The Advent Time Machine

(This is a chapel talk, for elementary school students. Probably a little too abstract for most of them. Ah, well.)

Advent began last Sunday. Advent includes the four Sundays before Christmas—all the way up to Sunday morning, December 24. We have an Advent wreath here in church. Maybe you have one at home. Maybe you also have an Advent calendar.

We often think of Advent as the time when we get ready for Christmas or even when we count down the days until Christmas. We do our Christmas shopping, or we make Christmas gifts. We plan parties, cook special food, have Christmas celebrations with friends and family. Here at school we spend a lot of time during Advent practicing music to get ready for our Christmas Eve service.

But celebrating Advent is not really the same as getting ready for Christmas. There’s a lot more to Advent than doing all the things we do to prepare for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The Advent season is kind of like walking into a time machine—an imaginary machine that can send you back into the past or forward into the future. Time machines are just pretend—we can’t really travel into the future or the past. But during Advent, in our minds and hearts, we do travel into the past and the future. We look at Jesus in the past, the present and the future.

This next part is going to sound more like an English grammar lesson than a chapel talk. We’re going to talk about the word “come.” What kind of a word is come? A noun? A verb? A preposition? Who knows? It’s a verb. How do you know this? Conjugate it. I come, you come, he, she or it comes.

But what if we talk about coming to school yesterday? I --- came to school yesterday, or last week, or last year, or long ago, when I was just five years old. That’s called past tense. It happened in the past.

What if we talk about coming to school tomorrow? You will come to school tomorrow. You will come next week, you will come back to school in January after Christmas vacation. You all will keep coming to this school, and then high school, and then college, for many, many years. When we say “will come,” that’s future tense. It’s in the future.

We’re going back to our Advent time machine now. When we are inside this Advent time machine, celebrating Advent, we talk about Jesus in the past, the present, and the future. We go back to the past and say, “He came.” He came to earth long ago, as a little baby. A lot of people were waiting for him to come, because God had promised to send a Savior. So besides thinking about how Jesus came in the past, we also read about the people who were waiting for Jesus to come. Jesus’ coming was in the future for them, even though it’s in the past for us. (Got that? Today is yesterday’s tomorrow.)

We also think about Jesus coming in the future when we are in this time machine that we call Advent. We say, Jesus will come again. You remember that after Jesus rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven. But he told his disciples he would come back some day, and when he came he would come as a king, who would rule over a new kingdom, where there is peace and justice and love for everyone. Because we are inside this Advent time machine, we do things to help that new kingdom show up in the world right now. We take care of people who are less fortunate than we are. We take care of our world, of our planet. We pray for wars to stop.

We talked about the past tense—when Jesus came. We talked about the future—Jesus will come again. What haven’t we talked about yet? The present. How Jesus comes to us right now. And since we don’t really live in a time machine—we can only live in the present—this might be the most important part.

How does Jesus come to us right now, during Advent? Will you watch for Jesus coming today? Maybe you will see Jesus in your friend’s smile. Maybe you will see Jesus in a teacher. Or Jesus will come to you as you pray, or when you sing. In our first hymn today, which we sang as we lit the Advent candle, we sang “Christ is coming soon.” That doesn’t mean when we tell the Christmas story on Christmas Eve. That doesn’t mean sometime in the future. It means now, today. Watch!

Worlds of wanwood leafmeal

It is that time in the fall when more and more trees turn yellow, red, and brown. The dead leaves cover the ground. The summer annuals blaze away, showing their brightest, bravest colors just before the killing frost.

Death is on my mind, grief and grieving. I went to a college chapel service this morning where we prayed for a young woman, mother of two children, whose husband was killed in a car accident. The preacher in his sermon spoke of a promising college student who'd had to quit school to help support her mother and siblings after her father died. The litany at the close of the service mentioned those widowed and orphaned, a group that now includes me.

In my mind, I've practiced saying "I'm a widow." I try to say it brightly, in a way that makes me sound interesting: "Actually, I'm a widow--" Like I can be upbeat about it, because I'm over this, I've moved on, the sad part is in the past. In truth, if someone I was meeting for the first time asked about my marital status, I would probably sound almost apologetic: "I'm, like, a widow. . . . Yeah, my husband died in September, but it--it's okay. I'm okay." I'd fumble my way through the answers to follow-up questions. Even if I tried very hard, I would not be very convincing with the "moved-on" attitude, though I might move the conversation quickly on to something else.

It is hard to count myself among the widowed and orphaned, to be at the receiving end of concern and pity. Hard to repeat a standard answer to the question, "How are you doing?" to everyone who asks. Hard to listen when others project their own grief experiences onto me. Hard even to look closely at my own grief.

I learned this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins via a musical setting by Ned Rorem.

Spring and Fall
to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Here is an excerpt from Rorem's song, sung by Donald Gramm.

I am not a young child, like the Margaret of the poem, who grieves over fallen golden leaves and "things of man" that pass away. I know that few things last, that last year's good times cannot be recreated next year, that children grow up and grow away, that change is the one constant in life. I also know that I will get through the winter, see light and new birth in the darkest days of December, and rejoice when the grape arbor in the back yard turns pink with budding leaves next May.

But still I mourn--a husband, a life, years lost to Alzheimer's, loss of security in home and family. I wonder how these things can pass away. I wonder what will replace them. I wonder if a loving God will untie the knot in my throat and the one in my gut. I wonder what words like "redeemed" and "eternity" mean to my husband now. Do human words have anything to do with life in eternity?

It should be so obvious that we all die. Are Abraham and King David alive and well and living in Tel Aviv? Is John Marshall here to advise the Roberts Court on how to interpret the Constitution? People are born, they grow old, they die to make room for more of the same.

We're coming up on the end of the post here. Where I quote from the last act of Our Town, or from the end of The Once and Future King (the favorite Camelot novel of my youth--"some of those drops do sparkle," more or less). Here's where I consider, for myself, what it is that gives life this side of the grave enough weight, enough meaning, enough joy, to soften the hard angles of death.

What does Scripture say? You could read 1 Corinthians 15, Paul's long argument about Christ, the first fruits of the dead, and the perishable body putting on imperishability--the classic Easter/funeral chapter. Paul finishes strong, no mean rhetorician he: "O death, where is thy sting?" and "Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

But the promise of immortality seems like a huge leap from Hopkins' "blight man was born for." The distant trumpets of heaven are faint comfort when there's an empty place in a family home. What can fill the vast space in between earth and heaven?

To know the answer, ask what it was that made Christ the first fruits of the dead, what brought our Lord and God to the cross to die, becoming "wanwood leafmeal" like us?

Love. Pure, simple, radiant. We live on even as we mourn, because of divine love, which we see not just in the promise of the resurrection, but--thanks be to God--breaking into our life on earth.

Two Sticks and Some String

I picked up my knitting last night for the first time in several days. When I don't knit for a while and then I do, I am genuinely surprised at the pleasure it gives me. My fingers know what to do. The yarn curls through them and cooperates as I wind it around the needle tip and pull it through the stitches. The motion soothes and comforts.

It is hard to explain this to people who either A) go into a panic at the mention of anything involving needles and fiber; or B) think "crafty" pastimes are trivial and simple-minded. It's odd that knitting occupies this "between place"--frighteningly complex to some, barely worth the notice of others.

Each project has a history--for whom, why, how, when and where it was made. My most vivid knitting memories are of where I sat and worked on something--the old couch in the playroom of my childhood home, the bed in my college dorm room, the end of the sofa or the chair in the window. Some projects are connected to events--rehearsals for a certain show, the older or younger son's basketball season, doctors' appointments. Putting on a sweater or even socks I have made recalls the time when that yarn and work filled my hands, my lap and my knitting bag.

I learned to knit when I was eight, and most of the time since then, I've had something on my needles. It may have been languishing in a tote bag or on a shelf without being worked on, but my knitting is there, waiting for me to finish it, waiting for a time when I need to knit.

Knitting creates a kind of industrious peace. It is a way to stay awake while watching TV and a way to calm myself before going to bed. Have I ever fallen asleep with needles in hand? Yes.

Some people say they meditate or pray when they knit. Some knit prayer shawls to comfort the sick and dying and to shield new parents and others embarking on great adventures. Sometimes I knit gifts to mark important occasions for family members and friends, but the finished product often arrives late. I don't knit on deadlines. I do knit for friends to thank them for their presence in my life.

And now a word about ripping. I must interrupt this pleasant post to report that I just ripped out six inches--two full repeats--of a complicated celtic cable pattern. I have finished the left front of the cardigan, and I am working on the right, but when I set up the pattern for this side, I followed the wrong chart. The cables were the same as the ones on the left side, rather than their mirror image. Would this have been noticed by anyone but me? Yes, designs like this should be symmetrical and I'm not the only one who surreptitiously checks other people's garments for this quality. Besides, this is an heirloom sweater for an 18-year-old niece who has been closely involved in its design. It will take as long as it will take.

But hey, it's only yarn. Pull out the stitches, wind the charcoal grey wool back into a ball, and get it right the next time. Give me a week or less and I'll knit those six inches again and enjoy doing it. But now you see why I don't knit for deadlines.

This week I'm knitting to feel more comfortable in my own skin as I take in the changes and look again at the sorrow connected to my husband's death at the end of many years with Alzheimer's. One of the prayers early in the memorial service for him on Wednesday night asked God to knit together his people. I hadn't noticed this in other funerals I'd been to and checking the Lutheran Book of Worship shows that it's not in the text for the Burial of the Dead. Guess somebody put it there just for me.

But here's another confession: I know too much about knitting to go along with the "knit us together, Lord" metaphor. Where does it come from? I ran a search on "knit" and came up with this in Ephesians 4:15-16:

"But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love."

A mouthful, thank you, Paul.

There are some problems here. According to fiber historians, there was no knitting in the first century. So what word did Paul use really? The New Jerusalem Bible says "fitted and joined together," which makes more sense to me. Knitting uses one long strand of yarn to make fabric. It doesn't join lots of parts together (well, there is the three-needle bind-off, but that's a technical detail we don't need to go into here).

"Fitted and joined" suggests a cabinetmaker at work and some trimming, planing, and sanding that has to happen for things to come together properly. "Fitted and joined" also suggests piecing and quilting, where the quilter collects fabrics, cuts shapes, joins them together and makes something new. something that warms, covers and encloses. The designs, even when carefully planned, can surprise you. Paul was a tentmaker. Fitting and joining with scissors and stitches would have been skills that lived in his fingers.

The search for "knit" in the bible turned up another reference in Psalm 139:13:

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I like the idea of being God's project, whether it's quilting, knitting, or cabinetry. I hope the process of knitting me together brings God some genuine pleasure.

"God will not leave you astray"

My husband, Lon, died yesterday morning after, as the obituaries will say, "a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease."

Those words cover a lot of ground--seven, eight, maybe nine years in which the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's confused and then destroyed Lon's mind. I should say his brain, because that's where the anatomical disaster struck. Mind is something else, but something hard to describe. Perhaps it's the content encoded in all those neurons and neurotransmitters, content that was obscured by Alzheimer's. Maybe it's the "ether' of the brain, to use a word from the nineteenth century (or earlier). Webster's first definition for ether is "an imaginary substance regarded by the ancients as filling all space beyond the sphere of the moon, and making up the stars and planets." Go small with this concept and you have a mysterious something in the infinitely small spaces between nerve endings, the spaces between brain cells, inside molecules and between the particles of atoms--something that makes structures come to life.

Ether, anatomy, biochemistry--I don't know much about any of these. But I watched while Lon struggled with the complexities of daily life, of a job, of relationships. He lost the ability to understand time, to count money, to write checks and pay bills. He lost the ability to write--to be accurate when writing for the newspaper. Journalism was his career, his passion, his vocation. But rather than journalist, he preferred to be called a newspaperman, or a reporter, an editor, a critic. These words said what he did. They were alive and active, with no pretentious "ism" behind them. But these parts of who he was were stripped away by the disease. He was relieved to stop working, to stop making those demands on his mind.

The world no longer made sense to him. No, that's not quite right. His brain kept trying to make sense of what he saw and of what happened around him, but what his mind created was at odds with what everyone else knew to be true and real. He attacked the pictures on video boxes. Our tall but gentle younger son was greeted with a raised and shaking fist. People wearing Cubs jerseys made him angry. When he wet his pants he blamed the guy who came in and threw water on him.

Through all of this, Lon's mother worried about the humiliation he must have felt. For the Lon of old to have known what would happen to him would have been devastating. He could not have borne becoming an impotent object of pity. In the early years of this battle with Alzheimer's, I was angry with Lon for many, many reasons. He, for his own deeply personal reasons, could not tell me what was happening inside his head. We fought bitterly, with no resolution, and he would sometimes exclaim, "Just shoot me. Why don't you just shoot me?"

The deepening dementia relieved his frustration. The depression lifted. The eager-to-please child that he carried inside appeared as the responsibilities and prerogatives of adulthood faded. The fog of Alzheimer's enveloped him, comforted him. and finally carried him away.

Yesterday evening, I stopped to use the phone at my family's church, where my younger son is an eighth grader in the parish school and where I direct children's choirs. There was an envelope waiting for me, full of die-cut paper angels with messages written on them by students in the sixth grade. Many were addressed by name to one of my three children, and they said things like "God is watching over you" and "You are not alone."

One in particular made me smile. It said, "God will not leave you astray." It's a malapropism, a confusion of words because of the resemblance in their sounds. Did the child mean "God will not lead you astray"? Or perhaps "God will not leave you alone"? This one was addressed to my older son, who at nineteen, has plenty of opportunities to go astray, though I am confident he will come through this great grief in one piece, compassionate beyond his years.

Still, that sentence sticks in my mind: God will not leave you astray. Lon was astray in so many different ways and places through all these years with Alzheimer's. Sometimes literally he was lost and not sure how to get home. He was increasingly astray in the ether of his mind, because the neuron pathways in his brain were twisted and obscured. He was astray spiritually, when the thing he counted on most in life--his intelligence--left him.

But God did not leave him astray. God was there in the fog. God granted him peace and people who cared for him, most importantly in these last days, caregivers at the nursing home who sincerely loved him. And God led him home.

Headache

Yes, I've got one. Pain in the right temple, threatening to spread behind the ear and down the neck. Noticeable tension around the rest of my face. I have been walking around all day with my mouth set, my teeth clenched, and my eyes squinting and scowling. Now, nearing bedtime, it feels strange to relax my face and jaw. Letting go of tension feels unnatural. I notice that I'm tired and achy from the effort it takes to present myself to the world and shield myself from its light and noise.

This morning I spilled coffee down the front of my white shirt. The top on the cup leaked and dripped, unknown to me. I looked down and saw a teardrop-shaped stain three inches in diameter.

Makes you want to go home and start over. Or go home and stay.

Instead I kept on with the work in front of me. I changed to a black t-shirt offered by a friend, the church youth director. It had a bible reference on the back--3 John 1:5--in pink letters and said "making the faith visible" and "message remix." I'll get the bible out and look up the verse.

Can't say that I've ever read the 15 verses of 3 John and after having read them, I can't say that I see the point of verse 5. The words on the page are thin and sharp and the effort it took to read them has sent the headache pain into my neck and shoulders.

Bleach may remove the coffee stain from my white v-neck t-shirt. Or it may not. Sleep will cure the headache. A little yoga in the morning may help with the struggle of getting through the day. And I did find something in the 11th verse of 3 John:

"Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God."

An imitation, we think, is a bad thing--a knock-off, second-rate, not the genuine article. We pride ourselves on being genuine, on being authentic, on being who we are, not who others want or expect us to be. So what's good about imitating what is good? (I'm starting to sound like Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City.)

Art imitates life. Art creates images. If I am to imitate what is good, I should make images of the good. (Oh, gosh, am I now imitating Plato? Or Aristotle?) I should be a good vocal example to the children in my choir tomorrow, and that means I have to warm-up in a good way tomorrow.

Ultimately, what is good is God, or is from God. Seems simple. But making an image, a living image is complicated, detailed, an experiment.

I'll let you know how tomorrow goes.

Perverse Lutheran

I've been posting to this blog on and off for about six months. It's time to write about the title.

First, the story: I was editing copy for some publicity material for my church. The copy included a three-part trinitarian statement of what the congregation believed about an important facet of its ministry. The language was a little overblown and a bit dated, and the origins of the statement were uncertain, and this led me to ask some questions, via email, of our pastors and two other congregational leaders.

I knew I was being a pain in the butt. I was supposed to be finishing the publicity brochure, not questioning essentials, much less asking whether the essentials were truly essential. But hey, I believe that words should be carefully chosen, because someday, someone is going to take them to mean exactly what they say. Graphic designers who say they know, because they prepare lots of printed material, tell me that nobody reads all that grey type. But this does not dissuade me from considering how specific words will be read by the various individuals who encounter them.

In sending these essential questions around, I did what I often do when I'm afraid that being too smart and too critical is going to make me unpopular: I added humor. Ingratiating, self-mocking humor. The idea is that if I can let you know that I know I'm being a pain, maybe you won't hate me.

So the email went out with a subject line that read "Questions from a perverse Lutheran" and an introductory paragraph that turned the refrain in Luther's Small Catechism "This is most certainly true" into a question--"Is this most certainly true?"

The questions I asked did not get resolved. They were good questions, but were postponed to a vague group process in the vague future. But this was not the end of the Perverse Lutheran. When all the emailing was done and we were all politely acknowledging and thanking each other, one person wrote to me, "I like questions from a perverse Lutheran. It sounds like the title for a blog."

Uh-oh.

I had hoped to be clever in this blog, to turn established thinking on its ear and have fun upsetting whatever monuments of Lutheranism, substantial and otherwise, seemed ripe for the picking. I hoped to write quickly and casually enough that mixed metaphors (refer to the previous sentence) flew by uncorrected by self-editing. I saw myself writing more from the head than the heart, attempting to razzle-dazzle 'em, rather than play on their emotions..

It hasn't turned out that way. (Perverse, huh?) So many questions come from the heart, not the intellect. The head gets involved when something doesn't feel right in the gut. The brain, with its creeping branches of neurons, tries to organize our visceral reactions. It is the higher organ. It likes to think it's on a journey that makes sense, that follows a discernible path, that has a goal. We need this kind of understanding, but . . ..

Too often, in religious thinking, the head's efforts to explain life and speak for God produce answers that defy or deny the heart's reality. Received religion may tell the believer's heart what it should be feeling or what it should give up and confess, shamed by God's goodness and power. The Lutheranism of my chilldhood did this. It was "stiff upper lip" Lutheranism, the kind where you said, I have faith, I can face anything, and then worried that something would happen one day that would reveal your cowardice and the whole Christian community would know that your faith was not strong at all and that you weren't worthy to be called Christian.

I try not to tell my heart all the time that it is wrong. This makes my troubles more complicated. (The Complicated Lutheran--that would be another great name for a blog.) But it recognizes that much of what the head is doing, even sometimes its most rational thought, is just an attempt to make sense of the feelings that begin in the gut or the brainstem or what we call the heart. This is not all that perverse an idea for a Lutheran. Luther's great drive to proclaim the gospel came from his own gut-wrenching experience of feeling guilty before God.

Faith, to me, is not about trying to be good. It is about seeking, speaking, testing, and feeling truth.

More Than Enough

Sunday morning. I've been back from vacation for two days. It's mid-August, prelude to September, when the cycle of school and serious work and life accelerates and things have to get done. The sense of peace and calm I cultivated while doing nothing but reading, writing, swimming, and eating for five days did not survive the drive home. When we switched from listening to CD's to listening to the car radio, the news was of bomb plots foiled and continued turmoil in Lebanon. Bills in the mail, a cell phone on the blink (necessitating an encounter with a cell phone salesman), paperwork for school enrollment, family stuff, and ninety minutes at the movie theatre watching "Barnyard" have ganged up on me here at home. I am back to feeling like a frightened, foolish woman, who does not have a hard enough head or a thick enough skin to survive the real world.

Is it better to not read the paper, not listen to the radio, and to avoid animated kids’ movies? What difference does it make to the world if I have an opinion on the polarization of American politics or on healthcare reform? Even if I launch that opinion into the blogosphere, who will care, especially if that opinion is expressed quietly, in nuanced language, with respect for those with other ideas? And on the home front, can someone like me, who can't even achieve mastery over the weeds--the big ones--in the backyard, make sense of health insurance, retirement accounts, or the best deals on phones and internet access?

I suppose this next paragraph could be the one where I take refuge in spiritual insight, or at least in a spiritual question, a spiritual slant on life that transcends the mundane stress and despair of daily living. Something about eternal truth or nothing new under the sun. I could call up imagery from my vacation on that island in Lake Michigan, where the view of water stretching to the horizon and clouds floating in the infinite sky above never fails to invoke in me the psalmist's reaction to a similar sight: "Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens."

But how do I fall back on that love as a safety net in a world where plenty of sentient human beings just like me starve or die from AIDS or watch their children suffer and get into enormous trouble? Disaster can follow disaster within even one small life. My own future holds plenty of questions marks, and I know it is arrogant and wrong to see one's own prosperity as a sign of God's favor. Or to view one’s troubles as God’s wrath or judgment. It’s not just theologically simplistic, it’s dangerous.

I started this post with my morning coffee, but it is now early evening. I’ve been to church, been to lunch, had a beer, and finished off two (count them, two!) tedious tasks that took too much time. I’ve been busy, trying to pack down my anxiety one step at a time.

The sermon this morning, by the excellent Craig Satterlee, circled around two themes: that a little knowledge of God can limit our ability to experience all that God is, and that God is super-substantial, far more than we can know.

So I must go back and reconsider that love stretching to the infinite heavens. It is more than justice, more than right or wrong, beyond loss or gain or human success or sorrow. It is infinitely small as well as bigger than the universe. Specific and universal. It may not give me the confidence to confront life’s petty details and come out a winner. But if I take a deep breath, stop rehearsing my own worries over and over again in my mind, and go fold some laundry, I think I will remember that it is enough. It is more than enough.