https://alienbuddhapress.wordpress.com/author/alienbuddhapress/
I am so thrilled about this short story collection,, my first one. Alien Buddha Press has been awesome. I really appreciate the kind words on the blurb from poets/writers whom I respect.
Link to "Epiphanies" and my other books
https://www.blurb.com/b/10799783-the-botleys-of-beaumont-county
Link to my novel
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One of my joys is having good friends from all walks of life and all over the world. Miriam is a pastoral colleague and has amazing insights into all facets of life. She asked me a few years back to run a translation (by Google) for those who do not speak German but who have an interest in her activity.
About places of longing and concerns about the church's present and future
ON MARCH 3, 2024 BY GERMAN PASTOR IN GENERAL
“Where does your longing live?”
I looked speechless at the small card that had been handed to me at the beginning of the service at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Erlangen, complete with hymn books and service sheet. The mountains depicted, surrounded by a blue sky punctuated by blobs of clouds, invited people to pause for thought thanks to the swing placed almost in the middle.
I took a breath and sat down with my family instead of on a swing in the last row of chairs in the community hall, which had not yet been occupied. Longing for the old Reformed homeland in distant Scotland had lured me to this community for the second time. But the fact that the service would now take up this topic surprised me greatly.
“Where does your longing live?”
the Schwabach pastor Dr. Guy M. Clicqué asked those attending the service in his sermon. I would have liked to tell you about my spiritual and community place of longing. My heart silently screamed Orkney again and again, but as a visitor I kept this to myself, instead listening to the preacher's words and letting myself drift in the familiarity of the Reformed service.
When a call came from the place I longed for in Orkney in the afternoon, I was astonished. But the news from my old Scottish parish was anything but rosy: when I started there in 2007, there were still six entire parishes on this northern Scottish archipelago. Now there should only be one parish and one parish for the archipelago, because the Church of Scotland is in free fall. Hundreds of churches will have to close in the next few years and thus pastoral and community positions will be cut (Link: BBC). The proud former Scottish national church, in which I was allowed to work thanks to my Lutheran and Scottish Reformed exams and whose decline was only very vaguely looming on the horizon as a timid dawn, will soon exist as a small religious minority.
What happened there in less than twenty years was not foreseen and was ultimately accelerated by the Corona years - and slowly it seems to be becoming more conscious in my own Lutheran church in Bavaria. I have been watching with stomachache for a long time the worrying development in membership numbers, which is now being accelerated by the inadequate processing of cases of abuse in addition to the after-effects of the pandemic. Yes, I'm worried. Worries about my longed-for place, Orkney, but also about my Bavarian home church.
How can we credibly convince others of an open and welcoming church? Perhaps the key to this is that communities and church groups are a place of longing where faith and heaven meet people who seek closeness to God.
I thoughtfully turned over the card, on the back of which the front image had only been discreetly printed, thereby creating space for noting my own place of longing. Many other places came to mind besides Orkney - two special home groups, several communities that had been a home to me all over the world, but also very "worldly" places like Carnegie Hall or the café of my childhood and youth, and so many more.
Where does your longing live?”, dear reader. A little inspiration for this can be the song “There lives a longing deep within us”, which the English composer Anne Quigley wrote in 1973 and which we of course sang in the service. I look forward to hearing from you either via email or through this survey.
In my family in peace with my friends in my community in church in sports
in a place from my childhood or youth in a place special to me in my heart
A sad week in our household. For the first time in over forty years, my wife and I do not have a newspaper to hold in our hands. She...
