For the last several months, I’ve been hearing reports (coming out of the Office of the Bishop) about a book entitled Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (by Tod Bolsinger). One of the comments, representative of some of the material in the book, was the question, “What do you do, when you’ve got all of your belongings (including the family piano) in a covered wagon, and you find you need to make your way up the Rockies?” The answer is probably, “The family piano, as beloved as it is, should not keep us from reaching the Oregon Territory. So, we’ll leave by the side of the trail”.
The analogy, of course, is that the Church's mission in the 21st century is like approaching the Rocky Mountains with a wagon full of beloved, but unnecessary, baggage. Or, to use another image from the book, to approach those mountains by canoe (i.e., on the Missouri River), only to discover hundreds of miles of mountains, rendering the canoes useless. I’m reminded, too, in this regard, of another saying that “Generals have most often prepared to fight the last war” . . . . meaning NOT the final war, but the previous war . . . and finding that the resources and tactics are inadequate to the task.
Resources and tactics adequate to the task are what we, at Good Shepherd, will strive to identify, with intention, as we enter our Season of Visioning. As I’ve said in my sermons during January, we need to imagine who are those folks who are traveling to Good Shepherd, and for what reason. We need to recognize that transitions are difficult for individuals as well as institutions (including Good Shepherd). And we need to embrace the fact that the time is ripe to accept our call to follow Jesus into this new reality.
Another, complimentary, image came to me as I was driving into the office this morning. I heard the beginnings of an interview by Mary Hynes (of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Tapestry”) with author/scholar Margaret Wheatley (https://tinyurl.com/v8gmoqf)
As part of the intro, Hynes referred to Wheatley answering the time-old question “Is the glass half-full or half-empty?” in an entirely unexpected way: “Who cares!? The real question is: ‘Who needs the water, and how do we get it to them?’” Our challenge, moving forward, is to recognize the “living water" in our glass—as much of it as we have—and to make it available to those who need it.
With regard to the metaphor of the “family piano”, we can recognize that some of us learned to play on that “piano”, some of us played duets on it, some of us sang around it, some of us just enjoyed listening to it. Those are memories associated WITH the piano; those are what are precious about the piano, not the instrument itself. We will take those memories—the living water—with us to the “Oregon Territory” and, with God’s grace, learn to make music in new way, in a new “land”.
Blessings,
Fr. Gary+
PS: The Senior Warden and I are asking the Vestry and the Visioning Team to read Canoeing the Mountains this year. I’ll probably be making reference to it from time to time. I invite others to read/listen to it as well . . . in a sort of “One Book; One Flock” experiment!