Front Porches

Luna takes her "sabbaticals" on our porch

when her porch gets too busy.

Wade and I spend a lot of time on our front porch. We each have fond memories of front porches. As a child in Indiana, Wade used to sit with his paternal grandmother on her front porch, munching saltines topped with butter while watching cars and people pass by. My Kansas relatives would apologize that there was nothing to do in their small town, but, as a youth, I loved just sitting on their front porch reading. “Nothing to do” was an invitation to enjoy the quiet, to relax.

My family porch in California was not large enough for chairs or a swing, but Mom used to enjoy sitting on its concrete steps, and that’s how I often remember her as I left for my own homes, whether in New Haven, Philadelphia, West Hollywood, or Atlanta. And it was there that a non-English speaking Asian neighbor left a vase of flowers on the day of her funeral, twenty years ago this week, in memory of their friendship around their gardens.

Wade and I recently had stonework put on our front porch columns followed by new handrails. Wade said it made it look like a new house. The skillful Mexican stone mason’s name is Javier, a variation of Xavier, which, I found in my friend Cleve Evans’ Unusual & Most Popular Baby Names, comes from a Basque word that means “new house”!

Historically, I’ve been told, front porches served to keep neighbors in touch. We too enjoy seeing the kids going to and from school, greeting neighbors walking their dogs (or, in the case of our pastor’s family two houses down from us, their dog and their cat, Luna, who follows along), watching runners and walkers, bicyclists and those riding the trendy scooters filling Atlanta neighborhoods.

Porches seem to be a particularly Southern thing, and so it seemed natural for our new church start, Ormewood Church, to organize “porch groups.” And, in worship, we sit in clusters as we might do on a porch, to facilitate discussion of the question for the day. Btw, I’ll be guest preaching there this Sunday.

I sometimes do my morning prayers on the porch, with coffee of course, and almost every late afternoon Wade or I find ourselves reading or watching something on our tablets, sipping wine and munching chips or crackers. We welcome the occasional neighbor or friend who might join us, most likely on weekends.

What surprises us is that more people don’t use their front porches. Nearby is a very toney neighborhood with fabulous and sometimes wrap-around porches, but when we walk that way, it feels like a ghost town. Maybe they have to work harder and longer to afford their pricey homes. I suggest this as a possible reality, not a critique.

Just as we apply what we learn in school or church or on the job to the rest of our lives, what we learn on our front porches may be helpful as we encounter people and pets elsewhere. Relax. Recreate. Remember. Reach out. Invite. Welcome. Listen. Pay attention. Appreciate our environment. Lift others in prayer. And thank God.

Our front porch, Winter 2019.

Please hold the United Methodist Church in your prayers as it meets in St. Louis this week to discern "The Way Forward" regarding the full welcome of LGBT Christians!

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Jesus: Introvert or Extrovert?

Reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, was like coming up for air! Or eating an entire box of See’s chocolates at one sitting, enjoying every morsel! As one friend said to me on Facebook, reading the book was her own “coming out” experience.

You see, I am an introvert who nonetheless manages to play the extrovert—I do enjoy people, after all—but then needs a rest, alone, in quiet, probably why I’m a promoter of contemplation. Throughout my life, however, I have felt constantly compared to what Cain calls “The Extrovert Ideal,” sometimes by my own hand, and sometimes at the hands of others, including American culture and the church. For example, I realize now that preaching or even speaking from a manuscript is not deficient, as I have been told, but my strength. Oh, for President Obama’s teleprompters!

Acknowledging the need for both extroverts and introverts, Cain, an introvert, strikes a blow (though that’s usually an extrovert’s temperament) for the necessity of introverts. Studies suggest that introverts are usually “high-reactives” to stimuli, and thus need to limit our exposure. Another word that is used is “sensitive.” We need time to observe, reflect, and consider situations, people, and events prior to speaking or taking action.

That’s why I insist on a “monastic moment” of silence when I pose a question to people in a workshop or retreat, a moment to turn inward, consult one’s own experience and feelings and thoughts, before opening general discussion. My experience has been that others are quick to express their thoughts before I have had a chance to consult my own experience. I thought Sir Thomas More’s Utopia had it right when its legislature vigorously debated a concern but waited till the next day to take action! Cain writes, “Congress…is made up of some of the least sensitive people in the country” because to get elected and re-elected virtually requires an extrovert’s temperament.

That’s also why I wrote a post two weeks ago about experiencing spiritual community outside of church, what I had thought of calling “spirituality for loners.” Several pastors took me to task on Facebook, though in previous posts I have acknowledged that church and worship are worthy spiritual disciplines.  But as I have discovered the need for silence in my own spiritual practices, I have looked for more silence in worship, and when it is interrupted or when worship gets raucous it sounds to me like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. And I reclaim words I found appealing in college, words from Alfred North Whitehead, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”

The post opened me to pleasant conversation with Sam Troxal, a young and gifted blogger, and with a role model pastor and author, J. Barrie Shepherd. Barrie, a regular reader of this blog (I am proud to say), has written many books of poetry whose daily rhythms encouraged me to pray regularly long ago. I appreciate the fact that in poetry, pauses are as vital as words, and an economy of words are carefully, thoughtfully selected to convey exactly what is intended. In my book of “secular” poetic meditations, Communion of Life, I called poets “secular mystics.”

Barrie sent me his recent book, Between Mirage and Miracle: Selected Poems for Seasons, Festivals, and the Occasional Revelation, urging me to read his poem about church, “Why I Still Go,” which meaningfully concludes: 

For all my weary, reasoned doubt,

the continuing disillusion and despair

of this already blood-drenched century,

for all my anger at her blind echoing

of the worst that hides in all of us,

come Sunday morning, somehow,

I still find myself in church.

I have questioned whether it is the church’s “blind echoing” of prejudice against LGBT people that prompts me to seek other counsel and other forms of worship. But it is also true that the expected conformity and the lack of silence and gentle voices are also factors. And what presents itself as teamwork, collaboration, or democratic process is too often an opportunity for extroverts—sometimes with less experience and expertise, or worse, less compassion and wisdom—to outtalk and occasionally bully others! 

So I’ve been wondering about whether Jesus was an introvert or an extrovert. Obviously I may be projecting, but I believe he was an introvert. He was certainly a “high reactive” to religious hypocrisy and “sensitive” to religious outcasts. When tempted in his solitary sojourn in the wilderness by relevance, sensationalism, and power, he resisted. Though followed by multitudes seeking healings and teachings, he found lonely places to pray or a boat from which to preach. He called 12 disciples, and taught them privately. Perhaps it was the temperament of being introverts that Jesus shared with “the disciple whom Jesus (especially) loved” who gave us the most mystical gospel. But without extroverts like Peter and Paul, the world may not have been evangelized.

That may be the power of the Spirit, that gives even introverts the gift of speech. Yet it is also the Spirit’s gift to hear God’s voice in “the sound of sheer silence” that follows the storm, the earthquake, and the fire.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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