I was working on my first master’s degree at Northern
Michigan University, where I had also received my undergrad. During the four
years I’d spent there studying English Ed, I was dating a guy named Michael,
who grew up Lutheran (as I did) and had connections to the Lutheran Campus
Ministry, a relatively small group led by a pastor named Jon.
Jon was unlike most pastors I knew. He had a degree in
social work and ran a nonprofit that provided counseling services to other
clergy. He practiced tai chi and drank green tea. He spoke with a quiet respect
and reverence not just for matters of faith but for nature as God’s creation.
And on Wednesday evenings at nine in a small, candle-lit University Center room,
he tipped a wooden mallet against a brass bell he brought back from his Peace
Corps days in Nepal. The bell echoed gently, seven resonant tolls. For the next
hour, we sang the liturgy in quiet harmony, shared roses and thorns from our
drama-filled college lives, breathed in the heady aroma of sweetgrass from an
Indian reservation, received the Eucharist, murmured prayers, and listened as Jon shared a few verses
from Scripture and maybe an anecdote from one of his travels.
On one of the very first of these gatherings I attended with
Michael, Jon shared the New Testament story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.
It was a chapter I knew well, an often-referenced narrative in my Sunday School
classes as one of those fabulous miracles. Two
loaves, two fishes. And He fed all those people. It was magical.
But Jon suggested another way to understand the story. What
if, he posed, Jesus had shared such a message of hope and love with the
multitude that those who had food with them—tucked deep in pockets, hidden away
in the bottom of a basket—were moved to share what little they had with those
around them? What if, instead of magically materializing from the hands of the
Savior, the sustenance that fed the five thousand was supplied by changed
hearts, by newly-generous souls?
A funny knot had positioned itself within my gut. But that’s not what happened, I thought.
It was a miracle. Jesus performed
miracles, that’s just what He did. I sat uncomfortably, probably pulling at
a hangnail, likely crossing and uncrossing my legs. What kind of pastor is this guy, contradicting the Bible like that?
As weeks went on, though, I returned Wednesday after
Wednesday, maybe because my friends were going, or because it helped me feel
connected spiritually to my boyfriend, but ultimately because I was powerfully drawn
to the new perspectives offered by the conversations that took place. I soon
realized that Jon wasn’t misinterpreting Scripture; he was simply presenting it
from another angle. We studied Paul Tillich and Diedrich Bonhoeffer. We slowed
down our perpetually-occupied bodies by learning tai chi. We took field trips
to walk labyrinths. It was though all my life I had seen my faith, my belief in
God, as a square. And now that square had been jostled out of place, and it
became clear to me what had been true all along: that two-dimensional square
was only one side of a three-dimensional cube.
It was a miracle, I realized. It was a bigger miracle than I
thought.
I remember the story about that pastor.I like his take.
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