Abide in My Love - Update from the Coordinator

Since Rick Ness invited me to speak at the Wales church  ‘celebration’  of his commissioning as lay pastor, I’ve been thinking about the two “companion metaphors”  home and journey that characterize the life of Mission at the Eastward.

Journey is a powerful metaphor in contemporary life.  The metaphor speaks to something deep within us—an aliveness, a confidence of spirit, a yearning for transcendence, for reaching beyond ourselves. 

The companion metaphor to journey is home. Homemaking and homesteading are activities which build a space where we can thrive and grow and dream—secure, protected, related, nourished and whole.  Simone Veil wrote “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

Home and journey describe the life of Mission at the Eastward.  Our congregations are nurturing communities of faith.  The word ‘abiding’ describes well the lasting, persevering, ‘staying with it’ quality of our congregations.   I understand the metaphor of ‘journey’ in the sense of the mission of the MATE ministries.  Here the key word is Jesus’ command, ‘follow me.’   Jesus’ words are lived out in the motto of MATE - “to reach the last house on the last road.” 

As I look back upon my ministry serving a small church parish and as a member of the staff of Mission at the Eastward, I believe the staying power of MATE is this twin theme of home reflected in the congregations and journey seen in our outward mission.  Home and journey, nurture and mission belong together.

Traditionally images of home and pilgrimage were linked:  pilgrimage meant venturing outward, but also returning home.  The greatest challenge of the journey is to return home, to share the lessons of your experience, to incorporate the journey into its place of origin.  Today, journey and home have been sheared away from one another resulting in widespread destruction of people, communities and the land.

These twin themes of home and journey  are inseparable from one another:  if our life is only staying home, we go round and round and we get stuck; if we only move forward, we lose our way, lacking the sustenance for the journey; we get cut off from the source of our life.

The MATE Vision Statement reads:

Mission at the Eastward
cooperates,
as a parish of congregations and ministries
located in West Central Maine
bound  together in Christ
to witness and work
by reaching out
both  locally and globally
to  individuals, congregations and communities
by creating a place where God’s gifts and graces
are multiplied and exemplified.

What is important is the phrase cooperates as a parish of congregations and ministries meaning holding together home and journey.  In this is our health and our hope.