From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

There’s a discipline I’ve picked up for Lent and I don’t know how successful I’m going to be at it. I have committed to turn as many judgmental or critical thoughts I have into positive ones. I’ve committed not to try to eliminate judgments or critique but to be aware of them enough to follow them up with a positive interpretation of the same thing.

It’s a hard discipline! I am reflexively a fixer; I look for things I can fix. At home this might mean lots of projects are always on my list. At church it means that I’m always looking for ways to improve just about anything I look at. I think it comes from that desire we all have to be useful. We don’t want to just stand around so we look for stuff to do.

But it means that I’m reflexively critical, too. You see, the “fixing” desire is my positive reframing of the critical impulse. It’s easy to think, if you’re not paying attention, that coming to Church is about having one more place where we get to make our judgments or preferences known.

Or, maybe it’s one more place for us to complain. For example: Oh, I wish the preaching were better; Oh, I don’t like that font; Oh, that cake is hideous; Oh, that hymn wasn’t very nice; Oh, there’s a misprint in the bulletin; Oh, look those trees need trimming and someone’s going to mess it up; Oh, I don’t like that color for that room; Oh, the room I want isn’t available; Oh, I don’t like the new forms we’re using to reserve the room; Oh, there are too many people making too much noise; Why aren’t there more young people?; Why are young people so loud and rude and disrespectful?; Why aren’t there more young people again?

It all boils down to us saying, “I don’t like this. I don’t like what the Spirit is doing! I do not like it in a boat…I do not like it with a goat…” Oops! Wrong good book!

The complaints we make at church are endless mostly because we kind of like being endlessly miserable—and it’s not just at Church that we’re so miserable. My least favorite thing is now how many choices there are at the supermarket. There are 30 kinds of butter. Do we need that many choices of butter? Are there that many different cows?

I hear people do it about work all the time. They complain-brag about how overwhelmed they are as if no other choice is humanly possible! We kind of like being miserable.

And it starts so early in life—this mix of pettiness and judgmentalism. Karrie and I were following a family on a walk in Denver and we heard this girl, maybe eight or so, say to her friend as we passed a house that had recently sold, “I mean, I’m not judging. It’s their million dollars to spend.”

We learn judgment so early and it often preoccupies our whole lives to the point where nothing will ever really feel like a gift, or joy, or wonder because it could always be better if we were in charge.

What saps your sense of joy, wonder, and gratitude? What reflexive habit might be drawing your attention away from that which is holy and life-giving?

So that’s my Lenten discipline—to reframe the impulse to critique or judge or second-guess. After Lent I’ll critique my performance so I can be better at it next year, I’m sure.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert