most exquisite & maddening way.  I also realize that so much of this wisdom flows from when I came undone, when so many things I held back finally hatched, whether I wanted them to or not.

All this creativity and insights and original thinking I find flowing around me come from the community I am living in the midst of, the school I have finally found (or has found me):

Comments

[paul]

beautiful.