The Slaughter of the Innocents

It's December 29. In the "Twelve Days of Christmas," it's the fifth day of the season, with "gold rings" given by true love in the song. This year the fifth day is also the First Sunday of Christmas, where the gospel reading this year, Lectionary Year A, is Matthew 2:13–23. This would be Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt and Herod's orders to kill all the children under age two in Bethlehem, agitated as he was by the threat of a new king. The Slaughter of the Innocents.

The story seems out of sequence. We won't hear about the wise men following the star to Herod's court in Jerusalem and ultimately to the baby in Bethlehem until Epiphany on January 6. But at a distance, time folds back on itself. We hear in one story the echoes of others, from times before and after. And history has no shortage on stories of slaughter, of times of "wailing and loud lamentation" (v. 18).

Today, December 29, is also the 129th anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee. I learned this from a Facebook friend who posted this link, and I then read more at Wikipedia. In an attempt to disarm a band of Lakota Sioux, the U.S. 7th Cavalry ended up murdering at least 150 men, women and children -- perhaps as many as 300. One Lakota man could not be made to give up his gun -- he was deaf and did not understand what the soldiers were saying. The rifle went off, others fired, and the people were slaughtered. Women were shot down as they fled through the snow with infants wrapped in their shawls.

Gold plays a part in this story: the Black Hills of South Dakota had been Sioux land, protected by treaty with the U. S. government — until the Black Hills Gold Rush began in 1874. And gold was only a small part of what white settlers took from native people.

It would be nice, or convenient, or comforting, if we could say such things no longer happen. But that's not true. In many and various ways, innocent people are rendered powerless and suffer the loss of dignity, freedom, life.

When you read about Wounded Knee you learn about the Ghost Dance, a religious movement within the Lakota culture that foretold a time of peace. It would "reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples."

Familiar echoes?

Whites felt mystified and threatened by the Ghost Dance, like Herod felt threatened by the prophecies about a rival king. Power and privilege distort vision. God was made human not as a great king, but as a tiny baby, as an ordinary man, as one who suffered and died at the hands of power and privilege. A gift of true love.

This little babe

The second week of Advent. Up early, with silly songs from last night's Christmas concert rehearsal looping through my head.

It's my daughter's birthday today. We had the big party for her last weekend. (There is always a big party.) Today is a quieter day--a usual Wednesday, but with a little birthday shimmer and dinner at a restaurant when the day is done. The early-morning house, the rush of air from the furnace, quiet churn from the dishwasher running in the kitchen — I'm listening, waiting, with slow, morning mind.

Ghosts of days past, of birth days, birth stories, track the house, the dining room, the windows of the kitchen, the living room. My daughter's birth day included a diagnosis of Down syndrome when she was less than 12 hours old.

This little babe so few days old
Is come to rifle Satan's fold.
All hell doth at his presence quake
Though he himself for cold do shake.
For in this weak, unarméd guise
The gates of hell he will surprise. 

That's not the song from last night--it's another concert, also coming up, a text from Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, and one that goes by  lickety-split. It takes typing to make me see the text. In performance, I'm conducting this, so I'm more focused on controlling the tempo than anything else.

With tears he fights and wins the field
His naked breast stands for a shield.
His battering shot are babyish cries.
His arrow looks of weeping eyes.
His marshall ensigns cold and need
And feeble flesh his warrior's steed.

Warfare, weapons, armies in the field  charging into battle — I should go look for 16th century engravings of these things. Lots of lines, confusion, violence — not my favorite imagery for a life of faith. But that crying, shivering babe at the lead? That seems — well, a lot like life. I've held naked, wet, puling babies in my tired arms, including one small whimpering daughter with Down syndrome 29 years ago today. And I've hugged, held, stroked adults weakened and disabled, confused by cancer, dementia, ALS.

We fight these things -- but even more, we live into them. Cold and need and feeble flesh are weaponized. The music grows ever more confusing, with one voice chasing the next in canons just a beat apart, until they come together to sound the alarm.

His camp is pitchéd in a stall.
His bulwark but a broken wall.
The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes,
Of shepherds he his muster makes.
And thus as sure his foe to wound
The angel trumps alarum sound. 

And then a big unison:

My soul with Christ join thou in fight
Stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward
This little babe will be thy guard.

The big finish:

If thou will foil thy foes with joy
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

Foiled with joy. The struggle, as they say, is real. But so is the joy.

Listen here. Watch the children's faces at the end: Joy!

NOT the program notes

"Holy hellfire, Batman!"

That's what tops the little list I made for myself of points to include in writing program notes on J. S. Bach's cantata, "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort" (BWV 20). If the sound of Donnerwort is not enough to make your eyes pop open, be advised that it means "thunder word." The complete English title on the front of the Stuttgart Bach-Ausgaben score is "Eternity, thou thunderous word."

It's a chorale cantata, the first in the cycle of chorale cantatas Bach composed in his second year (1724) as Kantor in Leipzig. It's based on a 16-stanza hymn from the previous century by a poet and dramatist named Johann Rist. It's not a very good hymn. The sixteen stanzas were reduced to twelve when it was published in a later hymnbook, and that didn't improve it much. Verse after verse after verse (sigh) describe the torments of an eternity in hell. Only toward the end does the hymn writer warn you to take heed and shape up now so that you don't offend a righteous God and end up damned forever.

One senses that 18th century German Lutherans appreciated a good scare.

And where better to experience it than in church? There was no opera company in Leipzig in Bach's time, no regular theatre, only traveling troupes passing through during trade fairs.

Bach lets loose with the drama in this cantata. A full-on French overture (ba-da-DUM, da-da-DAH) accompanies the chorus singing the first stanza of the chorale. There's weeping and wailing in the bass section with an ascending arpeggio of minor seconds on the word Traurigkeit (sadness, troubles). Chromaticism everywhere. And some crazily expressive and deeply creepy arias and duets.

And oh! jolly good music for the bass soloist, including a wake-up call sounded first by a trumpet (a sliding trumpet in Bach's day) immediately after the sermon that was preached in the middle of the cantata (and was surely at least an hour long).

I'm lucky I never had to sit through this one as a child. I'd have been deeply shaken, perhaps scarred for life. I remember lying awake at night, at the age of seven or eight, contemplating eternity and scaring myself half to death. And I wasn't even thinking about an eternity in hell -- I was thinking about heaven. My father came upstairs to check that my sisters and I were asleep, and I confessed to him that I was not looking forward to going to heaven and endlessly singing hymns in an eternal church service. (When your father is a church organist, this is not an easy thing to share.) My good father said that Jesus loved me, that God loved me and whatever heaven was, it would be something I liked. I could go to sleep.

He was a good explainer, Herb Gotsch. And a good theologian, too.

We're singing BWV 20 in the Bach Cantata Vespers at Grace Church in River Forest on November 24, Christ the King Sunday, a day when there's a lot of power and awesomeness to contemplate, as well as a cross and whiffs of the trumpet sounding for the final judgment. These end of the church year Sundays are troubling, amplified by the chaotic times we live in and all the apocalyptic movie images we may carry in our minds.

(My late husband, movie aficionado Lon Grahnke,  made me watch at least one Mad Max movie with Mel Gibson. We saw "Apocalypse Now" once in a midnight showing, sitting in the front row before a very big screen with Dolby Surround-Sound echoing off the walls.)

My official notes for the cantata service bulletin await a final edit from me, in which I may have to tone down the drama I've written into them. I've listened to several conductors' performances of the cantata, and they're astonishing for different reasons, but the one by John Eliot Gardiner raises hairs on the back of my neck.

(I'd link to a performance on YouTube. But I keep getting error messages when I try to go there. Will the Last Judgment kick off with YouTube going down?)

The original audience for BWV 20 heard the cantata on a June morning on the First Sunday After Trinity in 1724. I can't help wondering if it was, for them, perhaps the equivalent of a good summer horror movie, with the final impression being less about piety and more about dramatic catharsis. I don't know. I can't know--I'm almost three centuries away from their experience, and an additional 75 years away from the German landscape in which Johann Rist lived after the The Thirty Years War. Even Lutheranism has changed a bit in those centuries, and we have plenty of newer images of a hellish German landscape. Heck, plenty of hell in places here in America, too.

I had not meant to get so dark in this post.

Music, art, literature mediate the fear and terror of knowing that there are forces far bigger than us at work in the world.  That time is an endless mystery not measured by clocks. That we must account for our lives win some way, at some point, if only to ourselves.

No wonder that we need a God who loves us. And people who remind us of that even in our darkest moments.

The Harrowing of Hell, depicted in the Petites Heures de Jean de Berry, 14th-century illuminated manuscript commissioned by John, Duke of Berry.

BWV 194, Reformation Sunday

It seems that of all the days on the liturgical calendar when a perverse Lutheran blogger should post, Reformation Sunday would be at the top of the list. 

Or perversely, perhaps not, but here I am, laptop on my knees, blog open in the browser, blank space on the screen.

I sat outside to eat my lunch in the warm and colorful October sun this afternoon, and then stayed in my chair, at the patio table littered with golden maples leaves, to finish the novel I've been reading "Leaving the Atocha Station," by Ben Lerner. My red wool sweater was just warm enough on this bright afternoon, and the number of pages left in the book just enough to fill up the minutes until it was time to return to church for a pre-service rehearsal for Bach Cantata Vespers. Now, in the evening, in the living room, my bare feet are craving the afternoon sunshine and warmth. Next Sunday, on All Saints, it will be dark already at 5 o'clock in the afternoon

This afternoon's cantata, at Grace Lutheran in River Forest, was not "Ein Feste Burg" or "Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schield," cantatas composed for Reformation Day. Instead we sang the festive "Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest," first performed for the dedication of a church renovation and a new organ in a small town near Leipzig in early November of 1723. If you'd like to know more about the cantata, you're welcome to read the bulletin notes (written by me last weekend).

It's quite the cantata -- lots of inventive dance-like music for happy people celebrating something. It was an eye-popping afternoon in the soprano section. The organ in this small town was tuned quite low, and the soprano part in the chorus, already pretty high no matter how you tune the organ, had some high C's, which did not have to be quite so high back in 1723.

When I was studying the cantata last week, I imagined a little domestic drama around it. The music comes from a secular work performed at the Court of Köthen, where Bach was music director before taking up the church musician job in Leipzig. Someone (couldn't track down who) has suggested that Anna Magdalena sang the solos in the 1723 church performance outside Leipzig, just as she may have sung the soprano solos in a performance of the early work in Köthen. This makes sense -- maybe Bach wrote this music with her voice in mind. It's not easy, and there's a lot of it. The duet with the bass goes on and on. Give the woman a chance to sing it again!

Anna Magdalena was a salaried court singer when she married JSB in 1721 at the age of 20. He was a widower, 16 years older than she was. Her first child, a daughter, Christiana, had been born in the spring of 1723 (and died in 1726). Women were not allowed to sing publicly in churches in Leipzig, so the move to Leipzig put an end to Anna Magdalena's singing outside her home, though perhaps that was inevitable after marriage and children; she became the household manager and a mother to stepchildren as well as 13 babies of her own. Only six of them survived to adulthood.

Here, on this day, in this place, in this music, in between pregnancies, she had a chance to shine. She sang an aria and a duet with the bass. Before the duet there's a dialogue recitative, in which the bass asks lots of questions about faith and the soprano has all the reassuring theological answers. If you were making a movie about the first performance of BWV 194 (a prequel to my romcom about BWV 197) this duet could be a way to show the relationship between the Great Composer and his young wife -- he setting her up to look good, she inspiring the music. He wanting to please the young wife, she with the capacity to please and cheer. In other scenes perhaps we'd see her chafing under the demands of running a household full of children and students, or working through the minefield of establishing her authority as mistress, while having to lean on the domestic experience of the sister of Bach's first wife, who remained part of the household. Does the movie end happily, with her far away from the kitchen, working as a copyist and singing to herself alongside Bach and his students in his workroom? And what about that famous Notebook?

Who knows? But I would insist that the scene where she sings the music of Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest be lit with golden filters and shot in the fall, with church windows open to an autumn forest, deep, brilliant and elegiac.

Random firing of neurons

Twice this week I've gotten almost eight hours of sleep. The sleep app on my phone, which sends me off to slumber at night with the sound of ocean waves and wakes me, gradually, in the morning, also scores my sleep quality. I didn't know that scores approaching 100% were even possible until this morning, when the app scored my sleep from last night in the upper 90s.

I'm sure that's a good thing. I'm sure it's a goal I should place above my night-owl need to keep going -- past 11, past 11:30, past midnight. But we'll see. I like my late-night hours, and on the days when I'm up before 7, I like the early-morning hours as well. (Two o'clock in the afternoon? Enh.)

This week's two nights of almost eight hours of sleep (really, two mornings of sleeping late) were accompanied by two curious and at times, nearly coherent dreams. The kind of dreams in which real people that you know appear out of the blue and surprise you by being there or even by being other than you know them to be.

I woke up from one of those about an hour ago and I'll be puzzling over it off and on for several hours more, trying to recreate the feeling of the dream in my mind, trying to figure out how the dream came to be, and even playing with the idea that it means something.

There are heroes in the Bible, in The Odyssey, in legend and mythology and even history who changed their minds, made new plans, ventured out into new places, because of dreams in which an angel or God or a god showed them the way. I'm modern, or post-modern, and tend to believe that dreams are only the random firing of neurons, random energy traveling here and there along established neuronal networks, often the same ones that were recently busy while awake. And yet my brain or my consciousness or whoever I am needs to construct a story around them.

What's the story? This week it's something about venturing forth on long gravel roads, something about trusting kindness, and something about looms (seriously, fiber, weaving). As I sit outside this morning in the warm September sunshine, these things cohere.

I'm watching the female cardinal fly into the grape vines on the fence, where she pecks at the grape skins to get at the pulp. She's plumping up for cold days to come.

I feed on dreams.

No words

"No words." "I have no words."

This is now a thing people say when reacting to tragedy or when offering words of comfort in times of suffering or loss.

"No words," they say, with a sad shake of the head, or with a gesture of the hand to the heart.

It sounds solemn and sad and dignified. It has the virtue of avoiding foolish woods or statements that turn out to be more about the speaker than the bereaved, and people who have listened to the condolences of long lines of friends and acquaintances at funerals and memorial services know that there are words that would have been better avoided. To say "no words" deeply, with emotion, as your hand moves to some place near your throat can be genuinely kind as it is unimposing.

But it bothers me, because if we can't find words to share and shape our feelings, can't find words to communicate and specify feelings in this moment--well, what hope is there for us miserable human beings? Complex language is what sets us apart from other mammals, what makes it possible to collaborate and compromise and work things out. Presence, embraces, sympathetic faces are all important, but they cannot do what words do. Words are out there at the edges where we challenge ourselves to understand, where we reach for words to be returned to us, in affirmation, agreement, antithesis.

And yet—tonight I have no words.

Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of the death of my son Kris. And what I feel I am not feeling in words, I cannot describe in words. There is a space in my chest where, when I inhale and raise the floodgates, everything Kris flows in--what it was like to be around him, his grin, his love, his four-year-old charm, his flashes of anger, his pride, his enthusiasm, his conversation, his maturity. His fierceness in the fight against ALS. His desire to stay and be present for those he loved even as death came closer and closer, a fight that was hard, but worth it (his words).

I can feel those things like he's still here, and those feelings are so strong, so particular to Kris and his Kris-ness, that trying to put words to them is all but useless. Somewhere, perhaps, in the epigrammatic world of poetry (in Emily Dickenson perhaps?) there may be words that fit and surprise the moment, that talk about the ache of grief and hint at the unwillingness to let it go--but I do not know what these words are. I do know that the mental labor of finding them and typing them is a process far apart from feeling the feelings.

So where I find myself tonight, grieving the death of my oldest child, is in a place where I have no words. Where it's hard to write. Where words never quite get it right. (This is happening in 21st century America where the meaning of words is endlessly and unethically manipulated, un-attaching them from stable, felt, rational truth.)

In words I would love to tell you about my son--Eliza and Kurt's brother, Michelle's husband, Dan's and Mark's and Tim's and Jeff's and John's friend. And I hope to find all  those words and more someday. But now, this last week of July in 2019, I have no words, only that place in my heart where Kris, child of my body, still smiles at me.

Robin, at work

Sunday afternoon as I sat working on my computer at the patio table, I heard a ruckus behind me, a small explosion in the dead leaves I had minutes earlier swept neatly against the chain-link fence with my new broom. What made this sudden noise? I watched as it happened again. Leaves scattered, and a robin hopped backwards, yanking something from the ground. Had she surprised a worm? Was she after a necessary piece of twig or bark for her nest? Just seven inches tall, she had dislodged an amount of yard detritus equal to herself in volume.

But she was not satisfied. She hadn’t found what she wanted. She hopped to her left, to the next interval between hostas and weeds and tried it again. She dug her head into the pile and pulled back hard, throwing leaves and dust and odd bits of this and that into the air, then ducked back in to inspect the ground and get what was there for her. She flew off when a squirrel chased across the patio cement, but was back at it, again and again, a few minutes later.

So much energy and purpose under those plain brown wings, that small brown head, and the red breast. She was light on her feet, light in every way, feathers puffed dry and weightless over hollow bird bones. Of course she could fly, but what a disrupter she was on the ground, connected to a purpose, a task, the thing that robins are wired to do in the spring.

I went back to my work, pulling quotes and ideas together into sentences, yanking on them, testing their truth, clearing away the clutter, searching for how to say it. Flew off (to Twitter!) for a few minutes, then back at it, doing the work God put in front of me.

Photo: "robin in garden, 15 April 2011" by mwms1916 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

#IAmALS

As I write this, on June 1, a month of #ALSAwareness has come to an end. This year the new organization I Am ALS was all over the place on social media: “I am …. You in? #IAmALS.” Statements of I’m hopeful. I’m pushing for change. We can do this. We’ll find a cure. Cheering on new drugs, new infusions, new trials. Cheering on those who find their way into these things, find their way into taking part. Cheering on those who just got a trach. Cheering all who fight hard and pubicly.

And also remembering to cheer for simpler things, for getting on with life. To cheer when folks with ALS travel or just get out in the back yard or tweet or post. To cheer for caregivers and spouses and children and parents. Remembering those who grieve, because #IAmALS includes everyone — even those who live with loss because of ALS. Because — it’s a horrible disease and it moves so quickly. A few intense years of living and loving and recognizing all the good in life, the way you can perhaps only when you are all too aware that it ends and will end quickly.

Standing as someone who has stood at the memorial service, committed ashes to the ground, what does it look like to fight on? How do you hold the soft edge of hope?

So many things rise up to harden the heart. Religion and religious explanations for tragedy. (“God has a purpose.” Or whatever). Cynicism — we all die. Tough luck. Bad genes. The way of the cross. Soldier on. Something better is waiting in the future, or at least something else.

But losing a son at the age of 30 to ALS hurts like hell. Losing a child, a loved one to anything hurts like hell.

What would it feel like, to have a cure for ALS emerge in the next few years? Some drug that would manage the disease, slow it, turn it into something to be lived with for a long time, if not cured completely. What would it feel like to know that if only Kris had gotten ALS ten years later, it would not have ended in his death? Sometimes I wonder about this—about how I will feel. I hope to find out.

Kris talked, wrote, hoped about finding a cure so that others after him would not have to endure and resign themselves to death from ALS. I know he embraced that sincerely. It has been the thing that has most impressed me, most weighed on me about ALS warriors raising money for research, taking to social media, walking, biking, everything they throw themselves into to raise awareness and raise funds. They know they’re doing this for a cure in the future, a future too far off in years to help them. Though perhaps that is changing.

On some days, certain cloudy days in June, perhaps, or when I am too much on my own or worn out by work and boredom, it’s very hard to keep a soft edge on hope, a soft growing edge, or to look positively into the future. After handling all the crappy tragedy of the last 20 years — Lon, Kris, neurologic disease — it’s hard to escape the sense of dread, anxiety, worry. What’s the next damn thing around the corner?

I think myself a fool for not knowing life would be this hard. (Am I?) I am far more vulnerable than I wish to be, less strong than I think I should be. I cherish my pain because it’s what’s left of love.

“I want to know what love is,” goes the song. Well, there it is—it hurts. But this, I think, is also what keeps hope alive.

In memoriam: Hertha Holstein

In the last two weeks there have been three deaths in the various worlds to which I belong -- church, my daughter's world of friends, and today, family. My Aunt Hertha died this morning, peacefully, in her sleep. She was my long-dead father's younger sister, mother of the cousins I grew up with, a first-grade teacher, firm, formidable, even a little scary, at least from the point of view of my nine-year-old self.

I am trying to hold all this sadness and grief carefully, fully, lightly, while trusting that life, that resurrection, triumphs. So much of who I am, of where my Christian family roots are, can be found in Hertha -- and so today I am thinking about who she was -- or at least who I knew her to be.

Hertha was an outspoken woman of faith. She knew her Bible and her Lutheran theology and could (and would) go head-to-head with almost anyone. She preached the love of Jesus to her many classes of kindergartners and first graders at the Lutheran parochial school where she taught. In retirement she led Bible classes. Always she paid attention. She showed up for people in need.

Here's a story I heard directly from her. Long ago, when I was a child, Hertha started a Sunday School class for people with intellectual disabilities. She wrote the lessons and her husband, Herman, drew illustrations. Her kids and others helped out in the class, and when Christmas rolled around she insisted that the children and young adults in her class be included in the Sunday School Christmas program. She got a surprising amount of pushback from the Sunday School leaders, but she went straight to Pastor Erwin Paul and together they set some people straight about who all was fully included in the kingdom of God and what that meant for Sunday School Christmas programs in God's church.

Hertha was a knitter. She was not good at sitting still and I'm sure knitting was a way to deal with this. She knit through meetings and through her sons' wrestling meets. She knitted and crocheted lap robes for veterans served by the nearby VA hospital, combining colors from donated and purchased yarn, often successfully; sometimes, well, with originality.

Through the years, as I've talked with people I know who knew Hertha back in the day, I've heard many fiercesome stories. At the core of many of these is something she said with great conviction but a shortage of tact. This was one of the differences between my dad and his sister. He was patient and tactful, if occasionally clueless. She was impetuous and outspoken. He was the son, petted and doted upon by his mother and aunts. She was the girl with opinions of her own, restless and rebellious against the "good, quiet girl" standards imposed by church and society and reiterated by her mother and aunt.

Born a generation later, Hertha might have entered the ministry--though she would have had to part ways with the Lutheran church in which she grew up. Many years ago, when un-ordained me was the homilist at a mid-week Lenten service at my church, she came to hear. I treasure that.

Hertha was far gone into dementia at her death. I had not seen her since Christmas 2017, when she gave a welcoming speech at the extended-family Christmas celebration, saying "I don't know who you are, but I'm glad you're all here." Did we all say grace at that point? I don't think so -- we'd done it a half hour before, but whatever. That evening she insisted that my daughter, Eliza (who has Down syndrome) come and sit by her for a while. Eliza has had some experience with people with Alzheimer's, so she sat and answered Hertha's questions, many of them more than once.

In ordinary times, when I think about heaven, my ideas are pretty abstract. I try to hold the not-knowing that is appropriate for one who is a creature contemplating her eternal Creator. But in the hours and days after someone I know and love has crossed the River Jordan,  I revert to the concrete--to the image of my dad perched on the bench of the great heavenly organ with J. S. Bach himself turning the pages. I imagine my son Kris on a lawn by a lake, running hard to catch a Frisbee, gracefully and in good humor, with a bottle of Island Wheat in his other hand.

Today I imagined Hertha entering heaven, meeting old friends, getting caught up on the news, slowly recalling names that she had not been able to remember on earth. She's talking to other Lutherans who've gone before her about forgiveness and humility, God's love for little children, and how to crochet a granny square.  And I'm pretty sure she probably has a few things she's planning to say directly to God, who is smiling and ready to listen.

At rest in Christ

Reposting from September of 2018, in memory of Paul Bouman, who died on April 28, 2019. We sang his setting of "Now Rest Beneath Night's Shadow" at the funeral service today.

There are other losses I am thinking of today, including Christian writer Rachel Held Evans and the father of one of Eliza's friends. And of course, I never sing this hymn without thinking of my dad, of Lon, and of my children, especially Kris.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Rest

Now rest beneath night's shadow the woodland, field and meadow.
The world in slumber lies.
But you, my heart, awaking, and prayer and music making
Let praise to your Creator rise.

The text is from Paul Gerhardt, prolific Lutheran hymn-writer of the 17th century. It is (obviously) a hymn for the evening. You could also call it, perhaps, a hymn for night owls, for people who cannot sleep. Though nature and the world of humans are fading into rest and quiet, the singer stays awake--not to toss and turn, but to pray and sing.

Lord Jesus, since you love me, now spread your wings above me
And shield me from alarm.
Though evil would assail me, your mercy will not fail me;
I rest in your protecting arm.

This hymn has many memories attached to it for me. This second stanza I learned as a bedtime prayer when I was a child. My father taught it to me, as his mother, I believe, taught it to him. Back any further in the generations and my ancestors would have prayed and taught these words in Gerhardt's original German. By the time I sang them to my own children, I was singing them in the slightly altered English translation of the Lutheran Book of Worship, published in 1978. The rhymes are the same, but the antiquated phrase "Lord Jesus, who dost love me" becomes the more direct "since you love me." I like the change.

My loved ones, rest securely, for God this night will surely
From peril guard your heads.
Sweet slumbers may he send you and bid his hosts attend you
And through the night watch o'er your beds.

Because this was a song heard often in our house, I asked that it be sung at my husband's funeral two years ago. It had been sung at my dad's funeral twenty-two years earlier. I sang it, by myself, as I had sung it to the kids at night, when my mother-in-law, my younger son, and our pastor went to see Lon's body and to pray there shortly after his death. It's appropriate, I think, to use sleep as a metaphor for death, since we will all wake again in some way unimaginable to us now, when God's kingdom comes at last.

As I sang that stanza at the close of the Bach Cantata vesper service this afternoon, I remembered that morning--the coldness of Lon's body, our wonder at his death. My eyes filled with tears--at the choir's rehearsal before the service and during the actual performance. The tears were a moment of indulgence, of stopping to acknowledge grief that has faded, that rests in shadows of the past. I didn't stay long in that place. There were some unfamiliar fancy notes on the last phrase of the stanza that needed my full musical attention. And the whole hymn was sung in a lovely, lush new setting for orchestra and choir by Paul Bouman, who recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday.

Even as I let go of the sadness, I thought of my children, who I had prayed for and reassured with this hymn. Back in the days when I sang my children to sleep, we all crowded together under the covers for books and songs at bedtime. First there was only my oldest, Kristoffer, and me. Seven or eight years later, Kris went to bed in an upper bunk, still within reach of my voice, and his two preschool-aged siblings, Eliza and Kurt, cuddled up on either side of me on the double-bed-sized mattress below. Sometimes Lon listened from the the hallway.

This afternoon I thought, who will sing this blessing about me? As a mother, I sang even the second stanza ("Lord Jesus, since you love me") for my children, not really for me. It was their faith, their peaceful sleep that I prayed for. After they had fallen asleep, I crawled out of the bed and went off to fight my own late-night battles with the world, ducking out from under those divine wings spread above me.

This afternoon I realized that it's time to put the memories away and start singing this hymn for me. The music this afternoon helped with that. Paul's setting of this beautiful five-hundred-year-old tune has those heavenly wings beating in eighth notes in the orchestra accompaniment and also in the unaccompanied four-part choral setting of stanza two. Singers can relax and sing easily with the support of that rhythm, carried by the reassurance of God's unfailing mercy.

Ear worm

These days I am spending time moving waves of children ("the Israelite army") in and out of a 30 x 12 foot space enclosed by blue painter tape on the floor of Fellowship Hall. We're rehearsing a musical titled "The Rock Slinger and His Greatest Hit" that includes 66 children, first grade through fourth. My colleague Janel teaches and directs the songs; a local dance teacher leads the kids in simple choreography; I figure out how to put the pieces together to tell the story. There's a small spark of creativity involved and a massive amount of problem-solving.

There's also the danger—tough on every adult who comes in contact with this show—of ear worms.

Ear worm is the term for a song that gets stuck in your head and won't go away. Over-exposure to a song can cause ear worms. When my daughter was young I sang "The Wheels on the Bus" constantly, sometimes to her, but mostly over and over again in my brain.

It's early morning as I write this, after a night spent wrestling with an ear worm from a song called "My God Is." Over and over again, in my sleeping and while I was awake. The song is sung first by little David as he resolves to fight Goliath, trusting in a God who is much bigger than the nine-foot bully he is about to face.—a God who is "taller than a mountain," "faster than a meteor," and many more such comparisons, sung on ever-rising intervals. We worked on the piece yesterday and while it's sounding pretty good, it doesn't look like much yet. So it's on my list of problems to be solved, and the amorphous mass of kids singing it appeared behind my closed eyes through the night.

"My God is this and more" says the lyric at the big key change. Big step forward for everyone on stage? Come together tighter as a group? Spread out? High fives with David—an easy-to-execute direction for kids this age? I don't know yet. But I did wake up thinking about "and more."

This has been a rough week. The news from Washington grows ever more disturbing. "Who Will Fight the Giant?" is another song in our show and it's a question that coming up in other contexts, not just the Old Testament battle between the Israelites and the Philistines who taunt them. (The kids in my show love to say Philistines. It's more phonetically expressive than "bullies.")

Closer to home there is the sadness and concern my daughter and I are feeling for vulnerable people after a sudden death in that family. "Taller than a mountain" and "stronger than a panther" don't seem to answer the needs of people in this situation--maybe they're not the words for any of us when we're riding the bumps in the atmosphere that remind us that we are all vulnerable, that we will all die, that sadness is a big part of life and not one to be batted away with swelling music and proclamations of power.

Where is God? My God is -- what?

I'm not looking at the power in nature (though it's nice to see the sun today). But other signs and wonders appeared yesterday.

The kind and concerned hearts of those who rushed in to do the hard, loving work of caring for people trying to comprehend sudden loss. The fierce advocacy of Ady Barkan, testifying before Congress about healthcare, using his own battle with ALS to make life better for others. My God is found in these kinds of places.

I hope, too, that God will be found in me today, in lightness and hope as I am patient with my own sadness and vulnerability, and in skill in clearing away obstacles to children telling a story about God siding with a vulnerable young boy.

Peace!

Easter joy

I have a large forsythia bush along the side of my house, under the bay window in the dining room, and another one a few feet away under the kitchen window. The green leaves are appearing, but there are no yellow flowers this year, none at all, except for one odd curved branch, bouncing just above the ground. Six inches of blossoms stand out against the dead leaves on the ground, in conversation with the daffodils straggling nearby.

Most years these two bushes are a fountain of yellow blossoms. They have rarely been pruned and I like them in their natural shape. Other forsythia bushes I see in front yards around town are often clipped into someone else's idea of the right shape for a bush, with no allowances made for branches that want to reach and curve and bend.

I've seen very few forsythia blossoms this spring. Perhaps all these plants could do was stay alive through the cold, cold winter of 2018-19. There was no energy left over to make flowers. (A quick search of "why doesn't my forsythia bloom" confirmed this theory.)

I miss those yellow flowers. The silk ones that decorate the chancel at my church during the Easter season are no substitute. They're lovely, carefully chosen, bundled and tied into artful sprays, integrated into the decor. But they are a performance of Easter joy, not the real thing.

Real joy at Easter?

(I wish I had poetic skills!)

Today I think (and today is only today)
Easter joy is a wild thing.
unkempt, unpruned, exuberant,
but sometimes vanquished,
or hidden, by a hard winter.

Just a few blossoms, close to the earth,
but still dancing in the wind,
are enough to recall the bigger, heavenly thing.
We will all see it someday.

Blogiversary: filters, formulas, modesty and wisdom

Transfiguration Sunday tomorrow. Means it's time to write a Blogiversary post, marking 13 years of The Perverse Lutheran. So I'm huddled at Starbucks while my daughter is at Saturday afternoon bowling. I'm sitting at a high counter under a speaker that's pouring out beats and female vocals that I'm sure are fairly bland, pop-culture-wise, but that I find irritating.  So I've layered Debussy piano music through my headphones onto the general aural ambience at Starbucks. The volume on my computer is turned as high as it goes and it's still not much of a solution to the problem. Unless the pianist is digging into the keys, banging out a big and percussive sound, the pop music leaks through.

My own thoughts? Can't seem to hear them.

One reasons is that there are so many more voices that I follow in the public media these days. So many pundits, so many echoing and self-referential Twitter accounts, so many ads and silly videos on Facebook. So many books on library shelves, so many next to my chair in the living room. So many books piled up in my Audible account, waiting for me to string together bits and pieces of listening time until I've heard the whole 8-hour, or 18-hour, story.

Why keep keep adding to the cosmic word count?

In the past 13 years I've immortalized (well, written about) fledgling cardinals in my back yard, conversations in Bible study groups, various communities of which I'm a part, my sons, my daughter,  ALS, Alzheimer's, funerals, knitting, grey days in February and beautiful days in May and June. (Perhaps I'll go back and add links for all those examples. Perhaps not.)

I do, I confess, go back and read old blog posts from time to time, in hopes of finding something that  I'm not embarrassed to read later. Sometimes the writing works, if I have looked and listened with openness and humility and haven't given up too soon.

Are these things helpful or interesting to others? Edifying? (I use that word without irony. I like that word.) I do apply that filter before I'm too many paragraphs into a post. That's one reason why the back side of this blog has so many abandoned drafts, especially in the last year or two. I think again before I hit the Publish button. I am not only a Perverse Lutheran but also what some call a Modest Lutheran. Despite all my inner and outer arrogance, a voice from childhood -- the same tone used to recite questions and answers from the catechism -- reminds me of how little my inner life matters to the rest of the world.

My best blog post formula starts with an image, seen, heard, or even imagined. There's a description, some sense of movement or change, questions and wondering, and perhaps a glance toward wisdom or a surprise.

Wisdom gives me an image for the end of this post: the wisdom tooth that I had pulled yesterday. It was ugly to look at, rocked out of my jaw and then held up before my eyes by the oral surgeon.

And yet.

I've had it a long time. It's decayed, no longer used for chewing and not worth the cost of a crown. So, it's gone. All the wisdom left in me must be in my head or my heart, perhaps in my breath and body (because I'm back at yoga). Does any of it date from the years when those wisdom teeth first came in? Is any of it worth sharing (though surely much of it is shared already)?

Thank you, dear readers, for reading. Time to hit the road and leave that Starbucks speaker behind!

Seven random bits on a Wednesday in February

1. There's a Eugene (Debs) Porter from Chicago's Revolution Brewery at my left hand, a Hershey's Chocolate with Almonds, King-Size, that I've been saving for weeks, at my right hand. This is how I'm closing out Wednesday. The Hershey's is nothing but a wrapper by now.

2. I've posted two "What made me smile today" posts on Facebook recently, thinking perhaps this could be a continuing series. But alas, the ironies and fantasies that made me smile today cannot shared on Facebook.

3. Knit these socks for three reasons:

1) to give to my son who likes hand knit socks; 2) to keep on using up yarn, so that soon I can buy more, and 3) to keep me awake while I read a long book: "Fatal Discord" about Erasmus and Luther and the Reformation. The socks are finished, the book is not. Having yarn and needles in hand made it a lot easier to get through the Peasants War, a part of Reformation history not taught in Lutheran grade schools (for good reason).

4. Erasmus seems to be coming out ahead in "Fatal Discord." Snippish, occasionally deceptive, even passive aggressive, but less exhausting than the constant churn of Martin Luther, his Anfechtung and his insistence that Christ came with a sword.

5. The sun was out today, thank the Lord. Snow and ice and frozen slush underfoot still impose on freedom to move about. But when I drove to work this morning, the front of the church building, its flat surface facing east, was coated with a thin glaze of ice, glinting in the morning sunshine. What ever does this mean?

6. Not much, I say. Because the best moments of the day were not about sun, ice, beautiful images, wool, or books. They were about people. (Too bad about not being able to share those smiles, she said quizzically.)

7.  I wore four hand-knit items today: a wool sweater, wool socks, wool scarf, and my Yak Hat, knit from gorgeously soft yak fiber. It took all of that to stay warm. Time to cast on for another project.

Saturday shopping

I spent a half hour in a thrift store this morning and another half hour in Home Goods this afternoon. In the morning I was spending time with my sister. Bought two books for less than $2. In the afternoon I was rewarding myself for the long walk through Super Target to do the grocery shopping.

You can look at a lot of consumer goods in a short period of time at Home Goods. And in a thrift store you see how all those glasses and bowls and sofas and end tables age. Big square oak end tables -- soooo 80's. Vintage dining room sets, on the other hand--kind of a bargain, if you're willing to reupholster the chair seats and have a big traditional dining room to put them in. Sets of matching glasses? They're down to two-of-a-kind at best at the thrift store. 

I go into Home Goods looking for something that will, and I say this seriously, change my life. Might just be the convenience of having another set of sheets. Might be a color upgrade: a new flowered pillow for the living room couch. Might be a good new pot at a good price. Or a large and friendly coffee mug to add to the morning rotation.

Note that "change my life" is not the same as "spark joy," but it is close. Good tools change my life -- that's why I have so many different kinds of knitting needles. My favorite non-book purchase of the past six months is a heavy sheet pan from Pampered Chef. Sturdy, practical Lutheran that I am, utility is a door to joy. 

The clearance shelf is a path to life-changing purchases. Luxuries are better when they're surprising and cheap. I found a bright blue wood snapshot frame there today. I will soon have a picture for me framed by me, rather than gifted to me. (I treasure the gifts but choosing is also to be treasured.)

Home Goods is aspirational--so much wall art with script-y slogans, so many make-a-statement decorator pieces, so many things to be looked at. I picked up a glass swan,  a graceful necking curving around a feathered bowl. It would have awed me as a six- or seven-year-old child, when swans in fairy tales were the epitome of beauty. The piece was $29.99, too expensive for small-time nostalgia. Also, it failed the "where will I put it" and "will it stack" text. (I am tempted to Google "stacking swans," just to see what's out there.)

So many things in stores are sold to hold other things we buy: fancy hangers, cloth bins, shelves of all shapes and materials, tables with drawers under them, organizers. It's crazy. 

I browse, sucked into thinking, at least for a while, that life can be changed with just a couple of good purchases.