An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

Practice, Practice, Practice

By Nanette Sawyer

Nanette Sawyer is an artist, writer, and founding pastor of Wicker Park Grace which gathers in an art gallery in Chicago. She has studied at McCormick Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School.

I’m writing a book about hospitality as a spiritual practice, and so, not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking about it hospitality a lot lately! Hospitality is a serious and potentially life-changing practice if we really engage it on a spiritual level. It’s no tea-party thing. Spiritually vibrant hospitality means sharing our lives with others, extending ourselves in order to be truly connected and to offer authentic relationship.

In my chapter in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope I wrote:

“Love is a spiritual practice which matures us as we try and try again to leave behind our isolation, expose our vulnerabilities, and make commitments to care truly for one another.”

Hospitality is about loving people, but sometimes loving ourselves is the hardest thing to do. In order to love other people, though, in order to have something sincere and beautiful to offer to them, we have to love ourselves. We can understand that even though we feel vulnerable, exposing our vulnerabilities doesn’t diminish us, but rather affirms that we are human beings. To pretend that we have “got it all together” keeps us separate from other people, and sets us up to fall pretty hard when it comes out that we are, after all, emotionally “messy” emotionally, needy, and haveing a tendency to make mistakes.

So how do we practice hospitality towards ourselves? One thing that has helped me is to metaphorically walk straight into the vulnerability. It’s almost as though I’m holding God’s hand while I do it, though. God and I walk directly into my fear or shame or whatever. I hold on to God’s hand and God holds on to my hand. I look around and say, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been feeling! Oh, I feel angry and I feel ashamed of feeling angry.” Or whatever it is.
I name the feelings, and then I realize that I am not those feelings. I’m something so much more than the feelings. I’m the one holding God’s hand while I look honestly at myself. And God never let’s go of my hand.

This kind of honest engagement with my own emotions is a spiritual practice which helps me leave behind my human tendency toward isolation, because it helps me feel a deep worthiness from God’s perspective. I feel more connected to God, and I feel more connected to myself—the core of myself.

Once I accept and forgive myself, it’s so much easier to accept and forgive and welcome others. Acceptance, forgiveness, welcome: these are foundational to hospitality and they require practice. Lots of it.

Something like LOVE

By Nanette Sawyer

Nanette Sawyer is an artist, writer, and founding pastor of Wicker Park Grace which gathers in an art gallery in Chicago. She has studied at McCormick Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School.

We were discussing my chapter (3) at a dinner gathering at Wicker Park Grace and one person expressed some discomfort with my writing the following:
“…we affirm that we are centered in a generous and dynamic Christianity.”
When I wrote that, in my mind the emphasis was on describing a new way of being Christian, a way which is generous and dynamic. I’m trying to redefine the word “Christian” and reclaim it from its stereotype of being “judgmental.”
The person who felt uncomfortable about this couldn’t go there with me. He could only understand the word “Christianity” to be referring to a historic institution, and he rightly wanted to say that we at Wicker Park Grace are not centered in a historic institution.
He asked the question, “Aren’t we really centered more in something like LOVE?” In his mind, “Christianity” is not and cannot be “something like LOVE.” Really, the whole point I was trying to make is that we can live a “Christianity” which is not only something like love, but which is fundamentally an expression of love. That’s what “walking the love talk,” the subtitle of the last section of my chapter, means.

Nevertheless, I truly understand his discomfort with the word, “Christianity,” and he made me remember again the tremendous struggle with we have with language. I had to question whether I should be much more cautious about using the term “Christianity” for descriptive purposes.
Isn’t it sad that so many people think that Christianity is not something like love?

Messy Glory

By Nanette Sawyer

Nanette Sawyer is an artist, writer, and founding pastor of Wicker Park Grace which gathers in an art gallery in Chicago. She has studied at McCormick Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School.

I like the phrase, “I’m just another Bozo on the bus.” It’s not meant to belittle myself, it’s just meant to as a reminder me that I’m human. I’m like all the other humans, trying to live my life the best way I can. I don’t have to be the Super Hero on the bus. I don’t have to be Most Awful Person on the bus. I just have to be human. Just another Joe. Or in my case, just another Josephine.

Saying I’m just another Bozo on the bus is kind of like saying “we’re all in this boat together.” The problem is, we forget that we’re all in this together. Sometimes we live more like comedian Lily Tomlin says. 
She says, “Just remember. We’re all in this boat alone.”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re all here in this same boat and somehow we think we’re not.

In An Emergent Manifesto of Hope I wrote, “Healing happens when people receive and offer each other a grace-filled welcome, accepting each other in all our messy glory, with questions, insights, hurts, and new hope. This grace-filled welcome is an invitation to authenticity in human community.”

I think this means that I can say to you with affection, “Hello Bozo, my name is Bozo. Wanna get a bite to eat?”