The Practice of Two Chairs

seeing, hearing, sensing, trusting

Hello, Blue Roomies!

Our Art of Onward series continues today with some spiritual sustenance for the difficult work of living, advocating, caring, resisting… all those abundant and tangled responses we’re called to make to a world that’s so often mean, baffling, ferocious, fragile.

My friend Ashley Goff, pastor of Arlington (VA) Presbyterian Church, shared her sermon from yesterday with me—we both preached on the healing of Tabitha in Acts 9. I’ll have a link to mine on Friday, but I was so taken with her approach to the text, especially the bit I’m sharing below. 

Ashley is a pastor, and APC is a community, I deeply admire for walking the talk with creativity and an eye toward justice and abundance. And as I thought about what I wanted to share with you today, I felt I could in no way improve upon this story of Ashley showing up in an incredibly fraught situation—a tragedy, even—with no idea of what she’d say or do, and then having the right approach come to her out of the formation she and her congregation have experienced together. (In addition to being APC’s pastor, Ashley is a chaplain for the Arlington Fire Department, which is what prompted the phone call she describes below.)

She and I have done some improv work together, and you can see that yes-and sensibility at work as well… the idea that when we say yes to an opportunity, we trust that our “and” will reveal itself. 

Thank you Ashley! 

---

Two weeks ago, 

I was doing something ordinary. 

Making some returns at the UPS store—

Holy Week stuff that never made it out of the boxes. 

Then I got a call from Arlington’s Emergency Communication Center (911). 

Photo by Rebecca Campbell on Unsplash

A tragedy at a school.

A chaplain was needed.

I didn’t stop to change my clothes.

I just went.

And as I crossed the threshold into that school—

stepping through the door, 

crossing from the parking lot 

into the hallway—I felt it: 

What am I going to say? What do I do?

What’s the kind thing to do here? 

Like Tabitha’s death, everything had stopped.

The routines of a school day were suspended.

The air was heavy, quiet, tense

with the weight of what had happened.

It was a moment when time held its breath.

After arriving, I’d told the staff:

If you want to talk,

come and sit in the chair next to me.

There were two chairs in the hallway.

I sat down on one.