The Perverse Lutheran

In God is my salvation

2012-01-16T23:55:00.000-06:00

I am sleeping on a dairy farm tonight. It's a farmhouse graciously given to us for the night. My aunt's friend has left a note about food in the kitchen for breakfast, where to find towels, and the password for the wi-fi. We're staying here on the night before my uncle's funeral.

It's a wonderful home, full of things that must have come into the house with stories. A collection of cruets in the dining room and another of flat irons on the landing, baskets and crocks and heavy wood furniture, new and old. Things here feel like they are loved not for what they say about their owner but because of themselves. These things had working lives once. They have their own dignity and stand tall with pride at being well used.

My uncle, Edward Pankow, was a pastor in this community, a farm community originally, but now one where there is a variety of economic activity beyond dairy farms and soybeans. Some things are different from the suburbs where I come from. There are no black people here, for one thing ("less diverse" would be the proper way to say this). People seem to know more about each other. Maybe this is just an effect of there being fewer people to know--same amount of news but fewer characters in the cast.

As people here remember Ed's ministry they speak of a gentle and unassuming leader, positive and encouraging. His own faith was an example to others. I know from stories I've heard that he walked through some sad times with the members of his flock, times when people must surely have asked him why things happen. I think his answer would have been a gentle one, a reminder to trust in God, to have faith. But I can hear him adding in inflections learned from his German immigrant parents, "Yah, yah, but it is hard sometimes."

We've just had the "Do I lock it?" debate about the front door. We are city people and don't feel safe unless the door is locked. But here on a country road, locking the front door is silly. Who would you be trying to keep out?

The funeral is tomorrow. The word of God will be preached, Christ's death and resurrection proclaimed, the cosmic struggle and the eternal victory. But there will also be my uncle's life and example, an earthly life of earthly struggle, following Jesus' example of praying to Abba, Father, following Jesus' example of trusting and finding salvation in God. In his later years, Ed was bent over because of back problems. He often walked with a cane, and he lived with pain. But now in heaven with the God he trusted he stands tall and well-loved, redeemed.

Sleepless

2012-01-13T04:56:00.001-06:00

Can't get back to sleep, too early to get out of bed. Yesterday was long and stressful, the kind of day that leaves you twisting and turning when you wake up at 3:00 a.m. My brain, which needs to rest, dear God, instead was locked into search mode, the little wheel spinning and spinning and coming up with the kind of reference list that does not differentiate between good and bad, trashy and useful.

If I breathe, can I sleep? And return to the thinking later?

All my heart

2011-12-25T01:25:00.002-06:00

There are ornaments and bric a brac to commemorate "Baby's First Christmas" or a "Just Married" Christmas and other such happy occasions. But I suspect it is the sad Christmases we remember best, the Christmas celebrations that come in hard times or when times are changing.

Tonight was one such Christmas, as the news slipped through the people gathered at church that someone, elderly and well-loved, had suffered a massive stroke and was not expected to live. It came to me between the two children's services that are the focus of my energy for much of November and December. And in the second service, the same words I had heard only 90 minutes earlier became more pungent, more clear, more true as I thought about this woman's life and her husband's loss.

Our lives on earth end, though God made us for eternity. This God incarnate we sing of tonight, this infant, died too, but leads us through death to life eternal. This God knows and understands our suffering, our grief, our loss.

Generation after generation sings of this, tells of this at Christmastime, and despite death, despite sadness, rejoices.

All my heart this night rejoices,
As I hear, far and near, sweetest angel voices;
“Christ is born,” their choirs are singing,
Till the air, everywhere, now their joy is ringing.

Hark! a voice from yonder manger,
Soft and sweet, doth entreat, “Flee from woe and danger;
Brethren, come; from all that grieves you
You are freed; all you need I will surely give you.”

Come, then, let us hasten yonder;
Here let all, great and small, kneel in awe and wonder,
Love Him Who with love is yearning;
Hail the star that from far bright with hope is burning.
(Paul Gerhardt, 1656)

To whom we belong

2011-12-14T22:57:00.002-06:00

Today was my father's birthday. He died 28 years ago, which is almost half my lifetime ago. He died when he was my age. Yet I still have a vivid picture of him in my mind, one brought to life today by much Bach and Handel. I stood in front of my children's choir, listening to the introduction to "O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion." I marked the beat and bounced slightly on my left foot and knew at once it was my father in me, it was what he would have done, the way he would have done it. Amazing. Last week this same choir sang this same piece at for a chapel service at the college next door. One of the students who was there told her friend, who is my son's girlfriend, that someone who looked an awful lot like Kris conducted the choir--his mother? Amazing what we carry with us, what we pass on. Amazing how we can recognize these marks of who we are and to whom we belong.

First Sunday in Advent

2011-11-27T06:47:00.001-06:00

A pre-dawn trip to the airport on the First Sunday in Advent. It is the end of Thanksgiving weekend, the busiest of airport days, and the college student is returning to school for three more weeks before another plane trip home for the long Christmas break.

We leave the house hurried, purposeful, drive south on Austin through Oak Park, Chicago, Cicero, small-ish houses lining the patched street. The lights and glare of the Stickney sewage plant rise in the distance. We jog east to Cicero Ave. to get to Midway and the sewage gas smell seeps into the car. The departure lane is crowded at the airport, with mostly young people piling out of cars, heading back to their youthful worlds after a few days back in the nest, lazing on the parental sofa. A hug, "love you," and he's gone.

I change the radio station to WFMT as I drive back home via Cicero Avenue, the great north-south artery of the city of Chicago. It's the church musician's hour on the classical station, "With Heart and Voice," a program of organ and choral music appropriate for the church year. I'm listening to choirs sing Advent hymns, "Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending," and other biblical Judgment Day imagery as I drive in the rain through the unnatural light of expressway interchanges and big box store parking lots, the darker pavements passing racetrack motels and old factory neighborhoods.

What kind of Advent imagery would one come up with for this setting? A large Christus Victor looming over Cicero Avenue seems kitschy or almost cultish. What is it we look for in a reign of Christ, in God's kingdom, in a second coming in our age of steel-reinforced concrete and dawn drowned out by street lights? What signs?

Back home I sit down in the big chair near the living room bay window. The pink dawn is creeping into the sky over the houses across the street. I'm curious--will the electric candles I put in the windows last night actually shut off when daylight comes? The boxes claimed the sensors would turn them off, but at $2.99 apiece (and half off after Christmas), I'm not expecting much. It is shaping up to be a grey day, and the feeble lightbulbs on these candles may stay on all day. Does a prudent virgin unplug them, not waste the electricity, or do I let them burn from now until Christmas?

I decide that they will stay on, and in that instant, silently, the bulbs turn off.

Rend

2011-11-26T14:17:00.001-06:00

It is raining the steady watery drip of not-quite-winter. It is not such a hard rain that it will rain itself out and end before the sun goes down. But it is more than a drizzle. I thought twice about taking the garbage out to the alley and decided last night's pizza box could wait by the back door until the raindrops stopped.

It is very late in November, meaning the Thanksgiving trappings are disorganizing, ready to be returned to the basement closet and the upper cupboards until next year. The best of the leftovers are eaten, but there is soup to be made. Other households are putting up Christmas lights--or did so yesterday, before the rain. But here, where German family tradition and church liturgical practice enforce Advent waiting, the dining room table is naked. The Thanksgiving cloth has been washed, folded and put away. The Christmas cloth is in the bottom of the drawer, needing ironing. It seems wrong to spread so much red cheer, right there in the middle of the house where food is served and the family gathers for Christmas Eve dinner. So it stays in the drawer and the table gathers stuff.

I went out shopping this morning. I am not unaffected by the economic pull of Christmas, the potential for bargains, the desire to celebrate connections with gifts that bring warmth or delight or new experiences. I set out with a few clear and practical goals and hope that delightful surprises waited out there. I came home with nothing, confused about sizes and what to buy. I resolved to do my shopping online, where I can walk away from the screen (well, not as easily as I'd like), where I do not have to face the piles of worthless stuff in the store aisles.

The lessons for tomorrow, the first Sunday in Advent, have Christ returning through heavens rent wide, stars falling, the Son of Man coming in clouds, gathering the elect from the four winds (Mark 13:24-37). I suppose today is just quiet enough, just miserable and gray enough to welcome that kind of excitement, that kind of clarity. Take that, you miserable department stores! Take that, you online retailers and the junk mailbox! Short circuit, you droning television set, chronicling petty materialism and false conflict between families!

Christ will come again--that's what we say in Advent, what we affirm in the eucharistic liturgy. But at the moment, the kingdom, like the red tablecloth, is in the bottom of the drawer.

Yet here am I, thinking that, as the song says, "we need a little Christmas," even if it's a long way from the sacred (and too-busy) night of December 24. Something should begin to make things new, or make them look new, or at least stop the rain. There's the knitting work I did yesterday--Christmas presents on the needles, yarn untangled and ready for casting on. Today--candles, lights, something to sound out the expectation of glory to God and peace on earth.

Thanksgiving Eve

2011-11-23T20:54:00.001-06:00

Over the weekend, in a keep-on-knitting couch-potato stupor, I watched a hostess-y program on Channel 20, (the lesser of the two Chicago-area PBS stations). This woman and her husband were rehabbing a giant early 1900s vacation house in the mountains and were planning to host Thanksgiving dinner there for their children and grandchildren. It had the usual rehabbing quandaries of matching moldings and heating the place mixed with recipes and table decorations. This skinny older woman walked through everything in her granny-jeans and J. Jill t-shirts. choosing lighting, then chopping and mixing and pouring stuff into an oven dish while ad-libbing about how all these good flavors were making memories.

She irritated me. Partly it was the pitch and flatness of her voice. (You want to be my friend, cultivate some resonance in your speaking voice.) But more than that, I was shaking my head at how she reduced family and memories and Thanksgiving to just the veneer of the whole thing--the food on the table, the "sense of bounty" evoked by tucking oranges and lemons and butternut squash into the greenery winding down the middle of her dining table. And how pumpkin swirl cheesecake would--I dunno--make everyone feel fulfilled, rather than just plain full.

I've been hosting Thanksgiving dinner at my house for fifteen years. It is a day full of memories. Some of them are even memories of flavors--like the gravy from a couple years ago that had a cup or so of red wine in it. I think it was merlot. I'm having a glass right now--opened the bottle tonight so it will be ready when I need it tomorrow. The chardonnay last year did not produce the same results.

My Thanksgiving memories are mostly made of people, the continuing characters of family in my life, and of eras, what we've all lived through together. There were years when the kids were excited to help me set the table. (Alas, no more.) There were crazy years with Lon, and before that, not-so-crazy years. There were the years when Eliza and Kurt were small and I did as much cooking as possible already on Wednesday, because I just never knew what was going to happen at the last minute. Now my children and the nieces and nephews are grown up, or something close to that, and we listen carefully to what they have to say over dinner, eager to know that they are people of good judgment, happy, thoughtful, and useful in the world.

Of course, you couldn't put all that shared history in a one-hour television program, not even on PBS. And you can't create your own version of a life to be thankful for based on directions from someone else. You've got to live your life in order to be grateful for it. You've got to trust God and the people walking alongside you. Trust the wine to flavor the gravy, one way or the other.

There's a turkey basket sitting in the middle of my dining room table, a close cousin to the stupid chicken collection on my kitchen windowsill. It's empty--I should fill it with something, but I don't know what. It's a goofy thing, but I enjoy it, just like the little "jug of pilgrim air" sitting uncorked on the sideboard--something that came from my grandmother's house.

I would rather have these familiar things than a table fit for photography.

Option C

2011-11-15T22:29:00.001-06:00

As predicted by me (for I know myself well), my extra time on my writing project is going toward option C:

C) Use the extra time to obsess more about doing your best work and meeting all the expectations you attribute to others but that are really your own.

To be honest, I'm not obsessing about doing my own best work so much as I'm obsessing about writing something really good, which at the moment would seem to demand that I write something better than my own work, because what I thought sounded pretty good at 8:15 this morning now sounds like I took a quick (and happy) trip to an easy finish, with much quoting and paraphrasing of material I'd already paraphrased elsewhere.

An hour later . . .

Fixed it. Made the whole thing much more complicated. Another C) option.More and better blogging when this project is finished, which it has to be by Friday!

Share something on Sunday

2011-11-13T23:33:00.001-06:00

Rabbi David Wolpe in Slate

"[A lot] of the good that religion does in the world goes unreported—not because people are prejudiced against religion, but that’s just the nature of reporting the news. You don't say, “Once again today, a religious aid worker saved someone's life.” That just doesn't make the paper. Religion is more complex and does much more good than people assume. Every single study in America shows that people who are part of religious communities participate in civic life more, give more money not only to religious charities but to secular charities, are more likely to help someone who's homeless, and more likely to help someone who's destitute. Religion does an enormous amount of good. Even though there are certainly egregious counterexamples, they are more flashy than persuasive."

It is so easy to be cynical about what religion does. It can be divisive, deluding, depressing. But as the good rabbi says earlier in this interview, it's not "religion that makes people do bad things . . . it’s being people that largely makes people do bad things."All the more reason for religion to focus on what God is doing, even though it's hard for us to see, than on what we're doing, or how we're doing it, or how we're describing it. And when we try to tell what God is doing, we need to do so modestly, because any one story of ours is only a small part of God's story.

Good enough

2011-11-12T22:16:00.001-06:00

What do you do when the deadline you thought was on the 14th turns out to be the 18th?

A) Continue as planned, finish early, and be ready to start something new that much sooner?

B) Slow down on the project so that you again find yourself working hard to finish at the last minute?

C) Use the extra time to obsess more about doing your best work and meeting all the expectations you attribute to others but that are really your own?

I'm hoping I choose A, but it could be C.

Is "good enough" a good statement or a troubling one?

Flow

2011-11-11T20:27:00.001-06:00

Maybe it was the double-shot of espresso mid-morning, but I had one of those days when at some point I recall that bipolar disorder runs in my family and I stop and make sure I'm not moving into a manic phase myself. Lots of ideas, lots of experiences (but didn't spend any money, no grandiose ideas, and was able to complete all but one of the tasks on my list for the day--which is really A-plus for me, since my single-day lists usually have enough items on them to last a week.) Mainly I was just so glad it was finally Friday, and without much other reason than that, it was just a happy day.

Every Friday I visit the Senior Kindergarten class for fifteen minutes of combined religion and music. We sing songs about Jesus and being a Christian, and we sing them in ways that reinforce the musical skills I teach in their Tuesday music class. It's November, so giving thanks is a good theme for a lesson. I went in planning to teach the doxology ("Praise God from whom all blessings flow"), but I also talked about Paul. We discussed the introductions to Paul's epistles yesterday in my Bible study group, the introductions in which he says "I give thanks to God for all of you." I think giving thanks can make one, if not a happier person, one who is better able to float through the trials and vicissitudes of life--the petty annoyances, the routines that drag you down, and the really big things that send you hurtling in directions you hadn't planned at all. Giving thanks to God keeps you focused on what God is doing, which is a source of hope and movement, or just contentment.

I'd like to say that the kids really got into this--being thankful--but I fear it was too much about being, which is pretty abstract for kindergartners, and not enough about doing. Anyway, we moved on to "Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice," because that, too, comes from the Apostle Paul. And we sang the song about that, and each child individually echoed the "rejoice" that is sung on the C above middle C, near the top of a kindergartner's comfortable range. It was fun to see their faces as they heard what great singing sounds could come out of their mouths on such an energetic word. We sang the doxology, but by then Sophia was clamoring for a prayer and Ellie Schnack, the kindergarten teacher took over. Sophia wanted to pray for her friend whose dog had died. And we had to pray for Charlotte's mother who was having surgery to fix her ear infection. And then somebody else had a friend whose dog--no, it was a cat!-- had died. Wiggles were everywhere as the children echoed their teacher's petitions, and some wandered off while others thought of more people to pray for. No well-defined ending to the class, but thanks and petitions and praise God from all blessings flow--it all kind of flowed into my day.

Rejoicing.

Parsley, sage, etc.

2011-11-10T00:19:00.001-06:00

Temperatures are dropping into the low-thirties tonight. I wanted to be sure to still have fresh herbs for Thanksgiving dinner. So I headed outside about 5:15 with a flashlight and a paring knife and brought back most of the leaves from the parsley and sage plants. Here's what I dumped on my kitchen counter.

There's a stray tomato in there, so pale it won't have much flavor.I put some in a glass of water in the refrigerator.

I put some in a cup of water on the kitchen windowsill.

I rubber-banded some sage sprigs together to dry.

Kinda looks like that big brown pitcher is using 'em to pretend he's a chicken. It's a stupid chicken collection--why would anyone want to be a part of it?And just in case you're wondering, where's the rosemary and thyme -- I potted them up on Saturday.

2011-11-09T23:59:00.000-06:00

How is blogging every day like dieting? When you blow a day, you have to get right back at it. Three different false starts, so far. Tried and deleted. In two more minutes it will be tomorrow, and in this kind of a panic I do not have time to write my way to something interesting. Suffice it to say it's cold. I cut my parsley and my sage outside and stored them in the refrigerator tonight for Thanksgiving dinner. I'd upload pictures, but things are moving slowly from phone to computer. It's coled. My fingers don't go fast. Publish.

Not illegals, but people

2011-11-07T18:10:00.000-06:00

I went to a forum on immigration policy yesterday. Here's the biggest thing I learned: there's not a big distinction to be made between legal and illegal immigrants--make that documented and undocumented immigrants. A person, we were told, can not be illegal. Only actions are illegal. It's kind of like the distinction I learned to make and then to insist on when my daughter was young: she was a child with Down syndrome, not a Down syndrome child. People who are in the U. S. without official immigration papers are first and foremost people, each with a story of how he or she came to be here, each with hopes and plans, each facing an uncertain future. The document/undocumented, legal/illegal status distinctions are not very useful even in public policy decisions, because of the sheer number of undocumented immigrants in the U. S. and because there aren't a lot of good alternatives to finding a way to allow people to stay here as permanent, legal residents.

What was also striking was how mean and selfish and small-minded people in the U. S. can be toward immigrants, and how this hurts all of us. Fear of being asked for papers, or even of others being asked to produce papers, can keep people from calling the police when their homes are burgled. One of the functions of immigrants in our bad economic times is to be scapegoats, someone to blame, someone to feel superior to--like poor whites in the antebellum south siding with the rich plantation owners, because that at least made them better than African-American slaves.

What was also striking was one of the speakers citing a study (or something) that found that people who didn't know any immigrants were the ones who had a poor opinion of them. People who knew immigrants thought well of them. Kind of like the gay thing. People knowing gay people has made society in general more tolerant of gays.

So we're left not so much with the dilemma of justifying amnesty and a path to citizenship, but with the challenge of changing people's minds about other people, about learning to open our hearts and being generous with what we have. If we started with those values, what could we accomplish?

Just one more hour in the day

2011-11-06T01:29:00.003-05:00

This will be dated early on September 6, but really it's still Saturday night. I'm looking back on the day and noting that today getting things done ran ahead of getting new ideas for things to get done (that is, as long as you count the vague idea that the entire house needs a thorough cleaning as just one thing, when in fact it is actually a multitude of things, from wipe off the sticky buttons on the microwave to clean and organize the attic).

Things done all in one day:
Two devotions written (five to go!)
Breakfast with friends
Went to the library
Went to the grocery store; remembered laundry detergent
Dropped off clothes at the thrift shop
Planted bulbs
Potted plants
Cleaned some stuff out of the garage
Did laundry
Loaded the dishwasher
Visited Kris
Did some work
Did some volunteer editing work
Knit
Hung up all the clothes that have been lying in the chair for the past ten days
Shopped for Eliza
Shortened pants, also for Eliza

Plus I sat outside on a glorious, golden day.

Just set the clocks back an hour. Amazing what you can do with a 25-hour day!

Sing

2011-11-04T22:12:00.002-05:00

What was remarkable about today? I listened to fifth graders sing today, in groups of two or three. These are the fifth graders in my fifth and sixth grade choir, and singing for me was part of the term's assessment. It's always a learning experience to work with small groups of children on singing. Here's some of what I learned and wondered about today:Why do they sing so timidly? Their voices barely get past their noses. On the other hand, the sound they make is pleasant, light, inoffensive. It's better for the teacher not to watch too closely when asking children to do funny vocal exercises. It's hard to sing "Pepe le Pew" if catching the teacher's eye makes you start giggling.Singing takes work, physical and mental effort, and some children are more willing to work at it than others. But with some work they can all do better. And there are always a few who surprise you. Sixth graders next week. They're so much older . . . .

Snark

2011-11-03T23:20:00.003-05:00

"What do you do with the mad that you feel?" asked Mr. Rogers. I'm sure he had some good suggestions for the preschoolers (and parents) who watched his show.

I think a lot of the mad in people around me lately has been coming out as snark--snide remarks. Perhaps it's because I'm around clever people, and most of us do sarcasm pretty well. In fact, we do sarcasm better than we do honest dealing with fear and anger.

That's true of me. On days when I've got a full head of steam going, I power through the hours high on snark and righteous outrage. It's a cover for other stuff--the sense that the world is all in a mess, that the mess rolls downhill, that I can't do much to change any of it. But complaining and ranting I'm good at.

What was non-snarky about my day?

This morning we ended our Bible study group's discussion of Jonah by looking at Jonah in art. Kathryn put together a slide show on her computer and we saw Jonah in the catacombs, Jonah in the Sistine Chapel, Jonah in Giotto, Jonah in Lutheran artists from Minneapolis. Some were interested in the texture on that big fish, some in Jonah's physique, some in the belly of the whale which was very much like a tomb. The one I liked best--or maybe it's the one with the emotion that matched mine--was a woodcut of Jonah under the gourd, the hot sun pounding down. Jonah is propping up the vine even as he withers angrily in the hot sun.

He was probably uttering snarky remarks about Nineveh and maybe even about the God who chose to save Ninevah.

Meaning in life

2011-11-02T22:09:00.002-05:00

Day two of posting every day in November. The prompt over at BlogHer is something along the lines of "If you knew your next meal would be your last, what would you want to eat?"

My response: that's a dumb question. It also gives me the creeps. If I knew my next meal would be my last, I would probably be so preoccupied with whatever was the reason for it being my last meal that I wouldn't much care what I eat. Mortality is a much more absorbing problem than what to eat.

It sounds like a question to ask Roger Ebert in retrospect. And he'd have a good answer, though he'd meander through some other ideas on the way to revealing it.

I just finished a bowl of ice cream, thinking that a hefty dose of sugar would help to calm my slightly over-caffeinated brain. I think there's some misguided visualization in my head, where the caffeine eats up the sugar and they both just dissolve away so that I'm left with no caffeine and no calories. Wishful thinking.

Clearly 10 minutes of corpse pose would have been a better choice though probably I'd lie there with my brain skittering and sparking like a downed power line.

I've got work to do. Thirteen hundred characters on Bartholomew, AKA Nathaniel, for one thing. And other work.

I'm gonna try. Still trying. Trying to do better tomorrow.

A good question to ask myself tonight? I'm thinking, but all that comes out are practical problems: How could I more clearly label the jars of coffee as decaf and regular? When will I get around to loading the dishwasher? What's the most comfortable thing I could get away with wearing to school tomorrow? Not exactly the big questions in life.

BUT as the guy in this video said: the meaning of life is to make meaning of life. And if getting the right balance of caffeine/decaf in a strong cup of coffee keeps me believing in purpose and meaning, well, then, it's important. Loading the dishwasher? Well, that's more about the pleasure I take in seeing a clean countertop (and I do love the countertops in my remodeled kitchen). Comfortable clothes--yep, so I can feel peppy and energetic after all the not-sleeping I'm going to be doing tonight.

I'm not waiting till a last meal to impose meaning on daily life.

2011-11-01T21:03:00.002-05:00

Over at BlogHer it is NaBloPoMo, not really a word, exactly, but a stand-in for National Blog Posting Month. The challenge is to post every day during November. I'm gonna try. Not exactly a strong statement of commitment, I know. But jeez, I've got a few other things going on, and many of these are writing assignments. And right now, I would rather be knitting. Still November is a good month for blogging. Death and darkness outside, furnaces cranking up instead, with cooking and baking and some ambitions for making Christmas presents. This is a short post, an inauspicious beginning. But I'm barely awake.

Op. 31, No. 3

2011-10-29T20:17:00.000-05:00

Someone who played Chopin remembered me today as someone who played Beethoven.In the sense, I hope, of the heroine of, oh, you know, that Helena Bonham Carter/Daniel Day Lewis movie of that English novel--come on, brain--yes--A"A Room with a View." A passionate young woman, with unruly hair, physically expressive at the piano. Sitting down to play the opening measures of a sonata with fury and intensity, then joining the composer’s passion with her own and rushing on to deeper more nuanced emotion.Was I a girl like that? Or just as someone who nailed Ludwig’s notes one day in a performance where things just came together?I going for the romance, the Romantic, in my soul.

The arc

2011-10-16T18:46:00.000-05:00

It was one of those days when I was in and out of the car every couple hours, catching snatches of NPR.The first, this morning between church services, was a report on rape and sexual violence in East Congo. The stories were horrifying. They made me sick. One of the people being interviewed spoke of how alone these women are, how they fear for their life every day, and how they stil have hope that something will get better. It did not make me hopeful. It astonished me that we humans need hope so badly we look for it and delude ourselves with it even in unthinkably awful circumstances.Later, in mid-afternoon, I heard another story. I remember thinking, Sunday must be NPR's day for reporting on everything awful in the world. But I cannot remember what the story was about. And I'm embarrassed to say so. Still later, while shifting the car from one end of the vast parking lot to the other (so much stuff in America, so much laziness), I heard a snippet from the dedication of the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, D. C. Quoting the man: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."Bend the arc, Lord. Show me where to push and pull.

Big picture

2011-09-05T09:40:00.000-05:00

Oh, Frank Rich, I've missed you.

Rich, the former theater critic at the New York Times, went from writing about stories on stage to writing a Sunday NY Timess column about American political culture. His reaction to the week's events often turned the back-and-forth snark of politics into the stark relief of a morality play by Henrik Ibsen. George Bush was bumbling, flawed, dangerous because of his thoughtlessness. Dick Cheney was much darker.

Wikipedia says Rich stopped writing his Times column just this year. It seems longer ago than that. My Sunday mornings have been less bracing. Sitting down at the computer to read Frank Rich before hurrying off to church was like stepping into a head-clearing autumn chill. It woke me up, to the bottom of my brain and back of my lungs.

Rich now writes for New York magazine, which I aspire to read but don't. Ultimately I'm not a New Yorker and the "New York is the center of the world" raison d'etre of the magazine is too exotic to be part of my regular reading. But this morning I followed a link to Rich's column on the 9/11 anniversary and gosh, yes, he still tell a tale of the decade he wrote about on the Times op-ed page: terrorist attack, tragedy, misdirected war in Iraq, no sacrifice at home, tax cuts, squandered patriotism, political mess, fiscal ruin.

Was it a decade worse than any other in American politics? Or is this what inevitably happens--all things lead to greater chaos? The sacrifices of the Civil War ended slavery, but the political deal that made Rutherford B. Hayes president ended Reconstruction a dozen years later, leaving African-Americans emancipated by the blood of Union armies to be newly enslaved by Jim Crow laws, written by the men who lost the war. A century later Nixon's "Silent Majority" political strategy harnessed the white backlash against the civil rights movement, and the country turned right, to Reagan and Republicans and eventually the mess we have now.

Rich's rhetoric steps back from the moment to take the longer view of a culture critic. But his writing is full of verbs and long muscular active sentences. He is a man of the theater, outlining a Shakespeare-sized epic. But history has no end, no final scene. In a play, and in Rich's commentary, the telling of the story is what appears to matter most, how you wrestle with the material, how you craft the narrative, how you tell the story.

The story is important. We humans hold onto much of what we know in stories we incorporate into our own. We let politicians, self-help writers, pastors, philosophers, friends and teachers tell us stories, some more worthy than others. We go on gut-sense and absorb mostly the stories that affirm what we alrelady feel. And sometimes we're right to do so.

But the universe is paradoxical and much, much bigger than our little minds. Frank Rich's push and pull rhetoric of American culture and politics is not out there with cosmology, but it's a reminder that the news cycle's won-loss scorecard adds up to something bigger. In his column on 9/11 it adds up to a heightened sense of loss, a nation whose leaders have lost their sense of direction.

In college and graduate school, when I was reading lots of plays (a play a day for a while), I learned to draw a distinction between two kinds of tragedies. There were tragedies where bad things happened and innocent people suffered and it was pitiful and sad. In other tragedies bad things happened to someone because of his own flaws (and yes, these characters were inevitably men) so the character's suffering was his own damn fault but at the end before expiring at center stage he achieved some kind of insight--understanding that was shared with the audience. The implication always was that this second type of tragedy was the higher, better sort--more interesting plays. (The first type, however, tend to make good librettos for opera.)

Looking at the week ahead, with its ten-year commemorations of 9/11, I wonder whether our tragic sense will tend more toward telling the first type of stories or the second type. We crave meaning and insight, so I fear we are in for a fair amount of myth and meaning-making. Rich's New York column, however, is a reminder that recent American history looks a lot more like the first kind of tragedy. Innocent people suffer, and the mighty and powerful profess to care, but learn little.

2011-08-30T00:08:00.001-05:00

I'm trying to choose a topic for the evening: existential angst caused by imagining eternity OR human behavioral quirks as demonstrated in my cleaning the clutter from the sewing machine.

Read this in the Daily Dish's ongoing discussion "Infinity hurts your brain":

I have been following this thread with interest and have noticed the subject has evoked a general sense of terror in many of the readers who have commented. I should point out that one of the classic hallmarks of intelligence is existential depression of the kind provoked by "infinity." In fact, in young, gifted, children (and children with OCD or Tourette's syndrome, who are often highly intelligent) existential depression is often triggered by their first encounter with the concept of infinity.

"Classic hallmark of intelligence," eh? And I thought I was just a weird seven-year-old. I scared myself silly, lying in the dark, unable to sleep, contemplating infinite participation, infinite standing in the heavenly choirs. I liked to sing, yes, but forever?

I finally talked to my dad, who broke the imagination logjam in the dark of the bedroom with the idea that heaven was where God was and God was good and infinite and loved me, and anything God had in store for me for eternity would be something I would like, even though I could not now understand what it might be.

God understood the not wanting to sing for all eternity. I understood the limitations of my mind when thinking about something as close to God as infinity.

Bless you, Daddy, for showing me ideas of God that went beyond anthropomorphism, that turned God into something more than super-person. (I'm sure he did not want to be condemned to an eternity of playing the organ.)

Flash forward a bunch of decades with that precocious seven-year-old, who has grown up and has just returned from driving her youngest child to college (a child who also likes to contemplate infinity). Last night I decided it was time to clean up the half side of my bedroom that is the sewing machine side. It took until 9:20 for me to work up the sense that I could actually find places for the accumulated stuff. But armed with an empty plastic underbed box found in the attic, I took the plunge.

I did not take a "before" picture, but trust me, it was horrifying. It hasn't been neat EVER, not ever, not since I moved into this room last fall.

Still, it was a mess filled with hope. The socks, good wool, some handknit, whose heels I plan to darn:

And thrifty generosity: three pairs of pants--khaki, grey and black--I plan to shorten for Eliza (two of them used to be mine, but don't fit anymore; the third pair--such a deal I go at Lands End this summer).

Creator spirit, help me to find projects for all this quilting fabric, and help me to complete them in my lifetime:

I have a goodly heritage--abundant buttons and button boxes inherited from my mother and grandmother:

And I have sinned. I have, uh, quite a tape measure collection.

(It's not that I steal tape measures exactly. It's just that if a tape measure is around, I pick it up, run it through my fingers, roll it up and slip it into my pocket as I talk to you. I'm interesting enough that you never know it's gone. I'm absent-minded enough that I don't know it's gone either.)

There is also evidence that I don't keep my promises and that I am a coward.

I promised to fix the buttonholes on this sweater I made long ago for my mother. Promised to do that at least a year ago. But since it involves making a machine buttonhole in a precious handknit and then cutting it, I can't bring myself to do it. A glass of wine would give me courage, but it wouldn't do much for the quality of the buttonholes.

God, give me the serenity to accept the things that ought not to be altered.

Plenty of theological metaphors available from this diverse and tangled drawer of thread. After a few feeble attempts at winding these spools up again, I took the scissors and trimmed every odd thread that was hanging out of the drawer. Pruning is good for vines. Why not for thread drawers?

"Train up a child in the way s/he should go," says the Book of Proverbs. I and my good friend Susan were trained once. Now, instead of den meetings, we get together for a weekly beer.

I nearly quit at this point, when many things had been pulled out and none had been returned. Signs of the coming kingdom?

And this pile is still there, awaiting another burst of energy (don't ask--but there's some really old clothes in there--I need to separate the sheep and the goats):

Then there's the chicken, representing the stupid collection, which is a blog post in itself:

This is what it looked like when I was done:

I went to bed satisfied. I no longer lie awake at night contemplating eternity. When I can't sleep, I think about my retirement accounts, which are finite things and more frightening than infinity. Stuff--we need a certain amount of it to live. Stuff that requires managing. But my stuff tells me about myself, the finite me and the infinite soul inside.

Nest, leaving the nest

2011-08-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

I'm driving my youngest child, Kurt, to college tomorrow, with his stuff. A few hours before we leave, the wife of a friend and colleague will give birth to their second child, a girl, by planned cesarean.

To call this day "beginnings and endings" would lay this almost-empty-nester open to charges of being over-dramatic. But the two events occurring more or less together leave me feeling that eighteen, almost nineteen years can sure seem like a short time.

And since that eighteen-year-old is still out with friends for the last night until Thanksgiving break, I have some time to think. I may doze off, but I won't sleep soundly till he's safe at home for one last night.

I'm not a person who dotes on babies. They don't turn me to mush. No, I hold back, because the pleasure and power of holding a newborn, or a three-month-old, or even a wiggly one-year-old, is not a mushy, sentimental thing. Mother love is something else entirely. I'm struggling to find words that are not cliches. Perhaps that's because there's nothing new to say, or because I'm really not up for poking and prodding myself until I bleed.

People have been having babies for a long time. As I sit here thinking about it, I pull my arms in toward my breasts, my shoulder. More than anything, raising babies is about this physical closeness.

I remember holding this child who goes off to college tomorrow in my lap, supported by couch cushions, and smiling with so much of myself I was amazed. He made me so happy just by being. Still does, though I doubt he knows it. How could he, until he holds his own child in his arms?

(Note to Eliza and Kris: the same goes for you two, now, though I loved you more fiercely than contentedly when you were babies.)

When I think about leaving this last of my children at college, there's kind of a hole in front of me. I could bemoan the fact that there will be no one left at home to cook interesting food for. I could recall the late-night piano playing with the repeated chord sequences that drove me nuts. I can even look forward to just going to bed when I'm tired, rather than debating the parenting ethics and practicality of waiting up. But the hole isn't about any of those things. It's the contradiction of loving someone who is me and not-me, who came from me but goes his own way. And carries my heart with him.

There's pink yarn in my knitting bag for the car tomorrow. I'm looking forward to the pictures on Facebook. Great adventures begin tomorrow, for all.

The pre-birthday-dinner post

2011-07-28T17:22:00.003-05:00

It's my birthday. Fifty, um, something. I'm sitting at the computer watching birds in the overgrown slippery elm outside the window next to my desk. The glass is covered with anti-glare film, to make it easier to see the computer screen, and the blind is mostly down. It makes it hard for the birds to see me. I've got seven of them within sight, tiny sparrows and some others I'm not sure about, other than suspecting they're young because of their spotted feathers.

How long will they live? A few years? Less than that? The bright red cardinal I've seen around our house for several years now--is he the same bird? Or somebody's grandson?

Next week this foliage will be cut down. The yard's a mess, stuff like volunteer trees got away from me years ago, and my neighbor has house painters coming next week, who need to be able to get at the side of her house. Lorenzo from the landscape company told me "you won't recognize the place." That will be nice, too, but I will miss gazing into the "tree house" from my desk, feeling like I know these birdies well.

Of course, now that I'm trying to take their picture, they've all disappeared. Did someone tweet that there are better bugs to be had elsewhere?

I watched an episode of "Through the Wormhole" last night with my son. It was about humans achieving greater longevity--living a thousand years, even forever. Morgan Freeman's narration made mind-spraining leaps from work on artificial intelligence and graveyard bacteria to aspirations for making the human body, or at least the human mind, last longer. In the final segment, a physics professor, photographed in a New Orleans cemetery, predicted an age thousands of years in the future when humans would merge with God and the universe. His language sounded almost creedal in proclaiming the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

J. S. Bach died on this day in 1750, probably of complications from diabetes. Birds with blow-away feathers and tiny, hollow bones flit through the depth of foliage behind my window now, on this warm summer day. Where will they go next week? My life stretches back over half a century to my mother giving birth--my aging mother who I have to pick up from physical therapy in a few minutes. My children whom we will soon meet for dinner eagerly plan their futures--college, marriage, families, homes.

I'm perched on my chair, writing it all down.

Plain happy

2011-07-06T00:14:00.001-05:00

Funny. I just read a short article about how to be happier, and already I'm happier. And I did not, believe me, sit down at the computer with hidden wells of happiness just waiting to be tapped.

In fact I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about how unhappy I am, and why that might be, and what I might or ought to do about it. And the effort has left me stuck in my misery, feeling like there's no remedy.

And then I go and read some self-absorbed self-help author's five book recommendations on happiness and not only does my mood lighten, I'm searching for Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson at the library web site and thinking I need to start a knitting group or a book group or a Friday afternoon beer-at-a-sidewalk cafe group. And act happy for the sake of the people who have to live and work with me.

Does this suggest that perhaps happiness will not be found by looking inward? Or that I am more suggestible than most people? Does it all comes down to just suck it up, get over it, do something? And act happy, for the sake of those who have to look at you, work with you, live with you? Within reason. I need more than a shimmering tinsel veneer of happiness -- irritating in others, ironic, overblown and ugly in me.

Striving, said the Buddha, is what makes us unhappy. It's the human condition, it's a lost cause. Being a blob is no recipe for happiness either, but working at something--that's good.

Not much wisdom in this post, not much eloquence, not much poetry. Happiness is plain stuff.

Firing on all cylinders

2011-06-27T00:18:00.002-05:00

I'm rehearsing a show these days. I'm the director.

I love directing. It's challenging. You get to work closely with a bunch of interesting, creative people. You get to help them be successful. Sometimes you have to negotiate, but you, the director, get the final say--at least until the show opens and things start to go their own way.

My job as director is to make sense of things. To make sense of the script, of what's behind the script, and of the bigger picture suggested by the script. And to make sense of all the details suggested by the music, if it's a musical (as this show is). You start with words and actions on paper, written by someone you've never met (at least in this case). You try to understand and think about and pretend all kinds of things that make those words and actions seem real and truthful and believable.

It's not at all like life.

Oh, the goal may be to create something lifelike. What's up on that stage is based on a lot of observation of life. But it's not at all like life.

I know this because this afternoon I went directly from four hours of rehearsal to life. A family backyard birthday gathering. At rehearsal I'm the person in charge, the person who is working full-speed ahead, millions of neurons firing in the brain at split-second intervals. I try to fill up songs with action: "Food, glorious--also wonderful, fabulous, magical and beautiful--food." March here, march there, march in a semi-circle, march to the front, to the back and up on the table. The song from "Oliver!" is sung by children, workhouse orphans, wan and pale. I have delightful, cooperative children in this show, but they jump up and down and lose focus when I stop to think. Stress hormones to the max. We moved on from there, to other scenes and a dozen new problems, many of which I had spotted and solved days ago as I prepared for this rehearsal in my backyard. Which isn't to say that the solutions worked when executed by actual people.

When I write, I work at sentences until they match some higher ideal of rightness in my head. When I direct, I work at scenes and manipulate actors until what I see seems right and smooth and brings clarity in the story. I look at things hard, and then I change them.

Cut to the birthday party: points to me for realizing that I needed to be self-observant and careful and quiet until I wound down a bit. Because what I really want to do is bark orders at people, change the way they're sitting, tell them what to say and laugh too loudly. I am sparkling and commanding, articulate and running the conversation, with knitting needles clicking furiously. The sock on the needles may have saved me. Somehow as the fingers speed through the twenty stitches on a needle in something under forty seconds, the mind falls under the control of that hypnotic rhythm.

I wanted to control the family story. To control the stories of everyone there. People are struggling in their lives--sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, grandmas, significant others and my own children. I want to shape their stories and their struggles and who they are into something that gets resolved and that means something. But on this summer evening they're happy playing bags, or sawing apart a downed tree branch, or showing off the innards of an old upright piano. I want clarity--why do we do these things? To what end? Is everyone okay? Where will it all end?

Not at all like the stage.

It's a summer night. Later there will be a bonfire. The lawn stretches out into gray-green as the sun goes down. The games end. The bugs come out. The young folks relax in their chairs, and the old ones go home to their beds.

And we face tomorrow with the same lonely questions we had at the beginning of this day.

Even the Spirit of Truth

2011-05-29T22:38:00.000-05:00

A day almost too full to write about. That was today, May 29, the Sixth Sunday of Easter in the year of our Lord 2011.

No, nothing big on the national or international front (that I know of--haven't read any news since early this morning). But here, on the domestic front, it's been intense.

My son, the graduating high school senior, was the preacher this morning at church, in the annual giving-thanks-for-high-school-students end-of-May service. He, a writer of growing craft, an exacting seeker of truth, spoke well what he had written very, very well. He took something from his life, found it in other people's lives, and applied the Gospel: "I will not leave you orphaned," said Jesus. "I will give you the comforter, the spirit of truth, who will be with you always."

Know that the spirit is with you always, he insisted, even in times of great change, when you must leave a place or a person or a stage in life, not sure that you will come back, or knowing for certain that you cannot return. He spoke of leaving the Island, the vacation place where he feels close to God and to all that is spirit and truthful. I thought of walking away from a graveside, of leaving a child at college, of facing a future where you simply must try something new, because to do the old thing over and over again and not have it work is crazy.

Love makes us able to do this, to grieve and move on, to grieve and set someone free, to grieve and wrestle free from falsehood, false selves, a false sense of control. Perhaps the Easter season is so long--seven Sundays--because there is so much from which we need to be resurrected, those of us, at least, who are old, who have seen a half century or more of self-deception, self-protection, greed, fear.

The text of the final hymn this morning, "We Know That Christ Is Raised and Dies No More," was woven through the sermon preached at my father's funeral, years before my children were even born. Its poetry and swelling tune open up for me a vision of a new creation, a "universe restored and whole." I left church with that ringing in my ears, with that energy in my feet, coming home to a good lunchand a party to honor our graduate.

With family members behind me, I walked up the steps to our back door and saw broken glass. The window in the door had been smashed. We realized quickly that someone had been in our house. The desktop computer in the back room was still there, but papers that had been piled on the desk were all over the floor. My son charged ahead into the living room. I looked around, struggled to get my bearings in my own home, struggled to find my phone in my purse to call 911. I walked to the front of the house, saw the empty place where the TV had been, the empty place where my son had left his laptop--the laptop that held the file for his sermon and all his writing from the last year or more. I called the police as I walked through the downstairs. In my bedroom, the dresser drawers had been emptied. Jewelry was missing. Everything was a mess. And in the back room, there was glass everywhere.

Outside the rain came down, from heavy gray skies. Inside we were angry and upset and were made to sit in the living room until the cops could search the house, assess the evidence, check if there might, just might be fingerprints. (There weren't.) We listed what was missing--some of which has since been found (the necklace my daughter made for me) and some of which (the PlayStation) we only thought about after the police officers had left.

One thing that was gone for sure was the exhilaration of the morning--the modest smile on my son's face, my beaming pride, the mastery of the moment, the vision of a universe restored and whole. "Shit, shit, shit," texted one of my friends in response to my message about the burglary. I finished heating up the food, got it out on the buffet, offered beer to those who drank beer, and opened one for myself. And then I led the saying of grace, a loosely-strung, prosaic prayer of thanks for safety and my son and for graduates and God-given talents. It was a feeble prayer, because those words of joy and gratitude were a thing of obligation, or at best, of hope. They were not what was spilling from my heart at that moment.

And we ate.

But here's the thing. If you have to have your house burgled, then discover it, as I did, with your sisters behind you on the back steps. They'll clean up the glass, and one of them will point out that at least you've got a better vacuum cleaner than the one she used to clean the living room the night your husband died. The other sister will fold your underwear and sort the t-shirts that were strewn around your bedroom. Nieces and a boyfriend and your brothers-in-law will pitch in. They'll hunt down bits of glass and keep up the conversation. Friends will call and other friends will arrive and listen to the story and sympathize and then help you think about something else. Your son's friends will come over and eat and sit next to him on the couch and then take him out to a movie. Family will linger and talk and clear the dishes and load the dishwasher. And later, after you've posted "burgled" as your Facebook status, another friend will call, and she and her husband will eat supper and come over, and he will fix the window in the back door. And while he drives to his shop to get the laminated glass that will stand up to a baseball bat if necessary, she and you will sit and talk the holy talk of friends who have been talking for nearly twenty years.

And in all these things, done with love, that new resurrected creation comes to life and grows, and the spirit of truth, always with you, always real, allows you, at the end of the day, to see this.

May dressed in gray

2011-05-07T21:51:00.000-05:00

I was out walking early this morning, in an almost-drizzle. The sky was gray with pink, and the pale green on the branches overhead vibrated in the cool air. The maples were elegant and sophisticated in their red buds. Close to the ground rose-colored tulips and deep purple hyacinths sang earthy songs, romantic and fleeting. I walked on the sidewalk, next to fences, peering into backyards at flower beds and decks and children's toys left lying in new soft, spring grass.

A sunny morning tells a different story. Buds are blood-red, flowers regal and arrogant. Trees care for nothing as they burn nitrogen and emit CO2. May sunshine cares nothing for others. It makes its own joy.

But this morning's sky, with so many colors suspended in it, like a rainbow, just waiting to be called to life, could be the setting for any story, every story, whether of lament or contentment, restlessness or hard-won peace.

Pile up

2011-04-11T23:10:00.001-05:00

Projects big and small are piling up. Some are started, though with short-lived enthusiasm. Many await the development of brilliant ideas. Most will require all-day, if not multi-day struggles, to move them along towards completion.

I fret, I fuss, I wonder what's wrong with me. I have a list, a long, scrawled list, but it's not helping. I've tried periods of chaining myself to the computer (i.e., sitting at the screen, typing whatever just to get something up there, knowing I can go back and fix it, wanting to get up, not getting up, finally getting up to visit the box of crackers in the kitchen; repeat).

It is a crisis of confidence: can I do all this?

It is a crisis of perfectionism: can I do all this and please myself?

It is a crisis of collaboration: can I depend on others to help me? And oh, gosh, can they depend on me?

Is it all worth doing? What about all the other things there are to do? And what about all this anxiety I feel? What about the waking up at night? And how I can't quiet my brain during yoga.

I write about it. I read what I write. A light bulb: time to cut back on the caffeine again.

Darn. I have rules about coffee. But I cheat.

Warm and whining

2011-03-24T18:53:00.001-05:00

Took a walk in the bright 5:00 p.m. sunshine, but the weather app on the phone says "33 degrees, feels like 25." My fingers are frozen, my nose is dripping, and the iPod is playing a jazz arrangement of "O Sacred Head" that is intensely sad.

It's an unsettled world, where what things look like, what they are like and what they feel like don't match up. I watch my kids try to define themselves in these uncertainties--one by asserting loudly that she is an adult now, the other by exploring philosophy and consciousness and his place in time and multiple dimensions of being. Somewhere between them you'll find me, trying to have some kind of a positive effect on them, trying to get through each day's necessary work, hoping to create a life where desire and doing come together happily.

So I walk. Because exercise is good for me. Because I've lost weight and walking will help to keep the weight off. Because usually the rhythmic pounding of my heels on the pavement smooths away the bumps in my brain and evens out the tense places in my heart.

The earth's tectonic plates have not shifted under my feet, as they did in Japan. I have not felt the waters of a tsunami rise swiftly around my ankles. There is no shooting in the street in my town, as in Libya, no humanitarian crisis. If I had to deal with stuff like that right in front of me, and not so very different from what it looks like, I might be a person who takes action.

But the things that drag me down, the things I could whine about--meetings to attend tomorrow morning, decisions about painting the house or investing in new windows--are much smaller. They are the problems of someone who is safe and secure in a warm home, with supper on the stove.

And yet, it's hard to know who you are, where you are, what you are, especially when cold winds make you feel trembly or rigid, when growing older leaves you feeling lonely, when you know you are not supposed to accept the wounded world as it is.

Or should you?

Joy to the heart

2011-03-13T23:09:00.000-05:00

On Saturday at church we sang, read, remembered and liturgized over the ashes of Mike Meyer, my high school English teacher, friend, and fellow actor/director. And then those ashes were interred in the church's memorial garden, in a biting cold March wind. The gloom has not yet lifted from my heart.

Twenty-seven years ago, on this same date, March 12, we watched as my father's casket was lowered into the ground, while the snow blew around our heads and our feet sank into the frozen muddy grass. Such a long time ago, and I still feel his absence.

Sunday morning's sermon was like ice on a tooth with a cavity. One shock of pain, then another. This was not the preacher's intention. He spoke of couples rehearsing their wedding vows, tears pouring down the face of tough guy grooms. My husband and I said our vows right to each other, from memory, because we felt something that serious should not need prompting. But he is gone now, too, and there is no one to remember that with me. The pastor went on to speak of other tears in church, poignantly. More pain hitting home. I had my phone in my hand, because I was texting the teens to find out if they'd made it to church. I wanted to throw it--or throw something--at the pulpit. My heart, my gut--they were weighed down enough.

This being Lent, the sermon moved on to mortality, to rehearsing for death with Jesus. Yeah, no need to say more about that here. Christ died for us, we die with Christ. We rise again. It's a way of looking at our lifetime on this earth. It's a way of looking at each day. It's a way of walking through the valley of the shadow of death with hope not despair.

I looked out the kitchen window while making coffee this morning. The houses across the alley reflected the rose-yellow glow of the sun, tricked into rising later by clocks sprung ahead for daylight savings time. The living and dining rooms were filled with this same pink and pale gold color, as if the sky itself had crept through the trees and past the apartment buildings just for me, to bring me joy.

I think I will look for it again tomorrow morning.

For Lent

2011-03-08T23:41:00.000-06:00

For Lent, I will practice compassion. Or try to. Quietly, in my heart.

A while back I read Paul Knitter's "Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian." My previous knowledge of Buddhism came from a high school class in comparative religions. There would be a list of terms (Nirvana, the Buddha), main ideas, history, and a lot of how Buddhism is not like Christianity. The take-away: Buddhism doesn't amount to much specific. Knitter studied Buddhism, not as a scholar but as a practitioner, meditating, working with teachers, and found it opened his mind about Christianity, a mind that had become weary and bored and tone-deaf to decades of church language. He was a Catholic theologian to begin with, and now considers himself both Christian and practicing Buddhist.

One thing I learned from reading his book is that meditation and mindfulness in Buddhism are not for oneself and one's own navel. One practicies these disciplines for the benefit of the world. Compassion is rooted in meditation and quiet. Breath and spirit produce compassion and works of love.

So for Lent, I will work on mindfulness and quietness, and see what grows out of that. A bigger world, I hope. A bigger heart.

"I will arise and go to Jesus
He will embrace me with his arms.
In the arms of my dear Savior,
Oh, there are ten thousand charms."

February 3, 2011

2011-02-03T21:16:00.000-06:00

A blizzard followed by sunshine has left me weary but cheerful. The huge piles of shoveled snow will complicate life for weeks. My shoulders will still ache tomorrow from yesterday's clearing of walks and driveway. The packed-down snow remaining in the driveway will ice over at some point in the next week or two; wheels will spin and it will take a couple rounds of reverse and forward to get going. But gosh, the sun has been out ever since the snow stopped. I had a nice lunch and a nice Harp's with my kids, plus Dan, the birthday boy. We've all been through a lot together. How good to celebrate snow day #2 over brats, burgers, beer and french fries.

Yet there are things I wonder about--things I've had time to wonder about in the last two days. Can those demonstrators in Egypt really change their government? So many thousands of people, assembled mostly peaceably, with reasonable expectations--yet will Mubarak's thugs and the ensconced elite prevail? The world watches, but what can the world do?

I'm reading "Year of Meteors," by Douglas R. Egerton. It's about the year leading up to Lincoln's inauguration. Fire-eaters in the South, fearful of the loss of millions of dollars of property in slaves and of their privileged position, pushed the debate to extremes. What was the North to do? There was no longer any way to agree to disagree.

Where would I have been in that debate? (Assuming it mattered at all where a woman stood!) Moderate and fearful? Wild-eyed and radical? One of those two--I don't seem to be wired for a reactionary. And I was more moderate when I was younger than I am now. But then everyone in America seems to be more one way or the other than they were twenty years ago.

Pray for peaceful change in Egypt. But change, nevertheless. Pray for clear eyes and sunshine after storms.

Whoosh

2010-12-31T18:18:00.002-06:00

A fat December fly, awakened by today's 50-degree temperatures, made weird shadows around the light fixture as I finished up my yoga routine, getting my back and sacrum lined up for standing around at tonight's new year celebration. I've been making resolutions today. Nothing momentous--quilt the quilt tops, get out more, try something new, keep the weight off--pretty much the things that are right there in front of me anyway, making decisions like that fly buzzing around doing what flies do.

David Brooks in this morning's New York Times writes about a book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly titled “All Things Shining” that proposes that we moderns find life's meaning in "whooshes" or "whooshing moments," the feelings of insight or exhilaration that accompany peak experiences--sporting events, civil rights speeches, whatever greatness and transcendence we can hitch our ponies to. Many of the commenters found this to be meaningless. There's not rigor of thought involved, no coherence required, just an emotional high. And as Brooks points out, such highs can come from speeches by nationalist dictators as well as tellers of more complicated, nuanced truths. Heck, complicated truths probably don't score high on the whoosh scale.

I wanted to leave a comment myself, but the comments were closed by the time I read the piece. (I did enjoy the comment that closed with "How's that navel, David?") One thing I thought was missing was the acknowledgment that many of life's whooshier moments don't come out of sports or election victories or from encounters with great works of art or great men and women. They come from encounters with sorrow and grief, with violence and despair. I've watched many people meet serious trouble in the past year and those are the places where meaningless and meaning meet, where the boundaries between our world and God's kingdom are just vapors, where insight and peace come from being able to despair and have faith both at once.

I ate a piece of Lebkuchen on my way to the computer--a substantial chunk of cookie, sweeter because of the spices, more substantial in the mouth because of the almonds. Whoosh.

Christ with clouds

2010-11-22T00:02:00.000-06:00

"It's all about clouds." That's what my friend said as she checked through her music for this afternoon's Bach cantata service.

"Why is it so dark?" asked my daughter, Eliza, as we crossed the street to go to church this morning. "Because it's a cloudy day," I said. "It might rain. It rained last night."

"The Clouds of Judgment Gather" and "Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending"--these were the hymns this afternoon to go with "Wachet auf!" Bach didn't have Christ the King Sunday. He had the end-of-the-church-year lessons about Christ's return and Judgment Day, the ones that kept me awake in bed late into November nights when I was a child. I hoped against hope that I would live a long life and die. That seemed less frightening than a supersize Jesus appearing suddenly in storm clouds above my head.* I didn't want to stand in the line of sheep and goats, or in the line-up where he pointed out that I had seen him many times naked and hungry, hadn't recognized him, hadn't helped and had blown my chance at heaven.

Of course, this isn't what's in the cantata. The bridesmaids are waiting, not for a judge, but for the bridegroom. There's some seriously passionate longing going on in the first duet between soprano and bass, the soul and her Lord. In the second duet where they're united, well, the flights of ecstasy in the music can be experienced with more than just the ears. The vocal music has all the urgency of lovers singing together at the opera. And then there's that sensuous oboe.

But what about those foolish virgins whose lamps ran out of oil? More than likely that's me. My planning-ahead skills are good--when I remember to use them. I don't much expect to be the one hanging out with the bridegroom. It's been decades since I sang a love duet, metaphorically or for real.

But there is Christ the King, ascended until the clouds hid him from view, enthroned with God. Jesus who walked the walk down here, perfectly, and now reigns over a kingdom that theologians describe as "both here and not yet."

On the way to writing this blog post, I got distracted and ended up trying yet again to sync my phone calendar, my computer calendar, and my online calendar without producing two and three copies on each machine of every choir rehearsal and day off from school. Compared to this, wrapping my mind around "here and not yet" is easy. I do believe that God's kingdom comes on earth, that the transcendant compassion that Buddhists speak of points to this, that the kingdom is seen where two or three gather together in Christ's name, that humans live collectively in hope, and this is wise, not foolish.

But not yet have I let go of the fear of being judged and, inevitably, found wanting. It's like seeing shapes in the clouds--your brain goes there because it tries to make sense of things. Why is it so dark? Why can't we see and understand God fully? Yet that passionate union seems so close, so knowable.

Cloudy tomorrow?

*Anyone who has ever visited St. John, Forest Park, the church of my childhood, has seen exactly what I saw when I closed my eyes on those nights.

2010-10-06T07:53:00.001-05:00

Do something creative first thing in the morning. I read this advice somewhere recently.

It makes sense to me. There's only so much good energy in a day, and it is soon dissipated. So it should be spent wisely, on something that matters. Probably not on reading the New York Times online. Not that what I read there doesn't matter--there's just not much I can do anything about.

The one thing I read this morning was an op-ed piece on how consumer spending drives the nation's economy. Consumer debt is the grease that helps those gears grind. We're all in this together--my spending creates your job, and your job gives you the income that funds my job. Interdependence. Not the fuzzy, sharing meals together, I'll support you through a crisis kind of interdependence. It's what? Structural? Unavoidable? An economic parable for the rest of our lives? Maybe even for the rest of the social contract.

That's a thesis that 's more involved than I care to argue before 8:00 a.m. Maybe I should just go read the paper.

In which she turns little things into bigger questions

2010-10-04T19:25:00.000-05:00

Kurt and I switched bedrooms over the weekend. Actually the switch is still going on. The dining room table is loaded with stuff that came out of his closet. His desk, which he doesn't want any more, is still in my room. It turns into a trapezoid when pulled out of the corner. The rectangular piece of heavy cardboard that's supposed to hold it square has mostly come away from the edges. Angle irons, I'm thinking, from the hardware store. But I'll have to find the power screwdriver first. My sewing machines and the storage units that go with it are in the living room and the dining room. And meanwhile, here at my desk, last Saturday's cleaning operation was interrupted halfway through by my niece's car accident. (Nobody hurt, but she had Eliza in the car, so off I went.)

So the house is not just cluttered or messy. It's completely out of sorts. I'm very tolerant of clutter--in fact, I need to see things out, not put away. But this is too much. Until I get it all sorted out, I don't know exactly how to live. And I won't get it all sorted out for a couple weeks, because I have to figure out how to wake up in a new space, how not to head upstairs to change clothes, where to knit and watch TV, where to knit and prop a book.

Is this a sign of age? Being such a creature of habit? I'm not against new habits. I just don't want to do the work of figuring out what they should be. It's just like figuring out what to wear these days, after losing 30-plus pounds over the summer. None of the old solutions work. I've bought new clothes. Moving closets forced me to weed out much of the too-big stuff yesterday. But how will it all work? How will it all end? Why am I here? Where am I going? And as my high school German teacher used to say, "Wo kommt es alle zu ende?"

It's not quite like what Jesus said about leaving mother and father and husband and wife behind. But still.

"Morgenlich leuchtend in rosigen Schein"

2010-09-28T20:09:00.000-05:00

I was out walking this evening, pounding along to the jazz trio on my iPhone. The playlist ran out. I stopped. What to listen to next?

It's not an easy decision. The wrong music at the wrong time irritates me. No, not those Bach cello suites again. (And I love Bach cello suites--at certain moments.) Ella Fitzgerald? Good for walking fast. When she sings Cole Porter, man, it takes energy to listen. Good for a burst of speed in the middle of a walk, but not for the winding-down stretch.

I tapped W and went to Wagner. Yes, I have the Solti "Die Meistersinger von Nurenberg" on my iPhone. I don't think the whole thing is there--one of those syncs where I'm not really sure what happens. I looked at the lines of German dialogue in the playlist and tapped something I thought would be from Act IV. I was hoping for Walter's prize song, but I didn't get it. What I heard, I think, was Beckmesser's rather pedantic effort. The beautiful voice was persuasive, not unpleasant to listen to, but the music did not go anywhere.

I kept listening, kept walking, and about four blocks from home, there it was. Three still, shining tonic chords to establish the tonality, and then a big ringing romantic tenor (literally big--Ben Heppner) at center stage singing "Morgenlich leuchtend . . . " Finishes the first stanza, the crowd reacts--cautiously. He sings another, there's a buzz. He keeps going, the crowd is swept up in the music.

Here is Ben Heppner in a concert version. Or listen and watch Johan Botha here. He sings beautiful phrases, although he looks kind of silly standing on that box. I liked the reaction shots of the crowd, everyone listening thoughtfully. But the staging doesn't show the crowd's excitement, which Wagner wrote so vividly into the music. To do justice to Wagner's music for the townspeople I suppose you'd have to have a movie set with cameras zooming in from up high, quick cuts, a swirl of pleasure and discovery.

There was a big smile on my face as I walked that last quarter mile tonight. I came back in the house with my heart sitting six inches higher in my chest.

Eighth Grade Confirmation

2010-09-12T21:53:00.001-05:00

I agreed to co-teach Sunday morning eighth-grade confirmation class. From now until mid-April it's a merry chase through half the catchism: the commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer. The teacher's guide provides eight times as much activity as a sane, middle-aged adult could possibly want to tackle with 20-plus kids in 55 minutes. I could drink more coffee on Sunday mornings, but the result of that would not be pretty.

Still, this will be interesting, especially the commandments. How do they hook up with the grace and love of God that young teens need to experience? What's good about being shown your sin? And what are these sins in today's world. I spent this afternoon shopping for new pants--remembering the sabbath? How do you judge if someone purporting to speak for God is using God's name in truth or in vain?

I sat in on this morning's class, taught by the other teacher. A reality bath. Eighth graders are restless, wary, self-conscious, and oh, so very hard to engage. One young man suggested something was a metaphor for God, which led me to be hopeful--someone understands that God is more than the words in which we try to describe something both immanent and unknowable. Other kids searched for "right" answers--some for the ones the teacher was looking for, some for the ones that seemed right to them. Some wanted to be noticed. Some wanted to escape. They were all acutely aware of one another.

Yeah. I'm either gonna like this or be very frustrated.

Thinner

2010-09-09T20:53:00.000-05:00

I am approximately thirty pounds lighter than I was at the end of May. Thirty years ago I would have expected this to change my life. I would have expected to get great parts on stage. I would have expected to be much more attractive to men. I would have expected to be happier.

This time, I am simply thinner. I am eating better. I'm approaching the normal range for BMI, so presumably I'm healthier. I am fascinated by the whole process. If you limit yourself to about a thousand calories a day, the red numbers in the LED display on the bathroom scale go down as the weeks go by. Relentlessly. And skirts and pants and t-shirts that used to be tight hang low on my hips, flap around my middle.

People ask, so I have to tell them what I did. It's seems odd to be discussing this with others--it's not that interesting to me. No sugar. Only fruits and vegetables for snacks, not boxes of crackers or bags of chips. And I eat when my body needs nourishment. I don't eat because I'm unhappy or lonely. I'm still unhappy and lonely and stressed-out. But it's not a reason to eat a bowl of cereal, much less to open a bag of potato chips. Celebrating is no excuse either.

I'm thinner, but I'm not younger. My face is thinner, and that makes the sags and bags more obvious. I walk lighter. I do feel better about how I look and I want to wear younger-looking clothes, but without looking ridiculous. I still don't know how a person my age is supposed to act.

It's all pretty superficial. Yet we judge people by their weight. Hmm.

Morning post

2010-08-26T08:35:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I need a vacation from screen time.

Too many ideas? Too few pursued and incorporated into my own? Too much abstract back and forth and not enough solid imagery that connects with the heart as well as the head--even if that heart, logically, must be located in my head.

Blog posts here often begin with an image--physical, or at least a moment in time or a specific interaction. Blog-reading, website-reading leave impressions that come and go too quickly, as soon as you click the link to the next item.

I've stayed home at the computer to listen to Carl Grapentine on WFMT, Chicago's classic radio station. Carl is a friend from church and I've been informed that between 8:00 and 8:30 this morning he's playing a recording of the Grace Senior Choir singing a piece by Paul Bouman that I wrote about on this blog a couple years ago.

Here it comes: strings introducing "Now Rest Beneath Night's Shadow." It's Paul's birthday. The sopranos have the first stanza. Oooh, a little flat over the top. Better at the second shot at that melodic line. One could wish for a little less violin and a little more choir, 'cause it's the melody line that's lovely: "Let praise to your Creator rise."

"Lord Jesus, since you love me." Good job tenors. This is the verse Paul made much of in his setting--a prayer prayed through a long life, from childhood to deathbeds. all the counterpoint coming to rest in Jesus with "I rest in your protecting arms."

And then there's a choral setting of stanza three. Not heavenly-perfected chorale singing. The sound is not quite together--perhaps mostly because the congregation is singing along and there's lag time in the building acoustics and recording. But that imperfection that includes everyone--surely that's more like the kingdom of God than exclusive excellence.

There's my image for the day. Put that on a sampler.

2010-08-19T20:09:00.001-05:00

Came in from a 45-minute walk thinking about having a beer--just a beer--for supper. Guess I didn't come back in a significantly better mood than I was in when I left. I had Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter on my iPod, which set a pretty good pace. But I walked directly west for the first 20 minutes, right into the sun. The afternoon's scowl from looking into the computer screen was heat-set between my eyebrows by the light of the sun just above the housetops.

That's the same sun whose setting I enjoyed so much last week on vacation.

But sitting and watching and talking--or not--to my kids is not the same as trying to walk off the piling-up anxiety and pressure of being back at work, getting ready for a new school year, and wildly thinking of more things to do than can ever be done in the time there is to do them. Where will my effort go? To the low spot in the ground to which it will most easily flow? Or will I dig some new channels, find new things to do, new ways to publish and present them? Will I keep on caring?

What's the trick of living one year after another?

Not beer for supper. I had a salad--organic greens, cottage cheese, carrots, sweet peppers, and some green grapes.

Maybe a glass of red wine for dessert?

Smiles

2010-07-07T09:16:00.000-05:00

"Don't you love farce?"

That's the question posed in "Send in the Clowns," the best-known song from Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," which I am currently directing. The show opens July 16. The next ten days are about putting the bits and pieces together into a cohesive, stylish whole.

The bits and pieces include plenty of farce: a cuckolded older man, a jealous pea-brained lover tripping on his trousers, a scorned wife, earthy lovers, young stupid romantics, and a schemer whose plots work despite her best efforts, not because of them. Yet the characters, even the ones we thought several weeks ago were kind of shallow show unexpected depth when confronted with their own foolishness.

Partly this is a choice made in this production--to consider the possibility that people change and learn, rather than stage a cynical ending and assume that the character's lives will go on as screwed-up as before but with new partners. Partly this is the poetry of the show, the summer night smiling on God's creatures in need of grace. And it's very much the music: despite a great deal of dissonance and uncertainty about tonal centers all the way through the second act, the show ends with a solo violin's upward winding scale resolving into major-key tonality in the last chord.

I can't wait.

Tuesday's Child presents
Stephen Sondheim's
"A Little Night Music"
July 16-18, 23-25
Tickets online

Baby birds

2010-07-02T22:13:00.000-05:00

In the past few weeks I've noticed robins making dive-bomb runs across our patio. They swoop by, low and fast and angry, and fly to the tree outside the gate. Sometimes it's a female alone. Sometimes it's one bird on the tail of another.

I've seen this behavior before. In past summers, I've seen robins dive at our dogs and then dash outside the fence. It's a diversionary tactic, the mama robin's way of quickly distracting attention away from her nest at the top of the tall pole that supports a Concord grape vine on the edge of our patio. It's left over from a huge but ugly arbor that I ripped down several years ago. The vine still produces grapes, and lots and lots of leaves. Robins have been nesting there for many years.

So as I sat on the patio the other morning growing bored with my book, I looked hard into the green umbrella of the grape vine, and found the dense twiggery of the nest.

I even saw two tiny beaks, open to the sky. I heard the babies' tiny chirp, answered with a tiny, soothing chirp from the mother who was in the tree outside the gate. She understands that flying to her babies' aid puts them in danger. They are better hidden without her presence. But today, when I looked very closely, I saw the spotted breast of one of these babies. It's towards the center of the circle, at about ten o'clock.

I've seen robins' nests in our backyard before, seen robin's-egg-blue shells on the ground. Many years ago I saw a fledgling on the ground, trying to figure out how to fly. But I've never seen such a healthy baby in the next waiting for its next meal.

This is the first summer in the twenty-four years I've lived in this house that there is no dog in the back yard. I used to think that any mother robin who built a nest in our back yard had a few screws loose, or didn't have the brains it would take for her genes to survive in her offspring. Backyard dogs will bark and bark and eat anything that ends up on the ground in front of them.

I have high hopes for these babies. I'll watch the nest closely in the the next couple weeks. I'll listen for that mother chirping at a distance. It reminds me, oddly, of myself, sending my teenager gentle, carefully worded text messages about staying safe and coming home at a reasonable hour. Mama robin is busy gathering worms and whatever else these growing infants eat. I forage at Jewel and bring home sweet cider from the Farmers' Market.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father." Matthew 10:29

Sparrows, robins, teenagers--all are cared for by a mothering God.

Binge reading

2010-05-31T11:45:00.000-05:00

I love to read.

That's not the exact way to express my relationship with reading. It's not like a hobby for which I set aside time, or make special trips to buy supplies. It's not like the obsession I sometimes have with knitting, where the wonder of seeing something grow on my needles compels me to sit down with it night after night until it's finished.

Reading is more like eating. I do it every day, sometimes thoughtfully and in celebration, often with little conscious thought, just to keep going.

So I guess I'd have to say I've been binge-reading for the last 24 hours. I went through half a novel yesterday, with little thought for the consequences.* This morning it was long, serious pieces as I wandered through various blogs and internet sites. Kind of like the days of getting lost in the library as an undergraduate.

I am looking for new ways to think, new things to think about.

And could the binge-reading be connected to efforts to change my eating habits?

* "The Help" -- story, story, story; interesting because a white female author has used the first person to give voices to black female domestics in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962-63

Red

2010-05-23T23:32:00.000-05:00

I took off the rumpled linen blouse, folded the long red scarf, left the shoes at the foot of the stairs. Pentecost Sunday is about over, and if I were somewhere in the middle of a good book, I'd be in bed nodding off with that book. It is so much easier to read than to reflect.

The female cardinal appeared in the tree outside my kitchen window this morning. She flashed her brown-red color here and there, sideways on the branch. The movement caught my eye. She is not bright startling red like her mate, but still red and regal from top to tail. She feeds in a tree, and I suspect, nests in the forsythia bush.

I had a bright red dress once, close-fitting, scarlet. I was in a show at the time, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret. My body was on display that spring, especially on stage. The red dress was not in the show, but still it said, Look at me, I'm bright and not afraid to be looked at. I sewed a red satin dress that spring, too, with spaghetti straps and not much room for a bra underneath. But worn on me, rather than on a character, I didn't know how to bring it off. I felt conspicuous and awkward.

I cannot imagine myself in a red dress now. The red scarf was about as much red as I could wear on this May mid-life day. Red for the fire of Pentecost. Red for the Holy Spirit--that person of the Triune God often pictured as a white dove. Go figure.

The preacher at the cantata this afternoon used the pronoun "she" for the Holy Spirit. I like that, more because it's startling than inclusive. How do you picture rushing wind and Spirit moving on the waters? How do you recognize truth and wisdom, creativity and the fire of love? Does the Spirit wear red sometimes--red of blood, red of passion? Red that suffers and celebrates.

Jack, the dog

2010-05-04T21:21:00.002-05:00

Took Jack, our thirteen-year-old dog to the vet this afternoon for euthanasia. Her back legs have been giving her trouble for the last year or more. She could hardly walk. She cried and barked in frustration. She struggled to get around the house to be with us. She couldn't run along the fence outside and bark at strangers passing by, though she continued to bark at squirrels in trees across the street.

Jack was sent by God to our family. She was the little black puppy, abandoned late at night in our back yard when our old dog, Max, was dying of cancer. My younger son, who was four, had prayed for a new puppy. God delivered. (Few things have been that simple since.)

Jack chewed up a couple of cowboy hats, chewed the noses off teddy bears, and one memorable day chewed a hole in a sweater back I had just finished knitting. It took hours and hours to reknit it. But on the whole, she was a great dog, a true member of the pack. She loved and trusted her boys, Kris and Kurt. She grew to be wary of Lon as his dementia worsened. He kicked her from time to time, but this only meant she spent more time with the rest of us, sleeping on top of my feet if Lon was prowling about.

It is yet another sign of the end of an era, the end of romping and wrestling and playing young'uns at our house. Another milepost that reminds us that life is ever-changing, with many comings and goings. Jack's chair, which absolutely reeks of acrid dog smells, will go out to the garbage, her bowls will go to the basement. Eliza is watching the video she took yesterday of Kris feeding Jack a bacon cheeseburger. Here's a photo:

I am relieved it's over with for her. Some would say I took too long in coming to this decision, that she suffered. But she soldiered on, for us. I tear up as I think of that love--or that hard-wired dog behavior that looks like love. Nah. She loved us. God sent her here to do just that.

The Lusty Month

2010-05-01T12:26:00.000-05:00

May arrived early this morning with bright blue, clear skies.

I looked out the bedroom window and went back to sleep.

Now, mid-day, it's cloudy. The flush of morning coffee has worn off, with only one load of laundry underway and a few miscellaneous computer tasks completed. We need a new mower to cut the dandelions that are eight inches deep in the backyard. And the spring cold/allergy thing in my head and throat has thickened and settled.

Such is the rhythm of Saturday. How soon before I can go back to sleep?

There is hope on the horizon. Kurt has gone off to buy charcoal, to grill hamburgers. You gotta love a kid who cooks for himself and shares with his old mom. And then it will be time for me to head off to the fabric store, for the pink glittery fabric that will become Eliza's prom dress--part her fantasy, part mine.

There may yet be life in this lusty month of lilacs and leafy green.

2.5 days is not enough

2010-04-25T22:19:00.000-05:00

My sister and I took our annual trip to Paducah, Kentucky, to the American Quilters' Society show. We left at 3:00 Thursday afternoon, drove 300 miles south to Mt. Vernon, Illinois, drove another 60 or 70 miles on Friday morning, saw the show, at the Olive Garden, stayed overnight in Metropolis, Illinois, took pictures with the giant statue of Superman, went to the quilt museum in Paducah, the yarn store, the fabric store, and drove 360 miles home.

The last hundred miles is when you get to anticipate returning to everything at home. Everything that hasn't budged since you left.

Is that why I was so angry all day? A couple of days in which to begin to think creatively, long car rides for knitting, reading, and daydreaming, a jelly roll of bright red-to-orange-to-yellow batiks, and now, no time to follow through with any of it.

Seriously bummed.

Why do I hate cleaning?

2010-04-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

Been cleaning the house. Dusting, floors, putting away clutter. There are people who are neither relatives nor bosom friends coming for dinner tomorrow.

I so not enjoy this. Today's theory on why: cleaning is aspirational. It's work towards a home I aspire to have: pleasing, interesting, comfortable, warmly welcoming. But removing dirt is tedious. The hand-work of cleaning aggravates everything in my wrist that doesn't work well. And the wanting others to think well of my home makes me very anxious.

There! Have I named the problem precisely? Now, according to what I read last night about some-kind-or-another of Buddhist mindfulness, I'm supposed to hold it with gentleness. Which involves being gentle with myself, even as I finish up the work in the next hours.

What was step three? Accept it, or let it go? Probably in Buddhism those two things are the same. Let it go by accepting it.

I may have to sit for a while before I can mindfully clean the bathroom.

Endgame

2010-04-13T23:13:00.001-05:00

I saw Sameuel Beckett's "Endgame" at Steppenwolf Theatre tonight, after a day of toothache, two hours at the endodontist, and other challenges.

I liked it. It wasn't very entertaining, but it wasn't repulsive either. Repulsive, I think, was the takeaway when I read the play back in college or grad school.

This time, the poetry spoke. Which is what tends to happen when you perform plays out loud. The images get out there, resound in the empty spaces around the audience. You could get all caught up in the rejection of meaning in life and time and Western culture. (God help you if you read the program note on Mad Men and Endgame!) Or you could listen and notice and wonder. In the face of everything, there are still attempts at stories and sugarplums and prayer. There's a faint vision of unattained happiness. The will to power coexists confusedly with a will to save. Of course, it isn't enough: "You're on earth. There's no cure."

When you come out of the show, for a while ordinary conversation sounds like Beckett-speech. I came home, looked at my email, and had to go look up John 20:19-31, last Sunday's Gospel, Jesus and Thomas, for tomorrow's chapel reading.

So I read that story through Beckett speech, or at least saw the story set in the dirty upper room with the garbage cans that house Nagg and Nell and the windows high on the wall. Ham confined to a throne on wheels. Clov in and Clov out, the only activity in the play. The apostles whose preaching and teaching founded Christianity cowering in the dim corner light. Wasteland?

In John there is revelation. Jesus appears, "Peace be with you here," shows Thomas his damaged hands and side, and utters a blessing on the unknown ones "who have not seen and yet believe."

Does it make any more sense than "Endgame"?

"You remain," says Ham at the end.

Remain. Yet.

Discernment

2010-04-12T22:29:00.000-05:00

Root canal tomorrow afternoon, followed by an evening at the theater: "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett. The show will start right about when the Novocaine wears off.

There is nothing much to be said about my teeth. They're not high quality teeth. My grandmother had dentures by the time she was forty, and I think if I were her contemporary, I'd probably have them too. I still have most of my teeth, but the ones with live nerves in them are increasingly rare. The good news: the hot-cold sensitivity thing is getting better. Except for right now. This aching tooth reacts immediately to hot food, slowly but more globally to ice cream. And the ache caused by singing is proof that a well-placed voice causes facial bones to vibrate.

More good news: I am getting this root canal a mere five days after the tooth began to hurt. I usually spend a couple weeks convincing myself that it's not that bad, or that the ache will go away when my sinuses clear up (like that ever happens). I have my Bible study group to thank for this. In the "joys and concerns" portion of the session, I mentioned that my tooth hurt, so in the prayers part of the morning, Pastor Kelly (bless her thirty-something heart--I bet she's got fine teeth) prayed that I might have discernment about what to do about my tooth. That put God on the side of the endodontist. Who am I to resist the Spirit's wisdom?

Complementary colors

2010-04-04T20:14:00.001-05:00

The liturgical color for Easter is white, but my color of the day is yellow. On my way to the garage this morning, headed for church, I turned to look back at the house and at the sky, the sun, the angular evergreen next to the basketball hoop, and the two forsythia bushes, singing of springtime and resurrection. In the evening, there was lemon meringue pie for dessert, lemon-yellow to sight and tastebuds.

My sister filled a vase with forsythia branches and daffodils for the center of her Easter dinner table, all cut from her yard. There were also purple Japanese irises from the store. Purple and yellow being complementary colors, they each made the other zing.

Purple is the color of Lent. Yellow may not be the official liturgical color of Easter, but it's there in church for Easter, in the white and gold and yellow banners, in the golden yellow threads that give the white vestments their elegance and Easter formality.

Here comes the metaphor.

Yellow is all the more intense when paired with purple. Lent brings focus to Easter. The repent and turn of the past six weeks, all the purple passion, prepare wintry spirits for the blazing splendor of the empty tomb, the sweetness of the risen Savior.

It's raining now. Will those yellow blossoms be on the ground in the morning?

Still the yellow and the purple are pressed into my brain. And I am still wearing the white linen shirt of Easter.

Christ is risen, alleluia.

Upon returning to my old college campus

2010-03-31T23:13:00.002-05:00

The title sounds like something out of 19th century romantic poetry. A paean to bygone days, to a younger self, and a place that remains the same even though it's changed.

But it was like that.

I hadn't been back to Augustana College since 13 months after I graduated, but I returned there yesterday, on a Spring Preview Day for college-bound high school juniors. I am the mother of a high school junior who is bound for a liberal arts college. It's his spring break, so we went.

I admit I was looking forward to going, but that's because I seldom go anywhere. Who would have thought I could get so excited about driving past Old Main? About crossing Seventh Avenue on foot, stopping traffic, and trudging uphill towards the Union and the dorms? It felt like I had just climbed the stairs from the practice rooms in Bergendorf, after an hour and a half of wrestling with Beethoven and Bach, or just finished up my work in my theater office, the one with the space heater that glowed very hot and the IBM Selectric type-like typewriter that took me months to master.

I feel so much younger today. Which is odd, because I'm a long way from twenty.

What didn't I know back then? I knew about music and dramatic theory and literature and how to unravel the meaning buried in the writer's work. I didn't know much about the doing of these things, the making of art, or that even the most subtle and vivid piece of writing or composition is a long way from both the banality of real life and its glory.

What else didn't I know? I knew that I could pretty much get an A in anything I wanted to (as well as in classes I didn't care about). I did know there was a downside to being the smartest one in the room. I didn't know that I'd cease to care about that (though I would learn something about when to shut up).

I didn't know that I would reckon the years passing in my life by the losses and the ongoing challenges, not by the accomplishments.

I didn't know that I would be as lonely in middle age as I was during my junior year.

I didn't know that one day I'd sit on a bench by the slough with my daughter and talk nonsense about a duck. I didn't know how much that would lessen the loneliness.

I knew a lot about Brecht, whom I liked, and Tennessee Williams, whom I don't. The years have not changed those opinions. I didn't know then, though teachers tried to tell me, that I could trust my musical instincts--they were better than most people's.

My wardrobe isn't all that different from what it was in college, but my shoes and my bags are more comfortable. I tried knitting while reading for the first time while I was in college, because that theater history textbook was so dull. I've since discovered that knitting at the same time also helps me read complex material.

Back in college, I was an optimist, though an optimist with a cynical streak. Yesterday I felt that was still true, though the cynicism is less deep. It's been replaced by doubt and worry.

All the things I was then, what I worried about, what I thought about, what I obsessed about--those all happened in real places, and I saw those places yesterday, and it's almost as if I didn't know how things turned out for that girl.

I may have to visit some other places.

Monday of Holy Week, John 12:1-11

2010-03-29T13:43:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, in a Wednesday morning chapel service, Mr. Brooks told us about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. He told how happy and excited everyone was—Lazarus, his sisters, Mary and Martha, the disciples and all the people who believed in Jesus after this. Here’s someone who has power even over death, they thought. He must be the Son of God!

And then—this part isn’t in the Bible, but it must have happened this way--Lazarus turned to Jesus and said, “We want to invite you over for dinner. Will you come for dinner? With your disciples? To celebrate. We want to thank you. What’s a good night for you?”

Now Jesus and his disciples were planning to go away for a while, because they knew that the news about Lazarus was going to get back to the chief priests and Pharisees—the guys in Jerusalem who didn’t like Jesus, didn’t like what he was preaching, and didn’t like the fact that people were saying he was the Son of God. So they were going to lay low for a few days.

But Jesus was planning on celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem, and Bethany, Mary and Martha and Lazarus’s home town, was just two miles from Jerusalem. So they agreed that Jesus and the disciples would come for dinner on the next Saturday night, on their way back to Jerusalem.

Martha cooked a good dinner. Everyone sat around the table talking, telling stories, listening to Jesus. Mary disappeared for a few minutes and she came back carrying a special jar. When she took the lid off, a wonderful fragrance spread through the house. It was a jar of very expensive oil. It came from far away. It was worth lots of money—as much money as someone could earn in a whole year. She went over to Jesus and poured this oil on his feet. The fragrance filled the room. And then she took off the covering that she usually wore on her head, and wiped the extra oil off Jesus’s feet with her hair.

You can imagine how quiet everyone got, watching her. Everyone could see how much Mary loved Jesus.

But then Judas started to grumble. “What a waste,” he said. “This oil could have been sold and the money given to the poor.”

You can imagine the hurt look on Mary’s face. You can imagine how everyone else felt. “Way to go, Judas! Way to ruin the evening!” And they looked to Jesus. What would he say? They had heard him before tell people to sell all they had and give the money to the poor. What would he say about Mary’s gift to him?

“Leave her alone,” he said. “Leave her alone.” And he must have smiled at Mary, to reassure her. Everyone was relieved—but only for a moment. Because then Jesus said, “She bought it that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

His burial? Yes, people used expensive oil like that to cover up the bad smell of dead bodies before they were buried. But who said anything about Jesus dying? Here they were, celebrating life, celebrating how Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, and Jesus is talking like he’s going to die. Soon. Was this the Son of God they all believed in?

All of us are going to die. We don’t like to think about it, and we probably shouldn’t think about it constantly. A couple weeks ago—I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about—but I said to one of the junior high students, “You’re going to die someday, we’re all going to die.” And she said, “Yeah, I know. But you’re bringing me down, Ms. Gotsch, you’re bringing me down.”

We began the season of Lent with ashes on our foreheads and the pastors reminding us that we are dust, and to dust we will return—reminding us that we will die. This is one of the things that you have to put up with if you go to a Christian school—teachers and pastors remind you that you’re going to die.

Do we talk about death because we want to scare you? Or because we want to bring you down?

No. We talk about death because there is a connection between your death and Jesus dying. And it’s good news. Less than a week after the dinner at Bethany, Jesus the Son of God was crucified, died and was buried. But on the third day he rose again. From his death came new life. New life for us after we die, when we go to heaven to be with Jesus. New life right now. Because Jesus died for us, we can die every day to sin and rise again forgiven to live a new life, a life that is full of love for others, like Mary’s love for Jesus. Like Jesus’ love at the Last Supper before his death when he washed his disciples’ feet.

We’ll be back here in church every day this week, remembering Jesus’ death on the cross for us, talking about our own sinfulness and death. But don’t let that bring you down. The disciples at the dinner in Bethany didn’t know it yet—but you do: Dying is how Jesus brings you to new life.

Sunday evening post

2010-03-22T22:00:00.000-05:00

The pasta is baking in a 400-degree oven--hot enough to send a slightly smoky smell through the house, thanks to the grease that is burning away, grease left behind by a chicken recently roasted at that high temperature.

What else is burning away?

We celebrated the Annunciation in today's Bach Cantata Vespers. Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern--beautiful Jesus imagery, with horns and oboes. And "The Canticle of the Turning," a metered paraphrase of the Magnificat. And a sermon that left me a little confused about whether I should "be not afraid" when God's angels show up, or be very afraid because God is doing things all the time because that's what God-- who has nothing else to do--does.

Sometime this week or next I'll take the battery out of the smoke alarm, lock the oven and set it to clean itself. I'll run the fan in the stove hood, so that the smoke mostly goes outside. I'll do this when no children are home to complain.

That roast chicken was really good. Three or four cloves of garlic, chopped up small. Rosemary--the dry, sharp needle-y kind. Mash and crush it all together with some salt. Add some pepper, loosen the skin of the chicken, and rub the salt mixture underneath. Then roast the chicken at 400 degrees until it's done. Make a mental note to clean the oven later.

God however is in continuous-cleaning mode. Scraping, burning, making all things new. Bringing that new kingdom into being. Oh, the tension between God's world and our crummy, greasy smoky one.

Ruminating

2010-02-28T21:02:00.004-06:00

A day, it's been a day. Singing with the little girls in my choir this morning, leisurely reading of the New York Times, frustration, anger, melancholy, comporting myself as an adult (miraculous, that), and coming out of it cheerful in the end.

This Sunday's New York Times magazine has an article called "Depression's Upside." The idea is that something so prevalent as depression must have an evolutionary purpose. A couple of researchers have suggested that a depressed brain deliberates more, thinks more analytically. Ruminates, as a cow slowly chews its cud. And this focused rumination gets problems solved.

I'm not sure I've ever really, in my whole life, arrived at a good solution to any problem more complicated than cleaning a closet, arranging furniture, or getting a cast of fifty offstage and back on again for bows. But as I think back, serious depressions have prompted me to make changes. Or try to make changes.

The article cites research that says that writers have a much higher incidence of depression than other people. Depression makes you think slowly about hard stuff. It gives you time to think about how to write it down. And writing it down in turn helps you do the thinking. So writing and depression are natural partners. I'm sure this applies to me. I'm sure there's a strong correlation between the timing and frequency of blog posts and my mood. Gloomy moods are more interesting.

All this is making me feel better about feeling bad. Being cheerful, steady, and resilient is a gift, but not one that I'm given very often. But now, as long as I can crawl out of bed and make it to the computer, I can think of spells of depression as a gift, an opportunity not to be wasted.

The Feast to Come

2010-02-23T16:28:00.002-06:00

Do they sing "This Is the Feast" in heaven? In Richard Hillert's setting from the Lutheran Book of Worship?

The book of Revelation, the source of the text of the canticle (5:11-14), describes the words being sung in heaven, but it doesn't specify a tune. Handel's "Worthy is Christ" from the end of the Messiah is nice, but not really suitable for "myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands" to sing together with all the people of God.

Hillert's refrain can be sung by anyone and everyone, by four-year-olds, who really enjoy that upward leap of a major sixth on the voiced-V of victory. It is sung by Christians of many denominations, around the world, in unison with the organ, or with brass and descants blaring. It is sung at Easter and on Christ the King Sunday, and at funerals, when we need music to turn our hearts away from grief to see, to sense, the glorious light pouring forth from the open doors of Christ's kingdom.

So are they singing "This Is the Feast" in heaven today, in Hillert's presence? He died last Thursday, at the age of 86. Is he beaming as my sainted father, his friend, accompanies the heavenly choirs on the organ?

It's all a little silly to think about. The picture in my head makes me smile. But listen . . . .

"Sing with all the people of God, and join in the hymn of all creation: Blessing, honor, glory and might be to God and the Lamb, forever and ever."

A foretaste of the feast to come.

Richard Hillert
1923 - 2010
Funeral service at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, March 1, at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest Illinois

Blog Anniversary Post: Glory

2010-02-14T18:00:00.004-06:00

Transfiguration Sunday more or less marks the fourth anniversary of this blog. Reason enough to post.

The epistle lesson this morning put me in mind of my confirmation verse. Here's a bit of Paul from today's readings:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:18)

My confirmation verse was 1 Peter 2:9:

But you are chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

That's the RSV translation, typed from the bible that was my gift from my parents for confirmation. I always have to look the verse up, because the various translations are confused in my mind. The RSV and the NRSV don't have the phrase that pulled me in as a young teenager. They say "declare the wonderful deeds" or "proclaim the mighty acts" (NRSV). The King James Bible said "that you should show forth the glory of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

Glory is my subject today. Show forth the glory.

What attracted thirteen-year-old me to oh-vowles of that phrase and to that glory and that marvelous light? On the neediest level, I'm sure I saw myself shining in a God-powered follow spot, the center of attention who nevertheless faithfully remembered to give the glory to God. A little further up on the faith scale, I remember the thrill and assurance I felt when I said those words and thought of myself as someone called into God's warm and loving light. This thrill was only slightly dimmed by Pastor Paul's note to me in the envelope with my certificate of confirmation, a gruff message that reminded me of the responsibility that came with being a chosen race, etc.

The light I pictured was mostly white, with a little yellow to give it some heat and maybe a tinge of pink for flattering skin tones. And I, standing in the light, glowed with divine love and generosity.

This is not a bad image. I don't mean to belittle it, or to distance myself from that gifted young person who had been brought up to think of her talents (not always positively) as God-given responsibility. But I didn't know much about how to work my own powers, and I didn't know how God's glory is also reflected in powerlessness and in puzzles.

We, according to Paul, are being transformed from "one degree of glory to another" (whatever that means) and in that glory, he goes on to say, we do not lose heart, we do not hide in shame, we live openly and state the truth.

These are not always things that people welcome. Being "chosen by God" means bearing burdens and crossing through the valley of the shadow of death (this morning's sermon--a good one).

Light and glory appear in different colors. Grey, and green-grey before a storm. Purple and pink as light fades at the end of day. Soft and new at dawn. I did not imagine all this variety at thirteen. Nor did I imagine that declaring the wonderful deeds of God means that sometimes the truth you speak comes across as foolishness, as utter nonsense. Or that sometimes you declare and proclaim with tears, or rebuke, with patient suffering, with anger that only God can transform into something good.

It's more than forty years since my confirmation, four since I started writing as the Perverse Lutheran. Even as a naive young teen I tested my thinking often. "Is that really true? Isn't there another way to think about it?" I am not more content now than I was then--probably less so. I don't know why this is--heredity, environment, experience, a restless brain. God has become an ever-greater abstraction as I've grown older, even as the still, small voice of God's presence has become more specific. The words of blessing, no matter how you translate them--"show forth the glory," "declare the deeds," "proclaim the acts"--still fill me with joy.

Junk

2010-02-09T17:46:00.002-06:00

Decided today to junk the old car rather than fix it.

It's a 1992 Oldsmobile Achieva and it's been in a steady decline for years now. Sensors and gauges don't work. The speedometer doesn't work. The front fender has been held together by duct tape for nine years. But it ran. One son drove it for two and a half years of high school and almost four years of college. Second son called it his own for the last nine months. But something--multiple things, are broken in the engine and it's no longer worth fixing. So I'm junking it.

But not without shedding a few tears. This was my husband's car, and when GM's ads used the slogan "It's not just your car, it's your freedom" they were talking about Lon. His freedom, his identity, his self-worth were tied up in the purchase of that car eighteen years ago, probably in more ways than I wanted to know at the time. It still carries many complicated memories of his eccentricities, the things he relished, as well as his faults and failures.

I never liked this car. It had a dependable GM engine, but so many other things about it were cheap. Pieces of interior trim have been coming loose and breaking for the last decade. The back seat was never large enough for our three children, especially when two were still in car seats. The electrical system was always doing odd things. Once, in the early morning hours of our annual summertime drive to northern Wisconsin, I had to dig out the owner's manual to figure out which fuse to pull to shut off the car's interior lights.

Still, it was Lon's car--a dark red, manly color. A General Motors car, made in America. Not a car for the type of consumer who researches quality and ends up with a Toyota or Honda. It was the car that seemed to fit his image, his personality when he bought it. He would have been happy to share it with his sons. I think he would have been happy to see it turn into the old beater that it was, suitable for parking near the high school, ideal for driving to DiNico's for a slice of pizza after school or after practice.

Lon used to name his cars. There was Reggie, the Buick Regal, and Kid Blue, the Chevy Malibu. If this car had a name, I don't remember it. I think it's dumb to name cars, and I never adopted the names Lon thought up for the cars I drove--the Dodge Dart, the Nissan, the Taurus. Cars are places to me, not companions--places in which I remember things happening, remember eras as well as trips and errands. Today has been a day for thinking about those bygone eras, and wondering what lies ahead.

So farewell, '92 Achieva. I'll say a prayer about the future.

Order, Imposed

2010-02-08T20:13:00.005-06:00

I'm having a little trouble seeing meaning in life these days. Or seeing meaning in housework, which is much the same thing. Do the same things over and over, and then they're undone, and you have to do them again. Repeat over days, over years, over generations. True for life, true of housework.

It would be more pleasant to live in a clean house, I admit, but it doesn't seem worth the dedication required. Somehow, I have managed to reach middle age without a compelling sense of "ought" when it comes to cleaning. I clean out of embarassment, when guests are coming, but rarely because I think I can make myself feel better by clearing out dust bunnies and putting papers away.

Though oddly, I do feel better when the floors are clean. And the desk is orderly. And the dining room is not littered with odd things that have found their way to odd places (i.e., the dental floss and needle-nose pliers on the buffet, the washcloth on the old German bible, which in itself is a mystery).

No moral here. No insight. I could post a picture of the laundry on the dining room table, but it's not a pleasing sight.

By the way, I'm hosting a bridal shower for fifteen to twenty guests twelve days from now. The contemplating will have to end and the busy-ness begin. But not for a few days.

Empathy

2010-01-31T19:42:00.003-06:00

The theme for what to think about today came out of the radio on a home-to-church-to-Grandma's-to-church-to home run. (Now you know why I don't look forward to Sunday mornings.)

The guy on NPR with a book to push was saying that humans and other higher primates are wired for empathy, to think along with one another, to be socially cohesive. I believe (though I'm not sure since I was calculating whether or not I'd make it through a green light at this point)--I believe he pronounced the end of the era of original sin and the beginning of an era where we would begin to understand that history should be written by the common folk who all get along with one another. Not by the powerful.

I'm oversimplifying. Big time. But never mind.

(I've really grown to dislike this short-sentence one-line paragraph transition gimmick, but that won't stop me from using it--I want to watch "Emma" on Masterpiece in 12 minutes. Masterpiece--the former Masterpiece Theater. Speaking of pretentiously short. Oh, never mind. Again.)

I don't doubt the research that says we're wired for empathy. This is how babies learn to interpret their social world. But there are so many challenges to that empathy, so many ways for it to get distorted.

Later this morning the sermon at church was called "Insider Outsider" (again, I am failing to check this for accuracy). Yes--those folks in Luke didn't like Jesus pointing out to them that God helped people from outside their community.

Empathy, which should link us to others, also locks us into thinking alike, thinking everyone in our social group thinks alike, because if they didn't think like us, they wouldn't be in our social group.

But boy, if we're all competing for the same cherries, or the same woolly mammoth meat, or the approval of someone powerful, charismatic, or mystical (i.e.,if we want that person to empathize with us), our wiring gets kinked. That distortion pulls us away from being the empathically-wired creature made by God as an image of the divine. And voila, injustice, selfishness, sin, societies at war with one another.

. . . in a handbasket

2010-01-21T20:24:00.002-06:00

On the downside, the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

On the upside, crisis means opportunity. More opportunities to point out that congressional Republicans have nothing constructive to offer whatsoever.

On the downside, health-care reform is dead.

On the upside, insurance reform may live on, and forcing insurance companies to insure everyone without mandating that everyone buys insurance will create such an expensive mess that health-care reform will come back, with a vengeance.

On the downside, the crazies control the political rhetoric in America.

On the upside, powerful corporations will now be able to spend millions to counteract the crazies, because corporations have first amendment free speech rights just like people.

On the downside, free speech does not equal sensible debate, and the crazies are unable to tell the difference between sound policy and a sound byte.

(Why didn't Madison and Hamilton consider mass media markets when they wrote The Federalist Papers?)

On the upside (which sometimes gets confused with the downside), Obama will give his State of the Union address next week. He's got an opportunity to tell off the Republicans/shame the Democrats/inspire the American people/keep hope alive.

On the downside, if all he has to talk about are hard questions and difficult solutions, who will listen?

What is a handbasket anyway?

Thy will

2010-01-06T21:53:00.003-06:00

"Let it be done to me according to your will."

The commenter on the previous post quoted Mary's response to the angel Gabriel's news that she would bear a son. That commenter, Patte, is an actor-friend from 30 years ago. She's the other "old lady" in the picture from Arsenic and Old Lace that I posted in early November. The show may have been thirty years ago, but neither one of us is yet as old as we pretended to be back in 1978.

Back to Mary--I heard those words read at the children's Lessons and Carols service on Christmas Eve by a young woman who knows something about how to read a story. She made Gabriel's voice strong and forceful, Mary's gentle and yielding. She read with confidence, but formed the words as if each phrase was a new discovery. But the most glorious moment in her reading was the smile that lit up her face as she said "Jesus"--"You will call his name Jesus." That smile was not Gabriel's smile. (Do angels smile?) It was her own. You knew that she knew Jesus--yes, him! You saw entire generations of Christians recognize the name of Jesus in this. And you knew that young Mary loved her baby from the moment she heard the angel pronounce his name. You knew that the world changed in that moment--not just for Mary, but for lots of other people alive then, and infinitely more since.

That baby--that creating Word of God made lovely, loving flesh--made it possible for Mary to say "Thy will be done," made it possible for her to trust that will through nine months of waiting and wondering and not being able to explain, through the dark night of labor, through the bearing down and the bringing forth.

It was not the faith she possessed. It was the grace of God that was shown to her-the grace of God shown to me, and shown to my young friend, the reader.

Three hundred words

2010-01-04T08:28:00.003-06:00

Three hundred words a day. Every day.

This is what makes you a writer. Writing.

It's what the books say, what writers say (disciplined ones), what experience shows. It's like exercise. You have to do it repeatedly to get in shape, to get those muscles flexible and strong. And the first minutes out of the gate are often a bit slow.

(Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three . . .

Soliloquoy

2009-12-20T14:28:00.004-06:00

To bake, or not to bake, that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the kitch'n to mix up
The bread and cookies of tradition's Christmas
Or to forego the effort and sea of dishes
And by giving up, gain time? To rest; to nap;
To nap, perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub
For in that sleep of December what dreams
May come: Trees naked, packages unwrapped,
Music unrehearsed and presents unpurchased.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of those
Whose Christmas is perfect, year after year,
When she herself might perfection achieve
With a little more organization.
Thus Christmas does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native warmth of the season
Is sicklied o'er with the vain pursuit of cheer;
And appreciation of Christmas's
Meaning and simplicity turns awry
Because we're just too tired. Soft you now!
I'm taking a nap.

November hymn

2009-11-16T17:20:00.002-06:00

For those who mourn

At the harvest, in the autumn, at the waning of the year
As we come to count our blessings, we confront the ancient fear:
Is there enough? The bushels laid up—will they last until the spring?
Can we truly count on God for enough of everything?

In the winter, in the stillness, in a barren, cold new year
As we wait and watch, we worry if the springtime will appear:
Where is the light, the voice that called us from the dim light of the womb?
Will God come to lead the way through the darkness and the gloom?

When the buds along the tree branch remain brown and tightly furled
When the waters from the rainstorms rise and flood familiar worlds
When the summer's heat overtakes us, when our souls are parched and dry--
Oh, where is the God who answers when his children ask him why?

We may rage and we may sorrow, feel new grief each time we wake.
The friends we love may leave us, we may live with hearts that ache.
Yet Christ is here. He walks beside us, knows our anger and our pain
And his dying and his rising join us all to his reign.

Anxious souls, oh, trust your Maker, through whatever comes your way
Even when the night is darkest, God creates another day.
Things we cannot understand may yet surround us with despair
But we can bear the burdens we give over to God's care.

For the God with power to save us is a God of boundless grace
And his tender love shines on us from his bright and radiant face
Love unchanging, love eternal, love immediate and strong
Love that reaches into human hearts and heals what is wrong.

Copyright 2009 Gwen Gotsch
Please do not reprint without my permission.

2009-11-14T18:41:00.003-06:00

I don't want to write this, and yet I must. My older son's friend and former housemate, a young man just graduated from college, died on Friday night. He took his own life.

If only there were a way to take the night back, to undo those awful moments. It should not be, and yet it is, and these young men who knew him and loved him mourn in shocked disbelief. How could he do it? What was happening inside him that they did not know, or could not know, or could not help? And what must his mother feel? Dear God, be at her side.

Rest eternal grant him, O Lord. May light perpetual shine on him. In your kingdom keep him safe Give him peace. Comfort those who mourn. Help them to carry him in their hearts, warm and sad, in the years to come.

For their deeds follow them

2009-11-01T19:53:00.009-06:00

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

2009-10-12T18:06:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-16T22:17:00.005-05:00

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

2009-08-30T18:04:00.003-05:00

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

2009-08-22T22:38:00.003-05:00

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

2009-08-12T08:30:00.005-05:00

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

2009-08-07T21:37:00.004-05:00

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.

We are such stuff--but not of dreams

2009-07-19T21:58:00.003-05:00

All sorts of corny things I could write about: God, I love theatre. Cool summer evenings. Talk. Friendship. Being authentic, like it or not. New bugs. Breaking the mold. Avocados, eggs, bare feet, dancing, singing, gratitude. Being young, being older, being out there, being quiet.

Self-conscious subjective bloggery. Or a quiet celebration.

Some days seem extra sweet. The air is clear, liquid, lapping, like cool water against bare skin. It smells of herbs, dusty, dry, tangy, and everything truthful, even what is painful, is seasoned with juniper and basil. Gifts given are reflected back, and others' joy becomes my wisdom, their choices, my peace.

My friend Pat and I had a discussion tonight about scattering our husband's ashes, about what we supposed we could make it mean and about the gritty practical reality that makes this a hard task to accomplish with dignity. You wait till just the right time, when you need to remember the person, or forget the person, move on or look back. In the week after scattering Lon's ashes, I was haunted by his presence, what he would have thought, what he would have said, though he had not thought or said those things for years. How could a bag of grit, emptied under a tree, bring him back into my imagination that way? How could it not?

Even things without substance are something.

Keeping silence

2009-06-27T17:01:00.004-05:00

My mind is racing with news from friends and church family. Bad news. Tough news. Difficult problems. How do we get from birth to death without giving up?

There is no answering sentence, no bible verse, no thought taking shape in my mind. Just silence.

At first, it is uncomfortable silence. I do not like to be with people who are in such misery, such tangles. I want to feel successful, happy, cared for. I want to think that others are in control of their lives, and that I am in control of mine.

The silence does not last. I don't stay quiet long there. I want to be able to help, to make phone calls, complain, order people around and eventually send them down a dry and level path that was there all along. There is an edge to my voice. I am imperious in my wisdom. Imperious and completely ineffective.

"The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!" (Habakkuk 2.20)

Silence. Where God lives.

Silence. Where God receives the saints whose mortal life has come to an end.

Silence. Where God listens to the prayers of those who feel helpless.

Silence. Where the Creator suffers with the beloved creatures.

When death or madness or majestic upheavals rise in front of us, each moment becomes more clear, more poignant, more transcendent. Ideas have substance. Random thoughts no longer skitter about the surface of the mind. All seems to fit together. Perhaps a brain researcher could point to an area in the brains that is active, that is itself creating this sense of the sacred. Perhaps perception is heightened to allow the mind to regain a sense of control.

Or perhaps God is present. That silence is the one I must seek, before I venture forth to serve.

Bear witness

2009-06-17T07:49:00.002-05:00

Revolt and protest in Iran, and the world follows the news via Twitter and Google and other networking sites on the Internet. How cool is that?

I don't Twitter or tweet or even read email on my phone. Yet. The idea of sending moment-by-moment messages to friends about where I'm going and what I'm doing doesn't appeal to me--much. Being able to go and not tell someone where is more appealing.

Of course, I don't think any of my friends would actually want to follow me around in my life in suburbia. Nor do I want to follow them. On the other hand, it would have been nice yesterday to be able to tweet out for support as I was slowly overwhelmed by Michael's, the chain store for crafters, where a million or more objects wait for someone to purchase them and then wire, glue or knot them together.

Nor should I be allowed to tweet from meetings, like a senator from the Senate floor. Griping about proceedings and people would be way too much fun. When I pray the Lord's Prayer, I ask not to be led into temptation. I believe it behooves me to not lead myself there.

But following a mass movement of people protesting a stolen election? Yesterday I followed some of the links in a New York Times article on social networking and the events in Iran. It was amazing. Ordinary people were passing on information about protests and calling for people to unite. There were pictures on Flickr of massive crowds in the streets. Stuff happens.

Imagine if we could have read messages from East Germany as communism tumbled. Imagine a blog post from an "Indian" just returned from dumping chests of tea in Boston Harbor. Imagine the almost infinite source material available to historians in the future who want to write about mass movements and popular culture.

The world can change in good ways and bad. Pray for peoples and governments. Pray that we use technology to move us forward into the kingdom of God.

2009-06-14T17:49:00.003-05:00

Warm and clear at last, after a June week of mostly rain. Beer after rehearsal in the late afternoon sun. What follows? Either delicious relaxation or the frustration of trying to make my mind--swimming, yes, on just one beer--focus on something either serious or seriously amusing.

Things grow with such energy in June. The suburban landscape is intensely green today, lush with the promise of a good summer. "Sent forth by God's blessing" we sang this morning in church, and the world into which we were sent teemed with blessings of blue sky, temperate air, enveloping summer. Lots of tree imagery in the lectionary today and in the sermon and hymns--the kingdom of God as tall cedars or spreading shrubbery. I could almost see the over-large volunteer trees in my back yard as evidence of a new world coming to life. There are times when I regard these six-foot-tall, six-foot-wide trees as evidence of the pernicious abundance of evil and chaos on this earth. But who needs the words or the visual images they invoke when God's rain and breath have called all of summer's lushness to life outside in lawns, gardens, and parks?

The best revenge

2009-05-29T20:53:00.008-05:00

I thought the browser was about to freeze on my way to the "New Post" page and I would then have a reason to walk away from the computer and the empty space on the screen. But the browser pulled through and here I am, mind dancing, contacts blurry, left ear ringing, and no serious knitting anywhere in the house to call me away from playing with my blog.

I'm done clearing my throat.

The title "Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman" keeps rolling through my mind. I think it's a good title, but I'm not sure what it's a title for. I'm not sure what the revenge might be. There is much about life as a fifty-something woman to be avenged, starting with that feeling of irrelevancy that sets in when young, pretty, unwrinkled girls of twenty or even thirty seem to be everywhere, seem to be having all the fun, seem to be the ones who flirt and flit and laugh and matter. Also to be avenged: the frustrations of trying to see things both near and far without taking out contacts and putting on glasses (or putting away glasses and putting in contacts). There's my newly crowned molar, crowding all the other old and crowned molars in my mouth. There are the times when I know my outside doesn't match my inside, when I feel absolutely childish inside while looking ever more unyielding and stern, like the Grandma Gotsch of my childhood.

What form would the revenge of the middle-aged woman take? I try to invent answers, wild and creative, meaningful and bold enough to get some attention. Should I craft a detective novel in which the middle-aged female detective (an unforgettable character!) or the crazy middle-aged female perpetrator (powerful in her own menopausal way) ultimately blasts someone away with a gun? I would have to do a lot of research just to figure out what kind of gun. Not exactly writing about things I know.

Perhaps I could create performance art in which the bitter and articulate middle-aged female monologuist avenges a her lost girlhood by slicing up a sofa with a broadsword. She then plays a Chopin etude (one of the posthumous ones) as the lights fade to red, a flash of green, and then black.

"I really haven't got any ideas," she said, sighing a little sigh and sinking back into her chair. (This is me describing me, not me describing a middle-aged female character in a story, who may or may not resemble me.) Exciting ideas, I tell you go back where you came from, that foreign country where creative artists, more courageous, more widely experienced than I, beat back despair with frantic disconnected activity.

Me, the aging suburban mom--all I can genuinely come up with is "Living well is the best revenge." Falling back on a cliche, which has some truth in it. Am I living well?

The wine in the fridge is only so-so (though the beer's pretty good). I have not been a paragon of wisdom or virtue this week. I've fumbled for answers to tough questions and been sarcastic in reply to dumb ones. This last week, the reality-based definition of "living well" would have to include ignoring the dishes piling up on the kitchen counter for several days, so that I can read the NY Times online in the morning and flop down on the couch and stare at whatever's on television from 9:45 to 10:45 at night. Other reality-based definitions: talking back to Bruckner and then Van Morrison on my iPod in my office (which no one else can hear anyway--I think); kicking off Saturday with a long breakfast with a friend, rather than the necessary loads of laundry and (ugh) gardening; spending an hour tomorrow afternoon with Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer, author of Washington's Crossing. (At this point, I'd read anything he's written because he writes very, very well. And he's an optimist. He's living well.)

Doing what I want to do from one moment to the next, without being constantly responsible, constantly looking ahead. I kind of like that version of living well. Sometimes it works.

Whoops. I criticized a teenage child of mine earlier this evening for pretty much that same approach to life. Someone's avenged.

Ascension

2009-05-20T22:24:00.004-05:00

Why do hymns for Ascension Day have so many verses? So many long verses?

I went to an Ascension service today (yes, only 39 days after Easter) and we sang "Alleluia! Sing to Jesus," five stanzas sung to Hyfrydol (a tune I used to groan about but have come to terms with over the last twenty-five years). We sang four stanzas of "Beautiful Savior" at communion (which means conscientious singers get two cracks at trying to flip both r's in the word "purer"). We sang all seven stanzas of "A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing" as a sending song, four of "Up Through Endless Ranks of Angels," and some other hymn I've forgotten.

This was a daytime service for the senior citizens in our congregation. I was there to sing the Psalm, but the Psalm setting was nothing compared to the endurance required for all the hymn-singing. I came away with a great deal of respect for the singing of Lutheran senior citizens. But I guess, if you're in church, you might as well take as much time as it takes. And it takes a lot of time to tell the Ascension story in "A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing." Two full stanzas are devoted to what the angels said to the disciples. It takes three more to get us all in heaven with Jesus.

Jaroslav Vajda's text for "Up Through Endless Ranks of Angels" covers the Ascension from the human point perspective: "Death destroying, life-restoring, Proven equal to our need, Now for us before the Father As our brother intercede." It ends with human yearning, reaching for God: "Oh to breathe the Spirit's grace! . . . Oh to feel the Son's embrace!"

Then there's "Alleluia! Sing to Jesus," which loads up on the Christ triumphant imagery. Many of those images come in short, four-syllable phrases to match the dignified 3/4, breathe-every-other-measure movement of the tune. Only the second stanza refers directly to the bible story. The rest describes the Ascension as the opening scene in the coming of Christ's kingdom on earth, which is what makes the hymn text challening.

I think it's easier for our small-ish minds to think about the Ascension as Jesus going up to heaven, leaving us here on earth, with the promise to send the Spirit. Everybody ends up in the right room in this version, and God's Spirit is housed inside us. But "Alleluia! Sing to Jesus" moves back and forth between heaven and earth: "bread of heaven, here on earth our food, our stay." Jesus "born of Mary" has earth for a footstool and heaven for a throne. It's not a song for a single Christian. It is a community that sings "He is near us" and a community that together remembers the promise "'I am with you evermore.'"

At the final stanza the hymn writer invokes "peaceful Zion," where Jesus rules over all of those redeemed out of every nation. A big vision, God's kingdom coming into being. Hard to keep it in focus. I tried to as I prayed the Lord's Prayer. I've noticed that when praying this prayer in church, my praying mind often doesn't sync with the words coming from my mouth until "Give us this day our daily bread," as if my physical needs were the heart of everything. Really this petition is kind of a footnote, an add-on to the glories recalled and looked forward to in the prayer's opening petitions: Holy is God's name and God's kingdom is coming as God's will is done on earth. That's something to wrestle with on Ascension Day.

Before I go off to bed, I will look for signs of the kingdom seen today, on the 39th day after Easter, 2009: friendships treasured and renewed; high school kids, abled and disabled, sharing a barbecue picnic and games of kickball on a warm, breezy May afternoon; a fifth and sixth grade 4 x 200 relay team in which the last two runners poured on the speed to win a victory shared by all.

Sing Paradise, Lead Home

2009-05-18T08:35:00.003-05:00

It's graduation season and the end of the school year. In the last four days I've been to a high school honors convocation, a university department's graduation reception, a baccalaureate service, and a full-blown university graduation ceremony.

I've listened to a lot of speeches.

Yesterday's commencement address at Valparaiso University in Indiana came from Walter Wangerin, Jr., a fiction and memoir writer of reputation who is on the faculty there. He began his speech with a proverb--I think he said it was Islamic in origin: "Paradise lies at the feet of your mother." He wandered through several tales, personal and Islamic, and ended with a story of an old classmate taking care of his elderly, demented mother, singing with her while changing her diaper.

I didn't get the "paradise at the feet" connection until several hours later. Wangerin is (IMHO) more an emotionally-indulgent storyteller than a writer. He is good at evoking emotion with visceral details, and for him, perhaps all this feeling exploding in his brain is sensation enough to declare the world meaningful. Doesn't work for me. I want an emotional lift from a connection, from the "aha" experience when I discover that God is not just in the details themselves, but in how the details hook up. Coherence counts, despite the prevailing incoherence of much of what happens in our lives.

The university president's homily at the Valpo baccalaureate service was coherent. He took the Psalm for the day, "Sing a new song," and hooked it up to John 15, "By this you shall know that you are my disciples, that you love one another." He sent the graduates out to sing new songs in service. A good "take-with."

Last Thursday's high school honors convocation ended with an intimate little speech from the high school superintendent, Attila Wenninger. He thanked the parents for making the kind of home for their students that made their achievement possible. In doing so--without saying it, he reminded these kids and their families of how privileged they are and of how others do not have this most wonderful of blessings. At the end of his speech, he asked students to choose a person in one of their classes, someone they didn't know very well, and help that person to achieve next year and become a leader. A simple idea, but one well-tuned to the hearts and minds of teenagers.

In the middle of the speech, he talked of his own three children, now adults, and their different abilities and different paths to success. From all of this, one could see why the high school board hired this guy--a white, blue-eyed older male--over candidates who would have been more pleasing to the folks pressing for diversity in the school administration. He didn't just talk diversity. He understood it in his heart and in his life.

Next to me at the high school honors convocation was my daughter Eliza, an eighteen-year-old young woman with Down syndrome, who was not too happy to be dragged to school a half-hour early because of her brother. It's unlikely that she'll ever be honored for achievement outside of Special Olympics or "special" something else. But she sat next to me and went through all the names in the program, picking out the kids she knew. Pretty impressive--did I know, back when I was told she had Down syndrome, that she would ever be able to do that? Or that I would think those other kids were privileged to know her?

One of the superintendant's kids became a special ed teacher, like my own graduating college senior. Kris was not among the graduates wearing honors cords or graduating cum laude, but he graduated! In four years, from a school where statistically he was in the bottom quartile when he was accepted. He got through. He did well in his education classes. Student teaching was fun for him, and he will be a good teacher. At the department's reception for graduating seniors, he joked around with professors who seemed genuinely proud and happy to know him.

Wangerin ended his commencement speech by telling the graduates that when they got their degrees they should think, this is for my parents. I'm not sure what he meant exactly--the parents sitting in the bleachers watching for their child's moment to cross the stage and shake the hand of the university president, or the parents who would someday need these young graduates to ease them through the indignities of old age. My children have already done that for one parent. My pride in them is shaped by the song they sang in those hard years and ever since.

I listened to parents yesterday boasting of their children's achievements and ambitions for graduate school, for more honors in the future. It seemed hollow. I am proud of who my kids are, right now.

Early

2009-05-03T08:21:00.003-05:00

I raised the storm and let down the screen at the window by the lilac bush, and now the dog, an old dog waking up in the soft chair she has claimed for her own, turns her head to the spring air and, I swear, smiles at me.

A still morning in May. Is there anything that compares to this? The leaves on the maples are tender and green, barely open. The grape vine in my back yard erupts with leaves of pink, folded around the tiniest imaginable green clusters of fruit. The dandelions, more aggressive in the fight to survive than I am in the fight to get rid of them, are blazing yellow, standing out like school buses in expressway traffic. Above all, a pale blue, cool sky where God looks down and sees the colors brighten in the world he made and cares for, the world moving toward redemption.

A May day. It holds such promises.

For the young, for those who will be confirmed in the faith later this morning at church, the promise of adventure and security, of lives that will make sense, though perhaps they will not--there are harder lessons yet to learn.

For those who mourn, the promise of resurrection. Bodies sowed in the damp May earth will surely rise again in the day of the Lord, and be changed, unfurled, fruitful in the living ether of the eternal reign of the Savior.

For those with work to do today and tomorrow, in the abundant rain and in the certain drought of the summer ahead, this morning brings rest and peace. Birds chatter and call far away in the tops of the trees, soft air touching skin quiets the mind, calms the blood.

This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.

Late

2009-04-28T23:25:00.002-05:00

I will persist in blogging, though the hour is late and I am tired from the effort of being pleasant and thoughtful and entertaining all day. The fluorescent light overhead is twitching, or perhaps it's me that's twitching.

Lately, my days begin with a prayer, a prayer that is thought, not spoken, while lying face down in bed, head under the pillow at 6:25 a.m. "Send me a good day, God. Send me a good day."

What makes it a good day? When I feel reasonably good about the work I've done, reasonably hopeful that I can go on doing it, reasonably satisfied that I am a force for good in the world. A good day is one where I have avoided slipping sideways or falling face forward into a mucky depression, a mudhole with sides that collapse around me, a hole that cannot be gotten out of without a good night's sleep and some detachment from the things that trouble me.

"This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it." Words from the appointed Psalm for Easter, Psalm 118. Words that ring true on that festival day, but that also apply to every day, since God is the maker of our days, days we rise in the morning to celebrate, days when it's hard to get out of bed.

When I pray for a good day, I find it usually arrives promptly. I know early in the day that I will keep my balance, keep my good cheer, and go to bed tired but not defeated. Part of this better mood is attributable to coffee, God's gift of French roast. But it is something else, too, some aligning of my own purpose with the Almighty's, and God reminding me, in that good day, that divine purpose is accomplished through me.

Spring

2009-04-27T22:40:00.002-05:00

There's a steady rain going on outside, and a teenager sitting on the back steps in the rain, thinking. The sound of the rain is especially loud because the gutter is clogged and the water is spilling over the side, pouring on the pavement below. The water is also quietly seeping into the corner of the basement even farther below.

It's such a tall ladder you have to use to clean the glop and the leaves out of the gutter. It's heavy and awkward and not at all fun to climb.

Last week it was cold rain, rain that about froze my early red dwarf tulips, one of the few plants that thrive from the days long ago when I gardened with enthusiasm. Over the weekend the warm weather, the wind, and (I suspect) some impulsive children finished the tulips off before they ever had a chance to show their perky redness in an appropriate spring setting.

Kind of like that teenage boy on the steps, who does not seem to travel in a congenial environment. People let him down. (His mother, for one, failed to follow through on a promise to have supper ready after volleyball practice.) Teachers fail to say what they want clearly and cogently. Girlfriends get angry and want what he can't fix. He can't will everything back into place. He can't seem to find a place in the sunshine, just more homework, more things that are not quite right.

How, where, do we all fit amid the glop and decay and water spilling everywhere? We go on thinking, trying, in the warm rain, the cold rain. Trusting and trying, hoping that the sun will shine more brightly tomorrow.

The Cardinal

2009-04-15T10:55:00.004-05:00

As I pulled up to the house this morning and parked the car at the curb, I saw the male cardinal. He was hopping through the brown leaves on the ground by the forsythia bush, looking for things to eat. I had been thinking about the need to clean up the accumulated litter in these bushes, the food wrappers, the faded flyers about gutter-cleaning and window-washing. This stuff collects here over the winter. It's wet, disgusting and muddy. How enchanting then to have my attention drawn away from the endless cares of home ownership to the sheer glory of being red.

My Great-Aunt Clara taught me respect for the cardinal. She watched for him from her kitchen window, left black and white striped sunflower seeds in a neat pile on the rails of her back porch for his enjoyment. He--the cardinal--would come to feast and would leave a mess behind, hulls scattered on the grey-painted boards of the porch floor. She would sweep it all up in triumph. The cardinal had been there! Females ate there, too. The love sunflower seeds was not strictly a male attribute, and she did not begrudge them the food (squirrels, however . . . .) But seeing the male--that was an event!

What is it like to be so very red, so scarlet, so different from the early spring groundscape, so different from the summer grass? This cardinal's partner was hunting for food, too, sitting in the forsythia bush, flirting even. But I did not see her until she moved and pointed her brownish orange beak in my direction. When I finally got out of the car and walked to the gate, my eyes followed the male, who leaped first into the bush, then to red roof over the dining room bay window, and finally flew upward into the maple tree. It would be hard to search for and find a brown nest and a brown mother with that bright red distraction drawing your eye elsewhere. Is this why the bird is so red, regal and flashy? To distract predators from the vulnerability of tiny, tasty eggs, of tender young birds?

Easter

2009-04-12T17:36:00.003-05:00

I'm an Easter girl. And at last Easter is here.

I have no patience for Lent, very little for Holy Week. Easter is where it's at. After spending the last six weeks feeling like the whole worshiping church was having a Lent party to which I had not been invited, at which I was a total, gawky wallflower, I am rejoicing this afternoon, glad to have celebrated Easter at last.

Easter girl, Easter woman. What does this mean?

From Ash Wednesday onwards we are urged to repent, to turn from our sinful ways. But we turn in circles and all we see are those sinful ways. We get bogged down, sick with guilt and helpless. We try to reform, we give things up for Lent, or take on new spiritual disciplines, opportunities to fall short once again.

I don't need Lent to get me to beat up on myself. I am a middle-aged woman, a widow, a mother of teenagers who I try to influence but don't always understand. I feel responsible for all of it, not good enough for any of it. From the laundry table to the making of song, prose and poetry, I feel hapless, even hopeless. I won't deny my own culpability, but I am my own victim.

Easter good news came for me on Good Friday, reading Ross Douthat's blog in The Atlantic. He quoted Rene Girard, a French literature scholar, reviewing yet something else. Here's a key sentence: "Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers." A radical new thought from the Hebrew-Christian tradition.

I am guilty of many things, but I am also a forgiven child of God. Forgiven by virtue of Jesus's innocent suffering and death, and shown a new way of living in Christ's sacrifice and resurrection. Easter says that the only reason for spending energy figuring out what is and is not my fault is so that I can live freely and move forward into the future as a little Christ--a Christ who is risen indeed. The real turn-about as we move from Lent to Easter is God's work, not ours--God's new kingdom revealed on the cross and at the empty tomb and blessedly, in our own lives.

Alleluia.

Detached

2009-03-28T17:06:00.005-05:00

The question this morning, at a workshop for worship leaders, was, how do you worship when as a lector or other worship leader you have to pay attention to the details of the service--being on the right page, speaking into the microphone, anticipating what comes next.

The workshop speaker who answered this question elaborated on the problem, and as both a pastor and a musician, he could cite lots of distractions for worship leaders. But I did not think his answer addressed the central question. I raised my hand to add my own two cents, which was something about how being detached from the worship experience in order to take care of logistics is the gift you bring to the assembly. You give up some part of your own immersion in worship for the sake of others.

Maybe that's so obvious that the world didn't need to hear me say it. But maybe not.

Most of us are hungry for direct experiences of God. We want to be moved in worship. The reading of scripture we hope will call up visions of Jesus speaking or the prophets. Music should touch our hearts or inspire our spirits. Preaching should find us, wherever we are in our lives. And we should worship God as we should love God--with our whole heart, our mind and our strength. These actions of ours, we believe, make it possible for our souls to be fed.

And yet, I thought, an actor onstage, caught up in the emotions of the play, must still remain conscious of his effect on the audience, must still find the place to stand where his face will be in the light, must remember to say his lines loudly and slowly enough to be understood. A musician brings all of her technique and training to bear on the notes she sings or plays. Music itself, for all its appeal to the emotions, is a highly structured, complicated art with rules that must be followed carefully or broken with purpose. The art of poetry (poetry in the Aristotelian sense of making something that is a representation) transforms the raw material of life into something more ordered and thus more meaningful. We in worship seek to transform the raw material of our own actions into something that praises, honors and testifies to the non-material presence of God among us.

It takes some detachment to do this, at least in Lutheran liturgical, non-spontaneous worship. The processional cross, the candles, the bible, the ministers come down the aisle at a measured pace that is the same on the Sundays of Lent as on Easter morning. Music may make our heart skip or weep, but both toe-tapping and heart-rending melodies must hold to an established tempo. Preaching requires study and preparation, and careful calculation not just about what there is to say but about how to say it so that it can be heard, understood, carried home.

Our language tries to say what God is, directly and also with image and metaphor, yet we know it falls short, know that religious language can create barriers to understanding God, even as it tries to make God known. We are always, even in the most profound moments, more than a few steps detached from God. Our worship, even as we plan, practice and seek to perfect it, will always fall short. We watch ourselves. We monitor our absorption in the process, and then our thoughts wander off

How lucky for us, then, that God's presence in our worship doesn't depend on us.

Beauty inside, outside, and all around

2009-03-08T21:06:00.003-05:00

My daughter just finished two weekends of performances as one of the townspeople in her high school's production of Beauty and the Beast. The show was a rousing success onstage and played to big audiences.

It was also a rousing success for Eliza. She is a teenager with Down syndrome. This is her fourth high school musical, so she is a veteran of the rehearsal room, the make-up table, the dressing room, and the stage. She and the other special-needs kids in the show had peer buddies, who helped them participate in the show so much more than the teaching assistants assigned to supervise them in the winter musical last year.

Eliza's peer buddy, Audrey, is an animated young woman onstage, and she kept Eliza focused and made her look great, even when she was right in the middle of the action. Eliza did so much more than she has ever done in a show before, and she truly belonged to the Beauty and the Beast community. Which is as it should be for a show whose message is something about it being okay to be different and about finding beauty and tenderness in unexpected places.

I know there is beauty in my daughter. In Beauty and the Beast, lots and lots of other people got to see it too. Brava!

There came a wind like a bugle

2009-02-27T21:07:00.005-06:00

There came a wind like a bugle . . .

It's a line from an Emily Dickenson poem, known to me from a song setting by Aaron Copland. Here's the whole poem:

There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

In Copland's setting all the words fly by, on the wind, on sixteenth notes in the piano, till the song slows at the final three lines.

It seems like a good poem for today--though there was no heat today--instead a rather chilly day in February. It was an uneasy day, a day when things seem to be turning into something else: a new, really new, budget in Washington, a disintegrating economy, torrential rains yesterday and cold winds today, a Friday night when I'm home alone while two teenagers are off turning into more grown-up people--until they come home again.

I am stiff from sitting in an office chair too much this week, stiff from not sleeping well, stiff from neglect. Stiff and cold, because the windows that surround my desk are old and leaky, and I never remember to turn the space heater on until I'm frozen to the bone.

Dickenson's poem is about change, I think, and anxious, ominous liminal fear. Can I bar the door against the wind? Can I keep it from touching me? I try, but I am stiff and sore and sorrowing from the effort.

It is hard to watch things change, to see dreams forsake the people who dreamed them, to see hope focus on less and less, as life slides into the sweet bitterness of death. It is other people's grief I am writing of here, not my own, grief I see around them, grief that is too private to mention.

Yet I will be someone who "abide(s) the world," for a while anyway, as much comes and goes.

Ash Wednesday Promise

2009-02-25T22:18:00.003-06:00

What's the difference between Groundhog's Day and Ash Wednesday?

On Groundhog's day we may or (may not) find out that we're due for six more weeks of winter. Ash Wednesday begins the countdown to Easter. In six more weeks it will be spring.

Is this a distinction like that between a glass half empty and a glass half full? It's more than a difference in outlook. Groundhog Day (not in the movie sense) is a grope for hope. Just maybe, maybe spring will come early and we'll find our way out of winter sooner than expected. Easter following Lent is a promise that's already been kept. Christ rose, and the earth and the crocuses and we all shall rise too.

Though not without dying first. It is Ash Wednesday after all.

2009-02-21T22:10:00.004-06:00

Oh, my poor blog. It's been a long time.

I began this blog on Transfiguration Sunday three years ago. That minor festival of the church year comes around again tomorrow. Time to catch up, or "repent and turn" as in Lent, and write some more.

The subject of doubt came up recently in a conversation with someone. I'm pretty sure that doubt is mostly a good thing. Some people have the gift of absolute, clear shining faith all the time. They're blessed. Others drag doubt in great measure through their lives, or parts of their lives, and this is a blessing, too. How could faith grow or change or mature or even look at its own image without doubt to prod it along?

Did all these things written about in the bible happen as described? Did God actually walk the earth during an otherwise insignificant era in Palestine? What does "redeem us from our sins" really mean? And what about that voice from the cloud on the mountain, and Moses and Elijah, and Jesus glowing like the sun? If someone claimed these things happened nowadays, and started a religion about them, I would run quickly in another direction.

And yet . . .

God's grace, God's presence show up regularly in my world, hovering at the edges of my darkest hours, surprising me in the middle of the mundane, knocking me out of the cynic's pose I wear everyday, most days.

From tomorrow's Psalm: "Out of Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth in glory."

The Birthday Tree

2008-11-01T09:18:00.008-05:00

It's Saturday morning, the first day of November, All Saints' Day.

The maple tree in front of my house is bright red. Not a rusty fall sort of red, but scarlet--a red that fills the bay window and turns the air in the living room pink. Parents of trick or treaters stopped to admire the color yesterday. The tree and the blue sky curving above it smiled benignly on the witches, superheroes, and firemen climbing my front stairs for Tootsie Rolls and Mary Janes.

In our family that tree is called The Birthday Tree, specifically, Kris's Birthday Tree. Kris, the first baby in our family, was born on a grey and rainy All Saints' Saturday twenty-two years ago. He was born at home, with a midwife, in a house that we had purchased and moved into just a month earlier. On the day of his birth, the house sheltered us, a cocoon around this new mother, new father, vulnerable infant. The next day dawned brilliant, clear and cold, and we saw for the first time the splendor of this maple tree, displayed, it seemed, just for us, a celebration of our little Kristoffer.

The tree's boughs are close enough to the ground to inspire climbing. During the summer, a couple of neighbor kids dragged a box found in an alley somewhere to the parkway in front of our house and used it to get themselves up to those first branches, so they could sit there, superior, surveying the stop sign, the intersection, the sidewalks. When our kids were small, Lon would lift them onto that low bough and stand beneath, ready to catch them if they fell, ready to help them down when they got bored.

Ten years ago, when construction trucks tore up our street, laid new sewers, and then repaved it, the tree took a bad hit. Carelessly, when no one seemed to be looking, some random piece of equipment chunked away an eighteen-inch circle on the street side of the tree trunk. I called the town forestry department. I don't know if they came out with emergency medicine for the wound. The leaves seemed thinner the next couple of summers, but the tree came back. The scar is ugly. The bark that thickened around the exposed vascular tissue of the tree is crude and gnarly. But the tree's canopy is full, deep green in the summer and celebration red on the last days of October and the first days of November.

The birthday boy called earlier this morning--earlier than I expected to hear from him today. Halloween on a Friday night means great parties for twenty-somethings. But he had awakened to an emergency: his computer wouldn't turn on. With two weeks to go on the one-year warranty, this is a good time to have this problem. I went to the internet to find customer support and turned Kris over to his sister for a happy birthday conversation. By the time I had information, Kris had figured otu what was wrong. The laptop's battery needed charging. Connected to a power source, it was fine--ready to play music so that its owner could go back to sleep.

A boy still needs his mother, I guess. We all need each other. The maple's leaves nourish the tree, and even after the leaves are shed, the tree will live on through the winter and bud again in the spring. Our lives nourish each other's and make each other's lives possible. Riches and complexity of thought and feeling come from those who have gone before and from lives all around us.

I read two nourishing stories in this morning's New York Times. After weeks and weeks of reading mostly election news--some blatantly partisan, some flatly balanced and blind to objective truth, the vivid human emotion in these stories was a relief. One was about medics and an Army doctor fighting to keep a bleeding man alive after a shrapnel attack on their post in the wilds of Afghanistan. The other told about opera-going Supreme Court justices, liberal and conservative, awed at meeting Leontyne Price at a National Endowment for the Arts luncheon in her honor. Very different settings. Life, death and violence in the first, the recollection of artistry subtly portraying these things in the other.

Dare I quote Studs Terkel who died yesterday? Or my sainted husband who loved to satirize the checkered-shirt Chicago icon: "Oh, the humanity . . . the humanity!"

Saints, a procession through the ages, of people sanctified and made holy, growing up and growing old, bleeding and dying for each other, giving life to new generations on God's good and fragrant earth.

Sending Song

2008-10-26T17:59:00.004-05:00

The congregation stood for the final hymn. There was a long, lush, legato orchestral introduction using motives from the hymn tune, followed by the tune, then the motives again. I stood in the chancel with the choir, looking out at the congregation. People's bodies moved slightly with the music. They looked up from their programs, glanced around, anticipating their cue. Their faces said, we're going to sing soon, we're going to sing this beautiful tune.

It was a vesper service on Reformation Day, and the church was packed with Lutherans. But we'd already sung the big German Lutheran hymns for the day. In the morning we had sung "Salvation Unto Us Has Come," theological statements set to a Renaissance dance tune. In this vesper service we'd sung "Lord Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word" with ritornellos from Dietrich Buxtehude, and we had Luther by way of Bach in the cantata "Ein feste burg."

We arrived at the final hymn, "The Church of Christ in Every Age." The tune is Wareham, in long meter, from eighteenth-century Englishman William Knapp. The text is from Fred Pratt Green, twentieth-century Englishman, copyright 1971.

The Church of Christ in ev'ry age/Beset by change, but Spirit led,
Must claim and test its heritage/And keep on rising from the dead.

It definitely seemed suitable for Reformation. Wareham is a sublimely singable tune. One easy skip, everything else in stepwise movement. This afternoon's congregation of enthusiastic Lutheran chorale singers felt at home here, moving smoothly from one pitch to the next, downward, turning around and rising again. The movement goes with the text, a church always testing and searching, prodded and led by the Spirit. Yes, we can be a part of that church.

But in stanza two, the challenge appeared:

Across the world, across the street/The victims of injustice cry
For shelter and for bread to eat/And never live before they die.

Whoa. This is not a Bob Dylan protest song. There were no scratchy voices and guitars to go with these lyrics. We were still in long meter, still singing Knapp's Wareham, though inverted and given to the choir by Paul Weber, the composer of this setting. But even upside down, it's a firm, smooth and singable tune. What kind of subterfuge brought these elements together?

Lyrics more typical of a hymn appeared in the third stanza:

Then let the servant Church arise/A caring Church that longs to be
A partner in Christ's sacrifice/And clothed in Christ's humanity.

The text appeals to our longing to be like Christ. We long to be like him because he was human and bled and died for us. It is the old Christian story, and that traditional melody, with its slurs of longing, feels more at home here. A fourth stanza is about Christ healing us and showing us how to "feed the starving multitude."

At this point the setting of the hymn moved into a long 30-bar interlude, strings and trumpets all preparing the congregation to make this remarkable statement of faith:

We have no mission but to serve/In full obedience to our Lord;
To care for all, without reserve/And spread his liberating Word.

What does this mean? (An appropriate question for Reformation Day.) Those first two lines do not equivocate. God has commanded us to serve one another. That is why we were saved-not to make music, not to preach, not to hang out with out people just like us who make us feel good. Was anyone in this church full of committed singing Christians caught by surprise? Did anyone rush out and sign up to work at a soup kitchen? If we have no mission but to serve, there must also be tasks and temptations that distract us, that are unrelated to "full obedience to our Lord," stuff we just should not do. Did we somehow end a Reformation Service with Law rather than Gospel, with a command to get our priorities in order?

Or are we too easily shamed? Too quick to think we can never do enough, and therefore too quick to give up entirely?

Fred Pratt Green used up four syllables in the last line of the hymn with the word "liberating." Fitting that big and awkward a word into a meter of simple pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables is not an easy task, and this word is very obvious at the end of the hymn. He's making a point, and it's one that goes beyond the liberation of oppressed peoples. God's command to serve others is liberating for the servant as well as the served, and Christ sets us all free to praise God--in acts of love toward one another and in singing praise.

Weber's setting of "The Church of Christ in Every Age" winds up with the doxology. May praise in music inspire praise in every dimension of our life as Christians!

Go in peace. Serve the Lord.

Take that into Monday morning.

Rest

2008-09-28T18:35:00.006-05:00

Now rest beneath night's shadow the woodland, field and meadow.
The world in slumber lies.
But you, my heart, awaking, and prayer and music making
Let praise to your Creator rise.

The text is from Paul Gerhardt, prolific Lutheran hymn-writer of the 17th century. It is (obviously) a hymn for the evening. You could also call it, perhaps, a hymn for night owls, for people who cannot sleep. Though nature and the world of humans is fading into rest and quiet, the singer stays awake--not to toss and turn, but to pray and sing.

Lord Jesus, since you love me, now spread your wings above me
And shield me from alarm.
Though evil would assail me, your mercy will not fail me;
I rest in your protecting arm.

This hymn has many memories attached to it for me. This second stanza I learned as a bedtime prayer when I was a child. My father taught it to me, as his mother, I believe, taught it to him. Back any further in the generations and my ancestors would have prayed and taught these words in Gerhardt's original German. By the time I sang them to my own children, I was singing them in the slightly altered English translation of the Lutheran Book of Worship, published in 1978. The rhymes are the same, but the antiquated phrase "Lord Jesus, who dost love me" becomes the more direct "since you love me." I like the change.

My loved ones, rest securely, for God this night will surely
From peril guard your heads.
Sweet slumbers may he send you and bid his hosts attend you
And through the night watch o'er your beds.

Because this was a song heard often in our house, I asked that it be sung at my husband's funeral two years ago. It had been sung at my dad's funeral twenty-two years earlier. I sang it, by myself, as I had sung it to the kids at night, when my mother-in-law, my younger son, and our pastor went to see Lon's body and to pray there shortly after his death. It's appropriate, I think, to use sleep as a metaphor for death, since we will all wake again in some way unimaginable to us now, when God's kingdom comes at last.

As I sang that stanza at the close of the Bach Cantata vesper service this afternoon, I remembered that morning--the coldness of Lon's body, our wonder at his death. My eyes filled with tears--at the choir's rehearsal before the service and during the actual performance. The tears were a moment of indulgence, of stopping to acknowledge grief that has faded, that rests in shadows of the past. I didn't stay long in that place. There were some unfamiliar fancy notes on the last phrase of the stanza that needed my full musical attention. And the whole hymn was sung in a lovely, lush new setting for orchestra and choir by Paul Bouman, who recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday.

Even as I let go of the sadness, I thought of my children, who I had prayed for and reassured with this hymn. Back in the days when I sang my children to sleep, we all crowded together under the covers for books and songs at bedtime. First there was only my oldest, Kristoffer, and me. Seven or eight years later, Kris went to bed in an upper bunk, still within reach of my voice, and his two preschool-aged siblings, Eliza and Kurt, cuddled up on either side of me on the double-bed-sized mattress below. Soimetimes Lon listened from the the hallway.

This afternoon I thought, who will sing this blessing about me? As a mother, I sang even the second stanza ("Lord Jesus, since you love me") for my children, not really for me. It was their faith, their peaceful sleep that I prayed for. After they had fallen asleep, I crawled out of the bed and went off to fight my own late-night battles with the world, ducking out from under those divine wings spread above me.

This afternoon I realized that it's time to put the memories away and start singing this hymn for me. The music this afternoon helped with that. Paul's setting of this beautiful five-hundred-year-old tune has those heavenly wings beating in eighth notes in the orchestra accompaniment and also in the unaccompanied four-part choral setting of stanza two. Singers can relax and sing easily with the support of that rhythm, carried by the reassurance of God's unfailing mercy.

Love on a lake

2008-08-16T13:11:00.004-05:00

They don’t call ‘em Great Lakes for nothing.

A little less than twenty-four hours ago I got up out of my chair, got in the car, and with the kids, drove away from the Sunset Resort, a small, family-owned hotel where my family has vacationed for the last twenty-two summers. We had a week of perfectly beautiful days—clear blue skies, temperatures in the seventies, light breezes, welcoming water, and we left on a perfectly beautiful day, after breakfast, after an hour of sitting and gazing across tiny Figenschau Bay at the vast waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan beyond.

That view makes me feel larger somehow, makes me feel that more things are possible than I have imagined. Everything I see reaches up to the heavens and outward to the horizon and I feel certain that I can make something out of all that. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll even finish the quilt whose colors come from this stretch of water, light, and sky.

Years ago, during a troubled family vacation at this place, words from the Psalms leapt to life in the sky and clouds around me. “Your steadfast love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens.” The Creator’s love extended from earth to heaven and wrapped around all I could see, comfortably, carefully holding me and mine though the future looked frightening and uncertain.

This year, the comfort and security of that view was addictive. I sat there in my wooden chair in the sun. I sat there while little bugs (no-see-ums) bit my arms. I sat there with books, with pen and paper, with knitting, and on that last day, yesterday, I sat there with my two sons, soaking up the peace, talking quietly. We talked of our future in that place, of returning next year and years after that. We talked a little of the immediate future here at home—the start of school, the demands, the plans, the progress to be made. Mostly we breathed in the view—the sand, the pines, the rocks, the water.

Today I can still feel it, even more than I can see it, stretching within me from shoulder to shoulder, deep in my lungs. But I may not be able to a week from now. Today I’m scraching those bug bites, doing the laundry, and putting off the details of replying to emails, of getting ready for Monday, of making a list of things to be accomplished between now and the start of school. It’s hard to reconcile the coming hours of meetings and nagging, petty details with the vision of life on a Great Lake. Hard to trade that landscape of lake and sky for offices and classrooms and people. Hard to imagine that somehow, that steadfast, reaching love of God that resides in the heavens, in God’s realm, can reach me back here at home and can reach through me to a troubled earth. Yet this will be my prayer—God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done.

At last

2008-07-01T20:59:00.007-05:00

At Morning Prayer today, the final hymn was "Lord, Thee I Love with All My Heart." The worshippers were the participants in a regional conference of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians. The occasion was the commemoration of Catherine Winkworth and John Mason Neale, English hymn translators of the 19th century.

As the service neared its closing, I geared up for singing this great, dense, and rather long German chorale, rendered into English by Catherine Winkworth, a woman I imagine to be a lot like me. Well-educated, adept with words, respectful of the spiritual power of language, of which there are many examples in "Lord, Thee I Love with All My Heart." The first stanza:

Lord, thee I love with all my heart;
I pray thee, ne'er from me depart;
With tender mercy cheer me.
Earth has no pleasure I would share,
Yea, heav'n itself were void and bare
If thou, Lord, wert not near me.
And should my heart for sorrow break,
My trust in thee can nothing shake.
Thou art the portion I have sought;
Thy precious blood my soul has bought.
Lord Jesus Christ,
My prayer attend, my prayer attend,
And I will praise thee without end!

The hymn speaks passionately of love for God so intense that you want to crawl inside to get close enough. I think that feeling comes in part from the melody being so tightly centered on the tonic. All but one phrase starts or ends there--like the soul always wanting to return to the Lord--despite a broken heart, great sorrow, or feelings of being forsaken.

I thought this morning, how many times have I sung this hymn in the last six months? Two or three times in worship services. Sang the last stanza on Good Friday in the Hassler double-choir setting that we do at the end of Tenebrae at my church. And I've sung it at several funerals, one just last week. I have sung from my place in the adult choir. I've sung it leading my children's choir.

With them, I took the time to explain why organists open up and let it rip when they get to the final half-stanza:

And then from death awaken me,
That these my eyes with joy may see,
O Son of God, thy glorious face,
My Savior and my fount of grace.
Lord Jesus Christ,
My prayer attend, my prayer attend,
And I will praise thee without end!

I wanted the kids to pay attention to this hymn as they sang, and I figured anticipation would keep them sharp and focused on the thrill of the mighty crescendo of eternity.

It is a wonderful hymn. Besides the account of an all-consuming love for the Lord, it contains a straightforward, unsentimental theology of death, burial, and the resurrection of the dead, of the body, when "these my eyes"--my own eyes--will see Jesus's own face.

This morning, however, I was wondering if singing this hymn so many times put the thrill at the end at risk of seeming old. The prelude to the service, on this tune, covered the crescendo thing, pouring forth lots of sound at that part of the tune. We'd have to do it again when we sang it, and stanzas one and two, long ones, had to be gotten through first. Just the week before, singing at that funeral, despite closing the hymn book and singing that last stanza from memory, loud and hearty at the end, I wasn't feeling it so much. My thoughts were more like, yeah, another Lutheran funeral. Do we have to sing this every time?

Surprising then, that this morning, thinking about the many times I've sung this hymn lately became the key to singing it in faith and hope. The repetition made the text and tune more powerful, made the resurrection seem almost imminent. Doggone it, I thought, we keep singing about this thing--upstairs, downstairs, morning, noon and night. With children's voices, with the feeble voices of a congregation of mourners gathered for a funeral, or sometimes with a hundred or so full-throated church musicians who glory in singing out. And this isn't the only church building where this happens. What if the resurrection of the dead came right now? Right here in the sanctuary.

Nobody knows exactly when, much less how God's kingdom will come to complete fruition. I don't think--quite--that an almost-perfect unison can sing it into being. But that great love of God for his creatures--for us. the love that inspired the tender passion of the first stanza of this hymn, has great things in store for us.

Dewfall

2008-06-25T09:23:00.005-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, in the sunshine, my older son spread the camping canopy over the weeds in the backyard to dry.

The canopy is a large piece of plastic--a tarp that fits over a roof-like framework of aluminum poles. We use it on camping trips to shelter our cooking and eating area from the sun and the rain. Kris and his friends had set the thing up at a Saturday barbecue--an all-afternoon, all-evening party for a large group of friends. They got rained on, and the canopy was wet when it was packed up and returned to our house. So we spread it out to dry in the sunshine before putting it away in the attic.

Spreading it out is the easy part. Folding it to the right size and cramming it neatly into the zippered bag that also holds the poles is more difficult, which is why, I suppose, the canopy was still out there on the grass when it got dark. Fireflies were out, and mosquitos, too, when I decided I would bring the thing back indoors, even if I had to do it by myself.

I got some help from Kurt (the younger son), but as we folded the tarp in halves and then quarters, I could feel drops of water on the underside. Too late, I said, the dew came up. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to get it thoroughly dry in the sunshine.

The dew came up. I'm not sure I know what this means or why this happens. From childhood I remember that the toes of my canvas PF Flyers would get soaked as I walked through the grass to get my bicycle out of the garage early on a summer morning. As an adult, I learned while camping that dry towels left on the clothesline overnight would be damp in the morning. All this is related to dew, something about water condensing when surface temperatures drop. It's a natural condition, but unless I'm camping or dealing with camping equipment, the dew coming up is not a phenomenon that affects my life, unlike, say, the network being down, or the internet being slow. Or even a thunderstorm blowing out the power for two minutes, or twenty.

Still, I like the phrase--the dew came up. But does it come up? The water comes from the air and the term for the formation of dew is dewfall. I just now learned more about all this by looking up dew at Wikipedia. There's not much to know, but the photos on the site--dew on a blade of grass, dew on spider webs--are beautiful: small, tender things supporting the weight of clear drops of water. Surface tension on the dewdrops makes them glisten and seem to move, even in a still photograph.

There are no pretty pictures of dew drops on a bright green plastic canopy. This morning, the canopy in the backyard is covered in puddles, not dew. It rained during the night and early this morning. With rain and thundershowers in the weather forecast for the next several days, getting this thing dry on both sides is going to take timing, and I suspect there are mosquitos laying eggs in those puddles right this moment. I can't see it happening, but I will feel the effects, just as I could not see the dewfall but felt the drops of water.

I prefer the dew to the mosquitos.

New and different

2008-06-22T14:19:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite exchanges in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice comes while Elizabeth Bennet is dancing with Mr. Darcy at the Netherfield ball. The conversation is about conversation and the need to make an effort at it, since as Elizabeth observes,
"It would look odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together." Then Elizabeth supplies an explanation for why she and Darcy may prefer to talk as little as possible while dancing together.

"We are each of us of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb."

Darcy replies, "This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure. . . . How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say."

Darcy's protest is polite, but ironic. Elizabeth's conversation is full of clever, original remarks, and she knows it. What she doesn't know is that Darcy finds this quality startlingly attractive.

I would classify myself as one of Elizabeth Bennet's unsocial, taciturn individuals--timid about speaking unless I've got something original and insightful to say. That's my excuse for two-and-a-half months of silence from the Perverse Lutheran. Despite beginning several posts, I've had nothing to say that would amaze the entire room, much less please myself.

I write because I want to find a new way to say something, because I want to test the truth for myself and find a new connection with it. I am looking for original insight, but even in summer's abundance of sunshine, I'm leaning towards the writer of Ecclesiastes' view of things: there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecc. 1:9). Or Shakespeare's view--the same idea with an original twist: "There is nothing left remarkable/Beneath the visiting moon." (Antony and Cleopatra, IV.xiii.60) Cleopatra says this shortly before she dies.

As for the Preacher behind the book of Ecclesiastes--well, I'd have to read the durn book to comment on where he goes in the eleven chapters that follow his declaration that "what has been is what will be." I have no objections to reading Ecclesiastes, but stopping to do so now would probably keep me from finishing this post. I'm skipping to the end of the book: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil."

Secret? That's a word I heard in church this morning, in the Gospel reading:

"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. (Matthew 10:26)

So God will ferret out every secret thing and will show these hidden things in a new light when they are brought to judgment. It's probably not theologically correct to describe God as taciturn and unsocial, but apparently the Creator likes to astound everyone in the room with amazing new views of stuff that is now hidden. Hey, being God, she can't help it.

Is that where Elizabeth Bennet and I get it from? Yes, there's some vanity, some false pride, maybe some prejudice, in having to discover everything for yourself There is vanity in thinking you can think what others have not thought, or that you can at least put a new twist on it. But I'm thinking the desire to do this could be part of what Paul described as being "dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." (Rom. 6:11--the second lesson this morning)

A new creation!