I receive a quarterly newsletter from a group in Seattle called Earth Ministry. I love looking through it for interesting articles on faith and care of the Earth. There are always challenging articles,poems and prayers written by people who are passionately trying to connect their faith and their daily life. They are trying to create their ‘life’s work’ based on how they see the Holy in the world. This is important and challenging work.

My eyes fell on a fall gathering they call "Story Chair". It is described as ‘an intimate,seasonal gathering honoring leaders in the community and inviting them to share how their faith informs and guides their life and their work.’ Reading the title made me think of the really large green Adirondack chairs that are placed around the Twin Cities as objects of art in various green spaces. I imagined the storyteller crawling up into the monstrous chair to tell his or her story,lifted up to the seat of the chair with the help of the rest of the community. The Story Chair would be the focus of the community for that moment as people listened deeply to the movement of the Holy in the life of this loved one.

Last week at one of our worship services I quoted an article I had read from another magazine. "Every morning we wake up at the intersection of faith and contemporary life, and we offer them Christ." I explained to the community that, while this magazine was written for church professionals, these words applied to everyone. Each morning we plant our feet on the ground, if we are blessed to do so, and we walk into the culture in which we have been born. A culture that for the most part we did not create but are a part of nonetheless. How we take our inner life and mold it with our outer life is the art of being human. This work is not for the faint hearted. There are many obstacles, many things to trip us up, many situations in which we would simply like to turn our backs and pretend that it is another time, another place, a simpler time(or so we imagine) or a time in which someone else is in control, certainly not us. Living faithfully, however we name that, in our time and our world, is the gift and the challenge each of us face. It is the task of integrity and authenticity to which each of us is called.

I wonder how I might tell my story if I found myself sitting in the Big Green Story Chair. How would I articulate my faith intersecting with contemporary life these days? How would you? How would you tell your story to the rapt listeners looking up with craned necks and hopeful eyes? The contemporary life we all share is complicated. We often think our lives are more complicated than those that went before us. I would venture to say that is probably not an accurate assumption. But since it is all we know it is our only barometer.

I would like to believe that if I sat in the Story Chair I would end my story by quoting the words of Annie Dillard which have always inspired me:" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been…. But there is no one but us. There never has been."

At the end of my story, I hope my friends would lift me gently from the Story Chair. There is, after all, much to be done. And there is no one but us.