I’m sitting at a pub in my little Oregonian home town tonight because a) it’s Whiskey Wednesday, b) my friend, Bubba, is working and can point neophyte me in the right whiskey direction (Basil Hayden Bourbon, y’all), and c) I’m trying to talk two of my favorite girlfriends — a pastor and a spiritual director — into running a spiritual formation retreat with me. It’s a good night, in other words, full of things that feel holy like water, whiskey and women who teach me how to love bigger and brighter and better and who think I’m awesome even when I fail completely at those things.
The music is loud in the pub — something with steady drums and the occasional tambourine, all ballady and wistful — and people in jeans and chunky sweaters are deep in conversation with friends, turned in toward each other and leaning forward to listen well. This place is community and it is a kind of church, too, in the Greek tradition of ekklesia, which was never about the building and always about the assembly of the people. A coming together for unity and common purpose.
My friends and I talk about the things we believe and how revolutionary and practical they seem. Like that we’re all unique and valuable, weird and wonderful, and wildly, desperately worthy of love. We perch on high stools at the rough-hewn wood bar, and we talk about calling and purpose and what it really means to love God and each other and how to invite those who have different ideas about God into our midst, to be our community, too, without the fear that we’ll try to coerce or convert them. We swirl ice in our glasses and talk about magic in the mess and finding God in the muck and mire and how we might reframe struggle as a worthy and rich place to meet Love and meet each other and meet ourselves.
At the end of the night, I pay my bill which is clipped to a clothespin. I thank Bubba for the whiskey, and I hug my friends. I walk away with excitement about doing a new thing, and reminded that my purpose is to be the pub to people. I was told as a child with my Christian friends that we needed to learn to be the church, and that’s true in the idyllic definition of it; that Greek definition, which is a gathering of people whose goal it is to love and listen well and allow Jesus to infiltrate our hearts and minds and souls. It’s just that it’s hard these days to think the church is doing that very well. So for today, I’ll keep this pub in mind and welcome strangers and lean in toward my friends, believing we’re not separate and are, instead, a wild, weird, wonderful community, worthy of great grace.
With love,
(Psst… more coming soon on the retreat! I’m over the moon.)
11 responses to “On the Pub and the Church and Doing a New Thing”
[…] I’m much more inclined to Revenge Take a Bath or Revenge Sit on the Couch or Revenge Go to a Pub. I am, in other words, not very good at getting Actual Revenge, as all of these usually go […]
[…] be gentle. Let’s be kind. Let’s allow ourselves the freedom to be who we are right now: wild and weird, messy and magical, human and divine and always, always worthy of great […]
Love your post and shared it with my “pub” friends and family. Goes very well with Brian McLaren’s book I’m reading right now: Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Not an easy, quick read, especially with a basketball game on in the background and an eleven-year-old child perched in your lap reading Dork Diaries–my experience last night. But it’s more than worth the effort. My dad bought it for me as “required reading,” and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever experienced. Life changing.
This is very much in sync with the new brewery about 2 blocks from our church. In fact, the place is co-founded by a pastor and his friend. It’s about community, although their beer is good, too.
Hi, Beth — I’ll join the others and say how much I love when you write things like this. I, too, am VERY much “not religious” in the regular sense of the word. Raised protestant, became a buddhist quite some years ago, but very much “out of touch” with any connection to “god” and especially “organized religion” and yet I truly LOVE what you write. It touches me and opens me to the very idea that if more people could share their relationship with god and love the way you do, the world would genuinely be a better place and a lot more people would probably claim their own relationship with god. (And yet, as you say, it’s the very fact that you are NOT trying to “convert” people that makes your truth speak to my heart, and that — clearly! — of others.)
So, lots of words to just say “thank you” for being you!
hugs!
–arden–
I love this, and I’m not even religious.
This makes my heart glad, Laura. Thanks for telling me.
Same. It speaks volumes to me and made me a bit teary.
Thanks, Leanne. Feedback like this when I say weird things about the church and pubs is healing. xo
Such a great idea! Retreats are RAD!
Love this blog post today, Beth! And why didn’t you invite me? LOL!