Collect for a cactus flower

 

God of houseplants, 

whose exuberance is manifested in Christmas cactuses that bloom again in Lent, 

bloom in us in these grey days and bring us to yourself 

so that we may bloom in you in unity of love and purpose,

bright pink God!

No salt

 I made Buttermilk Bread today. Buttermilk because I had a jug of it left over from another cooking project a couple weeks ago. Today because it's a Saturday, and if I think through the project ahead of time, I can squeeze the risings and the baking of a loaf of bread in between the driving and the coming home, dropping my daughter off for bowling, for swimming, for social club. And picking her up again.

It's 4:30 in the afternoon and I've eaten my first slice — the heel — of today's loaf. Crispy golden crust, profoundly bland interior. It's underbaked and doughy. Worse, I forgot the salt. Imagine white flour combined with immaculately white buttermilk and mushed into lumpy paste and that's a pretty fair description of what I just ate. 

The bread is back in the oven, minus one slice, for remedial baking. We'll see. There's salted butter in the refrigerator, which might help the eating. But truly, if you'd like to discover what it means to be "the salt of the earth" via negation, I've got what you need. 

And isn't that kinda like ... no life lesson here, other than read the recipe more carefully, or just plain pay attention! 

Plain collect for Transfiguration

 "Come with us to the plain" is the last line of the hymn for Transfiguration "'Tis Good, Lord, to Be Here."

In collect form:

Transfigured Jesus of the mountaintop

Who speaks with Moses and Elijah as we watch, squinting, mouths agape.

You are too bright for us. 

Walk down the mountain path again, trip over tangled roots, skin your knees. 

Speak with us. Know us. Shine the brightness of your mercy upon us. 

So that when we reach the long stretches of plain, we can keep going. 

Amen

Transfiguration Sunday 

February 27, 2022

Still perverse, still puzzling

Two months since I last posted, and now it's late in February, which means blog anniversary time. Time to post, even in the absence of an opening image. Even without something clear to say or discover. 

In summer I drink my coffee at the table in the backyard. I look around and there's always something to kick off a blog post:  dog-walkers outside the fence, sparrows rattling the aluminum gutters, jets or helicopters passing overhead, overgrown thyme creeping onto the patio, cardinals on the fence or high in the tree across the street. 

In the living room in late winter the scene is all my clutter. Books recently opened, books awaiting their turn in the queue. Yarn of pink and purple tinged with gold whose destiny remains TBD. Yarn that's becoming a sweater to be worn before it spring arrives. The knitting is tight. My hands are tired. There are photos, a crumpled up piece of paper that's been sitting on the piano bench for a couple days, a small journal with a pen clipped inside that's collecting — collects. 

A week ago, in the spirit of good things to keep doing post-pandemic, I attended an online collect-writing workshop from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The speaker was Irish poet, storyteller and public theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama. 

Within the liturgy collects (accent on the first syllable) collect (accent on the second syllable) the intentions of the people into a prayer, often a single sentence, with the emphasis on a single petition, preferably terse. In the interest of not creating run-on sentences, I would argue that it might be wise to punctuate a collect with more than one period, thus creating multiple sentences, while remembering that a sentence must include a verb to be a true sentence. The goal is terseness. 

A collect has five parts: 1) naming God; 2) saying a little more about God; 3) stating what you're asking for; 4) explaining briefly why that's a thing, or what that thing will produce in you or in the world; and 5) a closing, which might be a doxology or another formula or a simple amen. Padraig calls this "a bird of praise" which invokes, to me, whimsy. You leave the prayer with a smile and a wink, because God understands what it's like to be human. 

I left the Sunday afternoon session willing to try writing "a collect a day." Like many good intentions (including this blog), it didn't last long without some modification. I've written something in the little collect journal three times in the last seven days, which is not nothing, but which is not strong conviction either. 

These things don't flow out of me. There's a lot of ink on the page that's crossed out. There's a moment in the writing where you really have to think. Kind of like where you in Wordle after your second guess, when it's going to take some paring away of possibilities to arrive at an answer.

At the online collect-writing session, the first prompt was "A Samaritan woman came to draw water ... " Everyone, it seemed, was familiar with the story of the Samaritan woman's encounter with Jesus at the well  in John 4:4-26. In fact, to a group of mostly female spiritual seekers, this was like catnip. The prayers that were shared with in-person readings and in the Zoom chat had thirst and living water imagery flowing all over the place, and they were lovely, all of them. 

(Just now, auto-correct twice turned my mis-typing of "thirst" into "Christ." Is this how signs and wonders appear in the digital age?)

My collect was inspired by the daily work of drawing water: 

Jesus the carpenter, who hauled the wood and swept up the sawdust at the end of the day, help me to be careful and deliberate in my routine tasks, so that as I complete these jobs, I am free to think more deeply when those chances come. Amen.  

(God forbid I should do the obvious.)

Forms and structure are limits, and limits force insight. You have to make choices and your choices are limited. Naming God puts you in a relationship where you have to figure out what you want from God. Identifying a human need will point to a name or quality of God that fulfills the need. The collects I've scribbled down lately tend to start with part 4 of the form -- what am I trying to do better in the world or what do I seem unable to do and really need help with. I may (perversely) have something backwards here — God as seen through my head rather than God as an absolute something standing (or otherwise metaphor-a-sized) way outside of me. 

It's been a long winter, with more gray days, it seems, than usual. I've been preoccupied with snow and cold and car repairs, along with sinus headaches and quirky aches from a January fall on the ice. I've spent almost two hours on this blog post and the caffeine that got it going is wearing off. I've been at this blogging thing for 15 years, though less productively of late. My second post advocated for yielding, and I did not know then how much I would have yielded by now. 

But here I am (or here I stand, if I want to be Luther-esque about it), still trying to collect a few thoughts,  turn them around at different angles, puzzle my way through a post, hoping that when I go back to read it later, it's more coherent than I thought it was when I wrote it.  I may have to compose a collect about that later.

Dancing around the Christmas tree

A story my mother often told came from the Christmas when I was three. My sister Linda was two, and Karen (I should not forget to mention her) was just a baby. According to my mother she came into the living room one day shortly before Christmas and discovered that the Christmas tree had been pulled away from the wall out into the center of the room. And I had been the one who had done it, because, I said, I wanted to dance around the Christmas tree with Linda. 

I don't remember this happening — how, according to my mother, miraculously, no ornaments fell off the tree and nothing was broken. How she was so astounded she couldn't really administer a scolding. And I've never heard how the tree got moved back into place. 

My mother is known to embroider stories from the family past. I often tell others, believe half of what you hear — I just can't tell you which half. But I am absolutely certain that the part of the story about three-year-old me wanting to dance around the Christmas tree is true. I don't mean "true" in the sense that it might point to a deeper truth. Not at all. There's a picture in my head of little girls in folk dresses, gathered skirts, snug bodices, caps and aprons, lined up and silhouetted at the bottom of a page in the Augsburg Christmas Annual — "The Annual of Christmas Literature and Art" that we girls pored over as Christmas approached. Printed on high-quality paper, the oversized pages were filled with articles about Christmas customs around the world, inspiring stories I could not yet read, and beautifully illustrations of the nativity story. If you looked deep and long into Mary's beautiful face and Joseph's tender eyes, you could imagine in your heart what it was to hold the Baby Jesus, what it was to be there on that most holy night. 

Those girls in their dancing clogs and braids weren't much more than woodcut clip art, filling space at the bottom of a page about something else — butter cookies, perhaps. But to me at three and a half, they seemed to hold the key to a proper Christmas celebration. Maybe there was a tree in that line-up as well, decorated with candles set upright on the tips of the branches in little tin holders. Maybe this is more detail than could possibly have been incorporated in that little picture more than 60 years ago. Maybe my mother is not the only one who embroiders her stories. 

I don't know how Linda and I could have danced around the tree to my satisfaction, just the two of us (though much credit goes to her for faithfully following her big sister — and not for the last time). What dances did we know? What childish steps would have worked with the Robert Shaw Christmas carol recordings that were the sound of Christmas in our house in the 1950s? And we could hardly have encircled the tree. We'd have been more like a little two-car wind-up train chugging around a circular track on the floor.  Though perhaps, if Mother had not come in quite so soon, the dance would have fulfilled my childish dream. I've dreamed many other "perfect Christmas" dreams since that time. They are more perfect, more treasured in memory than they were as tried, too hard sometimes, to bring them into being. 

This year, as last year, Christmas is hard, even without dreams for a perfect celebration. This is what I've been saying to myself all day today. 

Christmas is hard this year, as Linda and I made plans for a COVID-safe Christmas Day with an elderly mother, unvaccinated family members and Zoom. 

Christmas is hard this year, as I click on yet another news story about how quickly the omicron variant is spreading. 

Christmas is hard this year. The aggravations and negativity I manage to sweep aside in the morning come creeping back in the afternoon. I have yet to bake a single cookie, nor have I grated the orange rind for the cranberry bread. I'm drinking white wine from the big bottle opened at Thanksgiving. It's not very good, especially on its own in the evening. 

And my heart is weighed down by news of old friends having sober discussions about cancer and thinking of those who keep vigil with the dying. Sad memories surface. It's hard. 

I subscribe to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation emails. Some days I even read them. This morning's was an excerpt from a Christmas piece by Kathleen Norris whose writing did much to form my mid-life faith. Here's what spoke to me this morning:

It is precisely because we are weary, and poor in spirit, that God can touch us with hope. This is not an easy truth. It means that we do accept our common lot, and take up our share of the cross. It means that we do not gloss over the evils we confront every day, both within ourselves and without. Our sacrifices may be great. But as the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas.

A proper Christmas celebration takes up the cross. That is where hope appears, right there, in the darkness. 

Hope appears in the care of the poor and hungry for others who are poor and hungry, in the care of the grieving by those who have known grief or who know that someday they surely will. Shreds of hope hang in the anxious or rueful conversations we share with one another, in the mirrored shrugs where we look at one another and acknowledge our lack of wisdom, our vulnerability. 

Hope appears in the Incarnation — not in a glowing halo of divine presence, but most clearly and truly in the smooth and slippery skin of a newborn child, the in-drawing of that first breath, the baby nuzzling his mother's breast, encircled in her arms, who will soon be greeted by rejoicing, dancing shepherds and glittering earthly gifts from the majestic procession of the magi. God with us, like us, on our behalf, so that we can care for one another and celebrate even a hard Christmas, perhaps daring to pull the tree away from the wall for some dancing. There is faith and love and Christmas joy in that circle of hopeful dancers around the tree — if you take the time to look, or better, just let it come. 

The tree in my living room in 2021 is encircled with gifts, wrapped last night. I have a new patchwork Christmas tree skirt this year, also a circle, pieced by me and quilted shortly after Christmas last year by sister Linda. (There's a present for Karen -- she's there, too.) The muslin angel on my tree, made by me in the 1980s, would have pleased my three-year-old self, with embroidered ribbon around her waist and red trim on her skirt and sleeves. 

I dared to move this tree after it was fully decorated, inching it off to the side a bit. Not for dancing, but to make room for my favorite chair, the place where I watch the December sky brighten in the morning and where I look deep into the trees' branches in the evening, seeking peace and hope for a new day.

Second Sunday of Advent

I went out walking yesterday morning. The weather app on my phone said rain from 9 a.m. on, through the afternoon and into the evening. I needed the exercise. So out I went at 8:15 to jam 45 minutes of fitness into my life before getting dressed for Sunday School and church. 

My walks are simple: walk 20 minutes in the "away" direction and then walk back home. Some mornings there are lots of right-angle turns through the grid of urban/suburban streets. Some mornings I walk mostly straight west without making decisions. It was a straight-street day yesterday. I saw a couple of runners  and a few quiet dog-walkers on a grey, grey day. Plus a long-legged walker in a pale orange hoodie, who quickly outpaced me. Brown leaves crunched underfoot -- oak leaves, the last to come down from the trees. 

I was trudging along next to an shoulder-high hedge when something yellow caught my eye. A tiny flower, poking through a mesh of unlit Christmas lights, the kind you drape over bushes, quick and easy coverage, no light strings to untangle later. It was a tiny, perfect forsythia blossom. Not plastic, not silk -- a real flower with a few green leaves on a hedge that was badly out sync with the natural cycle of fall, winter, spring.  

One little flower. An Advent thing. 

Behold, a Branch is growing

Of loveliest form and grace,

As prophets sung, foreknowing;

It springs from Jesse's race

And bears one little Flow'r

In midst of coldest winter,

zAt deepest midnight hour.

"Faith + hope = confidence." This was the formula in the Richard Rohr devotion in my email inbox this morning. Optimism is a gift of temperament, he said. Some of us are wired that way. Confidence is not like patience, which he said can be learned through practice. (I agree. Continual practice.) Confidence, faith plus hope, is a sign of participation in the life of God.

The sun will not rise today until 7:04, about the time I hope to hit the "Publish" button. I'm awake far too early, thinking Monday thoughts and cares. Soon I'll watch the electric candles in the living room window turn off one by one as they sense the morning light. I watched them come on yesterday afternoon, shortly after 3 p.m. -- such a dark and dingy day it was. 

The sky is gray this morning and moving, with a wind advisory. I won't be out walking in a westerly direction. It's chilly enough here in my chair. 

Where is this "life of God" of which mystics speak? Where do I look? 

In the wintry branches moving against the brightening sky? In the disordered flower on the forsythia hedge eight or ten blocks away from my home? In the hope and faith of cancer patients or ALS warriors treasuring life all the more gracefully because they must fight for it? In the laboring woman about to give birth? In the social justice advocates who fight for the dignity of Black lives? 

Somewhere in me? Today? 

Image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

All Saints Sunday 2021

The first, far-too-early sunset of Central Standard Time has cast blurs of pink and purple all the way across the sky. I saw them even from the east-facing windows of my living room. Not quite 5 p.m. and trees, evergreens, everything close to the earth was in shadow. If I had a fireplace I'd be thinking about building a fire, more for the light than the heat.

Metaphors were everywhere this morning in church on All Saints Sunday, from the pilgrim throng to the throne of God and the saints singing in glory. And the golden evening brightening in the west in the hymn "For All the Saints," just like the real one here in the Chicago suburbs a little while ago. 

I am steeped in all these images from a lifetime of All Saints celebrations, funerals, Easter services and prayers for the dying. On some days, in some circumstances, they open up the heavens for me, or lift the veil or something else -- alas, something metaphorical -- between life and death, between what can be known and what can't. On other days -- well, I can only marvel at the human poetic imagination.

Poesis, philosophically, is making something -- making something that did not exist before, such as a poem, a play, or a musical composition. You make it by speaking or putting words on paper, by singing or recording notes on a staff. Not as impressive as God speaking light and darkness, dry land and living creatures into existence in Genesis, but still, the making of a poem (or a blog post) is a creative act. There's no more blank page, there's something there. 

So it follows that other somethings must have been brought into being by other creators. And are those things brought into being real things, or just images of some greater and more perfect reality? I'm in far deeper than I set out to be. The little I know about Platonic ideals is nipping at my frontal cortex, and since what I know is indeed very little and I am not a methodical thinker, it seems best to back out of this mess. 

And return to pondering those metaphors which seem entirely other-world to me lately. Not as in heavenly, but as belonging to a very specific world or tradition within the church and western literature and liturgy, which may be slipping away. Do they still have any meaning for us today? Would they have any meaning at all outside the church, away from being among those who attend worship services or read Christian devotionals? 

There is, of course, the music associated with these texts, music brought to the texts to bring them more emotion, more dimension. You don't have to know the Bible to grasp the Brahms Requiem or the Verdi.

For me today, the best text from this morning was this one* which is very direct:

All of us go down to the dust, 
but even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia. 

We've all seen decay, we've seen the ashes. We've stood at the graveside. We all die, yet we rejoice in the beauty and mystery that is life on earth. Our brains can grasp -- or perhaps create -- that transcendence. 

Thanks be to -- God?

Washington Island sunset 

*Evangelical Lutheran Worship #223, setting by Matthew Mummert