Year-Round Stewardship Testimonial: Michael Neal Arnold
When asked if I am a Christian, I answer that I am a Practicing Christian. I go on to say that I like the term “Practicing” because it puts the emphasis on what I do rather than what I believe. (I also like the term because it suggests that I am still working on it.) Call it serendipity or the Holy Spirit at work; but what I am talking about is pretty much the same as “Faith is a verb, not a noun”.
My interpretation of practicing Christianity is focus on things like humility, community, compassion, empathy, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness.
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in a number of ministries here at Trinity. I would group them into three general areas; service to others, leadership, and liturgical. Service to others includes things like Home Visits as a Lay Eucharistic Minister, preparing meals at Transition House, and working with the residents at the Faulding Hotel. Leadership includes things like Parish Counsel, Vestry, and various Committees. Liturgical includes things like acting as a Reader, Lay Eucharistic Minister, and Acolyte during services. All of these activities are part of my practice of Christianity. And they all have brought me into a closer relationship with God.
The best way I can describe my understanding of the term “God” is the concept of “Universal Harmony”. By Universal Harmony, I mean the innate goodness and love that I believe is the default in all existence. Sometimes I think of it as being almost more like a universal hum – hmmmm. The experience of Universal Harmony has been described by others as grace, being at one with God, the Thin Place, the Body of Christ, and maybe even “in the zone”. The essential requirement is humility; that is, losing the sense of one’s self as being apart, or separate, from the whole. At its best - its purist - practicing Christianity is just that; acting with humility. And it puts us in direct relationship with Universal Harmony, with God.
Examples of my encounters with Universal Harmony include handing a warm plate of food to a child at Transition House, placing a Communion wafer on the tongue of an elderly woman at a convalescent hospital, sitting quietly in discernment with a Search Committee, reading Compline together at the end of a Vestry meeting, leading the Intercessions on the morning after yet another mass shooting, helping with foot washing at a Maundy Thursday Supper. And there are many, many more. These encounters, these brushes with the sacred, leave me absolutely euphoric. So many times, when I am leaving one of these encounters, people say, “Thank you, thank you for coming”. I always think to myself, “Silly people, I should be thanking them.”
What I have neglected to share with you are the scores of ministries here at Trinity that I have not been involved with. And that is equally important. No one person can do everything. We each do what we can do. And acting together, as a community, we have it covered.
One of my favorite Epistles is First Corinthians. A section of it reads;
12 There is one body, but it has many parts.
And later,
27 You are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of it.
Practicing Christianity is ultimately about community, about focus on being a part of the “whole”.
AMEN