Wedding day

 

And finally, it's October 11, wedding day for Kurt and Claire, Claire and Kurt, or, if you will, Clurt, who will be married this afternoon in the midst of family and friends, here in Maine.

Wrote that sentence, more or less, in my journal this morning and noticed the alliteration. Family and friends go together conventionally, paired up with that initial shared letter. "Married in the midst" was more interesting this morning, a reminder that marriages, while they are a private, shared space between two people, exist within communities--communities that may have introduced these two people to each other, provided space and occasions for developing a relationship, and that now come together to celebrate today and promise to support these two people in the days to come. 

My own 24-year marriage ended with my husband's death 19 years ago. If you solve the addition problem built into that last sentence, you'll see that as I remember my own wedding day today, I'm looking at 43-year-old memories. Are they memories of the actual way things happened? Or memories of the photos? It's been a long, long time. 

And so many other things happened in the years since, one of which is, of course, Kurt. 

Kurt, my youngest. Kurt the basketball player. Kurt who while trying to keep up with the big boys fell out of a tree, picked himself up off the ground, and announced "Walker, Texas Ranger, will return" before running, crying, into the house. The story comes from his older girl cousins. He probably doesn't remember, but we all had a good long laugh when Lauren told it last summer. Undaunted would be a good word for Kurt, one that holds for all the many things he's gone after in his 33 years, the way he's kept going, kept wanting and working and becoming himself.

Undaunted would be a good word for Claire as well, along with creative and kind and curious, and more words that I'll discover in the years ahead. I am so very grateful for her care of Kurt. That undaunted-ness in the both of them keeps them looking forward, facing into the wind and working at doing hard stuff.

And now, creating a wedding out of nothing, at least not the conventional stuff. No wedding planner, no banquet-hall venue, no color-coordinated linens. But they have a vision: friends and family frolicking on a farm on a beautiful fall afternoon, with a Wes Anderson vibe. Plus dancing under the stars, followed by overnight camping for the hardy ones. And they've gathered friends and family around them to make it all happen. To arrange the flowers and set the tables, build a photo background, set up conversation areas in the barn, move chairs, serve drinks, and be eco-warriors at the wedding so that all the compostable paper products end up in the right bins. 

This is no passive "married in the midst." It's an invitation to create the day together. To create the future together. 

Today's weather forecast says sunny, with highs in the 60s. The ground is dry, the woods here in Kennebunk are gold and yellow and green. The day smiles. The wedding website requested prayers for good weather, and people came through. So God came through. 

That's not good theology, but it's the kind of overly simple connection we poor humans like to make while God smiles benevolently. We're small but somehow we're connected to that wide and merciful Unity, that is the source of all love. God's presence is felt in the love Kurt and Claire discovered together. In their adventures, in their work, in their lives amid family and friends. 

And for me today, in the connections between past and future. Utter the word vision and my husband Lon, movie lover, would inevitably add, "Hell of a vision." He was quoting Captain Woodrow Call at the end of "Lonesome Dove," "Hell of a ..." encompasses a lot in that story: hard work, love, pain, maturity and loss. Can't see them at the start, but inevitable. 

If Kris, Kurt's older brother were here to give marital advice, he'd be quoting what his father-in-law told him: "Happy wife, happy life," the reality of dedicating your life to someone else's welfare. Kris, of course, would be bouncing around the wedding venue, working the crowd, and beaming, so crazy-proud of his little brother for winning the love of a woman as awesome as Claire. 

Lost

"One way to look at it," he told me one day as I sawed through scales to make muscle for flying, "is that we are all lost, we were already lost the day we were born. In music, we can become tragically and beautifully lost ... and found again."

Joy Harjo
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and has a host of other honors. I recently read her book of poems titled An American Sunrise, which was listed in a recommended reading article at The Atlantic. I frequently go from lists like that to the local library's online search page. A couple of clicks and the book's on hold. And, unless it's a recent book that many people want to read, it takes only a couple of days for the book to make its way from another suburban library 10 or 15 miles away to the pick-up shelf at the branch library just blocks from my home. This library service goes a long way to explaining the pile of books on the table next to my chair in the living room.

I searched and placed a hold on Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings last week and opened it up yesterday and again this morning. Harjo's musical world is a long way from mine. Her poems use images of the all-night circle dance with its singing. Others call on the saxophone and recreate the whirl and tension of jazz improvisation. 

This prose story quoted above brought me up short yesterday morning. What does that phrase mean exactly?  I stopped and noticed and thought about it. Could I find myself in "tragically and beautifully"?  

I've never been much for writing trails of adverbs and adjectives to describe music. This is because music does things that words can't -- so why use words? The words come out looking weak and insufficient. (Note: words also do things that music can't.) A critic can analyze forms, progressions, describe how a piece of music does what it does. A listener can describe the images a piece of music conjures in the mind — all those angels floating around singing "Holy, holy" in settings of the Sanctus, for example. A publicist will pile up the adjectives to promote a concert or musical event; these might include glorious, transcendent, hopeful — marketing words currently on display in promotional material I'm working on for an upcoming City Voices concert I'm involved in. (It's on October 18 and 19. More info here.) 

But "tragically and beautifully lost" was a new idea for me. I understand being lost in the music, cares and worries abandoned in the discipline of performing or in the immersive experience of listening. I was chatting with a fellow chorister recently during a break in rehearsal; he said that the thing he enjoyed about choral singing was that you could go to rehearsal and not think about anything else for a while. I had to agree. The mental and physical work of reading, counting, and singing well leaves little room in my brain for anything other than did I get that right and what's coming up next. 

That's rehearsal —mental work, uncertainty, vulnerability, eventual success. Getting lost in the bigger picture of the metaphysics of performance, of musicians and live audience traveling through musical time together -- that's something else. My most recent reference point is, as it often is here at the Perverse Lutheran, a Bach Cantata Vespers service. Last Sunday's was the first cantata in the 55th season, the first cantata in my 47th season of singing in the choir. (Yikes, this is a serious rut I'm in.) 

The cantata was based on my favorite hymn to sing as a ten-year-old, "Praise to the Lord the Almighty." Back in the day it was sung in the key of G, and that short "Let the Amen" phrase went up to an E, the top space on the treble staff, the note where a child's vocal apparatus pops into head voice, on the third of a brilliant major subdominant chord. In Bach's setting, in C major, with the tune sung a fourth higher, the melody is altered and the note is the third of a minor chord based on the second degree of the scale; Bach is pushing the phrase forward into the next one and through a more complicated harmonic progression (because he's Bach). (Here's the hymn sung more recently in F major. Cantata chorale here.)

The whole cantata is brilliant, with trumpets and oboes and all the things. And there was a lot of other very big music in the service, with a very big orchestra and a big Samuel Barber concerto for organ as a prelude.

The Epistle lesson that was read in the service (the one appointed for this cantata's day in the church year in Bach's time) was 2 Corinthians 3:4-11, a bit of a puzzle that used the word glory a lot. The final hymn was "When in Our Music God Is Glorified." Glory be, I walked out of the service happy and exalted, the hatred and conflicts of the outside world abandoned for a while. Soli deo gloria amidst all the negativity of these days in history.

And then yesterday, on another beautiful September morning, I found myself nodding along to "tragically and beautifully lost." Not the glorious trumpets, drums and organ of the day before.  Joy Harjo writes about the pain of Indian nations decimated and made homeless by Europeans arriving in America. Jazz is rooted in the Black experience, with its own themes of pain and struggle against injustice. We are all lost, says the speaker, lost from the day we're born. But when we're lost in music that condition is transformed -- not necessarily into happiness, but into tragedy and beauty. We're not just pounding along, practicing our scales because we must. We're something else. The disciplines of music (and art, poetry, drama) help us to see it. 

Soli deo gloria. ;-)

Random on a September Sunday

 It's been two months since I posted here at the Perverse Lutheran. One reason is that there are so very many words out there every single day. I'm so inundated with incoming information, so flooded, that there's no time to let anything soak in, let alone spin it back out into the world with added thoughts or insight. 

So, random thoughts today, on a Sunday.

From the lectionary this morning: choose life, choose Jesus. In church we sang "Let Us Every Walk With Jesus," German chorale from the 17th century. The second stanza begins "Let us suffer here with Jesus." So, one has to ask, who would choose Jesus if that meant choosing suffering? What's wrong with Christians? I think the Buddha has an answer for that: life is suffering. What crossed my mind singing the hymn this morning was not so much the "suffer here" part as the "with Jesus" part. The suffering is inevitable, sometimes because that's just how things are, sometimes because we bring it on ourselves even as we struggle against it. (Buddha again.) I think that suffering is a whole lot easier to manage, spiritually anyway, in the context of a God who gave himself up to suffering in life and death as a human person. 

"Choose life" comes from Deuteronomy 30:15-20, the Old Testament lesson read this morning. 

Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.

Choosing life means choosing what God values. Life worth living means choosing God's values and attributes: love, mercy, righteousness. "Choose life" is not just choosing to continue to live and breathe on this earth. It's not judging other people's healthcare choices. It's not even deciding to live your life to its fullest, or to seize the moment, or to resolve to live in the present every day. It's love and trust in what and who is God. It's bringing all of that into relationships with others. 

This is all pretty preachy for the perverse Lutheran. The sun is setting on what was a beautiful September day. The sky was so blue, the weather cool, the light at this time of day, golden. How did I end up in a post with all these imperatives? 

Spent some time in the car this afternoon and while driving I listened to Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America interview Heather Cox Richardson of Letters From an American. (Listen here.) She introduced herself as a cultural historian and told stories from American history that chronicled two different ideas: the strong individual under no constraints, no government regulation, that gathers resources to himself, versus the collective good, democracy, the people govern, resources are used for the good of all. (Pejoratively this is "socialism"--horrors!) One idea empowers enslavers, Jim Crow, Nixon, Reagan, and the current radical right. The other was articulated by Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama and turned into legislation by LBJ. 

Choose life. Choose life in a way that includes all, that suffers with all, that rises again. 

Waiting for the fireworks

It’s the Fourth. I did not brave the rain this morning to watch for my daughter in the local parade. I picked her up when it was over. Her red, white and blue t-shirt was damp, her red shorts, too. 

Damp falls far short of describing my depressed patriotic spirit today. 

But the weather has cleared up, it's evening, and I’m sitting in the park listening to a cover band entertain the crowd until it’s dark enough for the fireworks to begin. 

I don’t think anyone’s here for the music, but live music does seem to say this is the place to be. Celebrate, come on. There are a few women standing and dancing. I’m guessing they’ve had a beverage or two. And we just heard a round of “USA, USA” yelled from the bandstand. The band leader tired but if anyone picked that up, well, I’m too far away to hear it. 

The people-watching is good. Children with parents. Parents and kids on the blanket next to me are playing a card game. Teens are casing the crowd, pairs of girls in shorts and crop tops. Who’s here, who’s new. And plenty of people like me who are doing stuff on their phones. Not much conversation. The music is LOUD.

I like fireworks. I’m hoping these will brighten the end of July 4, 2025. I’ve been working on threading my loom today (and yesterday, and the day before yesterday), and I’m looking forward to sitting here in the dark, hearing the whoosh after the shell is lit, that second of suspense, and then the pow! and exploding sphere of blue or red or white light. And again the suspense before the sparks fade and fall. 

Lots of kinds of people here. This is the suburb where I grew up, and it’s a more diverse place now than it was then. The kids I grew up with have mostly moved elsewhere, farther away from the city. 

It’s a hard year for celebrating the birth of the American nation, a nation founded on ideas. What can we count on as shared values when fundamental words like liberty and freedom and citizen mean different things to different people and parties. Where are we headed with the country led by a narcissistic, stupid, boastful man with an unfortunate gift for getting attention and with no moral compass for how to use power. 

This too shall pass? Or will the things that are breaking stay broken for a long time? Those white men who met in Philadelphia 249 years ago and pledged each other their lives and their sacred honor — the sky just exploded! — started something we keep trying to make better. A more perfect union. A more caring and inclusive society. Lincoln's "last best hope." 

Here in the park, the fireworks kicked off with the "Star Spangled Banner" on the loudspeaker. It was followed by Bruce Springsteen and “Born in the USA.”

A protest song. Damn, it’s a patriotic night.  

Splendor

Blog or weed? Are those verbs or nouns? 

To blog or to weed, that is the question. To sit in the sun and type, or put the gardening gloves on, kneel by the perennial bed and pull out thistles? Or maybe this is a metaphor. Are the words I'm about to type worth keeping, or will they end up in the compost pile?

It's a blessed Sunday in May when you can sit in the sun and look through the green leaves of the maples into a vividly blue sky. The house sparrows are chipping in surround-sound in all the backyards up and down the alley. A few minutes ago a dogged robin sat on the corner of the fence and sang the same five or six notes over and over again, calling, calling, with every part of its body from grey-brown tail to yellow beak. 

Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.

We had Psalm 67 this morning.

and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe.

 Stand silently in awe. Or praise with chirps and bouncing tails. From one end of the earth to the other.

There are too many words in this world, and too many of them lately mean nothing or worse than nothing. They're weapons, or bullshit, or obfuscation, the kind that may not fool listeners but that the speaker uses to fool himself. 

"Ugh" was a significant part of my vocabulary this week, the word I yelled at the news on the car radio. "Ugh" and another word with a similar vowel. We now have a budget bill in this country that will rob the poor in order to make the rich richer while compromising our collective economic future as a nation. Because money means more to the people who have more of it? 

This morning's preaching included a lot of "I." I didn't want to look inside the preacher's soul; I didn't even want to look inside my own. I didn't come to church to be soothed. I turned to my phone and was able to provide useful affirmation to a fellow knitter on Facebook. And then I got the pencil out of my choir folder and set myself a puzzle, inspired by the entrance hymn we had sung earlier in the service: 

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.

 Its final lines:

All praise we would render, O help us to see
'tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.

Fill in the blank: 

'Tis only the splendor of _______ hideth thee.

So many things could go there. God's vision for justice, blinding unimaginable justice? God's merciful and gracious will, reaching beyond our comprehension? Or the splendor of divine love described by Jesus in the gospel for the day: 

“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them." (John 14:23)

Surely some dazzling imperatives would come with having Jesus and his Father for housemates. Works powered by light, hope, revelation in a new kingdom, so much larger than ourselves. 

Full text of the hymn here. Psalm 67 here. 

The day after

Last week was "B Minor Mass" week in my world: final rehearsals for and performances of J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor. It's a long sing (to use a technical term). A lot of singing and a lot of thinking. A lot of counterpoint. A lot of Latin. A lot. I applied a lesson learned in yoga class: smile when you do the hard stuff. And be patient with yourself.

But it's glorious music. Glorious in listening. Glorious in live performance. Glorious in hard work, and exhilarating in completion.

Bach, of course, never performed this work. (Start your background reading here.) It's not clear what his intentions were in putting this massive work together in his mid-60s, eyesight deteriorating and nearing the end of a life spent applying himself to the work of playing, teaching and composing music that he understood to be a gift of God to humanity. He chose compositions from his past work and adapted, edited, and reassembled them into the great, over-arching musical form of the mass: the Kyrie, calling on God's mercy; the Gloria of thanks and praise for salvation; a Credo, with newly-composed music for the wonder of incarnation, God becoming human like us. And a Sanctus that requires a lot of stamina to sing in 12/8 time, imitating angels floating, without effort, in the rafters of prophetic vision. 

We've been rehearsing since January, with three rehearsals in this last week before performances. I was tired all week and took naps on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, mostly because it's hard to go home and sleep after singing all this intense music in the evening. 

The concerts were a joint effort of Bach Cantata Vespers and Consonance and conducted by Grace Cantor Michael D. Costello. We sang the Mass ten years ago, so the music was not unfamiliar to me. The vocal lines are beautiful, interweaving in counterpoint that Bach took to its outer limits. Also remembered from ten years ago: the vocal panic engendered by long movements, zippy coloratura, and lots of high As for sopranos. 

But when the music is mastered, there's so much to discover as you listen while you sing. And while you sit (rest!) and listen to vocal soloists and instrumental soloists perform the movements that aren't choruses. 

So what does it all mean? Not that it has to mean anything in words, but still, what was J. S. Bach saying about God? And what is there for us, three centuries detached from the Lutheran dogma of Bach's time and place?

You can read commentary and analysis of the Mass that points to musical symbols -- the three-in-one of the Trinity, the descending notes of the incarnation, chromaticism illustrating all kinds of distressing things. I've read a number of analyses in the last few weeks and while scholars find lots to explain, I have to say that specific figures in the music rarely invoke theological concepts in my brain. I remember reading that something somewhere (in the Gloria?) showed the unity of the Son with the Father. I listened for it in various duets and solos last night, but can't honestly say it jumped out at me. 

Different century, different vocabulary. Instead I found myself thinking about all the different sounds and colors in the movements of the Mass. Flutes here, oboes there, violins high and low, plaintive, busy, and celebratory. A movement for the bass soloist accompanied by horn and two bassoons--who does that? And can keep it going that long? And all the different sounds in the chorus -- suspensions and resolutions, fugal entrances crescendoing one on top of another, step-by-step through a harmonic progression, or up the scale. Sudden unisons. Hushed resolutions. Explosive consonants. Loud cadences, quiet ones. Old-school counterpoint, baroque elaboration.

Yesterday as I listened I thought about Bach trying to show us something of what God sounds like, reaching for perfection beyond words, beyond literal, word-dependent theology. I thought about what it means to be a creator, a part of God's ongoing creation -- or, if you will, a creative person in an ever-demanding world of wonder, glory and terror. 

In that world, the world of Monday-morning headlines, we remain creatures dependent on mercy, received and shared, clashing and resolving. And in our finer moments, our God-honoring, creation-honoring moments we shared in the music of big, big choruses of gratitude (Gratias agimus tibi) and in the same music notes used in hopeful prayers for peace (Dona nobis pacem).

Transcendence. 

 

Anniversary blog 2025

Dishtowels on the loom. 

I went to my regular Friday morning yoga class today. It's "Hatha Yoga for the Core" which means there will be crunches or boat poses and a period of harder work and held poses in between the careful breathing and stretches and final rest pose. I like the instructor of this class because she finds a nice balance between predictable routine and bringing in new movement or new ideas. 

New to me today was a technique for shutting down the senses and moving into meditation that recalled the three monkeys who "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." We shut our eyes and placed our index and middle fingers softly over our eyelids, ring fingers on the nose, and pinkies on the lips. Our thumbs gently pressed our ears closed and we sat for a minute. Resting. 

I struggle these days to put my phone down or step away from the computer screen and take a break from the awful stuff that continues to rain down from the current presidential administration in Washington DC. So much evil to see! So much to object to! I'm emailing my representatives in Congress regularly, and also sending messages of support to Illinois's governor and attorney general in Springfield. I write mostly about Medicaid, but so many other issues leave me feeling disturbed and depressed: USAID funding, civil servants losing jobs willy-nilly, the betrayal of Ukraine, petty reprisals against political opponents. 

Closing your eyes to it all -- is that a better alternative? Is it even possible? I know people who don't pay much attention to politics, and others who think that the federal government needs a good goosing and choose to ignore the details and possible repercussions of all the upset. 

I can't ignore the issues and actions that I'm upset about. Maybe that's the way I'm wired -- to complain and object and protest. To want things set right. Or maybe it's the type of Christianity I grew up with, the intense discussions we engaged in about race and poverty when I was in eighth grade in a Lutheran school in the spring of 1968. Maybe it's my demographic: college-educated, urban-suburban white woman, voting Democratic most of my life. 

Whatever. 

I do know that I need a rest. It may be time to take up meditation—again. To sit for hours at the loom and listen to a good story instead of political podcasts. To clean closets or choose new colors for the pillows on the couch. To contemplate the smeary blue of today's late-winter sky and start to watch for snowdrops and crocuses. To smile and laugh as the fifth and sixth-graders I'm working with discover the human fun and foibles in their characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." 

Sunday is Transfiguration, the last Sunday before Lent, which is when I mark this blog's anniversary. I have been posting for 19 years here at The Perverse Lutheran, through all kinds of times. I just now took a look back and saw posts I remember and posts I don't. Posts that remind me to look for God's grace, to look for the light, and to remember that hope does not disappoint us.

Here's a previous Transfiguration anniversary post. And the Ash Wednesday 2015 post from a few days later has some fun moments. Reminds me why I'm retired.