Sam and Frodo weigh in on reliance

STORM LAKE, Iowa — To open her talk at Synod School on Thursday, the Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana played this clip, which appears near the end of “The Two Towers,” the second of the “Lord of the Rings” series.

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“Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why,” Sam says to Frodo. “But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back — only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

“What are we holding on to, Sam?” Frodo asks, and Sam replies, “That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for.”

“To me, that story speaks to why we fight for what’s good, irrespective of outcome,” McKibben Dana said.

She next turned to the futurist and philosopher Douglas Rushkoff, who was once invited to a gathering of industry titans where he was peppered with questions including “which region of the country will be least affected by the climate crisis?” and “how long should we plan to be able to survive without any outside help?” and “how do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

Rushkoff tried to say they couldn’t do that through intimidation, but “they would have none of it,” McKibben Dana said. She described “the incredible pull the scarcity mindset has on us. We are products of that culture as well — the culture of scarcity.”

“We who are now the richest nation are today’s coveters,” Dr. Walter Brueggemann has said. “We are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity — a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.”

McKibben Dana drew a chuckle when she said that “talking about community to a bunch of church people is like preaching to the choir.”

“We pride ourselves in being a welcoming congregation,” she said, “and yet there’s room to live into that further.”

She pointed to the work of Amy Julia Becker, who speaks and writes on disability, faith and culture and whose daughter has Down syndrome. Becker helps faith communities and other organizations become “truly welcoming” by outlining four levels of welcome:

• Exclusion. That’s not an issue most PC(USA) congregations struggle with, although “some are exclusionary toward LGBTQ people,” McKibben Dana said.
• Tolerance, a neutral value, which says, “you can be here, but the space was not designed with you in mind.”
• Inclusion, “a hot term in the culture right now,” McKibben Dana said. For Becker, it’s the attitude that “you are welcome here, but make sure your presence doesn’t require much from the rest of us.”
• Belonging, where “the welcome is explicit and specific to those who have been ignored or even shunned,” McKibben Dana said. “It says we are not us without you.”

“Think about your communities in light of this spectrum,” McKibben Dana suggested. “To what extent are you living out, ‘we are not us without you.’ … Do norms and traditions you uphold bring them in and allow them to serve and participate?”

A pastor McKibben Dana knows tells folks they should expect to be 70% satisfied with the worship experience.

“That’s what it means to be a community,” she said. You might sing a Doxology that’s not comfortable for you in order to welcome someone else. “That I should be completely satisfied with my experience is consumer mentality,” she said.

“As church leaders,” she said, “we have that 30% we put up with.”

McKibben Dana said it’s her theory that the reason the internet contains so many viral videos depicting poor behavior is that we now have fewer third spaces to enjoy one another’s company.

“We don’t bump into one another unless we are in a place of commerce,” she said. “You are a customer or a worker, and there is a transaction happening.” If someone cuts in line in front of you — even inadvertently — “they are in the way of getting that transaction done.”

Last weekend, McKibben Dana took in a community production of the musical “Mary Poppins” while visiting her in-laws in the Twin Cities.

“I didn’t know what to expect. I was told they didn’t turn anyone away, so there were 90 people in the cast,” she said. The show had two Berts who played off one another.

“I was expecting the worst, but I was blown away. Every single person had something important to do,” she marveled. “The little ones were focused” — even the ones playing the clouds overhead during the “Step in Time” number. “It said a lot about community.”

“What would the world look like if we could move toward that?” she wondered. “What would it be like to direct a show like this?” Three-year-olds were cast members. A suffragette holding her infant was part of the show.

For years, McKibben Dana has been part of a clergy group that supports and cares for one another. When her family was in crisis, she texted the members, saying her family needed their prayers, and return texts were immediately sent.

In the coming days, she got more texts, then a voicemail of a clergyperson singing a “God lullaby,” then something in the mail, then more texts. “I finally realized somebody in this group must have set up a schedule,” she said. “It was tremendously comforting and bolstering.”

Months later, when she thanked the group “for being there every day without exception” and not knowing who the grand designer was, “they looked at me and said, ‘we didn’t do that.’ It just happened that way.”

“That’s why we devote ourselves to the 70%, even when we don’t all see things the same way,” she said. “If we are together, we don’t need to set up a system. There is an intuitive sense of things. That will stem this scarcity mindset that’s so prevalent right now.”

Synod School, a ministry of the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, concludes Friday.