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Kyle Childress

Twenty-five years ago some pastors shared a meal at a Baptist meeting full of division and fighting that made us desperate to be with friends. Soon our meal and conversation evolved into a quick overnight gathering, frantic with frozen pizza, cold beer, cigars, and talk into the wee hours. It didn’t take long before we were doing the overnight thing twice a year; after Joe and Charlie came up with generous and beautiful ranch houses with plenty of room, owned by extended family members, we turned our get-together into a week and Nathan gave us the name “the Neighborhood” for Will Campbell’s little radical band of friends in his novel The Glad River.

Six of us clergy friends meeting twice a year for a week for over twenty-five years—that’s the Neighborhood, or the “Hood” for short. We block the dates on our calendars six months out and even our congregations do planning around them. We talk and plan and joke and anticipate with increasing excitement in the weeks approaching our little gathering while tending to myriad pastoral tasks so the Hood will be worry-free over what we’ve left undone back home. We bring books and sermon materials (Hood or no Hood a sermon still awaits us when we get home), and movies. We love our movies. Or to be more exact, we love a particular movie: The Big Lebowski.

We drive, fly, speed, shop for groceries and whatever else we need to do in order to be at the Hood by Monday evening. Rushed and tired from rushing, still on full-speed-ahead-time, we are excited and full of adrenaline; though we are glad to be away from the frantic stressors behind us, the habits of speed are still with us. We are committed to slowing down but it takes a while and it takes intention. The poet Theodore Roethke said, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow”; that’s us as we move into Hood time on Tuesday morning. Slowly we get to our coffee and the first order of business that sets the tone for the rest of our week of learning to abide —living into hanging out; learning simply to be. With coffee in hand we sit down and watch The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers comedy about the Dude, of whom narrator Sam Elliot says, “he’s a lazy man—and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide.” After fifteen years of watching the movie twice a year we’ve all memorized the script, favorite lines are repeated to one another throughout the year, and obscure references show up in our emails and conversation. The Dude has become a kind of hero or saint to us. He shows us the way.

Every one of us is amused that the Dude is the patron saint of the Hood. In our various ways and contexts, we are now or have been driven pastors in thriving churches and ministries with much going on. To enjoy to the point of cult status a movie character known for underachieving slacking, whose preferred dress is pajamas and a bathrobe, and who will blow an evening lying in the bathtub, getting high and listening to an audiotape of whale songs, is ironic, to say the least. In a kind of summary of who he is at the end of the movie the Dude says, “Yeah man. Well, you know, the Dude abides.”

Abiding is not something that comes to mind when thinking about our modern lives or even our church’s lives. We not only do not abide, we don’t even know what it is anymore. “Get ’er done” is more our motto. Church members are working longer hours or perhaps working two jobs, while also running kids to their numerous after-school activities, and we clergy are frantically fighting to find ways for them to worship God and to serve others. Even when I go to our local ministerial alliance the most common response to “How are you?” is “Busy.”

For us and for our churches, the old social activist saying, “If not us, who? And if not now, when?” echoes in our heads. With concealed racism rampant and unconcealed sexism on the rise, impoverishment, climate change, injustice, plus church members with cancer and heart disease and all of the rest, someone’s got to do something!

But “abide” keeps whispering to us. Not just from the Dude, but more, from Jesus himself (didn’t Jesus go around in a robe, too?). Jesus says that in order to know God, know love, and be able to do the specific work of this loving God, we have to abide in him. Simply being—being together in Christ is essential, not an addendum (John 15). When someone used to ask Will Campbell what we are to do in a world going to hell in a hand-basket, he’d say, “Do? Do nothing! Be something! Be what you are—reconciled to God and humanity.” And he’d quote Bonhoeffer, who pointed out that it was an “Anglo-Saxon failing” to imagine that the church was supposed to have a ready answer for every social problem. Will’s friend, and another patron saint of ours (and another guy in a robe), Thomas Merton, said, “Before you do a damned thing, just be what you say you are, a Christian; then no one will have to tell you what to do. You’ll know.”7

After four days of sitting on the porch and watching cows graze, telling stories, and reading books, going for walks and just hanging out, we point ourselves toward home and the work of ministry which awaits us. Every gathering, twice a year for twenty-five years, we end our Neighborhood in a circle, arms around each other, and someone prays. We are grateful. God’s grace is sufficient. The Hood abides.

7. Quoted in Campbell, Up to Our Steeples in Politics, 152 –53.