‘Sad Libs’ for our time

LOUISVILLE — On Friday, the next-to-last day of APCE’s Annual Event, the Rev. Jeff Chu, one of the event’s two plenary speakers, wove a spell during his discussion about wrestling with disenchantment.

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Chu, who’s a reporter and editor, pastor and educator, used a takeoff on the classic Mad Libs that he called “Sad Libs.” Chu asked attendees to write down 14 words — nouns, adjectives and verbs specific to what Chu called for, including “favorite names for God” “verbs saying what you want God to do” and a past-tense verb “summarizing how God has shown up in your life before.”

Two brave attendees handed their list of words to Chu, who fashioned them into a modern-day psalm. Here’s one: “To you, O Lord, I have cried out. To you I have lifted up breakup. My soul is sad and lonely. How long, O Lord, will you be distant and vindictive? How long, O Holy One? Do not refuse my cries, O Lord. Listen to me. Show up and bring peace, for I know you are loving and kind. I remember how you showed up. I will not forget that in your presence my soul was joyful and at peace. But this much I know: You, O Lord, are the God of steadfast love — love and eternal Spirit. God’s love endures forever.”

“I find disenchantment to be an intriguing word,” Chu told those attending online and in person at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Disenchantment is a little like disappointment, but “that lacks a certain oomph. To say one is disenchanted implies one was once enchanted” — literally, put under a spell or bewitched. “Disenchanted is to be set free from that spell,” he noted.

In the biblical account of Jacob’s all-night wrestling match, “we see that a blessing broke the enchantment” when Jacob was “given something that was rightfully his.” The story “tells us that post-blessing, everything pretty much fell together” for Jacob. He reconciles with his brother, Esau, and together they bury their father.

“What are the things that enchant you that are actually harming you? That hurt the church? That damage society? That destroy the world?” Chu asked. “What I wish for you is holy disenchantment.” Together with the whole world, we “are deeply and profoundly loved, and through that love we will be liberated.”

Chu said he wants the country “to grow disenchanted with white supremacy” and with fundamentalism, arrogance, greed, individualism and “with addictive habits that distract us from our true selves, and with all manner of marginalization.”

“Holy disenchantment is an awakening to the beauty of all God made,” he said, but “it’s not always greeted with joy.”

“Liberation and freedom are often excruciating processes that require often painful patience, the drip, drip, drip of living water,” Chu said.

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“It’s the kind of holy disenchantment we work for as educators,” Chu said. “We have one another, and we are more similar than we might think. You are tender, hard-working, faithful and true to your calling. You deeply care about each other and your denominations. I know there is a powerful store of love in this room.”

Our biblical forebears “were so messy, so human,” Chu said, and they remind us — like our own ancestors do — that others came before us. One spiritual ancestor who was “thoroughly disenchanted” expressed lament in just four words in Psalm 13: “How long, O Lord?”

“That was a gift the psalmist gave us,” Chu said. “It was a way of saying, ‘Something isn’t right and some things are just beyond us.’ It’s a way of beginning to lament, to invite God to do God’s thing, to dare God to keep God’s promise, turning what is profane into what is holy.”

Chu’s upcoming book, “Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand,” will be published March 25. It includes lessons learned while working at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Farminary, a 21-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions.