Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
Music lover.
Found beer in seminary.

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Archives for 2012

The Wonder of Nature

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I spent the past three days exploring the Highlands of Scotland with my friends Donald and Sheena of Portmahomack, Scotland. Their home was a wonderful base for several explorations of better-known places like Loch Ness and lesser-known places like Cromarty and Dornoch Firths.

Words really can’t describe all that we saw over the past few days. We saw several places of human-made beauty like Dunrobin Castle, a couple of places that make beautiful and wonderful things like Glenmorangie Distillery, and some towns like Cromarty and Inverness that are just wonderful examples of Scottish life at various points in the past and present.

However, the most breathtaking things of the past few days have been the beautiful natural scenes that have surrounded us every step of the way. Even the photos just don’t do them all justice – but I’ll share them here nonetheless in hopes that you can get a sense of what I’ve been seeing and doing.

Traveling Memories

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This is not my first trip to Scotland. A little over three years ago, my recently-retired friend Charles called me up one day. “Do you have a passport?” he asked. When I replied yes, he continued right away: “Do you want to go to Scotland?” I quickly learned that he wanted to go to Scotland about two or three weeks later to attend the wedding of a friend, and he felt that he needed someone to assist him along the way. Who can turn down a free trip to Scotland with a friend? So I spent a memorable week visiting Charles’ friends Donald and Sheena and attending their daughter Gillian’s wedding. (A pretty extensive photo gallery is already online.)

It was Charles’ last international trip in a lifetime of journeys to wonderful and special places. Not long after our return, Charles learned that he had ALS, often known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and he died of it last summer. I had the deep honor and privilege of preaching at his memorial service in Queens last September.

Tonight, as I walked through Terminal 7 at JFK Airport to catch my flight to Reykjavik, I passed the gate where Charles and I spent a couple hours waiting for the flight to London that would put us on our way to Scotland. This was the first of many moments on this trip when I know that I will be thinking of Charles. I’ll spend my first four days in Scotland with Donald and Sheena, and I know we’ll be swapping stories and sharing memories of our friend. It will not be easy being on this trip without him, but I know that he would be enjoying every minute of it or at least be looking for a full report upon my return!

The last time I saw Charles in May of 2011, he and I presented a slideshow of pictures from our trip (and several of Charles’ previous trips) to Scotland at the retirement community in Dallas where he moved to be near his brother. While at that point Charles’ body was declining, his brain was sharp as ever. Sharing those memories and stories together was an incredible joy, in largest part because I know how much he loved that trip.

So as I make my way across the pond once again, I am grateful for the traveling memories along the way: for little reminders of my friend Charles and especially our time together in Scotland, for the joy of being back in a place that he so deeply loved and visiting people who knew him well, and for the privilege of making my own traveling memories in this place over the next twenty-five days that will surely go with me for a lifetime.

Why I Go to Church

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Being on sabbatical has already provided a space for me to ask some important questions about my life. What is my ongoing call to ministry, both in the congregation I continue to serve and beyond? What do I really do with all my time at “work”? How does my work impact my daily life and living?

the interior of St. Bart’s Church on Park Avenue in Manhattan, July 8, 2012

Most importantly, though, I’ve wondered a bit about why I go to church. I’ve now had two Sundays where I had no responsibilities to lead worship, and yet I still went to church. Some of my friends – in church and otherwise – were a bit astonished at this. They suggested that on my sabbatical I should actually try living like most of the world does, sleeping in, reading the Times, enjoying a favorite morning beverage in my pajamas at home, etc. While I might still try this out sometime in the eight Sundays that remain of my sabbatical, I think I’ll most likely end up in church every week.

Why, you might ask? Well, here are four good reasons.

  1. Repetition. There is something important about setting aside regular time to gather with a community – even an unfamiliar one – to sing praise, listen to God’s Word proclaimed, and spend time in prayer for God’s world. Sometimes even the most familiar words can speak in a new and different way to the experiences of the moment. All this repetition makes worship a very important part of my week, and something feels off if I miss it.
  2. Tradition/Habit. I’ve worshiped nearly every Sunday I can remember. In high school, in a time when my parents were not active in the church, I kept going. I can count on one hand the number of Sundays in college I was in town that I missed worship. For better or for worse, my life doesn’t feel the same when I’m not in a church for at least a little while on Sunday. Normally, “we’ve always done it that way” is a really awful reason t0 continue practices in the church, but in this case, I think it is a valid and reasonable way of thinking.
  3. Community. I grew up surrounded by a very personal orientation of faith, where the individual’s actions and perspective were incredibly important and participation in a community of belief and practice was not nearly as important. Over the years, though, I’ve come to believe that I can’t take this walk alone. There remain times when the faith of the community “bears me through the swelling current.” Worship reminds me that I do not walk this road alone, that I have companions on this journey whom I may or may not know, and that I can trust God to keep working and keep speaking beyond my understanding and even my comfort zone.
  4. Preaching. I’m a good Presbyterian, so this comes as no surprise. Wherever I worship, I need the Word to be proclaimed in faith, hope, and love. As I plan my worshiping communities this summer, I’m not beyond checking church websites to see who is preaching and what the text might be! Still, I trust that what I will hear is inspired by the Spirit and will open me to what I need to hear on a particular day. I found this very much to be true this past Sunday as I worshiped at St. Bart’s Church in Manhattan. Their current priest-in-charge (very similar to a designated pastor in the Presbyterian system) is also a native Mississippian, and his words about home resonated so well with me in my thinking about my home state and even my understanding of home in the Presbyterian Church (USA) after attending General Assembly last week. I couldn’t have asked for a better word in the midst of these times, and I was beyond grateful for it.

So over the course of these two months, I plan to keep up my practice of worship as best I can. There’s also the reality that I am doing reading and thinking about worship revitalization while on sabbatical, so experience worship in different styles and forms will be incredibly important all around. There will likely be a week or two where I can’t do this for practical reasons, but on the whole I plan to be quite the churchgoer for a New Yorker in July and August! Look for more on these things as the sabbatical progresses.

General Assembly

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As I mentioned earlier, I spent the first week of my sabbatical at the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a strange and wonderful way to begin this time away. Somehow, immersing myself in the depths of being Presbyterian actually was the right way to begin my time away from my work in the church!

I have a long history with General Assembly. In college, I served as a volunteer in the assembly newsroom, helping to get information out to the world via the web, and spent one assembly as a Youth Advisory Delegate. Even today, several of my closest friends are among those I met at a General Assembly. Even though I hadn’t been to an assembly since 2002, I still followed the event every time through live-streaming and Twitter and whatever else I could, helping me to maintain my status as a “GA Junkie.”

This year, my goals at the assembly were twofold. First, I wanted to reconnect with friends and colleagues. On this goal, my success was beyond measure. I got to spend time with dozens of people from so many different and varied quarters of my life and world, everyone from the music director at the church where I was baptized who has known me since before I was born to friends from Twitter I know well but had never met in real life. I even made a couple new friends along the way!

Over the course of the week, I felt more fulfilled and happy than I have felt in a long time. This is particularly interesting and unusual because I am not usually one to enjoy large crowds and busy times. I tend to appreciate my own space and dislike hanging out in large groups. Somehow, though, the interactions at GA were not this for me. I had lots of time for one-on-one conversations with friends – time to catch up on old stories, mutual friends, and life in general. These things feed my soul, and I was very full by the time I returned home!

My second major goal at GA this year was to spend time in worship. I did this pretty well, too. The week began with a major worship service at the convention center with over 4,000 Presbyterians in attendance, where the moderator of the last General Assembly preached. Sunday, attendees made their way to congregations across Pittsburgh, and I worshiped in the beautiful Neo-Gothic glory of East Liberty Presbyterian Church. And on most other days of the week, I worshiped in other assembly worship services at the Convention Center. I will admit that none of these services were the most wonderful I had ever attended, but I nonetheless found the week grounded and centered in the gift of this time set apart for worship.

On the whole, I’m really glad I went to General Assembly this year. Even amidst the disappointments of business that did not turn out as I hoped, I felt a bit of what Church should be like amidst the joy of time with friends and even amidst the strange movement (or in the case of this year, stalling) of the Holy Spirit. I hope and pray that the spirit in me that prevailed last week will only continue over the remainder of my sabbatical!

The Sabbatical Beard

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I’ve never had a beard of any sort. Ever since I started shaving (at an age I can’t remember), I’ve trimmed my facial hair every day or two. But over the past several days, I’ve decided to try out a beard for my sabbatical. Part of this is because I dropped and broke my electric razor the other day, but part of it is about something else, too.

Sabbatical is a time for rethinking things, building new patterns, and getting the natural rhythm of life back. It’s a time to set aside some of the things that get in the way of enjoying and living life to the fullest. For me, this beard experiment is a good reminder of all this. It’s a tangible reminder that my life is different for the next two months, and it gives me a chance to try something new.

I don’t know if I’ll keep the beard even through the whole sabbatical – it seems like the summer months might be a bit warm for this project! – but right now starting this feels like the perfect way to honor these days of rest, renewal, and reconnecting.