Trip Toward the Far Horizon: How Far is JukkMokk? To Flourishing?

Welcome again!  

   Time for a bit of refreshing here on the blog. And here in the mountains, where we have escaped for a few days of renewal. It's been an intense start to the year. And we have miles to go!  

  Annika bought her plane ticket for Anchorage this week. And here, I thought she wanted me to drive her. I've always imagined a marathon on the AlCan Highway, but no, she's going to fly!  Where's the sense of adventure in that!  :)   

  So now I'm just going to have to drive to Jokkmokk. 

You think I'm kidding. 

   Three years ago I made an 11 week, 11,000 mile road trip alone from Denver to Nantucket and back. Conversation with long-time best friends mingled with insights from folks I just met. I was covering familiar territory but it all felt new, as I was moving quickly and it all mixed together. 

  Two years before that, I lived on my own in Warsaw, Poland altogether for seven months, listening, taking it all in, putting pieces together from communist past to EU, capitalist present. 

  I’m an anecdotal anthropologist, seeking to find insight from the stories and experiences of people I’ve known for eons and the mechanic who just fixed my car.

   How does the light get in?  What do folks want?  Value? Hate? Long for?  What is going on?  What is life? For you? For folks who are very different from me?  And like me?

 I invite you to consider this blog a long road trip around the world, from 5 Points in Denver and my beloved mountains, all the way to Moscow, through a time warp of Soviet era Eastern Europe, across modern Europe, through my true home territory in Sweden, crossing  the Mediterranean into Africa, especially South Africa, and back in to the Middle East, especially Palestine and Israel. 

  We travel by way of spirit and heart, conscience and engagement with the traditions and stories that I've gathered up through listening and through my own desire and attempts to live faithfully according to the words of Micah, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, and with the words and life of Jesus of Nazareth, who said without irony that the life given away for others, will be the fullest life one could ever imagine. And who insists still, that grace, grace is everything. That's a lot of ground to cover! 

  You are invited to ponder, wonder, and ask right along with me: is this our best work? Our best living? How can we get beyond the injustices and hate, the deep fears and frightening reactions society tends to put out there? I invite your feedback, ideas, 'best practices.' .

  I want to tell truth about life so far as I know it. I sense that folks are hungry for honest expressions and stories about "the living of these days," and welcome blunt, probing, but also encouraging, inspiring words of grace and hope.  

"Forget your perfect offering;  there is a crack in everything;

That's how the light gets in."    __Leonard Cohen

  There are many cracks, fractures and whole slices of me that have been cut away. And I have been quoting Cohen since early June, 1982, Tallinn, Estonia, 'the "white nights," nearing the Arctic Circle where the the nights were bleached by dim sun, dusky twilight lasted all night and emptied into the bright revelations of day, where too much was exposed to harsh unrelenting glare of capricious and summary judgment. Entirely illegally, we sat -- young adults from there and here, and tried to imagine a future. Life in Soviet Estonia was bleak and uncompromising (except when you were compromised, and that's another story entirely), and the songs of Leonard Cohen brought raw comfort, broken "halleluhjah's" and all. They discovered him long before we did. And begged, if anything, for me to bring back more Leonard Cohen. And that's when I discovered imperfect offerings, and how "Light Gets In."

  Adrienne Rich, a favorite poet, taught me many long years ago that it is costly to be creative, as she wrote about Madame Marie Curie who discovered radium and the use of radiation, “She died a famous woman, denying her wounds, denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.”  So it is. And yet we must not be afraid of using our power, and of becoming “fierce with reality.”  (Florida Scott-Maxwell)    We have work to do!    

   If curiosity pulls you to know who is this woman writing these things, you may find references by googling either "The Reverend Jan Erickson-Pearson," or "Rev. Jan Erickson-Pearson" or "Jan Erickson-Pearson"  where some of the different and various aspects of my life, work,career will appear. In some circles and on Facebook I'm known simply as Jan Erickson but googling that will get you nowhere. On FB, I am the Jan Erickson from Denver, with my 'About' references to Princeton and the ELCA, blonde hair and a very handsome husband.   I am an ordained (1983) pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), but like I had to write on the bottom of every single page of the first book I wrote, "Safe Connections"   (ironically, for the ELCA):  all opinions are my own do not reflect official policy and teaching of the church. If you're more curious than even my kids, you'll find bio material on the Google plus page that links from this  blog. 

  Thirty-five years of professional writing, work, and thinking out loud about, more than anything else,  this:           the life of the spirit          I find there is now a deepening, a clarity, a winnowing.  

  At the same time, there is more breadth and the horizons are moving farther away. I have always lived in  mystery, and these days yet more inviting, enticing, compelling. Clarity is not about what, or how, or even why, but about the urgency of engagement, or action, healing, justice. Tikkun Olam, ‘hesed,’ kindness, and transformation seem urgent. The earth, the world needs us to care, to change, to turn around.  

  Grace, though, is the notion that beckons to me with more power,more gravity,more gravitas, more pull, more energy than anything else. It begins with being beloved, blessed, given to, and life goes from there. It is the place to which we return when we are bogged down, bashed, broken, empty. It is primal: grace.

  I invite you to join me on a continuing journey to push out the edges, plumb the riches, tug at the sleeve of what that means.  Not so I can nail it down, but in order to experience it more profoundly.  Dialogue is very very welcome. I hope you'll respond. 

  I laugh a lot. My nurse was so very serious as she copied down my list of medicines the other day. She got down to this item on my list    "One good belly laugh per hour."  And she just wrote it down. Exactly. If we're not laughing, we're not paying attention. And, if we're not laughing, we're paying too much attention!  

  Of course, there is always this, worth remembering, from my favorite Polish poet, Wyslawa Szymborska,  "the facts, while interesting, are irrelevant."  Or might be. They certainly are not the last word!  

  We have to push beyond, to the deeper, buried realities, behind the facts, to the world, the life that is ultimately one that is given away, for others. That is where, and how I think the light gets in.  You?  

   Mobilization.        For.       Survival.        Not a movement, a lifestyle.

   And we were born to do so much more than merely survive.

   "We know that we more made for so much more than ordinary lives! 
     It's time for us to more than just survive!  
     We were made to thrive!" 


Time for a road