Anxious

I've been reading articles about anxiety lately--nothing authoritative or definitive or diagnostic or anything like that. Just people writing for newspapers and the web about anxiety. It seems to be the affliction of the age.

What I remember from one article was someone saying that the cure for anxiety was realizing that you can handle all those things you think you can't. Not much comfort there, if that's the big secret. But it's probably the truth. You get to the actual thing, and whaddaya know, you handle it. Because there really aren't a lot of other choices. But I find I fret and funk over things that are on the horizon--things that I have no choice but to live through.

Long ago I was in a stage production of Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology"--lots of characters telling about their lives from the graveyard of a small town. I didn't perform "Lucinda Matlock," but it was one of the upbeat, inspiring poems that showed up toward the end of the show,and it was beautifullly spoken by an older actress (well, older than me) who radiated joy and gentleness and ferocity too. You can read the whole thing here. It tells the story of the woman's long life, full of happiness, troubles, and small pleasures. Lucinda ends with this:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters,   20 Life is too strong for you— It takes life to love Life.

Those last two lines have stuck with me, as a challenge, but also as something I puzzle over. That  Life—what makes it deserving of a capital letter? It's kind of a cheap solution on the poet's part--capitalizing the word and creating a little aphorism, instead of thinking of something more original. Though perhaps that is how is the character of this hard-working woman would put it, to her grandchildren and neighbors and others who complained: "Ach! Life is too strong for you. You have to live your life in order to love it."

So maybe anxiety is the affliction of this age because we live so much of our life at a distance from what's real. Too much screen time, too much time alone in cars and at desks. Too much thinking about how cold the lake water is. Not enough time riding the waves.

Believing, behaving, belonging

This 19th century mission hymn followed the sermon yesterday at my church.

Hark, the voice of Jesus calling,"
Who will go and work today?
Fields are white and harvests waiting,
Who will bear the sheaves away?"
Loud and long the master calls you;
Rich reward he offers free.
Who will answer, gladly saying,
"Here am I. Send me, send me"?

It's got a singable tune in a good key that clips along at a steady pace, with the occasional dah-de-dah dotted rhythm to keep it interesting. I remember I enjoyed singing this as a child.

But to me it fell short as a response to the gospel lesson and the sermon preached on the sending of the seventy (Luke 10:1–11, 16–20):

Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” . . .  Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

I stopped singing for a stanza to figure out what I didn't like about this hymn. What made it seem so 19th century imperialist? I looked through the text to see if it said anything about the voice of Jesus calling folks to cure the sick or start hospitals, or about the fields being in poverty. Nope, it didn't. All people need, it seems, is someone to preach at them, or "tell the love of Jesus."

Words. They're important. But they're not much without a Word incarnate.

The Fourth

I love fireworks. I don't ooh and ahh with the crowd. I just grin at the sky.  What a good way to use gunpowder.

In the grocery store line this morning I checked in with my RSS feed and saw this in Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:

If we feel pride, it should be in the accomplishments of our fellow citizens and in any contributions we ourselves have made toward making our country and community a better place, however small and local. Pride of simply being born American leads to hubris, which leads to bigotry and belligerence. For pride to be authentic, it must be something we feel we have earned.

I saw accomplishments to be proud of this morning--the Oak Park parade this morning was made up of civic groups, with modest signs and colorful t-shirts. There was a gay pride marching band (who says the fun has to end when you leave school?), the Oak Park Art League, therapy dogs, baseball teams for kids, the high school football team--tall and gangly, the West Suburban Special Recreation Association bus, the Friends of the Library, the Democratic Party of Oak Park, dancers, even acrobats--pleasant, marching, waving, happy to be part of something celebrating life in America.

Tonight's fireworks were at the high school. A peaceful assembly of good citizens filled the grandstand on one side and the tennis courts and streets on the other. Kids with glow sticks, folding chairs, the noise of conversation. Sparks blew our way and a few came all the way to the ground. Just the setting--the sports fields with the school looming in the background are signs of community pride and investment in the future.

It all sounds so upstanding. And it is.

Still moon

Is it possible that I can see the moon moving in the sky? It seems like it, and no, I'm not driving in the car and claiming that the moon is following me. Which is an interesting, spooky feeling, but not what I'm talking about.

During the time I've been sitting in my backyard, the moon has traveled from behind my house to eleven o'clock in the sky. It has certainly moved. The sense that I am seeing it move comes, I think, from looking past and through grapevine leaves that are tumbling off their support and bouncing gently in the breeze. My brain thinks the leaves are still or stable and attributes their motion, in one plane anyway, to the moon.

I see the moon, the moon sees me.
God bless the moon, and God bless me.

Because the truth is, I am moving, too, on this rotating earth. Though I seem still.

The moon and I, moving through this universe.

Work them out in me

This is embarrassing to admit, but the big question I've been asking myself lately is, what is life for? Embarrassing because, well, at my age, you'd think I'd either a) know; or b) have made up a pretty good answer for myself. But honestly, this is the question rattling through my brain: why?

And while it seems I'm asking in a general sense--like, is there a purpose to the whole planet--I'm also asking in a personal sense: what is my life for? I don't think I'd be asking about the larger purpose if I felt I had a personal answer.

So yes, it really is all about me.

The thing I liked about having small children is that I always knew what to do and why it was important. The kids were important. Letting them know that they could trust me was important. As they grew, it was important that they knew they were loved and that they loved in return. It was important that they knew themselves and came to understand that the world is complicated and interesting.

I worked at all of these things, reflecting back to them a world that made sense, a world that cared for them and that was a place where their actions made a difference.

Funny how when it's just about me, I find it harder to keep batting that balloon up in the air, hard to think that life is anything but a cycle of "getting and spending" or of failing to control the weeds in the garden or the clutter on my desk. Hard to know just what I'm supposed to do.

So yeah, keywords for indexing this blog post would include "empty nest syndrome."

The world goes on--a fact which contributes significantly to my struggle. My husband and I had sex and had babies so that the babies could grow up and have sex and more babies. And yes, this next generation has some different ideas and believes that it's all happening to them afresh, but it's pretty much nothing more than the world going around. Things don't move toward an end of history, or toward "happily ever after" and if they did, you'd still have to explain what's happening in the "after."

So is it just genes struggling to will out because that's what DNA makes them do?

Gosh, in the words of my heroine, Nellie Forbush, "I just can't work myself up to getting that low." (South Pacific, Act 1, Scene 1.)

And because I can't--because I'm sitting on the couch writing about what's the reason for it all--I'm noticing God in the room. Because it seems just asking if there is a reason for life invokes God's presence.

If I were a decided atheist I might not be calling that presence God. It might be reason or purpose or just the awesomeness of living. And while I do call it God, I also call it a working out of purpose, of love, of compassion--things that happen in relationships.

Work them out in me, O Lord.

Pretending together

Knee, shoulder, hip--I awoke with aches and pains this morning after sitting through two performances of our lower-grade musical yesterday, on the floor stage right. The kids pretty much knew what to do when they got onstage but many had trouble listening for when to do it. I hissed "go, go now" and "leave, leave, get off the stage." Supported success.

But with the awkwardness of scooting around on the floor also comes the fun of hanging out with kids while we all pretend something together. That's what I love about theater--the fact that we all somehow agree to pretend together. With a paper horizon hung on the wall behind the platform stage, with costumes pulled from closets at home or made from baseball caps, yarn, fleece and other stuff from the aisles at Hobby Lobby, we had a ranch onstage, a thunderstorm, a stampede, a couple of square dances, horses, longhorns, cowboys, and a prairie full of four-year-old prairie dogs with little feet kicking in the air.

A couple hundred adults went along with all of this. They weren't pulled in and transported to another time and place the way they would have been in a movie theatre. They were well aware of gym lights overhead, babies in the audience, and the many leaps of belief required of them to follow the story of "The Cowboy and the Black-Eyed Pea." But even so, you lay the logic of the story out there and people follow. They go along with all the "what ifs."

I staged my first play at the age of ten. It was a historical epic in four scenes (actually four pieces of notebook paper) with five characters and two romantic sub-plots. I rehearsed it with four friends, invited to be in the cast, and the single rehearsal didn't go all that well. It devolved into the two boys climbing on chairs and throwing bits of paper at each other. But we had a performance in front of the whole class one afternoon. It fell short of what I had visualized in my head, but adults were impressed. And I was marked as way more serious about practically everything than my classmates. I went on to direct a version of "Peter Pan" in sixth grade in lessons led by a student teacher. That met with more success probably because the crowd control issue went much better. And when Peter came to the rescue and jumped onto the piano bench to confront Captain Hook, it was truly thrilling.

At least I think so. Maybe I'm so wrapped up in believing in what I create that I don't notice that others are observers more than believers. It's possible. That would be a dangerous way to live real life--though plenty of people do that. But it's a great way to escape for a while.

Consolation

Before this afternoon's St. Matthew Passion rehearsal began, my friend Laura, the orchestra I organist, said "I have something to show you." She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a small green book with "J. S. Bach/St. Matthew Passion" on the cover. She opened it and showed me my father's name, Herbert Gotsch, on the flyleaf, in the unmistakeable large-and-small cap style he used to write his name on books and music. My brand-new blue Bärenreiter Urtext has my name, G. Gotsch, on the cover in a similar large-and-small-caps style. It is a conscious imitation.

The small green book is a miniature score, with a German introduction dated 1929. There are no notes in the score, nothing that tells me how he came to have this or what he may have done with it. Laura found it at Concordia where she works; when Daddy died in 1984, we gave much of his library to the music department there, where he had taught organ for 35 years and had conducted Bach's St. John Passion on a Palm Sunday long ago, when I was in second grade. I remember discovering as I sat through the performance that recitatives were short but arias went on forever. I also remember the fun of sitting on my parents' bed watching Daddy put on tails and all the studs and buttons and suspenders that went with them.

Laura said she would give me the book after tomorrow's performance. She treasured it because my dad was her organ teacher and dear to her, but as she said, he was even more dear to me. As things turned out, she gave it to me after today's rehearsal. She had thought she would use it to follow along on the movements where she wasn't playing, but she decided instead to just listen--and rest.

Somewhere on the shelf in my living room, or perhaps in the sheet music cabinet that was my Grandma Gotsch's and then my father's, is a choral score for the St. Matthew Passion, with my grandfather's name, also Herbert Gotsch, written on the cover. It is a distinctive signature, with a consistent slant and carefully spaced letters. My father's signature looks much like it. The application of the same handwriting method taught in Lutheran parochial schools from one generation to the next? Or another conscious imitation?

Grandpa Gotsch would have sung the St. Matthew Passion with "the old Chicago Bach choir," as my dad always called it. I am singing it with it the Bach Cantata Vespers choir at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest tomorrow afternoon at 4:00. Laura is the orchestra I continuo organ. Steve Wente, another  student of my father's is at the part II organ. Up in the balcony, playing organ with the soprano choir singing "O Lamm Gottes," the chorale tune in the first movement, is Dennis Zimmer, yet another former student of my dad's.

I'm sure there are many other interwoven stories that could be told about the singers and orchestral musicians in this performance, as we take our place in a tradition extending back through the centuries to Mendelssohn and ultimately to Leipzig.

The Matthew Passion is a very emotional piece of music. This became especially clear to me when I watched a DVD of the Berlin Philharmonic performing the St. Matthew Passion "ritualized" by Peter Sellars. Sellars is an opera stage director and the video recording of the performance is deeply moving. The physical movement of the chorus and the soloists reveals much about Bach's poetic structure. Their faces reveal the emotion.

There is lots of suffering in this Passion. Jesus' suffering, yes, of course--but the words of Jesus are limited to the actual gospel text. It's the arias that intensify the sense of suffering--the expressions of the believer's grief at Jesus' suffering. And the arias go on forever, just as they did when I was a child. They are, however, tender; Jesus suffering invokes compassion as much or more than guilt in believers.

For a while at this afternoon's rehearsal, I was thinking about why this piece seems to be so focused on suffering--not on theologies of redemption or justification related to the cross, not on heaven or life eternal. Duples and appoggiaturas, oboes d'amore, violins, and especially the alto solosist say over and over again, "my beloved Jesus, it's unfair that you suffer," and "I will care for you and suffer with you." And to what end: ultimately in the last bass aria, "Make my soul pure in you."

Suffering was surely a more obvious, unavoidable part of life in the 18th century. People were much more likely to die before reaching old age. Women died in childbirth. Children died. Death happened in homes, not hospitals. People died or were horribly injured in accidents and in war. So many things that science and medicine fix now could not be alleviated then. So people needed a Jesus who suffered with them, and people accepted a Jesus who suffered and lost his life.

In our time, we hide suffering, and we hide from it. There's a chorus setting of Matthew's report that people mocked Jesus by saying "If he's the king, why doesn't he come down from the cross? And then we'd believe in him." I think there's a modern version of this false belief. It's the one that goes "I can't believe in a God who allows children to suffer. If God is so powerful, why doesn't he do something about that?"

Bach shows us a God who suffers, and who suffers and dies with us, and in whom our sin and suffering is transformed into faith and righteousness. As I sang the stanza of "O Sacred Head" this afternoon whose text prays for Christ's presence at our death, I thought of people I know who are facing suffering in the weeks and months ahead, and painfully, of my own children and the hard times inevitable in their futures. Tomorrow I'll carry my dad's miniature score with me and think of how cancer weakened him and robbed him of his life. I'll think of my grandfather's dementia, and my husband's. And maybe even of my own death--sure to come someday.

And I'll bless a God who in Jesus is present in all of that anguish, and who transforms it to peace.