Fermata Apr 1, 2022: "Sleep in Seattle"
First UMC of Tacoma, WA & University Presbyterian Church of Seattle, WA
Fermata is the weekly newsletter describing some of the past week’s highlights from Notes of Rest, which is my spiritual retreat ministry that interweaves text, music, and questions for the sake of cultivating stillness, introspection, and creativity in communities so that all may rest. I'd love to host a Notes of Rest for your church, seminary, or affinity group. Feel free to reply to this email to start the conversation!
First UMC of Tacoma, WA & University Presbyterian Church of Seattle, WA
Hi everyone,
This week I had a wonderful time hosting multiple sessions in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. At First UMC Tacoma, I offered a session on the sacredness of work. We sat with how workers were so special to God that God wanted to make sure everyone could find their rest from it (Deuteronomy 5:12-15). I asked this group of social justice-bent pastors and laypeople from around the city how their rest in God was starving their idolatry of work. I asked because any work, including that of social justice, can lead to overexertion and thus degradation of the self. The session reminded us that God had taken the Hebrew people recently freed from slavery away from the temptation to overly focus on work by giving them routine rest.
The participants shared beautiful responses. Rev. Shalom (the pastor of First UMC and pictured below) was inspired to sculpt her play-doh into the various phases of the moon. She explained that the moon is often visible only in part, yet it is always there in its fullness. Similarly, our need to rest may make us more obscure to people, but we should not equate lessened visibility with being less than whole. I found that insight instructive: sometimes we overwork because we want to remain visible, but that overexertion renders us less whole than if we were like the moon and embraced our phases. May God help us discern how visible we actually need to be.
At University Presbyterian Church, I got to work with the staff for a session during the day and then with the whole church at night. The staff session was special because this was my third session with them, but my first in-person! I am thankful to have cultivated this longitudinal relationship with them, because familiarity can deepen our rest. We had a wonderful time thinking about how sleep can sharpen our souls’ vigilance and signify our trust in God (8:23-27, 26:40-46).
Something powerful happened while I played for the church-wide session that night. I was playing my standard ending, the Negro Spiritual Give Me Jesus, when all of the sudden the Spirit came over me and I spontaneously went into Holy, Holy, Holy, written by the Englishman John Bacchus Dykes. When I finished the medley I was almost crying onstage because of the profundity of melding two songs about The Lord that emerged from opposite ends of empire. Dykes wrote Holy, Holy, Holy from the vantage point of imperial England during the height of their colonial reign (1861), whereas Give Me Jesus emerged as a collective declaration and cry from my ancestors living through the hell of chattel slavery (also 19th century). Both songs could be Notes of Rest because they spoke to a God who knew suffering (the thesis of Give Me Jesus) and who died at the hands of empire (a roundabout way of reading Holy, Holy, Holy). This spontaneous blending of the genres was showing me, showing us, how God might be present in all kinds of contexts. In the midst of restlessness of colonialism and slavery, God can still give us beautiful Notes of Rest.
Here’s what Atsuko Tamura, a parishioner from UPC, had to say about our time together Wednesday night:
“We find ourselves as a church and a faith community, in a time of high stress that comes from a combination of what some may describe as the tension between grief but also hope. The grief, anxiety and sadness as a result of the pandemic's effects on our bodies, minds and souls, the state of the world and our own neighborhood and for some, families that are even more divided. But it's also the hope and conviction that comes from how we as believers are called to unity as God's children to be true Jesus followers…How can we put our shared desires for rest - individually and as a community - in the presence of God? ‘Notes of Rest’… was an experiential lesson and invitation individually and as a faith community on the importance of REST and how it is possible to find it. I hope for more chances to be immersed in Julian's ministry. It's just what this world needs and I've not seen or experiences anything like it.”
abundantly,
Julian