Know Boundaries, Know God. No Boundaries, No God. No Life.

Boundary (noun) 1. A line or a limit where one thing ends, and another begins   --Dictionary.com

“What are you looking at?!”

I was just finishing up supper last week with friends whom I’ve shared a weekly dinner table with for more than twenty years now.  If it is a Monday night chances are good that we are breaking bread together. But this meal, this sacred and set apart meal I so appreciate? It was being disturbed by a lack of boundaries that evening.

Ok, by my lack of boundaries.

Back story. Last fall, in a fit of consumer envy, I bought myself a smartwatch, because everyone has one, right? In fact, I purchased a wicked “smaht” watch. Not some undereducated Fitbit, not for me anymore! My new watch tells me about so much than steps. It precisely measures my heart rate and my pulse ox (whatever that is), gives me a weather report, tracks my sleep, measures my stress even.  You can’t have too much information phone wise—I think. Oh, and when I get a text message on my phone or a call, the watch then vibrates on my wrist.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZZZZ.

Kind of like a Pavlov’s bell. The watch shakes. I immediately turn my wrist to look, push my sleeve up, and then read that oh so important text, confirming my haircut appointment for the next day. I react to that technological stimuli. And yes, I guess I do that even at the dinner table now.

Hence my friend’s legitimate protest, “What are you looking at?!”  She rightfully wanted to continue our discussion about family and work, about the election and our friends, but me?  Well, the “bell” went off. My brain got a jolt of adrenaline—WHAT’S THAT!!!! WHO IS THE VERY IMPORTANT PERSON TRYING TO GET IN CONTACT WITH ME? I AM SOOOOOOOOO NEEDED BY THE WORLD—MUST…READ…TEXT!

And so, I broke the precious boundary of our mealtime together, our connection, my paying attention to her, as a way of showing her, and saying, “I care about you.”  And yes, “I care about you more than my next trivial or annoying or interruptive text message.”  But that night the text trumped the friend. Not the first time I’ve done that. Not good. Not good at all.

I’m no Luddite. (Google it.) I mostly love technology. Enjoy it. Use it. Appreciate it. Yes, my new smart watch too.  But what I don’t like about it is how so easily I allow it to break boundaries in my life.  To break into my life when I should be fully “here” and  fully “now,” and not being dragged away by some technological interruption. It’s sobering for me to recognize and confess just how often I do allow my phone to break boundaries.

At the dinner table. On a walk in the woods. In the car: how many times have I almost rear-ended someone to try and read a stupid text or notification? I’ve broken the boundary of looking at work emails or texts when I am at play and reading personal emails or texts when I should be working. I don’t think I’ve been as aware of this busting of boundaries as I should be.  So, I am very grateful to my friend for calling me out for my rude behavior at the table.

One of the real gifts of practicing a faith tradition, is its requirement that you set boundaries, as a way to connect with God and take a breath and quiet the heart and soul. In faith we set boundaries between sabbath and work; boundaries between holy days and regular days; boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Go to worship at church, temple or mosque and you’ve set a boundary. This is my God time. Phone off. Tech ceased. For now, it is just me and my higher power.  Set aside time for daily prayer or meditation and you’ve got a boundary. Listen to the deepest longings of your heart, listen for the invitation of transcendence, somethings beyond daily life…this cannot happen unless we are intentional about setting a boundary and honoring that boundary.

Faith teaches boundaries and when you start doing that for God, you can also start doing it in the rest of your life too. No phones at the dinner table or no phones in the bedroom.  Maybe no TV in the bedroom.  Or how about this? A weekend is a weekend—not time to let more work bleed over into what is supposed to be time off. Boundaries. This is my time to walk, to exercise, to paint, to birdwatch. To be disciplined, to experience such things, we have to set boundaries.

So, thank you my friend, for your truth telling, showing me that by reading some throwaway text and not being fully present to you, we’d lost the boundary of loved ones at the table. Just so you know: I got home later that night and stopped notifications for my watch. I guess it is now not so smart. Maybe I am a bit wiser.

Thank you, God, for life and for boundaries. Now friend, can you please pass the bread and butter? We’ve got a meal to share and lots to catch up on.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

    

 

  

 

 

When Bullies Win the Vote, Human Decency Always Loses

“Why do we continue to breed little minds who can find no recompense for their own failures other than to belittle and mock the talents…of others? When will everyone realize that we are all equal in the eyes of God?”                 --Og Mandino, author

No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get the words out.  Or the word actually.  I’d know what I wanted to say.  I’d begin to say it but then it was as if it got caught in my throat and no matter how much I struggled, the best I could do was an awkward, elongated sound, like “NNNNNN” or “DDDDDDDD.”

I stuttered.

It wasn’t for very long, in middle school, for a few years. Every once in a while, it will happen to me again, when I really, really want to say something, and my eagerness seems to trip up my speech.  The medical definition of stuttering is straightforward. From mayoclinic.org, “Stuttering is a speech condition that disrupts the normal flow of speech….With stuttering, the interruptions in flow [of speech] happen often and cause problems for the speaker.”

Thank goodness I grew out of it. Kind of ironic that I went on to do public speaking for a living, my vocation and my life’s calling. But one thing never, ever happened to me because of my stuttering and for this I am so grateful to God, to folks in my life, and even to the world I grew up in. No one ever mocked me for my stuttering. No one ever put me down. No one ever shamed me or called out my stuttering in front of others to humiliate me. 

Who would do such a thing?

Be so cruel, mean spirited, so devoid of empathy, that they’d actually insult someone because of a disability like stuttering? I’m not talking about middle school kids who don’t know better, who bully out of deep insecurity. They usually grow out of that meanness. I’m talking about an actual adult who did this, in public, and I suppose, to build himself up by tearing down someone else.

It was a former United States president, who mocked our current president, for struggling with stuttering. Happened at a rally in Georgia. I won’t quote what was said but the former TV reality star apparently got what he wanted from that mocking: applause and laughter from his supporters.

That awful story made me remember what it was like to struggle with stuttering. It made me sad about the casual cruelty that has seeped into our common life in the past few years, how once publicly accepted norms of decency and mutual respect in the public square, have just gone away. How such meanness is now the norm in social media, in many public meetings, in snarky news stories, and from candidates who are supposed to represent the best of America and bring out the best in Americans but do just the opposite.

Now, too often, public speech is hurtful, hateful, spiteful, and personal. It digs and it jabs, and it insults. It lowers our civic life to the level of the middle school playground. When I watched the video of a powerful national leader acting like an adolescent bully, mocking another, being so nasty, it broke my heart. Angered me. Is this how we now talk to and about one another in public? Are these the lessons we want to teach our children about what it means to be a good citizen, and a fellow neighbor?

It reminded me of a very different political rally and story from October 2008. One of the presidential candidates then was Senator John McCain, and the gathering was held less than a month before election day. McCain versus Barack Obama. A voter stood up and gave her opinion about Obama. “I have read about him and he’s…he’s an Arab.” Code word back then, for either Muslim or terrorist or both. 

McCain shook his head and gently said to the woman, “No ma’am, no ma’am” and then he continued, “He’s a descent family man, [and] citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with…on fundamental issues and that is what this campaign is about.” The crowd even applauded.

My calling out abhorrent behavior by a current leader isn’t political or partisan. It’s not about this political party or that specific candidate. Not about policy or legislation. It is about character. Human character or the lack of it. As a person of faith, I’ve learned in my religious tradition that character is what forms the heart of a good life and being a good man or a good woman, a good soul. Character matters in the life of a person and in the shared life of a country. None of us are perfect. But always trying one’s best to treat fellow children of God with dignity, respect, and honor: that will always matter.  As Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”   

I don’t stutter anymore. If I did, I’d hope and pray that no one would ever mock me for that struggle. That people would treat me how they wanted to be treated and that I would do the same for them.

Dear leaders, fellow citizens, journalists, cultural influencers, those we are supposed to look up to, learn from, and be led by: stop the mocking. Just treat others with decency, kindness, and respect.

Is that too much to ask?

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

 

  

What's the Hurry? Slow Down. Live Life. Know God.

"Most misery is caused by rushing.”             --Melissa Kirsch, New York Times, March 2024

I cannot wait.

I cannot wait to blow out of this work meeting and go home and chill. I cannot wait for summer and the warmer weather! I cannot wait for retirement and all the time I will have. I cannot wait for the coffee to brew faster, or for the train to come quicker, or for the traffic to finally clear.    

I just cannot wait. 

So many of us—the truth is we cannot wait, for whatever the next thing is. For the work week to conclude. For our tyrannical two-year toddler to finally get to that next developmental stage. For our cranky high school senior to finally go away to college.  

It’s like we are telling life: “Just hurry up already!” But is that anyway to live and live fully? To live faithfully and to appreciate the precious gift of life we receive from our Creator? If we cannot wait to get there and then, what about here and now? What if all of our rushing ahead cheats us out of being fully right now, and yes, even when right now is the last place we want to be?

Years ago, I was brand new in my current church job and I so wanted to be a good doobie and impress everyone, prove that they actually did hire the right person.  So, each morning, I would fly out of bed and down the stairs to get the coffee maker dripping and then rush out the door to get the Boston Globe newspaper in the driveway. One frosty January week, I came flying out the door, skidded on black ice, went head over heels, totally airborne, then landed with a heavy thud on my butt. OUCH! This happened twice in one week. I recounted these woes to my spiritual director, and he dryly commented, “Maybe the universe is trying to tell you to slow down, John. What do you think?”

Yet even 17 years later, I’m still a chronic rusher, and don’t seem ready to slow down. To embrace the God blessed spiritual practice of being present in the present. Rushing robs us of enjoying what is right in front of us, leaning into whatever we are experiencing at a given moment. Life is amazingly diverse in what it can give to us. Some days I imagine I go through something like twenty different emotions in response to whatever is happening in my day. I get angry at the traffic and then cranky at too much email and then smile when my co-worker greets me with good humor and then I sing a song at full volume in the car on the way to an appointment and then I sweat on the bike at the gym and then I text my Godson and hear back about what ails him or what brings him joy and then and then and then and then.

Rush through life and such profound and simple life moments will be gone before you know it. As a homeowner in New Orleans prayed one morning on the front lawn of his flood ravaged house, a home my church group was helping to repair, “Dear God: help us to appreciate this lovely day, that has never been before, and will never, ever be again. Amen.”  Maybe I should pray that prayer, live that prayer more often. Give up my addiction to hurrying up and insisting others do the same too.

GET MOVING! (Not that I’ve ever thought or said that in the Dunkin’ Donuts Drive-thru line.)

One of my favorite pieces of scripture comes from Psalm 46.  Its author writes, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Be still. Profound spiritual advice. To orient ourselves to God, we must first plant ourselves in the immediate, that which is, not that which we are running off to. God does not live in the past nor in the future. The only place we can find God, find joy, find true life satisfaction, is in the only time we have.

Now.

In a recent New York Times article, “Why the Rush?” Melissa Kirsch writes, “…the poet Marie Howe…in her poem ‘Hurry’, describes running errands with a child in tow. ‘Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,’ she urges, as the little one scampers to keep up. Then she wonders: ‘Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? / To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?’”

I cannot wait. We cannot wait.

But life needs us to wait. To pay attention. To be engaged wherever we are.  To be alive, not pseudo-living in some imagined fantasy future. 

It will all stop one day. This life and our place in it. Howe is right. We are all rushing towards the grave.  So, in the interim and on the way, may our God put us, keep us, find us, love us, place us, right here.

We can wait.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.