Farewell for Now

I started writing for the Reformed Journal blog in Autumn of 2019. Some five years later, I’ve just crested the 100-blog peak. When I look back over those blogs, they cover a whole host of topics and ideas and commentaries. I’ve written about worship, about community, about the pandemic, about home, about beauty, about ships getting stuck and election results and synodical decisions. Writing for this blog has been an incredible discipline. It’s helped me to pay attention, to look at the world with curiosity, wondering what God might be up to in any given moment, asking myself if there’s something in this moment worth writing about.

Writing for this blog has also been a gift, both in the sense of community I’ve gained from the other writers and all you readers and commenters, and in the way this writing has developed a sense of direction in my life.

One of the first blogs I wrote was titled “Writing Towards.” I reflected on a presentation from Isaac Anderson at the Bast Preaching Festival at Western Seminary in November, 2019. Anderson paraphrased Scott Cairns, saying, “We think of our work as expression. But if you only think this way, you inoculate yourself to surprise. Writing is also cognition, an invitation to grapple and write towards those things.”

As I look back at the last five years, writing for this blog has been an exercise in writing towards. The process of paying attention, of articulating and finessing my thoughts, and of engaging with all of you, has led me to a new chapter in my life that I’m confident wouldn’t look the same if not for this blog.

That journey all started with a blog I wrote on January 30, 2020, called “A Decent Thing.” I wrote about military funerals, about the power of ritual, about the implicit understanding that these rites show respect and honour, about how moving these practices are. Most of the commenters agreed. But one person, commenting on the Facebook post, noted that his wife, also a pastor, struggled with military funerals because they always seemed to supercede the religious ceremony. People were more emotionally moved by the rites of the military service.

That made me ask the simple question, “Why?” Why did people find the military service more moving? That certainly rang true of my own experience. Yes, people might tear up during “In Christ Alone” or Q&A 1, but they would almost certainly cry during taps.

That spring I was taking a Research Methods class at Calvin Seminary, so I set out to answer my own question by writing a research paper comparing the practices of the church (mostly in a Protestant, Western context) and the military, and how those practices conveyed and shaped beliefs of identity and belonging. I concluded that, ultimately, the funeral practices of the military demonstrate a clearer “ecclesiology” than those of the church. The embodied rituals – taps, the flag, the salute – remind us of our embodied community. The similarity and dependability of those rituals, regardless of rank, status, ethnicity, or any other demographic marker, create a strong sense of belonging. And the fact that those rituals are usually carried out by people who didn’t know the deceased, but who still show up to honour them, speaks to a sense of community that is shaped by more than personal knowledge and love.

All these things ought to be true of the church. We are an embodied people, with an incarnational faith. We belong to one another, we belong to the church, we belong, body and soul, to Jesus. And we are part of a community built on the promises of baptism, on our shared identity in Christ. Our family extends beyond our flesh and blood to our brothers and sisters in the church.

Our funeral practices, however, don’t always – or even often – speak to and inform these truths. The community tends to gather, not at the funeral service, but at the visitation, meaning the church community as a whole doesn’t participate in the liturgical drama of the funeral. Funerals themselves have become rarer – often the burial is a private affair and we gather for memorials instead. In the words of undertaker Thomas Lynch, we’ve “banished the dead from their own funerals,” and I wonder how this development affects our sense of embodiment and our ability to confront and grapple with the reality of death. And when, as is the CRC’s case, funerals are family affairs, not ecclesiastical worship services, it becomes more difficult to develop local rituals that become part of the fabric of a community, shaping and strengthening a sense of belonging.

I wrote this paper in the spring of 2020, and it was published in the Calvin Theological Journal that fall. By winter of 2021, I knew I wanted to do more. The idea of a PhD had been in the back of my mind for some time already, but, on the wise advice of Mary Hulst, I had wanted to do some years of ministry first, so that whatever I studied would grow out of that experience. And here it was. Funerals. That February I spent a week on a Florida beach, and I remember looking out at the ocean and telling my spiritual director over the phone, with excitement and gratitude, that I knew what I wanted to study. When I got home I wrote a blog out of that sense of excitement, titled Asombrado. Wonder.

A lot of life has happened since then, with further questions about what that studying would look like. After a lot of discernment, this September I’ll begin a PhD program in practical theology at Fuller Seminary. It’s mostly online, so I can stay in Southern Ontario and continue to pastor. But it’s going to be a lot of work, and between that and continued ministry, something else had to give. And, unfortunately, that thing is this blog.

This will therefore be my last blog as a regular contributor. Maybe one day I can come back to it, and I hope to still post one-offs from time to time. As I said earlier, this community has been such a gift, and I’m so grateful for these last five years of writing towards something with you all. I’m glad this space exists – today more than ever – and look forward to continuing to read the work of my brilliant colleagues and your equally brilliant comments. This community is important, and you never know when something you write will open a door for yourself, or someone else, to a whole new adventure.