For their deeds follow them

It was, like, All Saints Week last week. Extended All Hallows' Eve. The Day of the Dead times seven. This first week of November was--not haunted--peopled, happily, with Saints Gone Before.

Item: I went back to my old high school on November 1 to see a production of "Arsenic and Old Lace." A friend's daughter, my daughter's friend, was playing Aunt Abby, the role I played long ago in high school. I was in this show again when I was 24, playing the other old lady, Aunt Martha. I met my husband, Lon, in this production. He had also been in the show in high school. Both times, he was Teddy Brewster--the quintessential Teddy Brewster, the nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. It wasn't just Lon's mustache that made the role, it was his enthusiasm, and the crazed look in his eye. Here we are, with Patte Shaughnessy on the left as Aunt Abby.



As I watched the play, the lines came back to me. I recalled where I had entered from, and that Karl Sorenson, at rest in Christ, had played the opening scene with me and Patte. When the young man playing Teddy entered the scene at the high school, all I could hear was Lon (also at rest in Christ). I didn't watch. I just listened. Those weeks of rehearsal long ago, the eleven (?) performances had left tracks in my brain easily found and followed. Lon's character was onstage; was he himself backstage, behind the scenery, in the corner? Things happened back there. Life-altering moments.

Item: There was a funeral at church last week, for a woman--wife, mother, grandmother, piano teacher, friend--known to all, who had spent the last year battling a brain tumor, a tumor that was going to win in the end--like the brain tumor that claimed the life of Ted Kennedy a few months ago, like the tumor that took my dad's life 25 years ago. Marj died a few days before her 70th birthday, her last year an abrupt end to a cheerful, busy life. She had been the woman who coordinated funeral luncheons, who always worked on the annual Fall Sale, and who delighted in the friends and acquaintances who worked alongside her. Her funeral was on Wednesday, and it was followed by a luncheon. The big sale was on Friday, with all the ladies, young and old, at their booths of crafts and bakery and pasta sauces. Another luncheon. Marj's spirit, at rest in Christ, was somehow also part of the energy in the air at the sale.

Item: My son Kurt's science class assignment was to make a musical instrument that could play an eight-note scale, out of materials you have at home. Lucky for him, objects in our home include a clavichord my father built for me when I was 18. The instrument needs work. Lots of broken strings. We twisted these out of the tuning pins and strung them across an old wooden bread box. If you tuned the thing right before you played it, you could indeed play a recognizable tune by plucking the string, or even better, by striking it firmly with your fingertip, like the tangent on the end of the clavichord keys. I do not often get involved in Kurt's homework. (He's a high school junior; he doesn't want my help.) I was glad to be allowed to be part of this project. It brought my dad back to me. Maybe in some way, it brought my dad, Herb Gotsch, to Kurt, one of the seven grandchildren he, at rest in Christ, never got a chance to meet.

"And I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'Write this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.' 'Yes,' says the Spirit, 'they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.'" (Revelation 14:13)

I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean in the context of the Revelation of John, but it sure felt like those deeds were following me around last week.

Saints in heaven, saints on earth, resting in, relying on Christ.

Lincoln

Columbus Day. No school. But all I've done all day is read and write and manipulate words. That must be my hobby, my favorite recreational pursuit. Well. Maybe.

The project I laid out for myself this weekend was to finish the two-volume, 1600-page biography of Abraham Lincoln that I have been reading since early August. It's by Michael Burlingame, a Lincoln scholar who has edited the diaries and papers of John Hay, John Nicolay, William Stoddard, and Noah Brooks. The first three were Lincoln's White House secretaries. Brooks was a journalist who was close to the 16th president. The biography is exhaustive (and exhausting) in its quotations from Lincoln's contemporaries, but it's not particularly readable. For every action or presidential speech, letter or paper, Burlingame writes several paragraphs of who said what in support of Lincoln, followed by who said what in opposition--lots and lots of good old American political and journalistic spin. It begins to feel like flipping back and forth between MSNBC and Fox. The rhetoric isn't all that different.

Burlingame's Lincoln is a remarkably mature, magnanimous, forgiving man, even-tempered, tender-hearted, but rather crude at times. It's hard to imagine the statuesque Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial telling a joke with "he can kiss my ass" as the punch line. But the Memorial was built at a time when the Lincoln myth had grown huge and quasi-religious. Nowadays we want to know about the dirt under the fingernails, the flares of temper, the back-room political deals. Lincoln's greatness survives twenty-first century tell-alls. Lincoln is a man who grew to meet the challenges he faced. Who knew he could do it and who could let go of the pettiness that obscures the right path for most of us, at least part of the time. Great challenges help you focus on what's important.

I finished the book this morning before getting out of bed. Volume two goes back to the library tomorrow. This is probably the end of my bicentennial gorge on Lincoln biography. (Probably. Have to see what's on the shelf at the library.) I have been reading Lincoln books since I discovered the children's biography section at the library when I was six or seven. I'm sure part of the fascination comes from living in Illinois, from multiple trips to Springfield and New Salem, from an interest in American history that was fed by the Bruce Catton books my father bought and read during the Civil War centennial. But I also feel a kinship with Lincoln. Sounds like a high-falutin' claim, or a fatuous one. But I can't be alone in this feeling. Lincoln fascinates lots of people. Only Shakespeare and Jesus have had more books written about them. I guess I want to know what it was like to be him--and how much different is that--apart from the obvious--from being me?

Cicadas in my head

I've had this persistent ringing in my ear for months now.

It's nothing serious. It seems to be related to stuffy sinuses, plugged up tubes somewhere, some fluid in the ear. It got better during the summer. It faded away to a sound that was barely there. But it's back now, like cicadas inside my head, made bold by the coming of fall, or by too much time spent among hidden allergens in my office at school.

I believe the ringing to be at a specific pitch, with prominent overtones--D, to be exact, with the octave and the fifth. Or perhaps it's almost but not quite D. Whatever it is, music in the key of D major and other related sharp keys bothers me, especially when it's loud and reverberating all over the rehearsal room.

I am subjecting this problem to all this analysis because explaining it helps me deal with it. Certain sounds seem to produce beats when they clash with the sound in my ear. (Beats: a sort of wah-wah effect created when sound waves that are not quite at the same frequency bump into one another. More or less.) When this happens my ear-brain-voice-ear feedback loop short circuits. I become a very frustrated singer.

When I have trouble singing, it spills over into the rest of my life. Long ago a voice teacher quoted Birgit Nilsson to me: "The bird who is not happy does not sing." The Gwen Gotsch corollary is: "The bird who is not singing well is not happy."

The reading in chapel this morning: "We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life." The speaker illustrated this, and the "by grace you have been saved" part before it, with flower pots, dirty and broken, then clean and restored, and then brought out a big pot filled with a blooming pink geranium.

I tried to think of myself as that pink geranium all day, somehow showing forth God's goodness to others. But it was the kind of day where the feedback loop didn't work well. Spent too much of the day alone, getting tired from focusing on the computer screen. All I could hear was the ringing in my ear and the buzzing in my brain, the kind that says the work is never done, no one appreciates me, and I'm not good at anything anyway. (There may be distortions here that I should analyze.)

I don't like to whine on my blog. I prefer to sing (soundlessly here, in prose), or think differently, or at least think productively. Those cicadas in my brain have to get out of the way.

Heart song, hearts sing

I got caught up in watchng first, the memorial service for Ted Kennedy on Friday night and the funeral and graveside services on Saturday.

I never knew that he loved to sing, how much he loved singing. I loved how important singing was to everyone saying goodbye. That big Broadway star who sang "The Impossible Dream" on Friday night was impressive (though how his accompanist coped with 9/8 measures that felt more like 7.5/8 I don't know). But what I loved was Nick Littlefield, an attorney and Kennedy staff alum singing "a song for Teddy." The song was Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Love Changes Everything." Littlefield said he had often sung it with Ted, including the last time he had seen him. And that it seemed to sum up Kennedy's love for his wife, Vicky. Littlefield sang it confidently, joyously, forthrightly. He's a fine singer, not a pro, but one whose song is connected to his mind and heart. Watching and hearing him makes me so happy.



More singing: Placido Domingo at the funeral, making good choices with "Panus Angelicus." With just Yo Yo Ma accompanying, it was the lower end of his range, the firm, warm baritone, that made the most wonderful music. Susan Graham, was, of course, perfection. The Tanglewood Chorus singing Brahms "Let Nothing Ever Grieve Thee"--eh, it's harder to make music with that piece than one might think.

But again, what struck my heart was not the professional music makers. At the end of the service, the casket left the church to "America, the Beautiful." And the Kennedy family members who acted as pallbearers sang as they walked along side the casket.

Later at the capitol, the plan was for all the staffers on the steps to sing "America the Beautiful," led by a DC school choir director. The moment was less than wonderful, however, at least on television, because the microphone picked up only the director's voice--now crowd. But then--ah, in those last moments before the hearse pulled away, the crowd of citizens and tourists across the street sang--spontaneously--"God Bless America" and again, "America the Beautiful." As solemn a moment as you could hope to see, to sing.

Erring, Errant

What kind of perverse Lutheran would I be if I did not comment on the ELCA voting that it's okay to allow someone in a committed same-sex relationship to be a pastor?

It is good to see Christians dare to err on the side of grace, to see Christ in surprising places, to accept and bring people in rather than judge and shun them. All those things, I'm sure, sound old and obvious, especially to anyone who has listened to the days and weeks, months and years of discussion that preceded this decision.

I'm the sort of lay person who decided this one long ago for myself. So watching a church body labor through this is kind of like watching someone much younger struggle through adolescence. You can't be sure how he'll come through and if you'll want to know him when he's a serious adult.

I have this idea that this vote is one more step in the choosing of sides. Many of us can relax now that our more moderate branch of American Lutheranism has come down on the liberal side of this issue. Check that one off. What will be the fallout from those who believe in the other side? Will we all end up at the heavenly banquet sitting on opposite sides of the table, finding it hard to make conversation, suspicious of how the people on the other side of the table got there? Why they are there at all? And which ones exactly are the Pharisees and which the rabble from the wayside?

Yet we are all there. Even now we are moving into God's new kingdom, marching to Zion, together. What does it mean to be a motley crew headed for heaven's mansions, pulling one way and then the other along the straight and narrow--no that would be the wide and winding path in front of us?

It means we're human. God's image broken, though not entirely lost.

Health care--not spirtual

Who will explain to angry people that leaving their healthcare alone is not the answer? Who will explain that insurance companies give you the illusion of free choice, not the reality, and that people can't buy health care rationally the way they choose a brand of laundry detergent? That behind the scenes, doctors and hospitals and other providers of health care make all kinds of financial deals that have everything to do with maximizing profit and that providing good quality care is not consistently a byproduct of that process?

I am frustrated this morning by an insurance system that tells an old friend, in need of follow-up care after a serious mental health crisis, that she must see a new doctor a half-hour drive away from her home instead of going to an office six blocks away to see the doctor who knows her case well. This is crazy, and it is making her crazier than she needs to be right now. The New York Times this morning has an article on outrageous doctors' fees -- actually on a survey of doctor's fees conducted by America's Health Insurance Plans, an organization representing insurance companies. I'm imagining a press release headlined "Don't blame us--it's their fault!"

How can we fix something as complicated as healthcare when the public discussion deteriorates to a level where a proposal for Medicare paying for someone to help people make a living will is twisted into a "government death panel"? Most of the people screaming about this would probably acknowledge that at the end of life they don't want to be kept alive by a bunch of machines and tubes and that hospice care is a good thing. If someone supported them in writing a living will, they could control their own exit from this world. Yet the truth is distorted.

We live in a very complex world, where it takes some sophistication, some appreciation of both rationality and irrationality to understand the banking system, the health care system, international politics, government budgets. Yet we have these visceral debates. On the one hand, don't tell Sarah Palin that baby Trig does not have quality of life. On the other hand, don't raise anybody's taxes so that state governments can provide adequate services for people like Trig with developmental disabilities. (Disclaimer: this blogger has an eighteen-year-old child with Down syndrome.) This is a democracy, yes, where Senators and Congressmen work for the people who elected them. But the Founders, steeped in the Enlightenment, never imagined an electorate or a world like this.

Or did they? There was rabble and the fear of mob rule when the American republic was founded (and the populist, ignorant outcry against rational reform of the health care system is a kind of mob rule). The Founders believed that better minds could prevail, that elected officials could make good decisions, that collectively we could act in society's best interest.

It would be easy to watch this all from the sidelines, make cracks about the stupidity of angry white people of certain economic classes, and shake my head sadly about the whole mess. But I think I'm going to have do better than that.

For starters: MoveOn.org's "Top Five Health Care Reform Lies—and How to Fight Back."

Wave and shore

The first day back from vacation began soberly enough--coffee and the New York Times online, the way most days at home begin for me. A little bit of work while still in my jammies, some family business to arrange with a friend, then off to church to try to catch up, whatever that means. By midday, my leisurely vacation life was left behind, and pretty soon, the mad extrovert that rested while I was on vacation had spilled out, and I was back to analyzing problems instead of contemplating them lakeside.

It's a high-contrast life. I'm wearing a black t-shirt and white capris today--would that be yin and yang, sin and holiness, darkness and light, sanity and craziness--what? Drama.

Here's my journal from the last day of vacation--just yesterday:

It is a beautiful shore. Prettiest place on the island. Maybe that's not quite the word--pretty.

God separated the dry land from the water at such a place as this. No boats there then. No sand toys strewn on the beach. But grass and plants growing from dry land, moving in the Spirit blowing upon the face of the waters--plants growing in the shallows as the water becomes the shore, gold and green, leaning, always leaning toward something, bent by the Spirit wind, dancing.

Birds of the air, fish of the sea--one can see why these come next in the Creation myth. Birds glide on the wind as if they were a part of it, as if they flew out of it, called into being by the word of the Lord. Fish form in the water, unseen, from muck at the bottom, from still water deep down, and go their own dark ways, beneath the waves, in dimmed light.

Animals, man, woman--we become strangers to this shore, our lives complex, twined and twisted together in social systems whose patterns look silly, unnecessarily complicated. We are captives, not of wind and wave, but of brains and language that never quite says what we need. Captives of each other, on the earth, not of it. We have come far away from the Spirit that long ago gave us birth.

And yet.

A family group--three generations--walks down to the water and closes ranks for a picture, water behind, arms extended to hold young ones, support old ones, alive together where water meets land. Standing tall, leaning together in the wind.