Pressing on, keys in hand

Or, meeting a sage at my 45th birthday

Hi friends,

Greetings from Pennsylvania! I am tucked away in my hotel room for a brief respite between events with the Campolo Center for Ministry at Eastern University. This is my first time here and it’s spring already. As someone who hails from a climate where it is still staunchly winter, I’m a bit dazzled by the flowering trees and ditches stuffed with daffodils and forsythia.

And it’s my birthday this very day! Forty-five to be exact. When I turned forty, my friend Jen joked that I was finally the age I’d always been - which feels both aggressive and very accurate. I guess I’ve just always been an old soul. Forty-five feels like it fits me just right at the moment though. I like it. I like the gentle crow’s-feet at the corners of my eyes and the more pronounced lines right where I have always quirked my mouth up on the left side. I’ve finally learned to gently love every version of me that got me here. I even feel a bit rich in all the ways that matter most: love, friendship, home, beauty, goodness.

I’m think I’m properly middle-aged now, halfway to ninety and all that. I’m feeling incredibly grateful for this. I’ve lived long enough by now to know that aging is never a tragedy, it’s an absolute gift to be savoured and enjoyed. I hope I manage to appreciate this truth even when it comes with complications … after all, most of our truest joys have an edge.

Yesterday, in the midst of meeting Eastern University students and spending time with the lovely faculty here along with public events (including a rowdy night with friend of the newsletter Pete Enns), I had the opportunity to spend some time with Dr. Tony and Peggy Campolo.

Many of you will recognize their names immediately, I know. (If you don’t know them, don’t fret, but check out this link for a quick glimpse into his life and ministry over the years. Peggy has done her own deep work advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusion within the church going back to 1994, too.) They are now 89 and 87, respectively. Tony experienced a stroke a few years ago but he is lively and engaged, making jokes and asking questions. We shared some time together, getting to know each other and sharing stories. They were so kind, supportive, interested, generous, and curious. God. What a legacy of work and ministry they share. How lucky was I?

When our visit concluded, I felt a bit teary. Some part of me wanting to get on my knees to honour them, which was a weird impulse, I know.

They didn’t know me before that visit.

But oh, I knew them.

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As we walked out the door, one of my favourite poems from Hafiz came to mind:

The small man
builds cages for everyone
he knows.
While the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

As a former prisoner, I have such a beautiful, jangly collection of keys that were dropped to me. I can point to Tony and Peggy as two of those sages who dropped a key in my outstretched palm. They dropped keys to many generations of beautiful, rowdy prisoners.

There are so many chance encounters and scattered moments that end up changing our lives.

And there are so many people we encounter along the way who have NO IDEA that they were the key in the lock that we needed on the darkest of nights.

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More than twenty years ago, my husband was a youth pastor and, like many churches, we had a small budget for a conference or continuing education opportunity once a year. And we ended up choosing to go to a conference called Youth Specialties / National Youth Workers Convention in the early aughts. I was already deep into my first experience with deconstruction, even if I didn’t have the language for that yet.

And I’ve mentioned to you before that my first experience of deconstruction was NOT pretty.

If you think I’m terrifyingly sincere now, you should have met earnest early-twenties Sarah who wanted to burn it down because BLESS HER HEART. When I deconstructed, I did that with my whole entire sloppy heart, as passionately as I had been taught to encounter every aspect of spirituality.

And so right in the very middle of that, we went to these ‘youth pastor conferences’ that turned out to be the exact crossroads that changed so much for us. So many stories started there.¹ These were the very early days of the emerging church conversations, the moment when the church was discovering postmodernism and deconstruction in popular terms. It was the first place I saw pastors drinking beers² and asking intellectual questions and gently giving our foundations a shake.

My tradition referred to seminary as “the cemetery” - because it was a place of ‘dead faith,’ you see - but these folks talked about education and learning and questioning and wrestling like it was the gasoline that ignited everything. It was the very first time that I even heard about contemplative ancient practice like lectio divina and the Book of Common Prayer. It was one of the first times I heard anyone talk with urgency about the connection between faith and justice right now, with the issues in our actual time and place.

It was like putting a feast in front of a hungry kid.

And it was at one of those conferences that I first heard Tony Campolo speak. He was irreverent and frighteningly brilliant, hilarious and pastoral, deeply evangelical and yet progressive. He had what my charismatic tradition called “the fire” - a fire of the five-alarm, scotch-bonnet variety. And I remember being absolutely dazzled by him. He preached the roof off the place. As a charismatic, sure, this was the kind of preaching I knew, but rather than deploying that heat and energy for prosperity gospel, he preached the roof off the place about justice and politics and engagement. Like many travelling preachers of his generation, he had a library of sermons seemingly memorized and I remember it including one of his more famous quotes:

“I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

I remember being electrified, like YES, that was it! This guy got it! Also, were we even allowed to say “shit” on stage?? even to make a point?!

Yesterday I remembered that version of Sarah, sitting in that auditorium, having her mind blown open. I had thought that because I had questions, doubts, critiques, longing for social justice, a litany of little-t traumas, and a chip on my shoulder that I had to leave Christianity behind altogether. I thought there wasn’t room for me any more.

And that was sort of true: there wasn’t room for me in the churches of my context then, not with all that was underway in me at the time. (That would prove to be true in the future, too. Not every place is for us and the sooner we accept it, the easier it gets.) I was threatening and disruptive and upsetting. But listening to Tony and to Brian McLaren and a few others there, I had dawning realization that maybe, just maybe, there was still room for me. For all of me. For all of my critiques and questions, my longings and doubts, my bleeding heart and curious mind and inconvenient questions.

Maybe … I could still have my own white hot “fire” of the Spirit in my life and yet care about justice? Maybe … I could love my Bible even if I didn’t read it the way that I used to? maybe there was more than one way to be faithful? maybe …. there was room for ancient practice and science, tradition and kicking the doors out, too?

I still have the battered books on my bookshelf that I bought at that very conference; Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo or A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey, also by McLaren. I read them secretly, underlining and marking them up, wondering and being challenged. This is absolutely one of the reasons why I began blogging in 2004. It was the reason why I began to slowly find community online with other folks who were ‘emerging’ (lol) and questioning. I cannot even express to you how much relief this brought to me in that back row of the auditorium.

I realized yesterday that one could draw a pretty clear line between my own bonkers trajectory of work and ministry right to the work of people like Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, Danielle Shroyer, Mike Yaconelli of Youth Specialities (another giant, gone too soon) and so many others. I had kind of forgotten this.

I haven’t thought of those moments in such a long time, probably more than a decade. But I remembered them this week.

I remembered how it felt to be so lonely, scared, disoriented, angry, and desperate.

I remembered how I felt like I had come to the end of the path within my religion.

I remembered how terrifying it was so be so angry.

I remembered how desperate I was for hope that this was not the end for me.

And then came along Tony Campolo that day. Well, him and a whole bunch of misfits and weirdos and church rejects and table-turners and snarky know-it-alls. And they were an imperfect light in the dark for me.

So I also remembered how it felt to not feel alone anymore. How it felt to know that there might be room for me still. How it felt to have someone bless my questions and my anger and my doubts and my longings. How it felt to be validated in that quest.

It was hope. Good, true, capable hope.

It was the first bit of light on that lonely path in the wilderness.

I think that’s why felt so teary when I left their home yesterday. What do you say to someone who gave you a very key moment of hope at the very second you were perishing without it?

What do you say to someone whose work cracked open the door to light the path in front of you for a while?

What do you say to two elders who are nearing ninety years old to express your gratitude for their steady faithfulness in the face of everything?

What a legacy.

At forty five now, I feel an urgency to not hold onto the keys I have in my own hands. I want to throw every single key someone dropped to me right up in the sky like confetti, hoping they land in someone else’s outstretched hands.

I think that’s a beautiful legacy. We don’t always know where the keys we’re dropping land, do we? I could name a dozen more right this second. And the funny thing is that many of them will have no idea how their faithful work and witness put a key in my own hand. We don’t always understand fully how just living our lives, stumbling forward faithfully, watching for the low moon, unlocks cages.

And so the Spirit sets us all free, not one key is wasted, not one lock is forgotten.

Yesterday, before I left, I asked Tony to sign a copy of that twenty year old book for me.

He did.

It reads: To Sarah, from a fellow traveller, from Tony Campolo Phil. 3:10-14.

When I got back to my hotel room, I looked up that reference.

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Pressing on, keys in hand,

S.

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YOUR TURN: If you have a minute, I’d love to hear about a sage who dropped a key to you?

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And in case you missed these recent Field Notes:

• "...to work harder against the dark, to sing louder, to find more teammates" (Brian Doyle): The small, ordinary, good things keeping me going from food to books to movies and beyond

• A pile of good books: My recent ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ reads plus all the books I finished lately and Kindle deals for you

• I used to belong there. I don’t belong there anymore: And a blessing for the combined sadness and relief of it

• Hello, hi, today is the day! + how to lend a hand

• Answering your questions about writing, books, & publishing: An AMA for the writers and the writer-curious among us

1. So many changes! So many encounters! But this is already too long. I also have a wild story with Dr. Stan Grenz in that room but that will wait for another time.

2. Note: at the time I thought this was terribly edgy and interesting. Not anymore.