Interview with Scott Taylor, Deacon

About dealing with the stress of waiting and not knowing:

My spiritual director just keeps telling me to lean into the waiting and not force things. Just let things be slow and let them unfold. It's going to be what it's going to be. You're not going to get in the jail [to minister] any faster by worrying about it or trying to push at it.

So just accept this time. And what can you be doing in this time? What can you be learning and thinking?

And so overall, the way I see this time is, I call it the trifecta of trouble that we have: the pandemic, and then we've got the fires and then I call the turmoil in the nation the third part of this trifecta. So it's pandemic, fires, and turmoil.

So it feels like one of those three I can handle. But all three at once at times just seems unbearable. But I think what has made it easier, is being here in nature.

I grew up in a small town in Waukesha, Wisconsin. So I'm from the Midwest and I miss the greenery after living in cities my whole adult life. And I felt like it was time to do this. So that's been a real blessing, to be outside and just see the birds, the sky, the trees. Taking a forest bath. Just walking in the forest really slowly, bathing in the greenery. I average about an hour a day walking through the paths and down to the ocean and back. Jennifer [my wife] goes about three hours a day.

About the role of the church now and after the pandemic:

I was talking with an older priest who's kind of a sage and he says, will the church have a role in rebuilding society after the pandemic?

That question really resonated with me: where’s the church in this discussion, we don't hear a lot about the church and the values of Jesus. It's like it's really muted with that discussion.

If you think about it, really, this town started as a spiritual retreat center. And it's like that's in the bones of this church. It's a spiritual center. And I'd love to see it become more of a spiritual center where people come here to pray, to be restored, to retreat, to, I'm just making this up right now.

But, we can get that labyrinth done down there. And, maybe those empty classrooms, maybe they become a little retreat center. And people are here. We just have no idea if that's viable or not and I just made it up right now.

How do you make this into a spiritual center? Because I think the trap of churches is that they try to become social agencies. It's like, how are you different than that nonprofit over there? And I get there is some overlap. You know, we hand out food. This group hands out food. But how do we do it? Why do we do it? And what else are we doing? You know, because we acknowledge that at CSC, the people that are handing out the food, the ministry is both ways. All right. In other words, who's doing the ministry benefits as much as who's receiving the food. Is that true for a nonprofit? I mean, how are we different? I like to say that the church is the only place where you can talk about God because you're not allowed to have those conversations at work. It's hard to have it with friends and things like that. But here you're encouraged to ask those bigger questions. What does it mean when my mother dies? What does it mean if that is Alzheimer’s? What does it mean if I'm a stranger to my sister? How come I have this disease? How come I lost my job? What's the meaning of all this? This is the only place where you can seek meaning. And why aren't we doing more with that? I used to work in the marketing business for 20 years. You don't have big posters saying “Come here to find meaning!” No, it's like it's not that. But how do we be the spiritual center that attracts people that are seeking meaning in life and then want to find it through being in this life-giving community that's driven by the values and love of Christ? To me that's compelling. But it's not the church that we've always known. So we don't know where it's going to go, but we need to do something to be relevant in society again and not become just this afterthought.

About his spiritual practices:

I reached out to my spiritual director and she's been very helpful because I think it's really hard not to get overly anxious.

I have to tell myself I'm not going to obsessively check the latest poll before I go to bed.

Fortunately I already have a good spiritual practice in that I get up in the morning and I start my morning meditation and go outside. You know, that's my first cup of coffee. It’s quiet--not being just active, just sitting there.

And then I go back inside and then I do the Psalms every day. I just do one Psalm a day and go through the book and I start all over again. I’ve been doing that for years. And it's like they just sort of get into you. They should sit on your heart, you know, and they're familiar. Reading these things again: “Oh yeah. I remember that.“

It's a full set of emotions.

Some days you're singing praises and slamming the tambourine and other days you're saying, “Oh God, I’m in Sheol. Who’s gonna praise you in Sheol? So let me out of here.”

Then I read the Bible and I've been doing something different.

I started reading the entire Bible out loud to myself. I just go through a chapter or two. But I did all the New Testament first and I did the prophets. And then the history books, Kings and Chronicles. Now I’m reading in Genesis to go through the Pentateuch. So it's like I made my own “Read the Bible in a Couple of Years”. It sounds different out loud. Because it was an oral tradition. We forget that the Bible was never written down until it had been told for years. Even the latest books came out of an oral tradition. And Paul's letters were meant to be read out loud.

That's good for me.

What the pandemic means and how it affects us:

What does God really want? Does he want a list of accomplishments or does God want me to be present to God? To me, you know, in a weird way, this is radical therapy to make us all present to God. We take away all the distractions. Now, will you focus on God?

I'm not one of those that believes this is the plague that God sends. Then you have to figure out what each plague means to you. And then aren't you playing God?

You know, it's like we just drive up and down the street and it's like closed, you know, this business closed and what's going to happen? The families are struggling, you know? And then you look at what's going on in Salinas with the farm workers, and undocumented people that were working in food service, not just agricultural, and they've all lost their jobs or they're forced to work on crews. People are sick.

I have such privilege. Right. But all these essential workers are risking their health to keep me safe.

So it's very humbling in that sense. What does that mean? What am I called to do in response to this, which is love really? So it's making me think about that too. 

Is there anything positive about the pandemic?

[The pandemic] is making us really look at what's important. I also think that the George Floyd protests wouldn't have lasted as long if everybody wasn't off work. 

And it's about time that we start to look at the policing policies which are racist. You know, [saying] it's one bad apple is bogus. It's not a bad apple. It's a bad system. Policies create this. So we need to change the policies and then the apples will change themselves.

Because I've worked with police and sheriffs and all that. And you have a whole range of people just like you do everywhere else.

They will follow the policies because they want to keep their job. And if the policies allow them to be explicitly racist then they will.

Or use of force. Drives me crazy. Why is the first answer to pull out the gun? Why do we need to send a police officer with a gun to someone having a mental health crisis? You know, many studies show that we could reduce the amount of police with guns, by probably 80 percent. Put private security people there, social workers there, things like that. Because the real deterrent to crime is not the police officer with a gun. It's a person. Watching. It’s this collective efficacy of that neighborhood caring for each other, these deep ties and everything, that makes a community safe. Not a policeman or policewoman there to arrest somebody, put them in jail. So I do think there have been some good things to come out of this. It's forcing us to get real about a lot of things. And I hope that we don't just try to go back to normal. It's not normal. It never will be the normal again. This is a new time. We need to acknowledge things are different and to look at what that means. What is God calling us to be as faithful people in this new time?