#Professional #Human

“I’m basically a professionalized human” I tell my non-religious friends as I try to explain the hows and whys of life and the wherefores of my deep thoughts upon it.

Much like philosophers and theorists, theologians are about the practicum of life

Both how it works and how it could work

and so when I caught a speaker on NPR, a snippet of one of their TED talks or some other type lecture (nope don’t know any more I was driving to my run and that’s all I caught) that purported that no one was telling the “current story” of humanity, I found myself yelling at the radio.

NB: I don’t really do this often.

I’m like, “That’s what religion does” and the lecturer says “religion tells the established story”

“It shouldn’t” I muttered

“It shouldn’t!” I found myself yelling “that is when religion doesn’t work”

“The story” the lecturer went on “should be open to telling about what it should be now.

“Well what do you think we are doing” I said. I thought about how an alive God is more interactive than the safe God that so many people would prefer. I thought about the “checklist Christianity” that so many people would rather deal with than the struggling, wrestling, ongoing dynamics that living actually involves.

If we had the right way to live, we would do it.

Or we would all be the same, copies of each other doing the exact same perfect thing.

Of course that isn’t right. Its more dynamic, that’s why we need people “in the trenches” so to speak.

A colleague and I discussed that there are few jobs more “in the trenches” than parish (i.e. regular old small church) ministry. There you are thrown all the problems of life and are doing small, little teachings to help people get through the day. There you deal with the mundanity, the normalcy, the muggle-ness of life and the practice of God’s presence and miracles in the ordinary.

Its there you practice being human.

Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times. View all posts by katyandtheword