gavoweb

spiritual | cultural | technological life

spiritual formation

Wild Goose Festival a final gander

By

Wild Goose Festival**This originally posted at Youthworker Circuit Blog. Kevin headed up the Wild Goose Festival Youth Community tent where he was able to get folks like Shane Claiborne and Brian McLaren came to share with the teenagers at the event.

When you get right down to it, there are more goose jokes than you might think.

I came into Wild Goose in a kind of hodge-podge, last-second decision kind of way and managed to experience it in a similar fashion. At the outset, I was alerted to its existence by a Twitter mention from Gavin: “@elvisfreakshow really wants to go to this, he just doesn’t know it yet.” It was the end of February, I think. So I headed over to the Wild Goose site, which at the time was less cool and more borrowed looking. I poked around a bit, but apart from a sense that Derek Webb was involved, there wasn’t much information. “Maybe he was kidding,” I concluded.

A few months months and a circus of communication later, I was asked (two weeks ahead of the festival) to lead the youth team. Which, as it turned out, was a bit of a blank page considering how close we were to the festival. My experience of the festival, then, was from the perspective of both insider and outsider. The most common sentiment I picked up throughout the festival from everyone I encountered was that we were all so glad it was happening. I don’t know if any two people came away with the same story; everyone seemed to be moving through in their own way. Two truths: I missed about half of the bands and speakers that I would like to have seen. And I would do it again the same way.

Because I approached the festival as an attendee, I came with my family. Because at the very last I became staff, my family and I had very different experiences of the festival and we were careful to evaluate our time together and apart as we went along, to avoid the former intention being ruined by the latter obligation. Late one evening we arrived at this conclusion that I think pretty fairly sums up the Wild Goose experience: in no other set of circumstances over any other 4 days would we ever have encountered such a powerful collection of moments. And all those moments added up to a sense of worthwhile that is difficult to express.

Ordinarily the event is about, well, the event. The right speakers, bands, whatever. At Wild Goose, it felt like the event was about those in attendance. Conversations you’d have nowhere else. People you’d meet nowhere else. Presenters and performers that were present for the duration of the event. When does that ever happen?

Sure, it wasn’t perfect. There’s probably a mighty check-list being nailed to the wall somewhere as you read this (“#16. Don’t attempt to transition from soul-warming Americana to intimate worship by putting a comic in the middle. #17. Especially if you’ve just passed out 1,000 marshmallows to the masses). But the spirit of the festival was picked up by the crowd entirely; walking the grounds the last day of the festival felt like the last day of a mission trip. Something special had happened. People weren’t streaming for the exits; they were lingering, savoring.

I’m all in for next year; I suspect I’m not the only one who has already Googled, “Wild Goose 2012″ with unreasonable optimism. I’ll be making my case to head next year’s youth team later this week; people seemed to resonate with this year’s efforts–imagine what I could do with more than a week and a half of preparation!

Hope to see you there next time.

Peace,
K


The Kinds of Monks or Christians

By

From the Rule of Saint Benedict:

There are clearly four kinds of monks. First, there are the cenobites, that is to say, those who belong to a monastery, where they serve under a rule and an abbot.

Second, there are anchorites or hermits, who have come through the test of living in a monastery for a long time, and have passed beyond the first fervor of monastic life. Thanks to the help and guidance of many, they are now trained to fight against the devil. They have built up their strength and go from the battle line in the ranks of their brothers to the single combat of the desert. Self-reliant now, without the support of another, they are ready with God’s help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind.

Third, there are the sarabites, the most detestable kind of monks, who with no experience to guide them, no rule to try them ‘as gold is tried in a furnace (Prov. 27:21), have character as soft as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions, they clearly lie to God by their tonsure. Two or three together, or even alone, without a shepherd, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds, not the Lord’s. Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden.

Fourth and finally, there are the monks called gyrovagues, who spend their entire lives drifting from region to region, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries. Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites. In every way they are worse than sarabites.

It is better to keep silent than to speak of all these and their disgraceful way of life. Let us pass them by, then, and with the help of the Lord, proceed to draw up a plan for the strong kind, the cenobites.

Was reading this today & had a little transfer of names. What if we changed the wording from ‘monks’ to ‘christians?’ What would it sound like then? Do we know those Christians who apply to a rule of life, sit under the leadership of an abbot? What about those that make everything work for them in theology and practice? Saint Benedict didn’t seem to like those monks very much. How bout the ‘gyrovagues’.. ever heard of those that “church shop?”

Funny to me in all this is that any monk is a claiming follow of Christ (at least in Saint B’s framework). But yet there is a distinction of commitment. Funny still is that the hermit, someone we’d probably look on oddly in our culture today, is one of Saint Benedict’s most favorite kind of monk. What does that say?

So what do we do with all these different kinds of monks, err Christians?

Saint Benedict says to not say anything and just pass them by. Easier said than done, cough cough westboro baptist folks. I’m more interested in helping folks though move from that sarabite stage to a cenobite.

When it comes to a topic of church growth, we might seek out a gyrovague or sarabite to pull numbers in quickly, but in the long run, they are gone as soon as they came or are of little help or even detriment to the work of the monastery through Christ.