I've been finding myself in couple-y situations lately. Situations where just about everyone there is part of a couple, and I am not. Switches switch, old feelings line up with more recent ones, and if I stop talking for just a minute, the self-pity thing kicks in, and kicks in hard. I feel like I did at high school dances, where you worked at not acting like a wallflower, even if that's who you were.
My perspective has shifted since then. I am now old enough to act like exactly who I am. I don't have to try on other roles. If you don't like women who are perversely intellectual or a little too bright and funny--well, you won't like me, and I may not even notice. But I've been married and I remember what it is like to talk in the car on the way home from a social event, or to slide into bed at the end of the day and not huddle there alone.
I miss the comfort. I am conscious now of the awkwardness of being the one who screws up the seating at tables set for eight or ten. I am too aware of being a widow when I talk to other women's husbands, self-conscious about being--not single exactly, but singular.
Everywhere you look the world works two-by-two. At least my world does, where people my age are sensible parents in stable marriages, living in brick houses with fixed-rate mortgages. They're like oxygen molecules; they travel in O2 pairs. They dread surprises, because these come mostly from teenage children and are seldom good.
Even the single people I know are paired up with close friends or somehow belong to groups of folks who look out for each other. People need people--someone to listen, or pretend to, as you prattle on at the end of the day.
Yes, I'm definitely feeling sorry for myself. I'm also feeling a little hypocritical. Back when my husband was alive, I went lots of places on my own. More often than not, he refused to be dragged along. And I have chattered away plenty of time today in the presence of friends, or on the telephone. I'm not alone in the world.
But I am an odd piece of the puzzle. The "plus 1" who turns even numbers to odd.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
New Year's Day 2008
Outside everything is white, covered in snow. It was pretty in the midnight darkness, quiet and lit by street lights. In the early afternoon, the glare coming in the windows aggravates my headache and makes the house seem even colder than it is.
I've read the newspaper--the New York Times online. Read about getting organized, eating better, and exercising more. Read about the need for new priorities in public health aid to Africa and for finance reform in American political campaigns. I've read about political chaos in Pakistan and Kenya. I've read Bob Herbert's piece on 1968 in America, a year I remember well. I was in eighth grade. Shortly before my confirmation day, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Shortly before graduation, Robert Kennedy was killed.
I was thirteen. My mother had told us stories of her childhood during World War II. They'd had a Victory Garden. She and her friends collected aluminum foil for the war. She had heard Franklin Roosevelt on the radio and had told us that yes, he'd had polio, but he'd gotten better and could walk.
I watched the historical events of my childhood on television--the crisp live broadcast of President Kennedy's funeral, the grainy black-and-white film coverage of civil rights marches, exotic images from Viet Nam that seemed more like a movie than reality. Even the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago--riots in Grant Park, a place I could get to just by riding the el--seemed to belong to another world. There was both evil and high idealism afoot in the world, but these things were distant, not to be tasted by a suburban girl, brought up Lutheran, brought up to be moderate, not passionate, in all things.
What does any one of us moderate, quiet people have to do with the big things that go on around the world? Yet there are things in the news that I connect with intuitively. There's Benazir Bhutto's nineteen-year-old son, thrust into the official leadership of his mother's political party, but telling reporters that the first thing he has to do is "finish my degree" at Oxford. He is reeling with grief, and way over his head in meeting family expectations. What about the frustration of Kenyans, whose votes for the opposition party don't seem to matter. Helplessness can make people angry and stupid. What about those presidential primary candidates--running hard now, facing disappointment in the near future? Does HIlary recognize herself now, or is it the Hilary of fifteen years ago that she wouldn't recognize?
A week or two ago, I received a Christmas card with the message "live in balance" or something like that. I put it on the kitchen windowsill and looked at it for several days, but then I put it away. It seemed too easy, too pat. Like calling all this snow pretty at midnight or one o'clock in the morning. By daylight, It's messy, and it will be pretty ugly by the end of the week. Reality is not a picture postcard. It's tough and unpredictable, and you fall down a lot and your feet get wet and cold, no matter where you live, no matter what you're doing--especially when you try to understand it all.
I've read the newspaper--the New York Times online. Read about getting organized, eating better, and exercising more. Read about the need for new priorities in public health aid to Africa and for finance reform in American political campaigns. I've read about political chaos in Pakistan and Kenya. I've read Bob Herbert's piece on 1968 in America, a year I remember well. I was in eighth grade. Shortly before my confirmation day, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Shortly before graduation, Robert Kennedy was killed.
I was thirteen. My mother had told us stories of her childhood during World War II. They'd had a Victory Garden. She and her friends collected aluminum foil for the war. She had heard Franklin Roosevelt on the radio and had told us that yes, he'd had polio, but he'd gotten better and could walk.
I watched the historical events of my childhood on television--the crisp live broadcast of President Kennedy's funeral, the grainy black-and-white film coverage of civil rights marches, exotic images from Viet Nam that seemed more like a movie than reality. Even the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago--riots in Grant Park, a place I could get to just by riding the el--seemed to belong to another world. There was both evil and high idealism afoot in the world, but these things were distant, not to be tasted by a suburban girl, brought up Lutheran, brought up to be moderate, not passionate, in all things.
What does any one of us moderate, quiet people have to do with the big things that go on around the world? Yet there are things in the news that I connect with intuitively. There's Benazir Bhutto's nineteen-year-old son, thrust into the official leadership of his mother's political party, but telling reporters that the first thing he has to do is "finish my degree" at Oxford. He is reeling with grief, and way over his head in meeting family expectations. What about the frustration of Kenyans, whose votes for the opposition party don't seem to matter. Helplessness can make people angry and stupid. What about those presidential primary candidates--running hard now, facing disappointment in the near future? Does HIlary recognize herself now, or is it the Hilary of fifteen years ago that she wouldn't recognize?
A week or two ago, I received a Christmas card with the message "live in balance" or something like that. I put it on the kitchen windowsill and looked at it for several days, but then I put it away. It seemed too easy, too pat. Like calling all this snow pretty at midnight or one o'clock in the morning. By daylight, It's messy, and it will be pretty ugly by the end of the week. Reality is not a picture postcard. It's tough and unpredictable, and you fall down a lot and your feet get wet and cold, no matter where you live, no matter what you're doing--especially when you try to understand it all.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Through the icon
(This was written for faculty devotions for the Lutheran school where I am the children’s choir director and revised for this post.)
Earlier this fall I attended Lectures in Church Music at Concordia University. The opening keynote address was titled “The Trinitarian theology as a source of inspiration for all who make music for God’s people.” The speaker was Calvin Witvliet from Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids.
He made the obligatory Calvin-Luther jokes. I looked at the hand-out. It was twenty pages long, with lots and lots of words. Not Power-Point slides, not bullet points, mostly hefty quotes from theologians and scholars: “I. The ‘relationality theme’: liturgy and koinonia and communion. A: Explication.”
I got out my knitting.
But letter B under each heavy theological theme was titled “Depiction.” Sprinkled throughout the handout were pictures of icons—old Russian and modern American, a 15th century painting, a contemporary stained glass window—art that depicted the Trinity.
Dr. Witvliet explained a few things about icons. The viewer is part of the icon. What you bring and how you respond are an integral part of what the icon is. He also told the story of an orthodox priest, who had watched and listened as yet another art history tour group came to view the icons in his sanctuary. “They look at the icons,” he said. “I wish they would look through them.”
When you look at the icon you see how it is made, the artist’s technique, the color, the culture’s influence on the representation of God. When you look through the icon, your imagination is engaged. God is moving and active, God gives and receives. God is omni-everything, but also working in you. The knowledge you gain is beyond words and specific symbols—kind of like the way talking to kindergartners can spin you off in a whole new theological direction.
It seems to me that our Children’s Christmas Eve service is a kind of icon. Lord knows, it’s revered like an icon, sometimes for worse, sometimes in better ways.
So it comes with the challenge to look through it, not just at it.
Now I suspect that teachers who are veterans of this Christmas Eve service know something about looking through it. If they didn’t, school would be a pretty Scrooge-y place during the last half of December. The image of God has a way of surprising us each Christmas in the children—clued-in and clueless—who sing songs, ring bells, and depict wise men and shepherds in sneakers and cotton robes worn over their jeans.
We are careful at Grace to speak of the Children’s Christmas Eve services as worship, not performance. Yet anytime you practice and practice and finally sing or ring or read or act like shepherds in front of hundreds of people, that’s a performance. It has all the urgencies of coming in on time, staying together, focusing and communicating. There is greater decorum because it’s worship. There’s no applause. And true to our Lutheran cultural heritage, we nip conceit and pride in the bud. Nevertheless, it’s not our reverence that makes those 70 minutes on Christmas Eve a worship service rather than a program. It is the presence of God that makes it worship.
The lecturer last October warned his audience of church musicians against what he called “a prevailing heresy in North American theology”—that worship is what we do for God. Our tit-for-tat minds sometimes reduce worship to something we do to earn God’s favor. When we emphasize to kids how important it is to do our very best on Christmas Eve, because this is Jesus’ birthday or because we are “singing for God,” we may be getting somewhere in range of this heresy.
I wrote down a phrase used by this lecturer to describe worship: “a whirlwind of divine activity.” Even actions that seem to originate with us—prayer, praise—are really divine actions, inspired by the Spirit, made acceptable to God by Christ’s sacrifice for us.
One of my predecessors speaks of “Christmas eyes,” a special spark of excitement and wonder in the faces of children during this traditional service. All the care in preparing this service frees them to experience it, to look through the icon and thrill to see God’s light entering every corner of earth’s darkness.
Earlier this fall I attended Lectures in Church Music at Concordia University. The opening keynote address was titled “The Trinitarian theology as a source of inspiration for all who make music for God’s people.” The speaker was Calvin Witvliet from Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids.
He made the obligatory Calvin-Luther jokes. I looked at the hand-out. It was twenty pages long, with lots and lots of words. Not Power-Point slides, not bullet points, mostly hefty quotes from theologians and scholars: “I. The ‘relationality theme’: liturgy and koinonia and communion. A: Explication.”
I got out my knitting.
But letter B under each heavy theological theme was titled “Depiction.” Sprinkled throughout the handout were pictures of icons—old Russian and modern American, a 15th century painting, a contemporary stained glass window—art that depicted the Trinity.
Dr. Witvliet explained a few things about icons. The viewer is part of the icon. What you bring and how you respond are an integral part of what the icon is. He also told the story of an orthodox priest, who had watched and listened as yet another art history tour group came to view the icons in his sanctuary. “They look at the icons,” he said. “I wish they would look through them.”
When you look at the icon you see how it is made, the artist’s technique, the color, the culture’s influence on the representation of God. When you look through the icon, your imagination is engaged. God is moving and active, God gives and receives. God is omni-everything, but also working in you. The knowledge you gain is beyond words and specific symbols—kind of like the way talking to kindergartners can spin you off in a whole new theological direction.
It seems to me that our Children’s Christmas Eve service is a kind of icon. Lord knows, it’s revered like an icon, sometimes for worse, sometimes in better ways.
So it comes with the challenge to look through it, not just at it.
Now I suspect that teachers who are veterans of this Christmas Eve service know something about looking through it. If they didn’t, school would be a pretty Scrooge-y place during the last half of December. The image of God has a way of surprising us each Christmas in the children—clued-in and clueless—who sing songs, ring bells, and depict wise men and shepherds in sneakers and cotton robes worn over their jeans.
We are careful at Grace to speak of the Children’s Christmas Eve services as worship, not performance. Yet anytime you practice and practice and finally sing or ring or read or act like shepherds in front of hundreds of people, that’s a performance. It has all the urgencies of coming in on time, staying together, focusing and communicating. There is greater decorum because it’s worship. There’s no applause. And true to our Lutheran cultural heritage, we nip conceit and pride in the bud. Nevertheless, it’s not our reverence that makes those 70 minutes on Christmas Eve a worship service rather than a program. It is the presence of God that makes it worship.
The lecturer last October warned his audience of church musicians against what he called “a prevailing heresy in North American theology”—that worship is what we do for God. Our tit-for-tat minds sometimes reduce worship to something we do to earn God’s favor. When we emphasize to kids how important it is to do our very best on Christmas Eve, because this is Jesus’ birthday or because we are “singing for God,” we may be getting somewhere in range of this heresy.
I wrote down a phrase used by this lecturer to describe worship: “a whirlwind of divine activity.” Even actions that seem to originate with us—prayer, praise—are really divine actions, inspired by the Spirit, made acceptable to God by Christ’s sacrifice for us.
One of my predecessors speaks of “Christmas eyes,” a special spark of excitement and wonder in the faces of children during this traditional service. All the care in preparing this service frees them to experience it, to look through the icon and thrill to see God’s light entering every corner of earth’s darkness.
Monday, November 19, 2007
The bosom of God
Someone, someone should have told me that having children would mean having to live through all their pain, all their sorrows, all their disappointments.
Today I am feeling these acutely. There's no need to describe the details here. These are my children's problems, after all, not mine to blog about. And they're not huge, life-shattering issues--just life's ups and downs. But oh, my Lord, it hurts me to see them hurting.
I could take this issue to therapy and explore a) my own adolescent disappointments and b) the boundaries (or lack of same) between my children and myself. Why do I get so involved in what they are feeling--or what I imagine they are feeling? What haven't I resolved from my own past? Step back, get some perspective. The kids will turn out okay. Everybody has to experience life for themselves. You can't protect them from the real world. This is how they grow up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a line between understanding and sympathizing with another person's pain and being hurt by it yourself. As a parent, you walk very close to that line, and often you step over it. Before I had children, I read that mothers' selves merged with their infants. I did not understand how this could be so, could not imagine my way out of myself and into that truth. But within forty-eight hours of my first son's birth, he was me, every part of me. Twenty-one years later I have still not untangled that knot, not completely. A happy smile from one of my kids can kindle warm hearth fires around my heart, and their losses hurt me more than my own.
Is this why the image of God as parent is so powerful? It's not just the tender parental care--"Children of the heavenly father / safely in his bosom gather." It is the Creator at one with her creatures, a passionate mother or father whose heart grieves when we sin--not so much because justice is offended, but because of the pain we are in. That same God must also smile deeply when we act with love or receive love from others. That same God sent Jesus, the perfect son, to suffer with us.
Oh, to be as large as God! To be there in the sorrow, to inspire the love, to take it all in and be great and good! Maybe, gathered in God's bosom--and I'm thinking a nursing bosom, not a manly one--maybe in that bosom I too can be whole and great and good, in pain or happiness.
Today I am feeling these acutely. There's no need to describe the details here. These are my children's problems, after all, not mine to blog about. And they're not huge, life-shattering issues--just life's ups and downs. But oh, my Lord, it hurts me to see them hurting.
I could take this issue to therapy and explore a) my own adolescent disappointments and b) the boundaries (or lack of same) between my children and myself. Why do I get so involved in what they are feeling--or what I imagine they are feeling? What haven't I resolved from my own past? Step back, get some perspective. The kids will turn out okay. Everybody has to experience life for themselves. You can't protect them from the real world. This is how they grow up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a line between understanding and sympathizing with another person's pain and being hurt by it yourself. As a parent, you walk very close to that line, and often you step over it. Before I had children, I read that mothers' selves merged with their infants. I did not understand how this could be so, could not imagine my way out of myself and into that truth. But within forty-eight hours of my first son's birth, he was me, every part of me. Twenty-one years later I have still not untangled that knot, not completely. A happy smile from one of my kids can kindle warm hearth fires around my heart, and their losses hurt me more than my own.
Is this why the image of God as parent is so powerful? It's not just the tender parental care--"Children of the heavenly father / safely in his bosom gather." It is the Creator at one with her creatures, a passionate mother or father whose heart grieves when we sin--not so much because justice is offended, but because of the pain we are in. That same God must also smile deeply when we act with love or receive love from others. That same God sent Jesus, the perfect son, to suffer with us.
Oh, to be as large as God! To be there in the sorrow, to inspire the love, to take it all in and be great and good! Maybe, gathered in God's bosom--and I'm thinking a nursing bosom, not a manly one--maybe in that bosom I too can be whole and great and good, in pain or happiness.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Singing for Gail's Funeral
I'm singing for a funeral today. This is the third time in the last week that I've been involved in the musical end of a funeral or memorial service. Once for a stranger, once for the 90-year-old father of a long acquaintance, today for a friend.
It is fourteen months since Lon died. Fourteen months since we gathered in church to give thanks to God for both his life and his death. He had suffered for many, many years with Alzheimer's and was ready to be called out of the fog and into his heavenly home. I have been to several funerals during those fourteen months, mostly of very old people. And at each one, I steel myself. If my eyes mist over, or there is a lump in my throat, I shake it off. I think about something else. I'm in the choir loft. There is singing to do. Tears will not help.
Detachment is my gift to the mourners. I explained this, kind of, to my children's choir last week, as they prepared to sing at the funeral of the 90-year-old grandpa. He was not their grandpa. They were not especially sad about his life coming to an end. And so they were able to sing for those who grieved, to give voice to the family's faith, and to the faith of the deceased. Most of all, their song spoke God's promises to the whole congregation, to those sitting downstairs in church, and even to each one of them. Though only ten or eleven or twelve years old, they have feelings about death. Fearful feelings.
Today it's "Amazing Grace," "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need," and "Lord, it belongs not to my care whether I die or live." This last one is a tough one. My friend Gail at the end did not care whether she lived. Beset with medical problems, feeling hopeless, she found, I hope, peace in hospice care. And surely God was there. Yes?
It is complicated. Life is complicated and messy and one does not always have the buoyancy to meet its challenges. I will feel sad today, but I can not dip too deeply into that sadness. When the fullness rises in my chest, some muscles relax too much and others tighten. There is no steady tall column of air to support the singing. The vocal cords move stiffly and the sounds that come out are not controlled, are not supple.
The problem is that floating above the sadness brings out the pissiness in me. My teeth are clenched against the feelings that rise from my gut, and like flint against steel, those clenched teeth strike sparks, shooting off every which way. I must guard what I say today because my own feelings about death and despair will make me sardonic, grim, sarcastic. I have feelings about death, too. But the anger will not help the singing. And grim determination is not the gift I wish to bring today.
Years ago, after another funeral choir experience, I said to someone who had been downstairs in the pews during the funeral, "Yes, it's a good thing for Christians to gather and rejoice and sing in the face of death." To sing that old evil foe back into his proper place on earth. To loft our music into the air, because God will use those harmonies to open heaven and give us a blessed foretaste of his own feast.
My parrners today in singing are first and second graders from Grace School. I'm covering the hymns. They are singing of baptism and the saints worshiping before the throne of God. Awesome. And then they are leaving the balcony, quietly, to go have lunch and then recess.
My life, too, will go on. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
It is fourteen months since Lon died. Fourteen months since we gathered in church to give thanks to God for both his life and his death. He had suffered for many, many years with Alzheimer's and was ready to be called out of the fog and into his heavenly home. I have been to several funerals during those fourteen months, mostly of very old people. And at each one, I steel myself. If my eyes mist over, or there is a lump in my throat, I shake it off. I think about something else. I'm in the choir loft. There is singing to do. Tears will not help.
Detachment is my gift to the mourners. I explained this, kind of, to my children's choir last week, as they prepared to sing at the funeral of the 90-year-old grandpa. He was not their grandpa. They were not especially sad about his life coming to an end. And so they were able to sing for those who grieved, to give voice to the family's faith, and to the faith of the deceased. Most of all, their song spoke God's promises to the whole congregation, to those sitting downstairs in church, and even to each one of them. Though only ten or eleven or twelve years old, they have feelings about death. Fearful feelings.
Today it's "Amazing Grace," "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need," and "Lord, it belongs not to my care whether I die or live." This last one is a tough one. My friend Gail at the end did not care whether she lived. Beset with medical problems, feeling hopeless, she found, I hope, peace in hospice care. And surely God was there. Yes?
It is complicated. Life is complicated and messy and one does not always have the buoyancy to meet its challenges. I will feel sad today, but I can not dip too deeply into that sadness. When the fullness rises in my chest, some muscles relax too much and others tighten. There is no steady tall column of air to support the singing. The vocal cords move stiffly and the sounds that come out are not controlled, are not supple.
The problem is that floating above the sadness brings out the pissiness in me. My teeth are clenched against the feelings that rise from my gut, and like flint against steel, those clenched teeth strike sparks, shooting off every which way. I must guard what I say today because my own feelings about death and despair will make me sardonic, grim, sarcastic. I have feelings about death, too. But the anger will not help the singing. And grim determination is not the gift I wish to bring today.
Years ago, after another funeral choir experience, I said to someone who had been downstairs in the pews during the funeral, "Yes, it's a good thing for Christians to gather and rejoice and sing in the face of death." To sing that old evil foe back into his proper place on earth. To loft our music into the air, because God will use those harmonies to open heaven and give us a blessed foretaste of his own feast.
My parrners today in singing are first and second graders from Grace School. I'm covering the hymns. They are singing of baptism and the saints worshiping before the throne of God. Awesome. And then they are leaving the balcony, quietly, to go have lunch and then recess.
My life, too, will go on. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Gargoyles
It's early, and it's dark. I got out of bed to drive my son to the high school, where he has pre-season basketball practice at 6:00 a.m. every day this week.
Along the way were houses decorated with Halloween lights, including one big ol' Prairie-style stucco with a front yard full of illuminated tombstones, gargoyles, jack o'lanterns, and skeletons. Odd that these things were still glowing at 5:45 in the morning. Christmas lights shining at dawn would inspire me.--something about light in darkness burning through the night, waiting and watching for morning. Halloween, on the other hand, is an invitation to play in the darkness, with whatever frightening spirits might live there. Can a gargoyle with a lightbulb inside give you goosebumps or raise the hair on the back of your neck?
One could rant about Halloween being commercialized, just like Christmas. Halloween has become the second-largest merchandising season in the United States. But it's hard to say exactly what "real meaning" was lost in the process. The Halloween of my childhood was Snickers bars. Butterfingers, and that peanut butter taffy that came in orange and black wrappers. The scare factor was just for fun. We had never heard of the Day of the Dead, and my church back then, All Saints' Day was conflated with Reformation. The origins of Halloween were too medieval for a twentieth century American child to take to heart.
I live just one block away from my suburb's border with Chicago's west side. If the weather is dry, we will see 250 to 300 trick-or-treaters at our door on Halloweeen, many of them from the city. There will be babies in strollers, toddlers who can't quite get up the porch steps, six-, seven- and eight-year-olds in costumes from Walmart, and hosts of teens and even young adults in masks and warm-up suits, or not costumed at all. Some will carry an extra trick-or-treat bag "for my sister who's sick" or "for the baby." Out on the sidewalk, the leaves crunch under the scuffling sneakers of every age group. Inside a nervous dog will be at my knee every time I open the door. Some children will be afraid of her--far more scared than they are of Halloween goblins and ghouls.
It's a holiday about cheap and abundant candy--rolls of Smarties at our house, not Snickers. In many houses on our block, no one will be home on Halloween, or they will not answer the door. Others--and it's the same people every year--choose to be hospitable.
Hospitable--like that illuminated gargoyle. There are enough real things to be frightened of in this world. Tonight we only play at fear.
Along the way were houses decorated with Halloween lights, including one big ol' Prairie-style stucco with a front yard full of illuminated tombstones, gargoyles, jack o'lanterns, and skeletons. Odd that these things were still glowing at 5:45 in the morning. Christmas lights shining at dawn would inspire me.--something about light in darkness burning through the night, waiting and watching for morning. Halloween, on the other hand, is an invitation to play in the darkness, with whatever frightening spirits might live there. Can a gargoyle with a lightbulb inside give you goosebumps or raise the hair on the back of your neck?
One could rant about Halloween being commercialized, just like Christmas. Halloween has become the second-largest merchandising season in the United States. But it's hard to say exactly what "real meaning" was lost in the process. The Halloween of my childhood was Snickers bars. Butterfingers, and that peanut butter taffy that came in orange and black wrappers. The scare factor was just for fun. We had never heard of the Day of the Dead, and my church back then, All Saints' Day was conflated with Reformation. The origins of Halloween were too medieval for a twentieth century American child to take to heart.
I live just one block away from my suburb's border with Chicago's west side. If the weather is dry, we will see 250 to 300 trick-or-treaters at our door on Halloweeen, many of them from the city. There will be babies in strollers, toddlers who can't quite get up the porch steps, six-, seven- and eight-year-olds in costumes from Walmart, and hosts of teens and even young adults in masks and warm-up suits, or not costumed at all. Some will carry an extra trick-or-treat bag "for my sister who's sick" or "for the baby." Out on the sidewalk, the leaves crunch under the scuffling sneakers of every age group. Inside a nervous dog will be at my knee every time I open the door. Some children will be afraid of her--far more scared than they are of Halloween goblins and ghouls.
It's a holiday about cheap and abundant candy--rolls of Smarties at our house, not Snickers. In many houses on our block, no one will be home on Halloween, or they will not answer the door. Others--and it's the same people every year--choose to be hospitable.
Hospitable--like that illuminated gargoyle. There are enough real things to be frightened of in this world. Tonight we only play at fear.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Passing out
I gave blood yesterday. It's a boring thing to do, but after a while I started to feel woozy, blurry, nauseous, not good. I knew I was in trouble. As the beeper sounded to alert the technician that I had pumped out the full pint, I hollered, "I'm blacking out here." At least I think I said that. I'm not quite sure what was intention and what actually happened. I know I passed out for a few moments, because I have no memory of anyone rushing over and lowering the head of my chair, yet that is what happened. I woke up and one of the women asked me my name. I knew it. Good for me, I thought. I'm back.
In ordinary life, I am not a fainter, but I am mildly claustrophobic. I discovered this many years ago when I took a tour of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky with some friends. The guide opened a door into the ground, and we all walked down--what, maybe 200 stairs?--into the cave. As I walked, I turned around and couldn't see the top of the stairs or the sky. Looking ahead, I couldn't see the bottom of the stairs, just lots of people. I got shaky. My knees wobbled. When we fistood on the solid rock on the cave floor, we had to wait for the rest of the people to get down the stairs and into the cave. I was restless, looking for the way out. If we were going to tour this hole these rooms that were way, way underground, I needed to get moving. It took careful, concentrated rational thought to keep myself from finding the ranger and saying, "I need to get out of here. Now."
Lying in that lounge chair after giving blood, I felt better when I could ask for apple juice. I felt better when I decided not to eat the pretzels. (I didn't want to throw up.) In Mammoth Cave I felt better when the guide started talking and I could make quiet jokes with my friends. I was pretty annoying, actually, because it took more than a little joking around to manage my panic.
Another mind-altering experience: childbirth. Three times I went to that most powerful of feminine places, undrugged and noisy. You master labor--well, you get through it--by giving yourself over to what your body is trying to do. You think of dark, circular places, places that spiral and open. Of power, of force, of breath and depth and life force. A whole other way of being, away from the sheets you lie on, apart from the room you are in.
It's what I picture when I read the opening verse of Genesis. Without form and void, in the darkness and the deep. The Spirit of God is there, moving, blowing, sweeping as a wind over the waters. The Spirit creates, by speaking. breathing the words, "Let there be."
We come back from these shaky places by asserting our will. I say my name. I ask for juice. I make jokes. I listen to a guide talk about rock formations and rivers inside the earth. I speak the name of the newborn child in my arms. I'm back.
Back from the void of unconsciouness, from physiologic panic, from the waves of labor, breathing, speaking, saying words creates the world as I see it, the world that exists in the mind of God.
In ordinary life, I am not a fainter, but I am mildly claustrophobic. I discovered this many years ago when I took a tour of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky with some friends. The guide opened a door into the ground, and we all walked down--what, maybe 200 stairs?--into the cave. As I walked, I turned around and couldn't see the top of the stairs or the sky. Looking ahead, I couldn't see the bottom of the stairs, just lots of people. I got shaky. My knees wobbled. When we fistood on the solid rock on the cave floor, we had to wait for the rest of the people to get down the stairs and into the cave. I was restless, looking for the way out. If we were going to tour this hole these rooms that were way, way underground, I needed to get moving. It took careful, concentrated rational thought to keep myself from finding the ranger and saying, "I need to get out of here. Now."
Lying in that lounge chair after giving blood, I felt better when I could ask for apple juice. I felt better when I decided not to eat the pretzels. (I didn't want to throw up.) In Mammoth Cave I felt better when the guide started talking and I could make quiet jokes with my friends. I was pretty annoying, actually, because it took more than a little joking around to manage my panic.
Another mind-altering experience: childbirth. Three times I went to that most powerful of feminine places, undrugged and noisy. You master labor--well, you get through it--by giving yourself over to what your body is trying to do. You think of dark, circular places, places that spiral and open. Of power, of force, of breath and depth and life force. A whole other way of being, away from the sheets you lie on, apart from the room you are in.
It's what I picture when I read the opening verse of Genesis. Without form and void, in the darkness and the deep. The Spirit of God is there, moving, blowing, sweeping as a wind over the waters. The Spirit creates, by speaking. breathing the words, "Let there be."
We come back from these shaky places by asserting our will. I say my name. I ask for juice. I make jokes. I listen to a guide talk about rock formations and rivers inside the earth. I speak the name of the newborn child in my arms. I'm back.
Back from the void of unconsciouness, from physiologic panic, from the waves of labor, breathing, speaking, saying words creates the world as I see it, the world that exists in the mind of God.
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