A Better Place

In short, we don’t make the world alone, the world makes us too.  Maybe the world also wants to make us a better place.  To know this is not to finally be at peace, or to be enlightened, or to be at home…it is to continue to experiment, to theorize, to touch the always-fresh blister that is our tale of becoming. 
Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (2017)

The world makes us a better place.  We like this idea a lot.  It allows us to let down and enjoy every living thing that groans with us.  We can trust in Something much larger, deeper and wider than ourselves. Something swimming in Love.  

This month has been a beautiful blur.  So have the past 3 1/2 years.  This is the final post on the 4910CecilSt blog.  If you wish to remain on our monthly email list in 2018, shoot us an email and opt in!  

These are a few of the shimmering images from our November:

The Ginkgo that we sat under all summer and early Fall lit up (above) and then let it all go (below).

We revisited the willow on Belle Isle that Tom's Dad stood under three years ago.  Mom joined us to sprinkle his ashes on a strangely warm windy day.  

Afterwards, Mom got the legendary Bill Wylie-Kellermann tour of the Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  

We hit the trails along the Huron River during Thanksgiving Weekend.

We recruited some friends to join us in a one-thousand gallon water shift to refill the water station at the St. Peter's Peace + Justice Hive.

Speaking of water, we ran into We The People of Detroit's Debra Taylor and Michigan State University professor Dr. Jade Mitchell transporting water to Lansing to test for high lead levels.  There have been many reports of colored water coming out of taps in Detroit neighborhoods!

We shared a meal with our friend Eliisa who is applying for her residency years in her quest to become a doctor who holds onto her integrity and holistic commitment to care, while walking the muddled tightrope of the medical industrial complex.  We got to know her and her husband Peter a year and half ago during a MarriageStrong weekend we facilitated for them (and then got to officiate their wedding in September 2016).

Keith Wilkinson (Capo Valley H.S., class of 2005) is still 6'9", but is now the assistant men's basketball coach at UC Riverside.  The Highlanders came out to play University of Michigan so Tom picked him up and took him for a little tour of Detroit.  

Our friend Bryan is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work.  He asked us to be guest lecturers for 90 minutes to talk about Detroit's struggle for water affordability.  

On Thanksgiving Eve, Tom shared a few moments with Fletcher 

on the sacred steps of the St. Peter's Peace + Justice Hive.  

May we all continue to experiment, to theorize, to touch the 

always-fresh blister that is our tale of becoming. 

Intimacy, Community, Justice

There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

John O’Donohue

As we pivot to embrace the Fall splendor, we find ourselves brimming with gratitude for our vocation and the community making it all possible.  For the past three years, we have been gifted with generous financial support for full-time pastoral and prophetic ministry.  More than ever, we feel prodded by Something beyond ourselves to carry on and deepen this work in a world stripped of intimacy, community and justice. One of our ongoing challenges is often feeling isolated and alienated, especially as we navigate the future.  Slowly but surely, we are learning how to ask for what we need.  Photo: As the days darken, the Ginko Tree (left) lights up on the banks of the Huron.

Since the beginning of this journey, we have been “fiscally sponsored” by Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, a non-profit Christian organization that we have been deeply shaped and supported by.  For a small commission fee, BCM has taken care of the administrative side of our work (processing contributions, payroll, taxes and expense reports) and has provided much-needed emotional support, mentorship and accountability.  In turn, we have staffed BCM institutes in Southern California and Saskatoon, as well as providing ad hoc pastoral and logistical support along the way.  It has been a wonderful partnership.  

During our Spring residency in Ojai, we had some important conversations with BCM about what our work with them might look like in the years to come.  They are definitely excited about the prospects of continued partnership.  However, they have had concerns about their own limited capacity to continue to fiscally sponsor our work.  Like most grassroots organizations, BCM is cash-strapped and overwhelmed with demands from all over North America.  Over the past few months, we have been researching and weighing the possibility of starting up our own nonprofit.  This is both exciting and scary!  

The challenges of this kind of venture include (A) the prospects of 15-20% of our time and energy focused on administrative duties, (B) the steep learning curve that comes with navigating the many hoops to jump through with the 501c3 process and (C) concerns about the financial sustainability of raising support over the long haul.  

This month, our base of supporters provided us with some really important feedback about the what, why and how of our work moving forward.  We asked what aspects of our work they were most excited about.  The top three:

1.  Facilitating retreats and groups for couples and individuals to be equipped with tools for healthier relationships.
2.   Helping oppressed and vulnerable people in Detroit (water delivery to victims of shut-off and home foreclosure, serving homeless guests at the soup kitchen, organizing and advocacy for change in city, state and national policy).
3.   Investing in one-on-one pastoring, counseling and mentoring work (in person, over Skype, on the phone).

This process has been helpful for us as both confirmation and challenge to focus on these elements going forward. We see it as both a nurture and a nudge, encouragement and accountability.  

In addition, we are thrilled that many of our supporters have communicated the desire to continue to financially contribute either monthly or annually, and have encouraged and supported us going forward with this process of starting a new non-profit organization.  Our next steps: filing articles of incorporation with the state of Michigan, writing by-laws and recruiting a Board of Directors.  We are deeply grateful for wisdom imparted by friends and continue to covet any advice from others who have experience starting or maintaining a non-profit organization.  

This update is our second-to-last on this 4910CecilSt blog.  In our December report, we will share some important news about the name and a few details of the non-profit we are starting.  We will continue sending out updates on a different website for those interested in keeping up with the Journey.  If you want to be on the monthly mailing list and/or want more information on how you can participate in this ministry, focusing on the nurture of intimacy, community and justice, send Lindsay an email at lindsay.airey@gmail.com.  Simply reply: "yes" if you would like to be included.

Our friends Joan and Luke get married at a campground in Wixom, Michigan.
Outdoor wedding: 45 degrees.  Notice Tom shivering on the left.  

A Hunting Party

A
Hunting party
Sometimes has a greater chance
Of flushing love and God
Out into the open
Than a warrior
All
Alone.
Hafiz

We teamed up with some beloved friends this month, in our constant search for love and God.

Sarah Nolan and Adella Barrett, in the midst of a cross country road trip, joined us for a couple days in Ypsi at the beginning of the month.  We had great connections with them during our time in the Ojai Valley this Spring.  They were part of the couples retreat we facilitated in April.  Both of them are committed to a form of ministry that blends pastoral nurture, theological depth and growing food!!  (Below, from left: Lindsay, Adella and Sarah pose at controversial Hantz Woodlands on Detroit's Eastside)

Our friend Bryan Victor helped us transfer a couple hundred gallons of water to a food pantry in Detroit's Brightmoor neighborhood.  These folks are consistently reporting high rates of water shutoffs and yellow and brown colored water coming out of their taps.  Bryan is a professor of social work at the University of Michigan and participates (with his partner Tom) in our weekly lectio divina Bible study on Wednesday nights in Southwest Detroit.

Speaking of the Larkins Street lectio divina group, Lindsay consistency joins Erinn Wylie-Fahey and her two sons (Cedar, 1, and Isaac, 4) for a pre-lectio jog through our old neighborhood.

Our friend Jacob Taylor drove four hours north from Cincy in his clearly messaged Hyundai to join us in a weekend of coffee, conversational catch-up, co-conspiring, and dream analysis.  We originally met Jay Tay when he was interning with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in February 2015.

Some people are hunting for love and God in the strangest of places.  Crowds flocked from the Detroit suburbs for six consecutive nights to take in Kid Rock's segregationist brand of music and politics.  We joined a group of about two hundred protestors before the opening night of $800 million Little Caesar's Arena, much of it financed with public money (while tens of thousands of black Detroiters suffer water shutoffs and home foreclosures). Images like these below remind us of the challenging words of Martin Luther King (and Jesus) who preached:

Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate...We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.

These are confusing and agitating times. We are feeling the wake-up call all the time. We need each other: for nurture, support, discernment and just to keep one another's courage up! Grateful to be part of an ever-expanding hunting party that prods us out of our alone-ness and into the love and God being flushed out all around.

A Sweet Spot

I am listening now with all of my senses, as if the whole universe might exist just to teach me more about love.
I listen to strangers,
I listen to random invitations,
I listen to criticisms,
I listen to my body,
I listen to my creativity and to the artists who inspire me,
I listen to elders,
I listen to my dreams and the books I am reading,
I notice that the more I pay attention, the more
I see order, clear messages, patterns, and invitations in the small or seemingly random things that happen in my life.
In all these ways, I meditate on love.
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (2017)

Here in Ypsi, signs persist that the season is turning.  The temp dips down to the low-50s at night and the sun sets seconds after the clock strikes eight (it was setting at 9:30pm just a month ago!).  The red robins and Canadian geese are steering south.

High school football has begun.  We attended the season opener with our friend Jyarland.  Her son Malcolm is a senior captain for U of D Jesuit.

And, sure enough, the women of We The People of Detroit are still hauling thousands of gallons of water to victims of water shut-off.

Since the day we packed up our Toyota Corolla and exited Detroit last September, we’ve spent significant time in a few contexts: Saskatoon, Canada; Portland, Oregon; Southern California (Ojai, Los Angeles and Orange County); and Michigan. We have spent the night in thirty different places. This has taken a toll on us. These past ten weeks, we really feel like we’ve hit a sweet spot, getting to do work we are passionate about, but also finding time to read, write, rest, go slower and breathe.  We have spent significant time centering ourselves and reconnecting with old partners in Detroit. 

Flowing from the gift of this time, along with much prayer, dialogue and discernment, we have decided to stay here in Ypsilanti for the remainder of 2017.  

We feel called to be soul tenders, or what the late Henri Nouwen called wounded healers. One of our mentors Rick Kidd refers to it as being change agents. We continue in a life-long process of learning to be free, joining others on the journey, and inviting more friends looking to do the same. It is a ministry of mutuality. We experience more newness of life as we share out of our own pain, struggle, hope and joy. 

Until next month, we send peace and blessings from the Huron River.