Tangier Island, losing its margins

Tangier Island

“‘The margins, Nathan,’ he said when he started speaking again. ‘That’s what we’re losing. We’re losing the churches on the margins. We aren’t doing enough for them.’”—Loren Mead to Nathan Kirkpatrick at faithandleadership.com.

Tangier Island is a disappearing island in the Chesapeake Bay, located twelve miles equidistant from both the Maryland and Virginia coasts, losing up to sixteen feet of its coastline annually due to rising sea levels resulting from global warming and soil erosion. The government believes the island will become uninhabitable for the over 500 people living there within twenty to thirty years. In fifty years, the island will be completely underwater.

The local islanders speak a dialect described as unique, combining elements of Elizabethan British and a southern drawl. They are primarily fishers of oyster and crab year-round, and tourist guides in the summer. The 1.2-square-mile island is steeped in religious tradition and completely shuts down on Sunday mornings.

Nathan Kirkpatrick, writing in the Duke Divinity School Leadership Education Center Alban Weekly (June 26, 2018), recalls the above conversation with Loren Mead, the founding director of the Alban Institute, who compared the Church to Tangier Island. What does Dr. Mead mean by saying the Church is “losing its margins?”

Is he telling us the Church is shrinking because it is not paying attention to people on the fringes or margins of society—the poor, the weak, the hungry, the homeless, the tired, the sick, those who are the most different from ourselves? In the larger scheme, is he referring to our neighbors who border us that we do not care about? Our call to service comes from these margins. Through our prayer life, we hear that call.

I remember one of my favorite quotes from Bishop Barbara Harris: “The Church is like an oriental rug. Its fringes are what make it most beautiful.” This is our call to bring the needs of the world to the church.

In spiritual direction, I also ask people how the story of Tangier Island might relate to the care of their soul. There are so many possible answers.

One question is, “Do you ever feel your soul shrinking? Do you feel you are losing the margins, the borders, the uniqueness, the most inspiring and possibly the most interesting parts of your soul, the God, the Christ within you?” Many causes contribute to this: a lack of time for silence or prayer, becoming too busy, a loss of priorities, or straying from only the fringes without being led by the Spirit in prayer, or when we stop being connected to community.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Storm Warnings

Storm Warnings

“Jesus also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens.… You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?’”—Luke 12:54-57.

joanna campbell

I sit and watch a storm come up the beach in the early morning. The sun is out, with blue skies to the east, but the sky is grayer to the west. Clouds move overhead. Sometimes, this dark overhead carpet seems so close that I feel I can almost touch it. Fishing boats return to port to weather the coming storm. Birds take shelter. The great blue heron moves inland. The pelicans are nowhere to be seen. The mighty osprey is the last to give up looking for one more meal before returning to her nest. A violent wind precedes and announces the pivotal event, almost horizontal driving rain.

patti martin

Jesus reminds us that we see signs that indicate storms may be coming in our lives. Our children act out, or their grades at school drop. We receive occasional hints that a project is not going well, but we are too busy to address the matter at the moment. Later. Too many other things are going on. We recall how a particular food affected us in the past, yet we still eat it anyway. Our clothes no longer fit, but we do not change our eating habits, exercise routine, or lifestyle. We ignore pain, a sign that some body part needs attention.

The same principle applies to our spiritual life. Our prayer life seems dry. We cannot remember our dreams. We can no longer write. All we read appears dull and uninteresting. We think of every excuse not to attend corporate worship. We stop going outdoors. It is too hot. Too cold. Too sunny. Too cloudy. We stop talking to friends. We isolate ourselves. 

In medicine, a sign is an outward or objective appearance that suggests what is going on, like the red butterfly rash across the nose characteristic of lupus erythematosus. On the other hand, a symptom describes something that is subjectively experienced by an individual, such as lupus fatigue or pain associated with a urinary tract infection, which requires some interpretation.

We are constantly given signs and experience symptoms in our outer and inner lives that can direct us. God never abandons us. We are called only to keep ourselves “in tune” to see and hear. Spiritual directors, spiritual friends, and spiritual practices are all gifts that can help us along this journey and place us in a position to connect to God. They assure us we are not alone, and that a directional move or change in course may be needed in our outer or inner life. But then, of course, it is God that changes us..

My own experience, however, is that I am so much like that osprey, waiting until the very last minute before I surrender to something greater than myself.

This last Rembrandt represents another storm. I grieve every time I see it mentioned. I rejoice that I had the opportunity to see the mesmerizing painting several times before it was stolen from one of my favorite museums. We see clearly the violent storms of our life and often have difficulty seeing Christ there with us, but he is so clearly there, beside us.

Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt, 1632. This painting was stolen in 1990 in the largest art heist in U.S. history from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  A $10M reward has not been claimed for its recovery.  Its empty frame remains hanging in the museum

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

The Family of Man... and Women

The Family of Man

“The purpose of these pages is twofold.

To serve as a remembrance of our happy times in the past and of our own search for ourselves.

To serve as a message of hope for a successful life in every respect in the future.

A past and a future—both tied together by the present—not only the present, but love—without which neither the past nor the future would exist.”— Judy Rand and Sue Latham, inscribed in The Family of Man, probably written in 1964, given to me as a gift at our graduation from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina at that time.

Migrant Mother Lange 1936

The Family of Man was a photographic exhibition of 503 pictures from 68 countries created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The exhibit then toured the world, drawing record-breaking crowds for eight years. The book from the exhibit became an instant success and has never been out of print.

My husband directs the archaeology of our past memories from our basement, and recently brought me this photographic book from the "The Family of Man" exhibition to consider giving to one of our granddaughters for graduation.

It is the perfect gift to pass on. Zoe will not know Judy Rand and Sue Latham, who gifted the book to me. But the book will always carry the inscribed love of these two dear college friends from my dorm. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, I have lost touch with Judy and Sue. However, my hope is that the above inscription from Judy and Sue in the book will carry the love of friends who changed my life, and may also bring meaning to Zoe at a similar age in her adventures, more than half a century later.

We all have a call: to continue to treasure the love we received from friends and pass that love on as best we can. This copy of The Family of Man is a treasured, visible tradition that allows this to happen. Discussing the photographs in the book with my granddaughter and talking about the friends who gifted it will be another way—simply spending time together in the present moment, remembering the past, and looking to the future. A sacred time.

A wonderful postscript. Through Facebook, Judy Rand and I recently reconnected. She is still the amazing person I once knew. After many years in the academic world, she is now an artist and musician living in West Virginia.

Joanna joannaseibert.com