The Camp Fire Girl Returns to Work...

Three weeks of Continuing Education after five years of ministry at University Lutheran Church of the Epiphany/Lutheran Campus Ministry...wow! I had taken five days in May 2008 at the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis - I loved that! But the time was long overdue...I could feel it in my bones. Pastors are granted two weeks and two Sundays each year for their Continuing Education. A pastor can roll the weeks into other years as the weeks accumulate. It was wonderful to be a student again. I love that, too.

I haven't even been back for a week. Upon my return last on June 22, I learned that there were kerfuffles at my work...interpersonal upsets. So, I set to work on trying to resolve some of the mix ups. This made me weary right away. Sigh. Too much drama is just too much, even for a Drama Therapist!

Speaking of Drama Therapists, did I mention that I was informed by my advisor and friend, Sally Bailey, that upon completion of the Creative Arts Therapies class and the Sociodrama class, I will have all the necessary requirements completed to make my application as a Registered Drama Therapist! This is amazing to me and I was thrilled to learn of this great news!

In answer to the question, What is Drama Therapy?, The FAQ page says: Drama therapy is the intentional use of drama and/or theater processes to achieve therapeutic goals. Drama therapy is active and experiential. This approach can provide the context for participants to tell their stories, set goals and solve problems, express feelings, or achieve catharsis. Through drama, the depth and breadth of inner experience can be actively explored and interpersonal relationship skills can be enhanced. Participants can expand their repertoire of dramatic roles to find that their own life roles have been strengthened.

If you're wondering what does a Drama Therapist do?, A drama therapist first assesses a client's needs and then considers approaches that might best meet those needs. Drama therapy can take many forms depending on individual and group needs, skill and ability levels, interests, and therapeutic goals. Processes and techniques may include improvisation, theater games, storytelling, and enactment. Many drama therapists make use of text, performance, or ritual to enrich the therapeutic and creative process. The theoretical foundation of drama therapy lies in drama, theater, psychology, psychotherapy, anthropology, play, and interactive and creative processes.

So, there you have it. Drama Therapy was recognized in 1979, the year I graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa with degrees in Religion and Psychology. I had been doing the things that I later learned that Drama Therapists have been doing all throughout my ministry. I was inspired to do this by my Religion professor, R. Simon Hanson. He taught Introduction to the Old Testament and he sang, danced and acted out the stories of scripture in class! I had never seen anyone do that before and I loved it! To my creative mind, it seemed to make the stories easier to remember. I've used drama and creative arts in my ministry with children, youth, young adults, older adults and many other groups of people.

When I got to K-State and heard there was this professor who was teaching something called, Drama Therapy. I was intrigued. I had come to experience and create for others, healing moments and encouters in the aforementioned activities and also in worship. So, after much cajoling by my friend and professor, "Doc" Norman Fedder, I registered for the graduate program in Theater with an emphasis in Drama Therapy. I took one class a semester, as per the Lutheran Campus Ministry guidelines for staff in degree programs while working full time.

I took me five years to complete the degree and I graduated in December of 2002 with a Masters in Theatre. At the end of my program I presented my Master's project: I wrote, co-directed and performed in my one-woman show, a comedic auto-drama, called FROCKED! It was one of the hardest things I've ever done! I had to rehearse by myself in the haunted Purple Masque Theatre at K-State, reciting my lines over and over to empty chairs. I felt silly and wondered why I ever thought that this would be fun. I memorized over an hour and a half of monologue complete with movement, blocking, actions, power-point projections, music and singing.

Now, as I'm at the end of my certification for Drama Therapy and on the threshold of new adventures, I started thinking about more ways to use my gifts, skills and commitment to the healing power of drama. One of my classes requires us to write a "fictitious" grant request. I thought about the Lilly Endowment foundation that provides grants for various religious purposes so I check the site out to learn if one of their programs might work. I was amazed again.

The Lilly Endowment for Religion sponsors a National Clergy Renewal Program. This program recognizes the importance and necessity for busy pastors to have an opportunity to take an extended break for renewal and refreshment. Usually we call this a Sabbatical Time. Their description of the life and work of a pastor gave me pause for reflection:

At the center of the congregation is the pastor. Spiritual guide, scholar, counselor, preacher, administrator, confidant, teacher, pastoral visitor and friend, a pastor has a privileged position and performs many roles. In season and out, a pastor is called upon to lead communities to the life-giving waters of God.

The job is demanding, and pastors perform their duties among a dizzying array of requests and expectations. Congregations are not always easy places, and the responsibilities can sometimes wear down the best pastors. It is not a job for the faint-hearted, but requires a balance of intelligence, love, humility, compassion and endurance. Most importantly, it demands that pastors remain in touch with the source of their life and strength. Like all people of faith, good pastors need moments to renew and refresh their energies and enthusiasm to determine again "what makes their hearts sing."

As I read and reread these words, I was grateful. I was grateful that there is a group of people who named, understand and recognize the complex, demanding, dizzying array of requests and expectations that pastors live with. In my case, I serve both as a congregation pastor and as a campus pastor. This amplifies and intensifies the complexities in ways that few individuals comprehend or understand.

I'm saddened when some well-meaning (and some not-so-well-meaning) folks think that all I do is deal with a few congregation members and that the campus ministry should be kind of like dealing with a youth group. Sigh. It's frustrating when some refuse to understand that the nature of campus ministry and my work with college students is very intense, highly relational, fast-paced, full of late nights, at times grueling in its academic rhythm and sometimes walking through the deep spiritual valleys and mountains with young adults as they discern their way of faith. Because the nature of campus ministry is this way, the ELCA (and other thoughtful, wise denominations) has set apart certain pastors and ministers to do only this: campus ministry.

One of the former LCMers at SCSU from long ago returned to ULCE a few years back. She is an amazing person. Our backgrounds are nothing alike, but we share this love and esteem for LCM. She says LCM saved her life. I believe this and know that it's most certainly true. I've seen the ministry of LCM save other lives, I've been blessed to have been part of that life-saving enterprise and have celebrated with others when, once they were lost and then they were found and found themselves embraced by the abiding, enduring love of God in Christ Jesus.

This friend of mine wrote some reflections after the 15th Anniversary of ULCE in November of 2009. I thought that her words were profound since she has the broad and long ranging perspective from one who was a college student in LCM at Saint Cloud State University as well as being a "grown-up" member of what had become the LCM and ULCE community.

I had not heard the thoughts expressed by anyone else in the congregation:

But what I don't understand is the way "we" don't show respect to our pastor(s) that I see in other churches. Is it because we are small? Or is it the same in bigger churches where you just don't notice it as much because it's not so glaring? Or is it the kind of church we are or is it the town? The town people have never liked the students in general. So, when you put the two together you get dislike. ULCE appears on the outside to be a church that is accepting of everyone. But at times I see our church stuck and not knowing whether it wants to move forward or stay stuck; to move on and grow into the life force we could be...I believe in us as a church body. We, all of us, just need to figure out what direction we want our church to go. What needs to be remembered is that it is the students that have brought us together in the first place.

I have thought about this a lot since my friend wrote this and since she read it aloud at a meeting of our congregational members and students. There was this pause; this silence after she read her reflections - as if no one could think of a thing to say. People just sat there. And then the leaders of the event and process, sensing the moment and not knowing what to say either, moved the process on and that was that. But something happened that day. There was a naming and an acknowledgement in what she said. Still, since that day it doesn't seem as though folks have gotten to the place - exactly - to figure out what direction we want our church to go.

I have been in prayer about this ministry before I arrived here and ever since that time. The treatment of pastor(s) is a mystery and my guess is that it's been this way for a long time before I arrived. Why? I have no clue. All I know is that I need to stay true to my calling, what I know, what is good, right and blessed in the sight of God.

So, I am going to center on my calling and that which gives life, hope, joy, peace, healing and faith. I have no time for that which drags on my soul or the soul of others. Life is too precious. Life is too short. Life is too grand to do otherwise. So, join with me and if this is not your calling -- let go.

Blessed be!

Tap-Stompin' the Porch

Leaving the Flint Hills

When we left the Flint Hills on Saturday, it was getting ready to thunderstorm - big time! As we packed and scurried to hightail it out in the big, red truck, glimpses of my five days drifted in and out of my mind.

I had an amazingly intense week in my Sociodrama class and met some incredible people. It was a huge extra plus that I had time to practice Aikido with old friends and meet some of the new dojo members. I biked to class and I biked to Aikido in the City Park - too fun! Biking all over Manhattan was like old home week as I zoomed here and there taking all the old short cuts and alleys like it was in my DNA. Then it got HOT! Geez-louise - it was wicked hot and killer-sticky humid...sweat, sweat, sweat. Drip.

I biked most days with my backpack chocked full of my computer and lots of books. Biking back to Stacy and Jon's up the College Heights hill (sometimes several times a day) became an exercise in sheer physical endurance and peddling through the burn in my legs. Yeow. I loved it - you know, pushing the limits of training, doing it for the sake of just doing it and being able to say that you did it is especially fun when people think you're a little nuts - which I readily admit and am proud to claim. I biked during break times in the afternoon because I was so super sick of sitting in the old-school wooden classroom chairs with their groovy little paisley-shaped tops. Some of us were amused at the ancient graffiti determinedly or absentmindedly inscribed on the tops and the petrified globs of gum stuck under the chairs - ick.

I gave up trying to keep track of where I would ride each day and that became a good thing. I had been making a map of my biking every day of my independent study. If I scribbled on a map of my Manhattan biking for you, it would look all criss-crossy and scribble-scrabbled. That's how it was when I lived in Manhattan as the bike-Campus-Pastor traversing all over town. I never thought about keeping track of where I went, I just did it. It was a different time and a different place. While it was glorious to return and ride, I know that I need to go home.

I'd like to think that when I return to Saint Cloud, that I'll keep up my biking-revival. It's almost 7 miles from my house to my church. I could ride there and I have but not consistently. Perhaps my bike-buddies and you readers will chime in with encouragement to ride. That would be lovely. But much change is needed in so many ways...ways that are difficult to articulate and that have just been forming in this complex, intriguing and wacky mind of mine.

There is so much need in the world for art, creativity, beauty and delight. Simultaneously there is so much resistance to such art in a world obsessed with expediency, efficiency, logic, rationality and workaholism. This obsession spills over in the realm of the church. While church folks love music and the like, there is resistance to actually doing and participating in making art. Art has the power to heal heart, mind and body. I believe this is so because art and creativity have as their grounding source, their essence in the Creator of the universe who has created us and all that exists. Art is spiritual at its core. Art nourishes and sustains our souls. Thus, art - in all of its multitudinous facets - is essential for faith and our life as the Church.

I like the guiding principles from the Heart of the Beast Theatre in Minneapolis. Heart of the Beast Theatre centers its art in puppetry. About themselves, they say, "Puppetry’s power lies in the act of transformation - of bringing something inanimate to life. This act in itself speaks to our lives, which rise and fall and rise again."

GUIDING PRINCIPLES From Heart of the beast Theatre:

1. We believe in the transformative power of art to heal and grow individuals, communities, societies, and the world.
2. We provide a positive, creative learning environment to encourage confidence, self-esteem, and “finding your voice” through puppetry arts.
3. We listen to our youth community, respond to their needs, and involve them as decision-makers and leaders.
4. We practice, preach, and provide art that is accessible and inclusive of people of all incomes, ages, races, orientations, abilities, and cultures.
5. We honor the deep cultural, spiritual, and ritual roots of puppetry that provide youth with reflections of deep community values, personal meaning and individual identity.
6. We excel at providing opportunities for people to create and expand community through the act of making puppet theatre.
7. We empower youth to take leadership in telling their innately valuable stories through puppetry and masks.
8. We believe youth are capable of professional standards of excellence in puppet theatre and strive to create high quality processes and productions with youth.
9. We create opportunities for youth to present their creative work and educate the community about their perspectives.
10. We recognize the folk-arts apprenticeship tradition of learning that puppetry stems from, and honor the commitment to train new generations in the craft of puppetry.
11. We facilitate the creation of meaningful peer community to reduce isolation of youth from each other and their communities.

I left the Flint Hills of my beloved Manhattan, Kansas with a renewed hope and enthusiasm for engaging and inviting others into the joy of a creative life in the Church. I've been doing art in the Church since I was a wee tiny little girl. Art resides in my heart and soul and I love inviting others into this life of mystery, joy, contemplation and wonder. As I watched the lightning bolts flash across the northern sky, I was in awe. The wind buffeted the big, red truck as we crossed the Tuttle Creek Lake Dam. The reservoir was roiling and the waves rolled up in about 3-4 foot swells. It was the lake upon which I had spent over twelve years of my life sailing summer after summer. We took our kids, the LCM and Aikido students, colleagues, friends and Sea Scouts sailing on the Sun Dolphin. But, more about the sensational Sun Dolphin in another post.

I was wistful peering out my window and a bit misty-eyed as I left a place that gave me solace and freedom, one that cradled my children and nurtured all of our spirits. It was fun to be - and will always be in my heart - a K-State Wildcat.

I sometimes wonder myself how feasible it is to commit one's life of creative purpose and living a life immersed in art in the midst of our hyper-drive culture. I wonder a lot about life and the world. I wonder about my place in it and where God needs me the most. I trust and pray that all will be well and that the gifts of my life will be received in grace.

Blessed be and may grace abound!