What Our Churches Can Learn From Tangier Island

Tangier Island

“‘The margins, Nathan,’ he said when he resumed speaking. ‘That’s what we’re losing. We’re losing the churches on the margins. We aren’t doing enough for them.’”—Loren Mead to Nathan Kirkpatrick at faithandleadership.com.

Tangier Island is a disappearing island in the Chesapeake Bay, located twelve miles equidistant from the Maryland and Virginia coasts. It is losing up to sixteen feet of its coastline annually due to rising sea levels from global warming and soil erosion. The government believes the island will become uninhabitable for the more than 500 people living there within twenty to thirty years. In fifty years, the island will be completely underwater. 

The local islanders speak a unique dialect that blends elements of Elizabethan British and a southern drawl. They are primarily oyster and crab fishers year-round and tourist guides in the summer. The 1.2-square-mile island is steeped in religious tradition and shuts down completely on Sunday mornings. 

Nathan Kirkpatrick, writing in the Duke Divinity School Leadership Education Center’s Alban Weekly (June 26, 2018), recalls a conversation with Loren Mead, the founding director of the Alban Institute, who compared the Church to Tangier Island. What does Dr. Mead mean by saying the Church is “losing its margins?”

Is he telling us the Church is shrinking because it is not paying attention to people on the fringes of society—the poor, the weak, the hungry, the homeless, the tired, the sick, those most different from ourselves? In the larger scheme, is he referring to our neighbors who border us, whom we do not care about? Our call to service comes from these margins. Through our prayer life, we hear that call. 

I remember one of my favorite quotes from Bishop Barbara Harris: “The Church is like an oriental rug. Its fringes are what make it most beautiful.” This is our call to bring the world’s needs to the church.

In spiritual direction, I also ask people how the story of Tangier Island might relate to the care of their soul. There are so many possible answers.

One question is, “Do you ever feel your soul shrinking? Do you feel you are losing the margins, the borders, the uniqueness, the most inspiring and possibly the most interesting parts of your soul, the God, the Christ within you?” Many factors contribute to this: a lack of time for silence or prayer, becoming too busy, a loss of priorities, or straying from our rule of life. My experience is that this also happens when we serve only the fringes without being led by the Spirit in prayer, or when we lose connection with community.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Another Photographic Failure

Another Photographic Failure

Guest Writer: Alan Schlesinger

Humpback Whale in Stephans Passage in Alaska Inside Passage

My wife and I recently returned from an eight-day cruise along Alaska’s Inside Passage. We had always wanted to visit this beautiful part of Southeast Alaska, and we had never been on a cruise before. We decided to splurge on this trip of a lifetime and signed up for a National Geographic/Lindblad small-ship cruise—100 passengers and a crew of 40 (including six naturalists), Zodiac excursions and sea kayaking, and vast landscapes and amazing wildlife. 

As a photographer, deciding what camera gear to bring was daunting. Not experienced in wildlife photography, I opted not to bring the long telephoto lenses needed to capture close-up images of bears and whales—even though friends offered to lend me theirs. I have enough photographic experience to know that an eight-day adventure is not the time or place to begin learning those skills. Those skills must be honed over years of trial and error, with Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” invested before hoping to make amazing wildlife photographs on a trip like this.

Therefore, I chose to focus on landscape photography—a genre that, though not my main focus in photography, is one in which I do have some experience. So, foregoing the long telephoto lenses required for photographing wildlife, I instead packed wide-angle and short telephoto lenses well suited for landscape photography. I told my wife that instead of trying to make a beautiful close-up photograph of a whale or bear in the wild, my goal was to make a beautiful photograph of the vast Alaskan landscape featuring a whale or a bear.

When I captured this amazing sight of a humpback whale breaking the surface of the glass-like waters of Stephens Passage, the nearby silhouetted islands and mountains, and the last light of the setting sun kissing the peaks of the distant mountains, I was deeply satisfied. It was what I had hoped for—a beautiful photograph of an amazing landscape with a whale in it.

Why, then, the title “another photographic failure”? Because, though I had made an image that captured a breathtaking sight in the Inside Passage, the photograph failed to capture the entire experience of witnessing this magical portion of God’s creation: the sound of a hundred people gasping at the sight of a whale—whether it was their first time or they had seen many whales before—as it spouted a geyser of seawater skyward, flipped its tail, and took a deep dive, or the thunder of a glacier calving and sending a blue iceberg into the bay; the clean, woodsy smell of Sitka spruce when landing on the shore and stepping off a Zodiac, or the pungent aroma of hauled-out sea lions as one kayaks past nearby rocks; the tingle on exposed skin from the cool Alaskan summer air when standing on deck, or the chill of icy water dripping from your kayak paddle with every stroke. 

Though I was very happy to have made what I consider a beautiful photograph—one I had “pre-visualized” and planned for—it did not fully capture what one experiences in this indescribably beautiful place. I have to agree with writer and photographer Dave Bohn, who, in 1966, first visited Glacier Bay in the Inside Passage and saw the terminus of Muir Glacier: “And now I understand. I understand all the old attempts at description. I understand why they were written and why they failed. The scene before me is staggering and I find no other word*.”

*Dave Bohn, Glacier Bay; The Land and the Silence. Ballantine Books, 1967. Page 133.

 Alan Schlesinger

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Walking Each Other Home

Walking each other home

“Find those who tell you, Do not be afraid, yet stay close enough to tremble with you. This is love.”—Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 90.

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I have most often described courage as “fear that has said its prayers.” Many may recognize this as a 12-step recovery saying.

Cole Riley deepens our understanding of fear. He tells us that fear is not something we need to face alone. We are to live in community with friends who understand our worries and may even share them. Friends walk with us through fear. Neither of us knows what will happen, but their presence, not their words, makes all the difference. This, indeed, is love. 

We sit with those who are sick and afraid to die. We stand with each other when no one else will.

I see the image of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, when she was the Surgeon General, holding her young son’s hand as she walked with him to court when he was accused of drug use. That was love. 

I see parents and friends sitting at the bedside of a child who was severely injured in a car accident.

I see men and women in Ukraine standing together to resist an invasion of their country, even though they were shopkeepers and teachers just a few months earlier.

Ukraine LA Times

I see members of a town devastated by a hurricane, flood, or tornado holding each other up and picking up the pieces together.

I see young men and women in the military, protecting our country in wars they did not start, who went to proms and graduations just months earlier.

Today, we give thanks for all those known and unknown who have done this for all we love.  

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/