Absent

Twenty years. 

I’ve formed the words and said them, quietly, or silently, many times in the last week. Twenty years — always ending with a period. Full stop, with a slight shake of the head, a gaze into nothingness, focus blurred on time itself. 

Twenty years. 

It’s been twenty years since my husband and partner, Lon Grahnke, passed away at age 56, after long years with early-onset dementia. 

What does time feel like? I’m riding on the back of an elephant, way up high, the past somewhere under the animal’s heavy feet as they plod through grass, weeds and gravel from the past. I’m sitting on a giant bubble, the size of my living room. It’s the same space inside it has always been. Yes, the couch has changed, there’s a new chair, but it sits in the window where Lon’s leather armchair sat. I’m looking at the same wall, looking through the same dining room to the same hall. 

What’s inside the bubble? Twenty years of living that Lon has missed: our kids’ growing up, graduations and weddings, a son’s funeral. Other milestones, personal and cultural: anniversaries, grey hair, sore knees. Presidential elections, TV streaming through wifi, Bruce Springsteen at age 76.  

Time has me both grateful and spooked. Lon died on September 1, 2006, and 20 years later, to the day, I lay on the floor of the room where we first met. How did that happen? The green room of the community theatre where we both auditioned for a production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” is now a yoga studio. It’s now a more open space, and certainly much, much cleaner. The lingering gritty smell of old cigarette smoke is gone, but ghosts look down from the tin tiles of the ceiling. I lie there and let go during the Tuesday class’s final savasana. My mind circles the corners of my being that hold the grief and yearns for and wonders about my younger self. 

Wendell Berry died this week, and his poem appeared in my social media feed:

The Loved Ones
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

Sometimes I dream about Lon. Not often. Usually, when I wake up remembering my dreams they’re run-of-the-mill anxiety dreams about rehearsals running amok, performances gone horribly wrong, or panic over a college class I forgot to attend and needed to drop. 

But once or twice I’ve had a dream in which Lon appears in his blue oxford-cloth shirt, khaki pants, and red tie and he’s totally coherent, recovered from dementia. Somehow the plaques and tangles in his brain healed themselves and unremarkably, he has rejoined family life. He’s standing in the kitchen, talking about his day in the newsroom, just like before.

Huh, I say to myself when I wake up. Huh. 

Twenty years—are they over and done? Am I the absent one? From what? Can I hold it all? Or at least sometimes, live and breathe past, present and future all together?

Acquainted with grief

Madonna and child statue c. 1450, St.Marien Wallfahrtskirche Ziegelheim

A bottle of Bell's Amber Ale in my right hand, a fistful of tortilla chips in my left, I sit down and reach for the laptop to write something in which I contemplate Holy Week. Or contemplate something. 

Easter's on the early side this year, and the weather has been wandering back and forth from promise-of-spring temperatures to so-cold-for-March. Some days the sun shines brightly, but never all day, never for long. The tulips in the yard are far enough along for the rabbits to nibble the tips off the leaves. The forsythia are blooming, sprays of yellow flowers that float above the ground which is still blanketed with last fall's leaves. One hard rainstorm and the forsythia will be done for this year.

Do I need greenery, deciduous greenery? The bare shapes of the maples and oaks and all the others are interesting aesthetically, but all they seem to say to souls is, this is it for the moment. Hold on, keep waiting. We may -- may -- deliver again this year.

Grief caught me in morning worship today. And as it happens, it was a hymn that did it: "The Tree of Life," the text that begins "There in God's garden/stands the Tree of Wisdom." I quote it here so that you do not confuse it with many other "tree of life" hymns. The text, a little unconventional, is from Hungary in the early 1600s, now with a paraphrased translation by Eric Routley. (Read it here.) 

Stanza four ends: 

Hear what the Voice says, "Come to me, ye weary!

Give me your sickness, give me all your sorrow,

I will give blessing."

Stanza five begins: 

This is my ending, this my resurrection;

into your hands, Lord, I commit my spirit.

At age 20, or 30, or even 40, I didn't know—perhaps wouldn't have believed—that grief can fill up a whole hollowed-out body. I may have seen people act this on the stage—MacDuff receiving the news that his wife and children had been slaughtered, or some histrionics in a more modern play. But that was acting, and I turned quickly away from such hard emotions. I didn't know that grief, for real, can suddenly collapse your gut and take away your breath and you need to put your hand on the wall or the table or the back of a chair until your diaphragm relaxes and again draws air into your lungs.

That happens to you and you always remember it. In fact, it catches you and happens again and again. Hard lump in the throat, eyes filling with tears, no breath. You stop singing or walking or working or whatever you're doing and feel the feeling. You feel the gaping absence of what or who you've lost, and your own gaping presence, still here, living with emptiness. 

It was one of those moments that caught me this morning. I paused to feel it and to respect it. And to call up the sweet-sad memories of the dead, the missing. 

But stanza six of the hymn arrangement called for a soprano descant. I've learned in the past ten or twenty years how to recover and keep singing. To open again, breathe again, seriously, playfully, joyfully. Amen. 

In much of my life I've tended to spend Holy Week looking forward to Easter. Maybe this is because I've almost always been singing in church choirs and even as the choir is singing sad and solemn tunes at Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, it's also rehearsing bright D-major music for Easter Sunday. But also, temperamentally, I lean toward comedy--the plays that turn out well, the novels where all the girls get married in the end, Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale," where, after repentance and tribulation, the kingdom, sadder but wiser, is restored.

But in me, in my body, that gut-strike of grief lives on, recording the truth of the utter shittiness of a world where things regularly go wrong and so little can be counted on to go right. So much is encompassed in the rounded vowels of sorrow. Here at the beginning of Holy Week 2026, what I see when I look at the black outlines of the trees against the heavy grey sky is Christ on the cross, in pain, alone, suffocating, suffering. 

And I know that God gets it. The giant gut-punch of all that's wrong with the world. 

Twenty years of making a blog

I came to a point in the middle of my knitting last night where the pattern in the row I was knitting was not matching up with the pattern two rows below. It's lace; the pattern is the whole point. The group of five plain stitches in the row I was knitting had to be centered on a group of three stitches below it, but that group of three had somehow turned into five, with holes intentionally made by yarnovers falling in the wrong places. As I studied the work in front of me I saw that midway through a previous row my eyes had slipped down to the wrong row on the chart and there was much more that was wrong than just a few stitches. I remembered that the previous right-side row had ended with only half a repeat of the pattern. Now I knew why. 

There was no easy remedy. Some knitting mistakes can be fixed with just a five or ten-minute digression. To fix this one I was going to need to rip out two rows, which doesn't sound that bad -- except that each row currently holds approximately 350 stitches long. The silk yarn is slippery as a guppy in a fish tank, and the pattern is complicated, so they have to be taken out one by one. When a stitch slips away from me  I have to grab it fast and then solve the puzzle of how to bring it back into the pattern. 

Mistakes and correcting them. Isn't that a lot like life? 

I've long had a rule for myself about mistakes in knitting or sewing: you don't have to fix them before you put the project down and go to bed, but you do have to rip out the mistake so that when you next pick up the work you can go forward rather than back. This has kept messed-up projects from spending an indefinite amount of time tossed into a corner or abandoned altogether. I don't like to get up in the morning and look at what went so wrong the night before. Late last night however I put the knitting down with a couple hundred stitches left to rip out and a long, twisty strand of yarn lying on the couch cushion. It's full of static electricity; it's not going anywhere. 

I am a maker. Not in the larger economic sense of job-creator, business person, technology innovator, youthful start-up entrepreneur, etc. Just in the humble sense of always being in the middle of making something: shawls, sweaters, socks, quilts, handwoven dish towels, occasionally even a meal. We are a category of people, we makers. I am more likely to give you something I've made if you, too, make things, because I know you'll appreciate it. 

I started this blog on February 26, 2006 -- twenty years ago. I was at a point in life where I was waiting to see what was next. I had sent one child off to college the previous fall; the other two would soon be in high school. My husband was in a nursing home with late-stage dementia. Transitions all around. What do I do while I'm waiting? I make something.

Writing is a kind of making, working with words, information and images to create something where there once was nothing. Fixing mistakes is easier on a screen than in real life, easier even than rearranging quilt blocks. The finished project? Here at The Perverse Lutheran it's often some kind of discovery: a new idea, grace, endurance. It seems to me that I found those things more readily twenty years ago or ten years ago when much of the light shining in The Perverse Lutheran came from Gronks Finding Grace, my son Kris's blog about his journey through ALS. 

In 2026 it feels harder to make a path through the weeds, harder to find the clearing. It's a much noisier world. Empathy is overextended; cynicism is easy. I'm tired, I say to myself. I'm overwhelmed. I start blog posts hoping to figure something out but then abandon them.

I'll pick up the silk shawl tonight. I'll finish pulling out those stitches and then reknit them. And tomorrow, maybe, the quilt blocks spread on my dining room table made of print fabric purchased years ago will be joined together with a teal blue solid purchased yesterday. 

It's good to be making things instead of being pushed around by tides and time. I hope that making blog posts, too, continues to be a good thing, putting words together to make small islands of grace and light. 

FROM THE ARCHIVE

"Shining"  from ten years ago. I think "Do the Next Thing" would also be a good title.

A Lenten Prayer from 2006.

Zero sum?

No fear -- this is Gwen writing, not an AI experiment like a couple weeks ago. Although Google has offered to help me with this blog, to find keywords and add links to them and/or to add image previews, I am rejecting that AI-powered assistance. I suppose that accepting Google's help would push me higher up in the algorithm, wherever that lives, but I'd rather not see my sentences, however they turn out, littered with underlined words in colored type and links that bear no connection to my thinking. There are links in what follows, but I put them there myself and there's no need to click on them.

First thing I read this morning was this: Zero-sum economics keeps failing, a Substack post by econ blogger Noah Smith, who on Substack is called Noahpinion. He wrote something recently that led me to click the subscribe button, and now I get an email from him two or three times a week. The full text of his posts is in the email -- he's not making money off me. I blame Paul Krugman, one of the few Substack accounts I do pay for, though again, most of his posts are mostly free. Back when Krugman wrote for the New York Times I read hime regularly because he, a Nobel Laureate in economics, had the gift of being able to explain macro- and microeconomics in ordinary language. This quality, nothing to sneeze at, is my intellectual love language. 

This morning Noahpinion's post used empirical data, displayed in graphs and tables, to demonstrate that immigration is good (i.e., on the whole, doesn't take jobs from citizens) and tariffs are bad (i.e., they don't create manufacturing jobs in America). Taking stuff away from some people it turns out does not increase the good or goods that others get to own and enjoy. Pluses and take-aways don't zero out everywhere as they might in algebra. 

(Simple math is predictive in other places, like when counting threads in dents and heddles on harnesses on a loom. I consulted the calculator on my phone multiple times yesterday afternoon. As well as Alexa -- give her a math problem and she's back with an answer in seconds. You do need to write down what she says. There's still a market for pens and sticky notes.)

The failures of zero-sum economics made for a great kick-off for a Sunday in Epiphany. As the kingdom of God is revealed in Jesus, zero-sum economics and everything else are turned upside down, inside out, and refuted, at least on a metaphysical level. I'm pretty sure I heard this expressed in a sermon as anti-zero-sum thinking at some point in the past. All the way back during Reaganomics? Or after a financial crisis in the early oughts? I know it echoed through all that hope and change we saw on the horizon when Barack Obama was president. 

The thing is, it's true. Not just in religion but in the real world. Big picture, many things get even bigger and more generous as we all participate in them. We're not dividing a pie, we're sharing an expanding one. This is so much better than learning to live with less all around when the pie contracts because of circumstances or selfishness or bad policy. Or than some of us living with a lot less while others enjoy a lot more. (I'll leave it to Substack economists to pursue this theory into dealing with the federal deficit.)

I heard the refutation of zero-summing in the Old Testament lesson in church this morning, as Isaiah offered a bigger, more expansive vision:

 “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
  to raise up the tribes of Jacob
  and to restore the survivors of Israel;
 I will give you as a light to the nations,
  that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”  (Isaiah 49:6)

And I heard it again this afternoon in a Bach Cantata, Alles nur nach Gottes willen (BWV 72). In English that would be "Everything according to God's will alone." 

I stopped to think about it during the sermon. All is God's good will. I'm not always persuaded of this. I mean, some things absolutely suck and if that's God will, I'm on the losing end. How do I see beyond that?

"Alles, alles" -- "all, all" -- are the words that echo through the cantata's opening chorus. Singers are handed notes --  a sudden D-sharp, an unlikely B-flat -- that leave you with no idea of where the harmony is headed. Ha, ha, Herr Bach -- is God's will capricious? It felt that way, struggling to learn this chorus in just two rehearsals. Or is Bach telling us who we are, adrift, not knowing where things are headed and that God's will is more than we can understand, beyond the numbers we enter into an algebraic equation or the clicks that feed a social media algorithm? How did this all feel to the people in the pews in the 18th century, when the Leipzig occasionally had to worry about invading Turks and all the ordinary maladies that killed infants and small children?

I don't know. This year, 2026, is already a turbulent one, with a federal ICE agent murdering a mother of three in Minnesota and the rest of them rampaging on, bullying immigrants and wine moms in communities where citizens and non-citizens try to live together in peace. Where the president of the United States wants to take Greenland away from Denmark. 

Perhaps I, bruised by life, should shrug my shoulders and acknowledge that this is a world where the strong inevitably consume the weak. But somewhere in my Lutheran education or a lifetime of churchgoing, in some reading about the Kingdom of God or in a light-dawning recitation of the Lord's Prayer, something took root. When I see charts and diagrams that show zero-sum thinking fails to explain the way the economic world is working, I smile and praise God. 

10 dents per inch in a 22-inch reed equals 220. Sleyed 2 threads per dent with 28.5 empty dents.  That's 383 warp threads wound and soon to be threaded in 11 repeats of 32 threads plus 1 for balance and 15 threads either side for straight-draw selvages. It's math now, it'll be cloth someday soon.  

NOT by me -- an LLM experiment

I was reading a thread about how writers and college writing instructors can detect text that comes from LLMs -- Large Language Models, i.e. AI. So for an experiment I have ChatGPT the following prompt: 

Write a New Year's Day blogpost in the style of the perverse lutheran.blogspot.com. Dismiss the idea of New Year resolutions and instead write about reliance on God's will. Use imagery from anti-Trump folks and the gospel of Matthew.

Here's what it came up with. What do you think? (I'll tell you what I think at the end.)

January 1 arrives like a reset button everyone insists on pressing too hard. Gym memberships bloom, planners open with a crackle of ambition, and the secular liturgy of “new year, new you” is chanted as if enough willpower might finally save us. It’s all very earnest. It’s also mostly bunk.

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions isn’t that they aim too low. It’s that they aim in the wrong direction. They assume the universe is waiting for us to get organized, that history will finally straighten itself out if we stop eating bread or start waking up at 5:30 a.m. They baptize self-improvement and call it hope.

Meanwhile, outside the sanctuary of self-help, the streets are still full. Cardboard signs sag in the cold. Pink hats are stuffed back into closets but not forgotten. The chants echo anyway—against cruelty, against lies, against the cheap salvation of strongmen and red hats promising glory. Anti-Trump folks know something the resolution-makers forget: the world is not fixed by better habits alone. Something deeper is wrong, and something deeper is required.

Matthew’s Gospel does not begin with a to-do list. It begins with a genealogy—messy, compromised, full of people who did not keep their resolutions and were never asked to. It moves quickly to a baby born under empire, to refugees fleeing violence, to a voice crying in the wilderness, “Repent.” Not: optimize. Not: resolve. Repent. Turn. Be re-oriented.

Jesus in Matthew does not say, “Blessed are those who finally get their act together.” He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the mourners, the meek, the ones who know they are not in control. He tells us not to worry about tomorrow, not because tomorrow will be fine, but because worrying is a lousy god. “Your heavenly Father knows what you need.” That is not advice for productivity; it is a confession of dependence.

New Year’s resolutions are a small, private Tower of Babel—our annual attempt to climb our way into a better future by stacking days and habits just right. And like Babel, they assume God is impressed by height. Matthew’s Gospel suggests God is impressed by mercy. By bread broken and shared. By enemies loved. By lilies that do not hustle.

So on this New Year’s Day, skip the resolutions. They will forgive you; they always do. Instead, stand still long enough to hear the quieter word: “Follow me.” Not after you improve. Not once you’ve figured it out. Follow—into uncertainty, into protest and prayer, into a world still aching under bad rulers and worse idols.

The year will unfold whether we resolve or not. Empires will strut. Crowds will gather. Signs will be lifted. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Christ will be where Matthew always finds him: not crowning our plans, but interrupting them. Not endorsing our willpower, but undoing it with grace.

That, inconveniently and perversely enough, is good news.

What I think: 

It doesn't sound like me or my writing at The Perverse Lutheran. It lacks the wandering, wondering quality of me starting out and not knowing where I'm going to end up. It's a little too tight. 

Certainly pulls in biblical imagery and mixes it up with anti-Trump political images. Maybe too glibly. I do like the idea of New Year's resolutions being "a small, private Tower of Babel." I wonder if ChatGPT stole that from another blog or sermon published online. Actually I think a lot of what I thought at first was pretty good is a regurgitated mix from human writers. Might even be traceable through search engines. 

But -- I've heard many less coherent sermons. 

Celebrating

Last night while carrying out the garbage, I thought about celebrating a pagan Christmas. The walk from the backdoor to the garbage carts in the alley took me past the blue lights woven through the grapevine on my fence. Like most Christmas lights these days, they're LEDs and quite bright, a fiery gas-burner blue. 

And quite tasteful, if I do say so myself. 

Over on the next block, there's a celebration of electric Christmas lighting going on, spreading from house to house with trees wrapped in red and white and arches of light over the sidewalk. "Too much," some would say, shaking their heads, because what do we live for (to paraphrase Mr. Bennet), but to judge our neighbors? 

So go ahead and judge me: I did some serious binging of Hallmark-style Christmas movies earlier this month. Enough to get knit one complicated cabled and three colorwork hats knitted, Christmas gifts all. You need a movie you can watch with only half your mind so that you can keep one eye on the pattern chart. These generic Christmas romances (and there are dozens of them on Netflix) feature very circumscribed Christmas celebrations. "What's your favorite family tradition?" one lead actor will ask the other as they discover one another's better self. The answer invariably involves snow or hot cocoa, family, and a special Christmas tree ornament. But sadly, these things have been inexplicably lost although there's a hint that they might -- just might! -- return at the movie's end. 

I learned while growing up that this sort of sentimental Christmas was, if not hollow, less important than the "real meaning of Christmas" which happened at church with Baby Jesus and traditional religious carols (definitely no chestnuts roasting on open fires). This was a lesson reinforced by participation in traditional Christmas Eve services with my Lutheran elementary school classmate. It continues, since in adult life, including this year, I've ended up as one of the teachers guiding students through this ritual. At some point this evening, during such a service, I'll stop and pray that the ritual -- the music and poetry, scripture and songs -- stays with these kids and somehow shines on into their adult lives. 

But gosh, I could go for a bonfire this Christmas. Or some dancing around the Christmas tree, fueled by spiced grog and good whiskey. Less metaphor, more serious yelling against the darkness. Fire up the Christmas lights, all the colors you've got. Turn on the blowers that populate front lawns with Santas riding on elephants and snowmen ten feet high bobbing in the winter wind. Feast on honey-sweetened Lebkuchen and cinnamon-roasted pecans. Revel in the now, enjoy the secular.

Poets and others fond of paradox make much of God becoming human, of Jesus being born to die and embracing human suffering. A lot of me is wrapped up in that truth -- just read my November post. But there's a lot to be said for letting in the primitive celebration of Christmas -- stuff Christianity borrowed and good taste struggles to tame. Not just a single star, but vast starry heavens. Not just a flickering light in the manger but electrical energy powering lights all around the neighborhood. The seasonal return of longer days and shorter nights. Dinners and desserts and Santa suits and cornball music. 

Pagan is a stretch for this perverse Lutheran. But less theologizing, more staying in the moment -- I'm going to try that on this year and join in as heaven and nature sing all kinds of songs.

Merry Christmas

Candlelit vigil

Last week I attended a vigil at my church. It was a time to sit quietly in a darkened, mostly empty sanctuary, to pray, to contemplate, to sit with a recent and very sad death. 

I went up to the front to light a candle. I stood it up in the dish of sand, with other candles that had been lit and placed there by people who had come to the vigil earlier in the evening. Then I went and sat next to a friend, in silence.

I thought about lots of things, one of them being candles. As I had walked to the front of church, past the tall Christ candle, lit at baptisms and funerals, words from the Easter Vigil service had suddenly popped into my mind, almost as if they'd been spoken aloud: "The light of Christ rising again." 

Huh. I lit my candle from others in the bowl and carefully placed it in the sand, arching my wrist, careful not to scorch the sleeve of my winter jacket.

These skinny white candles were the same kind we use at Easter Vigil, to pass the light of Christ from person to person through the congregation. And those words? It seemed to me like there should be more, like I'd forgotten the next part. Rising again for what? But apparently that's all there is to it. "The light of Christ rising again."

Practical churchwoman that I am -- or is because I'm impractical, I'm curious -- I thought about when else we use these white tapers. Actually, it was just a few weeks ago. Candles had been lit on All Saints Sunday, commemorating those who had died in the previous year. So here they were again, flickering, shining in memory of another saint, a new addition to the roster. 

My mind moved on to this family's loss, the hugeness of it. The deeply broken hearts, personal faith that I know all too well is upended by grief and loss and disaster. Inevitably, because it's a lifelong habit to ask, I thought about where was God in all this, and how I cannot answer that question.

I came back to the candles and when we use them and remembered suddenly that we would be lighting them on Christmas Eve. Yes, at my Lutheran church, we sing "Silent Night" by candlelight at the end of the late service. It's what we come for. It's sentimental. We even sing the first stanza in German, because ... well, for me, because my grandmother taught it to me. It's quite beautiful, as "the dawn of redeeming grace" breaks upon us in "Jesus, Lord, at your birth."

Christmas is a very different thing, I thought. No ideas about death running through Christmas, not like Easter or All Saints. Except, like all of us, Jesus was born to die. Mary brought forth her firstborn son safely, something that could not be assumed would happen (can't be assumed even now). She held him in her arms, watched him grow, and thirty years later, buried him. Yes, Jesus had a remarkable career of teaching, working miracles,  making disciples and upsetting authority. But I thought to myself in that darkened church, surely he had times when stuff happened, friends died, injustice was done and he, disturbed, angry, confused, asked where was God in all this? He was fully human. What do we think he thought about as he gazed into campfires late at night by the Sea of Galilee? Maybe the same kind of stuff that we toss and turn with late at night, staring at the heavens through the bedroom ceiling. 

Candles are for keeping vigil. The electric ones on my windowsills during Advent and Christmas say -- I don't know exactly. Keep hope alive? Watch for the morning? Or just, people live here, and through the darkness, the light of Christ keeps vigil with them.