Coffee Shop Catharsis

If you come to Denver this year, let me know and I'll take you here.
If you come to Denver after this year...go here, it's good. 

I spend an hour and a half every week intentionally free to meet with parishioners during what I call 'Office Hours' where people come by and hang out.  It's part pastoral care, part building and deepening my relationships with parishioners, and partly facilitating community between everyone who shows up.

Then there are some weeks, like this one, where no one shows up for a while.  Granted, there is an hour left of that time, but I've brought a book along to read for a book club I'm leading during Advent so I've got things to do during this time.  However, today is a weird day in the basement of Hooked on Colfax, I've spent the last half hour completely enthralled with a guy who is talking to another guy...he's been recounting the details of his attempted suicide.  Eavesdropping is probably not the best practice, obviously, but listening to his story of depression and living hell and the rebirth that happened from it is so interesting, and has given me a lot to think about.

Today in Text Study we talked about incarnation and the nature of Salvation Luke talks about in next week's gospel: salvation of all the fleshy beings.  We talked about how we have a God who dared to reveal God's self in flesh to us, and how sacred flesh is, then.  Now, sitting here listening to this story of rebirth and how this guy recognized the importance of his own self and own fleshy nature as a human is giving me chills.  And I think about my own flesh, the parts I'd like to kill off, and how they too are loved by a fleshy and incarnate God, and that's deeply comforting to me.  Catharis...in the basement of a coffee shop (where I'm certain more pastoral care takes place by people who have no church or no use for church than in some church buildings).